A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence

  As Washington’s ragtag army tied up British forces, feelings for independence grew more intense. The movement awaited only a spokesman who could galvanize public opinion around resistance against the king. How unlikely, then, was the figure that emerged! Thomas Paine had come to America just over a year before he wrote Common Sense, arriving as a failure in almost everything he attempted in life. He wrecked his first marriage, and his second wife paid him to leave. He destroyed two businesses (one as a tobacconist and one as a corset maker) and flopped as a tax collector. But Paine had fire in his blood and defiance in his pen. In January 1776 he wrote his fifty-page political tract, Common Sense, but his “The American Crisis,” published a month earlier, began with some of the most memorable lines in history: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”67 Eager readers did not shrink from the book, which quickly sold more than a hundred thousand copies. (Paine sold close to a half-million copies prior to 1800 and could have been a wealthy man—if he hadn’t donated every cent he earned to the Revolution!) Common Sense provided the prelude to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that appeared in July 1776. Paine argued that the time for loyalty to the king had ended: “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘Tis Time to Part.’”

  He thus tapped into widespread public sentiment, evidenced by the petitions urging independence that poured into the Continental Congress. Many colonial delegations received instructions from home to support independence by May 1776. On May fifteenth, Virginia resolved in its convention to create a Declaration of Rights, a constitution, a federation, and foreign alliances, and in June it established a republican government, for all intents and purposes declaring its independence from England. Patrick Henry became governor. Virginia led the way, and when the state congressional delegations were sent to vote on independence, only Virginia’s instructions were not conditional: the Commonwealth had already thrown down the gauntlet.68

  In June, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” The statement so impressed John Adams that he wrote, “This day the Congress has passed the most important resolution…ever taken in America.”69 As the momentum toward separation with England grew, Congress appointed a committee to draft a statement announcing independence. Members included Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and the chairman, Thomas Jefferson, to whom the privilege of writing the final draft fell. Jefferson wrote so eloquently and succinctly that Adams and Franklin made only a few alterations, including Franklin’s “self-evident” phrase. Most of the changes had to do with adding references to God.

  Even so, the final document remains a testament to the skill of Jefferson in capturing the essence of American ideals. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he wrote, 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.”70 It is worth noting that Jefferson recognized that humans were “created” by a Supreme Being, and that all rights existed only in that context. Further reiterating Locke, he wrote that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.” Government was natural, not artificial, so that when one government disappeared, the citizenry needed to establish another. But it should be kept in mind that these “self-evident” rights constituted “an escalating sequence of connected assertions” that ended in revolution, appealing not only to God, but to English history and law.71

  This distanced Jefferson from the writings of Hobbes, and even though he borrowed heavily from Locke, he had further backed away from the notion that the civil state was artificial. On the other hand, Jefferson, by arguing that men “instituted” governments, borrowed entirely from the Enlightenment proposition that government was a human creation in the first place. In short, the Declaration clearly illustrated the dual strains of Western thought that had emerged as predominant by the 1700s: a continuing reverence for the primacy of God in human affairs, and yet an increasing attraction to the notion that earthly systems depended on human intellect and action, even when all aspects of that philosophy were not fully embraced.

  Jefferson’s original draft, however, contained “censures on the English people” that some in Congress found excessive, and revisions, despite John Adams’s frequent defenses of Jefferson’s words, excised those sentences. The most offensive was Jefferson’s traditional Virginia account of American slavery’s being the fault of England. But any criticism of slavery—no matter whose fault—also indicted the slave colonies, and was not tolerated.72 After a bitter debate over these phrases, and other editing that changed about half of the draft, Congress adopted the final Declaration on July 4, 1776, after adopting a somewhat less refined version on July second. Two weeks later Congress voted to have the statement engrossed on parchment and signed by the members, who either appeared in person on August second or later affixed their names (Hancock’s being the largest since he, reportedly, wanted the king to be able to read it without his spectacles). Each one of the fifty-six signers knew that the act of signing the Declaration made them traitors to the Crown, and therefore the line in which the delegates “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” literally exposed these heroes to execution. By the end of the war, almost every one had lost his property; many had lost wives and families to British guns or prisons; and several died penniless, having given all to the Revolution.

  North to Saratoga

  Following his stunning surprise attack at Trenton and his subsequent victory at Princeton, Washington experienced more defeats at Brandywine Creek and Germantown. In the second battle, the Americans nearly won and only the timely arrival of reinforcements gave the British a victory. Washington again had to retreat, this time to winter quarters at Valley Forge, near Philadelphia.

  What ensued was one of the darkest times for Washington and his army: while the British enjoyed warmth and food in one of America’s richest cities, the Continentals suffered through a miserable winter, decimated by illness and starvation, eating soup made of “burnt leaves and dirt.” Washington deluged Congress with letters and appeals. “Soap, Vinegar, and other Articles allowed by Congress we see none,” he wrote. Few men had more than a shirt, and some “none at all, and a number of Men confined to Hospitals for want of shoes.”73 Gradually, the army obtained supplies and equipment, and in the Spartan environment Washington fashioned a disciplined fighting force. Washington proved the glue that held the entire operation together. Consistent and unwavering, he maintained confidence in front of the men, all the while pouring a steady stream of requests for support to the Congress, which was not so much unreceptive as helpless: its only real source of income was the confiscation of Tory properties, which hardly provided the kind of funds demanded by armies in the field. The printing of paper money—continentals—had proven a disaster, and American commanders in the field had taken to issuing IOUs in return for food, animals, and other supplies. Yet in that frozen Pennsylvania hell, Washington hammered the Americans into a tough fighting force while the British grew lazy and comfortable, especially in New York and Philadelphia. Franklin quipped that Howe did not take Philadelphia so much as Philadelphia had taken Howe. The policy of occupying and garrisoning “strategic hamlets” proved no more successful in the 1770s than it did just under two hundred years later when the American army tried a similar strategy in Vietnam, and with much the same effect on the morale of the occupiers.

  Washington’s was not the only American army engaging the British. General John “Gentleman Johnny” Bu
rgoyne launched an invasion of the Mohawk Valley, where he was to be supported by a second British column coming from Oswego under Barry St. Leger. A third British force under Howe was to join them by moving up the Hudson. The plan came apart rapidly in that Howe never moved north, and St. Leger retreated in the face of Benedict Arnold and Nicholas Herkimer’s forces. Further, the Indian allies of the British abandoned them, leaving Burgoyne in a single column with extended supply lines deep in enemy territory. Having forgotten the fate of Varus’s Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest centuries earlier, Burgoyne’s wagons bore the general’s fine china, best dress clothes, four-poster bed, and his mistress—with all her personal belongings. (His column’s entourage included four hundred “women camp-followers,” some wives; some paid servants; most, prostitutes.) Whatever their intangible contributions to morale, they slowed Burgoyne’s army to a crawl.

  Burgoyne’s scavenging units ran into the famed Green Mountain Boys, commanded by Ethan Allen, who killed or captured all the British detachments. When news of the victory reached New England towns, militia flooded into General Horatio Gates’s command. He had 12,000 militia and 5,000 regulars facing Burgoyne’s 6,000 troops with their extended supply lines. Burgoyne sensed he had to break the colonial armies before he was surrounded or his overtaxed transport system collapsed, prompting him to launch two attacks at Freeman’s Farm near Saratoga in September and October. The patriots decisively won the second encounter, leaving Burgoyne to ponder escape or surrender. Still placing his faith in reinforcements that, unbeknownst to him, would not arrive, Burgoyne partied in Saratoga, drinking and cavorting with his mistress. On October seventeenth, when it at last dawned on him that no relief was coming, and with his army hungry, stranded, and surrounded, Burgoyne surrendered his entire force as the band played “Yankee Doodle.” In this age of civility in warfare, the defeated British troops merely turned in their arms and marched to Boston, where they boarded transports for England, promising only that they would not take up arms against Americans again.

  Trust the French

  When spring arrived, the victory at Saratoga, and the thousands of arms it brought to Washington’s forces, gave Americans a new resolve. The ramifications of Saratoga stretched far beyond the battlefields of North America, all the way to Europe, where the colonists had courted France as a potential ally since the outbreak of hostilities. France sensibly stayed out of the conflict until the patriots proved they had a chance of surviving. After Saratoga, however, Louis XVI agreed to discreetly support the American Revolution with munitions and money. A number of factors accounted for the willingness of France to risk involvement. First, the wounds of the Seven Years’ War still ached, and France wanted revenge. Second, if America won independence without the help of European allies, French (and Spanish) territories in North America might be considered fair game for takeover by the new republic. Finally, any policy that weakened English power abroad was viewed favorably at Versailles. Thus, France furnished funds to the colonists through a front business called Rodrigue Hortalez and Company. It is estimated that until 1780 the colonial army received 90 percent of its powder from the French enterprise.

  Even before official help arrived from Louis’s court, numbers of individual Frenchmen had volunteered for service in the Continental Army, many seeking merely to advance mercenary careers abroad. Some came strictly for glory, including the extremely talented Louis Berthier, later to gain fame as Napoleon’s chief of staff. More than a few sincerely wished to see America succeed for idealistic reasons, including Lafayette, the young nobleman who in 1777 presented himself to Washington, who accorded him a nomination for major general. But the colonies needed far more than laundered money and a handful of adventurers: they needed the French navy to assist in transporting the Continental Army—giving it the mobility the British enjoyed—and they could benefit from the addition of French troops as well.

  To that end, the Continental Congress dispatched Silas Deane in early 1776 as its agent to Paris, and several months later Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin joined him. Franklin emerged as the premier representative in France, not just because Congress recalled Deane in 1777, but because the droll Franklin was received as a celebrity by the Parisians. Varying his dress from Quaker simplicity to frontier buckskins, the clever Pennsylvanian effortlessly quoted Voltaire or Newton, yet he appealed to common footmen and chambermaids. Most important to the struggle to enlist French aid, however, Franklin adroitly utilized British conciliation proposals to convince France that America might attain independence without her. In February 1778 France signed commercial and political treaties with the Continental Congress, agreeing that neither side would make a separate peace without the other.

  Spain joined the war in April 1779 as an ally of France for the purpose of regaining Gibraltar, Minorca, Jamaica, and Florida. By 1780, France and Spain had put more than 120 warships into action in the American theater and, combined with the heroic, harassing escapades of John Paul Jones, menaced British shipping lanes, besieged Gibraltar, threatened Jamaica, and captured Mobile and Pensacola. French ships commanded by Admiral Jean-Baptiste d’Estaing even mounted an unsuccessful attack on Newport, Rhode Island, before retreating to the West Indies.

  British abuses at sea already had alienated Holland, which in 1780 joined Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, and Russia in the League of Armed Neutrality, whose members agreed their ships would fire on approaching British vessels at sea rather than submit to boarding. In an amazing display of diplomatic ineptitude, Britain had managed to unite all the major navies of the world against its quest to blockade a group of colonies that lacked a navy of their own! Not only did that place all of England’s supply and transport strategies in America at risk, but it internationalized the war in such a way as to make England seem a bully and a villain. Perhaps most important of all, the aid and support arrived at the very time that Washington’s army had dwindled to extremely low levels.

  Southern Invasion, Northern Betrayal

  Despite the failures at Trenton, Princeton, and Saratoga, the British still fielded five substantial armies in North America. British generals also concluded, however, that their focus on the northern colonies had been misplaced, and that their true base of loyalist support lay in the South. Georgia and the Carolinas contained significant numbers of Tories, allowing the British forces to operate in somewhat friendly territory. In 1778 the southern offensive began when the British landed near Savannah.

  In the meantime, Washington suffered a blow of a personal nature. Benedict Arnold, one of his most capable subordinates and an officer who had been responsible for victories at Ticonderoga, Quebec, and, in part, Saratoga, chafed under the apparent lack of recognition for his efforts. In 1778–79 he commanded the garrison in Philadelphia, where he married Peggy Shippen, a wealthy Tory who encouraged his spending and speculation. In 1779 a committee charged him with misuse of official funds and ordered Washington to discipline Arnold. Instead, Washington, still loyal to his officer, praised Arnold’s military record.

  Although he received no official reprimand, Arnold had amassed huge personal debts, to the point of bankruptcy. Arnold played on Washington’s trust to obtain a command at the strategic fort West Point, on the Hudson, whereupon he intrigued to turn West Point over to British general Henry Clinton. Arnold used a courier, British major John André, and nearly succeeded in surrendering the fort. André—wearing civilian clothes that made him in technical terms a spy—stumbled into the hands of patriots, who seized the satchel of papers he carried. Arnold managed to escape to England, but André was tried and executed for his treason (and later interred as an English national hero at Westminster Abbey). Britain appointed Arnold a brigadier general and gave him command of small forces in Virginia; and he retired to England in 1781, where he ended his life bankrupt and unhappy, his name in America equated with treason. As colonial historian O. H. Chitwood observed, if Arnold “could have remained true to his first love for a year longer his name would probably
now have a place next to that of Washington in the list of Revolutionary heroes.”74

  Events in the South soon required Washington’s full attention. The British invasion force at Savannah turned northward in 1779, and the following year two British columns advanced into the Carolinas, embattled constantly by guerrilla fighters Thomas Sumter, Andrew Pickens, and the famed “Swamp Fox,” Francis Marion. Lord Cornwallis managed to forge ahead, engaging and crushing a patriot army at Camden, but this only brought the capable Nathaniel Greene to command over the inept Horatio Gates. Greene embraced Washington’s view that avoiding defeat was as important as winning battles, becoming a master at what Russell Weigley calls “partisem war,” conducting a retreat designed to lure Cornwallis deep into the Carolina interior.75

  At Cowpens (January 1781), colonial troops under Daniel Morgan met Sir Banastre Tarleton near the Broad River, dealing the British a “severe” and “unexpected” blow, according to Cornwallis. A few months later Cornwallis again closed with the Greene’s forces, this time at Guilford Courthouse, and again Greene retreated rather than lose his army. Once more he sucked Cornwallis farther into the American interior. After obtaining reinforcements and supplies, Cornwallis pressed northward after Greene into Virginia, where he expected to join up with larger contingents of British forces coming down from the northern seaboard.

  Washington then saw his opportunity to mass his forces with Greene’s and take on Cornwallis one on one. Fielding 5,000 troops reinforced by another 5,000 French, Washington quickly marched southward from New York, joining with French Admiral Joseph de Grasse in a coordinated strike against Cornwallis in Virginia.

  By that time, Washington’s men had not been paid for months, a situation soon remedied by Robert Morris, the “financier of the Revolution.” News arrived that the Resolve had docked in Boston with two million livres from France, and the coins were hauled to Philadelphia, where the Continental troops received their pay. Alongside the formal, professional-looking French troops, Washington’s men looked like a rabble. But having survived the winter camps and evaded the larger British armies, they had gained confidence. It was hardly the same force that Washington had led in retreat two years earlier. Now, Washington’s and Rochambeau’s forces arrived in the Chesapeake Bay region, where they met a second French column led by Lafayette, and together the Franco-American forces outnumbered the British by 7,000 men.