1775 (94 page)

Encouraged by Congress and its secret committees, colonies like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina were commissioning shipowners and merchants to trade any commodity available—fish, provisions, wheat, rice, but especially tobacco—for war matériel. It remained true, as late as December, that George Washington was looking to a surrendered Quebec for a treasure trove of powder and large cannon to drive the British out of Boston. But in European, Caribbean, and American waters alike, the Royal Navy had too few of the small vessels needed to catch the merchant sloops and schooners transporting munitions to America or to such tropical entrepôts as St. Eustatius, Cap Français, or Martinique.

A fourth campaign, albeit closely connected with the third, required the Patriot faction to cultivate and maintain enough support and influence in Europe to keep the arms and munitions flowing, to interfere with King George’s plans to hire mercenaries (as in Holland and Russia), and to keep both the French and the Spanish hooked on the idea of trying to weaken Britain by promoting a revolution in her North American colonies. Eventually, or so men like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams believed, such relations would ripen into alliances. They did.

These battles had to be begun in 1775; waiting was not an option. But for the most part, the four campaigns—the four triumphs—have not been described in the language of shooting wars and battles.

Within the thirteen colonies, however, many more such developments took place in 1775 than believers in
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum
like to admit.
Chapter 20
employed the term
Battle of Boston
to describe the two years of fierce antagonism that began in the spring of 1774 when the British government confidently imposed the Coercive Acts. Two years later, in March 1776, that same government had to scramble to find transport to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a bedraggled British army forced out of Boston by new rebel artillery emplacements! That the Battle of Boston was an American victory is beyond dispute. The question is whether it represented something more unusual.

Thomas Gage clearly thought so. In a July 1775 letter to the Earl of Dartmouth, the general had argued that Boston was where “the arch-rebels formed their scheme long ago. This circumstance brought the troops first here which is the most disadvantageous place for all operations…Was this army in New York, that province might to all appearances be more easily reduced.”
⁴
Gage, of course, was not the only one to scent conspiracy. Washington, Adams, and Jefferson all thought that British ministries had conspired against the rights of the colonies. It is entirely conceivable that Samuel Adams was thinking and planning for war. If Samuel Adams planned to trap the British in Boston, he probably began in 1773 or 1774, which would make any such plot one of the best-planned and best-sprung political and military traps of the eighteenth century.

New Englanders were clever to push for an invasion of Canada in 1775, in part because it kept the British military there too busy to mount a back-door attack on the American army besieging Boston. Beginning in 1775, the British were forced to overconcentrate forces in Canada. This ensured that the main invasion of the thirteen colonies would be launched
from Canada—and that focus remained until the invasion army under Burgoyne was defeated in October 1777.

Two other British political and military miscalculations made in 1775 worked in the colonies’ long-term favor. Lord Dartmouth and his colleagues at least passively agreed to Virginia governor Dunmore’s strategy of bringing down the Indians on the colonists and enlisting slaves who would run away to join the British Army. However, distaste for Dunmore pushed Virginians toward the Patriot faction and independence. So did the failure of the southern expedition, which alienated the Carolinas and played a role in delaying the invasion of New York.

In short, 1775 was a good year politically and militarily. It was a good year to launch the Revolution, although the forces set in motion during 1774 left little choice.

The Revolutionary Economy: Grave 1775 Miscalculations

Here American assumptions were more mistaken than shrewd. In particular, the Patriots were naïve to embrace the mercantilist assessment of the thirteen colonies being so important that the king and Parliament would have no choice but to accede to the First Continental Congress’s far-reaching political, commercial, and economic demands. But earlier nonimportation boycotts had not been that decisive in the British policy retreats of 1765 and 1770.

Back in the autumn of 1774, then, Congress had been foolish to expect that King George and his ministers would back down in early 1775 after eleven of the thirteen colonies endorsed the nonimportation and nonexportation calendar and mechanisms set out in the Continental Association. Even Lord Dartmouth, the relatively conciliatory American secretary, pronounced its intentions “criminal.” The British government’s anger led to a series of harsh responses—the Restraining Acts of March and April 1775, the king’s August Proclamation of Rebellion, and the Prohibitory Act in late December, which declared that as of March 1, 1776, all vessels entering or exiting Americans ports would be subject to seizure.

As trade shrank late in 1775, after the last large export shipments of wheat and tobacco had made the September cutoff, rebels hoped that the ensuing dearth of trade was injuring Britain more. For the most part, though, that was illusory. Nonexportation had become a snare for Patriots, not a laurel wreath. To remedy the mistake, Congress had recommended,
and a half dozen provinces soon implemented, activity by local merchants and shipowners to export salable commodities like tobacco and wheat in return for munitions and other necessities like salt and medicines. Foreigners who brought war matériel to American ports were promised similar desirable cargoes. Beyond these exceptions, trade was shrinking, and little resurgence was apparent in April 1776, when Congress finally opened all American ports to non-British vessels and trade.

In the weeks after Lexington and Concord, few were surprised by the economic pain starting to be felt in maritime New England. The Royal Navy in those waters was initially authorized by the Crown to seize vessels carrying munitions or supplies for the army encircling Boston, and within a few months local fishermen were obliged to beach their vessels as Restraining Act prohibitions went into effect. Beginning in July, the Royal Navy was authorized to seize New England merchant vessels bound for any port save a British or West Indian one.

However, because a second Restraining Act also extended the July deadline to three middle colonies and two in the South, trade in these ports also fell off sharply. Little data is available, but figures for vessels arriving in Philadelphia charted a precipitous decline. Between September 6, 1775, and March 1, 1776, the tonnage of shipping entering at Philadelphia was down by two thirds from the usual prewar level, Between March 1776 and August 1776, those already-depressed levels experienced another two-thirds shrinkage.
⁵

The strategists who promoted the import and export ultimatums in late 1774 had not anticipated these developments, which also put some of their other optimism at risk. Patriots spoke with confidence about America’s great manpower resources—about how the colonies could put as many as 200,000 men in the field. Provisioning them would also be easy, it was felt, because meat and grain production (wheat, corn, rice) exceeded domestic demand. Instead, by late 1776 and 1777, as the Revolutionary economy weakened, expected manpower surpluses turned into troop shortages.

Historians who cast doubt on the effectiveness of Britain’s naval blockade were correct with respect to the early days in Boston, and with respect to how much war matériel, especially gunpowder, got through in 1774, 1775, and beyond. However, the Royal Navy did have a large enough presence to discourage and chill an important percentage of ordinary American waterborne trade. Commerce in New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and elsewhere was badly disrupted by the effects of British invasions and occupations
on the particular area, and by the effects of Royal Navy concentrations in areas of landings or blockades. In some places, large-scale American troop mobilization—like the call-up of the Connecticut militia in mid-1776—also sapped the local economy.

With fewer goods being produced and traded, the wartime economy of the new United States suffered further injury from excessive emissions of paper currency at both the national and state levels. Congress’s initial printing was necessary—$5 million by the end of 1775, rising to $15 million in mid-1776—and the money held its value reasonably well until the defeats of George Washington and the Continental Army in the August and September battles in and around New York City. By the end of 1777, as issuance got out of hand, the total of congressional and state currency reached some $72 million.
⁶
If trade had been thriving, and if products had been widely available, the inflationary effects would not have been so severe, but too much money was chasing too few goods, and inflation soared.

This is not to undertake an economic history of the Revolution, but only to explain the miscarriage of the economic proposals and expectations voiced in 1774 and 1775. After showing strains and inflationary signs in 1776, the Revolutionary economy dipped in 1777, worsened in 1778 and 1779, and probably bottomed in 1780. This failure undermined the Revolution psychologically as well as economically, and many erstwhile Patriots lost faith. The southern states, reinvaded between late 1778 and 1780, suffered more than others and came out of the Revolution in 1783 in the worst economic shape. By some calculations, the economy of what became the United States did not recover to prewar levels until the 1790s.

Between 1778 and 1780, hundreds of thousands of Americans must have wondered, and with reason, whether they would have done better to remain British colonials. The larger answer, though, is clearly no, and not just because economic self-determination had to be pursued sooner or later. Had policy makers of 1775 better understood the economic strains and damages to follow from fighting the mother country, they might not have wanted to gamble. But 1775 was the year to do so, with the political, global, and military stars in alignment; it was the critical year for an American Revolution. No other would have proved so fruitful.

No volume this size reaches fruition without incurring some debts and requiring some acknowledgments.

To begin with, my wife, Martha, in addition to putting up with a second round of American Revolution–centered research and trips, shared driving and logistical duties from the Mohawk Valley and the Carolina backcountry to Flanders. She also did the photography in museums, libraries, and archives.

This is my fourth book at Viking edited by Wendy Wolf, and it is hard to imagine working with any other editor. Her assistant, Maggie Riggs, also helped.

As I began
1775,
in the spring of 2009, I had some guidance from Ronald Hoffman, director of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. Few scholars have such a broad knowledge of the Revolutionary era. I also owe a debt to the specialists who detailed the particular importance of late 1774 and 1775 in the vanguard colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and South Carolina. So too for those who emphasized the importance of the provincial militia reorganizations and political purges during that same period, as well as those who catalogued the organization and scope of the committees set up by the colonies in response to the Continental Association voted by the First Continental Congress in October 1774. These wide-ranging committees—there were nearly a thousand—became vital mechanisms of local control as Patriot government replaced King George’s crumbling authority.

My pages have also cited the scholars who have explained that the real American
rage militaire
came in 1775, not 1776, as well as those who have pointed out the various months and episodes prior to the summer of 1776 in which de facto American independence became increasingly clear.

Several other appreciations are in order. In
Chapter 4
, which identified
economic self-determination as a major force behind the Revolution, I cited a dozen or so historians who explained the provocations of British currency laws and regulation. In the early twenty-first century, attention to the nation’s money supply has become a staple of discussion and press coverage. However, I would have been more reluctant to emphasize its importance in the 1770s without so many specialists’ agreement.

In two cases, foreign historians have pursued directions less attended to by their American colleagues. The critical role played during late 1774 and 1775 by American colonists’ global struggle for gunpowder and munitions—and British attempts to halt or intercept those supplies—was spotlighted in 2009 in the doctoral dissertation of a Belgian, Marion Huibrechts. Meanwhile, Canadian historians have gone where most U.S. historians have not in underscoring how near the 1775 American invasion of Canada came to success. I am indebted to Eric Ruel, conservateur of the Musée du Fort St.-Jean, for Quebec historians’ arguments that without the drawn-out resistance of that fort’s outnumbered British defenders, American forces would have been able to reach Quebec City in November, at which time the great citadel could not have held out.

The frequent inattentiveness to 1775 events carries over into a too-limited range of prints, paintings, and commemorations with the principal exception of Massachusetts. Historians in Virginia and the Carolinas occasionally lament that the early Revolution in New England gets excessive attention, but too few have commemorated their own early battles—like the First Battle of Ninety Six in South Carolina and the defense of Hampton and the fighting at Great Bridge in Virginia.

In terms of prints, maps, and paintings, my thanks goes to libarian Peter Drummey and his staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and to the Beverly, Massachusetts, Historical Society and to the Beverly Public Library for permission to photograph their painting of HMS
Nautilus
chasing the colonial schooner
Hannah
into Beverly Harbor. In Machias, Maine, the Machias Savings Bank permitted the reproduction of their painting of the local
Unity
capturing the British armed schooner
Margaretta.
In Connecticut, state archivist Mark Jones and the town of Lebanon Historical Society gave permission to reproduce a painting of Governor Jonathan Trumbull. Professor Richard Buel was kind enough to let me reproduce the map of militia regimental districts in his book
Dear Liberty: Connecticut’s Mobilization for the Revolutionary War.