Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Only John Adams was not in motion, though his thoughts and emotions were racing inside him as he watched the gathering storm from his post in Philadelphia. On May 14 he was joined by a somewhat obscure delegate from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson, reporting for duty again after tending to his ailing wife at his hilltop estate in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Though Jefferson did not know it at the time—nor, for that matter, did anyone else—he was the final piece of the puzzle.

  2

  Of Arms and Men

  I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting a command under such Circumstances, I should have taken my musket upon my Shoulder & entered the Ranks or … had retir’d to the back country & lived in a Wig-wam.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON TO JOSEPH REED, January 14, 1776

  Although American independence was still not officially declared by the late spring of 1776, it already had a martyr and a hero. The martyr was Joseph Warren, a local physician who was marked as a rising star in Boston politics and who also just happened to be the doctor for the Adams family. Warren had bravely stood his ground at Bunker Hill until the redcoats overwhelmed his redoubt; he had been shot in the back of the head as he turned to escape, and then his dead body had been bayoneted by several British soldiers caught up in the heat of the battle. The next day, an execution squad that was finishing off the American wounded made a point of decapitating Warren and displaying his head on a spit, thereby ensuring his martyrdom.1

  The hero was George Washington, the commander in chief of the haphazard collection of militia units now being referred to as the Continental Army. Over six feet tall and just over two hundred pounds, Washington was a physical specimen produced by some eighteenth-century version of central casting. (There is an ongoing scholarly debate about Washington’s height. In his instructions to his tailor, he described himself as six feet tall. Fellow officers in the French and Indian War described him as six foot two. Measurements of his corpse for his coffin list him at six foot three and a half.) Adams had been the one to nominate him as American military commander in June 1775, later explaining that he was the obvious choice, in part because he was a Virginian and Virginia’s support for the still-undeclared war was critical, and in part because he was a full head taller than anyone else in the room.2

  Although the Boston Siege was really less a battle than a prolonged tactical minuet in which the Americans enjoyed a three-to-one superiority in manpower, the fact that the British Army eventually sailed away to fight another day was regarded in the American press as a major victory. And the obvious symbol of this triumph was Washington. Not only did Harvard grant him an honorary degree, but the Massachusetts General Court issued a statement predicting that monuments would be constructed in his name. And the Continental Congress ordered a gold medal cast to commemorate his triumph. John Hancock, the president of the congress, explained what the medal was intended to celebrate: “Those Pages in the Annals of America, will record your Title to a conspicuous Place in the Temple of Fame, which shall inform Posterity that under your Directions, an undisciplined Band of Husband men, in the Course of a few Months, became Soldiers [and then defeated] an Army of Veterans, commanded by the most experienced Generals.”3

  So there it was. The widespread apprehension that the British Army was invincible had just been disproved. Not only was the British fleet sailing away in defeat and disgrace, but the formula for American military success had now been discovered. Rank amateurs who believed in the cause they were fighting for could defeat British veterans who were fighting for pay—that is, if the Americans were commanded by a natural leader who proved himself capable of tapping the bottomless well of patriotism in his citizen-soldiers. Washington was obviously that man, now the one-man embodiment of “The Cause.”

  As he headed south from Boston with slightly less than 10,000 troops to oppose the presumed British attack at New York, Washington was greeted with parades, multiple toasts to “His Excellency,” and the kind of spontaneous public adulation that would become commonplace throughout the rest of his life. If all successful revolutions require heroes, and they do, the American Revolution had discovered its larger-than-life personality around whom to rally.

  Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian War, he had been more outspoken, but he learned from experience to allow his sheer presence to speak for itself.) While less confident men blathered on, he remained silent, thereby making himself a vessel into which admirers poured their fondest convictions, becoming a kind of receptacle for diverse aspirations that magically came together in one man. All arguments about what independence stood for ceased in his presence. As the toasts to Washington put it, he “unites all hearts.”4

  Beneath this magisterial veneer, however, Washington himself harbored serious doubts about the assumptions underlying Hancock’s uplifting assessment, chiefly his confidence in the military prowess of an army of amateurs. During the Boston Siege, he had unburdened himself on several occasions on this very point. “To expect then the same Service from Raw, and undisciplined Recruits as from Veteran Soldiers,” he warned, “is to expect what never did, and perhaps never will happen.” Patriotism was an indispensable ingredient, no question, but it was not an adequate substitute for military discipline and experience. What no one seemed to notice was that the triumph at the Boston Siege had been achieved without a major battle. In that sense, the Continental Army was still untested. And Washington was uncertain that it would perform with equivalent success when confronted by the full power of the British Army in New York. If he had known what the British intended to throw at him there, he would have been more skeptical.5

  Here, for the first time, an underlying contradiction that in fact was never wholly resolved began to take shape. (In Washington’s mind, it was the shape of a satanic specter.) Namely, the very values that the American patriots claimed to be fighting for were incompatible with the disciplined culture required in a professional army. Republics were committed to a core principle of consent, while armies were the institutional embodiments of unthinking obedience and routinized coercion. The very idea of a “standing army” struck most members of the Continental Congress and the state legislatures as a highly dangerous threat to republican principles. And yet, at least as Washington saw it, only a professional army in the British mode could win a war that then permitted those republican principles to endure. At least logically, this dilemma was insoluble, an ends-means problem of the most dramatic kind. Even at the rhetorical level, it was never really resolved so much as obscured beneath the glittering gloss of the Washington mystique. Because he was the universally recognized symbol of all the American cause claimed to stand for, any army that he commanded was, by definition, republican in character. Thomas Jefferson was about to declare some rather significant self-evident truths of his own, but for now, and in fact for the entire war, Washington was the towering self-evident truth on horseback, indispensable because he rendered all argument unnecessary.

  WHAT WASHINGTON KNEW, having learned it over and over again during the nine-month-long Boston Siege, was that the Continental Army he was leading down the coast through Rhode Island and Connecticut to New York was neither continental in character nor an army in anything like the professional sense of the term.6

  On the first score, over 90 percent of his troops were New Englanders. This made perfect sense, given that the initial military actions had all occurred in and around Boston; the militia units that rallied to “The Cause” were overwhelmingly volunteers from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. Moreover, if patriotism had a temperature, the hottest region in the American colonies was New England, where political indifference in many towns and villages was stigmatized as treasonable behavior. Outright expressions of loyalty to the crown were severely punished with tar and feathers in the town s
quare, mobs that tore down and burned your house, and public notices of your imminent demise. Not for nothing did the British ministry regard New England as the cradle of the rebellion.7

  But if the army was the clearest expression of American resistance and patriotism, the hegemonic presence of New Englanders raised serious questions about the level of political commitment in the middle and southern colonies. Washington was acting on the presumption that he was leading a consolidated American effort to withdraw from the British Empire, but no political statement to that effect had yet been sanctioned by the Continental Congress. Despite the confidence that Washington projected as he rode through Providence, New London, and New Haven, it was still unclear whether the colonies south and west of the Hudson would rally to “The Cause” in the manner of the New Englanders.

  The army marching behind Washington might charitably have been called a work in progress. It represented the enduring remnant of the militia units that had formed around Boston the preceding summer and then become incorporated into what was now being called the Continental Army. In fact, most of the men with farms and families, the prototypical yeomen farmers, had gone home to till their fields and resume their role as state militia. The troops who stayed represented the bottom rung of the social ladder—former indentured servants; recent Irish immigrants; unemployed artisans, blacksmiths, and carpenters—who stayed because they had nowhere else to go. What Washington called “the soldiery” of the Continental Army was a motley crew of marginal men and misfits, most wearing hunting shirts instead of uniforms, spitting tobacco every ten paces, all defiantly confident that they had just humiliated the flower of the British Army at Boston and would soon do the same at New York. Free-spirited, rough-hewn, and full of youthful vigor, they were not the kind of men you wanted living in your neighborhood.

  They had driven Washington to the edge of exasperation for the past nine months, resisting most forms of military discipline, relieving themselves wherever and whenever the spirit moved them, and mocking their junior officers, whom in many cases they had elected and regarded as their representatives rather than their superiors. “I have often thought,” Washington confessed to a trusted aide, “how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting a command under such Circumstances, I should have taken my musket upon my Shoulder & entered the Ranks or … had retir’d to the back country & lived in a Wig-wam.”8

  On several occasions, when Washington had recommended an assault on the British defenses in Boston, all the general officers, meeting in councils of war, had convinced him that the troops lacked the discipline and unit cohesion to conduct an offensive operation. They were simply too inexperienced. (The average length of service in the Continental Army was less than six months. In the British Army it was seven years.) Washington eventually, if reluctantly, accepted the limitations imposed by the kind of troops he was commanding and adjusted his tactics accordingly: “Place them behind a Parapet—a Breast Work—Stone Wall … and they will give a good Acct.… But they will not March boldly up to a work—or stand exposed on a Plain.” The paradigm was Bunker Hill. Occupy a strong defensive position, then invite the British to attack, and the men would fight like demons. That was the picture and tactical vision that Washington was carrying in his mind on the road to New York.9

  THEIR COMPENSATING ASSET, intangible but essential, was that they were all volunteers fighting for a cause they believed in passionately. On several occasions outside Boston, Washington had brandished this asset before them. “Whilst we have men who in every way are superior to mercenary troops,” he urged, “why cannot we in appearance also be superior to them, when we fight for Life, Liberty, Property and our Country?” But the question made no sense to the bulk of the troops, who regarded instinctive obedience to orders and ready acceptance of subordination within a military hierarchy as infringements on the very liberty they were fighting for. They saw themselves as invincible, not because they were disciplined soldiers like the redcoats but because they were patriotic, liberty-loving men willing to risk their lives for their convictions.10

  In that sense they embodied what came to be called “the spirit of ’76,” also known at the time as “rage militaire.” This was the heartfelt but romantic notion that the moral supremacy of the American quest for independence was an indefatigable and undefeatable force—picture Joseph Warren going down in glory at Bunker Hill. Neither Washington, who was too much of a realist to embrace this attitude, nor the troops themselves knew it at the time—there was no way they could—but the so-called spirit of ’76 was dying even before the year itself ended and, most ironically, even before the Continental Congress got around to making American independence official. What one historian has called “the Norman Rockwell moments of the war” were over. The military struggle was not going to be a short conflict won by a burst of American patriotism that convinced the British that the game was not worth the candle. It was going to be a protracted war in which the capacity to endure would count more than the purity of “The Cause.” For that kind of conflict, and Washington knew this, the Continental Army as currently constituted was woefully inadequate, indeed no match for their disciplined British opponents.11

  For once you got past the patriotic rhetoric and the romantic glorification of amateur status, the simple fact was that the so-called Continental Army was less than a year old. For over a century, the British Army had been building up an institution with rules and procedures that were now established. The Continental Army had to start from scratch, improvising on the run to create a centralized commissary system for providing food, a quartermaster corps to deliver equipment and clothing, and rules for hygiene and medical care, right down to the elemental matters of latrines and waste disposal.

  Nor was that all. Questions of pay rates for officers, procedures for courts-martial, and uniform regulations for marching and drill all had to be invented and then standardized. And because enlistments for the vast majority of the troops lasted only a year, the Continental Army would become a permanent turnstile, different soldiers always coming and going, so that by the time they had learned the rudiments of military life, they were replaced by inexperienced recruits. Washington kept pressing his civilian superiors in the congress for mandatory troop allotments from each state and inducements for those willing to serve for three years or, better yet, “for the duration.” But the response from the congress was stunned silence, since what Washington was requesting sounded very much like a permanent standing army, the epitome of everything Americans were rebelling against.

  Moreover, allegiances were still provincial rather than national, meaning circumscribed by local and at most state loyalties, so all the political incentives favored service in the state militia, and in most states the pay rates were higher as well, making the Continental Army the choice of last resort.

  Creating an officer’s corps de novo, especially at the senior level, also presented a unique set of problems. In the British Army, senior officers were the product of privilege and merit. The privilege came from being born into the aristocracy, the merit from undergoing about twenty years of experience as a proven leader on the battlefield. Since America had no such thing as a titled aristocracy and the only military theater in which soldiers could have acquired experience was the French and Indian War, the pool of candidates was quite small, though large enough to include Washington and a few others like Charles Lee, the most experienced and colorful general in the Continental Army. Lee’s many eccentricities included an ever-present pack of dogs that accompanied him into battle and the nickname “Boiling Water,” given him by the Mohawk tribe for his unpredictable volatility.12

  But Washington and Lee, in different ways that would eventually collide, were singular figures. More typical, and more illustrative of the leadership problem facing the fledging Continental Army, were two men who, over the long course of the war, turned out to be examples of Washington’s excellent eye for talent.

  One was Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Islan
d Quaker who was cast out of the Society of Friends because of his support for the war. In 1775 Greene was a private in a Rhode Island militia unit called the Kentish Guards. A year later he was a brigadier general, plucked from the ranks outside Boston on the basis of his conspicuous intelligence and dedication.13

  The other was Henry Knox, one of the fattest men in the Continental Army at well over three hundred pounds, whose only experience of war had been acquired through books, which he devoured feverishly in his own Boston bookstore. Impressed with Knox’s resourcefulness in transporting the British cannons captured at Ticonderoga on forty sleds over the ice and snow, the near-impossible logistical feat that had provided the firepower on Dorchester Heights so crucial in forcing the British withdrawal from Boston, Washington appointed Knox to head the artillery regiment in the Continental Army.14

  The appointment of Greene and Knox as senior officers is usually cited as an example of Washington’s uncanny judgment about latent ability. And this is unquestionably correct, as their performance over the next seven years would confirm. But in the moment, which is to say in the spring of 1776, Greene and Knox represented the unprecedented level of military inexperience leading the Continental Army. In any European context, or from the perspective of the officer class of the British Army, they were preposterously unimaginable. To be sure, America was already renowned as the land of opportunity, where credentials mattered less than demonstrated ability. But Greene and Knox, neither of whom had ever before heard a shot fired in anger, were measures of Washington’s desperation and the novice status of the Continental Army. No one wanted to say it outright, but the looming battle in New York represented their opportunity to acquire on-the-job training.