Speaking of librarians, you checked this book out from your local library which means you had to return it. That need to show off the books you've read on prominently placed shelves is apparently circumvented by the pride you feel in reading a good book from the library. But this one would sure have looked nice sitting in the Revolutionary Era section of your bookshelf. Plus is has deckled edges. By Gandalf's Beard, you love deckeld edges! They're so tactile and satisfying. They give their books a sense of importance, a weight that comes from an era where paper was torn by hand to be bound into a book rather than cut by some soulless machine. Every turn of the page lets your fingers feel like they are climbing the Matterhorn, exploring every ridge and crevasse. It's got to be the closest thing to reading Braille you will ever come across. It really hurt you to return this book to the library. Hey, wasn't the library a creation of Benjamin Franklin? That's pretty meta, reading a book featuring Franklin which you checked out from one of the institutions he himself created right? Does that really qualify as meta? Who knows... Wait...
There is supposed to be a book review here...
Focus, Sam!
In "Revolutionary Summer" Ellis makes the simple case that the few months between spring and fall of 1776 were the most important, formative, and perilous in American history. Others have made this claim as well, it is not unique. However, Ellis has a quality that cuts to the quick of the issues he chooses to illuminate, an insightfulness and a personability that makes his books highly readable. His strength is his ability to empathize with his subjects and infect his readers with that same connection. He makes history feel more immediate, more urgent.
Before he gets to the meat of his thesis, though, Ellis has to set the stage. For years before the fateful summer of '76, the American colonies have been chaffing at the increasingly tight rule of King George III in England.Taxes have been levied, protested and repealed. Tea has been tossed over the sides of merchant ships by the tons in Boston Harbor. Increasingly, Americans are realizing that their requests to be represented in their Parliament will not be granted. In response to even more taxation without representation, the thirteen colonies convene the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Skirmishes have been fought in the Massachusetts countryside between British regular soldiers and American militiamen, and the full-fledged Battle of Bunker Hill in Boston has resulted in an American retreat, but with looses for the British that are obviously unsustainable. George Washington has been placed in command of the new Continental Army and for nine months Washington with his rag tag army has besieged the city of Boston. In March of 1776, the General finally outmaneuvered his supposedly invincible foes, placing artillery on Dorchester Heights. The mighty British Empire has been forced to retreat from a force of barely trained militiamen without one shot having been fired. In triumph, Washington begins marching his army south and west towards New York where he correctly assumes the British will strike next.
The year before, the Continental Congress, at the urging of Pennsylvanian delegate John Dickinson, had requested that Parliament and King George come to their senses and allow for either more colonial autonomy or for representation in the government. Many loyalists believed this call for reconciliation would be enough to quell the rising voices calling for independence, for a revolution even. They were wrong. By spring of '76, the king has rebutted this call for reconciliation and declared the colonies to be in a state of rebellion and he orders the creation of a massive army to cross the Atlantic and restore order. About the same time, the pamphlet "Common Sense" appears in cities throughout the Eastern Seaboard and sells 150,000 copies in just three months. It compels the people of the American colonies to begin to question, many of them for the first time, the very idea of monarchy itself. They are beginning to realize that without representation, they cannot consider themselves true citizens of any nation, let alone a tiny island, half a world away intent on ruling an entire continent of people but with no interest in hearing their voices. On May 12th, John Adams of Massachusetts, convinces the Continental Congress to adopt a resolution that all 13 colonies throw out their Constitutions written under the authority of the British Crown and each write their own new Constitutions as they see fit. Adams will later argue that this moment was the real Declaration of Independence.
And then the summer hits. Ellis makes the point that the events leading up to that fateful summer were the most decisive of the whole War for Independence. The flash in the pan rage, the vaunted "Spirit of '76" was already over. What had started as a surprisingly successful insurgency had now become a full scale war. While Washington's army was slowly evaporating on its march to New York (the citizen soldiers had to rush home for the harvest, you know) the greatest armada to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean was sailing to meet him. Those waters would not see so many ships gathered for one purpose until the American navy sailed in the opposite direction to help out her revolutionary sister France during the First World War a century and a half later. The popular uprising that had erupted early in the year now had to stiffen to the reality of creating and sustaining a government birthed in war while struggling to maintain its republican roots. A massive standing army was, after all, anathema to republican ideals. The consensus of dissolving ties with England quickly dissolved itself as the delegates to the Continental Congress became immersed in the revolutionary language they were throwing around. Questions abounded. Questions about what the idea of liberty truly meant in a land that enslaved millions and kept the vote from women and the poor. Most of those questions were tabled as the British invasion force appeared in Hudson Bay. It was clear that the King was no longer interested in compromise. In response to this aggression, Independence was now the policy of every colonial legislature.
Before joining the Continental Congress, Benjamin Franklin, the most famous and respected American on Earth, had been an advocate for reconciliation with the British Crown. He, like everyone else in America, had grown up thinking of himself as an Englishman. He was not interested in throwing off the rule of King George; he was merely advocating for a government that recognized the mutual consent of the governed. In early 1774, he was forced to sit silently in the House of Lords (colonists had no representation, remember?) and listen to himself be humiliated and pilloried for his views. This moment proved to be too exquisitely painful of an example of exactly what was the disagreement between the colonies and the crown for Franklin to keep his loyalist tendencies. He immediately changed his tune and became a steadfast proponent of American Independence.
Franklin was the perfect example of how much of an epiphany the Americans had had. The Revolution resulted in an entire people who had acquiesced for generations to the rule of a monarchy now espousing instead their God-given right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. This, a largely philosophical idea, soon spread Eastward from the colonies and took root in places like France and later in India, Ireland, and all of Latin America. Even more recently, this idea has been seen revolutionizing oppressed peoples in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria.
It is important to remember that, although they were inexorably tied together and most people think of them as the same thing, the War for Independence and the American Revolution were two different things. The War was a military engagement. It achieved independence from England through military means. The Revolution was an idea. It was a new idea that established, for the first time in history, the realization that all humans were inherently equal to one another, and the Revolution enshrined the belief that governments were only legitimate to the extent that they derived their power from the consent of those same equal humans whom they governed. In "Revolutionary Summer" Ellis recognizes that the Revolution most likely would have persisted even if the War for Independence had been lost. In fact he makes the point that the British General Howe recognized this earlier on than General Washington.
During the Battle of New York, Howe could have repeatedly used his superior numbers of troops and his dominance of the waters to cut off and annihilate Washington's army. In fact some of his generals urged him to do just that. But Howe was looking to defeat the American Revolution, not win the War for Independence. To Howe, it was more important to bring all of the colonists back to their senses and back under the control of the British Crown than it was to destroy any colonial armies. He believed that a few high profile victories by his gigantic army would remind the American population that the fight for Independence would exact too high a price for any silly intellectual Revolution. Every American should thank God that Howe was wrong. The premise of "Revolutionary Summer" is that it is entirely possible, even probable, that no British military victory could have ever quelled the Revolution. Once the American colonies (now States) had crossed that line, there was no going back. The genie was already out of the bottle. It was King George's acts of aggression, when faced with reconciliation, that had driven the colonies to sever their allegiance to the British Crown in the first place. Ellis makes the point that more aggression would have hardened every revolutionary heart on this side of the Atlantic even more. Had the British destroyed every army the former colonists could muster and hanged every patriot they could find, they would still never have been able to destroy the Revolution. To quote Princess Leia, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin <General Howe>, the more star systems <colonists> will slip through your fingers."
General Washington, on the other hand was rash and overly aggressive in defending New York. He almost met with disaster for that rashness. Washington had failed in a commander's most sacred duty, to pick his battles well. He did not need to defend an indefensible city or risk his army for the sake of personal honor. He only needed to keep the hope of the Revolution alive. Washington's defeat (and miraculous retreat across the East River) lead to two major events. The first was the he would never again allow his army to be put in a position where it could be destroyed. Even though he was an inherently aggressive commander, he fought the rest of the War of Independence in a conservative, defensive style. His defeat in New York let him realize that all he had to do was not lose. The second event Washington's defeat inspired was a realization in the Continental Congress that more soldiers were needed to fight this war. Relying on state militias was no longer enough (in fact, Ellis spends considerable time giving the lie to the myth that the war was won by scrappy, well-armed militiamen rather than the regular army soldiers; indeed, the militias were often worse than unhelpful). But what was essential from a military point of view was a political impossibility. The individual state legislatures lacked the will to forcibly draft the 60,000 soldiers General Washington and the Continental Congress (which was acting as the de facto federal government) needed if they were to ever be capable of fighting and defeating the British. This problem, a weak central government's need to defer when states had all the power, would eventually lead to the collapse of the new American government under the Article of Confederation and the subsequent adoption of the US Constitution.
But, once again, this history book showed you how the immediacy of the moment is more illuminating than hindsight. Howe and Washington and the delegates to the Continental Congress were operating under the fog of war and neither knew what was coming next. 230 years or so provides you with the luxury of second-guessing and strategic criticism. These men were not so lucky. To quote from page 99:
"Any historical reconstruction of the crowded political agenda of the Continental Congress in midsummer 1776 inevitably imposes an ex post facto sense of coherence that the delegates at the time, doing their best to manage events that were coming at them from multiple angles and at very high velocity, did not share. They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to recover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown."
And that is exactly why you read history books. That empathy, the act of seeing familiar events with new, fresh eyes, to abandon your knowledge of what is going to happen and try to walk alongside people long dead in order to explore how it must have felt to be in their shoes... that is the most thrilling part of reading history books. Authors like John J. Ellis and books like "Revolutionary Summer" not only make that act easier, they make it more exciting.
On to the next book!
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