The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

two-thirds of white colonial men owned land, compared to one-fifth in England; that two-thirds were literate, more than in England; that in most colonies two-thirds could vote, compared to one Englishman in six; that provincial America glowed with Enlightenment aspiration, so that a city like Philadelphia now rivaled Edinburgh for medical education and boasted almost as many booksellers—seventy-seven—as England’s top ten provincial towns combined.

George’s resolve helped his ministers rally around three critical assumptions, each of which proved false: that most colonists remained loyal to the Crown, notwithstanding troublemakers in Massachusetts capable of inciting a rabble; that firmness, including military firepower if necessary, would intimidate the obstreperous and restore harmony; and that failure to reassert London’s authority would eventually unstitch the empire, causing Britain to “revert to her primitive insignificancy in the map of the world,” as a member of the House of Commons warned.

The king and his men

believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies. The erosion of authority in America, followed by a loss of sovereignty, would encourage rebellions in Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, India. Dominoes would topple. “Destruction must follow disunion,” the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, warned. With the empire dismembered, an impoverished Great Britain, no longer g...

The Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act galvanized American resistance, empowering the radicals and further converting neutrals and moderates to a cause now touched with fire.

The odds were heavily stacked against the Americans: no colonial rebellion had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. But, as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

This economic decay, compounded by the Coercive Acts and British political repression, made these colonial Americans anxious for the future, nostalgic for the past, and, in the moment, angry.

That army would become both the fulcrum on which the fate of the nation balanced and the unifying element in the American body politic, a tie that bound together disparate interests of a republic struggling to be born.

Clearly the king needed another champion for his cause, a minister who shared his conviction that battering the colonies into submission was politically tenable, morally justified, and militarily necessary. And he had just the man in mind.

Little coordination was imposed on one commander in chief in Canada or another in Boston, or with their naval counterparts. Subordinate generals were permitted, even encouraged, to offer their views directly to policy makers in London. Swayed by loyalist exiles and vindictive Crown officials in the colonies, king and cabinet continued to overestimate the breadth and depth of loyal support. No coherent plan obtained to woo the tens of thousands who straddled the fence in America, or to protect those who rejected insurrection but risked severe retaliation from the rebels.

Germain, like the best of kings he served, could neither grasp the coherence and appeal of revolutionary ideals, nor comprehend the historical headwinds against which Britain now tacked.

In addition to protecting Dunmore in Virginia and the other floating governors along the American seaboard, the navy was to conduct punitive raids; support the army; escort merchantmen; send five ships to protect Nova Scotia, including the vital dockyard at Halifax; aid besieged Quebec; carry dispatches to all compass points; and enforce Parliament’s trade ban by stationing men-of-war on approaches to the colonies, from Maine to Florida.

Though still drawn largely from New England, this Continental Army was intended to embody national unity, or “at least the illusion of unified purpose, military strength, and political respectability, both at home and abroad,” as the historian John Shy would write.

Royal governors in the southern colonies had long pleaded for reinforcements to hearten the loyalists—the so-called good Americans—and to splinter the rebellion geographically.

A modest, show-the-flag mission to succor North Carolina loyalists had become an immodest campaign of confused purpose, vaguely intended to subdue a region almost twice the size of the United Kingdom in a couple months by delivering, in the king’s words, “a severe blow to the rebels.”

Rebel strength, cohesion, and ruthlessness in the southern colonies were disregarded, loyalist fervor and competence exaggerated. British military resources, already stretched, would be stretched further.

Yet the expedition sailed off with several convictions oddly intact, including the certainty that a faithful multitude of southern loyalists still awaited liberation and that defeat at Sullivan’s Island—“one of the most singular events that has yet conspired to degrade the name of the British nation,” in Captain Murray’s sour assessment—had resulted from bad luck and tactical blunders rather than faulty intelligence and strategic misapprehension.

The Cherokee threat unified southern whites and discredited loyalists, some of whom had even fought with the Indians. Britain’s influence waned still further.

Little had come of the Crown’s adventurism in the American South. The diversion of Royal Navy ships to Virginia, Cape Fear, and South Carolina had hindered efforts to blockade the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, allowing American gunrunners virtually unimpeded passage for months. Rebels completely controlled four colonies that now called themselves states—Virginia, Georgia, and the two Carolinas—and for the most part they would be left in peace for the next several years.

he had been grievously wounded and then badly injured at Quebec, lost his wife while serving the cause, helped save the army in Canada, preserved Ticonderoga, and upended British strategy for 1776.

Jäger and light infantry regulars charged down King Street “and fired into our right flank at every space between the houses,” wrote Private Howland, the Rhode Island soldier who had poised his firelock to reenlist the previous day.

“feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel.… [They] are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves will become, and which indeed

seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”