American Aurora

by Richard N. Rosenfeld

  WILLIAM DUANE, EDITOR,

  AURORA GENERAL ADVERTISER, 1798–1822641

  The great character [GEORGE WASHINGTON] was a Character of Convention … [N]orthern, middle, and southern statesmen and northern, middle, and southern officers of the army expressly agreed … to cover and dissemble all faults and errors, to represent every defeat as a victory and every retreat as an advancement, to make that Character popular and fashionable with all parties … as the central stone in the geometrical arch. There you have the revelation of the whole mystery …

  JOHN ADAMS,

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1797–1801642

  [Favorable] ideas of Washington are probably entertained by the world at large; for few men were acquainted with his real character, and of those few, a very small number … will venture, except perhaps in whispers, to speak what they thought or think of his talents … [I]t was important to maintain, during the revolution, the popular opinion in his favour. Accordingly, there was no public disclosure … But is it proper that the truth should forever be concealed?

  TIMOTHY PICKERING,

  U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE, 1795–1800643

  SEC. 3. And be it further enacted. That if any person shall be prosecuted under this act for the writing or publishing any libel aforesaid, it shall be lawful for the defendant … to give in evidence the truth of the matter contained in the publication …

  SECTION THREE (TRUTH DEFENSE)

  OF THE SEDITION ACT OF 1798644

  [I]t will be some consolation to me to … do justice to them with posterity, since a gang of greater scoundrels never lived. We are to dance on [WASHINGTON’S] birth night, forsooth, and say they are great & good men, when we know they are little people.

  JAMES MONROE,

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1817–1825645

  PROLOGUE TO BOOK TWO

  George Washington wasn’t winning the American Revolution. He was losing it. So, under cover of darkness on the evening of October 26, 1776, seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin boarded his seven-year-old646 namesake grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, into a carriage and headed south from Philadelphia beside the Delaware River to Chester, Pennsylvania, where a 130–man, sixteen-gun American warship the Reprisal waited, under orders of the Continental Congress, to carry them on a secret mission to Europe.

  On that fateful night, little Benny Bache could not have known that he would not see his parents, Richard and Sarah Bache, again for nine long years, not until he was old enough to enter college. Little Benny Bache could not have known that from childhood till manhood, he would be in the care of the world-famous grandfather he had met only a year and a half before.

  Instructions to Lambert Wickes, the Reprisal’s thirty-four-year-old captain, from the Committee of Secret Correspondence of the American Continental Congress were to be opened only after the committee’s chairman, Benjamin Franklin, was safely on board. They ordered Captain Wickes to transport Franklin and his party with all possible speed to France and not to stop, not even for British prizes, along the way. Thus began the historic mission which prompts these writings and which decided the independence of the United States of America.

  (To illuminate certain details of this history, I have chosen to quote the weekly newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette, which Benjamin Franklin co-owned and edited from 1729 until 1748. I do so as a tribute to Franklin’s newspaper career and as a further reminder that the roots of American democracy lie deep in the freedom of the press.)

  CHAPTER SIX

  FABIUS

  We shall have all the Sages and Heroes of France here before long …

  Our Fabius will be slow, but sure.

  JOHN ADAMS,

  JUNE 18, 1777647

  The real Fabius was never despised by Hannibal; but his imitator, Mr. Washington, was always despised by his enemy … For a long period indeed the British succeeded in every considerable expedition purely military which was attempted by them, so that, in this defensive war as it was called, many months elapsed before one point actually and seriously attacked was really defended on the part of Mr. Washington.

  BENJAMIN F. BACHE,

  EDITOR, AURORA GENERAL ADVERTISER, 1790–1798648

  Early on the morning of May 28, 1754 (more than two decades before the American Revolution began and five years before I, William Duane, was born), a handsome twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel of Virginia militia committed an act of atrocity—the murder of a peaceable French diplomat, Lieutenant Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville—that started America’s French and Indian War.649 It was a war, however, he could not finish.

  Captured at Fort Necessity by French soldiers under Jumonville’s half brother (Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers) and released after confessing in writing to the “assassination,” George Washington returned to Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, a defeated soldier. He demonstrated clear military incompetence in constructing Fort Necessity (and deploying his militiamen) within musket range of a nearby forest and surrounded by higher ground,650 and he would unquestionably need British forces not only to avenge his humiliation at Fort Necessity but also to push the French off frontier lands that Washington and fellow land speculators coveted in the Ohio Valley. Despite Washington’s promise (as a condition of his release by Jumonville’s brother) never to return to the region of Fort Necessity, George Washington would break that promise at the first opportunity.651

  That opportunity came a year later, in the spring of 1755, when Great Britain supported Washington with a substantial force under British General Edward Braddock. Perhaps unaware that Washington lost Fort Necessity through an injudicious deployment of troops, Braddock relied on George Washington’s advice652 rather than on Ben Franklin’s653 in leading 1,300 British soldiers and Virginia militiamen to the frontier where Jumonville was killed. Franklin warned Braddock to avoid the trackless path through Virginia’s uncleared woods: “The only danger I apprehend of obstruction to your march is from ambuscades of Indians … and the slender line, near four miles long, which your army must make, may expose it to be attack’d by surprise in its flanks and to be cut like a thread into several pieces…”654 Washington urged, on the other hand, “in the warmest terms I was Master of, to push on … leav’g the baggage and other Convoys with the Remainder of the Army to follow by slow and regular marches … ”655

  In this march to the frontier, Braddock’s and Washington’s forces were injudiciously scattered, so that, on July 9th, a much smaller force of French and Indians surprised and destroyed, piece by piece, the entire British force. Braddock was killed, his troops were massacred, and Virginia’s militiamen, despite Washington’s entreaties, fled in a panic.656 As one historian has observed, “Rarely in history has an army suffered such destruction, never perhaps from an enemy of only half its numbers.”657

  By the following year (1756), Britain and France were fully at war in America and abroad. As Horace Walpole, a member of the British Parliament, explained, “the volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.”658

  To free America’s frontiers from French encroachment, Britain dispatched hundreds of ships and ten thousand soldiers, driving the French off the frontier and defeating them in Canada. During the first three years of the war, Washington continued to lead Virginia’s militiamen, but failed to undertake a single major engagement, constantly complaining of gunpowder and food shortages, the worthlessness of Virginia’s paper money, and the cowardliness, perversity, niggardliness, and private preoccupation of his troops. Virginia’s press chastised Washington for this failure to take the initiative,659 but when Washington finally engaged the French in November of 1758 near the site of Braddock’s massacre, his troops mistakenly fired on each other (killing fourteen and wounding twenty-six). As one historian has written, “His first armed engagement (the ambush of Jumonville) had been called a murder; his second [at Fort Necessity] and third [with Braddock] had been bloody and humiliating defeats; now his fourth had be
en fratricidal.”660 It is not surprising, therefore, that, one month later, Washington removed his colonel’s uniform to preside over the fortune he acquired by inheritance (from father Augustine and brother James) and by a marriage of convenience661 (in January of the following year) to Martha Dandridge Custis, a dowdy Virginia widow, somewhat older, awkwardly shorter, but possessed of seventeen thousand valuable acres.662

  With the British victorious and the French at their mercy, Britain negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1763 which ended not only the French and Indian War but also French rule throughout Canada and the rest of North America (except for New Orleans and environs). In a remarkable twist of fate, however, and to quell an uprising of Indians who feared westward expansion of land-hungry colonists (now that the French were gone), Britain issued a royal proclamation in 1763 which promised Chief Pontiac and warned George Washington (and fellow land speculators) that colonial settlement west of the Alleghenies would thenceforth be prohibited.663

  Washington faced a real dilemma. He had killed Lieutenant Jumonville and made war against France to access those frontier lands. Now that Britain was becoming an obstacle to the very same lands, what might George Washington do?664

  The French and Indian War had been costly for Britain, and, when the war ended, Britain wanted to recoup some of those costs. Taxpayers back in Britain were unhappy paying stamp and other taxes to support inter alia the American war, and they resented the much lighter tax burden that Americans had to bear.665 Furthermore, with the war over, that ten-thousand-man British army would remain in America to defend against frontier Indians, so it seemed doubly fair for Americans to contribute to the cost of their own protection.

  Britain based its American policies not only on the expectation of American gratitude but also on a theory that a British economist Adam Smith would later call “mercantilism.”666 Mercantilism viewed Britain and her colonies as interlocking pieces in a puzzle of national self-sufficiency. For that self-sufficiency, it encouraged home-based manufacturing and agriculture, assured home markets for home-grown products (through the import/export restrictions of Britain’s Navigation Acts), and sought favorable trade surpluses (exports over imports) to generate national wealth (“gold and silver”) and a powerful military to defend mother country and colonies alike. As mercantilists viewed the matter, Britain and her colonies were “in it together.” Each contributed what it could.

  To obtain an American contribution toward the cost of American defence, Britain passed a Sugar Act in 1764 and a Stamp Act in 1765. The Sugar Act imposed an import duty (an “external tax”) on molasses that New Englanders imported from non-British islands in the West Indies to manufacture rum, which they could trade for West African slaves, whom they then sold in the American South (or perhaps traded triangularly in the West Indies for more molasses). The Sugar Act was a mercantilist measure, protecting Britain’s sugar growers in the British West Indies from non-British price competition in the North American home market.

  The Stamp Act, on the other hand, was an “internal tax,” a simple revenue-raising measure, lacking mercantilist trade protection as a justification. It required government stamps for many printed materials but most expensively for legal documents (e.g., deeds, customs clearances, licenses, and wills) which real estate developers like George Washington, merchant-traders like John Hancock, and their lawyers like John Adams had to file with (or obtain from) the government.

  * * *

  Whatever the British expectation of American gratitude, many Americans were bound to disappoint. Even before the war, John Hancock and other merchant-traders violated British import/export restrictions with smuggling operations to and from countries outside the protected British home market.667 Important lawyers like John Adams defended such smugglers and shared their principal concern that Britain not use tougher warehouse inspections, stronger admiralty courts, etc., to turn paper regulations into enforceable ones. During the French and Indian War, colonial assemblies declined to authorize supplies or funds for arriving British troops (until Britain guaranteed reimbursement), and, when Britain legislated (by its Quartering Act in 1765) that Americans house remaining British troops if barracks were unavailable, Americans were angry and even aghast at the idea. Finally, as soon as the war was over, George Washington and other land speculators trespassed the 1763 Proclamation line to the very lands whose trespass had cost Britain seven years of war. In 1767, the man who “can’t tell a lie” instructed his real estate partner to mark lands in Western Pennsylvania beyond the proclamation line, suggesting the activity be “snugly carried on by you under the pretence of hunting other Game.”668

  News of the Stamp Act incensed America. On May 30th, 1765, Patrick Henry led the Virginia House of Burgesses to denounce the act. No taxation, he said, without representation in the British Parliament. Other colonies quickly followed.669 Wealthy taxpayers, including George Washington, were quick to agree. In August, merchants, lawyers, and plantation owners organized “Sons of Liberty” gangs to terrorize stamp masters and burn stamped paper.670 In September, John Adams issued his famous “Braintree Instructions” against the taxes (and against strengthened admiralty courts),671 and, in October, a “Stamp Act Congress” in New York rejected taxation without representation as well as any proposal to seek such representation.672 On November 1st, the day the Stamp Act was to become effective, tax protesters rioted in New York city.673

  Why were Americans so ungrateful? That’s what Britain wanted to know. After all, people back in England were themselves paying a stamp tax to support inter alia George Washington’s war. Weren’t Americans going to contribute anything to Britain’s cost for their defense? Why hadn’t the principle of representation come up before? Britain had regulated the American economy for over a hundred years (Britain’s first Navigation Act passed in 1651), and the colonies never demanded parliamentary representation. Americans knew full well that having a few representatives in the British Parliament would not have prevented passage of the Stamp Act, and they knew full well that, even in Britain, fewer than one in thirty had the right to vote for members of Parliament. So why were Americans complaining?

  The American complaint, as Jimmy Callender would later recall, was that “[t]he arbitrary proceedings of the king and parliament, in assuming a power to make laws for the colonies, without their concurrence, filled up the measure of American wrongs … This kind of reasoning cuts short all claims of gratitude on the part of America towards England.”674

  The King had promised, when chartering the colonies, that they were to be self-governing, meaning that they were to be left alone. The Stamp Act and other measures violated this promise and further violated the fundamental liberty of British subjects to be secure in their property until they or their representatives agreed to relinquish it. The British constitution was to protect such liberty, with the British monarch (largest property owner), the House of Lords (the landed nobility and their heirs), and the House of Commons (representing the rest) checking and balancing each other’s interests to assure the enactment of virtuous law, but the British constitution had failed. Parliament was taxing Americans (taking their property) without their consent and without an American representative in Parliament to grant such consent. Parliament had been corrupted. That’s why America complained.675

  Taken aback by the American reaction, Britain repealed the Stamp Act in March of 1766; however, in 1767 a new British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, decided to replace the Stamp Act’s “internal taxes” with presumably more acceptable “external taxes,” meaning import/export duties to protect British industries and agriculture. (The Townshend Act also created a new board of colonial customs officers to enforce Britain’s Navigation Acts.) Again, the colonies said no.

  In February of 1768, the Massachusetts provincial assembly charged that the Townshend duties also constituted taxation without representation and, in a circular letter, urged other colonies not to pay. Britain demanded a retraction of that letter,
and when the Massachusetts and other assemblies refused to back down, Britain went about dissolving colonial assemblies. By autumn, extralegal colonial assemblies were refusing to import British goods, America was increasing its smuggling to and from countries outside the British trading group, and the Sons of Liberty were beating up British customs officials and any colonial wearing British cloth.676

  Charles Townshend’s death allowed Britain to take another backstep, so, on March 5th of 1770, Britain rescinded all the Townshend duties, except the duty on tea. With this tergiversation and despite an unpleasant incident the same day in Boston (frightened British sentries fired on a nighttime crowd of snowball-throwing colonists—killing five—in what outraged colonists called a “Boston Massacre”), the colonies resumed importation of British goods in May and restored relative calm to relations with Britain for the next three years.677 Then came 1773 …

  In 1773, Britain adopted measures which threatened America’s real estate speculators and merchant-traders. In 1773, Britain prohibited her royal governors from making further grants of Crown land in America, causing land speculators like George Washington to fear they might never profit from the lands they coveted (and illegally marked) beyond the 1763 royal proclamation line.678 (Britain enhanced those fears in June of the following year by passing the Quebec Act, extending the boundaries of Quebec south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi.)679

  In May of 1773, Britain upset America’s merchant-traders, ostensibly by renewing the remaining Townshend Act duty on tea (about to expire) but perhaps more so by allowing the British East India Tea Company to sell direct to the American public without any middlemen (and without any middleman markup). The elimination of middlemen lowered America’s tea prices (even with the tea tax) to less than what tea drinkers in England had been paying, but lower tea prices came at the expense of American middleman profits. They even cut into tea smugglers’ sales.680 Thus, Boston’s merchants (and smugglers) reawakened the public to the principle of the tea’s taxation, encouraged Sons of Liberty to attack East India Tea Company agents, and finally, on the evening of December 16th, inspired some thirty stalwarts disguised as Mohawk Indians (one claims to have exchanged Indian grunts with John Hancock)681 to dump 342 chests of British tea into Boston Harbor. It was a Boston Tea Party to be long remembered.