A Short History of the American Revolution

James L. Stokesbury

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780688123048
• eBook ISBN: 9780061983481
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The first one-volume survey of the American Revolution that is both objective and comprehensive, this outstanding narrative history traces the growth of a conflict that inexorably set the American colonies on the road to independence. Offering a spirited chronicle of the war itself -- the campaigns and strategies, the leaders on both sides, the problems of fielding and sustaining an army, and of maintaining morale -- Stokesbury also brings the reader to the Peace of Paris in 1783 and into the miltarily exhausted, financially ruined yet victorious United States as it emerged to create a workable national system.

CHAPTER ONE

The Causes of the War

THE SMOKE of Lexington and Concord had hardly cleared before both sides appealed to public opinion. General Gage immediately sent his dispatches to London, while the Americans, with a well-developed sense of political propaganda, set up investigatory committees and took a series of depositions, all with the aim of discovering who had fired the first shot and proving that it was not they who had done it. As it happened, their reports were sent after Gage’s, but went on a faster ship, so the American version of events reached Britain before the official report did.

Though probably more ink has been spilled over it than there was blood shed at Lexington, the question of the first shot was a meaningless one, to which no definitive answer has ever been produced. The actual fact far transcended the details, and the fact was simply the logical culmination of events that had been in train ever since the founding of the colonies two centuries earlier. In the nature of human affairs, the relation between mother country and offspring was bound to change over time; for the later, second, British Empire, that change would be evolutionary, but that was because of the lessons learned in losing the first empire. Barring evolution, there was instead revolution.

Some historians have argued that ultimate separation was almost inherent in the founding of the colonies to begin with, that metropolitan and colonial British were two different peoples within the single society, and that from the earliest stages they viewed themselves as different. Those who left and went abroad saw the stay-at-homes as docile and spineless, willing to put up with injustices or lack of opportunity, or whatever else had driven the emigrants out; they saw themselves as the members of society who were willing to put principle into practice, who had the initiative to seek and make new opportunities, to suffer hardship and privation, all to create better lives for their families and subsequent generations. In this view, as it might be later mythologized, all the colonists were of the Puritan, Pilgrim, or Virginia tidewater aristocracy types, holding a monopoly on truth and virtue.

The opposite view, as it might be held by the metropolitan Briton, was that the colonists represented the exportable surplus of Englishmen, people who could or would not fit into society at home; religious cranks like the Pilgrims; down-at-heels gentry such as those who went to Virginia and starved rather than worked; men and women at the extreme end, of whom England might well be rid, such as paupers, indentured servants, and transported criminals. Such views are too overstated to make the argument, but emigration, by its very nature, is an act of rejection of some sort, and however much the colonists might have thought of themselves as British for however many generations, the potential for eventual separation was always there.

By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the British Empire was the chief world power. Great Britain itself was small in population compared to some of the other states of Europe. There were perhaps eleven million people in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, altogether about half of the population of France or the German states. Yet thanks to a largely homogeneous society, and the accidents of history and geography, Britain had built an empire that was the envy of all the other states. The bedrock of that empire, and its ultimate reason for existence, was trade.

The operative economic theory of the period was a set of ideas known as mercantilism, or, after their foremost practitioner, Colbertism. In this view, there was a fixed amount of wealth in the world, represented by gold and silver; it was all allotted: the king of France had a share, the king of England had a share, and so did the Mogul emperor in India or the chief of the Iroquois. If one person or society was to get more, someone else had to have less. Trade therefore became a kind of war, and wealth might be pursued by what we would consider legitimate trade, or by force of arms. Sometimes, especially outside the borders of Europe, it was hard to tell one from the other.

To profit and expand in this scheme of things, a well-developed empire needed several components, which could be worked out almost mathematically. First of all, the system must have a strong mother country in Europe, capable of taking and holding the colonies it needed, of providing military and naval support, of producing manufactured goods, and of holding the whole thing together. Then, in lesser order, the empire needed different types of colonies: tropical, to produce the materials not provided by the climate of the home country; African slave stations, to send labor to the tropical colonies where Europeans found it difficult to work and survive; and last of all, temperate colonies, to provide whatever residue of materials the home country could not grow for itself.

All of these elements were held together by the mother country, and the whole was in competition with other empires. The ultimate aim for any given system was to produce a surplus of goods, which would then be exported to other, less efficient systems, bringing bullion back into one’s own empire, making it rich, and powerful, and ultimately impoverishing one’s neighbors, rivals, and enemies. The needs and perceptions of the mother country were absolutely paramount, and the growth, development, or perhaps ambitions of any of the lesser component parts had to be subordinated to the central direction.

This was all a theoretical construction, and in practice it never worked out as neatly as the statesmen and imperial administrators in London, or Paris, or Madrid, would have liked it to. Things were always slipping out of balance, and any one empire always had some things that it did not need, and lacked some things it did. In the British Empire, the construction of the edifice had been very informal. The French, beginning in the seventeenth century, had attempted to build an empire on logic, and a whole series of first ministers had sponsored companies, for the Indies, for the fur trade, for India. The Dutch had put together an empire that was a unique blend of private enterprise and state support and direction. But the British Empire had just grown, more or less by happenstance, without a great deal of central control. By good luck as much as by good management, the British had created an empire that conformed roughly to the mercantilist dictates of the day. They had a foothold in India, they had sugar islands in the Caribbean, they had slaving stations along the African coast, and they had the temperate colonies of the North American seaboard.

In terms of what they contributed to the imperial scheme, these last colonies were useful but not crucial. The view from London was different from the view from Philadelphia. The former is best illustrated by the famous speech of William Pitt condemning the government at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Why on earth, he asked, had the ministry been stupid enough to keep Canada, a few thousand acres of barren wilderness, when it could have had the rich sugar island of Martinique instead?

Indeed, the marginal nature of the American colonies in the empire was exacerbated by their phenomenal recent growth. In 1700 the colonial population was only about 250,000, but three quarters of a century later, by the outbreak of the Revolution, it had increased ten times, to 2,500,000. New colonies had been founded—Georgia in 1732 was the last of the “thirteen”—or added, most notably Canada in 1763. None of this growth was planned by government, and only belatedly was it realized in London that the colonial situation had gotten somewhat out of hand. That realization came at the end of the Seven Years’ War.

The Anglo-French struggle for primacy in western Europe, and for empire overseas, was one of the main features of world history for two hundred years. It began in 1689, when the Protestant champion, William of Orange, seized the English throne from his father-in-law, James II, in the Glorious Revolution. William was actually Dutch, and he rather disliked Englishmen, but he wanted their money to pursue his lifelong struggle against the growing power of Louis XIV’s France. The conflict thus begun ended only in 1815, in the carnage of Waterloo; Napoleon’s final defeat also ended the French attempt to gain hegemony over Europe. The next aspirants for that position would be from east of the Rhine.

The period from 1689 to 1815 has been called a “second Hundred Years’ War,” and during it British and French, and each other’s allies or satellites, fought a series of wars, all having similar characteristics. In each of them, Great Britain acted as paymaster, guiding spirit, and organizer. The British repeatedly created anti-French coalitions, sent small armies to the Continent to assist their allies, and always dominated the seas and picked up colonies abroad to offset defeats on land. The French invariably divided their efforts between campaigns along their land frontiers, either the Low Countries, the Rhineland, northern Italy, or the Pyrenees, and secondary naval and colonial attempts, which, in spite of occasional successes, were in the long run failures. So they fought the War of the League of Augsburg, of the Spanish Succession, the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War. Then they fought the War of the American Revolution, and finally the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

The simple listing of these contests suggests that the nature of warfare was different in the eighteenth century from the twentieth, and that was blessedly true. The twentieth century has seen near-total war, in which the aim has been to destroy the enemy utterly, or come as close to that as a modern, nationalistic, industrialized society could manage to do. In the eighteenth century, England did not expect to destroy France, or vice versa. In all the wars of the period, the only sovereign state which really disappeared was Poland, and that was as much the Poles’ own fault—the unwillingness of their nobility to accept a workable constitution—as it was their neighbors’ greed. States expected rather to gain advantage, a small accession of territory, a colony overseas, an important trading privilege, the accession of a relative to a vacant throne. It was a society which throve on blood sports, and war was the sport of kings. The Tory poet Robert Southey summed it up in a famous phrase by saying that in that period men fought “because their betters fell out.”

It was not simply benign inclination that kept these wars from being more decisive; indeed, they could be nasty enough at times, and territories were ravaged and people slaughtered repeatedly throughout the course of the fighting. But all of the states of the day labored under severe limitations both of technology and of national organization, which militated against decisive conclusions. The Americans had already found this out during the colonial wars, and were to discover it even more during the Revolution.

As the French had founded and built up colonies along the St. Lawrence gateway to North America at the same time as the English were settling the Atlantic seaboard, the European struggle was transported overseas from the earliest days. Each of the wars on the Continent had its equivalent in North America, where they were called by different names. To Americans, the War of the League of Augsburg was King William’s War; the Spanish Succession was Queen Anne’s War; the Austrian Succession King George’s War; and the Seven Years’ War was thoroughly misnamed as the French and Indian War, and by the time of the Revolution, it was commonly referred to as “the Old French War.” Beginning in the 1690’s, small parties of militia, Indians, and local or regular troops had ranged back and forth between the two nations’ colonies, raiding and ambushing, occasionally besieging a small frontier post, and fighting also at sea. Northern New England, New York, and the Ohio Valley saw repeated clashes, and the Americans, who rapidly outnumbered the French, tried several times to take Quebec; their failures were more often of organization and resources than actual military defeat.

By King George’s War—that of the Austrian Succession, fought from 1740 to 1748—the British colonies were slowly but perceptibly becoming dominant. During that war the New Englanders took the great French fortress of Louisburg, on Cape Breton Island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and this could have been the beginning of the end for New France. Unfortunately, to the intense disgust of New England, the British government ceded Louisburg back to France in 1748 at the peace conference, in return for Madras, which Britain had lost in India.

But during the French and Indian War British policy finally came together under the guiding genius of William Pitt, one of the great war leaders of history. He subsidized allies on the Continent, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and used British resources to destroy the distracted French empire. The French Navy was blockaded in port or beaten at sea, Bengal was secured in India, French islands were seized in the West Indies. In North America, Pitt sent for the first time substantial numbers of regular British soldiers to help the colonials in their struggle. British professionals took a rather dim view of colonial military talents. Louisburg fell in 1758, and the Ohio Valley was secured. The next year a combined expedition took Quebec itself, and with that, the French threat was removed from North America. By the time the war ended in 1763, the British Empire stood supreme; among other things, it was now certain that North America was going to be English and not French. It had been a very expensive war, but it had been well worth it—or so it looked at the time.

Partly because of the successes the British enjoyed, and more because of the expenses incurred in achieving them, the government in London spent the next several years trying to rationalize and regulate its empire. This attempt was what brought it into increasing conflict with the American colonies. To understand why, it is necessary to look briefly at the British system of government and the constitution of the empire, as they existed in the eighteenth century, for they bear little relation to the present British system, and less to the American.

The most important single fact about the British constitution is that it does not really exist. In the United States, as it eventually became, the written Constitution was probably the supreme political expression of the Age of Reason; it is right there, everyone can read it, and periodically it has been subject to amendment, wisely or not. This idea, and the reverence the document inspires, is quite foreign to the British. To them the constitution is, and was, a rather vague collection of statutes and usages that go all the way back to the Magna Carta of 1215; but even among British scholars, no two would produce the same list of what statutes actually made up “the constitution.” Certain late medieval documents might be included, others would be left out; some statutes contradict earlier ones. In modern times, for example, the British have had to call elections every three years, or every five years, or every seven years; the most famous of all prime ministers, Winston Churchill, was not ever elected as such, and in fact the office of prime minister does not even exist constitutionally—it is simply a convenient usage that developed during the early eighteenth century.

Thus the constitution of Great Britain, or of the British Empire, is whatever thinking persons generally agree it is at any particular time. In the 1760’s, that meant what a few hundred leading, political families, and a few thousand electors thought, because they were the only people concerned with the question.

The governing body of the empire, Parliament, was unreformed, unrepresentative, and responsible not to the people but to the Crown. Electoral reform and some degree of proportional representation both had to wait for the nineteenth century. There were usually about 560 members of Parliament in the House of Commons, of whom slightly fewer than 100 came from the counties, 4 from the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 45 from Scotland (a block added in 1707), and the rest from towns, or as they were known, boroughs. Very few of these were sent up as a result of real elections. Most of the seats, even in the boroughs, were controlled by the great landowning families; they posted the candidate they wanted, and their tenants elected him. Some boroughs had no electors at all. William Pitt, for example, sat for a borough that was actually no more than a pile of moss-covered stones. Some families had controlled parliamentary seats for centuries, and the Scots could usually be delivered en masse by some of the great landlords; but in any case, all these non-elective seats were known as pocket boroughs, for they were figuratively in someone’s pocket. Elections were more choices than contests, and not once in the entire eighteenth century did a sitting government lose an election.

If there were not really elections, there were not really parties, either. The British political classes grouped themselves loosely into Whigs and Tories, or very roughly liberals and conservatives, but neither of the terms strictly translates into modern ideas. Generally the Whigs saw themselves as Low Church, business, urban, and possibly internationalist in outlook, while the Tories were seen as High Church, rural, agricultural, and less interested in foreign alliances, but there were so many variations as to make such classification virtually useless. What happened instead was that a charismatic figure such as Pitt, or a power broker with important friends such as Thomas Pelham-Holles, the Duke of Newcastle, would attract and control a block of members and therefore votes. Alliances and interests constantly shifted, ministers were regularly undermined, driven out of office, and then reappointed, as the tides of political opinion shifted. There were not elections producing clear parties with stated platforms; there were instead shifting coalitions, as men who could deliver parliamentary support combined with other such men to form ministries, and policies had to be trimmed to suit the composition of the government. Some men might be so antagonistic to others as to refuse to serve with them, but it was always possible to find someone to form a government. This was especially and unfortunately true in the period from 1763 to 1783. It was once remarked that Britain in these twenty years suffered from a brain famine, but that could hardly be farther from the mark. If anything, there were too many intelligent and ambitious men about; they were simply not organized properly.

Part of that was the fault of His Majesty King George III, the man who played what was still by far the most vital role in the running of the British government. George has been damned as a villain, and, less often, praised as a hero; he was neither. He was a profoundly unfortunate man in an enormously difficult situation. His concept of his position is central to the whole story.

George III was twenty-two in 1760 when he succeeded his grandfather on the throne of England. He was shy, immature, insecure, and extremely naive politically. His father, Frederick, the Prince of Wales, had died in 1751; like all the Hanoverians, Frederick had hated his own father, George II, and young George had been brought up in the same tradition. He distrusted his grandfather and despised his ministers as a pack of political scoundrels. His mother had constantly reminded him of his destiny: “Be a king, George,” and he intended to do just that. He wanted to cleanse the Augean stable of British politics; unfortunately he did not understand that the King himself was necessarily the chief politician in Britain.

George’s job was actually to run the government, to make policies and to see them carried through. He had certain fixed ideas, the most important of which was his determination to preserve the constitution as he understood it. For example, he vigorously resisted any lifting of the punitive laws on Catholics, for he had taken an oath to defend the Church of England. He would equally resist what he perceived as an attempt by his American subjects to alter the political complexion of empire.

Because a large number of members of Parliament were automatically loyal to the Crown, and another large number were placemen, who sat because they held offices at the Crown’s pleasure, George could control a substantial block of votes. He could therefore usually get what he wanted through Parliament, and a combination of the Crown, plus the other vote deliverers, actually produced the government of Britain. George recognized that occasionally his policies might be unpopular, and if they were simply minor questions and not what he regarded as matters of principle, he would drop them. If, however, he considered them crucial, he would cling to them with all the strength of a drowning man clutching a lifeline. He also acknowledged that at some ti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Searchable Terms
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Other Books by James L. Stokesbury
• Copyright
• About the Publisher