by Howard Fast
In making this study, I am proposing that these twenty days were critical to the final success of the war and to the coming into being of the United States of America. Others might argue with this supposition, and no absolute proof can be offered for or against the contention. In any case, if the twenty days were not the ultimate crisis, they were certainly one of the most critical periods of the American Revolution and perhaps one of the few moments that tested to the limits the endurance of the people involved in the central military effort of the rebellion.
At the time of the American Revolution, the thirteen colonies had been settled by a varied and diverse group of people whose interests were far from homogeneous. However, these varying interests coincided in a unity of desire and necessity at a moment in history that enabled them to join themselves together into a single national force that was able to oppose the British Crown, first in a series of actions of civil disorders and finally with armed force.
Roughly, the colonies can be divided into three areas, New England, the central region, and the South. Farming was universal among the three areas, and in each case the non-agricultural forces had their base in agriculture. The New England region was in its commercial complexion mercantile and fishing. In the central or middle area, which included New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, there was a grouping of mercantile interests similar to those of New England. But also there was a good deal of industry: iron works, lumber, leather tanning, papermaking, printing and oven works whose kilns were devoted to the production of pottery and bricks. The southern area, from Virginia to Georgia, was for the most part agricultural; and the main cash crop of this area was tobacco, not yet cotton, for this was still prior to the invention of the cotton gin.
The civil dispute between these thirteen colonies and the mother country of England had been going on for a good many years. It is difficult to place one’s finger on the precise moment when civil disturbance changed from random acts of annoyance on the part of the colonies to a maturing movement of civil defiance. The colonies had just contributed a very large and efficient force of soldiers, and arms as well, to the war that we remember as the French and Indian War, that part of the conflict between England and France that took place on the American continent.
The local militia of the various colonies had been tried by fire. They had seen regular British and French troops in action, and they were by no means overawed by the performance of the professionals or doubtful of their own capabilities in this field.
In 1764, a year after the war was over, King George and certain members of the British Parliament put forward a demand that the Americans pay for their share of the large English debt that had been incurred. This demand for contributions was sent to the colonial assemblies, where it was rejected with more or less common indignation.
This was the first real crisis in the British assumption that they had the absolute right to tax the Americans, and this was the first large American defiance of an attempt to exercise that right. Both sides of the dispute found their sensibilities exacerbated, and in 1765 the Quartering Act was passed by Parliament out of pique rather than out of any true necessity. The Quartering Act demanded of the colonies that they make their houses available as living quarters for the standing army of British soldiers that were still an occupation force in America.
Indignation over the Quartering Act ran high. When it was followed by the Stamp Act, which put a stamp tax on all newspapers, pamphlets and on a variety of legal documents, the anger of the people in the colonies reached a point that caused rioting and active resistance. Younger people in the colonies, mostly between fourteen and twenty years of age, began the first organization of quasimilitary resistance, called “The Sons of Liberty.”
Everywhere in the colonies the Stamp Act brought into being a sort of official colonial indignation. Patrick Henry introduced a resolution into the Virginia Assembly that condemned and denied the right of Parliament to legislate on any internal affairs of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Massachusetts, a hotbed of anger generated by both the Stamp and the Quartering Acts, called for a Stamp Act Congress, which met in 1765, and this special group issued a Declaration of Rights. The Stamp Act Congress was in actuality the first mechanism for unity that the colonies put forth and also the first sign of a desire for separate government. The resistance against the Stamp Act was sufficient to cause the British prime minister to repeal it. But in the act of repealing it the British felt that they had to make some new assertion of their right in America and their hold over the colonies.
A man called Charles Townshend, who was then the British chancellor of the exchequer, framed a bill that contained a considerable list of new taxes, taxes on lead and painters’ colors, paper, oil, wine, glass and tea—indeed taxes that touched almost every area in which the colonists were attempting to establish their own independent manufacturing and importing facilities. The British rationale for these levies was that the duties collected would be used to pay wages of governors and judges functioning in the colonies.
Again in response to this act of the British, a functioning union, however thin, was put together by the colonists, first in the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768 and then later in a Virginia resolution condemning the act. Meanwhile, the New York legislature condemned the Quartering Act and refused to supply any living space for British troops, and in response to this, Parliament deprived New York of its legislative rights.
So began the nonmilitary war, in which each side tested the strength of the other and then withdrew if the opposition became too great. At this point, certainly, not even the most radical elements in the colonies thought in terms of severing their connections with the motherland and organizing an independent nation on American soil.
In the same year, 1768, the merchants of Boston met and signed a nonimportation agreement. Under this pact they agreed to stop all imports from England until the obnoxious taxes were repealed. This agreement against importation was a measure that caught the fancy of the other colonies, and the movement around it spread like wildfire. Boycott, it would appear, has always been an American way of protest.
Again, in response to this action, the King of England dissolved the Massachusetts legislature, and a British warship disembarked a regiment of British soldiers for quartering in Boston. Lord North, the British prime minister, tempered the King’s anger and was able to bring about the repeal of all taxes except the levy on tea. This was a nominal tax and it was retained simply for the sake of a principle, that is, to demonstrate the right of the British to tax the colonies. But the exacerbation increased, and the Americans seized upon the symbolic tea tax for further steps toward unification. A movement to stop the drinking of tea swept the colonies, and four years later what is remembered as the Boston Tea Party took place in Massachusetts, an attack on a tea cargo that was dumped into the water of the harbor and that led to an increase in the aggressiveness of the radical elements among the colonists.
In 1770, British soldiers in Boston attacked a large crowd that was yelling insults and throwing snowballs. Known as the Boston Massacre, this bloody police action by the British angered many people in Massachusetts. Parliament reacted by passage of the Boston Port Bill, closing the port, and at the same time the commander of the British troops, General Gage, was made the royal governor of Massachusetts.
In 1772, a British revenue cutter, the Gaspee, ran ashore in Narragansett Bay. The Gaspee had been attempting to enforce the navigation acts, and now, trapped on the reef, it offered an irresistible target for the men of Providence, who attacked the vessel, captured the crew and then burned the ship where it was.
The Crown’s government in Massachusetts organized a commission to investigate the matter, and to determine who was responsible, arrest and bring them to trial in England, but this was all a facade of noise and fury. No one was arrested, and the Gaspee incident became in a sense the first real act of war on the part of the Americans.
By now the situation in Boston had become
so untenable and so filled with opportunities for further provocation that Massachusetts was looked upon throughout the thirteen colonies as the leader of the incipient rebellion. All of these factors and many more served to bring the thirteen colonies together and to convince them that it was necessary to create some mechanism to extend their need for common action. Thus, the first Continental Congress came into being, and it met in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774.
While all these events and others annoyed and frustrated the American colonists, the basic cause of the American Revolution can be summed up briefly.
The explosive force of settlement and growth in America was proceeding at a pace beyond England’s ability to cope. The mercantile interests of the North were in an increasing state of competition with similar British interests, who demanded protection.
In the middle colonies the settlers were producing an extraordinary crop of children; the poorest of the colonial farmers appeared to produce the largest families. And as their sons and daughters came to maturity, they pressed westward for land of their own. Without such land, they felt that they could not exist. Vast tracts of hundreds of thousands of acres had been tied up in British Crown grants. The British were nervous and worried about this westward expansion, and, in order to slow it, they turned their already existing alliance with the Indians against the settlers.
In the South, the planters depended for almost all of their wealth upon the proceeds of their tobacco crops, which were sold in Great Britain. In turn the British agents fixed the price of tobacco at rates that kept the great southern planters, of whom George Washington was one, in a condition of almost perpetual land-rich poverty.
It was the coincidence of these conditions that brought the three disparate elements in the colonies together in the alliance that produced the American Revolution.
It is not to be thought that a society of equalitarianism existed among the thirteen colonies. The class differentiation and gap between the enlisted men in the American army and those who constituted the officer corps was far greater than anything we imagine today. Nor was the army kept together by patriotic pressure or by those irritations that had initially moved the colonists into action. Rather the army was a troubled and shifting group in which the various elements in the colonies continued to fight a battle that expressed their class difference and their basic antagonism toward each other.
This was the army over which George Washington, the Virginia planter, was given command. His command lasted for more than seven years, and those years were a period of agony and toil that few other men could have endured. It is not my purpose to glorify George Washington. He has been wrongly glorified, and in the process the entire meaning and color of the man have been lost.
In the few days of his life that I chose to chronicle here I tried to bring out some of the important and viable facets of the man’s character. I do not claim to understand his character. Indeed I doubt whether many of his associates who were with him at the time or beside him through all the seven difficult years that the Revolution lasted either knew him well or understood him. He was tied by chains that he had forged and hidden behind walls that he had erected. But there are sufficient glimpses of this gentle and remarkable man for us to wish that he could come alive again and symbolize those principles which he stood for and which are so necessary in our own time.
He took command of the American army in the late spring of 1775. On May 10, the Continental Congress at Philadelphia chose him to be commander in chief. Certain cynical observers of the scene said that the chief factor that occasioned this choice was the beautiful fashion plate he made in his very expensive buff-and-blue uniform. Be this as it may, the Congress chose well, and Washington went north to take command of his army.
The army was in high spirits then. From the first attempt of the British to seize the arms the Americans had stored at Concord, Massachusetts, the war had been an incredible series of, if not American victories, at least American demonstrations of their power. The British army that retreated from Concord, Massachusetts, back to the security of Boston, was hit and harassed all the way and suffered very grievous losses. In Boston, where the Battle of Bunker Hill took place, the British again suffered bloody and unexpected losses, and though they took their objective, they left the Americans with the feeling that the British army could be beaten at will.
When General Washington took command, this feeling had begun to dissipate. As has been shown in an operation that began in Brooklyn and continued in and around Manhattan Island and then in Jersey, the troops George Washington led suffered defeat after defeat.
The army that Washington brought across the Delaware was, many observers thought, in the final stages of disintegration. The cause that he led at that time had been deemed hopeless by most of the sensible men in the colonies. After he had turned the tide at Trenton, the direction was upward, and even though the American forces were defeated many times and even though they endured winter encampments of great privation, such as that at Valley Forge, never again were they in a process of becoming the remnants around a lost cause.
On the other hand, neither did the progress of the war turn into an endless series of triumphs. It is true that two stunning victories followed Trenton—the first at Princeton in New Jersey, only a week later, and the second in the far Northeast through the summer and fall of 1777, where first Johnny Stark sent Burgoyne’s troops reeling and then Gates and Arnold defeated him decisively—but these two victories were only a prelude to four years of bitter, heartbreaking war. In battle after battle, Washington’s troops were either defeated or left holding bloody and indecisive ground.
In 1777, Washington was defeated at both Brandywine and at Germantown, after which he took the shattered remnants of his army into winter quarters at Valley Forge. Yet bad as his situation was, it was better than a year ago. He had proved to our French allies that Americans could face the British and Hessians, bayonet to bayonet, and win as well as lose. He had captured great stores of booty, so his condition, dreadful as it was, did not ever again approach the point of disintegration that marked the first crossing of the Delaware River; and most of all, he had proven to the financiers of the American cause that ground could be held and battles won and had thereby assured his army of at least minimum financial backing.
Having lived through the winter at Valley Forge, Washington turned to the offensive—as he had eighteen months before—and at the end of June, he attacked General Clinton’s army at Monmouth in New Jersey.
Who won or who lost the Battle of Monmouth was of less importance than the fact that it occurred. It was one of those indecisive battles in which neither side could claim either victory or a meaningful defeat of the enemy. The important point is that Washington attacked a great British army—not a small garrison, as at both Trenton and Princeton, but the solid heart of British military strength—and, at least at several points on the battlefield, held his ground and drove the British back.
The war went on. In the west, on the Pennsylvania frontier, two terrible massacres of Americans took place, while the Americans captured the British forts at Vincennes and Kaskaskia. The British moved by sea, and in 1779, they made dozens of incursions and sorties on the coasts of Connecticut, Virginia and the Carolinas. John Paul Jones brought the American navy into being, and fighting from an old hulk, he sank the British warship Serapis. In 1780, Gates was badly defeated by Cornwallis in the South, and then a year later, the brilliant and courageous Cornwallis was trapped in the South and destroyed.
Nathanael Greene began the process of Cornwallis’s defeat by facing him early in the year, defying him, meeting him and then retreating before him for three hundred miles into the South. When, in August, Cornwallis took up a defensive position at Yorktown, Washington took his army south by forced march, while the French fleet bore down upon Cornwallis by sea.
Out-generaled finally, trapped, General Cornwallis surrendered his army to Washington on the nineteenth of October in 1781, just tw
o months and six days short of five years after the crossing. Two more years would pass before a treaty of peace was finally signed, but to all effects and purposes, the war was over, although some sporadic fighting continued through most of 1782.
Thus, between the crossing and the signing of a treaty of peace, seven years ensued. At the end of that period, very few of the enlisted men who crossed the Delaware with General Washington were still in his army. Many of them were dead, some of wounds suffered in battle, far more of disease and of privation. Many others incurred incurable illness during the war and never truly recovered from these diseases.
It has been estimated that fewer than six thousand American soldiers died in battle during the American Revolution, but more than a hundred thousand died of wounds, in British prisons and of disease, privation and hunger. In the small population of the time, the cost of that war in human suffering was by no means inconsequential. These early volunteers were cooks who prepared the soup and the meat and the other courses of the dinner, but who never sat at the table or ate the food.
A study was once made of the average age of the soldiers in the army Washington led in 1776, and the figure was nineteen years. Like all statistics it tells only a part of the story. To get an average of nineteen years, there had to be hundreds who were no more than fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. These were the boys who had gone forth with high hopes and with brave hearts. The emotion that drew them was simple and uncomplicated. They were defending the land where they had been born and upon which they stood and for most of them the ground that they broke to plant and harvest their crops.
They knew little of war, nor did they make a fetish out of military glory. Quite to the contrary, the sere Protestant ethic that came out of the faith most of them espoused looked upon the European game of war, where men were moved like pawns and sacrificed without qualm or regret, as sin and evil beyond justification.
