THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 1765 to 1788
By Mike Donovan
Based on a True Story
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Overview
The Stamp Act 1765
You Call This Protection?
The Stamp Act Congress NYC 1765
Go East, Young Redcoat
Support for the Colonials in England
Declaratory Act 1766-67
Townshend Acts 1767
Vice Admiralty Court Act 1768
American Department - British Handicaps
The Blank Colonial Pallette
Standing Armies - Redcoats in Private Homes
Enter the Stage, One of the Ugliest Men in London 1770
Blood in the Snow - The Boston Massacre - March 5 1770
The Boston Tea Party - December 16 1773
Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty
Intolerable and Coercive Acts 3-31-74
The Suffolk Resolves - September 4-9 1774
Militia Factor
First Continental Congress - September 1774
Eve of War 1774-75
One if by Land, Two if by Sea
“The British Are Coming!”
Lexington and Concord - April 19 1775
All is Fair in Love and Revolutionary War - The Reds Retreat to Boston
Israel Gordon’s Atrocity
Three Blind Cats
Committees of Safety
Now We Are Enemies - Battle of Bunker Hill
Washington Takes Command
Plans for Dorchester Heights and Boston
Benedict Church
Tico
Boston
Oh No, Canada
Widow Moore’s Creek - 2-27-76
14 Generals
The Articles of Confederation - June 1776
Lee Steps up to the Plate
Indy-Pendence
Islander Morale
French Secret Aid
Providence - April 5 1776
Washington to New York
The Howe Brothers - I’ll Take Manhattan
The Battle of New York City
Haarlem Heights 9-16-1776
White Plains
Fort Washington Falls - 11-16-76
British Smoke a Newport - 12-76
Retreat Across the Jerseys - Late 1776
Trenton - Dec 26 1776
Congress Changes its Name
Princeton - January 1777
Morristown
Saratoga - Part I - Boob Burgoyne Plans to Cut the Colonies in Half
Tico Taken by GJ - July 6 1777
Past Tico
Bennington
The Scatesgoat of Saratoga
The Brave Historians
Oriskany
British Surrender at Saratoga - October 17 1777
Who’s on First - Where is Howe?
Brandywine - September 11
The French Alliance 1777-78
Why England Slept Alone
Blockade, You Blockheads!
The Hessians, Victims of Propaganda
Conway Cabal - 1778
Valley Forge 1777-1778
Reuben Steuben
York Peppermint Congress
Franklin’s Double-Game
Naval War of the Revolution
British Navy in Sorry Shape Too
Comte D’Estang - The Goat of the French Navy 1778
Lord Sandwich - The Goat of the British Navy
Jack Jones is Just Getting Warmed Up
Wyoming Massacre 1778 - The Tomahawk Chop
Newport and Boston 1778
Monmouth 1778
Nuclear Rockets Destroy Bristol
Kaskaskia Fireworks July 4 1778
Savannah New Year - January-1-79
British Burn Portsmouth/Norfolk 5 79
Spain Joins the Fracas 1779
Sullivan Expedition to the Finger Lakes - Summer 1779
Benedict Arnold Betrays the USA 1779
The Civil War in the South
Made Marion: The Swamp Fox of the Revolution
Dutch Treat 1780
Lincoln Surrenders Charleston S.C. - May 12 1780
Steeple Chase
The Sober Swamp Fox of the Revolution
Fitzy’s Nickel and Tarleton’s Quarter
Washington, We Are Here!
Camdentown - October 1780
King’s Mountain - October 1780
Eugenio Claims Michigan for Spain January 17 1781
Mutiny on the Unpaid Bounty - January 1781
Benedict Arnold Raids Virginia - January 1781
Dave Cowpens - January 17 1781
Weathersfield - May 1781
Battle of the Capes - September 5 1781
Yorktown - October 1781
Grisly Griswold - September 1781
Charleston Offensive Rejected
Battle of the Santees - April 9-12 1782
Gibraltar - The Grand Assault September 18 1782
Mysore Wars
Newburgh Conspiracy
Fears of a False Peace
Paying for the War
Negotiations
The Issues
North Heads South
More on the Loyalists
Oswald the Good
The Wild West
The Supreme States 1784-86
The Great Depression
The Annapolis Convention - September 1786
Unanimous
The Constitutional Convention - 1787
The US Constitution
Jefferson, the Father of the Constitution
The Federalist Papers
Rhode Island Gives In
Slavery
Sources
OVERVIEW
Why do Americans celebrate the Fourth of July? If the Revolutionaries had negotiated a peaceful settlement with Britain and remained autonomous within the Empire, that might have in the long run made for a better world. It's hard to imagine a World War I or II in Europe if America was still in 1914 or 1939 a part of the British Commonwealth. It's hard to imagine a war in America over slavery if a British world government were still in operation in 1861. Americans sometimes forget that in the Revolution, both sides stood for democracy and freedom. The two just had a big argument over money. America stood for the freedom to not pay taxes. It wasn't like America was fighting a fascist member of some axis of evil.
Did the Colonists rebel because the British were bullies? No. The Colonists rebelled because the British were weak, vacillating and incapable of sticking with any given policy.
The British were always torn between having to win the hearts and minds of its colonial subjects, and keeping them subjugated. John Bull had to play good cop and bad cop at the same time, and it proved impossible.
England had to play macho cop every time the Colonists did anything rebellious. The King's men inflamed one situation after another because it would seem a blow to their pride to back down even a little. A more mature and shrewd England could have handled it better.
British politicians had been speculating for decades that the colonists might demand independence some day. 1776 wasn't exactly a shocking turn of events, just a disappointing one. Some in London were even recommending it. The mother country could benefit from American trade and commerce while no longer having the expense and burden of governing. If some liberals (Whigs) had their way the Parliament would have proposed legislation granting independence to the Colonies 20 years before they rebelled. But once the Colonists started to act defiant, it became a matter of pride fro crown and country to get tough right back.
A lot of liberals pleaded with King and Parliament to act with more understanding towards their Colonial brothers in America. But the Whigs were not in power during the entire American rebellion. Their opposition voices were heard, but never adhered to. When the King finally allowed the Whigs to form a new government, it was 1782, and the war was lost, all over but the drafting and signing of the Peace Treaties.
THE STAMP ACT 1765
Colonial history ends and Revolutionary history begins with the Stamp Act. At least that's the way I'm calling it.
The real 1776 was 1765. That's when the American Revolution really began. That's when it became cool for the first time denounce the mother country in a public place, to denounce the King, and to denounce the Parliament and its laws. Before that it was socially dangerous, and social laws are always supreme. The big change, the change inside the heart that leads to great actions, began in 65.
Who in 1765 could have imagined what changes were in store for America in the next 100 years? In 1865 Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. In 1765 the American nation didn't exist, not even in anyone's mind. Imagine a person born in 1760 and dying at 106 in 1866. From crown colony to Reconstruction is a lot of road.
The Stamp Act of 1765 was a Crown tax on business paperwork in the form of a required stupid stamp. To get an idea of the system just buy a pack of playing cards and check out the stamp (and keep the deck because I'm not into cards.)
The irony of it all as that on the eve of the Stamp Act patriotism towards the crown was riding high. The colonial mind still enjoyed the happy afterglow of the victorious French and Indian War of 1756-1763. The Colonists had fought side by side with their fellow Englishmen from across the pond. Together they had defeated the hated French. Yet by 1778 the Colonies would be fighting side-by side with the French against the troops of England.
England started the trouble with a logical argument for the need and the right to tax the colonists. Mad King George needed money to pay for the finished war, and who better to ask for money than the colonists who had so benefitted from the war. England had saved the American continent for the Americans, had promoted trade and welfare, and British men had shed a lot of blood. The least the colonists could do was pay the bill for the services rendered. The colonists didn't exactly see it that way and resisted the new war tax. England didn't feel it had many options. King George in 1765 didn't have the luxury that President W. Bush had in the 00's of paying for war with massive deficit spending and foreign loans from China.
So from October 1 1765 on, the Colonists would have to buy these special stamps from England in order to conduct day to day business. Everything had to have one of these paid stamps on it. If you bought a newspaper, it had to have a stamp on it. If you got married, the license had to have a stamp on it. If you bought a box of candles, the box had to have a stamp on it. If you paid for a carriage ride, the driver had to hand you a receipt with a stamp on it.
The Colonists had not resented the mother country until now. Sure, the Colonists were mad about the Molasses Act of 1733, the Sugar Act of 1764, and the Chewing Gum Act of 1737. But they were also slow as molasses to openly rebel over these offenses.
The Stamp Act stamped out loyalty to the Crown deep down. The Colonials resisted the Stamp Act so successfully that it created an adversarial relationship with the Crown. Grumbling against the Royal authorities now seem like the norm for almost everyone. It was like prohibition in the 1920's which made the average American for the first time embrace criminal behavior as a norm. The Stamp Act changed the continental mind-set. When even the Colonial authorities were looking the other way or were participating in the stamp-avoiding scams, the crown was in trouble. Even many of the Colonial governors opposed the Stamp Act. The Stamp Act created a sense of unity among the colonists that had not existed previously.
There was a brief spell when Colonial authorities and Colonial rebels were on the same angry page. But then blue-collar mob behavior changed all that and restored the Colonial authorities to their old Tory hearts.
1765 was the Revolution completed. Now the events had to catch up with what was already a done deal in the Colonial mind. How can you call it any other way when angry mobs from New Hampshire completely and successfully defied all English authority? England should have learned its lesson in 1766 and saved it self the expense and losses of the Revolutionary War. 1765-66 was the last chance for England to avert revolution, and that could only be done with major concessions. If England had backtracked a little with wisdom and absorbed the lessons learned from the reaction to the Stamp Act it never would have lost the colonies and there never would have had to have been a Revolutionary War.
The Stamps arrived in the various ports of the Continental coast in the fall of 65. They were to be managed by special Stamp Officers who would make sure the new stamp laws were obeyed. That's not a job you wanted to have in the fall of 1765.
There was an amazing level of defiance and resistance to the Stamp Act, but it should be stressed that the Colonial mobs did not murder. That was the way of Europe, Africa and Asia and Antarctica in this era. When you lost out to an angry mob in Moscow or Cairo or Berlin in 1765, you'd better have your insurance papers in order. But in America you just better make sure you have a ticket to go somewhere else for the rest of your life. It is quite a tribute to the relative decency of the American spirit that the Colonial mobs intimidated and threatened but they did not murder and they rarely beat people to a pulp. Resistance was violent but limited to spirit.
The reaction against the Stamp Act was more revolutionary and more violent than the Revolutionary War itself. No one was killed in 1765, but the decision to kill and fight later on was made ten years before the fighting actually broke out. Married couples break up years after they start fighting with each other. The period where the fighting started was the real break-up.
From South Carolina to the coast of Maine, Colonists defied and openly intimidated British authorities, most of whom had to go hide on British ships in the harbor. It was as if an IRS officer came to your house and you put him in a headlock and told him to never show up here again, and you got away with it completely, and that was the end of it.
That's not far from what went on in 1765. In fact the Revolutionary War almost ignited on Halloween night in 1765 in New York City, instead of at Lexington in 1775. On that night more than 6,000 furious Yankee fans surrounded and invested Fort George at the tip of the Battery. They demanded the odious Stamps. They were going to give the British the Boston Tea Party treatment 8 years before 1773.
Tommy James, the Mayor of New York was inside the fort and debated whether or not to Kent State the threatening mob. Thomas held on until the middle of the night when the crowd gradually dispersed to go home and catch some zees. If James had told his troops to open fire in 65, there never would have been a Boston Tea Party in 73. General Gage, the Crown military commander of the colonies reported back to London that if James had given the order to fire, the rebels “would have come back within 48 hours with 48,000 more undisciplined enraged militia from all the surrounding colonies and all would have been lost.”
English rule from this point on was a Potemkin village. Crown rule was there in thin structure on the outside, while inside there was nothing. There was a Tory minority of course, but they were just that, and had no mo. Royalty had run out of loyalty.
The people of Boston were the worst behaved. In August of 1765 the Patriot fans went to the fancy home of crown tax collector Percival Darren Oliver on West Street in Boston and proceeded to trash his house. They broke almost every window and punched holes through expensive paintings. They stole the silverware, smashed in the stove, and sent a piano out a second story window and then lit it on fire in the street. Every room in the house got the full treatment. The message was “we don't like the Stamp Act.”
Two nights later they went to the Attorney General's house and did the same and worse. The AG was Tommy Hutchinson the future governor of Massachusetts. “Hutch” was a Loyalist but still personally popular in Mass. TH tried to make friends with the angry mob. The key word there is “tried.” They went into his mansion, smashed their way in through the windows, and spent an entire evening destroying the place. From dusk till dawn they took the place apart and stole everything they could carry off, trashing what they didn't steal. Hutch had a 4,500 volume library he had been building for more than 30 years. The mob destroyed every last book. And they laughed while they did it. Hutchinson was working for more than six years on a definitive history of Massachusetts Colony. He had over 700 handwritten pages completed and was negotiating with a London publisher for publication soon. Dare I tell you what happened to his manuscript? Pages were strewn about in the mud for miles around. I think I'm going to be sick. The poor man spent days wandering around Boston trying to recover as a many pages as he could, while Colonials asked him cruelly, “hey, how's the book coming?”
I have mixed feelings about capitol punishment. A guy who shoots four bullies in a donut shop deserves life in prison without parole. On the other hand, anyone who destroys a writer's manuscript should be slapped senseless every day for six years and then thrown into a pit full of hungry wolves with meat sauce all over his body.
There was only one famous Revolutionary American hero who openly supported the Stamp Act, and told the Colonists to obey their King. That man, of course, was Benjamin Franklin. Big Ben is the Tory's Tory and only really joined the Rebs at the last moment when it was clear they were going to win.
YOU CALL THIS PROTECTION?
The English explanation for why the SA was necessary inflamed resistance to it. History says it was all about “taxation without representation.” That is only partly true and covers up the larger truth. Almost any populace will agree to taxation if it is for an crucial and worthy cause. So what was the worthy cause?
The mother country explained that the tax was necessary because the King needed to keep an army in the Colonies to protect the Colonies. The Colonists should have to help pay for it. That was only fair, yes?
It was in theory. But the Colonists pointed out quite sanely that the French had not only lost the French and Indian War, they had been completely expelled from the continent. All the French had left in the entire hemisphere were a couple of small islands. The Indians were not on the warpath in the west, thanks to the unpopular Proclamation Line of 1763 which forbade the colonists from expanding any further into red lands. Colonial militia had a fairly good record of handling local Indian raids, wars, and massacres going back to the day of Captain Jack Smith in Virginia. So what exactly were the British supposed to be defending the colonists from, and why put standing armies in the Colonies at all?
Colonial leaders protested the double-standard on militarism between home and empire. The strong anti-militarism movement in England was respected there by Crown and Parliament, but brushed aside with a scoff when it came to colonial affairs. There was a healthy and popular left-wing feeling against “the redcoats” both in England and in America. Troops in England were being reduced and the people didn't like seeing them in their towns. Even though they had won a few wars recently, the English people were swinging wide left, and were liberally hoping that the days of standing armies in England were on their way out. All this at the exact same time that redcoats were being sent to America and, to top it off, taxes on the Americans were supposed to pay for the unwanted troops.
The colonists weren't that stupid. They concluded that the redcoats weren't being sent to the Colonies to protect them from the French and the Indians. They were being sent to the Colonies to protect the crown from the Colonists! This was the real reason for the violent resistance to the Stamp Act. The colonist were being asked to pay for their own suppression and oppression and they were supposed to pretend they were paying for protection. Taxation without representation would have been acceptable if the taxes were imposed to help the colonists meet a discernable and immediate threat. The colonists were the threat.
THE STAMP ACT CONGRESS OF NYC 1765
Massachusetts issued a call in the summer of 65 to the other Colonies to send delegates to an official 'Stamp Act Congress.' Nine of the 13 Colonies agreed and sent them.
The Stamp Act Congress met and deliberated and drafted a document to be sent to the King and Parliament protesting the Stamp Act and pledging to resist it.
What is most interesting about the Stamp Act Congress is its weak defiance. The body representing a chain of violent mobs up and down the coast should be even more revolutionary than the rabble it spoke for. But most of the SAC delegates were men of political position it was thus time to tone it down. Its fine to throw a rock through the governor's mansion window, but when you have to answer in a formal high setting, it's another story. So the Stamp Act Congress resolution was a surprisingly gentle request to Parliament that we aren't happy over here, so can please knock it off with the taxation without representation, especially the awful stamps.
On the other hand there is a larger paradox that made the Stamp Act more defiant than the angry mobs it represented, in spite of the emasculated tone of its final draft. Just the fact that the Colonies had held a formal Congress of unhappy Colonial aristocrats in open rebellion was at least as politically violent as mob riots.
The staid, almost deferential posture of the Stamp Act Congress was illusory. England accepted and even expected an occasional unhappy riot now and then from ground level subjects, both at home and abroad. A British regiment would be dispatched to settle them down with musket and powder, and if the mob desisted, the ruthless officer might complain, “What a pity! Our troops could have cut them down like wheat. Couldn't we just shoot a few on general principles?”
But such a solution was not available when the rebs elected delegates to an openly rebellious formal Congress. The SAC aroused more alarm in England than the riots.
GO EAST, YOUNG REDCOAT
One of the reasons the Brits couldn't smack down the Stamp Act rebellion was lack of redcoat power in place in American cities to enforce order. The Redcoats were far away in the west protecting redmen. The British Army was stationed on the Indian frontier trying to enforce the Proclamation of 1763 which kept the Colonists hemmed in on their own coast behind the Appalachians. The King's troops out in Ohio and Kentucky country were there to arrest miscreant whites, not to shoot down unruly reds.
Back on the coast, back in 1765, the Royal governors had been forced to cower in terror before the American mobs. They subsequently asked the King to bring the Redcoats back to the east coast where they could protect the loyalists and governors in the event of any more such trouble.
The mother country agreed that it was time to turn the redcoats into bluecoats. They hadn't done much in the western wilderness anyway. Those frontier troops were not trained in frontier warfare, but rather were classical soldiers prepared for formal flat open-field military confrontations. In Indian country they served as something of a deterrent, but if settler musket push came to Indian tomahawk shove, they were as unreliable as a senile alcoholic with a gambling problem. Even if the Redcoats did enforce the frontier law and arrest a settler for violating Indian rights, they would have to drag the rogue back 900 miles to the east coast through the wilderness for an appearance in court before a magistrate who was not likely to convict him or her anyway. The King's men weren't doing a whole lot of good out there and were stirring up disloyalty among the whites who resented their pro-Indian bias.
Even more ominous perhaps for the colonists was the new English plan to station large forces of redcoats in the eastern towns of Canada and Florida ostensibly to protect these places from the French and Spanish, but in fact to be ready to jump in and help the royal governors enforce English laws
on short notice.
These redcoat brigades in Halifax, Quebec, and St Augustine were a Counter-revolutionary RDF 1766 (Rapid Deployment Force.)
SUPPORT FOR THE COLONISTS IN ENGLAND
What made the situation so much more difficult for the King and Parliament in all stages of the rebellion from 1765 to 1783 was the fact that there were many prominent and powerful politicians in England who supported the Colonists. Charlie Fox was the most important but there were many others. Throw in some famous writers too, and many periodicals of influence.
King George had to play LBJ for 18 years, as he faced a war abroad and support for the enemy at home. His head spun from being surrounded by enemies, and from syphilis. (That's not a rude joke – See the historical movie, The Madness of King George, an edifying work of deserved renown.)
England repealed the Stamp Act, but the retreat came with a warning.
DECLARATORY ACT 1766-67
The Colonials had managed to get the crown to back down in the Stamp Act, through use of the boycott (named after Fred Boycott.) But the King and Parliament needed to save some face and wanted to establish a legal principle. England passed the Declaratory Act, a petulant law stating that the crown could pass any law on anything whenever and wherever it wanted. Especially including the colonies. The DA was a reminder that 'you colonials won this one. But we won't back down the next time. You've been warned.'
Sam Adams called the Declaratory Act 'treasonous' on the part of Parliament. Sam Adams was always mad at someone.
TOWNSHEND ACTS 1767
The Colonial governors were appointed by Parliament, but Colonial Legislatures paid their salary. This gave the disgruntled colonists the ability to turn the King's governors into paupers.
The King could tell governor Smith to do one thing and the Colonists could tell their governor to do something the opposite. The Governor would then tell the Colonists that “Hey, I have to obey my King.” The Colonists would reply, “Hey no problem, we understand, Gov. Now just try getting your next pay check cashed.” The governor would then say “Hey, I think the King might have been in error on this one after all.”
In the “Parson's Cause” case the Crown won a legal battle to force the colonists to pay their governor. So the Colonial legislature complied... and awarded him a salary of two cents.
England decided to crack down and passed the Townshend Acts in 1767. These new laws passed the power for paying colonial officials from the Colonists to the Crown.
New York took the lead in resisting the Townshend Laws.
VICE ADMIRALTY COURT ACT 1768
Prior to 1768, there was only one operating 'admiralty court' in the colonies and that was in far away Halifax Nova Scotia. Admiralty courts aren't history famous like the Boston Tea Party or the Sons of Liberty, but they played a major part in starting the American Revolution.
The Admiralty courts were not admirable. They operated like Nazi courts. No one had a right to a trial by jury and pretty much everyone was convicted. Admiralty courts were like the Planet of the Apes Tribunal,
Prosecutor “Objection your honor! This smuggler is not being tried, your honor, he is being disposed of!”
Judge “Well put Mr. Chillingworth.”
The right to a trial by jury was sacred to some rebels, one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. If you found yourself on trial in an Admiralty Court you would wish that your biggest problem was taxation without representation. The Admiralty Courts were specifically mentioned as a reason for separation from England in the Declaration of Independence. Most of the cases referred to these courts involved trade and smuggling, so it was a pocketbook issue for everyone.
In response to Colonial complaints about unfair trials in Halifax, the Crown passed the Vice Admiralty Court Act in 1768, setting up four more tough courts in Boston, NYC, Philly, and Charleston. It was an arrogant response to Colonial complaints.
The problem for English, the reason they needed the Admiralty Courts, was that Colonial juries usually acquitted Colonial defendants. If a judge instructed Colonial jurors to only consider whether the law was broken, he was wasting his breath. So if the Colonial courts would not enforce the law fairly, England decided that the admiralty courts would enforce it unfairly. The Colonists had only themselves to blame for having mocked justice in their free courts.
A friend of mine once said, “You have to ask yourself one question; Do you want to be right or do you want to be married?” It was the same for England. If only it didn't have to be right, it could still be married to America today, the same way Canada and Australia are. But no, the King and parliament had to be right. They had to win all the arguments. They lost both the argument and the marriage.
AMERICAN DEPARTMENT – BRITISH HANDICAPS
Until 1768 England administered America through a “Southern Department,” as in Southern Europe. There was a Northern Department, headed by the Northern Secretary, and a Southern Department headed by a Southern Secretary. The Americans were considered so friendly that they didn't need to be looked after in a separate administrative department. England tossed the Yanks in as an afterthought in the Southern Department of European affairs.
By 1768 Lord North and the King became alarmed enough to create a new “American Department.” The 'American Secretary' would head it.
The sudden haphazard creation of an American Department says much about British slipshod 'invent as you go' administrative operations. Great Britian was still learning how to govern itself as the American Revolution brewed to a boil and then hit the battlefields for 7 years. Britain's own political revolutions were a recent memory. When the Stamp Act was passed, there were a million elderly Brits who remembered the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Britian had a disadvantage in being not only a Royal Parliamentary hybrid, but a brand new one. It was learning on the job and now had to fight a rebellion before it had its own sea legs as a new form of government. When the King had ruled as an absolute monarch in the good old days, everyone knew what was what. The King may not have always made the right decision, but when he made one it was implemented efficiently. Nothing was disobeyed because nothing was vague, and punishment for disobedience or inefficiency was certain. “One bad general is better than two good ones.”
Then along comes Cromwell and after all the smoke has cleared there is a completely new system of administration. Few important politicians were now exactly sure of their job titles and what it did or did not empower them to do. If they consulted the opinions of other politicians they'd hear back, “That's a coincidence, I was just going to ask you the same thing about my job.” The King might be decisive but lacked power, while the Parliament had power but was not decisive. Parliament almost never took any bold initiatives on anything, let alone a collective grand strategy for suppressing the American Revolution.
Historians generally condemn English individual leaders for this or that unwise decision toward the trouble-maker Colonies, but the lack of any cohesive Parliamentary brains trust had as much to do with British blunders as the personal foibles of a North, George, Amherst, Sandwich or Hoagie.
It's a lot more fun emotionally for Americans to see Britian as a Goliath bully with all the advantages. It makes the Colonial victory that much more rewarding. But Britian was a ship with a disabled rudder trying to fight a battle it never wanted, while the leaders were below decks trying to figure out how this newfangled rudder actually steers the ship.
BLANK COLONIAL PALATTE
The Americans had a big advantage being in a virgin land with no established traditional political infrastructure.
Americans make a big deal of our brilliant scholars and leaders who so wisely wrote the U.S. Constitution and set up a great system. But the European geniuses who came before them only failed because they faced a crippling handicap in too much established structure that wouldn't back down and disappear just because some thinkers proved that these new ideas were indisputably the best ones ever.
America in the revolutionary age was a new village under construction and a bunch of intrepid brainiacs were in the right place at the right time. Madison, Jefferson and Randolph didn't have superior ideas to Locke, Voltaire, and Bertolini, they just had a superior opportunity to implement them. The Founding Fathers in fact ripped off everything from Europeans who had long ago 'known these truths to be self-evident.'
British administrative inefficiency overlaps any study of the Revolution. The hybrid British system was unwieldy compared to the newborn but solid America democracy that was emerging to fight it. The Rebels were more capable of all being on the same page and doing something about it at any given time in the tale.
STANDING ARMIES – REDCOATS IN PRIVATE HOMES
One of the clear causes of the revolution was the forced quartering of Redcoats troops in Colonial private homes. The Patriots were steamed about this.
Who can blame them? Most of us are ready to jump off a roof when the in-laws stay over for three days, even if we like them. Imagine how you would feel if a Canadian sergeant knocked on your door and introduced you to three thuggy looking young men and said,
“These men are going to be living in your house for the next few months. You have to feed them and make sure they have their own bedrooms.”
“But sir! We don't have barely enough room in here for oursel...”
“Silence, whippersnapper! This is not open for debate!”
American militia forced on private citizen homes would have been bad enough, but foreign troops from England was way too much. If it were local troops involved the home family could at least try to find some social and cultural common ground to try and get along. These foreign troops in your home didn't even know how to make friendly small talk.
To Colonials in the know, the practice was all the more outrageous because it was specifically forbidden in England! The old Mutiny Act had addressed
this issue. The English Bill of Rights expressed outrage and declared a ban on the practice. But in quartering troops in private homes without the consent of the residents, the Colonies were clearly being treated as second class members of the Empire at the crown's convenience, and the quartering of British troops definitely helped light the fuse that ignited the struggle for Independence.
ENTER THE STAGE ONE OF THE UGLIEST MEN IN LONDON - 1770
That's what the fat jolly new British Prime Minister once called himself. His title was Lord North, and he is known in English history as the man who lost the War of Independence (as it's called over there.)
Lord North is the Tojo of the American Revolution. His tenure was a road map of English disasters from 1770 to 1782. English historians rake him over the coals pretty good, while American historians just tell the story plainly of how he ran things in London.
King George is far more famous but George and North ran the Revolutionary War (as it's called over here) as a team. They both dropped the ball together by playing tough guy.
There is one famous painting of North, the Earl of Guilford. So judge for yourself.
BLOOD IN THE SNOW BOSTON MASSACRE – MARCH 5 1770
It started one block from where Fanuel Hall stands today. It was snowing. A bunch of little kids were harassing British soldiers who were patrolling outside the State House. They threw snowballs at them, and called them names. One soldier decided that enough was enough and he gave the 8 year old boy a big time slap, knocking the tyke to the ground.
The kid ran back to the docks and told his story. He had witnesses who confirmed it. The longshoremen and the unemployed adults ganged up and marched to the State House in truculent mood. This time they had snowballs with rocks in the middle and they began pelting the Redcoats with grown-up throwing arms. It turned into a near riot as the Rebs screamed bad names at the troops and threw all sorts of debris at them.
Suddenly a shot rang out and a Reb fell bloody in the snow. More soldiers opened fire like Kent State and when the powder smoke cleared four more Bostonians were lying dead in the snow. One of the dead was an African-American.
The incident inflamed the entire Massachusetts colony and the solders and their commander were arrested and put on trial.
Paul Revere drew a painting of the incident as if a bunch of sadistic soldiers had fired in cold blood at innocent civilians under the direct order of a superior officer who shouted fire with the precision of a European Battle leader.
John Adams defended the soldiers in court. Most of them were acquitted. Adams survived the fallout. If anything, his name rose in respect for having the courage to defend the unpopular side. It would serve him well in the future as his word was now unquestionably honest. Please don't tell me about the HBO special starring Paul Giamatti. John Adams was not a beady-eyed Italian fat guy with a lot of facial twitching.
BOSTON TEA PARTY 12-16-73
The colonists drank a lot of tea and they bought most of it from the London based East India Tea Company. The London group imported tea from India and paid a 25% tariff. The EITC before re-sold it to other companies, who then either distributed it in England or exported it to America.
The colonists drank tons of smuggled tea, which was a lot cheaper and usually wasn't quite as tasty. Total tea imports legal and illegal to the 13 colonies was almost a million pounds a year
The Tea Act of May 1773 gave London and the EITC the right to cut out the middleman and export their tea directly to the colonies, and with the 25% tax refunded. The Tea Act provided for government subsidies so East Indy could flood the market, drowning out the smugglers by providing better tea at a price lower than smuggled Dutch tea. Dutch tea was Stop & Shop, India tea was Starbucks Sumatra.
Meanwhile the crown put a tax on the tea going from the home island to the colonies. The revenue was useful but the tax was really more an act of defiance against the colonists. The mother country was telling the colonists that they had the right to tax, even though they had repealed the Stamp Act. The tea tax was a token tax to test the air and it came up stormy. That was the reason for the strong reaction to it. It wasn't the tax itself, nor the precious issue of tea. It was that the colonists knew exactly what the tax was about, and it wasn't about that tax, not really. England was telling America to 'fetch the water bucket,' just to see where we all stand.
The colonies preferred to drink smuggled second-rate tea at a higher price than the better East India tea. They were resisting the taxation principle, and protesting the way the crown was bankrolling one private big company while coldly doing nothing to help the colonists financially.
On December 16, 1773 a group of 52 Boston Patriots disguised as Algonquin Indians boarded three ships in the harbor that belonged to the EITC. These yahoos dumped 343 chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor rather than pay a tax on it.
The actual damage to the tea wasn't enough to disrupt the tea industry, but the political act shook things up a bit. They do a re-enactment of the Tea Party every year on a replica tourist trap ship on the Boston waterfront.
One of the reasons I detest the current Republican “Tea Party” movement is that they are out of line taking the name of this great historical event and riding on it to national attention. They're telling me that they are just like those people of 1773, because they hate big government and excessive taxation. It's two completely different situations and they are arrogant to arrogate such a great name for themselves.
PAUL REVERE AND THE SONS OF LIBERTY
The Sons of Liberty were bad Bostonians long before they made movies like The Departed. The Sons instigated and bankrolled the Tea Party and were behind most of the sparks that started the war. The Sons of Liberty could hurt you bad if you weren't in their corner.
Once the Colonies declared their united but separate independence, there had to be some sort of reb government, some sort of authority, (and this was the era before police departments.) So the radical Patriots created roaming government bodies of powerful men whose rule was law because, other than them, there was no law. The Sons especially had the power to legally terrorize Tories. For example, the SLs could confiscate your property just because you declared boldly for the mother country. That is the story of thousands of these so called “King's Friends.” I feel sorry for Tories. Believing in American Independence didn't mean you were a good and moral person, and being against the radical independence revolutionary movement didn't mean you were a bad or immoral person. But it all came down to that in the end.
The whole thing is very much like the situation in Russia in 1917, when temporary but powerful ruling local revolutionary bodies, called 'soviets' were everywhere established after the fall of the Romanov dynasty.
INTOLERABLE AND COERCIVE ACTS MARCH 31 1774
Boston had been a very bad boy and needed a spanking. The King was going to do the honors with the support of most of Parliament. King George even had the newfound support of most of the British people. Even lefty whigs in England thought it as time for Boston to, “get over itself,” and fetch the water bucket.
Boston was 'grounded.' Parent Britain passed a number of official acts punishing Beantown until it paid for the water-soaked tea. The city of Boston was closed for business until further notice.
Other new tough laws were passed, which affected all the colonies, including the Quebec Act which expanded Canada at the expense of the Americans. But the Boston Port Act, closing the harbor to all trade was the big one.
The rest of the Colonies came to the defense of Boston and so began the American Revolution.
THE SUFFOLK RESOLVES SEPTEMBER 4-9 1774
In Milton Mass there is an old ordinary colonial house that I used to ride by on my bicycle when I lived in Braintree. Few people driving by appreciate that it was in this building that the break with England came.
The political leaders of the Mass rebs met here at the 'Suffolk Resolves House' on September 4, 1774 in response to the Coercive Acts and the closing of Boston Harbor. People were getting hungry and many were leaving Boston to go fend for themselves in the hill country.
The Suffolk Resolves declared that for now, Massachusetts was an independent nation! It might join with the mother country later, but for now it was finished with England. Not even Pat Henry in Virginia had ever gone this far before.
The Suffolk Resolves declared a boycott on all English goods. It was a boycott for all true Americans to adhere to, and woe to those who didn't.
One Suffolk Resolve threatened General Gates with revolutionary military force if he tried to arrest any of the political leaders of the Patriot cause. Another Resolve set in motion the procurement of weapons and gunpowder to be used as Massachusetts saw fit. Another resolve promised to punch the King right in the nose, “if such an opportunity arose.”
The SR's were approved by a larger political group on the 9th in Dedham, and Paul Revere rode off to Philadelphia to pass the stimulating news on to another rebellious group meeting there.
MILITIA FACTOR
In lining up the two teams for military analysis the historians habitually bash the quality of the Colonial militia. Sure, they were not professionals. Sure, they usually needed bounties to work for the cause, sure they were prone to desertion when the going got rough, lacked the discipline of British troops and sometimes refused to march.
That is not contested, but the militia factor is generally underrated. For starters, they won the war. French naval help was crucial of course, but French land forces only helped out significantly in one campaign, the end game at Yorktown. No outsider professional army contributed to the 95 other battles and campaigns of the war. The militia, for all its weaknesses, did it all on their own, even if they didn't do it flawlessly.
Too much judgement comes down on the negative side of militia because it failed pathetically in this or that battle. But just the fact that the militia system was already well established as part of colonial culture and society, is what gave the Americans the inspiration to start the Revolution in the first place. If there had been no militia system there would have been no Revolution. What could they expect to do against English professional troops of they had no militia tradition to call on? Militia tradition gave the Yanks the confidence that led to Lexington and Concord. The Colonials already knew they could organize their own expedition to take the powerful fortress of Louisbourg (1745) with absolutely no help from the mother country. If they could take Louisbourg, a standing fortress manned by the professional French army, who was to say they couldn't hold their own against overextended British punitive expeditions?
The militia system was the National Guard before it was called that. Once a month, every able-bodied man between 16 and 55 had to muster on the town common and demonstrate skill with muskets. Military training was a normal part of being a man. (Today it is being against the military that is a normal part of being a man.)
Most revolutions come from an angry unorganized rabble of have-nots who have had quite enough. This was not the case in the Colonies. All classes were part of the rebellion. The banker and the farmer had both drilled in the militia together. The American Revolution was a rare revolution in that it already had a military organization standing and waiting to be used at crunch time. Most revolutions fail because an unorganized rabble can't defeat an organized army.
FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS SEPTEMBER 1774
56 delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies met on September 5, 1774 in Philly. It was the famous First Continental Congress, or as it was commonly called, the FCC. Alaska refused to send any delegates to the FCC.
THE EVE OF WAR 1774-1775
General Gates was in command of a hostile Boston held hostage. If it were left up to Gates, the Intolerable Acts would be rescinded and the British would evacuate, and if Boston then still misbehaved he would come back in force and occupy again.
But this line of thinking never got a chance. The British set 2,000 troops to beef up the Boston Redcoat garrison for 1775. They also sent three famous generals. What they didn't bring was enough food and lumber supplies.
Word got to the British that the rebellious colonists were skimming the gunpowder and musket supply of the Commonwealth. The Bos-Rebs were creating an armory for insurrection, a secret stash. London ordered Gates to go out and find the secret ammo depot.
Gates believed that the stores were scattered in more than one location and that such an expedition was both logistically foolish and politically incendiary. Gates needed the element of surprise to even have a remote chance to make it work, and he definitely didn't have surprise.
Gates actually thought his mission to find the ammo was secret. But in shutting down Boston, Gates had created a huge unemployment problem, and these disgruntled Pats were delighted to act as spies and get the scoop on what the British were up to. Regular Redcoats liked to drink and soon the word leaked that the Brits were readying for a foray to Lexington to find the gunpowder. As General Gates marched a regiment across the Boston Common he found Tories yelling “Good luck in Lexington! We know you'll find those weapons of mass destruction!” Then a little kid went up to Gates and said, “You guys won't find anything at Lexington! You're wasting you're time and you're gonna get wasted!” After shoving the kid to the ground and calling him, “An insolent toad,” Gates actually turned around and went back across the Common from where he came. He called his generals together and explained that they had no element of surprise. But the officers more or less said that orders were orders and they should send the expedition out anyway.
On April 1775, 775 British troops marched out of Boston looking for the magic storage dump that didn't exist. The guns and powder were indeed well dispersed. Some of the rifles were buried in various cornfields.
ONE IF BY LAND – TWO IF BY SEA
The rebels wanted to know which way the British were heading out of Boston to go take a powder. Were they going to march out by land, first south across Boston Neck, then back north across Brookline within 1,000 yards of my current home? Or were they going to cross Boston Harbor within 1,000 years of where I grew up, and move up the Charles River by boat and shorten the route that way? The rebels were to signal the info with lanterns in the Old North Church. One if by land, two if by sea. Two lanterns went up like Indian smoke signals and the word spread all the way to Lexington. That's the basic schoolbook version, at least.
The story that two lanterns were hung in the Old North Church is an old desperate housewives tale. Maybe they were, but the lantern intel wasn't crucial, and the info was out and on its way easily enough without the lamps.
“THE BRITISH ARE COMING!”
You know what's coming. I'm going to tell you it didn't really happen that way and you're exactly right and the famous story is even more wrong than the lamp business.
LEXINGTON AND CONCORD APRIL 19, 1775
200 British light infantry regulars showed up at dawn on the Lexington Green on April 19. Opposing them was a disorganized gang of about 90 local Massachusetts militia. It was dawn, and you don't need any flowery descriptions of it either. The men ranged from 16 to 65. Seven father-son combos were there waiting to face danger. This is moving stuff. The only time my father and I ever faced danger together is when we went to a New York Giants football game wearing New England Patriots jackets.
Like almost everything else in history, there are many conflicting accounts of exactly what went down on the Green. Original sources differ, and conclusions of historians differ to the point where you just have to throw a dart and tell it the way you like it best. Or, far worse, go over each version citing each source and each historian, a process which requires 16 turgid pages, ruining a lively one-page story.
So here is my version. A row of Redcoats fired a warning volley into the air. Then British Major Pitcairn made a pitiful blunder. He cursed at the rebels while demanding they desist. He could have asked them a way that gave them a way to lay down their weapons with dignity. Instead he screamed,
“Put down your weapons and cease this insurrection
you damn dirty Rebels!”
Calling people names laced with profanity removes all hope of conciliation. Some of us have learned that one the hard way at some point in life. And by the way, “damn” was a pretty big swear word in 1775. Pitcairn was doing his Dice Clay impression.
One of the Rebs then fired his own warning shot into the air.
Pitcairn now tried to back track a little bit as he sensed the situation might get out of control. Just as he began to shout to his men to hold their fire they began screaming wildly and charged at the Rebels. They didn't hear his sanity amidst their temporary insanity.
The British struck the Americans with a volley and a bayonet attack. Eight Minute Men were dead in a minute, man, and 17 were seriously wounded. One British soldier got a flesh wound in the leg. That was it for their side. Pitcairn's horse was wounded, but didn't have to be put down (later on it heard more gunshots, tossed Pitcairn to the ground and ran away for good, and who could blame the poor thing? A great story.)
Lex was one of the great phyrric victories of all time. England won a skirmish and set the colonies aflame, igniting a war it could not possibly win because only compromise and conciliation could have. The only victory available was peace. There was now no way to win because the British goal was not conquest, but preventing separation. In killing eight men at Lexington the British lost the war at the very moment it started it.
The Battle of Lexington went so badly that Yankee poets couldn't bring themselves to name “the Shot Heard Round the World” after the shots fired there. They saved the hero worship for the second battle at Concord. That one went a little better.
CONCORD
The Yankee militia retreated to Concord.
At noon the stage moved a few miles down the road to the Concord Bridge spanning the dark blue waters of the Concord River. Here were three companies of British regulars facing a much larger squadron of American militia.
A British soldier fired a warning shot. Then a few more shots rang out, but neither side really wanted to start a war. Neither side was shooting to kill. Musket-balls were landing in the river. It was a battle of the warning shots. Neither side wanted to be known as the men who began the killing. But eventually a couple of bullets did their dirty deeds and found some chest. The battle of warning shots changed over like rain to snow and men fell dead.
At Concord Bridge, the militia stood and fought the British in a small but stubborn formal military engagement. Both sides took casualties. The Revolutionary War had begun.
ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR – THE RETREAT TO BOSTON
The fantastic news of battle spread through the countryside and Colonial militia began to arrive from all over Massachusetts. The British were outnumbered and under fire. The hunters were now the hunted. The Brit commander decided to retreat 18 miles back to Boston where the Kingsmen still held firm control. They now realized that the Mass countryside was a hornets-nest of Revolutionary hatred.
The 18 mile trip back to Boston was a shooting gallery with traveling targets being tracked by moving snipers. The British were on the road in formal formation trying to fight off the terrorists who were shooting at them from behind trees, walls, windows, barn-lofts and haystacks. Is was as blackhearted as a video game.
British officers and Tories later said that this wasn't war, this was murder. I read about this as a kid and loved the image of the colorfully targeted redcoats getting shot down piecemeal as they marched back to Boston. Good for us! That is an inhumane scene, however righteous in the bigger picture it might have been. As an old adult I see it with fresh eyes. The Colonists were indeed not fighting fair by military rules. They were shooting down defenseless targets with little or no risk to themselves, like B-29 pilots in 1945. In 1782 at the Paris Peace negotiations, Americans complained about the “butchery” of the British in waging war. But the march back to Boston was definitely some first rate butchery too. Almost 300 British soldiers were killed or wounded that day, with less than 100 for the Massachusetts men.
ISRAEL GORDON'S ATROCITY
There is a terrible story from Concord that most Americans don't know about. A wounded British soldier was moaning on the ground near the bridge when Izzy Gordon, a teen-aged boy, came by. Israel was a Patriot with a bit too much vinegar in his blood. Maybe he had just seen one of his relatives gunned down on Lexington Green earlier that day. The motive for what he did is not recorded. But what he did wasn't pretty.
Borden too a little axe out of his pocket and proceeded to hack in the skull of the wounded redcoat. It was murder, and it was the first real atrocity of the Revolutionary War.
Word of this hatchet job got back fast to Brits Francis Smith, and Pitcairn. The Royal troops were informed too and became enraged. From now on there would be no quarter.
All the way back to Boston as the Mass snipers were picking off British soldiers without mercy, the English were giving some of it right back. Pitcairn sent out flanking parties ahead of his troops to try to get the snipers before they got them. On at least six occasions, the bloody-backs went into private homes and bayoneted the adult males in the house to death. For a couple of houses, it was My Lai Massachusetts.
For the first year of the war all across the continent, British officers made the most of the Borden hatchet story and it was reported in the English newspapers. The dead man served as a mascot of fighting spirit for the Crown.
Israel Gordon was never prosecuted for the murder of the wounded Brit. In fact, when he heard that he might be, he and his father fled Massachusetts and were never heard from again.
A ditty made the rounds of New England,
Izzy Gordon took an ax,
And gave a redcoat 40 whacks,
And when he saw what he had done,
He packed his things and chose to run
About 100 years later this little poem was re-hashed and touched up to apply to Lizzie Borden of Fall River.
THREE BLIND CATS
When the Americans besieged the British in Boston, General Gates asked (begged) London for reinforcements. Instead Lord North and King George sent over three celebrity generals to shock and awe the Colonials. They were Howe, Burgoyne and Clinton. These great cats would scare the American mice back into their holes.
All three were famous military leaders, but all wore Whigs. The King was enforcing a right-wing policy with left-wing generals. George wasn't fond of any of them, at least not politically. But he wanted to scare the Rebels with big names to show them what they were up against. These guys had already proved they could beat France, Spain and Prussia. You primitive American rebels should best come to your senses. All three celebrity generals favored a compromise peace with the rebels as soon as they could intimidate them to surrender. Howe, Clinton and Burgoyne understood the need for a tough short-term policy, but saw no need for a tough long-term policy. At the earliest possible moment, these men would restore the colonies with love, forgiveness and friendship. It was a precarious way to run a war.
COMMITTEES OF SAFETY
Shortly after the news from Concord and Lexington swept the land the British government in the colonies ceased to exist. Powerful 'Committees of Safety' stepped in to fill the huge colonial leadership void. This was the new improved and nationalized version of the Boston Sons of Liberty, except now they were organizing to govern, not simply to rebel. The Safety Committees were temporary governing bodies of Rebels who made the rules as they went along and had the power to seize, to try, to bully, and if need be, to kill. All of these powers were used, sometimes justifiably. Sometimes rank injustice was visited upon innocent Tories in the name of righteous justice.
Woe to anyone who defied the COS. They were the cop, judge, and legislature all rolled into one dusty moving body of men, checking out one location after another to make sure there were no known Tories ready to sabotage the cause.
As in 1765, most of the British Royal Governors in 1775-6 fled to a British man-of-war (big ship) in the closest harbor. The govs feared for their personal safety committee.
Again, it's almost scary how similar it all was to St. Petersburg in November 1917.
NOW WE ARE ENEMIES - BUNKER HILL JUNE 1775
The Battle of Bunker Hill was not only the first real battle of the Revolutionary War and the biggest battle of the entire Revolutionary War.
General Gordon Howe wanted to teach the Rebels a lesson with a frontal assault against an entrenched enemy at the top of a hill.
Howe could easily have trapped the Americans on the Charlestown peninsula by occupying Charlestown Neck. But Howe was like a football coach who has first and goal at the one and he has to run it up the middle just as a show of power. No clever plays. That was for use against real armies. These rebels didn't deserve any military respect. It would be beneath the dignity of a British general to use trick plays to score against the American rabble.
But of course Howe was being an idiot. By disrespecting the Rebs he enabled them to score a great victory.
The British marched up the hill in the bight sunlight at thousands of Bostonians watched from across the harbor on the docks and rooftops with popcorn and programs. The bookies were giving 50-1 odds on the locals with 10 points.
As the Redcoats marched towards the Americans lines they were easy targets for the defenders who held high ground and were generally good shooters. The rebels singled out officers for early death. The British soon were advancing against a “withering fire” (the pro historians love to use that phrase.) A lot of Redcoats had red all over their coats. The British lost more than 1,000 casualties, and the Americans only 500. Casualties includes wounded.
By some accounts, the British attacked in three separate assaults, and the third one finally broke through, but isn’t true. The assault was one continuous sustained drive towards the top of the hill.
British warships shelled the town of Charlestown and set it on fire and paintings of the Battle always show the town burning. But this is sometimes misrepresented as a terroristic sort of thug move to show everyone what they were up against, the kind of merciless destruction machine the British can be if you force them into it. But there was a fair and forgivable reason the British burned Charlestown. For one thing, a psychic told Howe that Ben Aflack was going to star in a bad movie about it in 260 years, so Howe thought he should raze it ot the ground to prevent hat future atrocity. More importantly, The Town was hosting a couple of hundred snipers who were hiding behind the skirts of the rules of war. They knew thatthe civilized British did not want to kill women and children. They were using The Town as a human-shield. The British had enough death in their face without a withering fire from the Charleston flank. Once it became clear that the town was hosting snipers who were killing with impunity, the word went to the Royal warship in the harbor to open fore on Charlestown. That is why Charlestown burned while the Battle of Bunker Hill raged.
Historians still can’t say who was in command of the Americans at the top of the hill. But the fighting discipline held remarkably firm. If there was no singular leadership, then the show was all the more remarkable. The rebel held as though Patton was in charge and Grant was his second in command. (Of course, exceptions prove the rule. Just as the battle was beginning, the chief of the only two small artillery pieces the Americans had to work with got scared and fled to Cambridge dragging one cannon with him. No one shot him in the back but some were tempted. The record shows that the defenders had no artillery on Bunker’s Hill but they were supposed to have two pieces that might have helped.)
There were more deserters at Bunker Hill than American history cares to remember. Almost all of it was in the officer corps. A lot of officers deserted at the beginning of the battle and ran back to Cambridge. But overall, the American fought like maniacs.
The British did take Bunker Hill after all the fighting was over, so in one sense of course, it was not technically a victory for the Americans. But the Revolutionaries had had stood tough and fought for every square inch of Charlestown, like a fine division of Prussian pros. The Yank rabble only quit after they ran out of ammo and slugged it out at the top of the hill in an insane hand to hand death match at the very end.
The British suffered many times more casualties than the Rebs, and many times more casualties than were necessary. Howe should have shown the Patriots some respect and tried a little play-action. But by deliberately disrespecting American capabilities Howie hurt his cause, wasted an advantageous military position, and sent a lot of young men to the box.
On June 18 downtown Boston was littered with the dead and wounded redcoats of Bunker’s Hill. It was Mass General 75. The British had to restore their wounded pride with convoluted explanations why they had lost, or, at least why they had lost so many casualties in a tough victory. The word got around, and even made it back to London in official reports, that the Americas had 15-20,000 troops on Bunker Hill. One officer complained that he had reported only 1,500 Americans at 1 p.m. He wanted to know how it could be that a report was going back to London that at 3 pm. there were 15,000.
No wonder they called it Breed’s Hill. Somehow it’s population multiplied by 1,000% in one afternoon. This lie provided the excuse towel for why the frontier farmer militia punished Howe’s regular Army so badly. But that was a tenth power lie. There had been only 1,500 Rebs on Bunker Hill on that bloody June 17. Exaggeration of enemy strength to explain defeat is a standard lie of war. (Churchill created the Rommel legend in 1941 to explain away the UK’s military blunders in the desert. Britian had lost because they were up against the greatest genius general of all time. That was better than admitting that one’s own mistakes was the real issue.)
Bunker Hill changed history. This was now a real war, not a simple squashable rebellion. Both sides were surprised at how far it had come in just three months, but all this had been brewing since the Stamp Act of 1765. The casualties the Rebels put on the redcoats was sensational news all over the globe, and it tremendously increased confidence of the cause for Independence. American Tories realized that it was best to keep a low profile from now on.
WASHINGTON TAKED COMMAND
General Washington reached the Cambridge Common. This was where the four state militias were gathered. Together, the regiments of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut was the Continental Army, having been named so in Philadelphia. Washington was quite the outsider.
A few platoons of snipers were on the way to help. The central and western regions supplied these characters who had the best guns and were great shots. When they got to the Continental Army lines they started up a sniper war with the British sentries, and other targets inside Boston.
A redcoat would be whistling a happy tune and - pow - down.
Washington was shocked by the lack of discipline. Morale was good. The entire army’s existence was based on morale. But there was little or no military discipline.
This is leading to an important point. The problem on the Cambridge Common in 1775 was not that the Continental Army had not been capable of establishing military discipline. The problem was that they had all made a left-wing political revolutionary decision not to.
It was called “levelling” and its practitioners were called “levellers.” This meant that royalty, class and privilege were history. Everyone was equal. Privates obeyed orders if they felt like it and the officer would accept the refusal of an order with equanimity for the officer was a leveller too. Most of the Army were levellers. It was a red left revolutionary army.
Many books dwell on the awful state of the army and how Wash straightened it out, which he definitely did. But I think most book miss a big part of the story which is the levellers, and how they held the whole thing in their hand for a couple of weeks until Washington arrived.
General Washington was an experienced military pro and a tough man when he needed to be. Soon there was a public horse-whipping of a NH militiaman from Derry who had refused to salute and officer and called him “fatso.” More whippings followed. Many miscreants were drummed out of the army. One officer yelled at Washington that
“Damn it George, you need men! You can’t throw me out of the Army!”
To which Washington replied,
“Yes! We need men! And we don’t need you!”
Sure, a few troopers deserted when Washington horsewhipped a dozen more drunks and thieves, and threatened to hang traitors who sold information to the British. But within a couple of weeks a pecking order was in operation.
Military discipline is also a political discipline. It was hard to be a leveller and take orders from a rich snob officer. The individual had to make a choice, and by the time Washington was fightin in the Jerseys in 1777, the political will of the revellers was a forgotten momentary flash in the pan revolution. The only way the Pats could win the war would be to train and fight like a disciplined army. Levelling means never having to say, “yes sir.” That lefty revolution died in Harvard Square, which is quite ironic.
Washington wanted to attack Boston in the fall of 1775, but his generals talked him out of it. Most of the enlistments were “time sensitive.” They were going to expire at the end of the year. Washington was of the “use it or lose it” mentality. Might as well send this army into battle before it goes home having done no fighting at all ( a few vets of Lexington and Concord notwithstanding.)
Sure enough on New Year’s Eve at midnight more than half the Continental Army beseiging Boston began packing up. New Years Day saw the road to Hartford and Providence covered in patriot soldiers marching home again. Washington couldn’t prevent this, but he did write a new law on December 30 that soldiers had to leave their guns behind. This was a bold order since a farmer needed his gun and it was an expensive an personal thing. Most of the sunshine patriots left without their rifles, but many defied the rule also.
Washington tried to keep the news of the mass depletion of his forces from the British. Over the course of January a lot of new Massachusetts and Rhode Island units formed up and replaced most of the lost manpower. But New Years Day was a tough one for the rebs.
PLANS FOR DORCHESTER HEIGHTS AND BOSTON
Howe knew that he had won a disastrous victory at BH. The General wanted next to storm Dorchester Heights and remove Wash and Knoxie from that hill too. But Howie couldn't take those kind of casualties in back-to-back games. Now it seemed risky for the Brits to storm Dorchester Heights, where I grew up. Another Bunker Hill type victory on the Heights would leave Howe weak in numbers, his hold on Boston weakening. To the defeated go the spoils.
Its hard to imagine that the place where I skipped out of algebra class regularly to smoke cigarettes with Valerie and Vinnie Breton in 1972 was a focal point of American history but, such is so when it comes to Dorchester Heights in South Boston.
He had to break the siege of Boston somehow. British troops tore down homes in Boston all winter for firewood to keep from freezing to death, and food was mighty scarce. A British relief expedition was scattered at sea in a storm, and Yankee privateers were intercepting unprotected merchant food ships and eating the goodies themselves. The American raiders captured the Nancy, a merchant loaded with muskets and gunpowder. Washington's army hit the jackpot with Nancy. Howe couldn't afford another Bunker Hill but he couldn't afford to starve to death either.
Howe knew that Washington held a commanding high ground on “The Heights.” Howe was ready to attack Dorchester in late February 1776, but a severe storm damaged several of his vessels and he reconsidered.
Washington, meanwhile, had his own attack plan.
George wasn't thinking strictly in defensive terms. Historians stress General Washington's overall record as being that of a general generally running away. Yes, but that was out of fort necessity in the Jerseys and New York later. For now, in the first year of the war, the Americans and Washington were actually playing offense.
Washington planned an amphibious assault on Boston from the launch pad of the very spot where 200 years later white parents shouted cruel racist chants at black schoolchildren getting off buses to go to classes. The general had two ideas on howe to pull it off. His first and favorite plan was to wait and bait Howe into attacking Dorchester heights. Just as Howe's marines were hitting the Southie beach the Americans would send its own attack force to take Boston in a mirror assault in the other direction. Even if Washington's Army couldn't hold the Heights, the other half of his forces would be taking the now lightly defended Boston. Washington's bold plan was to make Army as visible as possible on the Heights to try and entice the very attack that most historians think he feared.
Imagine if Howe won at Dorchester and Washington also won Boston in a 48 hour battle window. After the gunpowder smoke had cleared the cartoon music - 'wa wah' you stupid fool - would play at Howe's expense. Your victory gives you the outside position with weakened forces and no support system, while the Rebels regained the Provincial capitol with a regional support system of limitless strength. Howe's men might have stormed the Heights wondering why the battle was won so easily and the answer would have come the next day through binoculars as they saw the Yanks rolling around the Common laughing.
Washington's other battle plan was to just attack Boston and win it back. His new militia, and his rough and ready regulars would storm Boston by sea even if Howe didn't take the bait. This idea is historically scary. There is every chance that Washington and America would have lost that one. Most of the budding army, a force crucial to Independence, probably would have been captured, killed or wounded. Offense needs a three to one advantage to storm a strong position and the Americans had nothing of the sort and were ill-equipped by comparison to the defenders. Washington's failed attack on Boston in 1776 might have gone down as one of the biggest blunders in military history and Washington probably would have been replaced as Commander in Chief by Benedict Arnold. Or, worse, the Continental Congress on hearing that the Army was history might have thrown in the towel.
There was no Battle of Boston (at least not until the busing crisis of 1974-5, but that is for another book.)
BENEDICT CHURCH
The Americans threatened the British who were cut off by the Boston neck, and surrounded by angry armed rebs. But the Brits did not know the strength of the American siege force. They didn't dare to regain the offense and come out and attack. A swine by the name of Doctor Benjamin Church stepped in to help the Redcoats with info, the first traitor of American History.
A straight ahead Tory deserved begrudging respect for having the courage of their convictions, but Doc Church was a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and had been the keynote speaker at one of the solemn remembrances of the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1773. On that day he said,
“Three years ago those lobsterbacks spilled our blood in the snow and by God some day they will pay for it! Mark my words ladies and gentlemen!”
Now in the fall of 1775 Church sent his brother in law Jack Fleming into downtown Boston on several supposed missions of mercy to help sick English troops suffering from smallpox. By sending a relative into town with medicine for the enemy, Church was posing as a Doctor Without Borders, but in reality he was a jackal without principles. Fleming had a ciphered letter in his boot for General Howe telling everything about the Patriots game plan, and signed Ben Church. But one night rebels stopped Fleming before he crossed Boston Neck and found the poorly coded letter. They dragged Fleming back to George Washington by the scruff of his Boston neck.
The Patriot leaders understood that in wartime, treason was punishable by death. That was SOP. But this was not yet a declared war, America was not yet a nation, and the goal of Washington, Lee and Artie Ward was not yet definitely Independence. The only laws the rebels could find on treason in wartime concerned traitors to the King of England, and since Church and Fleming were spies promoting the interests of England, it seemed legally difficult to hang them as traitors. The rebels were outside of anyone's laws so they had to improvise.
The unholy Ben Church prayed to God for mercy. Washington sent a horseman off to Philadelphia to explain the dilemma and the answer came back three weeks later that, “We don't know what to do with Church any more than you do.” Washington finally decided to allow Church and Fleming to sail back to England explaining to them,
“You are both very lucky. If I had my way you'd ... you'd .... just get on that ship before I change my mind!”
Church and Fleming thanked their lucky stars and sailed off to England on the merchant ship Humptis on November 23 1775. But their luck ran out along the way and fate had the final say. The Humptis sank somewhere in the icy North Atlantic. Justice prevailed. Karma is king.
If Church and Fleming had tried this stunt in 1777 instead of 1775 they never would have lived to board the Humptis. They would have done the Sadaam shuffle within 48 hours of being discovered. You can ask Nathan Hale.
As usual, there are conflicting accounts of the Ben Church tale. One historian says that Church was still an American prisoner in chains when he was put aboard a ship that sunk at sea, but that makes no sense at all if you really think about it. Another historian says that Church was captured first at the house of his traitor-mistress, and that he sold out the cause because of gambling debts incurred as a result of his keeping company with her lowlife friends. By this account Benny's brother-in-law played no important role in the story.
TICO
Henry Knox in upstate New York changed the course of the Revolution. 'Knoxie' captured Fort Ticonderoga and more importantly, took the Tico cannon and dragged them all the way back to Boston. It was a moving story. Henry's men miraculously dragged cannon across New England in the winter. I can't get my Buick out of the driveway in February 2011 and these Rebs dragged 58 cannon from New York to Boston in February of 1775.
The cannon from Tico saved the day for the Rebs. When the big guns were placed on Dorchester Heights they scared the Howe out of Boston.
Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold were also there at the capture of Tico. Those two guys didn’t get along. Benedict Arnold only got along with Benedict Arnold.
BOSTON
The British evacuated Boston on March 17, 1775. To this day the city celebrates the anniversary by getting drunk. The Bloodybacks became “The Depahted.”
The British were planning on burning Boston to the ground as they left, but Washington negotiated an evacuation deal. The Conti-cannon would not fire on the British ships in the harbor if they sailed out peacefully. If they started any Boston baked fires, Dorchester Heights would sound off and sink the Kings ships.
What Howe didn't know was that the Southies had no gunpowder to fire their shots with. They had essentially bluffed the Brits out of beantown.
OH NO, CANADA
The Rebs now came up with another bright idea, as fool-proof as Amelia Earhart's plan to circle the globe. The Continentals would invade and take Canada from the British before they had time to get substantial re-enforcements there. The Yankees weren’t so much as trying to conquer Candada like they tried to do outright in 1812, they were more trying to capture the hearts and minds and enlist Canada in the Rebellion.
The scheme failed for a number of reasons. The Rebel Colonists miscalculated the sentiments of the Catholic French Canadians living under English rule since 1763. They thought that the French Canadians would be eager to join the cause of overthrowing the British tyrants. The Canadians would allegedly just love to become the 14th Rebel Colony. The Americans made the same analytical mistake the British made late in the war when the thought they could easily conquer the American South because the Tory support was allegedly so strong there.
The Continental Congress, which authorized the Canada quest should have also thought long and deep about religion. They thought the hatred of the British Anglican religion would be enough to get the Canuks to say ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ The Americans to the south had long been just as anti-Catholic as England. In fact, Canadian-English rule was tolerant compared to the tone of material coming out of the Colonies in the years between 1763 and 1775. England had to rule a Canadian Catholic region. Imposing the Anglican Church would have been dangerous. All vestiges of Anglican oppression were eliminated officially as part of the Quebec Act of 1774 (which also pushed Canana into the area of today’s Michigan and Indiana.) Canada Catholics didn’t have that much of a beef with England. Canadians weren't looking to the Americans to rescue them from England in any way, shape or form, but the foolish Founding Fathers thought that.
In Cambridge Washington was writing letters to Congress complaining about the ignorance of the Massachusetts people having fun hanging and burning the Pope in effigy, while at the same time Congress expected the French Catholics in Canada to see the Americans as liberators.
The Americans also hoped that by taking Canada they would, as a bonus, force the British out of the chain of forts west of the Appalachians. If the Rebs had managed to conquer Canada this would doubtless have taken place. Since the forts could only be supplied by way of Canada, the English would have to quit them. That was a major prize indeed.
It was quite an aggressive move to try and conquer Canada, considering most of the images of the Revolution is of a defensive struggle by the underdog colonies. The Americans were the aggressors in Canada. This worked against the Colonial cause back on the Island. The English press made the most of the Colonists having the nerve to shout “tyranny!” while they were invading their neighbor to the north without provocation.
The plan was for one Colonial force to sail the long way around into the Gulf of St Lawrence and down that cold waterway to attack Mount Royal (Montreal.) At the same time a force under Benedict Arnold was to March across the wilderness of Maine to unite with the St Lawrence force and together conquer Canada for the cause.
A march across the wilderness of Maine into Canada? In November? In 1775? And then conquer Montreal, Quebec, and all of Canada with those men who just finished that march? In 1775? In December? A march across the wilderness of Maine would challenge the abilities of the best army in the world today. Gee, what could possibly go wrong? But conceit was in play and ruining a lot of good lives. The Americans had won at Bunker Hill and now they were like Southerners in 1861 boasting that any Southerner could lick any ten Yankees, just because they had won a rout at Bull Run in July and were already conceited like that before the first shot of the war. The Americans of Maine in 1775 were, like some in South Carolina in 1861, drunk with the righteousness of their cause and their own martial skills. They were both heading straight for an electric fence.
A third prong was added to the crazy Canada plan. General Montgomery was to march with 1,000 troops north from Tico, and attack Montreal and then Quebec from the south, the three forces untied for victory at the perfect moment. The naval prong never happened, but the other two forces did unite to take Mount Royal but then lost at Quebec.
The route to Quebec went up the Kennebec River to remote Northern Maine where few people are seen even today. Then they had to cross over portage land and ponds to the dead River which raced west about 25 miles in deep curving currents. Then they had to portage again north across the border of Canada to Megantic Lake. From there it was another hundred miles downstream on the Chaudiere River to the St Lawrence. The Chaudiere empties into the St Lawrence about four miles south of Quebec City.
On paper-map this looked like a fairly viable plan. This route had been studied as far back as the French and Indian War as a route to attack the colonies from Canada. Arnold and Washington simply reversed the route. One thing they hadn’t thought of was the Dead River, the middle link. If the French had taken this route in 1762 to attack the Colonies, they would have ridden the Dead River downstream, west to east. The Arnold expedition was going to have to travel the Dead River against the stream, and the Dead River had a mighty current. This would prove the most disastrous of many disastrous legs of the journey.
Arnold’s idea was bold and idiotic, and to his discredit, Washington jumped on it with enthusiasm. He was all for taking Canada out early. Washington was thinking militarily, that Canada was a threat to attack his wide northern flank. If Arnold was right that he could “liberate” Canada from its British oppressors, and furthermore, enlist Canada on the side of the Rebellion, that would be fantastic. The trouble with the plan was, it was exactly that. It was fantastic. It was pure fantasy.
ARNOLD’S MARCH TO QUEBEC
Arnold’s Maine moron march was brutal in a hundred ways. There were no roads of any kind across the roughest and most mountainous lands on the continent. And it was going to get wicked cold wicked fast.
Washington had contracted a boat builder in Kennebec to construct 40 bateaux on short notice. He told Wash that he couldn’t do it in the short time allotted. Washington told him you have to and he said I’ll try.
If this were a movie you’d have a montage of people working hard and making the finest bateaux in the world, and these boats would save the day for the Americans. But the 40 boats the AE picked up at Kennebec became, over the long haul, more of a liability than an asset. The work it took to carry them across the land portages did not outweigh the benefits because too many of them leaked and broke up and major efforts were required to fix them. By the time the expedition reached the pivotal Megantic River they had only six bateaux left. The rest had busted up in attrition along the rivers and forests of the wilderness.
The brave conquistadors assembled on the Cambridge Common on September 13 and marched north to Newburyport.
Scout ships checked to literally make sure the coast was clear to the mouth of the Kennebec River. When they reported all clear of Royals the AE, the Arnold Expedition sailed out of Newburyport on ten schooners.
The 1,100 were divided into two battalions, one under Lieutenant Colonel Greene, the other under Lt. Colonel Enos Slaughter. There were 13 companies of about 90 men each. When the trip became arduous the units broke up across large distances, one surpassing the other then being surpassed again.
The AE picked up their bateaux and started up the hard part on October 9, just as there was a chill in the air at night. These guys marched out of Cambridge in the summer, and had estimated the trip to Quebec would be finished in time for Halloween. Instead, they ended up in the snows of winter and still hadn’t reached the citadel of Quebec.
Just getting up the northern route of the Kennebec wasn’t easy. They were marching against the river the entire time. Some bateaux were lost even at this early stage.
The fort major portage was across “The 12-Mile Carrying Place.” It was ten times tougher to cross than anyone had expected. That got them to the Dead River. At this point there had been so much hardship that a meeting was held to decide whether to call the whole thing off and go back to Cambridge and drink in Harvard Square. 400 voted to go back. Arnold and just over 600 decided to drive on.
They fought against the tide of the Dead River for many miles. This was where the weather went berserk on them. Torrential near freezing rain turned the Dead River into a lake. The whole region was a lake. The guys were waist deep in cold water and had to fight their way out of that for miles and miles, while their boats got smashed up, their provisions and food got washed away, and units became so separated that some got lost and died out there. It was insanely bad and they were only half way to Quebec with winter closing in.
At the west end of the Dead River was the next big portage. But the Dead River, which was supposed to be the smooth link in the middle of two tough portages, turned out to be a rougher stretch than either of the two portages, so there was no break in the brutality.
Across the several ponds and portages they came to what is now Arnold Pond and then Arnold River. Arnold Pond is on the American side and Arnold River is on the Canadian side and it empties into Lake Megantic which in turn feeds the Chaudiere River which flows north to the St Lawrence near Quebec City.
Here the men had reached signs of civilization, yet it was ironically at this stage that starvation became acute. The cold was getting worse and there was a lot of snow and ice. At this stage across the highlands border thresh-hold, some men were actually left behind to die. No one had the strength to carry them and there was no way to help them. Things were so depserate that those left behind were to bitter
They rubbed each others feet at night to prevent them from falling off from frostbite. Sound like fun? There's more. Frostbite was routine. Death here and there. Men were drinking moccasin juice. And liking the taste! The oxen had been killed and eaten a long time ago. They hadn’t performed well in the clutch anyway. One guy looked at Captain Farrel’s Yorkshire terrier and said “I could go for some tasty hot dogs,” said one guy. Then they voted on whether to kill and eat it. I don't want to tell you what happened next because I love my little Chihuahua 'Pepe' too much to bear the thought.
Now this story has come down in history as “they ate all the dogs.” But the firsthand accounts seem to indicate that this only happened to one little dog. They had a Big York at McPuppies. I don’t have any info on whether the captain approved, suggested, or resisted the killing and eating of his dog, nor do we know if he had a bite.
The ragged men put the last six remaining bateaux in action at the top of the Chaudiere River, the one with all the boiling rapids. Within ten minutes, all six bateaux had smashed up against rocks in the rapids. That looked bleak until a march one mile down river revealed a treacherous waterfall. The boats and the invaders inside them would have been dashed.
So now the 500 lunatics had to march all the way to the St Lawrence 80 miles away. Almost a third of them were sick, many had no shoes or weapons, all were on the verge of starvation. Then, like Dorothy seeing the Emerald City out of the poppy field, there appeared three of their advance party driving cattle towards them. Everyone raced towards the first beast and slaughtered it on the spot. They ate like kings.
There was still a lot of hell ahead, but at least they weren’t going to starve to death and they didn’t have to eat any more dogburgers.
A GLORIOUS ACHIEVEMENT
Some American historians write of the march to Quebec as if it is some glorious achievement to be admired. Yes, they made it through. The fact that it was an idiotic idea and that out of 1,054 men who started out, only 541 got through with no shoes on in winter, no boats left, and no food, and most of their weapons left behind in some icy waters of the wilderness, the fact that the entire idea was a jingoistic truculent neo-imperialist assault against a colony at peace, and that those who froze to death on the way sort of deserved it; the fact that the entire plan to take Canada in the end failed utterly and turned into a rout that depleted the American cause of a great deal of military supply and manpower; the fact that the attack on Canada hurt American’s prestige in international circles for several reasons, and turned the Canadian people against America indefinitely; all of these angles don’t count. To blind historians, the march of the expedition to Canada was something to celebrate. These men deserve “high honor and unstinting praise for their great triumph,” suggests Chris Ward.
THEY REACH QUEBEC - ARMY NEAR ITS END ON BOTH ENDS
On December 2 Richard Montgomery and his 300 men appeared from the southwest with Montreal in the bag. It was an exhilarating day for Arnold’s corps, for Monty brought guns ammo and other supplies. Collectively the force was just about 1,000 men but inside the fort, the British Canadian defense had 1,454 men.
Now it was on to Quebec for a dramatic glorious attack on the citadel. The assault went down on New Year's Eve but the fortress did not.
Monty was having the same enlistment crisis outside the gates of Quebec as Washington was having on the Cambridge Common. More than half the Army was enlisted to the end of the year. At 12:01 a.m. on New Year’s Day they were free to honorably leave. No one talked Montgomery out of his ‘use it or lose it’ strategy. He would make these soldiers earn their pay before they go. The attack would take place on New Year’s Eve. If they won the city, maybe everyone would decide to re-enlist. Use it or lose it made sure the Americans lost the Battle of Quebec Citadel. They had to attack in untenable weather conditions because 70% of the Army was going to break for home the next day.
DO YOU SURRENDER?
Arnold’s army sort of invested Quebec from the landward side, on or next to the Plains of Abraham. On several occasions they sent a man forward with a white flag to demand the surrender of Quebec. The fort answered with cannon shots landing just close enough by to let the guy know to turn back.
When Arnold’s Army first set up outside the landward gates of Quebec there was actually a sense of real fear and panic inside. They had heard from both white and Indian spies that this force was on the march. The Arnold Expedition was well known in Quebec even when Arnold was in the worst of it at the Dead River. The rumors were that the Yankees on the march numbered 1,500 or more. The last time Quebec had tried to defend itself it had lost on the Plains of Abraham. Quebec thought itself the underdog.
If Arnold and Montgomery had launched a full attack as soon as they linked up, the whole thing might have had a slim chance. But more local militia and British units from other lands began to slip into the fortress until the defenders had the 1,500 or more, while the Americans all-told were barely 1,000.
As December rolled on the Americans continued to try to get Quebec to surrender peacefully. They sent and old woman to ask to see the commander of Quebec, Mr Terry Cherrier. When they asked her what it was about she insisted that she couldn’t say except in person to the commander. When she finally saw the commander she said she had a written demand for the surrender of Quebec from the Continental Army. No one would have to be needlessly killed in a futile war that Quebec stood no chance to win. She handed Cherrier the letter. He dropped it on the floor and ordered a minion to pick it up with the fireplace tongs and drop it into the raging logs. Then he had the old bag arrested.
It was silly how persistently the Americans tried to get the Canadians to surrender, when the Canadians had more strength. If the two forces were on the open Plain of Abraham, the Conties would still be the underdogs. Add up the fortress of Quebec, and the American insistence makes little sense.
It makes sense only if we consider that Rich Montgomery knew that his situation was hopeless, but he felt that there was simply no choice. You couldn’t come this far and do months of work with thousands of men suffering and dying and toiling to get there to set this up, with the Congress depending on you to win and change the course of the war for independence, and then just call it off and take the brutal march back home. Monty and Arnold were like the bounty hunter in the film The Outlaw Josie Wales. The bounty hunter tracks the bad guy across nine states to a tavern, and when it’s time to duel the hunter realizes he is the hunted - he’s overmatched. The Bounty hunter walks away without drawing. But two minutes later he comes back into the tavern and says,
“I had to come back.”
Josie Wales says,
“I know.”
They draw and the bounty hunter dies. It’s a famous movie scene.
Monty and Arnold couldn’t walk away either. That explains the parade of white-flag guys demanding surrender and getting shot at. Monty and Arnold were desperate and why not give that a shot? The odds on that working were about as good at the attack working anyway.
THE ATTACK ON QUEBEC - BON ANEE!
The Yanks attacked the fortress of Quebec on New Year’s Eve in a blizzard. There was four feet of snow on the ground, the wind was howling. The attacking force was only 800 against a fortress defended by 1,500. The defenders had some artillery and the attackers had two small cannon which misfired at the beginning of the battle and were out of service. Half the Americans were sick with something or other. The defenders held their ground inside the castle. Guess which side won?
The Patriots chose to attack in a snowstorm in order to cover their approach to the fortress. A thick terrible storm showed up just in time before many of the enlistments expired on Jan 1 1776.
The attack began at about 3 a.m. on January 31. The plan was to attack the Lower Town which wound around the low ground at the base of the citadel. The Lower Town was filled with houses and other buildings which set the stage for some serious house to house fighting.
There were more than 100 Canadians in the assault forces, men who actually did believe in the patriot cause, or had a real grudge against the British.
Arnold’s force of about 350 would attack from the north at the edge of the St Lawrence, and Montgomery’s force would simulcast in an attack around the edge from the South. When the two forces linked up it would mean that the fortress was surrounded on the sea side by an army about to bust inside, and blocked from escape by the mad forces with some artillery. That was the plan.
The two battles both failed, but Arnold’s men in the north flank did manage to break through an outer barrier and get close to the entrance to the city before the British-Canadians battled back and won the day. Commander Carleton sent a force to block the Arnold exit. They had to either fight their way into the city or surrender. Arnold’s men made it to a main street the Rue de Daye and in the heavy darkness and snow they wondered why everything was so still and quiet. It was an ambush, planned for days. On signal windows opened up all over the street and the Americans were subjected to the old “withering fire.” The Brits “cut them down like wheat.”
One musketball ricocheted of a rock and struck Arnold near the knee. The selfish knee-jerk retreated from the field. All right, he was carried. The men had a hasty panicked meeting over who was to take his place and it fell on the resolute Danny Morgan, a famous name in American history. Morgan soon found himself surrounded by the enemy while his men were surrendering in all directions. Morgan flashed his breast to them and said,
“Kill me. I will not surrender to you scums!
The Brits looked at each other. Morgan had no powder but he was holding a rifle with a bayonet.
Do we kill this nut, or try to take him? Just then Morgan, who apparently didn’t want to die as badly as he claimed, noticed that a priest had a gun pointed at him. Morgan announced that he was willing to surrender to a man of the cloth, but not to “them other scums.” By this survival ruse, Morgan lived to surrender, obtain his release, return to the states, and fight another day, and would indeed.
So much for the attack on the northern flank of the Lower Town. Now for the Montgomery attack on the southern wing.
Dick Monty was one of the ablest military leaders of the early stage of the American Revolution. But personal qualities can;t stop cannon balls. His force of 321 men, unlike Arnold’s force, did not get past the first barricade. The defenders were terrified and planned all along to run away, but they had a running away present for the attack force. They had two cannon and one large volley all set to go and then they would break and run for the inner defenses of the citadel. They presumed that the Americans could and would break through. So the idea was to hit em with one good shot and then run for the next round at a more protected position.
So Monty’s men rushed like heroes to the barrier without artillery to breach it. The moment Montgomery got close the cannon and the volley let off one big shot. Montgomery was killed instantly with a bullet through the head (one military historian says that a cannon ball tore him in half, but I’m sticking with the version I read three other times, which is that Rich was killed by musketball through the head.
Plenty of other Americans went down in this volley. It looked in one spot like the morning after Antietam in the whirling snow of the Lower Town. Dismembered bodies were bleeding in the blizzard. The rest of the party, including future Vice President and scoundrel Aaron Burr panicked and fled. At the same time the defenders panicked and fled. This was the moment of truth on the whole affair, the march to Quebec from Arnold through the wilderness and Montgomery up through champaign Champlain route. One moment of violence kills about 30 Americans, wounds about 60 others, and both armies run away in terror in opposite direction, the one knowing at heart it had just lost the war, the other not realizing it had just won it.
POST GAME LOOK
The Patriots didn’t even get within a sniff of taking the city. The attack was a disaster. It was like trying to take down a statue on City Hall Plaza by throwing a tennis ball at it. Too many mistakes were made. If only I had been in command.
Colonel Richard Montgomery died in a a hail of musket-balls. The Americans needed his talent. The unhip Benedict Arnold was shot in the hip. As much as we hate this guy, the Conties did need his personal leadership on the field, and when both Monty and Benny went down, it was bad.
This time there was no repeat of the stupid blunder of the French and Indian War when the French left the fort and met on the Plains of Abraham, a plains mistake. The Brit/Canuck force just sat in the citadel of Quebec and said “venir au papa” (come to papa.)
The Americans in Quebec watched the NYE ball drop on the dreams of a swift strategic victory in the North. The Colonists lost one third of their force to bullets, and many others died from frostbite. 500 casualties versus about 20 for the British-French-Canadians.
WOOSTER SAUCE
To replace Montgomery, Washington shipped General Wooster to Quebec. Wooster was saddened by the state of the siege. Wooster sent out parties to the Montreal - Champlain - Hudson route to try to scrape up some reinforcements. What he had here would not work, even though the size of the attack force was ostebsibly growing in power.
A “SOUTHIE” TAKES OVER
The weak siege of Quebec did not end with the victory of the Nordiques on New Year’s Eve. Washington authorized the sending of more troops to the Canadian cold front. He also sent a new commander to replace the departed Montgomery of Montreal Amein. The new leader was the hero of South Boston, General John Thomas. Thomas had seized Dorchester Heights with his regiment back in march of 75. Now he was taking over an army that was growing in size up to nearly 2,000 and adding some artillery power.
But things looked better than they were. The besieged British were getting more new troops and heavy gunpowder than their besiegers. Thomas also estimated that of his 2,000 troops, about 900 were so sick as to be unfit for battle. A British fleet was just waiting for the ice to melt to get in there and at these Yankee aggressors.
THE BATTLE OF THE CEDARS - MAY 1776
General Butterbrain was supposed to hold a fort at place just upriver past Montreal called “The Cedars.
Butterbrain surrendered the fort after a short siege. The place was surrounded by a force of about 500 indians and 200 Redcoats. Butterbrain was afraid that everyone in the place would get scalped if he surrendered.
Benedict Arnold was furious when he heard that Butterbrain had surrendered without a real fight.
THE BATTLE OF THREE RIVERS
Even though the initial force that attacked Quebec was on the retreat southwest, the Americans did not give up on the overall idea of an offensive, not a defensive, against Canada. The Continentals sent a lot of new troops north to at least hold the line in an offensive stance somewhere. They Americans tried to hold a defensive/ofensive line at Trois Riveires. They thought they could hold the line here and solidify a large scale siege of Canada. But by now the BC’s (British-Candains) had to many troops. The attack on Three Rivers was just another fiasco in the nightmare campaign.
The Americans suffered a sharp defeat at Three Rivers in June of 1776. Three Rivers is about halfway between Quebec and Montreal. I saw a AA baseball game there in 1981.
The Americans suffered 300 casualties at Three Rivers and the British suffered 17. About 700 Americans attacked a strong position defended by about 5,000 fresh British and Canadian troops.
The Americans were attack in in the summer with “eight zillion moskitos attacking each soldier” according to one Pat letter. The defenders were indoors most of the time and did not have to go sleepless every night because of “eight zillion moskitos.”
The Americans were repulsed at 3R and their retreat south was cut off on land and sea. They had to retreat north and make their way south down rivers. The St Lawrence was now guarded by big British warships.
LET’S GET OUTA HERE
This process was not a disciplined fighting retreat to be proud of. It was an inglorious retreat all the way back to Ticonderoga with an unacceptable number of weapons left behind.
The Iroquois Indians picked right now to pick a side. They attacked the Americans as they retreated. The Iroquois had been neutral in the Revolution until the British scared them out of Canada. Stragglers from Monty’s Army got scalped. (Washington paid the Iroquois back later with Sully’s Expedition.)
DELUSIONS OF HEARTS AND MINDS
The Americans had to flee Canada and end the siege because the local population had turned almost completely against them, the Royal Navy was setting up a “shell party” against them in the near future, and The Hero of Dorchester Heights knew that he still had no real chance. The cannon the Continentals had turned out to be ineffective against the thick walls of the fortress. That was a
“deal-breaker.” Colonel Montgomery had already saved the national honor by attacking against all odds on NYE. There was no need to do it again.
The Americans had remained deluded too long that somehow the Canadians wanted to join the United States. That's why “the Conties” tried to invade Canada with light forces in the first place. The Canadian people would provide the reinforcements on the spot. (this Pat delusion continued when France became allied to the USA. French Canadians would then theoretically rally around the American flag attached to a French flag.
At first there was a reasonable amount of support from the Canadians for their aspiring conquerers. But they always hedged their bets. The Canadian people had been conquered several times and had learned to bend in the windstorms. They were supportive of whichever side was clearly going to be the winner. Montgomery’s march in the west prong picked up some support along the way. This wasn’t enough to make a military difference but it would be misleading to suggest that the Canadians were hostile to the Americans in general at first. This turned later, and it was more over money and any hatred of the Americans wanted to take over from the British.
The Americans settled down for a siege and they had to eat. They did business of all kinds with the locals. There was an understanding that the American fight was not against the Canadian people, but against their British oppressors. But the problem was money. Continental currency was worthless to Canadians. They refused it. So the Americans got tough and start seizing supplies and reneging on debts. One American shot the Canadian store clerk who demanded his payment in “real money, rube, not this patriot cabbage.”
The American invasions of Canada failed because of overconfidence, weakness, ineptitude, poor intelligence about the Canadian people, and smallpox.
In the Civil War, the Confederate Army tried to conquer Kentucky at a time when the North was on the offense, only because the Southerners presumed that a slave state like Kentucky would want to join up with the Confederacy, and was only waiting for an invading army of heroes to make it safe to do so. In the 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuban exiles thought that the Cuban people would rise up to join them and together they would take down Castro and take Havana. Wrong in 1862, wrong in 1962 and wrong in 1775.
When things went wrong and Americans had to retreat from where they came, the Canadians became almost 99% anti-American and pro-King George. The hearts and minds campaign failed even worse than the military effort.
While Arnold and the rest were trying desperately to flee back to the states, the Continental Congress was responding to the bad reports arriving out of Canada by outfitting a new and even bigger expedition. Talk about chasing bad money with good money. The Conties couldn’t beat the British before they got their big cross-ocean reinforcements. How were they going to do after the British send over troops and supplies? About one fourth of the Continental Army had charged the fortress of Quebec armed with spears. It wasn’t a good time to double up and go back to Canada with an even larger force.
The American army had to pillage and steal its way back to New York, leaving a trail or resentment as they went. More than 75% of the retreating American army was sick with smallpox, and you read that right.
WHAT IF?
The embarrassing failure of the Canada offensive may have been a blessing in disguise. What if the Americans had won? Then they would have sent a stream of men and supplies north to Canada to try and maintain their position there. The English would have sooner or later (probably the next spring) used their naval superiority to come down the St Lawrence to take back all of Canada. The American cause would have been deprived of desperately needed troops, leaders, and resources in a distant Canadian cause that still ended in defeat.
THE GREEN BERETS
When Montgomery first linked up with Arnold near Quebec he marveled at the quality of Arnold;s force, especially after all they had been through. In his diary he noted,
“I have never seen so many pretty young men.”
This is one more reason this entire episode has to be made into a movie some day. My own conclusion in reading about the March across the wilderness, the Dead Riover and all that, is that - 1 - I would have died halfway there. - 2 - There was no logical reason why as many as 600 of these men made it through alive. They should have died of exposure for starters.
What we really have here is a team of Revolutionary War soccer stars. These were the best physical specimens in the colonies. Think about it. They had to pass through four rounds of Darwinian selection to get to the Boiling River.
First they were young men who had joined the Revolution at personal risk. They were feisty enough to take up a gun and join the Rebel Army at Cambridge. Then they had to volunteer for extra danger. Then they were handpicked for this special assignment to the rigors of the Maine-Canada wilderness. It was like NFL draft day as Washington and Arnold picked only the star bodies of angry youth for the mission. Then when the going got really tough in northern Maine 400 men called it a day and went back south to the forts on the Kennebec. The 600 that marched to Quebec were like the 600 biggest strongest slaves in the South owned by the richest plantation owner. It was careful controlled unnatural selection. No wonder Montgomery was dazzled by all the pretty young men.
Usually when they make a movie about some historic event, it always annoys me that everyone is a “pretty boy” actor - the story doesn’t work that way. Eight Men Out, for example, is a film about a bunch of rube coal-miner hillbilly MLB players in 1919, and having pretty boys play the leads ruined the movie for me. Old time ballplayers look 10 rough years older than they are, and EMO cast it the opposite way.
But you could make a film about the Arnold Expedition to Canada and make just about every one of the volunteers a strong young handsome man in tip-top shape and it wouldn’t hurt the credibility of the film.
They probably thought about making this into a movie but it doesn’t have a jingoist happy ending, so that sort of ruins the idea financially.
BATTLE OF WIDOW MOORE'S CREEK – FEB 27, 1776
News of the Massachusetts fighting reached the South. The Governor of North Carolina tried to crack down on rebel trouble there. But the rebs drove him out of the state to the shelter of a British warship. From here he contacted the home island and proposed a combined operation to take back North Carolina for King George. He wrongly advised Lords North and Sandwich that Tory strength in North Carolina was predominant and that a little show of force would bring the loyal Regulators and Highlanders out to fight.
Gov. Martin thought he could raise 10,000 loyal troops and they would combine with British regulars to win in NC. He only raised 1,500. They tried to march to the coast at Cape Fear and a force of 1,000 Yankee disloyalists awaited them at Widow Moore's Creek Bridge on February 27 1776. The rebels had the superior position, having greased the bridge and removed many of the planks. The Loyalist bad guys were also short of muskets. No more than 60% of them had weapons, so their numerical advantage was cancelled out. Just before dawn the Loyalist Highlanders and Regulators attacked and lost. 30 Tories died and only one rebel was KIA. Hundreds of Loyalists were wounded or captured. Moore's Creek was a tactically small but strategically important victory for the rebel colonists. The battle lines were drawn on the Civil War within the Revolutionary War.
As a result of this stinging little defeat, Britian abandoned the strategy of trying to take the South with the help of Tory strength, at least for now (Britain tried it again a few years later.) For now, GB (meaning Great Britain – not to be confused with the Green Bay Packers) had lost North Carolina. The Royal Army not placed the bulk of its forces squarely against the Northern colonies, leaving the South for now to its ugly little civil war.
One of the main British goals of the whole Widow Moore episode was to try to get western guns to the eastern Tories. The King's men were poorly equipped, largely because one of the first orders of business in Philadelphia in 1775 was to issue orders for all Patriots to confiscate Tory guns. Pamphlets were nailed to walls all over the Colonies warning of severe punishment for all avowed Tories who owned guns. As long as they turned in their guns, they could think whatever they wanted.
Lack of Tory muskets plagued the entire British war effort. Often when a British general petitioned North and the King for reinforcements in manpower the answer came back to simply “arm the Tories to create your own reinforcements.” The Loyalists tried in vain to explain to London that they nothing to arm these faithful Tories with.
14 GENERALS
The Continental Congress appointed 14 generals to lead the Continental Army. Most of them were political appointments. The most obscure name on the list turned out to be the most successful man in the war and that was Nat Greene of Rhode Island.
Two men who failed in the long run were Lee and Gates, although they had enough personal status to have served a positive purpose just by having their names out there among the public as having embraced the cause as military leaders.
Lee was a short-tempered veteran of the 7 Years War. The Indian allies he worked with nicknamed him “boiling water.” He was destined to have a major-league blowout with George Washington in 1779.
ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION JUNE 1776
It wasn't adopted officially as the new nation's governing document until November of 1777, and it wasn't officially approved by all the states until 1781, but the Articles of Confederation, written by Jack Dickinson in June of 1776, was the de facto American constitution, before the famous capital C Constitution was ratified in 1788.
The strength of the Articles was that some form of government was way better than none at all. The weakness was that it had no power to compel the states to do anything. The states were sovereign within the new confederation. What the South claimed to be in 1861, the states were in fact from 1776 to 1788. They had the right to put their local interests ahead on the national interest, and they exercised that right often.
History is pretty rough on the AOC, but really, they didn't do that bad of a job under the circumstances. They did steer the new nation to victory over the British, and managed to keep a sense of nation while the Continental Army marched about the land with bad clothes and worthless currency. In focusing on the undeniable weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, history books are seeing the 1776 glass as half empty. But considering the situation, it's a bit much in hindsight to think that much more was doable. Presentist scholars think that the Revolutionaries were supposed to adopt a finished Constitution with checks, balances, and central power at a time when a third of the country didn't even support the rebellion.
From Lexington in 1775 to the Fourth of July 1776, the semi-united colonies used a system that was almost the same as what was agreed on in the Articles polished and formalized in 1777. So the Articles may be said to have dated from 1775 to 1788. In presiding over such a time they were hardly a flop. The Colonies might not have evolved into a nation without them as a stepping stone.
The articles were originally supposed to be of a title indicating defiant Independence, but Ben Franklin insisted that they be dummied down to a more neutral title. Franklin wanted, as always, to leave an opening for the Colonies remaining in Great Britain under some autonomous arrangement.
Just because the headliner, Constitution was so much better, doesn't mean that historians need to diminish the performance of the opening act, which helped to set up the Constitution by warming up the audience.
LEE STEPS UP THE PLATE
It was Richard Henry Lee, not Washington or Adams or Pat Henry or Tom Paine that stepped up and risked his neck to dare propose what people were hinting about for years but would not say for fear of being hanged as a traitor. Richard stood up before Congress in June 1776 and proposed absolute irrevocable Independence from England. A few men were shocked but overall it was a bubble that had needed bursting for some time and the Congress responded favorably.
INDEPENDENCE
Independence was declared on July 3 1776. It was proclaimed officially to the public the following day. But another historian says that it wasn't proclaimed in public until July 8. One historian says it was only proclaimed for the first time three days after the end of the Spanish-American War.
When news of Independence reached Cambridge, George Washington personally read the news to a crowd of troops who gave a classic three cheers, a “hip hip hoo-ray!'” for Independence.
It was more than about time. American officers were still toasting the King while cleaning their muskets to go out and shoot his troops. It was an anomaly not lost on many and now at last they could bag the hypocrisy. The rebels had long ago decided to defy and disown the oppressive decisions of Parliament, but they claimed to still be loyal because they had not officially disowned the Crown.
It was understandable that the Crown was the last to go down. The whole concept of Royalty was partly to keep consistency of the heart in each and every person. No matter what changes took place in Parliament, no mater how much one hated the King's ministers, there was always the symbolic figureheads of King and Queen to give loyalty an anchor. The King maintained the heart in spite of any objections in the brain. It's little wonder that Colonial loyalty to the King was the last to go, even though there was more support for the Colonists in Parliament than in the King's chambers.
Independence was like legally disowning an abusive parent. It was simple and logical on the surface, but instinctually it was enough to make you sick and delay doing it for years.
Independence was the key to military victory because without foreign allies, victory was nearly impossible and without Independence, it was virtually impossible to make formal alliances with great foreign powers. in the military field. Without foreign alliances, how could the rebs really hope to win, and why in the world would France or Spain want to help the American cause in the name of reconciliation between the Crown and the Colonies? No Independence, no alliances. The only way for the 13 Colonies to break with their old friend was to officially make it the new enemy. It was time to show the potential friends of America in Europe that joining the Pats cause would provide benefits.
Even so, the King's foreign enemies hesitated. They (meaning France for the most part) for the first two years of the war helped the Rebels secretly with serious money, but there were no open and formal agreements and few military supplies. Europe kept a cautious distance the first three years after Lexington.
ISLANDER MORALE
One of the things that made this war tough for England was a lack of morale for the fighting. The redcoated boys of Bristol and Sheffield weren't chomping at the bit to go bayonet some Yankees in Newport. Only the most loyal and chauvinist troops of the Empire wanted to march on New York and give em a taste of Guadalcanal. Many British officers submitted formal requests not to be asked to serve in America because they did not want to shoot fellow Englishman.
One famous general was so offended by the war against the Americans that he resigned from the British Army with a very public statement on the matter.
The King was technically a member of the military officer corps (pronounced 'corpse' according to President Obama) with the title of captain-general. The Hanover man's grandfather had been a military hero. But the kooky King George couldn't fire a musket accurately at 50 feet, and he never interfered with military decisions. George tried to be a symbol and figurehead of inspiration, his job. George tried to keep First Minister Lord North out of the public eye because of North's poor lethargic public posture. Literally, his physicality was an issue.
First Minister North (not Prime Minister, the title didn't really exist formally at the time) could damage British morale with his uncouth and dreary demeanor. North was an able politician but he was about as exiting as my tax accountant (his first name is Samuel, that's all I'm going to say.) King G was forever trying to get North to show some enthusiasm, to try and get it “through your skull that being an administrative leader is not enough, you must be an inspirational leader as well.”
It never really worked. North was what he was down to the defeated end.
FRENCH SECRET AID
France watched the revolutionary events in America with glee. Their #1 enemy, England, was in a pretty bad fix. France would never rest until the great defeat of 1763 was corrected.
Spain was watching too and these two enemies of England were bonding and scheming to help America win independence. Spain and France were helping America for selfish reasons, and for selfish reasons were reluctant to make an open commitment until it at least seemed like America was going to win. They were like a bank that won't lend you money until you can prove that you don't need it (a slightly paraphrased quote that has been attributed to many people, but I know for a fact that it goes back to Will Rogers.)
The two England-haters were willing to provide secret military assistance through the magic medium of money, something the Colonials needed more than they needed soldiers, something everyone likes for Christmas. John Adams for one, was all for accepting French money, but Adams did not want French military help of any kind.
France and Spain formed a fake financial company to loan the new American Republic 1 million livres each. I don't know what a livre was worth, but I'm sure that in 1776, 2 million livres was worth a lot.
A character named Beaumarchais was behind this fake company. He also wrote the Figaros. Have you heard his Figaros? His real name was Pierre Caron. Pierre's loan company was never going to ask for any of the money back. It was a gift pretending to be a loan, so that France and Spain would not appear to be aggressors.
France was fairly strong militarily at this time, more than England, but England was strong financially at this time, more than France. It was a dangerous time for France to be fronting the American rebels a lot of money.
In fact this government bailout of the American revolution was the beginning of a chain of events that would lead to royal French bankruptcy, the fall of the dynasty, and a Paris soccer tournament played with powdered-wig heads. The French Revolution was caused in large part by the damage done to its economy and treasury by all the expenditures in the war with England brought on by the daring alliance with the United States.
The USA-France alliance was not cemented officially until 1778, but the first French free money for guns and powder was shelled out even before the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in 76.
PROVIDENCE APRIL 5 1776
After the Brits beat it out of beantown, Washington decided to take the Continental Army to New York to see the Empire State Building (a wooden structure of three stories) and defend the city from the British. He correctly guessed that after leaving Boston, Howe was planning to attack NYC and try to take it from the damn Yankees.
On April 5 the Continental Army passed through a cheering crowd in downtown Providence.
I've also played for cheering crowds in Providence on many a night. On many another, not so cheering.
WASHINGTON TO NEW YORK
Washington and his two rag-tag CA divisions arrived in New York on April 13. Hundreds of them got parking tickets on the first night until Washington spoke to the mayor about it. Several stagecoaches got their wheels slashed, and 23% of all the horses were missing their shoes by the end of the first night.
The King and Lord Germain agreed that the only way to stop the monster of the Revolution was to snuff it before it matured. The Crown needed a major overwhelming military victory, and an easy one, to make it clear to the Colonists that they had no chance against big bad Redcoats of Great Britian.
The Reds were right in theory, but wrong in practice, for two reasons. First of all they were wrong because they failed. Two, even if they had succeeded, so much had changed since June of 1775 that even if Washington had lost his Army at New York, there was every chance the Rebs could and would have resurrected a new one, even if slowly. The break with England was so much more accepted in August of 1776 than in June of 1775 that even the very idea that one great battle victory could equal total political victory was no longer operative.
The Brits had their chance to kill the monster while it was still a youngster in the mad scientist's lab and that came at Charlestown Neck back in June 1775. All they had to do was land 500 troops and some cannon on the neck and they would have had that victory. Now they thought they could bait Washington into a needless battle for New York City and then trap him by cutting him off from all sides with superior naval forces backed by timely amphibious landings at key strangulation points.
The Howe Brothers completely succeeded on the first point. They baited Washington to stand and fight, when his best choice would have been to retreat to the interior and frustrate the British to no end. Howe's troops defeated the chaotic Continentals on schedule. But the Howe Brothers played out the second part of the plan poorly. They dallied and made some wrong decisions and let Washington slip away to the Jerseys. Three weeks after they beat him on the battlefield on Long Island, Washington was playing dice in Atlantic City when he should have been clapped in irons at the bottom of a British man-o-war in Graves End Bay NY.
CHARLESTON CHEWED - JUNE 28 1776
The British were disappointed by their setback at Widow Moore’s Creek. So the Royal fleet sailed for Charleston South Carolina to make up for it. Charleston was the largest and best port in the South. If the British could take it they would deprive the Rebs of the port and have it for themselves.
They attacked on June 28 1776. The Rebs held on to Fort Moultrie and actually won the artillery duel between the fort and the British Men-o-war. Many first-rate Royal ships got charleston chewed by US cannon.
There were two battles for Long Island developing at the same time a thousand miles apart. The British in Charleston Harbor landed 2,000 troops on Long Island, South Carolina. After the British cleared the Harbor they 2,000 on Long Island would get picked up and dropped off on the SC main.
But when the fort held and two ships ran around, the 2,000 on Long Island were rendered useless. The British cannon chewed up the forts in outer Charleston Harbor, but Moultrie gave back more than it took.
It wasn’t actually named Fort Moultrie at the time. It was called Fort Crim. But the Commander Moultrie did such a courageous and successful job on June 28 that the fort was re-named Moultrie.
This fort played a major role in the Second American Civil War from 1861-5. The first American Civil War was the American Revolution. It was a three way game of one-on-one.
Defeat at Charleston was a humiliation for the Royal Navy. But the Charleston 6.28 cloud had a silver lining. The defeated British Naval force headed straight to New York to help Howe take Manhattan.
THE HOWE BROTHER'S – I'LL TAKE MANHATTAN
The battle for NYC began on the drawing boards of Whitehall.
The British sent out a great expedition in 76 to take Manhattan. It was the Normandy invasion force of its time. Not only was it the biggest amphibious armada ever assembled in world history, it would be decades after before anything was ever put together anywhere to match it.
The British landed their first troops on Staten Island in mid-July. Three major army-navy forces collected there over the next four weeks. The Americans watched through binoculars as their upcoming opponent got a little bigger and stronger every day, some days a lot. The Redcoat troops finally totaled 32,211 men and one woman. Royal sailors added another 13,033 men. Collectively this was three times more manpower than Washington's Army had on Manhattan. Yet Washington chose to stand and fight a pitched battle. This was British strategic dream come true.
Why this Washington bad decision? Firstly, George was a big tough soldier and he was following his instincts. Second, he was overconfident from the major strategic victory at Boston.
Americans had now won four times, and were perhaps a little delusional about their fighting abilities. First they had sent the Brits running all the way from Concord to Boston. That was number one. Then they won at Bunker Hill. Even though the British took the Hill, they also took way more casualties. The Americans won because they shocked the world by going 15 rounds with Apollo Creed and losing in a split decision. They won a third time when they drove the British out of Boston. They won a fourth time at Moore's Creek North Carolina, driving the British out of the South. The Americans were overconfident as Britian prepared to attack with maximum mobilization, better guns, superior training and discipline, plus better supplies and clothing, i.e., superior logistics.
The British land forces were commanded by General Billy Howe. The British Naval forces were headed by Admiral Dick Howe. They were brothers. One was a conciliator, the other was the bad cop who pulls you over for making eye contact as you pass him on a small town state highway (that actually happened to someone I know.) Admiral Richard Howe was the peacemaker. General William Gordon Howe was the one who wanted a fight.
Admiral Rich Mark Howe, in fact, was playing a dual role, arriving as an ambassador of peace and compromise, and as a fighting admiral. Richard asked the King if he could bring some compromise peace proposals to America with him and try to arrange a meeting with the Colonials with an eye towards a political settlement of the war. The King gave him permission, but mostly as a ruse to get the fighting side of Admiral Howe over to New York to help his brother and the Crown.
The King gave Admiral Richard Howe permission to offer the Colonists these terms; Britain would allow the Yanks to tax themselves in order to provide money for the Crown to protect them militarily. The Crown wouldn't tax them directly anymore, and yes, that would be tyranny. But the Colonials still had to come up with the tax dough. There was no mention of independence, nor any of the other issues that had caused the insurrection. In exchange, the Colonists would all be pardoned, with the exception of Sam Adams and a list of six other bad Bostonians.
Admiral Howe got his white-flag meeting on Long Island with some Revolutionary Yankee leaders, but Washington did not attend. The Colonists rejected Gordie Howe's proposal with a shrug, saying they had not done anything that they should accept anyone's pardon for. Admiral Howe, who sincerely wanted peace and had been a friend of America for many years, went back to his warship and said,
“We have their reply. I offered them a chance for peace and they chose war.”
He was doing his Don Rumsfeld impression.
Anyway, it was far more than about taxation by now. King George didn't really want a settlement. He was pricing Britain out by offering nothing and pretending it was an olive branch. KG had given Howe nothing to work with.
THE BATTLE OF NEW YORK CITY
The Battle of New York City lasted several weeks. It's usually called the Battle of Long Island, a part of the larger Long Island Campaign, even though half the major events happened on Manhattan. Every part of the story except the ending happened on a place that was eventually part of today's New York City, so I see no reason I cannot take some initiative here and re-name this campaign the Battle of New York City.
The Battle of NYC was several small battles after the big one on Long Island.
This was the biggest battle of the Revolutionary War. It was the first time the new nation sent its troops into combat under the title of the US Army. It was a bad way to start US Army history. The British gave the Patriots a 'welcome to the NFL' taste of reality. In the Battle of Long Island of August 22, 1776, the British gave the Yankees a Long Island Sound beating, ending the overconfidence problem.
The Kingsmen inflicted almost 4,000 casualties on the cocky Continentals, while sustaining only 300.
The British won at Long Island by use of a large flanking attack after a sneaky end-around march in the wee hours of the night behind the American far left. Even trained professional troops might flee under such a well executed tactical plan, so it was hardly shameful that the American support forces panicked and bolted pell-mell to Pelham Bay, leaving a U.S Army trapped on Long Island where it was forced to surrender.
Actually come to think of it, it was shameful. The Army didn't start out as “no soldier left behind.” It was more like, “Every man for himself! Run for your lives!”
BLUNDERING SQUIDS
The British could have won the Battle of New York City without breaking a sweat of they had just cut off the Conties at the Hudson. And they easily could have done that before any rela land fighting had even begun.
The Americans had fort batteries in several spots in the harbor and up the Hudson. In theory, no British warship should dare sail up the Hudson unless the crew wanted very much to pick timbers out of their gums.
But Corny Cornwallis tested these forts in early July 76. He sent three frigates up the harbor and up the Hudson. Every time they passed a Rebel fort they had a little artillery duel. The Yankee guns didn’t dent one British ship. Royal cannon did more damage to the forts than the forts did to the ship. The three frigates sailed all the way up to the place where the overpriced Tappan Zee Bridge stands today, then went back to Staten Island to report that the Colonial fort canon were a joke.
What Cornwallis and Clinton failed to appreciate was that the way was proven clear to land on the northern tip of Manhattan and at the point just north of that across the Bronx River. That would have sealed the Americans off from New Jersey permanently before the first skirmish began on land. The two month campaign might have still played out in a lot of land fighting, but Washington’s Army would have been entrapped into annihilation or surrender at some point. Some historians suggest that had the Johnny Bulls played the NYC campaign this way, the New York Yankees might have been forced into terminating the rebellion on negotiated terms. It’s a good point, but I don’t agree. I think the rebellion would have continued, the setback pushing back the Yorktown moment until, say, 1783 instead of 1781. Sooner or later the British had to concede Independence because the hearts and minds situation was simply irreversible by July of 1776. If they had done the similarly wise thing at Charlestown Neck a year earlier, now you’re talking. That might have ended the rebellion, and even then I doubt it.
THE STATEN ISLAND FERRY - TICKETS FOR 18,000
The British ferried more than 15,000 redcoat regulars from Staten Island to Gravesend Bay Long Island in one day. The British Staten Island ferry followed the path of today’s awesome Verazanno Bridge. Within the next three days they sent another 3,000 Hessian bums to join that force. Corny had almost 20,000 professional troops to fight about 9,000 unprofessional American troops. But at least the Americans held the high ground and the defensive position.
But Washington and Nat Greene thought, (or at least feared) that the British were going to attack Manhattan. Their spies gave inaccurate reports of the size of the force that was landing at Gravesend Bay. When American intelligence told Washington that only 7,000 British troops had landed on the LI X-way, he had no reason to doubt it. It was all he had to go on. So he kept about 60% of the Continental force on Manhattan where they did absolutely nothing useful while the Battle of Long Island unfolded.
THE LONG ISLAND RETREAT EXPRESSWAY
Near the harbor, the Americans had 1,900 troops. That was the right flank as seen from the American view. The U.S. left flank at Flatland, way out on Long Island, was manned by exactly five soldiers. That’s right. Five. So that’s where the play went. The British outflanked Flatbush and attacked the extreme left flank of the American line. The Redcoats flatlined it to the Flatland flank. (Flatbush was in the center - From the British view Flatbush was in the center and Flatland on the far right.) The Americans thought the British might try a flanking movement at Flatbush, but did not expect them to travel so far east to outflank it all at Flatland. But they did and it worked. They did it with stealth during a long dark night, and when the five guys woke up at 3 am to see 1,700 Redcoats and Hessians surrounding their hut, the battle, for all purposes was lost.
The British generals had scouts, spies, and open Loyalists keeping the British informed of the situation. Not only did the British have five times the superior forces, they also had the superior intelligence network. They knew that there were only five guys guarding the last left-wing post of an official American defensive line.
The British had enough resources to keep the American right flank down near the bay, while sending an even larger force to do the end around at Flatland and breach the “Highlands” defense line of the Patriots.
The British under General Grant pressured the Americans under Greene for several days, while holding back a rush offensive move until the Flatbush flank attack had time to develop. Grant was waiting for his blockers. Grant told General Clinton,
“I intend to fight it out on the Long Island line if it takes to the end of the summer.”
The British flank movement lead to a sense of panic and envelopment in the Yank ranks. The panic they can be blamed for, but the envelopment, well, once they got past the five guys at Flatland Village, there was no stopping envelpoment. Plus Grant attacked near the coast and broke through the Greene brigade without too much trouble. The Long Island defense collapsed and the trooped Dunkirked it back to Manhattan.
There was a 48 hour period now where the British could easily have sealed the New York Army up in on lower Manhattan, they could have broken the Revolution in a last ditch battle at the spot where the WTC went down in 20001. But Cornwallis set up camp in the Bronx and didn’t move. The Continental Army slipped away up the West Side Highway where it set up at Fort Washington and Knightsbridge on the other maine side of the Bronx River. This army that escaped the Battery lived to fight across the Jerseys and beyond.
WEATHER HISTORY L.I.
The weather saved the day from being even worse for the Americans. The wind was howling out of the north when Admiral Clinton tried to sent five warships up the harbor to bombard the Americans and cut them off from getting back to Manhattan. But only one ship could even get halfway up, and it did manage to shell Fort Defiance. But if it hadn’t been so windy, the entire force on Long Island might well have been complete destroyed and captured.
HAARLEM HEIGHTS 9-16-76
There was the Battle of Haarlem Heights on September 16, 1776. This was a victory for the Americans but it was tiny compared to the big Long Island loss. American historians sometimes play this one up a little too much. It was a successful attempt to merely slow down the British offensive, and it's treated like the Continentals threw Rommel out of Libya.
WHITE PLAINS
A British colonel boasted to the locals before the Battle of White Plains that “We got what it takes and we know how to use it.” On October 28, they proved that this slogan was no idle brag. They beat the Americans at the Plains.
There was also the Battle of Pelham Bay. I have nothing to say about it.
IS NEW YORK BURNING?
From the beginning to the end of the Long Island campaign, the issue of the flammable nature of New York City was always on the front burner. Would the Patriots burn it down if they evacuated? Would the British use the threat of burning it down to induce surrender?
There was no doubt that it was a flammable wooden town. The British wanted to attack it in the old-fashioned way with cannon and marine landings, but they feared that NYC would burn to the ground even if the Brits tried to avoid it. Even a small amount of cannon fire could set the place up.
One thing was sure. New York defense was set up for a Stalingrad house to house street by street battle. The Colonials had worked hard for months on this interior defense. There were pill boxes and barricades and earthen-works. Later on, after the British occupied New York, their generals were truly impressed by the quality of the New York City Maginot Line.
This quality work was probably one of the Yank blunders of the war. The battle never reached lower Manahattan, and so much effort and supply went to beefing it up. The Americans were still in the Bunker Hill mentality. They just presumed that the British would march on New York City exactly the same way they had marched up “The Town.” The Americans prepared for tomorrow’s battle with yesterdays playbook. The British, however, had learned their lesson and from now on would use every possible tactic to score. They treated the Yankees with respect because the body count from Bunker Hill was the last word on everything. That must never happen again.
When the British took over New York City, some American Patriot spies set several fires. One third of New York burned down in one night. The British still used the city as HQ, but now it overcrowded and it wasn’t the same luxurious experience that it might have been without Rebel firestarters (Reb spies also tried to set New York City on fire in 1864.)
FORT WASHINGTON FALLS NOV 16, 1776
A part of it still stands as part of one-block Bennet Park. FW is on Manhattan just north of the eastern end of the George Washington Bridge. Fort Washington was the last fort standing for the Patriots in New York City and it fell on 11/16 1776. More than 2,900 Yankees surrendered in the Bronx to a superior investing force of more than 10,000 Redcoats.
This was the first serious defeat of the war, and it looked bad for publicity and morale. Only nine Americans were killed defending a fort on high ground with plenty of working cannon. The British captured huge supplies of ammo, rifles, and artillery. The British were reversing the classic relation between the rebels against the authority. The rebels are supposed to seize the guns and ammo from the big guys, like the VC did in 68. Rebs are supposed to raid and hijack the authority merch, and live on the run of the spoils of war piracy. But the British were doing it to the rebels instead. Americans had been fleeing the field without their cannon and rifles since the first attack on Long Island. Now with the fall of Fort Washington and a treasure chest of cannon and gunpowder, the British were starting to thing they could fight without a supply train, just capture as you go. It was humiliating for the Revs to have this done to them.
The historians say that Washington should not have defended Fort Washington and that doing so was a major mistake. Let's hope that Washington didn't defend the fort because the it was had been named after him, and he couldn't bear to see it captured like the Adolph Hitler Bridge over the Rhine, where that thinking was actually a factor. One writer suggests that Washington though the name of the fort gave it a morale value, and that might have played into his thinking.
Washington cannot be blames because he wanted to evacuate the fort and save the supplies, but his generals, particularly Charles Lee, talked him out of evacuation. Washington stood absolutely alone in believing it best to evacuate. So how can anyone blame him. Only a first class jerk would reject the collective opinion of a large body of subordinates. Listening to their unanimous opinion was the only correct thing to do. It was absolutely Churchillian. (Every time his WWII generals as a body disagreed with one of Winston Churchill’s opinions, Churchill backed down. No major mistake of his in WWII was not backed by someone in the upper brass.) So Washington was right and everyone else was wrong, and Washington was also right to listen to them. He never wanted to be the military dictator over the Continental Army.
SHRINKING PATRIOT ARMY
After the Battle of New York City the Continental Army shrank from 8,000 to 2,000. The defeat at Long Island had something, but not all, to do with it. The fall was harvest season, and too many of these Yankees were farmers. They turned in their muskets for pitchforks and went back home. There were families to feed and protect, and money to be made. They had the same mind-set of today's 2011 Congresspersons - one after another is making news by choosing not to run for re-election, saying, “There is a lot more money to be made in the private sector, and I'm tired of people taking shots at me.”
Howe captured New York and would hold on to it for a long time. The New York smack-down bugged Washington for the rest of the war, perhaps more than was productive. He probably took it personally how badly the Brits had beat him in NY. Late in the war Washington planned a slugfest frontal assault campaign to re-take New York at a time when the war was being won by stalemate and the French were preparing major offensive moves in the Chesapeake. It may have been for unbecoming personal reasons that he planned the 1782 New York campaign that never was.
BRITISH SMOKE A NEWPORT 12 – 76
On December 8 1776, a date which will live in obscurity, the forces of Great Britian launched a surprise attack on Newport Rhode Island. 6,000 troops under General William Clinton took over this key seaport, and would hold it for many years. Newport was one of the beachheads that gave the British a false sense of how well the war was going. The further the Redcoats went inland, the more trouble they had, but the port cities they could hold if they had a mind to. If they tried to move too far inland it was like punching a cloud. The Colonies had a limitless rear, the deathtrap for any invader.
In early 1778 the Americans planned an expedition to take Newport back. Rebel General Spencer gathered up a force of more than 8,000 militia at Providence, plus Colonial regulars and planned an attack for October. But Newport is an island, and when a series of Atlantic storms destroyed most of Spencer's transports, the assault was on newport was cancelled, just like the Newport Jazz Festival in 71 where I actually got tear-gassed.
By holding Newport for most of the war, the British instigated the rise of Providence as the largest city in Rhode Island. City growth in size and importance that should have gone to Newport, but it was choked off by the British occupation. Before the Revolution, Newport was the most populous and most important city in Rhode Island. All that has changed, unless you count yachting, waterfront bars, and overpriced drinks.
RETREAT ACROSS NEW JERSEY – LATE 1776
After the fall of Fort Washington, Washington retreated towards Pennsylvania with Howe's hound-dogs in pursuit. History often describes this as a “race” to capture Gen. Washington and win a decisive victory. But the army movements on both teams were slow and deliberate with long stops at many towns. It was the old fable of the tortoise and the tortoise. Both Washington and Howe's army stopped for gas at New Brunswick, Trenton and Camden. It must have been an eyeful for these humble inhabitants to see the new United States Army come though, retreat west and then watch the British professional Army stop by afterwards.
Howe really wanted not so much to capture the famous Rebel leader, as he wanted to simply keep Washington out of New Jersey so that the British Army could settle down there for the winter without fearing any flanking counter-attacks. The British military mindset was that campaigning season had a strict calender and was now shutting down. Warm season was war season, and winter was a time to pass time until the next spring training camp saw the pitchers and catchers reporting.
Howe chased Washington out of the Jerseys but he did not anticipate that Washington was of a different mindset with regard to winter.
The Continental army was not a classic European army and in its desperate condition could ill afford to sit still and do nothing while winter passed. Washington's army was as shoeless as the last Confederate armies of the Civil War, and would surely suffer more than the well-clothed Brits in the snowy weather. If you're gong to go hungry, cold and shoeless, you might as well go hungry, cold and shoeless while fighting. Maybe running around in battles will keep you warm. Keep the blood circulating. So Washington planned a surprise counter-attack.
In mid-November Howe played a little hearts and minds with his war effort. He issued a proclamation that any Rebel who laid down his arms within 60 days after November 30 would receive a full pardon from the King. Rebs would not have to worry about hanging for treason, but they would have to swear an oath of loyalty to the King. General Howe knew that Washington was in a near panic because more than half of his army was scheduled to go home after the New Year began. Their enlistments were for short periods, and with winter coming on and the war in a stall, Howe hoped and Washington feared that the battle could be decided by having the Continental Army melt away back to the farms.
TRENTON DECEMBER 26 1776
Billy Howe swept the Jerseys clean of Continental jerseys by mid-December 1776. On the 15th he declared the military campaign closed for the season.
The British had established a series of forts, posts really, from Princeton to Staten Island. They were not heavily defended, but did maintain a British supply line and presence against the weakened Americans. There were a few Hessian regiments in the front lines ready to attack if need be. General Howe went to New York City for the winter and Cornwallis went back to England for a little R&R.
Howe knew that his line of posts was stretched out a little too thin, but he presumed that the Americans lacked the will and capability to strike any offensive blows. Clinton and Gage had recommended a shorter line from New York only out as a far as the Raritan River, but Howe was almost as arrogant and confident as a beginner comedian, so there was no reasoning with his reasoning.
For George Washington the situation should have seemed hopeless. He and his “Army” had retreated across the Delaware into Pennsylvania. Washington and his Generals (Sully – Cadwalter – Lashua, - and Roche de Fermoy to name three) also knew that any Hessian surprise attack across the Delaware would probably succeed, and if the German mercenaries had any element of surprise it definitely would. Washington had no strong fortification or position to fall back on and a sudden large engagement was a thing to fear.
The Continentals did have one advantage. They had commandeered most of the boats along the Delaware so the British would have had that major logistical problem if they had taken to attacking him cross the river.
Perhaps the biggest fear for Washington was New Year's Eve. On that night the party was not beginning, it was over. More than half of his army were of limited enlistments. At midnight most of Army was free to yell “Happy New Year!” and go back home to their farms and their wives. The Continental Army was potentially going to drop from 6,000 to 1,500 men in one minute. Washington was going to start the New Year with a bad hangover.
Washington weighed it all and decided that the only smart call was to attack. The men should be used before they went home. To sit and wait for a surprise attack by advanced regiments of the King's mercenaries didn't make much sense. If Washington could cross the Delaware and surprise the Hessians at Trenton, he might alter the momentum of the conflict and steal some desperately needed supplies and morale.
On Christmas night Washington's Army crossed the Delaware in 50 foot Leon Durham Boats, a popular model that was big enough to carry a cannon and a few men. The Durhams had waling planks along the side to enable pole vaulters to push the boats forward by sticking their poles into the mud and thrusting.
The good guys crossed the Delaware and marched double-time to Trenton before dawn.
Washington's army surprised the drowsy hung-over Hessians and surrounded them inside the Trenton-town. The fighting went up and down the center of the town. It was raining heavily with a mix of light snow, and both sides had trouble getting their muskets to fire. But the Americans had the momentum and the numbers in all aspects of the battle. There was a half hour of brutal killing and suddenly it ended. The Brit-mercenary Hessians had to surrender.
Their arrogant Commander was a Colonel Rall who had boasted for weeks about how pathetic the Americans were and how dare they call themselves soldiers. We've all seen enough movies to know what happens to someone arrogant like that. At some point they look around and realize the battle is lost and they were wrong, then then they catch a musket-ball in the head. That's precisely what happened to Rall at Trenton.
The victory at Trenton was a small tactical win. But it had a strategic impact psychologically. Trenton didn't really shake up the British, but it did inspire the Americans to new confidence and sparked a speedy spike in new enlistments at a critical moment when there was real fear that the American Army would melt away from both desertions and expired enlistments.
CONGRESS CHANGES ITS NAME
The Continental Congress around this time changed its name to the Congress of the Confederation. Some general histories refer to the “Congress,” which is incomplete, or the “Continental Congress” which is inaccurate.
The new body gave states rights top priority and gave little or no power to either the executive or the judicial branch. The Americans were afraid of executive tyranny and judicial tyranny. The national government existed as an exiting new rallying point, but the national government had little real power.
The states wrote new constitutions for themselves along the same lines. They gave the governor about as much power as a floor-sweeper and the judges were allowed to rule on obvious calls subject to legislative review. The judges couldn't judge the legality of legislative decisions, while the reverse was sanctioned.
PRINCETON JANUARY 1777
Back to the war.
Getting across the Delaware and slapping the British Lion was not as frightening a prospect as was that of then having to get back southwest across the river after the singed cat got up and started chasing. Just after New Year's Day 1777, Washington found himself just about trapped in front of the Delaware River.
A large and experienced British Army had made Trenton and kept on marching. It was preparing to bag GW and his army in the morning. Washington and his officers discussed strategy. There weren't many options. They could stand and fight and be driven into the Delaware to get slaughtered there all afternoon. Or they could make a hasty panic retreat to the Delaware at night and get decimated during the morning when the British caught up.
Washington proposed a daring idea. They could spent the night making concealed offensive flanking movement and try to take Princeton from behind. The British would never expect to get cut off from its supply train from the rear when it was holding all the cards and was driving on the weak and retreating enemy.
Princeton was a supply base in the English rear with a large prize of supplies. If the Washington Nationals could take Princeton, there was then another similar prize not too far further to the northeast. New Brunswick was lightly defended and had more supplies to steal.
Steuben said to Washington,
“Its a million to one shot – It'll never work”
Washington snapped back,
“You got a better idea?”
The Americans kept their campfires going and did plenty of loud spadework where the British could hear it, and kept sentries marching back and forth where the British could see them. But all the while the entire force of nearly 5,000 rag tag militia and Army left the area to the south of Trenton and did the end-around to Princeton.
At dawn they came upon the British 17th regiment that was beginning to march towards Trenton with supplies and men. There was then a series of small battles in and around Princeton. The Americans fell back in terror every time the British launched a bayonet charge.
What's next comes out of a corny children's book, except that it was real. The battle was being lost in several spots. It looked like the Battle of Princeton was going to be a disaster for the Continentals. Then out of nowhere appeared George Washington on his great white horse. He rode up and down several hot spots where his men were losing and rallied them to stand and fight. In one location after another the men could not believe their eyes as their commander in chief went out into the very front line of fighting and stood amidst whizzing bullets and grapeshot and exhorted his men to stand and win. Some men didn't want to look at him because they were sure they were about to watch him die. But Washington did not die. Sometimes the General would be enveloped in a cloud of gunpowder smoke, and then the smoke would clear and there's their commander in chief, the top brass hat, crying out orders and rallying the troops. Washington's personal courage and leadership turned the tide of battle and Princeton became an American victory.
British troops retreated in many spots and were now being chased down by the Yankee amateurs. Both sides took about a hundred casualties with about 40 dead. As usual the stats differ depending on the sources. (One FOX News Channel historian says that 2,890 British died at Princeton and only one American.)
One group of British soldiers took shelter in Nassau Hall at Princeton University. Knox cannon fired a few quick rounds into the building. One of them actually scored a perfect bull-eye on head of a huge expensive painting of King George hanging on a wall. The 194 British troops saw the writing on the wall and came out of Nassau Hall with their hands up. Their semester was up.
The victory at Princeton changed the psychology of the entire conflict. The British were still obviously in the lead, but it was no longer a slam-dunk. The Americans began to believe they could take these guys in the long run.
If Washington was a private first class in 1950 Korea and had performed exactly the same way in combat, he could have easily won the Congressional Medal of Honor. It's a travesty that he doesn't have it.
Most who win the medal die winning it, but the key ingredient is exposing oneself to almost certain death in order to perform for the greater good. Men who take out three enemy machine gun nests single handedly to save the day for their brothers can win the MOH whether they live or die in the process. Washington was almost suicidal in his bravery at Princeton. He is truly the great hero the schoolbooks tell us he is. To have the leader of the entire Army rallying troops like a crazed sarge at Okinawa tells us two things. One, that George Washington was a hero and that two; the United States is a nation with a destiny. It was simply meant to be that this guy was bulletproof in many situations where he logically should have died. What would have happened to the American cause if Washington had died at Princeton?
How come Theodore Roosevelt has a Congressional Medal of Honor and Washington does not? (Go to my Bill Clinton chapter for the answer.)
MORRISTOWN
After his tactical victories at Trenton and Princeton, Washington's Army spent the early winter months of 1777 in Morristown NJ. The winter of Morris-time is not as famous as the winter at Valley Forge, but things were not much better in Mo-town in 77 than they were at the Forge in 78. Washington's troops were short of arms and ammo, poorly housed, ill-clothed, badly fed, unpaid, demoralized, freezing cold, disorganized, and infiltrated by Tory spies. Other than that everything was great.
SARATOGA PART 1
“BOOB BURGOYNE” PLANS TO CUT THE COLONIES IN HALF
The the 1777 campaign was obviously going to decide the war, so during the winter the British big shots of North America went back to England for warm tea and direct consultations with King George, Lord Germaine, Lord North, Lord Sandwich and Lord Howard Hurtz. Whatever was decided upon would be decided collectively, with no mistaken notions as to whether or not the Crown and the civil authorities had signed on or not on any major action. This made it safer for everyone to be frank about what to do. No one would be asked to take all the blame, whatever was decided.
General Burgoyne had a sharp critical tongue when it came to the other British generals and admirals. Burgoyne not only disrespected the American generals, he disrespected his own. He blamed General Clinton for the scandalous defeats at Trenton and Princeton, and said that,
“If I had been in charge at Long Island, Washington's rag-a-muffins would never have set one shoeless foot on Jersey soil.”
After some debate, the Crown brains-trust adopted the plan that Burgoyne proposed. It was a three-prong plan to cut New England off from the rest of the so-called United States of America by creating a line of British control from Canada down the Champlain-Hudson waterway to NYC.
Burgoyne would advance down from Canada with one big army. Clinton or Howe would advance North from New York City, and a third force would come in from the west by way of Lake Oswego and the Mohawk river. The three would unite somewhere just south of Albany and, to quote an arrogant prediction from one British officer, “We shall make all them bow down and apologize for all the trouble they started.”
Militarily the plan was better than good, but politically, what was the point? The idea was to stop Revolution, not occupy parts of the rebel waterways and cut off one section from the other. The plan would have made far more sense if the Americans spoke Swahili and were ancient implacable enemies. But what was to be done after the plan succeeded? New England would be cut off by way of the Hudson from the lower colonies.
So?
Did the British really think that New England would no longer be able to find other ways to keep in touch with the rest of the rebels? New England was a self-sustaining land of small farms and fisheries, not easily starved into submission like a besieged fort? Even if New England was intimidated and caved in, how was Old England supposed to find the human resources to re-establish royal government there, and in what form? How would cutting off New England lead to a political conclusion of the rebellion? Burgoyne's plan had two ways it could go. It could end in victory which would lead to a greater prospect of defeat because of the increased resentment that was already snowballing everywhere. Or it could end in defeat. It was like the prospect of getting into a fight as an adult. You either win and go to jail and feel like a bully and then get sued by his family for the hospital bills, or you suffer a beating.
The British plan was based on that same old miscalculation that ruined the Quebec expedition of 1775. The Brits presumed that upstate New York was Toryland. Sure, it still votes Republican today, but upstate NY wasn't so Tory that it was going to decisively augment an invading army of Hessian and Redcoats with a surge of Tory militia. Tories were more prominent in upstate New York than they were in eastern Massachusetts but that didn't mean they were going to come out and fight. They had already made a choice. They had already chosen a side - the side of definite actual neutrality, no matter what their mind or heart said. If they were the kind of people who would risk their life for a cause, chances are they would have picked a side and marched off with their musket by now. The Tories knew they were still an unpopular minority within the composition of the region. Sure, for a week or two, with a British Army in the neighborhood, they were on the winning team, but that doesn't mean they were stupid enough to think this was permanent and that there wouldn't be a horrible price to be paid later for joining up with the temporary winners. In other words, Tory support failed to materialize, not because it wasn't there, but because it was comprised of Tory chicken-hawks to begin with.
The British expected 10,000 timid Tories to come out and fight for the Crown and reveal themselves to their Patriot neighbors in the process. The Tories knew that the Sons of Liberty could be sons of something else. You might hang from a cherry tree as your face turned red, white and blue, meaning you joined the Revolutionary cause after all.
The next best hope for the British was that the Loyalists might at least come out and supply the British Army. If the Tories wouldn't risk their necks, maybe they'd at least risk their crops, horses, cattle, and wells, for the Crown cause. But that didn't happen either.
There were plenty of Tories in the British Army. But that's the whole point. They were already there. Those passionate Tories willing to make a stand had already been weeded out. It was dumb to presume that a passing Army could squeeze more support juice out of the Tory orange. There was no Tory pulp left because they didn't want to get beaten to one.
Another part of it was simple chauvinism. The British thought that their nation, cause, flag, queen, and government were so great that of course the support would come out of the woods as they marched.
So the plan was for Burgoyne with 9,000 troops to invade from Canada down Lake Champlain to the central Hudson. That was the heart of the plan. This was the main force.
Even today it looks like a great plan, even without the Tory support.
A lot of things went wrong for the Brits but by far the most important thing that went wrong was that Howe decided not to fulfill his part of the bargain. Howe failed to march North and instead took his tip-top army south to Philadelphia. What chance would a three pronged attack into the heart of enemy country have to succeed if the biggest prong of the three doesn't even show up? The 77 campaign was a tricycle missing the front wheel from the start. Burgoyne out of Canada made his own mistakes, which will be cheerfully noted, but the main problem was not his fault. In fact he was the innocent victim of the worst mistake of the war, even if he did make things worse with his mistakes.
This is an orthodox schoolbook version, and it is essentially correct and a good starting point for the overall look at the Saratoga campaign.
TICO TAKEN BY GJ– JULY 6 1777
“Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne was so confident that he could cut the colonies in half with his grand plan that he placed a wager with Lloyd's Casino in London against cynic Member of Parliament Jimmy Foxx. Burgoyne bet Fox that he would be home in London with a complete victory in his pocket by Christmas Day 77. The wager was for the equivalent of $6,000 American money in 2012 and Foxx gave Burgoyne 3-2 odds.
Burgoyne's first major objective was Fort Ticonderoga, the same fort that the Yanks had captured and had supplied the cannon for Washington at Dorchester Heights back in 75. The Rebs had taken it then and Burgoyne was going to now take it back, not so much because it was so strategically important, but because it was in his path.
Defending the fort for the Americans was General Horatio Patriot Gates. Historians hate this guy.
The British northern force had left Canada with 138 cannon. The heavy artillery had slowed down Burgoyne considerably through his wilderness journey, and had done very little for his team. Finally they found some defiant use at Ticonderoga. Just south of Tico was Mount Defiance. Burgoyne squeezed two cannon up the hill. From there he couldn't quite shell Tico, but he could threaten its supply line. The commanders of the fort were a Mr. St. Clair and Phil Shuyler, his commanding general. They abandoned the fort, saving 3,000 precious troops from near certain capture. But the US Congress was furious. with the two men for deserting “Old Tico” without a fight. They put the two a courts-martial trial for deserting Tico. Shuyler and St. Clair were acquitted, but the trial was rough, and the careers of Schuyler and St. Clair were never the same. They are two of the American goats of the Revolutionary War.
The loss of Ticonderoga was big news, but not the devastating strategic loss that it might have seemed at the moment. When King George got the news on six weeks delay he misread it entirely. He went running around the Palace shouting with glee that,
“Tico has fallen! I have done it! I have beaten the rebels!”
Wrong.
PAST TICO
The Burgoyne-boys marched further south towards Saratoga. Supplies were already running low. The Tories weren't supplying men or supplies. Burgoyne's supply line stretched all the way back to the entrance to the Bay of St. Lawrence, Howe wasn't on the march to help him, and the third wheel out in western New York was failing too.
So Burgoyne dispatched a couple of thousand troops, 95% Hessians, to strike out to the east into Vermont to scrounge up some supplies. Burgoyne heard that the area was lightly defended and that the locals loved the Redcoats.
Now into the story steps Jane McCray. She was a Tory from Hammondsport NY who was in love with one of Burgoyne's officers. Indians in the service of England attacked the both of them and did them in. They brought their scalps back to Burgoyne. The general was aghast, but he couldn't scream and holler at the native American savages because he needed them as allies. He couldn't get mad at his cat for killing the sparrow and dropping it off as a gift.
Unfortunately for Burgoyne, a false and biased version of the incident began to sweep New England and New York. Now it seems that Jane McCray was a loyal Patriot wife who had been kidnapped by the British who handed her over to the Indians who raped her, tortured her, then killed her and then scalped her as the British applauded and made sketch drawings.
The story was as untrue as a Harry Potter story, but the Pats spread the story around. All of a sudden militia volunteers were forming into some fairly large units and drilling for combat chanting “Remember Jane McRay!”
BENNINGTON
Burgoyne's advanced redcoat brigades ran into a countryside suddenly swarming with hate and militarism. This wasn't the Tory welcome they expected. A pitched battle took place at Bennington Vermont, which is ironic since it's now the mellowest city in the world where people eat really expensive ice cream and talk about peace. Yet it was here that the second biggest battle of the RW in New England took place. The Americans won at Big Ben; not by a lot, but they won, and the British exploration and supply mission retreated west, a dismal failure.
Bennington was a great military and psychological victory for the Rebs. There's a giant obelisk monument there now. It's more than 330 feet tall. Every time I go there, there's no one around.
SGATESGOAT OF SARATOGA
The first Battle of Saratoga was at a place called Freeman's Farm. The British won by a slight margin, but the Americans should have won if only that turkey Horatio Patriot Gates had not been guilty of freezing up under fire and doing nothing. Gates did everything wrong and showed unmanly reluctance throughout the second battle of Saratoga too. I hate Horatio Gates! He was all set up to be an American hero and instead he almost cost the USA two victories!
THE BRAVE HISTORIANS
I'm just reacting the way the historians seem to want me to. If only these professors in 1970 commanded the field back in 1777, the whole war would have been won so much sooner. All my life, through 40 years of reading military history, I have always hated the 'this guy was a coward because he hesitated and did nothing' approach to writing history. What about the 1,000 generals who advanced like brave macho fools and got their men slaughtered in a failed assault? Historians only chastise them gently at worst. But those who hesitate are yellow. Historians never come out and say the word “yellow” but their meaning is plain. I just wish they'd take full responsibility for the accusations they are slinging and just say that “McClellan was a yellow coward.” Then they'd have to answer for the personal desecration of that man's grave. Instead we get 239 various sentences saying things like, “Once again McClellan chose not to act, and the results were disastrous.” Or, “At a time when all of his officers begged him to advance, General Donovan decided to retreat. History must judge him accordingly.”
The scholars pretend it's all about wise military strategy, but it's really about macho and our sick admiration for that value system. The proof is that history never loved a single general for a brilliant decision to retreat anywhere anyplace at anytime. There is not a single statue or holiday for a fantastic successful withdrawal. No one ever has celebrated a genius decision to retreat that saved four thousand lives and a campaign. But armies that attacked in suicide waves and lost the battle are celebrated as greatness itself.
ORISKANY
The western end of the three prong plan to take the empire state didn't go well for the red. The British invasion of western New York came to an end at Orsikany. The British and their Indian allies got the best of the battle but also decided that if this was what awaited them the rest of the way, they had better call it off now. The Indians and Tories deserted in droves after winning, not realizing that they held a wide field. They thought more tough fighting was just around every corner, and if it was going to be like this all the way to Albany and then down to NYC, no thank you.
ENEMY SURRENDER AT SARATOGA - OCTOBER 17 1777
“Sarah Seventy-Seven” was the big win, the wonderful win that won the war. General Benedict Arnold fought long and hard and was wounded severely in the leg.
The British signed a “convention” which enabled them to avoid the word surrender, but it was a surrender. Burgoyne and his army gave up their arms and became prisoners of war. But they didn't technically “surrender.”
WHO'S ON FIRST? - WHERE IS HOW?
Howe overestimated the value of capturing Philadelphia. Somehowe he thought it was the heart of the new nation just because it was a big city and because the decision to secede was made there. But wars are not won by capturing cities, they are won by capturing armies. Howe didn't get it. Neither had General Clinton when he felt it was all important to capture and hold New York City.
When Franklin heard the news of the British defeat at Saratoga, he wrote about it almost as though he was annoyed at British mistakes. He wrote that,
“Only a boob such as Burgoyne could have so mismanaged such a manageable campaign.”
When this letter was published James got tagged with the nickname “Boob Burgoyne.” Prior to Saratoga, General Burgoyne was nicknamed “Gentleman Jim.” His star fell a lot after Saratoga.
BRANDYWINE SEPTEMBER 11 1777
America won a big one at Saratoga.
Then lost a big one at Brandywine.
Patrick Henry was so down when heard the news he wrote that “This news is so disheartening that I may drink both the brandy and the wine.”
The British plan was to land in force south of Philly and take it from below.
Howe's fleet of invaders sailed out of Staten Island and made an arduous journey around the bend, past Atlantic City (they fired cannon into the Bally's Casino), past Cape May, and up the Chesapeake. 16,000 Redcoat troops landed at Elkton at the top of Chesapeake Bay. This force was slated to march north for Lord North while the Jersey Brits boxed Washington in from the top side of the map.
Brandywine was a creek on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The British and the Americans fought a sharp battle and the Americans caved. The road was open for the British to take Philadelphia. They did and stayed in control of Philly for the next nine months.
When Franklin heard that Howe had captured Philadelphia he said. “No, Philadelphia has captured Howe.” Franklin always had something clever to say at the right time. He was a real talented guy.
THE FRENCH ALLIANCE 1777-1778
After Saratoga the French decided to formally agree to an alliance with the shiny new United States of America. It was the turning point in the war.
The Alliance did not become official until May 5 1778, but the French made the decision after Saratoga. Of course there is one historian who says that the decision had already been made before Saratoga. There is always some killjoy historian ruining everything you thought you already knew and thank God for them, because they are right at least one third to the time in my estimation - but it's so hard to say when they are right that I have to generally go with the standard version of general history.
England altered its entire grand strategy when France entered the conflict because a war with France meant a war on many fronts all over the world. The retention of the American continental colonies lost some of its urgency. Britian could almost concede the loss of the USA in exchange for hitting the French hard somewhere else, like in the Far East or the West Indies. The War of the American Revolution had started out as a localized war, but now it wasn't and to some extent England was 'mailing it in' against the Americans, while maintaining a more eager eye towards a showdown with France elsewhere.
France of course, only came in on the side of America out of enmity with England. It certainly wasn't because France admired the American democratic experiment against aristocracy. France was an absolute monarchy. England was far more democratic than France, yet France became America's ally. It was a little bit like when the USA invaded secular Iraq in order to rescue Islamic Kuwait in 1991, or when Russia fought on the side of England in 1916 to make the world safe for democracy when Russia was an autocracy. Most wars are just power struggles per se, with crumb crisp coatings of ideology baked over the top when it fits.
Vergennes, the F.M. was careful to instruct every French diplomat and soldier going to America to make sure you emphasize that we are with you ideologically, and that's why we're here. Vergennes told them not to say a word about selfish French interests in committing to a great war. They were not to mention the many places all over the globe where France could grab rich rewards for its dedication to American 'Liberty.'
The common image of French help for American in the Revolution is that of a European underdog coming in to help an American underdog getting beat up by the big bully. But France was just as much a big bully anytime it got the chance to be. Its entry into the American Revolution was an act of greedy aggression against an arch-enemy, not a noble act of sticking up for liberty or the underdog.
The same could be said in reverse for why the USA liberated France in 1944. That wasn't about democracy at all. France was in the road on the way to Berlin.
There's plenty of examples of nations joining great crusades for not so great reasons. Japan joined up with the Allies in World War I just so it could grab German possessions in the Pacific. France of course made a much lager commitment and took a much larger risk in 1778 than Japan did in 1918. But the idea was the same. Jump in the fight and grab. France was in it because England was vulnerable now. France didn't care about Liberty any more than I care about Texas Hold-em. And let me tell you something, I don't give a damn about Texas Hold-em.
A key element in the picture is the myth of the super-d-duper English Royal Navy. The British Navy was a Royal neglected mess and the French Navy was in top shape. Britain's navy was larger than the French, but ship for ship was inferior in quality. If Spain could come on board with France, these two Catholic sea powers combined definitely outclass the Royal Navy both in size and quality. The Naval preparedness of France was as decisive in their decision to enter the war as love for the American cause.
WHY ENGLAND SLEPT ALONE
England fought both America and the combo-power of France, Spain and Holland, and did so without allies. History makes sense after it's acted out. But Great Britian had made a great error in allowing this to happen, it wasn't normal, and it wasn't necessary.
Britian, of all people, should have not let this happen. Traditional British foreign policy was based on making sure it always had at least one powerful and committed ally on “the continent.” This policy was so established that it went by the name of “continental policy.” England in earlier wars always had a friend it could count on on the European land mass. Usually, this was Prussia, but at other times it was Austria, or even an occasional Spain or Sweden.
England abandoned this Kissingeresque 'balance of power' policy at the very time it ended up needing it most. Its reasons were logical but it turned out all wrong.
First reason to abandon the Continental policy was the problem was money. These alliances required large money subsidies. No one works for free except open-mikers, and Prussia was no open-miker. Abandoning the continental system saved a lot of money.
The continental system was not abandoned in favor of nothing. It was abandoned in favor of what was thought would work just was well or better, the 'Colonial system.' Some historians call it 'mercantilism.' Under this new concept the strong nation with a powerful navy and merchant marine builds an overseas colonial empire that is essentially self-sustaining in every way. Food, trade, armaments, navies, and diplomacy could all be sustained efficiently within their own private empire. No need for any draining continental alliances anymore because the empire would function from a global direction, rather than a strictly European. Britian had colonies now in India, America, the West Indies and Canada. That was enough to start out on a new road to new thinking. Britain didn't need allies because it was growing its own! The strategy blew up in their face in the American Revolution and the world war that followed.
It was a good idea but it just didn't work once the American rebellion proved impossible to defeat. Mercantilism was a wagon without a wheel when America took itself off the board.
British overconfidence hurt. What else is new with most imperial countries? Britain was well aware that France was secretly helping the Americans with the fake loan corporation of Pierre Caron Beaumarchais, but it felt that it didn't matter either way. They were going to defeat the American so quickly and so heartily that any French munitions delivered to the Americans would probably end in in some British armory anyway.
BLOCKADE, YOU BLOCKHEADS!
The Royal Navy made another major strategic mistake when it failed to keep the French Navy pinned in on its home ports. Even before the formal alliance, France was a clear enemy, was helping the Americans, and was obviously getting ready to jump in. Some Brits advised a dispatch of strong forces to threaten the French fleet in its home ports. The Manchester Globe wrote in frustration, “Blockade, you blockheads!,” but the RN sailed to all corners of the globe, while ignoring the most threatening corner next door, preferring to needlessly take on French warships in the open seas.
Then there was such a paranoia about a French invasion of the Home Island, that the Royal Navy further depleted its resources by dispatching significant battle groups to patrol the home coastlines. These first and second-rate monster ships should have been hovering outside the ports of France, not England. All in all, the English let the French cats out of the bag, and paid the bill in 1783.
THE HESSIANS – VICTIMS OF PROPAGANDA
Most Americans who aren't completely ignorant of their own history (meaning about 1% of all Americans) know that the Hessians were hired German mercenaries who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War.
They were paid troops who had no love for England and no political or religious anger towards the Rebels. As the war went along the Americans hated the Hessians more and more and the Hessians hated right back. They were particularly savage fighters. Not as ruthless as, say for example, the Iroquois, but Hessians were quite rough.
I hated the Hessian all my life because I read children's books about the Revolutionary War and never shook that image.
There were a shamefully high percentage of Hessians in the invader armies of Britain. The King had a recruiting problem for the war with America. It wasn't easy to convince British troops to volunteer to go aim their muskets at their English-speaking brothers. Many soldiers in the King's army had relatives in America. The British Army was not at full strength, and the English people were so afraid of military tyranny that they elected members to Parliament who wanted to reduce, not increase Britain's military strength. The war against the American Colonies was never popular at home so the British turned to paid troops do the hard work of anti-freedom.
English officers and soldiers also understood that they were in a no win of glory situation. Over and over everyone ranted about how pathetic and weak the Colonials were militarily. That meant that if you won a victory over them there was no glory in that. They were weaklings. And if you suffered even the most minor defeat at their hands it would be a large humiliation. Who wants a slice of that pie?
But the Hessians are really victims of historical propaganda. It's chauvinist fun to magnify their evil purpose and behavior as against the noble and admirable Revolutionaries.
First of all, the practice of hiring these guys was not unusual, so it didn't really prove that England was desperate. It was a normal way to run a war in those days. On four occasions in the 80 years before 1776 Britian hired Hessians to fight for them in Euro-continental wars. The only thing new this time was that they had to make a rough trip across the ocean to fight in a very strange land.
Half of the Hessians were virtual kidnapped slaves. Several of the little German states, including Hesse-Lashua (after which they are named,) treated mercenaries like wheat, fish or lumber. These poor men were commodities to be exported for profit, and not half of them really volunteered out of a love of the fighting life (as I insipidly wrote in my first draft.) Selling soldiers to foreign states was a human meat-market. If you were a young man in a German town in the 1700's you'd better sleep with one eye-open because otherwise you might end up tied up and thrown into the back of a German wagon on your way to Hamburg where a ship awaited you for transport to one of England's wars. Welcome to draft day.
One Hessian left a detailed diary of his life in the Revolutionary War. He was on the way to visit a cousin in Bremen when he was kidnapped and forced to volunteer to fight in America. When he shouted angrily that, “this is tyranny! I did not volunteer!” he got 25 lashes, and then said, “I'd like nothing better than to fight those Yankee scums for the wonderful King George.”
The voyage to America was only a little better than the Middle Passage for African slaves. Six men were assigned to each bunk. In order to get any sleep they all had to turn over at the same time at regular intervals during the night. The food was fit for a King (as in 'Come here King! Come on boy!') He records that he interviewed everyone in his platoon and found that everyone had been abducted. One guy said he was drunk at a tavern and woke up in chains on his way to the ship. Another said that he was a cobbler's apprentice and that the troops had burst into the shop, clubbed the old man down and abducted him. One guy said he was a stand-up comedian that had just stopped by at Berlin's famous Dumkoff's Cararet one afternoon to pick up an overdue check and the troops were waiting for him in the booker's office. They knew that this guy, a middle act hack, wouldn't be missed. Still another said that he was an ordained Protestant minister who looked too fit and trim for his own good on the day the troops spotted him walking down a country road. This was the reality of the hated Hessians. They were victims of war as much as callous prosecutors of it.
They were victims of kidnapping, and then victims of Colonial propaganda. The Colonists hated the Hessians more than I hate Clark Gable's performance in Teacher's Pet (see it to believe it.) Then they became the victims of history propaganda. History truth can't get out of bed in the time it takes a history fable to circle the universe 46 times.
There was one propaganda related happy ending for some of the Hess boys. Franklin and Jefferson strongly urged the positive brainwashing of the Hessians in order to get them to desert and come over to the American side, or, at least, to desert and melt into the western countryside to find a new life as far removed from this foolish war as possible. Leaflets were left on the trail for them wherever they marched. One extant missive read,
“Heinz – this isn't your fight. Discard your weapon, shed your uniform and join the free and happy life of an American. You won't be sorry. You don't even have to join the American Army. - Get out while you can. We will never tell Johnny Bull where you went. We give you liberty or we will give you death.”
Quit a lot of Hessians deserted and became wetbacks. Of the 43,000 Hessians who went to America to fight someone else's enemy, less than half of them made it back to the fatherland. Admittedly, most of those who did not return had died of disease or musket-balls, but a few thousand, not a few hundred, did indeed listen to the American propaganda campaign and became instant immigrants.
After the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse in 1778 for example, Howe reported 600 Hessians missing. The battle had not gone so badly for the Brits that 600 Hessians were PW. (and I always go with PW instead of POW, just as I don't live in the USOA. I cite Omar Bradley as literary precedent – his book always says PW's not POW's)
Liberals in England questioned the wisdom of employing mercenaries in America. 'How can we ever get a post-war reconciliation with the rebs if we leave this bitter taste in their mouths,' they asked?
The Hessians did serve one major cultural purpose for America. They helped to spread the cult of Christmas through the colonies. I will never forgive them for that. Half the Hessians were Catholics. We can thank the Hessians for 80,000 Christmas TV commercials starting November 1.
'Hessian' is today still sometimes used as a derogatory term for anyone who callously sells their services to the highest bidder. - “That hessian comedian is doing Pizza Hut commercials, and he never eats pizza.”
CONWAY CABAL 1778
It was really a small matter, but it got “blown out of proportion” to use the modern complaint, and it ended up as a perceived threat to overthrow George Washington and the young American government in a military coup. The overblown threat was put down with a severe overreaction to the overblown threat, and then all was well. History has improperly remembered the Conway cabal as the huge threat it never really was. The perceived threat has been recorded by short history as a real one.
Fat books on the Revolutionary War debunk the myth, but the short books are the ones people read, and the short vid-byte version of history on the so-called “History Channel” always treat the CC threat as being the real deal.
Essentially it was as simple as this. A lot of mid-level officers were not too happy with George Washington's performance and felt that the entire cause would be better served if someone else was in charge. Do you see anything treasonous there? Are there any plans in that sentence to try and force him out and install a military dictatorship of new approved and improved leaders?
These were the typical grumblings of any war. The favorite of the anti-Washington officers was General Gates. And why not? He had won the big one at Saratoga, he was older and more experienced in military affairs, and Washington had only demonstrated so far that he could run away and occasionally win a rear-guard harassment skirmish against surprised inferior numbers.
So a few officers complained in private letters to General Gates that Washington was just about the worst person to be leading them right now - George was a walking disaster in the field of military leadership. This wasn't an untenable gripe, and it was not followed by any, “therefore we gotta do something about it.”
The problem was that a few fans of Washington got a hold of the private letters and passed them on to Washington, Adams, Lee and everyone else who would flip out when they read them. The worst letter-leaker was Jimmy Wilkenson, who 20 later would conspire with the Aaron Burr to try and separate the western territories from the USA and form a separate nation with Spain. That is getting ahead of the story of course, but it is important to note the type of scum that passed along the letters and let a harmless cat out of the bag until it became a rabid mountain lion.
The worst pen-pusher in the CC was General Thomas Conway of New Hampshire. He eventually had to resign and his name is now placed on the foolish episode as though he was some sort of a traitor which he was not, and I play regularly in Conway New Hampshire which is named after him, so I have a reason to defend TC.
Washington personally fanned the publicity of the alleged coup in the making. GGW was a real porcupine. Wilkinson knew that Wash would bang his knees leaping up from the table in anger when he read the Conway letters, and he did.
Before you knew it, the Rebel cause was in the middle of a coup. A military junta was going to kidnap Washington if he refused to step down. The young nation would soon be ruled by the very kind of military aristocracy it was claiming to reject as a reason for its very existence.
A coup was an understandable fear. Washington was locked out of Philadelphia by the victorious British. General Gates was the American hero of Saratoga, and Sam Adams was openly saying he wished that Gates was the Commander in Chief, instead of Washington.
For all of that there was no real conspiracy, just a lot of people griping when the chips were down, and the remarks getting blown up out of proportion. All this paranoid fantasy was fueled by gossip and the press, but the public believed it long enough that drastic steps were taken to stop this rebellion that didn't exist. Major generals had to resign and apologize for things they said about Washington that everyone says about their boss.
It makes for a better story to say that there was a serious conspiracy against Washington when things were looking the most bleak. But it isn't really true. Washington had such support in Congress and such a personal quality of leadership, that even if he wasn't winning battles, he was still winning hearts. There wasn't much of a chance that some other general was going to take over.
VALLEY FORGE 1777-1778
The winter of 1778 is remembered by history as being particularly brutal. Washington's weak and ill-clothed Army was camped 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia at a place called Valley Forge. At the same time British General Howe had captured Philadelphia and he and his army were living the life of luxury there while the Revolutionaries froze and starved. The Americans were heroic and the British were not.
Of course, there is more to the story. First of all the winter of 1777-1778 in the Philadelphia area was warmer than average. But since many of Washington's men were shoeless, even a mild winter was a terrible winter.
The real reason Washington's Army suffered so badly was a complete lack of money and an equal lack of regional patriotism.
The locals didn't do their duty enough. There were shoes in the area for everyone, but local civilians apparently wanted to be paid for them, and not in worthless Continental IOU's. There was the money shortage per se, the absolute physical lack of currency, and then the lack of uniform currency even if there had been currency.
Thousands of Americans traded with the enemy for their British pound of flesh, while a few heroes gave their money to the Revolutionary cause. The balance sheet of opportunist selfish Americans versus brave Americans willing to take risks and make sacrifices is not flattering to the young nation.
Adding to the misery at the Forge was a shattered communication and transportation system. Even if the Independent Congress could have paid for supplies, it would been a Sinbadian task to get them there. Roads were poor, the Brits controlled the waterways, railroads hadn't even been invented yet, and a million Tories were obstructionists aiding the British.
Actually the next two winters at Morristown were more brutal on the American troops than the one at the Forge, but the VF story is the more famous, probably because thing were looking more bleak at the time for the American “glorious cause.”
REUBEN STEUBEN
He was so fat that his soldiers called him “Reuben Steuben.” The Prussian was one of the foreigner-heroes of the American Revolution. There were a few, and they made up for the Hessians.
Baron Freiderich von Steuben was a high ranking officer in the Prussian Army who believed in the American cause and made it his own. “Stewey” paid his way to America and offered his service to General Washington, who took him up on it in a British occupied New York minute.
Steuben took the rag-tag army at Valley Forge and instilled Prussian military discipline into them. Washington had his strong suits, but drilling men around the clock until they had Prussian order was not one of them. It was Baron Steuben's forte. Steuben saw to it that the months shivering at the Forge was not wasted. These men may have had holes in their shoes and no socks, but they were still marching and drilling from dawn to dusk under the tough but beloved Freddie Stueben. I have to try and like him because I lived in his county in 1974-45 when I was a disc-jockey in Bath, New York.
When Washington won a limited victory the next spring against Howe at Monmouth Court House, Steuben's drilling and discipline received much of the credit.
Near the end of the Valley Forge winter Steuben was “outed.” Someone looked into his past and found out that BVS had only been a low-ranking officer in the Prussian Army and he was not even a Baron.
By that time Washington had already made him second in command at Valley Forge and was so grateful for the invaluable help that he actually enabled the lie. Washington reportedly remarked that,
“I don't care if the man was a Munich wino! He has molded my army into fighting shape and he is a fully accredited Baron as far as I am concerned. Do not let this get out amongst the men. And do not tell the Baron that we know of this. A man's deeds are his title in the end anyway.”
So von Steuben has come down to history as Baron von Steuben, when his real title was simply Fred.
One debunker says that Steuben gets way too much credit for instilling European military discipline on the American Army at Valley Forge. He says the troops were already well aware of several different European military organizing systems and were trying to learn them before he showed up. But he adds that Steuben still made a priceless contribution by instilling the discipline to pick one system (his) and sticking to it. One good system is better than seven great ones. Everyone learned Steuben's Prussian drill and order exclusively. One uniform system it made for an army of “group-think.”
YORK PEPPERMINT CONGRESS – DARK CHOCOLATE DAYS
When I think of York I think of a peppermint candy-bar or a coastal town in Maine with a lame zoo. It's hard to think of York, Pennsylvania as the capital of the United States of America, but that's where Congress sat (on its hands) in the winter of Valley Forge.
These were the times that tried men's quorums. Many Confederation Congressmen didn't go the extra miles to get to York. Important national decisions could not reach a quorum on a given day. 13 states were supposed to supply at least three delegates for a given session. 29 or more should be there, but on many days only nine states put up one guy each. And these no-shows were the same people saying that General Washington was not up to snuff. Look in the mirror, baby.
The main business of the York Congress seemed to be blaming the generals for all that was going wrong with the war. The generals were, of course, blaming Congress. And, in spite of the great victory at Saratoga, the war did seem to be going badly. It was hard to think otherwise with the Army freezing in ditches at Valley Forge with Congress meeting in a cold cow-barn in York, while Howe was sipping wine in front of a gold-plated fireplace at the Ritz Carleton in downtown Philly with a Tory bimbo in each arm. The Americans had lost Philly, had lost at Brandywine and Germantown, and lost the Delaware forts. The Revolution was not exactly running like a Swiss watch.
General Washington was the target of much of the dork-York criticism. Some legislators felt that the adulation the country gave Washington now made it, “impossible to get rid of him and we're stuck with his amateur military abilities.” One Congressman said “It is fortuitous that Gates won at Saratoga and not Washington. In fact, I doubt that Washington would have won at Saratoga” Most of the anger towards General George came from the Congressional delegations of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the two states that had taken a beating at the hands of the British while Wash conducted rear-guard hit-and-run tactics.
Most of the criticism of Washington was of the Warren G. Harding variety. GW was a said to be an honorable leader of personal integrity, but a man with not much ability who surrounded himself with corrupt and inept advisors that he unfortunately listened to.
The real objects of criticism were Nat Greene and Henry Kevin Knox who were 27 and 35, disrespectfully. It may be that the mid-Atlantic press arrows hurled at Knox and Greene had had more to do with regional jealousy than with an actual lack of confidence in these two heroes of the American Revolution. Both Knoxie and Green were New England Patriots, not Philadelphia American Eagles.
Thomas Mifflin of PA was especially miffed with Nathaniel Greene. Mifflin was the adjutant general of the United States. An adjutant general was the guy who stayed back home and controlled weapons and supplies. Miff was from Pennsylvania and he felt that Greene had to go. They had an e-mail fight with quills that made them both look bad.
FRANKLIN'S DOUBLE GAME
I found a book 30 years ago that claimed that Ben Franklin was a British Spy during the American Revolution. I thought it was a fascinating read, but I didn't take it too seriously, even if it was written by a university professor named Curry who was an established Ben Franklin author and historian.
But then I studied American history for 30 years and every time Ben Franklin's name comes up he is doing something that is not consistent with the actions of a revolutionary patriot. Then the historian inevitably explains away his behavior as some sort of shrewd game designed to really help the cause. So you see, his equivocal actions are even more helpful than those of an over-the-top whig rebel. Or they simply say its not important that he did this or that thing not consistent. Here is a sample from James Stokesbury, one of my favorite historians. Jimmy mentions that Franklin was sent over to Paris to help pave the way for the French alliance. He praises “the old philosopher” to no end then reluctantly adds,
Franklin was not above a quick dollar, either, and he may have sold material to the British. But this was a period when the lines between personal and public conduct were not clearly drawn; many a European diplomat or minister saw nothing wrong in making his own fortune out of his ministry, or accepting favors from interested parties; this is, after all, not unknown to a later age.
What a reach to justify the otherwise unexplainable actions of a slimy snake. So it's ok to make secret deals with the enemy, because hey, even today a lot of powerful people make deals to help themselves personally. Like General Norman Shwartzkopf got a fleet of power boats on the side from Sadaam on the side while he negotiated at Safwan in 1991.
BF may have sold material to the British? And that fact is supposedly no big deal? No one ever said that Adams or Jay did that, and they could have. They didn't because they were great guys.
This pattern is so consistent, this apologism for Franklin's persistent actions which are on the surface Tory, have led me to conclude that the book is right. Franklin was at best a selfish Tory with a leg in both camps, and when he failed to prevent Independence, which he tried to do at all times in the crisis years, he accepted Independence with the begrudging admonition that, “We had all better hang together or we will all hang separately.” The others might have, but Franklin would have read about it in a London parlor.
Then one day my friend Martin Olsen said he didn't like Ben Franklin and my jaw dropped. I was just listening in on the conversation and no mention had been made about Franklin being a spy, and my friend Marty said, “I can't stand that guy!.”
I asked in disbelief why he didn't like Ben Franklin. I had never heard anyone say that before.
“I read his autobiography in college. He had this arrogant conceit that totally disgusted me. It was torture. The worst autobiography I have ever read. It was so disappointing.”
There is nothing significant about this quote unless you know Marty Olsen. He is a successful Hollywood scriptwriter today. At the time he said this he was a piano player and government technical engineer. Martin Olsen is the most positive person I have ever known. Show me ten jerks and I'll show you nine people that Martin will greet with a smile and a warm handshake, and his jury's out on the other guy. He is Christlike in his ability to always see the best in everybody. If Marty doesn't like you, it means you are up to no good. I consider his dislike of Franklin to be strong evidence that Franklin was not one of the good guys. I never saw anyone get mad at Olsen and I never saw Marty ever get mad at anyone. I could call him up right now and tell him a new idea I have for a movie or a novel and he'll be telling me what a great idea that is a how if I can get it out there to La La Land I'll be rich and famous and he'll laugh with delight that I even thought it up. And it probably isn't even such a great idea, but that's how positive and enthusiastic he is about everything and everyone.
To me, Marty backs up the Bash-Ben book. It's called Code Name 72, by Professor Cecil B. Curry of the University of South Florida. Much of his daring opinion comes from a previous book by Richard Deacon, A History of the British Secret Service.
Curry cites extensive quotes from letters by many famous contemporaries saying that Franklin was not to be trusted except to please his own best interests. Many of the Founding Fathers disliked Franklin immensely, but this gets buried under the hero-worship Hollywood mentality sound-bite story that makes Ben infallible. The historians only quote praises of the fat man, and this snowballed into a boulder of myth. Ben Franklin's son couldn't stand the guy. Ben was talent, brilliance, hype, ego and glitz.
Franklin was not only one of the most famous men in American, he was one of the most famous people in the world. And he needed and wanted the glory. Every time his name comes up in our story, he is doing something that seems a little odd if for a true Patriot like Sam Adams or John Randolph.
One of the most famous Franklin quotes is another perfect fit. After the war a woman asked him what the Americans had really won. Franklin snapped at her, “A Republic, madam .. If you can keep it.”
The “if you can keep it” line is always attributed to him as if it's a great thing, but I see the words of a man who isn't really thrilled about who won and is being cynical about the infant nation's chances to prosper.
Just so you know, every four months a University professor published a new 900 page biography that worships Franklin to the hilt. So you can presume that I am wrong, even though you will never convince me. If Marty Olsen thinks he’s slimy snake, I’ll take his instinct over any professor. Olsen published a book in 2011 called The Encyclopedia of Hell.
THE NAVAL WAR OF THE REVOLUTION
The Iraqi Navy in the first Gulf War accomplished as much as the American Navy in the Revolution. If you want a painting of the great American naval ships of the Revolutionary War, see a painting of the French Navy. The Americans won the war on land pretty much by themselves, and the French won the war at sea all by themselves. Sure, there are a few small battles at sea that the Yankees won, and American history magnifies them for “patroganda” (patriotic propaganda) purposes, but the USA owed its victory to the French Navy.
The United States had no navy before the war because there was no United States before the war. Instead, the individual states had their own little navies. One rowboat with a guy yelling through a bullhorn was the US Coast Guard in 1775.
Young America passed the Marine Act in 1775 authorizing the construction of a national navy with the limited reb funds available.
The naval war of the revolution was a mismatch. The British had 200 super-battleships. The United States had two moderate sized battleships, called frigates.
The only thing the rebels could skillfully do was commerce raiding. This practice was legal, not piratical. It was called “privateering.”
More than 2,000 US sloops and brigs were granted letters of marque, giving them license to raid and steal British merchants without being hung as pirates if captured. The Patriot sloops captured more than 3,000 British prizes and towed them back to Boston or Charleston for sale to supply the war effort. But 1,000 privateers were captured and re-flagged with the Union Jack. These turn-ships went on to capture American prizes, and their Yankee crews were sent to long terms in ghastly prisons in Halifax N.S., and across the sea at the infamous, “Bristol Hilton.”
BRITISH NAVY IN SORRY SHAPE TOO
Relative to the USA Navy the British Navy was Goliath against Davey. But relative to normal Royal Navy standards, the English navy was in sorry shape. And if the Royal Navy had been in tip-top shape at the start of the War of the Rebellion, the entire outcome might have been different.
The rust on the British Navy was the typical story of the winner in a war powering down its post-war military capabilities while the loser of the war was powering up. Britain defeated France in the 7 Years War which ended with the Peace of Paris in 1763. At that time the Royal Navy had 48,000 men full-time at sea. English Men of War (war wagons with more than 50 cannon on board) were plentiful. The EMW's were modern and meticulously maintained. But in the 13 years since 1763 the Royal Navy had lost half its fighting strength. Some of it was due to ships being sold or de-commissioned. Some of it was due to ships losing quality from old age and poor maintenance. Some of it was because no one in their right mind wanted to join the Royal Navy where a man could get 45 lashes for being overheard complaining about the rat soup.
There was a Catch-22 element to England going to war with its colonies. It seems that the British in the era were brimming with confidence in its military power largely because its forces were heavily augmented by help in many areas from the Colonies. 'We're five times stronger than you because we have your help' doesn't make sense. In 1765 no less than 18,000 Americans were on board Royal Navy fighting ships. Thousand more were on English merchant ships. These men were no longer in the English tally column by 1777. The Royal Navy had only 18,000 men left by then, the same number of Yanks that departed. The Brits had to scour the English slums for England scums, impressing them into service. Men were delivered to the English navy as an alternative to prison, making the quality of life aboard RN ships that much worse for nice quiet young men. Royal warships even intercepted British merchant ships on the high seas and kidnapped new “volunteers.”
But impressing farmers, artisans and merchant sailors hurt England in the same proportion as it helped. There arose a desperate shortage of English sailors on merchant ships, which made the war more difficult to win. Whichever way it went, the manpower shortage hurt either the military equation either directly or indirectly. Impressing civilians was sweeping the shortage under the rug. It reminds me of 1864 when the Confederate Army was desperately short of two things, men and food. So they drafted southern farmers into the army, thus increasing the starvation problem and stimulating desertions.
Another problem was wood. American pine was the best in the world. The best and most durable English ships were built with prized Maine pine. These special trees were so valuable that local Yankees were not allowed to cut them down. Royal surveyors went into the forest and marked them with special tomahawk chops, and it was a punishable offense to cut them down. The governors of New Hampshire and Maine (still a part of Massachusetts) received many angry complaints about the woodpecker policy, and it was in fact, one of the causes of the American Revolution! The point here is that when Britain got tough with the Colonies and provoked Independence, it cut off its ability to get tough. It had to settle for second-rate masts made of Stettin (in the Baltic) wood. By 1782, the British were pining for Maine pine.
It was the same with the Army. The lack of once plentiful American volunteers was one of the main reasons why the British Army had to employ Prussian mercenaries.
COMTE D'ESTANG, THE GOAT OF THE FRENCH NAVY - 1778
Every history needs a few goats, a few goalies who let in the winning goal to condemn for a hundred years. The Revolutionary War gave US history plenty of Bill Buckner's and Fred Merkle's. One naval goat was French navy commander Comte d'Estang.'
When France allied itself to America, the British knew that their position at Philadelphia was dangerous to a point bordering untenable. Clinton had some powerful land forces, but Brit Admiral Richard “Black Dick” Howe had only six ships guarding the Delaware River Bay. If 20 French warships appeared at the entrance, Clinton and Howe would both be trapped in Philly hero bread, Clinton the steak and BD Howe the cheese.
The situation was not lost on the French who immediately sent out exactly such a squadron to do just that, trap the British in Philly. But 'Tang' took his sweet time crossing the Atlantic and by the time he arrived off of Delaware Bay the prey had got away. Richie Howe and his six Brit ships of the line slipped out of Philly and made it safely into New York harbor three days before the French arrived.
Then D'Estang messed up for a second time. His force was stronger than the British fleet in New York and he could have sailed in and blew them to Brit bits. But the cautious Tang felt that he couldn't cross the sand bars to get into New York. He thought his heavy ships might get stuck in the sand, enabling the lighter British frigates to dance around and pick his ship off like sitting ducks. D'Estang held off and then sailed off, leaving New York to the British for the rest of the war.
Most military historians assert that Tang was wrong about the sand bars and that he would made it over them with no problem, but no one can prove that. For all we know, he could have been right and history might be just a judgmental martinet.
LORD SANDWICH, THE GOAT OF THE BRITISH NAVY
He was the Earl of Sandwich, and I am the Prince of Spucky.
Lord Sandwich was in charge of the Royal Navy for the entire length of the American Revolution and his record is impeccably bad by almost accounts. The Naval Minister made a royal mess of the Royal Navy. The defeat of the British may largely be Sandy’s fault. No one trusted him as far as I could throw Adele. ES apparently made one wrong decision after another, and was personally an all-around turkey Sandwich.
As usual there is one historian who claims that Earl's critics only bit into the Sandwich to absolve their own plentiful mistakes. He says Sandy wasn't a bad guy, and didn't perform as badly as history says. They toasted Sandwich only to escape blame. He was just a turkey club in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Lord Sandwich actually made it into my act one night at Giggles Comedy Club. Burger King was offering a breakfast sandwich called “Breakfast Buddy.” I commented on how foolish I felt ordering an sandwich by that name.
“A sandwich can't be my friend, ok? The only sandwich that could possibly be my friend is Lord Sandwich and he died more than 250 years ago.”
One woman laughed hysterically for quite some time. Unfortunately no one else did, so I never tried the joke again.... until now.
JACK JONES IS JUST GETTING WARMED UP
John Paul Jones was the first hero of the American Navy. He was actually named John Paul and was a native Scotsman, but he wanted to sound like an American, not some lad from Liverpool, so he added the Jones.
Jones commanded the compact SUV frigate Ranger. JPJ was a licensed privateer but Jones in Ranger was also a daring war raider. Ranger actually raided two English seaport towns, Whitehaven, and Portmeirion. Rowdy Ranger bombarded the towns, set fires, and sank harbor boats. These raids had political ramifications beyond the actual damage done. The English had to dispatch naval forces to protect the homeland. Morale in America went up with the news. English went down. The raids have to be considered some of the more successful small naval actions of all time. (Portmeirion is where in 1967 they filmed the TV series The Prisoner – I have to go there someday. Have to.)
In September of 1779 Jack Jones in his famous ship the Bonne Homme Richard won a dramatic victory over the Brit frigate Serapis. The two ships grappled hooks and it was hand-to-hand fighting for, oh, about an hour, hour and a half. One of Jones officers shouted through a bullhorn that he wanted to discus terms of surrender. Jones smashed his pistol over the skull of the American trying to surrender and picked up the bullhorn and screamed,
“I have not yet begun to fight, you scums!”
This was shortened up to the now famous battle cry of the US Navy “We have not yet begun to fight!” - the originator was John Paul Jones. He captured the Serapis. In fact, his own ship was so damaged he had to adopt the Serapis.
In a major European war a victory like that of of Jones over the Serapis would be page three news, but with little to cheer for in the Colonies on land, and next to nothing to cheer about on the sea, the victory of JPJ over the Serapis was celebrated like it was some sort of Guadalcanal game-breaker.
There is a mediocre movie about John Paul Jones, an old black and white starring Robert Stack. The title is very clever. It's called, John Paul Jones. The movie makes Jones look perfect. He’s a warrior and a saint at the same time. The movie ignores a lot of facts. For example, the movie doesn't tell you that John Paul was once charged with murder while living in the West Indies. The also don't tell you why John Paul Stack decided to come to America in the first place. After barely escaping the murder charge, the English Colonial government in Jamaica charged John Paul with being abusive and cruel to his crew. Knowing he would probably be convicted this time, John Paul decided to flee to America, renounce his nationality, and join the tiny American Navy. He also decided to change his name, figuring that the best was to keep up with the Joneses was to become one.
The story of famous Americans like JPJ explains political and social conditions better than specialized history textbook chapters called “Political and Social Conditions.”
America was the Las Vegas of the 1780 globe. You could go there and re-invent yourself, now matter what kind of a dirty dog you were or still are. If you are not welcome in your conservative home town, come to America. What happens in America stays in America. Thomas Paine was a major league loser and low-life in England. He flees to America, adopts the cause, starts writing, and ten years later he is one of the most noble men that ever lived. John Jones was the same way. He sought refuge in America, not freedom. He goes from being two days away from two years in the brig and becomes a storybook war hero who fights for freedom. Yeah, the freedom to not face legitimate charges in another country.
The impressment controversy, which led to the War of 1812, had its beginnings in the very first year that the United States declared independence. From 1776 until 1815, the Royal Navy seized American sailors and claimed they were British citizens. They forced these men to serve in the British Navy for decades, a life of semi-hell. The Americans claimed that these seizures, with rare exceptions, were completely unjustified. The British claimed the opposite. They claimed that once an ‘Englishmen always an Englishman.’ Britain refused the right of British citizens to become Americans citizens, no mater how long they had lived in the Colonies or the USA. “Impressment” appears in the American story repeatedly until settlement of the War of 1812.
American history always treats this impressment as a great offense, since so few of these seizures were justified, and US history certainly believes that he author had every right to spark up the War of 1812 over it.
The British would have been justified if they caught Jones and gave him 30 lashes ............. a day. But since he never lost a battle and got captured, he is a comic book patriot hero. John Paul Jones was the only creditable naval war hero of the American Revolution and he wasn't even an American citizen.
WYOMING MASSACRE 1778 – THE TOMAHAWK CHOP
The British and their Indian allies massacred more than 200 cracker civilians at Wyoming, New York in July of 1778. After the colonists had surrendered, 16 were tied up and a squaw named “Queen Esther” danced up and down the line of prisoners singing songs and cracking their skulls with a tomahawk on the last line of the song.
I lived in Western New York for two years and every week or so I'd visit another park with a marker that told of some unspeakably violent historical incident there. Wyoming New York in 1778 was the equivalent of Wyoming in the Rockies in 1878. This was the front-line of the Indian danger.
And who killed all these innocent civilians?
The Butler did it.
James Butler was a Loyalist who led the massacres and became a Top 10 most wanted man among Patriots.
The following summer of 79 the Colonials conducted reprisal raids all across western New York. If the Indians would not come out and fight in the open the only thing left to do was burn their villages and crops. The Iroquois were so devastated by these raids that they never made their presence felt very much from then on in NY, even after the War was settled. More on that later.
NEWPORT AND BOSTON – 1778
The Americans planned a major two-pronged assault to take Newport from the British. The Yanks would attack from land, and the French fleet under de Estaing was to attack by sea.
But bad weather blew Esty's ships around, damaging several. The unadmirable Admiral quit the scene at Newport and sailed his fleet into Boston Harbor in September to the consternation of the land based American forces near Newport under General Sullivan. Sully's Regiments were poised and ready to strike and had come a long way in preparations and march. Now the French fleet had scooted and there was no way Sully could expect to win without the bombardment and the blockade on the French end of the plan.
On September 17, 1778 the French sailors of Esty's fleet got into a pier six brawl with the working men of Boston. Some historians make up a heavy political and cultural cause for the “riot,” but there aren't any detailed accounts of what started it, so who knows? Many French sailors were badly wounded, and one or two may have died. Do I have to mention that it happened on the night of September 17?
After a conference between Estaing and the Mayor of Boston, a smart spin was put on it and fed to the newspapers who printed the lie in the name of the glorious cause. British Navy deserters, the crew of certain privateers in the harbor, had started the riot.
There was another riot a short time later in Charleston SC between French sailors and the men of the city, and some Frenchmen definitely died in that one. You can speculate on what caused that one too. I have a scenario in my own mind but its only guessing (it involves alcoholic beverages and the dumbest people doing the loudest talking.)
MONMOUTH JUNE 1778
The Battle of Monmouth Courthouse between advance units of George Washington's Steubenized Army and the baggage train of the British Army was the last major land battle in the northern theater.
Both sides suffered 350 casualties, give or take a few souls and limbs, so it was a very sharp engagement. This was the Patriot Army that had just suffered through Valley Forge, had been trained in the Prussian style by Steuben, and had been reinforced by a spike in recruits from the lovely spring weather. It was a better fighting force than the one that had gone into winter hibernation at 'The Forge' the previous winter.
General Washington showed classic leadership and courage under fire at Monmouth, just as he had shown it at Trenton. Big George rallied his retreating troops all up and down the line. “The Wash” turned them around like it was a bad Hollywood action film where only the leading man could save the day.
But this story also has a bad guy on the American side. The reason the men were retreating in the first place at Monmouth before Washington arrived was a bad guy named Charlie Lee. What a squid. CL was so inept, so determined to retreat and not do battle, that many historians think he was actually a traitor, a British sleeper double-agent who was trying to throw one battle after another for his side. At the very least he was an arrogant prissy snob who liked to dress up for battle but never wanted to attack when the bullets were real. I'm not saying all this is true. I'm just saying that's what I heard.
A digression about history's whipping boys.
I think good people can get a bum rap, and bums can pull the wool over people's eyes, so a person's legacy reputation isn’t rock fact. They aren't the facts, they are the reputed facts.
Historians read what is said about a person and then declare that this person was this sort of fabulous person or that kind of lizard. Yet if a hundred historians could go back in time and know Charles Lee, for example, in person, I'm certain that six or seven would stand tall in his defense and say that history has judged him unfairly. But history locks in on pigeon-holing people into personality categories, like movies do. We know who not to like in our movies, and we know in our history books. I know people that everybody likes and I don't like them. I know people that most people dislike and I like them and get along great with them. Who are we to call any historical figure a twit, based on three sources who spread that image forever, while three great people who loved that person never tossed in their two cents.
Back to the story.
When Washington caught up with the retreating General Lee the two of them had a famous screaming argument saddle-to-saddle. Washington finally told him off and ordered him off the battlefield. Some historians think they know the exact text of what they yelled at each other. This is the standard account;
Lee: “You shall have my resignation as soon as my hand can write it!”
Washington: “Why wait? I have an extra quill in my pouch right here!”
Then Lee rode off the battlefield in anger.
Other historians say that no one really knows the exact words; the accounts of what exactly was said between the two men vary quite a bit. But Wash and Lee definitely exchanged red-in-the-face angry words, and Lee got fired.
Huffy Lee requested a courts-martial to clear his name. Dumb move. The courts found him guilty and sentenced Charles to suspension from the military service without pay for two years.
NUCLEAR ROCKETS DESTROY BRISTOL – MAY 1778
In May of 1778 Jefferson acquired several ICMB rockets and convinced General Knox to launch them. The Titans destroyed Bristol England in six minutes. But King George and Lord North did not surrender.
KASKASKIA FIREWORKS 7 - 4 – 1778
George Rogers Clark is one of the great unsung heroes of American history. His initiative and leadership in capturing several key forts and towns in the far west (Illinois) changed the map of the United States for all time.
Rogers has a more famous brother, he of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. That was later, in a time of peace, under President Jefferson. This was now, in a time of war.
GR Clark approached Virginia Governor Jefferson seeking funds for a military expedition to the far west.
The British held a chain of fort towns from Detroit on down to Kaskaskia in southern Illinois. They had Indian Allies who were easily persuaded to raid and scalp American settlers regularly. Rogers met with Jefferson, Pat Henry and James Mason and convinced them that the money troops and supplies were well invested in defending the area. He failed to tell them that he intended to conduct offensive operations of the frontier. If they had known they might have said no, but had they known the final outcome they of couse would have said yes. The Rogers expedition failed to take Detroit but it succeeded in taking several key small forts and towns in the area.
The bad guy in our story is the British commander at Fort Detroit, a scum by the name of Claude J. Hamilton. He incited the Indians to commit terrorist attacks. Hamilton paid good pounds for scalps, sometimes overpaying to stimulate business. Hamilton earned himself the nick-name, “Triple H” which stood for 'Hair Hunter Hamilton.'
Rogers Clark set out from Kentucky with only 200 men and these poor slobs fought their way through forest and battled heavy rains and floods the whole time.
Clark won three major victories in Illinois country without gunplay. The locals were mostly French and they were willing to take a new vow of allegiance to the United States. Clark was like Fremont in the Mexican War. He exploited the war situation to explore claim new territory outside the combat zone.
SAVANNAH NEW YEAR JANUARY 1 1779
The year ended on an upbeat note for the British when they captured the Southern port city of Savannah, Georgian. The city was a New Year's gift for King George for 79 (Sherman in 1864 presented Savannah as a Christmas present to President Lincoln.)
BRITISH BURN PORTSMOUTH/NORFOLK - MAY 1779
In 1779 most of Virginia's best troops were on the road fighting the Revolution in New York and South Carolina. Virginia was also contributing mightily with food and supplies to the American forces due north and south of the Commonwealth.
Tom Jefferson was the governor of Virginia and he had little material to work with for state defense. The British recognized the opportunity and dispatched a powerful raiding force to do some damage to the Rebel cause with a fire raid.
On May 10, 1779 the British landed in force at Portsmouth and Norfolk and they wreaked June Havoc. 130 American ships were trapped in the harbor and put to the torch. The towns of Norfolk and Portsmouth were more than half ruined by the torch. The raid of 5-79 was a complete success. The British seized tons of ammo and food. The damage inflicted was estimated at two million British pounds, and this was back when one pound could buy a mansion in London.
There was one indirect long term consolation for the Patriot cause from the raid. This success of this raid would inspire the British to try it again in 1780 under Benedict Arnold. This raid riled Washington enough to send his forces South at long last to try and capture the rat Arnold. This started a sequence of events that led to the great Americo-Franco victory at Yorktown.
SPAIN JOINS THE FRACAS 1779
In June of 1779 Spain declared war on England. This was a tremendous asset to the American cause, even though Spain wasn't doing it to help the USA. Like France, Spain was a Catholic monarchy. So much for bonding with the young republic ideologically. Spain just wanted to jump in and help itself to English colonial possessions all over the world. In the case of Gibraltar, Spain wanted to take a former Spanish possession back.
Spain specifically declared that its entry into the war was not in order to achieve American Independence, and reserved the right to leave the war at any time. France, on the other hand, committed itself to helping the Americans gain independence as a war aim.
In the peace settlement of 1783, Spain did everything in its power to thwart American goals. Some ally.
The entry of Spain in 1779 further turned the conflict into a world war and further transformed the American continental conflict into a side-show. The real war was now between England and her combined enemies all over the world, and much more about who controls the West Indies, India, Africa, and the Mediterranean than American Independence. Now the British would be willing to concede American Independence if it helped to win prizes in exchange on other fronts. Americans see their victory over England as a win over a great power trying its damnedest to keep the Colonies in royal control. But England was no longer doing everything in its power to win the war. If it could win in the war against Independence, fine. But if it lost, it would find a way to win elsewhere and accept the loss of the colonies as an acceptable price.
Spain helped when it attacked and conquered West Florida from the British. They didn't hand it over to the Americans. But at least they took it from the British.
One reason Spain joined up with the jackal pack trying to take down England was Gibraltar. This irredentist English mountain fortress guarded the gates of the Mediterranean like Neptune. Spain and France combined to try and take that thorn in their side. The siege of Gibraltar lasted more than three years, and for the entire second half of the American Revolutionary War.
SULLIVAN EXPEDITION TO THE FINGER LAKES – SUMMER 79
As the British efforts shifted to the southern theatre, Washington had a few more options with his forces in the north. It wasn't a 'use it or lose it' situation, but why have troops and not give them something to do while Greene and Cornwallis were running around the Carolinas?
So Washington and his brains trust decided on a punitive expedition to the wild wild western regions where the year before, the Indians, Tories and British had combines forces to conquer and massacre the Yankee settlers at Cherry Valley in Pennsylvania and Wyoming Valley in New York (or is it the other way around?) -
Many names were suggested to Washington to lead the expeditions, but he waved his hand away and said, “Give me Sully.” General James Sullivan would teach the Injuns, Tories and redcoats a lesson. This would be the mother of all reprisals.
Sullivan led out to the “west” and soon had more than 4,000 troops of scattered battalion origin. 4,000 troops was quite a lot for the western theater in 1779 and bad guy Butler, the Tory commander in upstate west NY became aware through a thousand spies of this Patriot build-up going on in Pennsylvania. It was like Ike gathering divisions for the cross-channel invasion. The Yanks were coming back to the Finger Lakes with a vengeance. The Redcoat side knew it was coming, but what could they do? Butler and his Indians and Tories added up to only 1,100, and the last two showed a propensity for breaking out the magic act and disappearing when the going got tough. The Americans were more committed.
The campaign was supposed to commence in early June. On the Fourth of July Sully still sat still. He was having a pen-pal fight with Washington on what was the fair balance between Sullivan's need for supplies and Washington's need to get the offensive moving while it was still baseball season (campaign season – same months.) Sullivan was angry that the locals around him in Pennsylvania had not contributed to his army in troops or supplies and had selfishly held on to its munitions and food.
At one point some towns in Pennsylvania petitioned Sully to spare some troops to defend them from Indian attacks. James wrote back a curt denial saying,
“I'm sure your state militia is plentifully available to help you, since they refuse to help me.”
Sullivan finally got the war wagons on the move at the end of July, and in spite of the delayed start, his mission was a strategic success.
There was only one spot where the enemy stood and fought back like pros. That was at Lake Archer, just south of Tioga New York. The fight was a draw with some 30 total KIA's, but it was the Reds who quit the field and fell back towards Niagara. Other than that there was no genuine resistance to Sully’s Raiders.
The worst was yet to come for the Butler’s army. A second American column under Colonel Roger Clinton met up with Sully's 4,000 at Tioga New York. Now this was a monster of a force ready to go up into the five finger lakes and give it a five finger slap.
Here is one of the chilling moments in human history. Sully writes back hastily to Washington that he hears that the Indians and the Tories want to come to some sort of negotiated settlement and end the fighting.
Washington writes back and says (this is not an exact quote but this is absolutely accurate)
“The last thing I want is a negotiated settlement. Great, now that they're about to lose, they want a diplomatic solution.
Look, Sully. We're old friends. Read my lips. Destroy the region. We have to completely eliminate the Indian food supply. We want to drive them out of the region with such righteous cruelty that not only will they never again threaten us, they will never return. Use terror. If you have to kill a lot of people, I will back you up 100%. That is they price they must pay for what happened last year at Cherry Valley and Wyoming. You now have my word in writing that the policy comes directly from me. If they approach you to negotiate it is a treacherous scheme to buy time and regroup for another massacre at our expense.”
Sullivan read the message loud and clear. Get moving and don't take too many prisoners.
Wow. That's tough stuff. Washington must have just had a fight with Martha when he penned that one off.
Sully's Rangers wreaked havoc for a month and a half on the Indian people and Indian lands. It was very ugly. Jesus was on vacation. General Sherman would have said, “Hey! This is a bit much!”
Bands of wasters would branch off and find new lands to destroy that weren't even on a map. The destroyed all the way from what is today the WENY Elmira-Corning area all the way up to the head of the Genesee River. It was a hot dry summer and it was easy to burn the crops. Tee-pees went up in flame with minimal effort from the guy with the Zippo. Washington's orders were very explicit - go in there and take the beauty out of the beautiful Finger Lakes. (I can say that because I've seen them all and worked on a hill overlooking Lake Keuka.)
One scholar wonders why Sullivan's Expedition is not more famous than it is. Maybe because it makes the USA look murderous. Sully and Clinton in the summer of 1779 slayed a lot of Indians to 1) help win the war 2) avenge Cherry Valley and to 3) secure the beautiful Finger Lakes for long-term all white settlement. And the greatest hero of them all, George Washington literally used the word 'terror' to describe what he wanted Jim Sullivan to inflict on the Indians. No one has really estimated the number of Indians massacred, but it's definitely higher than 70. The number that starved to death over the winter of 1779-1780 was as high as the number killed directly in the campaign season of 1779.
The five Iroquois tribes of the Finger Lakes were sent packing forever but left their names all over the land. I try to remember the five Iroquois tribes of New York with the acronym SCOOM. That is, the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, and Mohawk tribes. The Tioga's were also eliminated from the region at the end of Sullivan's saber, although Tiogas aren't Iroquois.
The band of Sullivan brothers returned east in the fall of 1779 as victors. The New York-PA Indian frontier would no longer trouble the Patriots in their goryous cause. Cherry Valley was avenged by Sully's March to the Genesee.
The news was very good for national morale.
BENEDICT ARNOLD BETRAYS THE USA 1779
On October 2, 1779 at Tarrytown, the Rebels executed a British Major, the head of intelligence for Howe's redcoat army. The man was named Andre, and he was conspiring with the all-time traitor, Benedict Arnold. Major Andre was caught with the interior engineering plans for West Point in his pocket. Arnold had sold them to Andre and had sold out his country.
Benny Arnold, the decorated war hero, got himself appointed to the command of the fortress at West Point New York. Once there, he plotted with a go-between from General Clinton to turn over all the defensive plans for the fort to the enemy. Arnold added to the betrayal by giving orders to his own troops that made the fort more vulnerable instead of more defense-worthy. The men were complaining of Arnold as a foolish and inept commander. They didn't know that his order to remove all locks was based on treachery, not stupidity.
Some blame his girl friend Peggy Shippen Arnold. Peg talked him into it, and took him down a peg. A few historians think this, but most of them think Peg was innocent.
The secret agent for the Brits was Major Andre, and what a vulture he was. A British warship, the Vulture, dropped Andre upriver and waited while he did his secret business with the traitors of the fort. But the Patriots set up a couple of cannon and began shelling the Vulture back to the outskirts of Manhattan. Now Major Andre had a long overland journey with all these incriminating papers on his person. The all-Americans arrested Andre and found the stuff.
Meanwhile, Arnold escaped before Washington could catch him. Wash wanted badly to string him up, even though they were friends once. Washington was a big tough competitive man and I believe that he wanted ten minutes alone in a room with Arnold.
Washington offered the General Clinton a one-on-one prisoner exchange, Andre for Arnold. That's some offer. General Clinton could save the life of a British friend, but condemn to death, an enemy low-life. Yet he chose to decline the offer. How could the British be trusted if they betrayed their informants? No one would inform anymore and they would lose a mountain of intelligence to save one man. No, the scoundrel Arnold must live. And Andre must die. After a trial that found him guilty of espionage in time of war, John Andre was hanged on October 2. Andre's last words were,
“I'll haunt you from the dead, you scums!”
Arnold didn't really do it for the money, although that part helped. Arnold betrayed his country because of the most popular sin: pride. Arnold felt he had been slighted in many ways for all the heroic service he had performed for the Revolution. Benny was easily one of the most decorated combat heroes of the American Revolution. Arnold took on as much danger as an American infantry man in the final offensive against Germany in 1945. Arnold was wounded severely in the fight at Saratoga.
Yet there were lesser men who were getting promoted over him because they knew or bribed the right people. At the same time he was being unfairly slighted in job promotion, state courts tried and convicted Benedict for minor offenses, assessing heavy fines. Add a few other incidents and you get Benedict Arnold, a great man, taking his great ego, that can be channelled into positive contributions, and surrendering it to evil. And hell hath no fury like a great ego scorned.
The sad part is that Arnold had every right to feel slighted. He was indeed getting smacked around a little bit by life. Washington had asked Congress in 1777 to appoint Benedict to lieutenant general and instead Congress appointed foreign adventurers to posts above him. It's like some guy at the office who gets the shaft, gets blamed for stuff he didn't do, runs into some bad luck that wasn't his fault, and then get laid off. You talk passionately to everyone about what a bad break this poor guy is getting. Then he comes to work and shoots the receptionist, and the boss. Now you hate this guy's guts. He goes from right to wrong. If Arnold had done himself a favor and died at Saratoga, he would have been the second greatest war hero of the American Revolution.
CIVIL WAR IN THE SOUTH
The Tories asserted themselves in the South to the point where this was something of a Civil War in the Carolinas and Georgia. A lot of personal scores were settled as people used the chaotic military-political situation as an excuse for looting, pillaging, stealing and killing. Marion’s soldiers also skirmished with escaped slaves who fought for the British, or at least helped supply them. Patriot units had several scraps with the Cherokee Indians too. So it was Brit, Tory, Indy, and Slave vs. the all-Americans.
MADE MARION - SWAMP FOX GUERILLA OF THE REVOLUTION
One of the heroes for the Americans was Frances Marion, the “Swamp Fox of the Revolution.” I loved reading about this guy when I was a boy. The British saw him as something of a terrorist.
Marion used hit and run tactics to harass and deplete the English enemy.
The Swamp Fox worked the South. The War itself was fought mostly in the South for the last couple of years. Marion fought in some of the major Southern battles in the old fashioned straight-up manner, but his guerilla warfare gained his famous name.
His adversary was Banastre Tarleton. The British assigned Tarleton to go and find Marion. Marion was the Osama bin Laden of the South. Tarleton supposedly gave Marion the nickname of Swamp Fox after Marion barely escaped capture by dashing through the swamp trails he knew better than the British. Marion had a nickname for Tarleton, ‘The Swamp Skunk,’ but it didn’t catch on like Swamp Fox.
They never did trap the fox. The governor of North Carolina made FM a brigadier general. Walt Disney made a 1960’s TV series about him called The Swamp Fox, starring Robert Stack as Frances Marion, and Lawrence Harvey as Banastre Tarleton. I remember seeing these as a kid and being disappointed. I had read the young adult book, The Swamp Fox of the Revolution, and thought the book was ten times better.
DUTCH TREAT 1780
The Dutch declared war on Great Britain in 1780, adding to the coalition in the American corner. Like Spain, the Dutch were not in the war to help the Americans, but by being in the war they did anyway. The knowledge of the growing forces against England made Lord North and King George a little more open-minded about perhaps conceding independence to the Americans. This would free up British resources to whip their arch enemies with.
There was a great deal of home opposition in London to the American war. Many members of Parliament did their Willie Fullbright impressions for the chamber, declaring that they hoped England lost the war and openly voiced support for the Yank Rebels.
If some MP's could go this far, you can imagine how divisive the whole matter must have been among the common people. Just like in the 1960's in the US, the opposition to the war had to be strong in the streets before elected legislators would risk their office by declaring the same sentiments. The people led the legislators, not the other way around. With Liberal MP's cheering for the Americans, Lord North and King G felt like LBJ and Mel Laird.
Violent disorders at home made matters that much worse for George/North, even if these disorders weren't directly evoked by the American struggle.
In 1780 came the Gordon Riots. It was a religious race-riot, the Catholics being the undesirable race.
Over the previous 80 years, the Parliament had enacted many laws designed to protect Catholics from persecution by the majority of Protestants. But these laws had not been enforced. Persecution of idolators was mitigated but not eliminated. When the Crown, to its credit, began to actually protect the Catholics the Protestants rebelled violently. It had all come full circle. The Catholics had been for a thousand years so monolithic, intolerant, and tyrannical, and ritualistic that a fantastic new religion grew up in “protest.” Indeed the very name of the Protestants is directed against the Catholics - a protest against popery. But after years in power in England the Protestants had become just as intolerant and tyrannical as the Catholics they had so gloriously taken down and supplanted.
There were two major riots in 1780 in London against the Catholic menace. The first time was in June when 100,000 bigots surrounded Parliament and threatened members as they walked in to go to work. A few aristocrat politicians got their pieze nezes knocked off and their bowlers flattened into their skulls with a word of warning about what comes next.
I forget what the other one was.
LINCOLN SURRENDERS CHARLESTON SC – MAY 12 1780
After a long siege of several weeks, the British finally captured Charleston South Carolina from the rebels.
The goat of the story is General Poindexter Q. Lincoln. The verdict of history is that a better man would have done a much better job defending the city. I don't engage in that sort of piling on. I think the goats of history need their lawyer and seldom get one because nobody likes a loser, and nobody writes a loser.
Lincoln would have been wise to take all his fighting forces into the interior to live and fight another day like the elusive Washington did in the Jerseys.
But the political Reb officials of Charleston and of South Carolina would have none of it. They more or less told Lincoln to hold Charleston or he could go look for work at Burger King. Lincoln's blunder was not in failing to understand that if he tried to hold Charleston, the British could cut him off, lay down a siege, and then bombard the town into a helpless surrender. He understood that. Lincoln's mistake was giving in to political pressure and making their blunder his own.
The historians let Linc have it for losing Charleston, but if he had done the wise thing and evacuated, the same historians might be condemning him today for the famous cowardly abandonment of Charleston. Lincoln was either going to look yellow, or stupid, and he chose stupid, which was probably wise because people forgive stupid. Maybe not right away.
The British cut off the Carolinians in Charleston. Tthe Rebs had high hopes that the two powerful forts guarding the Harbor would keep the wolves at bay. But Forts Moultree and Sullivan proved no match for the British men-o-war. The Royals sailed right past these two futile forts and did more damage to their walls than the fort cannon did to the side of the British ships.
With Charleston surrounded, Lincoln rushed word to General Washington who was camped outside of New York. He asked Washington to bring the Army South to raise the siege of Charleston. Washington could thus win the war with one bold stroke and gain a lot of glory too, suggested Lincoln.
Washington did not respond to this request. It wasn't Washington's fault that the Southern Patriots had failed to learn the fighting tactics of Washington and had holed themselves up in Charleston. Now they wanted him to bail them out after they hadn't emulated him properly. Now Washington was supposed to march the length of the continent to win an uncertain victory in the deep South at risk of major defeat.
Sitting in New York was a sitting victory to Washington, because all Washington was trying to do was exist. He wasn't even trying to drive the British out of New York. He was just camped on their flank daring them to come out and destroy him which they could not. The stalemate was to the American advantage, and Washington wasn't about to abandon a strategically helpful stalemate in New York for a distant battle which he may or may not win.
The British dug classic siege trenches closer and closer to Charleston until they could lob shells into the center of town around the clock with impunity. The Royal Navy had Charleston blocked on the water side. It was time to surrender.
General Lincoln agreed to terms and his force of 5,000 men kow-towed to the redcoats. The victor for the British was general Clinton. It was probably the worst defeat of the entire Revolution for the Americans.
There had been plenty of time for Lincoln and his five g's to escape to fight another day in the backlands and hills of the South. But American counsel decided to try and hold on to Charleston at all costs and they lost it at all costs.
The British not only captured 5,000 men, it also took prisoner three famous men who had signed the Declaration of Independence. “Where's your independence now?” Taunted one British officer.
The British officer who accepted General Lincoln's surrender told him, “You guy's put up a hell of a fight. But you had way too many traitors crossing over every night and telling us everything. You never had a chance.”
It was true. There were enough traitors in Charleston to fill a soccer stadium, and they went out of their way to help the British take Charleston. Especially active in betraying the glorious cause were black slaves. They'd steal away during the night and give supplies and info to the Redcoats. I think that says a lot about how the Southern slaves felt about the American Revolution.
The figure of 5,000 captured is misleading. So few American soldiers reported for surrender at first that the British knew something was up and threatened to unleash drunken Hessians on the town to do their worst if more humbled troops didn't report for capitulation.
The city then overreacted and every able-bodied man in Charleston showed up to surrender. There were teen-aged boys, elderly men and many hundreds who had not taken a side in the war at all. Even Loyalists were reporting for surrender to save the place from the Cherry Valley treatment. On top of that a lot of American sailors had fallen back into the city at the very end of the campaign and their numbers swelled the total. It might be a better estimate that 2,500 Patriots surrendered at Charleston, still a major defeat.
The British could now use Charleston as a base from which to conquer all of South Carolina, and, hopefully beyond that into North Carolina. But General Clinton was so confident that the South was an easy mark that he took 5,000 British troops back north to New York. Clinton left Cornwallis in charge of South Force. “Corny” was a even more overconfident and haughty man than Clinton. The back-to back wins at Savannah (the failed siege) and the capture of Charleston in May 1780 were the apex of the campaign. Everything went south for the British from here. As the months went by, Corny lamented often about those 5,000 crack British troops watching plays in New York while he had his hands in a Yankee bees nest in the interior of the Carolinas
The loss of Charleston was bad news for the home boys, but it wasn't decisive nor devastating. The situation didn't really change that much. The British could hold firm several of the larger port cities, but had no hope of subduing the countryside, and not enough naval power to hold every important seaport, just some of them.
The Americans had blundered badly, but it didn't cost them the war in the South, nor the war in general. For what could the British do with the ports they held? They could expensively supply and maintain them. But they had lost the war of hearts and minds. Basically they had taken the crisis of Boston in 1775, and extended it to the whole east coast. We're mad at these rebels so we'll seize their ports and make them cry uncle. The movement was more elastic and smokey than that. They were chasing a phantom victory when they occupied New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Boston and Charleston in various stages of the war.
Foreign occupation only increased reaction and resistance, as was later learned in Nam. What they won on the coast cost them the most. The entire countryside was aflame with the knowledge of the occupation of these cities. British-held ports were suns heating up American anger all around their locations. The British might just as well have failed on purpose to take Charleston if they were really hoping for a positive outcome for the war. The could have thrown the last few games to win a high draft pick for next year. Holding Charleston at gunpoint turned Charleston into Boston, and that wasn't a good thing for the King.
A delightful incident during the siege of Charleston came when the British snuck up on a Patriot harbor ship in the dead of night, hi-jacked it, and sailed it out of the harbor. It was quite a prize. Trouble was, the hi-jackers hadn't really gone below decks to see what was in the cargo hold. The ship was filled with sick people afflicted with deadly infectious smallpox. The British had kidnapped a floating leper colony. It reminds me of true story of a magician who got his bag stolen. The only thing in it? A live cobra snake.
STEEPLE CHASE
There was an explosive incident long after the Battle of Charleston ended, which damaged the British more than the battle itself.
British grunts were piling up all of the surrendered Colonial weapons and gunpowder in a central warehouse. A British officer sensed danger and yelled at the men to,
“Watch out where you're tossing in those muskets! Its awfully dry in here, and if a flintlock scrapes the wrong way it could set off a shot and ignite the powder.”
A man shouted back,
“Don't be so paranoid!”
With that remark he tossed a dry musket the wrong way into a pile of powder and the flintlock went off. It triggered one of the great ka-booms of American history, a blast heard and felt for miles away. A city block up Charleston went up in a Hollywood special effects explosion. 51 British soldiers were killed, more than in most of the individual battles of the war. Arms and legs were strewn all over the city. The British tried to blame the blast on Yankee sabotage, but the charge was false. It was stupid British troops ignoring the warnings of intelligent British officers that caused it.
There are a lot of funny cartoons where someone gets hurled into the side of a building or cliff after an explosion and as the body falls off it leaves a mark of a body behind it. Very funny. This actually happened at Charleston. A British soldier was hurled high and wide 500 feet on the fly and crashed into the high side of a church steeple. After the corpse fell, the outline of his body could be seen for weeks. The British finally had to climb up clean up the mess because it was bad for morale. That is a true story.
SWAMP SOBER FOX OF THE REVOLUTION
Another story out of Charleston is about the Swamp Fox, whom we vaguely met earlier. Marion would have been trapped in Charleston and put in chains but for a party. Marion went to a party that got out of control. The host locked all the doors and yelled,
“Anyone who doesn’t get out of here on a stretcher is a yellow woman!”
Meaning you have to drink till you drop or you’re stigmatized. Marion was a total abstainer. He walked around the second floor and found a window. But he fell badly when escaping and had to go to a hospital outside of Charleston to treat a couple of fractures. He wasn’t in town when Tarleton cut it off. That was how Marion stayed in play and became so famous.
I feel for him. Being the only sober one in a noisy room of temporarily euphoric drinkers is a saddening experience I have known too often.
WITH SPANISH FRIENDS LIKE THESE, WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?
Throughout the second half of 1780 the Spanish were trying to cut a separate deal with the British behind Sam’s back, a separate peace to Spain's advantage. Spanish agents in London conducted secret negotiations with British diplomats over terms.
The treaty of alliance with Spain explicitly did not include Spanish recognition of the USA, but it also promised to not make a separate peace with Great Britian.
The plan was for Spain to get West Florida, no recognition of the USA, and the British would be otherwise allowed to permanently stay where they held land on the American Continent. In other words Britian would have permanent Colonies of empire in New York, and on a strip of Southern Coast from Savannah to Charleston. Spain wanted the French fleet back home so their two navies could plan an invasion of Britian.
John Jay was at the time on a two-year mission to Spain to seek concessions in the US west. Spain had no intention of honoring any proposals Jay cared to make. But Jay could be of service to Spain unwittingly.
Spain could have just sent him home with a rejection letter. But he was treated cordially, and kept hanging on. Spain wanted British agents in Madrid to see Spanish diplomats dining with Jay the American. They used Jay as a prop to make it seem like the alliance between Spain and the USA was strong when it was weak, thus increasing their own bargaining position artificially with England.
Britian suspected that the Spanish were up to no good and for that selfish reason rejected the slimy proposals for a Spanish separate peace. (I am not morally singling out the Spanish for diplomatic double dealing. International relations in the era in general can best be described as one historian has as, “A Backstabbing Festival.”)
Jays mission to Madrid lasted from January 26, 1780 to May 17, 1782. He accomplished as much as I did when I sent my video to a Toronto comedy booker in 1983.
FITZY'S NICKEL, AND TARLETON'S QUARTER
Secure in control of the South coast from Savannah to Charleston, the British sent out Banastre Tarleton and his “Loyalist Legion” to raid and maybe even take the interior. BT chased down a unit of 380 USA militia and then caught it napping at Waxhaw Creek.
This guy is one of the demons of American history and I will give you the straight version ripping him to shreds. However there are a couple of historians that argue that most of the stories of the atrocities committed by “Bastardo Banastre” and his “El Destructos,” two names given to him and to his battalions by the Spanish, are very exaggerated.
“Fitzy’s Nickel” was a phrase in our sixth grade class at the Gate of Heaven School in South Boston. The two Fitzgerald twins were bigger than everyone else and made every boy pay a nickel a week “for protection.” I was the second smallest and first skinniest kid in the class and I was the only one that wouldn’t pay the nickel. One day in the schoolyard the Fitzies spotted me with some change in my hand from a tiny carton of milk I had purchased with a quarter. They cornered me next to the front steps of the school and in the course of four minutes or so, managed to get my hand open and took the nickel. I was allowed to keep the rest of the change. But it was a token payment and they let everyone know I had paid like everyone else. But they never came after me for more payments. It wasn’t worth the effort to hunt me down and force a nickel out of my hand.
I know that this is irrelevant and self-indulgent, but I hear the term Tarleton’s Quarter and it makes me think of Fitzy’s Nickel. And now you know your author a little better.
WASHINGTON, WE ARE HERE! - HELLO - WE ARE HERE
When the British evacuated Newport RI in order to invade the South, they left Tennistown open for the French to arrive and set up station there the next year. And on July 11 1780 the French arrived in Newport to save the day.
5,000 troops of the First French Division provided new added power to the Rebel cause.
The original plan back in France was to send both the First and Second Divisions to America, but there weren't enough transports to carry both divisions “over here.” So the Second Division stayed in Brest waiting for a later expedition to fit them out. The Royal Navy soon located the Second Division and established a blockade. The Second Division was still in Brest when the Battle of Yorktown virtually ended the war in October 1781.
The French expected a glorious welcome of formal parades and celebration. Newport welcomed them with moderation. There was plenty of individual admiration and welcome for the brightly uniformed manly bunch, but nothing formal. The townspeople of Newport went about their business as usual for the most part. The moral of the story is probably that from a distance of time or geography, the Revolution was a “glorious cause,” but up close on the ground in real time there are endless variables that take a lot of the glory out of it. Most people, even those that supported the Revolution, wished it wasn't happening and most of all wanted to go about the regular life they had lived before.
The American Army had no immediate military plans for the French troops, which left the French officers dumbfounded. They had landed 5,000 professional fighting troops into the combat theatre and told Washington,
“Do what you want with us, we are trained and ready to rumble.”
Washington wrote back,
“We are so pleased an honored that you have arrived to lift our spirits in this noble cause. Our gratitude shall be eternal.
Yours, truly, Washington”
The French Commander Rochambeau read the dispatches from GW with disbelief. Here they were ready to take on anything the British had to offer and Washington had no orders for them to march anywhere or do anything.
In September 1780 Washington rode to Hartford to meet with Rochambeau and discuss how best to use the French First Division. But nothing was really decided at Hartford. At least one historian thinks that Washington was afraid to show the French the bad condition of his forces, lest they pack up and head back to Brest in disgust and derision.
So the French stayed in Newport for a whole year. They built the Tennis Hall of Fame, played polo with the Von Bulows, and dug the Cliffwalk. Other than that they wasted their time and resources.
A large French force was sent to Lebanon Connecticut. They got along great with the locals. This was fortunate. If there had been brawls in Lebanon or Newport between drunks (as had happened in Boston earlier) the entire alliance might have been strained to the breaking point.
CAMDENTOWN - AUGUST 16, 1780
The British won what seemed at the time to be a decisive victory in the Southern theater on August 16, 1780. Lord Cornwallis and his crack troops (37% were on crack) defeated a large American force at a spot ten miles north of Camden, South Carolina.
The loser for the Yanks was Horatio Gates. Just as well, since he was a useless fat old dork. It was for the best that he lost. Congress had appointed Gates only as an act of showcase non-support for General Washington. Wsshington did not think highly of Gates, and had opposed the appointment. The appointment of Gates was testimony to the low ebb of glory for Washington personally at this moment in the war.
After what went down at Camdentown, Congress did an about-face and told Washington to make his choice, which he readily and instantly did. GW was a big fan of Nathaniel King Greene, a soldier and a leader that Washington admired. Nat King Greene took over the southern Rebel army.
The British victory at Camden was plenty big, and might compare at face value to the Patriot win in the North at Saratoga in 1777. But there was a difference. The win in the south at Camden did not have political impact, while Saratoga did. Militarily, the Lobster-backs won a big battle at Camden, but nothing changed politically either in the Americas or in Europe. It was the same world, the same stalemated war, the same naval stand-off between England and France after Camden that it was before Camden. Saratoga had changed everything, Camden nothing.
KING'S MOUNTAIN - OCTOBER 1780
It wasn't a good day for the King at King's Mountain. The first major victory for the Americans in the Southern theater came on October 7, 1780. KM-80 was a hard-fought affair between Patriots and Tories. The Southern theater in the second half of the war was truly as much a Civil War as a Revolutionary one. King's Mountain was an ugly civil war battle, Americans fighting Americans. It would be 81 years before such a brother against brother conflict would again stain the land.
There was only one non-American present at the battle, a British officer of medium rank.
It’s easy for me to imagine the hatreds that sent rebels against redcoats and vice-verse, but I have trouble getting a feel for the passions that drove neighbors to kill each other without mercy in inter-American Revolutionary War violence.
It’s kind of creepy, and I think most students of American history also try not to think about it too much. The subject needs more scholars on it. Its understandably understudied. Or it might be better to say that the best existing scholarship on the subject has not been popularized. No one made a four part mini-series for NBC about the fighting Tories in the American Revolution.
A large percentage of the Tories fighting in the South were actually from the North. The British had recruited and trained Tory regiments from the the unemployed along the docks of New York and Philadelphia, rugged scum who liked the security and didn't love the Patriot cause. A lot of the intra-mural bloodshed in the South came from clashes between Patriot Southerners and Northern Tories on road games, which makes it a little easier to understand.
1781
EUGENIO CLAIMS MICHIGAN FOR SPAIN JANUARY 17 1781
Things in the west weren't kaleidoscopic enough with British, Indians, Tories, currier du bois, and Patriot settlers all slugging it out, now the Spanish got into the mix. America’s olive-oil-rich allies were going to stake out a post-war claim for the American northwest by seizing some key posts at the last hour of the war. They were like the Russians in Manchuria in August of 1945, taking advantage of what ostensibly was a noble alliance and using it for last-minute looting.
A Spanish commander with the very cool name of Eugenio Pourre led a band of amigos up the Mississippi and beyond to the gates of British held Fort St. Joseph, in what is now the state of Michigan. The commander of the fort, Sir Miles Mello IV, surrendered St Jo to The Genie. Spain now could say at the bargaining table in Paris that it was in possession of a huge stretch of land in the Great Lakes region. Wherever a fort was the only European civilization for a hundred miles, whoever owned it had a empire claim of a hundred miles. Even if the fort were only held by three elderly Spanish winos, as long as they had European skin and a Spanish flag, the land was claimed.
There is at least one historian that insists that everything everyone knows about the Eugenio mission to take Fort St Joseph is wrong, and that most of these men were actually bandits and Frenchmen and the mission had no such strategic motive. But the conventional wisdom I will go with on this one, since the Spaniards did mention the taking of Fort St Joseph at the Paris Peace talks of 1783.
I find the Fort St Joseph story disturbing to read about because it reminds me of the 10 years I spent under the Sisters of St Joseph.
MUTINY OVER THE UNPAID BOUNTY JANUARY 1781
There were two mutinies in the Continental Army in 1781. The first one was settled peacefully. The second one was only settled when two of the miscreants were executed by the rifles of twelve of their co-conspirators.
The issue, of course, was pay. The soldiers were entitled to bounties and salary, and they got neither. The men hadn't been paid in years, were living in rags, were marching without shoes, were hungry, and one more thing; They hadn't been paid in years.
The first mutiny came on New Year's Day 1781 at Morristown New Jersey. The Pennsylvania Line got a little drunk and then refused to follow orders and decided they were going home. Washington heard about it and dispatched Colonel Shane Reed to settle down and speak to the rebellious rebels. One of the leaders screamed at him
“Our fight ain't with you Shane! It's with the Congress who won't pay us our bounties as promised.”
Reed screamed back that
“I represent the Congress just as much as I represent Washington!”
Reed then ripped open his military coat and bared his shirt daring the “mutinous dogs” to “shoot me now or go back to your units. The choice is yours.”
But the rowdies didn't buy the two-options only format. They just walked away from the camp and dared Reed to shoot them as they walked away. He did not.
By the ninth of January the men had been promised their bounties and some decent clothing. The mutiny was over. But Washington was not going to make giving concessions to dogs a habit. At the end of January there was another mutiny in New Jersey. Washington treated that one differently. He had the ringleaders put to courts martial and two were executed. That put an end to the mutiny fad of 1781.
BENEDICT ARNOLD RAIDS VIRGINIA - JANUARY 1781
Traitor Arnold was now a star player for the British. They sent him to Virginia to do a major raid on his brothers and sisters. The May 1779 raid on Portsmouth had been such a success that the Brits decided to try it again, with a man who knew the countryside well enough to take the point with the torch. Benedict had with him two especially mean British commanders, Jack Simcoe and Tommy Dundas.
The raid was dispatched from Clinton's NYC force on December 20 1780. But a storm busted up the force at sea and only 60% of it made it to Norfolk/Portsmouth. In spite of the stormy set-back, the raid worked almost as well as the one back in 1779. The neo-Vandals landed on January 2 1781. Arnold and Simcoe marched and burned all the way up to Richmond and then back to Portsmouth.
When the story reached Washington he decided to march some of his New York troops south to capture Arnold and hopefully hang him.
DAVE COWPENS JANUARY 17, 1781
Cowpens, South Carolina was the site of another important victory for the Americans.
Captain Daniel Morgan was the winner over the legendary British bad boy Banastre Tarleton, the butcher of Buford.
There is a sideshow story at “The Pens” that is good enough for a movie.
At one point, with the fighting hot and heavy, there in the middle of it were two famous men on horseback, fighting it out with swords and pistols in hand-to-hand combat.
One was Willie Washington, the first cousin to General George. William Washington was a brigadier general. The other man in the fight was the Brit second most hated by the patriots, Banastre Tarleton, the man accused of massacring 200 surrendered Americans at Waxhaw Junction (“Buford's Massacre.”)
So there they stood in the gunpowder smoke, and all the sounds of battle, the big strong Willie Wash and “Bastardo Banastre.”
Banastre slashed the leg of Washington's horse and the animal began to collapse. Washington became a sitting duck as he sank with his horse. Banastre raised his sword again, ready to ram Washington through. A teen-aged American black soldier saw the scene while galloping by and shot Banastre with his pistol. Banastre went down and Willie Washington was saved in the nick of time.
WEATHERSFIELD - MAY 1781
The war was grinding on for some time now in stalemate. A strategy for victory was needed.
Washington wanted the French to help him to take New York City. The French wanted to fight the British much further south, closer to the West Indies. That's why the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse decided to take on the British in the Chesapeake, instead of up north: Proximity to its West Indian possessions and desired possessions.
Washington met with French Admiral Rochambeau at Wethersfield Connecticut on May 21 1781 to discuss grand strategy. Rochambeau listened attentively to Washington's military plans for the soon to come siege of New York. The Frenchman nodded in agreement and said, “I shall be delighted to order de Grasse to New York Harbor at once.” But in fact he had already told de Grasse to pay no attention to Washington's plans for New York. De Grasse was of the same mind and didn't have to be persuaded. The French would ignore the invasion of New York City.
The fact that Washington so openly was advocating a combined Franco-American assault against New York City managed to work heavily in the American's favor, even if they didn't exact the exact attack they wanted. For when Cornwallis and Clinton gained repeated intelligence indicating that there was an operation in the works to take back New York, they both agreed to slice off 5,000 troops from Cornwallis in Virginia and sent them up to re-enforce Clinton at New York. The lie that Rochambeau told Washington served both men well. It satisfied Washington for the moment, and is ended up misleading the British generals into a fatal error in weakening Cornwallis by 5,000 men at the very time he was about to be trapped and needed those extra troops.
THE BATTLE OF THE CAPES - 9.5.81
A British fleet tried to relieve Yorktown, but a bigger and better French fleet of Ships of the Line (big battleships of 70 or more cannon) went out out from the Chesapeake to block.
On September 5, 1781 the two fleets shelled each other in a day long encounter. Not a lot of actual damage was done overall. The fight ended inconclusively from a tactical standpoint. But the British fleet did not succor Cornwallis at Yorktown and in fact turned and went back to Newport with its Lion's tail between its legs. So the toothless Battle of the Virginia Capes (it is known by several titles) was not only a major victory for France, it was a major victory for America and for Independence, almost as important as Saratoga for all it meant in the big picture.
YORKTOWN - OCTOBER 1781
Once de Grasse chased the British Navy away, the position of Cornball Cornwallis (he wrote plays) at Yorktown was untenable. Corny had a big army but he was isolated and had no hope for re-supply. Washington and Lafayette combined to lay siege to the British position. Slowly but surely the “Allied” lines advanced in trench pattern with cannon readying. Once the Franco-Americans began lobbing meatballs into the British lines it was all but over. Cornwallis had to sit still and take a few days of pounding to save face but he knew he could not fight back and had to surrender. Why sit and die if you can't answer fire with fire?
On October 19, 1781 Cornwallis surrendered his 9,287 troops and 456 officers to Washington and Lafayette. The British did not formally surrender anything more than that one army at Yorktown, but it meant the end. Everyone kind of knew it. Yet it would be two year before the end of the Revolutionary War was ironed out and formalized.
GRISLY GRISWOLD SEPTEMBER 1781
The British burned New London and massacred 80 unarmed prisoners on September 6, 1781. One of the the British brigadier generals responsible for this double atrocity was Benedict Arnold. Arnold was “A Traitor's Traitor.”
The raid on New London was partly to relieve the siege of Yorktown.
CHARLESTON OFFENSIVE REJECTED
Following Yorktown, Washington begged De Grasse to help him in a combined operation to re-capture Charleston South Carolina from the Brits. If that had worked, Britian would have been in a very bad position on the continent, reduced to residence in New York City while the rest of the land was free of all bloody-backs. This would have made a big difference in the later peace settlement, a difference in America's favor. But with a solid hold on Charleston, Britian could look at a map and know they had some good overall strategic strength.
But de Grasse firmly denied the request. The French Navy was going to head to the West Indies and take some prizes there. The American alliance ended at the water's edge of French self interest.
De Grasse left a mere two French frigates (second-raters) to patrol the American coast while he went prize hunting in the Caribbean.
American history books recall the great help of the French in winning the war. What they really did was help the USA win one big victory at Yorktown, and that was all. They get credit for waging an entire war when there is no truth to that picture. France provided more money than military power.
If England had decided after Yorktown to resume the war and try to win it, the French would not be there to help. America had no Navy and an Army that was dwindling down in the post Yorktown peace euphoria. But in England there was no support for resuming the offense in America, not with their old European enemies to deal with. The British liberals never liked the American war to begin with, now the Great French Satan next door jumped in. Now they liked it even less. British liberals won the Revolutionary war for the Continentals just as much as the French did.
BATTLE OF THE SAINTES - APRIL 9-12 1782
Washington got some bad news early in 1782. The French fleet under Admiral de Grasse was supposed to sweep the British Navy from the Caribbean. France would take the West Indies almost down to the tiniest Gilligan's Island, and then the United States would have a friendly trading partner in the rich warm islands. That one didn’t work out.
Britian was determined to punish the rebels by cutting off American trade with the British West Indies until at least forever. If de Grasse could teach the Royal Navy a lesson in the West Indies, like he had already done at the Chesapeake, the USA would be on the road to economic recovery. Britian would have to sue for peace at a price bordering on surrender.
But the Royal Navy under Admiral Rodney kicked de Grasse all over the seas near Jamaica. In a four day battle four French battlewagons were captured and one blew up like a tactical nuke. It was the end of any realistic chance to invade Jamaica and take it from the British.
The British took many prizes. Admiral de Grasse, the hero of Yorktown, a name toasted in bars from Boston to Charleston, was toast himself. The British took him to an English prison (where he was later exchanged for a spy named Rudolph Abel, but that is a long story.)
Like Gibraltar, the defeat of the French at the Santes produced an ironic reverse effect on peace negotiations. As long as England was losing, it could not logically seek peace. They say you should never quit while you're on a roll. True, but they fail to mention that it works in both directions. It’s just as hard to walk away from a losing roll as it is from a winning one. Britian had enough confidence to know it should and could wait for a couple of major victories before it sat down to make peace terms. Gibraltar and Santes fit the bill.
In any case, Britain had long ago conceded that America would win its Independence. The war was really in the final analysis a battle for 'hearts and minds,' of the Americans, and few in England were deluded about that part of it anymore. That horse left the barn when Burgoyne surrendered in 77, and Tory support had not materialized later in the Southern campaign either. With no Loyalist support to speak of anywhere in the colonies, it was pointless to try to win a distant continent militarily that which would have been impossible to hang on to anyway.
The HMS Arrogant failed to score a single hit, nor take a single casualty. But when it got back to Bristol the crew boasted that it had fought the best out of all ships in the Saintes.
GIBRALTAR – THE GRAND ASSAULT - 9/18/1782
There wasn't much happening militarily on the American continent by the middle of 1782, but things were not that way in the Mediterranean. The siege of Gibraltar had been going on for more than three years as Spain and France wanted to clear the Mediterranean of the Saxon pest controlling the gates. The American allies thought this their proper reward for running interference for the Rebs in America.
The climactic battle came on September 18, 1782. Spain and France struck in full force for one final breakthrough at Gibraltar. And they lost. Britain held and still holds Gibraltar, and it has become the picture logo of a corrupt insurance giant.
The British victory at Gibraltar was a bigger and more bloody battle than any fight in the American Revolution, including Bunker Hill. And its consequences were equally rich.
Ironically, the British victory gave Britian the room it needed to have in order to surrender the American colonies to Independence!
Ever since France entered the war in 1779, Britian had been willing to concede the Colonies in exchange for gains in other areas of world-wide competition. But Britain could not and would not make a move on this diplomatic front until they had some bargaining power to work with. They hadn't won a major battle anywhere, and like a gambler who won't leave the table until his hot streak is over, France and Spain were not very interested in negotiated peace as long as they kept rolling front-line sevens and elevens. But the snake eyes at Gibraltar changed the playing board. Now Britian could and did offer to negotiated a grand settlement of the war on all fronts. The British victory at the Grand Assault paved the way for peace.
MYSORE WARS
The American Revolution triggered a world war that reached all the way to India. The British and the French warred in India and the British were getting the best of it when it was time for the peace negotiations to begin in Paris. The English victory in the 'Mysore War” was the third leg of the Gibraltar-Santes-India triad and put the British in anything but the position of a supplicant when it was time to talk things over.
NEWBURGH CONSPIRACY 1783
Washington's bad eyesight saved the American Revolution in 1783.
The officers of the old Continental army stationed in Newburgh NY were in an understandably foul mood because they hadn't been paid in a while. I've made angry calls to bookers for being a month late on a pay check from Goof-ball’s Comedy Cave. These poor guys had risked their lives in combat, given up their life at home (with all that implies) and had won a revolution for millions of others who had risked nothing. And they hadn't been paid in years.
The angry unpaid officers went through a lot of meetings and more or less decided they were going to march on New York City and stage a military revolt. If they had to destroy the gains of the revolution to make sure they got paid, that's what they would do then. If they had to set up a temporary military dictatorship to make sure they got paid, that's what they would do then.
Washington heard all the awful rumors and a grand meeting of all the disgruntled officers took place. Washington gave a long talk about how we all had to hang in there and be patient and that it was wrong to overreact and throw away all we had gained over mere money. The men just stared angrily at him no matter what he said. Washington was beaten and broken. He knew there was no placating these angry men and inside he knew it was hard to blame them for how they felt. After all, Washington was a rich man and most of his officers were not. They didn't budge an inch and told him that if he would not lead them in their demands, they would march on New York City without him.
Finally Washington gave up and said he had one last prepared statement to read to them. He took the paper out of his pocket and struggled to read it. He couldn't get past two sentences before he stopped and dug into his coat for his glasses. Washington was embarrassed. The proud man had never worn his reading glassed in front of anyone before. No one else knew he used them except his wife and Hamilton. GW humbly started to explain to them that he had given so many years to the cause of liberty and independence that he had grown old somewhere along the way. Now his eyesight was failing him and he couldn't read a simple of paper anymore. He apologized for his poor performance in trying to read his statement.
At this point the content of the paper no longer mattered. What mattered was that Washington was breaking their hearts in revealing his physical weakness. They had always looked up to him as a nearly perfect hero, and they were not ready for this one. How could they defy him now? As he fumbled trying to read the statement through his old guy glasses, the men melted. A few began to shed tears, and then a few more. The whole angry officer corps broke down and wept. They felt their shame for defying this great guy. In exposing his frail eyes, Washington had opened theirs. The Newburgh Conspiracy melted away in a sea of tears and love for George Washington.
FEARS OF A FALSE PEACE
After Yorktown, Washington feared that the euphoria of victory would lead the nation into thinking the danger had passed. The Wash feared that England might bide its time while his army melted away thinking they were no longer needed. Then Great Britian would strike back. It was a logical fear, and only a person with good political and military instincts would have thought of it. No one in the house was looking out for burglars except daddy and everyone else was calling him “up tight.”
Then, late in 82 the rumors began to fly that a real peace settlement was on the verge of happening, which it was - but Washington properly suspected that it was ruse. The rumors might completely disarm the rebels in every way and then the British would strike hard and take several key cities on the coast before anyone knew what had happened. Again, a logical fear. Just because it turned out to be wrong doesn't mean it was paranoia.
If there was a CNN in 1782 Washington could have kept track of all the negotiations going on in Europe and would have known he could relax. But there wasn't so he couldn't. And he never would have suffered Anderson Cooper.
PAYING FOR THE WAR
Many historians wonder why it took so long for America to win the war. The British were inept and had no chance at hearts and minds from day one. The Americans were on home turf, had a French ally, and possessed the better morale to fight.
Apart from disunity, the Americas were held back by financial problems. How to pay for the war with no money down and no currency was a big problem. The Americans began printing money like there was no tomorrow, especially since there was no tomorrow if they lost. It didn’t matter that they had no assets to back up the paper. By 1782 more than $300,000,000 had been printed. Of course, no one wanted to take these bills, but they were printed. Meanwhile state banks printed their own money, almost a quarter of a million dollars worth. These bills looked good on paper but try to get a merchant to take one on a debt. By the end of the war these “Continentals” were worth less than the promise of a development deal from a Hollywood agent!
The USA also begged the states for money, and got a little that way, sometimes resorting to semi-force (“requisitioning.”) America also borrowed from Holland and France and just ran up a lot of debt at home too.
There was one other way.
I was reading a history book at a night club and a guy came by and asked me what I was reading. I showed him my book on the American Revolution. Then he asked me,
“Do you want to know something interesting?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know how they paid for that war Mike, do you know?”
My look said I wanted to hear the answer.
“Lotteries. Can you imagine that? Lotteries. Isn’t that amazing? Lotteries.”
Then he walked away. I was annoyed that he was playing one-upmanship while pretending to be having an intellectual chat. What he was really saying was, “You are reading a book about something but I know more than you off the top of my head on that subject.” A lot of people do that with me. They see me reading something and then take a condescending instructional tone with me on that subject and walk away.
The Colonials did use lotteries to raise money, but from my subsequent careful research, I say that the amount of money raised by lotteries could not have been more than 6 or 7% of the cost of the war. So there was some very interesting truth to what he said, but the way he sold it was very poor. The Revs did not “pay for the war” through lotteries. That’s like me telling a new comedian that the one key to comedy is knowing how to handle hecklers. That’s about 4% of it. The other 96% of how to do comedy is another whole book.
If it had been that simple the Conties would have printed 8 million scratch tickets in 1776 and the war would have been over and won in two years.
In spite of the dire financial situation of the people running and fighting the war, most of America was not in an economic depression in the RW years. The back regions untouched by the war were untouched by poverty too. In the war zones, American greed was the American creed. A lot of people made a lot of profits selling food and clothing and other things to the British. To hell with patriotism, the British are coming and they have hard currency that is good in all stores. The population at large had full bellies.
The Yankees usually had enough guns and powder but rarely enough food and clothing. Many men could not go into battle because thy could not cover up their private parts. It is a shame of American history that the only people who went hungry during the War of Independence were the troops doing the fighting. Yellow ribbons aren’t nutritious.
NEGOTIATIONS
The negotiations at Paris and London in 1782 was a back-stabbing festival (not as bad as at a stand-up comedy festival, but it was bad.) Everyone was trying to sell out their ally behind their back. The only one you could trust was your enemy.
Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, was ready to sell out the United States to make deals with Spain and Britian. The United States was willing to cut a better deal with England even if that meant selling out its savior, France. Spain was going to sell out France and the United States to get deals with Britain in Gibraltar and the American west. Britian would cut secret deals with France to back-stab the USA, or would gladly cut secret deals with anyone to back-stab France. And in the middle of it all was Ben Franklin stabbing everyone in the back except his beloved England. Franklin was especially slippery with his fellow negotiators in Paris, John Jay and John Adams.
John Jay and John Adams both distrusted Franklin. They thought he was tool of the French court and would betray America to cut a deal with his French pal, Vergennes.
But they were both wrong. Franklin was tool of the English court and would betray America to cut a deal with his pals in London, all the while pretending for public consumption, to be a Francophile.
Franklin lost his love for America the day in 1765 when the Patriots tried to burn down his house. A man of great ego, he never forgot that sting. Was it a coincidence that he moved to London from 1765 to 1775? What kind of true Patriot would move from Philly to London from 1765 to 1775 anyway? Then he goes to live in Paris and jumps into the final peace settlement negotiations to the horror of many true American Patriots who never trusted him farther than my 80 year old father can throw Louis Anderson.
THE ISSUES
American Independence was the trigger that started this world war so that was a big one. All but one American diplomat held firm to the condition that Independence comes first or else there is nowhere to go from there. Only Benjamin Franklin insisted that negotiations could begin without British recognition of American independence!
Western boundaries: Spain, England, the Indians, and the Canadians all wanted a piece of the pie in the American west. The USA of course wanted to concede nothing to these vultures and keep all of it for itself to grow on. The British would eventually promise to evacuate the forts out west, and then would use American non-compliance with other things to justify breaking that promise.
The British wanted a buffer zone of Indian nations in the west to keep the American hemmed in on the coast, and not because they cared for the nationalist aspirations of the Native Americans.
Compensation for Loyalists: This one almost broke the negotiations. During the war Patriots had robbed and beat up Tories by the tens of thousands and England did not think that was proper, both legally and morally. The British felt that the United States owed every last Tory due compensation for the sinfully seized farms and homes. These people had committed no crime. The new nation should settle that old debt. The British could not abandon these brave squares who had stood up to the mob and lost. If American Loyalists were robbed with impunity, British loyalists the world over would think twice in the future before defending the mother country in a political hot zone.
Fishing rights: This is the boring one. Disputes between Britain and America over the rights to fish off the banks of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; this was a bone of contention at Paris. John Adams was “Mr. Cod.” He knew that New England would be hurt badly if he couldn't win the right for Yanks to catch, dry and cure fish along the shores of east Canada. He worked hard on winning for the Americans the fishing rights.
The pages of American history are bogged down with this remarkably uninteresting controversy for the next 130 years. Every time I get to another chapter about fishing rights disputes, I feel like going out for a beer, and I don't even like beer.
NORTH HEADS SOUTH
The King had to finally allow Lord North to resign in February of 1782. North had wanted to resign for some time, and Parliament was pushing him from behind to resign. The Lord was walking the plank, but the King was making him stand on the edge for about a year, year and a half. It wasn't so much that the King didn't understand that North had to go, it was more that George couldn't face the alternative, the formation of a Whig cabinet. The Whigs were the liberals, and they were a thorn in any King's side. They were pledged, like 1968 US hippies, to end the foreign American war as soon as they got into power.
Two top 'tip-top' Whigs coming in to replace North were Bob Rockingham and Sidney Shelburne.
Charles James Fox came into the London cabinet. The King hated “That arrogant Whig Jamie Foxx” with all his fruit and fiber. The idea of bringing that “uncouth unkempt extravagant gambling womanizing Foxx” into power was abhorrent, but what could George do?
The Whigs took over in April and as advertised, proceeded at once to open negotiations with the Americans for a peace settlement that included independence.
King George hated the idea of treating with the two people on this planet he disliked even more than Jamie Foxx; the French Foreign Minister Vergennes, and Ben Franklin.
Franklin was demanding that the British give up Canada to the United States as a concession for coming to terms. I have to wonder if it wasn't a disinformation move to protect the secret friendship between Britian and Franklin. Franklin was living in Paris but his heart was in London. If he seemed to be making these outrageously aggressive demands on England to give up Canada, then no one would suspect that he was in with the enemy. Franklin had to know that he was making a demand that could never be won.
Even if Britian had at the time been losing the world war on all fronts, India, The West Indies, the American Continent, and Canada; and even if the Canadian people had wanted to join the United States, the British still wouldn't have given Canada to the victorious rebels. The reality of the situation was the opposite on every count, and here was Franklin the wise seriously insisting in Paris that Great Britian hand over Canada to the USA.
Jay and Adams distrusted Vergennes and the French and had more bad feelings towards them than they ever had towards the enemy England. They thought Franklin was in deep with France.
At every meeting of the important people, Franklin condemned England in rough language even for the time. he called them 'evil wicked enemies of America' and things like that, while Jay and Adams were trying to keep the tone more above board. Franklin spoke well of France while Adams and Jay were mad at France. Adams and Jay were ready to ask Franklin to tone down his attitude towards England. Yet it was Franklin that had made England his home from 1765 to 1775, and had a thousand English friends. It doesn't make sense at face value except in the sense that the historians must make it make sense so they write it up to suit pre-conceived conclusions, not as socratic scholars searching for the truth whatever that may end up being.
What better way to throw off suspicion of a double-cross between Franklin, England and the USA, than to make it seem like Franklin was England's worst enemy? England had no better friend in the world than Doctor Franklin. If you have an affair with your sister-in-law, make sure you stage a brutal argument with her at every family holiday. No one will ever dream that you are dating her on the side.
That was Franklin's game. Play every card to make sure England gets the best of it, but at the meetings, give England holy hell and make demands that will never really get off the ground to make your sincerity above doubt.
It wouldn't be so frustrating if all the historians didn't buy into it. Our history books are loaded with apologist convoluted explanations of Franklin's endless oddly equivocal moves. The real question to me is, why are these convoluted explanations necessary in the first place? If big shot Ben was acting like a square Patriot, there would be no call for the 1,000 pages of explanations of why his seeming betrayal of the American interest was actually a shrewd game designed to actually help.
I've seen 15 historical (not historic) movies in which some great actor plays Franklin. Where's the bucket? They make him more perfect than Jesus Christ. He is infinitely wise, kind, good, brave, and absolutely lovable in every way. If his bad relations with his son comes up, it is the son who is condemned. Franklin says something genius witty about the problem with Jr. Of course it's never mentioned that his closest friend in England was a notorious spy. There’s a new 800 page biography about Franklin every month that loves him. Too bad. I’m entitled to my opinion.
The Declaration of Independence would have happened a year sooner if Franklin hadn't importuned to the First Continental Congress to tone down its title in 75.
MORE ON THE LOYALISTS
The Americans felt that to agree to the British demands for compensation for Loyalists would be a tacit admission that the entire cause of the Revolution was morally wrong. Adams and Jay believed that this was the equivalent of saying, “we stole our Independence wrongly but since we won we via lucky military victory, here's some compensation for our criminal methods.” The Brits told Adams and Jay to calm, down; that no one in England was saying that.
But England made it clear they couldn't let this one go. The Loyalist compensation matter was resolved when the British made concessions in the American West in exchange for some American co-operation. But there was a key catch.
The Americans pleaded with some justification, that they had no real national government that could pay these Loyalist financial claims, even if they agreed to do so. The Americans were still a collection of 13 sovereign states, so as representatives of a weak central government, these mere diplomatic men could not agree to something that could not be enforced. They told the Brits that they would have to take it up after the war with the individual states. The Yanks could put in a good word for the Loyalists and “recommend strongly” to the states to pay up on the farms and homes taken from Loyalists. But they warned the British that they were making no promises.
The British had to agree, for they had little choice. At least this made them look good with the Loyalists as doing their best. The British at least get some recognition for the justice of the Loyalist/Tory cause.
OLD NEWGATE PRISON FOR TORIES - ABU GHRAIB 1776 - 1782
The Tories were thrown into Patriot prisons just for being rich Tories. Their lands were confiscated and distributed to Patriots. For what crime? For having an opinion. Honest men and women, plus innocent children were victims of patriot radicals, and this crime is largely forgotten in the euphoria of USA chauvinism.
In the town of East Granby Connecticutt was a copper mine called Simkow Mines Inc. It was founded before the war and was the largest copper mine in the northeast. But Siumkoe went bankrupt just before the Revolution. Connecticut officials converted it into a prison. The inmates had to live deep underground in makeshift bunkers carved out of the earth.
Between 1773 and 1776 the Simkoe Mines Prison held legitimate scums, people who had committed very serious crimes, like stealing jokes, or murder. But after the war began, the mine jail became a political prison. Tories were sent there for the crime of disagreeing with the patriots who loved freedom. A mob of Patriots seizes the house of a rich Tory who had committed no crime but to support the King and say that hopes the revolution fails. Where are they going to put the guy while he is kicking and screaming that he has been arrested unjustly and deprived of his rights?
200 feet underground in a northwest Connecticutt mine shaft should do the trick. The Patriots gave the Tories a taste of Patrick Henry-Sam Adams fascism. When the USA was exposed as guilty for torturing political prisoners at Abu Graihb prison by “waterboarding,” there was mass outrage. What the Patriots did to the Tories at Simkoe was 100 times worse. It was a war crime.
The Patriots rejoiced in the cruel conditions at Simkoe. They re-named it Old Newgate Prison, after the famous Newgate Prison in London (where my great great great grandfather was executed in 1866.) They wanted it feared among Tories.
Several websites give a history of Newgate Prison, but none give a body count. It seems a subject that is dodged in the name of a sanitized tourist trap brochure. You would think no one ever died in that evil jail. But John C. Miller says that many Tories died there. He doesn’t give a number. But it’s safe to say some did. Conditions were infamously unsanitary and there were cave-ins. Prisoners had to live like Danny in the Great Escape. A life in underground tunnel cells and being in fear all the time.
I’ll probably never write a novel but if I did, it would be about Tories that get wronged unjustly by one Patriot knave after another and in the end the poor Tory gets no satisfaction. The neighbor gets away with 20 felony crimes against a neighbor he’s had a feud with, and hides behind the Betsy Ross flag and gets away with it.
OSWALD THE GOOD
The chief English negotiator or peace was Richard Harvey Oswald.
Oswald had much to do with the success of the peace negotiations. Richie was a great guy. He must be in heaven because his life's work was very positive. Oswald was reasonable, liberal, mature, conciliatory, compromising, and nice. Oswald was a man of history who isn't half as famous as a hundred generals who sent men to die in foolish assaults against impregnable positions. Oswald is about as cool a guy as the Russian military commander who in 1983 spotted an incoming American ICBM on his radar and decided to ignore his order to retaliate. He knew it had to be a technical glitch mistake and it was.
Lee Harvey Oswald pretty much ruined the Oswald name, but people like Roy Oswald and Richard Harvey Oswald make up for it a bit.
THE WILD WEST - NORTHWEST ORDINANCE 1787
There were actually two Northwest Ordinances, one passed in 1784 and a new improved brand passed in 1787. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 finally settled the matter on how the new American west was to be settled.
Independence meant that the Proclamation of 1763 was null and void. The emigrants were no longer pinned in by treat to the Appalachian mountains. The Indians didn't know it, but they were beginning right about this time to get pushed back out of the way of the Euros, like it or not. The pushing and shoving wouldn't end until 1892 at Wounded Knee.
The big old states still had legal claims to all the land on their latitudes (or is it their longitudes?) going to the Pacific Ocean. That was some claim. Virginia held the largest claim. It was the owner of all lands in the central region all the way tot he pacific ocean, at least in its own provincial mind. The national government didn't want to set any policy about settling the new lands until the old states gave up these long-lined claims to the new lands.
The eastern aristocracy didn’t love the idea of easy access western expansion because it would drain their cheap work force and drive seaboard property values down.
The Ordinance provided that lands of Northwest Territory would be divided into townships of identical size, and then subdivided again into a uniform division within each township. The towns would be composed of 36 square miles, each mapped precisely into square mile blocks. Four blocks were to be set aside for government buildings, one block set aside for a school and one block for a comedy club. (The square mile for a comedy club provision was eventually dropped after complaints that the comedians at the first club in Lima Ohio did gay jokes, which had been explicitly prohibited by the Continental Congress.)
Many of these Ohio lands were already occupied by squatter and many of these were evicted by federal officials, and many others managed to stay.
A very positive feature of the Ordinance was the provisions for new states to be mapped out form these new lands once there were enough people there. It wasn’t so much a great thing that new states were coming in, what was really great was that these new states would be admitted with the exact same status in the Federation that the old states had. A lot of people simply presumed that the USA would add new colonial territories within the new nation, not new equal states. The same colonial condescension that had provoked the Revolutionary War would be used against the new states within the new nation. But no, the new states would be of the same status as Virginia and Massachusetts and a lot of folks in Virginia and Massachusetts weren’t thrilled about it.
The Northwest Ordinance took a stand on slavery. It forbade it in all the new territories north of the Ohio River that were under the control of the Ordinance. That was a hug step for progressivism in the USA and in the history of the world. That progressivism would be set back in 1820 and in 1856 when the Missouri Compromise and the Dred Scott Decision wiped a lot of the gains of 1787 off the racist map.
THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF VERMONT
Because New York State refused to drop its claim to much of the lands of Vermont, the Green Mountain state was out of the loop as the new nation coagulated. So Vermont was almost an independent nation from 1776 until 1791 when New York dropped its claim. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys actually sent out feelers to Britian about joining the British Commonwealth. Vermont had drafted a state Constitution in 1777 but the New York situation negated it.
The idea of an independent Vermont in 1791 is ironic since it is now so uniquely hippie left-wing (it has the only openly socialist senator in DC, Bernie Sanders) that a lot of righties have sarcastically called it the “People’s Republic of Vermont.” That joke almost became a reality in the transitional period of American history.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION 1784-1785
The nation’s first economic depression lasted from 1784 through 1785, then there was some recovery. The first economic depression was caused by a flood of British goods entering the country after all the years of American boycott. There was already a currency shortage when these British good hit the seaboard like a tsunami, and the drain on hard US currency to GB aggravated the situation to the point where it triggered a mini-depression. I exaggerate in the title. It wasn’t really a “great” depression, but that might help you remember that there was one at all in these years.
THE SUPREME STATES 1784-1788
The United States was a true federalism of 13 sovereign independent states for about five years. Then the Constitution was adopted and ratified.
The states then ceased to become states in the real sense of the term. Yet the fake version of the word “state” is the one we recognize first today. In other countries a subsection of a country or a state is properly called a province, but we pretend our provinces are “states” just because they were for three years of so back in the 1770's.
If Massachusetts were really a state it could defy the federal government any time it wished. It’s a province masquerading as a state. Its only sovereignty is in areas where the federal government is more than happy to have nothing to do with those burdens of administrative responsibility.
In these years of the Confederation of America, states were states. Something had to change if the new nation were to prosper. There was no national income and the economy was tanking fast.
THE ANNAPOLIS CONVENTION – SEPTEMBER 1786
Delegates from five states in the Chesapeake region met at Annapolis in September of 1786 to negotiate their little trade and tariff disputes. States had been charging each other a tax on interstate commerce at various rates and it was agreed that they had to at least come to uniform trade rules for Chesapeake trade. They might even consider dropping all tariffs between states.
The Annapolis Convention of 86 led to the creation of the US Constitution.
Many of these delegates to the AC were “nationalists,” meaning people who thought the Confederation government was not strong enough and kow-towed too much to states rights. Those who wanted to keep things the way they were were known at this time as “federalists.” Later on, it would be those who wanted to change things to make the national government rights the last word, who would become known as Federalist. The federalists of 1785 were probably more true to the word than the Federalists of 1795. The states rights people were the ones who wanted true a federation of equals, while the “anti-Federalists” of 1795 were just as later on misnamed. They wanted true federalism.
The Annapolis nationalists saw this local issues convention as a chance to prepare the groundwork for desperately needed serious change. They settled up some of the smaller local matters and then called for a full national convention for the next spring to be held in Philadelphia to amend and possibly completely re-write the Articles of the Confederation. Publicly, they did not reveal the true intent of the Philadelphia convention, otherwise they knew that the states rights jerks (we'll hear more from them in 1860) would obstruct the convention and refuse to send delegates. So they sort of lied to the country about how they were not planning to change the country. The Philadelphia convention was just going to tie up some loose ends about tariffs and maybe re-write some parts of the Articles of the Confederation.
Some prominent “federalists” at Annapolis protested that they were being deceived, and the delegates of three states would not sign the document calling for the 1787 convention. Patrick Henry looked at Franklin and said, “I smell a rat and the wind is coming from your direction.” Franklin returned a wry smile. He knew that he knew that he knew and there was nothing Pat Henry could do about it.
Many of the most ardent Revolutionary War leaders of 1776 became the most vociferous opponents of the U.S. Constitution ten years after, including Alvin Lee, Patrick Henry and Williams Morris.
UNANIMOUS
One part of the Articles of the Confederation stipulated that no changes in the document could be made without the unanimous consent of all the states. Yet the Annapolis Convention of 1786 passed a document into law calling for the Philadelphia Convention. They treated the Articles like a minor article, and did so again in 1787. The Articles of the Confederation were challenged, re-written and discarded in one totally illegal fell swoop at the two conventions of 86 and 87.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION - 1787
The smart guys met at Philly and worked it out in the blistering heat of Convention Hall (named that only after they did that there.)
The most divisive issues were proportional representation versus one-state-one-vote, slavery, judicial review, and the power of the Presidency.
The small population states wanted each state to have an equal vote in the new Congress. Very selfish. The large population states wanted the Congressional votes to be proportionate to population. Very selfish.
The latter was called the “Virginia Plan.” Virginia would get, say, 30 votes on important matters and Delaware would get one.
One vote per state came from “Joisey.” The New Jersey Plan wold give each state one vote, and that's that.
The Connecticut Compromise settled it. The upper house of the Congress would satisfy New Jersey, and the lower house would satisfy Virginia. The US Senate became a body of equal states, each with two votes. The Congress is represented proportionately. For example, California has 878 Congresspersons, and Rhode Island has none.
PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM – THE US CONSTITUTION
Every general history of the United States comes to a dull screeching halt when the subject of the Constitution comes up, as that document is described and analyzed for 38 pages. I wish they'd tell the story of it without stopping to break it all down. Its important to analyze our Constitution but it should be for a separate classroom, separate from the story of our nation which is better when it keeps moving. I’ll tackle this one briefly and paraphrasingly.
Madison wrote the whole thing, then some of the others gave it a run-through and changed it up. But The C was Madison's baby.
I'd say that the 5th Amendment is a pretty good part of it. A lot of conservatives have advocated an amendment to abolish the right (5) to not have to testify against yourself.
I'll paraphrase it briefly... Tomorrow.
JEFFERSON, THE FATHER OF THE CONSTITUTION
Jefferson was in Paris when the Constitution was born, and did not write a word of it. Yet a famous comedian does a bit in which he refers to “Thomas Jefferson the Father of our Constitution,” and does a very funny joke about the affair he had with a female slave (Jefferson, not the comedian.)
I've opened for him a few times (the comedian, not Jefferson) and I don't know how to tell him he is mistaken. In any case the crowd doesn't know or care. They laugh. They nod along, as though Jefferson wrote the Constitution.
THE FEDERALIST PAPERS
The nation needed a publicity campaign to convince people, great and small, that the Constitution was not only a good idea, it was a necessity. They got it in a series of lively essays (by the standards of 1787) by some big time Founding Fathers. These essays appeared in serial format in many of the major newspapers. They were later called collectively “The Federalist Papers.”
You can buy them as a single book today. Madison was the primary author, but others pitched in. I have tried several times, without success, to read them. The FP's did their job well, since the Constitution was ratified after much initial opposition.
RHODE ISLAND GIVES IN
In 1788 Rhode Island finally gave in and ratified the Constitution. Little Rhody began to realize that if it held out any longer, the United States would probably form without it. That would have left Rhode Island independent, if you can imagine that. I have trouble enough accepting Rhode Island as a state, let alone as a country.
SLAVERY
The Founding racist Fathers had a tough time rationalizing the triumph of freedom while tolerating slavery. It is unfair to suggest that the founding fathers encouraged it, but it’s certain that they were guilty of tolerating it while forming the new Constitution as well as when they drafted and ratified the Articles of the Confederation.
The Southern states didn’t need slavery in 1788 as badly as they had in 1688, but the system was too entrenched to be easily discarded. If the slaves were freed there would have been too much economic disruption and chaos in an already economically chaotic era. Besides that, the Southern while lived in terror of the sudden emancipation of 700,000 slaves. There were a lot of fears that went into that scenario, all wrapped up in an overcoat of simple racism.
The reason the South loved slavery less in 1788 than in 1688 was the fall of tobacco as a sure-fire money-maker. Owning slaves might produce a profitable year in tobacco, but then again, it might not. Owning slaves was a risky gamble in 1788. That all changed when cotton and rice became king and slavery became a good and profitable thing all over again. That is getting ahead of the story but then again, it isn’t because the main point is that few people realize that even though the South was the section that stuck up for slavery and insisted on its tolerance in the US Constitution, the fact of the matter was that in the big picture, the South was slowly maturing into realizing that slavery was evil and, if not for the later invention of the cotton gin, the South probably would have gradually went along with mass and complete emancipation, albeit probably with compensation.
The Northern leaders understood this too and that was one of the reasons many of the “liberal” Northern leaders allowed for the allowance of slavery in the Constitution. They felt that slavery was naturally on its way out in the South, so if they had to turn a blind eye to this evil in order to get the South to join the USA, then they could at least do it with a semi-clear conscience, knowing that the South was trending towards gradual emancipation. The hard-left history crowd today condemns all the Founding Fathers for their vile support or tolerance of slavery. My apologist explanation is not a stretch. It is based on trying to see the story from the back of history looking forward to the unknown, not from the seat of today looking back. The Northern libs didn’t know in 1788 that Whitney was going to invent the cotton gin and ruin everything.
The North was abolishing slavery state by state as the new Constitution was grown and ratified. Massachusetts abolished it by a court order in 1781. New Jersey still had slaves as late as 1804 and was the last whip-master in the North to wise up.
“THEY TOLD ME I WAS THREE FIFTHS OF A MAN”
I believe this is close to the exact words of Rev Farrakhan at the Million Man March as he recounted the injustices of American history against his race. A lot of lefties white and black cite this as a stinging arrow of criticism against the 56 racist men who wrote the Constitution.
Brother Louis is talking about the provision in the Constitution that a slave was counted in the national census as three fifths of a person. The Zinn-Air America-George Carlin school of history agrees with Farrakhan on this. Shame shame shame USA!
But the reason this 3/5 business came about was because the North was trying to punish the South for slavery and spark a new movement towards its abolition. The 3/5 was the result of liberal agitation against slavery, not the result of arrogant callous national racist support of slavery, which is how bitter left wingers of all races speak of 3/5. They are taking it out of context big time.
The Constitution had to determine the population in order to distribute districts to the House of Representatives, which was the branch that respected population size, unlike the Senate. But the North did not think that the South should be allowed to count their slaves in their Congressional representation census. The South felt that their slaves should be fully represented and they argued about this in the hot halls and rooms of Philly in 1787.
So in the end, the compromise that the slaves would only count for three fifths of a person was a small victory for progressivism, not repression. Two fifths of each slave-person would not be represented in D.C.. This was a small victory on the long march to freedom. If the South had been able to bully the situation, the slave would have been fully represented. It would have been more unjust if the slaves had been represented as five fifths of a person. That would have been a victory for the Slavocracy. The glass was 2/5 empty but that 2/5 was the only part that was actually full. Turn the glass upside down for the real story. The empty part, the 2/5 is/was progressivism attacking racism.
SOURCES
America and its Peoples, A Mosaic in the Making - 5th Edition by Randy
Roberts, Steve Mintz, Linda O. MrMurray, James Kirby Martin and Jim Jones - c) 2004
Very leftish textbook, but in this early stage of the story, that’s not important or evident.
The American Heritage Book of the Revolution, by Bruce Lancaster – c) 1958 – Intro by Bruce Catton –
Giant picture book with solid text. It’s such a colorful book that I hesitate to mark it up with notes and underlining. But its not hard to find cheap copies at flea markets so...
Bruce also published a separate book on the Revolution by a different title, but the text is 90% exactly the same as in this book.
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford University – c) 1961 D.C. Heath
This book is so good that a Harvard professor has recently revised and updated it, even though Tommy’s been dead about 25 years. She wants to keep the work alive, and I am exited to someday buy the new one. This 1961 edition is pure pleasure on every page. Bailey writes like a real man of the people, even though he is a brilliant scholar and could easily write like a slick academia snob if he wanted to.
The American People, A History, by Pauline Maier – c) Pauline gives the poor kids a cruel quiz at the end of every page. AP sets a new world's record for taking the fun out of studying.
How Many miles did St. Leger travel from Montreal?
If St. Leger had traveled by the shortest route from Albany, how many miles would he have traveled?
AP does have some great maps but all the positives are off-set by the stern interrogations.
The Book of the Revolution, by Bruce Lancaster
Paperback mini textbook for the general reader mentioned earlier as being the same virtual book as the one by American Heritage.
The Cambridge Modern History, Vol VII The United States, by (the late) Lord Acton L.L. D. c) 1903
Acton supervised the writing but it is a comprehensive work by the entire history staff at Cambridge. This is really fine reading. 749 pages, but very little material after the Civil War, so it’s a fairly detailed account of early American history.
As British scholars, they naturally tend to focus a great deal on the Colonial period of the USA story.
Code Number 72, Ben Franklin, Patriot or Spy? - by Cecil B. Curry c) 1972 – When Franklin was in Paris to conduct negotiations for ending the Revolutionary War, John Adams wrote of him that,
“Franklin's cunning will be to divide us; to this he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will maneuver.”
Was Franklin a spy? Maybe not. But his close pal Doctor Bankroft was a proven British spy posing as a loyal American Patriot. Was Franklin a Tory that never wanted to separate from England while pretending to want that when it selfishly suited him? That is absolutely true in my opinion.
The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, by Samuel Flagg Bemis, c) 1957 – A great and priceless work, late in life, by the grand master from Yale.
A Diplomatic History of the United States, c) 1934 - by Sam Flagg Bemis (Yalie)
This book is slow and dull, and yet it is great. Ingrid Bergman once asked Humphrey Bogart, “How can a man so ugly be so handsome?” I ask, “How can a writer so dull, be so marvelous?”
The Enduring Vision - A very current big general history book.
The Founding of a Nation, A History of the American Revolution 1765-1776 – by Glenn T. Jensen – c) 2004
Too many dull quotations from the era to slow things way down, but this guy is a winner. Some famously original scholarship in here, and in all his books.
The Glorious Cause, by Rob Middlekauff c) 2004
Considered the best single volume history of the American Revolution by most of today's historians. My copy has a broken bind and I can’t bring myself to read it.
The Golden Age of American History, edited by Frank Freidel – c)1959 – A collection of classic historians doing their thing with American history. I read most of a 75 page chapter by George Bancroft, The American Revolution. It's a disappointing read thanks to too many long antiquated language quotes.
The Great Republic, Bernard Bailyn, Harvard, - David Herbert Donald, Harvard, - David Brion Davis, Yale, - Robert Dallek, UCLA – John L. Thomas, Brown – Gordon S. Wood, Brown - c) 1985 Two volumes.
College textbook that in some chapters delivers more per page than any book I have ever read. In other chapters on economics or trends in religion, art and education, it is 'kill-me-now' boring.
A History of the American People, by Graebner, Fite and White – c) 1970
Good general history textbook written by brilliant hippie professors for hippie students and properly reflecting all the left hippie values of the time.
1,403 pages. I’ve read sections out of sequence, which I don’t usually like to do, but this thick textbook has a poor design and layout and I don’t care to start it from the beginning and make it a friend.
History of a Free People, by Hank W. Bragdon of Phillips Exeter Academy, and Samuel P. McCutchen, NYU – c) 1954 MacMillan
It's unbelievable the amount of rough homework and quiz questions they assign the poor students at the end of every 11 pages or so. History of an Enslaved Classroom People.
A History of the Modern World, by R.R. Palmer of Princeton, and Joel Colton of Duke.
c) 1956 - Knopf
A student has to try to see the events of America from the prism of world history. This general treatment for college students is high-end basics. Well done. But it suffers from the standard flaw of its era. It claims to be a world history but it’s 92% about Europe.
History of the United States of America, by Elson – c) 1961 - 17th edition! -
Short fat hardcover – This is how it's done. High school, college, or general reader can all benefit from this delightful work.
John Adams, by David McCulloch, c) 2001 – America's most popular historian.
Why?
Try to compare the experience of reading Otto Trevelyan and David McCulloch, and tell me this guy comes out ahead. Just because one guy is alive and other guy is dead, means you ignore the better book and read the lame one. Presidents and subway riders read the recent history books that come out and hit the best seller list. Doesn't mater what the book is about. They let the hot seller factor set their reading schedule when a more carefully reasoned search for the best starting point will almost invariably lead to the old timers.
New Age Now Begins, by Page Smith –
The American Revolution by a prolific author who is somehow determined to never make his subject clear in his book titles. He's very readable. But other historians don't seem to cite his work that often, even though his books are super-thick. Maybe its because he's very readable, since the first rule of most historians is to try not to be.
Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1965 Oxford University Press
Morison is great on maritime history, and wrote the book on Columbus. There is a statue of him on Comm. Ave in Boston. Every day, thousands of people walk by and say, “Who is that guy?”
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994 – Prentice Hall
This is a PC history textbooks. They don’t think it is. It’s not sneaky bias, but it’s irrepressible bias.
A Patriot's History of the United States, c) 2002 - by Larry Schwekart, and Michael Allen.
Any history book by a guy named Larry can't be all bad. This is the conservative answer to the overdose of leftism in today's history textbooks. I don't always agree with them, but I salute them and if I have to pick a team for all its imperfections, I pick them, not Howard Zinn or the other left polemic textbooks that are brainwashing our college freshmen today.
Presidential Campaigns, by Paul F. Boller, Jr. - c) 1984 – Oxford University Press
PC is one of the better books in my library.
The Revolutionary War, America’s Fight for Freedom - by the National Geographic Board of Editors
One of the Nat Geo writers takes his family to the tourist sites of the Revolution and builds up a short history of the War of Independence around his travel-writing. We hear of Steuben drilling troops at Valley Forge and how his feet are killing him from all the walking. It’s a bizarre concept, but no harm done. The illustrations carry the book, and were supposed to.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty, Columbia – c) – 1974, Second edition – Harper & Row
Mr. Garraty has an unpleasant edge to his work. I've read 469 pages as of 2011 and only have 78 to go. So I guess he's a good writer and historian. But overall, a thumbs down for this schoolbook. It’s rare for an individual historian to write a general US history without other scholars collaborating. Maybe no one wanted to work with this crab.
A Short History of the American Revolution, by James L. Stokesbury – c) 1991 – Great book by a man of the people who not only writes in a simple clear style, ideal for beginning students, but also with a depth of political wisdom that makes the simple just as rewarding scholastically as the complex snob books.
I do not agree with his analogy that for Britain, the Revolutionary War for America was the equivalent of the Vietnam War for the United States. Don't get me started on that one, and he's not the first historian to spin that.
The American colonials were not mass murderers trying to impose an atheist brutal anti-individualistic way of life on the world in a mass movement that had already emerged victorious over most of Asia with millions killed. The cause of the USA in Vietnam was ten times more noble than the cause of Britian in the American Revolution. For every arguable parallel, there are four ways the situations were completely different. People are the same as Zebras because they both have two eyes and two ears, and both will die if they do not eat.
A Struggle for Power, The American Revolution, by Theodore Draper - c) 1996 - Times Books
I read his history of the Six Weeks War in France in 1940 and couldn’t follow the battles by his writing. I only just started this one and I’m worried that his style will leave me stuck in the mud on page 62 or so. Draper does not possess “clarity and colloquial vigor.” (Bernie Parkes phrase)
Triumph of Freedom 1775-1783, by John C. Miller – c) 1948 - Little-Brown
I completely love this book. Excellent writer, great scholarship. Cloth paperback of 688 Atlantic Monthly Press Club pages. Put the coffee on. I once had words with a guy in a used bookstore over this book, and that's all I am going to say.
The United States to 1865, by Michael Kraus – c) 1959 University of Michigan Press
Part of the University of Michigan series of hardcovers of various country histories. Kraus drew the task of the US to the end of the Civil War and did a great job, in spite a couple of clunker chapters that bored me to near suicide. Please don't quote poetry in my history books. Ever. No exceptions. It never works. First of all you have to love fine poetry. Then the quote has to be incisive and relevant. Then it has to somehow not interrupt the flow of the book writing style. All three are impossible tasks with me.
Kraus is solid overall and sometimes excellent. Of the rebellious colonists of 1770 he says,
“Like ancient Puritans whose obsession was sin, committed or anticipated, their descendants were obsessed with thoughts of tyranny, real or fancied.”
Of the American Revolution he wrote,
“The British conduct of the war was flabby, since hope still persisted of
conciliation.”
Such a great point in such a short sentence.
There is a sculptor named Michael Kraus who is more famous than this guy, but our Bill Miller does have a university scholarship fund named after him.
The United States of America, A History, by Henry Bamford Parkes - c) 1967 Knopf
Bam Bam is a smooth writing historian. He provided the quote about “colloquial vigor.”
The United States, From Colony to World Power, by Chitwood, Owsley, and Nixon – c) 1954 – I read this textbook general history slowly from cover to cover. They don't offend in this early period of American history, but later on they get on my bad side real bad.
Owsley is an especially famous and respected historian. Just not in my house.
The United States, The History of a Republic, by Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, William Miller, co-author of The Age of Enterprise, and Daniel Aaron of Smith College – c) 1957 Prentice-Hall
Beautiful heavily illustrated hardcover one volume history of the USA by three top scholars. Too much has happened since 1957 to ever hope to squeeze the whole story into 757 fat pages like they do here so very well.
They tell us of a writer in the 1600's named Jack Boucher who defined liberty as “the liberty to obey the laws created by one's betters.”
Voices of a Peoples History of the United States, by Howard Zinn and Pepe Roni - c) 2004 - Seven Stories press
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