Public-domain ebook
Language: en312 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: The Mentor·History - American·History - Modern (1750+)
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #49877.
The opening · free to read
What is a revolution but an overturning, a spinning of the wheel, left to right, and bottom come uppermost? Likewise, since the right believes itself right, and the top is sure that the world exists in order that it may be the top, most revolutions mean force, arms, big guns booming, troops marching, bullets flying, heads cut off with axes or caught in a hangman’s noose; also arms and legs cut off, and the ground soaked with a crimson fluid. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs,” and in a revolution there is bound to be breakage of heads and hearts, and banks and constitutions.
We know that the American Revolution was a military contest, because the pictures in our first textbook of American history show General George Washington, in buff and blue, leading his Continentals up to within sixteen feet and eight inches of General Howe, in a magnificent red coat laced with gold, in vain trying to rally battalions of craven Hessians wearing highly inconvenient bearskin caps.
Commanding officers of opposing armies are not really so intimate as that; but Americans are justified in immense pride over the military success of the Revolution. The simple fact was that three million people, of whom about a fourth were negro slaves, put up a fight against a mother country having four times their population. They began without a single professional officer, except the traitor Charles Lee; and with only a thousand or two men who had not seen military service except militia training day, and desultory frontier warfare with French and Indians. They had not one ship of war, not a factory of arms. Yet they attacked the great British empire,--though it was flanked right and left by the lion and the unicorn, trained by two centuries of European wars, thousands of troops under arms, officers successful in other fields,--and they sailed into the greatest naval power on the sea.
So far as power and prestige and experience decide wars in advance, the Revolution was due to be snuffed out at the end of 1776; Benjamin Franklin was destined to be hanged, George Washington to be immured for life in a gloomy dungeon, dressed in a ball and chain. Were not the English everywhere successful? They captured New York, they captured Newport, they captured Philadelphia, they captured Savannah; they were driven away from Charleston by the palmetto forts, but returned and captured Richmond. They beat the Americans at Long Island, at the Brandywine, at Germantown, at Camden. Their cruisers and privateers swept the seas, until Nathaniel Tracy of Newburyport lost ninety of his hundred and twenty vessels. They drove the little American navy from the seas.
Yet in the end they were beaten. It is easy now to criticize the strategy of Washington and Greene and the rest, and to show that by all the laws of war they laid themselves open to defeat. Nothing can alter the stubborn fact that the American militia at Bunker Hill for hours held off a British army and so damaged it that it never took the field again; then the Americans captured Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga in 1777, a humiliation seldom known in British annals. And this victory brought the French alliance, and the aid of Von Steuben the magnificent drill master, of d’Estaing and his fleet, of Rochambeau and his army. With that aid, the Americans beat the second army at Yorktown, and that ended the war. General Cornwallis had to surrender his sword to an officer whom a few months before the British had addressed as “George Washington, Esq., etc., etc.”
This picture, from a painting by Trumbull, the famous American artist, shows the surrender of the English general John Burgoyne to the Americans at Saratoga, New York, on October 17, 1777.]
In one way the Americans were too successful. Beginning with raw militia, ill-equipped, worse disciplined, the Americans made an army that beat the British. General Washington never ceased to implore Congress and the states to give him a better system for a real national army. Half the men and a fourth of the money expended would have done the job just as well, if the advice of Washington and other experts had been followed.
The British general, Lord Cornwallis, surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. The victory virtually decided the Revolution in favor of the Americans.]
On the sea also the Americans began a great career of naval success; or, rather, they repeated the methods of earlier wars by sending out a hornets’ nest of privateers, christened with such gallant and suggestive names as The Charming Peggy, The Fair Lady, The American Revenue, The Black Joke, The Fair America, The Scotch Irish, The Skunk, The Nimble Shilling, and The King Tamer. If they did not tame George III, they did tame the British merchant and his representatives in Parliament; for American privateers in the course of the war captured about seven hundred British merchantmen.
And then there was the American navy; or rather John Paul Jones, for in him the navy was concentrated. It was a painful surprise to the British to have the royal frigate Serapis taken in 1779 by the Bonhomme (Bo-nom) Richard, a condemned merchant ship hastily fitted out in France. Jones is already a sort of mythical figure, partly because of Buell’s imaginary so-called biography; but he is the naval father of Hull and Porter, and the grandfather of Farragut and another Porter, and the great-grandfather of Sampson and Dewey.
A revolutionary overturning came whenever the Union Jack was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes hauled up. But the revolutionary army was not the Revolution: it was like the line in a football match, desperately holding back the other line while the backs get into play. The real Revolution was an overturning of governments, and charters, and political power. The revolving wheel whirled the old colonies out of existence, and cunningly framed and polished new state governments. The Revolution turned the British empire down, and pushed the United States of America up. The Revolution rolled to the bottom of the wheel Governor Gage of Massachusetts, and Governor Tryon of North Carolina, and Governor Dunmore of Virginia; and up to the top revolved Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. The Revolution was like a religious conversion: it set the American people out of their old ways, and into a new upward path.
Commander of the first American navy. From the portrait by C. W. Peale.]
John Paul Jones, the “founder of the American navy,” was born in this cottage at Kirkbean, in Scotland, in 1747. He died in Paris in 1792.]
All that seems natural to us; for we have been brought up on the tyranny of George III, and the misgovernment and plunder of the colonies by the British government. We realize the bad state of things much better than did the Americans at the beginning of the Revolution. In truth the colonies were freer from harsh and arbitrary government than England, Scotland, and Wales, to say nothing of what was then the separate kingdom of Ireland. Every colony had its local assembly: not a single English county had one. In every colony any freeman who had the necessary pluck and health could acquire land and become a voter: in England not a twentieth part of the adult men could vote. The colonists laid their own taxes and expended them for their own purposes: Englishmen paid taxes levied by a Parliament over which only a few of them had control.
Apparently the main cause of the Revolution was that the colonists could do so much for themselves that there was no reason why they should not do substantially everything for themselves. They had a personal attachment for England, the king, and the English system of government, very like that now felt by the Canadians, and would have been quite satisfied with the degree of self government that England has since freely given to Canada. John Adams says, “That there existed a general desire of independence of the Crown in any part of America before the Revolution, is as far from the truth as the zenith is from the nadir.”
From this belfry was rung out the alarm on the morning of April 19, 1775, calling the minute men to assemble on the common.]
The tablet that may be seen between the second and third stories of the house was placed there by the Paul Revere Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.]
From the painting by the famous American artist, Gilbert Stuart.]
Then why revolt, especially when above a third of the thinking people in America were opposed to the Revolution, and had to be driven out or silenced? To the original grievances of the Revolution was added a stupid John Bull obstinacy, concentrated in George III, but shared by a good part of the British nation. These mistakes made by England are a fine example of what comes to a country that falls into the hands of what are called the “Interests”; for Parliament was really nothing but a combine of great titled families, who took in some representatives of the cities and the merchant class. One of the best results of the Revolution was that it shook up the British aristocracy; and the best proof that the Revolution was right is the admission of Lord North, when the war was all over, that it had been a great mistake, but that the nation had made it, and not simply the prime minister.
The Revolution was worth all the blood and treasure that it cost, because it lighted a new torch of popular government. There had been plenty of government of the people in ancient and medieval times; but at the epoch of the American Revolution the formerly democratic Swiss and Dutch, and the free citizens of the German and French and Spanish cities, had lost faith in themselves. It was fashionable to revere Demosthenes and Cato and Brutus and the Populus Romanus; but real republican government had about ceased on the earth when the new constellation of the United States appeared on the horizon.
The colonies had very tidy little governments, schools of politics, in which the speaker of the assembly was commonly the leader of a healthy opposition to the governor; and on that foundation they built tidy little state governments, which showed the prevalent belief that governors were dangerous creatures who ought to have as little power as possible; while legislatures were a reflection of the people’s will which could not err. The wheel of revolution has twirled backward in our day; for we make governors and presidents great political leaders, and set our legislators on a one-legged race against the initiative and referendum. In the midst of the confusion of the Revolution, when town after town was picked up by the British, and nobody knew whether the Revolution would win out, it is wonderful how well the state governments worked, and how successful they were in putting on record the great principle of the two kinds of law,--fundamental or constitutional law, and statute law.
He is famous for his speech supporting the resolutions to resist the Stamp Act. At one point he exclaimed, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third”--“Treason! treason!” shouted the Speaker of the Assembly, “Treason! treason!” shouted the members--“and,” Henry continued, “George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it!”]
The book keeps going
Reading is free forever. Sign up and watch scenes appear while you read.
Scenes Storieta drew for other classics.
New illustrated classics
Once or twice a month: the latest books to get full character casts, scene art, and free comic editions. No account needed.
