Introduction
What is it that so fascinates us about the American Revolution? It is a seemingly simple question but one without a simple answer. The Revolution is (1) a glorious period, (2) a glamorous period, and (3) a period that changed our lives, no matter that we weren’t around at the time and may not recognize that our lives were changed.
Glorious? Maybe, maybe not. The Revolution was a fraternal and civil war that may have pitted at the most one third of us (those who wanted the colonies to separate from Britain) against another third (those who wanted to remain with Britain), with the rest (the final third) not caring one way or the other. For all, lives were disrupted, government was altered beyond imagination, and homes and existence were, at the least, threatened.
Glamorous? The eighteenth century saw people die of diseases that today can be cured with less than a dollar’s worth of medicine. A medical treatment often used in the eighteenth century was also commonly used in ancient Egypt—“trephination,” in which a surgeon used a cylindrical saw to cut a hole in your skull to release bad vapors. The surgeon, incidentally, doubled as your barber, which is why barber poles are made of red and white stripes, white bandages and red blood.
It was a time when the air was polluted, not by man-made chemicals but by animal-made excrement. A town’s sewage system often consisted of a shallow ditch flowing through the streets. From second-story windows residents blithely threw out the contents of chamber pots, giving rise to the saying “Will you give the wall?” because it was safer to walk as close to the houses, as close to the wall, as possible. Human smell wasn’t much better, because bathing wasn’t all that common in the eighteenth century. Troops in the Revolution were actively discouraged from taking baths; it was felt bathing would be too relaxing and, thus, injurious to a soldier’s health. Imagine whole towns smelling of unwashed bodies, roadways peppered with excrement, and open sewage flowing by your house. Realize, too, the town’s sewage system became a trough for animals, which themselves became tomorrow’s meal for humans. The waste trickled down to become drinking water thick with mud and disease.
The American Revolution was more than Washington standing up in a boat while crossing the Delaware River in the middle of a winter’s storm. It was more than Thomas Jefferson taking quill in hand to write the Declaration of Independence. It certainly had nothing to do with myths surrounding those characters we have dubbed the Founding Fathers. The American Revolution was a time that changed the government of the colonies and changed the world, and that is why it is so interesting, why it is so important. If the Revolutionary era was neither glorious nor glamorous, perhaps what so fascinates us is that it was a time of massive changes.
This is not the American Revolution of powdered wigs and the minuet; such wigs were worn by, and the dance danced by, those above the middling class. Rather, what follows is the history of people—men and women—salted down with toughness and wisdom, individuals who, as the saying goes, had “been up the creek and over the mountain.” It was not an army that won the Revolution; it was a population.
Those we call the Founding Fathers are, as a certain Mr. Shakespeare put it more or less a century and a half earlier, such stuff as dreams are made of. But at the moment of their birth, they were neither dream nor myth. The myths they became were begotten by hard reality, the very stuff of life.
What follows includes some dark and delicious details of history. These are stories—“roughness, pimples, warts, and everything,” as Oliver Cromwell once said. Along the way, in telling these stories we hope to have a little fun, because we humans truly are a funny species.
It is almost as if we are taught that the American Revolution sprang godlike from the conjoined heads of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Washington. Not only was there no such “godlike” springing, it took decades and the will and work of thousands of people throughout the colonies to tear apart and then rebuild a government.
A long and often fractious relationship evolved between the American colonies and their mother country. Yet, despite a troubled relationship, most colonists not only regarded the British government as the best the world had to offer, they firmly maintained that they were part of that world. They were an ocean away from London, but New Haven, Connecticut, farmers believed they were as true Englishmen as their cousins in East Anglia; Charleston, South Carolina, merchants were as British as those in Manchester; and sailors out of Boston, Massachusetts, were certain they were no less than those sailing from Bristol.
The story of the American Revolution is more than the battles. The true story is what caused this love of all things English to change, what caused residents of Williamsburg and Philadelphia and Boston to alter their definition of “my country” from Virginia or Pennsylvania or Massachusetts to mean “The United States of America.” This change, this alteration, was a long time coming.
What follows is a series of essays, presented in only a general chronological order. They are short takes on parts of our history that we may never have been taught before. Much of the material was there all along, but for whatever reason—perhaps in a rush to move on to the “important events”—a lot of the really interesting moments in our story were never mentioned. We make no claim to this being a definitive work. Rather, we hope it will entice the reader into doing further reading. After all, books are a marvelous invention.
CHAPTER ONE
Prelude to Independence:
Revolution, Dogma, and Stamps
Why do I have to know about the past? You gotta look to the future.
—Teenager, December 31, 1995
I was among the first who embarked in the cause of our common country [and] I have never left your side one moment but when called from you on public duty.…
—George Washington, March 15, 1783
George Washington grew marijuana on his farm at Mount Vernon, Virginia. It’s not known whether he smoked pot, much less inhaled it, but the Father of Our Country1 did raise the weed that two hundred years later became something of a symbol of rebellion as well as a major cash crop in the United States.
For many years Washington grew tobacco on his plantation and for a while at least he also grew hemp—the marijuana plant. At one point in his farm diary he wrote of ordering his gardeners to separate the stalks of the hemp plants from the flowers. The stalks contain fiber for making rope. Dried flowers and leaves of the hemp plant are the source of the drug cannabis.
We don’t know whether George kicked back and lit up a doobie, but there is evidence that like others we glorify as the Founding Fathers, Washington experimented in many of life’s ways. The lives of thousands who fought and died for independence reenforce our knowledge that these men and women were real people who took real risks and created a real miracle.
That miracle went beyond flag waving and holiday celebrations and hamburgers on the backyard grill. Very simply, the miracle they created invented a world we can either remember and retain or forget and forgo.
On October 31, 1753, young Major George Washington of the Virginia militia rode out of Williamsburg with a warning for the French commandant along the Ohio River. With him he took as interpreter Jacob van Braam of Holland, a schoolteacher who supposedly spoke flawless French but who in reality did not. Certainly not flawlessly. Washington’s first military command consisted, all told, of just seven men, one of whom was an interpreter who couldn’t interpret.
Fifty-two days out of Williamsburg, almost five hundred miles from the Virginia capital, Washington marched into French-held Fort le Beouf, near present-day Waterford, Pennsylvania. George not only was far from home, but he was in over his head.
Fort le Beouf was packed with troops and bristling with cannon. Wearing the bright red dress uniform of the Virginia militia—he’d taken it along for just that occasion—Washington presented himself before the fort authorities. He gave Coulon de Villers, the garrison’s commander, Governor Dinwiddie’s demand that the French withdraw from the Ohio Valley. The elderly Frenchman waved off “the summons you sent me to retire,” saying, “I do not think of myself obliged to obey it.”
His message delivered and rejected, all that young Major Washington could do was return to Williamsburg. It was January 16, 1754, when George Washington stood again before Governor Dinwiddie, tired and worn out from a harrowing journey. He didn’t have long to rest. Within a week of returning from his journey, Washington was ordered to train an army to secure the Ohio territory. In somewhat conflicting orders, Dinwiddie told Washington to “act on the defensive, but in case any attempts are made to obstruct the works or to interrupt our settlement by any persons whatever, you are to restrain all such offenders, and in case of resistance to make prisoners of or kill and destroy them.” His orders specified that Washington should “conduct yourself as the circumstances of the service shall require and to act as you shall find best for the furtherance of His Majesty’s service and the good of the dominion.” This time Washington was to be a lieutenant colonel with a lot more than six men to command.
On May 24 he arrived at a spot called Great Meadows, about ten miles from Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The area was nearly all marsh; still, he called it “a charming field for an encounter.” He ordered his men to set up camp.
Three days later, frightened members of a garrison who’d been building an English fort at Pittsburgh met Washington and his troops. More than a thousand men had surrounded them, the workers reported, and they were lucky to get out alive. The would-be fort builders were ready to head back to Virginia. Not so George Washington.
