King's Survey: New York State of Mind

In which we see that the American Revolution was really won—in part by not being lost—in New York (city and state) 

—So where are we going today, Mr. K?

To New York, Ethan. Crucible of the American Revolution.

—Crucible?

Crucial moment, or place where different elements merge to form something new.

—Cool. And when are we going?

Right now.

—No, I mean when in New York’s history are we going?

Ah, yes. I like that. Today we’re going to 176-77.

—We’re going to cover two years in one class period?

Well, more like a 14 months. Hey, that’s time travel.

—Actually, that’s pretty slow. We were doing centuries at a time in the first few days of class.

That’s true, Jonah. Sometimes I get a little tired of traveling at such high speeds. But that’s the thing with a survey course. Can’t spend too much time in one place. Gotta keep moving.

—Dontcha ever wish you could slow down, just live someplace for a while?

Of course. And I do. That’s what’s nice about reading history. I usually make an annual trip to visit Abraham Lincoln, for example. Great guy to spend time with. You really should make a trip. There are a lot of books that can take you there very inexpensively.

—I hear the food is terrible in the 1800s.

Well, maybe. I don’t go for the cuisine. Anyway, kids, we land in the summer of 1776. Congress is meeting in Philadelphia. But as I mentioned to you in the last class, here on Staten Island, the largest invasion force that this side of the planet has ever seen is preparing to invade Manhattan, something George Washington and his new Continental Army is trying to stop.

—Hey, whatever happened to the Minutemen?

They’re still around, Adam, mostly in Massachusetts. But here’s the thing: they’re volunteers. Fighting for their homes. To really defeat the British, you need a professional army—guys who are required to stick around for a couple years rather than a few weeks, who are required to travel, and who have the training and discipline to stick it out for the long haul. In 1775, the Second Continental Congress authorized the creation of such a force, which was named the Continental Army. The next question was who should lead it. Which wasn't all that hard to figure out. George Washington, who had fought in the French and Indian War, was one of the few revolutionaries with any real military experience. He was nominated for the job by John Adams, who thought it would send an important message to have a Virginian lead an army that was still mostly New Englanders. (Adams experienced pangs of jealousy over this idea of his for the rest of his life.) So Washington headed up to Massachusetts to take over in 1775.

You may remember that after the of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, the British decided to pull out of Massachusetts. Washington had to try and determine where the Brits would show up next. His guess was New York: it had a deep harbor that would make it an excellent staging ground for a naval landing, and a strategic location more or less in the middle of the colonies. Washington was right. But in a way that didn’t matter, because he only had about as half as many troops as the British did, and at the Battle of Brooklyn on August 27^th, 1776 the Continental army was surrounded by land and hemmed in by sea. Game over.

—But it wasn’t. Why not?

Luck. In the form of the weather. That night turned out to be exceptionally foggy. So foggy that Washington could ferry his troops across the East River and make it to Manhattan without being detected. In a way, you could argue that the Revolution was won there because the Revolution wasn’t lost there. Had British General William Howe and his naval commander Richard Clinton bagged the Continental Army on Long Island, the war would have been over. End of story.

—So where did Washington go then?

The army retreated up the island, which was a dangerous place for him to stay, since it could get trapped there. So after making a brief stand uptown, Washington ceded the city to the British, which they’d control for the rest of the war. Washington retreated into Westchester. He crossed the Hudson River into New Jersey and retreated some more. In fact, he kept retreating until he got to Pennsylvania, at which point it was winter and the general assumption was that major military operations were over for the year.

—How did he win the Revolution if all he ever did was retreat?

Well, one way of answering that question, Sadie, is to say that he won because he retreated. Washington knew that as long as he had an army, he had a Revolution. The British knew that, too. They wanted to maneuver the Continental Army into a decisive battle, and Washington’s grand strategy amounted to not allowing that to happen.

—So he was smart.

Yes. But that’s not to say this was an easy or painless experience for Washington, his army, or the Patriot cause. Remember that while all this retreating is going on, the Second Continental Congress is meeting. Washington is on the run when the Declaration of Independence is approved. Which, by the way, is no big deal.

—No big deal. This is where we’re supposed to disagree with you.

No, not really, Emily. The Congress had all kinds of things to worry about in the summer of 1776: raising money, forging alliances (two sides of the same coin), managing resources, and the like. The Founders all sat on multiple committees. The Declaration was considered necessary, but not an especially prestigious task. Thomas Jefferson was assigned it, with help from Adams and Franklin, among others, in part because he was known to be a good writer. But also because he was not a really big name among the heavyweight Virginia delegation who were in Philly. We all know he did a good job. But he himself didn’t consider it among his most important accomplishments until much later in his life. We can and should talk more about this. But what I want to emphasize now is that when, in the final line of that document, the Founders pledged “our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” it was by no means certain that the Revolution would survive. And if it didn’t they well knew their heads would be in a noose.

—Right. I still don’t get how the Americans could they win if all Washington ever did was retreat?

They couldn’t. Remember that a minute ago I said there was a general assumption that military operations ended with the start of winter? Washington exploited that assumption. On Christmas night of 1776, Washington took his troops across the Delaware River separating Pennsylvania and New Jersey and made a successful surprise attack on the British at the Battle of Trenton. He followed it up the following week with another victory at Princeton.

—Go Georgie go!

Don’t let him hear you talk like that, Emily. General Washington can be touchy when it came to his dignity.

—Oh, so sorry. I’m mortified.

I’m sure you are. Anyway, Trenton and Princeton were two victories that showed the Continental Army could fight and win. But in another sense, they were mere pinpricks. Washington was still outnumbered. And he faced a truly frightening scenario. Even as he was down in New Jersey, trying to protect the rebel capital at Philadelphia, another British army was in Canada preparing to march down the Hudson River. If that army marched down, and the army he was facing marched up—

—The colonies would be sliced in half.

Exactly right, Adam. New England—the place where so much of this trouble originated—would be cut off from the rest of the colonies. Fortunately for the Americans, the two British forces never managed to coordinate their plans. The British commander in the north, John Burgoyne, started making his way down the Hudson. But the commander in the south, William Howe, decided to go the other way and take Philadelphia instead.

—That seems dumb. Why did he do that?

Well, a lot of people at the time would have agreed with you. Actually, it’s not entirely clear why Howe and his brother did do that. He believed, plausibly, that capturing the capital city could be a decisive blow. And also, as decisive blows go, it would be relatively painless. The Howes were trying to avoid a vicious, protracted conflict. Their brother had died with the Americans fighting the French at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York during the French and Indian War, and Massachusetts men who had fought alongside him had paid for a monument to honor him.

Not that the Howes were anything but consummate professionals. They conquered New York. And, after defeating Washington’s army at Germantown and Brandywine in 1777, they conquered Philadelphia too. The British figured that capturing the rebel capital would bring about a quick end to the war. But it didn’t.

—Why not?

Because of what happened in the north. Burgoyne kept driving south, south, south, and as he did his supply lines got longer and longer. He believed Howe would be meeting him in the middle, and by the time he realized this wasn’t going to happen, he was dangerously exposed. Meanwhile, a series of American forces converged on him from the east, west, and south. The result of these moves was the Battle of Saratoga in October of 1777, in which Burgoyne’s entire army was surrounded and had to surrender.

—Where was Washington when this happened?

He was down south shadowing Howe.

—So who led the Americans?

A general named Horatio Gates. But a lot of people at the time and ever since believe the credit really should have gone to a man named Benedict Arnold.

—Wait. Wasn’t he a traitor?

That came later. In part because he felt he didn’t get the credit he deserved at Saratoga. Arnold was wounded, physically as well as psychologically, as a result of what happened there. Later, he ended up in Philadelphia, and married a woman with Loyalist ties. She convinced him to defect. His plan to give up the American fort at West Point in 1780 was foiled—another piece of luck, because if the plot worked that key nexus of the Hudson would have again cut off New England—but Arnold got away. He ended up in England.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The key point here is that Saratoga was the turning point in the American Revolution. Unlike the surprise raid at Trenton, this was a major victory: capturing an entire army is a big deal. But the consequences of the victory weren’t only military ones. It was as a result of the battle that France decided to enter the war on the side of the Americans.

—Why didn’t they do it sooner? After all, the French hated the British, didn’t they?

Yes, and that's a fair question, Yin. But the French didn’t want to back a loser. If they were going to get into a fight with the Brits—again—they needed to feel like it was going to be worth it, literally and figuratively. Once the French saw that the Americans could hold their own and pin the British down to at least some degree, they concluded they could attack them in the Caribbean, which is where the real action was as far as they were concerned. So they pledged give the Americans financial and military assistance, and this in turn convinced the Spanish and the Dutch to get involved, too. All in all, these were much bigger problems for the British than the pesky Americans. Now the British had serious opponents.

—So that’s when the Americans began to win?

In retrospect, yes. But we’ve still got years to go.

Next: Waiting for the world to turn upside down

Treacherous choices

Benedict Arnold, great traitor

The following is the second of two posts on loyalists in the American Revolution (the first, "The Price of Loyalty," is below).

Perhaps no one shows how difficult it was to choose sides in the American Revolution, and the price to be paid for picking the wrong one, than Benedict Arnold. For the entire history of the United States, Arnold’s very name has been a byword for treason. But for most of the Revolution Arnold had been regarded as a hero—in some eyes second only to George Washington in his military accomplishments and the contribution they had made to the Patriot cause. In fact, before he tried to give away the base at West Point in 1780, you could make a pretty good case that Arnold had actually achieved more than Washington had in making material contributions to the cause of American independence.

Like Thomas Hutchinson, George Washington, and other Founding Fathers, Arnold had a blue-blooded colonial background. His great-grandfather, for whom he was named, was an early governor of Rhode Island. His grandfather and father, also named Benedict, were prominent in New England business and politics. But Arnold’s father was also an alcoholic, and family fortunes suffered during his childhood. Though he attended elite private schools, Arnold never went to Yale as expected, and an apprenticeship as a apothecary (pharmacist) with his uncles was interrupted by his decision to run away to the state militia, to which he later returned and served briefly in the French and Indian War. In the years that followed, Arnold built a successful business in eastern Connecticut, much of it based, like that of Massachusetts merchant John Hancock, on smuggling foreign goods illegally and avoiding imperial taxes.

The coming of the Revolution was good for Arnold. He was at the forefront of colonial resistance all through the increasingly escalating fights over tax and economic policy in the 1760s and ’70s, and was elected captain in the Connecticut militia in 1775. He marched his newly formed company to Massachusetts, whereupon he proposed an expedition up the Connecticut River to seize the weakly defended Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, whose artillery could be a valuable asset in the coming struggle. Though he squabbled with Ethan Allen, leader of the famed Green Mountain Boys—one of many disputes that marked Arnold’s military career—the expedition was successful. The artillery at the fort was later moved to Boston, and played an important role in the British army’s decision to withdraw from the city in the aftermath of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a narrow British victory that nevertheless convinced the victorious General Thomas Gage that his besieged position in the city was no longer defensible.

In the early years of the Revolution, even Arnold’s defeats were impressive. When an initial plan to lead an attack on Quebec was rejected and the campaign given to someone else, he formulated an alternative route and was put in charge of it as a second prong of the operation. Though the effort to take the Canadian city in late 1775 ultimately failed—a smallpox outbreak, among other mishaps, hobbled the effort—most observers then and since credit Arnold for his ingenuity and persistence in keeping the operation going. (He was promoted to general for his efforts.) Arnold has also been credited as a founding father of the United States navy. His smuggling experience came in handy when orchestrating American operations on Lake Champlain in 1776. While he fought to a draw at best, his maneuvers were a factor in the British command’s fateful decision to delay further offensive operations until the following year.

Which brings us to Arnold’s finest hour. British grand strategy for 1777 involved a pincer movement whereby one British army would move up the Hudson River from New York, while another moved down from Montreal, cutting New England off from the rest of the colonies. But a lack of coordination among British commanders resulted in the New York contingent heading to Philadelphia instead. Meanwhile the northern British army, its supply lines spread dangerously thin, moved down the Hudson, where it was met by Americans converging from three sides. At the decisive moment of what became known as the Battle of Saratoga, Arnold led an American attack on a fiercely defended British position that turned the tide.

Saratoga is widely considered the turning point of the American Revolution. Not only did the battle take a big British piece off the chessboard, it also convinced a previously skeptical French government that aiding the Americans could be a worthwhile investment in taking their hated enemy, the British, down a peg. French financial and naval support would ultimately be decisive in the outcome of the struggle.

So Arnold had a lot to feel good about. And yet every step of the way he encountered resistance and indifference: promotions that never came; subordinates who were promoted over him; a Congress that failed to recognize his achievements. And, always, there were personal conflicts: Arnold seemed to be perpetually arguing with his fellow officers. At the time of Saratoga he was on such bitter terms with his commanding officer, General Horatio Gates, that he was actually relieved of command before the battle. Arnold’s leading the decisive attack was actually an act of insubordination, and an furious Gates unsuccessfully sent an aide after him to keep his rogue junior officer from reaching the front.

And while Arnold earned himself some glory at Saratoga, it came at a price: he took a bullet in the leg at the battle, and the horse he was riding fell on top of the same leg and broke it, an injury from which he never fully recovered. Nor did he get all the glory he deserved: Gates pointedly omitted mention of Arnold’s achievements in his official account of the battle. (Though his reputation never took the hit Arnold’s did, Gates’s career was persistently marked by a whiff of scandal; he was apparently involved in a plot to replace General Washington early in the war, and may have played a role in the shadowy near-mutiny that took place in Newburgh, New York at the end of it.)

 Arnold was no perfect victim. Stories of his arrogance and shady dealings dogged him his entire life, and while it’s safe to say such stories were more likely to be embellished and repeated in the decades after the war, the record is clear that he was a controversial figure even when he was considered one of the military stars of the Revolution. There were persistent rumors that he personally profited from his management of army resources, and was officially reprimanded by General Washington in December of 1779 over his lax approach toward handing out passes and his use of public wagons to save private property. Aggravated by what he regarded as petty haranguing, Arnold considered retiring from the army.

By this point he had been posted to Philadelphia. Arnold had been widowed early in the war; it was there that he met Margaret (“Peggy”) Shippen, who became his second wife. Shippen came from a prominent mercantile family with strong Loyalist ties. She was also was friendly with John Andre, a British officer she introduced to Arnold. Needless to say, the details of what followed are at least partly shrouded in mystery. But Andre and Arnold worked out a plan whereby Arnold, who was to be given command of American operations at West Point in early 1780, would sabotage operations at the base as a prelude to turning it over to British control. As it turned out, Andre was intercepted with incriminating evidence while he was on his way to meet Arnold, and he was eventually executed as a spy. Arnold, tipped off to Andre’s arrest just before he was to meet with Washington, managed to get away, aided by Peggy, who stalled a move against her husband by professing ignorance, shock and outrage when Washington interrogated her at West Point. Washington let her go, and she ultimately joined her husband in London. The couple raised five children and spent much of their subsequent life in Canada.

Why did Arnold betray the American cause? Did he do it for love? Money? A character defect? Probably all three were involved, among other reasons. Actually, Arnold himself offered a bunch himself: “Neglected by Congress below, distressed with the small-pox; want of Generals and discipline in our Army, which may be rather called a great rabble, our credit and reputation lost, and great part of the country; and a powerful foreign enemy advancing upon us, are so many difficulties we cannot surmount them,” he explained of his decision.

Go ahead and call that rationalizing on Arnold’s part. It surely was. But while you can credibly call him slimy or cowardly, one thing you can’t really say about him is that he was stupid. Actually, George Washington could have said exactly the same things Arnold did in 1780, when a major British offensive in the southern colonies showed every sign of succeeding, at least at first. In fact, Washington did say many of the same things in his steady stream of letters cajoling, complaining and lamenting the lack of support the American effort was getting. Like the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence, Washington had pledged his life and honor on the American cause. Noble or not, these people knew they were as good as dead if that cause failed. Arnold knew it too, but he made a different calculation, one that had a certain plausibility to it whether or not he happened to be a nice man, or whether or not you happened to agree with him. Washington made his bet on the outcome of the Revolution and won, thanks to the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, where, as at Saratoga, the Americans bagged an entire British army, convincing the government in London that the war simply wasn’t worth it anymore.

Arnold, by contrast, made his bet and lost. Actually, the outcome Revolution wasn’t a total disaster for him. Unlike Andre, Arnold escaped with his life, and while he never got the big payday he was hoping for in turning over West Point—since he didn’t actually do it, he didn’t get the money—the British government did compensate him for at least some of his pains. He assumed a command in the British army, and fought in Virginia late in the war, capturing Richmond in December of 1780. After the war, he was received by King George the III and resumed his business. He was embroiled in any number of personal disputes, but that had always been the case with him. Still, Arnold who died in 1801, spent the last twenty years of his life with his name as a byword for treachery, and he wasn’t much more liked in Britain than he was in the United States. He clearly regretted his choice, and once said it would have been better had he been shot in the chest rather than the leg at Saratoga. In that scenario, he would have died a hero.

Let’s be clear: the goal here is not to rehabilitate Benedict Arnold. George Washington was more than a lucky gambler—among other things, he was a man who was notably good at working with and mentoring people, like Alexander Hamilton, an arrogant genius who served as Washington personal aide and who Washington as president would shrewdly delegate the job of inventing a modern capitalist economy. (Another man who worked under Washington was Aaron Burr, who would later kill Hamilton.) Washington was exceptionally careful in managing his personal affairs as well as in running an army for which he refused to accept a salary. Of course, he could afford to. Could, and did. 

But being a good or nice man is beside the point. Which is this: that major social upheavals like revolutions are not simply difficult experiences because of the death and destruction they rain down on those on those who choose to participate in them.  Or that they rain down death and destruction on those who do not choose to participate in them, but nevertheless get caught in the crossfire. It’s also that they create situations where people perceive that they might actually have a choice in the matter, and that their choice may have consequences far beyond their ability to calculate. As Americans we cherish our freedom. But this is a kind of freedom most of us would cheerfully forgo.

As a military event, at least, the American Revolution ended 230 years ago. If you’re like most Americans, you regard yourself as a happy beneficiary of that outcome, which you commemorate with a barbeque, fireworks display, or some other form of celebration every July 4. If pressed, you’d probably concede that the Patriot cause was not entirely noble, and that as with most disputes, there are at least two sides to every story. You might even feel like American victory wasn’t all that deserving, like a team that wins a game on a disputed call or technicality. But you’re still glad your side won.

You should be even more glad that you didn’t have to pick the winning side. Maybe it’s that more than anything that makes being an American so precious: the freedom to not choose. Americans weren’t always that fortunate (life wasn’t much fun in this regard when the Civil War broke out in 1861, or at the height of the Vietnam War). And they won’t be forever. But overall, our history has been one of stability. It may well be that the very definition of a successful society is one that spares its citizens the most painful polarities of politics.