Problem: even as British forces were colliding in the field with their American opposites, the king and the prime minister still persisted in pursuing the idea of sending a peace commission to treat with the rebels. They appointed as commissioner Admiral Richard Howe, and decided that his brother, General William Howe, whom Germain had sent to head the army, would support him on the commission—so that the two brothers were to treat for peace while fighting a war. Forced to deal with the peace commission, Germain pushed for the strongest possible terms: the commissioner, he argued, should insist that Britain would negotiate with the rebels only after they recognized “the supreme authority of the Legislature to make laws binding on the colonies in all cases whatsoever.” Of course they would never do that, which would mean he could go ahead with the plan to crush them into obedience. Admiral Howe wrote to Germain, saying he could not possibly head a peace commission on those terms. The solicitor-general weighed in on the matter, and the Lord Chief Justice. The prime minister threatened to resign. So did Germain. The king stepped in; Lord North called a series of cabinet meetings. Germain marched in and out of No. 10 to push for the hardest possible line. In the end, Admiral Howe sailed for America without the burden of the condition Germain had wanted, but with other terms so onerous—all congresses and armies to be dissolved, colonial governments reformed by British officials—that the commission was almost certain to fail. Germain, in effect, got his way.
Then came good news. Early in 1776, word reached London that British forces had routed the colonials in Quebec. Germain exulted. He could send Carleton with a smaller-than-planned force to ensure that Canada stayed British, and otherwise could direct his attention to what he had long since determined would be the stroke to break the rebels’ will and end the war quickly. It was clear that New England was the center of the rebellion. Military science dictated that dividing an enemy was the best road to vanquishing him. The maps spread out in Germain’s office showed that the Hudson River separated New England from the other colonies. Taking possession of this river would maroon the most rebellious region of the colonies. Doing that required, first, an all-out assault on the chief port city in the Americas. Germain therefore directed General Howe to take New York. This would be the explanation for George Washington’s surprising first victory, on Dorchester Heights. Even before Washington had reached Boston, Howe had decided on a plan to evacuate the city.
At the same time, Germain and others in Whitehall were working on a larger strategy. Once Canada was secure, the army there could move down the Hudson and join forces, in some as-yet-undetermined way, with Howe’s army. This would complete the strangulation of the rebellion.
That step, however, was months in the distance. First, the object of Germain’s unceasing effort was supplying 31 battalions, comprising approximately 21,000 men, all to be put under General Howe’s direction. Weeks of meetings followed: of shuffling papers and scraping pens, of secretaries with heads bent in transcription, of rounds of coffee giving way to bumpers of brandy, of heated arguments with periwigged colleagues, the end of each day signaled by the whinnying of horses outside in the darkness indicating the coach that would take him home to his devoted Diana.
Somehow in the midst of this organizational and political undertaking, he found the time, and the nerve, to broach a topic that most British officials considered out of bounds. In one of his first letters to General Howe, he noted that “the Indians of the Six Nations” were “a consideration of no small importance.” Left at that, the observation simply underscored an unremarkable fact. But Germain was nudging his colleagues toward the unthinkable: attempting to bring in on their side warriors whose tactics most British officials considered “savage” and “barbarous.”
In the early months of 1776, ships set sail from ports all around the British Isles with guns, gunpowder and provisions, as well as troops. Their destination was Halifax, where Howe sailed after evacuating Boston. On June 6, 1776, after biding his time for two months, Howe watched a British ship, the Mercury, arrive in port. The wild and stupendous harbor—a mile across and four miles long, with “a bold shore”—was already crowded with ships of war; but this was the one he had been waiting for. A Captain Emmerick strode from the vessel with a thick packet in his hands, marched across the breezy and bustling port, and delivered it to Howe. Inside were copies of dispatches—letters Germain had exchanged with the Lords of the Admiralty and others—as well as a letter from Germain to Howe. The packet contained Germain’s full update on political and military matters, and the order sending him forth into battle. Howe sat down to reply even as more sails on the horizon signaled the arrival of the last troops he had been expecting: a convoy of Scottish Highlanders. He penned a thankful response to Germain, expressing “my utter amazement at the decisive and masterly strokes for carrying such extensive plans into immediate execution, as have been effected since your Lordship has assumed the conducting of this war.” The general knew perfectly well that at the core of Germain’s herculean efforts lay a longing for personal redemption. He hoped, he wrote, that “you may finally receive the acknowledgments of a grateful country” and “the lasting glory which such services merit.”
Two days later, Howe’s fleet set sail, the vessels crowded with veteran soldiers, their hulls packed with all that was needed to rain destruction on an enemy. As grand a sight as they made, they were due to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet, under his brother, Admiral Howe, making for a combined force of 32,000 men. Their destination was New York.
Abraham Yates was also preparing to head to New York in June of 1776. He wasn’t going there to fight, however. He was fifty-two and riddled with gout; the trip alone, what with the jostle of waves and the horse cantering, was sure to be agony. But he had a role to play, and he was consumed by it, so he said his goodbyes to Anna and fourteen-year-old Susanna and boarded a sloop for Manhattan.
Besides, he was angry, and the only way to deal with it was to confront the situation that was playing out in Manhattan among his fellow New York insurgents. In a sense, he had been seething ever since he was ousted from Albany’s city council two and a half years earlier. For ten years he had worked painstakingly to build a new kind of political party, one comprised of ordinary workers and tradesmen. In doing so, he had given a voice to people who had never played an active part in politics. Then the old guard outsmarted him.
After losing his city council seat, Yates had gone back to his legal practice. Much of his time, however, he spent at his home on Market Street, reading. Someone looking in his window and seeing the small man bent over his books may have assumed he was pursuing a leisurely activity. But with him, reading was an act of engagement. He was searching for context, trying to understand the unprecedented times he was living through. The obvious question involved the impingement of Americans’ rights and what recourses history spoke of. But a related issue tugged at him as well. What, exactly, had come over his fellow Albanians, his fellow New Yorkers, and the rest of the colonists? Americans were conservative: farmers, churchgoers, people who respected order, tradition, routine. What had made so many of them into radicals? Britain’s policies over the previous decade had been provocative, but the reactions to them—parading in the streets, delivering thundering sermons from church pulpits, dressing up as Indians and committing acts of vandalism, engaging in battle with trained soldiers—seemed extreme even to him.
In search of answers, he turned to his books. He read Polybius, the ancient historian of the rise of the Roman republic. He read Montesquieu and Locke, Grotius and Goldsmith. He was interested, he said, in “the different principles of a monarchical and republican government,” and in how and when the one gave way to the other.
The concept of freedom was ancient, but Yates was able to locate the beginnings of the modern mania for it a century and a half before his time. As Yates’s own ancestors were emigrating from England and the Dutch Republic to found American colonies in the early 1600s, European monarchs were gathering po
wer. At the same time, philosophers like René Descartes were reorienting knowledge, declaring that the proper basis for human understanding was not received wisdom from the church or the state but rather human reason. A bold new idea was born out of this divergence of politics and philosophy. If everyone possessed the ability to reason, then one had to conclude that there was something special about the individual human being, which meant that each person, male or female, rich or poor, was equally deserving of education, equally deserving of respect, equally entitled to participate in society. It followed, said the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, that the best form of government—really, the only legitimate one—was one in which each individual had an equal say. Since monarchies had become so very powerful, some people concluded that the only way out was revolution.
Such thinking had been so radical in the previous century that it was illegal even to own books by Spinoza. But that one central idea—that individual freedom was as necessary as air—continued to expand. Through the 1600s and early 1700s there were attempts to found utopias based on democratic principles and redistribution of wealth. These schemes mostly went nowhere, but as Yates pored through his volumes and watched the parade of history go by, he saw that core idea spreading like a subterranean fire. Whereas, he noted, in the Middle Ages “the lower people were reduced to servitude . . . slaves fixed to the soil,” in recent times people both in America and Europe had discovered “a natural inclination to liberty.”
Vrijheid, it was called in his native Dutch. Freedom. He was particularly interested in how the various Dutch provinces had united into one nation in the Eighty Years’ War that ended in 1648. The Spanish king, Philip IV, had imposed harsh taxes on these vassal states, and brought the Inquisition in to enforce his rule. This “violation of the people’s rights and liberties,” Yates observed, “gave rise to the union of the seven united States and the declaring themselves independent.” The result, the Dutch Republic, was a new European nation, led not by a monarch but by a government with a rudimentary form of popular representation. Might that be a precursor to what the Americans were about?
In England, meanwhile, the watershed came in 1688, with the so-called Glorious Revolution, which resulted in one monarch replacing another: not in itself a thoroughgoing transformation, but it left the country with a newly strengthened Parliament and a bill of rights. That era’s political advances were captured in the writings of John Locke. Among other things, Locke dismantled the prevailing wisdom about the absolute power of kings, arguing that human beings are born into a “state of liberty,” that “all men are by nature equal” and that a just society is governed by “the consent of every individual.” In subsequent decades Locke’s writings were picked up by Whigs in Parliament, who were frustrated that many of the freedoms promised in the Bill of Rights had not been granted.
Yates too had latched onto this manifesto of freedom. It had first gripped him during his struggles with British military officials in the French and Indian War twenty years before. More and more Americans had in the past decade likewise caught the freedom fever; they had reconfigured and refined it, and focused it on their own matters. The framers of the Virginia resolutions against the Stamp Act had expressed this same thinking. So had the colonial leaders assembled in Philadelphia.
But, remarkably, so too had droves of ordinary people—the sort who formed the membership of the Yates party: people like Isaac Fonda, a carpenter, and Robert Hoaksley, who ran a liquor store, and the farmers and craftsmen of nearby Schenectady, who erected a “liberty pole” in defiance of the British. These were the types who gathered at Richard Cartwright’s tavern in December 1774 and unanimously agreed to support the people of Boston in their struggles against “the Arbitrary Measures of a designing Ministry” and agreed further that the sufferings of the New Englanders were part of “the common Cause of America.” Yates was there too, watching and marveling.
The same group met the following month, January 1775, now calling themselves the Albany Committee of Correspondence, Safety and Protection, in answer to the call of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia for localities to form shadow governmental authorities to replace those still loyal to Britain. After swearing an oath of secrecy, vowing “on the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God” not to divulge one another’s names, they unanimously elected Abraham Yates Jr.—who they all knew as a mighty organizer and who had been pursuing this path since before some of them were born—as their chairman. He was back in politics.
He cast his books aside and got to work. He set up subcommittees in each of Albany County’s fifteen districts and began communicating via secret dispatches with all of them, focusing on how to raise funds and troops in the area. At the next meeting of the Committee, Yates and his colleagues learned that the New York Assembly had refused to nominate members to the upcoming session of the Continental Congress. The meaning of this refusal was perfectly clear: most of the official representatives of the colony still backed the British.
This was infuriating—expected, but infuriating. Yates’s Committee of Correspondence took it upon itself to put forth names—effectively elbowing the official governing body to the side. He dashed off a letter to county leaders: “take the Sense of your District in respect to the appointment of Delegates”—again, quietly. When the news of the battles of Lexington and Concord reached Albany, secrecy became irrelevant: people brought their outrage into the streets. From that moment, the Committee of Correspondence met openly, at City Hall. Realizing they would henceforth be taking on the duties of governing, and feeling that they did “not conceive themselves fully invested” with a popular mandate, the members put out notices for elections. Yates won his seat, and the chairmanship. He was now the head of local government. Through the extraordinarily roundabout means of taking part in a multicolony revolt against a distant empire, he had come charging back onto the Albany political scene. And he had the exquisite satisfaction of having defeated his old foes.
Except that they hadn’t gone anywhere. This was what angered him: the elite, which had kept an utterly undemocratic hold on power for so long, had not acquiesced to the modern reality that was right in front of them but had merely regrouped. Some of them were outright Tories, supporters of George II; but these were on the run now, or soon would be. Others, however, had insinuated themselves into the revolutionary movement, complicating and weakening it. Debates were flaring all up and down the Hudson River from Manhattan to Albany. Some would-be revolutionaries—lawyers, merchants, owners of large estates, people like the Livingstons and Van Rensselaers—believed a break with England was right and necessary, but wanted it done in a cautious and orderly way, with a respect for tradition and property. They wanted, in other words, to be sure that in the new era they would continue to run things. They maneuvered so as to give the English hope for reconciliation. Others—sailors and farmers, masons and tanners, unschooled men who did hard work and felt abused by the old system—wanted to break things, to riot and rebel, and hoped that in the aftermath there would be spoils.
Yates didn’t exactly fit into either group. He believed political revolution was just, and after Lexington and Concord he believed it was necessary. While his shoemaker’s inclinations were with the lower classes, he didn’t like the disorder of the mob. Yet he distrusted the elites with every fiber of his being. He believed the impulse to freedom he had tracked through his reading pointed not just to a break from England but toward something more broad and revolutionary: genuine and just popular rule. A revolution, he was coming to conclude, if it were to be true to the force of history, had to be not only against the British elite but against the American elite as well.
Thus the anger he had felt for two and a half years. This was no time for delay and compromise. Yet the same forces that had ejected him from the city council were undermining the vital work being done in the colony. Some of those who had engineered his ouster were on the same Committee of Correspondence he led. Stephen De Lancey, for one, a member of on
e of the wealthiest families in the colony, was quietly leading a movement to counter the work Yates was about, buying time, trying to forestall the call for independence. The moderates had likewise taken root in New York City’s Committee of Correspondence, where, out of fear of losing their wealth, they were trying to check the radicals’ rush to war. As one noted, “Many People of Property dread the Violences of the lower Sort.” Another elitist revolutionary, fellow New Yorker Alexander Hamilton, likewise tempered his zeal for independence with a frank distrust of commoners. Hamilton believed that “the multitude . . . have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority.”
If Yates felt torn between the two revolutionary forces, his mind was made up in January of 1776. Even as he was in the midst of his historical study, a new addition to the rapidly growing library of freedom reached him. Thomas Paine, an Englishman who, like Yates himself, had been apprenticed in a humble craft (corset maker) but pushed on to more intellectually adventurous pursuits, had emigrated to America two years earlier. Through a friendship with Benjamin Franklin he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine and immersed himself in the political crosscurrents of the colonies. In his writings he came to express a radical and thoroughgoing form of the freedom ideology: equal rights for women, an end to slavery, a belief in reason as the religion of the modern world, and most of all an abhorrence for monarchy and an unyielding commitment to democratic principles. In a pamphlet he wrote partly at Franklin’s urging, Paine applied radical Whig notions, fresh from England, directly to the American situation.
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