Don’t Know Much About History

Somebody dumped some tea into Boston Harbor. Somebody else hung some lights in a church steeple. Paul Revere went riding around the countryside at midnight. Jefferson penned the Declaration. There were a few battles and a rough winter at Valley Forge. But George Washington kicked out the British.

That’s the sum of the impression many people keep of the American Revolution. It was not that simple or easy.

This chapter highlights some of the major events in the colonial period leading up to the War of Independence, along with the milestones in the political and military victory over England.

AMERICAN VOICES

An account of the battle against the Pequot Indians, from GOVERNOR WILLIAM BRADFORD’S History of the Plymouth Plantation:

It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them. . . .

What was King Philip’s War?

We tend to think of the colonial period after the early “starving time” as a rather calm era in which Yankee resourcefulness and the Puritan work ethic came to the fore, forging a new American character that would burst forth into nationhood in 1776.

Overlooked in this view is the genocidal campaign carried out against the Indians by the Pilgrim fathers and other colonists. The English, French, and Dutch could be as ruthlessly cruel and deadly as the worst of the conquistadores. In 1643, for instance, following the murder of a Dutch farmer, the governor of New Amsterdam ordered the massacre of the Wappinger, a friendly tribe that had come to the Dutch seeking shelter. Eighty Indians were killed in their sleep, decapitated, and their heads displayed on poles in Manhattan. A Dutch lady kicked the heads down the street. One captive was castrated, skinned alive, and forced to eat his own flesh as the Dutch governor looked on and laughed.

In New England, the first of two Indian wars was fought against the Pequot, a powerful Mohican clan treated by the English as a threat. Urged on by Boston preachers and using a trumped-up murder charge as a pretext, the Puritans declared all-out war on the Pequot in 1637.

It was not a war fought by the chivalrous standards of European engagement. The Puritans sacked and burned Indian villages by night. Aided by loyal Narragansett and Mohican forces, the colonial equivalent of a search-and-destroy team entered a stockaded Pequot town near the Mystic River, slaughtered its 600 inhabitants, and burned the village. In the only other confrontation of the war, a group of Pequot was trapped. The men were killed, the boys sold to slavers, and the women and girls kept by the Puritans as slaves. As a tribe, the Pequot were practically exterminated.

The English maintained peace for nearly forty years thanks to their old allies, Massasoit’s Wampanoag—saviors of the Pilgrims—and the Narragansett led by Canonicus (who had sheltered Roger Williams after he was banished from Boston). When these two chiefs died, the English were ready to complete the subjugation of the New England Indians. But Massasoit’s son Metacom, called King Philip by the English for his adoption of European dress and customs, struck back.

The fighting took place in the summer of 1676, and for the colonists it wasn’t as easy as the Pequot battles had been. The combat was the fiercest in New England history, and far bloodier than much of the fighting during the Revolution. Metacom’s Indians were equipped with guns and armor acquired through trade, and he was an aggressive leader. The outcome of this war was not assured, particularly in the early going. But the colonists had too much on their side: superior numbers—including 500 Mohican gunmen, blood rivals of the Wampanoag—and devastating battle tactics, including a return to the wholesale massacre of noncombatants.

King Philip was ultimately killed, his head displayed on a pole. His wife and son, the grandson of the chief who had saved the Pilgrims, were sold into slavery in the West Indies, an act of mercy according to the leading Puritan clerics.

What was Nat Bacon’s Rebellion?

As the New England colonists learned at great cost from Metacom, the “Indian problem” was not a simple matter. Massed confrontations were risky, so new tactics emerged. The colonists found an effective measure in the “scalp bounty,” a Dutch innovation in which a fee was paid for Indian scalps. The common conception is of Indians as scalp takers, but it was the colonists who adopted the tactic as a means of Indian control, and it even became a profitable enterprise. In the Bay Colony in 1703, a scalp brought 12 pounds sterling, a price inflated to 100 pounds by 1722. The most famous American scalp taker of the colonial period was a woman named Hannah Dustin, who was taken captive in 1695 in Haverhill, Massachusetts. She and two other captives killed ten of the twelve Indians holding them. Dustin left but then returned to take their scalps, believing that the Massachusetts Bay Colony would still pay a bounty for the scalps. In her hometown, Dustin was later memorialized with a statue showing her holding a hatchet in one hand and the scalps in the other. It was the first permanent statue built to honor a woman in American history. (The story of Hannah Dustin and relations between colonial settlers and Indians, especially in New England, is recounted in more detail in my recent book America’s Hidden History.)

In 1676, while New England struggled against King Philip, the Indian issue boiled over into something different in Virginia. This overlooked episode, known as Nat Bacon’s Rebellion, can be seen as another in a series of wrongs committed against the Indians. But it was also a demonstration of a new anti-authority sentiment in America, a foreshadowing of the Revolutionary spirit.

A cousin to the scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, Nathaniel Bacon was a young planter and an up-and-coming member of Virginia’s ruling elite. At the time, Virginians were fighting sporadic battles with the Susquehannock, the result of treaties broken by the English. When his plantation overseer was killed, Bacon grew angry at what he thought was the docile Indian policy of Virginia’s Governor Berkeley. Without the governor’s permission, Bacon raised a militia force of 500 men and vented his rage on the Indians. When his little army attacked the peaceful Occaneechee (instead of the more warlike Susquehannock), Bacon became an immediate local hero, especially among the Indian-hating frontier colonists who favored pushing farther west. In his Declaration of the People, written exactly 100 years before another Virginian wrote another declaration, Bacon criticized the Berkeley administration for levying unfair taxes, placing favorites in high positions, and not protecting the western farmers from Indians. Governor Berkeley branded Bacon a traitor, but granted some of the reforms he demanded, and Bacon was later pardoned, having apologized.

When Bacon felt that the governor had reneged on his pledge to pursue the Indians, the fiery rebel focused his anger toward the colonial government. In the first popular rebellion in colonial America, Bacon led troops of lower-class planters, servants, and some free and slave blacks to Jamestown and burned it. Faced with a true rebellion, Governor Berkeley fled. An English naval squadron was sent to capture Bacon, who died of dysentery before they reached him, and the remnants of his backwoods army were rounded up, with two dozen of them ending up on the gallows.

Nat Bacon’s Rebellion was the first of almost twenty minor uprisings against colonial governments, including the Paxton uprising in Pennsylvania in 1763, Leisler’s Rebellion in New York in 1689, and the Regulator Rebellion in South Carolina in 1771. All of these were revolts against the colonial “haves,” those wealthy colonists who owned the bulk of America’s land and controlled its prosperity, and the “have-nots,” often backwoodsmen or lower-class farmers struggling for survival. By adding these bloody outbreaks of popular resentment against the colonial “establishment” to the numerous riots and slave revolts of the pre-Revolutionary period, the picture of colonial gentility is destroyed. Instead we get a clouded image of unsettled grievances waiting to boil over.

Who were the witches of Salem?

Modern-day Salem does a good business in lightheartedly promoting its Halloween capital image. The town may have more psychics and tarot readers per capita than anywhere else in America. But for the twenty people who died there in 1692, there was little humor in the affair. The hysteria developed, as many New England disputes had, out of religious infighting. New England was a theocracy, a Puritan church state in which church and government were closely connected. And since Puritanism then controlled the politics and economy of most of New England, such a controversy among churchmen was no small matter.

Salem Village was created in 1672 by a group of rural families who wanted their own church instead of going to church in the larger town of nearby Salem, a prosperous trading town. Several years of haggling over ministers followed until Samuel Parris, a former merchant and Harvard dropout, was called and arrived in Salem Village in 1689. No peacemaker, Parris failed to calm his troubled parish, and in two years’ time things went haywire. In January 1692, the minister’s daughter Betty and his niece Abigail, aged nine and eleven, and twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, daughter of one of the town’s most powerful men, began to act strangely. So did five other young girls. A doctor diagnosed them as bewitched and under the influence of an “Evil Hand.” Suspicion immediately fell on Tituba, the Parris family’s West Indian slave, who had been teaching the girls fortune-telling games.

At first, the slave Tituba and two elderly townswomen, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn, were arrested on February 29, 1692, accused of witchery, and a general court jailed them on suspicion of witchcraft. But their trial triggered an astonishing wave of accusations, and three of the young girls, basking in their sudden notoriety, ignited a storm of satanic fear throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Governor William Phips convened a special court that formally charged more than 150 people.

The three Salem Village girls were the chief witnesses, and even though they said they had concocted the whole affair for “sport,” the trials continued. The charge of witchery soon became a means to settle village feuds. Reason was turned upside-down and the court was right out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. To escape the hangman’s noose, the panic-stricken accused often “confessed” to anything, including broomstick rides and sex with the Devil. Professions of innocence or criticism of the proceedings were tantamount to guilt. Refusal to implicate a neighbor meant a death sentence.

There was nothing peculiarly American about these witch trials. In fact, America was relatively free of the far more murderous rampage of witch hunts that had swept Europe for centuries. Between 1300 and 1700, thousands of people, mostly women, had been executed in Europe. Eventually twenty-eight suspected witches, most of them women, were convicted in Salem. Five of them “confessed” and were spared, two escaped, and a pregnant woman was pardoned. But in the end, nineteen “witches” were hanged, and the husband of one convicted witch was “pressed” to death, or suffocated under a pile of stones for refusing to plead. Three of the executed said they had actually participated in “malefic practices” or black magic. At the belated urging of Increase Mather (1639–1723), the president of Harvard, and other Puritan ministers, Governor Phips called off the trials that were literally ripping the colony apart. He may have been influenced by the fact that his own wife had been accused.

So what caused this extraordinary outbreak? Start with the idea that the girls were actually possessed. The Christian belief in the existence of the Devil is widely accepted in modern America. There have been reports that the pope himself has performed exorcisms. So, for some people, the concept of satanic possession is entirely plausible, if not scientifically verifiable.

Were the girls simply playacting? There is little doubt that they were young girls whose wild stories were used to attract attention, but then got out of hand. It is a plausible explanation, especially when set against the tenor of the times when people were more than willing to accept that the Devil walked in New England, a refrain that they heard every day of their lives, and certainly from the pulpits on the Sabbath.

But that still does not completely explain the strange behavior that was documented and seemed to go beyond playacting. Perhaps the girls had inadvertently discovered what we might call “magic mushrooms”? An intriguing scientific answer to the behavior of the Salem girls was put forth by behavioral psychologist Linda Caporeal, who likened their actions to those of LSD users. While there was no LSD in colonial Massachusetts, there was ergot, a fungus that affects rye grain and the natural substance from which LSD is derived. Toxicologists know that ergot-contaminated foods can lead to convulsions, delusions, hallucinations, and many other symptoms that are present in the records of the Salem trials. At the time, rye was a staple grain in Salem, and the “witches” lived in a region of swampy meadows that would have bred the fungus. Caporeal’s theory is based on circumstantial evidence and is unprovable, but is quite intriguing nonetheless.

Natural highs aside, there is another medical explanation. Were the girls mentally ill? Did they suffer from a neurotic condition that doctors like Freud later called hysteria? As Frances Hill writes, “There can be no doubt that what beset the Goodwin children, Elizabeth Knapp, and all the others . . . was clinical hysteria. The extraordinary body postures, inexplicable pains, deafness, dumbness, and blindness, meaningless babbling, refusal to eat, destructive and self-destructive behavior . . . are just the same in all three accounts. So are the exhibitionism, the self-control even in apparent abandonment and the complete power over parents. . .” According to Hill, clinical hysteria is understood differently today, and one of its most frequent forms of expression is anorexia, the eating disorder that primarily affects adolescent girls. She also notes that hysteria often occurs among ill-educated, rural populations.

Whatever the real cause, the incident at Salem had no real lasting impact on the course of American history. However, it certainly demonstrated a strain of intolerance and stiff-necked sanctimoniousness of the New England Puritan spirit. The incident also demonstrates the danger of a church state, an institution vigorously avoided by the Framers of the Constitution. The failure of an entire community to prevent the madness was a sad tribute to moral cowardice, a trait not limited in American history to either New England or the colonial period. (Another “witch hunt” with eerie parallels to the Salem affair but far more damaging was carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy against alleged Communists in government in the 1950s, and is covered in Chapter 7. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, written in 1953 in response to the McCarthy Red Scare, and filmed in 1997 with Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis, is a compelling dramatic treatment of the Salem incident.)

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the Salem incident underscores the importance of the protections for the accused that the Framers would solidify in the Constitution and, to a greater extent, in the Bill of Rights about one hundred years after the Salem trials. The rule of law—presumption of innocence, jury trials, right to counsel, and other protections that were codified as the birthright of Americans and the foundation of the American legal system—were all lacking in 1691. They might well have saved innocent lives. That is an important lesson to keep in mind whenever panic threatens to overcome the restraints that governments and people are often too willing to abandon in the name of security.

Must Read: A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials by Frances Hill.

AMERICAN VOICES

Puritan leader COTTON MATHER, writing in 1705 to Rev. John Williams, held captive by the French, after a French-Indian raid on the settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704:

My Dear Brother,

You are carried into the Land of the Canadiens for your good. God has called you to glorify Him in that land. Your patience, your constancy, your Resignation under your vast Affliction, bring more glory to Him, than ye best Activity in any other Serviceableness. You visit Heaven with prayers, and are visited of Heaven with comfort, Our prayers unite with yours. You are continually and affectionately remembered in ye prayers of New England. The faithful, throughout ye country, remember you, publickly, privately, Secretly.

Williams was a minister in the colonial village of Deerfield in western Massachusetts. During a February 1704 raid by the French and their Indian allies, some forty-eight men, women, and children were massacred. The raid’s purpose was to take Williams hostage and exchange him for a French prisoner then being held in Boston by the British. Williams was eventually “redeemed” after negotiations. But his seven-year-old daughter, Eunice, remained with her Indian captors. To the great horror of her Puritan family, Eunice joined the Indians, embraced the Catholicism they had learned from the French Jesuits, and took a Mohawk husband.

Must Read: The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America by John Demos.

What was the Great Awakening?

Another, more benevolent outpouring of religious fervor swept the middle colonies, New England, and the rest of the colonies in the 1740s. A wave of fundamental, orthodox Protestantism that touched every colony, the Great Awakening was largely created by two powerful, charismatic evangelists who—without benefit of television crusades and religious theme parks—would have put the likes of such modern “televangelists” as Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Oral Roberts to shame.

American-born Jonathan Edwards, pastor of a church in Northampton, Massachusetts, became famous for his fire-and-brimstone, pit-of-hell sermons, which provoked near hysteria in his listeners. Edwards was responding to a softening of religious attitudes that had been occurring throughout the colonies. As the colonies prospered, attention had turned from observing the Sabbath to such earthly pursuits as real estate, slave trading, the rum business, and other profitable worldly enterprises. In the most famous of his sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards likened his sinning listeners to a spider hung over a flame. When his popularity and influence later waned, Edwards became a missionary to the Indians and was later appointed president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), but died before taking office.

(Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr, would later attend the school that had been cofounded by Aaron Burr Sr. Among Burr’s classmates was a young Virginian, James Madison.)

George Whitefield, an Oxford-trained Anglican minister, was one of those influenced by Edwards. An orator of legendary ability, Whitefield attracted thousands to his outdoor meetings. His emotionally charged sermons chastised his listeners and then brought the promise of salvation. Even Benjamin Franklin, no model of piety, was moved by Whitefield and commented on how he transformed all who heard him. But Edwards and Whitefield’s influence went beyond religion. Their ardent followers tended to be lower or middle class, with little education or influence. The wealthy, powerful elite of America, its new ruling class, preferred traditional worship, and the differences between these factions threatened to turn radical.

Although the Awakening eventually ran its course, it did have a considerable long-term impact on America. In a practical sense, the split among the various factions encouraged the founding of several new colleges, including Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth. In political terms, the divisions the Awakening had created contributed to a new spirit of toleration and secularism. The old-guard Puritans no longer held complete control over church and political matters. New religious forces forced the loosening of ties between church and state throughout the colonies, a new secular spirit that would become embedded in the Constitution.

AMERICAN VOICES

ANDREW HAMILTON, in defense of Zenger, August 1735:

It is an old and wise caution, that when our neighbor’s house is on fire, we ought to take care of our own. For tho’, blessed be God, I live in a government where liberty is well understood, and freely enjoy’d; yet experience has shown us all that bad precedent in one government is soon set up for an authority in another; and therefore I cannot but think it mine, and every honest man’s duty that . . . we ought at the same time to be upon our guard against power, wherever we apprehend that it may affect ourselves or our fellow-subjects. . . .

I should think it my duty, if required, to go to the utmost part of the land, where my service could be of any use in assisting to quench the flame of prosecutions upon informations, set on foot by the government, to deprive a people of their right to remonstrating (and complaining too) of the arbitrary attempts of men in power.

What was John Peter Zenger on trial for?

In 1732, a wealthy landowner, Lewis Morris, founded the New York Weekly Journal. Like others before and since, the Journal contributed to a grand American newspaper tradition, not by reporting the news, but by axgrinding and mudslinging at a political opponent. In this case the target was New York governor William Cosby and his allies, among them the prominent merchant James DeLancey.

A German-born printer, John Peter Zenger, was hired to edit and produce the paper, but editorial policy was in the hands of a Morris ally, attorney James Alexander. The Journal’s front page usually offered a polemic on the right of the people to be critical of rulers. But what Governor Cosby found intolerable were the back-page “advertisements,” thinly veiled attacks in which the governor was likened to a monkey and his supporters to spaniels. Cosby shut down the paper, charged Zenger with seditious libel, and had him jailed for ten months.

In the trial that followed, Zenger’s attorney, the Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton (no relation to the more famous Alexander Hamilton), contended that the articles in question were truthful and therefore not libelous. Although the judges ruled Hamilton’s argument out of order, the jury was swayed. Hamilton’s defense carried the day and Zenger was acquitted. Of the jury, Hamilton later said, “You have laid a noble foundation for securing to ourselves that to which Nature and the Laws of our country have given us a Right—The Liberty—both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power by speaking and writing Truth.”

For a royal colony still forty years away from independence, that was pretty heady stuff. Though subjects of the English Crown, an American jury had demonstrated a stiff resolve that they did not feel duty-bound by English civil law. Just as important, Zenger’s trial and acquittal marked the first landmark in the tradition of a free press, a somewhat radical notion that became the law of the land as the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. There was a practical effect as well. In the immediate years ahead, that freedom would become an important weapon in the war of words that preceded the War for Independence.

AMERICAN VOICES

GEORGE WASHINGTON, describing his first night in the Wilderness in March 1748 (from The Diaries of George Washington):

We got our Supper and was lighted into a Room and not being so good a Woodsman as ye rest of my Company stripped myself very orderly and went into ye bed as they called it when to my Surprize I found it to be nothing but a Little Straw-Matted together without Sheets or anything else but only one thread Bear blanket with double its weight of Vermin such as Lice, Fleas &c. I was glad to get up (as soon as ye Light was carried from us) I put on my Cloths and lay as my Companions. Had we not been very tired I am sure we should not have slep’d much that night I made a Promise not to Sleep so from that time forward, chusing rather to sleep in ye open Air before a fire.

When they said, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite” in colonial America, they meant it, as seventeen-year-old George Washington discovered during his first foray into what was then the “wilderness” of colonial Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley. Besides showing what life was like in the “West” for young George, this passage also demonstrates that he, like many Americans of his day, was not well schooled in spelling and grammar, which often had tremendous local variations.

Who fought the French and Indian War?

No. It was not the French against the Indians.

At the end of the seventeenth century, North America was an extremely valuable piece of real estate, teeming with the beavers so prized by the hatmakers of Europe and claimed in part by the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish, as well as by the king of England. The people in Canada and America were pawns in a larger chess game. Between 1689 and the War for Independence, the major European powers engaged in a series of wars, usually fought under the guise of disputes over royal succession. In fact, they were wars of colonial expansion, fought for territory, raw materials, and new markets for exports.

EUROPEAN WARS FOUGHT IN THE COLONIES
Date	European Name	Colonial Name
1689–97	War of the League of Augsburg	King William’s War
1702–13	War of the Spanish Succession	Queen Anne’s War
1740–48	War of the Austrian Succession	King George’s War
1756–63	Seven Years War	French and Indian War

In the first three of these, the colonists played supporting roles. Most of the fighting was limited to sporadic surprise attacks by one side or another, usually joined by their respective Indian allies. Colonial losses, especially in New England and Canada, were still heavy, and the costs of these wars created a serious inflation problem, particularly in Massachusetts, where paper money was printed for the first time to finance the fighting. By the time the first three wars had been played out, England and France were left standing as the two major contenders, and England had acquired a good portion of Canada from France. In the last of the four wars, however, these two rivals fought for absolute dominion over North America. And it was the French and Indian War that most shaped America’s destiny.

The conflict started inauspiciously enough for the Anglo-American cause when a young Virginian was dispatched by Virginia’s Governor Dinwiddie to the Pennsylvania backwoods in 1753 to tell the French that they were trespassing on Virginia’s territory. During an evening in which the French drank some brandy and the young Virginian did not, he learned that the French had no intentions of leaving the territory. With this important intelligence, the young Virginian spent a few difficult weeks returning to Virginia where he delivered his report. He wrote a small book, The Journal of Major George Washington, describing his adventure. All London soon agreed that the young author was a man of courage and intelligence.

Soon after, this inexperienced twenty-two-year-old son of a planter was made an officer and sent back with a militia force of 150 men and orders to build a fort. To his dismay, the new lieutenant colonel found the French already occupying a fort they called Duquesne (on the site of Pittsburgh). Though outnumbered, the young commander, along with some Indian allies, attacked a French party, took no prisoners, and hastily constructed a fort that was aptly named Necessity. Surrounded by French forces, he surrendered, and the French sent him packing back to Virginia, where he was still hailed a hero for taking on the sworn enemies of England. Without realizing, George Washington had ordered the shots that began the French and Indian War.

It was during that skirmish with the French that Washington had his first taste of battle and famously wrote his brother, Jack, “I can assure you. I heard Bullets whistling and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” When King George II heard this tale, he remarked, “He would not say so had he been used to hear many.”

How differently world history might have turned out had the French decided to do away with this green soldier when they had cause and opportunity! Instead, twenty-two years later, the French would again come to the aid of George Washington in his war of revolution against England.

Bad went to worse for the English and their colonial allies in the war’s early years. The 90,000 French in America, vastly outnumbered by 1.5 million English colonials, were better organized, were more experienced fighters, and had the most Indian allies. To the Indians, the French were the lesser of two evils; there were fewer French than English, and they seemed more interested in trading for beaver pelts than did the English, who were pushing the Indians off their lands. For many Indians, the war also provided an opportunity to repay years of English treachery. The Indians’ rage exploded in the viciousness of their attacks, which were met with equal savagery by the British. Scalp taking was a popular British tactic, and the British commander, General Edward Braddock, offered his Indian allies five pounds sterling for the scalp of a French soldier, one hundred pounds for that of a Jesuit missionary, and a grand prize of two hundred pounds for the hair of the powerful Delaware chieftain Shinngass.

For the English side, the great disaster of this war came in 1755, when 1,400 redcoats, under General Braddock, marched on Fort Duquesne in a poorly planned mission. A much smaller force of French slaughtered the English, leaving George Washington, Braddock’s aide-de-camp, to straggle home with 500 survivors. The English suffered similar defeats in New York.

This colonial war became linked to a global clash that commenced in 1756, the first true world war. Things went badly everywhere for the English until there was a change of leadership in London, with William Pitt taking over the war effort in 1758. His strategy emphasized naval warfare and the conquest of North America, which Pitt viewed as the key to overall victory. He poured in troops and found talented new commanders in James Wolfe and Jeffrey Amherst. One of Amherst’s novel tactics, when negotiating with some attacking Indians, was to give them blankets from the smallpox hospital. A string of victories between 1758 and 1760 gave the English control over the American colonies and, with the fall of Montreal in 1760, all of Canada.

In 1763, the Treaty of Paris brought peace and, with it, a complete British triumph. The English now owned all of Canada, America east of the Mississippi Valley, Florida, and a number of Caribbean islands. France lost its American colonies, except for a few islands in the French West Indies, and France’s overseas trade had been crippled by the British navy.

Colonial Americans, now fully blooded in a major armed conflict, took pride and rejoiced at the victory they had helped win for their new king, George III, who had taken the throne in 1760. George Washington, who played no small part in the fighting, rode back to Williamsburg, Virginia, to resign his command. A career as a professional soldier no longer interested him.

What do sugar and stamps have to do with revolutions?

In the short space of thirteen years, how did the colonies go from being loyal subjects of King George III, flush in their victory over the French, to becoming rebels capable of overthrowing the most powerful nation on earth?

Obviously, no single factor changes the course of history. And different historians point to different reasons for the Revolution. The established traditionalist view is that the American Revolution was fought for liberties that Americans believed they already possessed as British citizens. The more radical political and economic viewpoint holds that the Revolution was simply a transfer of power from a distant British elite to a homegrown American power class that wanted to consolidate its hold over the wealth of the continent.

History is a boat big enough to carry both views comfortably, and a mingling of these perspectives brings an approximation of truth. It is safe to say that British bungling, economic realities, a profound philosophical revolution called the Enlightenment, and historical inevitability all played roles in the birth of the American nation.

As for the British bungling: In the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years War, England had an enormous wartime debt to pay. In London, it was naturally assumed that the colonies should chip in for some of the costs of the defense of America as well as the yearly cost of administering the colonies. To do this, Parliament enacted what it thought an entirely reasonable tax, the so-called Sugar Act of 1764, which placed tariffs on sugar, coffee, wines, and other products imported into America in substantial quantities. A postwar colonial depression—economic doldrums typically following the free spending that accompanies wartime—sharpened the act’s pain for American merchants and consumers. Almost immediately, negative reaction to the tax set in, an economic dissent that was summed up in a new political slogan, “No taxation without representation.” James Otis, one of the most vocal and radical leaders in Massachusetts, wrote that everyone should be “free from all taxes but what he consents to in person or by his representative.”

In real terms, the representation issue was a smokescreen—a useful slogan for galvanizing popular protest, but not really what the new breed of colonial leaders wanted. They had the wisdom to see that getting a handful of seats in Parliament for the colonies would be politically meaningless. Growing numbers of American politicians saw a wedge being driven between the colonies and Mother England, and they had their eyes on a larger prize.

Resistance to the sugar tax, in the form of drafted protests from colonial legislatures and halfhearted boycotts, failed to materialize. Until, that is, Parliament tightened the screws with a second tax. The Stamp Act of 1765 set stiff tariffs on virtually every kind of printed matter, from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. One member of Parliament, protesting the new tax plan, used the phrase “Sons of Liberty” to describe the colonists, and it was quickly adopted by men in every colony. While the Sugar Act reflected Parliament’s power to tax trade, the Stamp Act was different. It was a direct tax, and the protests from America grew louder, stronger, and more violent. Riots broke out, the most violent of which were in Boston, where the house of Governor Thomas Hutchinson was destroyed by an angry mob. In New York, the home of the officer in charge of the stamps was also ransacked. A boycott of the stamps, widely joined throughout the colonies, was followed by a general boycott of English goods. Hit hard by the economic warfare, London’s merchants screamed, and the law was repealed in 1766.

But it was a case of closing the barn door after the horses had scattered. In America, forces were gathering that most London politicos, ignorant of American ways, were too smug to acknowledge.

What was the Boston Massacre?

Having been kicked once by the colonial mule, Parliament failed to grasp the message of the Stamp Act boycott, and in 1767 thought up a new set of incendiary taxes called the Townshend Acts, once again placing itself directly behind the mule’s hind legs. Once again, an American boycott cut imports from England in half. The British answer to the Americans’ protest was a typical superpower response—they sent in troops.

Soon there were 4,000 British redcoats in Boston, a city of 16,000 and a hotbed of colonial protest. These troops, however, did not just idly stand guard over the populace. In a town already hard-pressed for jobs, the British soldiers competed for work with the laborers of Boston’s waterfront. Early in March 1770, a group of ropemakers fought with a detachment of soldiers who were taking their jobs, and all around Boston, angry encounters between soldiers and citizens became more frequent. Tensions mounted until March 5, when a mob, many of them hard-drinking waterfront workers, confronted a detachment of nine British soldiers. The scene turned ugly as snow and ice, mixed with stones, began to fly in the direction of the soldiers. Confronted by a taunting mob calling for their blood, the soldiers grew understandably nervous. It took only the word “fire,” most likely yelled by one of the crowd, to ignite the situation. The soldiers shot, and five bodies fell. The first to die was Crispus Attucks, the son of an African father and a Massachusetts Natick Indian mother, a former slave who had gone to sea for twenty years to escape slavery.

It did not take long for the propagandists, Samuel Adams chief among them, to seize the moment. Within days the incident had become the Boston Massacre, and the dead were martyred. An engraving of the shootings made by Henry Pelham, a half-brother of the painter John Copley, was “borrowed” by silversmith Paul Revere, whose own engraving of the incident got to the printer first and soon became a patriotic icon. As many as 10,000 marched at the funeral procession (out of Boston’s population of 16,000).

In the wake of the killings, British troops were withdrawn from the city. With the Townshend Acts repealed (coincidentally on the day of the Massacre), a period of relative calm followed the Massacre and the trial of the soldiers—defended by John Adams, who wanted to ensure fairness—most were acquitted and two were branded and discharged—but it was an uneasy truce at best.

What was the Boston Tea Party about?

In the thick of the 1988 presidential election campaign, candidate George Bush made Boston Harbor an issue that badly hurt his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Bush made political hay out of the fact that the harbor was an ecological disaster zone, and placed the blame squarely in the lap of Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor. Once before, the mess in that harbor played a role in history, and back then the results were quite extraordinary. If George Bush thought Boston Harbor was a mess in 1988, he should have seen it in 1773.

The post-Massacre peace and the end of the nonimportation boycott brought renewed prosperity to the colonies and with it a respite from the bickering with London. Fearing this calm would soften resistance, Samuel Adams and his allies tried to fan the embers over such local issues as moving the Massachusetts assembly out of Boston and who should pay the governor’s salary. These were important legal questions, but not the sort of outrages that inspire violent overthrow of the government. Things heated up considerably when a party of patriots in Rhode Island boarded and burned the Gaspee, a grounded Royal Navy boat intensely disliked for its antismuggling patrols.

While the Gaspee arsonists avoided arrest, the British Crown threatened to bring the guilty to England for trial, rebuffing the English tradition of right to trial by a community jury. It was the bit of tinder that Samuel Adams needed to stoke the flames a little higher. In Virginia, the House of Burgesses appointed Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Henry Lee as a Committee of Correspondence, and by 1774, twelve of the colonies had such committees to maintain a flow of information among like-minded colonists.

But a burning—or boiling—issue was still lacking until Samuel Adams found one in tea. In 1773, Parliament had granted a legal monopoly on tea shipment to America to the nearly bankrupt East India Company. The injury was made worse by the insult of funneling the tea business through selected loyalist merchants, including the sons of Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts. The East India Company could now undercut American merchants, even those using smugglers, on the sale of tea. Tea first, thought the colonists, what will be next?

In November 1773, three tea-laden cargo ships reached Boston. Led by Samuel Adams and a powerful ally, John Hancock, one of the richest men in America and one of those most threatened by the possibility of London-granted trade monopolies, the patriots vowed that the tea would not be landed. Governor Hutchinson, whose sons stood to profit by its landing, put his back up. After two months of haggling, the Boston patriots made up their minds to turn Boston Harbor into a teapot.

On the night of December 16, 1773, about 150 men from all layers of Boston’s economy, masters and apprentices side by side, blackened their faces with burnt cork, dressed as Mohawk Indians, and boarded the three ships. Once aboard, they requested and received the keys to the ships’ holds, as their target was the tea alone and not the ships or any other cargo aboard. Watched by a large crowd, as well as the Royal Navy, the men worked for nearly three hours, hatcheting open the cases of tea and dumping it into the harbor. So much was dumped that the tea soon piled up in the waters and spilled back onto the decks, where it was shoveled back into the water.

The Boston Tea Party, as it was quickly anointed, was soon followed by similar tea parties in other colonies and served to harden lines, both in America and England. Patriots became more daring; loyalist Tories became more loyal; Parliament stiffened its back. The Sons of Liberty had slapped London’s face with a kid glove. The king responded with an iron fist. “The die is now cast,” King George told his prime minister, Lord North. “The colonies must either submit or triumph.”

What was the First Continental Congress? Who chose its members, who were they, and what did they do?

From the moment the tea was dumped, the road to revolution was a short one. In a post–Tea Party fervor, Parliament passed a series of bills, called the Coercive Acts, the first of which was the Port Bill, aimed at closing down Boston until the dumped tea was paid for. It was followed by the Administration of Justice Act, the Massachusetts Regulating Act (which virtually nullified the colony’s charter), and the Quebec Act, establishing a centralized system of government in Canada and extending the borders of Canada south to the Ohio River. Parliament backed up these acts by sending General Thomas Gage to Boston as the new governor, along with 4,000 troops. In addition, it reinforced provisions of the Quartering Act, which gave the army the right to demand food and shelter from colonists.

In response to these Intolerable Acts, as the colonists called them, the colonial assemblies agreed to an intercolonial meeting, and each assembly selected a group of delegates. Gathering in Philadelphia from September 5 to October 26, 1774, the First Continental Congress was made up of fifty-six delegates from every colony but Georgia. They represented the full spectrum of thought in the colonies, from moderates and conservatives like New York’s John Jay or Pennsylvania’s Joseph Galloway, who were searching for a compromise that would maintain ties with England, to fiery rebels like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry of Virginia (Thomas Jefferson was not selected to make the trip). As they gathered, John Adams privately worried, “We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, in education, in travel, in fortune—in everything.”

But his opinion would soon change as the debate began, and Adams became aware that he was indeed in remarkable company. The first Congress moved cautiously, but ultimately adopted a resolution that opposed the Coercive Acts, created an association to boycott British goods, and passed ten resolutions enumerating the rights of the colonists and their assemblies.

Taxes and representation were only part of the issue, as Theodore Draper writes in A Struggle for Power. “The struggle to deprive Parliament of its power over taxation struck at the heart of British power in the Colonies and spilled over everything else.”

Before adjourning, they provided for a second session to meet if their grievances had not been corrected by the British. While they had not yet declared for independence, the First Congress had taken a more or less unalterable step in that direction. In a very real sense, the Revolution had begun. It needed only for the shooting to start.

Must Read: A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution by Theodore Draper.

What was “the shot heard ’round the world”?

Now governor of Massachusetts, General Gage wanted to cut off the rebellion before it got started. His first move was to try to capture hidden stores of patriot guns and powder and arrest John Hancock and Sam Adams, the patriot ringleaders in British eyes. The Sons of Liberty had been expecting this move, and across Massachusetts the patriot farmers and townspeople had begun to drill with muskets, ready to pick up their guns on a minute’s notice, giving them their name, Minutemen.

In an increasingly deserted Boston, Paul Revere, silversmith and maker of false teeth, waited and watched the British movements. To sound an early warning to Concord, Revere set up a system of signals with a sexton at Christ Church in Boston. One lantern in the belfry meant Gage’s troops were coming by land; two lanterns meant they were crossing the Charles River in boats. Late on the night of April 18, 1775, as expected, it was two lanterns. Revere and another rider, Billy Dawes, started off to Lexington to warn Hancock and Adams and alert the Lexington Minutemen that the British regulars were coming. Continuing on to Concord, Revere and Dawes were joined by Samuel Prescott, a young patriot doctor. A few minutes later a British patrol stopped the three men. Revere and Dawes were arrested and held briefly, while Prescott was able to escape and warn Concord of the British advance.

Meanwhile, in Lexington, the group of seventy-seven Minutemen gathered on the green to confront the British army. The British tried to simply march past the ragtag band when an unordered shot rang out. Chaos ensued, and the British soldiers broke ranks and returned fire. When the volleying stopped, eight Minutemen lay dead.

Warned by Prescott, the Concord militia was ready. Farmers from the nearby countryside responded to the church bells and streamed toward Concord. The resistance became more organized, and the Concord Minutemen attacked a troop of British holding a bridge leading into Concord, and later took up positions behind barns, houses, stone walls, and trees, pouring fire down on the British ranks. Unused to such unfair tactics as men firing from hiding, the British remained in their standard formations until they reached Lexington again and were met by reinforcements.

By the day’s end, the British tallied 73 dead and 174 wounded.

The Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, had come to the crisis point. The bloodshed at Lexington meant war. With swift action, the patriots could bottle up the whole of the British army in Boston. To John Adams, all that needed to be done was to solidify the ranks of Congress by winning the delegates of the South. The solution came in naming a Southerner as commander of the new Continental Army. On June 15, 1775, George Washington, a delegate from Virginia who had hinted at his ambitions by wearing his old military uniform to the Philadelphia meetings, received that appointment.

MILESTONES IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

1775

April 18–19 Seven hundred British troops march on Concord, Massachusetts, to secure a rebel arsenal. They are met on the Lexington village green by a small force of colonial Minutemen, and an unordered shot—the “shot heard ’round the world”—leads to the killing of eight Americans. During a pitched battle at Concord and on their return to Boston, the British are harassed constantly by colonial snipers and suffer heavy losses.

May 10 Under Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, a colonial militia force takes the British arsenal at Fort Ticonderoga, New York, capturing cannon and other supplies; in a separate attack, the British garrison at Crown Point on Lake Champlain is seized.

June 15 The Second Continental Congress decides to raise an army and appoints George Washington to lead it.

June 17 In the Battle of Bunker Hill (actually fought on Breed’s Hill), the British sustain heavy losses, with more than 1,100 killed or wounded, before forcing a rebel retreat. Nathanael Greene, an American commander, comments, “I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price.” In the wake of this costly victory, General Gage is replaced by Howe as the British commander in America.

1776

January Tom Paine publishes the pamphlet Common Sense, a persuasive and widely read argument for independence.

March 4–17 Rebel forces capture Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston Harbor. Cannon captured by the Americans at Ticonderoga are brought in, forcing a British evacuation of Boston.

May King Louis XVI of France authorizes secret arms and munitions assistance for the Americans.

June 11 Congress appoints a committee to compose a declaration of independence.

June 28 Under General Charles Lee, American forces in Charleston, South Carolina, fend off a British attack, damaging the British fleet. The British suspend operations in the South for another two years.

July 2 British General Sir William Howe lands an army at Staten Island, New York, eventually amassing 32,000 troops, including 9,000 German mercenaries.

July 4 The Declaration of Independence is formally adopted by Congress.

August 27–29 Battle of Long Island. Howe forces withdrawal of Washington’s army from Brooklyn Heights to Manhattan. Before Howe can finish off the rebel army, a miraculous retreat saves Washington and the army. In September, Washington evacuates New York.

September 22 Nathan Hale, captured by the British in Long Island, is hanged, without trial, as a spy. He goes to his death bravely and is reported to have said, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”

October–November Crushing American defeats at the battles of White Plains (New York) and Fort Lee (New Jersey) force Washington to move westward through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. Again, Howe fails to pursue Washington vigorously, and the army is saved.

December 25 In a surprise Christmas Day attack, Washington leads troops across the Delaware River for a successful attack on British forces at Trenton, New Jersey. Although a small victory, it boosts American morale. It is followed by a second victory, at Princeton.

Must Read: The Winter Soldiers by Richard M. Ketchum.

1777

April 27 Benedict Arnold defeats the British at Ridgefield, Connecticut.

June The American seaman John Paul Jones is given command of the Ranger and begins raiding English shipping.

July 6 The British retake Fort Ticonderoga.

July 27 The Marquis de Lafayette, a twenty-year-old French nobleman, arrives in America to volunteer his services to the Revolution.

August 16 Battle of Bennington (Vermont). Americans wipe out a column of General Burgoyne’s men.

September 9–11 Battle of Brandywine (Pennsylvania). Howe drives Washington’s army toward Philadelphia; Congress is forced to flee.

September 19 First Battle of Saratoga. An American victory.

September 26 General Howe occupies Philadelphia.

October 4–5 Battle of Germantown (Pennsylvania). A costly American defeat, the battle is inconclusive as Howe fails again to finish Washington.

October 7–17 Second Battle of Saratoga. British are routed and 5,700 surrender. A major turning point for the American cause as Europe is encouraged to aid the revolution, including formal French recognition of American independence.

December 17 Washington’s Continental Army enters winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, remaining there until June 1778. The horrors of that winter cannot be told in simple statistics, but an estimated 2,500 soldiers out of 10,000 died during these six months, but it was most often due to American mismanagement, graft, speculation, and indifference. Pennsylvania farmers sold their produce to the British in Philadelphia, and the same was true elsewhere in New England and New York, where farmers sought hard cash for their crops.

1778

February Franco-American treaties of alliance and commerce are signed.

February 23 The Prussian Baron von Steuben arrives and assists Washington in drilling and training the army at Valley Forge. By the end of the difficult winter, the Continental Army is a cohesive, disciplined fighting force.

May 8 Howe is replaced by Henry Clinton as the British commander in America.

July 8 Continental Army headquarters are established at West Point.

July 9 The Articles of Confederation are signed by Congress.

July 10 A French fleet arrives; France declares war against Britain.

December 29 The British capture Savannah, Georgia, from American General Robert Howe.

1779

January 10 The French give a dilapidated ship to John Paul Jones. It is refitted and renamed Bonhomme Richard in honor of Ben Franklin, internationally renowned as Poor Richard of Almanac fame.

January 29 British forces capture Augusta, Georgia.

February 25 Americans under George Rogers Clark defeat the British at Vincennes, Indiana.

May 10 Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia, captured and burned by the British.

June 16 Spain declares war on England, but makes no American alliances.

July 15 American general Anthony Wayne recaptures Stony Point, New York, and takes some 700 prisoners while suffering 15 casualties.

August 19 American general Henry Lee drives the British from Paulus Hook, New Jersey.

August 29 American generals John Sullivan and James Clinton defeat combined loyalist and Indian forces at Newton (Elmira, New York).

September 3–October 28 An attempt to recapture Savannah results in a disastrous loss for the American-French combined forces.

September 23 In a naval battle off the coast of England, John Paul Jones captures the British warship Serapis, although he loses the Bonhomme Richard. A French vessel takes another British ship.

September 27 Congress appoints John Adams to negotiate peace with England.

October 17 The Continental Army returns to winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, where it will suffer a winter even worse than the year before at Valley Forge. Desertions and mutiny are commonplace. Record-breaking cold creates an ordeal of unbelievable suffering.

1780

January 28 A fort is established on the Cumberland River to defend North Carolina from Indian attack. It is later named Nashville.

February 1 A British fleet carrying 8,000 men from New York and Newport, Rhode Island, reaches Charleston, South Carolina.

May 6 Fort Moultrie falls to the British, and with it Charleston. In the heaviest single American defeat of the war, 5,400 Americans are captured along with ships, munitions, and food supplies.

May 25 A major mutiny in Morristown is put down by Pennsylvania troops, and two leaders of the mutiny are hanged.

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.

AMERICAN VOICES

PATRICK HENRY 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.

Most of his war years were spent in Virginia as a legislator and later as governor. After his wife’s death, in 1783, he joined the Continental Congress and served as ambassador to France, where he could observe firsthand the French Revolution that he had helped inspire. Returning to America in 1789, Jefferson became Washington’s secretary of state and began to oppose what he saw as a too-powerful central government under the new Constitution, bringing him into a direct confrontation with his old colleague John Adams and, more dramatically, with the chief Federalist, Alexander Hamilton.

Running second to Adams in 1796, he became vice president, chafing at the largely ceremonial role. In 1800, Jefferson and fellow Democratic Republican Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College vote, and Jefferson took the presidency in a House vote. After two terms, he returned to his Monticello home to complete his final endeavor, the University of Virginia, his architectural masterpiece. As he lay dying, Jefferson would ask what the date was, holding out, like John Adams, until July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration.

Richard Henry Lee (1732–94) A member of Virginia’s most prominent family and the House of Burgesses, Lee was a valuable ally of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams. Sent to the Continental Congress in 1776, he proposed the resolution on independence and was one of the signers of the Declaration.

James Otis (1725–83) A descent into madness kept this Boston lawyer, a writer and speaker on a par with the greats of the era, from earning a greater place in Revolutionary history. Samuel Adams’s first ally, Otis became one of the most fiery of the Boston radicals, his pamphlets declaring the rights of the colonists and introducing the phrase “no taxation without representation.” Although he attended the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, by 1771 his behavior was increasingly erratic. Walking the streets of Boston, he fired pistols and broke windows until his family bound him and carted him off to a country farm. In and out of asylums, he died when his farmhouse was struck by lightning.

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) One of the Revolution’s pure idealists, the English-born Paine lived up to his name in the eyes of those he attacked. Unsuccessful in London, where his radical notions got him into trouble, he came to America with the aid of Benjamin Franklin. At Franklin’s urging, he wrote Common Sense and helped push the colonies toward independence.

With the Continental Army in retreat, he later wrote a series of pamphlets at Washington’s request that became The Crisis. In 1781, he went to France and helped secure a large gold shipment for the rebel cause. After the war he returned to England and wrote The Rights of Man, which earned him a conviction on charges of treason. He took refuge in France, where his antimonarchist ideas were welcomed as France went through the throes of its great Revolution. But as that revolution began to eat its own, Paine was imprisoned and wrote The Age of Reason while awaiting the guillotine. Spared execution, he returned to America. The eternal gadfly, Paine alienated the new American powers-that-be with his Letter to Washington, and died a poor outcast.

AMERICAN VOICES

From The Crisis by THOMAS PAINE:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink from the service of his country. . . . Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered.

Paul Revere (1735–1818) “Listen my children and you shall hear . . .” It is perhaps the best-known bit of doggerel in American literature. But like most epic poems, Longfellow’s tribute to the Boston silversmith fudges the facts. Boston born, Revere was the son of a Huguenot, the French Protestants who had been driven from France. In America, he changed his name from Apollos Rivoire. A silversmith like his father, Paul Revere also went into the false-teeth business. A veteran of the French and Indian War, he was in the Samuel Adams circle of rebels, serving as a messenger. He took an active part in all the events leading up to the war, and his famous engraving of the Massacre, which had been lifted from the work of another artist, became an icon in every patriot home.

But it was the ride to Lexington that brought him immortality of sorts. In fact, he made two rides. The first was to warn the patriots to hide their ammunition in Concord, and the second was the famous “midnight ride.” After receiving the signal from the South Church, Revere and two other riders set off. Although he was able to reach Lexington and warn John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and the Minutemen of the British approach, Revere was soon captured.

His wartime record was also slightly tarnished. Despite his services as a trusted courier, he had not received a commission from Congress and served out the war in a militia unit. In one of his few actions, Revere was ordered to lead troops against the British at Penobscot. Instead he marched his men back to Boston when American ships failed to engage the British. Because he was relieved of command and accused of cowardice, Revere’s honor was smudged until a court acquittal in 1782.

Joseph Warren (1741–75) A Boston physician, Warren became one of Sam Adams’s most devoted protégés. An active participant in the major prewar event in Boston, Warren became an instant hero when he charged into enemy fire at Lexington to treat the wounded. His fame was short-lived as he became one of the first patriot martyrs. Commissioned a general despite a lack of experience, he joined the ranks on Breed’s Hill and was killed in the fighting there.

Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) Sister of the patriot leader James Otis, Mercy Warren surmounted the heavy odds placed before women in eighteenth-century America to become a writer of considerable influence. A dramatist, she was unable to see her plays performed because Puritan Boston did not permit theatrical works. An outspoken critic of the Constitution, she wrote widely to defeat its ratification. In 1805, she published the first history of the Revolution, the three-volume Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. While rich in anecdotal material and period detail, the book was colored by Warren’s fierce anti-Federalist bias, and was written in the full fervor of postwar patriotic sentiment.

THE SOLDIERS

Ethan Allen (1738–89) A flamboyant veteran of the French and Indian War and a giant of a man, Allen raised a private army in Vermont called the Green Mountain Boys during an ongoing border dispute with Vermont’s sister colony, New York. After Lexington, Allen and his men, joined by Benedict Arnold, captured the undermanned Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York from the British, but he was voted out of command of the Green Mountain Boys. Captured during an assault on Montreal in 1775, Allen was thrown in irons and returned to England to stand trial. He was held prisoner for two years. Later he attempted to negotiate a separate peace treaty with the British. And in May 1778, he joined Washington at Valley Forge, was given a commission, and returned to Vermont, where he pressed the cause of Vermont’s independence from New York and New Hampshire. There is a suggestion that he was negotiating with the British to make Vermont a province of Canada. He died of apoplexy before Vermont was admitted as the 14th state.

George Rogers Clark (1752–1818) A surveyor and frontiersman, Clark led the successful military operations against the British and their Indian allies on the western frontier in what would later become Kentucky.

Horatio Gates (c. 1728–1806) A British-born soldier, he was badly wounded in his first action during the French and Indian War. Gates took up the patriot cause and led the American forces that won the key battle at Saratoga in 1777. But later that year he took part in an abortive attempt to wrest control of the army from George Washington. In 1780, he was given command of the army in the South, but was badly defeated at Camden, South Carolina, and lost his command. After the war, Gates was reinstated as the army’s second ranking officer.

Nathanael Greene (1724–86) A Rhode Island Quaker with no military experience, Greene became a self-taught student of military history and emerged as one of the war’s most successful tacticians, rising to the rank of general. At the war’s outset, he commanded Rhode Island’s three regiments but was picked by Washington for rapid advancement. With Washington at the defeats in Long Island and Manhattan as well as the victory at Trenton, he made his greatest contribution as a commander in the South. Using a guerrilla strategy, he harassed Cornwallis from the Carolinas, forcing him back toward Virginia and the Yorktown showdown. At the end of the war, his reputation was second only to that of Washington. After the war he fell into financial difficulty because he had pledged much of his personal fortune to an associate who went bankrupt. In 1785, he settled on the confiscated estate of a loyalist near Savannah, Georgia, but died there the following year from sunstroke.

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was proof that low birth need not be an impediment in early America. The illegitimate son of a shopkeeper mother whose father deserted them, Hamilton caught the attention of wealthy benefactors who sent him to King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York. He became an ardent patriot and, at age nineteen, was leading a company of New York artillery.

At Trenton he caught Washington’s eye and became a favorite, rising to the position of Washington’s aide and private secretary, and later commanding in the field. A convenient marriage to the daughter of Philip Schuyler, a powerful New Yorker, gave him entrée to society and additional clout.

His career was even more significant after the war, when he established a law practice in New York and became a key figure in the constitutional convention of 1787. Hamilton was one of the chief essayists behind The Federalist Papers arguing for the Constitution’s ratification (see Chapter 3). He became Washington’s secretary of the treasury, and was a crucial figure in the first two administrations, establishing the nation’s economic policies. But he became involved in political and amorous intrigues that crippled his career.

He returned to private practice, remaining a central figure in the Federalist Party, and his views were the source of the feud that led to his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.

John Paul Jones (1747–92) Essentially an adventurer who followed the action, America’s first naval hero was born John Paul in Scotland and began his career on a slave ship. He came to America under a dark cloud following the death of one of his crewmen, and added Jones to his name. When the Congress commissioned a small navy, Jones volunteered and was given the Providence, with which he raided English ships. With the Ranger, he sailed to France and continued his raids off the English coast. The French later gave him a refitted ship called the Bonhomme Richard, and with it he engaged the larger British ship Serapis in a battle he won at the loss of Bonhomme Richard. A hero to the French, Jones was later sent to France as an emissary, and received a congressional medal in 1787. He finished his sea career with the Russian navy of the Empress Catherine before his death in Paris. (In 1905, his supposed remains were returned to the U.S. and reburied at Annapolis, Maryland.)

AMERICAN VOICES

JOHN PAUL JONES during the battle against Serapis:

I have not yet begun to fight.

Henry Knox (1750–1806) A Boston bookseller and a witness to the Boston Massacre, Knox rose to become the general in charge of Washington’s artillery and one of the commander-in-chief’s most trusted aides. His nickname, Ox, came from both his substantial girth—he stood six feet, three inches and weighed some 280 pounds—and for the exploit in which, during the dead of winter in 1775, he transported the British cannons captured at Fort Ticonderoga by oxcart back to Boston. In Washington’s first engagement as commander, these guns were placed on Dorchester Heights, forcing General Howe’s army to evacuate the city without a shot being fired.

At Yorktown, Knox commanded the artillery bombardment of General Cornwallis’s forces and after the war, he served in Congress. War secretary under the Articles of Confederation, Knox was a trusted aide to Washington and became the first war secretary following Washington’s election. He also founded the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization formed (1783) by former officers of the Continental Army. Initially nonpolitical, the society became a conservative Federalist power and was criticized as an aristocratic military nobility. To counter the Society, Tammany societies were formed by working-class veterans in cities like New York and Philadelphia, which soon evolved into an anti-Federalist power. (Both Knoxville and Fort Knox are named for him.)

Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) One of the Revolution’s idealists, this young Frenchman came to America at age nineteen, wealthy enough to pay for his own ship to make the journey. Like other young European aristocrats for whom war was a matter of personal honor and social standing, Lafayette came in search of glory and adventure. In exchange for a major general’s rank, he offered to serve without pay, and quickly earned Washington’s affection. They developed an almost father-son relationship. Given a minor command, Lafayette proved to be an able and loyal commander.

During a trip back to France, he was instrumental in securing the French military assistance that was the key to the American victory at Yorktown. At the surrender, Lafayette’s personal band proudly piped “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” once a song mockingly sung by the British to taunt the Americans. After the war, Lafayette returned to France with enough American soil in which to be buried.

Charles Lee (1731–82) A British-born soldier who rose to general in the patriot army, Lee had fought in the French and Indian War with Braddock, and had seen combat in Europe as well. A professional soldier, he was far more experienced than most of the American commanders, including Washington, whom he grew to disdain. Commissioned a major general, he justified the rank with his defense of Charleston early in the war. He was later captured and held by the British for fifteen months. Allegedly, he offered his captors a plan for defeating the Americans. At the Battle of Monmouth, Lee ordered a confused and costly retreat, for which he was court-martialed and broken of command. He returned to Virginia, where he died in a tavern before the peace treaty was signed.

Francis Marion (1732?–95) Best known as the Swamp Fox, Marion led a successful guerrilla war against British and vicious Tory troops under General Cornwallis in the Carolinas. It was the efforts of Marion and other guerrillas, including Charles Sumter, in the southern colonies that frustrated the British strategy to control the South. One British officer complained that he “would not fight like a Christian.”

Daniel Morgan (1735–89) A veteran of Braddock’s French and Indian disaster, Morgan had driven supply trains, earning his nickname Old Wagoner. During the French and Indian War, Morgan had received 500 lashes over a fight with a British officer and he held a grudge. Another of Washington’s most valuable commanders, he led a troop of buckskinned frontier riflemen who played a crucial role in the victory at Saratoga. Elevated to general, he commanded half the southern army and led the key victory at Cowpens and was also instrumental in the bloody Battle of Guilford Court, where General Cornwallis’s losses were so heavy that the British commander had to abandon his plans to hold the Carolinas and retreat to Virginia.

Molly Pitcher (1754–1832) During the exhausting summer heat of the Battle of Monmouth (1778), Mary McCauley Hays, the wife of Private John Hays, fetched water for her husband and his gun crew, earning her the sobriquet Molly Pitcher. When her husband was wounded in the battle, she knew his job well enough to help the gun crew continue firing. An apocryphal story they perhaps didn’t tell you in grade school was that a cannonball passed through Molly’s legs and tore away her petticoats. Molly is said to have told the men that it was a good thing it hadn’t been higher, or it would have carried away something else! After the war, Mary Hays became a scrubwoman and the Pennsylvania Assembly later granted her a yearly pension of $40.

Israel Putnam (1718–90) A colonel in the Connecticut militia, Old Put left his plow, in the great tradition of civilian soldiers, and headed for Boston when the shooting started at Lexington. One of those in command on Breed’s Hill, he achieved immortality of sorts with his order, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” a well-known piece of military advice of the day.

When the rebel troops started to break ranks after inflicting heavy losses on the British, Putnam unsuccessfully tried to keep his troops in place. But his failure to reinforce an American position was one reason the patriot army left off the battle when a victory might have been won, and Putnam was nearly court-martialed. Instead, Congress made him a general out of regional political considerations. Though never a great strategist or commander, he remained a loyal aide to Washington throughout the war.

Comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807) Commander of the 7,000 French troops sent to aid the rebels, Rochambeau had far more experience than Washington. Coordinating his movements with the French war fleet under Admiral de Grasse, Rochambeau deserves much of the credit for forcing the showdown at Yorktown at a time when Washington seemed to prefer an assault on New York.

Deborah Sampson (1760–1827) Assuming the name Robert Shurtleff, this former indentured servant enlisted in the Continental Army in 1782 and became the only woman to serve formally in the Revolution. Fighting with the Fourth Massachusetts, she managed to maintain her disguise, although her fellow soldiers nicknamed her Molly because of her hairless face. A fever finally uncovered her true identity, and Sampson was discharged in 1783. She married the next year and received a small military pension. In 1802, she began a lecture tour, one of the first American women to do so, recounting her experiences as a soldier, a performance capped by her donning a soldier’s uniform. Congress granted her heirs a full military pension in 1838.

George Washington (1732–99) As for the cherry tree story, it was one of many fabrications created by Washington’s “biographer,” Parson Weems, who also fashioned the “fact” that he was rector of a nonexistent parish at Mount Vernon. The coin tossed across the Rappahannock—not the Potomac—was another of Weems’s inventions. The legends began there, leaving “the father of our country” enshrouded in more layers of myth than any other figure in American history. Most of those myths came from the pen of Mason Locke Weems, whose Life and Memorable Actions of Washington was published in 1800. Many of his tales were invented to underscore Washington’s heroic qualities.

Washington was born into a modestly prosperous Virginia family. The death of his father, a tobacco planter, reduced his fortune, but with the help of relatives he did well, eventually inheriting the family estate at Mount Vernon. He was given a modest amount of “grammar school,” but never went to college. A plan to send him to the Royal Navy was squelched by his mother, who assumed—probably correctly—that a young American would never go far in the rigidly aristocratic British navy. Washington’s mother was tough and smoked a corn-cob pipe and, while he was respectful of her, they clearly did not have a warm relationship. He eagerly took the chance to live with an older half-brother.

An excellent horseman, with a natural affinity for math—as a boy, he counted the number of windowpanes and the stairs in staircases—Washington eventually combined his love for the outdoors with his mathematical ability by becoming a surveyor. Eventually he began to acquire some of the land he had been mapping. His early military career was mostly remarkable for the fact that he survived it. Yet when the French and Indian War was over, Washington was something of a homegrown American military hero.

His wealth came from his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis, the young widow of one of Virginia’s wealthiest men. By the time of the Revolution, Washington was among the richest men in America, although his holdings were in land and slaves rather than cash. As expected of men of his station, he ran for the House of Burgesses and was sent to the two Continental Congresses. After volunteering to serve without pay, he was unanimously chosen commander of the Continental Army when it became apparent that for political reasons a southerner had to fill the job.

There are conflicting views about his military leadership. Traditionalists say that he held together a ragged, ill-equipped army by sheer force of will, chose his commanders well, and had to spend too much time dickering with Congress for enough money to arm his men. This view also holds that he was a master of the strategic retreat, and tricked the British into believing his point of attack would be New York when it was actually Yorktown.

The revisionist view holds that Washington was an unduly harsh leader who maintained brutal discipline in the ranks, nearly lost the war several times, to be saved only by greater incompetence on the part of the British, was better at politicking than commanding, and had to be dragged against his will by the French to attack Yorktown. Several historians argue that Charles Lee or Horatio Gates would have been more daring commanders who might have ended the war sooner. It is an intriguing speculation that will remain unanswered, although Lee’s actions in battle and assistance to the British while a captive do little to arouse confidence in his abilities.

Clearly, Washington was no tactical genius on the order of Caesar or Napoleon. He fought nine battles during the war and won three of them. But that does not mean he was not a great leader. A story reported during the early days of the war is telling: in Boston, bands of American rebel fighters had gotten into a near riot. Washington raced to the scene on horseback and landed in the midst of a brawl. Physically imposing, Washington grabbed two of the men fighting, lifted each off the ground, and shouted commands at the rest. A witness to this scene, Major General John Sullivan of New Hampshire, later said, “From the moment I saw Washington leap the bars at Cambridge, I never faltered in the faith that we had the right man to lead the cause of American liberty.”

The fact remains that Washington, dealt a weak hand, surmounted the odds of poorly outfitted troops, political intrigues, numerous betrayals, and a vastly better equipped opposition to sweep up the jackpot. If nothing else, he was a consummate survivor, and that may have been what America required at the time. That he was universally loved by his soldiers seems unlikely; there were frequent mutinies for the suppression of which Washington kept a well-fed and -trained group of militia. He did inspire fierce loyalty among his officer corps, perhaps the true strength of a commander. For the American people, he was the first larger-than-life national hero, something a new nation arguably needs to survive.

In London after the war, King George III met with American painter Benjamin West and asked what Washington would do after the war. When West said that the general would resign and return to private life, the amazed king reportedly said, “If he does that, sir, he will be the greatest man in the world.” After his emotional farewell at Fraunces Tavern in New York, Washington did just that. He retired to Mount Vernon, until he was called back to serve as president at a time when probably no other man in America could have united the country behind the new government.

What was Common Sense?

When the Continental Congress met for the second time, in May 1775, it was a very different group. The first Congress had been cautious and even conciliatory, with conservative and moderate voices holding sway. But the pendulum was swinging to the radical position, and there were new faces among the delegates, Benjamin Franklin—once cautious, now rebellious—and Thomas Jefferson among them.

Events were also moving swiftly. The battles at Lexington and Concord, the easy victory at Fort Ticonderoga, the devastating casualties inflicted on the British army by the rebels at Breed’s Hill, and the evacuation of British troops from Boston in March 1776 had all given hope to the Whig (patriot) cause. But the final break—independence—still seemed too extreme to some. It’s important to remember that the vast majority of Americans at the time were first and second generation. Their family ties and their sense of culture and national identity were essentially English. Many Americans had friends and family in England. And the commercial ties between the two were obviously also powerful.

The forces pushing toward independence needed momentum, and they got it in several ways. The first factor was another round of heavy-handed British miscalculations. First the king issued a proclamation cutting off the colonies from trade. Then, unable to conscript sufficient troops, the British command decided to supplement its regulars with mercenaries, soldiers from the German principalities sold into King George’s service by their princes. Most came from Hesse-Cassel, so the name Hessian became generic for all of these hired soldiers.

The Hessians accounted for as much as a third of the English forces fighting in the colonies. Their reputation as fierce fighters was linked to a frightening image—reinforced, no doubt, by the British command—as plundering rapists. (Ironically, many of them stayed on in America. Benjamin Franklin gave George Washington printed promises of free land to lure mercenaries away from English ranks.) When word of the coming of 12,000 Hessian troops reached America, it was a shock, and further narrowed chances for reconciliation. In response, a convention in Virginia instructed its delegates to Congress to declare the United Colonies free and independent.

The second factor was a literary one. In January 1776, an anonymous pamphlet entitled Common Sense came off the presses of a patriot printer. Its author, Thomas Paine, had simply, eloquently, and admittedly with some melodramatic prose, stated the reasons for independence. He reduced the hereditary succession of kings to an absurdity, slashed down all arguments for reconciliation with England, argued the economic benefits of independence, and even presented a cost analysis for creating an American navy.

With the assistance of Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine came to America from London and found work with a Philadelphia bookseller. In the colonies for only a few months, Paine wrote, at Franklin’s suggestion, a brief history of the upheaval against England. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the impact and importance of Common Sense. Paine’s polemic was read by everyone in Congress, including General Washington, who commented on its effects on his men. Equally important, it was read by people everywhere. The pamphlet quickly sold 150,000 copies, going through numerous printings until it had reached half a million. (Approximating the American population at the time, including slaves, at 3 million, a current equivalent pamphlet would have to sell more than 35 million copies!) For the first time, mass public opinion had swung toward the cause of independence.

AMERICAN VOICES

From a letter written by ABIGAIL ADAMS to her husband, John, who was attending the Continental Congress, March 31, 1776:

In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited powers into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

Upon receipt of this directive from home, a bemused John Adams replied, in part, “Depend upon it. We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”

What exactly does the Declaration of Independence say? What did Congress leave out?

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia and a member of one of that colony’s leading families, rose in Philadelphia to propose a three-part resolution: (1) to declare the colonies independent; (2) to form foreign alliances; (3) to prepare a plan of confederation. After days of debate, Congress compromised. In that time-honored congressional tradition of putting off important decisions, this Congress decided to form committees, one for each of these points.

The committee selected to draw up some document declaring that America was free of England naturally included John Adams and Ben Franklin, already an internationally known writer. Robert Livingston, a conservative from New York, was named along with Roger Sherman of Connecticut. A southerner was needed for political balance, and John Adams lobbied hard for the fifth member. His choice, Virginian Thomas Jefferson, was seen as a compromise. Jefferson had a reputation as a writer, and had already contributed one pamphlet to Congress, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Although a bitter political rival in later years, Adams now deferred to Jefferson because, as he admitted, Jefferson could write ten times better than he.

Distracted by his wife’s health and a preference to work on the new constitution of Virginia that was being written while he was in Philadelphia, Jefferson was a reluctant author. But closeting himself away, he set to work quickly, writing on a portable desk he had designed. He presented his draft to the committee, which recommended changes and forwarded it to Congress for debate.

Of course the delegates demanded changes, all of which Jefferson considered deplorable. The most debated was Jefferson’s charge that the king was responsible for the slave trade. The southern delegates, joined by northerners who were known to have profited from, in Jefferson’s own phrase, “this execrable commerce,” deleted this section.

With the advantage of hindsight, cynicism about this Congress and Thomas Jefferson in particular is easy. But the baffling question remains: How could a man who embodied the Enlightenment—who wrote so eloquently that “all Men are created equal” and are endowed by the Creator with the right of liberty—how could such a man keep black slaves, of which Jefferson (like Washington and many others in Congress) possessed many? There is no truly satisfying answer. Earlier in his life, as a lawyer and member of the Burgesses, he had unsuccessfully argued against aspects of slavery. At worst, Jefferson may not have thought of slaves as men, not an unusual notion in his time. And he was a man of his times. Like other men, great and small, he was not perfect.

On July 2, Lee’s resolution of independence was passed by Congress. On the evening of July 4, the Declaration of Independence, which explained the act of independence, was adopted. At the signing, John Hancock reportedly urged unanimity. “There must be no pulling different ways. We must hang together,” he said.

“Yes,” said the inimitable Ben Franklin. “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” (Whether the story is true, most biographers agree that it certainly suits Franklin wit and wisdom.)

Although Jefferson suffered doubts because of the changes forced upon him, many of which many historians agree were for the better, the finished document was cheered throughout the colonies. Jefferson had voiced all the pent-up anguish that the American rebels had been feeling for years.

Must Read: American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier.

Why is there a statue of Benedict Arnold’s boot?

Once trusted and admired, Benedict Arnold (1741–1801) became the most famous traitor in United States history, his name synonymous with treachery. Yet in Saratoga, New York, one of the most unusual memorials in America is a statue of a boot that stands in his honor.

Born in Norwich, Connecticut, Arnold learned the apothecary trade and, in 1762, established a book and drug store in New Haven, while also carrying on trade with the West Indies. By 1774, he was one of the wealthiest men in New Haven and became a captain in the Connecticut militia. Soon after the war began, he was commissioned as a colonel in the patriot forces. Along with Vermont’s Ethan Allen, Arnold led the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, in New York, on May 10, 1775, one of the most significant early victories for the American rebel army.

Later that year, Arnold led 1,100 soldiers, including three companies of Colonel Daniel Morgan’s well-trained western riflemen, into Canada. It was a disastrously unsuccessful assault on Quebec in an attempt to get Canadians to join the other colonies in the struggle for liberty. Severely wounded in the assault, Arnold gained a growing reputation for courage and audaciousness and won promotion to brigadier general, despite criticism that he was recklessly bold.

But then he began to suffer a series of bitter disappointments. Passed over for promotion in February 1777, when Congress appointed five new major generals, Arnold, who had more seniority than any of the men promoted, nearly left the army. He was convinced to remain by General Washington, and in May 1777 Congress promoted Arnold to major general as a reward for his bravery in helping drive a British raiding party out of Connecticut. But it did not restore his seniority and Arnold seethed, again coaxed by Washington to stay in the army.

Later that year, Arnold served under General Horatio Gates against the British general John Burgoyne. During two days of crucial fighting near Saratoga in upstate New York in October 1777, Arnold showed gallant courage against Burgoyne and suffered a serious wound to the same leg that he had wounded in the fighting at Quebec. These engagements, won by the patriots, led to Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga several days later. General Gates received credit for the victory, but Congress voted Arnold the country’s thanks and instructed Washington to restore Arnold’s rank. The Saratoga statue of Arnold’s boot, among the most curious of America’s historical statues, honors Arnold’s heroic role in a battle that surely changed the course of the war and perhaps all of American history. Had Arnold died from his wounds that day, he would have probably gone down as one of the Revolution’s most significant martyrs. Another tall obelisk monument at the Saratoga National Historic Park honors General Philip Schuyler, General Horatio Gates, and Colonel Daniel Morgan. A niche for Arnold stands empty–stark testimony to what most people think of when they hear Arnold’s name: the greatest traitor in American history.

In 1778, Arnold took command of the Philadelphia area and married Margaret (Peggy) Shippen, a young woman from a prominent family. They lived extravagantly and began to incur debts. Arnold also argued with local authorities. When the executive council of Pennsylvania accused Arnold of using soldiers to do personal favors, a court-martial cleared Arnold, but it ordered General Washington to rebuke him, which Washington did reluctantly. To Arnold, his service had been met with ingratitude and injustice, and he began corresponding with the British commander Sir Henry Clinton, an acquaintance of Arnold’s father-in-law, a wealthy Pennsylvania judge with Tory (pro-British) leanings.

Given command of West Point, then a crucial strongpoint overlooking and controlling the Hudson River (and the future home of the United States Military Academy), Arnold worked out a plan to surrender that important military base to the British commander. But Clinton’s director of intelligence, Major John André, was captured in 1780 by American militiamen, and papers pertaining to the plot were found in his boot. Arnold escaped to New York City, while André was to be hanged as a spy. André appealed to Washington, asking to be shot instead of hanged but Washington declined. “All that I request of you gentlemen,” André is said to have told his captors, “is that you will bear witness to the world that I die like a brave man.”

Although Washington made several plans to kidnap Arnold after he deserted, they all failed, and Arnold became a brigadier general in the British army. He demanded 20,000 pounds from the British for the losses he incurred in joining them, but he received only 6,315 pounds. As a British officer, he led expeditions that burned Richmond, Virginia, and New London, Connecticut. He also advised Henry Clinton, the overall British commander in America, to support the British army at Yorktown. Clinton ignored that advice with disastrous results for the British.

Arnold was received warmly by King George III when he went to England in 1782, but others there scorned him. In 1797, the British government granted him 13,400 acres (5,423 hectares) in Canada, but the land was of little use to him. He spent most of his remaining years as a merchant in the West Indies trade. In his last days, Arnold was burdened with debt, became discouraged, and was generally distrusted before his death in London in 1801.

Must Read: Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War by Richard M. Ketchum.

What were the Articles of Confederation?

Congress had invented a wonderful new machine, with a flag and an army, but they didn’t quite know how to work it. Ben Franklin, who knew a thing or two about inventing, had been tinkering with the idea of a colonial confederation as far back as 1754, but his attempts to create one had been in vain. Local colonial power brokers wanted to see that power stayed that way—local and in their hands, not in the hands of the rabble. But now, with independence declared, British warships floating off the coast, and the threat of the hangman’s noose if they failed, a little machinery of government seemed a sensible idea.

In August, the Congress began to debate what would become the Articles of Confederation, the first loosely organized federal government. Disagreement hinged on questions of representation and voting: Should votes be apportioned on population, or should each state receive a single vote in Congress? Obviously, big states wanted population to determine votes; small states wanted one vote per state. The war diverted their attention to other matters—such as saving their own necks. It was 1777 before the Articles were submitted to the states for ratification, and 1781 before they were ratified. As foundations for national governments go, this was a rather shaky one. Under the Articles, the presidency was a powerless office, and Congress lacked the power to tax. Owing to uncertainties about what kind of power the government should have, the Articles provided almost none. But Congress was able to sputter through the war until it could build itself a better mousetrap.

Betsy Ross: Did she or didn’t she?

On January 1, 1776, George Washington raised a new flag over his rebel lines in Boston. But it wasn’t the stars and stripes. The first American flag was a banner with thirteen alternating red and white stripes with the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew set into the upper left corner. These were symbols of the British throne and captured the hope that there might still be a political resolution that would maintain some connection between Americans and the throne of England. Many Americans of that time—John Adams thought as many as a third—were still loyalists. Many others still considered themselves Englishmen, and this flag—the flag of the Grand Union—symbolized that connection.

By June 1777, it was clear that such a reconciliation was not possible and Congress resolved that the flag of the U.S. should be “13 stripes alternate red and white and the union be 13 stars in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”

The record doesn’t show who made the decisions or was responsible for the design.

It is definite that it was not Betsy Ross.

Elizabeth Griscom Ross was a Philadelphia seamstress, married to John Ross, an upholsterer who was killed in an explosion in 1776. She kept the upholstery shop going and lived on Arch Street, not too far from the State House on Chestnut, where the Continental Congress was in sessions. According to popular legend, George Washington was a frequent visitor to the Ross home before receiving command of the army, and Betsy Ross embroidered his shirt ruffles. Later, as the general of the Continental Army, George Washington supposedly appeared on Mrs. Ross’s doorstep with two representatives of Congress. They asked that she make a flag according to a rough drawing they carried with them. Mrs. Ross suggested that Washington redraw the flag design to employ stars of five points instead of six. (This account of the creation of the stars and stripes was first brought to light in 1870 by one of her grandsons, William J. Canby. After Canby’s death, a book called The Evolution of the American Flag, published in 1909, presented the claims for Betsy Ross made by William Canby in 1870.)

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.

What did America win?

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.

AMERICAN VOICES

GEORGE WASHINGTON, 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].

DR. HARRIS, 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.”