On the verge of 250 years from 1776, the mystic chords of memory are badly out of tune, the better angels nowhere to be seen. The Revolution does not live for us in the same way it did for Lincoln. Its remains lie dry and brittle, ready fuel for culture-war conflagration. We are caught between caricatured versions of the Revolutionary past. One presents the Founders as hypocrites who could do no right; the other casts them as heroes who could do no wrong. The first forecloses the possibility of a collective and usable past; the second locks us into a limited vision of who we are based on who we were.