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

by Rick Atkinson

The hour is fast approaching on which the honor and success of this army and the safety of our bleeding country depend. Remember, officers and soldiers, that you are freemen, fighting for the blessings of liberty.

He was frugal in an age of excess, pious at a time of impiety.

Referring to King George

The three requirements of a British king came easily to him: to shun Roman Catholicism, to obey the law, and to acknowledge Parliament, which gave him both an annual income of £800,000 and an army.

George disliked disorder, and he loathed disobedience.

He was no autocrat, but his was the last word; absent strong, countervailing voices from his ministers, his influence would be paramount, particularly with respect to, say, colonial policy.

And if his subjects cheered him to the echo, why should they not? Theirs was the greatest, richest empire since Rome.

Triumphant Britain massed firepower in her blue-water fleet and organized enough maritime mobility to transport assault troops vast distances, capturing strongholds from Quebec and Havana to Manila in what would also be called the Great War for the Empire.

Spoils under the Treaty of Paris in 1763 were among the greatest ever won by force of arms.

This year another writer, George Macartney, would coin a more dignified phrase, a paean to “this vast empire, on which the sun never sets.”

the gun decks painted bright red to lessen the psychological shock of blood spilled in battle.

Britain now owned thirty separate colonies in the New World alone, with almost two thousand slave plantations growing sugarcane in the West Indies.

in just fifteen years, 3 percent of Scotland’s population and almost as many Irish had bolted for the New World in what one Scot called “America madness.”

the Great War for the Empire had cost £100 million, much of it borrowed, and the country was still strapped for money.

It had seemed only fair that the colonists should help shoulder the burden. A typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, compared to the average Englishman’s twenty-five shillings—a ratio of one to fifty—even as Americans benefited from eradication of the French and Spanish threats, from the protection of trade by the Royal Navy, and from British regiments keeping peace along the Indian frontier at a cost that soon exceeded £400,000 a year.

Repeal of the act in March 1766 triggered drunken revels from Boston to Savannah, with fireworks, much bad celebratory verse, and, in New York, the commissioning of a huge equestrian statue of George III, the “best of kings,” tricked up as Marcus Aurelius.

To maintain order, in 1768 the government dispatched four regiments to fractious Boston; that, too, turned sour in March 1770, when skittish troops fired into a street mob, killing five.

Two soldiers were convicted of manslaughter—their thumbs so branded—and the regiments discreetly decamped from town, including “the Vein Openers,” as Bostonians called the 29th Regiment troops involved in “the Massacre.” That spring, Britain repealed all Townshend duties except for the trifling tax on tea, left intact to affirm Parliament’s fiscal authority.

Many Britons now viewed Americans as unruly, ungrateful children in need of caning. Many Americans nurtured an inflated sense of their economic leverage and pined for the traditional policy of “salutary neglect,” which for generations had permitted self-sufficiency and autonomy, including governance through local councils and colonial assemblies that had long controlled fiscal matters.

With no elected delegates in Parliament, the Americans had adopted a phrase heard in Ireland for decades: “no taxation without representation.”

There was much they did not know or understood imperfectly: that the American population, now 2.5 million, was more than doubling every quarter century, an explosive growth unseen in recorded European history and fourfold England’s rate; that 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.

And: that unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples, the Americans were heavily armed. Not only were they nimble with firelocks, which were as common as kettles; they also deployed in robust militias experienced in combat against Europeans, Indians, and insurrectionist slaves.

The celebratory mood soon faded: the next eighteen months proved bleak. An American woman the king would never meet, a New Jersey Presbyterian named Jemima Condict, captured the prevailing distemper in the colonies when she wrote, “We have troublesome times a-coming for there is a great disturbance abroad in the earth & they say it is tea that caused it.”

Just before the king’s excursion to Portsmouth, an ingenious, ill-advised rescue plan had passed Parliament, hardly noticed by the London press. The Tea Act restructured the East India Company and gave it a monopoly on tea sold in America.

The price of tea in America would drop by more than a third, selling for less than the smuggled Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese tea popular in the American market.

Too clever by half, the plan infuriated both smugglers and American merchants now superseded by favored East India agents.

The cynical manipulation of colonial markets on behalf of British mercantile interests nudged American moderates toward common cause with radicals who deplored all British meddling in American affairs.

“The devil is in these people,” a British naval officer wrote after surveying the damage.

“I am much hurt,” King George confessed when news of this outrage reached him in mid-January 1774. Sorrow soon yielded to anger.

Demands mounted for vengeance against Boston, “the metropolis of sedition,” including proposals that the town be reduced to salted ruins, like Carthage.

The essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, known without affection as Dictionary Johnson, had already denounced the Americans as “a race of convicts, [who] ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”

The colonists bought up to 20 percent of British manufactured goods, but the market for certain commodities was much bigger—a quarter of British white salt and wrought brass, a third of refined sugar, tin, and worsted socks, half of wrought copper, glassware, and silk goods, and two-thirds to three-quarters of iron nails, English cordage, and beaver hats.

The king’s heart hardened.

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.

From late March through June 1774, Parliament adopted four laws known collectively in Britain as the Coercive Acts (and later in America as the Intolerable Acts). The first was punitive: Boston’s port must close until the cost of the ruined tea was paid to the East India Company. The other laws tightened British control over Massachusetts by converting an elected council into one appointed by the governor, by restricting town meetings and jury selection, and by permitting royal officials accused of serious crimes to be tried in England or another colony. British troops would return to Boston under a commander in chief who would also serve as the royal governor.

The Quebec Act replaced military rule in newly acquired Canada with an autocratic civilian government, while legitimizing the Catholic Church’s authority and vastly extending the provincial boundaries west and south, to the rich territory between the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

“The die is now cast,” George wrote. “The colonies must either submit or triumph. We must not retreat.”

In September, fifty-five delegates from a dozen colonies—Georgia remained ambivalent—gathered in Philadelphia, emboldened enough to call themselves the Continental Congress.

What he would call his “great lenity” toward the Americans had been a mistake; he would not make it again. “I am not sorry that the line of conduct seems now chalked out,” he wrote his chief minister, Lord North, in a note dated “48 minutes past midnight” on November 18. “Blows must decide.”

For those whose carriages and sedan chairs kept them above such hurly-burly, the queen’s birthday, on January 18, marked the traditional opening of London’s social season, with Parliament scheduled to convene the following day.

In 1770 the king turned to a childhood playmate—he and North had acted together in a schoolboy production of Joseph Addison’s Cato—and a political partnership began that would endure through a dozen difficult years.

Capable of reciting budget statistics for hours without consulting a note, he supervised national finance as head of the Treasury Board.

Referring to Lord North.

He could talk tough, as in his claim that “America must fear you before they will love you” or his assurance to the Commons that “four or five frigates” could close Boston Harbor because “the militia of Boston were no match for the force of this country.”

On January 20, William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, the venerable statesman and strategist who had engineered Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War, rose to his feet to denounce the government’s folly and to demand withdrawal of British troops from Boston.

“All attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation must be in vain,” he warned. “We shall be forced, ultimately, to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.”

At two-thirty a.m. on February 7, the Commons by a vote of 288 to 105 supported North’s proposal to ask the king to declare Massachusetts in rebellion, and to take all measures needed to bring American insurgents to heel.

1775

We find that a part of your Majesty’s subjects in the province of the Massachusetts Bay have proceeded so far to resist the authority of the supreme legislature, that a rebellion at this time actually exists.… We consider it as our indispensable duty, humbly to beseech your Majesty that you will take the most effectual measures to enforce due obedience to the laws and authority of the supreme legislature.

On Friday, North introduced another bill, this one to prevent all New England colonies from trading with any foreign nations and to exclude them from the world’s richest fishing grounds, in the North Atlantic.

General Edward Harvey, the adjutant general and the highest army official in Britain, agreed that “attempting to conquer America internally with our land force is as evil an idea as ever controverted common sense.” He added bluntly: “It is impossible.”

There was a run on New World maps, although one London skeptic later wrote, “The small scale of our maps deceived us, and as the word ‘America’ takes up no more room than the word ‘Yorkshire,’ we seemed to think the territories they represent are much the same bigness, though Charleston is as far from Boston as London from Venice.”

Europeans have never been able to grasp the size of America.

“When once these rebels have felt a smart blow,” George told his Admiralty, “they will submit.”