REBELS & REDCOATS EB

Hugh Bicheno, Richard Holmes

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780007156269
• eBook ISBN: 9780007390915
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Due to the level of detail, maps are best viewed on a tablet.

Controversial and revisionist history of America's first civil war. Published with hugely successful accompanying four-part BBC TV series – written and presented by star military historian, Richard Holmes.

Most people view the American Revolutionary War of the 1775–83 (also known as the War of Independence) as a popular struggle for liberty against an oppressive colonial power. REBELS & REDCOATS by historian Hugh Bicheno, written to accompany a four-part BBC television series presented by Richard Holmes, demonstrates that it was in fact America's first civil war.

Employing the latest scholarship and vivid eyewitness accounts, Bicheno argues t that the war was the product of a broad French imperial design, and greed of many prominent colonials. As many Americans remained loyal to the Crown as rebelled against it, and the reasons for adopting or changing sides were as varied as the men and women who had to make the unenviable decision. Native and African Americans overwhelmingly favoured the British cause.We hear not only the voices of Rebels and Redcoats, but also of German mercenaries and aristocratic French adventurers, as well as Indian warriors and Black slaves fighting for their independence, which together shed new light on events that forged a nation. The main loser was the French monarchy, which ruined itself to gain no lasting influence over the United States, while unable to exploit the distraction the war created either to invade Britain or gain control of the West Indies, which at the time were considered a far bigger prize than all of North America.

1

CAUSES

THE SPIRIT OF the times was captured by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, both published in 1776. These reveal a common belief among the educated and thoughtful that the freedom to make money and dispose of it as each saw fit was not only fundamental to the liberties set out in the 1689 English Bill of Rights – upon which, sometimes word-for-word, the US Bill of Rights of 1791 was based – but had also divided the prosperous from the indigent since time immemorial. The major difference between the two Bills was religious tolerance, an indulgence the English could not afford in 1689 with only nineteen miles of water separating them from France, the would-be hegemonial power in Europe and standard-bearer of imperial Roman Catholicism. As Linda Colley convincingly argues in her landmark study of the emerging British identity: ‘As members of the chosen land they might, were indeed virtually bound to have lapses and their periods of failure. But almost by definition they were blessed, and these blessings had a material as well as a spiritual form. An extraordinarily large number of Britons seem to have believed that, under God, they were peculiarly free and peculiarly prosperous’. What she tactfully refrained from suggesting was that it defined the American identity even more precisely, and still does.

It is imprudent to attach too much importance to the concepts bandied about in the cloud of political pamphlets published in the colonies during the immediate pre-war period. Most of them betrayed only a crude understanding of the political issues they dealt with and were generally rather poor echoes of similar English works published before, during and after the British civil wars. In his meticulous survey of these ephemera Bernard Bailyn summarizes the distinguishing theme of the American pamphlets as ‘the fear of a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world – a conspiracy believed to have been nourished in corruption and of which, it was felt, oppression in America was only the most immediately visible part’. The eminent Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed this ‘the paranoid style in American politics’, arguing that it emerges when members of a particular social interest are shut out of political decision-making, feeding an underlying conviction that the world of power is satanic. When one party achieves this frame of mind the other can do nothing right and even inaction will be construed in a sinister light.

The Founding Father of the paranoid style and the foremost advocate of violent confrontation with Britain was the Bostonian Samuel Adams. Provincials will always find more than enough to condemn in the metropolis, but the puritanical Adams was consumed by hatred for the bawdiness and corruption of the British ruling elite, which in his eyes justified any misrepresentation, no matter how gross, to shed the worst possible light on what was usually no more than bumbling incompetence. During the pre-war decade he single-handedly generated a vast number of subversive ‘letters to the editor’ contriving spurious debates in which he would write both sides under different aliases, until at last the sparks he struck found some tinder.

The ideological seam Adams mined was a definition of liberty with uniquely English roots, in opposition to the emergence of a new, British identity, struggling to devise a coherent administration for the territorial gains of the Seven Years/War for Empire. In all probability the effort was doomed from the outset, for the war had also removed the threat from the Roman Catholic French in Québec and Spanish in Florida, which had previously bound together the interests of Britain and her super-Protestant colonies. It had also nurtured a competing imperial mentality. Adams gloated ‘providence will erect a mighty empire in America; and our posterity will have it recorded in history, that their fathers migrated from an island in a distant part of the world’, whose worthier citizens would necessarily flee its ‘luxury and dissipation’, leaving it to sink into ‘obscurity and contempt’. The theme also jumps off the pages in George Washington’s correspondence, in which the words ‘empire’ and ‘nation’ are employed interchangeably. The underlying argument was that while ‘England’ was an absolute standard, the concept of ‘Great Britain’ was open to challenge from those who believed a more pristine Englishness survived on their side of the Atlantic.

A belief that the emergence of the new British mentality threatened liberty was not confined to America. Many in Britain believed the country had taken a fatally wrong turn, the wars with France serving mainly to strengthen the hold on power of a corrupt oligarchy much like the Long Parliament, whose members grew fat during the English civil wars until expelled in 1653 by Cromwell. The most telling assaults on British moral authority in the colonies were reprints of broadsides with a wide circulation in Britain. Perhaps the most savage was written by James Burgh in 1746, reprinted in Philadelphia the following year by Benjamin Franklin, which bitterly denounced: ‘luxury and irreligion … venality, perjury, faction, opposition to legal authority, idleness, gluttony, drunkenness, lewdness, excessive gaming, robberies, clandestine marriages, breach of matrimonial vows, self-murders … a legion of furies sufficient to rend any state or empire that ever was in the world to pieces’. Plus ça change …

Burgh’s litany of social pathologies are, however, the dark side of individualism, itself the essence of an Englishness believed by many on both sides of the Atlantic to be more perfectly expressed on its western shores. Contrary to the Romantic myth linking the American rebellion to a notional libertarian Saxon heritage struggling to emerge from under the feudal Norman boot, the concept of land as a commodity, owned by individuals who could buy, sell and bequeath it freely, took hold in the century after the Norman conquest and marked a break with the collective ownership that properly defines the term ‘peasant’. When Major-General John Burgoyne, on his way to America, learned the garrison in Boston was besieged, he commented to his cheering troops, ‘What! Ten thousand peasants keep five thousand King’s troops shut up? Well, let us get in, and we’ll soon find elbow room’. He was a trifle behind the times – the besiegers were not peasants, nor had their ancestors been for half a millennium. The assertion of new and collective imperial obligations offended against deep currents of custom among people who no longer had the present danger of rival empires to persuade them any such changes were necessary.

Then as now, people knew individual freedom without self-imposed restraint must result in antisocial behaviour, requiring constraints that infringe on liberty. An acute awareness of this constitutes the philosophical mainstay of what some have dubbed the ‘religious Right’, whose more thoughtful representatives express the belief that unrestrained private behaviour has public consequences inimical to freedom. Between 1765 and 1775 Samuel Adams focused this concern on the British, but his task was made immeasurably easier by the volatile nature of a rapidly expanding society in which half the inhabitants were under sixteen years of age. Although writing about the late twentieth-century United States, James Q. Wilson observes that young people in all cultures and every age test the limits of acceptable behaviour: ‘Testing limits is a way of asserting selfhood. Maintaining limits is a way of asserting community. If the limits are asserted weakly, uncertainly, or apologetically, their effects must surely be weaker than if they are asserted boldly, confidently, and persuasively’.

The hesitant exercise of British authority in the colonies, strikingly evident before and continuing into the war itself, perfectly fits this description. By contrast the Rebel leaders acted ruthlessly to enforce their own control, even hanging some pacifist Quakers to emphasize that neutrality was not an option. Warfare, given more or less equal numbers and technology, is a matter of the will to dominate, and while the directors of the British war effort were no less determined to prevail than their American counterparts, they had to answer to a parliamentary opposition that espoused the Rebel cause for its own partisan ends. In addition British ministers had to act through local commanders whose political affiliations gave them the status of independent contractors. Above all, British power was attenuated by distance and distracted by more pressing matters of state nearer home, so that sustained, concerted action by the self-appointed leaders of the thirteen colonies must have brought the war to a rapid conclusion. It dragged on as long as it did because Rebel no less than British writ ran only where there were armed men to enforce it, with the result that the Rebel provincial authorities gave priority to the pay and equipment of their local Militias, whose primary function was to suppress domestic opposition, to the detriment of the collective force devoted to combating the British optimistically named the ‘Continental Army’ in 1775.

When measured against the performance of their British peers elsewhere the lack of a sense of loyalty and obligation among the leading American landowners and merchants can be seen as part of the social and economic wallpaper of the time. The foremost slave and plantation owners, ‘land rich’ but relatively cash poor, were George Washington of Virginia, Charles Carroll of Maryland and Henry Middleton of South Carolina, all important movers and shakers once the rebellion began. Washington’s view that ‘the Parliament of Great Britain hath no more right to put their hand in my pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into yours for money’ could have been written by any of the British West Indies plantation owners, who also talked a good libertarian line while refusing to pay towards their own defence, traded freely with the enemy and profiteered shamelessly from the armed forces sent from Britain and America to protect them. Finally, not even the subtlest ethicist could differentiate among the moral qualities of the Yankee merchants and the leading citizens of the great British seaports.

The difference was one of scale. The enormous profits generated by the British merchant houses, by corporations such as the East India and Hudson’s Bay Companies, and by the West Indian planters, bought them a political influence in London to which their less wealthy and often heavily indebted North American peers could not aspire. For them the calculation that local government could be bought more cheaply led compellingly to thoughts of independence, as it did to those locally eminent men denied membership in the class an aggrieved Washington called ‘our lordly masters’. It was also appealing to late converts such as John Adams, once they perceived that separatism offered the prospect of greater social prominence than the colonial relationship permitted. Money, no matter how earned, was always a more certain means to membership in the British oligarchy than merit and the colonists simply did not have enough of it. We may wonder whether the war might have been averted by spreading the net of patronage wider and by awarding knighthoods (the Order of the Bath, revived in 1725) to men like Washington, but the Crown was in no doubt about it. The Order of Saint Patrick was founded in 1783 to remedy this deficiency in Ireland, but it was not until the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George was established in 1818 that the British establishment fully recognized the need to honour imperial service.

The fish most clearly torn between the large and small ponds was Franklin, the only American who could aspire to significant status in either. He was pushed off the embankment and lost his sinecure as Assistant Postmaster-General in early 1774, when Solicitor-General Wedderburn excoriated him in the Privy Council over some dubiously acquired letters written some years earlier by the men who later became the governor and lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, which Franklin had sent to the seditious Committee of Correspondence in that colony for use against them. The attack had some justification beyond the purloined letters, as in his private correspondence Franklin was a pot-stirrer quite on a par with Samuel Adams, like him carefully tailoring his message to whatever audience he was addressing. But in an age when the courtesies were observed even between mortal enemies, a man with a solid international reputation was treated like a thieving servant in the presence of the great and the powerful, without one of them seeking to moderate Wedderburn’s intemperate language. This underlined a contempt for all things American vengefully resented by a broad range of prominent provincials who did not share Franklin’s ambivalence about the size of the pond that best suited them.

Nonetheless they would not necessarily have been moved to armed rebellion had it not been that their own status in colonial society was threatened by incendiary proselytism and unchecked mob action. By the time the government of Lord North was moved to take action against rising disorder in the colonies with the words ‘it is not political convenience, it is political necessity that urges this measure’, many judged it too little and much too late. Among the upper and middle classes of colonial society, one of the clearest dividing line between Rebels and Loyalists was that by 1775–6 the former believed the British incapable of maintaining order and stability, and the latter did not believe the Rebels wanted to.

From the British side of the Atlantic there was another priority. When the House of Lords rejected a proposal made in January 1775 by William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, which would have recognized the fact of colonial self-government, Franklin commented they ‘appeared to have scarce discretion enough to govern a herd of swine’. But within the economic and political understanding of the time their lordships were correct. The Acts of Parliament demonized by the American separatists could only be construed as the symptoms of a conspiracy by overlooking that ‘planning’ has always been the antonym of ‘British way of doing things’. What they did betray was fear Britain might lose and its enemies gain the benefit of a transatlantic trade amounting to one third of all its international commerce, and of colonial iron, timber and shipbuilding resources believed essential for continued maritime superiority. Not many of the colonists shared Samuel Adams’ burning desire to destroy, but with only a handful of exceptions all those living in Britain believed the loss of the colonies would leave them at the mercy of France. Until the sharp recovery of direct and indirect trade with the colonies during the war made it apparent, very few on either side of the Atlantic appreciated that a commonality of interests and tastes, and Britain’s unique ability to supply the manufactured goods the colonists craved, would maintain and indeed increase trade after independence. The many prominent separatists who had hoped to repudiate their debts by declaring independence, or to diminish them through inflation by printing paper money, soon found the laws of commerce more binding than those of political affiliation.

There was a conspiracy, but it was not in London. The French insisted on the British keeping Québec province at the 1763 Peace of Paris in the confident expectation it would encourage separatism in the British colonies. Their ploy prompted the chief British negotiator to worry ‘whether the neighbourhood of the French to our North American colonies was not the greatest security for their dependence on the mother country, which I feel will be slighted by them when their apprehension of the French is removed’. That concern was exacerbated by knowledge that French agents, including the spuriously titled Bavarian Baron de Kalb who was to die as a major-general of the Continental Army at Camden in 1780, had been dispatched to make contact with colonial dissidents within months of the treaty. Governments always have a problem defending policies based on the hints and nuances of secret intelligence, but behind the evasive public utterances of the Lord North administration lay well-founded suspicion that covert French encouragement lay behind the rising tide of unrest in the colonies.

Secret intelligence aside, Franklin’s action over the purloined letters was just one of many indications that his apparent moderation was simply a smokescreen, even if his supporters among the opposition Whigs found it convenient to believe there was still enough common ground to preserve a figleaf of parliamentary supremacy. The words ‘loyal’ and ‘opposition’ would not have been linked by any observer of British politics in the eighteenth century and in this respect as in so many others the actions of the American dissidents were unremarkable in an age before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars uncorked the malignant genie of nationalism. But it is thought-provoking that some of those who claimed to be the champions of English liberties and Protestant purity were in treasonous contact with absolutist, Roman Catholic France many years before the guns began to shoot. Not that it has ever stopped anyone, but it is not ethically sustainable to claim the high moral ground while practising realpolitik.

There is a reason why both Americans and Britons love to hate ‘the French’, and it has nothing to do with the real French people. ‘The French’ is a construct, an idealized enemy of infinite cunning and resource implacably committed to the subversion of the English-speaking peoples’ heritage of freedom. Just like poor old Lord Raglan in the Crimea, the enemy is still ‘the French’ even when they happen to be our allies and they can’t hoodwink us with their collectivist talk of liberty, equality and fraternity. Given that it is approaching two centuries since either the British or the Americans were involved in active hostilities with them it is not difficult to imagine how intense such feelings were at the time when France really was the mortal enemy of Protestant England and its quirky but freedom-enhancing political institutions. For the British government it made no difference whether the American dissidents were consciously or unconsciously serving French interests, but for the colonists to reconcile their self-righteousness with a war waged in alliance with France against Britain, it was necessary to invest ‘the British’ with all the negative associations of ‘the French’.

The process of demonization was assisted by the treaties signed by the British with the Native Americans during the Seven Years War. These were regarded as meaningless by the colonists once the war was won, but were perceived as a firm basis for policy by the young King George III and the Earl of Bute, once his tutor and now his First Minister. The result was the Proclamation Line of 1763 (see MAP 1), which sought to limit the colonies to the space between the Appalachians and the Atlantic. It came too late to prevent the damaging uprising misnamed after the Ottawa leader Pontiac, in which the main protagonists were Delawares who had wisely departed Pennsylvania (those who remained and became Christian farmers were massacred by the Scotch-Irish ‘Paxton Boys’), the Shawnee and the Seneca. The idea of a stable frontier also prompted Bute to propose the colonists should pay £225,000 per annum to defray the cost of maintaining a garrison force to guard it, the first of the substantive dominoes to fall in the sequence to war.

Although the peace-keeping rationale for the Proclamation Line was valid, when later in the decade London declared all territory west of the Proclamation Line to be ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Chronology
• Foreword by Richard Holmes
• Introduction
• 1: Causes
• 2: Opening Shots: Massachusetts
• 3: New York and New Jersey
• 4: Pennsylvania and New Jersey
• 5: The Valley
• 6: Turning Point: ‘They Stood Like Soldiers’
• 7: Northern Endgame
• 8: Opening Shots: The South
• 9: Partisan War
• 10: Carolinas’ Endgame
• 11: Checkmate in Virginia
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher