Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (16 page)

Most of his war years were spent in Virginia as a legislator and later as governor. After his wife’s death, in 1783, he joined the Continental Congress and served as ambassador to France, where he could observe firsthand the French Revolution that he had helped inspire. Returning to America in 1789, Jefferson became Washington’s secretary of state and began to oppose what he saw as a too-powerful central government under the new Constitution, bringing him into a direct confrontation with his old colleague John Adams and, more dramatically, with the chief Federalist, Alexander Hamilton.

Running second to Adams in 1796, he became vice president, chafing at the largely ceremonial role. In 1800, Jefferson and fellow Democratic Republican Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College vote, and Jefferson took the presidency in a House vote. After two terms, he returned to his Monticello home to complete his final endeavor, the University of Virginia, his architectural masterpiece. As he lay dying, Jefferson would ask what the date was, holding out, like John Adams, until July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration.

Richard Henry Lee (1732–94)
A member of Virginia’s most prominent family and the House of Burgesses, Lee was a valuable ally of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams. Sent to the Continental Congress in 1776, he proposed the resolution on independence and was one of the signers of the Declaration.

James Otis (1725–83)
A descent into madness kept this Boston lawyer, a writer and speaker on a par with the greats of the era, from earning a greater place in Revolutionary history. Samuel Adams’s first ally, Otis became one of the most fiery of the Boston radicals, his pamphlets declaring the rights of the colonists and introducing the phrase “no taxation without representation.” Although he attended the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, by 1771 his behavior was increasingly erratic. Walking the streets of Boston, he fired pistols and broke windows until his family bound him and carted him off to a country farm. In and out of asylums, he died when his farmhouse was struck by lightning.

Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
One of the Revolution’s pure idealists, the English-born Paine lived up to his name in the eyes of those he attacked. Unsuccessful in London, where his radical notions got him into trouble, he came to America with the aid of Benjamin Franklin. At Franklin’s urging, he wrote
Common
Sense
and helped push the colonies toward independence.

With the Continental Army in retreat, he later wrote a series of pamphlets at Washington’s request that became
The Crisis
. In 1781, he went to France and helped secure a large gold shipment for the rebel cause. After the war he returned to England and wrote
The Rights of Man
, which earned him a conviction on charges of treason. He took refuge in France, where his antimonarchist ideas were welcomed as France went through the throes of its great Revolution. But as that revolution began to eat its own, Paine was imprisoned and wrote
The Age of Reason
while awaiting the guillotine. Spared execution, he returned to America. The eternal gadfly, Paine alienated the new American powers-that-be with his
Letter to Washington
, and died a poor outcast.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

From
The Crisis
by T
HOMAS
P
AINE
:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink from the service of his country. . . . Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered.

Paul Revere (1735–1818)
“Listen my children and you shall hear . . .” It is perhaps the best-known bit of doggerel in American literature. But like most epic poems, Longfellow’s tribute to the Boston silversmith fudges the facts. Boston born, Revere was the son of a Huguenot, the French Protestants who had been driven from France. In America, he changed his name from Apollos Rivoire. A silversmith like his father, Paul Revere also went into the false-teeth business. A veteran of the French and Indian War, he was in the Samuel Adams circle of rebels, serving as a messenger. He took an active part in all the events leading up to the war, and his famous engraving of the Massacre, which had been lifted from the work of another artist, became an icon in every patriot home.

But it was the ride to Lexington that brought him immortality of sorts. In fact, he made two rides. The first was to warn the patriots to hide their ammunition in Concord, and the second was the famous “midnight ride.” After receiving the signal from the South Church, Revere and two other riders set off. Although he was able to reach Lexington and warn John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and the Minutemen of the British approach, Revere was soon captured.

His wartime record was also slightly tarnished. Despite his services as a trusted courier, he had not received a commission from Congress and served out the war in a militia unit. In one of his few actions, Revere was ordered to lead troops against the British at Penobscot. Instead he marched his men back to Boston when American ships failed to engage the British. Because he was relieved of command and accused of cowardice, Revere’s honor was smudged until a court acquittal in 1782.

Joseph Warren (1741–75)
A Boston physician, Warren became one of Sam Adams’s most devoted protégés. An active participant in the major prewar event in Boston, Warren became an instant hero when he charged into enemy fire at Lexington to treat the wounded. His fame was short-lived as he became one of the first patriot martyrs. Commissioned a general despite a lack of experience, he joined the ranks on Breed’s Hill and was killed in the fighting there.

Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814)
Sister of the patriot leader James Otis, Mercy Warren surmounted the heavy odds placed before women in eighteenth-century America to become a writer of considerable influence. A dramatist, she was unable to see her plays performed because Puritan Boston did not permit theatrical works. An outspoken critic of the Constitution, she wrote widely to defeat its ratification. In 1805, she published the first history of the Revolution, the three-volume
Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution
. While rich in anecdotal material and period detail, the book was colored by Warren’s fierce anti-Federalist bias, and was written in the full fervor of postwar patriotic sentiment.

THE SOLDIERS

Ethan Allen (1738–89)
A flamboyant veteran of the French and Indian War and a giant of a man, Allen raised a private army in Vermont called the Green Mountain Boys during an ongoing border dispute with Vermont’s sister colony, New York. After Lexington, Allen and his men, joined by Benedict Arnold, captured the undermanned Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York from the British, but he was voted out of command of the Green Mountain Boys. Captured during an assault on Montreal in 1775, Allen was thrown in irons and returned to England to stand trial. He was held prisoner for two years. Later he attempted to negotiate a separate peace treaty with the British. And in May 1778, he joined Washington at Valley Forge, was given a commission, and returned to Vermont, where he pressed the cause of Vermont’s independence from New York and New Hampshire. There is a suggestion that he was negotiating with the British to make Vermont a province of Canada. He died of apoplexy before Vermont was admitted as the 14th state.

George Rogers Clark (1752–1818)
A surveyor and frontiersman, Clark led the successful military operations against the British and their Indian allies on the western frontier in what would later become Kentucky.

Horatio Gates (c. 1728–1806)
A British-born soldier, he was badly wounded in his first action during the French and Indian War. Gates took up the patriot cause and led the American forces that won the key battle at Saratoga in 1777. But later that year he took part in an abortive attempt to wrest control of the army from George Washington. In 1780, he was given command of the army in the South, but was badly defeated at Camden, South Carolina, and lost his command. After the war, Gates was reinstated as the army’s second ranking officer.

Nathanael Greene (1724–86)
A Rhode Island Quaker with no military experience, Greene became a self-taught student of military history and emerged as one of the war’s most successful tacticians, rising to the rank of general. At the war’s outset, he commanded Rhode Island’s three regiments but was picked by Washington for rapid advancement. With Washington at the defeats in Long Island and Manhattan as well as the victory at Trenton, he made his greatest contribution as a commander in the South. Using a guerrilla strategy, he harassed Cornwallis from the Carolinas, forcing him back toward Virginia and the Yorktown showdown. At the end of the war, his reputation was second only to that of Washington. After the war he fell into financial difficulty because he had pledged much of his personal fortune to an associate who went bankrupt. In 1785, he settled on the confiscated estate of a loyalist near Savannah, Georgia, but died there the following year from sunstroke.

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804)
Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was proof that low birth need not be an impediment in early America. The illegitimate son of a shopkeeper mother whose father deserted them, Hamilton caught the attention of wealthy benefactors who sent him to King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York. He became an ardent patriot and, at age nineteen, was leading a company of New York artillery.

At Trenton he caught Washington’s eye and became a favorite, rising to the position of Washington’s aide and private secretary, and later commanding in the field. A convenient marriage to the daughter of Philip Schuyler, a powerful New Yorker, gave him entrée to society and additional clout.

His career was even more significant after the war, when he established a law practice in New York and became a key figure in the constitutional convention of 1787. Hamilton was one of the chief essayists behind
The Federalist Papers
arguing for the Constitution’s ratification (see Chapter 3). He became Washington’s secretary of the treasury, and was a crucial figure in the first two administrations, establishing the nation’s economic policies. But he became involved in political and amorous intrigues that crippled his career.

He returned to private practice, remaining a central figure in the Federalist Party, and his views were the source of the feud that led to his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.

John Paul Jones (1747–92)
Essentially an adventurer who followed the action, America’s first naval hero was born John Paul in Scotland and began his career on a slave ship. He came to America under a dark cloud following the death of one of his crewmen, and added Jones to his name. When the Congress commissioned a small navy, Jones volunteered and was given the
Providence
, with which he raided English ships. With the
Ranger
, he sailed to France and continued his raids off the English coast. The French later gave him a refitted ship called the
Bonhomme Richard
, and with it he engaged the larger British ship
Serapis
in a battle he won at the loss of
Bonhomme Richard
. A hero to the French, Jones was later sent to France as an emissary, and received a congressional medal in 1787. He finished his sea career with the Russian navy of the Empress Catherine before his death in Paris. (In 1905, his supposed remains were returned to the U.S. and reburied at Annapolis, Maryland.)

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

J
OHN
P
AUL
J
ONES
during the battle against
Serapis
:

I have not yet begun to fight.

Henry Knox (1750–1806)
A Boston bookseller and a witness to the Boston Massacre, Knox rose to become the general in charge of Washington’s artillery and one of the commander-in-chief’s most trusted aides. His nickname, Ox, came from both his substantial girth—he stood six feet, three inches and weighed some 280 pounds—and for the exploit in which, during the dead of winter in 1775, he transported the British cannons captured at Fort Ticonderoga by oxcart back to Boston. In Washington’s first engagement as commander, these guns were placed on Dorchester Heights, forcing General Howe’s army to evacuate the city without a shot being fired.

At Yorktown, Knox commanded the artillery bombardment of General Cornwallis’s forces and after the war, he served in Congress. War secretary under the Articles of Confederation, Knox was a trusted aide to Washington and became the first war secretary following Washington’s election. He also founded the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization formed (1783) by former officers of the Continental Army. Initially nonpolitical, the society became a conservative Federalist power and was criticized as an aristocratic military nobility. To counter the Society, Tammany societies were formed by working-class veterans in cities like New York and Philadelphia, which soon evolved into an anti-Federalist power. (Both Knoxville and Fort Knox are named for him.)