The 1776 Project: 1775 to 1776
This is the second in a series of articles explaining how the United States came to be and how the lands we now know as Minnesota came to be a part of it.
British woes
On July 4, 1775, the British had every reason for alarm at the situation in their American colonies.
The “victory” won at Bunker Hill in June had been hideously costly in terms of lives and the colonists were, if anything, stronger after being defeated than they were before. The British army was bottled up in Boston, short of food and firewood, every wooden building in the city being sacrificed. British foraging led to occasional skirmishes with the surrounding militia, but neither side sought anything bigger. A group of theatrically minded British officers performed a play written by General Burgoyne titled “The Blockade of Boston,” but when a sergeant interrupted a performance to report an outbreak of fighting, the assembled officers cheered him enthusiastically, thinking that it was part of the play.
In London, Prime Minister Lord North moved ahead of many of the colonists themselves and claimed that hostilities had “now grown to such a height that it must be treated as a foreign war,” though George III, with better political instinct, reminded him that he was talking about “subjects, not a foreign foe.” In Parliament, the Whig MP Charles James Fox attacked North as: “the blundering pilot who had brought the nation into its present difficulties…Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost — he has lost a whole continent.” North did not disagree. He would repeatedly offer his resignation in the coming years, but, for some reason, George III felt he could not do without him.
In Boston, General Gage knew that he was going to carry the can and put his defense on record nine days after the battle. “These people show a spirit and courage against us they never showed against the French,” he wrote to the Secretary of War:
…and everybody has judged them from their former appearance and behaviour when joined with the King’s forces in the last war; which has led many into great mistakes. They are now spirited up by a rage and enthusiasm as great as ever people were possessed of, and you must proceed in earnest or give the business up. A small body acting in one spot will not avail. You must have large armies making diversions on different sides, to divide their forces. The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear. Small armies cannot afford such losses, especially when the advantage gained tends to do little more than the gaining of a post…We are here…taking the bull by the horns, attacking the enemy in their strongest parts. I wish this cursed place was burned. The only use is its harbour…but in all other respects it is the worst place either to act offensively from, or defensively. I have before wrote your Lordship my opinion that a large army must at length be employed to reduce these people, and mentioned the hiring of foreign troops. I fear it must come to that, or else to avoid a land war and make use only of your fleet.
“[T]he tryals we have shew that the Rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be,” he noted in a letter to the London Gazette the following month.
Boston was not the end of British woes. Besides the loss of Fort Ticonderoga in May, Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, had been forced to seek refuge on a ship in June, from whence, in desperation, he issued a proclamation in November which formally offered freedom to slaves who abandoned their rebel masters to join the British.
This caused some concern among the colonists, even those who opposed slavery, but saw the issue as secondary to the national question and sought to keep their slave owning allies onside. A South Carolinian warned John Adams that a British officer promising “Freedom to all the Negroes who would join his Camp” could quickly enlist 20,000 blacks in Georgia and South Carolina. “The Negroes have a wonderfull Art of communicating Intelligence among themselves,” Adams was warned. “It will run severall hundreds of Miles in a Week or Fortnight.” But emancipation was a double-edged sword as many of the biggest slaveowners were staunch Tories and, as was pointed out, with such a proclamation “the Slaves of the Tories would be lost as well as those of the Whiggs.” Of course, if his Lordship had really wanted to free the slaves he could have done so when he was governor, when it might have meant something, not when he was bobbing about on a boat hiding from his former subjects. Dunmore’s impotence encapsulated the British position in the colonies in the summer of 1775.
Colonial confidence
The colonists, by contrast, had good reason to be satisfied with how the early stages of hostilities had gone.
But however well the colonial militia had performed in Massachusetts, the fact remained that it was lacking in organization, leadership, training, logistics, and much else. George Washington described the troops as:
…men just dragged from the tender scene of domestic life; unaccustomed with any kind of military skill…when opposed to troops regularly trained and disciplined and appointed supreme in arms makes them timid and ready to fly from their shadows.
It is to the great credit of the colonial leadership that they did not rest on the laurels “won” that summer but recognized that they would need a force possessing all those things the militia lacked. Congress announced the formation of the Continental Army on June 14, and named Washington Commander-in-Chief on July 2. He arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the following day to take over from Artemas Ward and set about turning the militia into an army.
Washington is one of the great figures of American history and his greatness is all the more remarkable when one notes that it rests on his military accomplishments which, in many senses, were somewhat slim.
In battle, Washington was beaten by the British more often than he beat them, but he didn’t judge his success or failure by the winning or losing of battles. He recognized the essential political truth of the situation, which was that the colonial cause would last as long as the colonist’s ability to fight for it. In other words, as long as the army survived the war was not lost, so, time and again, Washington would take the certainty of retreat over the possibility of victory. In an insightful passage written in 1777, Thomas Paine — of whom more anon — wrote to the British Commander-in-Chief:
In point of generalship you have been outwitted, and in point of fortitude outdone; your advantages turn out to your loss, and show us that it is in our power to ruin you by gifts: like a game of drafts, we can move out of one square to let you come in, in order that we may afterwards take two or three for one; and as we can always keep a double corner for ourselves, we can always prevent a total defeat. You cannot be so insensible as not to see that we have two to one the advantage of you, because we conquer by a drawn game, and you lose by it.
Following such a strategy, none of Washington’s defeats were decisive; he suffered no Gettysburg or Nashville. If later Virginian generals had followed his example more closely, their cause might have fared better; happily, they did not. As it was, for all his faults, Washington truly was an indispensable man.
Quebec
High colonial spirits after “defeat” at Bunker Hill quickly led them into a grave error.
The question of what to do with Fort Ticonderoga was answered in June when the Congress ordered the local commander, General Philip Schuyler, to move north and, “if [he] finds it practicable, and that it will not be disagreeable to the Canadians,” conquer them. This could be justified on the grounds of securing the colonies’ northern flank, but it also resulted from an American desire, not quenched for a few decades, to bring Canada under its government.
Schuyler sent Brigadier Richard Montgomery, a former British regular and MP, north up Lake Champlain to capture St. Johns and Montreal. From there he was to move up the St. Lawrence towards Quebec, and somewhere along the way he would rendezvous with troops being led overland from the Atlantic coast by Benedict Arnold.
Quite what purpose it served for Arnold to adopt this needlessly indirect route across a mountain range in savage weather is unclear beyond ensuring that this talented but high-strung officer maintained a separate command. Whatever the reason, the march was a heroic epic of endurance on the part of his men, who arrived outside Quebec on the brink of starvation when they could as well have sailed up the lake. “At length the wretches raise themselves up,” Private George Morrison wrote of the march, “wade through the mire to the foot of the next steep and gaze up at its summit, contemplating what they must suffer before they reach it.-They attempt it, catching at every twig and shrub they can lay hold of-their feet fly from them-they fall down-to rise no more.” All this just to get to the battlefield.
Not that Montgomery’s force had it easy. While the Hudson River/Lake Champlain route was well traveled commercially, mounting military operations along it was another matter. Moving in late August, the colonial troops fell ill, supplies broke down, and commanders squabbled. And, when they came upon St. Johns on September 10, they found a fort manned, besides British troops, by Quebecois Catholics who found the prospect of conquest by their Anglo Protestant neighbors disagreeable after all. St. Johns held out for five weeks, slowing Montgomery’s advance into the bitter winter; “Under our Feet was Snow and Ice and Water, over our Heads Clouds Snow and rain, before us the mountains appeared all white with Snow and Ice,” one of his men wrote. Montreal fell on November 13, and on December 2, Montgomery’s exhausted force rendezvoused with Arnold’s even more exhausted force outside Quebec, their combined strength about 1,000 men. Given their emaciated state and the fact that many of their enlistments expired at the end of the year, protracted operations were ruled out. The colonial troops would have to storm the city.
General Sir Guy Carleton, British commander in Quebec, had his problems too; most of his regulars had been sent to Boston and his 1,800 troops were almost all militia. Nevertheless, the odds were in his favor. When the Americans attacked on December 31, it was all over quickly.
“[T]his morning about 4 AM the time appointed to storm the city our army divided into different parts to attack the city,” Caleb Haskell, a colonial soldier wrote.
[W]e got near the walls when a heavy fire of cannon and small arms began from the enemy, they being prepared and expecting us that night…came to the wall cannon roaring like thunder and musket balls flying like hail.
Montgomery was killed and Arnold wounded almost instantly. Whatever impetus the attack might have had was gone and the survivors reeled back and settled down to an ineffective siege.
The widening war
As Congress overreached, George III and Lord North were formulating a response to the setbacks in Boston, Virginia, and New York.
In August, the King proclaimed the colonies to be in a state of rebellion; Parliament forbade trade with them, declared them outside British protection, and threatened to seize any colonial ships found at sea. In October, Gage was replaced as Commander-in-Chief by William Howe. In November, Lord George Germaine became Secretary of State for the American Colonies charged with coordinating British strategy.
Germaine had “all the requisites of a great minister,” his Under Secretary wrote, “unless popularity and good luck are to be numbered among them.” He came up with an ambitious three-pronged plan. First, an army under Burgoyne would sail for Quebec and lift the siege, after which Carleton would take over, clear Canada, then advance south down Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. The second prong would be led by Howe. Abandoning Boston, he would capture New York and Long Island and move north up the Hudson to rendezvous with Burgoyne and cut off the rebel heartland in New England. A third, smaller prong under General Henry Clinton would seize Charleston in South Carolina. There was much of Gage’s proposal for “large armies making diversions on different sides, to divide their forces” here, but that is unlikely to have comforted him much on his voyage home.
In execution of this plan, Clinton arrived in North Carolina in March 1776, expecting to be met by 6,000 Scottish Highlanders from the North Carolina Piedmont. In the event, he was met by just the governors of North and South Carolina and a few of their slaves; the Highlanders had been defeated by rebel militia at Moore’s Creek Bridge so the expected Loyalist rising failed to materialize. “‘Tis clear to me,” Clinton wrote with notable insight and candor:
…that there does not exist in any one [province] in America a number of friends of Government sufficient to defend themselves when the troops are withdrawn. The idea is false and if the measure is adopted…all the friends of Government will be sacrificed en detail. This is the case in Georgia, will be in South Carolina, is already in North Carolina and in Virginia, will probably be in Boston, and must in my opinion be everywhere.
Clinton’s faith in the expedition had evaporated and he favored abandoning it and returning north to join up with Howe, as he was authorized to do. But the commander of the naval component, Admiral Parker, resented the idea that he had sailed all this way for nothing and persuaded Clinton that the capture of Charleson would be an easy task. So, the attempt opened on June 28, with an attack on a fort guarding the approaches which was ably defended by Colonel William Moultrie. Indeed, the attack was such a fiasco that the guns in the fort inflicted more damage on the Royal Navy’s ships than those ship’s guns inflicted on the fort. “No slaughterhouse could present so bad a sight with blood and entrails lying about, as did our ship,” an officer on the HMS Bristol wrote. The infantry were landed and found a supposedly shallow body of water they were supposed to cross to attack the fort from the landward side was, in fact, eight feet deep. A British ship, attempting to maneuver, ran aground and was abandoned by its crew. They set it on fire to prevent its capture, but enterprising colonists were able to board it and make off with valuable supplies.
The operation was abandoned and the British force sailed north to join Howe. It was, one officer noted, a fiasco which would “scarcely be believed in England” and Clinton, an officer more sensitive of his reputation than most, wrung a written letter of apology out of Parker for talking him into it. One of Germaine’s three prongs had broken and the war in the South was over, for now.
Elsewhere the plan went better.
The siege of Quebec was lifted on May 6, and the colonists, realizing that the game was up, began the long, miserable trek back down the St. Lawrence. Carleton went in pursuit and when Burgoyne arrived later in the month, he had to go chasing after him. Arriving back at Crown Point, the colonists, under Arnold, began constructing a flotilla with which to contest a British assault down Lake Champlain. Carleton had long served in this theater — he had been badly wounded in the capture of Quebec in 1759 — and realized, as the colonists had not the previous year, the difficulty of moving an army along the Hudson / Lake Champlain route. His advance would be deliberate and, mirroring Arnold, he set to work through the summer building his own flotilla at the northern end of the lake.
In February, heavy artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga was brought to Washington’s army outside Boston and a bombardment of the city began, providing extra inducement for the British to evacuate. They did so in March, Howe, taking several thousand Loyalist civilians with him, departing for Halifax to prepare for the capture of New York.
Independence
Since gathering in May 1775, the Second Continental Congress had taken solid steps to put military matters on a firmer footing, forming the Continental Army and appointing Washington to command it, but the great political question remained; what was this army fighting for?
The Congress was divided between moderates, who wanted Britain to redress certain grievances and a return to the status quo ante, and radicals, who saw independence as the only solution; “A Union and a confederation of Thirteen States, independent of Parliament, of Minister and of King!” was John Adams’ aim.
At the prompting of moderates, the Congress issued the Olive Branch Petition in July 1775, which listed certain wrongs which needed righting but affirmed American loyalty to Britain. At the same time, the radicals issued the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” written by Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian who was rapidly gaining a reputation as one of the colonial cause’s most able expositors. The arrival of both in London at the same time led to confusion, the one cancelling out the other, and, in any event, the British government’s invocation of rebellion and commencement of blockade in August cut much of the ground out from under the moderates.
As events took their course in the months that followed, as rebellion spread and so did British efforts to contain it, momentum built behind the radicals. Besides Jefferson and long-standing fire breathers like John Adams and Patrick Henry, they also included former conciliators like Benjamin Franklin, who would, in 1783, refer to the British Empire as “that fine and noble china vase” which great care must be taken not to break.
For one thing, the colonial leaders were aware that their necks were now committed to the fight. After the slaughter of British troops and officers at Breed’s Hill, the attempted invasion of Canada, and the embarrassment at Charleston, it was inconceivable that those responsible would be allowed to return unmolested to their pre-war lives in the event of a British victory. “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” Franklin mordantly quipped.
And how were the two positions to be reconciled? The colonists were adamant that they would not be taxed without their consent, an argument that had centuries of English history behind it. Equally, while the British government might have been willing to find some formulation that could give the colonists this in practice, it could not concede the principle that the sovereign power of the King in Parliament was indivisible, and if the colonists allowed that where might it end? At the time of the Stamp Act, Boston clergyman Johnathan Mayhew had warned that: “People are not usually deprived of their liberties all at once, but gradually.” Eventually, with the transition of the empire to a commonwealth of nations under the crown with Statute of Westminster in 1931, the British would concede that the colonists had been right all along, but that lay in the future and, for now, the principles on each side were irreconcilable.
And then there was the weight of the dead. Had men like Warren and Montgomery only given their lives to convince George III to appoint a new cabinet or Lord North to reappraise fiscal policy? If this was admitted, how in the future could men be convinced to give their lives in that less than glorious cause? People will only give great sacrifices for great causes; Patrick Henry had asked for liberty or death, not a new colonial secretary or tax cut.
If this was how the radical portion of the colonial leadership felt in late 1775, could they bring a large enough share of Congress and the wider public with them? They received considerable help in January 1776, when Thomas Paine released his pamphlet Common Sense. “[I]t can be said,” Christopher Hitchens wrote, “without any risk of cliche, that it was a cataclysm that altered the course of history.”
Paine was a former British customs official turned political radical who had arrived in America in 1774 after the failure of his tobacconist business and second marriage. Here, he quickly became a leading pamphleteer. Paine claimed never to have read John Locke, but when he was asked to write a summary of the colonial case, this veteran of tavern-based debating societies in Britain and America took Locke’s erudite philosophizing and put it in the language of the White Hart. “As it is my design to make those that scarcely read understand,” Paine wrote, “I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.”
Paine based his argument on two Lockean points.
First, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges every one,” Locke wrote, “and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Governments are instituted among men — and only for this purpose — to protect them from violations of this natural law: “it is not without reason,” Locke wrote, “that [man] seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others…for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, by which I call the general name property.”
In Paine’s telling, this became:
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other law-giver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expence and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.
From this notion that governments were formed to protect natural rights followed Locke’s second point: A government which became destructive of these ends had forfeited its right to govern. “[W]henever the power, that is put in any hands for the government of the people, and the preservation of their properties is applied to other ends,” Locke wrote, “and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have it; there it presently becomes tyranny.” In this case:
…if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.
As Paine put it:
As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of [government] in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry,) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good People of this Country are grievously oppressed by the Combination, they have an undoubted privilege to enquire into the Pretensions of both, and equally to reject the Usurpation of either.
Paine went further than Locke. The Lockean notion of government forming from individuals “contracting” with each other for the mutual protection of their natural rights also meant that there were people not party to this contract. Membership of a Lockean polity — citizenship — was exclusive; there were those who were members — citizens — and those who were not, and the government these citizens had formed through contract was permitted, indeed required, to treat the two differently; there would be little point in forming it otherwise.
This was not so for Paine. While the colonial leaders made much of their ancient liberties as Englishmen — what the poet John Milton called “the Good Old Cause” — Paine noted that many Americans were not English: “This new World hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe,” he wrote, so it was difficult to cast a substantial number of Americans as heirs to Magna Carta. For Paine, the colonists were not justified in asserting their rights as Englishmen but as men, and all men had those same rights whatever their nationality, a theme he would explore more fully in The Rights of Man in 1791; “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Paine wrote. This tension between a Lockean notion of restricted citizenship and Paine’s notion of a citizenship common to all remains today.
Where the Congressional radicals had concluded that the British constitution no longer worked to guarantee their rights, Paine argued that Americans simply had no need for it to do so; “For God’s sake,” he concluded, “let us come to a final separation,” and on that there was increasing agreement.
Common Sense was a sensation. By March, 120,000 copies had been sold and half a million were in print by the end of the year. Some of Paine’s phrases, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “are part of the common stock of political and journalistic discourse.”
Paine’s arguments echoed in Congress. On June 7, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution stating:
That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Moderates opposed the resolution and Congress punted. But Paine had advised:
Were a manifesto to be published, and despatched to foreign Courts, setting forth the miseries we have endured, and the peaceful methods which we have ineffectually used for redress; declaring at the same time, that not being able any longer to live happily or safely under the cruel disposition of the British Court, we had been driven to the necessity of breaking off all connections with her; at the same time, assuring all such Courts of our peaceable disposition towards them, and of our desire of entering into trade with them: such a memorial would produce more good effects to this Continent, than if a ship were freighted with petitions to Britain.
As a compromise, Congress agreed to draft a declaration of independence to be held in readiness and a committee was appointed, composed of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston to draft it. Jefferson, whom John Adams credited with a “happy talent for composition,” took the lead and took to his lodgings on Market Street in Philadelphia to “place before mankind…the common sense of the subject in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are to take.”
His draft was ready on June 28. It went before Congress on July 1 and was the subject of intense debate; a clause blaming George III for imposing the institution of slavery on the colonies was wisely removed. When Congress voted on its adoption, however, it failed to pass. More debate followed and a second vote on July 2; this time Congress voted for independence. The text of the Declaration of Independence was formally approved on July 4, 1776, and was issued in the name of the “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” the Declaration began, echoing Paine, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
It proceeded with a Lockean statement tinged with Paine’s universalism:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It then tacked back toward Locke’s “contractarian” notion of government:
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 or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” the Declaration continued, but went on to argue that “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
This was of crucial importance, and reflected Paine, who had called George III the “Royal Brute of Great Britain” in Common Sense. By making the King the focus of their grievances, they removed the possibility of a compromise solution where he could appoint a new cabinet and institute a new colonial policy. Even Washington struggled to conceive of the force under Howe as the “King’s Troops” and wrote of them as the “Ministerial Army.” Now, there could be no going back.
The declaration was met with derision in London. The Gentleman’s Magazine reported:
The declaration is without doubt of the most extraordinary nature both with regard to sentiment and language, and…reflects no honour upon either the erudition or honesty [of its authors]. We hold, they say, these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal. In what are they created equal? Is it in size, strength, understanding, figure, moral or civil accomplishments, or situation of life? Every plough-man knows that they are not created equal in any of these. All men, it is true, are equally created, but what is this to the purpose? It certainly is no reason why the Americans should turn rebels.
The author had, revealingly, called them Americans.
The United States’ troops — for that is what they now were — received it enthusiastically. It “was announced to the army in general orders,” a colonel recalled, “and filled everyone with enthusiastic zeal, as the point was now forever settled, and there was no further hope of reconciliation and dependence on the mother country.”
The Americans had declared independence, now they would have to fight for it. On July 3, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail:
You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. — I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. — Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.
He was right. One the day the United States of America was born, the empire was poised to strike back.