by Conrad Black
These words, and the conclusion, pledging everything including “our sacred Honour” to fight for the achievement of independence, have enjoyed an immense historical resonance. Their stirring appeal to natural law and the concept of universal rights and the dignity of all men are justly celebrated, both for their eloquence and their historical importance. But they are a rather grandiose magnification of what was really a straight jurisdictional dispute, over the right of the British Parliament, whose authority had not previously been challenged in America, to levy taxes in America, largely to retire debts incurred in defending the colonists from the French and the Indians. The ill-considered actions of the British government had been as vigorously, and at least as stirringly, debated in the British Parliament as the intrepid accretions of the ambitions of the revolutionaries had been debated in their Congress.
Only the lead weight of the king’s friends in Parliament (and this for the last time in British history), backed by the infelicitous combination of jingoism and the pomposity that generally afflicts the attitudes of imperial powers to their colonists, torqued up the press and official and public opinion to take such a strong line against the colonists. It must be said that the Americans had shown an athletic dexterity in shifting from importunity for assistance against France to extreme protectiveness about their right not to be taxed by a previously authoritative Parliament that had, on urgent request, rendered redemptionist services to the rebels. There is no clear absence of right for Britain to tax the colonists, especially at this time and for the reduction of debt subscribed for this purpose. And despite Jefferson’s commendable improvisation of self-evident truths and inalienable rights adhering, by act of the Creator, to human life itself, Jefferson and many of the other delegates were slaveholders, and were deists or more distant believers in any notion of a Creator. And the British not only possessed and exercised as many of these rights and truths as the Americans, but they, and not Jefferson’s bowdlerized rendering of Enlightenment philosophers, were the source of any American enjoyment of them. It was, in the abstract, a bit rich for these delegates to throw all this back in the face of the Mother of Parliaments, which, whatever its electoral chicaneries and shortcomings, was the world’s, and America’s, chief source of the rights claimed.
Of course, the British have their own myths, and the Glorious Revolution of 1687 and the Settlement Act of 1701 are pretty weak reeds on which to claim a great coruscation of self-government. The concepts of human rights, the rule of law, and responsible government had, with the utmost difficulty, taken some hold in a few places—Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, parts of Scandinavia, and, sketchily and tentatively, a few Italian and German principalities (where, as the future history of those countries would show, they were very fragile and easily revocable). America was not adding much to what already existed, except the genius of presentation and of the spectacle, which Jefferson may be said to have originated in America, as opposed to outright propaganda, a laurel that falls to Paine. These talents that Jefferson bestowed on the questing new regime have never departed the character and society of America, and have been much amplified by media technology, and with Washington’s military leadership and Franklin’s diplomatic brilliance, must be considered one of the original ingredients of the American story that would command and rivet the attention of the whole world for centuries after.
The other main element of the Declaration of Independence, the representation of George III as an epochal tyrant of satanic odiousness, like the blood libel on the American Indians as barbarous savages of no merit, as if they had not been the rightful inhabitants of the new nation before being rather brusquely displaced, were much more emphasized at the time of publication. And they have, naturally, not weathered the ages as successfully. George III was not a tyrant at all, and his greatest minister up to this time, Chatham (rivaled in all of his 60-year reign only by his son the younger William Pitt), was as strenuous a critic of his policy as the leading American revolutionaries. At the height of these events, the young Charles James Fox, just 26, told the House of Commons on October 26, 1775, nine months before the Declaration of Independence: “The Earl of Chatham, the king of Prussia [Frederick the Great], nay Alexander the Great never gained more in one campaign than the noble Lord North [then the prime minister] has lost—he has lost a whole continent.” (Fox betrayed unjustified pessimism about Canada and in the interests of forensic hyperbole ignored Mexico, but he expressed accurately the contempt of the opposition for the king’s policy.)
The attack on the Indians was understandable and they were primitive and often barbarous, but few people today would dispute that they had some rights of prior possession that were simply dismissed with a brutality that was cavalier and often aggravated by violations of treaties and agreements on the most spurious pretexts. The British were, if anything, more respectful of native rights than the colonists, and certainly British policy toward Indians in Canada was a good deal more civilized than American, and almost wholly untainted by the corruption that afflicted American policy to Indians from colonial to modern times.
The principal congressional edit of the Declaration was the removal of Jefferson’s effort to blame the importation of slavery into the colonies on George III. This from Jefferson, who recognized the moral difficulty of slavery and its potential to disrupt the new country’s future but could not bring himself to emancipate his slaves, and carried on a sexual relationship for 38 years with one (Sally Hemings), who bore him seven children and from whom most of his descendants came, is a brazen act of hypocrisy. Fortunately for Jefferson and the acoustical clarity of the call to the ages he was writing, his colleagues saw that the great pamphleteer was intoxicated with his own virtuosity, as man and craftsman, and excised that one allegation.
The British regarded the Americans as ingrates, and they were. The Americans regarded the British as overbearing and presumptuous meddlers, and they were. In the contest of public relations, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson easily routed George III, a limited, ill-tempered, and intermittently mad young monarch of no particular ability. If Chatham, Burke, and Fox had been able to act in the king’s name, there would have been a much narrower issue and a fiercely contested battle for public relations and intellectual rigor. The United States did indeed become a “shining city on a hill” and a “new order of the ages,” but in the sense that it was a vast, almost virgin continent being set up politically at the cutting edge of democratic advances that in the Old World had only been reached in a few places, and after centuries of internecine struggles punctuated by violent revolutions and sanguinary changes of regime.
As a practical matter, the American Revolutionary War was a struggle between two almost equally advanced and very conditionalized democracies, and what governed was the correlation of forces as it evolved under the varying levels of military and diplomatic competence and political agility of the two sides. The American leaders doubtless persuaded themselves of a somewhat more exalted moral distinction between the parties. They were men of conviction, certainly, but they were also self-interested opportunists who saw the main chance, painted it with a thick coat of conjured virtue, and deserve the homage due to the bold, the brilliant, the steadfast, and, by a narrow margin, the just. On the legal and political facts, they do not deserve the hallelujah chorus ululated to them incessantly for 235 years by the clangorous American myth-making machine and its international converts.
The British made the classic historic error of trying to impose taxes on people from whom they could not ultimately collect them, not that they were such unjust taxes. And the British explanation of their actions was so inept that the Americans not only withheld the tax but largely grasped the moral-political leadership of the whole planet with a nascent regime already clad in star-spangled swaddling clothes. This was the strategic genius of American national nativity: it discarded the great oceanic powers in order, the French and the British, each with the assistance of the other, and covered this accompl
ishment in the indefectible virtue of the rights of man. This would be the American formula in centuries to come, under Lincoln, Wilson, the Roosevelts, and in the Cold War, generally with a stronger legal and moral case: the advantage of force and possession of virtue, both applied in carefully selected circumstances.
The Congress had received three resolutions from Richard Henry Lee of Virginia on June 7, 1776, proclaiming “that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states” and should dissolve all political association with Great Britain; proposing “articles of confederation and perpetual union”; and recommending that envoys be sent to France and other powers to seek alliance against Britain. These resolutions were adopted on July 2, and the Declaration of Independence, as all the world knows, was signed on July 4, 1776, though at first only by the president (John Hancock) and the secretary (Charles Thomson) of the Congress. Over the next year or so, most of the other delegates signed.
4. WAR, THE FIRST PHASE
It is not the purpose of this book to give a detailed military history of the Revolutionary War. It took Washington a few months to settle on the correct strategy, and it was to some degree forced upon him as the only remaining option, but it became in many respects the first modern guerrilla war. (Then and subsequently, guerrilla wars have only been conducted by powers that have not had the means to wage real wars.) The British could not occupy the entire insurrectionist territory, as Lord Amherst, who had enjoyed such success in the previous war, calculated that it would require 45,000 troops to occupy New York, Philadelphia, and Newport, and a standing army of at least 30,000 additional soldiers to be prepared to meet the main enemy army at any time. (Philadelphia was the second largest British city, though it only had 34,000 people, compared with London’s 750,000, which was the second highest city population in the world after Beijing’s, at about one million.) Amherst’s optimum force levels were completely out of the question, because the worldwide strength of the British army was 50,000, only about 10,000 of them in North America. A substantial army was always necessary to assure continued control of the immense empire in India.
After eight years of war in America, the British army in all areas would only total 145,000, including 5,000 American loyalists and 30,000 hired Germans (as part of the old exchange with Hanover, which had so often availed itself of British forces). Even at the end of the war, there were just 57,000 of these in America. Washington started with 10,000 regulars and 7,000 militiamen at Boston, which attrition wore down to only 3,000 regulars within a year. Throughout the conflict, Washington rarely deployed more than about 8,000 regulars that moved with him. The Continental Army had about 150,000 members, plus around 100,000 militiamen, and wherever Washington and his later southern colonies commander, Nathanael Greene, went, there were ample forces to set aside what they were doing and rally to the revolutionary colors. John Adams and others had advocated an army of militiamen, but Washington, though his militia were relatively trained as events progressed, never lost his respect for trained professionals and his skepticism about part-time soldiers, who enlisted when the enemy was close by, grumbled at conditions and lack of pay, and melted as soon as they weren’t under direct threat to their homes and families.
On August 29, 1776, after a very professional assault by the British, Washington withdrew in good order from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Washington declined to defend Manhattan more than perfunctorily, after tactically blundering badly in advancing his forces across the East River into Brooklyn, where they were roughly handled on land and could have been cut off by water. Both General Howe and Admiral Howe missed their chance out of, it was suggested, relative kinship and hopes for American surrender.33 Washington did demonstrate great organizational ability and opportunism by evacuating back to Manhattan an army of 9,500 and all their guns in the night of August 30, ignominiously ending what was called the Battle of Long Island. Stronger and swifter action here too, by the Howes, could have done grievous early damage to the Revolution.
Washington then developed a plan that became general for the war, and retreated to Westchester, drawing the British inland and away from their sea-borne communications and supplies, and into territory where they would have to expend troops protecting their lines against constant irregular harassment. Washington retreated first to White Plains and then to New Jersey, and the British did take 2,700 Americans prisoner at Fort Washington, at the far northern end of Manhattan on November 16. There were again great celebrations in Britain, as in Pitt’s time, but it was an illusion; Washington was conducting a Fabian campaign, drawing and pulling British forces fruitlessly about the interior. In New Jersey, he was chiefly concerned to protect Philadelphia. Washington conducted an almost scorched-earth retreat to Trenton, New Jersey, on the Delaware River, and on into Pennsylvania on December 8, 1776, blowing up bridges and leaving the path of the warily advancing British strewn with obstacles and enfiladed by snipers.
At this point, one of Washington’s greatest problems was the short and precise enlistments of most of his men. They could pack up and leave after six months, no matter how intensely at grips with the enemy they might be. Washington had pulled together a force of 6,000 on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, and just as he seemed in inexorable retreat and the Continental Congress quit Philadelphia for Baltimore, Washington, in the boldest and most original move of his military career to date, recrossed the Delaware, and on Christmas Day and December 26 attacked the British and their German allies at three points, exploiting a considerable post-Christmas hangover of the Germans. As the eminent British historian George Otto Trevelyan wrote: “It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater or more lasting results upon the history of the world.”34
Washington had sent his skeptical and scheming second-in-command, General Horatio Gates, to Philadelphia, where he agitated to replace Washington, who gambled all the meager forces he had on this daring counter-attack, which moved on to the capture of Princeton and the advance to Morristown, about 10 miles west of the Hudson and Manhattan. It was a masterstroke and is the basis of much of Washington’s claim to being a first-rate commander, albeit with small forces. This was where the armies sat, Washington in Morristown and Howe in New York, until the spring of 1777. With expiring enlistments and the months of hard slogging and fighting, Washington’s forces had dwindled down to about 3,000, against nearly 10 times as many under Howe. But Howe did not know how feeble his opponent’s numbers were, only that if he attacked, the Americans would draw the British farther into America. Washington was able, as he put it, to “keep up an appearance”35 and expressed “great surprise that we are still in a calm ... much beyond my expectation” at the end of March. Howe made a feint with 18,000 men in late June, but Washington outmaneuvered him and the British withdrew to Staten Island. Howe embarked 15,000 men by sea from New York in July and generated great mystery about his destination, as Washington marched his forces to and fro trying to anticipate a landing. This finally occurred in late August near Philadelphia. The Battle of Brandywine ensued, in which the British forced an American withdrawal and inflicted more casualties than they sustained, but the Americans fought well and tenaciously and remained between Howe and Philadelphia, the capital through which Washington had marched his crisply turned-out forces in a morale-boosting parade on the way to the battlefield.
Washington did not have the forces to prevent a direct British march on Philadelphia from two directions by all Howe’s forces, and the British captured the city with 18,000 men, more than one for every two inhabitants, on September 26, 1777, without opposition. The Congress had fled again and there remained many loyalists to welcome the British, but maintaining the sea-land supply lines to the occupying forces consumed a large number of troops to no practical military end. It should be remembered that while these operations were under way, almost all the rest of the Thirteen Colonies apart from New York were functionally independent and accustoming themselves t
o self-government. The British could muscle their way into the large towns but that did not return to them the forced, much less the voluntary, fealty of over two million insurrectionist Americans. On October 4, Washington provided a plan too intricate for his under-trained troops at Germantown just outside Philadelphia. He almost prevailed but had to retire, in good order, having taken about 1,000 casualties out of 11,000 mainly militiamen, to 500 British casualties in a force of 9,000 regulars.
British general John Burgoyne, who had been unwisely given the command in place of the able Carleton, had been approaching New York from Canada, along Lake Champlain, by Fort Ticonderoga (formerly Montcalm’s Carillon), and in actions reminiscent of those in the same terrain less than 20 years before. The British plan was to cut New England and the western country off completely from the colonies south of New York, and take Philadelphia as a first step in pushing Washington into Virginia and gradually driving organized rebel military forces south and bottling them up and destroying them in the Carolinas. When Burgoyne, who had been repulsed at Ticonderoga in 1776, descended the well-trodden route to New York in 1777, it was evacuated, but at the end of August 1777, some of his units suffered a severe defeat and nearly a thousand casualties in a confused action around Bennington, New York. The American commander was General Philip Schuyler, who was sacked for his trouble and replaced by the politically ambitious General Horatio Gates.
Gates had 7,000 men to block Burgoyne from taking Albany, and his force was increased by nearly 10,000 militiamen. If Burgoyne could reach Albany, it was expected that Howe could advance toward him both by land and on the Hudson and cut the colonies in two. There was an indecisive skirmish at Saratoga on September 19, 1777, and a clear American victory there on October 7, followed by the capture of Burgoyne and the surrender and deportation of his army of over 4,000 after a well-executed pursuit by Gates. This led to what was known as the Conway Cabal, in which there was an attempt to infiltrate the Congress and recruit Lafayette, a French nobleman leading some volunteers from among his Anglophobic countrymen, to assist in displacing Washington in Gates’s favor. Washington, who was sensitive to the political currents, rallied Lafayette and squashed the plot. Gates was chastened and the other conspirators were punished. As the historian Robert Harvey remarked, Washington “had not yet proved himself to be a great general, but he was a masterly political operator.”36