Authors: Kevin Phillips
Representatives of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps helpfully provided
high-resolution images of several paintings. Thanks to Michael Knapp, deputy director of Army museums, and Major Michael Gambone of the U.S. Army Center of Military History for
The Soldiers of 1775,
a representation of George Washington, the commanding general, and Major General Artemas Ward of the Massachusetts forces. Art curator Joan Thomas of the National Museum of the Marine Corps furnished the image of their painting of
The First Recruits, December 1775.
Below the Mason-Dixon Line, the Culpeper, Virginia, Historical Society provided a portrait of John Murray. In South Carolina, The Charleston Library Society helped with maritime images, and Charles Baxley of the organization Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution assisted in locating several maps and paintings. With respect to Williamson’s Fort and the First Battle of Ninety Six, the National Park Service provided vital assistance. At the Ninety Six National Historic Site interpretative ranger Sarah Cunningham was a fount of information and together with Guy Prentice of the National Park Service’s Southeast Archaelogical Center located an NPS version of a local map from William Drayton’s 1821
Memoirs of the American Revolution.
The painting of soldiers from the 3rd South Carolina Regiment for 1779, including one Catawba warrior and several “men of color,” appears courtesy of the Culture and Heritage Museums of York County, South Carolina. Michael Scoggins of that museum is also the director of the Southern Revolutionary War Institute. Charleston may be preoccupied with Fort Sumter and secession, but interest in the Revolution thrives in the backcountry.
Preface: Why
1775
1.
Frank H. Horton, “The Building of America,”
Illustrated American
11, no. 123 (June 25, 1892), p. 287.
2.
Gwenda Morgan,
The Debate on the American Revolution
(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 58–59.
3.
Ibid., pp. 62 and 69.
4.
John S. Shy,
A People Numerous and Armed
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), p. 317.
5.
Ibid., pp. 183–84.
6.
Mark Kwasny,
Washington’s Partisan War
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996), p. xv.
7.
Arthur M. Schlesinger,
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957).
8.
Ray Raphael,
The First American Revolution
(New York: New Press, 2002); Ivor Noel Hume,
1775: Another Part of the Field
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1966); Lewis Pinckney Jones,
The South Carolina Civil War of 1775
(Lexington, S.C.: Sandlapper Store, 1975).
Chapter 1: The Spirit of 1775
1.
Charles Royster,
A Revolutionary People at War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 30–31.
2.
Rhys Isaac, “Dramatizing the Ideology of Revolution,”
William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd ser., 33, no. 3 (1976), pp. 381–82.
3.
John Ferling,
Almost a Miracle
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 26.
4.
Jerrilyn G. Marston,
King and Congress
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 53.
5.
Michael Kammen,
A Season of Youth
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 256.
6.
Bernard Knollenberg,
Growth of the American Revolution: 1765–1775
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), pp. 202–3.
7.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/intolerable_Acts.
8.
John R. Galvin,
Minutemen
(Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1996), pp. 46–48.
9.
Allen French,
The First Year of the American Revolution
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), p. xx.
10.
Galvin, op. cit., p. xiii.
11.
Don Higginbotham,
The War of American Independence
(New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 22.
12.
Arthur B. Tourtellot,
Lexington and Concord
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), p. 23.
13.
National Park Service,
Salem: Maritime Salem in the Age of Sail
(Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1987), p. 46.
14.
Higginbotham, op. cit., pp. 11 and 85.
15.
William B. Clark, ed.,
Naval Documents of the American Revolution
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), vol. 2, p. 324.
16.
New Hampshire American Revolution Bicentennial Commission,
New Hampshire: Years of Revolution, 1774–1783
(Concord, N.H.: Profiles Publishing, 1976), p. 10.
17.
James S. Leamon,
Revolution Downeast
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 77, and James D. Phillips,
Salem in the Eighteenth Century
(Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1969), pp. 370–71.
18.
Marston, op. cit., p. 51.
19.
There were British soldiers on ships—off Norfolk, Virginia, for example—but, save for Boston, none on land until Canada in the North and British East Florida in the South.
20.
Terry W. Lipscomb,
The Carolina Lowcountry, April 1775 to June 1776
(Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1994), p. 17.
21.
Jeffrey Dorwart,
Fort Mifflin of Philadelphia
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. xii and 18–25.
22.
Edward G. Burrows and Mike Wallace,
Gotham
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 225.
23.
French, op. cit., p. 148.
24.
Ibid., p. 598.
25.
John A. Neuenschwander,
The Middle Colonies and the Coming of the American Revolution
(Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976), pp. 200–201.
26.
The term dates to the 1800–1802 period, when Pennsylvania was labeled the “archstone of democratic politics,” but the origins are not precise.
27.
George Washington,
Writings from the Original Manuscript Sources,
ed. J. C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913–1941), vol. 6, pp. 397–98.
28.
Thomas Fleming,
1776: Year of Illusions
(Edison, N.J.: Castle Books, 1996), pp. 431 and 36–37.
29.
Joseph Ellis,
American Creation
(New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 20.
30.
French, op. cit., p. 714.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Neuenschwander, op. cit., p. 46.
33.
Sydney George Fisher,
The Struggle for American Independence
(Cranbury, N.J.: Scholar’s Bookshelf, 2005), vol. 1, p. 230.
34.
Lipscomb, op. cit., p. 6.
35.
William Moultrie,
Memoirs of the American Revolution
(1802: reprint edn., New York: Arno Press, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 57–58.
36.
William E. White, “The Independent Companies of Virginia,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
86, no. 2 (April 1978), p. 155.
37.
Royster, op. cit., pp. 25–27.
38.
David Ammerman,
In the Common Cause
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. ix.
39.
A Bid for Liberty
(Philadelphia: William Penn Association, 1937), pp. 14–17.
40.
Naval Documents,
op. cit., vol. 1, p. 7.
41.
Helen Augur,
The Secret War of American Independence
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), pp. 133–34.
42.
Because several Massachusetts enterprises had produced muskets for earlier wars, the province’s initial reaction was to favor local gunsmiths, but as the winter of 1774–1775 moved toward a fight, procuring the weapons became paramount.
43.
Augur, op. cit., pp. 17–18.
44.
Ibid., p. ix.
45.
Naval Documents,
op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 44–45.
46.
David H. Fischer,
Paul Revere’s Ride
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 51.
47.
Allen French,
General Gage’s Informers
(Cranbury, N.J.: Scholar’s Bookshelf, 2005), pp. 10–33.
48.
Naval Documents,
vol. 1, pp. 388–461.
49.
Ibid., p. 53.
50.
Lipscomb, op. cit., pp. 3–10.
51.
Ibid., p. 10.
52.
Fischer, op. cit., p. 43.
Chapter 2: Liberty’s Vanguard
1.
Robert L. Scribner, ed.,
Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 79–84.
2.
Neuenschwander, op. cit., pp. 36–37.
3.
Catherine Drinker Bowen,
John Adams and the American Revolution
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), pp. 479–80.
4.
Neuenschwander, op. cit., p. 9.
5.
Alan Tully,
Forming American Politics
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 311.
6.
Neuenschwander, op. cit., pp. 66–67.
7.
Tully, op. cit., p. 420.
8.
Neuenschwander, op. cit., p. 13.
9.
Bruce Bliven,
Under the Guns
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 9.
10.
Neuenschwander, op. cit., pp. 207, 160.
11.
Wallace Brown,
The Good Americans
(New York: William Morrow & Co., 1969), p. 60.
12.
Neuenschwander, op. cit., p. 194.
13.
Ibid., pp. 20–21.
14.
Ibid., pp. 77, 105, 119, 123.
15.
See in particular William H. Nelson,
The American Tory
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), pp. 21–23.
16.
The fullest portrait of the five Virginia conventions can be found in
Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence,
vols. 1–6, compiled for the Virginia Bicentennial Commission and published by the University of Virginia Press in 1975.
17.
Walter Edgar,
South Carolina: A History
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 218–19.
18.
Ibid., p. 219.
19.
Terry Lipscomb,
South Carolina Becomes a State
(Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1976), pp. 6–14.
20.
South Carolina claims are plausible, but there appear to be no records.
21.
Harold E. Selesky,
War and Society in Colonial Connecticut
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 227.
22.
Richard Buel, Jr.,
Dear Liberty
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), p. 4.
23.
David S. Lovejoy,
Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution
(Providence: Brown University Press, 1958), pp. 179–83.
24.
Ammerman, op. cit., pp. 21–22.
25.
As tensions rose in New England during the 1760s, so did British and Tory discussion of abrogating the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island charters. During the winter of 1774–1775, after elements of the Massachusetts Charter of 1691 had been set aside by the Coercive Acts, British government attention refocused on the other two. According to Peter D. G. Thomas in
Tea Party to Independence, the Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773–1776,
“one possible move was to declare forfeit the charters
of Rhode Island and Connecticut, whose popular institutions of government were deemed a factor in their defiance of Britain” (p. 217). General Gage privately agreed, and Anglicans in Rhode Island had begun urging an end to the charter in the 1760s.
26.
Buel, op. cit., p. 30.
27.
Oscar Zeichner,
Connecticut’s Years of Controversy
(Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), p. 188.
28.
Buel, op. cit., p. 31.
29.
Zeichner, op. cit., pp. 191, 196; Buel, op. cit., p. 38.
30.
See, for example, Buel, op. cit., pp. 42–80, and Bliven, op. cit., pp. 61–126.
31.
Buel, op. cit., pp. 43-44.
32.
See Chester M. Destler,
Connecticut: The Provisions State
(Chester, Conn.: Pequot Press, 1973).
33.
David M. Roth,
Connecticut’s War Governor: Jonathan Trumbull
(Chester, Conn.: Pequot Press, 1974), pp. 10, 14–15, 20, and 72–75.
34.
Charles Kingsley’s 1855 novel
Westward Ho!,
set in the sixteenth-century North Devon of Drake and Hawkins, Gilbert and Raleigh, painted an English spirit that had already taken the “westward enterprise” across Wales and Ireland to America and was farther questing for the Northwest Passage. The English Americans in the vanguard colonies were only continuing that spirit in their own drive toward the Pacific.
35.
Because Connecticut’s 1662 charter granted territory westward to the Pacific, it was at odds with a 1664 royal patent extending New York territory east to the Connecticut River. A preliminary compromise was worked out under a 1683 boundary agreement in which Connecticut did well, but a handful of Yankee-settled towns from Rye north to Bedford and Brewster wound up in New York’s Westchester County. Disputes continued, as several books document. See, for example, Philip J. Schwarz,
The Jarring Interests: New York’s Boundary Makers, 1664 to
1
776
(1979) and Clarence Bowen,
The Boundary Disputes of Connecticut
(1882).
36.
Three of the five men selected as delegates to the First Continental Congress came from Essex County, and after the Congress adjourned, Essex spearheaded the implementation of the Continental Association in New Jersey. Neuenschwander, op. cit., pp. 39, 58.