Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (17 page)

Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834)
One of the Revolution’s idealists, this young Frenchman came to America at age nineteen, wealthy enough to pay for his own ship to make the journey. Like other young European aristocrats for whom war was a matter of personal honor and social standing, Lafayette came in search of glory and adventure. In exchange for a major general’s rank, he offered to serve without pay, and quickly earned Washington’s affection. They developed an almost father-son relationship. Given a minor command, Lafayette proved to be an able and loyal commander.

During a trip back to France, he was instrumental in securing the French military assistance that was the key to the American victory at Yorktown. At the surrender, Lafayette’s personal band proudly piped “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” once a song mockingly sung by the British to taunt the Americans. After the war, Lafayette returned to France with enough American soil in which to be buried.

Charles Lee (1731–82)
A British-born soldier who rose to general in the patriot army, Lee had fought in the French and Indian War with Braddock, and had seen combat in Europe as well. A professional soldier, he was far more experienced than most of the American commanders, including Washington, whom he grew to disdain. Commissioned a major general, he justified the rank with his defense of Charleston early in the war. He was later captured and held by the British for fifteen months. Allegedly, he offered his captors a plan for defeating the Americans. At the Battle of Monmouth, Lee ordered a confused and costly retreat, for which he was court-martialed and broken of command. He returned to Virginia, where he died in a tavern before the peace treaty was signed.

Francis Marion (1732?–95)
Best known as the Swamp Fox, Marion led a successful guerrilla war against British and vicious Tory troops under General Cornwallis in the Carolinas. It was the efforts of Marion and other guerrillas, including Charles Sumter, in the southern colonies that frustrated the British strategy to control the South. One British officer complained that he “would not fight like a Christian.”

Daniel Morgan (1735–89)
A veteran of Braddock’s French and Indian disaster, Morgan had driven supply trains, earning his nickname Old Wagoner. During the French and Indian War, Morgan had received 500 lashes over a fight with a British officer and he held a grudge. Another of Washington’s most valuable commanders, he led a troop of buckskinned frontier riflemen who played a crucial role in the victory at Saratoga. Elevated to general, he commanded half the southern army and led the key victory at Cowpens and was also instrumental in the bloody Battle of Guilford Court, where General Cornwallis’s losses were so heavy that the British commander had to abandon his plans to hold the Carolinas and retreat to Virginia.

Molly Pitcher (1754–1832)
During the exhausting summer heat of the Battle of Monmouth (1778), Mary McCauley Hays, the wife of Private John Hays, fetched water for her husband and his gun crew, earning her the sobriquet Molly Pitcher. When her husband was wounded in the battle, she knew his job well enough to help the gun crew continue firing. An apocryphal story they perhaps didn’t tell you in grade school was that a cannonball passed through Molly’s legs and tore away her petticoats. Molly is said to have told the men that it was a good thing it hadn’t been higher, or it would have carried away something else! After the war, Mary Hays became a scrubwoman and the Pennsylvania Assembly later granted her a yearly pension of $40.

Israel Putnam (1718–90)
A colonel in the Connecticut militia, Old Put left his plow, in the great tradition of civilian soldiers, and headed for Boston when the shooting started at Lexington. One of those in command on Breed’s Hill, he achieved immortality of sorts with his order, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” a well-known piece of military advice of the day.

When the rebel troops started to break ranks after inflicting heavy losses on the British, Putnam unsuccessfully tried to keep his troops in place. But his failure to reinforce an American position was one reason the patriot army left off the battle when a victory might have been won, and Putnam was nearly court-martialed. Instead, Congress made him a general out of regional political considerations. Though never a great strategist or commander, he remained a loyal aide to Washington throughout the war.

Comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807)
Commander of the 7,000 French troops sent to aid the rebels, Rochambeau had far more experience than Washington. Coordinating his movements with the French war fleet under Admiral de Grasse, Rochambeau deserves much of the credit for forcing the showdown at Yorktown at a time when Washington seemed to prefer an assault on New York.

Deborah Sampson (1760–1827)
Assuming the name Robert Shurtleff, this former indentured servant enlisted in the Continental Army in 1782 and became the only woman to serve formally in the Revolution. Fighting with the Fourth Massachusetts, she managed to maintain her disguise, although her fellow soldiers nicknamed her Molly because of her hairless face. A fever finally uncovered her true identity, and Sampson was discharged in 1783. She married the next year and received a small military pension. In 1802, she began a lecture tour, one of the first American women to do so, recounting her experiences as a soldier, a performance capped by her donning a soldier’s uniform. Congress granted her heirs a full military pension in 1838.

George Washington (1732–99)
As for the cherry tree story, it was one of many fabrications created by Washington’s “biographer,” Parson Weems, who also fashioned the “fact” that he was rector of a nonexistent parish at Mount Vernon. The coin tossed across the Rappahannock—not the Potomac—was another of Weems’s inventions. The legends began there, leaving “the father of our country” enshrouded in more layers of myth than any other figure in American history. Most of those myths came from the pen of Mason Locke Weems, whose
Life and Memorable Actions of Washington
was published in 1800. Many of his tales were invented to underscore Washington’s heroic qualities.

Washington was born into a modestly prosperous Virginia family. The death of his father, a tobacco planter, reduced his fortune, but with the help of relatives he did well, eventually inheriting the family estate at Mount Vernon. He was given a modest amount of “grammar school,” but never went to college. A plan to send him to the Royal Navy was squelched by his mother, who assumed—probably correctly—that a young American would never go far in the rigidly aristocratic British navy. Washington’s mother was tough and smoked a corn-cob pipe and, while he was respectful of her, they clearly did not have a warm relationship. He eagerly took the chance to live with an older half-brother.

An excellent horseman, with a natural affinity for math—as a boy, he counted the number of windowpanes and the stairs in staircases—Washington eventually combined his love for the outdoors with his mathematical ability by becoming a surveyor. Eventually he began to acquire some of the land he had been mapping. His early military career was mostly remarkable for the fact that he survived it. Yet when the French and Indian War was over, Washington was something of a homegrown American military hero.

His wealth came from his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis, the young widow of one of Virginia’s wealthiest men. By the time of the Revolution, Washington was among the richest men in America, although his holdings were in land and slaves rather than cash. As expected of men of his station, he ran for the House of Burgesses and was sent to the two Continental Congresses. After volunteering to serve without pay, he was unanimously chosen commander of the Continental Army when it became apparent that for political reasons a southerner had to fill the job.

There are conflicting views about his military leadership. Traditionalists say that he held together a ragged, ill-equipped army by sheer force of will, chose his commanders well, and had to spend too much time dickering with Congress for enough money to arm his men. This view also holds that he was a master of the strategic retreat, and tricked the British into believing his point of attack would be New York when it was actually Yorktown.

The revisionist view holds that Washington was an unduly harsh leader who maintained brutal discipline in the ranks, nearly lost the war several times, to be saved only by greater incompetence on the part of the British, was better at politicking than commanding, and had to be dragged against his will by the French to attack Yorktown. Several historians argue that Charles Lee or Horatio Gates would have been more daring commanders who might have ended the war sooner. It is an intriguing speculation that will remain unanswered, although Lee’s actions in battle and assistance to the British while a captive do little to arouse confidence in his abilities.

Clearly, Washington was no tactical genius on the order of Caesar or Napoleon. He fought nine battles during the war and won three of them. But that does not mean he was not a great leader. A story reported during the early days of the war is telling: in Boston, bands of American rebel fighters had gotten into a near riot. Washington raced to the scene on horseback and landed in the midst of a brawl. Physically imposing, Washington grabbed two of the men fighting, lifted each off the ground, and shouted commands at the rest. A witness to this scene, Major General John Sullivan of New Hampshire, later said, “From the moment I saw Washington leap the bars at Cambridge, I never faltered in the faith that we had the right man to lead the cause of American liberty.”

The fact remains that Washington, dealt a weak hand, surmounted the odds of poorly outfitted troops, political intrigues, numerous betrayals, and a vastly better equipped opposition to sweep up the jackpot. If nothing else, he was a consummate survivor, and that may have been what America required at the time. That he was universally loved by his soldiers seems unlikely; there were frequent mutinies for the suppression of which Washington kept a well-fed and -trained group of militia. He did inspire fierce loyalty among his officer corps, perhaps the true strength of a commander. For the American people, he was the first larger-than-life national hero, something a new nation arguably needs to survive.

In London after the war, King George III met with American painter Benjamin West and asked what Washington would do after the war. When West said that the general would resign and return to private life, the amazed king reportedly said, “If he does that, sir, he will be the greatest man in the world.” After his emotional farewell at Fraunces Tavern in New York, Washington did just that. He retired to Mount Vernon, until he was called back to serve as president at a time when probably no other man in America could have united the country behind the new government.

What was
Common Sense?

When the Continental Congress met for the second time, in May 1775, it was a very different group. The first Congress had been cautious and even conciliatory, with conservative and moderate voices holding sway. But the pendulum was swinging to the radical position, and there were new faces among the delegates, Benjamin Franklin—once cautious, now rebellious—and Thomas Jefferson among them.

Events were also moving swiftly. The battles at Lexington and Concord, the easy victory at Fort Ticonderoga, the devastating casualties inflicted on the British army by the rebels at Breed’s Hill, and the evacuation of British troops from Boston in March 1776 had all given hope to the Whig (patriot) cause. But the final break—independence—still seemed too extreme to some. It’s important to remember that the vast majority of Americans at the time were first and second generation. Their family ties and their sense of culture and national identity were essentially English. Many Americans had friends and family in England. And the commercial ties between the two were obviously also powerful.

The forces pushing toward independence needed momentum, and they got it in several ways. The first factor was another round of heavy-handed British miscalculations. First the king issued a proclamation cutting off the colonies from trade. Then, unable to conscript sufficient troops, the British command decided to supplement its regulars with mercenaries, soldiers from the German principalities sold into King George’s service by their princes. Most came from Hesse-Cassel, so the name Hessian became generic for all of these hired soldiers.

The Hessians accounted for as much as a third of the English forces fighting in the colonies. Their reputation as fierce fighters was linked to a frightening image—reinforced, no doubt, by the British command—as plundering rapists. (Ironically, many of them stayed on in America. Benjamin Franklin gave George Washington printed promises of free land to lure mercenaries away from English ranks.) When word of the coming of 12,000 Hessian troops reached America, it was a shock, and further narrowed chances for reconciliation. In response, a convention in Virginia instructed its delegates to Congress to declare the United Colonies free and independent.

The second factor was a literary one. In January 1776, an anonymous pamphlet entitled
Common Sense
came off the presses of a patriot printer. Its author, Thomas Paine, had simply, eloquently, and admittedly with some melodramatic prose, stated the reasons for independence. He reduced the hereditary succession of kings to an absurdity, slashed down all arguments for reconciliation with England, argued the economic benefits of independence, and even presented a cost analysis for creating an American navy.