This is the first in a series of articles explaining how the United States came to be and how the lands we now know as Minnesota came to be a part of it.
Taxation and representation
It is often said that Britain’s empire made it rich. It did not. Britain got an empire because it was already relatively rich. That is why it was the British who were able to project their power to North America, India, and Africa and not the North Americans, Indians, and Africans who projected their power to Britain. More often than not the empire was, in fact, a drain on the country’s resources. The story of Britain’s American colonies — and the lands we now know as Minnesota — and their loss illustrates this.
What Americans call the French and Indian War was just one theatre in a world war, the Seven Years War (1756-1763), which pitted Britain and Prussia against France, Austria, and Russia. The British paid Prussia’s Frederick the Great to keep the enemy occupied in continental Europe while they sailed around the world seizing bits of the French empire. In 1757, British troops defeated the French at Plassey in India, ending Louis XV’s interest there, and in 1759 and 1760, Quebec and Montreal fell to the British, ending French hopes of dominating North America. France’s flag had followed its traders down the St. Lawrence and up the Mississippi and its tributaries, carving out a vast — albeit nominal — possession named New France, which stretched west from the Appalachians. The Treaty of Paris which ended the war in 1763 liquidated this, splitting it between Spain, which received the land west of the Mississippi including half of modern day Minnesota, and Britain, which received the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, including those lands east of the river which now comprise the other half of our state. Nobody asked the people living there what they thought about all this.
Winning all this territory had been enormously expensive. Britain’s national debt ballooned by 80% between 1755 and 1764 and spending on the interest alone rose to £5 million annually compared to total government spending of £8 million before the war.
Keeping the territory promised to be similarly expensive. Just two months after the Treaty of Paris was signed, an Ottawa chief named Pontiac destroyed all but three British posts west of the Appalachians and killed 2,000 colonists. The rising was suppressed at great expense, and the British tried to avert further conflict by issuing a proclamation forbidding Eruopean settlement west of the Appalachians, but this merely annoyed the colonists who ignored it anyway, and furher trouble seemed inevitable. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, Britain’s Commander-in-Chief in North America, estimated that 10,000 troops would be required to police and protect these vast new lands.
The British government believed that the colonists ought to contribute more to financing this policing and protection. By 1763, the average resident of Great Britain was paying 25 shillings annually in tax, while the average resident of Britain’s North American colonies paid sixpence. If these colonies were to be a source of financial strength for Britain, it was time for them to deliver.
This would be no easy task. The 19th century British historian John Robert Seeley famously wrote that “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind,” and this was nowhere truer than in North America. Some of the colonies were established for economic reasons, some by people fleeing religious oppression. Some were crown colonies; some were largely private enterprises. There had never been any grand plan of imperial expansion and Britain’s administration of its colonies had generally been an arm’s length affair. While the Westminster Parliament had the authority to regulate colonial trade, in reality it did little to enforce the laws and smuggling was a way of life in the colonies.
Neither was the political situation in London auspicious for the attempt to draw more revenue from America. England’s turbulent 17th century had produced two embryonic political parties. The Whigs were the party of Parliament, John Locke, limits on royal power, and progress. They were effectively the winners of that turbulent century, imposing a Bill of Rights on William III in return for their support for his seizure of the throne in 1688. They had dominated politics in the first two thirds of the 18th century, governing continuously from 1714 to 1761. While the throne was occupied by a German with little interest in English affairs — as it was under the first two Georges from 1714 to 1760 — the Whigs had their way but they, the party of ideas, had largely exhausted their stock with the settlement of 1689, and the progressive impulse was now directed at laying the foundations of the first industrial economy.
The other party were the Tories, the party of the king, Thomas Hobbes, executive privilege, and tradition. As Whig governments coasted and offered no further constitutional innovations, the Tories settled down to comfortable opposition. But when George III became king in 1760, things began to change. This George was the first born in Britain and the first to see himself primarily as British and to take a particular interest in British affairs. The Tories would be woken from their slumber to become his vehicle in Parliament, a vehicle for a more assertive executive. If George was never the tyrant of popular American myth, he did inaugurate a very different approach to the “benign neglect” Britain had hitherto taken to its North American colonies.
The task of making the colonies pay fell first to George Grenville, Prime Minister of a Tory government and Chancellor of the Exchequer. As a first step, Parliament passed the Sugar Act in 1764, which actually cut the tax rate on molasses but included stronger measures to ensure collection. The Stamp Act followed in 1765, which levied a tax ranging from three pence to four pounds each on newspapers, pamphlets, college diplomas, deeds, bills of sale and lading, marriage licenses, legal documents, playing cards, dice, and wills. The Quartering Act was also passed in 1765, which stipulated that British troops be lodged in public houses, inns, and even empty homes if their barracks were full, and at the expense of the local colonial authorities. Charles Townshend, Paymaster of The Forces in Grenville’s government, asked whether “these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms” would “grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?” He soon got his answer.
“This single stroke,” William Smith, Jr, of New York wrote, “has lost Great Britain the affection of all her Colonies.” A customs agent wrote that his officers felt the anger “not of a trifling Mob, but of a whole Country.” The Massachusetts legislature called a Congress to protest these taxes, asking for delegates from all thirteen colonies and receiving them from all except Virginia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Georgia. When it met in New York in October 1765, South Carolina’s Christopher Gadsden brought order to proceedings with a plea that it “stand on the broad and common ground of natural and inherent rights…as men and descendants of Englishmen!” “There ought to be no more New England men, no New Yorkers,” he went on, “but all of us Americans!”
This “Stamp Act Congress” proclaimed “the warmest sentiments of affection and duty to His Majesty’s person and government” and acknowledged “all due subordination to that august body, the parliament of Great Britain.” But as the Congress went on to outline its complaints, it quickly moved past the specifics of the taxes themselves and onto the more fundamental question of whether the Parliament in London had the right to tax them at all. The Congress argued that “it is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted right of Englishmen, that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.” This would remain the American position through the years which followed.
Some pursued more militant methods of protest. Groups called the Sons of Liberty were founded, and Boston soon became the epicenter of resistance; the elm tree from which they hung effigies of unpopular officials became known as the “Liberty Tree.” A warehouse in the city was burned and the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, and his daughter were chased from their home. In March 1766, Hutchinson noted that “the authority of every colony is in the hands of the sons of liberty.”
Opinion in England was divided as old wounds were reopened. Tories tended to see the colonists as rebels almost, denying the rightful authority of the king as the English Whigs had in the previous century. One pro-government pamphlet argued that while the colonists like “nine-tenths of the people of Britain” had no vote in Parliamentary elections, they were, like those unrepresented Brits, “a part, and an important part of the Commons of Great Britain: they are represented in Parliament in the same manner as those inhabitants of Britain are who have not voices in elections.” It is hard to see how this argument could have been expected to cut any ice with the colonists.
Whigs, by contrast, tended to see the colonists as fellow strugglers against an overweening executive. Isaac Barré, a Whig Member of Parliament, answered Townshend’s question directly:
They planted by your care? No! Your oppression planted ’em in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable, and among others to the cruelties of a savage foe, the most subtle, and I take upon me to say, the most formidable of any people upon the face of God’s earth….
They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of ’em. As soon as you began to care about ’em, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over ’em, in one department and another, who were perhaps the deputies of deputies to some member of this house, sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon ’em; men whose behaviour on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them….
They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument …. The people I believe are as truly loyal as any subjects the king has, but a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated; but the subject is too delicate and I will say no more.
Former Prime Minister William Pitt, the elder statesman who had guided the country through the Seven Years War, branded the Stamp Act “unhappy,” “unconstitutional,” “unjust,” and “oppressive,” and asked how it was defensible for an English “borough with half a Dozen houses” to be represented in Parliament while the three million subjects in the colonies were not.
To help find a way out of this controversy, Parliament summoned the Pennsylvania colony’s London lobbyist, Benjamin Franklin, to explain colonial sentiment. The colonists, he warned, no longer saw Parliament as “the great bulwark and security of their liberties and privileges.” He was asked whether the colonies would ever consent to taxation levied by Parliament and answered: “No, never.” Would crown forces find opposition if they attempted to enforce the Stamp Act? “They will not find a rebellion,” Franklin warned, “they may indeed make one.”
Faced with this opposition, George III dismissed Grenville and summoned the Marquess of Rockingham to form a Whig government. The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, but Parliament felt bound to assert its legislative authority over the colonies. The Declaratory Act was passed, asserting Parliament’s absolute authority to make laws binding the American colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” This would be Britain’s position through the years which followed.
Celebrated as a great victory in the colonies, the British government viewed repeal of the Stamp Act as merely a tactical withdrawal; financially, it could hardly afford to do otherwise. Rockingham’s government fell in 1766 and Pitt, now the Earl of Chatham, was installed as Prime Minister. This great statesman, who had opposed the Stamp Act and said that “America must be embraced with the arms of affection,” might have been expected to bring a more conciliatory approach, but he was, by now, aged and suffering from some form of mental illness. His Chancellor, Townshend, was the next minister charged with finding a way to make the colonies pay and did so with little tact.
Townshend reasoned that if the colonies objected to being directly taxed by methods such as the Stamp Act they might consent to being indirectly taxed by measures such as duties on imports. The result was the Townshend Acts of 1766 and 1767, which imposed duties on tea, paper, paint, glass, and lead. His hopes were quickly dashed once again.
A Virginia militia colonel and veteran of the French and Indian war named George Washington was moved to declare in the state’s House of Burgesses that only Virginians could tax Virginians. The assemblies in New York and Massachusetts were suspended by their colonial governors for their protests against the Acts. Boycotts of British goods spread across the colonies. Customs commissioners were attacked in Boston. In October 1768, the British sent troops in to keep order, with 4,000 in the city of 15,000 by 1769, a sign that the governed were withdrawing whatever consent they might be deemed to have given. Franklin warned that committing troops would be “like setting up a smith’s forge in a magazine of gunpowder,” and he was proved right. On March 5, 1770, a mob attacked a group of British troops who opened fire, killing three men and wounding five others.
Such was the outrage this “Boston Massacre” generated, especially after a fanciful rendering by local artist and dentist Paul Revere became a bestseller, that the British were forced to offer up seven of the soldiers involved for trial. They were defended by John Adams, who claimed that they had been attacked by a “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarres.” All were acquitted of murder, two were convicted of manslaughter. Nevertheless, the city’s government warned the British authorities that, if they did not withdraw their troops, ten thousand local residents were prepared to do it for them, and the authorities acquiesced.
On his death in September 1767, Townshend was replaced as Chancellor by Lord North who, in turn, became Prime Minister in 1770. North was a Tory, only their second Prime Minister and the first since the Earl of Bute a decade earlier. For the sake of a peaceful resolution of the mounting crisis, the elevation of a Tory to the Premiership came at the worst possible time.
This wasn’t immediately apparent. On accession, North repealed most of Townshend’s duties, which had generated only £21,000 in revenues against a loss to British exporters of £700,000 as a result of the various boycotts. The duties were, Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Hillsborough noted, “contrary to the true principles of commerce.”
But the principle of Parliamentary authority could not be surrendered. The tea tax was kept explicitly “as a mark of the supremacy of Parliament, and an efficient declaration of their right to govern the colonies.” The revenue question remained, however. In 1773, North imposed the Tea Act as a favor for the politically well-connected East India Company. This triggered a final outbreak of revulsion at British fiscal policy in the colonies.
The “Day is at length arrived,” a committee of Philadelphia merchants declared, “in which we must determine to live as Freemen — or as slaves to linger out a miserable existence.” On December 16, to protest the new tax, a group of Bostonians led by Samuel Adams snuck aboard ships holding tea in the city’s harbor and dumped it overboard. “This is the most magnificent Movement of all,” John Adams wrote of what became known as the “Boston Tea Party.” “There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire,” he continued. “The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered – something notable And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I can’t but consider it an Epocha in History.”
It was, in truth, a fairly minor act of vandalism — the lost tea was worth about $2 million in current prices — but it was far from an isolated incident. In early 1774, a Boston Loyalist wrote that “the most shocking cruelty was exercised a few nights ago, upon a poor old man and tidesman one Malcolm…[A] quarrell was picked with him, he was afterward taken and tarred and feathered…they gave him several severe whippings at different parts of town.” She concluded by noting that “the doctors say that it is impossible this poor creature can live they say his flesh comes off his back in stakes.”
Taken together, such incidents prompted North’s government to pass the Coercive Acts in 1774; “We are now to establish our authority,” North thundered, “or give it up entirely.” The port of Boston was closed until the lost tea had been paid for; ringleaders, like Samuel Adams and John Hancock, were told they would be tried in Britain; town meetings would require the governor’s permission; Massachusetts’ government was suspended; and General Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief, North America, since 1763 arrived in the city with 3,500 troops to take over as governor of Massachusetts.
Gage had long experience in North America, and, as a young colonel, had served in Braddock’s ill-fated attempt to capture Fort Duquesne in 1755. He was not encouraged by what he found. “Affairs here are worse than even at the Time of the Stamp Act,” he warned his superiors. “I don’t mean in Boston but throughout the country…If you think ten thousand men enough send twenty; if a million [pounds] is thought enough, give two; you will save both blood and Treasure in the end.”
A government cannot maintain itself in the face of sufficiently widespread opposition. “By the end of 1774,” historian Gordon S. Wood writes:
…in many of the colonies local associations were controlling and regulating various aspects of American life. Committees manipulated voters, directed appointments, organized the militia, managed trade, intervened between creditors and debtors, levied taxes, issued licenses, and supervised or closed the courts. Royal governors stood by in helpless amazement as new informal governments gradually grew up around them.
The royal governor of Georgia complained that the committee in control of Savannah consisted of “a Parcel of the Lowest People, chiefly carpenters, shoemakers, Blacksmiths etc. with a Jew at their head.” Reflecting on the committees in South Carolina, one prominent citizen noted that “Nature had never intended that such men should be profound politicians, or able statesmen.” The American Revolution had a populist edge.
In early 1774, the Virginia House of Burgesses issued a declaration asking that “A Congress should be appointed…from all the colonies to concert a general and uniform plan for the defense and preservation of our common rights.” This Congress should issue “humble, dutiful remonstrance to the King, who was to be conjured and besought to reflect that from our Sovereign there can be but one appeal.” The implication was clear, and on that basis the First Continental Congress met at the Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia in September and October 1774, to coordinate a united colonial response to what they dubbed the “Intolerable Acts.”
The British believed that they were faced with localized opposition in Boston, and that by crushing the rebellion there they could deter rebels elsewhere. But the Congress drew representatives from every colony except Georgia, including Samuel Adams, George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Patrick Henry; Edward Rutledge of South Carolina spoke for all when he said that “the Acts and Bills of Parliament in regard to Massachusetts Bay affect the whole Continent of America.” “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, New Englanders are no more,” Patrick Henry roared. “I am not a Virginian, but an American!”
The Congress issued a declaration condemning the Coercive Acts and rejecting “every idea of taxation internal or external, for raising a revenue on the subjects, in America, without their consent.” When it endorsed a call for Massachusetts to form a new government, John Adams called it “one of the happiest Days of my Life.” “This Day convinces me that America will support the Massachusetts or perish with her.”
Even so, the colonists still did not yet see themselves as revolutionaries but as conservatives, guarding their ancient rights as Englishmen from the predations of George III. Their declaration was issued “as Englishmen,” and appealed to “the principles of the English constitution,” “English liberty,” “the common law of England,” “English statutes,” “the English constitution,” and “the equitable system of English laws.”
If this was intended to placate the British government, it did not succeed. The Quartering Acts were reactivated. Gage received orders to arrest colonial leaders, but demurred, for now, for fear of provoking unrest he felt underpowered to contain until he had more men.
The Massachusetts assembly, meeting illegally, established a Committee of Safety under John Hancock to coordinate local militias. They began stockpiling what weapons and ammunition they could, on some occasions overrunning British forts, as at Fort William and Mary in New Hampshire in December 1774, or ambushing them, as at Salem, Massachusetts, in February 1775. In response to British disarmament operations, the assembly ordered that whenever troops “to the Number of Five Hundred shall march out of Boston…it ought to be deemed a design to carry into execution by Force the late Acts of Parliament…and therefore the Military Forces of the Province ought to be assembled and an army of Observation immediately formed, to act solely on the defensive so long as it can be justified on the Principles of Reason and self-preservationand no longer.” The colonists fired no shots but put the British soldiers in situations where they either complied or opened fire. “Put your enemy in the wrong, and keep him so,” Samuel Adams wrote in December, “is a wise maxim in politics, as well as in war.”
In London, the Tory MP Charles Van told the House of Commons that Boston should meet the same fate as Carthage. “I am of the opinion,” he said, “you will never meet with that proper obedience to the laws of this country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.” As debate drifted to disturbance, even Whig support began to swing behind the King’s ministers. The historian and Whig MP Edward Gibbon said “I am more and more convinced that we have both the right and power on our side, and that though the effort may be accompanied with some melancholy circumstances, we are now arrived at the decisive moment of preserving or losing for ever both our trade and Empire.”
British troops stepped up searches for and seizures of weapons. On April 19, 1775, one of these exercises led to violence, war, and, eventually, the creation of the United States of America.
Lexington and Concord
In November 1774, George III told North that “blows must decide whether they are to be subject to the Country or Independent.” Gage repeated his warning that “if force is to be used at length, it must be a considerable one…for to begin with small numbers will encourage resistance, and not terrify,” and estimated that 20,000 troops would be required. He had 13 battalions by the spring of 1775, and London’s response — Gage was frequently denounced there as an “old woman” — amounted to “Get on with it,” so when, in early April, he received reports that a large cache of gunpowder was being stored nearby, he acted.
“Having received intelligence that a quantity of Ammunition, Provision, Artillery, Tents and small arms, have been collected at Concord, for the Avowed Purpose of raising and supporting a Rebellion against His Majesty,” he ordered on April 18, “you will march the Corps of Grenadiers and Light Infantry, under your Command, with the utmost expedition and Secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and destroy all Artillery, Ammunition, Provisions, Tents, Small Arms, and all Military Stores whatever. But you will take care the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants, or hurt private property.” Late that night, about 700 British troops left Boston, slipping across the Charles River headed for Concord.
They did not leave unnoticed. Two men, Paul Revere and William Dawes, rode ahead through the Massachusetts countryside in the early hours of April 19th raising the alarm with the famous cry “The British are coming!” In response, about 70 militiamen gathered on Lexington Green under Captain John Parker, a veteran of the Seven Years War who was dying of tuberculosis. When it was suggested that these few dozen amateurs allow the hundreds of professional soldiers to pass, Parker replied: “Stand your ground! Don’t fire unless fired upon! But if they want to have a war let it begin here!”
The senior British officer, John Pitcairn, ordered the militia to lay down their arms and go home. Parker ordered his men to hold fire. Then a shot rang out, fired by nobody-knows-who. “[O]n our coming near them [the militia] fired one or two shots,” a British Lieutenant, Barker, recalled. After that, he continued, “our men without any orders rushed in upon them, fired and put them to flight.” “[W]ithout any order or regularity,” Pitcairn reported, “the light infantry began a scattered fire and continued in that situation for some little time, contrary to the repeated orders of both me and the officers that were present.” When the troops ceased firing, eight militia were dead and ten wounded with just one British soldier wounded. So ended the battle of Lexington, the first of the Revolutionary War.
Pitcairn reformed his troops and set out again for Concord. On arrival, light infantry took control of the bridges north and south of the town and grenadiers set about destroying the cache of weapons and gunpowder. But word of the fight at Lexington was spreading through the small, relatively densely packed farms of Massachusetts and more militiamen gathered and headed for Concord.
Fighting flared at the north bridge. “[W]e were all ordered to load [muskets] and had strick orders not to fire till they fired first then to fire as fast as we could,” one militiaman recalled. “[T]he British…fired three guns one after another…we then was all ordered to fire.” “[T]he weight of their fire was such that we were obliged to give way,” a British soldier noted. Pitcairn had lost one killed and eleven wounded in the battle of Concord.
The day’s fighting wasn’t done, but the character of the fighting changed. With the cache destroyed, the British set out for Boston around midday. They faced sniping all the way and a mile south of Concord they got bunched up at Meriam’s Corner and suffered heavy casualties. At Lexington, the reinforcements ordered earlier caught up with Pitcairn’s force, bringing British strength up to 1,500. Even so, they had to contend with continual attacks from militiamen. “[W]e were attacked on all sides from woods, and orchards and from stone walls and from every house on the road side,” a British veteran recalled. “We retired for 15 miles under an incessant fire,” Lord Hugh Percy, commander of the reinforcing column, wrote, “which like a moving circle surrounded and followed us wherever we went.”
These regular troops were trained to fight other regular troops, but the colonists were using irregular tactics, and these attacks from an unseen enemy discombobulated the British. “[T]he soldiers were so enraged at suffering from an unseen enemy, that they forced open many a house from which the fire proceeded, and put to death all those found in them,” according to one account.
As the bedraggled British recrossed the Charles River for the relative safety of Boston, Gage rejected advice to secure Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill which overlooked the city from the north side of the river. By the time they reentered Boston, the British had lost around 70 killed and 170 wounded while the militiamen had lost around 100 men killed and wounded.
The following day, Percy — who had forged an improbable friendship with John Hancock while stationed in Boston — wrote:
During the whole affair the Rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance & resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body. Indeed, they knew too well what was proper, to do so. Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as Rangers against the Indians & Canadians, & this country being much covered with wood, and hilly, is very advantageous for their method of fighting. You may depend on it, that as the Rebels have now had time to prepare, they are determined to go through with it, nor will the insurrection here turn out so despicable as it is perhaps imagined at home.
A Rubicon had been crossed. Men had been called and came to fight and kill the King’s troops. As historian Bruce Lancaster wrote, “An old order died on the nineteenth of April, 1775, simply because so many ordinary citizens believed so deeply in what underlay that call.”
Bunker Hill
Reinforcements for both sides poured into Boston and the surrounding area when word of the battles of Lexington and Concord got out. By the end of May, the militia numbered around 17,000 and held the heights which dominated Boston; Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill to the north and Dorchester Heights to the south. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress adopted them as an ‘army of observation’ under General Artemas Ward.
This made it difficult for the British troops inside Boston to supply themselves from the surrounding area. When some cows were landed from far off Connecticut, the colonial press mocked the Redcoats in verse:
In days of yore the British troops
Have taken warlike kings in battle;
But now, alas! their valor droops,
For Gage takes naught but – harmless cattle!
Gage, meanwhile, received the welcome reinforcement of three infantry regiments, and the perhaps less welcome one of Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne. In the years to come, British generals would be as liable to attack from their colleagues as from the Americans.
When the Second Continental Congress gathered at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia on May 10, John Adams proposed that it adopt the militia around Boston as a continental army and nominated George Washington — who had arrived in his Virginia militia colonel’s uniform — to command it. Samuel Adams seconded the motion and Washington accepted. His first remarks as Commander-in-Chief were an historic excercise in modesty. “Though I am truly sensible of the high honor done me in this appointment,” he told the Congress:
…yet I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities & Military experience may not be equal to the extensive & important Trust: However, as the Congress desire i⟨t⟩ I will enter upon the momentous duty, & exert every power I Possess In their service & for the Support of the glorious Cause: I beg they will accept my most cordial thanks for this distinguished testimony of their Approbation.
But lest some unlucky event should happen unfavourable to my reputation, I beg it may be rememberd by every Gentn in the room, that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think my self equal to the Command I ⟨am⟩ honoured with.
As to pay, Sir, I beg leave to Assure the Congress that as no pecuniary consideration could have tempted me to have accepted this Arduous emploiment at the expence of my domestk ease & happi⟨ness⟩ I do not wish to make any proffit from it: I will keep an exact Account of my expences; those I doubt not they will discharge & that is all I desire.
Washington’s modest opinion of his abilities was shared. “No on at the outset showed any disposition to attribute to him any great military qualities,” the Congress reported:
…but all appeared to admire him for his rectitude, sound judgment and business experience, Eliaphet Dyer probably spoke the mind of many when he announced that Washington was highly esteemed by those who knew him, but “as to military and real service he knows no more than some of ours”. In the end expedience to assure Southern supporters seems to have prevailed even though the impression of Washington’s martial ability had failed to convince that he was preeminently the man to head the army.
Whatever the reasons for his appointment, it wasn’t clear in any event what Washington and his army were fighting for. While some were contemplating more radical aims, many were still not ready to sever the link with Britain. John Adams compared Congress to a “large Fleet sailing under convoy. The fleetest Sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest.”
The British in Boston, meanwhile, had formed an objective. In June, Gage, urged on by Howe and Clinton, decided to seize the heights overlooking the city. Clinton suggested a battle of movement, landing behind the colonists so as to trap them on Bunker and Breed’s Hill, but Gage rejected this. “Mr Gage,” Clinton complained, “thought himself so well informed that he would not take any opinion of others, particularly of a man bred up in the German school [officers who had fought in continental Europe], which that of America [those who had not] affects to despise…These people seem to have no idea of any other than a direct [attack].”
Nevertheless, the British were confident. The “untrained rabble” opposing them, Burgoyne wrote, could never stand against “trained troops.” On the 17th, the British opened a bombardment of the militia’s positions on Breed’s Hill from land and water, and Howe crossed the Charles River with 2,000 men. They formed up as if on the parade ground with knapsacks containing three days supplies to sustain them on the coming pursuit and set off up Breed’s Hill to scatter the militia.
But the militiamen under Colonel William Prescott proved a tougher foe than the British generals imagined. They were committed to their cause, and had done a good job of fortifying their positions; there were veterans of recent wars among the militia, too. Prescott had been offered a commission in the British army aged just 19 for his impressive service in the French and Indian War. When Gage saw a militia officer urging his men to stand firm under the navy’s bombardment, he handed his spyglass to a Loyalist aide and asked if he recognized him. The aide was Prescott’s brother-in-law, and Gage inquired, “Will he fight?”
“I can’t answer for his men,” came the reply, “but Prescott will fight you to the gates of hell.”
Of the men under Prescott’s command, one observer wrote:
To a man, they wore small-clothes coming down and fastening just below the knee, and long stockings with cow hide shoes ornamented with large buckles. The coats and waistcoats were loose and of huge dimensions, with colors as various as the barks of oak, sumach, and other trees of our hills and swamps could make them. Their shirts were all made of flax, and like every other part of the dress were homespun. On their heads was worn a large round-top and broad-brimmed hat. Their arms were as various as their costumes; here an old soldier carried a heavy Queen’s arm, with which he had done service at the conquest of Canada twenty years previous, while by his side walked a stripling boy, with a Spanish fusee not half its weight or calibre, which his grandfather may have taken at Havana, while not a few had old French pieces, that dated back to the reduction of Louisburg. Instead of the cartridge box, a large powder horn was slung under the arm, and occasionally a bayonet might be seen bristling in the ranks. Some of these swords of the officers had been made by our province blacksmiths, perhaps from some farming utensil; they looked serviceable, but heavy and uncouth. Such was the appearance of the Continentals to whom a well-appointed army was soon to lay down its arms.
Among them was Joseph Warren, President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. When Prescott offered him command, Warren declined, explaining that he had come not to give orders, but to fight.
As the British infantry drew to within 15 paces from the colonial positions, two heavy volleys sent their left reeling back and the right fared little better. A second frontal attack was launched which Howe elected to lead personally. This, too, failed, and Howe’s entire staff were either killed or wounded. “[T]he oldest soldiers here say that it was the hottest fire they ever saw,” a British veteran wrote, “not even the Battle of Minden…was equal to it.” Without orders from Gage, Clinton came from Boston with reinforcements and the militia faced a third British attack — no knapsacks this time — with their ammunition running out, so they held their fire until the Redcoats were around 45 feet away then opened fire. The British wavered but recovered and went in with fixed bayonets. Warren was killed in this attack, his body mutilated, and identified later by Revere from dental work he had performed on him.
The militiamen had, however, executed a smart retreat across the Charlestown Neck to safety. This was “no flight,” Burgoyne wrote, “it was even covered with bravery and military skill.” Indeed, the colonists could have inflicted more losses had those troops stationed on Bunker Hill under Israel Putnam joined the fight. When Prescott demanded to know why they had not, Putnam explained “I could not drive the dogs up.”
“If you could not drive them up,” Prescott shot back, “you might have led them up.”
The British held the field at the end of what was misnamed the battle of Bunker Hill, but it felt little like victory. Of 2,500 British troops involved, 228 were killed and 800 wounded, a casualty rate of 41%, Britain’s worst losses of the war. Among the colonists were a number of excellent shots who targeted the British officers; during the entire war, 77 British officers would be killed in action, 25 of whom — 32% — were killed at Breed’s Hill on June 17, 1775. Among them was Pitcairn, described as “perhaps the only British officer…who commanded the trust and liking of the inhabitants,” who died in the arms of his son. Gage abandoned plans to attack Dorchester Heights, and his army would lick its wounds in Boston for the rest of the year.
The colonists, having lost the battle, were well satisfied: “I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price,” General Nathanael Greene quipped.
July 4th, 1775
On July 4, 1775, the colonists could be happy with how the war had gone militarily. Not only were the British surrounded in Boston, but in May a force under Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen had captured Fort Ticonderoga on the route to Canada.
But what was it all for politically? When the British officer in charge of the fort asked to whom he was surrendering, Arnold replied: “In the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress.”
“Damn you, what does this mean?” the officer replied.
It was a good question. As Clausewitz recognized when he famously wrote that “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” wars are fought as much politically as militarily, and impressive military achievements will count for little without matching political achievements. The Continental Congress was divided over what it wanted politically; redress of grievances or something more radical? It would decide in the next twelve months.
