The American Revolution: A History (9 page)
The “United States of America” thus possessed a literal meaning that is hard to appreciate today. The Confederation resembled more an alliance among closely cooperating sovereign states than a single government—something not all that different from the present-day European Union. Each state annually sent a delegation to the Confederation Congress (called by some states “our embassy”), and each delegation had only a single vote. The Confederation was intended to be and remained, as Article 3 declared, “a firm league of friendship” among states jealous of their individuality. Not only ratification of the Articles of Confederation, but also any subsequent changes in the document required the consent of all the states.
The local self-interest of the states prolonged the congressional debates over the adoption of the Articles and delayed their unanimous ratification until 1781. The major disputes—over representation, the apportionment of the states’ contribution to the Union, and the disposition of the western lands—involved concrete state interests. Virginia and other populous states argued for proportional representation in the Congress, but these larger states had to give way to the small states’ determination to maintain equal state representation in the unicameral Congress. After much wrangling over the basis for each state’s financial contribution to the general treasury, the Confederation eventually settled on the proportion of people in each state, with slaves counting as three fifths of a person.
The states’ rivalries were most evident in the long, drawn-out controversy over the disposition of the western lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The Articles sent to the states in 1778 for ratification gave the Congress no authority over the unsettled lands of the interior, and this omission delayed their approval. States like Virginia and Massachusetts with ancient charter claims to this western territory wanted to maintain control over the disposal of their land. But states without such claims, such as Maryland and Rhode Island, wanted the land pooled in a common national domain under the authority of Congress. Only in 1781 after Virginia, the state with charter rights to the largest amount of western territory, finally agreed to surrender its claims to the United States was the way prepared for other land cessions and for ratification of the Articles of Confederation by all the states. But the Confederation had to promise, in return for the cession of claims by Virginia and the other states, that the national domain would “be settled and formed into distinct republican states.”
The Congress drew up land ordinances in 1784 and 1785 that provided for the Northwest Territory to be surveyed and formed into neat and orderly townships. In 1787 it adopted the famous Northwest Ordinance that at once acknowledged, as the British in the 1760s had not, the settlers’ destiny in the West. In the succeeding decades the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Ordinance of 1787 remained the basis for the sale and the political evolution of America’s western territories.
Apart from winning the War of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the greatest accomplishment of the Confederation Congress. It created an entirely new notion of empire and at a stroke solved the problem of relating colonial dependencies to the central authority that Great Britain had been unable to solve in the 1760s and ’70s. When the monarchies of early modern Europe claimed new dominions by conquest or colonization, they inevitably considered these new provincial additions as permanently peripheral and inferior to the metropolitan center of the realm. But the Northwest Ordinance, which became the model for the development of much of the Southwest as well, promised an end to such permanent second-class colonies. It guaranteed to the settlers basic legal and political rights and set forth the unprecedented principle that new states settled in the West would enter the union “on an equal footing with the original States, in all respects whatsoever.” Settlers could leave the older states with the assurances that they were not losing their political liberties and that they would be allowed eventually to form new republics as sovereign and independent as the other states of the Union. With such a principle there was presumably no limit to the westward expansion of the empire of the United States.
THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE
However important constitution-making of the states and the Union may have been to the Revolutionaries, it would mean nothing if independence were not achieved. Once Britain had determined to enforce its authority with troops, Americans knew that they had to take up arms to support their beliefs and their hopes for the future. For over a year before the Declaration of Independence, American and British forces had been at war. It was a war that would go on for nearly eight years—the longest conflict in American history until the Vietnam War two centuries later.
The war for independence passed through a series of distinct phases, growing and widening until what had begun in British eyes as a breakdown in governmental authority in a section of the empire became a worldwide struggle. For the first time in the eighteenth century, Great Britain found itself diplomatically isolated; at one point in 1779 it was even threatened with French invasion. The war for American independence thus eventually became an important episode in Britain’s long struggle with France for global supremacy, a struggle that went back a century and would continue for another generation into the nineteenth century.
British troops had suffered heavy losses in their first clashes with the American militia in Massachusetts in the spring of 1775—at Lexington and Concord and especially in the bloody battle of Bunker Hill. This initial experience convinced the British government that it was not simply dealing with a New England mob, and it swept away almost every objection the members of the ministry had to a conquest of the colonies. During the summer of 1775 the Second Continental Congress appointed fourteen generals, authorized the invasion of Canada, and organized a Continental field army under George Washington. Aware that the southern colonies were suspicious of Massachusetts’s fanaticism, John Adams pushed for the selection of the forty-three-year-old Virginia militia colonel as commander in chief. It was an inspired choice. Washington, who attended the Congress in uniform, looked the part: he was tall and composed, with a dignified soldierlike air that inspired confidence. He was, as one congressman said, “no harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm.”
All these congressional actions only confirmed the British government’s realization that it was now involved in a military rather than a police action. This new understanding of what Britain was up against dictated a conventional eighteenth-century military policy of maneuver and battle between organized armies.
This change of strategy required that the British evacuate Boston and transfer their main forces to New York, with its presumably more sympathetic population, its superior port, and its central position. Accordingly, in the summer of 1776, Sir William Howe, who replaced Gage as commander in chief of the British army in North America, sailed into New York Harbor with a force of more than 30,000 men. Howe aimed to cut New England off from the other rebels and to defeat Washington’s army in a decisive battle. He was to spend the next two frustrating years trying to realize this plan.
On the face of it, a military struggle seemed to promise all the advantage to Great Britain. Britain was the most powerful nation in the world, with a population of about 11 million, compared with only 2.5 million colonists, a fifth of whom were black slaves. The British navy was the largest in the world, with nearly half its ships initially committed to the American struggle. The British army was a well-trained professional force, numbering at one point in 1778 nearly 50,000 troops stationed in North America alone; and more than 30,000 hired German mercenaries were added to this force during the war.
To confront this military might the Americans had to start from scratch. The Continental Army they created numbered usually less than 5,000 troops, supplemented by state militia units of varying sizes. In most cases inexperienced amateur officers served as the American military leaders. Washington, the commander in chief, for example, had been only a regimental colonel on the Virginia frontier and had little firsthand knowledge of combat. He knew nothing about moving large masses of soldiers and had never conducted a siege of a fortified position. Many of Washington’s officers were drawn from the middling ranks of the society and were hardly traditional gentlemen. There were innkeepers who were captains and shoemakers who were colonels, exclaimed an astonished French officer. Indeed, “it often happens that the Americans ask the French officers what their trade is in France.” Not surprisingly, most British officers thought that the American army was “but a contemptible band of vagrants, deserters and thieves” and no match for His Majesty’s redcoats. One British general even boasted that with a thousand grenadiers he could “go from one end of America to the other, and geld all the males, partly by force and partly by a little coaxing.”
Yet such a contrast of numbers and abilities was deceptive, for the British disadvantages were immense and perhaps overwhelming—even at the beginning when their opportunities to put down the rebellion were greatest. Great Britain had to carry on the war three thousand miles across the Atlantic, with consequent problems of communications and logistics; even supplying the army with food became a problem. At the same time, Britain had to wage a different kind of war from any the country had ever fought in the eighteenth century. A well-trained army might have been able to conquer the American forces, but, as one French officer observed at the end, America itself was unconquerable. The great breadth of territory and the wild nature of the terrain made conventional maneuverings and operations difficult and cumbersome. The fragmented and local character of authority in America inhibited decisive action by the British. There was no nerve center anywhere whose capture would destroy the rebellion. The British generals came to see that engaging Washington’s army in battle ought to be their main objective; but, said the British commander in chief, they did not know how to do it, “as the enemy moves with so much more celerity than we possibly can.”
Washington for his part realized at the outset that the American side of the war should be defensive. “We should on all occasions avoid a general Action,” he told Congress in September 1776, “or put anything to the risque unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.” Although he never saw himself as a guerrilla leader and concentrated throughout on creating a professional army with which he was often eager to confront the British in open battle, his troops actually spent a good deal of time skirmishing with the enemy, harassing them and depriving them of food and supplies whenever possible. In such circumstances the Americans’ reliance on amateur militia forces and the weakness of their organized army made the Americans, as a Swiss officer noted, more dangerous than “if they had a regular army.” The British never clearly understood what they were up against—a revolutionary struggle involving widespread support in the population. Hence they continually underestimated the staying power of the rebels and overestimated the strength of the loyalists. And in the end, independence came to mean more to the Americans than reconquest did to the English.
From the outset the English objective could never be as simple and clear-cut as the Americans’ desire for independence. Conquest by itself could not restore political relations and imperial harmony. Many people in England were reluctant to engage in a civil war, and several officers actually refused on grounds of conscience to serve in America. Although the king, the bulk of the Parliament, and most members of the English ministry were intent on subjugating America by force, the British commanders appointed in 1775 never shared this overriding urge for outright coercion. These commanders—Sir William Howe and his brother Admiral Richard, Lord Howe, who was in charge of the navy—saw themselves not simply as conquerors but also as peacemakers. They had in fact been authorized by Lord North to seek a political solution while putting down the rebellion with force. Consequently they interrupted their military operations with peace feelers to Washington and the Continental Congress, and they tried to avoid plundering and ravaging the American countryside and ports out of fear of destroying a hope for reconciliation. This “sentimental manner of waging war,” as Lord George Germain, head of the American Department, called it, weakened the morale of British officers and troops and left the loyalists confused and disillusioned.
The policy of the Howe brothers was not as ineffectual initially as it later appeared. After defeating Washington on Long Island in August 1776 and driving him from New York City in the fall of 1776, General Howe had Washington in pell-mell retreat southward. Instead of pursuing Washington across the Delaware River, Howe resorted to a piecemeal occupation of New Jersey. He extended his lines and deployed brigade garrisons at a half-dozen towns around the area with the aim of gradually convincing the rebels that the British army was invincible. Loyalist militiamen emerged from hiding and through a series of ferocious local struggles with patriot groups began to assume control of northern New Jersey. Nearly 5,000 Americans, including one signer of the Declaration of Independence, came forward to accept Howe’s offer of pardon and to swear loyalty to the crown. American prospects at the end of 1776 were as low as they ever would be during the war. These were, as Thomas Paine wrote, “times that try men’s souls.”
The Howes’ policy of leniency and pacification, however, was marred by plundering by British troops and by loyalist recriminations against the rebels. But even more important in undermining the British successes of 1776 were Washington’s brilliant strokes in picking off two of Howe’s extended outposts at Trenton on December 25–26, 1776, and at Princeton on January 3, 1777. With these victories Washington forced the British to withdraw from the banks of the Delaware and to leave the newly formed bands of loyalists to fend for themselves. Patriot morale soared, oaths of loyalty to the king declined, and patriot militia moved back into control of local areas vacated by the withdrawing British troops. With New Jersey torn by ferocious partisan or guerrilla warfare, the British again had to reconsider their plans.
