Colin Woodard (20 page)

What we call the American Revolution did indeed play out very differently in the various nations of the Atlantic seaboard. But there weren't four neat struggles, one unfolding as the previous one concluded; rather, there were six very different liberation wars, one for each affected nation. Some occurred simultaneously and two involved invasions by one American nation into another. Despite the presence of a nominally continental army, most of the fighting was done by militia forces and guerrilla bands with local loyalties, and many bloody battles occurred in the complete absence of British forces. Wars of colonial liberation are often ugly, combining resistance to imperial forces with a civil war between rival factions hoping to seize control. Ethnic minorities and indigenous elites often side with the colonial power for fear of what might happen to them in the new order. The American wars of liberation were no exception.

Recognizing what each nation was fighting for—and how it did so—is essential to understanding what the “revolution” was all about and the limits it placed on the strange confederation to which it gave birth.

 

The first of the wars broke out in Yankeedom, where it took the form of a mass uprising against the British effort to dismantle the region's self-governance and key cultural institutions. Nowhere in British America was rebellion more universally supported than in New England and the parts of New York and Pennsylvania settled by New Englanders. By 1775 Yankees had already organized a clandestine intelligence and communication systems, a shadow government of “public safety committees,” and a network of community-based military units ready to turn out at a minute's notice. Yankees fought not for the universal rights of man, freedom of religion, or the liberties of their ruling class, but in defense of the way they'd always lived their lives and regulated their affairs. They were defending local control by elected representatives (where local usually meant town governments, not provincial ones), the primacy of the Congregational (i.e., Puritan) Church, and their Anglo-Saxon birthright of freedom from tyranny. God's “chosen people” would not give up their divinely ordained ways easily.

In true Yankee fashion, the war was largely fought by citizen militias organized at the local level and led by elected officers. In founding the new units, townspeople literally drew up their own “covenants” spelling out how each would function. Fiercely independent, the Yankee minutemen regarded their commanders as public servants rather than superiors, and in the early stages of the war often challenged their decisions; since Yankees were fighting to not be given orders, they were hardly going to passively accept them on the battlefield.

This egalitarian streak frustrated and alarmed Continental Army officers from other regions. When General Washington arrived to take command of the Yankee forces besieging occupied Boston in the summer of 1775, he was amazed at their ragtag appearance, insubordinate attitude, and insistence on serving in units made up of and led by their own neighbors. Only when outside commanders learned to explain their reasons for giving a particular order did they begin to earn the trust of their Yankee subordinates. Washington denounced them as “nasty people” in his private letters, even as he publicly pleaded “that all distinctions of colonies will be laid aside” among “troops of the United Provinces of North America.” When a few companies of Tidewater sharpshooters joined the siege a few weeks later, Virginians expressed horror that ex-slaves were serving alongside whites in the New England militia.
¹

Open warfare broke out on April 19, 1775, when a column of British soldiers was sent out from Boston to seize gunpowder stockpiled in Concord, Massachusetts. Fighting erupted when citizen militia confronted them on the town green of Lexington, and again at Concord Bridge, where local militiamen forced a British retreat. Imperial troops suffered heavy casualties during their withdrawal as militia from surrounding towns attacked them from the roadsides. Narrowly escaping across the water to Boston, the British found themselves besieged by thousands of Yankee minutemen. Meanwhile, word of the fighting spread to the other colonies with explosive effect.

Ultimately, the British were unable to break the siege of Boston, retreating eleven months later to Nova Scotia, itself threatened by seaborne raids organized by Yankees in eastern Maine. In effect, Yankeedom had won its independence in March 1776. From that point forward, New England would serve as the primary stronghold for liberation forces in the other nations, providing the lion's share of food, supplies, money, and troops to Washington's Continental Army. Coastal settlements would face occasional British raids, and for more than a year Yankees had reason to fear a British attack from the west, but by 1778, George III had given up hope of forcing New England back into the empire. Overall, American independence was still very much in doubt, but the Yankee war of liberation was complete.

 

If Yankeedom was the stronghold of the rebellion, New Netherland was its antithesis: the capital of loyalist North America and the nexus of British military power on the continent. It was to here that loyalist refugees from the other nations fled, and from here that the Royal Navy and British Army organized in their campaigns of reconquest. Under the uninterrupted control of British forces from September 1776 onward, Greater New York City became a thriving, self-sufficient city-state with a nearmonopoly on imperial trade.

New Netherlanders were generally suspicious of the rebel cause for three reasons. Unlike the nations around them, they didn't feel the need to defend their sovereignty because they never truly had it, given that the Dutch West India Company, the Duke of York, and crown governors had all ruled the place without reference to local opinion. The Dutch, who still comprised about a fifth of the population, were by no means certain that their tradition of cultural and religious tolerance would be safe in an independent province of New York, which would likely be dominated by Yankees (who already controlled much of the province's interior). For New Netherland elites of all ethnicities, liberation could not be expected to bring either freedom or independence. When the Second Continental Congress convened in early 1775, the provincial assembly voted two to one against sending delegates, and even those appointed by a rebel committee were not given the authority to vote on independence.

Nonetheless, when news of Lexington reached Manhattan, a rebel minority seized power by forming gangs that terrorized the authorities and their supporters. The royal governor fled to the
Duchess of Gordon
, a Royal Navy frigate stationed in the harbor, where he lived for months, holding council meetings and issuing impotent decrees. Other prominent residents departed for England, while many of those who stayed behind were beaten, taunted, jailed, or “carried and hauled” through the city by angry mobs. In February 1776 Washington's Yankee-dominated army occupied the city, but it was not universally welcomed. “Hundreds in this colony are active against us,” a New York City patriot wrote John Adams. “Tories openly express their sentiments in favor of the enemy and live unpunished.”
²

New Netherland's patriot uprising met with sudden and complete defeat in the summer of 1776 following the arrival of a British armada of 30 warships, 400 transports, and 24,000 soldiers. This invasion force scattered General Washington's army, retook the city, and by the end of September occupied an area conforming almost exactly to the boundaries of the New Netherland nation. The rebels dispersed and ecstatic townspeople carried British soldiers around on their shoulders. “A Universal joy,” a German-born minister reported, “spread over all countenances.” Loyalist refugees came to the city in droves, first from hiding places in the surrounding countryside, then from Boston, the Midlands, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah. Secure behind British lines, New York City's population swelled from 22,000 to 33,000 during the course of the war, the newcomers joining loyalist military units or rebuilding transatlantic commerce. Civil government was restored; theaters, taverns, and coffeehouses prospered; and propagandist John Rivington returned from exile to edit the most influential loyalist newspaper on the continent, the
Royal Gazette
. Thousands of loyalists joined militias and provincial forces in the New Netherland zone and regularly foraged in Connecticut and New Jersey, skirmishing with Yankee counterparts throughout the war.
³

As the headquarters of both Admiral Richard Howe's fleet and his brother General William Howe's North American military command, New Netherland was the primary staging area for both the ultimately disastrous counteroffensive against Yankeedom and the initially successful occupation of the neutral Midlands. Both strategies were based on the Howes' recognition of regional cultural differences in British North America. The first campaign correctly identified Yankeedom as the source of the rebellion and sought to quarantine the region by a two-pronged invasion of the Hudson River Valley; once the Yankee-settled interior of New York was pacified, New England proper could be simultaneously invaded from three sides. The Midlands strategy correctly assumed that most people in that region wished to settle imperial differences without resorting to open warfare. The Howe brothers realized that victory in the Midlands depended on winning hearts and minds, not on unleashing total military power upon its inhabitants. They accordingly moved gingerly against Washington's army after it withdrew to upper Manhattan, herding it out of New Netherland with obvious flanking maneuvers in an effort to avoid civilian casualties while still demonstrating the invincibility of British forces. They even hosted a dinner for rebel leaders aboard a warship in the harbor in an unsuccessful effort to convince them to stand down peaceably.
⁴

Unfortunately for the Howes, the first part of their strategy collapsed with the defeat and surrender of their northern army at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777 to an essentially Yankee army from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and upstate New York. The victory was a decisive turning point in the war, not only because it preserved Yankeedom's independence but because it convinced France to join the conflict, radically altering the balance of power. The fate of the Howes' second strategy will be described momentarily, but neither it nor subsequent British efforts would save Britain's North American empire.

Even after the ultimate British surrender at Yorktown in 1782, many New Netherlanders held out hope that the crown would keep control of the region as a condition of the peace treaty they were negotiating with a weak new confederation calling itself “the United States.” When news came in 1783 that no part of the thirteen colonies would be retained, some 30,000 civilians—perhaps half the area's wartime population—fled Greater New York City for Britain, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. New Netherland had fought a war
against
liberation and had lost badly.
⁵

 

The pacifist Midlands did its best to remain neutral in a conflict which most of its inhabitants had wanted no part in. Even after Lexington and Concord, leading figures such as James Wilson and John Dickinson opposed independence, and their political allies were the big winners in the Pennsylvania assembly elections of May 1776. The region wouldn't have rebelled at all if a majority of the states attending the Second Continental Congress hadn't voted to “totally suppress” Pennsylvania's government. In effect, representatives of Yankeedom, Tidewater, and the Deep South intervened in Midlands affairs, sanctioning a coup d'état against their legitimate, but cautious, government.

The result, in mid-1776, was the assumption of power in Pennsylvania by a vocal patriot minority backed by the Appalachian half of the colony and entirely dependent on the Congress for validity. With little local support, this patriot government and its Delaware counterpart arrested anyone who opposed the war and searched the homes of any who hadn't “manifested their attachment to the American cause.” Pennsylvania Quaker leaders were rounded up in 1777, denied habeas corpus, and deported to the Appalachian section of Virginia for imprisonment, further alienating the sect's followers. New Jersey simply fell into anarchy. “The state is totally deranged [and] without government,” a Continental Army general observed before the British moved in. “Many [officials] have gone to the enemy for protection, others are out of the state, and the few that remain are mostly indecisive in their conduct.”
⁶

Shortly after occupying New York, General Howe sent troops into the Midlands to bring the region under British control and encourage its inhabitants to stand with the empire. After skirmishing with Washington's weakening army in the winter of 1776–1777, British forces invaded the Midlands sections of Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania by sea. Encountering little resistance, they captured Philadelphia in September 1777, sending the Continental Congress into exile in the Appalachian backcountry. Greeted enthusiastically by the city's inhabitants, Howe's army swatted back a counterstrike by Washington's Yankee-and-Borderlander-dominated army at Germantown and settled into warm and comfortable urban quarters for the winter. Washington's forces bivouacked in Valley Forge, twenty miles to the north, and soon discovered that Midlands farmers preferred to supply the British because they paid in hard currency. Some German pacifists offered support to the rebel army in the form of medical care or humanitarian supplies but shunned direct participation in the war on either side. Meanwhile, former congressional delegate Joseph Galloway assumed leadership of the civil administration and organized a corps of loyalist troops in Philadelphia that raided rebel supply lines to Valley Forge. Galloway did his best to make Philadelphia a showplace for the merits of benevolent royal administration in the hopes of negotiating a peace based on his previous plan for an “American Assembly.” But while the city's social life bloomed with balls, concerts, and theater performances, the British defeat at Saratoga doomed Galloway's scheme. Fearing a French naval attack, the British abandoned the Midlands in the summer of 1778, transferring their forces to New York and the West Indies.
⁷