Lessons For Today From The Revolution
Thomas J. Fleming (1974)

Thomas J. Fleming, one of the nation’s foremost historians of the American Revolution, strips away the mythical “golden glow” version of the Revolution to show that the “seven long, grey years” between 1775 and 1782 were a tumultuous time. Military leaders bickered; the Continental Congress was frequently second-rate and inept; war profiteering was rampant; the army was riddled by mutinies and desertion; as many New Jerseyans served in loyalist regiments as in the Continental Army; and when the Revolution was won, one tenth of the population left for Canada. “The Americans of 1776 were human,” not demi-gods, Fleming concludes. They made mistakes, quarreled, got discouraged, and bad-mouthed one another. But enough were sufficiently committed to republican principles and individual freedom to persevere through personal hardships and make the messy political compromises necessary to keep the Revolution alive until Yorktown, where 11,000 Americans — and 28,000 French soldiers and sailors — bottled up Cornwallis and won the decisive victory.

From east and west, north and south, we have been hearing laments about lack of enthusiasm for the forthcoming bicentennial. As a student of the Revolution for the past 25 years and as a writer who has strenuously sought to communicate not only with fellow historians, but with the average intelligent reader, I have another worry. I am afraid that the bicentennial may worsen rather than lessen our current malaise. I suspect it may give contemporary Americans an even worse inferiority complex about the state of our society. I think that all of us — particularly concerned and influential citizens like you gathered here today — should make a concerted effort to stop wreathing the American Revolution in a too idealized light.

Let me state in the broadest terms what I call the “golden glow” version of the Revolution. It was fought and won by sturdy citizens who leaped to arms when their liberties were challenged. They were led by a military hero whom every officer and soldier worshiped. Presiding over this band of stalwarts was the Continental Congress, a caucus of geniuses who provided the inspiration and unerring political guidance that led us invincibly to victory.
This fable is rooted in those first fervent days of 1775, when the Massachusetts minutemen stormed down on the British at Concord bridge and backed by volunteers from other New England states blasted the Redcoats at Bunker Hill. But the fighting did not end until 1782. The space between 1775 and 1782 — seven long, grey years — is the reality that myth has too long shrouded — a reality that I believe has its own kind of inspiration.

What do we see when we look at these years? We see people struggling with many of the same problems that harass us today. Contemporary Americans seem to get upset — or pundits tell us we should be upset — because we are seriously divided over various issues. If the leaders of the Revolution had waited for unanimity, we would still be a British colony. After the war, one of the best possible witnesses, John Adams, the architect of the independence movement, candidly admitted that only one-third of the Americans of 1776 were in favor of the Revolution. Another third were opposed and the middle third were neutral. Here in New Jersey the percentages were even more hostile. The latest statistical research inclines historians to conclude that at least 50 percent of New Jerseyans were either active or hidden loyalists. At one point there were more New Jersey men enrolled in the loyalists regiments of the New Jersey Volunteers than Washington had in the ranks of the four New Jersey Continental regiments.

According to some estimates, about 60,000 American loyalists served in the British army at one time or another. When the British withdrew, more than 200,000 men and women — almost one American in ten — chose exile rather than live under a republican government. This is a higher proportion of exiles than resulted from the French Revolution.

Nor was there anything like total unity among those supporting the revolutionary cause. Take Valley Forge, a name synonymous with America’s will to endure. Actually it was a will shared by Washington and the three or four thousand soldiers who stumbled through that winter of chilblains and starvation. Only a few miles away, Pennsylvania farmers were sitting before warm fires feasting on a bountiful harvest — and so were most of the other two and a half million Americans in the supposedly united colonies. Here in Morristown the army’s suffering was worse, and even more inexcusable. In my latest book,The Forgotten Victory, I have detailed the unbelievable agonies of the winter of 1780. “Poor fellows!” exclaimed quartermaster general Nathanael Greene on January 4, 1780, “they exhibit a picture truly distressing. More than half naked and two thirds starved. A country overflowing with plenty are now suffering an army employed for the defence of everything that is dear and valuable to perish for want of food.”

Even within the revolutionary army itself there was constant bickering and feuding. In mid-1776, for instance, with a 25,000-man British army about to attack New York City, Major Generals Horatio Gates and Philip Schuyler spent their time arguing over who had the right to command the so-called Northern Army which had just retreated from a ruinous attempt to invade Canada. The bitterness with which partisans supported their favorites can be glimpsed in a letter to Gates from the army’s commissary general Joseph Trumbull. “Your authority will be at an end,” he warned him, “commanded by a person who would be willing to have you knocked in the head . . . if he can have the money chest go in his power.”

Washington himself was by no means immune from such attacks. Later in 1776, after a series of disastrous defeats drove the Americans from New York City, his second in command, Major General Charles Lee, wrote to Horatio Gates, bluntly denouncing Washington. “A certain great man,” Lee wrote, “is damnably deficient.” Later, there was a plot, abetted by disgruntled New Englanders in the Continental Congress, to get rid of Washington and make Horatio Gates, by then the hero of Saratoga, the supreme commander. The infighting to suppress this so-called “cabal” was fierce. A Washington supporter eventually challenged one of the plotters, Major General Thomas Conway, to a duel and gave him a near-mortal wound.

After the battle of Monmouth, Washington and Major General Charles Lee, had a public falling out that was so vitriolic, Washington ordered Lee court-martialed. He was found guilty of insubordination and suspended from the army. Can you imagine the reaction if the American commander in Vietnam or Korea had been forced to court-martial his second in command? The newspapers and the airwaves would have been full of stories about the imminent collapse of the American army.

As for the Continental Congress, after the year 1776 most of the great names — Franklin, Adams, Jefferson — were no longer among its members. A harried Washington was soon writing nervous letters to friends in Virginia, wondering why he was forced to take orders from a collection of second-raters. Parties and factions soon developed within the ranks of the Congress, and the feuding reached shocking levels of bitterness.

Samuel Adams of Massachusetts was known to most of the Congressmen south of New England as “Judas Iscariot” because of his love of backstairs intrigues. Congressmen from small states regarded those from large states as potential tyrants and did not hesitate to say so. Discussion of taxation raised the question of whether Negro slaves should be counted as people. This led to savage exchanges between northern and southern congressmen.
Congress was not only acrimonious; it was woefully inept. This aspect of 1776 — the shocking incompetence and ineptitude of the American revolutionary leaders — is even less well known than the lapses from harmony we have just discussed. A glance at the minutes of the Continental Congress in the year 1776 shows a constant inability to distinguish between important and unimportant matters. Delegates spent more time wrangling over the appointment of a regimental officer than they devoted to formulating the proper policy for running the war. As a result, they bungled the relatively easy matter of bringing Canada — and Nova Scotia — into the war on the American side. They did nothing to stop the incredible depreciation of the American dollar until the situation reached crisis proportions in late 1779. By that time a single horse cost $20,000. A night’s lodging, including “a bad supper” for an officer and six men, cost $850.

Congress’s solution to this chaos was to stop printing money, period. This meant Washington’s army ran out of cash in a few weeks. But the Congressmen had a solution. They grandly decreed that henceforth individual states would supply the soldiers. New Hampshire, for instance, was to deliver 35,000 gallons of rum, and other states proportionate mountains of hay, salt, and meat. How these tons of supplies were to be delivered over the awful roads of 18th Century America when there was no money to pay for teamsters, wagons or horses never seemed to enter into Congress’s deliberations. Twentieth century Americans frequently lament the inefficiency of Congress. But no modern Congress ever did anything quite this stupid.

For dissension, scandal, and even a touch of madness, nothing in Congress equaled the chaos in the American delegation to France. Congress sent three commissioners with equal powers to negotiate a desperately needed treaty of alliance. Silas Deane of Connecticut, whose name remains on a major highway in the Nutmeg State to this day, soon became more interested in making money for himself and eventually switched sides in return for a handsome bribe from George III. Dour Arthur Lee of Virginia was pathologically suspicious of Frenchmen and almost everyone else and swiftly alienated every member of the French government with whom he came in contact.

Without seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, the diplomatic mission would have almost inevitably ended in disaster. Franklin used his world fame as a scientist and his shrewd judgment of human nature to persuade the bewildered French to ignore the other members of the American delegation, and deal largely with him. While managing this, he had to endure incredible abuse from Arthur Lee, who slandered him unmercifully in letters to members of Congress. one of whom was his powerful brother, Richard Henry Lee. Eventually, Arthur Lee accused Franklin and Deane of stealing a million dollars from the massive amounts of French aid which Franklin had procured.

The dispute that erupted almost tore the country apart. The President of Congress, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, resigned and joined the fracas on the floor. Richard Henry Lee arose to tell his fellow Congressmen that Franklin was a “wicked old man,” who had made his headquarters “a corrupt hotbed of vice.” Lee and his friends also accused Franklin’s grandson, who was serving as his secretary, of disloyalty. It would be hard to match such character assassination today, unless we include the comments of the lunatic fringe on recent Presidents.

Another problem with which Franklin had to deal was Thomas Morris, the brother of Robert Morris, the powerful merchant and Congressman from Pennsylvania who handled America’s finances. Morris wangled an appointment for his brother Thomas as the chief commercial representative for the American mission in France. This meant he was in charge of purchasing huge amounts of supplies from French merchants, selling captured
British ships, and handling a wide range of other business transactions for the American government. Within a matter of months it became apparent, in the words of a British spy, that Tom Morris was “the greatest drunkard in Europe.” Day in day out he was drunk within a half hour of his breakfast, and stayed that way. Franklin eventually managed to get rid of him, but not before he cost the American government millions of dollars.

Nothing approaching these kinds of scandals occurred in the hundreds of diplomatic missions that Americans have sent overseas since World War II. To compare them, it would be like finding out that the man in charge of our Foreign Aid program was an alcoholic, and the ambassador to our most important ally, Great Britain, was a maniac who hated Englishmen. Can you imagine what critics would say about a Congress or a President who made such appointments? Again we would be assured that the American government was afflicted with galloping decay, and the decline and fall of the United States was only minutes away.

The American reaction to the foreign aid they received from France was remarkably similar to the complaints we have recently had about some of our allies. We simply stopped fighting, sat back and waited for the French to win the war for us. “People here are fast asleep,” exclaimed a Continental officer in Pennsylvania. “It’s as perfect a peace as it was in Seventy-three.” Another patriot compared America to a great beauty who had landed a husband. “We have grown careless in our dress and sluttish in our manner.” In fact, only a series of dreadful defeats — the capture of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780, the annihilation of a 5,000-man army in the battle of Camden, South Carolina, a few months later — aroused the Americans to make the final effort to win the war.

Even then they required immense amounts of help from France. French loans and cash subsidies totaled 18,358,000—the equivalent of about $80,000,000 in current terms. In addition, France shipped tons of weapons and supplies, trained engineers and artillerymen and finally sent us thousands of troops and a fleet.

At Yorktown there were about 11,000 Americans in Washington’s army—and 28,000 French soldiers and sailors.
Do we lament a lack of public spirit, a tendency to put self-interest ahead of one’s country in today’s America? As early as December 31, 1775, General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island raged to a friend: “We find many articles of merchandise multiplied four fold their original value .... The farmers are extortionate wherever their situation furnishes them with an opportunity.” On December 29, 1777, John Harvie of Virginia wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson: “The avarice of individuals will be more fatal to the liberties of America than the sword of the enemy.” Earlier in the same year, Robert Morris wrote to his friend Silas Deane urging him not to miss “so fine an opportunity to make a fortune.” On goods shipped from Europe it was possible to make profits of 500 to 700 percent. No wonder by the spring of 1781 a discouraged George Washington was writing in his diary: “Venality, corruption, prostitution of office for selfish ends, abuse of trust, perversion of funds from a national to a private use, and speculations upon the necessities of the times pervade all interests.”

Revolutionary Americans disliked army life as thoroughly as their descendants of the 20th Century. By 1780 Washington found it almost impossible to raise men. During one typical month, he had sixty-two officers out recruiting and they brought back only 53 volunteers. When a desperate Washington decided to draft men into the regular army from the militia, farmers in New Jersey sought asylum en masse in British-held New York. Between January and June of 1780, 600 men deserted from the Continental Army’s base camp in Morristown. This was one-sixth of the army’s total strength.

Surviving muster rolls count no less than 231,771 men who served in the Continental Army. Yet Washington seldom had more than 10,000 men available and the most he ever commanded was 26,000. The conclusion is inescapable: few Americans stayed in the army for the duration of the war. Generally, when a man’s one- or two-year enlistment expired, he went home.

Toward the end of the war, more than a few men lost hope and turned savagely on their fellow Americans. “Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep in their composition,” cried Colonel Alexander Hamilton of New York. “I wish I could say I was not born in America, I once gloried in it but now I’m ashamed of it,” declared Colonel Ebenezer Huntington of Connecticut. No less than four mutinies shook the Continental Army between May 1780, and May 1781.

What are we to conclude from these harsh Revolutionary realities? Did the Americans of 1776 win the Revolution by sheer luck? By no means. The realistic lessons we can learn from our Revolution are far more valuable — and as I have said — just as inspiring — as the mythical ones.

1. The Americans of 1776 were human. Like us, they made mistakes, often serious ones. They had their likes and dislikes and quarreled vigorously among themselves. They got discouraged when things did not go well and even occasionally bad-mouthed each other or their country.

2. They recovered from these bouts of discouragement and stayed in the game. This was one of Washington’s favorite expressions. They did not let the failures of others immobilize them. Major Samuel Shaw of Massachusetts, in a mournful letter to his mother and father in 1779, lamented the fact that so many Americans had “lost sight entirely of the noble principle” which inspired them in 1776. But he added: “We are not to stand still and wait for salvation, but we must exert ourselves — and then we may reasonably hope for success.” They were also prepared to pay a personal price for this devotion to their country. “It is true I shall see many persons crown rich at the end of the war who at the commencement of it had no more than me,” Shaw wrote. “But I shall not envy them.”

3. The Revolutionary generation never lost sight of the primary value for which they fought: a free society. Not only, please note, individual freedom, the right to do their own thing, but a free community. When Congress, almost despairing in the gloomy chaos of late 1776, gave Washington dictatorial power, he replied: “I shall constantly bear in mind that as the Sword was the last resort for the preservation of our Liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those Liberties are firmly established.” Six months later, he voluntarily surrendered his power, and put himself under the command of inept quarrelsome picayune Congressmen again.

4. Washington and the men around him understood that many of the problems and confusions from which they suffered were the result of this deep American attachment to freedom. It was the main reason Washington found it hard to keep men in his army. The efficiency of the Continental Congress was impaired because each state held elections regularly and delegates were frequently replaced by the voters. But even in a war for survival, Americans believed that the principle of representative government, the chief bulwark of a free society, was too important to sacrifice. Many of our contemporary problems are also the result of our continued devotion to freedom. Our government could be more efficient, we could compete more effectively with totalitarian governments, if we switched to rule by one or a few powerful men. We should, of course, keep trying to make our present system more efficient, more responsive. But we should recognize that a certain amount of inefficiency, of sluggishness, is the price we are paying — and should pay gladly — for freedom.

5. The men of 1776 also understood that our tradition of free speech made it inevitable that a man who served his country as a public official was bound to be criticized. They were political realists, who understand that men inevitably formed factions and parties. As Thomas Jefferson put it: “An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.” This did not mean our forefathers enjoyed criticism. Franklin almost resigned as Ambassador to France and George Washington uttered primeval roars of rage when newspapers attacked his presidency. But most of the time they were philosophic about it. Franklin compared the name calling to mud thrown at a marble wall. After a few hours of sunshine it dried out and fell off.

6. While remaining devoted to a free society, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the other Founding Fathers provided the leadership that enabled the American experiment to survive its perilous birth. This is perhaps the most important lesson of the Revolution, and one that Americans have been most reluctant to learn. We have been so obsessed with the idea that power corrupts men, we have failed to appreciate and study the dynamics of leadership in a free society. We even tend to look down upon the compromises, the limitations on their power, the burden of perpetually seeking assent, that our leaders must accept. Leadership of this sort, leadership that surmounted violent opposition from fellow Americans, the defection and discouragement of others, was the heart of America’s Revolutionary success. Let us — freed from the illusions of a golden age in 1776 — search for and cherish men who can give us the same kind of leadership today.