While forging an identity around the excessive violence they had endured at the hands of the British, Americans scrubbed their own Revolutionary War record, which they celebrated as “untarnished with a single blood-speck of inhumanity.” In 1815, one orator felt confident that “[o]ther revolutions have been conducted with sanguinary violence; ours with a spirit of dignified moderation, worthy of the cause, and characteristic of the nation. The patriots of the revolution were as humane as they were brave.” Already the whitewashing was well under way.6
