A History of the American People Part 3

The const.i.tutional impa.s.se was aggravated by a gradual breakdown in order in some of the colonies, caused by a variety of factors some of which had nothing to do with disagreements between America and London but which nonetheless made them more serious. In 1763 a powerful Indian chief called Pontiac, a former ally of the French who had been exasperated beyond endurance by the consequences of the British conquest, formed a grand confederacy of various discontented tribes, and ravaged over a thousand miles of the frontier, destroying every fort except Detroit and Pittsburgh. The violence ranged from Niagara to Virginia and was by far the most destructive Indian uprising of the century. Over 200 traders were slaughtered. It took three years to put down the uprising, which was achieved only thanks to regular British units, deployed at considerable expense. Only four colonies, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Virginia, made any attempt to a.s.sist. On top of this came the violent refusal to pay the Stamp Tax, which many rightly saw as a triumph of mob rule.

There were other outbreaks, some trivial, some serious, but all const.i.tuting a threat to a system of government which was clearly outmoded and in need of fundamental reconstruction. For instance, at the end of 1763 a gang of Scotch-Irish frontiersmen, from Paxton and Donegal towns.h.i.+ps, carried out an atrocious ma.s.sacre of harmless Indians, some of them Christians, and many of whom had taken refuge in the workhouse at Lancaster. They slaughtered another group of 140 Indians, converted by the Moravians, who had been taken for safety to Province Island on the Schuylkill River. They threatened to march on Philadelphia and slaughter the Quakers too, for they saw them as 'Indian-lovers' who would prevent the development of the frontier and the freeing of land for settlement. Franklin was asked to organize the defence of the city against the 'Paxton Boys,' mustered the militia-six companies of foot, two of horse, and a troop of artillery-and eventually persuaded the rioters to disperse. But there was not the will to punish even the ringleaders, and Franklin, no friend of the Indians but disgusted by what had happened, had to content himself with writing a bitter pamphlet denouncing 'the Christian White Savages.' There was yet more violence when Charles Townshend, on behalf of the British government, returned to the financial attack (he was Chancellor of the Exchequer) with a new series of duties, on gla.s.s, lead, paint, and tea, in 1767. The colonies responded with what they called Nonimport Agreements, in effect a boycott of British goods. But a considerable amount of tax was collected this time-30,000 a year, at a cost of r3,000-and this encouraged the British authorities to press on. The port and town of Boston became the center of resistance, which was increasingly violent, with individual attacks on customs officials, and mob raids on customs warehouses and vice-admiralty courts.

The effect of these outrages on British opinion was disastrous. There was a call for 'firmness.' Even those generally sympathetic to the colonists' case called for a strong government line, not ruling out force. Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, laid down: 'The Americans must be subordinate ... this is the Mother Country. They are children. They must obey, and we prescribe.' The Earl of Shelburne, cleverest and wiliest of the London politicians, wanted the civilian governor of New York, Sir Henry Moore, replaced by 'a Man of a Military Character, who would act with Force or Gentleness as circ.u.mstances might make necessary."' The view of the British military men, especially of the foreign mercenary commanders, like Colonel Henri Boughet, who put down the Pontiac Rising, was that the American militias were useless and that, however gifted the colonists might be at playing noisy politics, they were no good at fighting. By the late 1760s Britain had about 10,000 troops in the theater, regulars and German mercenaries, based in Jamaica, Halifax, and the mainland colonies, and costing about 300,000 a year. Why not use them?

Just as the British despised the colonial militias, so they refused to recognize the const.i.tutional or moral legitimacy of the colonial a.s.semblies. Lord North, Prime Minister from 1770, a man dismissed by Dr Johnson in the words 'He fills a chair' with 'a mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar-cruet,' criticized the Ma.s.sachusetts const.i.tution as a whole because it depended on 'the democratik part.' His minister in charge of colonial matters, Lord George Germaine, took an even more contemptuous view: 'I would not have men in mercantile cast every day collecting themselves together and debating on political matters.' This view was shared by the generals. General Guy Carleton, governor of Quebec, warned where it was all leading: 'A Popular a.s.sembly, which preserves its full Vigor, and in a Country where all Men appear nearly on a Level, must give a strong bias to Republican Principles.' General Gage summed up the conclusion: 'The colonists are taking great strides towards independence. It concerns great Britain by a speedy and spirited Conduct to show them that these provinces are British Colonies dependent on her and that they are not independent states.'

The upshot was that the British garrison in Boston, the most 'difficult' of the colonial cities, was suddenly increased by two whole regiments. That, as Franklin put it, was 'Setting up a Smith's Forge in a Magazine of Gunpowder.' On March 3, 1770, a sixty-strong mob of Boston youths started to s...o...b..ll a party of redcoats. There was a scrimmage. Some soldiers fired, without orders, killing three youths outright and wounding others, two of whom later died. Britain and its colonies were under the rule of law and for soldiers to open fire on civilians without a previous reading of the Riot Act was to invite charges of murder or manslaughter. Ten years later, indeed, the whole of central London was given over to the mob because of the timidity of the military authorities for this reason. In this case the commander of the redcoats, Captain Preston, was put on trial; so were some of his men. But there was no conclusive evidence that an order was given, or who fired the shots, so all were acquitted, though to appease the Bostonians two of the men were branded. This was to hand the colonists the first of a whole series of propaganda victories-the story of the 'Boston Ma.s.sacre,' as it was called, and the failure of Britain to punish those responsible. Sam Adams and Joseph Warren skillfully verbalized the affair into a momentous act of deliberate brutality, and Paul Revere engraved an impressive but entirely imaginary image of the event for circulation through the eastern seaboard.

The American Revolution was the first event of its kind in which the media played a salient role-almost a determining one-from first to last. Americans were already a media-conscious people. They had a lot of newspapers and publications, and were getting more every month. There were plenty of cheap printing presses. They now found that they had scores-indeed hundreds-of inflammatory writers, matching the fiery orators in the a.s.semblies with every polysyllabic word of condemnation they uttered. There was no longer any possibility of putting down the media barrage in the courts by successful prosecutions for seditious libel. That pa.s.s had been sold long ago. So the media war, which preceded and then accompanied the fighting war, was one the colonists were bound to win and the British crown equally certain to lose.

Boston was now the center of outright opposition to British colonial rule. We can look at it through the eyes of its most distinguished and certainly most acrimonious son, John Adams (1735-1826), who was then in his thirties and a prominent lawyer of the city. Adams came from Quincy, the son of a fourth-generation Bay Colony farmer, and was as impregnated with the self-righteous, opinionated, independent-minded, and contumacious spirit of Ma.s.sachusetts as anyone who had ever crossed the Common. He was a Harvard graduate and had the high-minded sense of intellectual superiority of that famous academy, and his sense of importance had been much increased by his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith of Weymouth, an able, perceptive, charming, and socially prominent lady. The proto-Republicans of Boston called themselves Whigs, in sympathy with the London parliamentary critics of the British government, such as Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, and Adams became a prominent Whig at the time of the Stamp Act agitation. He published, anonymously, four notable articles attacking the British authorities in the Boston Gazette, and he later brought out under his own name A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1768), which argued that the tax was unconst.i.tutional and unlawful and so invalid. It says a lot for the fair-mindedness of Britain in these years before the conflict broke out openly that Adams published this philippic in London. But it is important to note that Adams, then and later, was not a man who believed in force if arguments were still listened to. Unlike his cousin Sam Adams, and other men of the mobs, he deplored street violence in Boston and, as a lawyer, was prepared to defend the soldiers accused of the 'Ma.s.sacre.' The breaking-point for him came in 1773-4 when North, by an extraordinary act of folly, made British power in Boston look not only weak, vindictive, and oppressive, but ridiculous.

The origins of the Boston Tea Party had nothing to do with America. The East India Company had got itself into a financial mess. To help it to extricate itself, North pa.s.sed an Act which, among other things, would allow the company to send its tea direct to America, at a reduced price, thus encouraging the 'rebels' to consume it. Delighted, the hara.s.sed company quickly dispatched three s.h.i.+ps, loaded with 298 chests of tea, worth 10,994 to Boston. At the same time, the authorities stepped up measures against smuggling. The American smuggling interest, which in one way or another included about 9o percent of import-export merchants, was outraged. John Hanc.o.c.k (1737-93), a prominent Boston merchant and political agitator, was a respectable large-scale smuggler and considered this maneuver a threat to his livelihood as well as a const.i.tutional affront. He was one of many substantial citizens who encouraged the Boston mob to take exemplary action.

When the s.h.i.+ps docked on December 16, 1773, a crowd gathered to debate what to do at the Old South Meeting House. It is reported 7,000 people were jammed inside. Negotiations were held with the s.h.i.+p-masters. One rode to Governor Hutchinson at his mansion on Milton Hill to beg him to remit the duties. He refused. When this news was conveyed to the mob, a voice said: 'Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?' Sam Adams, asked to sum up, said 'in a low voice,' 'This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.' The doors were then burst open and a thousand men marched to the docks. There had been preparations. An eyewitness, John Andrews, said that 'the patriots' were 'cloath'd in blankets with the heads m.u.f.fled, and coppercolor'd countenances, being each arm'd with a hatchet or axe, and a pair of pistols.' The 'Red Indians' ran down Milk Street and onto Griffith's Wharf, climbed aboard the Dartmouth, chopped open its teachests, and then hurled the tea into the harbor, 'where it piled up in the low tide like haystacks.' They then attacked the Eleanor and the Beaver. By nine in the evening all three s.h.i.+ps had been stripped of their cargo. Josiah Quincy (1744-75), one of the leading Boston pamphleteers and spokesmen, said: 'No one in Boston will ever forget this night,' which will lead 'to the most trying and terrific struggle this country ever saw.' John Adams, shrewdly noting that no one had been injured, let alone killed, saw the act, though one of force, as precisely the kind of dramatization of a const.i.tutional point that was needed. As he put it: 'The people should never rise without doing something to be remembered, something notable and striking. This destruction to the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I can't but consider it an epoch of history.

Adams was quite right. The episode had the effect of forcing everyone on both sides of the Atlantic to consider where they stood in the controversy. It polarized opinion. The Americans, or most of them, were exhilarated and proud. The English, or most of them, were outraged. Dr Johnson saw the Tea Party as theft and hooliganism and produced his maxim: 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.' In March 1774, on the invitation of the government, parliament closed the port of Boston to all traffic and two months later pa.s.sed the Coercive Acts. These punitive measures, paradoxically, were accompanied by the Quebec Act, a highly liberal measure which gave relief to the Canadian Catholics and set Upper and Lower Canada firmly on the road to self-government and dominion status. It was designed to keep the Canadians, especially the French-speaking ones, loyal to the crown, and succeeded; but it infuriated the American Protestants and made them suspicious that some long-plotted conspiracy was afoot to reimpose what John Adams called 'the hated despotism of the Stuarts.' In the current emotional atmosphere, anything could be believed. At all events, these legislative measures, which included the compulsory quartering of troops on American citizens in Boston and elsewhere, were lumped together by the American media under the term the 'Intolerable Acts.' They mark the true beginning of the American War of Independence.

We must now s.h.i.+ft the eyewitness focus yet again and see how things appeared to Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), then in his early thirties and already a prominent politician in Virginia. He came from the same background as George Was.h.i.+ngton, and was related to many families in the Virginia gentry, such as the Randolphs and the Marshalls. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a surveyor who mapped the Northern Wilderness part of Lord Fairfax's great domain. Jefferson was one of ten children and owed a great deal to his devoted elder sister Jane, who taught him to read books and, equally important, to love music. He learned to play the violin well and carried a small instrument with him on all his travels. He delighted to sing French and Italian songs. When he went to William and Mary College, aged sixteen, he was already fluent in Latin and Greek, and could ride, hunt, and dance well. He had a gift for friends.h.i.+p and became a devoted pupil of his Scots teacher, William Small, as well as a disciple of the gifted Virginia jurist George Wythe, seventeen years his senior. Small secured for the college the finest collection of scientific instruments in America and the two together, said Jefferson, 'fixed the destinies of my life.' Wythe was another of the enterprising polymaths whom America produced in such numbers at this time and had many clever guests at his house. Jefferson was in some ways the archetypal figure of the entire Enlightenment, and he first learned to blossom in Wythe's circle.' In terms of all-round learning, gifts, sensibilities, and accomplishments, there has never been an American like him, and generations of educated Americans have rated him higher even than Was.h.i.+ngton and Lincoln. A 1985 poll of members of the Senate showed that conservative and liberal senators alike regarded him as their 'favorite hero.'

We know a great deal about this remarkable man, or think we do. His Writings, on a bewildering variety of subjects, have been published in twenty volumes. In addition, twenty-five volumes of his papers have appeared so far, plus various collections of his correspondence, including three thick volumes of his letters to his follower and successor James Madison alone.,' In some ways he was a ma.s.s of contradictions. He thought slavery an evil inst.i.tution, which corrupted the master even more than it oppressed the chattel. But he owned, bought, sold, and bred slaves all his adult life. He was a deist, possibly even a sceptic; yet he was also a 'closet theologian,' who read daily from a multilingual edition of the New Testament. He was an elitist in education-'By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually'-but he also complained bitterly of elites, 'those who, rising above the swinish mult.i.tude, always contrive to nestle themselves into places of power and profit.' He was a democrat, who said he would 'always have a jealous care of the right of election by the people.' Yet he opposed direct election by the Senate on the ground that 'a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom.' He could be an extremist, glorying in the violence of revolution: 'What country before ever existed a century and a half without rebellion? ... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.' Yet he said of Was.h.i.+ngton: 'The moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.'

No one did more than he did to create the United States of America. Yet he referred to Virginia as 'my country' and to the Congress as 'a foreign legislature.' His favorite books were Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy. Yet he lacked a sense of humor. After the early death of his wife, he kept-it was alleged-a black mistress. Yet he was priggish, censorious of bawdy jokes and bad language, and cultivated a weare-not-amused expression. He could use the most inflammatory language. Yet he always spoke with a quiet, low voice and despised oratory as such. His lifelong pa.s.sion was books. He collected them in enormous quant.i.ty, beyond his means, and then had to sell them all to Congress to raise money. He kept as detailed daily accounts as it is possible to conceive but failed to realize that he was running deeply and irreversibly into debt. He was a man of hyperbole. But he loved exact.i.tude-he noted all figures, weights, distances, and quant.i.ties in minute detail; his carriage had a device to record the revolutions of its wheels; his house was crowded with barometers, rain-gauges, thermometers and anemometers. The motto of his seal-ring, chosen by himself, was 'Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to G.o.d.' Yet he shrank from violence and did not believe G.o.d existed.

Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres at fourteen from his father. He married a wealthy widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, and when her father died he acquired a further 11,000 acres. It was natural for this young patrician to enter Virginia's House of Burgesses, which he did in 1769, meeting Was.h.i.+ngton there. He had an extraordinarily G.o.dlike impact on the a.s.sembly from the start, by virtue of his presence, not his speeches. Abigail Adams later remarked that his appearance was 'not unworthy of a G.o.d.' A British officer said that 'if he was put besides any king in Europe, that king would appear to be his laquey.' His first hero was his fellow-Virginian Patrick Henry (1736-99), who seemed to be everything Jefferson was not: a firebrand, a man of extremes, a rabblerouser, and an unreflective man of action. He had been a miserable failure as a planter and storekeeper, then found his metier in the lawcourts and politics. Jefferson met him when he was seventeen and he was present in 1765 when Henry acquired instant fame for his flamboyant denunciation of the Stamp Act. Jefferson admired him no doubt for possessing the one gift he himself lacked-the power to rouse men's emotions by the spoken word.

Jefferson had a more important quality, however: the power to a.n.a.lyze a historic situation in depth, to propose a course of conduct, and present it in such a way as to shape the minds of a deliberative a.s.sembly. In the decade between the Stamp Act agitation and the Boston Tea Party, many able pens had set out const.i.tutional solutions for America's dilemma. But it was Jefferson, in 1774, who encapsulated the entire debate in one brilliant treatise-Summary View of the Rights of British America. Like the works of his predecessors in the march to independence James Otis' Rights of the British Colonists a.s.serted (1764), Richard Bland's An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonists (1766), and Samuel Adams' A Statement of the rights of the Colonies (1772) Jefferson relied heavily on Chapter Five of John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, which set out the virtues of a meritocracy, in which men rise by virtue, talent, and industry. Locke argued that the acquisition of wealth, even on a large scale, was neither unjust nor morally wrong, provided it was fairly acquired. So, he said, society is necessarily stratified, but by merit, not by birth. This doctrine of industry as opposed to idleness as the determining factor in a just society militated strongly against kings, against governments of n.o.bles and their placemen, and in favor of representative republicanism.

Jefferson's achievement, in his tract, was to graft onto Locke's meritocratic structure two themes which became the dominant leitmotifs of the Revolutionary struggle. The first was the primacy of individual rights: 'The G.o.d who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.' Equally important was the placing of these rights within the context of Jefferson's deep and in a sense more fundamental commitment to popular sovereignty: 'From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation.' It was Jefferson's linking of popular sovereignty with liberty, both rooted in a divine plan, and further legitimized by ancient practice and the English tradition, which gave the American colonists such a strong, clear, and plausible conceptual basis for their action. Neither the British government nor the American loyalists produced arguments which had a fraction of this power. They could appeal to the law as it stood, and duty as they saw it, but that was all. Just as the rebels won the media battle (in America) from the start, so they rapidly won the ideological battle too.

But they had also to win the emotional battle-the war for men's hearts-before they could begin the battle of bayonets. In the events leading up to the fighting, ordinary men and women in America were roused by a number of factors. There was the desire for a republic-the commitment to place each selfish and separate interest in the search for the res publica, 'the public thing,' the common good. Let us not underestimate this. It was strongly intuited by a great many people who could barely write their names. It was vaguely a.s.sociated in their minds with the ancient virtue and honor of the Romans. When James Otis gave the address at the public funeral of 'the fallen' of the Boston Ma.s.sacre, he wore a toga. And republicanism was a broad concept-every man could put into it the political emotions he felt most keenly. But there was also fear. The early 1770s were marked by recession throughout the English-speaking world. There were poor crops in England in 1765-73, with a primitive cyclical downturn, 1770-6. A fall in English purchasing-power hit American exports in most colonies, and this came on top of economic disruption caused by boycotts. Exports from New England hit the 1765 high only twice in the decade 1765-75, after many years of uninterrupted increases. Exports from Virginia and Maryland fell below the 1765 high every year until 1775. There was distress in England, which stiffened the resolve of parliament to 'make the Americans pay.' But there was profound unease among Americans that the exactions of the British government were bringing the good times-most colonists had never known anything else-to a close.

There was another fear, and a more deep-rooted one. Next to religion, the concept of the rule of law was the biggest single force in creating the political civilization of the colonies. This was something they shared with all Englishmen. The law was not just necessary-essential to any civil society-it was n.o.ble. What happened in courts and a.s.semblies on weekdays was the secular equivalent of what happened in church on Sundays. The rule of law in England, as Americans were taught in their schools, went back even beyond Magna Carta, to Anglo-Saxon times, to the laws of King Alfred and the Witanmagots, the ancient precursor of Ma.s.sachusetts' a.s.sembly and Virginia's House of Burgesses. William the Conqueror had attempted to impose what Lord Chief Justice c.o.ke, the great early 17th-century authority on the law, had called 'The Norman Yoke.' But he had been frustrated. So, in time, had Charles I been frustrated, when he tried to reimpose it, by the Long Parliament. Now, in its arrogance and complacency, the English parliament, forgetting the lessons of the past, was trying to impose the Norman Yoke on free-born Americans, to take away their cherished rule of law and undermine the rights they enjoyed under it with as much justice as any Englishman! Lord North would have been astonished to learn he was doing any such thing, but no matter: that is what many, most, Americans believed. So Americans now had to do what parliamentarians had to do in 1640. 'What we did,' said Jefferson later, 'was with the help of Rushworth, whom we rummaged over for revolutionary precedents of those days.' So, in a sense, the United States was the posthumous child of the Long Parliament.

But Americans' fears that their liberties were being taken away, and the rule of law subverted, had to be dramatized-just as those old parliamentarians had dramatized their struggle by the Grand Remonstrance against Charles I and the famous 'Flight of the Five Members.' Who would play John Hampden, who said he would rather die than pay s.h.i.+p Money to King Charles? Up sprang Jefferson's friend and idol, Patrick Henry. As a preliminary move towards setting up a united resistance of the mainland colonies to British parliamentary pretensions, a congress of colonial leaders met in Philadelphia, at Carpenters Hall, between September 5 and October 26, 1774. Only Georgia, dissuaded from partic.i.p.ating by its popular governor, did not send delegates. Some fifty representatives from twelve colonies pa.s.sed a series of resolutions, calling for defiance of the Coercive Acts, the arming of a militia, tax-resistance. The key vote came on October 14 when delegates pa.s.sed the Declarations and Resolves, which roundly condemned British interference in America's internal affairs and a.s.serted the rights of colonial a.s.semblies to enact legislation and impose taxes as they pleased. A common American political consciousness was taking shape, and delegates began to speak with a distinctive national voice. At the end of it, Patrick Henry marked this change in his customary dramatic manner: 'The distinction between Virginians and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American.' Not everyone agreed with him, as yet, and the Continental Congress, as it called itself, voted by colonies rather than as individual Americans. But this body, essentially based on Franklin's earlier proposals, perpetuated its existence by agreeing to meet again in May 1775. Before that could happen, on February 5, 1775, parliament in London declared Ma.s.sachusetts, identified as the most unruly and contumacious of the colonies, to be in a state of rebellion, thus authorizing the lawful authorities to use what force they thought fit. The fighting had begun. Hence when the Virginia burgesses met in convention to instruct their delegates to the Second Continental Congress, Henry saw his chance to bring home to all the revolutionary drama of the moment.

Henry was a born ham actor, in a great age of acting-the Age of Garrick. The British parliament was full of actors, notably Pitt himself ('He acted even when he was dying') and the young Burke, who was not above drawing a dagger, and hurling it on the ground to make a point. But Henry excelled them all. He proposed to the burgesses that Virginia should raise a militia and be ready to do battle. What was Virginia waiting for? Ma.s.sachusetts was fighting. 'Our brethren are already in the field. Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have?' Then Henry got to his knees, in the posture of a manacled slave, intoning in a low but rising voice: 'Is life so dear, our peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty G.o.d!' He then bent to the earth with his hands still crossed, for a few seconds, and suddenly sprang to his feet, shouting, 'Give me liberty!' and flung wide his arms, paused, lowered his arms, clenched his right hand as if holding a dagger at his breast, and said in sepulchral tones: 'Or give me death!' He then beat his breast, with his hand holding the imaginary dagger. There was silence, broken by a man listening at the open window, who shouted: 'Let me be buried on this spot!' Henry had made his point.

By the time the Second Continental Congress met, the point of no return had been reached. Benjamin Franklin, who saw himself-rightly-as the great intermediary between Britain and America, better informed than any other man of att.i.tudes and conditions on both sides of the Atlantic, had been in London in 1774 trying to make peace and in particular presenting a pet.i.tion to the Privy Council to have the unpopular Governor Hutchinson of Ma.s.sachusetts removed. He still believed in a negotiated compromise. But he got no thanks for his pains. His pet.i.tion coincided with the Boston Tea Party and the inflaming of English opinion. He was fiercely attacked by Alexander Wedderburn, North's Attorney-General, a man typical of the British hardliners who made a deal impossible. Wedderburn, to Franklin's amazement, attacked him as 'the leader of disaffection,' a rebel 'possessed with the idea of a great American republic.' The pet.i.tion was dismissed as 'groundless, vexatious and scandalous,' and to add insult to injury Franklin was peremptorily fired from his job as deputy postmaster-general. He saw Burke, and agreed with him that the British Empire was 'an aggregate of many states under a common head;' but he agreed with Burke also that the notion was now out of date-'the fine and n.o.ble China Vase, the British Empire,' had been shattered. He saw Chatham, but found the old man degenerated into a windbag, who talked but did not listen, and counted for little now. Sadly, Franklin set sail for Philadelphia on March 20, 1775, convinced there was nothing more he could do in London to make the peace.

When Franklin got to Philadelphia on May 5-five days before the Second Continental Congress was due to meet-the first shots had been fired. On April 19, sixteen companies of redcoats were dispatched on what one of their officers called 'an ill-planned and ill-executed' expedition to seize patriot arms-dumps in Lexington and Concord. They failed to get the arms, and in a series of confused engagements got the worse of it, losing seventy-three dead and over 200 wounded or missing (American casualties were forty-nine dead, thirty-nine wounded, and five missing). John Adams was profoundly disturbed at the losses. It was 'the most shocking event New England ever beheld.' He saw it as the microcosm of all the tragedy of civil war-'the fight was between those whose parents but a few generations ago were brothers. I shudder at the thought, and there is no knowing where these calamities will end.' But his cousin Sam, hearing the first gunfire, called out: 'What a glorious morning this is-I mean, for America.' The patriotic media machine seized on the skirmishes with delight and presented them as a major victory, and proof that colonial militias could stand up to veterans.

Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and Was.h.i.+ngton met on May 11 in Philadelphia, when the Second Continental Congress a.s.sembled. Franklin had known Was.h.i.+ngton twenty years before, during the Seven Years War. But most of the rest were strangers, many of them young men. He noted that 'the Unanimity is amazing.' But that was unanimity for resistance. Only a minority yet thought in terms of outright independence. The rich John d.i.c.kinson of Maryland (1732-1808) wanted a direct appeal to King George to give Britain a last chance, and drafted an Olive Branch Pet.i.tion. But even former moderates thought this pointless. John Adams, with characteristic ad hominem bitterness, dismissed it as 'the product of a certain great fortune and piddling genius' giving 'a silly cast to our doings.' He thought 'Power and artillery are the most efficacious, sure and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt. Franklin sadly agreed with him. Knowing what he did of British political opinion, he was moving to the view that independence was the only solution, and he busied himself preparing for a long war, seeing to the printing of currency, the manufacturing of gunpowder, and the designing of an independent postal system. He drew up Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which carried his defense union scheme a great deal further and was an early blueprint for the United States Const.i.tution itself. This was to include besides the Thirteen Colonies (Georgia had now joined the Congress), Canada, the West Indies, and even Ireland if it wished. Though sad about the break with Britain, he was confident that America's huge economic and demographic strength-he was one of the few people on either side who appreciated its magnitude-would make it a certain victor, though he thought it should look for allies immediately. He wrote confidently to the English radical Joseph Priestley: 'Britain, at the expense of 3 millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is 20,000 a head. During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America.'

In the meantime, though, everyone agreed that an army was needed to bring Britain to the negotiating table. Dr Joseph Warren of Ma.s.sachusetts, president pro tempore of the Congress, who was soon to pay for his patriotism with his life at Bunker's Hill, put it succinctly: 'A Powerful Army on the side of America is the only means left to stem the rapid Progress of a Tyrannical Ministry.' But who was to command it? Since the clashes at Lexington, the large, imposing delegate from Virginia, General Was.h.i.+ngton, had taken to appearing in the uniform of an officer in the Fairfax Militia. He was the only member of the Congress in martial attire. He had been a leading critic of British rule since the Great Proclamation. He called the Stamp Act 'legal thievery.' He blamed Britain for falling tobacco prices, which was his 'interest.' He refused to buy British-made articles for his estate. His wife and step-children no longer got presents from London. He set his people to manufacture subst.i.tutes. As long ago as 1769 he had advocated forming an American army, though only as 'a last resort.' He strongly disapproved of the Boston Tea Party, which seemed to him a disorderly affair, a needless provocation which gave Britain an excuse to 'rule with a high hand.' But the 'Intolerable Acts' resolved his doubts. The last straw was a British ruling that generous land-grants to officers who served in the Seven Years War applied only to regulars-this invalidated his large claims to Western lands. If ever a man now had an 'interest' in going to war, he did. He told John Adams: 'I will raise one thousand men, subsist them at my own expense, and march myself at their head, for the relief of Boston.' He made it plain he was enthusiastic for fighting. He told fellow-delegates that he regarded the Indians as a sufficient menace-'a cruel and bloodthirsty enemy on our backs.' But this told in his favor. The delegates were experienced, serious men. They did not want to be led by a hothead. They liked the look of Was.h.i.+ngton. He was described as 'Six foot two inches in his stockings and weighing 175 pounds ... His frame is padded with well-developed muscles, indicating great strength.' And again: 'In conversation he looks you full in the face, is deliberative, deferential and engaging. His demeanor at all times composed and dignified. His movements and gestures are graceful, his walk majestic.' Moreover, he was 'generally beloved.'

Adams gives us a blow-by-blow account of how a commander-in-chief was chosen. He himself was by now in a fever of martial emotions: 'Oh, that I were a soldier,' he recorded in his diary. '[But] I will be! I am reading Military Books!' Was.h.i.+ngton, he said, 'by his great experience and abilities in military matters, is of great service to us.' Adams tried to maintain, twenty-seven years later, that his foresight was responsible for Was.h.i.+ngton's election. Actually there was not much choice. His only rivals were Israel Putnam, now serving as a major-general, who was too old at fifty-seven; and Artemus Ward, in temporary command of the provisional army at Cambridge, described as 'a fat old gentleman.' According to the Congressional minutes, Was.h.i.+ngton was chosen unanimously." Was.h.i.+ngton, who whatever his faults was never arrogant or pushy, was so overwhelmed by his selection that he was unable to write his letter of acceptance, but dictated it to Isaac Pemberton, in whose hand it is, apart from the signature. He refused a salary and asked only for expenses. This was received with great approval, and it is clear from the minutes that the delegates intended him to be treated as more than a mere general. He was to be leader. 'This Congress,' they read, 'doth now declare that they will maintain and a.s.sist him and adhere to him, the said George Was.h.i.+ngton Esquire, with their lives and fortunes in the same cause."

On June 14 Congress agreed to raise six companies on the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia frontier, to be paid for by itself (as opposed to any individual state), and to be termed the 'American Continental Army.' Was.h.i.+ngton was instructed to draw up regulations for the new force. By July 3, the general was at Cambridge, taking charge. One of the reasons the New Englanders had been so keen to choose him was that they had, so far, borne the brunt of the fighting. They were anxious that Virginia, the most populous state, should be fully committed too. By his prompt move to the Boston theater of war, Was.h.i.+ngton showed he accepted the logic of this and that he intended to fight a continental struggle for an entire people and nation.

But was it a nation yet? Three days after Was.h.i.+ngton took over the army, Congress issued a formal Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms. This rejected independence. As late as January 1, 1776, when the first Grand Union flag was raised over Prospect Hill in Boston, it consisted of thirteen alternating red and white stripes with, in the left-hand corner, a red, white, and blue Union Jack. But the measures taken by Congress, far from compelling Britain to negotiate, as they hoped, had the opposite effect. General Gage, the last royal governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, wrote home: 'Government can never recover itself but by using determined measures. I have no hopes at present of any accommodation, the Congress appears to have too much power and too little inclination [and] it appears very plainly that taxation is not the point but a total independence.' Acting on his advice, George iii proclaimed all the colonies in a state of rebellion.

At this point an inspired and rebellious Englishman stuck in his oar. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was another of the self-educated polymaths the 18th century produced in such large numbers. He was, of all things, a customs officer and exciseman. But he was also a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler, what was termed in England a 'barrack-room lawyer.' In a later age he would have become a trade union leader. Indeed, he was a trade union leader, who employed his fluent and forceful pen on behalf of Britain's 3,000 excis.e.m.e.n to demand an increase in their pay, and was sacked for his courage. He came to America in 1774, edited the Pennsylvania Magazine, and soon found himself on the extremist fringe of the Philadelphia patriots. Paine could and did design bridges, he invented a'smokeless candle'-like Franklin he was fascinated by smoke and light-and at one time he drew up a detailed topographical scene for the invasion of England. But his real talent was for polemical journalism. In that, he has never been bettered. Indeed it was more than journalism; it was political philosophy, but written for a popular audience with a devastating sense of topicality, and at great speed. He could pen a slas.h.i.+ng article, a forceful, sustained pamphlet, and, without pausing for breath, a whole book, highly readable from cover to cover.

Paine's pamphlet Common Sense was on the streets of Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, and was soon selling fast all over the colonies. In a few weeks it sold over 100,000 copies and virtually everyone had read it or heard about it. Two things gave it particular impact. First, it was a piece of atrocity propaganda. The first year of hostilities had furnished many actual instances, and many more myths, of brutal conduct by British or mercenary soldiers. Entire towns, like Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) and Norfolk, had been burned by the British. Women, even children, had been killed in the inevitable b.l.o.o.d.y chaos of conflict. Paine preyed on these incidents: his argument was that any true-blooded American who was not revolted by them, and prepared to fight in consequence, had 'the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.' Crude though this approach was, it went home. Even General Was.h.i.+ngton, who had read the work by January 3I, approved of it. Second, Paine cut right through the half-and-half arguments in favor of negotiations and a settlement under British sovereignty. He wanted complete independence as the only possible outcome. Nor did he try to make a distinction, as Congress still did, between a wicked parliament and a benign sovereign. He called George III 'the royal brute.' Indeed, it was Paine who transformed this obstinate, ignorant, and, in his own way, well-meaning man into a personal monster and a political tyrant, a bogey-figure for successive generations of American schoolchildren. Such is war, and such is propaganda. Paine's Common Sense was by no means entirely common sense. Many thought it inflammatory nonsense. But it was the most successful and influential pamphlet ever published.'

It was against this explosive background that Thomas Jefferson began his finest hour. By March, Adams noted that Congress had moved from 'fighting half a war to three quarters' but that 'Independence is a hobgoblin of so frightful a mien that it would throw a delicate person into fits to look it in the face.' By this he was referring to opponents of outright independence such as John d.i.c.kinson and Carter Braxton, who feared that conflicts of interest between the colonies would lead to the dissolution of the union, leaving America without any sovereign. But the logic of war did its work. The British introduced not just German but-heavens above!-Russian mercenaries, allegedly supplied by the Tsar, the archetypal tyrant, who had equipped them with knouts to belabor decent American backs. More seriously, they were inciting slaves to rebel, and that stiffened the resolve of the South. On June 7 the Virginia a.s.sembly instructed Richard Henry Lee to table a resolution 'That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States,' which was seconded by Adams on behalf of Ma.s.sachusetts., At this stage Pennsylvania, New York, South Carolina, and New Jersey were opposed to independence. Nonetheless, on June 11 Congress appointed a committee of Franklin, Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Jefferson to draft a Declaration of Independence 'in case the Congress agreed thereto.'

Congress well knew what it was doing when it picked these able men to perform a special task. It was aware that the struggle against a great world power would be long and that it would need friends abroad. It had already set up a Committee of Correspondence, in effect a 'Foreign Office,' led by Franklin, to get in touch with France, Spain, the Netherlands, and other possible allies. It wanted to put its case before the court of world opinion,' and needed a dignified and well-argued but ringing and memorable statement of what it was doing and why it was doing it. It also wanted to give the future citizens of America a cla.s.sic statement of what their country was about, so that their children and their children's children could study it and learn it by heart. Adams (if he is telling the truth) was quite convinced that Jefferson was the man to perform this miracle and proposed he be chairman of the Committee, though in fact he was the youngest member of it (apart from Livingston, the rich son of a New York judge). He recorded the following conversation between them. Jefferson: 'Why?' Adams: 'Reasons enough.' 'What can be your reasons?' 'Reason first: you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of the business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspect and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: you can write ten times better than I can.' All this was true enough.

Jefferson produced a superb draft, for which his 1774 pamphlet was a useful preparation. All kinds of philosophical and political influences went into it. They were all well-read men and Jefferson, despite his comparative youth, was the best read of all, and he made full use of the countless hours he had spent poring over books of history, political theory, and government. The Declaration is a powerful and wonderfully concise summary of the best Whig thought over several generations. Most of all, it has an electrifying beginning. It is hard to think of any way in which the first two paragraphs can be improved: the first, with its elegiac note of sadness at dissolving the union with Britain and its wish to show 'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind' by giving its reasons; the second, with its riveting first sentence, the kernel of the whole: '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.' After that sentence, the reader, any reader-even George III-is compelled to read on. The Committee found it necessary to make few changes in Jefferson's draft. Franklin, the practical man, toned down Jefferson's grandiloquence-thus truths, from being 'sacred and undeniable' became 'self-evident,' a masterly improvement. But in general the four others were delighted with Jefferson's work, as well they might be.

Congress was a different matter because at the heart of America's claim to liberty there was a black hole. What of the slaves? How could Congress say that 'all men are created equal' when there were 600,000 blacks scattered through the colonies, and concentrated in some of them in huge numbers, who were by law treated as chattels and enjoyed no rights at all? Jefferson and the other members of the Committee tried to up-end this argument-rather dishonestly, one is bound to say-by blaming American slavery on the British and King George. The original draft charged that the King had 'waged a cruel war against human nature' by attacking a 'distant people' and 'captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.' But when the draft went before the full Congress, on June 28, the Southern delegates were not having this. Those from South Carolina, in particular, were not prepared to accept any admission that slavery was wrong and especially the acknowledgment that it violated the 'most sacred rights of life and liberty.' If the Declaration said that, then the logical consequence was to free all the slaves forthwith. So the slavery pa.s.sage was removed, the first of the many compromises over the issue during the next eighty years, until it was finally resolved in an ocean of tears and blood. However, the word 'equality' remained in the text, and the fact that it did so was, as it were, a const.i.tutional guarantee that, eventually, the glaring anomaly behind the Declaration would be rectified.

The Congress debated the draft for three days. Paradoxically, delegates spent little time going over the fundamental principles it enshrined, because the bulk of the Declaration presented the specific and detailed case against Britain, and more particularly against the King. The Revolutionaries were determined to sc.r.a.p the pretense that they distinguished between evil ministers and a king who 'could do no wrong,' and renounce their allegiance to the crown once and for all. So they fussed over the indictment of the King, to them the core of the doc.u.ment, and left its const.i.tutional and ideological framework, apart from the slavery point, largely intact. This was just as well. If Congress had chosen to argue over Jefferson's sweeping a.s.sumptions and propositions, and resolve their differences with verbal compromises, the magic wrought by his pen would surely have been exorcized, and the world would have been poorer in consequence. As it was the text was approved on July 2, New York still abstaining, and on July 4 all the colonies formally adopted what was called, to give it its correct t.i.tle, 'The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.' At the time, and often since, Tom Paine was credited with its authors.h.i.+p, which did not help to endear it to the British, where he was (and still is) regarded with abhorrence. In fact he had nothing to do with it directly, but the term 'United States' is certainly his. On July 8 it was read publicly in the State House Yard and the Liberty Bell rung. The royal coat of arms was torn down and burned. On August z it was engrossed on parchment and signed by all the delegates. Whereupon (according to John Hanc.o.c.k) Franklin remarked: 'Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most a.s.suredly hang separately. Interestingly enough, Cromwell had made the same remark to the Earl of Manchester at the beginning of the English Civil War 136 years earlier.

It is a thousand pities that Edmund Burke, the greatest statesman in Britain at that time, and the only one fit to rank with Franklin, Jefferson, Was.h.i.+ngton, Adams, and Madison, has not left us his reflections on the Declaration. Oddly enough, on July 4, the day it was signed, he noted that the news from America was so disturbing 'that I courted sleep in vain.' But Burke was at one with Jefferson, in mind and still more in spirit. His public life was devoted to essentially a single theme-the exposure and castigation of the abuse of power. He saw the conduct of the English Ascendancy in Ireland as an abuse of power; of the rapacious English nabobs in India as an abuse of power; and finally, at the end of his life, of the revolutionary ideologues who created the Terror in France as an abuse of power. Now, in 1776, he told parliament that the crown was abusing its power in America by 'a succession of Acts of Tyranny.' It was 'governing by an Army,' shutting the ports, ending the fisheries, abolis.h.i.+ng the charters, burning the towns: so, 'you drove them into the declaration of independency' because the abuse of power 'was more than what ought to be endured.' Now, he scoffed, the King had ordered church services and a public fast in support of the war. In a sentence which stunned the Commons, Burke concluded: 'Till our churches are purified from this abominable service, I shall consider them, not as the temples of the Almighty, but the synagogues of Satan.'' In Burke's view, because power had been so grievously abused, America was justified in seeking independence by the sword. And that, in essence, is exactly what the Declaration of Independence sets forth.

With Independence declared, and the crown dethroned, it was necessary for all the states to make themselves sovereign. So state const.i.tutions replaced the old charters and 'frameworks of government.' These were important not only for their own sake but because they helped to shape the United States Const.i.tution later. In many respects the colonies-henceforth to be called the states-had been self-governing since the 17th century and had many doc.u.ments and laws to prove it. Connecticut and Rhode Island already had const.i.tutions of a sort, and few changes were needed to make them sovereign. Then again, many states had reacted to the imposition of parliamentary taxation from 1763 by seizing aspects of sovereignty in reply, so that the total gestation period of the United States Const.i.tution should be seen as occupying nearly thirty years, 1763-91." The first state to act, in 1775, was Ma.s.sachusetts, which made its charter of 1691 the basis. Others followed its lead: New Hamps.h.i.+re and South Carolina in 1775, then Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina in 1776, and Georgia early in 1777. New York was the first to adopt a reasonably strong executive. Ma.s.sachusetts decided it liked the idea, and drafted a revised const.i.tution. The new draft was submitted to a popular referendum in March 1777, the first in history, but rejected 9,972-2,083. Then elections were held for a const.i.tutional convention, which produced the final version of 1780, adopted by a two-thirds vote.

The Ma.s.sachusetts const.i.tution (as amended) was the pattern for others. All but two, Pennsylvania and Georgia, were bicameral, and these two changed their minds, 1789-90. In all the lower house was elected directly, and the upper house was elected directly too in all but one, Maryland, which had an electoral college. All but one, South Carolina, had annual elections for the lower house, and many had popularly elected executives and governors. Twelve required electors to own property, usually 50 acres, which was nothing in America. In three you had to prove you paid taxes. All but one required property qualifications from office-seekers. The percentage of white adult males enfranchised varied from state to state but the average electorate was four times larger than in Britain. All in all, they amounted to popular sovereignty and were very radical indeed for the 1770s. They had an immediate and continuing impact all over Europe and Latin America. One const.i.tution, Pennsylvania's, initially went further in a radical direction. Franklin claimed parentage (though it was probably written by Paine's follower, James Cannon) and took it proudly with him when he went to France, where the liberal bigwigs gasped in admiration: as Adams put it, 'Mr Turgot, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Mr Condorcet and many others became enamored with the const.i.tution of Mr Franklin.' But it proved 'inconvenient' and was deradicalized in 1790. But by that time it had done its insidious work in French Revolutionary heads.

While the states were making themselves sovereign, the Continental Congress had also to empower itself to fight a war. So in 1776-7, it produced the Articles of Confederation, in effect the first American Const.i.tution. In drafting it, delegates were not much concerned with theory but were anxious to produce practical results. So, oddly enough, although Americans had been discussing the location of sovereignty with the British for over ten years, this doc.u.ment made no effort to locate it in America and nothing was said of states' rights. It was unanimously agreed that the Congress should control the war and foreign policy, and the states the rest-what it called 'internal police.' Thomas Burke of North Carolina proposed an article stating that each state 'retained its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to Congress.' This was approved by eleven of thirteen delegations and became Article II. But Burke himself later stated: 'The United States ought to be as one Sovereign with respect to foreign Powers, in all things that relate to War or where the States have a common interest.' So the question was left begged." The whole thing was done in a hurry and finished on November 15, 1777. But ratification was slower; in fact Maryland did not ratify till March 1, 1781, by which time experience had demonstrated plainly that a stronger executive was needed, and that in turn made the case for a new, and more considered, const.i.tution.

In the meantime, the urgent work of liberating and building the new country had necessarily pa.s.sed from the men of the pen to the men of the sword. The War of Independence was a long war, lasting in effect eight and a half years. It was a war of attrition and exhaustion. The issue was: could the Americans hold out long enough, and maintain an army in the field of sufficient caliber and firepower, to wear out and destroy Britain's willingness to continue a struggle, and pay for it, which was actually begun in order to save the British taxpayer money? Here was the basic paradox of the war, which in the end proved decisive. The British had no fundamental national interest in fighting the war. If they won, it merely brought more political problems. If they lost, it hurt little but their pride. Few, outside London, were interested in the outcome; it made remarkably little impact on the literature, letters, newspapers, and diaries of the time. Certainly, no one volunteered to fight it. A few Whigs were pa.s.sionate in opposing the war. But they had no popular support. Nor had the King and his ministers in waging it. There were no ma.s.s meetings or protests. No loyal demonstrations either. It was a colonial war, an imperialist war, which in a sense had more in common with the future Vietnam War or the Soviet war in Afghanistan, than with the recent Seven Years War. It was the first war of liberation.

In view of this, the American patriots were fortunate in their commander-in-chief. Was.h.i.+ngton was, by temperament and skills, the ideal commander for this kind of conflict. He was no great field commander. He fought in all nine general actions, and lost all but three of them. But he was a strategist. He realized that his supreme task was to train an army, keep it in the field, supply it, and pay it. By doing so, he enabled all thirteen state governments, plus the Congress, to remain functioning, and so to const.i.tute a nation, which matured rapidly during the eight years of conflict. Somehow or other, legislatures functioned, courts sat, taxes were raised, the new independent government carried on. So the British were never at any point fighting a mere collection of rebels or guerrillas. They were up against an embodied nation, and in the end the point sank home. It was Was.h.i.+ngton who enabled all this to happen. And, in addition, he gave the war, on the American side, a dignity which even his opponents recognized. He nothing common did, or mean, or cruel, or vengeful. He behaved, from first to last, like a gentleman.

His resources were not great. At no point did his total forces number more than 60,000 men, subject to an annual desertion rate of 20 percent. He was always short of everything-arms, munitions, cannon, transport, clothes, money, food. But he managed to obtain enough to keep going, writing literally hundreds of begging letters to Congress and state governments to ensure there was just enough. He was good at this. In some ways running an army was like running a big Virginia estate, with many things in short supply, and make-do the rule. He remained always calm, cool, patient, and rea.s.suring with all. As Jefferson testified, he had a hot temper-what red-haired man does not?-but he kept it mostly well under control. He had to take on many of the administrative responsibilities which Congress should have handled but, being weak executively, did not. He got through a vast amount of paperwork. He had some good people to help him. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben did the drill side of the army, and in effect served as Was.h.i.+ngton's chief-of-staff. From early 1777 he had as his secretary and princ.i.p.al ADC a brilliant young New Yorker from the West Indies, Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804). Colonel Hamilton had already served with distinction as an artillery officer, and he proved to be the most effective aide any American commander-in-chief has ever had. But essentially Was.h.i.+ngton had to do it all himself.

He was much criticized, then and later. Adams asked: 'Would Was.h.i.+ngton ever have been Commander of the Revolutionary Army or President of the United States if he had not married the rich widow of Mr Curtis?' General Charles Lee was amazed anyone called him great: 'He is extremely prodigal of other men's blood and a great economist of his own.' One close observer, Jonathan Boucher, summed him up: 'He is shy, silent, stern, slow and cautious, but has no quickness of parts, extraordinary penetration, nor an elevated style of thinking ... He seems to have nothing generous or affectionate in his nature.' A French observer, Ferdinand Bayard, said he lacked human animation: 'He moved, spoke and acted with the regularity of a clock.' But another Frenchman, General Marqui de Barbe-Marbois, testified: 'I have never seen anyone who was more naturally and spontaneously polite. He could be compa.s.sionate, and a great actor too. Elias Boudinot, in charge of prisoners-of-war, who went to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1778 to plead for clothing for them, reported: 'In much distress, with Tears in his Eyes, he a.s.sured me that if he was deserted by the Gentlemen of the Country, he would despair. He could not do everything-he was General, Quartermaster and Commissary. Everything fell on him and he was unequal to the task. He gave me the most positive Engagement, that if I could contrive any mode for their support and Comfort, he would confirm it as far as it was in his Power.'' But he could also relax, an eyewitness reporting from his HQ: 'He sometimes throws and catches a ball for whole hours with his aides-de-camp.'

With Was.h.i.+ngton deliberately fighting a war of endurance, the British strategy made no sense. Indeed it is arguable that Britain had no discernible, and certainly no consistent, strategy from beginning to end. It is a mystery that the British, with their political genius, and their very uncertain touch with military affairs, should have rejected a political solution and put all their trust in a military one. Lord George Germaine, placed in charge of the war by North, had no military gifts. But then he had no political gifts either. He believed that the American militias could never be any good, and that the Tory loyalists greatly outnumbered the revolutionary patriots. How could he possibly know? He had never set foot in America. And it never occurred to him to go there and see for himself what needed to be done, or whether an honorable compromise could be negotiated. No member of the government ever thought of crossing the Atlantic on a fact-finding mission. At various times, generals were given powers to treat, but only after the rebels had agreed to lay down their arms. What good was that? In fact the generals were frequently changed, a sure sign of mismanagement. First Gage came and went, then Admiral Richard Howe and his brother General William Howe shared a joint command-an absurd arrangement-then General Burgoyne and Marquis Cornwallis were given separate and unrelated armies-another absurdity-both of which they lost. Far from getting the chance to negotiate after a rebel surrender, the British generals in fact were instructed to make concessions only after they were involved in disasters-exactly the other way round. Much of the fault for these egregious errors lay with George III, a man who had never seen a shot fired in anger, who had never been abroadand who never even saw the sea until he was an old man.

The British commanders were not starved of manpower. Some 30,000 mercenaries were sent out. But this was probably counterproductive, since their conduct outraged even the Tory loyalists. When the two Howes were operating in New York in 1776, they had no fewer than seventy-three wars.h.i.+ps, manned by 13,000 seamen, and transports loaded with 32,000 troops. That was a big expedition by British standards. But none of the large resources Britain put into the war produced long-term results, or indeed any at all. It might have been different if George III or North had picked one really first-cla.s.s general, and given him unlimited military and political authority, on the spot. But such a person would almost certainly have concluded that the war was folly, and negotiated an end to it. As it was, all the generals (not the admirals) were second-rate, and it showed.

The course of the war is soon told. The first winter 1775-6,