Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
from whom most of his descendants came, is a brazen act of hypocrisy. Fortunately for Jefferson and the acoustical clarity of the call to the ages he was writing, his colleagues saw that the great pamphleteer was intoxicated with his own virtuosity, as man and craftsman, and excised that one allegation.
The British regarded the Americans as ingrates, and they were. The Americans regarded the British as overbearing and presumptuous meddlers, and they were. In the contest of public relations, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson easily routed George III, a limited, ill-tempered, and intermittently mad young monarch of no particular ability. If Chatham, Burke, and Fox had been able to act in the king’s name, there would have been a much narrower issue and a fiercely contested battle for public relations and intellectual rigor. The United States did indeed become a “shining city on a hill” and a “new order of the ages,” but in the sense that it was a vast, almost virgin continent being set up politically at the cutting edge of democratic advances that in the Old World had only been reached in a few places, and after centuries of internecine struggles punctuated by violent revolutions and sanguinary changes of regime.
As a practical matter, the American Revolutionary War was a struggle between two almost equally advanced and very conditionalized democracies, and what governed was the correlation of forces as it evolved under the varying levels of military and diplomatic competence and political agility of the two sides. The American leaders doubtless persuaded themselves of a somewhat more exalted moral distinction between the parties. They were men of conviction, certainly, but they were also self-interested opportunists who saw the main chance, painted it with a thick coat of conjured virtue, and deserve the homage due to the bold, the brilliant, the steadfast, and, by a narrow margin, the just. On the legal and political facts, they do not deserve the hallelujah chorus ululated to them incessantly for 235 years by the clangorous American myth-making machine and its international converts.
The British made the classic historic error of trying to impose taxes on people from whom they could not ultimately collect them, not that they were such unjust taxes. And the British explanation of their actions was so inept that the Americans not only withheld the tax but largely grasped the moral-political leadership of the whole planet with a nascent regime already clad in star-spangled swaddling clothes. This was the strategic genius of American national nativity: it discarded the great oceanic powers in order, the French and the British, each with the assistance of the other, and covered this accomplishment in the indefectible virtue of the rights of man. This would be the American formula in centuries to come, under Lincoln, Wilson, the Roosevelts, and in the Cold War, generally with a stronger legal and moral case: the advantage of force and possession of virtue, both applied in carefully selected circumstances.
The Congress had received three resolutions from Richard Henry Lee of Virginia on June 7, 1776, proclaiming “that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states” and should dissolve all political association with Great Britain; proposing “articles of confederation and perpetual union”; and recommending that envoys be sent to France and other powers to seek alliance against Britain. These resolutions were adopted on July 2, and the Declaration of Independence, as all the world knows, was signed on July 4, 1776, though at first only by the president (John Hancock) and the secretary (Charles Thomson) of the Congress. Over the next year or so, most of the other delegates signed.
4. WAR, THE FIRST PHASE
It is not the purpose of this book to give a detailed military history of the Revolutionary War. It took Washington a few months to settle on the correct strategy, and it was to some degree forced upon him as the only remaining option, but it became in many respects the first modern guerrilla war. (Then and subsequently, guerrilla wars have only been conducted by powers that have not had the means to wage real wars.) The British could not occupy the entire insurrectionist territory, as Lord Amherst, who had enjoyed such success in the previous war, calculated that it would require 45,000 troops to occupy New York, Philadelphia, and Newport, and a standing army of at least 30,000 additional soldiers to be prepared to meet the main enemy army at any time. (Philadelphia was the second largest British city, though it only had 34,000 people, compared with London’s 750,000, which was the second highest city population in the world after Beijing’s, at about one million.) Amherst’s optimum force levels were completely out of the question, because the worldwide strength of the British army was 50,000, only about 10,000 of them in North America. A substantial army was always necessary to assure continued control of the immense empire in India.
After eight years of war in America, the British army in all areas would only total 145,000, including 5,000 American loyalists and 30,000 hired Germans (as part of the old exchange with Hanover, which had so often availed itself of British forces). Even at the end of the war, there were just 57,000 of these in America. Washington started with 10,000 regulars and 7,000 militiamen at Boston, which attrition wore down to only 3,000 regulars within a year. Throughout the conflict, Washington rarely deployed more than about 8,000 regulars that moved with him. The Continental Army had about 150,000 members, plus around 100,000 militiamen, and wherever Washington and his later southern colonies commander, Nathanael Greene, went, there were ample forces to set aside what they were doing and rally to the revolutionary colors. John Adams and others had advocated an army of militiamen, but Washington, though his militia were relatively trained as events progressed, never lost his respect for trained professionals and his skepticism about part-time soldiers, who enlisted when the enemy was close by, grumbled at conditions and lack of pay, and melted as soon as they weren’t under direct threat to their homes and families.
On August 29, 1776, after a very professional assault by the British, Washington withdrew in good order from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Washington declined to defend Manhattan more than perfunctorily, after tactically blundering badly in advancing his forces across the East River into Brooklyn, where they were roughly handled on land and could have been cut off by water. Both General Howe and Admiral Howe missed their chance out of, it was suggested, relative kinship and hopes for American surrender.8 Washington did demonstrate great organizational ability and opportunism by evacuating back to Manhattan an army of 9,500 and all their guns in the night of August 30, ignominiously ending what was called the Battle of Long Island. Stronger and swifter action here too, by the Howes, could have done grievous early damage to the Revolution.
Washington then developed a plan that became general for the war, and retreated to Westchester, drawing the British inland and away from their sea-borne communications and supplies, and into territory where they would have to expend troops protecting their lines against constant irregular harassment. Washington retreated first to White Plains and then to New Jersey, and the British did take 2,700 Americans prisoner at Fort Washington, at the far northern end of Manhattan on November 16. There were again great celebrations in Britain, as in Pitt’s time, but it was an illusion; Washington was conducting a Fabian campaign, drawing and pulling British forces fruitlessly about the interior. In New Jersey, he was chiefly concerned to protect Philadelphia. Washington conducted an almost scorched-earth retreat to Trenton, New Jersey, on the Delaware River, and on into Pennsylvania on December 8, 1776, blowing up bridges and leaving the path of the warily advancing British strewn with obstacles and enfiladed by snipers.
At this point, one of Washington’s greatest problems was the short and precise enlistments of most of his men. They could pack up and leave after six months, no matter how intensely at grips with the enemy they might be. Washington had pulled together a force of 6,000 on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, and just as he seemed in inexorable retreat and the Continental Congress quit Philadelphia for Baltimore, Washington, in the boldest and most original move of his military career to date, recrossed the Delaware, and on Christmas Day and December 26 attacked the British and their German allies at three points, exploiting a considerable post-Christmas hangover of the Germans. As the eminent British historian George Otto Trevelyan wrote: “It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater or more lasting results upon the history of the world.”9
Washington had sent his skeptical and scheming second-in-command, General Horatio Gates, to Philadelphia, where he agitated to replace Washington, who gambled all the meager forces he had on this daring counter-attack, which moved on to the capture of Princeton and the advance to Morristown, about 10 miles west of the Hudson