Penguin History of the United States of America (31 page)

Meanwhile in Britain Lord North had prepared for the coming storm by holding a general election, which returned a Parliament much like the old one and no less resolved to reduce America to obedience. The radicals, led by Wilkes, made some effort to rouse the country against the ministry on the American question, but without success. As Burke had bitterly remarked in February, ‘Any remarkable robbery on Hounslow Heath would make more conversation than all the disturbances of America.’ Even the radicals thought America less important than Parliamentary reform. But the news, whether from Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, was now so alarming that in the midst of further aggressive preparations the minister tried to launch a conciliatory proposal, and the opposition roused itself for further mighty efforts against the fatal policy which, it seemed more and more likely, was leading straight to civil war. Chatham took the lead. On 1 February 1775 he brought forward proposals for settling the imperial question. They were sweeping: possibly even sweeping enough. Almost all the recurring colonial grievances were to be appeased by such measures as repealing every act abhorrent to the Americans, beginning with the Sugar Act; and the Continental Congress, which was planning to reconvene in May, was to be erected into what was, in effect, an American Parliament. The proposal was voted down in the Lords, 61–32; Lord North’s gestures of conciliation were approved, inadequate though they were and ineffective though they were doomed to remain; then Parliament hurried through the Restraining Act, which, in answer to the Association and non-importation, forbade any trade between the New England colonies and any British dominions (under the Navigation Acts they were already restrained from trading anywhere else) and forbade them access to the Newfoundland fisheries until the dispute was settled. Again a harsh bill became law (on 30 March) but again not until it had been fiercely attacked. Burke made one of his greatest speeches, calling for peace with America; but it was Lord Camden who uttered perhaps the gravest and wisest warning:

To conquer a great continent of 1,800 miles, containing three millions of people, all indissolubly united on the great Whig bottom of liberty and justice, seems an undertaking not to be rashly engaged in… What are the 10,000 men you have just voted out to Boston? Merely to save general Gage from the disgrace and destruction of being sacked in his entrenchments. It is obvious, my lords, that you
cannot furnish armies, or treasure, competent to the mighty purpose of subduing America… but whether France and Spain will be tame, inactive spectators of your efforts and distractions, is well worthy the considerations of your lordships.

Again in vain; the Act was passed, and on 13 April a second became law, which extended the restraints to the other colonies.

By that time the gap between war and peace was vanishing. Gage had long been virtually besieged in Boston, while the countryside hummed with drilling militiamen and military stores were piled up. The money for these activities had been voted by a Massachusetts provincial congress, which had in effect completely superseded the old General Court. Soon similar revolutionary governments would seize control in the other colonies, as the royal Governors fled to the safety of His Majesty’s ships and the conservatives prepared to defend themselves as best they might against the all-conquering patriots. But first General Gage, spurred on by a letter from the American Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, reluctantly set out to challenge the insurgent farmers. On the night of 18 April 1775 he sent what he hoped would be a secret expedition to seize or destroy a military store at Concord, twenty miles or so by road from Boston. The radicals in Boston found out; night-riders hurried ahead to warn the people that ‘the British are coming!’ At the village of Lexington, therefore, the 700 British infantrymen found in the morning a line of seventy-five volunteers, or Minute Men as they were called, drawn up to resist them. A shot rang out – fired by which side is unknown – and in a moment the redcoats had opened fire and driven the Minute Men from the field: eight had been killed, ten wounded. The British then re-formed and went on to Concord. But they accomplished nothing there, for the stores had been removed or hidden before they arrived and they were successfully attacked at the North Bridge by a force of local militiamen (the ‘embattled farmers’ of Emerson’s poem
¹⁶
who ‘fired a shot heard round the world’). The long march back to Boston was a nightmare. British casualties were heavy… So began the War of the American Revolution. It was characteristic of the way in which the British Empire had slid into ruin that the last step was taken because a minister in London thought he knew better than the man on the spot.

The war spread rapidly, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it flared up simultaneously in many places. In Virginia the British managed to seize the colonial store of gunpowder at Williamsburg. This was more than offset by the fall of Fort Ticonderoga to the rebels on 10 May, which opened the road to Canada. On the same day the Second Continental Congress met.

It had several decisions immediately forced upon it. Since war had come, it had to be organized, and it was of the highest importance that all the colonies should have a stake in the conflict. Already there were volunteers
from beyond New England in the force that, following Lexington and Concord, had sprung up outside Boston. The Congress took this force under its wing and voted to raise more troops. The command of the army was a question that had to be settled. It should go, Congress felt, to a Southerner, for the sake of American unity – a decision which greatly disappointed John Hancock. George Washington was the inevitable choice. He came from the right colony, and what was known about his military experience suggested that he had at least as much capacity as anyone else at the Congress – not that that was saying very much. He thought himself unfit for the post and took it only as a duty: he told Patrick Henry, with tears in his eyes, that ‘From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.’ He was wrong, of course. No greater stroke of good luck ever befell America than the availability of that remarkable man at that crucial juncture, except the availability, eighty-five years later, of Abraham Lincoln. Washington’s entry on the stage opened a new act in the history of the Revolution.

An old era ended symbolically some months later. As late as the debate on the Intolerable Acts the country gentlemen of England sitting in Parliament were deluding themselves that, if they supported the government, funds would be extracted from America that would avert the need for a threatened rise in the land-tax. They were appalled by the succeeding turn of events. Then, in the autumn of 1775, the Americans invaded Canada, thus turning, it seemed, their defensive war into an offensive one. The duty of Englishmen was obvious. Lord North moved that for 1776 the land-tax should stand at four shillings, and the country gentlemen patriotically acquiesced. The ghost of George Grenville did not know whether to laugh or cry.

And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write… I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name.

Revelation iii, 7–8

It is the will of heaven that America be great – she may not deserve it – her exertions have been small, her policy wretched, nay, her supineness in the past winter would, according to the common operations of things, mark her for destruction.

General Henry Knox, 1777

Under a full persuasion of the justice of our cause, I cannot entertain an idea that it will finally sink, though it may remain for some time under a cloud.

General George Washington, 1776

From the moment that war broke out, British rule in the thirteen colonies was at an end. The fighting that followed was, from one American point of view, irrelevant, for it proceeded merely from the British attempt to recapture and hold by force what had been created and maintained, before 1765, by consent; and the attempt failed. The genie of American independence could not be put back in the bottle. But from another, equally American and more humane point of view, the war was as important in American history as the movement which preceded it. It was the second saga (the first being that of the settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth, the third the Civil War). In it a nation was born and discovered its identity, its destiny. Without the disasters (the several occasions when all was nearly lost) and the suffering, as well as the triumphs, the American people as such, the entity which is the subject of this book, might never have, come
into being. Too early success might have left a handful of squabbling little states, under the informal and treacherous tutelage of France and Spain, clinging to the seaboard while the great continent behind them was developed by the peoples of Canada, Louisiana and Mexico. As it happened, the war produced a more remarkable outcome than any of the might-have-beens. The purpose of this chapter is to show what that was, and how it came about.

The British lost, but it took seven years and a world war to beat them. The effects of the military struggle thus had time to make themselves felt in every corner of the colonies (or states, as they soon began to call themselves). Soldiers, sailors, members of Congress, farmers, town-dwellers, men, women and children, all experienced the war, whether as a bloody struggle on their doorsteps, or as a terrible inflation which upset all the familiar patterns of trade, or as a general scarcity of goods (which was fine for those who produced them, and especially for the farmers who grew the food the armies needed), or, most of all, as a revolution: an overturning of all the old political ways and means. War hurried on change and in many cases determined its direction. It could not have done this if victory had come to either side as promptly as was hoped at Philadelphia and Westminster. The first question to settle, then, is why the war lasted so long.

British incompetence helped. It will not do to make too much of this. In terms of ships, men and money, Great Britain put forth a greater effort than she ever had before, even in the Seven Years War. The war ministers (Lord George Germain for the army, Lord Sandwich for the navy) were able and conscientious, whatever legend says, even if they were not the equals of Chatham or Churchill. The old order in England might be corrupt, but it had always been at its best as a war-machine, at any rate since the reign of James II, and modern notions of rationality were in fact making themselves felt first in the fighting services.
¹
Army and navy had alike been allowed to decay to danger point since 1763; but they were restored to a surprisingly vigorous condition surprisingly soon. (By contrast, the new order emerging in America found almost anything easier than the organization and support of an army, unless it was the organization and support of a fleet.) If British generals were, at best, merely competent, and were all too often less than that,
²
there was one great admiral, Rodney, and one who was later to prove himself great, Lord Howe.
³
Although, in the end, the British had to give up all their holdings in North America south of
Canada, they kept their empire everywhere else. They were defeated, but not conquered.

Still, defeated they were. Partly it was a matter of morale. There was no middle ground for the Americans: for them it was either victory or total submission. They were fighting for their fundamental interests in a way that the British, for all their huffing and puffing about their greatness and glory being at stake, were not. Consequently there was a limit to the islanders’ exertions. As Piers Mackesy puts it, ‘… in England before the French Revolution the line was sharply drawn by concern for individual liberty and low taxation’.
⁴
Of course the Americans also drew this line, and very hampering their leaders found it; but, with their backs to the wall, they were unlikely to be the first to give up the struggle because it was oppressive and expensive. George III and his ministers thus had, in the last analysis, a narrower political base than George Washington and the Continental Congress. And, as the great quarrel had been begun, so it was continued: again and again the British high command, whether at home or in the colonies, made disastrous blunders and threw away victory. The war was long partly because the British did not know how to win and would not admit that they had lost.

The rebels committed similar errors (they were British too, after all). Having appointed George Washington, Congress did at least have the sense to stick with him. But it made his task difficult to an extent that would have driven any less iron-souled man to throw in his hand. Again and again his army dissolved about him because the civilian authorities did not keep it paid, clothed, fed, sheltered, armed or reinforced. In large part this failure arose from the jealousy that festered between Congress and the state governments, itself an inevitable consequence of the primitive organization of this, the first attempt at an American Union. The state governments regularly left Congress without funds or authority, often because they themselves were abandoned by their citizens. But explanations and excuses never justify incompetence. It is impossible to follow the history of Washington’s campaigns without indignation at the inhumanity of the politicians and astonishment at their short-sightedness. They assumed – correctly, as it happens, though the arguments they put forward were absurd – that the American strategic position was, basically, very strong. That of the British, condemned as they were to attempt the conquest of thirteen energetically self-governing states at the end of a 3,000-mile supply-line (since they never gained enough American territory to secure an adequate foraging area) while constantly looking over their shoulders for fear of the French, was very weak. They were always short of manpower, and so could not endure losses in battle: ‘Our army is so small that we cannot even afford a victory,’ said one of their commanders, truly enough, though he was speaking of the largest force Great Britain had ever sent to North America. There was hope
of victory only if Washington’s army could be utterly destroyed. For that army could not be replaced, and without it there was nothing to stop the British from taking all the principal cities, controlling the seaboard and eventually breaking up the Revolutionary governments, including the Continental Congress. There would, no doubt, have been prolonged and bitter guerrilla resistance; British victory might well have been fruitless; but the great experiment launched in 1776 would have been aborted, and with it many a hope. At the very least, the Americans would have suffered even more grievously than they did. The survival of Washington’s army as an effective force was therefore the first, or should have been the first, of rebel war-aims. Instead it was, or seemed at times to be, the last. Again and again nothing but luck, or that Providence which is proverbially supposed to protect idiots, drunkards and the United States of America, stood between Washington and undeserved destruction. The Derby favourite had entered the race with a bag of cement up.