The USA is 250 years old today – but how did it start?
In 2000, I went to see the film “The Patriot” starring Mel Gibson and I thought that the American revolution could not possibly have been that simplistic so, on a trip to Washington DC later that year, I bought a book at the National Museum of American History: “A Short History Of The American Revolution” by James L Stokesbury. He is an American who worked as a professor of history at Acadia University in Canada. His book – first published in 1991 – is a lucid account of a seminal event encompassed in just short of 300 pages.
I suppose that, for Americans, the story of the revolution is a very familiar one, taught in schools and part of the psyche. However, for someone like me – British and with no schooling whatsoever in the period – Stokesbury’s book was a revelation. I just learned so much.
For starters, I had thought of the war as a relatively intense and short-lived affair of some months. In fact, it lasted eight years (1775-1783) and involved twenty or so major battles. For much of the time, though, “the war just bumbled along” and frequently looked like “a sort of equilibrium”. It looked as if “neither side was capable of winning it and both were tired of waging it” and, five years on, it was “less a contest of physical forces than of willpower or, more correctly, staying power”. Arguably the decisive battle of the war was Yorktown in late 1781, but peace was not signed until almost two years later and the British maintained their holdings in America even longer than that. At the end of it all, “The country was militarily exhausted and financially ruined”.
I had not appreciated either how much the American War of Independence was in fact a civil war. About 50,000 Americans actively fought for the British side. Stokesbury puts it this way: “The general estimates are that perhaps a third of the population were active supporters of the Revolution or Patriots; and one third were actively for the King or Loyalists or Tories; with the other third wanting to be left alone as much as possible; or, that one quarter took either active position, and as much as one half formed the amorphous and neutral middle”. One of the dreadful features of so many civil wars is often atrocities and, in this case, both sides were guilty of brutalities.
I had certainly not understood that this so-called American war was in effect a world war. From the start, the British employed foreign units, notably some 30,000 Germans (most of them from Hesse-Cassel). For their part, the Americans sought and obtained allies from the European powers opposing the maritime strength of thalassocratic Britain. First, the old enemy France declared war on Britain; then Spain and the Netherlands came out against the British; and finally the Baltic powers – Russia, Denmark and Sweden – combined in an anti-British coalition called ‘Armed Neutrality’ and, before the war ended, Prussia, Portugal, Austria and the Two Sicilies had all joined this alliance. So, as well as America, there were major theatres of war in the West Indies, the Mediterranean, India, and the English Channel.
Through the mists of time, we tend to see history in black and white terms in which events had almost an inevitability about them. Stokesbury makes it clear that reality was much more complicated.
For a start, in spite of all the intense research of the period, so much is still unknown or unclear. We do not even know who fired the first shot of the war on 18 April 1775 at Lexington. The conduct and casualties of many of the battles are confused.
Also the supporters of independence were far from a united army battling the evil British. There was enormous conflict between the Continental Congress and the individual states – a tension which continues today – and immense rivalry over who was to command which forces with the infamous Conway cabal against George Washington. There was desertion, mutiny and even treason in the shape of Benedict Arnold. Stokesbury writes: “It is fair to say that George Washington was the one indispensable man of the American Revolution and that, without him, there were several times when the whole enterprise would probably have collapsed”.
Then there is the odd situation of New York, then – as now – the chief city of the continent. For most of the war, it was securely held by the British and the Americans could do nothing to retake it. Stokesbury explains: “The military theory of the period held that, if you took the enemy’s capital, or his major cities, he would have sense enough to make peace. But the Americans were not involved in a conventional eighteenth-century war”.
Finally, there is a tendency to think of both the outbreak of the revolution and its success as inevitable. A more sensitive handling of genuine grievances by King George III and his Ministers would have made all the difference. Canada was kept for the British and the thirteen states could have been secured as well. A more determined effort by the British at the end of the first year of the war – following the taking of New York – and world history could have been very different. If one sees the conflagration as a world war, then Britain won in four of the five theatres.
And not one mention of Mel Gibson …