1775 (75 page)

One circumstance should be underscored. Like the enmity and confrontation in South Carolina, the mobilization and marching to battle in North Carolina during the autumn and winter of 1775–1776 was in the nature of a civil war. This was true even though some of the Scottish Loyalists were only recently arrived from the old country. The only two serving British soldiers involved were Lieutenant Colonel Donald MacDonald and Captain Donald McLeod.

The late February defeat of the poorly led Highlanders at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, to which we will return in
Chapter 25
, in contrast to the Snow Campaign in South Carolina, did not even temporarily mark the end of local civil war. Whig militia continued to suppress the Scots and other identifiable Loyalists, and small confrontations persisted. And not surprisingly, when civil war returned to both Carolinas in 1779–1780, it repeated on a larger and bloodier scale, following much of the political geography of 1775.

The Cousins’ Wars: Civil War on a Grand Scale

In 1775, on both sides of the Atlantic, well-read Whigs and Tories were aware that a new civil war seemed to be arising, at least in part, from the
ideological, religious, and even regional footprints of the old one—the English Civil War of the 1640s. Pro-Americans in English politics, as we have seen, remarked that the enthusiastic high-church Anglicans of 1775 seemed to be reprising the royalist fervor of high churchmen prominent in the 1630s and 1640s. Avid Tories, for their part, enjoyed hurling the epithet “Oliverian.”

As we have seen, nothing better introduces the scope and intensity of the three great English-speaking civil conflicts than widespread disagreement even over their names. People in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also called the English Civil War the Great Rebellion. In the early twentieth century, an Englishman, Henry Belcher, published a book relabeling the Revolution as
The First American Civil War.
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In a way, it was. But obviously, the name has not stuck; nor have historians been obliged to consider the fighting between 1861 and 1865 the Second American Civil War. However, that conflict has been given many other names, including the War Between the States and the War for Southern Independence. Persons mindful of the links among the great civil wars have tried to impose grander appellations on the 1861–1865 period, with practically no acceptance. Examples include the Second American Revolution and the Second War for Independence.
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A second important link among the three wars lies in their complex and tangled origins. All three had roots in a combination of politics, constitutional controversy, economic interests, and intense religious belief and disagreement. Amid such input, I would not try to allocate percentages. Religion remained important throughout but played less of a role in the 1860s than it had in the 1640s, with the American Revolution falling in between. By way of quick oversimplification, one can identify common economic threads in which entrepreneurialism, commerce, and opportunity for manufacturing triumphed, with agrarian interests and mercantilism generally losing.
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A third bond involves the sort of conspiracy-mindedness displayed by Washington, Adams, and Jefferson in their indictments of King George and British policy toward America in the 1760s and 1770s, as well as their fear of Catholic links to tyranny and absolutism. Such interpretations had also been staples of Parliamentary thinking in the 1630s and 1640s. During the lead-up to the American Civil War, in turn, both sides repeatedly emphasized conspiracies against liberty, whether by the southern “slaveocracy” or “Black Republicans” trying to void the constitutional compact of 1787.
The Cousins’ Wars wouldn’t be the Cousins’ Wars without this ongoing conspiracy chain.
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Let us close with a different war-related irony. Despite the fact that the American secretary, Lord Dartmouth, and his stepbrother, Lord North, must have been reasonably acquainted with the divisions in America, neither man—at least in 1775—seems to have internalized a consciousness of the unfolding Revolution as a civil war that divided the English-speaking people. The international law of that era did not approve of foreign intervention in a civil war, and Thomas Jefferson’s legally inspired insistence in the Declaration of Independence about one “people” dissolving the bonds that tied them to another people simply didn’t comport with demographic and cultural realities of what was in many places a widespread fratricidal conflict. A strong British counterargument could have been made.

But the legend of the Declaration has far outstripped its reality, and it is to these political carryovers from 1775 that we now turn.

S
everal times in late 1775 and early 1776, a frustrated John Adams mused how much better things would have been with some kind of declaration of independence already in effect. In September he gloomed that Americans, behind schedule, should already “have completely modeled a constitution; to have raised a naval power, and opened all our Ports wide.”
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As late as July 3, more reasonably, he complained that “we might before this Hour, have formed alliances with foreign states. We should have mastered Quebec and been in possession of Canada.”
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Adams overstated what was possible. For much of 1775, the future United States had what Thomas Jefferson called de facto independence.
Except in Boston, British troops had left or been expelled. Governance was in American hands. David Armitage, a Declaration scholar, has contended that “for almost two years before making the Declaration, Congress had been exercising most of the rights claimed in that document.”
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Congress, after basic nation framing and army building between June and November, thereafter took a number of actions that clearly moved toward “independence,” labels that Adams chortled with satisfaction in applying. What the United Colonies did not have was de jure or legally established independence. In part, this was because moderates in the middle colonies, who had experienced no fighting, were hanging back and nursing vague, unrealistic hopes of reconciliation with Britain.

Backstage Patriot strategy regarding independence during the early months of 1776 had practically nothing to do with equality, natural law, or the pursuit of happiness. Its preoccupation was with completing unfinished business, pressuring middle-colony delegates, and getting approval for a Declaration—actual signatures could wait—before the transports and warships arriving in New York could disembark enough professional soldiers to frighten that province and New Jersey back into the arms of King George. The Patriots in Congress succeeded, but not without some heavy-handed tactics and nervous moments. And with very little time to spare.

Declaring de jure independence earlier had not been feasible. Certain preconditions had to be met. Political sentiment and loyalty in America had to metamorphose from condemnation of an evil Parliament to putting blame on a tyrannical George III, and from pursuing only home rule and basic self-determination to cutting the last legal ties with the British Empire. Although the middle colonies were slowest to make the leap, by midwinter their reluctance was being worn down by repeated disillusionment with the mother country—by the burning of American towns; by December’s Prohibitory Act, which expelled Americans from the protection of the Crown; by the king’s hiring of mercenaries; and by London’s unwillingness to send official negotiators or emissaries. Reluctant moderates and conservatives had waited for some kind of reassuring word or hope from England. In the spring, as weather and communications improved, the word from England was belligerent rather than conciliatory.

However, it still remained for Congress to deal with a set of procedural handcuffs. Between November and January, assemblies or provincial congresses in four of the five middle colonies had voted to bind their delegates in Philadelphia to oppose outright independence. New York had done so
earlier, during the summer of 1775. Sentiment was changing, but these manacles first had to be removed.

It was also true that opportunities had been lost. Jefferson, in the notes he kept, cited the view of one delegate that had America been independent that winter, the French, readier to be bold, might have prevented the petty German princes from hiring out their troops to Britain.
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Fortune smiled on May 8 when the British frigate
Roebuck,
cruising up the Delaware toward Philadelphia, was repulsed by the fire of a dozen Patriot row galleys. No broadside ever fell on Independence Hall. Yet all of the middle colonies remained bound by instructions that seemed out of date. Their eventual decision for de jure independence can be approached in four stages: May 10–15, June 7–11, June 23, and July 1–2. The fourth of July itself was not pivotal because the Declaration, agreed to on July 2, appears not to have been signed by delegates until August, and the last few signatures were only added in November.
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But before explaining, it is useful to jump ahead. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, in his colony’s name, put a momentous resolution before Congress: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” A further sentence declared “That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign alliances.” These two propositions stated the essence of what was being sought between May and July.

Lee’s resolution could have been passed then, but only by a narrow margin, which would have been foolish and probably disastrous. So a decision by Congress was postponed for three weeks to accommodate the middle colonies in removing their handcuffs and to further the all-important hope of unanimity. After the final vote for independence on July 2, the full verbiage of the Declaration—beyond Lee’s vital statements, now inserted into the text—was something of an anticlimax. Nevertheless, the story is worth retelling to emphasize the Declaration’s limited meaning
at the time
in 1776, the portentous interpretations having been added by later publicists and generations.

The Limited Role of the Declaration of Independence

Historians generally agree that Jefferson was picked to draft the Declaration of Independence principally because of his writing skills, but also because
the more prominent men in this endgame, John Adams and R. H. Lee, had seemingly greater tasks to perform—for Adams, planning foreign treaties and plotting for the new governments needed in many colonies; in Lee’s case, taking the lead in proindependence speech making and legislative management. Over the previous two years, Jefferson had developed a unique expertise in setting forth the supposed tyrannical behavior and usurpations of the British government in general and then, by spring 1776, of King George III in particular.

The youthful Virginian had begun this specialization in 1774, penning much of the
Summary View of the Rights of British America,
adopted by that summer’s First Virginia Convention. In a year when other Patriots harped on the misbehavior and abuses of Parliament, Jefferson had put a finger on royal responsibility and ventured a bold aside: “Let not the name of George III be a blot in the page of history.”
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Come 1775, he was the principal drafter—this time in Philadelphia by request of Congress—of the
Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,
published on July 6. Once again, British transgressions were the focus, mostly on Parliament’s part, but with the addition of Generals Gage and Carleton as military miscreants.
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In the spring of 1776, Jefferson was again drawn to Virginia, which was about to draft a constitution to guide its independent and republican future. Here his “black Catalogue of unprovoked injuries” moved center stage, because the king had to be made tyrant enough to justify revolution.
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Jefferson’s sixteen-point list of royal malfeasance dominated the preamble of the Old Dominion’s new constitution, adopted in June, and much of the indictment quickly reappeared in his Philadelphia drafts of the Declaration of Independence.

Once such a declaration by the United Colonies was placed on Congress’s calendar—the eventual document would devote 60 percent of its space to the abuses of George III—Jefferson was the only plausible wordsmith. By now, he had it all in his head. If Patrick Henry was Virginia’s leading rhetorical king basher, Jefferson dominated the literary hatchet work. Indeed, another Virginia lawyer-cum-politician, Edmund Pendleton, congratulated Jefferson over the Declaration for expanding his litany: “I expected you had…exhausted the Subject of Complaint against Geo. 3d and was at a loss to discover what Congress would do for one to their Declaration of Independence without copying, but find that you have acquitted yourself very well on that score.”
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