In a source I cannot now recall, I once read that following the failure of a movie set during the era of the American Revolution a Hollywood mogul decreed: “No more quill pen pictures!” The studio head’s commercial instincts were sound. In public consciousness, the Civil War marginalizes the War of Independence, and American history between the Founding and the Jacksonian era has been lost to a kind of collective amnesia. The American republic in its first few decades, with its East Coast patricians and aristocrats, its balls and wigs and buckled shoes, seems more like a detached fragment of the Old World than the germ of a New, best suited for cinematic treatment by “Masterpiece Theater” or Merchant and Ivory.
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