Creation myths are the most enduring myths of all. The younger the country, the more potent and necessary the myth. The American Revolution and War of Independence arguably constituted the defining event in shaping the world as we know it. That Revolution, two and a quarter centuries ago, resulted in the birth of a nation which has had more impact upon the events of the last century than any other, and which has entered the new millennium in the unchallenged position of the sole global superpower, its armies and fleets bestriding the world, its businesses dominant wherever they impact, its culture popular and pervasive.
The Revolution not only created the mightiest nation in human experience: it set down, in a style virtually without parallel, the form and ethos of a government through a constitution which remains largely unaltered and reverentially respected to this day. The French revolutionary constitution has long since been discarded; the Russian formula lasted little more than seventy years; even the British constitution has steadily evolved. America’s remains holy writ, and is still fully functional.
Most Americans grow up with a heroic view of the Revolution and the War of Independence that is starkly at odds with the reality exposed by more detailed study (much of it American). The relative dearth of British books on the subject is also surprising. It is as though both countries still feel the wounds after all these years: the Americans needing constantly to assert the rightness of the struggle and the courage with which they fought it, so that their nation can be said to have been forged in the fires of righteousness and valour, the British still too hurt and humiliated by their loss.
This book is an attempt to right the balance. Obviously it is liable to be criticized for its British perspective, and indeed I have consciously devoted more analysis to the motives and politics of the war on this side of the Atlantic than is usual in American studies. But, in developing my argument that the creation of the United States and its constitution was the defining act in modern world history, I have also tried to be as fair as possible to the remarkable determination and achievements of the rebellious colonists.
It does not, I believe, detract from greatness to show America’s war for independence in its true light, ‘warts and all’. Rather, that greatness is enhanced. Pace Tolstoy, exceptional human endeavour is the more remarkable in having been achieved by mortal men with all their weaknesses, suspicions, treacheries and greed. Few figures in modern history remain more godlike – and therefore unreal and unsympathetic – than those towering, all-knowing founding fathers of the United States: Washington, Samuel Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton. Two and a quarter centuries is time enough for more shades of grey to be introduced into a picture that remains largely black and white to this day.
On the British side it is time to dispel the embarrassment of defeat and the caricature of incompetence that cloud the bitterly fought war in America. Stupidity there was – perhaps more so than on the American side – but there was also a string of victories, and acts of restraint, skill and intelligence. The causes of American victory and British defeat are a good deal more complex than the picture provided by received wisdom of determined, valiant Americans and bungling British oppressors.
Two factors, I believe, account for the remarkably enduring nature of the myths surrounding the Revolution. First, America remains a comparatively young country with a formidable patriotic sense that underlies much of its world success today: it is therefore vital to uphold the idealism and good intentions behind the country’s creation. As one prominent American told me, ‘America is a profoundly ideological country.’ This may sound odd to those who consider it primarily a pragmatic and materialistic nation, but is nevertheless absolutely true, in that most of its people still believe in its founding ideals (in contrast to the widely discredited ideology of, for example, its old Communist opponent).
The second factor is that, as far back as the late eighteenth century, the Americans were strikingly adept at, in the modern phrase, ‘spinning’ their own version of events. Americans mastered the use of propaganda from the beginning: their ability to present their case in terms of impeccable righteousness, and to extract victories out of military defeat and exaggerate infrequent victories into Alexandrian triumphs, was second to none. This is not surprising given that, as the underdogs and rebels in one of the most fiercely fought and devastating wars of the eighteenth century (although rarely recognized as such), the colonists sometimes had only propaganda to fight with, and it was always an invaluable adjunct to the military effort. Exaggeration and misinformation were vital in order to boost support among the American people, frighten domestic enemies, and demoralize a British war effort that had only the half-hearted approval of public opinion at home.
In this, as in so many other respects, the ironic similarities between the American War of Independence and America’s own experience two centuries later in Vietnam are striking. Britain in the eighteenth century was an over-extended, over-eager power with a young empire, imbued with deep conviction of its own rightness and the belief that it should extend its protection to the majority of Americans who were believed to embrace its values – a belief that also coincided with self-interest. Contrary to the widely held American view, but as with the Americans in Vietnam, its motives for resisting independence for the inhabitants of its colonies were idealistic as well as self-interested.
British public opinion – in a country where the small middle class had the vote and Parliament was now the ultimate arbiter of power, not the King, his servants or the nobility – was always divided or indifferent about the war. Many viewed the North American colonies as of little importance and certainly not worth the waste of young men’s lives or large amounts of money. British armies could win most of the set-piece battles, but they faced an enemy that, like the Vietcong in Vietnam, could retreat at will into a vast hinterland, regroup and fight again, while waging a continual guerrilla war of attrition. While the British could not protect any but the key coastal enclaves they controlled, American guerrillas could roam, attack and intimidate almost at will throughout the countryside. They were also generally more single-minded in their methods, disregarding traditional rules of conduct – and sometimes their own word.
As in Vietnam, Great Power interests were sucked in on the side of the colonial power’s enemies, rendering victory impossible. As in Vietnam, it was sheer exhaustion, the realization that decisive victory was impossible, and the growing hostility of public opinion to the continuing war, rather than military defeat, that caused the colonial power to withdraw. George III might have died with America written on his heart; very few other Britons thought the place was worth so much. (They were wrong, of course, as it turned out.)
What emerges from the fog of myth on the one side, and collective national amnesia towards a disagreeable topic on the other, is a fascinating epic bearing little relation to the popular version of events in either nation. Virtually every common assumption has to be substantially modified, if not rejected. It is generally believed that the Americans were being oppressed by a centuries-old British colonial yoke: on the contrary they were self-governing in all but name throughout most of the colonial period. British taxation, customs duties and regulations were said to be crushingly oppressive: in fact they were far lighter than in the mother country itself, and almost entirely unenforced, the great bulk of America’s trade being contraband.
It is asserted that the fundamental motive for the war was an ideological love of liberty reacting against British military oppression. The motives were in fact much more complex – ranging from a love of liberty, certainly, to economic self-interest, and above all to the extraordinarily rapid transformation undergone by American society, both in numbers and in material wealth, over the preceding half-century. This resulted in a genuinely revolutionary society, in which the thrusting newcomers challenged the staid gentry of the old social order. It was in fact an internal American confrontation, to which the struggle with Britain was largely peripheral. The old order’s most intelligent members sought to divert this irresistible pressure against themselves into a crusade against the British.
It is claimed that America was in deep economic trouble under British exactions before 1775; in fact the economy was booming. Much more significant than the issue of taxation (and more discreditable to the rebels) was the colonies’ bitter resistance to the British ‘Proclamation Line’, which sought to prevent the seizure of Indian territory west of the Appalachians by land-hungry settlers. Meanwhile the rebels’ pragmatic refusal to oppose slavery in their own country (to avoid losing the support of the south) made a mockery of high-flown expressions of freedom and the rights of man. As for British military oppression, the British army had intervened in strength only to defend the Americans against their French and Indian enemies during the Seven Years War, and thereafter it was barely visible until the rebellion gathered strength.
It is widely believed that Americans overwhelmingly rallied to the patriotic cause of resistance to the British. There is no evidence to support this. By the rebels’ own admission, as many Americans may have been opposed to independence as in favour, and the vast majority were probably indifferent. The exodus after the end of the war of those opposed to independence numbered at least 8 per cent of the population – a staggeringly high proportion. Independence was a minority cause, support for which was whipped up by a group of committed political ideologues supported by sympathetic commercial interests.
It is widely believed that the Continental Congress summoned to consider action against the British in 1776 represented the American people. On the contrary, it was largely chosen by unrepresentative cliques (except in Massachusetts, where there was overwhelming popular support for independence – although not in Boston). The war was alleged to have started as a result of unprovoked British military aggression at Lexington and Concord; the evidence of close study is that the British blundered into a carefully organized, efficiently executed ambush. The Battle of Bunker Hill is usually considered an American triumph. In fact it was a British victory – although a costly one – and was fought on Breed’s Hill.
British commanders in the war are generally portrayed as incompetent buffoons. This description applies with accuracy to only two admirals, Graves and Arbuthnot – not to the highly competent Richard, Lord Howe, or to the exceptional Rodney and Hood – and only one general, Burgoyne, the victim of his vanity and over-ambition. Admiral Howe’s brother, General William Howe, was effective and audacious, if lazy and unconvinced by the rightness of Britain’s cause; Clinton was competent, but overdefensive and introverted; while Cornwallis was a fearless tactician and leader in battle, but an appalling overall strategist.
Conversely, in the American pantheon, Washington ultimately displayed exactly that combination of qualities that establishes true greatness: patience and restraint, with lightning audacity when the moment is right. But his botched defence of New York and, thereafter, his headlong flight across New Jersey and – except for the brilliant guerrilla strikes at Trenton and Princeton – his crablike caution placed him under increasing pressure and criticism from Congress and his own generals, rendering him an always bitterly disputed commander-in-chief. (Indeed his chief quality at one stage seemed to be his ability to dispose of his rivals with consummate ruthlessness.)
As for the rest of the American high command, Generals Lee, Conway, Gates, Lincoln and Arnold all fell from the stars to ignominious discredit with dizzying velocity. Only the spectacularly able, larger than life Henry Knox and Daniel Morgan emerged with their reputations intact, alongside such foreign supporters of America as Baron Johann de Kalb (killed at Camden), the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron Friedrich von Steuben. At the end of the war, Nathanael Greene, the brilliant commander in the south, emerged as a star that burned as brightly as Washington’s, but he died tragically young immediately afterwards.
So the myths go on. Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, immortalized in American iconography, was a brilliant and daring guerrilla raid, but had no real military impact (although a great effect on public opinion). His failure to defend Philadelphia was potentially disastrous for the American cause, but was redeemed by Gates’s victory at Saratoga – which was almost a textbook example of how a single overambitious and overconfident British commander could sacrifice an entire British army.
Contrary to the received wisdom, Saratoga was not militarily fatal to Britain, nor even the turning point except that it averted American defeat and provided a pretext for the French to declare war on Britain. In fact Saratoga was not technically a British defeat at all, in that the British army was promised safe passage home. The cynical and unexpected American betrayal of this promise was what turned a setback into a disaster for the British. Even French entry into the war was not decisive: it merely ensured that the force of British power would be concentrated more on their Continental enemy than on the colonies: from that moment on, intervention by Britain in the numbers required to crush the American rebels was out of the question. However, to begin with, the French proved no more able to defeat the British in the colonies than the Americans alone.
British defeat after Saratoga was very far from inevitable. Indeed, with the launching of Britain’s campaign in the south and the successful capture of Savannah and Charleston, the initiative seemed to have returned to the mother country. The Indians and the blacks, whom the British sought to protect against their American overlords, were overwhelmingly on the British side. The darkest chapter in the war was the American massacre of the Indians and the seizure of their lands. Only as Cornwallis’s small army tried to penetrate deep into guerrilla-held territory did the British effort in the south falter, although Britain won most of the battles. Cornwallis then made the epic strategic blunder of penetrating into Virginia and allowing his troops to be trapped on the Yorktown peninsula. Up to that point the Americans’ own view was that they had probably lost the war.
But it was the French navy, momentarily in control of the sea, and French besiegers, supported by the Americans, that did the trapping. In most respects Yorktown was a classic French defeat of the British, with the Americans in a supporting role. It could not possibly have happened without the French. And even this defeat was not militarily disastrous – Britain still held New York and other enclaves, which could be reinforced. It was, however, decisive in its effect on British public opinion, which concluded that it had had enough. Britain decided to settle with the rebels, who then agreed to squeeze their French allies out of America – a settlement which pleased both English-speaking parties. The Americans also reneged on their treaty promise to compensate the tens of thousands of dispossessed and fleeing loyalists, many of them from the old gentry class. America was born of American valour, determination and ruthlessness, and British exhaustion.
The old order in America had been overthrown, and with the war’s end the revolutionary forces that had surged forward to break the umbilical link with Britain were now in control. It took nearly four years, when the country came under threat of economic collapse, anarchy and disintegration, for the conservative forces in America to unite around Washington and impose order upon the American people, under threat of force, through an unelected assembly which imposed the (in some respects undemocratic) constitution that has endured until this day. There was nothing representative about that greatest of all assemblies. The 1787 constitutional convention represented not the apogee of the American Revolution, but its defeat – the crushing of the men who had overthrown the old gentry order, as well as the British. It imposed a measure of central control, taxation and military enforcement greater than any previously attempted by the British – while respecting British-style constitutional liberties.
That counter-revolutionary settlement has endured to this day, making America, despite its revolutionary credentials, one of the most conservative societies on earth, yet one wedded to the virtue of individual freedom. This formidable reconciliation of those old antagonists, freedom and order – a reconciliation that emerged during the twelve tumultuous years from 1775 to 1787 – lies at the heart of American success. It deserves far greater attention than it has received in Europe, and far more detached general analysis than it has received in the United States.
This book inadequately attempts to provide both. Along the way, the story of the War of Independence is an enthralling one of outstanding personalities, suffering soldiery and civilians, vivid battles, military verve and incompetence, clashing ideals, betrayal and villainy – and the indomitable tenacity with which a handful of brave and determined men took on a superpower. They did not win their independence alone – Britain gave up, and it was largely the French who inflicted the decisive defeat – but the outcome was the same, and the battle could not have been continued without their determination.