BOSTON FREED
Thus began what seems to us now an impossible war. Although it had
been brooding for ten years, since the Stamp Act, which showed that
the ties of blood and of tradition meant nothing to the British
Tories, now that it had come, the Colonists may well have asked
themselves what it meant. Probably, if the Colonists had taken a poll
on that fine July morning in 1775, not one in five of them would have
admitted that he was going to war to secure Independence, but all
would have protested that they would die if need be to recover their
freedom, the old British freedom, which came down to them from
Runnymede and should not be wrested from them.
A British Tory, at the same time, might have replied: "We fight, we
cannot do less, in order to discipline and punish these wretches who
assume to deny the jurisdiction of the British Crown and to rebel
against the authority of the British Parliament." A few years before,
an English general had boasted that with an army of five thousand
troops he would undertake a march from Canada, through the Colonies,
straight to the Gulf of Mexico. And Colonel George Washington, who had
seen something of the quality of the British regulars, remarked that
with a thousand seasoned Virginians he would engage to block the five
thousand wherever he met them. The test was now to be made.
The first thing that strikes us is the great extent of the field of
war. From the farthest settlements in the northeast, in what is now
Maine, to the border villages in Georgia was about fifteen hundred
miles; but mere distance did not represent the difficulty of the
journey. Between Boston and Baltimore ran a carriage road, not always
kept in good repair. Most of the other stretches had to be traversed
on horseback. The country along the seaboard was generally well
supplied with food, but the supply was nowhere near large enough to
furnish regular permanent subsistence for an army. A lack of munitions
seriously threatened the Colonists' ability to fight at all, but the
discovery of lead in Virginia made good this deficiency until the year
1781, when the lead mine was exhausted.
More important than material concerns, however, was the diversity
in origin and customs among the Colonists themselves. The total
population numbered in 1775 nearly two and one half million souls. Of
these, the slaves formed about 500,000. The three largest Colonies,
Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania contained 900,000
inhabitants, of which a little more than one half were slaves.
Pennsylvania, the third Colony, had a total of 300,000, mostly white,
while South Carolina had 200,000, of whom only 65,000 were white.
Connecticut, on the other hand, had 200,000 with scarcely any blacks.
The result was a very mottled population. The New Englanders had
already begun to practise manufacturing, and they continued to raise
under normal conditions sufficient food for their subsistence. South
of the Mason and Dixon line, however, slave labor prevailed and the
three great staples--tobacco, indigo, and rice--were the principal
crops. Where these did not grow, the natives got along as best they
could on scanty common crops, and by raising a few sheep and hogs. As
the war proceeded, it taught with more and more force the inherent
wastefulness of slave labor in the South. It was inefficient, costly,
and unreliable.
The Battle of Bunker Hill was at once hailed as a Patriot victory,
but the rejoicing was premature, for the Americans had been forced
to retreat, giving up the position they had bravely defended.
Nevertheless, the opinion prevailed that they had won a real victory
by withstanding through many hours of a bloody fight some of the best
of the British regiments.
Washington took command of the American army at Cambridge, he was
faced with the great task of organizing it and of forming a plan
of campaign. The Congress had taken over the charge of the army at
Boston, and the events had so shaped themselves that the first
thing for Washington to do was to drive out the British troops. To
accomplish this he planned to seal up all the entrances into the town
by land so that food could not be smuggled in. The British had a
considerable fleet in Boston Harbor, and they had to rely upon it to
bring provisions and to keep in touch with the world outside.
Washington had his headquarters at the Craigie House in Cambridge,
some half a mile from Harvard Square and the College. He was now
forty-three years old, a man of commanding presence, six feet three
inches tall, broad-shouldered but slender, without any signs of the
stoutness of middle age. His hands and feet were large. His head was
somewhat small. The blue-gray eyes, set rather far apart, looked out
from heavy eyebrows with an expression of attentiveness. The most
marked feature was the nose, which was fairly large and straight and
vigorous. The mouth shut firmly, as it usually does where decision
is the dominant trait. The lips were flat. His color was pale but
healthy, and rarely flushed, even under great provocation.
All that had gone before seemed to be strangely blended in his
appearance. The surveyor lad; the Indian fighter and officer; the
planter; the foxhunter; the Burgess; you could detect them all. But
underlying them all was the permanent Washington, deferent, plain of
speech, direct, yet slow in forming or expressing an opinion. Most
men, after they had been with him awhile, felt a sense of his majesty
grow upon them, a sense that he was made of common flesh like them,
but of something uncommon besides, something very high and very
precious.
Washington found that he had sixteen thousand troops under his
command near Boston. Of these two thirds came from Massachusetts, and
Connecticut halved the rest. During July Congress added three thousand
men from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. They lacked everything.
In order to give them some uniformity in dress, Washington suggested
hunting-shirts, which he said "would have a happier tendency to unite
the men and abolish those Provincial Distinctions which lead to
jealousy and dissatisfaction." Among higher officers, jealousy, which
they made no attempt to dissemble or to disguise, was common. Two of
the highest posts went to Englishmen who proved themselves not only
technically unfit, but suspiciously near disloyalty. One of these
was Charles Lee, who thought the major-generalship to which Congress
appointed him beneath his notice; the other was also an Englishman,
Horatio Gates, Adjutant-General. A third, Thomas, when about to retire
in pique, received from Washington the following rebuke:
In the usual contests of empire and ambition, the conscience of a
soldier has so little share, that he may very properly insist
upon his claims of rank, and extend his pretensions even to
punctilio;--but in such a cause as this, when the object is
neither glory nor extent of territory, but a defense of all that
is dear and valuable in private and public life, surely every
post ought to be deemed honorable in which a man can serve his
country.[1]
[Footnote 1: Ford, _George Washington_, I, 175.]
Besides the complaints which reached Washington from all sides, he had
also to listen to the advice of military amateurs. Some of these had
never been in a battle and knew nothing about warfare except from
reading, but they were not on this account the most taciturn. Many
urged strongly that an expedition be sent against Canada, a design
which Washington opposed. His wisdom was justified when Richard
Montgomery, with about fifteen hundred men, took Montreal--November
12, 1775--and after waiting several weeks formed a junction with
Benedict Arnold near Quebec, which they attacked in a blinding
snowstorm, December 31, 1775. Arnold had marched up the Kennebec River
and through the Maine wilderness with fifteen hundred men, which were
reduced to five hundred before they came into action with Montgomery's
much dwindled force. The commander of Quebec repulsed them and sent
them flying southward as fast as the rigors of the winter and the
difficulties of the wilderness permitted.
By the end of July, meanwhile, Washington had brought something like
order into the undisciplined and untrained masses who formed his
army, but now another lack threatened him: a lack of gunpowder. The
cartridge boxes of his soldiers contained on an average only nine
charges of ball and gunpowder apiece, hardly enough to engage in
battle for more than ten minutes. Washington sent an urgent appeal
to every town, and hearing that a ship at Bermuda had a cargo of
gunpowder, American ships were despatched thither to secure it. In
such straits did the army of the United Colonies go forth to war. By
avoiding battles and other causes for using munitions, they not only
kept their original supply, but added to it as fast as their appeals
were listened to. Washington kept his lines around Boston firm. In the
autumn General Gage was replaced, as British Commander-in-Chief, by
Sir William Howe, whose brother Richard, Lord Howe, became Admiral of
the Fleet. But the Howes knew no way to break the strangle hold of the
Americans. How Washington contrived to create the impression that
he was master of the situation is one of the mysteries of his
campaigning, because, although he had succeeded in making soldiers of
the raw recruits and in enforcing subordination, they were still a
very skittish body. They enlisted for short terms of service, and even
before their term was completed, they began to hanker to go home. This
caused not only inconvenience, but real difficulty. Still, Washington
steadily pushed on, and in March, 1776, by a brilliant manoeuvre at
Dorchester Heights, he secured a position from which his cannons could
bombard every British ship in Boston Harbor. On the 17th of March all
those ships, together with the garrison of eight thousand, and with
two thousand fugitive Loyalists, sailed off to Halifax. Boston has
been free from foreign enemies from that day to this.