The Dangerous Book of Heroes (3 page)

Elsewhere, it's more accurately called the American War of Independence, for this was no revolution. It was a straight fight for independence from a controlling power. The eventual federal government, with its two houses of Congress and an elected president, was very similar to the British constitutional government, with its two houses of Parliament and elected prime minister. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published his influential propaganda pamphlet
Common Sense
. A phenomenal 120,000 copies were distributed throughout the colonies and Britain.

In Charlestown, meanwhile, General Howe's winter quarters were an indefensible position. As soon as Washington placed cannon on Dorchester Heights in March, Howe was forced to leave by sea. Washington then hurried overland to invade and fortify New York, while in July the colonies made the Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia. In August, Howe's army arrived at New York by sea and, in a succession of clever land and sea maneuvers, defeated Washington's army. Howe pursued it south through New Jersey. By winter, he had forced Washington across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. Nearly ten thousand patriots were wounded, killed, or captured, while many more men deserted.

It was then that Washington recalled the lessons learned in the earlier French and Indian War. His patriot army could never meet and ultimately defeat British armies on a traditional battlefield. Instead, it had to fight as the British and the militia had fought against the French: a small victory here, a small victory there, even a small defeat, then withdrawal to regroup and attack again elsewhere. In that way, he would wear down Britain's resolve, politically and
militarily. This is exactly what Washington ordered for most of the next six years, beginning that Christmas night.

Conducting a standard war, Howe had gone into winter quarters, leaving two outposts near the Delaware at Trenton and Burlington. Washington and his men crossed the icy river in darkness and attacked the mercenary Hessian regiment at Trenton, forcing its surrender. In response, General Cornwallis quickly advanced to trap Washington at Trenton and retake the post. The wind shifted into the north, the impassable bog roads around Trenton froze, and Washington was able to escape by night. He marched around to attack the Princeton garrison, putting the British detachment there to flight before withdrawing again, to New Jersey.

He had found the way to win the war. He wrote to Congress: “We should on all Occasions avoid a general Action, or put anything to the Risque, unless compelled by a necessity, into which we ought never to be drawn.” Not everyone agreed and Washington was persuaded at times to return to more traditional tactics.

A patriot army invaded Canada in late 1776 in an attempt to destabilize the loyal colonies. It was defeated by General Carleton near Quebec on the last day of the year. Although outnumbered, General Burgoyne advanced south into New York Colony in 1777, hoping to take the patriots by surprise. However, he lost minor actions at Freeman's Farm and Bemis Heights, to surrender to General Gates at the battle of Saratoga. Farther south in Pennsylvania, Washington was defeated later that year by Howe at Brandywine Creek and Germantown, with the subsequent loss of Philadelphia.

Behind the scenes, Washington's command was also threatened. A congressional plot to dismiss him, led by an Irish adventurer named Conway, was defeated. At his Valley Forge winter quarters in Pennsylvania, Washington lost a
quarter
of his ten thousand men to disease and starvation. A doctor recorded in his diary: “Poor food, hard lodging, cold weather, fatigue, nasty clothes, nasty cookery, vomit half my time, smoked out of my senses, the devil's in it, I can't endure it.”

Benjamin Franklin, meanwhile, had lobbied France to enter this civil war in support of the patriots. That a decadent monarchy should
send arms, ammunition, soldiers, and ships to support a republican rebellion, while viciously suppressing its own republicans and liberty at home, has its own irony. Such was France's enmity toward Britain. A French rear admiral who fought with the loyalists was guillotined in Paris during the later Reign of Terror.

General Sir Henry Clinton replaced Howe and changed Britain's strategy. He saw that holding patriot centers such as Philadelphia was not effective; Congress simply left to reassemble elsewhere. Somehow General Washington's forces had to be defeated in the field. So Clinton left Philadelphia, made a single British stronghold of New York, and sent General Cornwallis to recapture the southern colonies lost by an earlier tactic. Although slavery had been constitutionally illegal in Great Britain since the 1580s, it was not in its colonies. So when Governor Murray had offered freedom to any slave—black or white—who fought for Britain, he had pushed the lukewarm southern Loyalists into the patriot camp.

Yet Clinton's new tactics were really an admission of defeat. For as long as Washington refused any pitched battle, it was a war Britain couldn't win. A patriot army merely had to exist, somewhere, for ultimate victory. Supported by a French army in 1780, Washington had positioned himself at Brunswick so that Clinton's army could not move from New York without his knowledge or hindrance.

Cornwallis, meanwhile, campaigned through Georgia and North and South Carolina, winning engagements at Savannah, Charleston, and Camden before entering Virginia in 1781. Yet he had no more control over those colonies than he had had two years before; the patriot forces had simply withdrawn to reappear elsewhere. By then, the passions of the war had increased. The Loyalist colonials were desperate in their desire to engage the patriots in the open, while the patriot colonials were vindictive in their raids on Loyalist settlements. For every Loyalist Guilford Courthouse bloodletting there was a vicious patriot Kings Mountain.

In addition—for Britain but not the patriots—this 1755–83 American war had also spread overseas. Britain found itself fighting, sometimes separately and sometimes together, the Dutch, French, and
Spanish, and an armed neutrality of Russia, Denmark, and Sweden. As far afield as the North Atlantic, the Caribbean, India, and the Mediterranean, British territories were attacked as its European enemies attempted to take advantage of the American rebellion. Included in this conflict was a four-year siege of Gibraltar, from 1779 to 1783.

It's no wonder the British resolve to fight other Britons, never strong, had wavered significantly. By the beginning of 1781, the American war was incredibly unpopular in Britain. Washington had hung on to his ragged and underpaid army in an uneasy alliance with the French. He believed that just one significant victory or British surrender would win him the war—not in the field but in Parliament itself.

Most Native American nations had remained Loyalist, although there was no specific coordination with the British army. Constant colonial breaches of the 1763 proclamation and various colonial attacks and massacres had made them firmly opposed to the patriots. The worst of the massacres was by the Paxton Boys in, of all colonies, Pennsylvania. Irish-Scots frontiersmen from Paxton had murdered twenty Christian Native Americans at Conestoga village. They then broke into Lancaster jail, butchered 14 in protective custody, threatened 140 more sheltering on Province Island, and finally marched on Philadelphia to murder the “Indian-lover” Quakers. Ben Franklin negotiated their dispersal, but none was prosecuted.

The Delaware nation was one of the few to sign a treaty of military support with Washington. At Fort Pitt in 1778 the Delaware were given the right to send representatives to Congress, although Congress never honored the terms. In retaliation to Iroquois attacks against the patriots, however, Washington ordered that they be not “merely overrun but destroyed.” In late 1779, General Sullivan carried out a scorched-earth policy in present-day Upstate New York. His men cut down crops and orchards, destroyed more than forty towns, and burned five hundred dwellings and a million bushels of corn. Colonel Brodhead murdered many women and children. As a result the Iroquois called Washington
conotocarius
—“town destroyer”—still their name for the president today.

In Virginia in 1781, faced by two armies trained by Prussian general Baron von Steuben, Cornwallis withdrew his seven thousand men to the deepwater port of Yorktown. He expected supplies and support by sea from General Clinton in New York, and hoped then to draw the patriot forces into battle. On the peninsula before the city, the Chesapeake Bay on two sides preventing escape, he would defeat them in a traditional battle.

With the main Royal Navy fleet in New York and other vessels farther north, there was only one frigate, one sloop, and some transports stationed at Yorktown. French admiral Comte Grasse therefore risked sailing north in support. Washington saw a chance and marched his army south from Brunswick, not to do battle with Cornwallis but to besiege him. Steuben and Lafayette blocked the neck of the peninsula with local militia while Grasse ferried Washington's army across Chesapeake Bay. With his twenty-four ships of the line he then blockaded the bay, where he was joined by a second French squadron and more French soldiers. At that crucial moment in history, the Royal Navy had temporarily lost control of Chesapeake Bay, while the main British army remained in New York.

Cornwallis was in dire trouble. Even then, with prompt action that September, he could have attacked and defeated Lafayette's six thousand French soldiers and then advanced out of the peninsula, but he hesitated. In New York, Clinton believed Washington's march south was a feint in order to take New York, and he also delayed. It was poor leadership.

Isolated, fever-stricken, running out of food, and by then vastly outnumbered, Cornwallis surrendered his small army to George Washington on October 19, 1781. That same day, Clinton finally ordered the main army and navy to move south to support Cornwallis. It was too late. There were further skirmishes in 1782, but the war was effectively over that spring when the British government withdrew its support and funding for the war. As Washington had told Congress, he would win the war not on the battlefield but in Parliament. There never was any fundamental British interest in fighting the war; there was not even a coordinated military strategy.
The French army, the force against which the British army might have fought a regular battle, was never once engaged.

In France, meanwhile, plans had been hatched by the French and Spanish monarchies—yet again—to invade democratic Britain. Two French divisions totaling forty thousand soldiers and sixty-six French and Spanish ships had gathered to cross the English Channel, with possible American support negotiated by Benjamin Franklin. Opposing them were thirty-eight vessels of the Royal Navy's Channel Fleet. It would have been a close battle, but poor weather and sickness delayed the invasion attempt. By then, the navy had returned from North America and the opportunity had gone.

Separate peace with Britain was signed on November 30, 1782. The international treaty—recognizing the independent nation of the United States of America, the boundaries of the thirteen states, British Canada, and access to the Grand Banks fishing grounds—was completed in September 1783.

 

Many of the former slaves who'd fought for Britain fled to the Canadian colonies of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and to Britain. Eleven hundred of these black Nova Scotians later helped establish Freetown in Sierra Leone. Those who couldn't escape the new United States were returned to slavery.

The majority of Loyalists were dispossessed of their property. Some of the eighty thousand who left the United States found various positions and opportunities in Britain or in other British colonies, particularly Canada. One such Loyalist was James Matra of New York. He had sailed as midshipman with Captain James Cook in his first great voyage of discovery. After American independence, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the eventual British settlement of Australia in 1788. A suburb of Sydney, Australia, is named for him.

Another was Ben Franklin's son William, the last governor of New Jersey Colony. He remained steadfastly loyal to Britain, and his father cut him from his will and his life. William, too, left the United States. Civil wars are the bitterest of all.

During the long war, Washington had managed to keep the fragile
colonial alliances together and maintain the Continental army in the field. In March 1783 there was mutiny. Claims for large arrears of pay—supported by Washington—and arguments about the future leadership of the federated thirteen states led to the Newburgh mutiny. Some wanted Washington to be crowned king. During his rejection speech, Washington stopped to put on spectacles. He glanced at the assembled officers and said: “Gentlemen, I have grown gray in your service, and now I am going blind.” It was the end of the mutiny. The Continental army was disbanded in November, leaving a small standing force of artillery, while the last British forces left New York in December. Washington resigned his commission at Annapolis and returned to Mount Vernon.

Except for the one brief visit it was the first time he'd been home since 1775. He'd taken this step before, of course, after his first unsuccessful military endeavors and after his successful defense of Virginia Colony. At fifty-one years of age, he was tired, but it was also a canny political move. There were the usual complaints, jealousies, rivalries, retributions, and vendettas that follow every civil war. There was a postwar economic depression, and the new federation of states was bankrupt, with no way to collect revenue to pay its debts. The loose union created by Franklin's Articles of Confederation gradually began to break apart.

At Mount Vernon, Washington was well out of such petty politics. He was also in debt again. For three years he reorganized Mount Vernon and its crops. He made only the one trip away, to view his western lands and the new land near the Ohio River given him by Congress for his services.

By 1787, however, the states had decided an actual constitution was necessary to replace the defunct federation. The Virginia assembly unanimously elected Washington to lead its delegation, and at Philadelphia he was unanimously elected by the delegates to chair the Constitutional Convention itself. It lasted four months. The resulting constitution leaned heavily upon the Magna Carta of 1215, Britain's Declaration of Rights of 1689, and John Locke's
Two Treatises on Government
of 1690.