Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  storming of the Bastille, Paris, 1789

  CORNWALLIS IS TAKEN

  OCTOBER 20, 1781. YORKTOWN. LT. COL. TENCH Tilghman rides away from the army camp outside of Yorktown, carrying dispatches from Gen. George Washington to the president of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Tilghman is Washington’s most trusted aide. He has been with him since the war began in 1776, carrying Washington’s messages, writing his letters, and making copies of important documents.

  Now Tilghman carries the most important news of all. Cornwallis has surrendered. The war is over.

  Tilghman was tired and shaky with fever even before he began the long trip to Philadelphia. It would have been easier to turn the task over to another man, but he is determined to press himself to the limits of his strength and cover the distance as quickly as possible.

  Soon Tilghman reaches the York River: for the first two legs of his journey, he will travel by boat.

  First, he takes a rowboat downstream on the York River toward Annapolis. The rowboat grounds on the shoals of the York, costing precious time.

  When Tilghman finally reaches the shore, he switches vessels, boarding the regular packet boat. Soon he is sailing toward Rock Hill. But the packet comes to a standstill when the winds fail, and he loses still more time. The delays are agony.

  Washington, Lafayette, and Tilghman, who is holding the official dispatches declaring Cornwallis’s defeat, at Yorktown, 1781

  Philadelphia State House

  Eventually, the packet reaches Rock Hill, and Tilghman is first off the boat, eager to make up for lost time. He spurs his horse down the old post road, shouting his message to those he passes on the way. “Cornwallis is taken! The war is over!”

  At Chesterton, he stops to change horses and rest at his father’s house for a few hours. Then he rides on. The road is little more than a soft-dirt track, a foot deep in mud after the autumn rains. He rides all day and into the night, stopping only to change to a fresh horse wherever he can find one.

  Shaking with chills and fever, Tilghman rides into Philadelphia just after three in the morning on October 24. He has traveled almost nonstop for four days. He slows his horse to a canter and heads toward the home of his old friend Thomas McKean, now president of the Continental Congress. Before long he arrives at the McKean house.

  Tilghman announcing the surrender of Cornwallis from the steps of the State House in Philadelphia, October 23, 1781

  He dismounts his horse and grabs the letters from his saddlebag. He pauses and leans his forehead against the saddle for a moment to gather his strength. Then he runs up the front steps and hammers at the door.

  No one answers. Tilghman steps back and looks up at the windows, hoping to see the glimmer of a lit candle moving through the house. Nothing. He raises his hand to bang on the door again, but before he can, a passing night watchman grabs Tilghman’s arm, prepared to arrest him for disturbing the peace. Just then, McKean answers the door.

  Relieved, Tilghman presses his letters into his old friend’s hand and gives him the news: “Cornwallis is taken.”

  The watchman calls the hour. “All is well and Cornwallis is taken.” Word spreads through the city. Lit lamps appear in every window. People pour into the streets. The State House bell rings out. And Tilghman stumbles into a borrowed bed, exhausted and feverish from his arduous journey.

  When the members of the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they did so with sorrow. From their perspective, a long accumulation of grievances had forced them to change from loyal British citizens to Americans.

  The problems began with the French and Indian Wars, when British officers treated colonial volunteers like bumpkins. When the wars ended in 1763, the British and the colonists found themselves at odds in very fundamental ways. From the British point of view, the American colonies should help pay for the expensive war recently fought on their behalf and for the increased garrison of British soldiers needed to protect Britain’s new possessions in Canada. As far as the American colonists were concerned, they had already paid for the war in blood and sweat. Now the British government had made it illegal to settle in the rich western possessions they had won from France. Parliament assessed new taxes that united almost every class of American against the British government. Americans pushed back, using methods both nonviolent, like boycotting British goods, and violent, such as the Pine Tree Riot.

  By 1774, the relationship between the British and the colonists was in a constant state of crisis. When the British closed the port of Boston and occupied the city in response to the Boston Tea Party, towns throughout Massachusetts formed militia companies. By the end of the year, fifty-six delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies had convened in Philadelphia as the First Continental Congress.

  The colonies were a powder keg, needing only a single spark to explode into war. The spark came at Lexington and Concord on April 4, 1775.

  The colonies were a powder keg, needing only a single spark to explode into war.

  At first the American army was no more than a ragtag accumulation of badly equipped local militias, unwilling to accept orders from a central authority and held together by their belief in what George Washington frequently referred to as the “glorious cause” of American freedom. Many of the militiamen had gained some military experience in the French and Indian Wars, but few had served as regular soldiers. Washington had risen to the rank of commander of the Virginia militia, but he did not feel qualified to be commander-in-chief of the new Continental Army. He had never led a force of this size, or this complexity.

  For the first fourteen months of the war, jubilant American forces enjoyed astonishing successes while the British regrouped: at Lexington and Concord, Charleston, and Fort Ticonderoga. Neither the winning streak nor the jubilation survived the arrival of the British expeditionary force in New York Harbor over the summer of 1776. The scope of the force was enormous: more than five hundred ships, 32,000 British and German troops, and 40 percent of the British navy. Britain would not field a comparable invasion force again for more than 150 years—on D-Day during World War II.

  The American forces suffered such crushing defeats at Long Island and Manhattan that many American volunteers assumed the Revolution was over and headed home. Washington learned a different lesson from these defeats: outmanned and outgunned, the American army could not take on the British on their own terms. Washington did not have the resources either to muster sufficient troops or to train them in the European style of fighting in massed ranks. Instead the American army reinvented itself and the art of war, creating a frontier style of warfare based on sharpshooters, long rifles, and guerrilla tactics.

  In September 1777, American guerrilla tactics and the American wilderness itself defeated General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York. That victory convinced the French that the Americans had a chance to win. In February 1778 the French entered into a formal alliance with the thirteen colonies.

  The French entry into the war changed everything. Suddenly the Americans had access to both a strong navy and a well-equipped army. More important, their enemy was forced to change focus. With the French in the war, the British now had to protect not only their holdings in America, but their valuable sugar colonies in the West Indies as well.

  The final, decisive battle came at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781, where a combination of American and French troops surrounded the British forces under General Charles Cornwallis on land and a French fleet blockaded them from the sea. At the end of a three-week siege, Cornwallis surrendered on October 19.

  “Surrender of Lord Cornwallis” by John Trumbull, 1820

  The war was not technically over. The British still held Charleston, New York City, and Savannah. But they had lost the will to continue the war. Back in Britain, the American victory at Yorktown led to the fall of Lord Frederick North’s prowar government. Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham, the leader of the peace faction in Parliament,
replaced North as prime minister. With the Rockingham faction in power, peace negotiations between the British and their former colonists could begin.

  With the fate of America at stake, I see our job as prolonging the war as much as possible. So unless we are absolutely forced into it, our tactics are to avoid a large battle; in fact, to avoid any risks at all.

  —George Washington

  I have the mortification to inform Your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the posts of York and Gloucester and to surrender the troops . . . as prisoners of war to the combined forces of America and France.

  —General Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess

  The concepts of democracy and national self-determination—and the success of the American rebels—triggered revolution after revolution. The French were the first to follow the American lead in 1789 (and in 1830, and in 1871). In 1791, slaves and free blacks rose up against French rule in Haiti. Revolutions in Spanish America brought independence to Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia in the 1820s. In Europe, Greeks, Belgians, and Poles all fought for national independence in the 1820s and the 1830s.

  WHILE REVOLUTION WAS BREWING in the American colonies, a different kind of revolution was under way in Britain.

  Britain’s population boomed in the mid-eighteenth century, thanks in part to food crops from the New World that improved the diet of the poor—most notably, the potato. A growing populace meant an increased demand for goods of all kinds, including cheap cloth.

  Cloth had always been made by human hands: a cottage industry that involved entire rural families during seasons when there was little work to do on the farm. Now it would be made by machine.

  The first changes were small. John Kay’s flying shuttle, Lewis Paul’s carding machine, and James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny all increased productivity, but they did not change the basic structure of the industry. Families built additions onto their cottages so they could operate looms and jennies on a larger scale at home.

  The real change in the British weaving industry came in 1769, when Richard Arkwright, a smalltime wigmaker and barber, patented the water frame. Developed with help from master clockmaker John Kay, the water-powered machine spun perfect cotton—faster, cheaper, better, and more reliable than a human spinner.

  Unlike the spinning jenny, the water frame was designed to be a factory machine. More than a century before Henry Ford built his first auto plant, Arkwright combined power, machinery, semiskilled labor, and raw material to generate mass production. Arkwright was soon the world’s first industrial tycoon.

  The factory system wasn’t just a new way to manufacture; it was a new way of life, the biggest change in how humans lived and worked since farming began five thousand years earlier. Both factory and farm workers put in long days of physical labor. But agricultural work was seasonal and varied. Factory work was monotonous, with few breaks. Supervisors discouraged the song or chatter that made work lighter. As the use of machinery spread, unskilled laborers, many of them women and children, replaced skilled weavers. Cities grew at unprecedented rates as workers migrated from the countryside, in search of employment in the factories.

  ARKWRIGHT FACTORY UPRISING

  OCTOBER 3, 1779. CHORLEY, NORTHERN ENGLAND. A mob is on the hunt, not for a man, but for a machine.

  Angry weavers and spinners approach Richard Arkwright’s cotton mill, drums beating a march. Arkwight and his neighbors had driven them off two days before. Today they are prepared to fight, wielding axes, firearms, and hatchets. Coal miners and other workers join the displaced textile workers in their march on the mill. They push with ease through the wall of soldiers who block the narrow road to the mill entrance.

  Richard Arkwright

  Arkwrght’s Spinning Machine

  Their target is the Birkacre mill, Richard Arkwright’s flagship factory.

  Expecting trouble, Arkwright has charged his factory manager, John Chadwick, with protecting the mill. Chadwick is taking no chances. He has called in the army. Sir Richard Clayton is guarding the factory with fifty armed members of the infantry regiment known, paradoxically, as the Invalids.

  Two soldiers stand in front of the factory doors, trying to protect the entrance. The crowd pushes them aside. Soldiers on the roof fire warning shots into the air, but they are outnumbered sixty to one. The mob bashes in the doors and pours through. Once inside, they destroy the spinning frames.

  The soldiers follow, but they are no match for thousands of enraged workers and are forced to retreat.

  At the end of the day, two rioters are dead, eight more are badly wounded, and their leaders are in jail. Ninety spinning frames are destroyed, and the factory is in ruins. But the burned factory is only a temporary setback. Arkwright will rebuild. New owners will erect more factories. Industrialization is here to stay.

  Arkwright’s water frame

  Cotton carding machine

  One of the many small children at work in Lancaster Cotton Mills, South Carolina, 1908.

  Roman Ghetto late 19th century

  THE NEW URBAN POOR

  Just like the change from hunting and gathering to farming, the Industrial Revolution brought society long-term gains at the cost of an immediate fall in the standard of living for many.

  Cities couldn’t keep up with the influx of new residents. Working-class districts had open sewers and inadequate water supplies. Streets were often nothing more than rutted, muddy paths. Existing houses had to be divided and redivided to create space. New housing was just as cramped and badly built. Many of the new industrial workers could not afford enough of even the cheapest food. They dressed in rags, slept on straw, and worked sixteen-hour days. Disease flourished. Mortality rates were high. And the cities continued to grow.

  Today, the same patterns are being repeated in developing countries. Former rural economies are disappearing, to be replaced by manufacturing staffed with cheap urban labor pools. Often housed apart from their families in barracks and working six or seven days a week, these workers are sustaining global manufacturing and sales of everything from toys and sneakers to computers and cell phones.

  A second wave of industry followed the first. Textile mills created a demand for new tools, new machinery, and more power. Inventors and engineers created better ways to forge steel and mine coal. They designed faster and more specialized machinery, and found new ways to use machines to extend the productivity of a single laborer. In other words, they learned how to make more goods in less time.

  In the two and a half centuries since Arkwright introduced the water frame, the combination of power and machine has moved beyond the factory and into every aspect of our lives.

  THE RAILROAD WAS BORN IN the British mining industry, long before the invention of the steam locomotive. Horses, and sometimes people, pulled wagons full of coal along wooden or iron tracks as early as 1630.

  The steam engine also had its roots in coal. First developed to pump water out of mines, it was adapted to run machines in British textile mills. In the early nineteenth century, inventors began to play with ways to adapt the steam engine to a means of transportation. The earliest steam locomotives were simple upgrades on the horse-drawn coal railways.

  Steam locomotion moved out of the coal mines and into the public eye in 1825. George Stephenson, a self-taught Northumberland engineer who began his career as the brakeman on a coal pit train, opened the first public railway. The Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) carried six hundred passengers over a twenty-six-mile line in three hours on its first trip; regular passenger service opened a month later. The English went railroad mad. In the 1830s and 1840s, investors formed more than six hundred rail companies that together laid more than ten thousand miles of track.

  THE LONG RIFLE

  Throughout history, changes in weaponry have transformed the art of war. The introduction of iron weapons around 1200 BCE gave soldiers a literal edge over those armed with bronze or stone. The Ottomans’ use of cannons at
the siege of Constantinople revolutionized siege warfare. The spread of the musket marked the end of the armored knight. In the American Revolution, American troops came to the battlefield with weapons that challenged the traditions of Western warfare.

  British troops carried smoothbore flintlock muskets, which were quick to reload and well suited for the close drill of traditional European warfare. They weren’t very accurate, but accuracy didn’t matter when you were firing at a row of men marching shoulder to shoulder. If you fired, you were bound to hit something. In close combat, the musket’s bayonet was often more important than the musket itself.

  Accuracy in a weapon was important to American farmers, who relied on hunting for a large portion of their diet. The long rifle, sometimes called the Kentucky rifle, had a rifled barrel up to four feet long, improving the gun’s accuracy. In the hands of a skilled marksman, colonial rifles were accurate up to 300 yards: three times the range of a musket. Common practice targets were a turkey’s head at 100 yards and the turkey’s body at 200 yards. Hitting the body of a horse at 400 yards was no challenge, as British cavalrymen learned to their dismay.

  Rifling—spiraled grooves inside the gun’s barrel—improved the gun’s accuracy, but made it harder to load because ammunition had to fit more tightly in order to engage with the grooves. Loading got even harder under battle conditions because the residue of burnt powder from repeated firing built up in the grooves.