Part three
The Unfinished Revolution, 1775–1803
In 1775 Great Britain still possessed all of North America east of the Mississippi River, from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. If the British could suppress the troublesome rebellion along the Atlantic seaboard, their prospects for expansion in America looked promising. Farther west, Spain had recently acquired the vast Louisiana Territory from France. The Spanish retained their dominance in the Southwest, and they were finally beginning to expand their claim to California by building a series of new missions and presidios.
By 1803, however, the broad picture had changed markedly. In the Pacific Ocean, Europeans had encountered the Hawaiian Islands for the first time, Russian fur traders had consolidated their hold in Alaska, and Spanish vessels along the Pacific coast faced increasing competition from the ships of rival nations. The British still held Canada and Florida, but the thirteen rebellious colonies had become an independent republic and had started to acquire new territories. The most spectacular acquisition was the Louisiana Territory, which the United States purchased in 1803, after Spain returned the region to the control of France.
Few could have foreseen such an unlikely series of events in such a brief span of time. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 at age thirty-three. His generation had reluctantly become the effective leaders of a revolutionary movement by the mid-1770s. They contended ably with those who pushed for greater democratization, those who desired the stability of military rule, and even those who longed for the protection of the British monarchy.
These unlikely revolutionary leaders were by no means united in all their views and actions. They argued fervently over constitutional issues, domestic policies, and foreign alignments. Most managed to reap personal rewards from the new society’s collective success. And they saw to it that these rewards reached far beyond their own households. Urban artisans, frontier farmers, and immigrant newcomers benefited from the removal of monarchy.
Such positive developments inspired optimism for many, both at home and abroad. Yet although the revolutionary era fulfilled the expectations of numerous citizens, it failed to meet the hopes and aspirations of other Americans. Many American merchants and planters, indebted to British interests before 1776, gained by the separation from Great Britain as creditors and investors in the new society. Many frontier farmers and army veterans, on the other hand, faced burdensome debts after the Revolutionary War.
Women worried that the numerous written constitutions of the period were unresponsive to their interests. In 1776 New Jersey gave the vote to “all free inhabitants” who were also property holders. This included some single women, and in 1790 the state’s election law referred specifically to “he or she” among voters. But this novel provision was undone a generation later, in 1807, when New Jersey men objected to the idea of any women having the right to vote. From New Hampshire to Georgia, committed “Daughters of Liberty” had made possible colonial boycotts through their industry and had managed families, farms, and businesses during the dislocations of war. Female access to education and the courts improved somewhat in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but for most American women the advances were more symbolic than real.
For African Americans the disappointments were greater still. British offers of freedom prompted thousands of southern slaves to take up the Loyalist cause at great personal risk. Other free blacks and slaves, primarily in the North, shouldered arms for the Patriots, drawn by the rhetoric of liberty and the prospect of advancement. Even though they had chosen the winning side, they reaped few benefits. Although the number of free blacks expanded after the Revolutionary War, the African slave trade to the United States resumed and gained official protection. Slavery itself gained renewed significance with the transition to cotton production in the South and a federal constitution that sanctioned the power of slaveholders. Even in the North, where gradual emancipation became the norm by the end of the century, free blacks found their welcome into white churches and schools to be so half-hearted that many began organizing their own separate institutions.
Eastern Indians, like African Americans, had good reason to distrust the Revolution and its leaders. The majority, including most Iroquois and Cherokee warriors, sided with the British and paid a steep price in defeat. Throughout the Mississippi Valley, Native Americans who still remembered the benefits of French trade and British military support faced relentless pressure as American speculators, soldiers, and settlers dissected their homelands. After 1803, government officials promised that the newly acquired lands beyond the Mississippi would become an Indian Territory, providing a refuge for displaced eastern tribes. If so, what was to become of the Native American nations that already inhabited the western plains?
Like most political upheavals, the American Revolution left many questions unanswered and much business unfinished. Even the new federal government itself, in operation for little more than a decade by 1803, remained a work in progress. The specific roles and relative power of the government’s three separate branches spurred endless debate, as did the proper place of the military and the most suitable direction for foreign policy. The Constitution ratified in 1789 seemed promising, but it remained an uncertain and largely untested framework. 1776 Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Declaration of Independence
New Jersey gives women holding property the right to vote
Washington crosses the Delaware
1777 Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga
1778 United States forges an alliance with France
1779 Sullivan’s campaign against the Iroquois
1780 Charleston falls to the British
1781 Articles of Confederation ratified
Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown
1783 Treaty of Paris
Newburgh Conspiracy is thwarted
1785 Land Ordinance of 1785
1786 Shays’s Rebellion
1787 Constitutional Convention meets in Philadelphia
Northwest Ordinance creates Northwest Territory
Constitution of the United States is signed
1789 George Washington is elected the first president of the United States
U.S. Constitution goes into effect after ratification by nine states
Judiciary Act of 1789
1790 First U.S. Census enumerates population of 4 million
Congress restricts citizenship to “free white persons”
Northern states take steps to abolish slavery
Miami Chief Little Turtle scores victory over U.S. troops
1791 Bill of Rights is ratified
Saint Domingue slave revolt
Alexander Hamilton, “Report on the Subject of Manufactures”
Samuel Slater constructs first spinning machine on U.S. soil
Bank of the United States is chartered
1792 Washington is reelected president
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman
1793 Washington issues Neutrality Proclamation
Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin
1794 U.S. troops defeat forces of Ohio Confederacy
Whiskey Rebellion
1795 Jay’s Treaty
Treaty of San Lorenzo
1796 Washington’s farewell address
John Adams is elected president
1797 XYZ Affair
1798 Quasi War with France (to 1800)
Alien and Sedition Acts
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (1798–1799)
1799 Seneca Leader Handsome Lake proclaims gai’wiio, or “Good Message”
1800 Thomas Jefferson is elected president
Gabriel plot is exposed in Richmond, Virginia
1801 Judiciary Act of 1801
War against Barbary pirates
Spain secretly cedes Louisiana Territory to France
1803 Louisiana Purchase
Marbury v. Madison
Chapter 7
Revolutionaries at War, 1775–1783
Chapter Outline
“Things Are Now Come to That Crisis”
Declaring Independence
The Struggle to Win French Support
Legitimate States, a Respectable Military
The Long Road to Yorktown
Conclusion
Sites to Visit
For Further Reading
In 1775 African-born Thomas Peters was a thirty-seven-year-old slave in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a young man, he had been taken from what is now Nigeria and shipped to Louisiana aboard a French slave ship. Forced to cut sugar cane, Peters rebelled so often that his owner sold him to a merchant on North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. There he received his English name, operated a grist mill, and started a family. Still enslaved, Peters was working as a millwright and living with his wife, Sally, age twenty-two, and their four-year-old daughter, Clairy, by the eve of the Revolutionary War.
During the fifteen years between Peters’s abduction from Africa in 1760 and the outbreak of hostilities between America and Britain in 1775, nearly 225,000 people had streamed into the British mainland colonies. More than half came from the British Isles (125,000), and another 15,000 arrived from elsewhere in Europe. But the remaining 85,000 newcomers—or four in every ten—had all been purchased in Africa and enslaved in the coastal South. Thomas Peters, entering from Louisiana, was among the recent arrivals in British America.
In the summer of 1775, Peters must have heard talk about possible slave revolts in Virginia and the Carolinas. Before the end of the year, he certainly knew that Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, had offered freedom to slaves who would take up arms for the British. The following March, ships of the Royal Navy arrived at Cape Fear River. The fleet offered to provide safe haven for any slaves escaping from Patriot masters. Joining other black families, Tom and Sally Peters risked arrest to gain their personal liberty by bolting to the British vessels.
Peters was with the British fleet when General Henry Clinton’s forces tried to take Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1776. Throughout the war, Peters served in a unit called the Black Pioneers. Wounded twice, he rose to the rank of sergeant and earned the promise of a farm in British Canada. In 1783, as defeated Loyalists left New York City at the end of the war, he joined other Black Pioneers aboard the Joseph James, bound for Nova Scotia. With him were Sally, Clairy, and eighteen-month-old John. Departing in November, the ship was blown off course by foul weather. The ex-slaves spent the winter at Bermuda before finally joining 3,500 other black Loyalists in Nova Scotia in May 1784.
After he and others had been stripped of promised farmland in Nova Scotia, Peters ventured to London in 1790 to protest their treatment. In England, he met with British abolitionists who were planning a colony of former slaves in West Africa. Returning to Canada with this news, he led 1,200 African Americans to Sierra Leone, where he died at Freetown in 1792. In thirty-two years, Peters had seen New Orleans, Wilmington, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, Bermuda, Halifax, and London. (See Map 7.1.) He had escaped after sixteen years of enslavement and gone to war, fighting for his freedom and for the safety of family and friends.
Though Thomas Peters’s saga is unusual, it helps to illustrate that the War of American Independence was not a two-sided struggle, with English colonists unified to oppose the English monarchy. Instead, like most revolutions, it was a conflict fought by shifting coalitions. In a time of strife, there were countless possibilities for forging political “marriages of convenience” between different regions, groups, and interests.
Within each small community, and within the Atlantic theater as a whole, alliances often proved the old adage that “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Thomas Peters escaped servitude to join the British in part because the man holding him in slavery was a leading member of the local Sons of Liberty. Likewise, powerful merchants like John Hancock and Henry Laurens threw in their lot with the people because they had grown disillusioned with Parliament’s political and commercial controls. On the international scale, the monarchies of France and Spain swallowed their dislike for American rhetoric to join in a war that allowed them an opportunity to attack their long-standing rival, Britain. On the other hand, many Cherokee and Iroquois Indians, disillusioned by contact with land-hungry settlers, cast their lot with the British forces from overseas.
These numerous alliances remained problematic and incomplete. Not all Iroquois warriors or African slaves sided with the British, and by no means all New England merchants or Virginia planters embraced the Patriot cause. In a landscape marked by uncertainty, large numbers of people at all levels of society opted for cautious neutrality as long as they could, while others shifted their allegiance as the winds changed. The final outcome of the conflict, therefore, remained a source of doubt. Looking back, Americans often view the results of the Revolutionary War as inevitable, perhaps even foreordained. In fact, the end result—and thus independence itself—hung in the balance for years.
New England’s Minutemen had rallied swiftly at Lexington. In the ensuing months, Congress took the initial steps to form a Continental Army. It also launched efforts to force the British out of Boston and to pull Canada into the rebellion. If these predominantly Protestant rebels hoped to draw the French Catholics of Quebec into their revolt, would free whites also be eager to include the blacks of Boston, Williamsburg, and Charleston in the struggle for liberty? Or would it be the British who recruited more African Americans such as Thomas Peters and furnished them with arms? The answers to such questions became clear in the fifteen months between the skirmish at Lexington and the decision of Congress to declare political independence from Britain in July 1776.
The Second Continental Congress Takes Control
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Enthusiasm ran high in Philadelphia in May 1775 as the Second Continental Congress assembled, and the delegates moved quickly to put the colonies on a wartime footing. They instructed New York to build fortifications, and they paid for a dozen companies of riflemen to be sent north to aid the Minutemen surrounding Boston. They created an Army Department under the command of a New York aristocrat, General Philip Schuyler, and approved an issue of $2 million in currency to fund the military buildup.
In late May, word arrived from Lake Champlain in New York of a victory for soldiers under Benedict Arnold of Connecticut and for the Green Mountain Boys, Vermont-area farmers led by Ethan Allen. They had captured Fort Ticonderoga, along with its cannons, and the new Army Department badly needed all such heavy arms. This initiative not only secured the Hudson Valley against a British attack from the north; it also allowed Schuyler to propose a strike against Montreal and Quebec via Lake Champlain. Congress approved the assault, to be led by General Richard Montgomery. It also approved a daring scheme submitted by Arnold. He planned to lead separate forces up the Kennebec River. They would assist Montgomery in seizing Quebec and winning Canada before the region could become a staging ground for British armies.
But no single action by Congress had greater implications than the one taken on June 15, 1775. That day, members voted unanimously to appoint George Washington, a forty-three-year-old delegate from Virginia, “to command all the continental forces.” Colonel Washington already headed a committee drawing up regulations to run the new army, and he had notable military experience. But his strongest asset may have been his southern roots. Northern delegates sensed the need to foster colonial unity by placing a non–New Englander in charge of the army outside Boston. In military and political terms, the selection of Washington proved auspicious. The tall, imposing planter from Mount Vernon emerged as a durable and respected leader in both war and peace. But putting a slaveholder in command also closed certain radical options. It signaled the beginning of an important alliance between the well-to-do regional leaders of the North and South, contributing to the particular shape of the Federal Constitution a dozen years later.
“Liberty to Slaves”
The selection of Washington sent a strong message to half a million African Americans, spurring many of them to risk siding with the British. For their part, the British sensed an opportunity to undermine rebellious planters. In June 1775, the British commander in America, Thomas Gage, wrote to London: “Things are now come to that crisis, that we must avail ourselves of every resource, even to raise the Negros, in our cause.”
In the South, rumors of liberation swept through the large African American community during 1775. Slaveholding rebel authorities countered with harsh measures to quell black unrest. In South Carolina that spring, attention focused on a prominent free black man named Thomas Jeremiah, a skilled pilot in the busy port of Charleston. In April, Jeremiah supposedly told an enslaved dockworker of a great war coming and urged slaves to seize the opportunity. Weeks later, nervous Patriot planters made the well-known free black into a scapegoat, accusing him of involvement in a plot to smuggle guns ashore from British ships to support a slave uprising. In August 1775, despite a lack of hard evidence against him, Jeremiah was publicly hanged and then burned.
That September, a Georgia delegate to Congress made a startling comment. If British troops were to land on the southern coast with a supply of food and guns, he said, and offer freedom to slaves who would join them, 20,000 blacks from Georgia and South Carolina would materialize in no time. In November, the beleaguered royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, attempted just such a scheme. Dunmore issued a proclamation granting freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who agreed to take up arms on behalf of the king. Hundreds responded to Dunmore’s proclamation. They formed the Ethiopian Regiment and wore sashes proclaiming “Liberty to Slaves.”
The Siege of Boston
In the North, British forces had been confined in Boston ever since the Battle of Lexington. They would remain isolated on the town’s main peninsula for nearly a year, supported by the Royal Navy. In early July 1775, Washington arrived at nearby Cambridge to take up his command and oversee the siege of Boston. He quickly set out to improve order among his men, tightening discipline, calming regional jealousies, and removing incompetent officers. In addition, he wrote scores of letters to civilian political leaders and the president of Congress to muster support for his feeble army.
Washington made clear that nearly everything was in short supply, from tents and uniforms to muskets and cannons. He dispatched twenty-five-year-old Henry Knox, a former bookseller and future general, to retrieve the cannons captured at Ticonderoga. The Patriots’ siege could not succeed without heavy fieldpieces to bombard the city from the heights at Dorchester and Charlestown that lay across the water from Boston.
Even before Washington’s arrival, the British and the Americans had vied for control of these strategic heights. Indeed, General Gage drew up plans to secure Charlestown peninsula by seizing its highest point, Bunker Hill. But the Patriots learned of the scheme. On the night of June 16, 1775, they moved to fortify the area. The next afternoon, 1,500 Patriots confronted the full force of the British army in the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Gage might easily have sealed off Charlestown peninsula with his naval power. Instead, he used 2,500 British infantry to launch three frontal attacks from the shoreline. The first two uphill charges fell back, but a third assault finally dislodged the Americans. Although the battle of Bunker Hill was technically a British victory, success came at a terrible price. The encounter left forty-two percent of British troops (1,054 men) wounded or dead—the worst casualty figures of the war. Gage lost his command, replaced by General William Howe, and the Royal Army no longer appeared invincibile.
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