A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (18 page)

Third, no single port city offered a strategic center from which British forces could deploy. At one time the British had six armies in the colonies, yet they never managed to bring their forces together in a single, overwhelming campaign. They had to conduct operations through a wide expanse of territory, along a number of fronts involving seasonal changes from snow in New Hampshire to torrid heat in the Carolinas, all the while searching for rebels who disappeared into mountains, forests, or local towns.

Fourth, British officers, though capable in European-style war, never adapted to fighting a frontier rebellion against another western-style army that had already adapted to the new battlefield. Competent leaders such as Howe made critical mistakes, while less talented officers like Burgoyne bungled completely. At the same time, Washington slowly developed aggressive officers like Nathaniel Greene, Ethan Allen, and (before his traitorous actions) Benedict Arnold.

Fifth, England hoped that the Iroquois would join them as allies, and that, conversely, the colonists would be deprived of any assistance from the European powers. Both hopes were dashed. The Iroquois Confederacy declared neutrality in 1776, and many other tribes agreed to neutrality soon thereafter as a result of efforts by Washington’s able emissaries to the Indians. A few tribes fought for the British, particularly the Seneca and Cayuga, but two of the Iroquois Confederacy tribes actively supported the Americans and the Onondaga divided their loyalties. As for keeping the European nations out, the British succeeded in officially isolating America only for a short time before scores of European freedom fighters poured into the colonies. Casimir Pulaski, of Poland, and the Marquis de Lafayette, of France, made exemplary contributions; Thaddeus Kosciusko, another Pole, organized the defenses of Saratoga and West Point; and Baron von Steuben, a Prussian captain, drilled the troops at Valley Forge, receiving an informal promotion from Benjamin Franklin to general.

Von Steuben’s presence underscored a reality that England had overlooked in the conflict—namely, that this would not be a battle against common natives who happened to be well armed. Quite the contrary, it would pit Europeans against their own. British success in overcoming native forces had been achieved by discipline, drill, and most of all the willingness of essentially free men to submit to military structures and utilize European close-order, mass-fire techniques.
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In America, however, the British armies encountered Continentals who fought with the same discipline and drill as they did, and who were as immersed in the same rights-of-Englishmen ideology that the British soldiers themselves had grown up with.

It is thus a mistake to view Lexington and Concord, with their pitiable shot-to-kill ratio, as constituting the style of the war. Rather, Saratoga and Cowpens reflected the essence of massed formations and shock combat, with the victor usually enjoying the better ground or generalship. Worth noting also is the fact that Washington’s first genuine victory came over mercenary troops at Trenton, not over English redcoats, though that too would come. Even that instance underscored the superiority of free soldiers over indentured troops of any kind.

Sixth, Great Britain’s commanders in the field each operated independently, and each from a distance of several thousand miles from their true command center, Whitehall. No British officer in the American colonies had authority over the entire effort, and ministerial interventions often reflected not only the woefully outdated appraisals of the situation—because of the delay in reporting intelligence—but also the internal politics that afflicted the British army until well after the Crimean War.

Finally, of course, France decisively entered the fray in 1778, sensing that, in fact, the young nation might actually survive, and offering the French a means to weaken Britain by slicing away the North American colonies from her control, and providing sweet revenge for France’s humiliating defeat in the Seven Years’ War. The French fleet under Admiral Françoise Joseph de Grasse lured away the Royal Navy, which secured Cornwallis’s flanks at Yorktown, winning at Sandy Hook one of the few great French naval victories over England. Without the protection of the navy’s guns, Yorktown fell. There is little question that the weight of the French forces tipped the balance in favor of the Americans, but even had France stood aside, the British proved incapable of pinning down Washington’s army, and despite several victories had not broken the will of the colonists.

Opening Campaigns

Immediately before Washington took command, the first significant battle of the conflict occurred at Breed’s Hill. Patriot forces under General Israel Putnam and Colonel William Prescott had occupied the bluffs by mistake, intending instead to occupy Bunker Hill. The position overlooked the port of Boston, permitting the rebels to challenge ships entering or leaving the port and even allowing the Americans to shell the city itself if they so desired. William Howe led a force of British troops in successive assaults up the hill. Although the redcoats eventually took Breed’s Hill when the Americans ran out of ammunition, the cost proportionately to the British was enormous. Almost half the British troops were either killed or wounded, and an exceptional number of officers died (12 percent of all British officers killed during the entire war). England occupied the heights and held Boston, but even that success proved transitory.

By March 1776, Henry Knox had arrived from Fort Ticonderoga in New York, where, along with Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, the patriots had captured the British outpost. Knox and his men then used sleds to drag captured cannons to Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston. The British, suddenly threatened by having their supply line cut, evacuated on St. Patrick’s Day, taking a thousand Tories, or Loyalists, with them to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Only two weeks before, in North Carolina, patriot forces had defeated a body of Tories, and in June a British assault on Charleston was repulsed by 600 militiamen protected by a palmetto-wood fort.

Early in 1776 the Americans took the offensive. Benedict Arnold led a valiant march on Quebec, making the first of many misguided attempts to take Canada. Americans consistently misjudged Canadian allegiance, thinking that exposure to American “liberators” would provoke the same revolutionary response in Canada as in the lower thirteen colonies. Instead, Arnold’s force battled the harsh Canadian winter and smallpox, living on “boiled candles and roasted moccasins.” Arriving at the city with only 600 men, Arnold’s small army was repulsed in its first attack on the city. After receiving reinforcements, a second American attack failed miserably, leaving three hundred colonists prisoner. Arnold took a musket ball in the leg, while American Colonel Aaron Burr carried Montgomery’s slain body from the city. Even in defeat, Arnold staged a stubborn retreat that prevented British units under General Guy Carleton from linking up with General Howe in New York. Unfortunately, although Washington appreciated Arnold’s valor, few others did. Arnold’s theater commanders considered him a spendthrift, and even held him under arrest for a short time, leading the hero of many of America’s early battles to become bitter and vengeful to the point of his eventual treason.

Gradually, even the laissez-faire American armies came to appreciate the value of discipline, drill, and long-term commitment, bolstered by changing enlistment terms and larger cash bonuses for signing up. It marked a slow but critical replacement of Revolutionary zeal with proven military practices, and an appreciation for the necessity of a trained army in time of war.
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While the northern campaign unfolded, British reinforcements arrived in Halifax, enabling Howe to launch a strike against New York City with more than 30,000 British and German troops. His forces landed on Staten Island on July second, the day Congress declared independence. Supported by his brother, Admiral Lord Howe, General Howe drove out Washington’s ill-fed and poorly equipped army, captured Long Island, and again threatened Washington’s main force. Confronted with a military disaster, Washington withdrew his men across the East River and into Manhattan. Howe missed an opportunity to capture the remainder of Washington’s troops, but he had control of New York. Loyalists flocked to the city, which became a haven for Tories throughout the war.

Washington had no alternative but to withdraw through New Jersey and across the Delaware River, in the process collecting or destroying all small vessels to prevent the British from following easily. At that point the entire Revolution might have collapsed under a less capable leader: he had only 3,000 men left of his army of 18,000, and the patriot forces desperately needed a victory. In the turning point of the war, Washington not only rallied his forces but staged a bold counterattack, recrossing the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776, against a British army (made up of Hessian mercenaries) at Trenton. “The difficulty of passing the River in a very severe Night, and their march thro’ a violent Storm of Snow and Hail, did not in the least abate [the troops’] Ardour. But when they came to the Charge, each seemed to vie with the other in pressing forward,” Washington wrote.
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At a cost of only three casualties, the patriots netted 1,000 Hessian prisoners. Washington could have chalked up a victory, held his ground, and otherwise rested on his laurels, but he pressed on to Princeton, where he defeated another British force, January 2–3, 1777. Washington, who normally was reserved in his comments about his troops, proudly informed Congress that the “Officers and Men who were engaged in the Enterprize behaved with great firmness, poise, advance and bravery and such as did them the highest honour.”
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Despite the fact that large British armies remained in the field, in two daring battles Washington regained all the momentum lost in New York and sent a shocking message to the befuddled British that, indeed, they were in a war after all.

Common Sense
and the Declaration of Independence

As Washington’s ragtag army tied up British forces, feelings for independence grew more intense. The movement awaited only a spokesman who could galvanize public opinion around resistance against the king. How unlikely, then, was the figure that emerged! Thomas Paine had come to America just over a year before he wrote
Common Sense
, arriving as a failure in almost everything he attempted in life. He wrecked his first marriage, and his second wife paid him to leave. He destroyed two businesses (one as a tobacconist and one as a corset maker) and flopped as a tax collector. But Paine had fire in his blood and defiance in his pen. In January 1776 he wrote his fifty-page political tract,
Common Sense
, but his “The American Crisis,” published a month earlier, began with some of the most memorable lines in history: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”
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Eager readers did not shrink from the book, which quickly sold more than a hundred thousand copies. (Paine sold close to a half-million copies prior to 1800 and could have been a wealthy man—if he hadn’t donated every cent he earned to the Revolution!)
Common Sense
provided the prelude to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that appeared in July 1776. Paine argued that the time for loyalty to the king had ended: “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘Tis Time to Part.’”

He thus tapped into widespread public sentiment, evidenced by the petitions urging independence that poured into the Continental Congress. Many colonial delegations received instructions from home to support independence by May 1776. On May fifteenth, Virginia resolved in its convention to create a Declaration of Rights, a constitution, a federation, and foreign alliances, and in June it established a republican government, for all intents and purposes declaring its independence from England. Patrick Henry became governor. Virginia led the way, and when the state congressional delegations were sent to vote on independence, only Virginia’s instructions were not conditional: the Commonwealth had already thrown down the gauntlet.
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In June, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” The statement so impressed John Adams that he wrote, “This day the Congress has passed the most important resolution…ever taken in America.”
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As the momentum toward separation with England grew, Congress appointed a committee to draft a statement announcing independence. Members included Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and the chairman, Thomas Jefferson, to whom the privilege of writing the final draft fell. Jefferson wrote so eloquently and succinctly that Adams and Franklin made only a few alterations, including Franklin’s “self-evident” phrase. Most of the changes had to do with adding references to God.

Even so, the final document remains a testament to the skill of Jefferson in capturing the essence of American ideals. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he wrote, that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
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It is worth noting that Jefferson recognized that humans were “created” by a Supreme Being, and that all rights existed only in that context. Further reiterating Locke, he wrote that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.” Government was natural, not artificial, so that when one government disappeared, the citizenry needed to establish another. But it should be kept in mind that these “self-evident” rights constituted “an escalating sequence of connected assertions” that ended in revolution, appealing not only to God, but to English history and law.
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