Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (13 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

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Thomas Paine’s inflammatory pamphlet
Common Sense
called for independence and denounced monarchy generally, and had a huge sale and influence. Washington had sent a force to gain control of the British province of Quebec and persuade the French-speaking Canadians to join the incipient revolt. They captured Montreal but were sent packing before the walls of Quebec. Washington asked Franklin, as the Americans’ preeminent diplomat, to try his hand at persuading the Canadians. Unfortunately for the cause, the government of Canada was in the hands of a governor so skillful that had he been given charge of America instead, he might have settled down the whole problem. Sir Guy Carleton, subsequently Lord Dorchester, had caused the British adoption of the Quebec Act in 1774, by which the French Canadians pledged allegiance to the British Crown and the British government pledged preservation of the French language, the Roman Catholic religion, and the civil law. Both sides adhered rigorously to their pledges.
For the French Canadians, there was a credibility problem in the American profession of friendship, as hostility to the French and to Roman Catholicism had been prominent in the attitudes of their late opponents in the French and Indian (Seven Years’) Wars. Franklin was empowered to make no such pledge of continuity and cultural security, though he could probably have managed the religious and legal guarantees. But as citizens of a united amalgamation of emancipated colonies, the French population of 100,000 was sure to be subsumed in the English-speaking majority of three million. The Americans had been foraging off the land and were hugely unpopular with the locals, and they were effectively chased out of Canada. (Benedict Arnold, an able general, commanded, and underestimated at the outset, by almost 50 percent, the length of the long trek ahead of him. He led his force well, as he would continue to do as the most controversial figure in the war, but it was an impossible mission.)
From Lexington and Concord, possibly the most mythologized aspects of this entire conflict (no one knows which side fired the first shot “heard round the world”; Paul Revere did not ride alone, never got to Concord, and was arrested by the British in mid-ride; and Longfellow was perhaps the greatest myth-maker of all the fabulists who have had a hand in this, starting with Jefferson), the British repaired to Boston and the armies met at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. It was a bloody engagement, and the British retained control of Boston, but it was something of a moral victory for the Americans to have held their own so tenaciously against a larger and better-trained force. The British lost about half of the 2,200 men engaged, and three times as many casualties as the Americans. Washington skillfully besieged Boston, and the British commander, General William Howe, withdrew by sea to Halifax on March 17, 1776.
The war largely adjourned, apart from the redoubled preparations of both sides, until the British reappeared at New York on June 25. Hundreds of transports commanded by the naval commander, Admiral Richard Lord Howe, brother of lands forces commander, General William Lord Howe, transported 30,000 men, a remarkable feat of amphibious warfare for the time. General Howe’s second-in-command, Henry Clinton, had proposed going up the Hudson to what is now Morningside Heights, disembarking and cutting off Washington’s retreat from his positions on Manhattan and Long Island, which might have been a decisive stroke, but General Howe disembarked on Staten Island on July 2, 1776.
3. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
 
John and Samuel Adams had pushed through the Congress by a narrow margin a bill ordering each colony to suppress what remained of British government within its borders. A committee was set up to declare the independence of the colonies, consisting of Jefferson (whose “felicity of expression,” in Adams’s words, was widely recognized), Franklin, Adams, Robert Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut, representing five different colonies, though only Jefferson represented the South. Jefferson was tasked with writing the draft, which he did over nearly three weeks in the Philadelphia boarding house where he was living. He adapted his draft constitution of Virginia. Adams and Franklin had some substantive suggestions, which Jefferson incorporated, and the draft of the declaration was given to the Congress on June 28, 1776.
Jefferson addressed two objectives: the demonization of George III as a tyrant of Caligulan proportions, whose iniquities justified in themselves the revolt that was starting, and a universal declaration of human rights designed to put the new insurgent regime at the forefront of the Enlightenment’s exaltation of human rights, from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The second purpose thunders out of the preamble (and also winds up the document): “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
These words, and the conclusion, pledging everything including “our sacred Honour” to fight for the achievement of independence, have enjoyed an immense historical resonance. Their stirring appeal to natural law and the concept of universal rights and the dignity of all men are justly celebrated, both for their eloquence and their historical importance. But they are a rather grandiose magnification of what was really a straight jurisdictional dispute, over the right of the British Parliament, whose authority had not previously been challenged in America, to levy taxes in America, largely to retire debts incurred in defending the colonists from the French and the Indians. The ill-considered actions of the British government had been as vigorously, and at least as stirringly, debated in the British Parliament as the intrepid accretions of the ambitions of the revolutionaries had been debated in their Congress.
Only the lead weight of the king’s friends in Parliament (and this for the last time in British history), backed by the infelicitous combination of jingoism and the pomposity that generally afflicts the attitudes of imperial powers to their colonists, torqued up the press and official and public opinion to take such a strong line against the colonists. It must be said that the Americans had shown an athletic dexterity in shifting from importunity for assistance against France to extreme protectiveness about their right not to be taxed by a previously authoritative Parliament that had, on urgent request, rendered redemptionist services to the rebels. There is no clear absence of right for Britain to tax the colonists, especially at this time and for the reduction of debt subscribed for this purpose. And despite Jefferson’s commendable improvisation of self-evident truths and inalienable rights adhering, by act of the Creator, to human life itself, Jefferson and many of the other delegates were slaveholders, and were deists or more distant believers in any notion of a Creator. And the British not only possessed and exercised as many of these rights and truths as the Americans, but they, and not Jefferson’s bowdlerized rendering of Enlightenment philosophers, were the source of any American enjoyment of them. It was, in the abstract, a bit rich for these delegates to throw all this back in the face of the Mother of Parliaments, which, whatever its electoral chicaneries and shortcomings, was the world’s, and America’s, chief source of the rights claimed.
Of course, the British have their own myths, and the Glorious Revolution of 1687 and the Settlement Act of 1701 are pretty weak reeds on which to claim a great coruscation of self-government. The concepts of human rights, the rule of law, and responsible government had, with the utmost difficulty, taken some hold in a few places—Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, parts of Scandinavia, and, sketchily and tentatively, a few Italian and German principalities (where, as the future history of those countries would show, they were very fragile and easily revocable). America was not adding much to what already existed, except the genius of presentation and of the spectacle, which Jefferson may be said to have originated in America, as opposed to outright propaganda, a laurel that falls to Paine. These talents that Jefferson bestowed on the questing new regime have never departed the character and society of America, and have been much amplified by media technology, and with Washington’s military leadership and Franklin’s diplomatic brilliance, must be considered one of the original ingredients of the American story that would command and rivet the attention of the whole world for centuries after.
The other main element of the Declaration of Independence, the representation of George III as an epochal tyrant of satanic odiousness, like the blood libel on the American Indians as barbarous savages of no merit, as if they had not been the rightful inhabitants of the new nation before being rather brusquely displaced, were much more emphasized at the time of publication. And they have, naturally, not weathered the ages as successfully. George III was not a tyrant at all, and his greatest minister up to this time, Chatham (rivaled in all of his 60-year reign only by his son the younger William Pitt), was as strenuous a critic of his policy as the leading American revolutionaries. At the height of these events, the young Charles James Fox, just 26, told the House of Commons on October 26, 1775, nine months before the Declaration of Independence: “The Earl of Chatham, the king of Prussia [Frederick the Great], nay Alexander the Great never gained more in one campaign than the noble Lord North [then the prime minister] has lost—he has lost a whole continent.” (Fox betrayed unjustified pessimism about Canada and in the interests of forensic hyperbole ignored Mexico, but he expressed accurately the contempt of the opposition for the king’s policy.)
The attack on the Indians was understandable and they were primitive and often barbarous, but few people today would dispute that they had some rights of prior possession that were simply dismissed with a brutality that was cavalier and often aggravated by violations of treaties and agreements on the most spurious pretexts. The British were, if anything, more respectful of native rights than the colonists, and certainly British policy toward Indians in Canada was a good deal more civilized than American, and almost wholly untainted by the corruption that afflicted American policy to Indians from colonial to modern times.
The principal congressional edit of the Declaration was the removal of Jefferson’s effort to blame the importation of slavery into the colonies on George III. This from Jefferson, who recognized the moral difficulty of slavery and its potential to disrupt the new country’s future but could not bring himself to emancipate his slaves, and carried on a sexual relationship for 38 years with one (Sally Hemings), who bore him seven children and from whom most of his descendants came, is a brazen act of hypocrisy. Fortunately for Jefferson and the acoustical clarity of the call to the ages he was writing, his colleagues saw that the great pamphleteer was intoxicated with his own virtuosity, as man and craftsman, and excised that one allegation.
The British regarded the Americans as ingrates, and they were. The Americans regarded the British as overbearing and presumptuous meddlers, and they were. In the contest of public relations, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson easily routed George III, a limited, ill-tempered, and intermittently mad young monarch of no particular ability. If Chatham, Burke, and Fox had been able to act in the king’s name, there would have been a much narrower issue and a fiercely contested battle for public relations and intellectual rigor. The United States did indeed become a “shining city on a hill” and a “new order of the ages,” but in the sense that it was a vast, almost virgin continent being set up politically at the cutting edge of democratic advances that in the Old World had only been reached in a few places, and after centuries of internecine struggles punctuated by violent revolutions and sanguinary changes of regime.
As a practical matter, the American Revolutionary War was a struggle between two almost equally advanced and very conditionalized democracies, and what governed was the correlation of forces as it evolved under the varying levels of military and diplomatic competence and political agility of the two sides. The American leaders doubtless persuaded themselves of a somewhat more exalted moral distinction between the parties. They were men of conviction, certainly, but they were also self-interested opportunists who saw the main chance, painted it with a thick coat of conjured virtue, and deserve the homage due to the bold, the brilliant, the steadfast, and, by a narrow margin, the just. On the legal and political facts, they do not deserve the hallelujah chorus ululated to them incessantly for 235 years by the clangorous American myth-making machine and its international converts.
The British made the classic historic error of trying to impose taxes on people from whom they could not ultimately collect them, not that they were such unjust taxes. And the British explanation of their actions was so inept that the Americans not only withheld the tax but largely grasped the moral-political leadership of the whole planet with a nascent regime already clad in star-spangled swaddling clothes. This was the strategic genius of American national nativity: it discarded the great oceanic powers in order, the French and the British, each with the assistance of the other, and covered this accomplishment in the indefectible virtue of the rights of man. This would be the American formula in centuries to come, under Lincoln, Wilson, the Roosevelts, and in the Cold War, generally with a stronger legal and moral case: the advantage of force and possession of virtue, both applied in carefully selected circumstances.

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