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

by Rick Atkinson

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.

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.

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 empowerment of popery enraged Protestant New Englanders, who for more than a century had battled French Catholics and their Indian allies; colonists from New York through the Carolinas, keen to expand west of the Appalachians, were likewise infuriated at being confined to the Atlantic seaboard.

Roughly a quarter million Americans would serve the cause in some military capacity. At least one in ten of them would die for that cause—25,674 deaths by one tally, as many as 35,800 by another.

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.

he had been with Braddock—and Thomas Gage—for the disaster on the Monongahela, surviving four bullets through his uniform, another through his hat, and two horses shot dead beneath him, before dragging his mortally wounded commander across the river and riding sixty miles for help in covering the British retreat. That ordeal—more than four hundred British dead, including wounded men scalped or burned alive—gave Washington a tincture of indestructibility while convincing him that “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence” had protected him “beyond all human probability.”

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.

The Quebec Act, which took effect in May 1775, infuriated the Americans and altered the political calculus. Canada would be ruled not by an elected assembly, but by a royal governor and his council, a harbinger, in American eyes, of British tyranny across the continent. Even more provocative were the provisions extending Quebec’s boundaries south and west, into the rich lands beyond the Appalachians for which American colonists had fought both Indians and the French, and the recognition of the Roman Catholic Church’s status in Canada, including the right of Catholics to hold office and citizenship, to again levy parish tithes, to serve in the army, and to retain French civil law. These provisions riled American expansionists—fifty thousand of whom now lived west of the mountains—and revived fears of what one chaplain described as “this vast extended country, which has been for ages the dwelling of Satan.” Catholic hordes—likened to a mythical beast found in the Book of Revelation, “drunk with the wine of her fornications”—could well descend on Protestant America.

“The detested town of Norfolk is no more!” a midshipman wrote. The “dirty little borough,” now reduced to ash and skeletal chimneys, had suffered greater damage than would befall any town in America during the Revolution.

Roughly five thousand African Americans would eventually serve in the Continental Army, a more integrated national force than would exist for nearly two centuries.

Under nineteen paragraphs of instructions signed by Hancock, Franklin’s task was nothing less than to restore Canadian faith in America’s ideals, innocence, and military commitment after the debacle in Quebec. As leader of a small commission, he was “to settle all disputes between the Canadians and the Continental troops,” persuade Canada that “their interests and ours are inseparably united,” urge Canadians to join “our union as a sister colony,” and pledge “the free and undisturbed exercise of their religion.”

Eight of the ten wealthiest men in America were said to be South Carolinians, and Charleston’s collective worth was supposedly sixfold that of Philadelphia.

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.”

No battle in the eight-year war would be larger in the number of combatants—more than forty thousand, naval forces included—and few would be more lopsided. American prisoners huddled in fields and along the shoreline, Serle wrote, “so many that we are perplexed where to confine them.” British commanders on Long Island swaggered and crowed.

This year it had been Benedict Arnold’s turn. “No man ever maneuvered with more dexterity, fought with more bravery, or retreated with more firmness,” declared James Thacher, an American army physician. Upon Britain’s retraction into Canada—“of as great consequence as if they had been defeated,” in Brigadier General Arthur St. Clair’s assessment—Arnold promptly headed south with reinforcements for General Washington. When he finally went home to see his sons in Connecticut, he would draw cannon salutes and a hero’s welcome in Hartford, Middletown, and New Haven. Once again he had demonstrated that he was the most competent battle commander in an American uniform, and perhaps the finest combat officer for either side, able to lead other men through peril, on land or otherwise, with ferocity, prudence, judgment, luck, and an implacable will.

For Washington, the losses were frightful: 59 killed, 96 wounded, and 2,830 taken prisoner, including 230 officers. The Americans had also lost 2,800 muskets, 41 guns, and heaps of salt meat, potatoes, and other provisions.

Within eighteen months, roughly two-thirds of those captured at Fort Washington would be dead from disease, exposure, or malnutrition. No American defeat in the first five years of war would be more catastrophic, wrenching, or fatal.

By the end of December, according to the historian Edwin G. Burrows, disease and starvation would kill at least half of the Americans captured on Long Island and as many as two-thirds of those taken at Fort Washington—more than two thousand men in all.