7/14/00 2:55 p.m.
Schooling Brits on The Patriot
Setting the record straight on Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War.

By Michael Vlahos

rits are bloody angry at The Patriot. And no wonder. The atrocities portrayed in Patriot really happened.

But the Brits say not. And they are quite uncharacteristically shrill about it. Yet they go even further, demanding a public apology (I suppose on his knees, in the snow) from Mel Gibson.

I understand the anger that comes when something shameful is openly recalled, of wounds reopened in front of millions. But the Brits are getting righteous about it. They are saying to a man that these things did not happen. Yet they did. So even at the risk of straining our cherished Anglo-American amity, we should start setting the record straight.

At the epicenter of English rage (Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were enslaved at the time, and I haven't heard a peep on The Patriot from any Celtic commentator) is the film's portrayal of Basastre Tarleton.

The English Bill of Particulars on the character goes like this:

— It's Tarleton — He was a bad boy, but not that bad — If he had ever been that bad, he would have been censured, because Etonians are gentlemen

Yes, it's close to Tarleton, but it's carefully crafted not to be Tarleton. The English Colonel in The Patriot is a far darker and hungrier man, who sees no real future for himself back in Britain. He stakes everything on being a prince in British North America.

The real Tarleton returned to Britain to initial accolade, and became a favorite of the young Prince of Wales. He was elected to Parliament seven times, and died both rich and badge-encrusted: a major general and Knight of the Bath.

Gibson created a fictional character for a piece of fiction, based loosely, like Gibson's own character in The Patriot, on historical figures.

Like nobody does that.

But we're not finished with Tarleton quite yet. Even whining English admit he was a bad boy, "a ruthless soldier," as Edwin Clein, the mayor of Tarleton's home town avers. But, is the massacre of scores of soldiers who have just laid down their arms, or lying wounded on the ground, merely "ruthless"? Because that happened, with Tarleton commander at the scene. This massacre of the 10th Virginia Line at Waxhaws led to American militia responding in kind.

And this is how our militia responded to Tarleton [from a contemporary letter]:

"By tradition, this letter brought to Rockbridge the first news of the battle of King's Mountain, where Campbell and his over-mountain men had overtaken, surprised and massacred a Tory army in their bivouac on October 7th. The cry 'Tarleton's quarter' was heard in the American ranks and many Tories were murdered as they threw down their arms and tried to surrender. Revenge was thus taken for Banastre Tarleton's massacre of the 10th Virginia Line at Waxhaws the previous May, and most especially for the action of the Tory company which had bayoneted the wounded of that regiment where they lay on the field."

In fairness, The Patriot in no way shies away from showing this sort of American atrocity. But there remains the whole issue of killing women and children. Tarleton's command indeed killed civilians all over the Carolinas; and unfortunately, a number of non-combatants slain turned out to be Loyalists. And it must be said — perhaps it was an oversight — that he never chose to gather a whole group together and burn them in a church.

That honor goes to another unit in the service of the King. British-Loyalist-Indian attacks killed hundreds of women and children in massacres that make the church burning look tame. This happened in Pennsylvania, in 1778 [again, from a contemporary account]:

On the 1st instant (July) the whole body of the enemy consisting, it is supposed of near 1600 (about 300 of whom were thought to be Indians, under their own chiefs; the rest Tories, painted like them, except their officers, who were dressed like regulars) the whole under the command of Col. John Butler, (a Connecticut Tory, and cousin to Col. Z. Butler, the second in command in the settlement) came down near the upper fort, but concealed the greatest part of their number; here they had a skirmish with the inhabitants, who took and killed two Indians, and lost ten of their own men, three of whom they afterwards found killed, scalped, and mangled in the most inhuman manner.

Col. Nathan Denison went with a flag to Exeter fort, to know of Col. John Butler what terms he would grant on a surrender; Butler answered, THE HATCHET. Col. Dennison returned to Fort Kingston, which he defended till Sunday morning, when his men being nearly all killed or wounded, he could hold out no longer, and was obliged to surrender at discretion. The enemy took away some of the unhappy prisoners, and shutting up the rest in the houses, set fire to them, and they were all consumed together. These infernals then crossed the river to Fort Wilkesbury, which in a few minutes surrendered in discretion. About 70 of the men, who had listed in the Continental service to defend the frontiers, they inhumanly butchered, with every circumstance of horrid cruelty; and then shutting up the rest, with the women and children in the houses, they set fire to them, and they all perished together in the flames.

It should, after two centuries, be enough just to say that atrocities were committed on both sides. But the English just won't let it go. They have even gone so far as to showcase the rabid screed of the New York Post's film critic, Jonathan Foreman. It says the makers of The Patriot "... committed a kind of blood libel against the British people. I almost wondered why they didn't go all the way and have "the Brits" put thousands of colonists into camps, work half of them to death and exterminate the rest using some primitive form of poison gas."

Well, they sort of did.

Not the gas of course. They didn't need gas. They just jammed American sailors in to prison ships, up to a 1000 a ship. An incredible 13,000 American sailors died on British prison ships in New York harbor, abused and starved to death in a floating concentration camp. Only 1400 survived. When the British finally evacuated New York, they destroyed all evidence. Sound familiar?

The shocking thing about the English caterwauling is not the substance of their accusations. As I have tried to show, refuting their Bill of Particulars is straightforward. I have been since childhood a member of the true faithful. An Anglophile. And as a sometime historian, I am not the least bit blind to English misbehavior. What shocks me is the naked transparency of their attacks on The Patriot. The English want a free ride. They want to control how Americans see Englishmen. They want to own that little piece of England in the American mind.

It was not always thus. American attitudes toward Great Britain, and especially England, were ambivalent at best, and suspicious at worst, all the way down to the 1930s.

And it was Hollywood that turned things around. Starting around 1935, American audiences were hit with a slew of movies celebrating British Imperialism: Captain Blood, Wee Willie Winkie, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Gunga Din, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Charge of the Light Brigade, The Four Feathers. They were superb movies, by jingo, and they converted me as boy, glued to the black and white tube, dreaming of dreadnoughts and India and the Thin Red Line.

In contrast, in all of Hollywood's history, there have been (according to one count) only ten films about the American Revolution. The closest to a blockbuster (before The Patriot, if The Patriot is not garroted before it gets there) was Drums Along the Mohawk. Produced in 1939, it shows how politically correct Hollywood was regarding the English. The story takes place on the frontier not far from the scene of the Fort Wilkesbury massacre. Here, too, a fort is beseiged, but not by a horde of Tories dressed like Indians. O no, there is only one Tory, played by John Carradine, a figure every bit as blood-curdling as the green-dandy dragoon of The Patriot.

But all the rest are Indians. You would think that the Revolutionary War was an Indian war, with a couple traitorous Tories thrown in. Seventy years is a long free ride. Perhaps the English elite have just grown complacent about their image, but I don't think so. I think that the British have preserved their own self-image — tied to an almost mystical sense of superiority — through our willing acceptance of their aura of cultural authority. Like the Romans to the Greeks, the world's empire bows to the higher civilization. England's elite may at last be losing their inner empire of Scotland and Wales, but they will always have the United States.

The Patriot is a blow to that souffle.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For the other side of The Patriot argument, read Andrew Stuttaford's "The British are Groaning".