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7Revolution.pptxThe American Revolution
Commoner’s War, Aristocratic Triumph
Are we all better off because we had a Revolution?
Who actually fought? What were their motives?
Who benefited? Who did not?
To understand the American Revolution beyond the sustaining myths, these are some of the questions we have to ask.
The working classes certainly had complaints against the British, including lack of legal support, the fear of getting drafted to fight in one of Britain’s commercial wars, the fear of impressment into the British Navy to support its merchant fleet and control its colonies, taxes, etc.
The rich had their own dissatisfactions. One was the British control of land that the wealthier colonists felt should be theirs to dispose of as they saw fit.
George Washington’s interests in land acquisition would bring him to the West in both civilian and military capacities.
George Washington’s interest in trans-Appalachian lands ultimately led him to become a major participant in the French and Indian War and the Revolution. While there were certainly other issues, as we’ll see, that pushed Washington and many of his peers to rebel, land acquisition was a big one.
He’ was given command of a Virginia militia unit that was sent to Western Pennsylvania to dislodge the French. He ended up starting a war…The French and Indian War. Costs of this war and British bungling of colonial relationships in its aftermath resulted in the independence movement.
Washington Starts a War?
Ft. Necessity and Ambush
After Washington’s men slaughtered a French encampment, the French forced Washington to surrender.
Washington would go back to the frontier with General Braddock and witness the annihilation of British troops. Soon after, as tensions escalated, France and Britain would declare war on each other.
The Braddock Disaster
British General Edward Braddock was sent West with a large force to convince the French to leave disputed territories. George Washington went with him, having already had experience in the Ohio River Valley. Washington apparently went along reluctantly. He also seems to have warned Braddock that traditional tactics would fail against the Experienced French and their Indian allies.
Braddock failed to heed the advice, was ambushed and soundly defeated. Washington would rally the survivors and make an impressive escape.
Royal Recruits
Colonial Militias
Rangers
“Mountain Boys”
American Colonial Soldiers During the French and Indian War
During the war, the British made use of armed local colonists. Members of organized militias and gangs of “mountain boys” and frontiersmen would also be recruited by General Amhurst to form non-traditional fighting units. These units were charged with roaming far and wide through rough terrain in order to attack the French and their Indian allies, who had been raiding into British colonial areas with impunity.
These units were referred to as Rangers. Some, like Roger’s Rangers became known for atrocities that forced the public to wonder about the moral aspects of their fight.
Roger’s Rangers attacked St. Francis on the St. Lawrence River in Canada and purportedly engaged in acts of cannibalism against enemy women and children.
After the war, gangs of white settlers, enraged by what they saw as Indian atrocities, committed unprovoked atrocities themselves.
1764 The Paxton Boys Massacre 20 Peaceful Susquehannock Indians
Following the war, which dangerously depleted the British treasury, attempts at financial recovery using colonial resources led to the American Revolution.
The British had already been restricting trade, aiming to monopolize the benefits of colonial economics.
King George III
Englishmen All? War Costs and Joint Fiscal Responsibility ?
Many merchants who were affected by such restrictions formed black markets and smuggling networks to take advantage of trade opportunities outside of the British monopolies. This of course, made them criminals in British eyes.
Navigation Acts 1730s-1760s Restrict Colonial Trade to Britain ~ Outlawing Colonial Trade with France, Spain, and the Netherlands
Roots of vast smuggling operations.
Molasses Act 1733 and Sugar Act 1764 are taxes on sugar imports and meant to draw revenue from the colonies.
Effective colonial smuggling circumvents the taxes. British attempts to enforce the laws lead to tremendous colonial resentment.
British laws protected British merchants at the expense of the colonial economies. This was a main feature of Mercantilism, where the British government supported their own merchants, creating monopolies and supporting them both militarily and with monetary policies.
Currency Act
Meant to Protect British Merchants
Colonial issues of paper money can be used to pay taxes, but not to pay private debt (i.e. to merchants) due to inflation.
Colonial women organize boycotts of British goods.
When colonial resistance arose, the British government imposed laws meant to demonstrate who held the power. Lacking garrisons to house an influx of soldiers, an act was passed to house them with local colonists.
This was tantamount to having a police force living under your roof as you went about your daily activities.
1764 Quartering Act
At their own expense, colonists must house British soldiers.
In a revenue enhancement project, the British government imposed a new tax upon colonists that called for a fee for any public transaction. It required stamps of various costs, depending on the nature of the transaction.
The Stamp Act was rejected by many colonists who claimed that, without representation in Parliament, the taxes were both unjust and illegal. Unwittingly the British government had united the colonists in protest, since North and South, city and country, and rich and poor alike were subjected to the taxes.
For the first time, even after fighting a series of wars in common, there was a sense of geographical and class unity (although these pan-colonial sympathies only went so far, as we’ll see in later presentations.)
1765
Rich and poor alike.
Stamp Act
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Benjamin Franklin had tried to form a colonial union with his Albany Plan during the French and Indian War, but this was rejected both by the colonial elete who feared a centralized rule and by the British government who feared colonial unity.
The 1765 legislation brought the colonial elite together at New York City in what was called the Stamp Congress. Their agenda was to analyze the current situation and to explore the possibilities of collective protest. The precedence set at these meetings later led to the Continental Congresses as the relationship between the British government and it’s colonies deteriorated.
Stamp Act Congress
Foundations of Inter-Colonial Cooperation
Organizations of protest began to proliferate. Among them were the Son’s of Liberty whose members included an inter-class group affected not only by the Stamp Act, but by the continued embarrassment of impressment and kidnapping on the high seas, along with the various Navigation Acts.
Samuel Adams was long considered to be a leader of the Sons, but recent scholarship has brought me to reasses his involvement (see for example Pauline Maier’s article Coming to Terms With Samuel Adams in the American Historical Review. It is available through our library in the JSTOR Arts and Sciences database.
The Sons of Liberty
A multi-city, inter-class “secret society.”
A rural group of protestors calling themselves the Regulators, continued to harass the colonial elite while adding the British government as objects of scorn.
The Regulators
Against the British taxes and the corruptions of the colonial elite.
1766
The Stamp Act is repealed…
….but Parliament passes the Declaratory Act which is meant to undermine claims of “taxation without representation.” It says that Parliamentary rule is universal among English peoples.
Although Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, they did so in arrogant and alienating fashion. The Declaratory Act was a slap in the face of the protestors and this was followed by an even more oppressive act than the Stamp Act had been. The new taxes were imposed in the Townshend Acts (names after the new Prime Minister).
The Townshend Acts (1767) taxing glass, lead, paints, paper, and tea, inflames already volatile colonial passions against Parliament.
The trade restrictions, tax laws, and Quartering Act created economic devastation, including mass unemployment, in the port cities. The Quartering Act included a provision giving active British soldiers in the occupying army the few available jobs as an off-duty enhancement to their meager incomes.
In 1770 Boston, angry unemployed mobs would gather the streets, leading to a deadly confrontation with patrolling soldiers on March 5th. Five working class Bostonians were killed. The soldiers were put on trial for murder, but through the brilliant efforts of John Adams as their lawyer, they were acquitted.
Adams convinced an all colonial jury that the soldiers acted in self defense, and went on to blame the British government for placing them all in the volatile situation in the first place. Adams gained notoriety throughout the colonies.
Boston Massacre
1770
In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act which gave the East India company more control over tea based income, but also lowered the price of tea in the colonies. This seriously undercut the smuggling profits of colonial merchants.
The act also imposed a slight tax on tea. The colonists rejected this tax, reasoning that if they did so they would be acknowledging the right of Parliament to do so despite a lack of colonial representation.
The Tea Act of 1773
Intended to Protect the East India Company’s Colonial Tea Monopoly
In an act of sabotage, the Son’s of Liberty organized the dumping of 45 tons of East Indian Company tea into Boston Harbor. This action seemed to be the final straw, leading the British government to impose a set of Draconian laws on the people of New England.
1773
Boston Tea Party
As mentioned before, the colonial elite as well as the working poor who wanted settlement land, were deeply angered by the Proclamation Act of 1763 which forbade settlement in Western lands.
Now the Quebec Act seemed like salt in the wound, giving their very enemies in the French and Indian War concessions in religion and territory. It also created a centralized model of colonial government that would be imposed in the 13 lower colonies.
…but why were rich landowners and poor farmers seeking homesteads so upset?
The Royal Proclamation of 1763
Quebec Act of 1774
At the same session of Parliament that saw the passage of the Quebec Act, the British imposed a set of Coercive Act meant to punish for their insubordination.
The colonists would call these the Intolerable Acts.
The Coercive (aka Intolerable) Acts of 1774
Washington calls the Administration of Justice Act “the Murder Act
More troops were sent to Boston under General Gage and they began to hunt down the suspected ringleaders of the protests.
They accused these leaders of a variety of crimes, many of which were true.
Gage and Troops to Boston
April ‘74
John Adams
Sam Adams
John Hancock
Paul Revere
Instigators
Spies
Conspirators
Messengers
Gun Runners
Merchants
Smugglers
Statesmen
Patriots
Leaders from throughout the colonies (except Georgia) gathered in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774 to discuss what should be done. While all were concerned and even angry at the laws passed to suppress independent thinking, many, if not most, were reluctant to see violent reaction as an option.
They did agree to boycott British goods, hoping to damage the British economy and thus persuade Parliament to lift the Coercive Acts.
First Continental Congress
12 Colonies agree to boycott and to meet again.
September 5, 1774 to October 26, 1774,
Meanwhile, New Englanders were arming for rebellion. Much of the a available armory was financed by John Hancock, who would be the object of a British march from Boston to Concord.
Hancock
Paul Revere organized the messenger/spy network. His actions were overly romanticized by early 19th century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, but as the historian David Hackett Fisher maintains, he was nonetheless worthy of a strong historical reputation.
(The Long Island teenager Sybil Ludington is probably more worthy of the romantic esteem given her own midnight ride.)
Israel Bissell
Paul Revere
Sybil Ludington
The British occupation force marched toward Concord on April 19th, 1775, but were confronted by so-called minutemen at a bridge in Lexington. Shots were fired and these would go down in traditional histories as the first shots of the Revolution. Many have argued, however, that the war had already begun in earlier years. Nevertheless, this confrontation stirred the fears and ambitions of colonists from north to south.
The colonists would retreat from Lexington but regroup in Concord, a few miles west. They gained an unexpected victory at Concord prompting Gage to send word to England that this was all out rebellion and that he required additional military resources to get it under control.
Lexington
Concord
Breed’s Hill
The colonists surrounded the British in Boston and later, in the early summer, fought a pitched battle with them on the Charleston Peninsula referred to as the Battle of Bunker Hill. While the British ultimately won, they were convinced that the Americans had become a formidable enemy.
June 17th 1775
The battle took place as colonial leaders were meeting in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress. The Congress issued a half-hearted peace Proposal known as the Olive Branch Petition, but it was too little, too late. (The colonists had already invaded Canada.)
The Second Continental Congress will remain in sessions until a new governing body is formed by ratification of the Articles of Confederation toward the end of the Revolutionary War.
Second Continental Congress
May 10, 1775 – Feb. 1781
Olive Branch Petition July 5th, 1775
after invasion of Canada
They also drew up a document explain to the rest of the colonists why they were going to war. This was, of course, upsetting to most Americans…even to many of those who supported the cause.
Second Continental Congress
(Convenes May 1775 and Stays in session for over a decade.)
Declaration of Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (July 1775)
June 1775
Washington is appointed Commander –in-Chief
of the
Revolutionary Forces
New Hampshire ratifies a State Constitution in January, 1776. The other colonies follow suit.
Despite declarations from the Continental Congress and from each of the states, the purposes and motivations behind the rebellion were poorly articulated. This changed with the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Paine’s little pamphlet excited Americans and pushed then toward further action and toward better explanations of their rebellion.
January 1776
A simple, direct democracy.
Declaration of Independence
July 1776
John Adams Massachusetts
Benjamin Franklin Pennsylvania
Roger Sherman Connecticut
Robert Livingston New York
Thomas Jefferson
Virginia
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Steeped in the traditions of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. It is a combination of poetic determination and a prosaic listing of grievances.
Read the entire document. We’ll be reviewing it in some detail in our next discussion.
http://www.ushistory.org/DECLARATION/document/
Newton
Locke
Smith
Hume
Still, it is a statement of universal freedom that excludes women and African Americans.
“he [the king of Britain] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. “
The war had been raging since “74, but there was no unifying document until the 2d Continental Congress wrote the Articles Of Confederation for Perpetual Union in ‘77, which was debated and not ratified until 1881 at the end of the war.
It was a patchwork document that failed to address many of the concerns Americans had bout the so-called unity. Under the Articles, the individual colonies were to remain independent states (i.e. countries).
Approved by Congress
Nov. 15, 1777
Ratified
March 1, 1781
Americans were split into at least three mentalities or outlooks: 1) Pro-Revolutionary Patriots; 2) Pro-British Loyalists; and 3) the largest sensibility, neutrality.
Patriots
Loyalists
Neutralists
Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys initially fight for the Patriots. They take Ft. Ticonderoga in 1775.
Later, without Allen, the “Boys” will be a significant factor in the war’s most important battle at Saratoga and at several other key battles.
Vermont will eventually become Neutralist.
The Revolution quickly becomes a civil war. Many urban workers and mountain settlers fight for the Patriots.
Slaves and freedmen are caught in the middle.
One of the bloodiest battles of the war is fought between two factions of colonists at King’s Mountain, S.C. in 1780.
Many loyalists like Landon Carter think that the world is coming to and end…that the rebellion portends the end of civil society.
Class distinctions are exacerbated during the war.
Working class soldiers often don’t understand what the war is about and their initial enthusiasms recede into profound grievances.
The Continental Congress will use a number of desperate measures to fund the war. Robert Morris will do this rather brilliantly after 1781.
But, soldiers pay is devalued monthly because of rampant inflation, and they are “encouraged” to buy war bonds that many cannot afford to hold onto after the war in order to get full value.
Many working class soldiers returning home after the war will find their families gone, farms repossessed, and if wounded they may be unemployable.
While words like “freedom” were used by all (including Loyalists), working class common soldiers were fighting for the radicalism of social reform, while the officer elite were generally fighting for the radicalism of economic freedom from British mercantilist demands.
Early in the war, the Americans will attempt to annihilate the Indians or at least to remove them from the Ohio Valley. This is land coveted by American commercial interests, including a number of the so-called founding fathers.
Destruction of the Six Nations
Washington couldn’t maintain control of New York against a superior British force, so he retreated. Had he not done so, the war would have been over.
His recruitment efforts their ran into a number of glitches and the Continental forces were ragtag army at best.
August 1776
Battle of New York
On their way to Philadelphia they had to cross the Delaware River. Look at the following picture and see if you can pick out the flaws in this highly romantic and patriotic portrayal.
Crossing the Delaware
Dec. 25-26, 1776
Washington will get his first, much needed victories against the Hessian troops at Trenton and Princeton. The Hessians are German mercenaries hired by George III to fight the Americans. (Remember, the Hanovers, were Germans themselves.)
December, 1776
But, it was a almost a year later that the Americans once perhaps their most significant victory of the war at Saratoga in the Hudson River Valley.
The battle was ostensibly won by General Horatio Gates, who got the credit, but later historians point out that Benedict Arnold was the true hero of the battle.
After this, the French were convinced that the Americans could win and they began to support the American efforts both financially and militarily.
Saratoga
Fall 1777
Burgoyne
Gates
Arnold
After giving up Philadelphia, Washington was forced to regroup for the winter of 77-78 at Valley Forge. Contrary to popular histories, it was not a particularly cold winter. This fact allowed the troops, who would eventually get supplies from the Congress and training, from the likes of a German soldier named von Steuben, to prepare for the next season’s campaigns.
Valley Forge
Winter 1777-78
Washington hires
von Steuben
By Fall of 78, French armies had arrived in America. Despite his youth, LaFayette became a general in Washington’s army, while a couple of years later his French counterpart Rochembaud would lead the French troops.
May 1778
Louis XVI
While Washington fought in the North or Middle states, the South was more of a guerrilla war. These tactics proved effective as Francis Marion “the Swamp Fox” kept British General Cornwallis’ troop frustrated. The when northerner Daniel Morgan brought his troops to South Carolina and defeated Cornwallis, the British general decided to give up the South.
Cornwallis settled his troops in at Yorktown on a coastal peninsula in Virginia. He expected to be picked up there by the British navy.
It was a race, since Washington and his Generals Greene and LaFayette were all converging on Yorktown.
Yorktown
1781
LAFAYETTE
ROCHAMBEAU
Washington
Greene
A French fleet, under the command of the Marquis de Grasse, turned back the British squadron headed to Yorktown, thus sealing the fate of Cornwallis and his troops.