Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (15 page)

June 22
Reinforcements sent by Washington join General Horatio Gates in North Carolina, as the focus of the war shifts to the South.

July 11
Five thousand French troops under Rochambeau arrive at Newport, Rhode Island, but are trapped by a British blockade.

August 3
Benedict Arnold is appointed commander of West Point. He has been secretly communicating Washington’s movements to the British commander Henry Clinton.

August 16
At Camden, South Carolina, American forces under General Gates are overwhelmingly defeated by General Charles Cornwallis; Gates is relieved of command.

September 23
Carrying the plans for Benedict Arnold’s surrender of West Point, British Major John André is captured and later hanged as a spy. Arnold flees to a British ship and is made a brigadier general in the British army.

October 7
A frontier militia force captures a loyalist force of 1,100 at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, forcing General Cornwallis to abandon plans for an invasion of North Carolina.

October 14
General Nathanael Greene replaces General Gates as commander of the southern army. Greene begins a guerrilla war of harassment against the British.

1781

January 17
The Battle of Cowpens (South Carolina). American forces under General Daniel Morgan win a decisive victory.

March 15
Despite a victory at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse (North Carolina), Cornwallis suffers heavy losses, abandons plans to control the Carolinas, and retreats to await reinforcements.

June 10
American forces under Lafayette are reinforced by General Anthony Wayne in Virginia to combat Cornwallis.

August 14
Washington receives news that French admiral de Grasse is sailing a fleet carrying 3,000 men to Chesapeake Bay. Washington secretly abandons plans to attack Clinton in New York and moves south instead.

August 31
French troops, under de Grasse, land at Yorktown, Virginia, and join American forces under Lafayette, blocking off a retreat by Cornwallis.

September 5–8
In a naval battle off Yorktown, the French fleet is victorious and additional French troops arrive from Newport, Rhode Island.

September 14–24
American troops under Washington are transported to Williamsburg, Virginia, by de Grasse’s ships.

September 28
A combined force of 9,000 Americans and 7,000 French begin the siege of Yorktown.

October 19
Cornwallis, with 8,000 troops, surrenders at Yorktown, effectively ending British hopes of victory in America. Aware of Cornwallis’s predicament, Clinton fails to send British reinforcements in time. They sail back to New York.

1782

January 1
Loyalists in America, fearing confiscation and reprisals, begin to leave for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

February 27
The House of Commons votes against waging further war in America; the English Crown is empowered to seek peace negotiations. In March, Lord North resigns as prime minister and is replaced by Lord Rockingham, who seeks immediate negotiations with America.

April 19
The Netherlands recognizes the independence of the United States.

August 27
A skirmish in South Carolina is the last wartime engagement on the eastern seaboard.

November 30
A preliminary peace treaty is signed in Paris.

1783

January 20
Preliminary peace treaties are signed between England and France and England and Spain.

February 4
Great Britain officially declares an end to hostilities in America.

April 11
Congress declares a formal end to the Revolutionary War.

June 13
The main part of the Continental Army disbands.

September 3
The Treaty of Paris is signed, formally ending the war. The treaty is ratified by Congress in January 1784.

THE PATRIOTS

John Adams (1735–1826)
Born in Braintree (Quincy), Massachusetts, a Harvard-educated lawyer, he was the cousin of Samuel Adams. A thorough but cautious patriot, Adams safely crossed a political high wire in defending the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. A prominent member of the Continental Congresses, Adams was among those named to draft the Declaration of Independence, which he later signed. As America’s wartime envoy to France and Holland, he was instrumental in obtaining the foreign aid of both of those countries, and then joined in negotiating the Peace of Paris ending the war.

After the war he served as first U.S. minister to Great Britain and then returned home to serve as Washington’s vice president for two terms. Adams succeeded Washington as the second president in 1796, but was defeated by Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Both Adams and Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Must Read:
John Adams
by David McCullough.

Samuel Adams (1722–1803)
After squandering an inheritance, ruining his father’s brewery business, and failing as a tax collector, this most fiery of Adamses found his calling as a rabble-rouser. Always a step ahead of arrest or debtors’ prison, he was one of the most radical of the patriots, far better at brewing dissent than beer. Samuel Adams was the chief political architect behind the machinations that led to the Boston Tea Party, as well as tutor to his younger cousin, John Adams. A signer of the Declaration, he all but faded from the national picture after the war was over, holding a variety of state offices and leaving his more illustrious cousin to take a leading role.

Dr. Benjamin Church (1734–78?)
Although not as notorious as Benedict Arnold, Church earned the unpleasant distinction of being the first American caught spying for the British. A physician from Boston, Church had established powerful credentials as a patriot zealot, being the first on hand to treat the wounded after the Boston Massacre. But in 1775, coded documents he was transmitting to the British were intercepted and he was tried as a spy. Found guilty, he was spared the hanging that George Washington requested.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–90)
Of all the figures in the Revolutionary pantheon, perhaps only Washington has inspired more myths than Franklin. Printer. Writer. Philosopher. Scientist. Politician. Diplomat. All the labels fit, but none defines the man who was, during his life, one of the most famous men in the world.

Born in Boston, he was the fifteenth of a candlemaker’s seventeen children. His brief formal schooling ended when he was apprenticed to his older half-brother James, printer of the
New England Courant
and a member of the young radicals of Boston. Failing to get along with James, Ben moved to Philadelphia and found work as a printer, quickly gaining the confidence of the most powerful men in that cosmopolitan city. A trip to London followed in 1724, although financial support promised to Franklin by Pennsylvania’s governor fell through and he was forced to find work as a printer.

Returning to Philadelphia in 1726, he began a rise that was professionally and financially astonishing. By 1748, he was able to retire, having started a newspaper; begun a tradesmen’s club called the Junto; founded the first American subscription library; become clerk to the Pennsylvania legislature; established the first fire company; become postmaster of Philadelphia; established the American Philosophical Society; and launched
Poor Richard’s Almanac
, the collection of wit, wisdom, and financial advice he produced for twenty-five years.

Franklin turned his attention to science and politics. He performed his electrical experiments—most famously the silken kite experiment, which proved that lightning and electricity were the same force of nature—and he invented the lightning rod. He added to his list of inventions with bifocal eyeglasses and the efficient Franklin stove. A key mover in the Pennsylvania legislature, he was sent to England as the colony’s agent in 1764, emerging as the leading spokesman against the Stamp Act. (His illegitimate son William, who had assisted at the famous kite experiment, became the colonial governor of New Jersey and remained a loyalist. In 1776, William Franklin was arrested and declared a “virulent enemy to this country.” Exchanged with a patriot prisoner, William lived out his life in London, while Franklin raised William’s son Temple. The deep fracture of this relationship was never repaired.)

With war looming, Franklin returned to America a month before the battles at Lexington and Concord. During the war, he sat in the Second Continental Congress, was a member of the committee that was formed to draft the Declaration, and soon afterward was sent to Paris to negotiate an alliance with the French, staying in Europe to make the terms of peace.

Must Read:
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
by H. W. Brands;
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
by Walter Isaacson.

Nathan Hale (1755–76)
A Connecticut schoolteacher, Hale joined Washington’s army but saw no action. When Washington called for volunteers to gather information on British troops, Hale stepped forward. Recognized and reported by a Tory relative, he was arrested by the British, in civilian clothing with maps showing troop positions. After confessing, Hale was hanged. While his dignity and bravery were widely admired and he became an early martyr to the rebel cause, his famous last words of regret are most likely an invention that has become part of the Revolution’s mythology. The words have never been documented.

John Hancock (1736–93)
The richest man in New England before the war, Hancock, an ally of the Adamses, was a merchant who had inherited his wealth from an uncle who had acquired it through smuggling. Hancock’s purse assured him a prominent place among the patriots, and he bankrolled the rebel cause. Hancock attended the Continental Congresses and served as president of the Congress. Despite a total lack of military experience, Hancock hoped to command the Continental Army and was annoyed when Washington was named. He was the first and most visible signer of the Declaration, but his wartime service was undistinguished, and after the war he was elected governor of Massachusetts.

Patrick Henry (1736–99)
Far from being a member of the Virginia aristocracy, Henry was the son of a frontier farmer whose first attempts to earn a living met with failure. Through influential friends, he was licensed to practice law and made a name for himself, eventually winning a seat in the House of Burgesses. An early radical and an ambitious self-promoter, Henry represented frontier interests against the landed establishment and was known throughout the colonies for his fiery orations. He went to both Continental Congresses, and following the first, he returned to Virginia to make the March 20, 1755, speech for which he is most famous.

He was elected first governor of Virginia, and sent George Rogers Clark to expel the British. After the war he opposed the Constitution, but later reversed himself. His poor health kept him from taking a position offered in Washington’s administration.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

P
ATRICK
H
ENRY
to the House of Burgesses:

Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? . . . I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
Born into a well-off farming family in Virginia’s Albemarle County, the Declaration’s author distinguished himself early as a scholar, and gained admission to the Virginia bar in 1767. Although no great admirer of Patrick Henry’s bombastic style, Jefferson was drawn to the patriot circle around Henry after Jefferson was elected to the House of Burgesses, having provided voters with rum punch, a colonial tradition for candidates. His literary prowess, demonstrated in political pamphlets, prompted John Adams to put Jefferson forward as the man to write the Declaration, a task he accepted with reluctance.