Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  For the first time, Washington and his men raised a new and different flag, a specifically American flag, and the Continental Congress, meeting regularly now in Philadelphia, asked the colonies to begin to disown their royal connections by declaring themselves to be independent states. South Carolina adopted a provisional constitution in March, North Carolina leaders reached agreement to declare independence on April 13, and Virginia decided on May 15 to ask the Congress to declare formal independence from Britain for all the colonies. On June 7, a member of the Virginia delegation, Richard Henry Lee, made that proposal, but Congress, still moving cautiously, agreed only to appoint a committee of five men to draft an independence document. Everybody knows that three of the men were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, though there’s a tendency to forget the other two, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston.

  Well, maybe that’s all right, now that I stop to think about it because the first three I’ve listed did most of the work anyway. Jefferson did the basic writing and then he and Ben Franklin and Adams did the revising, and then the whole Congress did some more tinkering after that. (I probably shouldn’t say “tinkering” because that sounds as though I’m saying that they messed things up, but the changes were really improvements for the most part. Did you ever see a marked-up copy of the Declaration of Independence, in which Franklin and the rest of those fellows made inserts? It looks just like one of my speeches when I write one and my people go to work on it, and those changes are usually improvements, too. It’s a wonderful thing when you contemplate the Declaration of Independence, and the reason it’s so wonderful is that it’s such a beautiful document to read, almost like a great piece of poetry in its way, and its results have been so successful. Otherwise, I guess it would never have been heard of. Jefferson became governor of Virginia after that, and the fine things he did on religious freedom and other innovative acts were, I’m sure, the direct result of his thinking on the Declaration of Independence. And, of course, he must have consulted all those fellows from time to time, particularly Franklin. Ben Franklin was the smartest man at that convention and possibly in the country. I guess I have a special admiration for fellows named Franklin, last name or first.)

  Congress finally adopted a resolution for independence on July 2, and the Declaration of Independence was adopted, of course, on July 4 - though not signed on that day as a lot of people seem to think. The official date for the signing of the Declaration of Independence was August 2; forty-nine delegates signed on that date, and six others weren’t present and signed afterwards. Not everybody signed it, however; Robert R. Livingston, for example, never did, even though he was on that committee. John Hancock signed first because he was president of the Continental Congress, and I’m sure everybody knows the famous story about his signing nice and big so that his signature wouldn’t be missed, which is why, of course, a signature is called a John Hancock today.18

  So now it was all official, and Washington went to New York that month in hopes of taking New York City in the same way that Boston had been taken. But, unfortunately, it proved to be a terrible defeat, which is no wonder in view of the fact that he had less than one-seventh of the number of men the British had, and many of his men armed poorly at that. Washington and his men were badly beaten in a battle in what is now the Brooklyn Heights section of the borough of Brooklyn, and then they were chased into what is now Manhattan and managed to escape from there only because a sudden and heavy fog developed and they were able to slip away under its cover. They then moved up into White Plains, and then across the Hudson River into New Jersey, meeting the British frequently and being defeated by them each time. Washington and his men lost a lot of their supplies and ammunition, and a large number of men began to desert, so many members of the New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and New England militia running away that Washington soon found himself left with only about 3,300 men.

  There were only a few bits of good news for wives and children and the other people waiting at home. The British had had some trouble signing up a sufficient number of recruits to join the forces fighting the Americans, so they brought in a lot of German mercenaries, the Hessians,19 to help them out, and on the night of December 25 and the morning of December 26, the Hessians were in Trenton, New Jersey, and were still celebrating Christmas. Washington and his men attacked suddenly while the Hessians were still full of Christmas spirit and schnapps, taking more than 1,000 prisoners. As everybody knows from that famous painting, Washington crossed the Delaware River to do it, though I doubt like the dickens that he stood up in the boat doing it the way the painting has it, because he would have fallen right into the ice-cold water. And then on January 3, 1777, Washington again defeated the British and their friends at Princeton.

  It’s a mistake, incidentally, to believe that the Americans won the battles they won only because they continued to fight guerrilla style, shooting from behind trees and other cover, while the British continued to stand up there in ranks and making beautiful targets. It didn’t work out that way: The British soon learned the error of their ways, and they also had Indian allies who were quick to tell them that it made no sense to fight open battles on American frontier terrain. The Americans fought guerrilla style, really meaning Indian style, when it was suitable to fight that way, but they also managed to match the British and Germans in European style when that was the right way to do it, sometimes managing to rout the enemy by waiting until they got up very close and using smooth-bore muskets to deadly effect.

  The best things the Americans had going for them was the fact that they were fighting on their own familiar terrain while the British were, as the saying goes, strangers in a strange land, and more important, the fact that that terrain was beloved to the Americans and they were fighting a war that meant everything to them while the British and their employees were just there to do a job. This was true of almost every American soldier, even the fellows who sneaked off to tend their crops and were brought back and lashed 100 or 500 times; when they went into battle, they fought with a fervor and a dedication that the other side just couldn’t match. They were completely fed up with the British and the constant injustice of King George III and some of his advisors, and they had plenty of inspiration in the sight of Washington and others who had left wealthy and comfortable homes to lead them and fight along with them.

  They also had the inspiration of a little book whose title and author I’m sure you’ll recognize, Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. Paine was an Englishman who came to America only two years before the start of the Revolutionary War; he was the son of a Quaker and aged thirty-seven when he arrived, and I guess you’d call him a radical of sorts because he was always in one kind of trouble or other through most of his life. He worked in the excise service in England and was fired twice, mostly because he was a kind of labor leader ahead of his time and kept agitating for higher wages and trying to get his fellow workers to agitate along with him. And after the war, he went back to England for a while and wrote some things in favor of the French Revolution and against Edmund Burke that were so strong that they got him into trouble again and he had to leave the country and go to Paris, and then he got into trouble there and was in a French prison for nearly a year. And then he wrote some things against the Bible and against George Washington which made him so unpopular with Americans that, when he returned to this country in 1802, he found himself practically friendless and died in total poverty in 1809.

  But he was a wonderful writer, and when he wrote Common Sense and it was published in January 1776, it sold more than 100,000 copies. And copies were constantly passed from hand to hand among the soldiers and helped tremendously to sustain their dedication during the darkest days of the war.

  The soldiers needed the inspiration. After the small victories at Trenton and Princeton, there was a bad loss at Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania on September 11, 1777. Washington learned that General Howe and his men were at Elkton, Maryland, and moving toward Philadelphia, a
nd Washington stationed most of his men at a place called Chadds Ford because he knew that the British would have to cross the creek at that point. Howe sent a Hessian general, Baron Wilhelm von Knyphausen, and his men to Chadds Ford, making it appear that that was the entire British force, but moved with most of his men on the Americans’ right flank. The Americans suffered many losses and were totally defeated, and Howe moved on and took Philadelphia. Washington had to retreat to Chester, Pennsylvania, and that was the winter in which he and his men suffered terribly at Valley Forge.

  There were other defeats, but also some important victories. One of the most important took place in northern New York on September 19, 1777. General Burgoyne, who was a fool in some ways, went home on leave and asked the King to allow him to go after the Americans around Albany when he returned, and the King bought it and the British War Office ordered it. Maybe it’s hindsight when I say this, but I don’t think so; I think it’s obvious that that was exactly the wrong thing to do, and that the right thing to do was to bring all the British forces together, instead of separating them, and wipe out Washington and his men completely in New Jersey. The concentration of all the British forces against Washington’s little group of men was what Washington himself feared most, and the destruction of his small army would have discouraged all other American soldiers completely and sent them home in total defeat. But, instead, Burgoyne went after the army in upstate New York, expecting that he’d be joined by Indians and loyalists and some of General Howe’s men in lower New York.

  It was the dumbest of moves. He left British headquarters in Montreal and marched his men a total of 185 miles into deepest wilderness, using up most of his supplies and making it necessary to send a force of about 1,300 men, mostly Hessians, to seize supplies from the Americans around Bennington, Vermont. He also had a secondary purpose: He felt that that area was a particular hotbed of American traitors and wanted to teach them a lesson. But for once, the Americans had the superior numbers. An army of 2,000 men met the Hessians at Bennington, led by General John Stark, an experienced soldier who had fought in the French and Indian War, and the Americans easily defeated the Germans. And Burgoyne and his men, totaling about 6,000, were met by a force of 9,000 Americans at a place called Freeman’s Farm in Saratoga, and were defeated there. Burgoyne and his men were then chased all over the place. His British and Indian and loyalist reinforcements never showed up, while more and more Americans arrived in northern New York, until the American force was up to about 20,000 men. On October 17, Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga to the American commander, General Horatio Gates.

  The victory was important in an even more relevant way than American morale; it finally brought the French into the war on the American side. Benjamin Franklin had been sent to France as the American minister late in 1776, joining two other Americans there, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee, in efforts to persuade the French, as longtime enemies of the British, to help America win the war. The French, however, refused to help the Americans openly, limiting their assistance to loaning the Americans money secretly and persuading Spain, their allies and also traditional enemies of Britain, to do the same. Only a small number of Frenchmen like the twenty-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1777 and was appointed a major general, helped the Americans openly. And when news reached France of some of the Americans’ earlier defeats, even the small amount of assistance slowed down to a trickle.

  But when Gates defeated Burgoyne at Saratoga, and the news traveled across the ocean to France, Franklin rushed to tell the French foreign secretary, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, about it, and simultaneously, Franklin’s close friend, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, ran through the streets to tell King Louis XVI what had happened. Beaumarchais ran so fast and so enthusiastically, swinging his arms as he ran, that he later felt severe pain in one of his arms and discovered that he had dislocated it.

  Beaumarchais wasn’t a professional politician; he was a watchmaker turned dramatist who wrote a lot of things that you’ll recognize, including Le Barbier de Séville, written in 1775, which Rossini turned into his famous opera in 1816, and Le Mariage de Figaro, written in 1784 and made into the opera by Mozart two years later. He was also a publisher who brought out, between 1785 and 1790, a seventy-volume edition of Voltaire’s writings. But he was also an occasional secret agent for the King and enjoyed cloak-and-dagger operations, and he was enthusiastic about America and loved Franklin, so he was helpful to the American cause from the start. The principal supplier of French arms to the Revolutionary Army, in fact, was a company called Hortales & Cie., but there was really no such firm; it was Beaumarchais shipping guns and ammunition. (One sad note here, which probably ought to be a footnote, but which I’ll put right in this paragraph because, as I’ve said, I don’t like footnotes. Beaumarchais was supposed to be repaid his costs with tobacco and other American products, but the American government became so busy setting itself up that he didn’t receive a dime in his lifetime. He died in 1799, and Congress didn’t get around to paying his heirs until 1835. Which is just shameful.)

  But the news about Saratoga fired up French enthusiasm again, and on February 6, 1778, the French government made it official and visible, signing a treaty with Franklin. They then sent over 6,000 experienced soldiers to help Washington out, led by another very good man whose name takes up half a page, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau. And the French also began to supply much more money and arms, and French ships started to harass the British on the seas.

  The British didn’t throw in the towel then and there, of course; the war dragged on nearly four more long years, until almost the end of 1781. The British now turned their attention to the South, planning to take over Georgia because there weren’t too many American troops there, and the place was loaded with loyalists, and they succeeded quickly. They captured the port city of Savannah and continued to move more and more deeply into Georgia and South Carolina, and when a general named Benjamin Lincoln, no relation to Abe, was sent with 5,000 soldiers to try to recapture Savannah, assisted by a fleet of French ships under Admiral Charles Hector, Comte d’Estaing, they were beaten so badly by British forces headed by Sir Henry Clinton that Lincoln had to run to Charleston, South Carolina, and was surrounded there and captured with all of his men. Then Gates, who had done so well at Saratoga, was sent to the South; he was so popular because of his success at Saratoga, at a time when Washington wasn’t doing all that well, that a thing called the Conway Cabal took place - a sort of unofficial movement by General Thomas Conway and some other American officers to remove Washington as commander in chief and replace him with Gates. But Gates only had 3,000 men, half of them just brand-new recruits, and he was met at Camden, South Carolina, by Lord Charles Cornwallis and beaten so badly that two-thirds of his men were killed or captured.

  The plain truth is that Gates and his men were so terrified that they turned and ran 200 miles before stopping, and some historians report that Gates himself was a couple of miles ahead of his officers and men all the way. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s certainly true that he was replaced immediately by General Nathanael Greene and an inquiry was ordered into his conduct, though it never actually took place. He didn’t get back into active service in the Army until after the war was over in 1782, and some of those historians are also now saying that it wasn’t really Gates who was so brilliant at Saratoga but a couple of generals under him, Daniel Morgan and Benedict Arnold. (Well, we all know how we feel about Arnold’s subsequent behavior, but there doesn’t seem to be any question about the fact that he was a brilliant soldier and military strategist. And it’s not too difficult to understand why he turned traitor after Congress promoted five other brigadier generals to major general and left Arnold in rank as a brigadier general despite the fact that the other men were junior to Arnold, and despite the fact that Washington kept pleading for a promotion for Arnold. This turned him into a bitter man, even though he eventual
ly got his promotion, and his pro-British attitude increased after he married the daughter of a Philadelphia loyalist, Peggy Shippen. He was also bitter because he had some disagreements with civilian authorities and had to face a court-martial in order to be cleared of most of the charges. Though I agree that there’s no acceptable excuse for traitorous behavior at any time and for any reason.)

  Greene didn’t do much better than Gates, or at least so it appeared at first; he was defeated in three battles in the Carolinas, at Guilford Courthouse, Hobkirk's Hill, and Eutaw Springs. And there was deep depression among many American officers and soldiers when a British spy, Major John André, was captured and revealed that Arnold, then the commander at West Point, was in the process of handing over West Point to the British in return for some money and a British commission - and when Arnold escaped and joined the British and led his men in victories against the Americans in Connecticut and Virginia. (André was hanged, even though he seems to have been a decent fellow and a patriot like our Nathan Hale, but Arnold got away to Canada and then to England and lived in England until his death in 1801 at the age of sixty.)

  Greene, however, was a better strategist and soldier than Gates, and probably better than most other American officers, and he kept regrouping after each retreat and harassing the British forces until he finally forced Cornwallis and his men back into Virginia. He was another true patriot and had to sign so many personal notes to get supplies for the Continental Army that, after the war, he was forced to sell his estates to pay off the pledges. I’m glad to say that the people of Georgia had the good sense to give him a plantation when that happened. And it can certainly be said that his victories in the South did much to demoralize the British and bring the war close to an end.