The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (74 page)

What remained for Jefferson was the American people defending their inalienable rights. Had Congress possessed more imagination and less realism it might have accepted Jefferson's version of American history. Had it done so, the declaration would have gained greater affective and symbolic power and ended the ambiguity that surrounded the ques-

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tion of just who was declaring independence -- "free and independent states" or "one people" bound by ties of passion.

As a people the Americans had much in common, more indeed than they apparently recognized. They had not yet fully learned how to work together or how to concentrate their power. Congress, their central political institution, had learned much since its first meeting in 1774. But Congress and state governments did not coordinate their efforts well. In 1774, for example, Congress created the Association, the great intercolonial boycott. Special bodies, local committees for the most part, not colonial governments, enforced it. Traditional authorities had not usually responded quickly to crisis, then or earlier, during the ten years that preceded the meeting of the first Continental Congress.

But if local governing bodies had sometimes proved maladroit, or at least ineffective, behind them stood a people just beginning to recognize its unities. In the generation before the upheaval of the 1760s, these people had experienced much together, a great "awakening" that revived religious conviction, and a war with the French and Indians that stimulated their patriotism. These events were in a sense continental, if not national, experiences. The conflict that began in the 1760s had gone a long way toward making a people.

Jefferson took a long view of this national development, arguing that America had come into existence as a free people with the first settlement in the seventeenth century. His original draft of the declaration did not reconstruct this version of history; rather it described the emotional ties that fused Americans. His was a passionate statement, which might have summoned from Americans the best of themselves. For he sought to remind them that benevolence, mutual regard, love for one another, as much as concrete interests, joined them. In the war they were fighting mutual affection was important, and in the national state they would erect it would be indispensable.

Many Americans owned slaves; yet Congress incorporated Jefferson's claim that "all men are created equal" into its version of the declaration. Jefferson, a slave owner, believed that in one respect, as men, blacks were the equals of whites because they possessed a "moral sense," the quality that defined men as men, that gave them their humanity. He did not believe, however, that they could ever enjoy equality in a society that mixed them with whites. A history of oppression and white prejudice made an interracial society unthinkable. Jefferson later explained this

forecast in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
, in which he argued that slavery had so poisoned the affections of both blacks and whites as to make their living together -- as equals -- impossible.
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In the declaration he attempted to cast the king as the perpetuator of slavery in America as well as the instigator of racial violence. The first charge was absurd and the second true in only a limited sense Governor Dunmore of Virginia had called upon blacks to rise against their masters and promised them freedom in return. But as Congress knew, white Americans -- not the king -- had instituted slavery and had maintained it. Congress removed almost all of Jefferson's denunciation, retaining only the charge, whose meaning was not altogether clear, that the king had "excited domestic insurrections amongst us." Yet Congress accepted Jefferson's claim that all men were created equal.

Congress may have intended to convey Jefferson's meaning. Perhaps, though we probably will never know, most Americans understood "created equal" to mean equal in the eyes of God. Whatever they understood, white Americans did not wish to free black slaves; nor did they attempt to extend to the small number of free blacks among them the rights at issue in the conflict with Britain.

Not many whites suggested that they should act to recognize the equality of all men. For most whites the struggle for independence assumed an importance which rendered all other concerns secondary. The Declaration of Independence approved by Congress declared the Americans free of Britain. That declaration defined American purposes and established a standard for which many had already died. And for which more would fight -- and die. For most white Americans, declaring their independence from Britain was not merely enough -- their brethren had given their lives -- it was a glorious act.

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In early September 1776, two months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington attempted to explain to Congress the strategy of the war he was fighting. The war, he wrote, was a "war of posts," a "defensive" war in which the American army sought to hold itself together and to avoid a "general action," a large-scale battle which might bring massive defeat. Washington's preoccupation with defeat was understandable: its taste had gradually soured his mouth throughout the summer as news of the disasters in Canada arrived. And then on August 27, sour turned bitter when Howe smashed American forces on Long Island. Nor could Washington look to the future with much hope, for his army on Manhattan seemed ready to disintegrate as its soldiers slipped away, homeward bound, and Howe prepared for still another attack.
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Although defeat prompted thoughts of defense, Washington had resigned himself to such strategy long before Howe pushed him from Long Island. His instincts of course were all for attack, for the offense in which courage, spirit, and honor all counted -- and which returned fame and glory. These instincts of Washington's youth were now under control. Harsh experience twenty years before in the French and Indian War had taught Washington to restrain them, and so had his reading of eighteenth-century writers on war. In a sense, one set of conventions -the desire for fame -- bad been superseded in his mind by another -the doctrine of prudence that governed the thinking of European military

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men. The deep-lying passion sometimes broke through the crust of training -- for example, in the siege of Boston, when only a decision by a council of Washington's generals had prevented him from sending his troops across the frozen bay in an all-out attack on the British.

In late summer 1776, other reasons for restraint bore in upon him even before General Howe gave him to understand that New York was not Boston. There Washington was, with still another army to be trained -- the passage of recently recruited troops in and out of his camps never seemed to stop -- while he defended a major harbor without a navy. And there was General William Howe, whose forces had begun arriving in June, with some 30,000 soldiers, transports, and warships commanded by his brother, Lord Richard Howe. The Howes had more men and ships and they had the luxury of choosing the site of battle. Washington, for reasons which are not entirely clear, felt that it was required of him to defend New York City whatever the odds. Congress soon disabused him of this notion, but not before he had almost been destroyed in a general action of the sort he dreaded.

And so after Long Island, while he uneasily awaited still another blow, he sat down to explain the facts of war to Congress. A defensive war seemed the only option left to his beleaguered army, but why a war of posts -- a war fought from strong fortifications? Why not a war of retreat in which the army served as guerillas, or as partisans (to use the term employed at the time) operating behind and around the British regulars who were always slowed by their baggage trains and the need to protect their magazines? Moreover, since Washington and the Congress seemed to believe that the British would seek to reduce the American colonies to submission by occupying them militarily, why not concentrate on rousing the entire population against them?
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If a strategy of defense seemed dictated by the relative weakness of the Americans, the sort of defense chosen -- a war of posts or of strong points -- followed from Washington's understanding of his enemy and his own troops. The British controlled the sea and coastal waters, and in most cases the rivers as well. Even keeping them out of the East River and the North River (as the Hudson was called) appeared almost impossible. Control of the water made relatively rapid movement possible, and it allowed concentration of forces. Washington had an almost instinctive sense of the importance of concentrating strength, and he recognized that his means of bringing his force to bear at salient points would

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rarely equal his enemy's. On land too the British forces were formidable because they were regular army, professionals who knew their craft and who had the discipline and skill to practice it in adverse as well as favorable situations. As much could not be said for the Americans under arms, at least not by their general. Washington did not denounce his soldiers to the Congress even in a confidential letter. All he permitted himself was the "painful" admission "that all our Troops will not do their duty." The word in that oblique clause that aroused passion in Washington was "duty." What he meant in this unfavorable assessment of his young soldiers was that they lacked the responsibility -- or loyalty -that made professional soldiers continue to fight when they knew they were about to die or to be captured. A sense of honor should bring men to such sacrifices, and Washington could never quite grasp what made some men incapable of feeling its call. "The honor of making a brave defense does not seem to be a sufficient stimulus, when the success is very doubtful, and the falling into the Enemy's hands probable," he reported sadly. Hence his reliance on "posts," which were chosen not simply for their tactical value but to persuade the American soldier to do his duty. Because "Young Troops" were not to be depended upon, he had avoided exposing them on "open ground against their Superiors both in number and Discipline." And "I have never spared the Spade and Pick Ax; I confess I have not found that readiness to defend even strong Posts, at all hazards, which is necessary to derive the greatest benefit from them."
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Why did his young troops repeatedly fail to stand and fight? Washington's explanation -- one which made him feel both despair and pride -was that they were free men. Their freedom brought them to revolution and, paradoxically, made them incapable of fighting it well. The freedom Washington saw left its mark on character: yes, the Americans were free -- a condition which made them impatient of restraint and discipline. And discipline was the heart of an army. It could be achieved only through long training, and a long period of training entailed long enlistments. As the war continued, Washington came to understand that the freedom which filled American life inhibited not only the fighting qualities of his troops but also the large-scale organization of men in a regular army and, behind the army, the political organization on all levels necessary to its support.
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