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July 21 - September 4, 2023
Possibly not one of the seventeen thousand soldiers now under his command in Massachusetts knew what George Washington of Virginia looked like.
If unquestionably brave, diligent, and sensible, he could also be humorless, aloof, and touchy about his lack of formal education.
He was a talented administrator, with a brain suited to executive action, thanks to a remarkable memory, a knack for incisive thinking and clear writing, and a penchant for detail, learned first as a young officer and then practiced daily as suzerain of his sprawling, complex estate on the Potomac River at Mount Vernon.
Washington quickly organized his army into three “grand divisions,” each commanded by a major general and composed of two brigades, typically with six regiments apiece. Ward led the division on the right wing, around Boston Neck. Putnam commanded the center, at Cambridge. The division on the left wing, overlooking Bunker Hill and ruined Charlestown, was led by Charles Lee, a brusque, vivid eccentric who had spent a quarter century in the king’s service before immigrating to America in 1773.
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.
Commissary General Joseph Trumbull,
For nearly a century, Americans had seen Canada as a blood enemy. New Englanders and New Yorkers especially never forgave the atrocities committed by French raiders and their Indian confederates at Deerfield, Schenectady, Fort William Henry, and other frontier settlements. Catholic Quebec was seen as a citadel of popery and tyranny.
Britain’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War and its acquisition of New France in 1763—known in Quebec as “the Conquest”—gladdened American hearts.
The First Continental Congress in October 1774 sent Canadians an open letter, at once beckoning and sinister: “You have been conquered into liberty.… You are a small people, compared to those who with open arms invite you into fellowship.”
Canadians faced a choice between having “all the rest of North America your unalterable friends, or your inveterate enemies.”
This would be the first, but hardly the last, American invasion of another land under the pretext of bettering life for the invaded.
With the seizure of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Arnold burst into American history, never to leave.
The “active woodsmen” were mostly farmers, with a few adventurous oddballs like a wiry nineteen-year-old named Aaron Burr, grandson of the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards and son of the former president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey, where young Burr was admitted at age thirteen.
the annoying letters from John Wesley, that Methodist, who warned that the Americans “will not be frightened.… They are as strong as you, they are as valiant as you.”
Walpole described seeing £10,000 on the table at Almack’s Club, where players wore eyeshades to conceal their emotions and leather cuffs to preserve their laced ruffles, then turned their coats inside out for luck.
London also had more than five hundred coffeehouses, and it was here that politics generally and the American question specifically might be discussed at any hour.
“I am growing more and more American,” James Boswell had written in August. “I see the unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their assemblies. I think our ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate war.”
Lord George Germain was known in Parliament for urging that Americans be treated with “a Roman severity,” and this week he had been appointed American secretary to replace the hapless Dartmouth.
The thirty-five thousand tons exported annually from the colony by the early 1770s had brought wealth but also more than £1 million in debt, nearly equal to that of the other colonies combined and often incurred by Tidewater planters living beyond their means.
In truth, although slavery had begun to disappear in England and Wales, Britain’s colonial economy was built on a scaffold of bondage.
Had the British “searched through the world for a person the best fitted to ruin their cause,” wrote Richard Henry Lee, “they could not have found a more complete agent than Lord Dunmore.”
Here two-wheeled carts brought cypress shingles and barreled turpentine from the Great Dismal Swamp,
A Culpeper minute company carried a flag displaying a coiled rattlesnake and the motto “DON’T TREAD ON ME”; in their ranks marched a rangy, twenty-year-old lieutenant named John Marshall, who one day would be chief justice of the Supreme Court.
“For God’s sake,” a voice shrieked, “do not murder us!”
“They fought, bled, and died like Englishmen,” reported Captain Richard Kidder Meade of the 2nd Virginia.
Transmitted by human vectors rather than by insects or contaminated water, the variola virus typically caused influenza-like symptoms twelve days after exposure; three or four days later, the first sores erupted, often in the mouth and throat, before spreading to the palms, soles, face, torso, forearms, nostrils, and eyes. By the fourth week, mortality might range from 15 to 60 percent. Survivors—like Washington and Montgomery—were scarred for life and sometimes blinded, though perpetually immune; pocked young men were much prized by military recruiters.
Insurrection in America coincided with a smallpox epidemic that would claim more than a hundred thousand lives across the continent from 1775 to 1782.
A French writer once observed that “in the new colonies, the Spanish start by building a church, the English a tavern, and the French a fort.”
Countless trees had already been reduced to stumps, including a fine row of buttonwoods lining the street near the Old South Meeting House.
The actors found a fine playhouse in Faneuil Hall, a combined market and meeting hall on Dock Square with a slate roof, eighteen compass-headed windows arranged in two rows across the brick facade, and a thirty-eight-pound grasshopper weathervane crowning the cupola.
Then a hush fell over the theater as the curtain rose. A British orderly sergeant rushed onto the stage, bellowing, “Turn out! Turn out! They’re hard at it, hammer and tongs!” Gales of laughter and pounding applause greeted him until he hollered, “If you won’t believe me, by Jasus, you need only go to the door.”
A mile to the north, Captain Thomas Knowlton, who six months earlier had fought so valiantly at the rail fence below Bunker Hill, led 130 raiders across the milldam from Cobble Hill to Charlestown.
A Boston loyalist lamented in a letter to his sister, “The ways of heaven are dark & intricate.”
“Could I have foreseen what I have, & am likely to experience,” he wrote, “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”
Roughly five thousand African Americans would eventually serve in the Continental Army, a more integrated national force than would exist for nearly two centuries.
A few weeks before the British marched to Lexington, Knox offered a shilling pamphlet on “the dispute between Great Britain and the colonies” by a precocious New York college student named Alexander Hamilton.
One day Washington would say of Harry Knox: there was “no one whom I have loved more sincerely.”
The colony’s population had increased sixfold since 1750, to 275,000, including many émigrés from Scotland deeply loyal to the Crown.
To the king’s delight, a favored young general, Charles Earl Cornwallis, a member of the House of Lords, volunteered to join the expedition.
Martin appointed Brigadier General Donald MacDonald, a sixty-four-year-old veteran of both Culloden and Bunker Hill, to command his loyal militia, with authority to recruit troops by offering land, cash, and tax exemptions.
After a 333-day siege, Boston once again was a town at peace. “The sun looks brighter,” Abigail Adams wrote John, “the birds sing more melodiously.”
The affair put Washington on edge. “We are indeed, sir, surrounded by enemies, open and concealed,” he wrote a friend. “It is next to impossible to know how deep the plot is laid.” But with his usual bluff confidence he added, “The all-wise dispenser of events will shield me from such diabolical designs.
And, in this unsettled hour, Washington offered his men a glimpse inside his heart: The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves.… The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.… Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.
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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
The leaner, edited result remained a stirring manifesto of republicanism, a radical assertion that power derived not from God or through bloodlines but from the people, and should benefit the many, not just the affluent or well-born.
That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.”
The head would be recovered by British Army engineer John Montresor and shipped to England to further illustrate the “disposition of the ungrateful people.”
General Howe had an answer to the Declaration of Independence, and he sent it on Friday afternoon, July 12.
Few issues would flummox the British more than how to move inland: waging war away from the coast and navigable rivers required transport for artillery, baggage, and supplies.
“This ruinous and mad war,” he wrote in a secret dispatch to Versailles, “is the reverse of the philosopher’s stone for England.”
