PART I The War Begins 1 Spreading the News of Lexington and Concord

The news of the victorious battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, hit the world like a thunderclap; they were truly a “shot heard round the world,” and it was the first order of the day for the Massachusetts radicals to make sure that the news spread—especially to the other colonies—in the right way. They needed to present a picture of events that would evoke sympathy and solidarity for the revolutionary cause. The basic outlines of the case were there in reality: proud British troops had invaded the countryside outside Boston; they had launched an armed conflict by shooting down a brave, heavily outnumbered troop at Lexington; and finally, they were smashed by a triumphant array of enthusiastic, individualistic, American farmers on the retreat from Concord. As historian Arthur Tourtellot has put it:

The British had marched out of Boston in force.... The British had fired to kill first. The British had destroyed property. There had been bloodshed and death.... All this established beyond any doubt that the Americans had been the victims. At the same time—and this was equally important—the Americans were also the victors. The half-believed argument... that the American colonists would never stand up to British regulars was thoroughly shattered. *

But the facts had to be dressed up for popular consumption, especially before the British could turn on their engines of propaganda. There was little need at first to whip up Massachusetts, whose armed farmers were on fire and beginning to pour in to aid the militia; but it was essential and much more difficult to try to command the support of the other colonies for the Revolution, colonies whose leadership had always been suspicious of the radicalism and individualism of the bay colony.

When John Hancock, John Adams, and Sam Adams departed for the crucial meeting of the Second Continental Congress scheduled for May 10, the leadership of radicalism in Massachusetts was left in the capable hands of Dr. Joseph Warren. A brilliant young man educated in liberty under Edward (“Guts”) Holyoke at Harvard, Warren had been the only political leader to participate in the first line of fighting over the whole course of the flight from Concord. Now the toast of Massachusetts, Warren set up civil headquarters at Cambridge on the day after the Concord battle, and was made acting chairman of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. Less than twenty-four hours after the end of the battle of Concord, he issued the first circular on the events of April 19. In the name of the Committee of Safety, Warren directed the circular to the prime immediate task: to raise an army of the Massachusetts militia. His circular therefore went to the Massachusetts towns and beat a drumfire of flaming warning against the British:

The barbarous murders committed upon our innocent brethren... have made it absolutely necessary, that we immediately raise an army to defend our wives and children from the butchering hands of an inhuman soldiery, who,... enraged at being repulsed from the field of slaughter, will, without the least doubt, take the first opportunity in their power, to ravage this devoted country with fire and sword.... Our all is at stake. Death and devastation are the certain consequences of delay.... An hour lost may deluge your country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery upon the few... who may survive the carnage.

He concluded by urging the speediest possible enlistment in a Massachusetts army.

The British troops had scurried from the Charlestown penninsula back to the safety of Boston across the river; and so the first task of the rebels was to raise an army to lay siege to Boston and contain the British forces within that city. That army sprang up literally overnight as, during April 20, militia from all over the province poured into Cambridge, where Artemas Ward and others, appointed as generals by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, now made their headquarters. Militia also poured in rapidly from Connecticut and New Hampshire, and in a few days many thousands arrived from these two colonies. As a result, in an incredibly brief time 20,000 eager militiamen formed an army laying siege to Boston. The provincial army which the radicals had sought and which the provincial congress had failed to raise only a week before Concord was now in being. Although it had a leader, Artemas Ward, it was as yet a force of individualists, each coming and leaving on his own responsibility.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress met quickly on April 22. Now that an army—albeit an individualistic army—could at least temporarily hem in the British force at Boston, Joseph Warren, the new president of the Congress, turned to the vital barrage of education and propaganda directed to the other American colonies. Warren and the radicals realized the vital importance of public support and enthusiasm—and hence of agitation and propaganda—in this new type of war. Here was not a usual war begun by one government against another; here was a people’s war of revolution waged against the existing state apparatus, begun without benefit of governmental or even organized direction. To continue demanded public support throughout the colonies for the Massachusetts cause.

Virtually the first act of the Massachusetts congress, therefore, was to appoint two committees, one to investigate the facts of Lexington and Concord, the other to draw up a narrative of what had happened there. Interestingly enough, while the Committee of Inquiry was making a careful investigation of the facts, the Narrative Committee was already writing its rather distorted report, and with little reference to the inquiry. Its chairman was none other than Dr. Benjamin Church, later discovered to be a secret traitor and informer, who felt he had to go out of the way to proclaim his devotion to the revolutionary cause. Church’s report, issued on April 26, revelled in fake atrocity stories—always an effective device for whipping up hatred of the enemy. Dr. Warren, when editing the report, added further touches to the manufactured atrocities in an appeal to the people of Boston.

Special teams of couriers swiftly carried the Church report throughout the colonies and the newspaper press hastened to publish the story, liberally adding further atrocity tales of their own. Many papers, refusing to wait for their weekly publication date, issued handbills as extra editions as soon as the news arrived. Often, the printed account was edged in heavy black borders, and headlines such as “Bloody News” and “Bloody Butchery by the British Troops” abounded. Isaiah Thomas, editor of the fiery, radical Massachusetts Spy, had moved his press from Boston to Worcester. From there he fired off a blast that was reprinted in newspapers throughout the colonies. Thomas called on Americans to “forever bear in mind the BATTLE OF LEXINGTON! where British Troops, unmolested and unprovoked, wantonly... fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen.” No piteous cries, thundered Thomas, could divert the British troops “from their DESIGN of MURDER and ROBBERY.” And the radical New York Journal mocked bitterly that “the kind intentions of our good mother—our tender, indulgent mother—are at last revealed to all the world”; for this mother was “a vile imposter—an old, abandoned prostitute—crimsoned o’er with every abominable crime, shocking to humanity!”

The Tory press, in the face of the intensity of popular feeling, was extremely circumspect about the events at Lexington and Concord. In Boston it ceased publication altogether, and the papers in New York refused to carry the British side of the case.

*Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963), p. 211.

2

The Response in Britain

So zealous and skillful were the American radicals at spreading their account of Lexington and Concord that, by a feat of seamanship and enterprise, the American version reached Britain two full weeks before the official dispatches of Gen. Thomas Gage! Dr. Warren dispatched the skillful young mariner Capt. John Derby to England from Salem. Derby reached London before the end of May, quickly placing the papers in the custody of the radical John Wilkes, by then lord mayor of London. The next day, the American version of the affair hit the English press with great impact. The Reverend John Horne, a leading radical of London, promptly issued an appeal for funds to aid the widows and orphans of Americans murdered at Lexington, funds to help “our beloved American fellow-subjects, who, faithful to the character of Englishmen, preferring death to slavery, were, for that reason only, inhumanly murdered by the King’s Troops....” For sending the money thus raised to Benjamin Franklin, who had already sailed for America earlier that year, Home was imprisoned by the crown. For its part, the British government, bereft of information for two critical weeks, could only deny that such battles had taken place—a denial that made it a laughingstock when Gage’s dispatches finally arrived.

The outbreak of war had a great and critical impact upon the liberal Whigs, many of whom were high-ranking officers in the British armed forces. Some refused outright to serve in war against the Americans, including Adm. Augustus Keppel and Lord Effingham. Rather than lead the war against the Americans, Effingham published his resignation from the army in September, for which he received public thanks from London, Dublin, Newcastle, and other cities. The British army was hit by numerous other resignations of conscience-stricken Whigs. Lord Chatham publicly refused to allow his son, William Pitt the Younger, to fight against the Americans. A typical Whig defection among leading Englishmen was that of Granville Sharp, the man chiefly responsible three years earlier for the legal action that had outlawed slavery within England. When the American Revolution broke out, Sharp was assistant to the secretary of ordnance and was in charge of ordering the munitions for the British army in the colonies. By midsummer, he obtained extended leave from his duties, because “I cannot return to my ordnance duty whilst a bloody war is carried on, unjustly as I conceive, against my fellow-subjects.” As the war dragged on, Sharp finally resigned his post, winning public applause for his courageous act.

Many merchants joined the Whig leaders in opposition to war against the Americans. The Common Council of London petitioned the king to end the harsh measures against the Americans, and the Livery Company of London declared that the Americans were dutybound to resist invasion of their rights. This American victory for the minds of the British people was never entirely erased by the government, especially since Warren had been careful to appeal to the English as “fellow-subjects” in natural alliance against the crown and its armed forces.

The crown, of course, in the manner of hardliners throughout history, refused to acknowledge that its policy of coercion had failed. Instead, so much the more did the Americans need to be suppressed, and the “rebels” and “villains” to be taught a lesson. For the moment six regiments from the Mediterranean were to be sent to Boston and more enlistments were hoped for—enlistments that failed to materialize. Neither was the North ministry at all apologetic about the failure to cow the Americans. Instead, blame was put on subversive Whigs who had put ideas of liberty and revolution into the heads of the Americans, and, more specifically, on the supposed incompetence of General Gage, who had, however, been essentially acting on crown orders.

3

Guerrilla or Conventional War

After their humiliating defeat at Concord, many leading British officers acknowledged their error in being contemptuous of American military prowess. But others accused the Americans of not fighting fairly, according to the rules of conventional warfare. Instead of marching out on the open field in an extended line to fire volleys at a similarly aligned enemy, the “cowardly” rascals persisted in hiding inside and behind houses, trees, and stone walls, picking off English soldiers with accurate individual rifle fire. To the European military mind of the day, such actions were sheer murder and therefore dishonorable.

Behind the almost blatant idiocy of such an attitude, there lay the hard core of an extremely important problem. For certainly here had been warfare that upset all the “rules” of organized European warfare, in which the armies of the various states were sent out to kill each other in formal massed array. The tactics employed by the Americans at Concord reflected a new type of war: revolutionary war by a people in arms, a war that would naturally take the course—unless deflected by conscious purpose—of guerrilla warfare, in which individuals among the masses, familiar with the terrain, employed their advantage of knowledge and mass support to achieve mobility and surprise against an army possessed of superior firepower.

The Americans, at the very outset, were therefore faced with a choice of extreme importance in conducting their revolution. Unfortunately, they saw their alternatives but dimly, although here and there leaders could see the vital issues with piercing clarity. Their choice not only determined the outcome and duration of the war; it also determined the permanent complexion and structure of any independent America that might emerge.

The colonists might choose either alternative or various admixtures of both. On the one hand, they could fight the war in European fashion, gathering together a standard European army, organizing it according to European-style totalitarian discipline, conscripting men and vast supplies to feed and equip the army, and then meeting the British in formal open combat. On the other hand, they could run a new style of war, a radical people’s war of national liberation, a guerrilla war resting on individual responsibility, mobility, and surprise. A guerrilla war would be enormously less expensive than an orthodox one. For one thing, the guerrillas would not be full-time soldiers, torn away from productive labor to require parasitic feeding from an already harassed and burdened population. They would not be hauled from place to place, region to region. Instead they would be part-time soldiers, remaining in production, not requiring taxes or inflation to impose burdens on the people as a whole; they would remain close to home, fighting with high morale for their own area and homes, and feeding off their own continuing production rather than off the rest of society. Moreover, whereas orthodox warfare would require taxation, conscription, hierarchy, discipline, and the creation of a vast unproductive and expensive state bureaucracy to direct and supply the armies while draining the production of society, a guerrilla war could be run individualistically, relying on the zeal of the individual guerrilla, and would entail virtually no central bureaucracy or centralized confiscation of property to finance the war.

In brief, a guerrilla war would be the libertarian way to fight a war fully consistent with the American revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality of rights, and, therefore, the only way to achieve the libertarian goals of the Revolution. A European-style, orthodox war would be heavily statist, and would inevitably lead to the resumption of the very statism—the taxes, the restrictions, the bureaucracy—which the colonists were waging the revolution to escape.

What is more, guerrilla war would be enormously more effective; for that is the way any subjugated people—not only libertarians—can best fight against a better-armed, but hated foe. The efficiency of guerrilla fighting as against European warfare had not only been demonstrated in the unbroken victories of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys in the Vermont revolution, but also in the victory at Concord, a guerrilla engagement so individualistic as to be almost completely leaderless. In contrast stood the slaughter at Lexington, where the Americans had fought in fixed ranks in the open.

Both moral principle and utility therefore required the choice of a guerrilla war; but various factors, certainly including the novelty of the dilemma, dictated a different choice.

4

The Seizure of Fort Ticonderoga

Massachusetts, a few days after Concord, had little time to ponder its choices. Twenty thousand individualists were keeping the British penned in Boston; but the 20,000, seeing little or nothing for them to do, began to drift home. In truth, the taking of major cities is the final stage of a guerrilla war; if the Americans were not yet strong enough to crush the British force of 4,000 within Boston, there was little point in maintaining the huge besieging force. Besides, Boston’s geography as a peninsula with a very narrow neck and General Gage’s panicky evacuation of the Charles-town Peninsula immediately after Concord insured the immobility of the British army. Here Joseph Warren took a large step away from liberty by pressing for a formal army organization to replace the individual militiaman and by insisting on terms of enlistment to last until the end of the year, and so destroying the freedom of action of the individual soldier. Massachusetts radicalism was beginning to be tempered by conservatism, and Liberty diluted by Power.

On April 23, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress voted to raise over 13,000 men for the siege, and the other New England colonies offered to supply a quota of several thousand each. Although these quotas were never filled, in little over a month 15,000 men of an organized army surrounded Boston. Occupying the center at Cambridge with 9,000 men was Gen. Artemas Ward, in command of the Massachusetts army and acknowledged as commander by the forces of the other New England colonies. On the right, at Roxbury, in front of Boston, was Gen. John Thomas of Massachusetts, commanding 5,000 men; on the extreme left, at Chelsea and Charlestown Neck, were over a thousand New Hampshire men, headed by Cols. John Stark and James Reed. The Americans had settled down to an expensive and unrewarding—and standard—“Sitzkrieg,” and collecting goods to continue to feed and supply this inert and continuing army soon began to prove difficult. Meanwhile, British reinforcements swelled Gage’s force to over 6,000 men, giving him a greater potential for mischief.

While the New England and British troops were thus stalemated, bolder souls began to dream of American irregulars taking the offensive and striking a vital blow against England. In particular, Ethan Allen had, at least as early as February, been stressing the importance of the American seizure of Fort Ticonderoga should hostilities break out with England. Ticonderoga, on the northern frontier of New York, and at the border of the New Hampshire Grant country, was the vital gateway to Canada —whether for offense or defense against any possible British attempt to march from Canada down the Hudson Valley, splitting the colonies in two. Furthermore, Ticonderoga was known to have by far the largest store of cannon and other heavy artillery in the colonies; if the Americans could possibly manage to transport the big guns to the heights around Boston, they could compel the British to evacuate.

Shortly after Lexington and Concord, Ethan Allen proposed to seize Fort Ticonderoga. The bulk of his force was to consist of his Green Mountain Boys, to which were to be added one troop from Connecticut and one from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. All in all, approximately sixty-five men from Connecticut and western Massachusetts joined a hundred Green Mountain Boys at Bennington (now in Vermont) on May 9, and the leaders unanimously chose Allen as their commander, with Seth Warner and James Easton as his lieutenants.

The same idea had also occurred to the outspoken and wealthy merchant of New Haven, Capt. Benedict Arnold; on hearing of the outbreak of fighting, Arnold, within a day, marched his militia company to Cambridge. On the way, Arnold met and convinced Connecticut’s Col. Samuel Parsons of the importance of capturing Ticonderoga. Parsons promptly set about organizing the expedition. At Cambridge, Arnold successfully threatened to seize the needed ammunition by force when the town authorities tried to block him from taking any. He also persuaded the Massachusetts Committee of Safety to grant him a colonelcy and authorize him to raise men and take Fort Ticonderoga. Hearing of the Allen-Easton expedition, he rushed to the Green Mountain country, and, with characteristic gall, brandished his Massachusetts commission and insisted on taking absolute command of the rebel force. Allen, of course, was not one to bow before any official commission, and neither were his soldiers. Finally, Arnold was allowed to march alongside Allen at the head of the expedition, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind—except perhaps Arnold’s—that Ethan Allen was the undisputed leader.

On the morning of May 10, Allen and his intrepid band sailed across Lake Champlain to Ticonderoga. Before launching the surprise assault on the fort, Allen, true both to his libertarian beliefs and to the individualistic framework of guerrilla war, reminded his troops that no one, even at this late date, would be forced against his will to embark on the attack.

The blow was swift and sure; the surprise was complete. Mighty Fort Ticonderoga fell without a shot being fired. Here was eloquent testimony to the effectiveness of the guerrilla tactic, with its advantages of great mobility, superior knowledge, and high morale. The next day, the small British force at neighboring Crown Point fell to a detachment under Lt. Col. Seth Warner, also without a shot.

On the day of Ticonderoga’s capture, the Second Continental Congress opened a monumentally important meeting at Philadelphia. The great task of the Massachusetts and New England radicals was to line up firm military support for and unity with the Massachusetts cause, a difficult task in the face of stubborn conservatism and middle-of-the-road confusion among their colleagues. The New England rebels found they were forced to temper their radicalism and individualism in order to appeal to the far more oligarchic leaders in the other colonies.

One of the early orders of business of the Congress was how to handle the news of Ticonderoga, and the dubious temper of the Congress was revealed in its reaction to the happy news. After Ticonderoga, on May 16, Arnold, reinforced by men from western Massachusetts, had raided and occupied Fort St. John’s in Canada, north of Lake Champlain, and he was preparing to occupy Ticonderoga permanently. Moreover, both Arnold and Allen were proposing to help keep up the momentum by pressing onward to capture Montreal and even all of Canada from the British. Allen asserted that all they would need was more men, but instead of rejoicing at the news, let alone encouraging further victories, Congress was horrified at the entire exploit. In contrast to Lexington and Concord or even to the siege of Boston, here was a frankly offensive action against the British armed forces. To welcome Ticonderoga would be to acknowledge that America was fully in the throes of revolution, and Congress, beset by timidity and conservatism, was unwilling to do this. Accordingly, on hearing the news on May 18, Congress promptly ordered Arnold and Allen to abandon Fort Ticonderoga and retreat to the south end of Lake George. Congress’ only slight acknowledgement of the victory was to concede that the Americans might take the guns and amunition back with them; but an accurate account must be kept of them, “in order that they may be safely returned when the restoration of the former harmony between Great Britain and these colonies... shall render it prudent.”

Arnold protested bitterly to the provincial congresses of New York and Massachusetts as well as to the Continental Congress. Allen, too, was willing to swallow his old hatred of New York and appeal to that colony for aid in keeping the forts and pressing onward to Canada. The New England colonies kept up a drumfire of protest and finally persuaded Congress to change its mind and keep the captured forts. Neither Allen nor Arnold were to gain congressional support for a conquest of Canada, however, despite the enthusiastic approval of Sam Adams. Instead, Ticonderoga and Crown Point were granted to Connecticut, and both Allen and Arnold were humiliated by being deprived of command in favor of Col. Benjamin Hinman of Connecticut, who was to occupy the forts with nearly 1,500 more troops from Connecticut. Understandably, Arnold was so disgusted that he resigned and went home. A scintillating guerilla conquest had lost its momentum and deteriorated into an orthodox, idle, and squabbling army of occupation at Ticonderoga.

5

The Response of the Continental Congress

The most important business before the Congress, however, was not Ticonderoga, but the problem of Boston and the army that Massachusetts and New England had hastily put up around it. What Congress decided to do about that army would determine what it would do about the entire Revolution. As soon as Congress opened, Dr. Warren of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress urged the Continental Congress to take responsibility for the army around Boston by appointing a commander-in-chief—thus committing the other colonies irrevocably to the Revolution. The Congress showed its temper by not even deigning to answer. Instead, as the Massachusetts radicals watched with dismay, it frittered away its time in evading responsibility for adopting the Revolution, merely sending elaborate proofs to London that the British troops had fired first at Lexington. It was clear that a considerable majority of the delegates, led by the now archconservative John Dickinson of Philadelphia, looked forward to reconciliation with Britain rather than to waging the Revolution with zest and vigor toward eventual independence. (Joseph Galloway and Isaac Low, heads of the ultraright in the first Congress, had by then, as outright Tories, moved outside the American dialogue as well as the Continental Congress, and were soon to slip behind British lines.) Seething inwardly, John Adams wrote to Joseph Warren from Philadelphia: “We find a great many bundles of weak nerves.... We are obliged to be as delicate and soft and modest and humble as possible.”

Not receiving any reply to its letter, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress developed a careful petition shrewdly designed to prod the Continental Congress into action by urging Congress to allow Massachusetts to set up a permanent civil government. Such official authorization of the provincial congress and the network of town committees would push the Continental Congress closer to endorsing an open political break with England. Above all, Massachusetts petitioned Congress to appoint a commander-in-chief of the army at Cambridge. The Massachusetts petition was sent down via the informer Church as personal courier, and was presented to the Congress on June 2. Cautiously, Congress appointed a committee to mull over and report on this vital and controversial petition.

The first part of the Massachusetts petition was relatively easy. On June 7, Congress sanctioned Massachusetts’ new civil government and approved the right of the people to set up their own government in the current circumstances, declaring, however, that this civil government would be only temporary, until reconciliation with Britain could restore the operation of the old, disrupted Massachusetts charter.

Meanwhile, the right-wing had been winning point after point in the Congress. An attempt to shift the site of the Congress northward to Connecticut, near the New England battlefront, had been quashed by the Dickinson group. So underdeveloped was the revolutionary timbre of this Congress that when New York asked what it should do if British troops were to land in New York City, Congress had generously urged the citizens not to resist and to give the soldiers proper quarters! Finally, while the hypocritical plan of British Prime Minister Lord North for conciliation was summarily rejected by the Congress, Dickinson and James Duane of New York infuriated the radicals by moving, at the end of May, to send “An Humble and Dutiful Petition” to the king, pleading for immediate negotiation and mutual accomodation. Infuriated, John Adams blasted such futile and humble petitioning. He argued that Congress should be making haste to defend the continent from the British, to take charge of the army at Cambridge, and even to warn that it was ready to make European alliances to aid its resistance. Adams was quickly backed by John Sullivan of New Hampshire, but Dickinson bitterly warned them that if New England didn’t agree to “our pacific system, I, and a number of us, will break off from you in New England!”

The radicals, however, were prepared to accept the Dickinson “Olive Branch Petition,” which they knew would be futile, provided that they won the crucial point—the second point in the Massachusetts petition—congressional assumption of responsibility for the revolutionary army in New England. The Congress took measured steps toward this goal during early June by voting to supply funds to furnish powder, first “for the Continental Army” and then frankly for “the American army before Boston.”

The final step, however, was whether the Congress would actually take over direction of the army at Cambridge, directing the troops and furnishing them with both supplies and a commander-in-chief. Here the Massachusetts radicals were in a cruel dilemma; any army under the Continental Congress would mean, in contrast to a guerrilla army, the inevitable buildup of a central state apparatus, and of a highly expensive and burdensome state army, which would inevitably saddle all Americans with heavy taxes, inflation, and debt. The Massachusetts radicals can hardly be blamed for their decision to press for a statist continental army; the theory of revolutionary guerrilla warfare had yet to be fully developed, and Massachusetts was understandably desperate to weld the other reluctant colonies firmly to the revolutionary cause.

On June 14, Congress took the fateful step of voting to organize an army of 15,000 men, and specifically to raise six (a little later, ten) companies of expert backwoods riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to be sent to Boston. It was not lost upon the delegates that the crack-shooting frontier riflemen had been particularly effective in the victory at Concord. The crucial question now remaining was the identity of the commander-in-chief to be appointed by Congress.

On this vital issue, the Massachusetts radical leadership, traditionally united as one man, was grievously divided. Sam Adams, almost always instinctively libertarian, began with the most individualistic and democratic plan of all: appoint no commander-in-chief at all and permit the local militia soldiers themselves to elect all of their own officers, up to the rank of commander-in-chief. Whenever any plans for a continental army and commander were mentioned, Adams “was apt to murmur the word Cromwell and begin animadverting on the sacred, inalienable rights of the civilian.”* Thomas Cushing, Robert Treat Paine, and other New Englanders wanted a New England general, the obvious choice being Artemas Ward, already in command before Boston. Ward, however, was a bit old for the job. The issue, of course, was not simply local pride, but the crucial one of keeping control of the army in the hands of individualistic and democratic New Englanders rather than subject to the aristocratic colonies. At this crossroads, John Adams, Elbridge Gerry, and Joseph Warren bent so far backward to achieve continental unity that they gravely compromised and sacrificed libertarian principle, storing up untold trouble for individualism in the future. In short, they decided to support for commander-in-chief that conservative scion of the Virginia landed oligarchy, George Washington. In doing so, incidentally, John Adams (though not Warren or Gerry) began a slow but steady political drift rightward out of the libertarian-radical camp.

Sam Adams, too, began to display an unsureness, a lack of confidence that would periodically display itself on national issues and would also lead him, at least temporarily, rightward. Something seemed to be going forever from that once uncannily sure and self-confident planner and organizer of the Revolution, and he allowed himself to be persuaded by his cousin John to second the nomination of George Washington.

From a short-range, opportunistic point of view, the nomination of Washington appeared to the radicals to have merit. Not militarily, to be sure, for he had had little military experience, and that was a series of decisive losses in the French and Indian War. The attraction of Washington was that he was virtually the only man who could gain the votes of most radicals and conservatives alike. On the one hand, socially and politically, Washington was a deep-dyed conservative and could be depended upon to support the oligarchy and classical military tactics. On the other hand, in the fight with Britain, he—along with most of the Virginians—was close to the radical camp and could be depended upon to be militant in warring against Great Britain.*

Consequently, John Adams rose in Congress on June 14 to nominate Washington, and he was seconded by Sam Adams. In so doing, they permanently alienated the vain and flighty John Hancock, who fancied himself in the panoplied robes of commander-in-chief and expected his fellow Massachusetts delegates to nominate him. Already ensconced in the high-sounding but largely honorific post of president of the Continental Congress, his unfounded ambition was gravely wounded by their decision not to notify him in advance of what was being planned. The consequences of the Hancock-Adams split for future Massachusetts politics were enormous; for a start, from this point on Hancock hobnobbed with and was feted by the ultraconservatives of the Congress, men who were better able to satisfy his taste for finery than were the plain men of Massachusetts.

John Adams’ plan met considerable resistance on June 14, especially from those backing Ward and the other candidates; but by the next day, resistance had melted away and Washington was approved unanimously. With their main points carried, the radicals supported the Dickinson Olive Branch Petition to England, which was passed by the Congress on July 5.

* Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), p. 531.

* Even such an admirer of Washington as Marcus Cunliffe admits that Washington’s best role during the war was political and consultative rather than military: “Like General Eisenhower, he was a coalition general for a large part of the war... major strategic plans usually lay outside his scope.... If his charismatic symbols were those of the flag, the sword, the beautifully caparisoned horse —, his day-to-day responsibilities were more appropriately symbolized by the chairman’s gavel... and the secretary’s quill. It was his task, and his talent, to preside, to inform, to adjudicate, to advise, to soothe, to persuade, to anticipate, to collaborate.” Marcus Cunliffe, “George Washington: George Washington’s Generalship,” in George Athan Billias, ed., George Washington’s Generals (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1964), p. 16.

6

Charles Lee: Champion of Liberty and Guerrilla War

If the choice of commander-in-chief of the Continental Army had been made on the basis of ability, genius, military experience, erudition, ardor for the cause of liberty, or for a combination of these qualities, this crucial appointment would have gone not to Washington but to one Charles Lee. But political considerations ruled, and Lee, a native of Britain, had no political base. Mere merit was submerged, though some delegates did favor Lee for the job.

George Washington and Charles Lee: No greater contrast could be found in their confrontation, and no more fateful choice of appointment could have been made, a decision which would bear heavily on the future course of the history of the United States. Washington, a half-educated, blunt, practical man, a highly conservative landed oligarch of Virginia, orthodox in his military and political views, a loser in his few previous battles, longed to become the head of a regular state army on the conventional European model. Lee, a brilliant, articulate, learned, déclassé, English intellectual, an ardent, witty, pungent individualist, personally and politically dedicated to liberty and deeply influenced by libertarian thought, an authentic military genius, had seen a great deal of fighting on the European model and saw its deficiencies for the American scene. It was almost inevitable that two such deeply contrasting figures (Lee was chosen by Congress as third in command of the army, after Washington and Ward) would come to an irreparable clash. That clash came to pass, and since the seemingly inescapable verdict of history was to give the victory to Washington, Lee sank into disgrace and oblivion from which historians are only now beginning to rescue him.*

Lee was that exceedingly rare combination: a brilliant soldier and a gifted intellectual. He was also the only general on the American side (with the exception of his old English-born friend Horatio Gates) to have had substantial military experience. A fluent linguist and learned in political and military theory as well as in classical and English literature, Lee had been influenced by the strongly pro-Whig history of England written by a French Huguenot, Paul de Rapin, and later by the writings of Rousseau. After serving as an officer in the French and Indian War (where he picked up the apt sobriquet “Boiling Water”) Lee performed with brilliance in the British expedition against the Spaniards in Portugal. Despite his distinction, Lee was retired from the British army after the Seven-Years’ War because his outspoken criticism of British political and military leaders and his increasingly radical Whig views had lost him favor with the crown.

In England, Lee was received with warmth in important Whig circles and became a friend of the liberal lords Thanet and Pembroke, of Charles Yorke, and especially of the ardent liberal Col. Isaac Barré. Thwarted in his military career at home, Lee became personal aide-de-camp to the rather liberal King Stanislaus of Poland. His letters from Poland reflected increasingly radical and libertarian views, denouncing the aggrandizement of George III, Granville, and the Tories, toying with the idea of a republic, and praising natural rights and the American resistance against the Stamp Act. He wrote: “May God prosper the Americans in their resolution, that there may be one asylum at least on the earth for men, who prefer their natural rights to the fantastical prerogatives of a foolish perverted head because it wears a crown.”

Lee returned to England the following year, but his increasing radicalism again kept him from military preferment. Befriended by Gen. Sir Henry Conway, he became an ardent supporter of the Rockingham Whigs and of radical leader John Wilkes. By 1768 he was contemplating running for Commons, to effect a “glorious revolution” in Britain. He was also increasingly attracted to the American cause and habitually referred to America as the last “asylum” of freedom. At this time, Lee, Horatio Gates, and other pro-American British officers began to gather periodically for an exchange of views.

In 1769 Lee was made an honorary major general in the army of the pro-Russian king of Poland. The same year, he joined the Russian army against Turkey and had the opportunity to observe guerrilla warfare by Turks and Polish rebel forces. Ill, and failing to be granted a command, Lee traveled widely through central and southern Europe, visiting such luminaries as Emperor Joseph II of Austria and growing ever more bitter in his correspondence against the Tory policies at home. He blasted the prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, as a man without conscience or honor and wrote that “if the axe is not applied to his neck, it is laid to the root of our liberties, national honor, and inheritance; there is no medium....” More and more he spoke of being free in exile rather than submitting to the domination of George III. Excusing his lack of urbanity on the subject, for the Whig cause he ardently wished for “triumph over tyranny, corruption, Grafton, North, and the Devil.... My puny dagger shall contribute its mite of annoyance to the breast of despotism and wickedness.” And he passionately conjured up “the spirits of Cato, Brutus, Hampden, and Sidney” for the cause of liberty. George III was “a reptile” and a “despicable... stupid... dolt,” while Lords and Commons were “dens of thieves.”

Returning to England in the spring of 1771, Lee published in the press, though more circumspectly, a criticism of King George III, and also composed a lengthy, though unfortunately unpublished and vanished, critique of David Hume’s History of England. He was irked at Hume’s Tory apologetics for the Stuart kings, and he projected a satirical whitewashing history of the emperors Claudius and Nero, which he bitingly dedicated to David Hume. In the introduction to this critique, which has survived, Lee again attacked the Tory policies of George III, the use of pecuniary influence by the crown, and the large standing army as instruments of oppression. Disapproving of capital punishment in general, he wished to preserve it for kings and their families, since the eradication of a royal house was surely preferable to the loss of a people’s freedom. It is little wonder that the manuscript could not find an English publisher. In these final years in England, Lee became friendly with the great painter and ardent Whig, Sir Joshua Reynolds, with Whig leader Edmund Burke, and also with the great radical republican historian, Mrs. Catherine Macauley.

Finally, Charles Lee, a major general in the Polish army and a lieutenant colonel in the British, consummated the exile for which he had long been heading. Eager to help the burgeoning American cause, he arrived at New York in the fall of 1773, where both he and the Americans were ripe for a revolutionary situation. For over a year, he travelled extensively throughout the colonies, making friends with all the revolutionary leaders, who were fascinated by his personality and by his military knowlege and ardor for liberty. In America he was no longer a maverick, but a leader in the American struggles with the British government. It was no coincidence that those particularly attracted to Lee were the radicals George Mason and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, Alexander McDougall in New York, and Sam Adams and his followers in Massachusetts. He became an especially close friend of Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee (no relation), who truly wrote of him: “A most true and worthy friend to the rights of human nature in general, and a warm spirited foe to American oppression.”

Charles Lee lost no time in lauding Boston’s resistance to the Tea Act and in urging energetic boycotts in reaction to the Coercive Acts of 1774. The crisis brought on by the Coercive Acts was obviously tailor-made for Lee’s revolutionary temper. Taking up the pen as “Anglus Americanus” on behalf of active resistance, he urged a boycott and attacked moderation as “Submission to Britain.” America was the “last asylum of liberty,” and therefore its defense of liberty was also a defense for the people of Britain and for the rest of the world. This was published in the Philadelphia press, and a similar handbill was published in New York and widely reprinted in the New England papers.

By this time, Lee’s old friend and fellow radical Horatio Gates, also forcibly retired from British army service after the Seven Years’ War, had also emigrated to America and retired to a plantation in Virginia’s Shenadoah Valley. Both men were clearly ready to take up arms for the American cause. Lee wrote to Gates that it was “incumbent on every man... to contribute his mite to the cause of mankind and of liberty, which is now attacked in her last and only asylum....” And Gates, known as early as 1770 as a “red-hot republican,” replied that he was “ready to risk my life to preserve the liberty of the western world.”

When the First Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in September 1774, Lee was there, charming nearly everyone and, remarkably, writing the appeal which Congress sent to the Canadians for support in America’s struggle. He also began in secret to draw up a plan for the organization of American battalions, a plan completed by the following February and which impressed many American leaders. Visiting Maryland in the fall of 1774, he induced the Maryland Provincial Congress to adopt his plan for organizing its battalions and even stayed to drill some of the troops. This plan of Lee’s impressed Washington, who persuaded Fairfax County to urge a similar plan for Virginia militia and prevailed upon Patrick Henry to get the plan adopted by Virginia the following spring.

Lee published several essays on behalf of American freedom that winter, one of which pointed to King George’s tyranny being exercised in Ireland and Minorca and warned of its advent in America. In an uncompleted essay, he praised the republican governments of Europe, citing contemporary policies of Geneva, Venice, and Switzerland, and in his letters, he began to advocate armed revolution.

Lee’s most significant work, however, was one that called forth his military as well as his ideological abilities. The Tory Rev. Dr. Myles Cooper, Anglican president of King’s College in New York City, had greatly disheartened the Americans with his pamphlet, Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans. Cooper had counselled that resistance was useless against the mighty and thoroughly disciplined British regulars, who would be aided by large numbers of American Tories and German mercenaries. How could the undisciplined and untrained Americans even dream of opposing the British victors of the French and Indian War?

No one was more qualified to rebut Cooper’s charge than Lee. He had seen the highly disciplined Prussian battalions—the envied model of all the regular armies of the day—at first hand, and was creative and individualistic enough to be unimpressed. Lee leapt into the fray, publishing his Strictures Upon a “Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans” in Philadelphia in November 1774. He pointedly deprecated the British regulars. Their showy and much admired massed formation parade-ground tactics were of no military importance, and the British only won the French and Indian War after discarding this pattern. Moreover, he argued, the highly touted victories of Frederick the Great were largely won by the Prussian militia rather than by the formally trained regulars. The Americans had numbers, zeal, and knowledge of the terrain on their side—and did not the amateur militias of the parliamentary armies defeat the professionals of Charles I during the English Civil War?

Lee’s pamphlet proved to be by far his most popular work; as the radical Salem Essex Gazette declared, it removed the terror the people had had of the British troops, and gave them the heart to resist. Strictures was reprinted five times during the winter of 1774–75—in Boston, New York, New London, and Newport—and was also republished in American newspapers. Alden has concluded that “the Strictures was probably one of the most influential pieces of propaganda in the revolutionary period.”*

After selecting Washington over Lee and Ward as commander-in-chief, the Second Continental Congress had to select the other generals of the Continental Army. The next step was to choose the major general who would be second in command, and the battle was rather naturally between Lee and Ward. Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania enthusiastically backed Lee, but he was bitterly opposed by Thomas Johnson of Maryland and by almost all the highly conservative New York delegation. As New England’s candidate, however, Ward was the inevitable choice for “first major general”; after Ward was chosen, the New England radicals, especially Sam Adams, fought ardently for Lee as second major general. Though Hancock and the more conservative delegates from Massachusetts opposed Lee, the backing of Washington, who had been impressed by Lee’s military genius, carried the day. All in all Congress selected four major generals (the others were Philip Schuyler of New York’s landed gentry and the veteran Israel Putnam of Connecticut) and eight brigadier generals, seven of whom were New Englanders. The preponderance of New England officers was natural, since the bulk of the troops then in the field came from that region. Chosen adjutant general, with the rank of brigadier, was Horatio Gates.

* On the bias of historians against Lee, see John W. Shy, “Charles Lee; the Soldier as Radical,” in Billias, ed., George Washington’s Generals, p. 23. The major event in the emerging historical rehabilitation of Lee is the work of John R. Alden, Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), the first sympathetic biography of Lee since the mid-nineteenth century. The Alden volume is indispensable. A growing appreciation of the value of guerrilla warfare has greatly aided in this reevaluation of Lee. See Shy, op. cit. and Don Higginbotham, “American Historians and the Military History of the American Revolution,” American Historical Review (October, 1964), p. 32.

* Alden, Charles Lee, p. 62.

7

The Battle of Bunker Hill

While the Congress was in process of choosing the heads of the Continental Army, a pitched battle was being fought at Boston. The famous Battle of Bunker Hill, later touted as a great American victory, was neither a victory, nor did it take place at Bunker Hill.

At the end of May, the crown had sent a triumvirate of eminent generals to assist, and implicitly to pave the way for superseding, General Gage. These prestigious arrivals were Gen. Sir William Howe, an ardent Whig, who as a candidate for Parliament had pledged never to accept a command against the Americans; young Gen. Sir Henry Clinton; and the dashing Gen. John Burgoyne. Ordered by the crown to proclaim martial law in Massachusetts, General Gage allowed General Burgoyne to write the inflamantory proclamation, which, on June 12, denounced the Americans as rebels and traitors and offered pardon to all laying down their arms, except for the irredeemable Sam Adams and John Hancock. Stunned by the proclamation, the Americans yearned to retaliate; but this yearning grew far stronger when they learned the following day that the British had decided to seize and fortify unoccupied Dorchester Heights, a peninsula south of Boston.

The city of Boston was confronted on two sides by peninsulas with heights commanding the town: on the north, Charlestown Peninsula, on the south, Dorchester Heights. Sensing the folly of battling the British directly for the heights, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, on June 15, urged the occupation and fortification of Bunker Hill on Charlestown Peninsula. The American council of war was split on the issue: the two best generals, Artemas Ward and Joseph Warren (who had been made a general by the provincial congress), had long counselled against fortifying Bunker Hill, for the narrow neck of the peninsula endangered the entire force, especially should their scanty ammunition give out. Besides, without artillery the Americans could not use the position against Boston. However, the widely beloved though incompetent Gen. Israel Putnam, seconded by Gen. Seth Pomeroy and Col. William Prescott, carried the day for rashness over caution. Colonel Prescott was sent out on the night of June 16 to occupy the peninsula with 1,200 of the 10,000 available Americans.

Despite the agreed-upon plan, Prescott and Putnam decided to place their main entrenchments on Breed’s Hill rather than on Bunker. This was a fateful decision. Bunker Hill was close to Charlestown Neck and guarded the only escape route off the peninsula. Breed’s was much further out on the peninsula and in a dangerously exposed position.

It was inevitable that when the British saw what had happened they would attack the fortifications overlooking Boston. Quickly grasping the situation, General Clinton urged a swift and immediate landing behind the American lines at Charlestown Neck, cutting off the Americans from the rear and seizing the entire force with ease. But Gage would not accept such a sneaky and “unmilitary” tactic. General Howe, he insisted, would mount a frontal assault against the strongest American position; the rebels would panic and run at the sight of the advancing British regulars! Such a display of force would restore the British honor tarnished at Concord.

This typical contempt of the British military for the Americans led them into a disastrous blunder. Even the advantage of speed was scorned as the British made their leisurely way to the tip of the peninsula, allowing the Americans to complete their emplacements. A series of frontal assaults up Breed’s Hill allowed the Americans to fight in their best manner: in quasi-guerrilla fashion, employing rifle fire from behind emplacements. The Americans were only partially at an advantage, however, for their precious mobility had been surrendered in favor of fixed positions. In addition, they were in short supply of amunition and far from an escape route. As a result, repeated frontal assaults by the British finally succeeded. Breed’s Hill was overrun and the Americans were routed out of the peninsula. Losses were enormous on both sides, the Americans suffering over four hundred casualties and the British over a thousand, amounting to over 40 percent of Howe’s forces. Indeed, the “Battle of Bunker Hill” (actually of Breed’s Hill, and sensibly known to contemporaries as the Battle of Charlestown) was the bloodiest single conflict on the American continent until 1815. The gravest single loss to the Americans was General Warren, who died in the rout. As for the British, perhaps the most fitting casualty at Bunker Hill was the killing of Maj. John Pitcairn by a Negro rebel, the same Pitcairn who had been sure that “if [he] drew [his] sword but half out of the scabbard, the whole banditti of Massachusetts Bay would flee” before him. Now the banditti had cut him down.*

The American defeat would have been yet far more severe if the advice of General Clinton had not once again been ignored. He urged swiftly seizing advantage of the rout by pressing forward to destroy the demoralized American forces and capture Cambridge. Had General Howe agreed, Clinton might have dealt the Revolution a devastating blow, which was precisely what the astute General Ward now feared. But Howe, beginning the rapid development of an unerring talent for making the wrong decision, chose instead to stop, dig in, and fortify Bunker Hill.

Thus the victory went to the British in that they had conquered the Charlestown Peninsula, but their preposterous tactics, born of overconfidence, had decimated their army. As in so many military engagements in history, the battle was a tragicomedy of errors on both sides, with Britain’s technical victory bought at an enormous price. For their part, contemporary Americans did not have the temerity to claim the battle as a mighty victory, and the entire operation was rightly denounced as rash and unfortunate.

* On the role of British contempt in their performance in the war of the Revolution, see Eric Robson, The American Revolution in Its Political and Military Aspects. 1763–1783 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 127ff.

8

Washington Transforms the Army

Washington’s first task was to assume direct command of the Continental Army before Boston, which he did upon reaching his Cambridge headquarters on July 2. Although he took up his tasks energetically, Washington accomplished nothing militarily for the remainder of the year and more, nor did he try. His only campaign in 1775 was internal rather than external; it was directed against the American army as he found it, and was designed to extirpate the spirit of liberty pervading this unusually individualistic and democratic army of militiamen. In short, Washington set out to transform a people’s army, uniquely suited for a libertarian revolution, into another orthodox and despotically ruled statist force after the familiar European model.

His primary aim was to crush the individualistic and democratic spirit of the American forces. For one thing, the officers of the militia were elected by their own men, and the discipline of repeated elections kept the officers from forming an aristocratic ruling caste typical of European armies of the period. The officers often drew little more pay than their men, and there were no hierarchical distinctions of rank imposed between officers and men. As a consequence, officers could not enforce their wills coercively on the soldiery. This New England equality horrified Washington’s conservative and highly aristocratic soul.

To introduce a hierarchy of ruling caste, Washington insisted on distinctive decorations of dress in accordance with minute gradations of rank. As one observer phrased it: “New lords, new laws.... The strictest government is taking place, and great distinction is made between officers and soldier. Everyone is made to know his place and keep it.” Despite the great expense involved, he also tried to stamp out individuality in the army by forcing uniforms upon them; but the scarcity of cloth made this plan unfeasible.

At least as important as distinctions in decoration was the introduction of extensive inequality in pay. Led by Washington and the other aristocratic southern delegates, and over the objections of Massachusetts, the Congress insisted on fixing a pay scale for generals and other officers considerably higher than that of the rank and file.

In addition to imposing a web of hierarchy on the Continental Army, Washington crushed liberty within by replacing individual responsibility by iron despotism and coercion. Severe and brutal punishments were imposed upon those soldiers whose sense of altruism failed to override their instinct for self-preservation. Furloughs were curtailed and girl friends of soldiers were expelled from camp; above all, lengthy floggings were introduced for all practices which Washington considered esthetically or morally offensive. He even had the temerity to urge Congress to raise the maximum number of strikes of the lash from 39 to the enormous number of 500; fortunately, Congress refused.

In a few short months, Washington had succeeded in extirpating a zealous, happy, individualistic people’s army, and transforming it into yet another statist army, filled with bored, resentful, and even mutinous soldiery. The only thing he could not do was force the troops to continue in camp after their terms of enlistment were up at the end of the year, and by now the soldiers were longing for home. In addition to all other factors, Americans were not geared—nor should they have been—for a lengthy conflict of position and attrition; they were not professional soldiers, and they were needed at their homes and jobs and on their farms. Had they been a frankly guerrilla army, there would have been no conflict between these roles.

As the end of 1775 drew near, then, Washington’s main preoccupation was in forging a new army to replace the 17,000 men whose terms of enlistment were about to expire. His problems were aggravated by Congress’ refusal to pay the bounties for enlistment New Englanders were used to receiving; instead caste distinctions were widened even further by raising officers’ pay, while privates’ pay remained the same. Only 3,500 of the old army agreed to reenlist; for the rest, very short-term enlistments of Massachusetts and New Hampshire men filled the gap until new enlistees finally swelled the total to about 10,000.

As might have been expected, the wealthy and aristocratic Washington, free from money worries, had little understanding of the economic plight of his soldiery. In contrast to the legends about his compassion, Washington railed about the defecting troops as being possessed of a “dirty mercenary spirit” and of “basely deserting the cause of their country.”*

A particularly colorful addition to the New England troops in the Continental Army, during the summer of 1775, was a detachment of nine enlisted companies of expert riflemen from the back-country frontier of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, five of them from Pennsylvania. There were over 1,400 of these riflemen in all. The bulk of them were hardy Ulster Scot frontiersmen, wearing hunting outfits bearing the motto Liberty or Death and employing the unique “Kentucky rifle,” invented by Pennsylvania German gunsmiths. This long-barreled rifle was uniquely suited for guerrilla warfare. It shot more accurately and over a far longer range than the shorter musket in general use, but it did not reload rapidly, and hence was not useful for orthodox, open-field, positional or linear volley warfare.

It is not surprising that these backwoodsmen proved even more individualistic and less tolerant of coercion than the New Englanders. When they terrorized British sentries with their sniping, Washington forbade such seemingly disorganized practice which spent ammunition. Whenever a rifleman was imprisoned for infringing one of Washington’s arbitrary but cherished rules, his comrades would break into the prison and set him free. On one occasion, virtually an entire Pennsylvania company mutinied to try to free one of their own, and several regiments were needed to disarm and convict the Pennsylvanians, whose penalty consisted of less than a week’s pay. The riflemen, however, were not so much unfit for any military service as they were “by nature and by experience, totally unfitted for inactive life in camp.” When the opportunity came for action for which they were suited, they were to serve admirably.**

Meanwhile, the British troops, reinforced in midsummer by up to 5,000 effectives, also dug in for a lengthy siege. As was inevitable, General Gage was made the scapegoat for Bunker Hill, and in mid-October he was recalled and replaced as commander-in-chief by the hardly less culpable General Howe.

* Willard M. Wallace, Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the American Revolution (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1951), pp. 54–55.

** Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1952), I:108.

9

The Invasion of Canada

While Washington busied himself with crippling the morale of the American army before Boston, other American forces were not idle. We have seen that promptly upon seizing Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold both pressed upon Congress the urgency of seizing the northern British base in Canada. They realized the necessity of speed; the British commander in Canada, Gen. Guy Carleton, his troops depleted to aid General Gage in Boston, had only two foot regiments and two artillery companies to defend the entire region. Speed was also needed to take advantage of spring and summer weather. There were Americans who supported a prompt strike at the British base in Canada—for instance, one of the sparkplugs of the blow at Ticonderoga had been John Brown, a lawyer of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who had been sent as early as February as a secret agent to the Canadians by the Boston Committee of Correspondence to whip up support for the colonial cause. But we have seen that the conservatives in the Congress timorously scuttled the plan and even tried to get the Americans to withdraw from Ticonderoga. They even went so far as to drive the bold and brilliant Arnold and Allen from command.

The discontented activist officers at Ticonderoga quickly reacted by sending Ethan Allen and Seth Warner of the Green Mountain Boys as emissaries to the Continental Congress. Apparently, Congress found Allen persuasive, for it promptly recommended to the New York Provincial Congress that it form the Green Mountain Boys into a ranger regiment with officers of their own choosing. Moreover, four days later, on June 27, Congress finally decided to authorize an invasion of Canada.

While the Americans essentially adopted Arnold’s tactical plan of taking Montreal and then moving on to Quebec, Congress, of course, did not have the imagination or daring to place such brilliant military radicals as Arnold or Allen in charge of the expedition against Canada. Instead, command was given to the man already in charge of the “northern department” at New York, the timorous and conservative scion of the New York landed oligarchy, Philip Schuyler. At a time when speed was of the essence, Schuyler dithered for two precious months, preparing his army of 1,700 men to move north from Crown Point and Ticonderoga. Fortunately, Schuyler had as his second in command the highly competent Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery, who recognized the need for speed in mounting the invasion. The British-born Montgomery had had almost as much military experience in Europe as his friend Charles Lee or Horatio Gates, and had resigned from the British army in 1772 to settle in New York and marry into the Livingston branch of the New York landed aristocracy. In vain did he press Schuyler to march north; finally, taking advantage of Schuyler’s absence at a parley to secure the neutrality of the Iroquois, Montgomery took it upon himself to make the move against Canada at the end of August, a decision in which Schuyler, taken off the hook, readily concurred.

General Carleton decided to make his main stand at Fort St. John’s on the Richelieu River, north of Lake Champlain. But Schuyler lingered defensively in front of St. John’s for two weeks, and only his illness, forcing him to return south in mid-September, permitted Montgomery to surround and lay proper siege to the fort.

The great bulk of the American expeditionary force came from Connecticut; the conservative province of New York, as Connecticut’s Colonel Hinman said sourly, “abounds with officers, but I have not had my curiosity gratified by the sight of one private.” While this proved to be a slight exaggeration, the New Englanders were understandably aggrieved at seeing the New Yorkers fill the major posts and gain lucrative commissary contracts, while they furnished the fighting men. The New Hampshire Grant contribution, in the meanwhile, had been gravely crippled by an upheaval among the Green Mountain Boys. Acceding to Congress’ request, the New York Provincial Congress, in early July, had agreed to raise a battalion of five hundred men from the grant lands, to be known as the Green Mountain Rangers. But when the Committee of Safety of the towns west of the Green Mountains assembled at Dorset at the end of July to elect officers of the new battalion, Allen was humiliatingly repudiated. Seth Warner was chosen to be commander and Allen was not even selected as one of the subordinate officers.

The brutal cashiering of the magnificent Allen had been accomplished not by his devoted Green Mountain Boys, but by the timorous town elders of the grant lands, who hated the radical, brawling, zestful deist, and took this opportunity to scuttle him. The enraged young men of the grant lands thereupon refused to enlist, and Warner was not able to bring the battalion to more than half strength. Deprived of their leader and their enthusiasm, the Green Mountain men were no longer the superbly effective force they once had been.

Allen, however, swallowed his pride in his eagerness to aid the revolutionary cause, and went back to Ticonderoga in hope of a commission, but Schuyler scornfully allowed the hero of Ticonderoga to sign on only as a private. At the siege of St. John’s, General Montgomery put Allen in charge of thirty Connecticut militiamen, and sent him off through the countryside between the Richelieu and Montreal to try to raise Canadian volunteers for the cause. John Brown, now a major, and Warner were also sent around the countryside on similar errands. Repeatedly urging Montgomery to seize St. John’s without delay, Allen managed to raise about eighty Canadians.

On September 24, Allen encountered Brown near Longueuil across the St. Lawrence from Montreal. Brown’s bold proposal to strike at Montreal with his force of 200 had been vetoed by Montgomery, so he joined with Allen in a daring plan for a joint surprise strike at that great Canadian port. They agreed upon an immediate coordinated attack: Brown to cross the river and approach the city from the north, and Allen, his force now grown to 150, to attack simultaneously from the south.

The plan was brilliantly conceived and rested on the mobility and surprise inherent in a guerrilla-style operation. But Brown unaccountably failed to cross the river as agreed. The abandoned Allen was left to face an open battle with a superior force of over thirty British regulars and two hundred Canadian volunteers. Furthermore, Allen’s men were not trained and loyal Green Mountain Boys, and the Canadians on Allen’s flanks fled as soon as the British force surged out of Montreal to do battle. Allen and the tiny remainder of his force were taken prisoner, with Allen placed in chains and transported to England. The Americans’ greatest and most daring guerrilla fighter was removed from the scene. Washington, who was wont to defend and wet nurse his fellow oligarch, Schuyler, could only react with near satisfaction to the loss of Allen: “Colonel Allen’s misfortune will, I hope, teach a lesson of prudence and subordination to others....”

The population of Canada in 1775 numbered approximately 60,000, almost all of them French peasants, or habitants, oppressed alike by the British state-privileged seigneurs and by the state-privileged church. There were only several hundred English Canadians (“Old Subjects”), most of them bureaucrats, soldiers, and merchants engaged in the Montreal fur trade. Naturally, as the Revolutionary War began, both the British and the Americans tried to woo the Canadians; equally naturally, the French Canadians, certain of English and American contempt for their religion and their ethnic origins, had little interest in either party and remained neutral and aloof. Had the Anglo-American record of racial and religious bigotry not prevented the French Canadians from joining the revolutionary cause, Canada (Quebec) would undoubtedly have become a fourteenth original state of the United States.

The capture of Ethan Allen had considerable influence in swaying the cautious Canadians and Canadian Indians toward what looked like the winning side; but Carleton quickly dissipated any goodwill among the habitants by trying to conscript them en masse into the army—a draft that the sturdy French refused to obey. Nine hundred new men thus conscripted swiftly deserted at a rate of nearly forty a day.

The weather was now turning cold; the many months of American delay were already beginning to take their toll. The heavy New England force was also irrepressibly asserting its individuality and was in a state near to total mutiny. Montgomery’s orders were being blithely disregarded, and he perceptively testified to the libertarian spirit of his troops, complaining to Schuyler that it was impossible to command men “who carried the spirit of freedom into the field, and think for themselves.” In short, “the privates are all generals.”

Things had begun to look up for the American forces, however. Montgomery’s kinsman, Col. James Livingston, managed to maneuver past St. John’s and capture Fort Chambly, some miles to the north, on October 8. St. John’s was now in grave peril and Carleton raised a rescue force of sixty regulars and over seven hundred allied Indians and set forth across the St. Lawrence. But Seth Warner and the Green Mountain Rangers had fortified the opposite bank at Longueuil; their fire beat back the British. The doomed Fort St. John’s surrendered on November 2, and 500 regulars, the bulk of the British force in Canada, were taken prisoner.

The great victory at St. John’s threw Montreal wide open to the American forces, and General Montgomery swiftly pressed his advantage. Carleton escaped with his 150 regulars down-river toward Quebec, the last British stronghold in Canada. On November 13, a citizens’ committee surrendered Montreal to the American force.

At this point there occurred another of the near misses at victory that were to stud this campaign. Carleton’s fleet, sailing down the St. Lawrence, reached American positions at Sorel, at the junction of the Richelieu and St. Lawrence rivers. Major John Brown managed to dupe the British into believing that great cannon were stationed at Sorel, thus convincing the British fleet to surrender on November 19. Canada could have been conquered then and there, but the redoubtable Carleton slipped past the American lines, disguised in peasant costume, and managed to reach Quebec.

He reached Quebec just in time for the British cause. The Americans had decided to strike on two fronts; while Schuyler and Montgomery were to make for Montreal, another force was to march overland across an extremely rugged route through Maine following the Kennebec, Dead, and Chaudiere rivers to assault Quebec. The daring plan for the expedition had been drawn up by the restless Benedict Arnold, who, having won the support of General Gates, was selected by Washington to lead the expedition with the rank of colonel. The plan was a brilliant one, and Arnold was happily given a free hand. But time was growing short. The decision to go forward with the invasion was made in mid-August—and “General Winter” was near at hand.

There was no dearth of volunteers for the Arnold expedition from the bored and fretting troops in the army around Boston. The assembled force of over a thousand men consisted of ten companies of musketeers from New England and three companies of backwoods riflemen from Virginia and Pennsylvania. Working at breakneck speed, Arnold was able to assemble the troops at Cambridge on September 11. They set sail for the Kennebec from Newburyport, Massachusetts, on the nineteenth, reaching Gardiner on the twenty-second.

Arnold now organized his army into four divisions, the lead division of riflemen under the command of Capt. Daniel Morgan, head of the Virginia rifle company. It was Morgan’s task to clear a path for the army through the wilderness over the numerous carrying places. This giant, burly frontiersman, teamster, and veteran Indian fighter was to prove to be the great guerrilla fighter of the Revolutionary War. Overcoming incredible difficulties and hardships, Arnold and Morgan led their men to Quebec in one of the most famous marches in history, ranked by many with Xenophon’s. But tragically, Lt. Col. Roger Enos, in charge of the rear-guard division, decided to betray his post at the end of October and took his force back home, absconding also with the bulk of the scarce remaining food. Enos’ defection subtracted three hundred crucial men from the expedition, a loss that might well have spelled the difference between victory and defeat.

Still, Arnold and his gallant seven hundred might have taken Quebec. They arrived at Point Levis, across the St. Lawrence from Quebec, on November 9. The city was weakly defended, and a quick thrust across the river could have meant its capture. But high winds forced fatal delays in the crossing, allowing the highland Scot, Allan MacLean, who by sheer accident had learned of the Arnold expedition, to reach Quebec with one hundred men before Arnold could mount his attack. Finally crossing on November 13, Arnold tried to provoke MacLean to leave the walls and fight, as Montcalm had done against the British over a dozen years before. MacLean sat tight, so Arnold, lacking men for a siege, went up-river to Pointe Aux Trembles to wait for Montgomery.

But the months of delay were now taking their toll, and the terms of enlistment of Montgomery’s troops were about up. He was left with only 800 men, and after leaving garrisons at St. John’s and Montreal, he could join Arnold with only 300, making a total American force of 1,000 before Quebec.

Montgomery and Arnold now found themselves besieging a city where 1,800 men had been mobilized, and with soldiers whose terms of service expired at the end of the year. The Americans were therefore forced to strike quickly. But the number of men was now too few, and the decision for coordinated surprise attack by the two leaders was betrayed to the enemy by deserters.

Two columns struck at Quebec on the night of December 30. Trying desperately to rally his column, the gallant Montgomery was cut down. The rest of the force promptly retreated in a rout, despite efforts of the brilliant young volunteer, Capt. Aaron Burr, son of the president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, to rally the troops.

The collapse of the Montgomery column left the British free to concentrate on Colonel Arnold’s force. Arnold was wounded in the attack, but Morgan, taking command, braved countless bullets and crashed the barrier. Morgan’s every instinct was to strike while the iron was hot and the British were in panic, but unfortunately, he complied with the advice of his officers against any further advance. If not for this amorousness, which Arnold would certainly have overridden, Morgan might well have seized all of lower Quebec. The delay proved fatal.

Now surrounded by the British, the undauntable Morgan offered to personally cut a swath through the British troops to gain an escape route, but the other officers refused. Instead, they decided to surrender. Morgan, completely alone and personally surrounded, steadfastly refused to surrender until the very end.

The battle of Quebec had been absolutely disastrous for the Americans, and most of the finest leaders in the American army were put out of commission. Allen had been captured, the great Montgomery was dead, Morgan was captured, and Arnold was gravely wounded. The brave Kennebec marchers were wiped out, with one hundred casualties and four hundred taken prisoner. Even so, Arnold, now a brigadier general, issuing orders from a hospital bed, refused to give up, and his few hundred half-starved men lay futile siege to Quebec for the rest of the winter.

For his noble efforts, Arnold once again received mainly humiliation; He had asked for Charles Lee or someone like him to take command and lead the assault, but when reinforcements came in early April 1776, he was replaced by craven commanders who abandoned the siege. Now he moved disconsolately behind the lines to take charge of the occupation of Montreal.

At this strategic moment, in early May 1776, Carleton surged forth from Quebec with nine hundred men to rout the American forces. In early June, New Hampshire’s Gen. John Sullivan was appointed commander of the forces in Canada. Sullivan was as bold as Arnold and Montgomery but lacked their brains. Now that strategic retreat was called for, Sullivan, on June 7, rashly launched an attack against the town of Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence. The result was collapse. Two hundred Americans (including the leader of the actual attack, Gen. William Thompson, commander of one of the Pennsylvania rifle regiments) were taken prisoner. Faced with the crushing defeat at Three Rivers, Sullivan had had enough, and he proceded to beat a hasty and ignominious retreat. Rushing back from Canada and abandoning all positions there, the American forces returned to Ticonderoga in early July 1776.

Thus ended the American push against Canada, a tragic and disastrous failure. Yet, few campaigns in military history have been so marked by so many hairline turning points: the delays of Congress and of Schuyler bringing on winter weather and the end of American enlistment terms; the failure of Brown to meet Allen; the melodramatic escape of the formidable General Carleton from capture by the Americans; the decimation of Montgomery’s army by the end of enlistment terms; the desertion by Colonel Enos; the high winds delaying Arnold’s crossing of the St. Lawrence; the accidental discovery by MacLean of Arnold’s advance; the hasty attack on Quebec impelled by the end of enlistment terms; the killing of General Montgomery and the subsequent rout of his column; the wounding of Arnold and subsequent hobbling of Morgan’s advance; and the replacement of Arnold the following spring. Some of the most daring and progressive leaders, those most sensitive to guerrilla-type warfare, had been lost: Allen, Morgan, Montgomery, Thompson. The inordinately expensive campaign had succeeded in losing 5,000 American troops to death and capture. And Canada was lost forever.

10

Paper Money Financing

Armies, especially European-style armies, have to be systematically financed, and it was up to the Continental Congress, which had assumed responsibility for the Continental Army, to decide on its financing. The financing of an activity by any organization may be either voluntary or compulsory; and the anarchically formed revolutionary bodies in the separate colonies, as well as the Congress, were now spontaneously constituted bodies, teetering on the edge of becoming governments. Whether they would become governments or not depended largely on how they would finance themselves, for the mark of government, the feature distinguishing it from all other organs in society, is that it finances itself by compulsory levy rather than by voluntary gift or purchase of service.

The Continental Congress, however, was in a bad spot. A purely guerrilla force might well have been naturally financed by voluntary contributions—in money and in kind—on the spot. But to finance regular armies on a centralized basis from voluntary contributions was completely outside the ken of the world at the time. On the other hand, it was out of the question for either the Congress or the local revolutionary bodies to impose taxation, the usual method of financing governments. Much of the thrust of the Revolution after all was against taxation, and the spirit of liberty among the American people was too strong to succumb immediately to similar taxation at home. Americans were in the throes of an anarchic uprising against their “legally authorized” government and its taxation. They were not yet prepared to slip on a new tax yoke in the cause of breaking the grip of the old. Later this would occur, but not yet in 1775. Furthermore, Congress had no power to tax, no power to impose its will on the separate colonies or the people therein.

One time-honored method of evading and postponing the point of coercion is to borrow the needed money—a method seemingly voluntary, but resting on the pledge of future coercion (taxes) to provide repayment. The Congress began tentatively in mid-June 1775 to move toward borrowing by appointing a committee to consider borrowing 6,000 pounds sterling for supply of powder, a loan which Congress would undertake to repay.

At this fateful crossroads Congress hit upon a device, coercive but seemingly painless, a device that the British colonies had pioneered in the western world, the issue of paper money. Paper issues fraudulently pretend to be equivalent to units of specie and are used by the issuer to bid away resources in society from the producers and consumers, in the process depreciating the money unit itself. Its nature and consequences are equivalent to the process of counterfeiting.

Historians who believe that paper money agitation is invariably the product of the lower classes or of impoverished farmers might well ponder the identity of the man who led the Continental Congress down the primrose path of paper money, a young scion of the New York landed aristocracy, Gouverneur Morris. The highly conservative Morris, grandson of Lewis Morris, royal governor of New Jersey, was delegate to the Congress from Westchester County.

Once paper money was decided upon, the next decision was whether each colony would be responsible for eventual redemption of its proportion of issues—for everyone recognized that paper money would only circulate if some sort of redemption were pledged for the future. This would mean that each colony would stand on its own bottom, and one of the advantages of Continental paper for the northern colonies was inducing the other colonies to take on some of the former’s financial burden. Hence Massachusetts and New Hampshire, on the firing line, were understandably eager to foist their expenses onto the shoulders of the other colonies. Finally, on June 22, Congress decided to issue $2 million in paper, or “bills of credit,” a sum that was soon to be rapidly expanded. Each colony, it was decided, would be pledged in seven years to redeem a pro rata share of the common Continental issue, based upon its relative population; but significantly, all the colonies were pledged to redeem any default by a particular colony. Redemption was to begin at the end of 1779. The process, however, was not envisioned as genuine redemption in specie, but merely the levying of taxes in Continental paper itself, which would then be used to retire the paper. In short, the redemption charted by Congress would not give hard-money backing to the new paper dollars; the bills would not be redeemed but retired. The prospect was only of a massive tax burden in a few years, which would be superimposed upon the previous “tax” burden imposed by paper inflation.

In short, the seemingly inexhaustible fount of new Continental money had begun, and an insistent clamor soon arose for ever greater shares in the new bonanza. As Edmund Burnett phrased it, “Such was the beginning of the ’federal trough’, one of America’s most imperishable institutions.”*

From the very start, the Continentals followed the sociological law that, once turned on, the engines of paper inflation accelerate as the clamor mounts for shares in the new cornucopia. By the time the $2 million were ready to emerge from the press in a few weeks, Congress had already concluded that the issue was insufficient. By the end of July, another $1 million of new money was authorized. What, after all, was to be the criterion for halting the money engine? Before the end of 1775, a full $6 million in three issues of new paper were issued or authorized. This issue for the year contrasted with a total money supply of approximately $12 million at the beginning of the war—a 50 percent increase in the money supply in less than one year!

Congress had no power to make its notes “legal tender” (compulsory for creditors to receive in payment of debts), but Rhode Island in 1775 pioneered in making the Continental paper legal tender for all debts in the province. Furthermore, any person refusing to accept these notes as equivalent to real specie dollars was to be denounced as an enemy of his country who “should be debarred from all communication with good citizens.”

The separate provinces themselves were not to be denied use of the new bonanza. Even before Congress acted, during May 1775, embattled Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island voted their own paper issues. At the end of June, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress rashly made not only its own bills legal tender, but also those of all colonies. Anyone refusing to accept any of the notes at par with specie would be deemed an enemy of his country.

* Edmund Cody Burnett, The Continental Congress (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), p. 83.

11

The New Postal System

If the colonies were to fight a war of any length or seriousness against Great Britain, they could obviously no longer rely upon the crown’s monopoly postal service for transmission of their mail. When the final crisis began at the beginning of 1774, and Britain got word of the Boston Tea Party, Benjamin Franklin, already in hot water, was swiftly removed as the royally appointed deputy postmaster general for America. Franklin’s unceremonious removal reminded the Americans that the postal authorities were empowered to open letters and block delivery of what they thought of as “objectionable matter.” In addition to the threat of the royal post to the freedom of the press, they began to see that postal fees were equivalent to another tax levied on them without their consent.

Extension of the American boycott from British trade to the royal post was thought of first, but it was soon seen that a boycott of a tight monopoly could only be self-defeating, for then no mail would be carried. The solution was set forth by the eminent radical printer William Goddard, publisher of the Maryland Journal and the Pennsylvania Chronicle. In early February 1774, he proposed an illegal revolutionary “Constitutional Post,” organized and financed by local private sources operating at cost. The post would be built from the ground up, with local officers and provincial postal committees electing a postmaster general. Under Goddard’s leadership, the plan soon flourished, the radical Sam Adams and the Boston Committee of Correspondence being unsurprisingly enthusiastic about the venture. By the spring of 1775, the illegal, privately organized and financed Constitutional Post had a chain of successful post offices from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Williamsburg, Virginia, and the languishing royal post in New York and Boston was being forced to discharge postriders for lack of work.

When the Revolutionary War began, the New England and New York provincial congresses removed the onus of illegality from the new postal system. But the Continental Congress, took a little noted step from liberty back to centralized statism in this vital area. In doing this, Congress had been prodded by a committee headed by Franklin who, since his disgrace in England, had been forced to throw in his lot with the American cause. A voluntary, efficient, grassroots postal service had aided the Revolution and replaced the royal post; but at the end of July Congress decided to nationalize the Constitutional Post. It was also decided to expand the postal system southward to Savannah, Georgia, and northward to Falmouth, Maine. Not fortuitously, Goddard, an ardent rebel and founder of the Constitutional Post, was deposed and shunted aside in favor of the old opportunist Franklin, who was chosen to be postmaster general of the new American post, operated by a newly created Postal Department. A colonies-wide governmental post, all too reminiscent of the old centralized royal post, had now replaced the grassroots private postal system.

In any event, under pressure of the growing American competition and its own increasing unpopularity, and further handicapped by being prohibited by the Maryland Provincial Convention, the royal post closed its American doors in December 1775, never to return.

12

New York Fumbles in the Crisis

The major weapon of American pressure on Great Britain at the time of Lexington and Concord had been the Continental Association, and after the shooting started, this boycott weapon continued its work with redoubled force. In mid-May 1775, Congress resolved on an absolute boycott of trade with those English colonies that had not joined the association: Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, St. John’s Island, the Floridas, and Georgia—with the exception of radical St. John’s Parish, which sent Dr. Lyman Hall as an accredited delegate to the Second Continental Congress. The boycott succeeding in injuring Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Floridas, but British exports soon made up the gap.

The news of Lexington and Concord sparked the local governments into circulating “defense associations,” a more radical extension of the Continental Association. In New York and New Jersey signers of these mass statements agreed to support any measures of the Continental Congress and the provincial conventions; in more radical Maryland and South Carolina they pledged their lives and fortunes to the rebel cause. Generally, the grassroots associations were soon adopted by the provincial conventions, which circulated the mass oaths to all adult males, taking the precaution of publicizing the names of any who refused to sign—especially in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and South Carolina. The new, more radical defense associations understandably superseded the Continental Association in the support of the public.

The New York associations responded to the electric news of Lexington and Concord on April 23 by immediately putting leadership into the hands of the leaders of the radical forces, Isaac Sears and John Lamb. Organizing parades in the towns, Sears and Lamb called on the people of New York to arm themselves in defense of their “injured rights and liberties.” Shipments of provisions for General Gage’s forces in Boston were quickly stripped by a mob led by Sears, Lamb, and Peter Livingston. Sears and Lamb also broke into the City Hall Arsenal and seized and distributed the muskets and gunpowder inside. Armed citizens patrolled the streets, and Sears and Lamb hastily drilled their followers.

Revolutionary popular rule prevailed. Hated Tory printer James Rivington was forced to flee to the safety of a British warship; the Reverend Myles Cooper and other Tory Anglican clergymen of New York went into hiding; and an armed mob, led by Sears, forced the collector of customs to surrender the keys to the customs house, which was promptly shut down. Sears ordered no ships to be cleared for Halifax or British-occupied Boston, and even went so far as to close the Port of New York.

The old, predominantly radical Committee of Sixty, after failing in its bid to run the city, organized a city wide election for a “Committee of One Hundred” as the city’s government. Elections were also called for a provincial congress to unify the whole province. In the election of April 29, two slates contested for the twenty city delegate positions and for the Committee of One Hundred: Sears, Lamb, the artisans, and the Sons of Liberty on the one hand, and a conservative group on the other.

The election was a victory for the conservative Whigs of Robert R. Livingston’s wing of the landed oligarchy and a blow to the Sears-Lamb radicals, who had been weakened by the growing conservatization of the third member of the once great radical triumvirate, Alexander McDougall. The conservatives swiftly moved to tame and bowdlerize the revolutionary movement in New York City. At a conservative-run mass meeting immediately following the election, headed by Isaac Low and Robert Livingston, a defense association drafted by the highly conservative James Duane, John Jay, and Peter Van Schaack pledged to carry out the measures of the Continental and provincial congresses. This was a seemingly bold and sturdy step, but actually, it channeled the revolutionary movement in New York into passive, legal measures and shunted aside the extralegal activities of Sears and Lamb.*

The newly elected Committee of One Hundred quickly resolved to offer this defense association to every citizen of the city and to record the names of those refusing to sign. Within a month, 1,800 citizens of New York City had signed. The Committee of One Hundred also mobilized and drilled the militia of the city, and sale of arms to Tories was prohibited. The swift military mobilization performed two functions, one revolutionary, the other repressive. On the one hand, the militia prepared against an expected British invasion of New York City; on the other, its actual concrete function was the centrist one of keeping the Sears-Lamb radicals under wraps.

The meeting of the first New York Provincial Congress on May 22 marked the first highly significant expansion of the revolutionary movement from the city to the whole province, which had until then been conspicuously lacking in revolutionary fervor. The congress expanded the defense association of April 29 to the entire province, and county committees were selected to offer the association to every inhabitant. Although no penalties except public obloquy were attached to nonsigners, by September the patience of the Provincial Congress had worn thin. It resolved on September 1 that “although this Congress have a tender regard for freedom of speech, the rights of conscience, and personal liberty,” the public safety required a stern crackdown upon those withholding allegiance not only from the provincial and Continental congresses, but even from county and district committees, all of which were extralegal and spontaneously created bodies. In two weeks the Provincial Committee of Safety, the Provincial Congress’ executive arm, pressed further to force the disarming of all nonsigners of the association, who were presumed to be ipso facto rejectors of the authority of the revolutionary bodies. While this step was too radical for the Congress that autumn, the following spring it agreed to the forced disarming of all nonsigners, who were then jailed at their own expense.

Whig rule in New York was beset by many problems not encountered so virulently elsewhere. Most important was the highly conservative tinge of New York opinion; a growing and active minority of Tories faced a Whig majority shot through with conservative, neo-Tory sentiment, thereby playing into Tory hands. Outright Tory were the DeLancey wing of the landed oligarchy, the Anglicans (concentrated in New York City), and oppressed tenants whose landlords were Whigs (e.g., Livingston) and who hoped to gain by opposing their masters. Thus the inner contradictions of New York’s drive for liberty that acquiesced in oppression of tenants arose to plague the revolutionary cause.

When the association was circulated throughout New York, it was found that Tories were in a majority on Long Island, overwhelmingly so in Queens and Richmond counties, where they prevented the election of deputies, and very strong in parts of Westchester, Albany, and Dutchess counties, and in New York City. The military effort of New York was thereby gravely crippled, and few men or supplies, and no money, could be furnished by New York for the crucially important invasion of Canada.

While outright Tories were unusually strong in New York, even the dominant conservative Livingston Whigs were eager for reconciliation with England. Only in New York was it credible that as late as the end of May 1775, the Provincial Congress should adopt the reconciliation report of the highly conservative Gouverneur Morris. Morris’ principles, obsolete elsewhere in the colonies, approved Britain’s right to regulate American foreign commerce but not domestic affairs and moved along the lines of Galloway’s old defeated plan of union with Great Britain.

So timorous were the Livingston Whigs, that at the end of August when Lamb, under Provincial Congress authority, attempted to strip the Battery port of royal authority and a British ship opened fire, the Whigs totally succumbed to Gov. William Tryon’s demand and left the cannon alone, even continuing to supply the British ships. When the Continental Congress recommended jailing all persons inimical to the American cause, and especially royal officials, the Whig rulers of New York City hastened to assure Royal Governor Tryon of his permanent safety. Further, in early November, when the Continental Congress urged New York to seize all British military stores in the city, the Whigs flatly refused. What sort of a revolutionary war was this? New York was clearly a pesthole for revolutionary activities.

Rendered desperate by the dead hand of the ruling Whigs, the New York radicals decided they had to carry on the Revolution by themselves. In early June, before Montgomery and Schuyler marched for Montreal, Marinus Willett defied the Provincial Congress and raided the baggage train of the royal governor embarking for England. An ordnance warehouse was looted and a royal barge burned. Sears, backed by Montgomery, decided to seize Tryon and take him to Connecticut in the summer of 1775, but he was overruled by the oligarchs, Schuyler and Washington. Finally, the defiance by New York of the Continental Congress on seizing crown military stores and royal officials was too much for Sears; it was obvious to him that he could not fight a revolution in New York, and he left for Connecticut in early November.

As for the other radical leader, John Lamb, he joined the army and participated in the invasion of Canada, falling wounded and captured, like so many other American leaders, at the battle of Quebec. Meanwhile, the third radical triumvir, Alexander McDougall, the last remaining in New York, continued to shift ever more steadily rightward into the Livingston camp. Thus, with their great leaders gone or recreant, New York radicalism and the Sons of Liberty were dealt a staggering and decisive blow, a blow which such new leaders as Daniel Dunscomb and William Goforth could not hope to repair. New York was now deprived of a Left; and remained only with a strong Tory Right and a conservative, fainthearted, Livingston Center-Right.

* Cf. Roger J. Champagne, “New York’s Radicals and the Coming of Independence,” Journal of American History (June 1964), p. 24.