Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  The opposition had tried in vain to deter North from these, he hoped, devastating counter-moves. Fox hammered, glittering Burke ridiculed a government which had contrived that ‘so paltry a sum as threepence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe’. ‘Why will you punish Boston alone?’ asked Dowdeswell. ‘Did not other towns send your tea back to England, and refuse the landing?’ The former Governor of West Florida warned that the Port Act would be ‘productive of a general confederation to resist the power of this country’. It was no good. Opinion was immovable, and Franklin despaired of colonial petitions: ‘The violent destruction of the tea seems to have united all parties against our province.’ It was too true.

  As usual, the news was slow to leak over the Atlantic. It was greeted with rage and astonishment when it did arrive, but with no weakening. On the contrary, the ranks of the radicals were much increased, for now it seemed clear that they were right, and that there was afoot, as young Thomas Jefferson of Virginia put it, ‘a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery’. Such was the universal language. It was used in connection with the Intolerable Acts by John Dickinson and George Washington as well as by all hotter heads. Andrew Eliot wrote of ‘a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism’. ‘The Parliament of England have declared war against the town of Boston,’ one patriotic young Virginian, Landon Carter, confided to his diary. ‘… This is but a prelude to destroy the liberties of America.’ So thought the Boston Evening Post, commenting that ‘It is not the rights of Boston only, but of ALL AMERICA which are now struck at. Not the merchants only but the farmer, and every order of men who inhabit this noble continent.’ All America seemed to agree. In March the men of Massachusetts had begun military training. News of the Boston Port Act arrived on 10 April. As it spread along the coast, Boston’s appeal was heard, and farmers throughout the colonies sent provisions to the beleaguered town. In late May the Virginia House of Burgesses appealed for public support of the Bostonians and was dissolved for its pains; but on 27 May it met extra-legally at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and invited delegates from all the other colonies to meet in a general congress to discuss the crisis. The idea had already been aired and was eagerly taken up. During the months that followed, in one colony after another, assemblies and Governors clashed, and delegates were appointed to the proposed Congress, which opened, amid vast enthusiasm, in Philadelphia on 5 September. Meanwhile in Massachusetts Gage found that the Intolerable Acts were unenforceable outside Boston, though inside the city their operation was effective enough to put hundreds of men out of work. The committees of correspondence were by now well able to defy him, and he had not troops enough to crush them or reduce the province, as North and the King were eagerly expecting. He dared not even arrest the radical leaders, who went unconcernedly about their business under his nose.

  The First Continental Congress was an infinitely more impressive body than the Stamp Act Congress which was its forerunner. This time, of all the colonies, only Georgia hung back. The others had each sent their brightest talents and best characters to speak for them, and all were welcomed at Philadelphia with fitting ceremony, rejoicing, wines and dinners – ‘Turtle, and every other thing – flummery, jellies, sweetmeats of 20 sorts, trifles, whipped syllabubs, floating islands, fools, etc… Wines most excellent and admirable.’ Not all the delegates were radicals, by any means: in fact the contingent from Massachusetts was regarded with some distrust, on account of its advanced views; but radical ideas dominated, above all the repudiation of Parliamentary supremacy. This was an important, perhaps a crucial step, for, James Madison was to assert in 1800, ‘The fundamental principle of the Revolution was that the colonies were co-ordinate members with each other and Great Britain of an empire united by a common sovereign, and that the legislative power was maintained to be as complete in each American parliament as in the British parliament.’15 This seemed the merest good sense to such delegates to the Congress as Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina, who, according to John Adams, was ‘violent against allowing to Parliament any power of regulating trade, or allowing that they have anything to do with us. – Power of regulating trade he says, is power of ruining us – as bad as acknowledging them a supreme legislative, in all cases whatsoever.’ The Congress showed its radicalism by approving the so-called Suffolk Resolves, resolutions passed by the Bostonians and their neighbours on 9 September 1774, refusing obedience to the Intolerable Acts and detailing measures of defiance to be taken against them; by rejecting the ingenious and statesmanlike plan of Joseph Galloway, the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, for reconciliation with Britain; and above all when, on 18 and 20 October, a few days before dispersing, it agreed to a policy of immediate non-importation and eventual non-exportation and set up a ‘Continental Association’ to enforce it. It was in one sense not new: there had been non-importation agreements before; in every important sense it was unprecedented. Never before had a pan-American body like the Congress appeared and laboured so effectively and so long; never before would its behests have been so strictly enforced. The committees of correspondence, by familiarizing the radical leaders with the techniques of inter-colonial co-operation, had been the first step towards political union. The Continental Congress was a long second step.

  Meanwhile in Britain Lord North had prepared for the coming storm by holding a general election, which returned a Parliament much like the old one and no less resolved to reduce America to obedience. The radicals, led by Wilkes, made some effort to rouse the country against the ministry on the American question, but without success. As Burke had bitterly remarked in February, ‘Any remarkable robbery on Hounslow Heath would make more conversation than all the disturbances of America.’ Even the radicals thought America less important than Parliamentary reform. But the news, whether from Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, was now so alarming that in the midst of further aggressive preparations the minister tried to launch a conciliatory proposal, and the opposition roused itself for further mighty efforts against the fatal policy which, it seemed more and more likely, was leading straight to civil war. Chatham took the lead. On 1 February 1775 he brought forward proposals for settling the imperial question. They were sweeping: possibly even sweeping enough. Almost all the recurring colonial grievances were to be appeased by such measures as repealing every act abhorrent to the Americans, beginning with the Sugar Act; and the Continental Congress, which was planning to reconvene in May, was to be erected into what was, in effect, an American Parliament. The proposal was voted down in the Lords, 61–32; Lord North’s gestures of conciliation were approved, inadequate though they were and ineffective though they were doomed to remain; then Parliament hurried through the Restraining Act, which, in answer to the Association and non-importation, forbade any trade between the New England colonies and any British dominions (under the Navigation Acts they were already restrained from trading anywhere else) and forbade them access to the Newfoundland fisheries until the dispute was settled. Again a harsh bill became law (on 30 March) but again not until it had been fiercely attacked. Burke made one of his greatest speeches, calling for peace with America; but it was Lord Camden who uttered perhaps the gravest and wisest warning:

  To conquer a great continent of 1,800 miles, containing three millions of people, all indissolubly united on the great Whig bottom of liberty and justice, seems an undertaking not to be rashly engaged in… What are the 10,000 men you have just voted out to Boston? Merely to save general Gage from the disgrace and destruction of being sacked in his entrenchments. It is obvious, my lords, that you cannot furnish armies, or treasure, competent to the mighty purpose of subduing America… but whether France and Spain will be tame, inactive spectators of your efforts and distractions, is well worthy the considerations of your lordships.

  Again in vain; the Act was passed, and on 13 April a second became law, which extende
d the restraints to the other colonies.

  By that time the gap between war and peace was vanishing. Gage had long been virtually besieged in Boston, while the countryside hummed with drilling militiamen and military stores were piled up. The money for these activities had been voted by a Massachusetts provincial congress, which had in effect completely superseded the old General Court. Soon similar revolutionary governments would seize control in the other colonies, as the royal Governors fled to the safety of His Majesty’s ships and the conservatives prepared to defend themselves as best they might against the all-conquering patriots. But first General Gage, spurred on by a letter from the American Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, reluctantly set out to challenge the insurgent farmers. On the night of 18 April 1775 he sent what he hoped would be a secret expedition to seize or destroy a military store at Concord, twenty miles or so by road from Boston. The radicals in Boston found out; night-riders hurried ahead to warn the people that ‘the British are coming!’ At the village of Lexington, therefore, the 700 British infantrymen found in the morning a line of seventy-five volunteers, or Minute Men as they were called, drawn up to resist them. A shot rang out – fired by which side is unknown – and in a moment the redcoats had opened fire and driven the Minute Men from the field: eight had been killed, ten wounded. The British then re-formed and went on to Concord. But they accomplished nothing there, for the stores had been removed or hidden before they arrived and they were successfully attacked at the North Bridge by a force of local militiamen (the ‘embattled farmers’ of Emerson’s poem16 who ‘fired a shot heard round the world’). The long march back to Boston was a nightmare. British casualties were heavy… So began the War of the American Revolution. It was characteristic of the way in which the British Empire had slid into ruin that the last step was taken because a minister in London thought he knew better than the man on the spot.

  The war spread rapidly, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it flared up simultaneously in many places. In Virginia the British managed to seize the colonial store of gunpowder at Williamsburg. This was more than offset by the fall of Fort Ticonderoga to the rebels on 10 May, which opened the road to Canada. On the same day the Second Continental Congress met.

  It had several decisions immediately forced upon it. Since war had come, it had to be organized, and it was of the highest importance that all the colonies should have a stake in the conflict. Already there were volunteers from beyond New England in the force that, following Lexington and Concord, had sprung up outside Boston. The Congress took this force under its wing and voted to raise more troops. The command of the army was a question that had to be settled. It should go, Congress felt, to a Southerner, for the sake of American unity – a decision which greatly disappointed John Hancock. George Washington was the inevitable choice. He came from the right colony, and what was known about his military experience suggested that he had at least as much capacity as anyone else at the Congress – not that that was saying very much. He thought himself unfit for the post and took it only as a duty: he told Patrick Henry, with tears in his eyes, that ‘From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.’ He was wrong, of course. No greater stroke of good luck ever befell America than the availability of that remarkable man at that crucial juncture, except the availability, eighty-five years later, of Abraham Lincoln. Washington’s entry on the stage opened a new act in the history of the Revolution.

  An old era ended symbolically some months later. As late as the debate on the Intolerable Acts the country gentlemen of England sitting in Parliament were deluding themselves that, if they supported the government, funds would be extracted from America that would avert the need for a threatened rise in the land-tax. They were appalled by the succeeding turn of events. Then, in the autumn of 1775, the Americans invaded Canada, thus turning, it seemed, their defensive war into an offensive one. The duty of Englishmen was obvious. Lord North moved that for 1776 the land-tax should stand at four shillings, and the country gentlemen patriotically acquiesced. The ghost of George Grenville did not know whether to laugh or cry.

  10 The War of the Revolution 1775–83

  And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write… I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name.

  Revelation iii, 7–8

  It is the will of heaven that America be great – she may not deserve it – her exertions have been small, her policy wretched, nay, her supineness in the past winter would, according to the common operations of things, mark her for destruction.

  General Henry Knox, 1777

  Under a full persuasion of the justice of our cause, I cannot entertain an idea that it will finally sink, though it may remain for some time under a cloud.

  General George Washington, 1776

  From the moment that war broke out, British rule in the thirteen colonies was at an end. The fighting that followed was, from one American point of view, irrelevant, for it proceeded merely from the British attempt to recapture and hold by force what had been created and maintained, before 1765, by consent; and the attempt failed. The genie of American independence could not be put back in the bottle. But from another, equally American and more humane point of view, the war was as important in American history as the movement which preceded it. It was the second saga (the first being that of the settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth, the third the Civil War). In it a nation was born and discovered its identity, its destiny. Without the disasters (the several occasions when all was nearly lost) and the suffering, as well as the triumphs, the American people as such, the entity which is the subject of this book, might never have, come into being. Too early success might have left a handful of squabbling little states, under the informal and treacherous tutelage of France and Spain, clinging to the seaboard while the great continent behind them was developed by the peoples of Canada, Louisiana and Mexico. As it happened, the war produced a more remarkable outcome than any of the might-have-beens. The purpose of this chapter is to show what that was, and how it came about.

  The British lost, but it took seven years and a world war to beat them. The effects of the military struggle thus had time to make themselves felt in every corner of the colonies (or states, as they soon began to call themselves). Soldiers, sailors, members of Congress, farmers, town-dwellers, men, women and children, all experienced the war, whether as a bloody struggle on their doorsteps, or as a terrible inflation which upset all the familiar patterns of trade, or as a general scarcity of goods (which was fine for those who produced them, and especially for the farmers who grew the food the armies needed), or, most of all, as a revolution: an overturning of all the old political ways and means. War hurried on change and in many cases determined its direction. It could not have done this if victory had come to either side as promptly as was hoped at Philadelphia and Westminster. The first question to settle, then, is why the war lasted so long.

  British incompetence helped. It will not do to make too much of this. In terms of ships, men and money, Great Britain put forth a greater effort than she ever had before, even in the Seven Years War. The war ministers (Lord George Germain for the army, Lord Sandwich for the navy) were able and conscientious, whatever legend says, even if they were not the equals of Chatham or Churchill. The old order in England might be corrupt, but it had always been at its best as a war-machine, at any rate since the reign of James II, and modern notions of rationality were in fact making themselves felt first in the fighting services.1 Army and navy had alike been allowed to decay to danger point since 1763; but they were restored to a surprisingly vigorous condition surprisingly soon. (By contrast, the new order emerging in America found almost anything easier than the organization and support of an army, unless it was the organization and support of a fleet.) If British generals were, at best, merely competent, and were all too often less than that,2 there was o
ne great admiral, Rodney, and one who was later to prove himself great, Lord Howe.3 Although, in the end, the British had to give up all their holdings in North America south of Canada, they kept their empire everywhere else. They were defeated, but not conquered.

  Still, defeated they were. Partly it was a matter of morale. There was no middle ground for the Americans: for them it was either victory or total submission. They were fighting for their fundamental interests in a way that the British, for all their huffing and puffing about their greatness and glory being at stake, were not. Consequently there was a limit to the islanders’ exertions. As Piers Mackesy puts it, ‘… in England before the French Revolution the line was sharply drawn by concern for individual liberty and low taxation’.4 Of course the Americans also drew this line, and very hampering their leaders found it; but, with their backs to the wall, they were unlikely to be the first to give up the struggle because it was oppressive and expensive. George III and his ministers thus had, in the last analysis, a narrower political base than George Washington and the Continental Congress. And, as the great quarrel had been begun, so it was continued: again and again the British high command, whether at home or in the colonies, made disastrous blunders and threw away victory. The war was long partly because the British did not know how to win and would not admit that they had lost.