“Was the Tea Party even such a good idea the first time around?”

Caleb Crain opens “Tea and Antipathy,” his recent essay in The New Yorker on the economic motivations for the Boston Tea Party, by revisiting Nathaniel Hawthorne’s vivid story about anti-loyalist fervor, “My Kinsmen, Major Molineux.” In the tale the mob, which tars and feathers a rich elderly merchant, is led by a rider whose face is painted as if divided in two: “One side of the face blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight.”

Crain argues that much of what we know about the original tea parties may have more than one side.

Spend a little time with the venality, misinformation, hysteria, and violence that led up to the Revolution and the picture becomes murkier.

Historians who “follow the money,” Crain contends, have found evidence of extensive smuggling among colonial merchants. And, as John Tyler writes in Smugglers and Patriots, “illicit traders were highly influential among political radicals.” The impetus for the climactic December dumping was when Parliament restored the tea tax refund and empowered the East India Company to unload its surplus tea directly on the American market, rather than through merchant middlemen:

With the new measures, the price of legal tea was expected to halve. Consumers would save, Parliament wouldn’t lose quite so much on its bailout of the East India Company, and smuggling would be driven out of business.

Threatened, Boston’s merchants had to act:

Not only might smuggling cease to be profitable but, if the experiment of direct importation were to succeed, it might cut them out of the supply chains for other commodities as well. Clearly, it was time for Sam Adams and William Molineux to rile up the public again.

Did precolonial merchants conspire to create the fiction that England was determined to enslave the colonies? Crain concludes by quoting T. H. Breen, author of American Insurgents, American Patriots:

“No evidence survives showing that the king or his ministers contemplated a complex plan to destroy American rights,” yet a significant proportion of the American populace became convinced that this was the case.

Certainly one of the more influential believers was George Washington. Although he initially was troubled by the Tea Party, subsequent actions by the British changed his mind, as this exasperated letter to Bryan Fairfax on July 4, 1774, attests:

As to your political sentiments, I would heartily join you in them, so far as relates to a humble and dutiful petition to the throne, provided there was the most distant hope of success. But have we not tried this already? . . . And to what end? . . . Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us? . . . Is not the attack upon the liberty and property of the people of Boston, before restitution of the loss to the India Company was demanded, a plain and self-evident proof of what they are aiming at?

Crain’s blog provides additional documentation for his article’s argument. The blog Boston 1775 found his notes for the article “even better than the original” and anyone seeking additional reading will enjoy Boston 1775’s extensive research into the history of tea parties.

Related LOA works: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches; George Washington: Writings

Did George Washington Swear During the Battle of Monmouth?

The Library of America’s current Story of the Week is George Washington’s account of the Battle of Monmouth. Part of the conflict’s behind-the-scenes lore, which Washington only glancingly mentions, is the cowardice and incompetence of General Charles Lee, who had been given command of the forces for the attack. Although details of warfare are always hazy, both on the scene and in retrospect, one of the more contentious points among historians and Revolutionary War buffs seems to be whether Washington, who famously prohibited the use of profanity by his troops, actually swore at Lee.

In his landmark biography of Washington, Ron Chernow summarizes a few contemporary recollections of Washington’s reaction when he encountered Lee abandoning the field:

“You damned poltroon,” Washington rejoined, “you never tried them!” Always reluctant to resort to profanities, the chaste Washington cursed at Lee “till the leaves shook on the tree,” recalled General [Charles] Scott. “Charming! Delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since.” Lafayette said it was the only time he ever heard Washington swear. “I confess I was disconcerted, astonished, and confounded by the words and the manner in which His Excellency accosted me,” Lee recalled.

Still, during the decades after the war—and even until the present day—there has been no consensus of what Washington may have actually said to Lee. In 1900, a “new” eyewitness account (albeit delivered secondhand across the span of two sixty-year generations) surfaced in the magazine of the Daughters of the Revolution. At a dinner party in 1840, a Major Jacob Morton, then eighty years old, claimed to have been at the scene and acknowledged that Washington looked “like a thunder cloud before the lightning flash,” but he vehemently denied that the general used any inappropriate language.

But perhaps an unnamed professor of divinity quoted in Franklin Ellis’s A History of Monmouth County (1885) said it best: “If ever any body did have an excuse for swearing it was Washington at the battle of Monmouth.”

Related LOA volume: George Washington: Writings

Recently uncovered: at least ten British ships sunk during the Siege of Yorktown

In the waters of the mouth of Virginia’s York River, there are as many as twenty-six ships, swamped since the Siege of Yorktown 229 years ago. In recent years a total of nine have been located and identified, and according to an article in the Virginia Gazette, a ship that is believed to be the tenth will be featured this weekend at a presentation coinciding with the anniversary of the siege, commemorated annually on October 19—the date Lord Cornwallis, commander of British forces in the South, surrendered to George Washington in 1781.

Several of the ships were sunk by cannon fire, but many were intentionally scuttled by British forces to keep the fleet from falling to the enemy during a battle that had turned into a complete rout. The following day, in a letter to Henry Clinton (the British general who failed to come to the rescue in time), Cornwallis reported that during the preceding three weeks the French and American armies had moved their artillery batteries closer and closer to the British lines, maintaining a relentless and devastating barrage:

Our works in the meantime were going to ruin . . . Our numbers had been diminished by the enemy’s fire, but particularly by sickness, and the strength and spirits of those in the works were much exhausted by the fatigue of constant watching and unremitting duty.

What Cornwallis fails to relate is one tactic that Ron Chernow recounts in George Washington: A Life:

In desperation Cornwallis took former slaves who had defected to the British lines and contracted smallpox and pushed them toward the allied lines in a version of germ warfare. One American soldier reported "herds of Negroes" who had been "turned adrift" by Cornwallis for this grisly purpose.

Soldiers examining the battlefield after the surrender were shocked at the large number of black cadavers.

The Articles of Capitulation were signed at 11:00 a.m. on October 19, but the signal event marking the surrender occurred at 2:00 p.m. when the allied forces lined up along a lane a half mile long. The contrast was dramatic: the French on the left side, with dress swords and polished boots, the Americans on the right, as eyewitness Baron von Closon described them, “clad in small jackets of white cloth, dirty and ragged, and a number of them were almost barefoot.” Drummers led the almost 8,000 defeated British and Hessian soldiers as they marched between the columns, their colors furled. Reportedly, the British troops studiously ignored the American side, looking only at the French as their fifes and drums played “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Another German officer, Captain Johann Ewald, captured in his diary the significance of what he saw:

I have seen many soldiers of this army without shoes, with tattered breeches and uniforms patched with all sorts of colored cloth, without neckband and only the lid of a hat, who marched and stood their guard as proudly as the best uniformed soldier in the world. With what soldiers in the world could one do what was done by these men, who go about nearly naked and in the greatest privation? Deny the best-disciplined soldiers of Europe what is due them and they will run away in droves . . . But from this one can perceive what an enthusiasm—which these poor fellows call ‘Liberty’—can do!

Related LOA works: George Washington: Writings (includes 43 pages from his Journal of the Yorktown Campaign, May 1–November 5, 1781); The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence

George Washington returns General Howe’s dog after the Battle of Germantown

In his new biography Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow confronts the popular belief that George Washington was a brilliant military strategist during the Revolutionary War. He shows Washington, in battle after battle, devising tactics that were too complicated, ignoring his military instincts, gathering inadequate intelligence, making poor decisions, and dangerously exposing himself to enemy fire. From the outset of his military career until the end of his Presidency, Washington does, however, emerge as a masterful motivator of men and a consummate politician with a knack for the personal touch.

The Battle of Germantown, which occurred 233 years ago this week, offers exemplary evidence of these traits. After the disastrous Battle of Brandywine in early September and British General William Howe’s capture of Philadelphia, Washington was eager to rally the spirits of his troops in one last engagement before winter. Howe had settled most of his main army of 9,000 troops in Germantown, a small town six miles northwest of Philadelphia on the banks of the Schuylkill River.

Recalling his successful nocturnal raid across the Delaware the previous December, Washington devised a plan that involved a forced nighttime march of 8,000 Continentals and 3,000 militia in a four-pronged attack that would surprise Howe in a pre-dawn raid. The heavy fog on the morning of October 4, 1777, helped cover the American army’s approach and caused the first wave of British troops to retreat, but only after they had set fire to a field. The ensuing mix of smoke and fog made communications between the rebel forces impossible and some ended up shooting one another. A British regiment turned Chew’s House, a three-story stone country home, into an impregnable fortress, and Washington lost valuable time and many lives deploying three regiments to try unsuccessfully to take it.

In just three hours the Continental forces were routed. The final tally was grim: 150 Americans killed, 520 wounded, and 400 captured versus 70 British killed, 450 wounded, and 15 captured. In a letter to his brother, Washington put a good face on it: “but for a thick fog rendered so infinitely dark at times, as not to distinguish friend from Foe, at a distance of 30 yards, we should, I believe, have made a decisive and glorious day of it.” In his report to John Hancock, Washington passed over that twice as many Americans as British had been killed. “Upon the whole it may be said that the day was rather unfortunate than injurious. We sustained no material loss of men . . . and our troops, who are not in the least dispirited by it, have gained what all young troops gain by being in actions.” Washington’s forces now knew that they could “confuse and even rout the flower of the British army with the greatest ease.”

Glad to hear anything that sounded like good news after its flight from Philadelphia, the Continental Congress commended Washington for his bravery and even forged a medal in his honor. Howe was apparently also impressed, recording that he didn’t think “the enemy would have dared to approach after so recent a defeat as that at Brandywine.” Howe’s response may have been influenced by two notes he received from Washington two days after the battle. One complained of the behavior of Howe’s troops: the torching of mills and the annihilation of Charlestown. The other was just two lines, most likely penned by Washington's aide-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton:

General Washington’s compliments to General Howe. He does himself the pleasure to return [to] him a dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on the collar appears to belong to General Howe.

Of related interest:

• A recent post on the Symon Sez blog includes more details about the Battle of Germantown and Washington’s note to Howe about the dog.
• Francis Spring Ronalds, writing in American Heritage, contends that the return of Howe's dog was more an opportunity to gather intelligence than an act of kindness

LOA related works: George Washington: Writings; The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence

223 years ago today, 39 delegates signed the new U.S. Constitution

In May 1787 delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia to begin the process of revising the Articles of Confederation (Rhode Island abstained). To ensure a free expression of opinions the proceedings were kept secret, but we know much of what transpired from James Madison’s detailed diary. In the course of often heated exchanges the delegates decided that what the country needed was not to amend the Articles but to design a new framework for the government and draft an entirely new Constitution.

After a long hot summer of debate the forty-two delegates met on Monday, September 17, 1787, with one item on the agenda: to sign the new Constitution. William Jackson, the convention secretary, read the final version. Then Benjamin Franklin rose. Eighty-one years old, he had not missed one session, but he was now too weak and thus handed his prepared speech to his friend James Wilson to deliver. It said, in part:

I confess that I do not entirely approve of this Constitution at present, but Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it: For having lived long, I have experienced many Instances of being oblig'd, by better Information or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own Judgment and to pay more Respect to the Judgment of others....

In these Sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administred.... I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution: For when you assemble a Number of Men to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion, their local Interests, and their selfish Views. From such an Assembly can a perfect Production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this System approaching so near to Perfection as it does....

George Washington’s signature appears at the top. Thirty-eight delegates signed below, state by state, with Jackson witnessing their signatures. Three delegates refused to sign without a Bill of Rights: Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.

The Convention then submitted the document to the states for ratification. So began the bitter, sometimes rancorous nationwide fracas (even sparking unruly mob scenes such as the “riot” in Carlisle, PA) chronicled in the two Library of America volumes, The Debate on the Constitution.

According to Article VII of the new document, nine of the thirteen states were required to ratify the Constitution for it to go into effect. Delaware was the first to ratify, on December 7, by a unanimous vote (30–0). Federalists vied with antifederalists to lobby state legislators, and elsewhere the votes were often close; in Massachusetts the margin was 187 to 168. New Hampshire was the ninth state to ratify the Constitution on June 21, 1788, and on March 4, 1789, the new national government began operations. Rhode Island was the last of the thirteen states to ratify the Constitution on May 29, 1790.

On September 25, 1789, to address the concerns of the antifederalists—a vociferous cross-section of many citizens across the country—about “fundamental principles of human liberty,” James Madison introduced into the First Congress of the United States the Bill of Rights. With Virginia’s ratification on December 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights became the first ten amendments to the Constitution and the law of the land.

Read Wilson Carey McWilliams on how the Constitution reflected a “new science of politics.”

Related LOA works: The Debate on the Constitution (two volumes); James Madison: Writings