MY 8-YEAR-OLD grandson Arnold left on Monday. He’s my buddy, and we tore it up in the month that he was here. Since the Lone Wolf and I are in South Carolina—one of the original 13 colonies of what became the United States of America—and with America’s 250th birthday coming—July 4, 2026, two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence—Arnold and I read about the Revolution.
You all probably remember the poem Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But you might not know the wonderfully written children’s book George vs. George by Rosalyn Schanzer. What a terrific book for children—and for adults. Not knowing (or possibly remembering) all the historical details, I can tell you I learned a lot.
Rosalyn Schanzer leads us through their story, and the story of their times, illustrating each side of the argument that divided the colonies from the Kingdom. Was King George a “Royal Brute” as American patriots claimed? Or was he, as others believed, “the father of the people?” Was George Washington a scurrilous traitor, as all the king’s supporters claimed? Or should we remember and celebrate him as “the father of his country?” Who was right? The answer might not be so black-and-white.
Schanzer’s book is a deeply researched and accessible account of one of the most vital periods in American history. It is also a timeless lesson in seeing history from different points of view. Her illustrations and creative use of first-person quotations bring the Revolution back to life, and allow the characters of the period to speak for themselves. Through its lively text, detailed illustrations, and fully authenticated quotes, George vs. George shines fresh light on two sides of the story of our country’s formative years.
And all of this was not faraway history to us. Lafayette—the young French aristocrat and soldier who became one of George Washington’s most important allies—first came ashore along the South Carolina coast near Georgetown, on North Island at Winyah Bay, in June 1777. He arrived in the dark to join a revolution that was not even his own. Georgetown was later occupied by the British, and the Revolutionary War came hard through South Carolina: through Charleston, through the backcountry, along the rivers, across the roads and fields, and into the swamps.
South Carolina was not a footnote in the American Revolution. More than 200 battles and countless skirmishes were fought here, and after Charleston fell to the British in 1780—one of the worst American defeats of the war—the fight in the South became brutal, local, and decisive. The British thought they could take the South and break the Revolution from the bottom up. But Patriot resistance kept rising—in the backcountry, along the rivers, through the swamps, across the roads and fields—and battles like Kings Mountain and Cowpens helped turn the Southern Campaign, weakening the British and pushing the war toward its final act at Yorktown.
Francis Marion was a South Carolina farmer, a local hero of the Revolution, and a guerrilla fighter before we had polished words for such things. He had learned something about irregular war during the Cherokee War—how smaller forces could strike, vanish, and use the land itself against a stronger army. In the swamps and forests of South Carolina, he knew how to disappear where the British could not easily follow. In Francis Marion and the Legend of the Swamp Fox, Arnold and I read about a man who knew how to take charge, how to move, how to survive, and how to lead other men when everything looked lost.
So when Arnold and I read about the Revolution here, we were reading about a war that had passed through the very state we live in. A war of armies, yes, but also of neighbors, loyalties, betrayals, courage, memory, and ground. It had happened all around us—in the fields, along the rivers, in the swamps, in this heat, among the alligators and the snakes.
We read about kings and rebels, horses and lanterns, redcoats and riders, and ordinary people who had finally had enough. Against all odds—sometimes hungry, freezing, without blankets or shoes—they kept going. And in the end, they won.
***
FROM THE JOY of Arnold’s love of learning, and from my experience of being grandmother to a young boy with a bright mind, a tender heart, a tablet, and a pile of Legos—he is himself an inventor and a builder of worlds—I found such pleasure in his interest in these books that describe the American Revolution so vividly. And because the 250th anniversary is almost here, I wanted him to start becoming aware of and perceiving who we are as a nation and what we fought for in our beginnings—and he did.
For a child, history begins as a story. A king becomes a character. Paul Revere becomes a man on a horse in the dark. Francis Marion becomes the Swamp Fox, slipping through the South Carolina swamps and forests, outwitting a more powerful army because he knew the terrain better than they did. And Arnold loved that, of course. What child wouldn’t?
But history doesn’t stay safely inside children’s books. Not if you’re paying attention, and not now. After Arnold went home, and the house grew quiet again, I kept thinking about George Washington and King George and the Declaration of Independence. I kept thinking about that list of grievances—the colonists’ bill of particulars against a ruler they believed had become unfit to govern a free people.
And I thought, Here we are again. Not in powdered wigs or with muskets. Not with Paul Revere riding through the night and Francis Marion disappearing into the swamps. But here we are.
Once again, Americans are being asked whether we believe one man should be above the law. Whether power belongs to the people or to the ruler. Whether cruelty can be dressed up as policy. Whether corruption can be shrugged off as politics. Whether criminality can become a credential. Whether billionaires, zealots, propagandists, judges, preachers, and tech lords can join hands and call domination freedom.
The American Revolution was not only a revolt against a king. It was a revolt against unaccountable power. And unaccountable power has many costumes. Sometimes it wears a crown. Sometimes it wears a red hat. Sometimes it wears a black robe. Sometimes it stands in a pulpit and calls itself “Christian” while worshiping domination, punishment, and control. Sometimes it wears a hoodie, builds an addiction machine, buys a platform, captures our attention, harvests our data, and calls the whole thing innovation. Sometimes it calls itself the market—or law and order. Sometimes it looks orange with a tie that hangs way too low.
Sometimes it calls itself patriotism. But patriotism is not obedience to power. Patriotism is loyalty to the principles that make power legitimate in the first place: consent, rights, law, truth, representation, accountability, and the common good. But patriotism is one of the words that the GOP has taken and changed its narrative to fit their manipulation of the principles we stand for—and for the people they want to exploit. It’s one of the words we must take back and make our own again.
I want my grandson to understand the true meaning of the word patriot. Not that America was pure at the beginning. God knows it was not. The men who wrote “all men are created equal” did not mean all men, and they certainly didn’t mean all women. They didn’t mean enslaved people. They didn’t mean Native people. They didn’t mean everyone whose labor, land, and lives made the country possible.
So no, I’m not interested in a gauzy, sentimental, flag-waving version of the Revolution. I’m interested in the part that still asks something of us, the unfinished promise. The Revolution didn’t settle the American argument. It began it. And the argument has come roaring back.
We were taught that checks and balances would save us. But have they? Or did we discover that guardrails are only as strong as the people willing to hold them with integrity and might—like the Republicans were still willing to do with Richard Nixon when he’d embarrassed himself, and them, with his illegal activities that created the Watergate scandal? It still seems unreal to me that a convicted felon is in the White House, a man so closely tied to Jeffrey Epstein and who is still keeping from us the Epstein files that name the many wildly rich and powerful men who abused so many young girls. This same man who is keeping the files from us is referenced, by name and related terms (such as Mar-a-Lago and Melania) in more than 5,300 individual files, totaling over 38,000 references across the 3 million pages of Justice Department records.
Checks and balances don’t enforce themselves. Courts don’t save a country by magic. Congress doesn’t save a country or its Constitution by merely existing. Laws don’t protect democracy if the people entrusted with them are corrupt cowards, cynics, opportunists, or collaborators. Institutions aren’t sacred objects. They are human arrangements, and human beings can betray them. That’s one of the lessons of this moment.
Another lesson comes from Francis Marion. The Swamp Fox didn’t defeat the British because he had the biggest army. He didn’t have the most money, the most weapons, or the grandest title. He survived because he knew the ground. He knew the creeks, the marshes, the woods, the hiding places, the shortcuts. He knew where he was and what he believed in.
That matters now. Because resistance isn’t always dramatic. It’s not always a horse in the dark or a musket in a swamp. Sometimes it’s knowing the ground under your own feet—your town, your county, the courthouse, the legislature. It’s knowing the people who hold power there. The people who have been pushed to the side. The local paper, if there’s still one. The old stories and the buried ones. The language people use when they’re telling the truth—and the language they use when they’re not.
Sometimes resistance begins with knowing who and where you are—and who your people are. As Sebastian Junger might say, your Tribe.
Sometimes resistance is telling the truth plainly when powerful people have made lying profitable—or refusing to let cruelty pass for strength. Sometimes, it’s refusing to let fake Christians define morality while they serve greed, hierarchy, racism, and domination. Sometimes it’s refusing to let corporate power and the Tech Bros turn human beings into data, children into products, citizens into targets, and democracy into a business model.
Sometimes it’s writing the grievances down—and maybe that’s what we need now. A modern Declaration. A bill of particulars. A clear-eyed list of what has been done to this country—who has done it, who has enabled it, who has profited from it, and who has looked away. Not because words alone save us. But because no free people can resist what they refuse to name.
The American Revolution wasn’t fought so Americans could trade one king for another. It was fought for the hard and unfinished idea that no man—crowned, elected, robed, preached over, algorithm-fed, or obscenely rich—gets to stand above the people. That’s the lesson I want Arnold to carry. Not the myth. Not the loud, cheap, flag-wrapped version of America being sold by people who confuse freedom with getting to rule over somebody else.
I want him to know that democracy isn’t something we inherit and then admire from a distance. It’s something we have to take care of. I want him to know that telling the truth matters. That the law matters. That honor is a man’s character and important. That kindness is not weakness. That all people deserve dignity.
And when powerful people try to make us forget all of that, we have to remember harder. Because the question comes back to every generation: Not what did they mean in 1776, but what do we mean now?
Thank you for reading From the Inside Out. Pieces like this are made possible by readers who believe clear-eyed, independent writing still matters.
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