- Author:: [[Rick Atkinson]] -  - [[∙Melvil Decimal System (DDC)]] - [[97 - North America]] - [[973 - United States]] - [[973.3 - Revolution and confederation (1775-89)]] - ### Highlights - An edgy calm returned to the colonies, but British moral and political authority had sloughed away, bit by bit. Many Britons now viewed Americans as unruly, ungrateful children in need of caning. Many Americans nurtured an inflated sense of their economic leverage and pined for the traditional policy of "salutary neglect," which for generations had permitted self-sufficiency and autonomy, including governance through local councils and colonial assemblies that had long controlled fiscal matters. Colonists also resented British laws that prohibited them from making hats, woolens, cloth, and other goods that might compete with manufacturers in the mother country. Almost imperceptibly, a quarrel over taxes and filial duty metastasized into a struggle over sovereignty. With no elected delegates in Parliament, the Americans had adopted a phrase heard in Ireland for decades: "no taxation without representation." // George had never traveled beyond England, and in his long life he never would, not to Ireland, to the Continent, not even to Scotland, and certainly not to America. None of his ministers had been to the New World, either. There was much they did not know or understood imperfectly: that the American population, now 2.5 million, was more than doubling every quarter century, an explosive growth unseen in recorded European history and fourfold England's rate; that two-thirds of white colonial men owned land, compared to one-fifth in England; that two-thirds were literate, more than in England; that in most colonies two-thirds could vote, compared to one Englishman in six; that provincial America glowed with Enlightenment aspiration, so that a city like Philadelphia now rivaled Edinburgh for medical education and boasted almost as many booksellers-seventyseven-as England's top ten provincial towns combined. // Also: that eradication of those French and Spanish threats had liberated Americans from the need for British muscle; that America now made almost 15 percent of the world's crude iron, foreshadowing an industrial strength that would someday dwarf Britain's; that, if lacking ships like Barfleur, the Americans were fearless seafarers and masters of windshin construction, with an intimate knowledge of every inlet, estuary, and shoal from Nova Scotia to Barbados; that nearly a thousand American vessels traded in Britain alone. // And: that unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples, the Americans were heavily armed. Not only were they nimble with firelocks, which were as common as kettles; they also deployed in robust militias experienced in combat against Europeans, Indians, and insurrectionist slaves. // Sensing its own ignorance, the government had drafted a rudimentary questionnaire that would soon be sent to colonial governors. The twentytwo questions ranged from No. 3, "What is the size and extent of the ince, the number of acres supposed to be contained therein?" and No. 4, "What rivers are there?" to No. 10, "What methods are used to prevent illegal trade, and are the same effectual?" and No. 21, "What are the ordinary & extraordinary experiences of your government?" No doubt some helpful answers would emerge. (Page 9) - Even a landlubber king recognized that just as his empire was under stress, so too his fleet. Sea power was fragile. A half dozen obsolete ships had been broken up for scrap in the past year, and no new ones launched. The Princess Royal, headed for sea in October, had taken six years to build. Although some wooden warships gave service for decades, many lasted only eight to fifteen years, depending on the seas they plied. Each required incessant, costly repairs in jammed yards like this one. Ships built with green timber-seasoned for less than three years-sometimes had only half the life span, or even a third. The urgent naval demands of the Seven Years' War had devoured England's reserves of seasoned oak; many warships during and after the war were built green, which left them vulnerable to dry rot and other ills. New seasoning sheds were under construction to replenish timber supplies, but much of the British fleet was nearing the end of its life. Simply making a new eighteen-ton mainmast for a onehundred-gun ship-a white pine stick forty yards long and forty inches in diameter-took a dozen shipwrights two months. Portsmouth and other royal yards needed more skilled shipwrights, many more. It did not help recruitment that they earned the same two shillings and one penny per day paid in 1699. (Page 11) - As he braced himself in the rocking barge, he looked the part, this king, all silk and fine brocade, "tall and full of dignity," as one observer recorded, "his countenance florid and good-natured." At thirty-five, [[George III]] had the round chin and long nose of his German forebears, with fine white teeth and blue eyes that bulged from their orbits. He had been a sickly baby, not expected to survive infancy; now he incessantly touted "air, moderate exercise, and diet," and he could often be found on horseback in pursuit of stag or hare. Not for another fifteen years would he be stricken with the first extended symptoms-perhaps caused by porphyria, a hereditary afflictionthat included abdominal pain, neuritis, incoherence, paranoia, and delirium. More attacks followed later in his life, along with the madness that wrecked his old age. //Unkind and untrue things often were said of him, such as the claim that he could not read until age eleven; in fact, at a much younger age he could read and write in both English and German. There was no denying that he was an awkwardly shy boy, "silent, modest, and easily abashed," as a courtier observed. In 1758 a tutor described the prince at twenty, noting traits that would bear more than a passing resemblance to the adult king: // "He has rather too much attention to the sins of his neighbor.... He has great command of his passions, and will seldom do wrong except when he mistakes wrong for right." Still, in the past decade or so he had grown into an admirable man of parts-diligent, dutiful, habitually moderate, peevish but rarely bellicose. Not easily duped, he had what one duchess called“a wonder frugal in an age of of knowing what is going forward." He was excess, pious at a time of impiety. His interests ranged from physics and theology to horticulture and astronomy-he had built the Royal Observa tory at Richmond to view the transit of Venus in 1769--and his tastes ran ful way from high to low: Handel, Shakespeare, silly farces that brought hie k guffaw ringing from the royal box. His sixty-five thousand books would stock the British national library. // Even his idiosyncrasies could be endearing. Until blindness overtook him in the early 180os, George served as his own secretary, meticulously dating his correspondence with both the day of the month and the precise minute. He copied out his own recipes for cough syrup time, to the (rosemary, rice, vinegar, brown sugar, all "boiled in silver") and insecticide (wormwood, vinegar, lime, swine's fat, quicksilver). He kept critical notes on dramatic actors-"had a formal gravity in his mien, and a piercing eye"or "more manly than elegant, of the middle stature, inclining to corpulency." He would personally decide which English worthies should get the pairs of kangaroos brought home by an expedition to Australia. Increasingly his conversational style inclined to repetitive exclamation: "What! What! What!" or "Sad accident! Sad accident!" His compulsion for detail drew him into debates on the proper placement of straps on Foot Guards uniforms. very Unlike the two German-born Georges who preceded him-the House of Hanover had been tendered the throne at Westminster in 1714, when Britain was desperate for a Protestant monarch-this George was thoroughly English. "Born and educated in this country," he proclaimed, "I glory in the name of Britain." The three requirements of a British king came easily to him: to shun Roman Catholicism, to obey the law, and to acknowledge Parliament, which gave him both an annual income of £800,000 and an army. Under reforms of the last century, he could not rule by edict but, rather, needed the cooperation of his ministers and both houses of Parliament. He saw himself as John Bull, the frock-coated, commonsensical embodiment of this sceptered isle, while acknowledging that "I am apt to despise what I am not accustomed to." // There was the rub. Unkind things were sometimes said of him, and not all were untrue. George disliked disorder, and he loathed disobedience. He had an inflexible attachment to his own prejudices, with, one biographer later wrote, "the pertinacity that marks little minds of all ranks." His "unforgiving piety," in the phrase of a contemporary, caused him to resist political concession and to impute moral deficiencies to his opponents. He bore grudges. - And if his subjects cheered him to the echo, why should they not? Theirs was the greatest, richest empire since Rome. Britain was ascendant, with mighty revolutions-agrarian and industrial-well under way. A majority of all European urban growth in the first half of the century had occurred in England; that proportion was now expanding to nearly three-quarters, with the steam engine patented in 1769 and the spinning jenny a year later. Canals were cut, roads built, highwaymen hanged, coal mined, iron forged. Sheep would double in weight during the century; calf weights tripled. England and Wales now boasted over 140,000 retail shops. A nation of shopkeepers had been born. - A fourth – the [[Seven Years' War]] – began so badly that the sternest measures had been taken aboard the Monarch in these very waters. Here on March 14, 1757, Admiral [[John Byng]], convicted by courtmartial of "failing to do his utmost" during a French attack on [[Minorca]], had been escorted in a howling gale to a quarterdeck sprinkled with sawdust to absorb his blood. Sailors hoisted aboard a coffin already inscribed with his name. Dressed in a light gray coat, white breeches, and a white wig, Byng knelt on a cushion and removed his hat. After a pardonable pause, he dropped a handkerchief from his right hand to signal two ranks of marines with raised muskets. They fired. [[Voltaire]] famously observed that he died "pour encourager les autres." - Spoils under the [[Treaty of Paris (1783)]] were among the greatest ever won by force of arms. From France, Britain took Canada and half a billion fertile acres between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, plus several rich islands in the West Indies and other prizes. Spain ceded Florida and the Gulf Coast. Britain emerged with the most powerful navy in history and the world's largest merchant fleet, some eight thousand sail. The royal dockyards, of which Portsmouth was preeminent, had become both the nation's largest employer and its most sophisticated industrial enterprise. // "There shall be a Christian, universal, and perpetual peace," the treaty had declared, "as well by sea as by land." In time, none of that would hold true. Yet for now, Britain cowed her rivals and dominated Europe's trade with Asia, Africa, and North America. "I felt a completion of happiness," the Scottish diarist James Boswell had recently exclaimed. "I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind." This year another writer, [[George Macartney]], would coin a more dignified phrase, a paean to "this vast empire, on which the sun never sets." - [[George III]] adored his navy, over three hundred warships scattered across the seven seas, and with __Barfleur__ cleared for action, he took time to poke about. // More than two thousand mature oaks had been felled to build a ship like this, the biggest, most complex machine in the eighteenth-century world, the steam engine and spinning jenny be damned. The king admired the massive oak balks, the knees chopped from tree forks, the thick planks wider than a big man's handspan, the gun decks painted bright red to lessen the psychological shock of blood spilled in battle. Twenty or more miles of rope had been rigged in a loom of shrouds, ratlines, stays, braces, and halyards. Masts, yards, spars, tops, and crosstrees rose overhead in geometric elegance. Even at anchor this wooden world sang, as timbers pegged and jointed, dovetailed and mortised, emitted creaks, groans, and squeals. Belowdecks, where each sailor got twenty-eight inches of sleeping width for his hammock, the powder monkeys wore felt slippers to avoid creating sparks in the magazine. The smells of tar, hemp, pine pitch, and varnish mingled with the brine of bilgewater and vinegar fumigant and the hoglard pomade sailors used to grease their queues. All in all, it was the precise odor of empire. - And, of course, the [[Treaty of Paris (1783)]] had left various European powers aggrieved if not humiliated, with smoldering resentments among the Prussians, the Spanish, the Dutch, and, most of all, the French. After the treaty was signed, Britain would remain bereft of European allies for a quarter century. // Then there was debt: the Great War for the Empire had cost £100 million, much of it borrowed, and the country was still strapped for money. There had been fearful, if exaggerated, whispers of national bankruptcy. With the British debt now approaching a quarter billion pounds, interest payments devoured roughly half of the £12 million collected in yearly tax revenue. Britons were already among Europe's most heavily taxed citizens, with ever-larger excise fees on soap, salt, candles, paper, carriages, male servants, racehorses-often 25 percent or more of an item's value. The cost of this week's extravaganza in Portsmouth-estimated at £22,000-would not help balance the books. // It had seemed only fair that the colonists should help shoulder the burden. A typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, compared to the average Englishman's twenty-five shillings-a ratio of one to fifty-even as Americans benefited from eradication of the French and Spanish threats... - ### New highlights added [[December 8th, 2020]] at 12:30 AM - London on the march toward war was much like London at peace aggressive, vivid, and alive with animal spirits. Cockfights and bearbaiting remained popular, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays. Raucous crowds assembled on January 10, 1775, to see six criminals-four burglars and two thieves-trundled in carts down Oxford Street to the Tyburn gallows. Another eight were condemned to death that week in an Old Bailer courtroom, among them a defendant who stole sixpence from a farm bor The British penal code listed nearly two hundred capital crimes, including such heinous offenses as demolishing fishponds and wandering at night with one's face blackened, not unlike the tea party hooligans in Boston. Tyburn's hangman would rarely be idle. // The largest city in the Western world now held three-quarters of a million souls, and what a din they made: the bawl of balladmongers, knife grinders, itinerant musicians, and pleading beggars, some with rented babies on their hips; the clop and clatter of hooves and iron-wheeled carts on paving stones; the tinkling bells of scavenger drays; the cries of Thames ferrymen and higglers selling flowers, or apples, or jellied eels, or quack potions. Watchmen known as Charlies-the office dated to Charles II's reign-called out the hour when clocks struck, proclaiming good weather or bad. With noise came the stink of sea coal and wood smoke and thick effusions from smithies, dyers' yards, and earthenware kilns. Pigs, chickens, and cows lived in cellars with their owners, and streets served as open sewers for tripe dressers, sausage makers, and the offal of catgut spinners. // The city had 42 markets and countless public houses, including, by one later tally, 55 Swans, 90 King's Heads, 120 Lions, but only 1 Good Man3; the author Tobias Smollett claimed a man could get drunk for a penny and dead drunk for tuppence. Among the estimated ten thousand prostitutes, streetwalkers worked the Strand or the alleys near Covent Garden, where higher-priced courtesans preened in bay windows on the piazza and men paid to be flogged by women known as "posture molls." Freaks and frauds peopled the metropolis: a certain Mary Tofts who supposedly gave birth to rabbits, an armless man who shaved with his foot, a Scot who broke glasses with a mighty shout, and shopkeepers who sold donkey as mutton and white bread kneaded with chalk or bone ash. But mostly it was a city that toiled hard: clerks and barbers, merchants and printers, coal heavers and coppersmiths with their beards stained green. If not already the world's greatest metropolis, London was working to earn that laurel. (Page 16) - For more than two hundred years, the [[House of Commons]] had met in St. Stephen's Chapel, built within the palace of Westminster in the twelfth century for the monarch's private worship. Window glass depicted biblical stories. Peacock feathers and squirrels' tails had been used to paint angels on the walls and saints around the altar; white down plucked from the breasts of royal swans was daubed in paint to inflect the high blue ceiling with thousands of gold stars. When [[Henry VIII]] shifted to a new palace at Whitehall, old choir stalls became members' benches, a Speaker's chair replaced the altar, whitewash covered the wall paintings, and the spangled ceiling was lowered to improve the acoustics. Architect [[Christopher Wren]] added galleries above the debating chamber, which was smaller than a tennis court. The hall retained an ecclesiastical air, even as parliamentarians cracked nuts, peeled oranges, or wandered out through the lobby for a game of whist and a glass of Madeira. (Page 18) - Slouched on the Treasury bench to the right of the Speaker's chair, a corpulent, round-shouldered figure listened as the recitation droned on, his eyelids so heavy that he appeared to be dozing. Thick-lipped, with both brow and chin receding, he was said to have a tongue "too large for his mouth" and "prominent eyes that rolled about to no purpose." No matter: Lord [[Frederick North]], a man without vanity who referred to himself as "an old hulk," was always pleased to be underestimated. // In the first decade of George IIl's reign, six men held the office of prime minister, better known at the time as chief or first minister. They had little in common other than slender competency and an unsteady handling of Parliament. In 1770 the king turned to a childhood playmate-he and North had acted together in a schoolboy production of Joseph Addison's Catoand a political partnership began that would endure through a dozen difficult years. George knew he had his man when he wrote North just a few months into his new chief minister's tenure, pleading for £13,000 in cash by day's end because of "a most private and delicate" need-the Duke of Cumberland had successfully sued the king's younger brother after catching him in flagrante delicto with his wife. North replied within hours that he had "no doubt of being able to procure the sum desired... in such a manner to keep it as much out of sight as possible." George answered, "This takes a heavy load off of me." // Even his adversaries adored North, a man "of infinite wit and pleasantry," as one admitted. A diplomat added, "It was impossible to experience dullness in his society." Now forty-two, the son of an earl, he was a gifted Greek and Latin scholar, adept in French, German, and Italian, with an adhesive memory, a youthful delight in the absurd, and "a temperament completely free from irascibility," as one admirer observed. A happy husband and a doting father to six children, he was generous, companionable, and honest. "He kept his hands clean and empty," a colleague wrote, while another noted, "What he did, he did without a mask." North held a con>> stituency in Banbury with fewer than two dozen eligible voters, who routinely reelected him after being plied with punch and cheese, and who were then rewarded with a haunch of venison. // Capable of reciting budget statistics for hours without consulting a note, he supervised national finance as head of the Treasury Board. Deft in debate, North was the principal defender of government policy in the Commons. In the past year he had delivered more than a hundred speeches on various measures, most of them harsh, relating to America. Many more such speeches lay ahead. // Ahead, too, lay calamity. By his own recent acknowledgment, North was "fond of indolence and a retired life." Averse to confrontation and an instinctive conciliator, he was given to melancholy and indecision. Now he was fated to be a war minister, with his king's empire in the balance. He could talk tough, as in his claim that "America must fear you before they will love you" or his assurance to the Commons that "four or five frigates" could close Boston Harbor because "the militia of Boston were no match for the force of this country." Yet colleagues sensed that his heart was not in it; he lacked, one said, the requisite "despotism and violence of temper." His confession that "upon military matters I speak ignorantly, and therefore without effect" revealed his ambivalence. // Devoted to George, he would stay the course set by his monarch, a vessel for the king's obstinacy. A loyal friend though perhaps not a good he reinforced His Majesty's narrow attitudes rather than gently widening his vision. It was North, after all, who in 1770 had said, "I can never acquiesce in the absurd notion that all men are equal." Now, with his stack of 149 documents as proof of American perfidy, he would seek Parliament's agreement to force submission. (Page 18) - Precisely how this formidable strength should be wielded against America remained in dispute among the king's men. "A conquest by land is unnecessary," the secretary at war, Lord William Barrington, had advised in December, "when the country can be reduced first to distress, and then to obedience, by our marine." That marine-the Royal Navy-might have its own woes, but General Edward Harvey, the adjutant general and the highest army official in Britain, agreed that "attempting to conquer America internally with our land force is as evil an idea as ever controverted common sense." He added bluntly: "It is impossible." The army's small size fueled this consternation. In 1760, at the height of the Seven Years' War, Britain had mustered more than 200,000 men, including mercenaries. Now the army's paper strength had dipped below 50,000-less than a third the size of France's army-and no more than 36,000 soldiers actually filled the ranks, of whom thousands kept the restive Irish in check. Recruiting was difficult, and although many of the army's 3,500 officers had combat experience, the force had fought few major battles since Quebec and Minden, sixteen years earlier. A few prominent commanders refused to fight the Americans, among them Sir jenier Amherst, who had led North American forces against the French from 1730 to 1763. While some junior officers were keen to earn their spurs. England, enough were leaving the service that in February the king declared he would "not listen to any further requests" from those hoping to sell their commissions rather than embark for America; he deemed such behavior a "great impropriety." Lord North, as early as September 1774, had suggested that "Hessians and Hanoverians could be emploved if necessary. During the winter, secret negotiations had begun in Kassel to retain German hirelings, should war erupt in America. (Page 24) - [[George III]] resolve helped his ministers rally around three critical assumptions, each of which proved false: that most colonists remained loyal to the Crown, notwithstanding troublemakers in Massachusetts capable of inciting a rabble; that firmness, including military firepower if necessary, would intimidate the obstreperous and restore harmony; and that failure to reassert London's authority would eventually unstitch the empire, causing Britain to "revert to her primitive insignificancy in the map of the world," as a member of the House of Commons warned. - ### New highlights added [[December 8th, 2020]] at 6:21 AM - Roughly a quarter million Americans would serve the cause in os military capacity. At least one in ten of them would die for that caue 25,674 deaths by one tally, as many as 35,80o by another. Those deaths were divided with rough parity among battle, disease, and British prisons, a larger proportion of the American population to perish in any conflict other than the Civil War. If many considered the war God's will and shaped by divine grace-certainly the outcome would also be determined by gutful soldiering, endurance, hard decisions (good and bad), and luck (good and bad). The odds were heavily stacked against the Americans: no colonial rebellion had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. ^^But, as [[Voltaire]] had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.^^ // This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought for territory or the usual commercial advantages. Instead, what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come. Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity. // Those 3,059 hard days would yield two tectonic results. The first was in the United Kingdom, where the reduction of the empire by about onethird, including the demolition of the new dominions in North America, proved to be as divisive as any misfortune to befall the nation in the eighteenth century, at a cost of £128 million and thousands of British lives. The broader conflict that began in 1778, with the intervention of European powers on America's behalf, led to the only British defeat in the seven Anglo-French wars fought between 1689 and 1815. Of course, what was lost by force of arms could be regained, and a second British Empire, in different garb, would flourish in the next century. // The second consequence was epochal and enduring: the creation or providential-ordained by the American republic. Surely among mankind's most remarkable achievements, this majestic construct also inspired a creation myth that sometimes resembled a garish cartoon, a melodramatic tale of doughty yeomen resisting moronic, brutal lobsterbacks. The civil war that unspooled over those eight years would be both grander and more nuanced, a tale o heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Beyond the battlefield, then and forever, stood a shining city on a hill. (Page 26) - An unusual bustle disturbed placid Craven Street on Monday morning, March 20, 1775. At No. 27, a looming town house with fourteen fireplaces, crates and trunks had been packed and prepared for shipment. Visitors in fine carriages had recently been seen wheeling up and wheeling off, bidding good-bye, adieu, bon voyage. Among the neighbors it was rumored that after almost two decades in London, Dr. [[Benjamin Franklin]] was going home. // He was famous in Craven Street, as he was famous everywhere, though he still referred to himself as "B. Franklin, printer." Except for a brief return visit to Philadelphia in 1763-64, and a temporary move a few years later to a different house on the street, he had lived at No. 27 since arriving in England as a colonial agent in 1757. Because he was widely deemed a "universal genius"-the accolade did not displease him-his eccentricities were forgiven: chuffing up and down the nineteen oak stairs, dumbbells in hand, for exercise; sitting nude in the open window above the street, regardless of the season, for his morning "air bath"; playing his "harmonica," an improbable contraption constructed of thirty-seven glass hemispheres mounted on an iron spindle and rotated with a foot treadle so that he could elicit three ghostly octaves by touching the moving edges with his moistened fingers. (Mozart and Beethoven, among others, would compose for the instrument.) And Craven Street had also been his laboratory, the site where he had launched inquiries into sunspots, magnetism, lead poisoning, the organic origins of coal, carriage wheel construction, and ocean salinity. At the foot of the street, on the Thames, he had repeated his celebrated kite-and-key demonstration; St. Paul's Cathedral, nearby, was Britain's first structure to install his lightning rod. // The tall man who emerged onto the front stoop that morning was now sixty-nine, with thin, graying hair and sensual lips that made him look younger. He retained the broad shoulders of the leather-apron tradesman who'd once carried lead type for a living, though he had grown plump enough to call himself "a fat old fellow." Furrows creased the prominent dome of his forehead, and the hooded blue eyes sagged. "Anxiety begins to disturb my rest," he had written a friend in America a few weeks earlier, "and whatever robs an old man of his sleep soon demolishes him." // He had chosen to spend this final day in London in semi-seclusion with Joseph Priestley, a fellow natural philosopher who lived a mile distant. As Franklin made his way across the city he had once loved, those anxieties weighed on him. How far he had traveled, this fifteenth child of an impoverished Boston candlemaker! With only two years of formal schooling, he had become not only a prosperous printer but the largest bookseller in Philadelphia and the most prominent paper merchant in America. As forty-two, self-made, he retired from the trades to devote himself to good causes-smallpox inoculations, paper money, and streets made safer by night watchmen paid through public taxes. He also threw him self into practical science, with inventions ranging from bifocals to eff cient stoves. He had once told his mother that for his epitaph, "I would rather have it said, 'He died usefully,' than, 'He died rich." His 1751 treatise Experiments and Observations on Electricity brought international fame for discoveries lauded by a contemporary as "the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton." He not only invented the first device for storing electrical charges, he also named it-the battery-as he named other things in this new field: conductor, charge, discharge, armature. Electrical experimenters in France were known as franklinistes. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him "the new Prometheus," a man who had captured heaven's fire. // He was proud, perhaps prideful. The ink-stained printer became Dr. Franklin, thanks to the honorary degrees from Oxford and St. Andrews, and he was not above snickering at American provincialism. "Learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England almost all make a point of visiting me," he had written in 1772 to his son William, who, thanks to Franklin's influence, was the royal governor of New Jersey. "The K[ing] too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard." If esteemed and clubbable, he still at times seemed opaque. A man of masks and personas, he was Poor Richard, after the pseudonym adopted for the almanac he'd first published in 1732; he was also, thanks to his many whimsical pen names, Silence Dogood, Cecilia Shortface, and Obadiah Plainman. Since moving to London at age fifty-one to represent Pennsylvania, and then other colonies, he had used forty-two different signatures on his published articles. // So, too, was he a creature of contradiction. An advocate for the rights of man, he had owned slaves for thirty years, complaining that most of them were thieves. A man of temperance and discretion, he enjoyed "intrigues with low women that fell in my way" and took a common-law wife in 1730. Perhaps most confounding, he had been a zealous citizen of the empire, so exuberant in his Anglophilia that in September 1761 he curtailed a trip to the Continent to attend George III's coronation. He had long favored excluding Germans and other non-English émigrés from the colonies. Americans "love and honor the name of Englishman," Franklin had wie ten in the London Chronicle in 1770; aping "English manners, fashions, a manufacturers, they have no desire of breaking the connections between the two countries." Yet in the past year he had become so hostile to Britain that now he could fulminate like a Boston radical, his face white with rage. Franklin, these days, was a few steps ahead of an arrest warrant. // His good friend Priestley, beak-nosed and thin-lipped, offered a sympathetic lev lived in the earl's sprawling mansion just off Berkeley Square. The son of a Calvinist cloth dresser, he, too, was a universal genius, one who, it was said, wrote books faster than people could read them. The previous August he had discovered the gas called oxygen, and he would be credited with identifying nitrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other gases, as well as photosynthesis, the principles of combustion, and the recipe for soda water. On this Monday he and Franklin pondered electricity and sundry scientific mysteries, as they had for years. Then the conversation turned to politics and what Franklin called "the impending calamities." "Much of the time was employed in reading American newspapers," Priestley later wrote of that day with Franklin, "especially accounts of the reception which the Boston Port Bill met with in America. And as he read... the tears trickled down his cheeks." The coming war would likely last ten years, Franklin preear. As librarian and companion to the Earl of Shelburne, Priestdicted, and he would "not live to see the end of it." // He wept, not least, for his own shortcomings. For decades he had championed a greater Great Britain, an Anglo-American union of "mutual strength and mutual advantage." As political upheaval strained those blood ties, he sought "to palliate matters" with various compromises, including an offer to pay for Boston's drowned tea from his own pocket. Even now he considered the schism to be "a matter of punctilio, which two or three reasonable people might settle in half an hour." But by degree he had grown vexed, then angry at what he called the "insolence, contempt, and abuse" of arrogant British officials toward his countrymen; the condescending reference to Americans as "foreigners" infuriated him. His writings turned acerbic: he proposed to answer the British practice of shipping convicts to America by exporting rattlesnakes to England, and his Swiftian essay, "Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One," postulated that "a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edge." // Then, two years ago, disaster had struck when a wise man did a foolish thing. Someone whose identity remained obscure gave Franklin a sheaf of private letters written by a Crown official in Massachusett (Page 27) - The six weeks following Dr. Warren's oration were suffused with "dread suspense," as the Reverend William Emerson of Concord later wrote. Yet daily life plodded on. Goods smuggled or stockpiled before the port closing could be found for a price, including candles for five shillings a pound in the Faneuil Hall market, along with indigo and a few hogsheads of sugar. Greenleaf's Auction Room sold German serges, Irish linens, and Kippen's snuff by the cask. Harbottle Dorr's shop in Union Street advertised spades, Smith's anvils, and brass kettles, "none of which have been imported since the port was shut up." A vendor near Swing Bridge offered fish hooks, cod lines, and "nails of all sorts." With spring coming on fast, W. P. Bartlett's shop in Salem sold seeds for crimson radishes, yellow Spanish onions, tennisball lettuce, and several kinds of peas, including black-eyed, sugar, blue union, and speckled. "Choice cayenne cocoa" could be found on Hancock's Wharf, and pearl dentifrice-reputedly invented by the queen's dentist "for the preservation of the teeth"-was peddled in a shop on Ann Street The London Book-Store in Cornhill, owned by gregarious young Henry Knox, offered lottery tickets and globes showing the reach of that empire on which the sun never set. For four pence on Marlborough Street, those desperate to glimpse a brighter tomorrow could buy a calculator that displayed the projected annual increase of colonial populations in America. // Auction houses sold the furniture of distraught residents determined to move-to England, to Halifax, deeper into New England, or just away. Mahogany tables, featherbeds, and looking glasses went for a song. For those who preferred to dance away their troubles, an unlikely new school in Boston offered lessons in minuets, hornpipes, and English country steps "in the most improved taste." The Boston Gazette, known to loyalists as "the Weekly Dung Barge," reminded readers that lofty talk of freedom had limits: a March 6 advertisement touted "a healthy Negro girl, about 20 years of age.... She is remarkably good-natured and fond of children.... Her price is £40." Another ad offered a reward for a runaway "servant for life," using the Massachusetts euphemism for a slave; this one, named Caesar, "is supposed to be strolling about in some of the neighboring towns. Walks lame and talks much of being free.... Had on when he went away a blue jacket." A Boston ordinance required the night watch "to take up all Negroes, Indians, and mulatto slaves that may be absent from their master's house after nine o'clock at night," unless they carried a lighted lantern and could account for themselves. // Freeholders gathered for meetings, as usual, in Faneuil Hall. The town agreed to borrow £600 to buy grain for the almshouse poor. A report in late March noted that thirty-eight smallpox patients were quarantined on a hospital scow in the Charles River, "some distance from the wharf." Freeholders voted to continue a recent ban on inoculation; many now feared that it posed a greater risk of epidemic than natural infection. Any household with sick inhabitants was required to display a large red flag on a six-foot pole or incur a £50 fine. For those intent on inoculation, newspapers advertised the services of a private hospital in New York. (Page 44) - ### New highlights added [[December 8th, 2020]] at 6:18 PM - The indiscipline of a bored, anxious army weighed on [[Thomas Gage]]. Gambling had become so pernicious that he imposed wager limits and established the Anti-Gambling Club. Worse still was inebriation in a town awash with cheap liquor. Regulars preferred West Indies rum, although it was often contaminated with lead, but 140 American distilleries also produced almost five million gallons a year, which sold for less than two shillings a gallon. “The rum is so cheap that it debauches both navy and army, and kills many of them," Major Pitcairn, the marine, warned the Admiralty in March. t will destroy more of us than the Yankees will." A soldier caught trading his musket for a jug of New England Kill-Devil could draw five hundred lashes with a nine-cord cat, enough to lay bare the ribs and kidneys. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd Foot-the Royal Welch Fusiliers recorded in his diary that many men "are intoxicated daily" and that two had died of alcohol poisoning in a single night. "When the soldiers are in a state of intoxication," he added, "they are frequently induced to desert." (Page 48) - And desert they did. Drunk or sober, redcoats were lured by Americans who offered farm-smock disguises, escape horses, and three hundred acres to any absconding regular. Estimates of British Army desertions over she past vear ranged from 120 to more than 200. Five-guinea rewards were advertised by company officers in the Boston Post-Boy for the likes of Private Will Gibbs, "about 5 feet 7 inches high, and of a fair complexion," last seen wearing a round hat and a brown coat trimmed in blue. The problem was even worse for naval captains: more than twenty thousand British seamen had jumped ship in American ports since early in the century, and nearly another eighty thousand-almost 14 percent of all jack-tars who served-would abscond during the coming war, including those who deserted in home waters. Many had been forced into service by press gangs, while some detested the harsh life at sea; all resented the paltry nineteen shillings a month paid seamen since the reign of Charles II. Boston was particularly notorious for desertion, and the Royal Navy ships now blockading the harbor had remained at anchor through the winter with their gunports caulked and their topmasts housed against the weather, unable to berth for fear of mass defections. // Floggings, and worse, had limited deterrence. Private Valentine Duckett, barely twenty-one, had been sentenced to die after a three-day trial for desertion in the fall. "I am now to finish a life, which by the equitable law of my country, I just forfeited," he told his comrades while being lashed to a stake on the beach below the Common. A six-man firing squad botched the job even at eight yards' range, but after a coup de grâce to the head, the entire army was ordered to march "in a slow, solemn step" to view Private Duckett in his coffin. Private William Ferguson of the 10th Foot, a former tailor now dressed in a white shroud, suffered a similar fate on December 24. The execution, a lieutenant observed, was "the only thing done in remembrance of Christmas." On March 13, Gage commuted the death sentence of Private Robert Vaughan, but after more soldiers deserted the next day, the high command announced that this would be "the last man he will pardon." Vaughan took advantage of his reprieve to flee again a month later, this time without getting caught. (Page 49) - The first herald was a beefy, slab-jawed tanner in a slouched hat. [[William Dawes]], Jr., barely thirty, still lived in Ann Street, where ^^he had been raised by Puritan stock so strict that children were forbidden to look outside the window on Sundays^^ and the instructive School of Good Manners advised, "Let thy recreations be lawful, brief, and seldom." Dawes had overcome such constrictions to become an adept smuggler, a patriot messenger, a militia adjutant, and an intelligence agent; (Page 57) - In 1775, America had more than three thousand churches, represent ing eighteen denominations, but none was more important on this April night than Christ Church in Boston's Salem Street. Known as Old North the church featured eight great bells cast in England, a magnificent quartet of hand-carved wooden angels perched above the nave, and a towering steeple, long used as a landmark by navigators entering the harbor and featured in a Boston panorama engraved by [[Paul Revere]] the previous year. As carefully planned earlier in the week, another confederate-Revere identified him only as "a friend"-climbed 154 stairs and then a rickety ladder to a window in the steeple's north face, lugging two lanterns of tinned steel with glass panels, pewter finials, and metal rings for hanging or carrying. For plainspun Boston, the lanterns-or at least the one that has survivedwere fancy artifacts: fourteen inches high, six inches wide and deep, with two hundred perforations in the top, arranged to throw exquisite shadows shaped as circles, diamonds, and Maltese crosses. Flint and steel soon lighted the candles, and twin gleams could be seen across the harbor. As Revere intended, rebel leaders beyond the Charles now knew that British troops were on the move via Back Bay-two if by sea-rather than taking the more circuitous, one-if-by-land route through Roxbury. // Dramatic as the signal was, and as enduring in American iconography, it proved to be superfluous, since both Dawes and Revere successfully eluded British patrols to spread the word themselves. Handed the reins to a big brown New England mare, Revere swung into the saddle and took off at a canter across Charlestown Neck, hooves striking sparks, rider and steed merged into a single elegant creature, bound for glory. // Two hours later, Revere trotted into Lexington, his mount thoroughly lathered after outgalloping a pair of Gage's equestrian sentinels near Charlestown. Veering north toward the Mystic River to avoid further trouble, Revere had alerted almost every farmstead and minute captain within shouting distance. Popular lore later credited him with a stirring battle cry-"The British are coming!"-but a witness quoted him as warning, more prosaically, "The regulars are coming out." (Page 58) - ### New highlights added [[December 9th, 2020]] at 3:18 AM - The limits of the musket even in close combat were clear enough after the davlong battle. Later scholars calculated that at least seventy-five thousand American rounds had been fired, using well over a ton of powder, but only one bullet in almost three hundred had hit home. The shot heard round the world likely missed. Fewer than one militiaman in every ten who engaged the column drew British blood, despite the broad target of massed redcoats. A combat bromide held that it took a man's weight in bullets to kill him, and on Battle Road that equation was not far exaggerated. (Page 79) - ### New highlights added [[December 11th, 2020]] at 4:07 PM - As the British boats beat from Boston, the most critical rebel reinforcements reached Charlestown Neck to the thrum of fife and drum: hundreds of long-striding New Hampshire militiamen, described as a “moving column of uncouth figures clad in homespun." Millers, mariners, and husbandmen, they included the largest regiment in New England, commanded by Colonel John Stark, the lean, beetle-browed son of a Scottish emigrant. Stark's picaresque life had included capture by Indians while hunting in 1752 and his release six weeks later for a hefty ransom. As a Ranger officer in the last French war, he had plodded more than forty miles in snowshoes to fetch help for comrades wounded in an ambush. After surviving the bloody Anglo-American repulse by the French at Fort Carillon in 1758, he and two hundred men subsequently built an eighty-mile road from Crown Point to the Connecticut valley. Upon hearing the news of Lexington, Stark, now forty-six, left his sawmill and his wife, pregnant with their ninth child, and was elected colonel by a unanimous show of hands in a tavern; so many men rallied to him that thirteen companies filled his regiment. At eleven this morning, General Ward's initial order to reinforce Charlestown reached Stark's camp in Medford, four miles up the Mystic. As he would tell the New Hampshire Provincial Congress a few days later, "The battle soon came on." (Page 100) - The rebels waited, now killing mad. At four p.m., well over two thousand regulars ascended the slope in two distinct corps. Swallows swooped above the hills, and the stench of a cremated town filled the nose. Many militiamen had loaded "buck and ball"-a lead bullet and two or three buckshot, known as "Yankee peas." "Fire low," officers told the men. “Aim at their waistbands." Again noting the brighter tint of the British officers' tunics-vibrant from more expensive dyes-they added, "Aim at the handsome coats. Pick off the commanders." In the redoubt, Prescott angrily waved his sword to rebuke several musketmen who were firing at impossible ranges; they were to wait until the enemy was danger close, within six rods or so--a hundred feet. "Aim at their hips," Prescott ordered. "Waste no powder." Five hundred yards to the north, at the far end of the rail fence, Stark told his men to hang fire until they could see the regulars' half-gaiters below their knees. Someone may also have urged waiting till the whites of the enemy's eyes were visible, an order that had been issued to Austrians, Prussians, and possibly other warring armies earlier in the century. (Page 103) - ### New highlights added [[December 18th, 2020]] at 5:36 PM - The king also decided, as Barrington informed Gage, that injury compensation would be paid, retroactive to Lexington. An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year's pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year's pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were "deemed slain in battle." No bonuses were announced for enlisted men. (Page 115) - For every moment when Washington drew his sword or spurred his horse to the sound of the guns, there would be a thousand administrative moments: dictating orders, scribbling letters, convening meetings, hectoring, praising, adjudicating. No sooner had he settled into Vassall House than he recognized that he personally needed to oversee the smallest aspects of the army's operation, from camp kettles to bread quality to the s333 paid an unidentified spy-and logged in his expense book in mid-July-"to go into the town of Boston... for the purpose of conveying intelligence of the enemy's movenments and designs." He quickly saw that unlike the fantasy army that existed in congressional imaginations-grandly intended, as Washington's commission declared, "for the defense of American liberty and for repelling every hostile invasion thereof"-this army was woefully unskilled; bereft of artillery and engineering expertise, it was led by a very thin officer corps. "We found everything exactly the reverse of what had been represented," General Lee complained. "Not a single man of 'em is (capable] of constructing an oven." Washington also recognized that his own five years as a callow regimental officer had left him, as he wrote, with the want of experience to move upon a large scale"; like every other American commander, he knew little of cavalry, artillery, the mass movement of armies, or how to command a continental force. Still, service under British officers had deeply imprinted him with European orthodoxy, including strong preferences for offensive warfare, firepower, logistical competence, and rigid discipline. He was no brigand chieftain. (Page 121) - British medicos scuffed through the high grass to feel with their feet for the dead and the merely dying, then held their flickering lanterns close to distinguish between the two. Those with a pulse or a glint in the eye were hoisted onto drays and wheeled to barges on the Charles for transport to Boston. "The cries and moans of the dying was shocking," wrote General Clinton, who also picked his way across the battlefield. "I had conv sation with many of these poor wretches in their dying moments" // Later studies by the British Army would demonstrate that soldiers wearing conspicuous red uniforms were more than twice as likely to be shot in combat as those in muted blues and grays. The tally at Breed's Hill seemed to anticipate those findings: Gage's army had regained roughly a square mile of rebel territory at a cost exceeding a thousand casualties, or more than a man lost per acre won. Over 40 percent of the attacking force had been killed or wounded, including 226 dead; losses were especially doleful in the elite flanker companies-the light infantry and grenadiers. Nineteen officers also had been killed. Of all the king's officers who would die in battle during the long war against the Americans, more than one out of eight had perished in four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown. // Casualties in some units were calamitous. All but four grenadiers from the King's Own were killed or wounded. Of thirty-eight men in the 35th Foot light company, only three escaped rebel bullets; with cer, sergeant, and corporal hit, the senior private led other surviving privates. After sustaining 123 casualties, British marines were nonplussed to find that their tents in Boston had been plundered during the battle, apparently by regulars not in the field. The Admiralty voiced "astonishment that it could have happened" but declined to pay compensation, because of the precedent such reimbursement would set. Howe, who lost virtually his entire staff to death or injury, admitted to General Harvey that when he studied the casualty lists, "I do it with horror." // Through Saturday night and all day Sunday, as artillery grumbled i the distance, blood-slick wagons, chaises, sedan chairs, wood carts, and barrows hauled broken men from the wharves to makeshift hospitals, bar racks, and rooming houses. "The streets were filled with the wounded and the dying, the sight of which, with the lamentations of the women ane children over their husbands and fathers, pierced one to the soul," a British official wrote. A woman in Boston told her brother of watching redcoats hobble through town, tormented by flies and pleading for water, "some without noses, some with but one eye, broken legs and arms." Shock and hemorrhage killed many before they reached a surgeon's table; gangrene would kill more. The first coach to the Manufactory House-built two decades earlier for the working poor to make linen and now a general hospital-contained a dying major and three dead captains; the second coach carried four more dead officers. The loyalist judge Peter Oliver encountered a soldier stumbling through town, "his white waistcoat, breeches & stockings being very much dyed by a scarlet hue"; the man told Diec "T have three bullets through me," then tottered off. A captain who rrived from England on Sunday Wrote his father of finding "wounded and dead officers in every street. Bells tolling, wounded soldiers lying in their Vents and crying for assistance to remove some men who had just expired.... They remained in this deplorable situation for three days." // Captain George Harris, shot in the head near the redoubt, was saved by trepanning, the boring of a hole in the skull to relieve the pressure from bleeding. Doctors positioned a mirror "so as to give me a sight of my own brain," he later wrote a cousin. "It may convince you and the rest of the world that I have such a thing." Others were less jocular. "I have received two balls, one in my groin and the other near the breast," a wounded soldier wrote his family, according to an account published after the war. "The surgeons inform me that three hours will be the utmost I can survive." Richard Hope, a surgeon in the 52nd Foot, described how the regiment suffered thirty privates killed in action and eighty wounded, "a fourth part of whom will die.... It would pierce a heart of stone to hear the daily shrieks and lamentations of the poor widows and fatherless left desolate and friendless three thousand miles from home." The dead included Major Roger Spendlove, who in four decades with the 43rd Foot had survived wounds at Quebec, Martinique, and Havana. Private Clement Nicholson of the 38th Foot had survived a thousand lashes for desertion the previous year, meted out in four ferocious sets of 250, but Bunker Hill would kill him, too. // A physician examining gunshot victims described the "yellowness of the face, paleness of the extremities, a falling of the pulse." Treatment was not far removed from such medieval remedies as pigeon blood for eye wounds or the liberal use of "oil of whelps," an ointment made with earthworms, white wine, and the flesh of dogs boiled alive. Surgeons probed wounded arms and legs with their unwashed fingers, feeling for bone fragments, whose presence indicated a need for immediate amputation. A surgical text recommended that a doctor preparing to lop off a man's limb with a saw "avoid terrifying him with the appearance of the apparatus [and] avoid a useless crowd of spectators." Lucky patients got a grain of opium or a swig of rum, and their ears stuffed with lamb's wool to mask the sound of the sawing. Many were less fortunate. Amputations above the knee took only thirty seconds, but no more than half the patients survived the orde or the subsequent sepsis. Orderlies sloshed vinegar across the bloody e and heaved the next patient onto the plank table. As for those shot in a abdomen, a sniff of a lint probe inserted into the wound would reveal whether gut contamination had set in, in which case, a medical text advised, "we lay the patient quietly in bed, there to take his fate." // “Many of the wounded are daily dying, and many must have both legs amputated," wrote one surgeon, who asserted that rebel gunmen fired nails and iron scrap to inflict maximum damage. Some had also fired pebbles but only because they had no more bullets. By one tally, only half of the more than eight hundred wounded regulars would ultimately be declared "cured, fit for service." Many in the coming months would also be tormented, sometimes fatally, by "the Yanky"-dysentery, in British slang. // A few miles away, the Yankees also suffered. A New Hampshire surgeon who rushed to Cambridge with a bullet extractor of his own design reported, "I amputated several limbs and extracted many balls the first night." American casualties approached 450, including 138 dead. More than thirty American prisoners, many of them wounded, were dumped at Long Wharf under guard on Saturday night, then jailed the next day; most would be dead by September, foreshadowing the treatment captured Americans could expect in British custody. A surgeon who packed up his instruments in Andover and galloped to Cambridge wrote of the terrible uncertainty besetting a hundred New England towns: "It was not known who were among the slain or living, the wounded or the well." Those who learned the worst soon submitted sad claims for restitution, like Mary Pierce of Pepperell, the widow of a private in Prescott's regiment. She requested compensation of five pounds, twelve shillings for his lost coat, trousers, stockings, shoes, buckles, silk handkerchief, knife, and tobacco box. - Possibly not one of the seventeen thousand soldiers now under his command in Massachusetts knew what George Washington of Virginia looked like. Few Americans did. Imaginary portraits that bore no resemblance to him had been sketched and printed in the penny sheets after his unanimous selection by the Continental Congress seventeen days earlier to be "general and commander-in-chief of the American forces," a host to be known as the Continental Army. Now here he was in the flesh, trotting past the sodden pickets just after noon with a small cavalry escort and baggage that included a stack of books on generalship, notably Military Instructions for Officers Detached in the Field and a volume with copperplate diagrams on how to build fortifications and otherwise run a war. At Hastings House, a dour Ward handed over his orderly book to the man Private Haws soon called "Lesemo," a perversion of generalissimo. No salute was fired; the Lesemo's new army could not spare the powder. “His personal appearance is truly noble and majestic, being tall and well-proportioned," wrote a doctor in Cambridge. "His dress is a blue coat with buff-colored facings, a rich epaulet on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword, a black cockade in his hat." At age forty-three. uns all that and more: over six feet tall, but so erect he seemed taller: nimble for a large man, as demonstrated on many a dance floor, and so Traceful in the saddle that some reckoned him the finest horseman of the age; fair skin that burned easily, lightly spattered with smallpox pits and retched across high cheekbones beneath wide-set slate-blue eyes; fine hair with a hint of auburn, tied back in a queue. He had first lost teeth in the French and Indian War, symptomatic of the perpetual dental miseries that kept him from smiling much. "His appearance alone gave confidence to the timid and imposed respect on the bold," in one soldier's estimation, or, as a Connecticut congressman observed, "No harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm." Abigail Adams, who would invite Washington to coffee soon after his arrival, told her husband, John, "Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier look ably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face." agreeClearly smitten, she paraphrased the English poet John Dryden: "Mark his majestic fabric! He's a temple / Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine." John Adams, in turn, noted that Washington "possessed the gift of silence," a virtue rarely found in Lawyer Adams. Washington's other traits, if less visible, would soon become conspicuous enough to those he commanded. Born into Virginia's planter class, he was ambitious and dogged, with a resolve that made him seem tireless. If unquestionably brave, diligent, and sensible, he could also be humorless, aloof, and touchy about his lack of formal education. Those military books in his kit were merely the latest texts of a lifelong autodidact; as a youth he had famously copied 110 maxims from the English translation of a Jesuit etiquette manual, including, "Let your countenance be pleasant but in serious matters somewhat grave.... Do not puff up in the cheeks, loll not out the tongue... Cleanse not your teeth with the tablecloth." As a twenty-threeyear-old colonel commanding Virginia's provincial forces in the last French war, he had been with Braddock-and Thomas Gage-for the disaster on the Monongahela, surviving four bullets through his uniform, another through his hat, and two horses shot dead beneath him, before dragging his mortally wounded commander across the river and riding sixty miles for help in covering the British retreat. That ordeal-more than four hundred British dead, tncluding wounded men scalped or burned alive-gave Washington a tincture of indestructibility while convincing him that "the all-powerful dispensations of Providence" had protected him "beyond all human probability." He had shed the uniform in 1758, telling his officers, "It really w greatest honor of my life to command gentlemen who made me l their company and easy by their conduct." Over the subsequent seventeen years, he paid little attention to military matters. Yet that experience of observing British commanders, organizing military expeditions, and leadwas the ing men in battle had served Washington well. He was a talented ad istrator, with a brain suited to executive action, thanks to a remarkable memory, a knack for incisive thinking and clear writing, and a penchant for detail, learned first as a young officer and then practiced daily as suzer ain of his sprawling, complex estate on the Potomac River at Mount Ver non. His fortunes, personal and pecuniary, grew considerably in 1759 when he married Virginia's richest widow, the amiable and attractive Martha Dandridge Custis. Over the years, their convenient business arrangement had become a love match. Great responsibility would enlarge him. His youthful vainglory-I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound," he had written his brother in 1754-had been supplanted by a more mature reflection that those charming bullets meant dead boys and sobbing mothers. War at its core, he acknowledged, was "gloom & horror." Once keen to advance himself and his interests, whether as a land speculator or a young colonel on the make, he now displayed a becoming, if artful, modesty. He was seen as “noble and disinterested," in John Adams's phrase: ecumenical, judicious, formal but not regal, emblematic of republican virtues in sacrificing personal interest to the greater public good, yet elevated above the republican riffraff. As a passionate supporter of the American cause, a well-connected and native-born political figure, and a man "strongly bent to arms," in his phrase, Washington was all but the inevitable choice to become commander in chief. Although he refrained from overtly angling for the post, he had worn his Virginia militia uniform in Congress to remind his fellow delegates of his combat experience. He had declined the offer of a $500 monthly salary, accepting only reimbursement for his expenses. From ferry fares and saddle repairs to grog and Madeira, those would be carefully logged in his account ledgers, beginning with the five horses and the light phaeton he bought before leaving Philadelphia. Washington professed to be fighting for "all that is dear and valuable in life" against a British regime intent on "despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us"including the intrepid Billy Lee, purchased for £61 and now at his side in Cambridge. Clearly he nursed resentments: at the preference given British land speculators, the imperial restrictions on western expansion, and the large debts accumulated with British merchants. Twice he had tried to ascend from the Virginia provincials by securing regular commissions for himself and his officers, and twice he had been snubbed. British tax policies jeopardized his commercial ambitions and offended his moral equilibrium; the royal governor in Virginia had threatened, through a technicality, to annul land grants issued twenty years earlier, which would have stripped Washington of twenty-three thousand wilderness acres. Yet just as clearly he saw the glory of the American cause: a continental empire to be built upon republican ideals, buttressed with American mettle, ambition, and genius. He also knew that it could all end badly on a Tower Hill scaffold, as it had for the Jacobite rebels of 1745. Thousands had been arrested and at least eighty hanged or beheaded; some of their skulls were still displayed on spikes at Temple Bar in central London. As a precaution, Washington had drafted his will before leaving Philadelphia. Few would guess that the imposing, confident figure who rode into Cambridge that Sunday afternoon concealed his own anxieties and insecurities. In tears he had told a fellow Virginian, Patrick Henry, "From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation." He also lamented leaving Martha alone in Virginia. "It has been a kind of dest - ### New highlights added [[December 20th, 2020]] at 1:17 AM - Alcohol helped, too. American rum was deemed "new and unwholesome," so in September the British government signed an initial contract for 100,000 gallons of West Indies rum to be delivered to the army, complementing 375,000 gallons of porter to help combat scurvy. By spring a half million gallons of rum would be purchased for the Boston garrison at three to five shillings a gallon, the largest single item of expense among government provisions; ten times more was spent on rum than on medicines. The Treasury Board also saw to it that British officials in America received hydrometers-each composed of a glass cylinder, a thermometer, and various weights carefully marked for Jamaica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and other sources of West Indies rum-along with three pages of instructions on how to test each lot to ensure that contractors delivered "the usual and proper proof." Rum had long been a reward for difficult military duty; Howe quietly made it part of the regular ration, issued at a daily rate of a quart for every six men. (Page 136) - **Note**: 1 quart = 936ml