Ellis reframes the arguments over American independence in terms of British invasion and American response. Excerpted from “the Birth of American Independence,“ July 11, 2013.

JOSEPH ELLIS, Author, Founding Brothers, American Sphinx and Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

 

I’ve been here once before. This is a really venerable venue. In my view, the most important political speech of the 20th century was delivered here by Franklin Roosevelt. It actually prophesied the New Deal; it explained why the role of government had to change for demographic and historical and economic reasons.

[In my book Founding Brothers] I am trying to tell a story that’s one of the oldest and most familiar and oft-told stories in American history: how the American Revolution happened. There are a lot of misconceptions that are easily corrected, but the challenge that I have is to try to tell it in a distinctive and fresh way. Every generation of American historians has told this story and at times in doing the work on it I felt like I was stripping layers of wallpaper. Each generation had its own interpretive layer of wallpaper to get back to the original wall. So some of the things that I have to say are not really new; they’re so old that nobody knows them anymore. They knew it back then and one of those things is why a consensus developed for independence in the late spring of ’76. I’ll try to offer you an explanation there.

When George Washington decided to attend the Continental Congress in May of 1775, he put on his military uniform. He knew we were going to war. This is one of the things that needs to be underlined in your understanding of the story. The war started 15 months before we declared independence. The war started in April of ’75 at Lexington and Concord. One of the bloodiest battles of the war was June of 1775 at Bunker Hill. We didn’t declare independence until, obviously, July of 1776. Washington already knew it was going to be a war. Part of being a leader is to have a sense of the future in your bones. And when he left Mount Vernon, he gave these instructions to his manager, Lund Washington, who was a second cousin. He said, “When the British come up the Potomac to burn Mount Vernon” – not if but when – “get out my books and Martha,” presumably not in that order. He assumed he was going to lose everything. This was a crisis that required an all-in mentality.

The American Revolution was an unnecessary war. It was obvious to both sides what the diplomatic resolution was. While New England was ready to rock and roll in 1774-5, because they were being occupied, the rest of the American colonies really were reluctant to go to war with the major military power on the planet. The British army wasn’t that much better than the French army or the Prussian army, but if you put the British army and the navy together, they were invincible, as France would discover.

So in England, both Edmund Burke and William Pitt embraced this diplomatic solution. In the moderate section of Congress, John Dickinson [and] Thomas Jefferson wrote to the British Parliament and the British king offering this resolution. What’s the resolution? What’s the diplomatic answer? Parliament said, “We’re not going to tax you or legislate for you; we’re going to recognize that your colonial legislatures have that sovereign ability. You will remain in the empire, under the authority of the king and under the economic reign of the Navigation Acts – you benefit from those mostly anyway.” You would have, in effect, invented the British Commonwealth 100 years beforehand – and both sides knew that option was on the table, and they were expecting that option to be the one that eventually resolved the conflict. A consensus on independence didn’t develop until the middle and late spring of ’76, and it developed for a particular reason. The British, and this means George III – not his ministers, not Parliament – he wants to declare himself a real monarch within the British system, pushing the monarchy forward as an equal player with Parliament. He said, “We’re going to invade America with the largest amphibious force ever to be sent across the Atlantic: 42,000 people, 437 ships.” The next time a fleet that large goes across would be World War I. “We’re gonna squash this rebellion in the cradle.”

Why did the British decide this? This would turn out to be the biggest blunder in the history of British statecraft.

Number one: Blackstone, the great jurist, says, “There must be a single source of sovereignty in any government or empire.” You can’t let each colonial legislature do its own thing. It must in the end be [in this case] Parliament. This is a very Aristotelian position. Madison, in the Constitution, thought you should have multiple sovereignties. It’s like, “Is there one God, or many gods?” From a constitutional point of view, the British didn’t have the luxury of permitting Americans to have sovereign legislatures.

Second: a version of the domino theory. If we let the Americans get away with this, what happens in Scotland? What happens in Ireland? What happens in India? That’s not a good signal for an empire to be sending to its colonies.

And third, Why should we negotiate since we have such military superiority we can’t lose? So let’s go do it, squash this rebellion, round up the ringleaders and hang ’em, and then we’ll let them come back into the Empire.

Well, that [military action] is the reason the colonists decide on independence. How do I know that? I have evidence. On May 15, John Adams wrote a resolution in the Continental Congress and he said to each of the colonies, “If you believe that we should head toward independence, you should rewrite your colonial constitution or charter to a state constitution or charter,” and this goes to all the governors and states. Adams always thought this was the real declaration of independence. One of the reasons he thought that was because he wrote it! He always thought Jefferson got credit for this. The governors and legislatures in each state sent that request to every county and town in the [state]; so in Massachusetts – 42 towns. Guess what? In this obscure 1840s collection of documents called American Archive – 9 volumes, 1,000 pages each volume – if you look hard enough you can find every one of those towns in Massachusetts and counties in, say, Virginia. And they all say the same thing. They say, “We can’t believe we’re saying this. Only a few months ago, it would have been impossible to imagine us committing ourselves to independence. But given the invasion and given the behavior of George III, he is not our monarch. He is not the person whom we can turn to to rescue us from Parliament. He is the most tyrannical of them all.” It helped that Tom Paine had written this pamphlet called Common Sense at the same time – though Paine’s pamphlet was as influential as it was for the context in which it appears as well as for the argument that it made.

So this was an avoidable war. The British sent two generals, the Howes – Richard Howe was the admiral and William Howe was the general – to lead the British invasion. The fact that they picked the Howes was really fortunate for the Americans, because in this battle on Long Island – if you notice, New York is an archipelago of Staten Island, Long Island, Manhattan – whoever controls the sea controls the battle. It was indefensible for the Americans. Why were they going to defend it? Well, the Continental Congress tells Washington he has to defend it. But it’s more than that. Washington has an honor-driven definition of battle. If the opponent appears on the field, he is duty-bound to respond in the same way that he would to a summons to duel; the Howes are invading at Long Island, that’s where I go to defend it.

Stupid. Suicidal. He’s going to start with 28,000; he’s going to end up with 3,500. The escape from Brooklyn Heights on the night of August 30 was the greatest military tactic of the war for Washington and the American side – more so than crossing the Delaware, because he gets his whole army across the East River. If they don’t get across the East River, they’re all going to be captured and annihilated; they’re trapped. And it has to work perfectly. The Nor’easter has to be blowing, the fog has to come in at the right time; it’s an even more dramatic version of Dunkirk. The papers didn’t report it – and I read 17 newspapers – the papers didn’t report the American defeat. The papers reported an American victory on Long Island. It was treasonable to tell the truth.

Anyway, the two British generals – the Howe brothers – brought to this a certain attitude; they didn’t want to destroy the Continental Army. They wanted to stun it, deliver a stiff blow that demonstrated to the Continental Army and to the Continental Congress that they [the Americans] couldn’t win the war. They did that, first on Long Island, then on Manhattan – easy victories and very few British casualties. Then they said, “OK, you’ve seen you can’t win. Why don’t we talk about reconciliation? We have terms to offer you.” They met and the Americans sent [Benjamin] Franklin, [John] Adams and this other guy, [Edward] Rutledge from South Carolina, to meet in this stone house on Staten Island on September 11.

Howe and Franklin were friends from London; they worked together to try to avoid this situation. Both the Howes thought this war was misguided, by the way; they voted against the war when they were in Parliament. [The Howe brothers] said, “Let’s end this silly business and all you have to do is step back from independence. Then we’ll let you have control over your own legislatures. OK, we’ll have to hang some of you…” But the response from Adams and Franklin is really interesting here. Adams said, “There’s no turning back. Once upon a time if you had proposed those terms, we would have been willing to accept them. But it’s too late now. Too many people have died; we’ve crossed the Rubicon. Plus, you’re assuming that if you can defeat the army here that that makes a difference. If you kill everybody in the army, we’ll just raise another army. We’ve got sufficient manpower to field an army of 150,000 if we need to. We’ll find another Washington.”

Franklin said to Howe, “Sir Richard, I know you think we can’t win, but I’m going to tell you, you can’t win. Because it’s not a conflict between armies, it’s a conflict between the British Army and the American populous. It’s a war for hearts and minds, and you cannot win that war. Or you can only win it at a cost that the British people won’t be able to pay.”

I think our own experience in Southeast Asia and the Middle East makes us more aware of the dilemma the British Army faced. The question often asked is: How could an army of amateurs defeat the greatest military force in the world? That’s the way Washington put it, too. He said it was a “standing miracle.” I always wonder what a sitting miracle would look like. [Laughter.]

It’s possible that the question now should be changed: did the British ever really have a chance? I think they did. They had to win it quickly, and New York was their one and only opportunity. They missed it and then after that Washington stopped this honor-driven definition of battle. He saw that he had to fight what he called a “war of posts.” It’s not quite a guerilla war, because it is a conventional army, but he’s never going to allow the Continental Army to be totally at risk. He’s not going to fight unless he has a tactical or numerical advantage, and that is the trick. Think about this: There are all these great generals in world history. Washington was not a great general; he lost more battles than he won. A lot of the great generals, like Hannibal, Napoleon, Robert E. Lee – they’re all losers. Washington’s a winner. Washington won the war, because he had the key insight – he doesn’t have to win; the British have to win. That makes all the difference in the world, because eventually they’re going to go away, and that’s what happened.

 

Question and answer session with Roy Eisenhardt

 

ROY EISENHARDT: We talk about phraseology and how so much of what we think about ourselves today is rooted in language rising out of this period. One of those phrases is, of course, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” One of our audience members is curious because it, at least in part, derives from [John] Locke’s phrase of “life, liberty and property.” They’re wondering why the transition was made.

JOSEPH ELLIS: At the same time he [Jefferson] was writing these words in mid-June in Philadelphia, the Virginians down in Williamsburg were writing the Virginia constitution and the guy writing the preamble was George Mason. He wrote a preamble in which he said, “life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.” That’s where he got it. It was published in the Pennsylvania Packet at the same time Jefferson was writing that.

You can also argue that this is the one place where Jefferson is making a clear statement against slavery, because it is the “property” that is going to be used by the Southern planters to justify slavery under the revolutionary principle. You know, “You can’t take my property away from me.” It’s by dropping property that he removes that; when they debated in the Williamsburg convention, the planters were very clear about keeping it. When asked about “the pursuit of happiness” later in his life, he made things up [as we all do] and he said that happiness isn’t a function of wealth; there are many forms of happiness that will not be possible for people who are not wealthy but they need to have their right to pursue their happiness in however way they want to. That’s operative too.

But those are the most important 37 words in American history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” When the women get together in upstate New York –

EISENHARDT: at Seneca –

ELLIS: – at Seneca Falls in 1848, they begin their resolution for women’s rights with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women…” When Lincoln gives the Gettysburg Address in 1863, he says, “Four score and seven…” that’s 1776. He’s reinterpreting the Declaration to mean that slavery is wrong. When Martin Luther King gets up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, he says he’s coming to collect a promissory note from Jefferson ending segregation. I did a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle on this in which the last sentence is, “For our time, for the younger generation at least for sure, the meaning for those words has expanded to include gays.”

None of that would have been imaginable to Jefferson, but that’s what the words say and what they’ve come to mean. They’re the basis for the liberal agenda in American history. More so, all these guys that are jurists, like lawyers – they think that the Constitution is the document. It’s interesting; Lincoln thought it was the Declaration. That has the real principles, and the Constitution is the legal framework in which we argue about these principles.

EISENHARDT: What you just said implies a flexibility in what those words mean as social values evolve, yet we have a judicial doctrine of originalism which suggests that they are frozen in their meaning. I was wondering if you could comment on that.

ELLIS: The doctrine of originalism as advocated by Justices Thomas and Scalia is historically preposterous. First of all, the Founders don’t themselves agree on what the Constitution means. Secondly, they all said, “Don’t make this written in stone.” Jefferson expected there to be a new constitution every 20 years – every generation. The last thing they wanted was to be regarded as the source of original intent.

Originalism has become a doctrine that allows the conservative members of the Court to do away with stare decisis. This is how they’re going to overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s because they can claim the Second Amendment does not say you have the right to bear arms; that’s a natural right. It says that if you serve in a militia, you have the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment and all the amendments were written by Madison. He actually wrote 12 of them and they reduced it to 10 because in 7 of the state-ratifying conventions ratifying the Constitution, the respective legislatures submitted suggested amendments to the Constitution – a total of 124. None of them had to do with the right to bear arms; 11 of them had to do with the fear of a standing army. The Second Amendment is really about the fact that national security would be in the hands of militia rather than a standing army; that’s what it’s really about. Scalia’s attempt to discover the natural right to bear arms is like the CIA’s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. [Laughter.] You can be damned sure he’s going to find them.

EISENHARDT: You do an interesting thing, which is not that common, and that is to join the political and military aspects of [1776]. Could you comment on that?

ELLIS: That’s my major contribution. People have told this story primarily as a political story centered on the Continental Congress – major players Adams, Dickinson, Jefferson and Franklin. Some people have also decided to write about the military side of this. David McCullough did a great book called 1776, which is all about the Continental Army. I’m saying you’ve got to put the New York campaign and Continental Army together with the Continental Congress to understand the story.

I told you one thing: The reason you get consensus on independence is because they’re being invaded! It’s a militarized situation; it’s no longer just a constitutional argument. The Howe brothers make decisions about how to fight in New York based on their perceived effect on popular opinion. They’re not fighting for territory; they’re really fighting for hearts and minds. So it’s going back and forth in that way that gives the story a different chemistry.

I’m also trying to recover the way it looked to the participants, while periodically stepping back and saying, “In hindsight, we can see that that was misguided, etc.” When you look at the interpretations of the American Revolution – the layers of wallpaper – every generation interprets it through the cultural values of its own context. So getting back to the primary sources and to the recovery of that psychological and political mentality, that’s the first order of business. Then, I think, I recognize that my interpretation is very much a function of my recognition of the Vietnam War’s impact on my thinking about the British Army. But I’m upfront about that. You can’t escape your present; no historian is going to be able to do that.

EISENHARDT: I think the point you made about the Howes – miscalculating, as you described it, their little punch to the Continental Army – ran on the rocks of the fact that nobody knew that had happened.

ELLIS: That’s partly true. Plus, the guys in the Continental Congress who are going to make the decision about whether they’re going to consider this – all these guys are on the list to get hanged. [Laughter.] So it’s not in their interest to consider this. Now, if you took an actual poll in the countryside – I don’t know. We know that 19-20 percent of the populous was loyalist or Tory. But the other 80 percent is not all patriot. It varies from region to region. In New England –it’s solid; if you’re against the revolution, they’ve either killed you or sent you away. But there’s this middle group of probably 20-25 percent of people that want to be neutral. They just want this thing to go away, and I think they would have been vulnerable if the American army was destroyed. I think that could have tilted it in that direction, but Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington – all those guys – they’re never going to let that happen. They talked about the “cause” – that’s what they believed in. It’s the best kind of conviction, because it’s based totally on faith. They believed, and this was not going to change. They were going to go down fighting, or else they were going to win.