by Harry Truman
Gage sent soldiers to arrest Adams and Hancock, but they evaded the soldiers and managed to escape; they then hid out and continued to fan the flames. John Adams and another colonist, James Wilson, wrote pamphlets questioning the right of Parliament, and by inference the King, to give them orders and place restraints on them without their consent. A Massachusetts group issued a declaration called the Suffolk Resolves, daring though unofficial, which called the Intolerable Acts null and void and proposed the formation of a local militia to protect Massachusetts against British soldiers if that became necessary. And finally, Virginia leaders suggested a Continental Congress at which representatives of all the colonies would meet and discuss their grievances against the homeland.
The Continental Congress met at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, with a man named Peyton Randolph, a Virginia lawyer and close friend of George Washington’s, presiding. (Randolph was a very good man but isn’t much remembered today because he didn’t participate in the American Revolution; he became ill and died in 1775 at the age of fifty-four.) The Congress was attended by fifty-one men, delegates from every colony except Georgia, and issued a series of declarations in which they stated their “rights and immunities” and listed all the British acts that violated these rights. They also stated openly their support of the Suffolk Resolves, and most important to the British government from the economic point of view, reached an agreement to stop accepting British imports after three months and exporting American goods to Britain after a year, continuing the boycott until Britain agreed to listen to their grievances and correct them. They also defined punishments for people who violated the boycott, including some uncivilized things, popular at the time, like tarring and feathering and public whipping of miscreants. It wasn’t an easy step for many of the delegates to accept, since many of the colonies depended substantially on England for sale of their products; Virginia, for example, sold much of its tobacco there. But the colonists were determined to regain and achieve their rights, and in the end, eleven of the thirteen colonies enforced the boycott, only New York and the absent Georgia failed to do so.
The delegates weren’t yet talking about breaking with England and, if necessary, using force to do it, because there were, in effect, three different types of thinking represented at the meetings, and two of these three groups didn’t advocate force at all. These were men who were totally against force under any circumstances, and men who didn’t think force would be necessary because they felt confident that England could be made to see reason and treat them better without resorting to force. But there was a third group present whose members felt that force might be necessary and acceptable if all other means failed, and so the idea was, at least, planted at that time.
The Continental Congress adjourned on October 26 but agreed to hold a second Continental Congress if their complaints were ignored by the King and his advisors, and they forwarded their list of complaints and demands to England. For a while, the British government seemed to relent and relax, saying it would cancel all taxation of the Colonies provided that the colonies would in turn agree to help support British defense needs and also support the costs of maintaining British officers in America. A compromise might have been worked out along these lines, but then, in the same breath, Parliament became very emotional about the importance of enforcing British law in the colonies and added a whole new set of resolutions that restricted the liberty of the colonists even more than in the past. This encouraged British officers stationed in America to get even tougher, and on April 18, 1775, General Gage decided to send a force of 800 men to Lexington, Massachusetts, where he’d heard that Sam Adams and John Hancock were hiding out, and then on to Concord, where it was rumored that a cache of ammunition was stored.
Then, as all of us remember from our schoolbooks and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem, Paul Revere warned people that the British were coming, and a group of militiamen, men who were mostly farmers and called themselves minutemen, seized their rifles and were waiting at Lexington when the British soldiers, with Major John Pitcairn in command, arrived there on the morning of April 19. (Though it was really three fellows who did the warning, I’m not trying to take anything away from old Paul, whom history tells us was a fine, brave fellow, a great silversmith, a skilled printer and engraver and maker of bells, and even an expert dentist who made George Washington a good set of wooden teeth so he could eat properly and keep his mind on his work. But just to keep the history straight, it was certainly Paul Revere who saw two lights and not one in that church tower and knew the British were coming by sea rather than land, but it was actually three men who set out to warn people, the other two being William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. In fact, old Paul Revere never completed the mission: Dawes and Revere were surprised by a British patrol, and Revere was captured. Dawes escaped but had to turn back, and only Prescott got through to Concord with word that the British were on their way.)
To this day, nobody knows for sure who started the shooting at Lexington. The leader of the minutemen was Captain John Parker, and he saw at once that his tiny group of men were hopelessly outnumbered by the British soldiers and ordered his men to withdraw. But while they were obeying his orders, admittedly very slowly, someone fired a single shot, and then a lot of British soldiers began to shoot - shoot back, they reported afterwards. The Americans insisted afterwards that it was a British soldier who panicked and fired that first shot, and the British insisted afterwards that it was a minuteman, and we’ll never really know (though H. G. Wells, an Englishman himself, and a man who did intensive research and study of records when he wrote his admirable book The Outline of History, says unhesitatingly in that book that a British soldier fired the first shot). In any case, and sadly, there’s no question about the fact that British soldiers fired a lot of shots after the first one, and when it was all over, eight colonists lay dead and nine wounded on the village green at Lexington.
That first shot was later called “the shot heard round the world,” and when the colonists met again for the Second Continental Congress on May 10, less than a month after the massacre at Lexington, there was no longer much hope or interest in settling matters peaceably with the British. A final message expressing a hope for peace was sent to King George III, but it was frankly halfhearted, and the delegates simultaneously called for the organization of soldiers in Boston into an American Continental Army, and in a brilliant choice, appointed George Washington as commander of the soldiers. On the same day that the Congress started, May 10, a group of men from Vermont, headed by Ethan Allen and called the Green Mountain Boys, together with a body of Connecticut militia led by a man who later became a lot less popular with Americans, Benedict Arnold, moved against the British and captured Fort Ticonderoga. Two days later, Allen’s cousin, Seth Warner, led another group of colonial soldiers and captured Crown Point, both of these in New York. The British under General Gage immediately moved to capture Boston, regarded, of course, by the British as the hotbed of American rebellion, and a month later, on June 16 and 17, came the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Let me, please, stop to correct this for the historical record, too, because the battle didn’t take place at Bunker Hill. The American soldiers were ordered to occupy Bunker Hill and wait for the British, but they decided instead to fortify a place called Breed’s Hill, slightly to the east of Bunker Hill and at a lower level. It doesn’t really matter which hill it was; the colonists proved themselves to be formidable fighters, and even though the battle was a minor one in the context of the whole Revolutionary War, it had immense importance because it established the whole tone and mood of the war - established American determination and British fear of that determination.
The Americans had only 3,500 men, many of whom weren’t even armed, and the much larger British army could have overcome them with ease by moving on them silently and from the rear. In fact, they could have won without a battle by simply occupying nearby Charlestown Neck with the help of
their navy and waiting things out, cutting off the Americans’ supplies and starving them into surrendering. But the British didn’t wage war in that way in those days; they wanted to win only by what they considered a fair fight, and their idea of a fair fight was to march openly toward the enemy with drums and martial music going full blast. General Gage had waited prudently for reinforcements after Lexington, and he was now joined by Generals William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Sir Henry Clinton, so he now became less prudent and (take your choice) more brave or dumber, and decided to fight the battle in the established way. He ordered General Howe to take the hill with his men wearing their full-dress red uniforms (which is why the colonials referred to them derisively as “lobsterbacks”) and carrying knapsacks and ammunition and three days’ rations weighing perhaps 100 pounds or more. He also ordered the British soldiers to advance in rank and warned them never to break rank. In short, he ordered them to move toward the Americans as the most visible targets possible on God’s green earth while the Americans waited for them silently, crouched and hidden.
The Americans waited until the British soldiers were about forty yards away, and then they fired, aiming at the British soldiers’ middle. It was an awful, horrible slaughter, and finally the British retreated. Then they came on again, marching in rank in the same way, a brave but senseless act, and again the Americans cut them down, and again, after a while, they retreated. On the third assault, the colonists ran out of ammunition, and after firing their last two rounds apiece, surrendered.
But the British had lost 1,054 men to the Americans’ 441, and not long afterward, Gage sailed back to England in disgrace. And General Howe, who took over command from Gage, was so appalled by the slaughter he’d witnessed that he was a weak and timid commander after that.
WASHINGTON TOOK COMMAND of the American army, such as it was, in July 1775. He was forty-three years old at that time, and even though he was sufficiently well-known and popular among the delegates at the Second Continental Congress to have been given the job of leading the American military against the British, he was essentially a question mark as a commander. His total previous military experience had been as a colonel in the French and Indian War, and even that didn’t happen because he liked the military life - but because he loved and admired his stepbrother Lawrence and wanted to follow in his footsteps.
Augustine Washington, father of George and Lawrence and five other children, had been married first to a woman named Jane Butler, but she died in 1730, and he married Mary Ball the next year, bringing two sons to his second marriage, Lawrence and Augustine, Jr., who was called Austin. George was born eleven months later. (As every American knows, the date was February 22, 1732. But in fact, the Gregorian calendar wasn’t in use at that time; the Julian calendar was the one used, under which the date was February 11. Washington celebrated February 11 as his birthday all his life.) His stepbrother Lawrence was already fourteen years old, so George began to follow him around like a puppy; and when Augustine died in 1743, at which time George was only eleven, but Lawrence was a grown man of twenty-five, Lawrence pretty much took over as surrogate father.
Lawrence was very much involved with the military: He served as commander of the colonial contingent in the West Indies and as adjutant in the Virginia militia. And when he built Mount Vernon, the plantation in which George later lived, he named it after his former commanding officer, Admiral Edward Vernon, chief of the British forces in the West Indies. Then, when George was fourteen, he suggested that George would do well with a career in the British navy and should join up as a midshipman, a suggestion George accepted eagerly because he accepted every suggestion made by his brother. But Mrs. Washington rejected the plan, and though a lot of young men ignored their parents’ wishes in those days and ran away and joined the navy, George was a dutiful son and remained a civilian. He never really got along with his mother after that, however, and at sixteen, he left the family home and moved in with Lawrence at Mount Vernon.
That wasn’t the only reason George didn’t get along with his mother. She was a strange woman in a lot of ways, including being so close to miser status that, although she was really quite rich, she complained all her life that she was destitute and that her children neglected her, and she kept embarrassing George by demanding money and other things from him, and then complaining bitterly and publicly even though he usually complied with her requests immediately. She even wrote to him once when he was serving in the French and Indian War to demand that he see to it that she got butter and one more servant, and I suspect that, when she died in 1790, during Washington’s first term as president of the United States, he might have felt ashamed of himself for experiencing a sense of relief. (When I was a young man myself and first read about Washington’s relationship with his mother, I couldn’t help feeling a bit superior about my own relationship with my mother, Martha Ellen Young Truman, who was my dear friend until her death in 1947 at the age of ninety-four. Which isn’t to say that we didn’t disagree on some things ourselves. She was an intelligent, well-educated woman, one of the few women to attend college in those days, Baptist Female College in Lexington, Missouri. But she had her prejudices, and when she came to visit Bess and me at the White House, she was such a dedicated southerner that she refused to sleep in Lincoln’s bed. These were usually little things, though, that I could laugh about or ignore entirely, and I sometimes felt pity for the young George Washington along with my sense of superiority.)
But Washington’s failure to remain close to his mother made him even closer to his stepbrother. And then Lawrence died in 1751. His death came as no great shock or surprise since he’d been gravely ill with tuberculosis for quite some time. He went to Barbados shortly before his death in hopes that the mild climate would help or cure him, taking George with him, the only time our future president stepped foot out of his country during his lifetime, but it didn’t do any good. The only thing that changed was that George became ill himself with smallpox and nearly died, but he made a full recovery except for some scars on his face that remained all his life, and his thoughts after the loss of Lawrence turned more and more toward emulating his beloved brother and doing something along military lines.
He could have devoted himself entirely to managing his plantation and other holdings. His father had left him the family home, Ferry Farm, near Fredericksburg, Virginia, an additional 2,000 acres, ten slaves (I don’t even like writing those words, but as I keep saying, it was a fact of life in those days), three other lots, and a number of other holdings. And when Lawrence died, he became even richer. Lawrence had been left the bulk of their father’s estate as the eldest son, but he had only one child himself, and his will directed that Mount Vernon and all his other holdings go to George if his daughter failed to survive, and that daughter died two years after Lawrence. So George was a very rich man, but he applied nevertheless for the job Lawrence had left, the post of adjutant in the Virginia militia. He got only a quarter of the assignment; the governor decided to divide the post into four parts, I guess because he was nervous about the youth and inexperience of all the applicants, and he made George adjutant of the southern portion of the colony on February 1, 1753. But he was now a military officer, Major George Washington at the age of not quite twenty-one, even though he didn’t know the first thing about military command.
He learned a bit about warfare after that, of course. French soldiers had gone into the Ohio Valley, an area that Virginia considered it owned and where Pittsburgh is now located, and the governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, decided to send a message to the French to tell them to get out. Washington volunteered to deliver the message, and with six frontiersmen accompanying him, started out on October 31 on a trip to French headquarters, Fort Le Boeuf on Lake Erie, a distance of nearly 1,000 miles and an extremely hazardous journey because of unfriendly Indians and conditions of extreme cold. It took Washington and his men two and a half months to get there. They had to make much of the journey on foot when their ho
rses became too weak to carry them; the weather was so bad that Washington later reported that there hadn’t been a single day from December first to the fifteenth when they hadn’t suffered through either snow or icy rain; and Washington was also shot by an Indian, though fortunately, the wound was superficial, and he recovered quickly. In the end, the French simply rejected the warning, and Governor Dinwiddie set out to move the French out of the Ohio Valley by force.
This was the start of the French and Indian War, which is the American name for the war because we were fighting French soldiers and Indians when we were involved in it; but many European history books refer to it as the Great War for Empire because it was really part of a series of struggles for territory going on in many parts of the world. By the time Washington made his unsuccessful trip to the Ohio Valley in 1753, the British and the French had been at each other’s throats in America for almost a century, starting with King William’s War, which ran from 1689 to 1697 and consisting of many attacks by the French and their Indian allies on British colonies and including a couple of major battles at a key Canadian settlement, Port Royal, Nova Scotia, now called Annapolis Royal, which the British captured in 1690 and the French recaptured a year later.