The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (3 page)

The volumes are to be published as they are completed. It is by fortunate chance that the first to appear is Robert Middlekauff
The Glorious Cause
, treating the period of the American Revolution. His work skillfully and handsomely exemplifies the editorial purposes and goals outlined above and adds much to our understanding and appreciation of this vital era of national history through his masterful command of the subject.

In the earliest stages of planning the
Oxford History,
the editor had the enormously valuable collaboration of Richard Hofstadter, who originally served as co-editor. His death was a deeply felt personal loss as well as a grave loss to this series. His inestimable contributions to the present work are gratefully acknowledged. Over time some changes have been made in the authors of volumes, but the general conception and plan for the series retain the character fixed in the original collaboration.

C. Vann Woodward

"The use of travelling," Doctor Johnson wrote Mrs. Thrale, "is
to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."
Johnson spoke for the age in this desire to see things as they are and to avoid the dangerous imaginings of how they may be. His England and much of pre-Revolutionary America shared a suspicion of what he called "airy notions" -- the illusions of dreams and fancies. Johnson's great American contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, as a young man put aside speculations on the nature of reality in favor of living as a reasonable creature in contact with the world that presented itself through the evidence of his senses.

Franklin was a practical man. Practical men usually do not make revolutions; dreamers do. Yet Benjamin Franklin became a revolutionary with several million others in America. His action suggests one of the ironies of the American Revolution: its sources in a culture of men devoted to the hard realities of life -- practical men, down-to-earth men like Franklin himself, men who in 1776 threw off their allegiance to the empire in the name of "common sense," a phrase Thomas Paine had chosen as the title of his great tract on behalf of American independence. That brings us to another irony: what seemed to be only common sense to Thomas Paine, and to most Americans, in 1776, would have struck them as uncommon madness a dozen years before. Paine
Common Sense
, a sermon disguised as a political tract, informed Americans that their long-standing connection to England was preposterous, that

it violated the laws of nature and of human reason, indeed that it aroused a repugnancy in "the universal order of things." And as for the institution to which they had always given their loyalty -- the monarchy -- it was ridiculous, and as unnatural as the traditional tie to the mother country. Monarchy, according to Paine, had a heathenish origin; it had been instituted by the devil for the promotion of idolatry. The word according to Thomas Paine was accepted easily enough by most Americans; they were a church of the converted, and he gave them exactly what they wanted to hear. They declared their independence six months after his essay appeared, citing the laws of nature and of nature's God as justification.

The laws of nature and the universal order of things covered a good deal of ground, and the Americans of the revolutionary generation almost spent themselves in an attempt to map their limits. They had not often tried their hand at such things before. Besides, until the crisis with England began, the fundamentals seemed fairly clear, including the lines of universal order. That order began with a power mightier than the monarch -- it began with God.

Almost all Americans -- from the Calvinists in New England searching Scripture for the will of God to the rationalists in Virginia studying the divine mechanics in nature -- agreed that all things fell within the providential design. Providence ordered the greatest and smallest events of men's lives; Providence controlled the workings of the universe from the turning of the planets to the flight of a bird. Men might disagree about the meaning of the occurrences of their lives, some of which seemed surprising, even inexplicable -- early deaths, epidemics, droughts, plagues, wars, evil as well as good. Such things men might wonder at, and even describe as judgments, or afflictions, or marvels, or mysteries. Yet they did not doubt that these things had meaning.

But the God who gave order to the world was not only seen in externals. He was felt, sometimes in the cool hush of Virginia churches, sometimes in quiet Quaker meetings, sometimes in the spare meetinghouses in New England villages. Whether in the calm rationalism of Arminians, the unforgiving harshness of Calvinists, or the surging spirit of enthusiasts, the divine was felt. To some the power of God seemed overpowering, to some His grace gave relief, and to some God's "majestic meekness," in Jonathan Edwards's startling phrase, appeared to reveal the joining of His majesty and His mercy.

Perhaps at some point in their lives most men had a sense of the divine who gave meaning to the eternal order of things. Perhaps few

sustained great religious passion for long, but they did retain faith in providential order. For most Americans, perhaps, providential order appeared most clearly in the progress of an increasing, flourishing people. They called themselves a thriving people and impressed European travelers with the ease and the zest with which they accepted their growth and success. They were not complacent -- more than one European remarked on their "enthusiasm," a word that suggested that they might be dangerous as well as filled with religious extravagance. Many observers called them prolific, meaning that they produced goods as well as children at a surprising rate. And more than one commented on their ragged money, as indeed it was from changing hands in the bustling markets of American business.

Their increase in business and population did not amaze Americans, who had long had great expectations for themselves. To the heirs of people who had begun by thinking of themselves as settling the New World in the service of God, success -- increase and growth in the things of this world -- seemed only their just deserts, only their due, and a part of the eternal order of things.

In the second half of the eighteenth century that order still extended to the ordinary doings of life -- and especially to work and family. Work seemed akin to the sacred. Work was a duty imposed by God and approved by Him as right and good. That everyone should have a trade or a calling was unquestioned. The trade should be worked at, the calling well followed, for as Franklin said, "there is much to be done" and though you may be "weak handed,""stick to it steadily and you will see great Effects."

To be sure, the higher purposes of these great effects were not so clear as they had once been, say, to the founders of the colonies. But the purpose of life was still the glorification of God. Teaching that proposition fell to all in authority and began with parents, especially fathers, who ruled the house and all in it. They did so as fathers seem to have done from time immemorial. They were commissioned by God and their word was law. They were responsible for much -- for bread, for discipline, for seeing that others lived up to responsibilities, and for doing so themselves.

The order that began with the divine and expressed itself in the lives of a people embraced their government. In the second half of the eighteenth century no one in America regarded the Crown as the immediate instrument of God. Yet royal government had the sanction of the Lord, and men accepted the existing structure of government without question, though they often protested against its agents whom they faced every day.

The structure of government, they agreed, should reflect the structure of society. The good, the well-born, and the socially qualified should govern. That arrangement had apparently always existed and should continue. Maintaining it seemed all the more desirable to Americans because they knew that it conformed to the ancient lines of the British constitution, the most glorious frame of government yet devised by man. The Americans marveled at the long history of the protection -- indeed encouragement-that the British constitution afforded to liberty. And it protected imperial liberty, the freedoms of Americans as well as Englishmen, a remarkable achievement when measured against the record of despotism in earlier empires, and the tyranny that infected most of European life.

Thus public life and private life, according to these widely shared assumptions, were a part of an inevitable and unchanging order. Yet what American colonials assumed seems to have flown in the face of the reality for which they professed such admiration. For in the New World much was different, and a fresh though not entirely new society was making its appearance. The assumptions about the fixed order also prevailed in England. That agreement between England and America is one of the facts that makes the Revolution so difficult to understand -how it began and what it became -- a bloody war between peoples who had long been held together by having so much in common.

When George III acceded to the throne in 1760, his English subjects were singing with spirit once more. "Rule Britannia" burst from their mouths -- words twenty years old (they originally formed a patriotic poem) -- and they went like this:

When Britain first, at heaven's command,
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung
this
strain
"Rule
Britannia,
rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves."

The call to rule seemed natural in 1760; a few years earlier it had mocked the realities of British power and influence in Asia and America. For in these years of war with France, British arms took a terrible beating -and so did British pride.

The war had begun with a skirmish in the wilderness between French troops and American colonials led by young George Washington, whose description of the affair revealed that his interest in war lay in the opportunities it offered for honorable and gallant action. Honor and gallantry did not die in the next few years, though large numbers of English, American, and French soldiers and Indians did. The deaths of the English and Americans were especially galling, for they came in a series of battles marred by ineptitude, stupidity, and, some said, cowardice. General Edward Braddock, not stupid but surely inept and ignorant of his ignorance, lost his army and his life a few miles from what is now Pittsburgh. Colonel James Mercer, brave but incompetent, gave way at Oswego

on Lake Ontario to General Montcalm, who pushed across Lake Champlain to Lake George and seized Fort William Henry. At sea things had gone no better, as Admiral Byng surrendered Minorca in the Mediterranean to French forces, whereupon the Admiralty charged him with cowardice and when found guilty in a court-martial ordered him shot. On the Continent disaster followed disaster. Frederick the Great, Britain's ally, sent armies against French and Austrian forces and absorbed defeat. The British and Hanoverian army did no better and after defeats in the summer of 1757 virtually surrendered Hanover to the French. In Asia Britain's prospects appeared dark as the French marched, Calcutta fell, and the entire subcontinent seemed ripe to be plucked by the French.

Up to this point in the war British leaders had squandered their resources; they had no clear idea of how or where to proceed against the French. They had failed to bring their power to bear, to focus it, and thereby make it bring victories. In 1757 these leaders gave up office, and the old king, George II, called William Pitt to head the new ministry.

Pitt was one of the marvels of the century, a leader who dazzled sober politicians and the crowd alike. He drew his peculiar appeal from some inner quality of temperament as well as mind, a quality which allowed, indeed drove, him to disregard both conventional wisdom and opposition and to push through to what he wanted. He was an "original" in an age suspicious of the original. He got away with being what he was, scorning the commonplace and the expected and explaining himself in a magnificent oratorical flow that inspired as much as it informed.

Pitt's powers of concentration shone from his fierce eyes, as did his belief in himself; in the crisis of war he said, "I know that I can save this country and that no one else can." He was obsessed even more by a vision of English greatness, a vision that fed on hatred of France and contempt for Spain. Pitt had despised the fumbling efforts of his predecessors to cope with the French on the Continent, and he was impatient with the incompetence of English generals in America. Hence he went to different men -- Saunders and Boscawen in the Royal Navy, Jeffrey Amherst and James Wolfe in the army in America -- and to fresh strategies in the war. Properly subsidized, Frederick the Great would take care of the French on the Continent. The navy's task was to prevent resupply of French forces in Canada, and it was in Canada and the West where Pitt ordered that the main effort should be made. Pitt was fascinated by the New World and captivated by the idea that imperial power should be forced to grow through trade in a vast arena under

British sway. And so he made the fateful decision to play his strongest hand in America while the French were occupied in Europe and held off on the sea.