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George Washington

CHAPTER TWO

Independence

The Americans and French Defeat the British in America, 1774–1789

1. THE END OF EMPIRE IN LONDON

Benjamin Franklin, such a constant figure in the rise and decline of Anglo-American relations through and after the Seven Years’ War, remained in London as trans-Atlantic civil war in the English-speaking world doomfully approached. Franklin published letters with the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, which inflamed opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. (In them, Franklin again, as he often had before, wrote that “The inhabitants of this country, in all probability, in a few years, will be more numerous than those of Great Britain and Ireland together.” This was the core of Franklin’s belief that America was sure to win.¹

On January 29, 1774, the Privy Council summoned Franklin to be present to hear discussion of the Massachusetts Assembly’s petition, and Franklin stood poker-faced, expressionless, while he was subjected to a vitriolic attack from the solicitor general of Great Britain, Alexander Wedderburn. The petition was rejected as “groundless, vexatious, and scandalous and calculated only for the seditious Purpose of keeping up a Spirit of Clamour and Discontent.”² Two days later, Franklin was sacked as deputy postmaster general of America. Franklin retired as agent for Massachusetts, but continued for Pennsylvania. He demonstrated admirable repose of manner and was calm and courteous throughout this difficult time. His serenity was doubtless fortified by his long-held prediction of what would come and his unshakeable conviction that America was predestined to surpass Great Britain and all other nations of the world.

Parliament’s response to the Boston Tea Party—the Intolerable Acts (or the Coercive Acts, as they were known in Britain)—substantially not only closed the Port of Boston and reduced the powers of the Massachusetts Assembly, it purportedly banned town meetings, curtailed trial by jury in the colony, and declared that British troops must be stationed in Boston and billeted and paid for by the locals at the whim of the commander of the troops. Franklin denounced the acts for provoking war with the colonies, “for a war it will be, as a national Cause when it is in fact only a ministerial one.”³

Despite his many British friends, and the esteem in which he was held there, Franklin was also seen by the arch-imperialists as the evil visionary who transmitted messages back and forth with America, always twisting them toward increased disharmony. This was not a fair allegation and was essentially a famous case of blaming the messenger. Abrasive spirits were skyrocketing on both sides. Franklin proposed compensation of the East India Company for its loss of tea, and of Boston for the closing of the port, without success in either case.

In the autumn of 1774, the ban on town meetings was generally ignored, and what were known as “Resolves” were adopted in Massachusetts and delivered by the talented horseman Paul Revere to the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, on September 18. They called for civil disobedience, dissolution of the courts, seizure of the money of the colonial government in Massachusetts, and intensive preparation for war. The Congress balked at this as too provocative, but prepared a bill of rights virtually seceding from the British jurisdiction and demanded an airtight boycott of all British goods. A petition to the king to uphold the colonies’ side in the dispute was also included. A reintroduction of Franklin’s Albany plan for inter-colonial parliamentary union was voted down as too much resembling the over-powerful Parliament against which they were virtually in revolt.

In August 1774, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, who had not been accessible to Franklin during the Seven Years’ War, though his chief secretaries were and they knew each other indirectly, called upon Franklin. They met again on December 26, right after Franklin had received and sent on to Chatham the Continental Congress resolutions. Chatham declared that the Congress had acted with such “Temper, Moderation, and Wisdom,” that it was “the most honourable Assembly of Statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times.” Chatham spoke in the House of Lords on January 20, 1775, ostentatiously greeting and speaking with Franklin in the lobby of the House and advocated withdrawal of British troops from Massachusetts, appointment of a commission to negotiate a settlement, and a general de-escalation. He feared for destruction of the Empire he had largely built and saw as clearly as Franklin did where the present course would shortly lead.

Chatham presented his bill to the House of Lords on January 29, 1775. It restricted Parliament’s right to legislate in America to matters of trade, made any taxation in America conditional on consent of the taxed, and recognized the Continental Congress. All British statutes that the Congress had objected to from 1764 to 1774 were to be suspended or repealed. The ministry attacked it as the insidious work of Franklin, as if Britain’s greatest living statesman were a mere mouthpiece. Chatham replied that the bill was his own, but that were he charged to resolve the mess the government and its predecessors had created, he would not hesitate to consult the man “whom all Europe held in high Estimation for his Knowledge and Wisdom, and ranked with our Boyles and Newtons, who was an Honour not to the English Nation only, but to Human Nature.”⁴

Such high praise from so great a man in so eminent a place indicated Franklin’s unique standing as the premier American in the world, but Chatham’s bill was vituperatively rejected. Franklin assimilated the praise as expressionlessly as he had endured being reviled the year before by the same objectors. This was the end, and he left a few weeks later and arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775. The die was cast.

2. THE OUTBREAK OF WAR

On April 19, 1775, American militiamen and British Redcoats exchanged fire at Lexington and Concord, outside Boston, and the British conducted a ragged retreat back into Boston, harried by American irregulars sniping and skirmishing. The war had begun, though sequels were a time in coming. The Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia just after Franklin’s return to that city; formed, at least theoretically, a Continental Army (of the Massachusetts militia and six additional companies the Congress thought it could dispatch); and drafted Colonel George Washington, as the ranking British officer among Americans (who attended the Congress in the old blue uniform he had worn for his official portrait), and by now a committed imperial secessionist, as its commander.

John Adams (of Massachusetts) had proposed him, which gave something of a national character to his commission. Washington, in his previous career, had not been a particularly successful commanding officer, though he understood logistics and the basic requirements of leadership and had been conspicuously courageous. He had earned the respect of all by his sober demeanor and imposing appearance. He said he was unworthy of the honor, and declined to be paid, apart from his expenses. He was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies because of his astute management of his plantation, adding little factories to provide what the escalation of the boycott against Britain had required to be manufactured domestically. And British victories over the French now assured a steady inflow of settlers and appreciating land values in the Ohio country where he had been a very astute acquirer of land.

George Washington the semi-autodidact, the unsuccessful striver for a British army commission and combat glory, had made himself, by default as well as by his own distinguished bearing, the custodian of the hopes of a new country. To his wife and others, Washington wrote that he could not decline the draft of the Continental Congress to command the Continental Army; that to have done so would have caused censure to rain down upon him, for cowardice, fecklessness, and betrayal. Thus was born the mighty myth of the disinterested Cincinnatus, the unseeking officer and country squire summoned from his bucolic and familial pleasures to take in hand the cause of human liberty. Fortunately for the whole project, the propagation of its motives was to be chiefly in the hands of one of the most adept spin-doctors of world history in Thomas Jefferson.

Washington proceeded to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take command of the minimalist, but grandiosely titled, Continental Army, ostensibly a force of 17,000. If he succeeded, he would be the father of a new and predestined nation. If he failed, he was running some risk of being hanged as a traitor. He had seen the ineptitude of British forces in America, except when they had overwhelming numbers, and he had certainly seen the insufferable incompetence and arrogance of British colonial administration, and shared Franklin’s view of the golden future of America. Britain’s greatest statesmen, Chatham (Pitt), Burke, and Fox, were in sympathy with the American project. In one of his greatest Demosthenean oratorical triumphs, Burke urged an almost spellbound but dissentient Parliament to “keep the poor, giddy, thoughtless people of our country from plunging headlong into this impious war.”⁵

John Adams forged what would prove the axis of the first administration of the new state and the basis of what became the Federalist Party by being the chief propagator of the Washington legend. None of the general’s (as he shortly became) successors in the great office he would hold and establish were better served by their touts and publicists than Washington was by Adams, who must have known there was some hyperbole in his comments, asserting in the summer of 1775 that the general was “a gentleman of one of the first fortunes upon the continent,” who was “leaving his delicious retirement [aged 43], his family and friends, sacrificing his ease and hazarding all in the cause of his country.” Washington’s gamble should not be understated. But Britain was at least as divided as America, as Franklin told him. It had been one thing to land forces on the Atlantic littoral of America and proceed westward and north to deal with outnumbered and under-supplied French, while receiving the cooperation, however grudging, of 2.5 million colonists (not counting several hundred thousand slaves). It would be something else, altogether more complicated, to land and sustain forces, or supply them by the tenuous routes from Canada, in sufficient numbers to subdue a rebellious population over an area four to five times as extensive as the British Isles.

The foolishness of the king and his advisers, who would be heckled mercilessly by Britain’s greatest parliamentarians (illustrating that whatever the grievances of the Americans, Britain was not quite the tyranny they claimed), could probably be relied upon to produce a great many mistakes. And the principal European powers, especially France, after the drubbing it had so recently received at the hands of the British, would be only too happy to assist in any obstruction of British enjoyment of the spoils of their recent victory. The British were hugely overconfident, because they assumed that almost all the colonists were a good deal more attached to the mother country and the Crown than they were (and they took no account of the substantial segments of the American population that were of Dutch, French, and German origin). No conventional colony had successfully revolted in post-Hellenic times, but there had never been a colony like this millions of headstrong people in as sophisticated a society as the mother country, thousands of miles distant.

For Washington, principle and opportunity conjoined, and it seemed a risk worth taking. For Franklin, it was unfolding as he expected, once he had had a good look at delusional British intransigence, toward an outcome of which he was confident. For Jefferson, much younger and less prominent than the other two, it seemed the tide of events and an idea that could be glamorized and sold. As often happens when people initiate wars, it would be much longer and more difficult than either side imagined, but, the principal American founders must have reasoned, especially Franklin with his intimate knowledge of both sides, it should be easier to exhaust the patience of the British by attrition than to crush the spirit of the distant Americans. Though no one could have known this at the time, suppressing such a revolt, as would be shown in the colonial struggles of the twentith century, from South Africa to Algeria, would generally require at least as many soldiers as there were able-bodied rebels, something vastly beyond the capacities of the British in this case.

Yet the purpose of the conflict was still not unanimously clear in America. In a pattern that would be replicated, there was an incomplete consensus in America about a war already underway. The leading Virginians, especially Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, and the leading Massachusetts public men, such as John Adams and his cousin, Samuel Adams, claimed the British recourse to force had begun a war for independence. There was a good deal of opinion in New York, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and other colonies (or states) that was less militant, still royalist in principle, and was wary of being dragged into a futile war by Virginia plantation owners and Boston merchants.

On July 5, 1775, the Second Continental Congress sent King George III a final and unanimous petition (including Washington and Jefferson and Franklin), asking that he exercise the impartial, overarching legal and moral authority he enjoyed as sovereign of all the British, at home and across the seas, to resolve the dispute between America and the British Parliament. In one of the most catastrophic blunders of British history, he issued a proclamation on August 23, condemning “the traitorous correspondence, counsels, and comfort, of diverse wicked and desperate persons within this realm” and ordered all loyal subjects, whether civilian or military, to use their “utmost endeavors to withstand and suppress such rebellion and to disclose and make known all treasons and traitorous conspiracies.” This drew the line, and many of the approximately one-third of Americans who were primarily loyal to the Crown prepared to depart for Britain or Canada; ultimately about 60,000 did depart (though estimates range up to 100,000),⁶ three-quarters of them to Canada, where they raised the English-speaking share of the population from less than 20 to over 40 percent, a total of 165,000 people (100,000 French), compared with about 2.5 million free Americans and 300,000 slaves. (As Canada was too northerly for the cultivation of cotton, there was never any economic rationale for slavery in that country.)

The rest of colonial opinion firmed up admirably in support of rebellion, and Franklin, still in intense correspondence with his British friends, ignored the king, whom he took to be a suggestible hothead (with some reason), and lamented “the mangling hands of a few blundering ministers. . . . God will protect and prosper [America]; you will only exclude yourselves from any share in it,” he wrote to an English friend.⁷ It would be a civil war, and therefore the bitterest of conflicts. Franklin was durably estranged from his son Billy, the royal governor of New Jersey, and after a long and unsuccessful conversation lasting through much of the night in May, they parted, on unfriendly terms. Young Franklin was interned in Connecticut in the ensuing conflict and spent the balance of his life in Britain. They were reconciled after the war. Franklin, now well clear of the harassments of the Penns, was president of the Committee of Safety of Pennsylvania (a precursor to the title of the dreaded authors of the Terror of Prairial in France, in the world’s next great revolution, less than 15 years off).

He called for the construction of ships to harass British men o’ war should they approach Philadelphia, and gave an outline of his proposed constitution for the new country in the Congress in the autumn of 1775. He claimed, then and later, to have been opposed to seeking alliances, but on December 9, 1775, he wrote to Charles Dumas, a learned and well-connected salonnier in The Hague, and asked for his informed opinion on the possibility of seeking aid in Europe against the British in a coming insurrection. While he was awaiting a response, the French government sent the Chevalier de Bonvouloir to America to investigate the military and diplomatic prospects. Franklin and his committee eagerly concerted hypotheses with the visitor. The Committee of Correspondence that Jefferson had helped establish, at Franklin’s urging, sent Silas Deane to Paris with a mandate to determine whether alliance, or at least recognition, would be attainable from the French.

Thomas Paine’s inflammatory pamphlet Common Sense called for independence and denounced monarchy generally, and had a huge sale and influence. Washington had sent a force to gain control of the British province of Quebec and persuade the French-speaking Canadians to join the incipient revolt. They captured Montreal but were sent packing before the walls of Quebec. Washington asked Franklin, as the Americans’ preeminent diplomat, to try his hand at persuading the Canadians. Unfortunately for the cause, the government of Canada was in the hands of a governor so skillful that had he been given charge of America instead, he might have settled down the whole problem. Sir Guy Carleton, subsequently Lord Dorchester, had caused the British adoption of the Quebec Act in 1774, by which the French Canadians pledged allegiance to the British Crown and the British government pledged preservation of the French language, the Roman Catholic religion, and the civil law. Both sides adhered rigorously to their pledges.

For the French Canadians, there was a credibility problem in the American profession of friendship, as hostility to the French and to Roman Catholicism had been prominent in the attitudes of their late opponents in the French and Indian (Seven Years’) Wars. Franklin was empowered to make no such pledge of continuity and cultural security, though he could probably have managed the religious and legal guarantees. But as citizens of a united amalgamation of emancipated colonies, the French population of 100,000 was sure to be subsumed in the English-speaking majority of three million. The Americans had been foraging off the land and were hugely unpopular with the locals, and they were effectively chased out of Canada. (Benedict Arnold, an able general, commanded, and underestimated at the outset, by almost 50 percent, the length of the long trek ahead of him. He led his force well, as he would continue to do as the most controversial figure in the war, but it was an impossible mission.)

From Lexington and Concord, possibly the most mythologized aspects of this entire conflict (no one knows which side fired the first shot “heard round the world”; Paul Revere did not ride alone, never got to Concord, and was arrested by the British in mid-ride; and Longfellow was perhaps the greatest myth-maker of all the fabulists who have had a hand in this, starting with Jefferson), the British repaired to Boston and the armies met at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. It was a bloody engagement, and the British retained control of Boston, but it was something of a moral victory for the Americans to have held their own so tenaciously against a larger and better-trained force. The British lost about half of the 2,200 men engaged, and three times as many casualties as the Americans. Washington skillfully besieged Boston, and the British commander, General William Howe, withdrew by sea to Halifax on March 17, 1776.

The war largely adjourned, apart from the redoubled preparations of both sides, until the British reappeared at New York on June 25. Hundreds of transports commanded by the naval commander, Admiral Richard Lord Howe, brother of lands forces commander, General William Lord Howe, transported 30,000 men, a remarkable feat of amphibious warfare for the time. General Howe’s second-in-command, Henry Clinton, had proposed going up the Hudson to what is now Morningside Heights, disembarking and cutting off Washington’s retreat from his positions on Manhattan and Long Island, which might have been a decisive stroke, but General Howe disembarked on Staten Island on July 2, 1776.

3. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

John and Samuel Adams had pushed through the Congress by a narrow margin a bill ordering each colony to suppress what remained of British government within its borders. A committee was set up to declare the independence of the colonies, consisting of Jefferson (whose “felicity of expression,” in Adams’s words, was widely recognized), Franklin, Adams, Robert Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut, representing five different colonies, though only Jefferson represented the South. Jefferson was tasked with writing the draft, which he did over nearly three weeks in the Philadelphia boarding house where he was living. He adapted his draft constitution of Virginia. Adams and Franklin had some substantive suggestions, which Jefferson incorporated, and the draft of the declaration was given to the Congress on June 28, 1776.

Jefferson addressed two objectives: the demonization of George III as a tyrant of Caligulan proportions, whose iniquities justified in themselves the revolt that was starting, and a universal declaration of human rights designed to put the new insurgent regime at the forefront of the Enlightenment’s exaltation of human rights, from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The second purpose thunders out of the preamble (and also winds up the document): “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

These words, and the conclusion, pledging everything including “our sacred Honour” to fight for the achievement of independence, have enjoyed an immense historical resonance. Their stirring appeal to natural law and the concept of universal rights and the dignity of all men are justly celebrated, both for their eloquence and their historical importance. But they are a rather grandiose magnification of what was really a straight jurisdictional dispute, over the right of the British Parliament, whose authority had not previously been challenged in America, to levy taxes in America, largely to retire debts incurred in defending the colonists from the French and the Indians. The ill-considered actions of the British government had been as vigorously, and at least as stirringly, debated in the British Parliament as the intrepid accretions of the ambitions of the revolutionaries had been debated in their Congress.

Only the lead weight of the king’s friends in Parliament (and this for the last time in British history), backed by the infelicitous combination of jingoism and the pomposity that generally afflicts the attitudes of imperial powers to their colonists, torqued up the press and official and public opinion to take such a strong line against the colonists. It must be said that the Americans had shown an athletic dexterity in shifting from importunity for assistance against France to extreme protectiveness about their right not to be taxed by a previously authoritative Parliament that had, on urgent request, rendered redemptionist services to the rebels. There is no clear absence of right for Britain to tax the colonists, especially at this time and for the reduction of debt subscribed for this purpose. And despite Jefferson’s commendable improvisation of self-evident truths and inalienable rights adhering, by act of the Creator, to human life itself, Jefferson and many of the other delegates were slaveholders, and were deists or more distant believers in any notion of a Creator. And the British not only possessed and exercised as many of these rights and truths as the Americans, but they, and not Jefferson’s bowdlerized rendering of Enlightenment philosophers, were the source of any American enjoyment of them. It was, in the abstract, a bit rich for these delegates to throw all this back in the face of the Mother of Parliaments, which, whatever its electoral chicaneries and shortcomings, was the world’s, and America’s, chief source of the rights claimed.

Of course, the British have their own myths, and the Glorious Revolution of 1687 and the Settlement Act of 1701 are pretty weak reeds on which to claim a great coruscation of self-government. The concepts of human rights, the rule of law, and responsible government had, with the utmost difficulty, taken some hold in a few places—Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, parts of Scandinavia, and, sketchily and tentatively, a few Italian and German principalities (where, as the future history of those countries would show, they were very fragile and easily revocable). America was not adding much to what already existed, except the genius of presentation and of the spectacle, which Jefferson may be said to have originated in America, as opposed to outright propaganda, a laurel that falls to Paine. These talents that Jefferson bestowed on the questing new regime have never departed the character and society of America, and have been much amplified by media technology, and with Washington’s military leadership and Franklin’s diplomatic brilliance, must be considered one of the original ingredients of the American story that would command and rivet the attention of the whole world for centuries after.

The other main element of the Declaration of Independence, the representation of George III as an epochal tyrant of satanic odiousness, like the blood libel on the American Indians as barbarous savages of no merit, as if they had not been the rightful inhabitants of the new nation before being rather brusquely displaced, were much more emphasized at the time of publication. And they have, naturally, not weathered the ages as successfully. George III was not a tyrant at all, and his greatest minister up to this time, Chatham (rivaled in all of his 60-year reign only by his son the younger William Pitt), was as strenuous a critic of his policy as the leading American revolutionaries. At the height of these events, the young Charles James Fox, just 26, told the House of Commons on October 26, 1775, nine months before the Declaration of Independence: “The Earl of Chatham, the king of Prussia [Frederick the Great], nay Alexander the Great never gained more in one campaign than the noble Lord North [then the prime minister] has lost—he has lost a whole continent.” (Fox betrayed unjustified pessimism about Canada and in the interests of forensic hyperbole ignored Mexico, but he expressed accurately the contempt of the opposition for the king’s policy.)

The attack on the Indians was understandable and they were primitive and often barbarous, but few people today would dispute that they had some rights of prior possession that were simply dismissed with a brutality that was cavalier and often aggravated by violations of treaties and agreements on the most spurious pretexts. The British were, if anything, more respectful of native rights than the colonists, and certainly British policy toward Indians in Canada was a good deal more civilized than American, and almost wholly untainted by the corruption that afflicted American policy to Indians from colonial to modern times.

The principal congressional edit of the Declaration was the removal of Jefferson’s effort to blame the importation of slavery into the colonies on George III. This from Jefferson, who recognized the moral difficulty of slavery and its potential to disrupt the new country’s future but could not bring himself to emancipate his slaves, and carried on a sexual relationship for 38 years with one (Sally Hemings), who bore him seven children and 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 and Manhattan. It was a masterstroke and is the basis of much of Washington’s claim to being a first-rate commander, albeit with small forces. This was where the armies sat, Washington in Morristown and Howe in New York, until the spring of 1777. With expiring enlistments and the months of hard slogging and fighting, Washington’s forces had dwindled down to about 3,000, against nearly 10 times as many under Howe. But Howe did not know how feeble his opponent’s numbers were, only that if he attacked, the Americans would draw the British farther into America. Washington was able, as he put it, to “keep up an appearance”¹⁰ and expressed “great surprise that we are still in a calm . . . much beyond my expectation” at the end of March. Howe made a feint with 18,000 men in late June, but Washington outmaneuvered him and the British withdrew to Staten Island. Howe embarked 15,000 men by sea from New York in July and generated great mystery about his destination, as Washington marched his forces to and fro trying to anticipate a landing. This finally occurred in late August near Philadelphia. The Battle of Brandywine ensued, in which the British forced an American withdrawal and inflicted more casualties than they sustained, but the Americans fought well and tenaciously and remained between Howe and Philadelphia, the capital through which Washington had marched his crisply turned-out forces in a morale-boosting parade on the way to the battlefield.

Washington did not have the forces to prevent a direct British march on Philadelphia from two directions by all Howe’s forces, and the British captured the city with 18,000 men, more than one for every two inhabitants, on September 26, 1777, without opposition. The Congress had fled again and there remained many loyalists to welcome the British, but maintaining the sea-land supply lines to the occupying forces consumed a large number of troops to no practical military end. It should be remembered that while these operations were under way, almost all the rest of the Thirteen Colonies apart from New York were functionally independent and accustoming themselves to self-government. The British could muscle their way into the large towns but that did not return to them the forced, much less the voluntary, fealty of over two million insurrectionist Americans. On October 4, Washington provided a plan too intricate for his under-trained troops at Germantown just outside Philadelphia. He almost prevailed but had to retire, in good order, having taken about 1,000 casualties out of 11,000 mainly militiamen, to 500 British casualties in a force of 9,000 regulars.

British general John Burgoyne, who had been unwisely given the command in place of the able Carleton, had been approaching New York from Canada, along Lake Champlain, by Fort Ticonderoga (formerly Montcalm’s Carillon), and in actions reminiscent of those in the same terrain less than 20 years before. The British plan was to cut New England and the western country off completely from the colonies south of New York, and take Philadelphia as a first step in pushing Washington into Virginia and gradually driving organized rebel military forces south and bottling them up and destroying them in the Carolinas. When Burgoyne, who had been repulsed at Ticonderoga in 1776, descended the well-trodden route to New York in 1777, it was evacuated, but at the end of August 1777, some of his units suffered a severe defeat and nearly a thousand casualties in a confused action around Bennington, New York. The American commander was General Philip Schuyler, who was sacked for his trouble and replaced by the politically ambitious General Horatio Gates.

Gates had 7,000 men to block Burgoyne from taking Albany, and his force was increased by nearly 10,000 militiamen. If Burgoyne could reach Albany, it was expected that Howe could advance toward him both by land and on the Hudson and cut the colonies in two. There was an indecisive skirmish at Saratoga on September 19, 1777, and a clear American victory there on October 7, followed by the capture of Burgoyne and the surrender and deportation of his army of over 4,000 after a well-executed pursuit by Gates. This led to what was known as the Conway Cabal, in which there was an attempt to infiltrate the Congress and recruit Lafayette, a French nobleman leading some volunteers from among his Anglophobic countrymen, to assist in displacing Washington in Gates’s favor. Washington, who was sensitive to the political currents, rallied Lafayette and squashed the plot. Gates was chastened and the other conspirators were punished. As the historian Robert Harvey remarked, Washington “had not yet proved himself to be a great general, but he was a masterly political operator.”¹¹

5. FRANCE JOINS THE WAR

Benjamin Franklin had arrived in Paris on December 4, 1776, to seek an alliance. For a time, he was saddled with the less devious and less diplomatic John Adams, who tended to engage his hosts on what he presented as their moral duty to assist the Americans. Franklin, one of the world’s most technically sophisticated printers, established a small printing press in his house and began churning out effective, though outrageously inaccurate, pamphlets, alleging British atrocities and making wild claims of the success of American arms. Franklin’s puckish sense of humor, as well as his subtle techniques of insinuation and polemical advocacy, were all well-served. Louis XVI was smarting from the cataract of defeats of the Seven Years’ War. Franklin dressed very plainly in black and wore a fur hat, and played to perfection the role of the frontier philosopher and the Enlightenment scientist. Louis’s foreign minister, the Count of Vergennes, had already persuaded the king to give a million livres secretly to the Americans, and despite the warnings of the king’s finance minister, the astute A.R.J. Turgot, that the country could not afford to invest much in this effort, the king was lured both by vengeance and by the spirited performance of the Americans. The king and his advisers were even more impressed by Washington fighting it out so effectively at Germantown than they were by the American victories at Saratoga.¹²

Washington marched his now ragged army of 10,000 to Valley Forge, to monitor and, if possible, retake Philadelphia, and went into uncomfortable winter quarters there. He lost a quarter of his men to frostbite and other problems of exposure and malnutrition, but maintained morale; training was improved under the German adventurer Baron Friedrich von Steuben, Washington famously shared the rations of his men, and in the spring of 1778 new volunteers replenished his famished ranks.¹³ The war had now been going on for over three years and the British were not close to subduing the rebellion, though they had occupied Philadelphia and New York. And on March 13, 1778, the French government announced a Treaty of Amity with America, a declaration of war on Britain in fact. Franklin’s achievement in bringing France, despite its precarious finances, into the war and in support of republicanism and secessionism was an astonishing one. No parliament had sat in France since the young Richelieu had dismissed the Estates General in 1614 with such finality that it did not dare to reconvene until the start of the French Revolution 175 years later, to which revolution the exertions of the American Revolutionary War doubtless contributed. Yet France, instead of seeking a payoff from Britain to remain neutral, was wheedled by Franklin into assisting a movement that in its liberalism would infect much thinking in France, to the peril of the French monarchy. The entire history of diplomacy yields few triumphs so great and important to the world as this coup wrought by Franklin at the age of 72.

On the news from Paris and Saratoga, British policy was reappraised. As would frequently occur in subsequent distant wars against rebellious populations, the commander requested more forces and was removed. Howe, so successful in the Seven Years’ War, asked for 10,000 more men.¹⁴ Howe was replaced by General Henry Clinton, and Clinton was ordered to abandon Philadelphia and Rhode Island and to defend the West Indies, where French aggression was feared and which was still more highly prized not only than Canada, as was shown 15 years before, but even than what was left of the British interest in the Thirteen Colonies. Clinton redeployed some of his forces to Florida accordingly (a strategically insane disposition, since there were no enemy forces there and the territory was worthless militarily). Washington gave an army command to Lafayette, largely to encourage tangible French solidarity, and he shared in a skillful harassment of the Howe-Clinton army as it moved from Philadelphia toward New York.

At Monmouth Courthouse in late June, Washington was visible in the action all day on his white horse, showing conspicuous gallantry, and narrowly missed destroying Clinton’s army, which crept away in the night and was embarked by the Royal Navy. (Washington destroyed the career of General Charles Lee, whom he used as a whipping boy with very excessive severity, for the escape of the British. He was a very political general.) At this point, and hereafter, it became clear that Washington’s strategy was working and that success was likely if the French were of any real assistance. Admiral Count d’Estaing arrived at the mouth of the Delaware River in July 1778 with a substantial fleet, and then engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to displace the British at Newport, Rhode Island. There were British spoiling raids along the New England shore, and the other main actions in the balance of 1778 were in Georgia. The British had no strategy at all to win the war except attrition, which was operating more effectively against them than against the Americans. The war dragged on and the Americans became stronger and the British more exasperated.

In 1778 there was again the danger of invasion of England from France. With much of the British fleet tied up in the Americas, the French army was always large enough to threaten the home islands if it could be got across the Channel. The British and French fleets skirmished indecisively in the Channel in mid-July, but the damage to French rigging and supplies made an invasion effort unlikely in that year. The lack of success of d’Estaing’s hovering around the American coast aroused sentiments that were to prove durable: “Americans who recalled the French and Indian Wars and looked upon the French as foreigners and papists, now also regarded them as foppish and cowardly. The aristocratic French looked upon the Americans as vulgar rabble.” Lafayette almost fought a duel with an American after hearing “the name of France . . . the leading nation of the world, spoken . . . with disdain, by a herd of Yankees.”¹⁵ D’Estaing, as the French too were preoccupied with the West Indies, took St. Vincent and Grenada after the British had seized St. Lucia. In India, the capable governor Warren Hastings (about to be unjustly persecuted by Edmund Burke) seized almost all the remaining French enclaves in the subcontinent.

This was to some degree the return of world war, because of the French element, but there was no plan to suppress the revolt that started it and the British planners henceforth really aimed only at breaking off and keeping some of the southern states and Florida, to make the core of a tropical and Caribbean empire. In a classic case of strategists believing what they wanted to believe rather than what was indicated by the objective facts, the British, to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam War, Americanized the war by trying to arm and encourage loyalists along the sea coast. It was nonsense, of course. The loyalists were never more than a third of the country at their most numerous and were less now, and the gap in the mismatch between the leadership talents and quality of command decisions between George III and Lord North on the one hand, and Washington and Franklin on the other, widened steadily. The British blundered into war with the Netherlands after seizing diplomatic correspondence bound for that country, on the high seas, and the blandishments of the French and two centuries of stunted envy brought the Spanish into the war against Britain in the summer of 1779, as it had in the Seven Years’ War. The British remained convinced, on no evidence, that most Americans were opposed to the Revolution, and they now intended to assist loyalist groups within the colonies and not try to insert overwhelming force to suppress and occupy the country.

The whole concept was a fantasy, and Washington established himself at West Point, a fort north of New York, where he could move the Continental Army to New England or New Jersey and Philadelphia, as need arose. The British continued to occupy New York City, but apart from that, very few Americans saw much of them from then on, apart from the to-ing and fro-ing with small forces in the South. In the debate on America in Parliament in May 1779, General James Robertson gave the new rationale: “The object of the war was to enable the loyal subjects of America to get free from the tyranny of the rebels, and to let the colony follow its inclination, by returning to the king’s government.” This was building a revisionist airplane in the air.

On the American side, much has been made of Washington’s failure to destroy the British though he had many chances, but he had pursued successfully his political/military strategy, of harassing and containing the British wherever they tried to advance, strengthening the quality of his fighting units, and facilitating the rise of rebel confidence and determination.

As had been the case in the years before the Revolution, the colonies tended to think of themselves and of military deliverance as an entitlement of miraculous origin. Just as they balked at paying their share of the cost of ejecting the French from North America, the colonies, as long as the Redcoats weren’t coming across their own fields and through the kitchen door, tended to ignore the Continental Congress’s calls for funds. The Congress, which had no authority over the individual states/colonies, droned self-interestedly and loquaciously on, taking pot shots at Washington and others who were risking all for the birth and life of a new nation. The British convinced themselves that the South was a loyalist heartland, and Clinton dispatched 3,500 by sea to Georgia and seized Savannah with a brilliant amphibious operation. Heady with this success, the normally rather diffident Clinton laid claim to Georgia and then marched for Charleston, the largest city in the South, but was stopped and sent swiftly back to Savannah, being as hotly pursued by the American general Benjamin Lincoln as Lincoln’s lameness, obesity, and narcolepsy would allow. D’Estaing was persuaded to assist in a recapture of Savannah, but became impatient lest he be taken by surprise by the Royal Navy during the siege and ordered a disastrous attack across a swamp in which more than a quarter of the investing forces were killed. D’Estaing, unashamed at being the author of this fiasco, then withdrew to the West Indies, and Lincoln withdrew to Charleston.

6. THE SOUTHERN CAMPAIGN, 1779–1781

The Spanish posed something of a distraction for the British in western Georgia and Florida, and Clinton was enticed by the southern climes to try his hand at winter war with an amphibious expedition from New York to Charleston at the end of 1779. Like so much of most wars, and certainly this one, macabre farce ensued, as the fleet of over a hundred vessels was severely buffeted by storms, and broken up, and Clinton and the naval commander, Admiral Arbuthnot, hated each other. There was no such concentration of loyal support as the British imagined, and the coastal area of South Carolina had only 19,000 whites and 69,000 slaves, not a rich reservoir of political support even if most of the citizens had been monarchists. The British did finally reach Charleston and Clinton commanded the attack well, took the city, and treated the inhabitants generously. It was the greatest British victory of the war. Unfortunately, one of his cavalry commanders, Banastre Tarleton, soon overran some retreating Virginians near the North Carolina border at Waxhaw in June 1780, ignored a white flag, and massacred the American force, 350 men. This was a shocking breach of discipline and civilized standards of war-making, and resonated ominously. (His excuse was that his horse had been shot out from under him after he had ordered the charge and before he saw the flag of surrender, but this is not believable, as the killing continued for 25 minutes among the idle and prostrate Americans.)

The condition of the Revolution lapsed back to the implacable gloom of Valley Forge, as Washington wintered in Morristown under another heavy winter, with the Congress providing neither funds nor recruits. Washington’s army of 15,000, with desertions and some deaths from exposure and malnutrition, dwindled to 5,000 in early 1780. This, coupled with the debacle at Charleston, seemed to bring American fortunes back to their lowest point in a war that had now sputtered on for five years. But it would be clear in time that the greatest impact of this trying time was on Washington’s views of post-independence government. He railed at the venality and cowardice of the Congress and assemblies. He lamented that war profiteers had not been “hunted . . . down as the pests of society. I would to God that one of the most atrocious in each state was hung in gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Hamen.”¹⁶ This galvanized Washington into a belief that only a strong, but non-monarchical, executive of a federal state in which the central government had authority in all non-local matters would govern successfully. Washington was as much a politician and administrator, and almost as much a financier, as a specialist in military strategy and tactics, and his conclusions in these trying times, which he navigated with great strength of character and astuteness, would ramify profoundly in the establishment of the state that would eventually emerge from these convulsions.

General Benedict Arnold, who had conducted the arduous march to Quebec, to be sent packing by the French Canadians in 1775, a very capable general who had been unfairly under-recognized because of his relative sympathies for the British (Washington had complained that he had not been promoted), deserted a command position, and missed arrest by a few minutes when he fled West Point in September 1780 and went over to the British, abandoning even his wife. He asked for 20,000 pounds, and received most of it, to lead American forces into a trap, squandering the lives of his men and forfeiting the respect of everyone, permanently, one of the most catastrophic career and public relations misjudgments in history. He wrote Washington, from the aptly named evacuation vessel, HMS Vulture: “The heart which is conscious of its own rectitude, cannot attempt to palliate a step which the world may censure as wrong.” He asked for gentle treatment of his wife and child, which was accorded. He became a commander of loyalist forces in the war and continued to be a capable combat general.¹⁷

The British conciliated the Indians and most of them rallied to the British, who had, to the extent they could be distinguished from the American colonists, been more civil and reliable than the Americans. This was to prove more than adequate justification for the Americans, after the war, to redouble their repressions, exploitations, and betrayals of the Indians. A read of Jefferson’s harangue on the evils of the Indians in the Declaration of Independence is instructive in that regard. Similarly, large numbers of slaves defected to the British, and as many as 60,000 of the slave population, now approximately 400,000, escaped to Canada and to Britain, or were shipped to free communities in West Africa, but in general, they were recaptured and ground down with even more severity than usual by the authors and adherents of the self-evident truths and inalienable rights with which the Creator had endowed all men.

Gates was appointed to the Southern Command by the Congress, over Washington’s support of Nathanael Greene, and the victor of Saratoga quickly suffered the worst American defeat of the war, at Camden, North Carolina, compounded by his headlong flight on galloping horseback to nearly 200 miles from the field of his complete humiliation. He was relieved, and Greene, perhaps the ablest military commander of the war, on either side, replaced him. The French, who were none too impressed with the performance of their ally, sacked the feckless d’Estaing and replaced him with Count de Guichen, and dispatched 5,000 more troops under the capable Count de Rochambeau, and the British gave the Caribbean command to one of the greatest admirals of their prodigious naval history, Sir George Rodney. The Spanish also escalated their efforts, sending 12,000 troops to the Caribbean, of whom a disconcerting 5,000 died like galley slaves en route on the overcrowded, under-provisioned Spanish ships. The shift in naval emphasis to the West Indies assisted the American revolutionaries, and Washington welcomed Rochambeau and his 5,000 soldiers at Hartford on September 21, 1780. Guichen and Rodney engaged and skirmished and the French did well to draw the issue with so distinguished an opponent. The state of the conflict was briefly stable, as the final act began.

Greene found the wreckage of Gates’s army, 1,400 “naked and dispirited” troops, at Hillsboro, on November 27, 1780, where the hero of Saratoga had fled after the Camden rout. He faced the British commander, the competent nephew of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Lord Cornwallis, who had performed well throughout the Revolutionary War in various commands, and had shattered Gates at Camden. What was later reckoned, in Jefferson’s pious words, “That joyful annunciation of that turn in the tide of success which ended the Revolutionary War” occurred on November 27, 1980, at King’s Mountain, on the border between the Carolinas. A little over a thousand British and loyalists commanded by a fierce Scot, Patrick Ferguson, met 1,400 “overmountain” men, virtual hillbillies, commanded by their militia-leading landlords, John Sevier and Isaac Shelby, and almost the entire British force was killed or captured. The overmountain men were tall and lean and agile, had matted hair, and seemed like savages to their enemies, and behaved accordingly. The rulebook having been dispensed with by Tarleton at Waxhaw, the Americans massacred many of the British and left many more to be eaten by wolves. They marched 700 prisoners off, but many of those perished also. The small and almost inadvertent engagement demonstrated, as would many sequels in other distant partly colonial, partly guerrilla wars, that the side that is in revolt only has to win occasionally to keep the fires burning, and the overseas power becomes easily demoralized by any defeat.

The British were now facing not only the war’s most able field commander in Greene and his deputy, Daniel Morgan, but also guerrilla warriors of genius, in Thomas Sumter and especially General Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion. Cornwallis moved cautiously from Camden toward Charlotte, and in January 1781, after the setback at King’s Mountain, he sent Tarleton to deal with the very able Morgan, while he went into North Carolina after Greene. Tarleton charged impetuously uphill after Morgan, at Cowpens on January 13. Morgan had 200 militiamen fire twice and then retreat as if in rout, and as the British reached the crest of the hill, in probably the most finely executed action of the war, Morgan’s main force poured fire onto the British, who broke and retreated, with the Americans on their heels. Tarleton bravely fought to the end, and was finally chased off with only 40 survivors, having lost over a thousand men to the Americans, who sustained only 70 casualties. Both armies regrouped and their combined forces met at Guilford Court House, North Carolina, on March 15, 1781, and Cornwallis did well to repel Greene, though outnumbered. It was not a decisive victory and the British lost 500 men to 300 American casualties. (Loyalists fighting with the British, when captured, often received a very rough and not infrequently mortal treatment; it had become a very nasty war.)

7. YORKTOWN

The Americans, with the advantage of interior lines, could reinforce Greene by land, but Cornwallis depended on supply from New York, and neither the timorous Clinton in New York nor the vacillating home government would send reinforcements. Finally, the masses of waiting loyalists upon whose existence the southern strategy was based didn’t exist and the whole British Americanization plan was a fiasco. Cornwallis, faced with the necessity to fall back to Charleston and pursue a southern redoubt strategy with no prospects of long-term survival, or make a huge gamble to try to win the war, marched for Virginia. Cornwallis arrived at the head of 1,000 regulars at Petersburg, a city that would recur in American military history (Chapter 6), on May 20, 1781, and was joined by Benedict Arnold at the head of 4,000 loyalists. Virginia’s governor, now Thomas Jefferson, had almost no forces, as almost all Virginians inclined to war-making were with Washington outside New York. Jefferson’s many talents did not run to military preparations. Richmond was being defended by Lafayette with 500 militiamen. Washington’s cousins offered supplies to a British contingent to prevent the sacking of Mount Vernon, eliciting a severe rebuke from the American commander, who would have preferred that “they had burnt my house and laid my plantation in ruins. . . . You should have reflected on the bad example of . . . making a voluntary offer of refreshments to them with a view to prevent a conflagration.”¹⁸

Cornwallis vainly chased Lafayette around Virginia, enduring the attrition of minor skirmishes as well as the harassments of Clinton, who kept ordering him to detach and divert packets of troops for footling purposes. The British held New York, Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah, but Washington, though enfeebled by desertions and mutinies, still held the rest of the North and Greene and Marion and Morgan roamed around the interior of the South at will. The British, after nearly seven years of fighting, could not suppress the revolt, and the Americans were still not able to win the decisive battle. But the inability of the British to win was permanent, as they were not winning over the population and could spare no more troops for the campaign. At some point, there was a danger that the Americans would win a main-force engagement, and reduce the British to mere perches on shore while domestic British support for this endless and costly attrition withered. And Britain could not keep large units of its navy endlessly overseas shuttling forces around the eastern shore of America. It was all right to chase the French and Spanish and Dutch fleets around, but not to leave them alone to transport a French army across the English Channel for months on end attending to distractions in America. Something finally had to give. The French had no confidence in the Americans and proposed a peace allowing both sides to keep what they held. Fortunately for the Americans, while Franklin led the opposition to such a settlement, George III would not concede an inch to the rebels.

Finally, Washington persuaded Rochambeau, who had been idling in Newport for a year, to bring his 4,000 men to join him in Westchester. The new French admiral Count de Grasse, as much more capable and aggressive than Guichen as Guichen had been compared with the hapless d’Estaing, sailed from the Dominican Republic on August 14, 1781, with 3,300 soldiers on board. Washington, in one of his several acts of both tactical and strategic genius in the long war, pretended merely to be shifting forces around New York as he rushed south in forced marches, but he left only 3,500 men facing the indolent Clinton with 11,000 Redcoats in New York City. Washington and Rochambeau had a triumphant progress through the streets and banqueting halls of Philadelphia as de Grasse disembarked his forces in Chesapeake Bay in the first days of September. Unfortunately for the British, Admiral Rodney, after many successes in the West Indies, returned to Britain to restore his health and fortunes and defend himself in Parliament, and the bumbling Admiral Sir Thomas Graves was left to deal with de Grasse. Graves was afraid to enter Chesapeake Bay and was thus unable to evacuate Cornwallis, who was now encircled on land by over 15,000 French and Americans around Yorktown.

Seven Years War in Europe. Courtesy of the Department of History, United States Military Academy

Clinton promised to relieve Cornwallis by land and send Graves back with adequate forces to disembark him, but neither occurred. Cornwallis had 8,300 men bottled up in Yorktown, at the southern end of Chesapeake Bay. Fearing British reinforcements by sea, as Clinton was not moving on the ground, Washington pressed the siege forward as quickly as he prudently could. The British surrendered on October 17, 1781. Cornwallis feigned illness and his second-in-command, Brigadier Charles O’Hara, handed his sword to Rochambeau, trying to maintain the pretense that the British had been defeated by the French alone. Washington had 8,500 men to Rochambeau’s 7,000, and had first seen the possibilities for Yorktown, but the French had the artillery and de Grasse drove off Graves, so it was a largely French battle in a mainly American war. Rochambeau treated Cornwallis very graciously, even lending him 10,000 pounds when he did appear, and the British band played “The World Turned Upside Down” as they marched out. As when he had crossed the Delaware with inferior forces and defeated the British at Princeton and Trenton, Washington had acted boldly and brilliantly, seeing at once the opportunity to concentrate forces around Yorktown and marching his and Rochambeau’s long-inactive forces at astounding speed through summer heat to the task. He was as brilliant in the swingeing stroke as he was implacable in the long periods of demoralizing inactivity, pecked at and aggravated by venal and spineless politicians.

Yorktown did not end the war but it was like Stalingrad, or Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954, or the Tet Offensive in 1968 (Chapters 11, 14, 15)—a dramatic (in the case of Tet, public relations, not military) victory that knocked the stuffings out of the morale of one side while lifting the other. As would happen to America in the Vietnam War, Parliament finally rebelled against the king’s policy and in November 1781 voted to refuse to approve any further offensive actions in America. Lord North was dismissed as prime minister after 12 disastrous years and the closest colleague of the late Earl of Chatham (who had died in 1778), the Marquis of Rockingham, was invested. (But power really resided in the conciliatory Earl of Shelburne, a friend of Franklin’s, who was theoretically charged with the nonsensical mission of talking the Americans back into the British realm. The British were still not, and probably are not yet, sure of what the Americans were so upset about.) Charles James Fox was put in charge of negotiating an exit from the war, and sent Thomas Grenville to Paris to deal with Franklin.

As war gave way to diplomacy, Franklin, now 76, reemerged as the key figure in the American leadership. The French wished to take back some of what had been lost in the Seven Years’ War; the Americans wanted unconditional independence for their territory and Canada; the British would give no more than they had to, but would prefer concessions to their belligerent American cousins (whom Rockingham and Fox had generally sympathized with) than to their ancient French foes. The Americans would not be a threat to them in the Americas, but French revival would. The French had effectively won the war for the Americans, with de Grasse, Rochambeau, and Lafayette, and had a strong moral argument opposite Franklin. The dithering Congress, fearing the inexhaustibly wily Franklin’s affinity for the French, had sent the incorruptible John Adams to help shore him up. This was not necessary, and the French found Adams stiff, unilingual, and self-righteous. He shortly moved on to the Netherlands to try to negotiate a loan with the Dutch. (It was nonsense anyway, as the same Congress had purported to instruct the commissioners to be guided by the French, which Franklin, who in practice acted on his own account for America until late on, ignored, as he carried on complex, secret discussions with all sides, inscrutable behind his mask as the affable and frank American frontier patriot and absent-minded scientist.) Franklin had had great success contracting loans with France during the active phases of the war. He was not prepared to offer more than moral appreciation for moral claims, and the issue was resolved when Admiral Rodney returned to the West Indies, discovered a French-Spanish plan to seize Jamaica, and smashed the enemy fleet, taking the doughty de Grasse prisoner. This timely whipping awakened the French from their reverie about regaining an empire in the Americas.

With all sides acting with extreme duplicity, and the Spanish not even recognizing American independence and seeking a comeback in North America themselves, Franklin, suffering from kidney stones, handed over negotiations to the recently arrived minister to Spain, the very able John Jay, but with continuing guidance and retaining general oversight. The British hand was strengthened by the repulse in 1783 of one of the longest sieges in history, by the French and Spanish at Gibraltar after four years. Britain raised the ante, demanding payment of American prewar debts that had provoked the taxes and the insurrection in the first place, and compensation for the expropriated and displaced American loyalists. Jay and Franklin accepted to compensate the loyalists, but did so on behalf of the 13 individual states, as they were about, officially, to become, knowing that it was unlikely they would produce a brass farthing. The British agreed to this flimflam, dropped their debt claims in the broader context of secret side deals dividing between them navigation rights on the Mississippi, and conceding, as between them, everything east of that river to the Americans; i.e., the British were inviting the Americans to evict the Spanish, including from Florida. In the final Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, Britain recognized American independence while retaining all of Canada and Newfoundland and its gains in the West Indies, returned Minorca again to Spain, but retained Gibraltar. Sir Guy Carleton, who was the last British commander in America, ignored Washington in the handover ceremonies in New York, and evacuated all 3,000 fugitive slaves from under plantationer Washington’s nose.

The Spanish gained nothing, and the French had been swindled by Franklin into providing and by Washington into deploying the margin of victory, as well as vital financial support, and had nothing to show for it but more war debts and the flashing sparks of republicanism and democracy in the dry straw and tinder that now underlay the French monarchy and aristocracy. They might have judged from the British experience as the colonists’ creditors how quickly the Americans would be repaying them.

Franklin had played the diplomatic cards brilliantly, and his construction, maintenance, and disassembly of the French alliance was one of the masterpieces of world diplomatic history, made more piquant by his masquerade as a guileless though witty yokel, pitched perfectly to the susceptibilities to narcissism and grandiosity of the French court, as he had previously so well gauged the temper of the ruling circles in London. Washington had made his mistakes but had been brilliant when necessary, and cautious when in error, and had maintained a largely unpaid, ragtag army in existence despite nearly eight demoralizing years of attrition and the endless prattling and meddling of contemptible politicians, masquerading as sovereign legislators in their forcibly itinerant Congress. Jefferson had not had a good war as a rather unresourceful war governor, but he had launched the great American claim to universal values and exceptionalism—a mystique that would grow and flourish for generations after the indispensable services of Washington and Franklin had receded into the mists of folklore and he would continue to propagate them in the new nation’s highest offices and then in a long and esteemed retirement.

8. ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION

Of the three resolutions of the Congress on Richard Henry Lee’s motions in June 1776, independence had been achieved and Jefferson’s independence declaration-drafting committee, like Washington’s specific military command, had been overwhelmingly successful. So had Franklin’s diplomatic mission. But the committee to produce “articles of confederation” had not produced a viable framework for a united country. The fulfillment of the founders’ dreams would require that this subject be addressed before this brave new world would be fairly launched. The Congress had purported to spend about $200 million but had no power to tax and was dependent on the colonies, or states, to back its obligations. These jurisdictions were not much friendlier to central authority than they had been with the British, and efforts to pass a federal constitution, including Franklin’s original effort and John Dickinson’s sequel, were rejected. In November 1777, Articles of Confederation were approved which made the states sovereign and ignored federalism. In fact, the only authority in the shattered jurisdiction was General George Washington and his army. The strength, wisdom, and character of the example he set can be best understood by the results when the Latin American republics, 40 years later, revolted and yielded to the temptation of military rule. Washington rejected such overtures, and condemned petitions to Congress urging Greene and others to seize power after vehemently declining to do so himself.

Washington urged his countrymen “to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man who wishes, under specious pretenses, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.”¹⁹ He consented reluctantly to the demobilization of the Continental Army, but warned that it remained to be seen whether the Revolution he had led to victory was “a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.” He called for “an indissoluble Union of the States under one Federal Head”; the honoring of public debt; the establishment of armed forces; and a spirit of cooperation and sacrifice among all the states. Washington took leave of his comrades at New York on December 4, 1783, in probably the most emotional public occasion of American history, and on December 23 handed over his sword to the president of the Continental Congress (Thomas Mifflin, whom he despised and had fired as quartermaster general of the army), taking “leave of all my employments of public life.” Mifflin replied with a majestic statement written by Jefferson, concluding somewhat ambiguously with “earnest prayers that a life so beloved may be fostered with all His care; that your days may be happy as they have been illustrious, and that He will finally give you that reward which this world will not give.” Washington was not quite prepared to sign off on the possibilities of the present world, though he returned to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, and wrote to friends and even casual correspondents of his relief at being able now to live quietly on his estates.

In fact, he put himself at the disposition of the public and in the reserve of the new nation, the chief facilitator of the American project, with a greater right than anyone to require that the supreme sacrifices of the 15,000 or so Americans who had died and the devastation that had laid waste much of the country and reduced the economic product by about 45 percent²⁰ not have been in vain. He was charging the Congress with the task of justifying and completing the Revolution, knowing that the chances of it doing so were zero.

In Paris and Versailles, despite the abrasions of the peace process, Franklin was a national hero, even appointed by King Louis XVI to a scientific commission. He and Washington were almost universally admired, and Franklin was the lion of the salons of both London and Paris, in a manner probably never approached by anyone else. He became acquainted and often friendly with the leading philosophes, and counseled liberal reforms but warned against anything violent. As always, his advice was good, and as was often also true, it was not followed. He retired his commission in 1785, aged 79, and then stopped with friends in England, his immensely alluring personality and intelligence overcoming all the vexations of epochal disputes. He was reconciled with his son, the former governor of New Jersey, and returned to a hero’s welcome in Philadelphia.

The Congress and all the states were printing money and the Congress eventually devalued all currency by 97.5 percent. Washington’s brilliant but impulsive aide, Alexander Hamilton; Jefferson’s understudy, James Madison; and Robert Morris, the Philadelphia financier who financed much of the war, proposed a 5 percent import duty, but a number of the states refused to cooperate. To some extent the states reneged on their financial obligations generated by the Revolutionary War, just as they had refused to contribute to the British to help pay for the eviction of the French from Canada. It was the same stingy impulse, but they were now largely, themselves, the creditors of their own almost worthless war debts.

Poverty stalked the country except for parts of Pennsylvania and New York and New Jersey; debtors’ courts were busy, and reformers such as Jefferson, whose talents were much more evident in peacetime as he abolished primogeniture and proposed universal education, broadened the franchise to assure a voice to the less prosperous. It was clear by 1785 that the system was not working, as the British, in particular, had predicted.

A land dispute between Maryland and Virginia had been settled amicably under Washington’s auspices at Mount Vernon, and Washington asked the 34-year-old James Madison, a brilliant Virginian lawyer and legislator, to convene a meeting between representatives of the states to discuss interstate commerce. Five states were represented at Annapolis, Maryland, at the meeting in September 1786. Shays’ Rebellion in late 1786 and January 1787, an uprising of destitute Massachusetts farmers, was put down by swiftly recruited militia, but led to suspension of some taxes, and emphasized the absurdity and impotence of the political system. Congress was reduced to asking the states to grant it the power to impose certain taxes, and New York vetoed this.

Twelve states, all but Rhode Island, then called for a constitutional convention to meet at Philadelphia in May 1787. Enthusiasm for the idea of a federal constitution was sketchy in many state elites. In Virginia, Washington and most of the rest of the 40 families that owned the great plantations favored a strong federal government. Jefferson was absent as minister in Paris (where he succeeded Franklin in 1785), and Jefferson’s cousin, Edmund Randolph, was skeptical. Patrick Henry, the radical Virginian independence leader, disapproved the project and did not attend, though he was elected a delegate. John Adams was absent as minister in England (where he was graciously received by George III). Also absent were his anti-federalist cousin, Samuel Adams, and states’ rights advocate John Hancock. The autonomist governor of New York, General George Clinton, boycotted, and the New York delegation was effectively led by the young and brilliant, but none too democratic or representative, Alexander Hamilton. Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris led the Pennsylvanians. Some delegations were chosen by state assemblies, but some were supplemented by invitations from the conveners.

Washington was in the background, but he and Franklin, who had been proposing federal arrangements since the Albany Congress of 1754, were the real champions of a strong federal state. Washington’s challenge to the state assemblies to justify the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the long and bloody war that followed it had, as he expected, not been met. He would not seize power as many had urged when his army was demobilized, but he was conspicuously available now, to be the legitimately chosen father of the nation in peace as he had been in war. At the instigation of the 81-year old Franklin, Washington was elected president of the Constitutional Convention, and as host, in his splendid role of president of Pennsylvania, Franklin was elected chairman, the two indispensable founders of the nation ensconced at the head of the unfolding process. Franklin, suffering from gout and gallstones, was conveyed by sedan chair to and from the proceedings, by inmates of the municipal prison (with whom he was courteous and jaunty). The two grand strategists and chief elders of America were ready for the supreme effort to complete their work: the replacement of the French threat to British America, and of the British overlordship of a post-French America, with a government that could lead independent America to greatness and fulfill the promise of Jefferson’s luxuriant Declaration of Independence.

9. THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were effectively self-chosen. It was assumed that state governors and some senior figures of the legislatures could come ex officio. The Virginians arrived first, led by their governor, Edmund Randolph (Washington being present in his national capacity by common wish, ratified by his election as president of the Convention). At first, the advocates of states’ rights and autonomy hung back, not wishing to be involved in a project whose aims they disapproved. As more states sent delegates and the sponsorship of Washington and Franklin lent it momentum and gravity, most decided that it could be contrary to their interests not to be present. By June, all the states except Rhode Island, which had been reduced almost to anarchy, and New Hampshire were present. There were 8 planters and farmers, 21 practicing lawyers and also some that were not active members of the profession, and 15 merchants. As in other parliaments and special conventions of the time, the working class and small farmers, not to mention the tenant farmers and indigent, were represented only in the altruistic afterthoughts of the more prosperous.

Washington stayed in Philadelphia with Robert Morris, the wealthy financier who had been the treasurer of the revolutionary government in fact, apart from what Franklin and Adams could raise overseas. Morris and the unrelated Gouverneur Morris were delegates, and among others who would be prominent were Rufus King of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, William Livingston and William Paterson of New Jersey, Jared Ingersoll, and Thomas Mifflin and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, John Dickinson of Delaware, Daniel Carroll of Maryland, John Blair of Virginia, William Blount of North Carolina, and Pierce Butler and cousins Charles and Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina, as well as Madison and Hamilton. The radical and populist elements were largely under-represented, though they certainly had their say when the time came to ratify the arrangements that emerged, in the legislatures of the several states. The discussions and side-arrangements of the Constitutional Convention are intricate and interesting, but are also not the subject of this book, which is rather concerned with the strategic direction and management of the United States, from its emergence as a concept to the time of writing. The governing arrangements of the country are immensely important to this narrative, but the precise interaction of men and events that produced them, beyond the designs of the country’s chief political architects, are not.

On May 29, Randolph introduced the Virginia Plan, drafted by Madison, approved by Washington, and based on Jefferson’s constitution of Virginia. Some of the states had lower houses broadly enfranchised, and upper houses elected by people who were larger taxpayers or property owners, who sometimes had life tenure. Some, like Pennsylvania, had a single house chosen by everyone who paid any tax, and there were various gradations in between. Jefferson was controversial, though a wealthy plantation and slave-owner, as he was a liberal who famously said: “My observations do not enable me to say I think integrity the characteristic of wealth.”²¹ The Virginia Plan had a two-house federal Congress—a popularly elected House of Representatives and a Senate chosen by the state legislatures. The Congress would choose the executive and judiciary and would have powers over all matters of interstate scale, reducing states to the level of local government. The smaller states objected that they would be swamped by the influence of the larger ones, and the populist elements saw this as a matrix for aristocratic and oligarchic rule, if not a centralized despotism scarcely less odious than the one from which they had all just successfully revolted. (There was some justice in both criticisms, which again highlights the fact that Britain was a relatively democratic country, and had become more so since the failure of the king’s American policy imposed on an unconvinced and ultimately rebellious Parliament.)

The under-represented masses, insofar as they existed in these colonies where the largest city had just breasted the 40,000 mark, were in the larger states, and so both their spokesmen and the conservatives were unimpressed with the argument for equality of small states, as states were imaginary or arbitrary creations in America, not distinct cultural and linguistic entities as in Europe. Some of the smaller states’ representatives, such as Gunning Bedford of Delaware, hinted that the aid of foreign allies of the small states might be solicited, to which Gouverneur Morris replied: “The country must be united. If persuasion does not unite it, the sword will. The gallows and halter will finish the work of the sword.” Threats of bayonet attacks and the attentions of the hangman are pretty robust debating gambits, especially between recent victorious comrades-in-arms, who had crusaded for universal human rights.

A triangular arrangement was agreed, in an impressive model of constructive compromise, where both Washington and Franklin, who were largely silent in the formal proceedings but convened delegates singly and in small groups privately, played a capital part. All of the states would have equal representation in the Senate, whose members would be chosen not by the lower house, as in the Virginia Plan, but by the legislatures of the country’s constituent states. The lower House of Representatives would be represented in proportion to its population, except the southern states took the position, en bloc, that they would not touch the notion of a federal state unless the slave population was factored into the weight given to the size of state delegations to the House of Representatives.

The compromise reached was that for purposes of calculating the representation of states in the House of Representatives, three-fifths of slaves would be counted. For these purposes, this effectively gave the slave states’ free citizens 1.5 to 1.6 times the voting power of each eligible voter in free states. Though covered over in verbose piffle about different economic criteria for voting in different states, this was an ugly arrangement certain to breed and amplify resentment. Many thoughtful southerners, including Jefferson, had moral reservations about slavery, “a fire bell in the night,” he later called it. Much more numerous were northerners, especially in the puritanical Northeast, who thought slavery an outright evil, shaming, blasphemous, and unchristian. Thus to adapt slavery to the comparative political advantage of the slaveholder was a bitter pill to swallow. The southerners even tried to exempt slavery from taxation in the Constitution but were unsuccessful, but did get a guarantee that slavery would be unchallenged for at least 30 years. Again, Franklin, who had become a quiet opponent of slavery and would become head of the Pennsylvania anti-slavery society, was instrumental in getting the compromise approved. He lobbied quietly with his usual argument that the triumph of American democracy was inevitable and that it would dwarf slave-holding cotton states as it would dwarf little Britain, and that what was needed was a long view.

There was passionate disagreement over the nature of the executive. Alexander Hamilton, who was a native of the West Indies, never had bought all the way into republicanism and favored an elected monarchy for set terms. This was generally seen as the sighting shot in Washington’s claim to the headship of a new state, as long as it had a coherent federal framework. There were calls for an elected chief of state who would not be styled a king. Some thought Congress should elect the chief executive, some the people, and the populists and the large-state conservatives were on the same side of the argument again. Another, rather intricate compromise emerged: the president and the vice president (a nebulous position whose occupant had the right of succession between quadrennial elections and would preside over the Senate “like an unwanted poor relation in a wealthy family”),²² would be chosen by an Electoral College of state representatives, in which each state would have as many electors as it had members of the two houses of Congress combined. This again pleased the populists by getting the vote closer to the people, and the large state delegates for recognizing their influence. In the event of an absence of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation casting a single vote reflecting the wishes of the majority of its congressmen.

There was an effort by the conservatives to restrict the vote in the lower house to propertied elements, on the theory that large employers would buy or otherwise control the votes of their employees. Madison and Franklin debunked this as likely to lead to another revolution. It was agreed that Congress could impeach and remove the chief executive, though the process would be a great deal more complicated than a mere vote of no-confidence as in the British Parliament. Members of the House would be elected to two-year terms and of the Senate to six-year terms, a third to be up for reelection every two years. It was an admirable compromise, but far from the exercise in pure democracy that was necessary to be consistent with the superlatives of the Declaration of Independence, and with other incitements to war against a nation that essentially had as popularly based and accountable a government, albeit on the basis of a shifting mass of practices and precedents rather than a constitution. The compromise went to a drafting committee, called the Committee of Style, consisting of William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris, Madison, and Hamilton, on September 8, 1787. The committee reported in four days later, and the Constitution was adopted by the weary delegates, after a general refusal to continue the convention to discuss a bill of rights.

The ratification process precipitated another prolonged crisis of horse-trading, threats, sulks, and blandishments. In Massachusetts, the two recalcitrants, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, relented in their hostility to the Constitution. Hancock presided over the state constitutional convention and it was suggested that he might be a fine candidate for vice president of the new republic. Samuel Adams, an almost deranged Anglophobe and relentless critic of any authority, even a presumptive one like Washington, agreed to support ratification in exchange for a bill of rights of individuals. This would take the form of a list of amendments to be recommended to the first Congress. On this basis, the new Constitution was adopted by a narrow margin, by 187 to 168 in Massachusetts, and by only 10 votes in New Hampshire and Virginia, despite the support of Washington, the absent Jefferson, the chief framer Madison, the rising James Monroe, and even Patrick Henry. And in New York, prodigies of persuasion by Alexander Hamilton notwithstanding, the Constitution was adopted by three votes in the legislature, over the objections of the four-term governor, General George Clinton (who served five more terms). North Carolina only ratified in 1789 and balky little Rhode Island in 1790, though there was by then no doubt that failure to ratify would have resulted in that little state’s being subsumed into Connecticut and Massachusetts. The Bill of Rights was eventually agreed in 1791, and was adopted in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.

By a hair’s breadth, the new nation had endowed itself with a Constitution that would serve it well and become one of the most renowned and respected texts in human history. No famous law-giver since Moses (who was, after all, a messenger), from Hammurabi to Justinian to Napoleon, remotely approached the triumph of, principally, James Madison, who devised the system of checks and balances between three co-equal branches of government. So great was Madison’s prestige, he wrote important messages for Washington, and on occasion, when the message was addressed to the House of Representatives, wrote the reply as well. Hamilton opposed a Bill of Rights, on the spurious grounds that it was unnecessary because the Constitution did not authorize the government to violate anyone’s rights, betraying a faith in the benignity of official executive authority that makes it clear that Hamilton had no interest at all in individual rights. Madison himself was lukewarm initially, until Jefferson remonstrated with him and he saw that nothing less would get the Constitution ratified and adopted. Madison’s achievement in producing a Constitution that secured federal authority, balanced the branches of a stable government, and assured individual rights, established him in the front rank of the nation’s founders, and was another immense and fortuitous strategic milestone for the emerging country.

That it was adopted was a felicitous stroke for America, a happy launch that enabled the new nation to assure itself and offer to immigrants a regime of ordered liberty and a society of laws that was slightly less girt about by impediments of tradition and antique formalism than Britain’s. Jefferson’s genius at the propagation of the new American era electrified the world. The words of Gouverneur Morris’s splendid preamble became and remained familiar to virtually every informed person in the world: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Those chiefly responsible for creating the circumstances that permitted, and generated the necessary support for, the promulgation of this document—Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, John Jay, and John Adams—did not doubt that it would guide the new country to glory and preeminence among nations, and that their work would long be discernible among men.

There was never much suspense about who would get the call as the first president; for the last time in the history of the country, someone would truly accept a draft to that office. Washington received the blandishments of Hamilton rather neutrally and expressed no interest in the presidency to anyone, saying only that he would accept it if to decline it would hurt the country. It is believable that he did not especially wish to be president, but not that he did not expect to be president. He was encouraged that supporters of the Constitution, called Federalists, won the congressional elections, and when the Electoral College gave all 69 votes to Washington voluntarily, without his ever having expressed even a private word of desire for the office, he had no choice but to accept, as he had accepted the command of the Continental Army. In what has proved an enduring tradition of using the vice presidency to provide regional balance, it was contested between John Adams and John Hancock. Washington made it known that he would be happy with Adams, a more staunch Federalist than Hancock and a personal loyalist, and Adams was narrowly chosen. George Washington, who in 1785 had described the notion of American unity as “a farce,” was inaugurated the first president of the United States, eight weeks late, on April 30, 1789.²³ In the 35 years since the Seven Years’ War effectively began in the backwoods of America (partly because of Washington’s actions)—a war that established Prussia as a Great Power, delivered all of India to Britain, and expelled France from North America—the American colonists had developed a burning, independent patriotism and brilliant national leadership, had outmaneuvered the greatest nations in Europe, had electrified the world, had restored serious republican government to the world after an absence of 17 centuries, had politically formalized the Enlightenment by endowing themselves with novel but instantly respected political institutions, and had set forth in the world, as their greatest subsequent leader famously said, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” An epochal political and national experiment had been prepared by a brilliant sequence of strategic triumphs.

1. Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 191. It somewhat presaged Abraham Lincoln’s addresses in the late 1850s when he warned the South that if it came to war, the North had too many people not to prevail (Chapter 6). With one as with the other, a knowledge of the demographic trend was a consoling trump card in the struggle both sought to avoid but considered likely.

2. Ibid. p. 203.

3. Ibid. p. 206.

4. Morgan, op. cit., p. 217.

5. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America, New York, Grove Press, 2001, p. 26.

6. Robert Harvey, A Few Bloody Noses: The American War of Independence, London, John Murray, 2001, p. 428.

7. Morgan, op. cit., p. 223.

8. It was a little like the comparative gentleness that some have claimed limited the German approach at Dunkirk 164 years later (Chapter 9). Both interpretations are improbable.

9. William J. Casey, Where and How the War Was Fought: An Armchair Tour of the American Revolution, New York, Morrow, 1976, p. 91. This may have been the inspiration for Winston Churchill’s comment on the Battle of Britain in 1940: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

10. Casey, op. cit., p. 100.

11. Harvey, op. cit., p. 298.

12. Casey, op. cit., p. 129. As would be the case in reverse between the British and Americans with the Battle of Britain 163 years later (Chapter 10), the argument for assistance was much strengthened by the performance of the petitioner.

13. The arrival of Von Steuben and other swashbucklers such as the Marquis de Lafayette and the Poles, Tadeusz Kosciusko and Casimir Pulaski, presaged the international attraction of future wars of pure popular motive, such as the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939.

14. As General William Westmoreland would ask for 206,000 more men after the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 and would be kicked upstairs to army chief of staff just before the commander-in-chief, President Lyndon Johnson, also withdrew (Chapter 14).

15. Harvey, op. cit., pp. 307–308. Little of this has changed in the intervening centuries, though there were some celebratory moments with the Third Republic, including the one that produced the Statue of Liberty.

16. Harvey, op. cit., p. 334.

17. Harvey, op. cit., p. 346.

18. Harvey, op. cit., p. 391.

19. Harvey, op. cit., p. 434.

20. Harvey, op. cit., p. 438.

21. Harvey, op. cit., p. 444.

22. Jeffrey St. John, Constitutional Journal: A Correspondent’s Report from the Convention of 1787, Ottawa, Illinois, Jameson Books, 1987.

23. Burns and Dunn, op. cit., p. 45.