by Ray Raphael
Aside from German states that rented out soldiers, Great Britain had no friends. Other governments—Russia, Denmark-Norway, Sweden, Prussia, Portugal, and even the Holy Roman Empire—formed a League of Armed Neutrality to protect their vessels, which traded with the allies, from predatory British ships. Russia, though, deemed the League too weak and was thinking of declaring war on Britain. The American Revolution, originally a contest between thirteen colonies and their home government, had evolved into another global war of empire that echoed the so-called Seven Years’ War of 1754–1763, known only in this country as the French and Indian War, which also originated in America.21
This was the state of European affairs when Cornwallis surrendered the troops under his command at Yorktown. To see things through British eyes, we have only to consult the official Annual Register, an official contemporaneous publication of Parliament that documented the political scene in London. Here is the introductory abstract for a section it calls “Retrospective View of affairs in Europe to the close of the year 1781â€:
Second attempt of France upon the island of Jersey. Baron de Rullecourt lands his troops in the night and surprises St. Helier the capital. Compels the lieutenant-governor to sign a capitulation. Summons Elizabeth Castle. Is gallantly attacked in the town by Major Pierson. French commander falls, and his remaining troops surrender prisoners of War. Major Pierson unfortunately slain in the instant of victory. Necessities of the inhabitants and garrison of Gibraltar. Extraordinary prices of provisions and necessaries. Admiral Darby sails with a grand fleet and a convoy to its relief. Spanish fleet retires into Cadiz at his approach. Gunboats. Dreadful cannonade and bombardment of the town and garrison from the Spanish camp. Town destroyed, and many of the inhabitants perish. Convoy from St. Eustatius taken by M. de la Motte Piquet. Secret expedition [to India], under Commodore Johnstone, and Gen. Meadowes. Fleet attacked in Port Praya Bay by M. de Suffrein. French repulsed. M. de Suffrein’s timely arrival at the Cape of Good Hope, frustrates the design upon that place. Dutch ships taken by Mr. Johnstone in Saldanha Bay. General Elliot’s grand sally from Gibraltar, by which he destroys the enemy’s batteries and works. Invasion of the island of Minorca. Combined fleets return from that service, to cruise at the mouth of the Channel. Proposal for attacking Admiral Darby at Torbay, overruled in a council of war. Enemy, frustrated in all their views, retire to their respective ports. State of the war with Holland, in Europe. Admiral Hyde Parker fails with a small squadron for the protection of the Baltic trade. Upon his return, falls in with Admiral Zoutman, with a great Dutch convoy, and a superior force. Desperate engagement at the Doggar-Bank. Dutch Fleet and convoy return in great disorder to their own coasts. Hollandia of 68 guns sunk. Consequences of the action. Royal visit to Admiral Parker at the Nore. Admiral Kempenfeldt fails to intercept a great convoy fitted out at Brest, with troops, stores and supplies, for the French fleets and armies in the East and West Indies. Falls in with and takes several of the convoy; but discovers the enemy to be so greatly superior in force, that he could not prosecute the design farther.22
Such was the Revolutionary War from a British perspective. This array of military operations across continents shaped British policy in the fall of 1781, when Yorktown fell. Had the American rebellion been their only concern, British officials might well have regrouped, sent more soldiers and ships, and continued the war. They might have staged more offensives, but even if they did not, they could have decided to hold on to the coastal enclaves they already controlled, thereby maintaining a strong presence on the eastern shore of North America. They were then holding Gibraltar, part of the Spanish mainland; soon, they would hold a port on the mainland of China—Hong Kong—that could withstand both the Nationalist and Communist revolutions. New York, Charleston, and Savannah, like Gibraltar and Hong Kong, might have remained in the British Empire for decades or even centuries.
It didn’t happen that way because the British people had tired of fighting—and financing—a global war. With European powers lined up against them and strong anti-imperial movements in both the United States and India, the government was overextended and falling ever more deeply in debt. Throughout the war, a strong opposition within the British Parliament had been predicting this outcome, and now the prediction was coming true. It was time to scale back the British Empire to more manageable proportions.
The defeat at Yorktown helped tip the political scales and trigger a change in the British ministry, but that didn’t happen immediately; not until March 22, 1782, not long after the British learned they had lost Minorca but five months after Cornwallis’s surrender, did Lord North’s government finally crumble. Even then, although Parliament resolved not to continue offensive measures in the United States, it did not voluntarily relinquish the ground it already held there, nor, of course, did it cease fighting elsewhere.
The war continued across the globe. Battles were lost and won in the West Indies. In April, at the Battle of the Saints, British ships avenged the loss of Yorktown by defeating the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse. In September, the British garrison at Gibraltar repulsed a massive French-Spanish assault. But on the east coast of India, Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore, raised a large army to fight the outnumbered British garrisons, while a French fleet disrupted shipments of supplies. This situation was reminiscent of that at Yorktown, but there was one essential difference: from the standpoint of British imperialists, India and the East Indies were even more important than the rebellious American colonies. The East India Company, which had triggered the American Revolution by trying to unload tea on the American market, considered the sources of that tea more valuable than one particular market for it, and it kept its own private army on the job to augment the government’s forces.
The writing was on the wall, and Britain finally engaged in peace negotiations, securing the best terms it could. On February 21, 1783, in defending the proposed settlement in the House of Commons, William Pitt the Younger, soon to become prime minister, laid out the pragmatic calculus of a strategic retreat. Carefully, he detailed how Britain faced steep odds against the combined forces of the “four powerful States†of the alliance in engagements across the globe, from the West Indies to the English Channel, the “Northern Seas,†and the Mediterranean, and now even in India. Further, the war had created “an unfunded debt of thirty millions,†seriously weakening the empire. To achieve “the dissolution of that alliance†and “the immediate enjoyment of peace,†negotiators had had to make concessions, but it was the only way, and it was time to move on: “Let us examine what is left with a manly and determined courage. Let us strengthen ourselves against inveterate enemies; and reconciliate our antient friends.†Those “antient friends,†of course, included the former British colonies in North America.23
Peace came just in time. On June 28, 1783—one year and eight months after the Battle of Yorktown—British garrisons in India found themselves in a precarious position. The French fleet had bested its scurvy-weakened British counterpart to control the coastline. A showdown loomed, with control of India hanging in the balance, but just at that moment, news arrived from back home: five months earlier, a preliminary peace treaty had been signed with Britain’s various adversaries (America, France, Spain, and the Netherlands). With hostilities officially terminated, French commanders were obliged to call off their assault.24
By treating with its enemies separately, British diplomats had been able to secure many existing possessions. Gibraltar, their islands in the West Indies, and colonies in India remained in British hands. (Lord Cornwallis, after his defeat at Yorktown, would go on to become governor-general and commander in chief in India.) Best of all, war was over and the threat of an allied assault on England itself had passed. In the peace that was to follow, British ships were free to go wherever they pleased and trade with whomever they likedâ�
��”including the newly formed United States. The empire, although diminished, had been salvaged thanks to the tactical retreat from thirteen rebellious colonies on the North American mainland.
The full story differs markedly from the one Americans tell themselves. According to our texts and popular histories, America was in command of its own destiny, defeating the mightiest empire on earth. “The world was amazed at what the Americans had done,†one high-school text proudly pronounces.25 Although we often give a grateful nod to France, rarely do we present the American Revolution as part of a global war. Only by ignoring the international context can we tell the story we like.
REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING GLOBAL HISTORY
Historians of the Revolutionary generation, having grown up as Englishmen, took more of an interest in events overseas. They kept a sharp gaze on British politics, after Yorktown as much as before. Nobody at the time would have thought that events leading to the conclusion of the war were somehow irrelevant to the main story. To understand the actions that resulted in the final settlement, early historians paid considerable attention to the global context, which clearly affected Britain’s decision to abandon its claims on the thirteen rebellious colonies in North America. They also recognized that in 1782, the year following Yorktown, the British maintained a formidable military presence along the coast, while the civil war in the Southern interior continued unabated.
William Gordon (1788) devoted almost two hundred pages to the post-Yorktown events that led to the final settlement.26 David Ramsay (1789) covered both “the campaign of 1782†and actions of “the other powers involved in the consequence of the American War.â€27 Mercy Otis Warren (1805) discussed the Battle of Yorktown in the opening chapter of her third and final volume; in the subsequent 394 pages, she discussed in considerable detail the continuing fight in America, naval battles in the West Indies, the war in the Mediterranean, British politics, mutinies in the Continental Army, negotiations for peace, and the consequences of American independence.28 John Marshall (1804–1807) followed Washington word for word: after Yorktown, the war was still on. Once the French fleet had gone, he wrote, Americans had little hope of dislodging the British from their coastal strongholds.29 Reporting on the final year and a half of the war, for these contemporary observers, was more than a mere afterthought.30
Popular writers of the nineteenth century began to play tricks with the historical record. Mason Weems, who in 1806 invented the story of Washington and the cherry tree, wrote that King George III, instead of wishing to continue the war, was “graciously pleased†to change leadership in Parliament and pursue peace.31 Noah Webster (1833) emphasized the “inexpressible joy†experienced throughout the United States upon hearing the news from Yorktown. The celebration of victory, he wrote, was so pervasive that Washington himself, instead of heightening his resolve to fight, “liberated all persons under arrest, that all might partake in the general joy.â€32 With Washington celebrating and the king graciously conceding, Yorktown was presented as a happy ending to the war.
Not all authors simplified the story to this extent. John Frost (1838) quoted the king’s speech to Parliament, in which he indicated his resolve to continue the war after Yorktown. Frost also discussed the continuing involvement of France, Spain, and the Netherlands.33 As late as 1874, in the final volume of his monumental history, George Bancroft engaged in a lengthy discussion of the international context of British politics, crucial to an understanding of the end to the war.34
But to extend the story beyond Yorktown, and to include a global sweep, presented several problems. First, a story this broad was not very elegant. The intrigues of international politics were more difficult to follow than a simple battle, winner take all. Second, any serious discussion of the Revolution in 1782 would entail an admission that the war in the South was essentially a civil war (see chapter 12). If Britain had supposedly capitulated after Yorktown, and yet the fighting had continued, who, exactly, was the “enemy� This raised more questions than could comfortably be answered in simple narrative form. Third, taking the global context in earnest would require the admission that Americans did not control their own destinies. The basic premise of the favored story—that patriots were able to overthrow the mightiest empire on earth because their cause was so noble—would be called into question.
For all these reasons, popular historians and textbook writers began to ignore the final year and a half of the American Revolution. Resorting to the simplest of narrative devices, they simply decreed that their histories ended at Yorktown. There, the Americans won and the British lost. The Americans celebrated, while the British, following Lord North, declared, “Oh God! It is all over.†End of story.
Early twentieth-century textbooks followed this line.35 One popular text in 1913 stated flatly, “The surrender of Cornwallis ended the Revolutionary War.â€36 Another in 1935 pronounced authoritatively, “In both England and America everyone realized that this surrender meant the end.â€37 No student would ever have suspected that “everyone†did not include either George Washington or King George III, both of whom endeavored to continue the war.
In 1956, at least one major textbook broadened and deepened the story. At that point, military alliances were very much in the forefront of the Cold War—NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), and the so-called Soviet Bloc—as they had been during World War II and the United Nations action in Korea. Wars fought by Americans were now seen in a more international context, and Thomas A. Bailey, in his popular college text The American Pageant, reflected this. Starting in 1778, he explained, what had been a colonial war evolved into a world war. Dutifully, Bailey listed not only members of the anti-British alliance but also those of the armed neutrality, which adopted “an attitude of passive hostility toward England.†The rebellious Americans, he explained, “did not achieve their independence until the conflict erupted into a multi-power world war that was too big for Britain to handleâ€; that was why Britain, which by his count still had over fifty thousand troops in North America and the West Indies, chose not to pursue the war further. “To say that America, with some European aid, defeated England is like saying, ‘Daddy and I killed the bear.’ †Here was a dramatic reversal of the classic national narrative.38
But Bailey’s depiction of the American Revolution as a “world war†did not root deeply in the American mind. For a national narrative to work, the nation itself, with just a little help from “daddy,†had to be the cause of its own independence. After the Cold War, the United States did indeed seem to determine both its own fate and the fate of the world, and the international context that permitted it to prevail in the Revolutionary War was for the most part ignored, save for later editions of Bailey’s text.
In 2002, of thirteen elementary, middle-school, and secondary textbooks displayed at the annual convention of the National Conference for Social Studies, not one stated that both Washington and King George III vowed to pursue the war after Yorktown, or that a bloody civil war persisted in the South, or that fighting continued across the globe. Instead, eight of the texts concluded their chapters on the Revolution by highlighting Lord North’s statement: “Oh God. It is all over,†while eight concluded with another tale indicating a final resolution: the surrendering troops marched to the tune of “The World Turned Upside Down.†(Four texts included both stories, while only one had neither.)39 Typically, the final year and a half of the Revolutionary War was abridged to a single subordinate clause, and reduced even further by qualifying adjectives: “Although some fighting continued, Cornwallis’s surrender effectively marked the end of the war.â€40 All texts gave the impression that the surrender of Cornwallis involved the whole British army, not just a small fraction of the British forces stationed in North Ame
rica: “On October 19, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered his entire army of 7750 regulars, together with 850 sailors, 244 cannon, and all his military stores.â€41 Few students, or even teachers, would even think of asking whether Cornwallis’s “entire army†and the entire British army were one and the same.
Today, elementary, middle-school, and secondary texts still disregard the international context, and only a handful of college texts do better. In my survey of twenty-three college texts published since 2009, only five discuss the global sweep of Britain’s entanglements that informed its decision to give up the fight for its thirteen rebellious colonies in America.42 Of the remaining eighteen, three discuss British concerns in the West Indies but nowhere else,43 and the other fifteen remain silent—no Gibraltar, Minorca, English Channel, Cape of Good Hope, India, or the East or West Indies.44 Some of these do mention that Britain still had many troops stationed nearby; some discuss briefly the political debates in Parliament; a few even observe, “The British could have fought on.â€45 But why did they not fight on, if they had the resources to do so? This is the obvious next question, and it would lead to an investigation of Britain’s defense of a global empire and how this affected its policy with respect to America. But these texts don’t go there.