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  Praise for The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789

  “A tour de force. Middlekauff has the admirable ability to capture historical truths in vivid images and memorable phrases. . . . Middlekauff’s empathy enhances this massive book’s cumulative power. The cause was glorious; the book is too.”—Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World

  “This is narrative history at its best, written in a conversational and engaging style. . . . A major revision and expansion of a popular history of the American Revolutionary period.”—Library Journal

  “The reader in search of a wide-ranging overview of the Revolution would be better off turning to . . . more recent works like The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, in a review of 1776

  The Oxford History of the United States

  David M. Kennedy, General Editor

  ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF

  THE GLORIOUS CAUSE

  The American Revolution, 1763–1789

  JAMES M. MCPHERSON

  BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM

  The Civil War Era

  DAVID M. KENNEDY

  FREEDOM FROM FEAR

  The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945

  JAMES T. PATTERSON

  GRAND EXPECTATIONS

  The United States 1945–1974

  JAMES T. PATTERSON

  RESTLESS GIANT

  The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore

  THE GLORIOUS CAUSE

  The American Revolution 1763–1789

  Revised and Expanded Edition

  ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF

  Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

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  Copyright © 1982, 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

  This edition first published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005

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  First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2007

  ISBN 978-0-19-531588-2

  Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Middlekauff, Robert.

  The glorious cause: the American Revolution, 1763–1789 / Robert Middlekauff.—2nd ed.

  p. cm.—(The Oxford History of the United States; v. 3)

  Previous ed. published as v. 2 in series: The Oxford History of the United States. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978 0-19-516247-9

  ISBN-10: 0-19-516247-1

  1. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783.

  2. United States—History—Confederation, 1783–1789.

  I. Title. II. Series. 973.3—dc22 2004016295 E173.094 vol. 3 [E208]

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  For Holly

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  When I began this book I was extraordinarily excited by the opportunity to write a narrative on a grand scale of a great event in the history of the United States and of Western Civilization. I still feel that excitement and believe even more strongly now in the possibilities offered by narrative history. This edition of the book remains a narrative, and all of the changes I have made in it extend the story I told in the first edition. The major emphasis of the book continues to be on political life in the Revolution, political life defined very broadly. The revisions, however, fall largely in the category of social history.

  Those revisions include the following: a section in Chapter 1 on the British fiscal-military state; in Chapter 6, further discussion of the popular responses in mobs and riots to British measures in the years 1764–1776; in Chapter 14, information on the early declarations in favor of independence in spring 1776 (thanks to Pauline Maier’s American Scripture); in Chapter 20, much more on military medicine; in Chapter 21, an extension of the discussion of women’s history in the Revolution and a new section on American Indians; in Chapter 22, a short rumination on the differences between the kinds of war fought by the British and the Americans; in Chapter 26, additional reflections on ratification of the Constitution; and at the end of the book, a new Epilogue. I have also added a new bibliography of books published since the book was published in 1982.

  In preparing this edition, I have been helped by a large number of professional historians, general readers, and students. Ten of my former graduate students rank first among them: Ruth Bloch, E. Wayne Carp, Jacqueline Barbara Carr, Caroline Cox, Charles Hanson, Richard Johnson, Carolyn Knapp, Mark Cachia-Riedl, Charles Royster, and Bill Youngs. All of them have contributed to my education, especially in matters pertaining to the Revolution and American society in their own books and articles. For many years my undergraduate students here in Berkeley have also given me much help and encouragement. I cannot name them, but I wish at least to acknowledge their spirited assistance. I also owe much to historians who have written on the Revolution, and I have attempted in the bibliography to acknowledge their work though I cannot express the full extent of my indebtedness.

  Since this book first appeared I have met and talked in the last three years with another group interested in the Revolution—the splendid officers in the United States Navy and Marines who take part in the strategy and policy seminars offered through the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. They are stimulating in their interest in all aspects of the Revolution—not just its military and naval history. I also owe much to their seminar teachers—Professors Wilton Fowler, Robert Gennette, and Neil Heyman.

  One other military officer also gave me much encouragement several years ago, General John Galvin, then recently retired from NATO command. General Galvin also corrected an error I made in my discussion of the battle of Lexington.

  The undergraduate students in Dr. David Hsiung’s classes in Juniata College sent me many helpful suggestions over a two-year period, and I am very grateful to them and to their teacher.

  The late C. Vann Woodward was the general editor of the Oxford History of the United States when I first wrote. He helped in more ways than I can list and did so with extraordinary thoughtfulness. I will never forget his kindness and resourcefulness—and the inspiration of his own work.

  At Oxford University Press over many years I have been the beneficiary of the wisdom of Sheldon Meyer, Leona Capeless, and most recently, in this edition, of Peter Ginna and his assistant, Furaha Norton. Joellyn Ausanka, Senior Production Editor, has seen the revised book through publication with great skill and care. I am enormously grateful to her for doing a difficult task so well. David Kennedy, now the general editor, has been a steady presence and has given faithful encouragement.

  As has always been true in all my work the best help came from my wonderful wife, Beverly. My daughter, Holly, to whom this book is dedicated, remains a marvelous source of inspiration.

  Berkeley

  September 2004

  R.M.

  Contents

&nbs
p; Maps

  Editor’s Introduction

  Prologue: The Sustaining Truths

  1. The Obstructed Giant

  2. The Children of the Twice-Born

  3. Beginnings: From the Top Down

  4. The Stamp Act Crisis

  5. Response

  6. Selden’s Penny

  7. Chance and Charles Townshend

  8. Boston Takes the Lead

  9. The “Bastards of England,”

  10. Drift

  11. Resolution

  12. War

  13. “Half a War,”

  14. Independence

  15. The War of Posts

  16. The War of Maneuver

  17. The Revolution Becomes a European War

  18. The War in the South

  19. The “Fugitive War,”

  20. Inside the Campaigns

  21. Outside the Campaigns

  22. Yorktown and Paris

  23. The Constitutional Movement

  24. The Children of the Twice-Born in the 1780s

  25. The Constitutional Convention

  26. Ratification: An End and a Beginning

  Epilogue

  Abbreviated Titles

  Bibliographical Note

  Index

  Illustrations

  Maps

  British North America

  Boston Area—Bunker Hill

  Quebec Theater

  Long Island

  Manhattan and White Plains

  New York to Philadelphia

  Trenton and Princeton

  Upper New York

  Bemis Heights

  Brandywine and Germantown

  Monmouth Court House

  Southern Campaigns

  Siege of Charleston

  Camden

  Cowpens

  King’s Mountain

  Guilford Court House

  Hobkirk’s Hill

  Eutaw Springs

  Siege of Yorktown

  Editor’s Introduction

  The original edition of Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause appeared in 1982, the first volume in the Oxford History of the United States to be published. On that occasion, the founding General Editor of the series, the late C. Vann Woodward, praised the author’s “masterful command of the subject.” The Glorious Cause, said Woodward, “skillfully and handsomely exemplifies the editorial purposes and goals” of the series that Woodward and his distinguished collaborator, Richard Hofstadter, had conceived some years earlier.

  In this revised edition of The Glorious Cause, Robert Middlekauff has once again brought to bear his exceptional skills as scholar and writer, and his unsurpassed mastery of the complicated and hugely consequential era of the American Revolution. The architecture and narrative thrust of the original edition remain intact, particularly its emphasis on the contingency of history, the often adventitious and even capricious developments that shape the flow of events. But Middlekauff has at several points tempered and enriched his account by judiciously culling new findings and perspectives from the last two decades’ bountiful harvest of scholarship on the revolutionary period. Readers will find in this edition a substantially expanded discussion of the character of British society on the eve of the colonial rebellion, as the industrial revolution was beginning to effect massive transformations in economic and social relationships, even while Britain’s senescent institutions of government remained inflexible in the face of the challenges posed by the restlessness of the American colonies. Middlekauff has also added extensive new material on the anti-British protests of American mobs before 1775; the debate over the Declaration of Independence; the role of the Continental Congress in waging the war; the involvement of slaves, Indians, and women in the conflict; the plight of the Loyalists; and the hazards of military service, including the threat of smallpox epidemics and the often grisly fate of the wounded in those days of limited medical knowledge. The author also offers fresh interpretations of both British and American conceptions of war and warfare, and on the ratification of the Constitution.

  In undertaking these revisions, Middlekauff has kept faith with the highest ambitions of the series as Woodward and Hofstadter originally envisioned it: to bring the very best of rigorous and imaginative historical scholarship to the widest possible audience. Each author in the series, Woodward said, must produce “a readable text that will be readily accessible to the educated general public, and at the same time he will provide students at various levels an interpretive synthesis of the findings of recent scholarship as well as the essentials of narrative history in the period or subject being treated.” Weaving the findings of specialized research into sound and compelling narratives is the historian’s highest art. It is also the historian’s most demanding duty. Woodward rightly called that task “essential to an understanding of American history by the modern citizen, who would otherwise confront the present and the future with outdated misconceptions of the past.”

  Several volumes in the series are in preparation, and will soon be forthcoming. The reception of the titles published to date—in addition to Middlekauff’s work, they include James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom on the Civil War era; James Patterson’s account of the post–World War II period, Grand Expectations; and my own Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945—has confirmed Woodward’s judgment that there is a genuine need for works that represent the considered thinking of seasoned scholars about important issues in the American past. The Oxford History of the United States aims to fill that need, and this revised edition of The Glorious Cause is an important contribution to that continuing enterprise.

  David M. Kennedy

  The Glorious Cause

  Prologue The Sustaining Truths

  “The use of travelling,” Doctor Johnson wrote Mrs. Thrale, “is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” Johnson spoke for the age in this desire to see things as they are and to avoid the dangerous imaginings of how they may be. His England and much of pre-Revolutionary America shared a suspicion of what he called “airy notions”—the illusions of dreams and fancies. Johnson’s great American contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, as a young man put aside speculations on the nature of reality in favor of living as a reasonable creature in contact with the world that presented itself through the evidence of his senses.

  Franklin was a practical man. Practical men usually do not make revolutions; dreamers do. Yet Benjamin Franklin became a revolutionary with several million others in America. His action suggests one of the ironies of the American Revolution: its sources in a culture of men devoted to the hard realities of life—practical men, down-to-earth men like Franklin himself, men who in 1776 threw off their allegiance to the empire in the name of “common sense,” a phrase Thomas Paine had chosen as the title of his great tract on behalf of American independence. That brings us to another irony: what seemed to be only common sense to Thomas Paine, and to most Americans in 1776, would have struck them as uncommon madness a dozen years before. Paine’s Common Sense, a sermon disguised as a political tract, informed Americans that their long-standing connection to England was preposterous, that it violated the laws of nature and human reason, indeed that it aroused a repugnancy in “the universal order of things.” And as for the institution to which they had always given their loyalty—the monarchy—it was ridiculous, and as unnatural as the traditional tie to the mother country. Monarchy, according to Paine, had a heathenish origin; it had been instituted by the devil for the promotion of idolatry. The word according to Thomas Paine was accepted easily enough by most Americans; they were a church of the converted, and he gave them exactly what they wanted to hear. They declared their independence six months after his essay appeared, citing the laws of nature and of nature’s God as justification.

  The laws of nature and the universal order of things covered a good deal of ground, and the Americans of the revolutionary generation almost spent
themselves in an attempt to map their limits. They had not often tried their hand at such things before. Besides, until the crisis with England began, the fundamentals seemed fairly clear, including the lines of universal order. That order began with a power mightier than the monarch—it began with God.

  Almost all Americans—from the Calvinists in New England searching Scripture for the will of God to the rationalists in Virginia studying the divine mechanics in nature—agreed that all things fell within the providential design. Providence ordered the greatest and smallest events of men’s lives; Providence controlled the workings of the universe from the turning of the planets to the flight of a bird. Men might disagree about the meaning of the occurrences of their lives, some of which seemed surprising, even inexplicable—early deaths, epidemics, droughts, plagues, wars, evil as well as good. Such things men might wonder at and even describe as judgments, or afflictions, or marvels, or mysteries. Yet they did not doubt that these things had meaning.

  But the God who gave order to the world was not only seen in externals. He was felt, sometimes in the cool hush of Virginia churches, sometimes in quiet Quaker meetings, sometimes in the spare meetinghouses in New England villages. Whether in the calm rationalism of Arminians, the unforgiving harshness of Calvinists, or the surging spirit of enthusiasts, the divine was felt. To some the power of God seemed overpowering, to some His grace gave relief, and to some God’s “majestic meekness,” in Jonathan Edwards’s startling phrase, appeared to reveal the joining of His majesty and His mercy.

  Perhaps at some point in their lives most men had a sense of the divine who gave meaning to the eternal order of things. Perhaps few sustained great religious passion for long, but they did retain faith in providential order. For most Americans, perhaps, providential order appeared most clearly in the progress of an increasing, flourishing people. They called themselves a thriving people and impressed European travelers with the ease and the zest with which they accepted their growth and success. They were not complacent—more than one European remarked on their “enthusiasm,” a word that suggested that they might be dangerous as well as filled with religious extravagance. Many observers called them prolific, meaning that they produced goods as well as children at a surprising rate. And more than one commented on their ragged money, as indeed it was from changing hands in the bustling markets of American business.