Penguin History of the United States of America (32 page)

Fortunately he also carried the champion jockey. George Washington cannot honestly be called a great fighting general, though he was a capable and aggressive one. He made some bad mistakes in his campaigns, especially in the first year or two. Matched as he was against such limited opponents as Gage, William Howe, Clinton and Cornwallis, it scarcely mattered: they made more and worse mistakes than he. What did matter was that he possessed various other qualities that made him, if not unique among commanders, at any rate highly unusual.

He had never been an especially conspicuous figure in Virginia, but he had always taken the place to which his large and well-run estates entitled him. During the first fifteen years or so in which he had farmed at Mount Vernon and gone down regularly to Williamsburg for the meetings of the House of Burgesses, he had slowly been recognized by his fellow-members of the Virginian élite (and later by the Continental Congress) as the sort of invaluable man that every enterprise needs. His judgement, if a little slow-moving, was invariably sound; he had a strong will and immense application: no detail was ever too small for his attention; yet he seldom lost his sense of proportion. Above all, his size and strength (he was a very big man) went with a tenacious, dignified, conscientious mind which never allowed difficulties, however great or disagreeable, to deflect him from the path of duty. It was as if his extra inches, like Abraham Lincoln’s, had endowed him with a spiritual shock-absorber. At any rate, no amount of unfair criticism, inadequate support, poor supplies, incompetent or treacherous subordinates, bad weather, inexperienced soldiery or any of the other thousand-and-one plagues that afflict generals was ever allowed to overwhelm his spirit; with equal resolution he kept his naturally hot temper under rigid command. Many were the occasions when a loss of nerve by the Commander-in-Chief would have meant the ruin of the American cause; indeed, on the one occasion (during the retreat from Manhattan Island in 1776) that Washington’s nerve did falter, all was very
nearly lost. But on the whole his temperament proved equal to the strain, and throughout the war, whoever else was delinquent, however justly depressed he felt (‘Fifty thousand pounds should not induce me again to undergo what I have done’), General Washington was always at his post.

The same could not be said of the men he commanded. Desertion was one of the principal causes of the chronic shortage of regular, ‘Continental’ soldiers which was always the General’s worst problem. Militiamen, untrained, reluctant to serve outside their native provinces, determined to go home as soon as their time was up, whatever the military situation, exacerbated it. It is hard to blame these reluctant heroes. Underpaid, when paid at all, in a constantly inflating currency, the Continental paper money authorized by Congress that soon became proverbially worthless; badly officered for most of the time (Washington never found enough good subordinates); unfed, unsheltered, unclothed, unequipped, through the callous neglect of the civilians, who could look even on the army’s sufferings at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in the winter of 1777–8 with indifference; oppressed by ‘Commissaries, Quartermasters, Surgeons, Barrack Masters and Captains’ whose own low pay too often led them to make illegitimate deductions from that of the men: why should they alone have martyred themselves for the American cause? It is much to their credit, as to Washington’s, that the army never melted away completely.

And, gradually, it learned the art of war. By 1777 an English officer was writing home that

though they seem to be ignorant of the precision, order and even of the principles by which large bodies are moved, yet they possess some of the requisites for making good troops, such as extreme cunning, great industry in moving ground and felling of wood, activity and a spirit of enterprise upon any advantage. Having said this much, I have no occasion to add that though it was once the
ton
of this army to treat them in the most contemptible light, they are now become a formidable enemy…

The Continental Congress can have had little idea, at the time, of how well it had acted in appointing Washington, but it soon found out. He went north to Boston in July 1775, and from his arrival there the war began to assume a tidier appearance; the American forces were set in order for a long haul.
⁵

Before the General left Philadelphia the British had made one of their blunders. If Gage was to keep control of Boston, let alone reconquer New England from that base, he needed to control the heights to north and south
of the town which commanded it and its harbour. Having neglected to secure these vital points while they were undefended, he launched an infantry attack on the northern one, Bunker Hill,
⁶
on 17 June 1775. Once again the British learned, the hard way, that they were up against a formidable foe. They carried the position, but at such fearful cost that ever since the battle has been remembered as an American rather than as a British victory.
⁷
Popular memory is right: exhausted and intimidated by this battle, Gage could attempt no more. Washington settled down to besiege him while trying to shape an army out of his very miscellaneous forces. In due course he saw that the key to Boston was now the southern position, Dorchester Heights. In the face of fearful difficulties
⁸
he and his staff gradually mustered sufficient artillery (most of it captured at the fall of Ticonderoga) and by early March 1776 it was plain that the British would either have to admit defeat and withdraw, or endure an assault which could only have one end. Wisely, they decided to withdraw – to Halifax, Nova Scotia – thus sparing Boston a bombardment. With them went many Loyalists, the first of an ever-swelling body of refugees which the war was to create. Washington, almost bloodlessly, had won his first victory. The British army never returned to Massachusetts.

They might have taken this setback as a warning to make terms with the Americans while these were yet nominally subjects of King George. Instead, the bulldog redoubled its efforts. Gage had already been superseded (he made a convenient scapegoat for the blunderers who had forced him to order the Lexington expedition). His successor was William Howe. The so-called ‘Olive Branch Petition’, Congress’s last attempt at a reconciliation, was rebuffed contemptuously; a naval blockade of American ports was proclaimed; British volunteers being in very short supply, 18,000 mercenary soldiers were hired from minor German princelings;
⁹
and a grand assault on New York was planned as the first step in the reconquest of America.

All this took time, and Howe was anyway a sluggish commander. When at last he and his admiral brother, Lord Howe (commanding the naval squadron), arrived off Long Island in the summer of 1776, the rebels had taken the final, irrevocable step.

It had been long in the making. Voices urging the complete independence
of America had grown steadily louder and more numerous ever since Lexington. Every battle since then had strengthened the feeling that reunion was impossible. So did the renewed British war-effort. Every new outrage by the mother country strengthened the desire to have done with her, the belief in her fatal corruption, the aspiration to create a new refuge, a new empire for liberty in America where her ancient flame still shone. In January 1776, a recent immigrant from England, Tom Paine, had published a pamphlet,
Common Sense
, that sold 120,000 copies. It anticipated many of the themes of United States history, and put the case for independence in savagely brilliant language:

Can we but leave posterity with a settled form of government, an independent constitution of its own, the purchase at any price will be cheap. But to expend millions for the sake of getting a few vile acts repealed, and routing the present ministry only, is unworthy the charge, and is using posterity with the utmost cruelty; because it is leaving them the great work to do, and a debt upon their books, from which they derive no advantage. Such a thought is unworthy a man of honour…

Government, said Paine, was at best a concession to man’s fallen state, ‘a mode made necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world’. Where was the true King of America? ‘I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain.’ This sort of thing seemed excellent teaching to the Calvinist ministers of New England, already denounced by the Tories as a ‘black-coated regiment’ of rebels, for they had happily sunk their innumerable doctrinal quarrels to unite in the patriot cause against the British and their bishops. They read out
Common Sense
from their pulpits. Washington commended Paine’s ‘sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning’, and doubtless they made nearly as many converts as the author later claimed. Perhaps more decisive was the fearful uncertainty of life while the great question was unresolved. Until it was settled who was to govern America, and by what authority, there was an ever-growing risk that no one would, or could. At the same time, the enormous advance that the colonies had made towards national self-consciousness is shown by the willingness of the provincial governments to wait for the decision of the Continental Congress. As early as the autumn of 1775 they had begun to seek and obtain permission from Congress to set up new constitutions. The cry went out for ‘revolutionizing all the governments’, and in May 1776 Congress, to speed the laggards, passed a resolution recommending each colony ‘where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs hath been hitherto established’ to set up a new one; in response new governing bodies appeared in what must hereafter be called the states; and one by one they instructed their Congressional delegations to vote for independence. By that instruction they again recognized the authority of Congress, and, more important, that Americans were
one people and must behave as such: if Congress could not act without the states, the states could not, in this matter, act without Congress; which body wrestled with the problem throughout the early summer at Philadelphia. Some stout patriots, such as John Dickinson, held out against independence to the very last;
¹⁰
but in spite of them the great resolutions were at length adopted. Early in June a committee was set up to carry out one of Tom Paine’s suggestions, by drafting a declaration of independence in succession to the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, compiled by Dickinson and promulgated exactly a year earlier. The members were: Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania); John Adams (Massachusetts); Roger Sherman (Connecticut); Robert R. Livingston (New York); and Thomas Jefferson (Virginia). Of the three accomplished penmen on the committee, Franklin was laid up with gout, Adams came from New England, which was lying low in Congress at the moment so as not to alarm less revolutionary regions, and Jefferson came from the most populous and important state. To him, then, fell the task of composition.

It could not have fallen to better hands. Superficially Jefferson looked like an untidy farmer. He was tall, red-haired, careless in his dress and a lover of the outdoors (next to George Washington he was reckoned to be the best horseman in Virginia). Under this commonplace exterior was the most passionately inquiring mind ever to be born in America; a mind of dazzlingly diverse talents, among them a gift for writing transparently lucid and attractive prose; a mind on fire with republican enthusiasm. He was a child of the European Enlightenment as well as of aristocratic Virginia; he had learned in a good law office how to make a case; best of all, he had been pondering and testing all the arguments for at least two years. By the end of June he had a draft ready for his colleagues.

On 2 July Congress approved the decisive resolutions, previously framed and presented by Richard Henry Lee on behalf of Virginia,

That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign alliances.

That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

Two days later, that is on 4 July, Congress voted its approval of Mr Jefferson’s document.

John Adams was never really reconciled to the adoption of 4 July as his
country’s great holiday. The actual break with Great Britain was undoubtedly effected by the resolutions of 2 July, and if that were all that counted July the Second should have become America’s great day, as Adams at the time predicted it would. Besides, he had played a leading part in the orating and arguing which had brought Congress to the sticking-point, answering Dickinson, for instance, in a notable speech on 1 July; not to mention his valuable services at an earlier date in the murky waters of Massachusetts politics. It was hard on him that his countrymen determined to commemorate, not an action, but a document, and one in which he had had so little hand. Jefferson himself at the time thought the fact of independence was more important than the words he had so carefully strung together, and thought, furthermore, that the few changes made in his text by Congress
¹¹
had ruined it. But both he and Adams were wrong.

For he had produced a masterpiece: one of the great achievements of the human spirit. Its form may seem to belie this statement, for the greater part of it (it is only some fifteen hundred words long) is a list, spirited in expression admittedly, of the chief grievances which the Americans had been denouncing since the Intolerable Acts. Today a knowledgeable reader will note that among many just complaints are some (for example, a protest about the Quebec Act) which are less than convincing; and it is impossible not to regret the degree to which Jefferson’s acceptance of the American Whig myth distorted his account of historical reality. Everything was blamed on George III (Parliament was not named once in the document, and was alluded to indirectly as sparingly as possible) and the long tale of British crimes and blunders was presented as evidence that ‘the present King of Great Britain’ had ‘in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States’, ‘a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism’. There is no doubt that by 1776 this was the almost unanimous belief of the Revolutionaries; but it was not a true belief, for all that. Had the Declaration been no more than an opportune and eloquent political manifesto its blemishes, and its occasional character, would have ensured that it was long ago forgotten: it would have diminished beside the enormous fact which it asserted, the independence of America.