1775 (7 page)

Officials in London had expected better from Georgia. But in mid-1775, the local Patriots took substantial control of government through an extralegal Provincial Congress and Council of Safety. This closely reiterated similar transfers of authority in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—and by January top officials were in custody. Disdaining house arrest, Governor Sir James Wright fled in February 1776 to HMS
Scarborough.

Focusing on these facts changes the way we think about these months. Even New England had nothing to match the exodus of the southern royal governors. History had already shown the effects of such action. Back in the early seventeenth century, the so-called Flight of the Earls—the exodus of key Irish Catholic nobles to Spain—was taken on the European continent as signaling the end of Gaelic Ireland. The flight of royal governors from New Hampshire to Georgia augured similarly for embattled British North America.

The breakdown in royal authority was a grievous political wound. It had been replaced by de facto American self-rule through local committees of correspondence and safety, trade-monitoring committees of inspection, oath-swearing associations, militia organizations, and provincial congresses. They began to exercise power twelve to eighteen months before the July 1776 arrival in New York of massive but belated British military might. This Patriot infrastructure, activity, and enforcement represented a governmental and political underpinning of American independence that was never effectively defeated or disassembled.

Despite lack of international legal recognition, the Continental Congress functioned as a de facto war government. By the end of 1775, the United Colonies had also created an army (June 15), a navy (October 13), and even a marine corps (November 10). American regiments were camped in Canada, wooing French
habitants,
occupying Montreal, and finally—too late—besieging the rocky citadel of Quebec. Below New England, from Philadelphia to Sunbury, Georgia, coastal defenses were springing up along key rivers and harbors. Pennsylvania, overcoming Quaker inhibitions, opted to protect Philadelphia with a small fleet of row galleys, river obstacles, and artillery batteries.
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To facilitate defense and coordination, Congress separated the colonies into three separate military commands—the Northern Department (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire), the Southern Department (Virginia, both Carolinas, and Georgia), and the Middle Department (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland). New England, with its four collaborative provinces, was a sector unto itself. The southern plantation elites were not far behind, but backcountry populations made those colonies less cohesive, and their Revolutionary future would be less secure in 1778–1781, when the British made a more serious southern invasion than the fumbled one of 1775–1776.

Map 1
shows the thirteen colonies and their major cities and rivers. Only half of the provinces conducted censuses in the decade before 1775, so there is no reliable way to include and detail the growth that was becoming such a topic of discussion in North America, Britain, and the European continent.

The Middle Colonies of 1775: The Politics of Ambiguity

The five “middle” provinces represented a third and more complex political geography too often skipped over or ignored in analyses of the early Revolution. Urban radicals in New York and Philadelphia favored independence, but partly as a vehicle for economic and social upheaval. The reverse side of the coin—this in addition to economic, cultural, and religious antagonisms that inhibited middle-colony consensus—was that many wealthy New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, wary of the Sons of Liberty and organized mechanics, thought they would be safer remaining under British rule. Patriot congresses and committees of safety held a partial, extralegal sway in all five middle colonies, aided by
rage militaire.
The existing institutions of government, however, were divided. As of December 1775, royal governors retained at least toeholds—William Tryon in New York, William Franklin in New Jersey, and Robert Eden in Maryland—and the legislative assemblies in New York and Pennsylvania remained in conservative hands.

Luckily for the Patriots, the extent to which British authorities had focused on Boston during the 1770s left hardly any scarlet-jacketed soldiery in middle-colony barracks. This persisted in late 1775 although New York was the next obvious battleground once British leaders vacated their untenable position in Massachusetts. A Dutch possession until captured by the Duke of York (later James II) in 1664, New York a century later was the
strategic and military gateway to the Hudson-Champlain corridor. Regaining full control of its storied eighteenth-century north-south warpath of rivers, portages, and lakes—one army moving north from New York City, another south from Canada—would split the rebellious colonies more or less down the middle. That, of course, had become London’s plan by the summer of 1775, but the logistics of implementing it would be difficult.

Having been drawn into war before achieving readiness, Britain lacked transports to move the worn-out troops in Boston to New York before winter’s onset. Thus, as the year ended, no British regular unit was stationed in the colonies’ swing region. New York’s last company of redcoats had marched out of their barracks in July, boarding the nearby 64-gun warship
Asia
—partly, cynics said, to keep them from deserting.
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Two other British regular units in New York—small detachments stationed at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, the once grand, now decrepit French and Indian War bastions—had been taken captive by New Englanders in May. Gage’s tardy April order to General Carleton to reinforce Ticonderoga by sending a regiment from Canada was overtaken by war. In a similar vein, combative instructions from the Cabinet sent in January 1775 by Lord Dartmouth, the American secretary—Gage was finally ordered to start moving aggressively, even at the risk of war—had been delayed initially in Whitehall, then held up by a particularly rough wintertime ocean crossing. Gage’s aides did not sign for them until April 14. On the British side, policy making for both Massachusetts and the Hudson-Champlain corridor had taken a costly winter holiday.

New York, in the meantime, was a weak link in the Revolutionary chain. Its timorous Provincial Congress was not even in charge of the May-June buildup in the province’s own northern counties. The Continental Congress, along with officers of Massachusetts and Connecticut troops actually on the scene, had most of the say. Back in February 1775, while Gage dawdled, the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence had sent an agent to Lake Champlain and Canada—John Brown, a Pittsfield lawyer and confidant of Samuel Adams. He reported in late March that “one thing I must mention to be kept as a profound Secret, the Fort at Tyconderogo must be seised as soon as possible should hostilities be committed by the kings Troops. The people on N. Hampshire Grants have ingaged to do this Business and in my opinion they are the most proper Persons for this Jobb.”
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When the two citadels fell in May to a small force from Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and the so-called Hampshire Grants (Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys), the way to Canada opened wide. Quebec, too, had lost garrisons to reinforce Boston. But despite the spreading Patriot confrontations with British forces in Virginia and Charleston Harbor, violence was held off in the five middle colonies, save for New England–guarded upper New York. The region remained politically ambivalent. John Adams would later argue that a naïve middle-colony desire not to break with Britain had interfered with Congress’s invasion of Canada.
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Most observers counted Loyalist politics and anti-independence sentiment strongest in New York, but caution and lingering hope for reconciliation enjoyed a vocal constituency in all five provinces. As January turned to February and March, avid independence backers like cousins Samuel and John Adams of Massachusetts and the Lee brothers of Virginia fumed at what they saw as delay and obstruction.

To committed Patriots, not least Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania was the middle-region linchpin because of its influence. The Quaker colony’s relatively powerless governor John Penn, a grandson of founder William Penn, was not much of an obstacle. The important opposition to independence came from Pennsylvania’s wealthy Quaker elite and the newer Anglican power axis of merchants and lawyers. Together, the two conservative elements dominated the provincial Assembly, which continued to look to the familiar Penn Charter and reject separation. To heighten the stakes, Pennsylvania was expected to sway two less important neighbors: New Jersey, half of which was the former Quaker stronghold of West Jersey; and Delaware, smaller still, which had long shared a Philadelphia-based governor with Pennsylvania.

Ironically, William Franklin, the royal governor in New Jersey, was the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. Respect for the father kept New Jersey Patriots from arresting his Tory son. In mid-June 1776, however, as sentiment shifted in next-door Pennsylvania, the New Jersey Provincial Convention would declare the younger Franklin “an enemy to the liberties of this country” and order him confined.
²⁵
He was sent to Connecticut for detention.

In the political geography of 1775, then, Pennsylvania stood as the critical domino. Her influence also touched Maryland. If Virginia loomed large over the Chesapeake, Pennsylvania dominated Maryland’s northern border and also shipped large quantities of wheat through the burgeoning port of Baltimore. The Adams cousins, Samuel and John, because they expected
New York to support independence once Pennsylvania and its offspring did, in effect had a “keystone” strategy, as we will see in
Chapter 19
. Pennsylvania’s nickname as the Keystone State came from its swing role in the presidential elections of 1796 and 1800.
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But its pivotal politics were evident a quarter century earlier.

As we will elaborate in
Chapter 2
, for reasons of history, government, and culture, four provinces—Massachusetts and Connecticut, Virginia and South Carolina—were the most assertive in 1774–1775. By contrast, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware were the cross-pressured, wavering provinces, further inhibited by local awareness that their region was certain to provide many of the Revolution’s early military battlegrounds.

If the absence of a British military presence between the spring of 1775 and the spring of 1776 nurtured an artificial relaxation in the middle colonies, summer’s invasion would change that. Indeed, between October and December, erstwhile American confidence slumped as the Continental Army reeled from late-summer and autumn military defeats in and around the city of New York. These drubbings came at the hands of General Howe’s 35,000-strong British and mercenary forces, which had assembled in July and August. Disenchantment in the region further deepened following the Americans’ inglorious late-autumn retreat across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Beginning a discussion of the American Revolution in 1776 slides over the middle colonies’ vulnerable psychologies and politics.

Americans today can reasonably wonder: If the radical faction had not pushed several independence-leaning resolutions through Congress by clever tactics in May and June, would a further delay have been fatal? What would uncomfortable New York, New Jersey, and Delaware delegates have later decided if the vote on independence actually taken on July 2 had been postponed to unhappy September or perilous October? George Washington summarized the regional gloom in a letter to his brother dated December 18, 1776: “Between you and me, I think our affairs are in a very bad situation; not so much from the apprehension of General Howe’s army, as from the defection of New York, Jerseys and Pennsylvania. In short, the Conduct of the Jerseys has been infamous. Instead of turning out to defend their Country and affording aid to our Army, they are making their submissions as fast as they can.”
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Thomas Fleming, the New Jersey historian, has taken December’s pattern of middle-colony disenchantment a province farther: “In Delaware, loyalists and anti-independence moderates controlled the
legislature and fired Caesar Rodney and Thomas McKean as their delegates to the Continental Congress.” The irony, he pointed out, was that “although contemporary Americans celebrate it [1776] as the year of their national birthday…for Americans who lived through the revolutionary experience 1775, not 1776, was the year of great patriotic outpouring.”
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So it was. Events and decisions in 1775 had put the sustaining congresses, associations, conventions, and committees in place. Fortunately for the United States, George Washington’s just-in-time military triumphs at Trenton (December 25) and Princeton (January 3, 1777) managed to restore—now in a more experienced, cautious, and sober vein—some of the spirit and hope of the early days, when Virginia burgesses had worn fringed shirts and tomahawks, and virtue had been presumed all-conquering.

The North American Communications Lag

At a certain stage, students of the American Revolution experience a distinct déjà vu in reading for the fourth or fifth time about this or that communications lag. These explain how delay or adverse winds kept instructions from reaching a British general or how slow sea travel during the winter of 1775–1776 kept anxious politicians or members of the Continental Congress three or four months behind in knowing the thoughts of British ministers or parliamentarians. People were on tenterhooks. New Englanders waited for undecided moderates to accept the depth and near-irreversibility of London’s war preparations; middle-colony delegates anxiously awaited word of rumored British peace commissioners.

Many scholars have cited individual situations; others have described the particular hazards and delays of winter voyages across the North Atlantic. But a brief overview seems in order.

Consider the months between August 1774 and July 1776, a pressure cooker period during which many Americans made up or changed their minds. Two periods stand out during which the North Atlantic winter held up information—November 1774 to April 1775, then essentially the same calendar of icebergs and adverse winds a year later—thereby slowing down decision making or implementation. British policy makers and military commanders, and American Patriots and Loyalists alike, waited for news or instructions. In retrospect, it seems implausible that cross-pressured colonists could have seen much hope for reconciliation with Britain in early 1776, but
they did—and information took three to four months to make a superficial round trip and probably five to six months to sink in and be absorbed.