1775 (4 page)
Authors: Kevin Phillips
As to why Virginia and South Carolina are identified as vanguard colonies and North Carolina is not, the latter was neither an old colony nor a national leader. But its rarely recognized importance in discouraging the 70-ship and seven-regiment southern expedition set in motion by King George and Lord North in October 1775 deserves a special mention.
The years 1774 and 1775 have more than their share of unsung heroes. Some of these have provided a further, welcome refreshment in this era of political disappointment.
Kevin Phillips
Litchfield County, Connecticut
April 2012
Contents
| Chapter 1. | The Spirit of 1775 |
PART II. THE REVOLUTION—PROVOCATIONS,
MOTIVATIONS, AND ALIGNMENTS
PART III. 1775—THE BATTLEGROUNDS
PART IV. CONSEQUENCES AND RAMIFICATIONS
List of Maps
1. The Thirteen Colonies, 1775
2. Greater Massachusetts, 1775
5. Greater South Carolina, 1775
6. Frontier Expansion in the Northern Backcountry, 1775–1776
7. Frontier Expansion in the Southern Backcountry, 1775–1776
8. Quebec, Nova Scotia, and the Threat from Canada
9. The Invasion of Canada, 1775
10. Britain’s Cape Fear Rendezvous
11. Chesapeake Bay: The Missed British Invasion Opportunity
12. The Civil War in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1775
13. Southeastern Virginia, 1775–1776
14. Charles Town and Its Harbor, 1775–1776
INTRODUCTION
The Spirit of 1775
In one sense it is doubtless true that nobody, in 1775, wanted war; in another sense it is almost equally clear that both the Americans and the British were aching for a showdown.
Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris,
The Spirit of ’Seventy-six,
1958
How do we account for the hostilities on Lexington Green?…Simple, in that control of munitions was crucial to both sides—to the Americans for making war, to the British for avoiding it.
Don Higginbotham,
The War of American Independence,
1971
S
uch was the arousal and spirit of 1775 that
rage militaire
—a patriotic furor, a passion for arms—swept the thirteen colonies that spring and summer, giving the American Revolution its martial assurance and its vital, if somewhat delusionary, early momentum. Great hopes took hold, and sedentary lawyers, publishers, and preachers pored over their libraries of English political and revolutionary precedents.
Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill sowed confidence, and by summer, scarlet-coated military might had shrunk back to encircled Boston and a few fast-deserting companies in New York. Following these initial successes, Patriots soon developed “a national conceit of born courage in combat with a sudden acclaim for a superior form of military discipline, easily acquired”—that of a valorous and virtuous citizen soldiery.
1
It was all very heady.
Virtue, the old Roman credo, clad itself in a uniquely American garb. Hunting shirts, belts, and leggings became fashionable, what a later era might term militia chic. Even gentry-minded Virginians cast aside their imported velours and joined in. Before the opening of a June 1775 legislative session in Williamsburg, burgesses were recommended to attend in
shirtmen’s garb—frontier-type apparel—“which best suits the times, as the cheapest and the most martial.” And “numbers of the Burgesses” did indeed come wearing “coarse linnen or canvas over their Cloaths and a Tomahawk by their Sides.”
2
New Englanders, informed by Harvard and Yale scholars, boasted that no plausible European army could be large enough to overcome the combination of American space and just cause. In Pennsylvania, even erstwhile pacifist Quakers marched in a volunteer light infantry company nicknamed the “Quaker Blues,” for which some were quickly read out of their monthly meetings.
Three thousand miles away, many British policy makers suffered from an opposite “empire militant” style of conceit. No colonial riffraff could hope to stand up to the professional armies of the world’s preeminent imperium. The revolutionaries would scatter in panic after two or three of their well-known leaders were hung as traitors. General James Grant told amused listeners that he could march from one end of the American colonies to the other with 5,000 British regulars. The king’s aide-de-camp, General Thomas Clark, thought he could do it with 1,000 men, gelding colonial males as he went.
3
Boston radicals, “Oliverian” at heart, were the trouble spreaders, subverting loyal and unwary subjects elsewhere. Through much of 1774 and 1775, even as British ministers transferred troops to hostile Boston, they naïvely emptied barracks elsewhere.
Clearly both sides misread some military and political realities. However, the rebels of 1775 had the better reason for confidence. Provincial boundaries of that era being imprecise, disputed, or vague, no researcher can hope to calculate the ratio of the thirteen-colony domain—from Maine (then a district of Massachusetts) south through Georgia—still effectively occupied by British soldiers or administered by functioning officials of His Majesty’s government at year’s end. Whatever the maps in Whitehall or St. James purported to show, the reality on the ground was stark: practically nothing.
Consider: in Virginia and both Carolinas, the summer of 1775 saw Crown-appointed governors ignominiously flee their unfriendly capitals for cramped but seizure-proof accommodations on nearby British warships. In February 1776, the governor of Georgia, all but powerless, finally decamped to a convenient frigate. In most places, the king’s writ no longer ran. In all four southern colonies, Patriot-led provincial congresses and committees of safety had taken extralegal but effective control of government. Forts had been captured, munitions seized, sea actions fought, towns burned, and regiment after regiment mustered into the new Continental Army.
An ocean away, the punitive intentions of King George III also kept growing—from his late-1774 comment about looking forward to putting down rebellion in Massachusetts to his mid-1775 hope of hiring Russian mercenaries, only to settle by year end for Hessians and Brunswickers. Henry Howard, twelfth Earl of Suffolk and a principal secretary of state, had agreed that the Russians would make “charming visitors at New-Yorke, and civilize that part of America wonderfully.”
4
A year before July 4, 1776, the die was all but cast. In fact, participants from King George to John Adams used precisely that phrase, first employed by Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon in 49
B.C.
The reader can learn about these events and escalations in the history books, just not conveniently or in very much detail. Over two centuries, as the Revolutionary War became all but sanctified as “the single most important source for our national sense of tradition,” public attention was diverted from the struggle’s more complicated, less-inspiring realities.
5
Disregarding the necessities of munitions smuggling and using militiamen to suppress political dissidence, the origins of the republic became ever more romanticized around the assertion of 1776 as a moral and ideological watershed not just for North America but for the world. Events were also confected into neat celebratory symbols like Paul Revere’s ride, George Washington’s greatness, Benjamin Franklin’s genius, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Betsy Ross’s flag, and the seriously misrepresented Liberty Bell. Boston, Lexington-Concord, Philadelphia, and Valley Forge became the hallowed venues, with legend-building side excursions to Mount Vernon and Monticello. This adulation has served to minimize comprehension of what actually happened—not least how a
rage militaire
helped put down deep enough early foundations for American nationhood to withstand the disillusionments that mounted in the second half of 1776.
Behind the bunting, reality is not merely a corrective but a more gripping tale. Much of it is scarcely known. Massachusetts and Virginia did play central roles, just as schoolchildren properly learn. However, the sprawling canvas of 1775, beyond even the other eleven insurgent North American colonies, stretches to include events in Bermuda, the Bahamas and the West Indies, Canada, Ireland and the Irish Sea, London, Glasgow, England’s Isle of Wight, the sea lanes off Holland and the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium), Paris, Nantes, the smuggler-ridden Channel ports of Dunkirk and Ostend, the Prince-Bishopric of Liège (Europe’s principal independent weapons contractor), and Hesse-Cassel and a half dozen other
minor principalities in northern Germany, as well as Madrid, Gibraltar, Mediterranean Minorca, and West Africa’s Slave Coast. Intrigue even reached the St. Petersburg palace of Catherine the Great, Russia’s czarina, who scoffed at King George’s Russian troop-hire request. All were venues where British or Americans, publicly or privately, sought critical assistance—mercenaries, munitions, or both. Competition and then confrontation were global.
Another essential subject is rebellion’s political geography—the different degrees of involvement and intensity within the insurgent thirteen. New England’s other three provinces, for example, were scarcely less motivated than Massachusetts. Self-governing Connecticut and Rhode Island, only nominal “colonies,” were in Patriot political hands from the start. In New Hampshire, the royal governor, John Wentworth, soon took refuge in harborside Fort William and Mary. Then in August 1775, he sailed away to Boston on HMS
Scarborough,
which six months later also became home to Georgia’s fugitive executive. In the South, despite the speed shown in driving out royal governors, important divisions lingered. As for the middle colonies—the future states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware—overall they included the highest ratio of doubters and temporizers. Their indecision during the winter of 1775–1776 worried commander in chief George Washington as well as pro-independence strategists in the Continental Congress. Part of our tale of 1775 involves the often-bitter backstage battle for political allegiance.
Massachusetts: The Coercive Acts as a Seedbed of Revolution