1775 (3 page)

If those names appear mostly in endnotes, I should acknowledge a particular debt to several groups of specialists in American history. One such combines the scholars and writers who have seen a great turning point in 1774’s fierce response to the several Coercive Acts and its culmination in the First Continental Congress. A second related school hypothesizes an accelerating mid-1770s rejection of George III by American colonials—a psychological version of regicide, which helped the public to embrace republicanism over monarchy. This aided a steady 1775–1776 transfer of legitimacy to a new nation, a Congress, and a new framework of thirteen republican states. Yet another small group of scholars identifies 1775 as the bold, daring year from a military as well as popular opinion standpoint. Their conclusions evoke a vivid “spirit of 1775,” not an ebbing “spirit of 1776.” This early confidence was essential.

A fourth body of opinion explains the American Revolution as a civil war—a clear display of the sort of bitter fratricide in which existing and emerging religious, ethnic, and sectional divisions deepen in both politics and warfare. In 1774, Thomas Jefferson penned his own fears of “civil” war. Then in 1776 he insisted that a united “people” were separating themselves from another “people” in Britain. This book takes the “civil war” position.

A fifth category includes authors who have examined an opening year, 1774 or 1775, from the standpoint of one province, Massachusetts, Virginia, South Carolina, or Connecticut, where confrontation began early. Titles include
The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord
(profiling Massachusetts in 1774),
1775: Another Part of the Field
(explaining Virginia during that year), and
The South Carolina Civil War of 1775.
⁸
Doubtless there are others.

The Book’s Plan

This volume’s attempt to set out a new view of the United Colonies and how they managed to become the United States is divided into four parts. The structure can be summarized as follows:

Part I
, the
Introduction,
is a single chapter designed to explain what the future United States was like in 1775, what the key events were between the summer of 1774 and the spring of 1776, and how they have been minimized
or even pushed aside by a fixation on 1776. This discussion also previews several of the book’s subjects, from the international gunpowder trade to Samuel Adams’s backstage role in Massachusetts.

Part II
, headed
The Revolution—
Provocations, Motivations, and Alignments,
examines the multiple origins of the American Revolution. The Continental Congress and most of the provincial congresses met in secrecy—wisely, because what they were planning and plotting amounted to treason. But the principal circumstances and subject matter can be set out in six chapters, which address the political, religious, economic, and cultural frustrations and motivations that underlay their Revolution.

To establish the leading actors,
Chapter 2
argues that four colonies—Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, and South Carolina—made up the vanguard of the Revolution, contributing two thirds or even three quarters of its momentum and leadership. These four boasted roughly half of the population, more than half of the wealth, and much more than half of the thirteen colonies’ political history. They were the old colonies, directly chartered by seventeenth-century kings (who granted territory west to the Pacific), proud of century-and-a-half- or century-old histories of defending against France, Spain, and a dozen Indian tribes, and equally proud of long-established assembly houses that considered themselves New World parliaments. Much of the colonial self-confidence and aggressiveness of 1774 and 1775 came from these four. Pennsylvania and New York, by contrast, although populous and important, lacked a parallel tradition and were foot draggers in revolutionary commitment.

Chapter 3
weighs the great importance of religion in the Revolution and puts it on a par with two other incitements to action: political and constitutional clashes with Britain, and North America’s growing demand for economic self-determination.

Chapter 4
catalogues and assesses colonial economic circumstances and complaints, emphasizing twelve. These include shortages of currency and money, lack of land banks or other banks, growing colonial debt burdens, so-called enumerated commodities (tobacco, rice, et al.) that could only be shipped to Britain, objectionable taxes, oppressive maritime regulation and customs red tape, imperial trade constraints, attempts to limit American population growth, increasingly restrictive British land policies, the transfer to Canadian jurisdiction in 1774 of western territory claimed by leading colonies, constraint of colonial industries like iron making, hats, and woolens, and growing American desire to manufacture what had to be imported from
Britain. Simply put, the mushrooming colonies were already more populous than Holland or Switzerland, and British curbs and limitations that had been acceptable in 1750 were becoming unacceptable, even insulting.

The focus of
Chapter 5
is on how the leading colonial cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—were particular seedbeds of revolution. Emphasis is put on seamen, artisans, and mechanics, and radical militias, the latter a real force in Philadelphia circa 1775.

The expansion of the colonial backcountry—from Maine to Georgia, but particularly in the south—was so pronounced that it unnerved the British. They feared not only the expense of Indian wars but that North America would soon populate beyond London’s control. However, as
Chapter 6
shows, the new southern backcountry settlements and large influx of poor whites also disturbed the coastal planter elites, who feared losing control of politics in the Carolinas and Georgia. In both Carolinas, white settlers who had arrived since 1750 outnumbered the preexisting coastal or low-country white populations by two or three to one. These latter-day settlers provided the framework of civil war in both Carolinas.

Chapter 7
, “The Ideologies of Revolution,” casts doubt on the role of abstract ideology or radical pamphleteers in bringing about the American Revolution, which some have asserted. Instead, it emphasizes five broadly ideological factors:
community
(the growth of American nationhood),
commerce
as resentment (colonial frustration over economic subordination),
constitutions
(competing British and American legal concepts),
Calvinism
(with its theology of republican religion and just war), and
conspiracy
(a long-standing English sensitivity further developed in America).

All of these angers and pressures contributed to the Revolution, albeit in different proportions from one colony to the next.

Having surveyed the principal causes and motivations, I’ve aimed in
Part III
to shift attention to the Revolution’s major political and military arenas as they emerged and developed in 1775. For historians to describe battlegrounds and confrontations as taking real shape only in 1776 is misleading; it passes over much of the essential context of what happened and why.

In this new vein,
Chapter 8
discusses “Fortress New England,” which is meant literally. Although the Patriot elites in Virginia and the Carolinas were not far behind in their politics and mobilization calendar, the four New England colonies, all dating back to the seventeenth century, and all largely English by ancestry, were the most united and cohesive bloc. They
were wedded to the belief that Englishmen in colonial Boston, Hartford, or Portsmouth had the same rights as Englishmen living in towns with those same names on the other side of the Atlantic. Because they had forced the issue, the major battles of 1775 were joined in New England or alongside it in upper New York or Canada. New England furnished most of the early soldiers.

The title of
Chapter 9
, “Declaring Economic War,” means just what it says. In October 1774, the First Continental Congress called for a phased-in popular refusal to import British products, followed by a prohibition against the export to Britain of key commodities like tobacco, rice, and naval stores. This did nothing less than challenge the central economic premise of the imperial system. By April 1775, even before Lexington and Concord, Parliament was identifying nine of the thirteen colonies as rebellious because of their participation.

Chapter 10
underscores how the war tilted north during the summer of 1775 as the British, with many regiments immobilized in Boston, nervously turned to defending Canada against an invasion—and almost lost.

Chapter 11
lays out one of the least-known but highest-priority enterprises of 1774–1775—the global munitions contest to determine whether the would-be rebels would have the gunpowder and arms needed to revolt. For example, although obtaining munitions was only a sidebar to invading Canada, the British commander there in November 1775, General Guy Carleton, was so worried about Quebec falling to the Americans that he returned to Britain a transport stuffed with needed munitions because it was likely to be captured.

Difficult and mismanaged logistics dogged the British from the start, as
Chapter 12
details. In late 1775, as war spread, there were too few escort vessels to guard military transports crossing the Atlantic and too few transports to move the British soldiers stuck in Boston to New York where they needed to be.

Chapter 13
details one of the most inept British strategies of 1775—the “southern expedition” conceptualized during the summer and put into motion by the king and Lord North during October and November. It was planned around an early 1776 naval and troop-transport rendezvous off Cape Fear, North Carolina, and it was botched so badly that the British and mercenary regiments expected to reach New York by spring did not get there until the summer, jeopardizing the 1776 invasion calendar.

British Admiral Samuel Graves’s late-summer orders for the Royal Navy
to burn seaports along the New England coast became, as
Chapter 14
details, a powerful Patriot point of condemnation. Although the Americans themselves were not beyond torching cities—Norfolk, Virginia, and possibly part of Manhattan in 1776—widely regarded as nests of Loyalists, Washington, Adams, and company handily won the propaganda war.

Chapter 15
, “Red, White, and Black,” looks at the British-laid plans of 1775 to have hostile Indians raid the American frontier, incite white indentured servants to run away to the British Army, and promise freedom to black slaves who would enlist in His Majesty’s forces. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, pursued all three, but his tactics backfired and drove white Virginians toward independence.

Chapter 16
explains how the Britain of 1775 could not fight a major war without hiring large numbers of mercenaries. The Russians were approached first, but refused in November. That meant hiring Hessians, Brunswickers, and other Germans, but their employment offended public opinion in much of Europe, North America, and even Britain.

The Chesapeake region, centered on the thirteen colonies’ largest estuary, had a large Loyalist population and might have been an effective British invasion route.
Chapter 17
looks at who made that case and how British planners, literally and figuratively, missed the boat in Chesapeake Bay.

Chapter 18
looks at how the American Revolution was also an English-speaking civil war, principally in North America but also to an extent in the British Isles.

Between the summer of 1775 and June 1776, the Continental Congress produced a wide range of proclamations, declarations, and enactments that moved the United Colonies further and further toward independence, with little left undone.
Chapter 19
looks at these various “almost-declarations” and makes the argument that the Declaration approved in July was anticlimactic and principally aimed at finalizing American withdrawal from the empire for legal, diplomatic, and treaty-making reasons. But it also had to be agreed to before the arriving British in New York harbor could disembark enough troops to scare New York and New Jersey back into the arms of King George.

Part IV
,
Chapters 20
through 26, goes beyond individual battles to interpret the overall meaning and significance of the principal campaigns and confrontations of 1775—the “long” 1775 that began in the late summer of 1774 and ended in the spring of 1776, when de facto American independence finally became de jure. From “The Battle of Boston,” fought between
the Coercive Acts of 1774 and British withdrawal in March 1776, to Britain’s woeful “southern expedition,” bungled from its conception in 1775 to its conclusion in Charleston Harbor, these were auspicious underpinnings for the United Colonies that often go unrecognized.

Several other points need to be made. To begin with,
1775
concentrates on the thirteen British North American colonies that mounted the Revolution. Five that did not—Quebec, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island (St. Jean), East Florida, and West Florida—are mentioned only in passing. There is an interesting larger context, which I discussed in
The Cousins’ Wars.
However, to put it simply, these were new colonies created from captured territory in 1763 and either were run by the army or navy or, like Nova Scotia, Quebec, and the Floridas, were home to major British bases. Although each held Patriot sympathizers—as for that matter did Bermuda and the Bahamas—none of these colonies wanted to participate in the Continental Congresses. They were a different breed.

Secondly, in identifying the four vanguard colonies in
Chapter 2
, it may be well to offer a few sidebars. One powerful reason for picking Connecticut will be fleshed out in the several chapters that discuss military preparedness in 1775. All but independent under its royal charter, Connecticut did not have to change governments in 1775, and its chief executive, ardent Patriot Jonathan Trumbull, already in office for six years, served eight more through 1783. The colony was uniquely positioned between the three major hot spots of 1775—Boston, New York City, and Lake Champlain—and was uniquely able to raise and send regiments where needed. Trumbull, who worked closely with George Washington, deserves much more recognition than he has ever received.