Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (19 page)
In the many years since the story was told, no one has been able to verify Canby’s claims. It is known that Betsy Ross made “ships colors” for Pennsylvania state ships for which she was paid. Beyond that, the Betsy Ross story is simply family myth.
After the war, Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphia poet, took credit for the flag’s design, but he was not taken seriously. So the men who deserve full credit for the design of the American flag remain a faceless, anonymous congressional committee.
How did the colonies win the war?
Does this sound familiar? The world’s most powerful nation is caught up in a war against a small guerrilla army. This superpower must resupply its troops from thousands of miles away, a costly endeavor, and support for the war at home is tentative, dividing the nation’s people and leadership. The rebels also receive financial and military support from the superpower’s chief military and political antagonist. As the war drags on and casualties mount, generals are disgraced and the rebels gain momentum, even in defeat.
The United States in Vietnam? It could be. But it is also the story of the British loss of the American colonies. There are numerous parallels between the two conflicts. For the United States, substitute England under George III, the dominant world power of the day, but caught up in a draining colonial conflict that stretches its resources. For the Vietcong, substitute the colonial army under Washington, a ragtag collection if ever there was one, who used such unheard-of tactics as disguising themselves in British uniforms and attacking from the rear. British generals, accustomed to precisely drawn battle formations, were completely taken aback, just as American commanders schooled in the tank warfare of World War II were unprepared for the jungles of Vietnam. For foreign support, substitute England’s chief European adversary, France (as well as Spain and the Netherlands) for the Soviet (and Red Chinese) supplying of the Vietcong.
There can be no question that without France’s armies, money, and supplies (as much as 90 percent of the American gunpowder used in the war came from France), the American forces could not have won. Why did the French do it? Certainly King Louis XVI and his charming wife, Marie Antoinette, had no particular sympathy for antimonarchist, democratic rabble. Their motive, actually the strategy of a pro-American minister, the Comte de Vergennes, was simple: to bloody England’s nose in any way they could and perhaps even win back some of the territory lost after the Seven Years War. Had the monarchy and aristocracy of France known that their own subjects would be greatly inspired by the American Revolution a few years later, the French royalty might have thought the matter over a bit longer. An American loss might have saved their necks.
C’est la vie!
Equally important to America’s victory was the consistent bungling of the British high command, which treated the war as an intolerable inconvenience. At any number of points in the fighting, particularly in the early years, before France was fully committed, aggressive generalship from various British commanders might have turned the tide.
If Washington’s army had been destroyed after Long Island or Germantown. . .
If Congress had been captured and shipped off to England for trial—and most likely the noose. . .
And what if England had “won”? Could it possibly have maintained sovereignty over a large, prosperous, diverse, and expanding America, a vast territory far richer in resources than England? It is unlikely. Independence was a historical inevitability, in one form or another. It was simply an idea whose time had come, and America was not alone, as the revolutions that followed in Europe would prove.
The British had to weigh the costs of maintaining their dominance against its returns. They would have seen, as America did in Vietnam, and as the Soviets did more recently in Afghanistan, that the costs of such wars of colonial domination are usually more than a nation is willing or able to bear.
It’s a pity that America’s military and political leaders never learned a lesson from our own past, a fact that speaks volumes about the arrogance of power.
The Peace of Paris, negotiated for the United States by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay, was formally signed on February 3, 1783. At the same time, England signed treaties with America’s allies, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. The most important thing the treaty did was to recognize the independence of the United States of America. Beyond that, it marked the boundaries of the new nation.
The United States now meant everything from the Atlantic west to the Mississippi River, save New Orleans and the Floridas. This area was ceded by England back to Spain as part of New Spain, the massive empire that now stretched from South America north, well into coastal California, and included much of the American Southwest, east to the Florida peninsula. The northern border was set at the Great Lakes and along the provincial frontiers of Quebec and Nova Scotia.
During the eight years of the American Revolution, there had been more than 1,300 land and sea battles. American losses have been calculated conservatively at 25,324. Of these, only 6,284 were killed in action. More than 10,000 died of diseases such as smallpox and dysentery, and another 8,500 died while captives of the British.
The victory also left America with a considerable foreign debt. In a report to Congress several years later, Alexander Hamilton would place this debt at $11,710,379 (in addition to domestic and state debts totaling more than $65 million). This enormous debt was just one of the problems that would threaten the new nation in its first years of independence. Behaving like thirteen independent countries, the states churned out worthless paper money. New York began to place taxes on every farmer’s boat that crossed the Hudson River from New Jersey.
Must Read:
Liberty!: The American Revolution
by Thomas Fleming;
Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution
by A. J. Langguth;
The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire
by Francis Jennings for a very different view of the Revolution as the work of a privileged elite, dreaming of empire.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON,
in a 1786 letter to Robert Morris:
There is a not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the gradual abolition of [slavery].
D
R
. H
ARRIS
, a black veteran of the Revolution, speaking to the Congregational and Anti-Slavery Society of Francestown, New Hampshire:
I served in the Revolution, in General Washington’s army. . . . I have stood in battle, where balls, like hail, were flying all around me. The man standing next to me was shot by my side—his blood spotted upon my clothes, which I wore for weeks. My nearest blood, except that which run in my veins, was shed for liberty. My only brother was shot dead instantly in the Revolution. Liberty is dear to my heart—I cannot endure the thought, that my countrymen should be slaves.
Some 5,000 blacks served in the Revolution. (Perhaps another 1,000, mostly runaways who had been promised freedom, fought for the British.) When George Washington had taken command, he told recruiters not to enlist any more Africans. Fearful of a slave insurrection, southerners in Congress balked at the idea of arming and training blacks. But when the army’s numbers started to thin, Washington reversed himself and asked Congress to resolve the issue. The Congress voted to allow any black to reenlist if he had already served. But as Thomas Fleming noted in his history of the Revolution, “The break in the color line would eventually make the Continental army more integrated than any American force except the armies that fought in the Vietnam and Gulf wars.”
Chapter Three
Growth of a Nation
From the Creation of the Constitution to Manifest Destiny
What was the Constitutional Convention?
What three-letter word is not in the Constitution?
Who were the Federalists, and what were the Federalist Papers?
Who elected George Washington the first president?
Guarantees in the Bill of Rights
Why didn’t Jefferson like Hamilton?
Was George Washington killed by his doctors?
What was the Revolution of 1800?
How did America purchase Louisiana?
Why did Aaron Burr shoot Alexander Hamilton?
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: Did he or didn’t he?
Who were Tecumseh and the Prophet?
What was the War of 1812 about?
What was the Missouri Compromise?
What was the “corrupt bargain”?
What were Jacksonian democracy and the spoils system?
Who was Tocqueville, and why did he say all those things about America?
What made the South fear a slave named Nat Turner?
Why did the Mormons move west?
A
fter the shooting stopped, the United States of America was recognized by the world’s major powers as independent. But this gangling new child was an ugly duckling among nations, a loose collection of states under the Articles of Confederation, not yet a completely sovereign nation. The big question was “Now what?” Following eight years of fighting, this new entity had to face the realities of governing. As might be expected, different people from different states had a lot of different ideas about how that should be done.
But during the next seventy-odd years, powered by dynamic forces, America would expand swiftly and aggressively. However, in that expansion, and in the way in which the new nation formed itself, the seeds of the next great American crisis were being sown. This chapter highlights the milestones in a developing America between the end of the Revolution and the prelude to the Civil War.
Rebellion, as the Founding Fathers would quickly discover, could be a catchy tune.
Besides independence, the end of the war had brought economic chaos to America. As with most wars, the Revolution had been good for business. Everybody works, soldiers spend money, factories turn out ships and guns, armies buy supplies. That’s the good news. The bad news is that after war comes inflation and depression. The years immediately following the Revolution were no different. America went through bad economic times. Established trading patterns were in disarray. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had no power to tax. In the thirteen states, where power was centered, the separate currencies had created an economic shambles.
While the situation was bad almost everywhere, in Massachusetts, the home of the Adamses and birthplace of the patriot cause, the economic dislocation boiled over into bloodshed between Americans. Like the prewar Bacon’s Rebellion, the Regulator Movement in the Carolinas, and the Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania, this “little rebellion,” as Thomas Jefferson would call it, was a sign of serious class conflict, a symptom of the economic tension that had always existed in America between, on one side, the working-class frontier farmers, inner-city laborers, the servant class, smaller merchants, and free blacks, and on the other side the “haves,” the landed, slaveholding gentry, and the international merchants of the larger cities.
