Rick Atkinson tells Morristown audience the ‘primal question of 1776’ still confronts America

By Madeline Jameson

With the nation’s 250th anniversary just days away, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, historian and bestselling author Rick Atkinson told a Morristown audience Thursday that the question at the heart of the American Revolution remains unanswered.

“The primal question of 1776 persists in 2026. Who do we want to be?”

The former Washington Post investigative reporter, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose acclaimed books on World War II and the American Revolution have made him one of the nation’s foremost military historians, spoke at the Mayo Performing Arts Center about Morristown’s pivotal role in the revolution before turning to a question that dominated the audience Q&A: What would the nation’s founders make of today’s political divisions?

The free program, sponsored by the Friends of Jockey Hollow, drew a large audience, including former Gov. Tom Kean. Organizers invited Atkinson after being impressed by his keynote address at last fall’s Morristown Festival of Books.

His latest work, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, is the second volume of his bestselling Revolution Trilogy and has helped make him a familiar voice in filmmaker Ken Burns’ recent PBS documentary series on the American Revolution.

Atkinson said the founders likely would not be surprised by today’s political turmoil.

“The fact that we are a disputatious people, it’s in the national genome,” Atkinson said, describing the revolution as our first civil war.

What would concern the founders, he suggested, is what they would view as the failure of Congress to fulfill its constitutional role.

“Article One prescribes the duties, prerogatives, and authority of the legislative branch. They believed they set up this mechanism with a balance of powers, executive, legislative, and judicial (branches). It was the legislative, and when they stop doing their job, as they have stopped doing, it really mucks things up,” Atkinson said.

He argued that the legislative branch was designed to serve as a check on executive power, a balance he said has eroded over time and has been further strained during President Donald Trump’s administration.

Much of Atkinson’s lecture focused on Morristown’s place in the Revolution, as chronicled in The Fate of the Day.

He recounted the Continental Army’s brutal winter in 1779-80 at Jockey Hollow, where more than 10,000 soldiers endured severe shortages. Fewer than 5,000 blankets were available, he said, and hungry troops were forced to roast their shoes and even pets to survive.

The encampment also became the site of one of George Washington’s most consequential military decisions: Ordering widespread smallpox inoculations after concluding disease posed a greater threat than the British Army.

“We should have more to dread in smallpox than the sword of the enemy,” Atkinson quoted from Washington’s writings.

He also cited a contemporary account from the New Jersey Gazette describing the remarkable order maintained amid the hardship.

“The huts are all of size, and placed in more exact order than the City of Philadelphia.”

Atkinson portrayed Washington as a leader who struggled with doubt and frustration but consistently placed the country’s interests ahead of his own.

“Repeatedly refusing to use his power for his own ends, he consciously tried to emulate the Roman Republicans he admired,” Atkinson said. Like the military hero Cincinnatus, Washington relinquished power to return to his plantation.

Atkinson also challenged romanticized views of the nation’s founding, noting the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence’s promise that “all men are created equal” and the exclusion of enslaved people, Native Americans, women and many Loyalists from those ideals.

Despite those contradictions, Atkinson urged the audience to view the revolution not as a completed chapter of history but as an ongoing responsibility.

“The perpetual challenge of the American experiment is to draw these aspirational ideas, to make them our own, to hand them off to our children and grandchildren, and to use that as a propulsion system for being a nation that those forebears thought we could become,” Atkinson said.

Kevin Coughlin contributed to this report.