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Damnable Deficient
Colin Kidd
1776: America and Britain at Warby David McCulloughAllen Lane, 386 pp, £
25.00, June 2005, ISBN 0 7139 9863 6
Their resolve fortified by the sturdy civic virtue of Cato and Brutus, and the
ir idea of republican self-government indebted to Greco-Roman models, the foun
ders of American independence deferred to the authority of the ancients, even
as they embarked on a revolutionary political experiment. George Washington, f
or example, identified himself with Cato of Utica, whom the 18th-century Briti
sh knew best through the medium of Addison’s popular tragedy Cato (1713). Lin
es from the play found their way into Washington’s letters and speeches, and,
in defiance of Congressional resolutions against the attendance of public off
icials at plays, he had Cato performed at Valley Forge to inspire his troops.
By inclination a foxhunting man, he was the least bookish of the leading found
ers, many of whom were much more deeply immersed in the classics. The selfless
Cincinnatus, the reforming Solon, Cicero in his defence of the republican con
stitution – these were the cynosures of virtuous conduct for the founding gen
eration.
Over two centuries later, today’s Americans display a similar reverence for t
he founding era itself. The generation of 1776-87 provides an unattainable ben
chmark for public virtue, political wisdom, statesmanship and heroism. Politic
ians and intellectuals – especially on the right – appear to regard Washingt
on, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and John Adams as the A
merican equivalents of Plato, Aristotle, Cato and Brutus, while the wider cult
ure acknowledges the near-superhuman qualities of the men of 1776. The founder
s in their periwigs, breeches and frockcoats hold a secure place in the popula
r iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and ti
ghts. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who
failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was publish
ed in 2001.
For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders h
as damaging political consequences. In particular, abject deference to the con
stitutional machinery devised in 1787, whose murky compromises are underacknow
ledged, tends to thwart the popular will and to stymie reformist impulses. Dem
ocrats proper, who have woken up in recent years to the dangers inherent in th
e electoral college, the equal representation of states – whether populous or
empty – in the Senate and the judicial review of federal and state legislati
on, see little possibility of amending a venerated constitution. However, a fe
w bold voices have questioned the infantile subservience of 21st-century citiz
ens to 18th-century political solutions, foremost among them Robert Dahl in hi
s devastating audit of the American political system, How Democratic Is the Am
erican Constitution? (2002).
Dahl’s attempt to stir Americans from their cultic attachment to the founders
is more than matched, however, by the efforts of conservatives to pickle the
18th century. The Federalist Society, named in honour of the Federalist Papers
(1787-88) published by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, is a conserv
ative law society dedicated to upholding with unswerving rigidity the original
intent of the constitution’s founders. By 1998, the Society had around five
thousand student members at 145 law schools, as well as fifteen thousand pract
ising lawyers in local chapters across the country, including the independent
prosecutor in the Whitewater-Lewinsky affair, Ken Starr, who was a member of t
he elite James Madison Club for major donors to the Society. When Hillary Clin
ton ‘imagined’ a vast right-wing conspiracy, the Federalist Society can’t h
ave been far from her thoughts.
Nor is it lawyers alone who sustain the cult. In his Bancroft Prize-winning bo
ok, Arming America (2000), Michael Bellesiles, a historian at Emory University
in Georgia, dared to challenge the view that the widespread possession of fir
earms in the mid-18th century had underpinned the success of the movement for
independence, and found members of the National Rifle Association – as well a
s sceptical scholars – checking the accuracy of each of his footnotes. Belles
iles’s researches into early inventories could not withstand such intense scr
utiny, and he eventually lost both his post at Emory and the Bancroft Prize af
ter a rigorous inquiry by a committee of three historians, though it was held
at the promptings of a firearms lobby wedded to the belief that the founders h
ad inhabited a gun culture. Clearly, there is a darker side to the worship of
the founders, and one can only speculate on the attraction of these dead white
anglophone Protestant males – among them Virginian slaveholders – for parts
of the South and the heartland.
The national obsession also manifests itself in healthier ways, not least in a
n avid public interest in the history of the second half of the 18th century.
David McCullough’s 1776: America and Britain at War is designed both to cash
in on the cult of the founding era and to act as a mild corrective to its exce
sses and misrepresentations. To be fair to McCullough, the book’s subtitle si
ts somewhat uneasily with a thesis that emphasises internal divisions within b
oth Britain and the 13 colonies, which in itself provides a persuasive reminde
r of the commercial constraints under which an independent historian such as M
cCullough operates. Academic historians have enjoyed more freedom – the fate
of Bellesiles notwithstanding – to puncture complacent myths of the founding
era. Jon Butler’s Becoming America (2000), for instance, argues that by 1776
the colonies constituted a ‘multi-hued, multi-voiced’ society of English, Sc
ots, Scots Irish, French Huguenots, Germans and Africans far removed from the
historical fantasy of a pure Anglo-Saxon America conjured up by the racist rig
ht, while Tim Breen’s recent work on the American Revolution portrays the mid
-18th century not as a lost age of heroes but as a consumer society with the s
ame kind of mundane vitality as our own.
McCullough is much less daring. Indeed, he exemplifies best practice in a very
traditional idiom. His narrative focuses primarily on the military events of
1776 and on the characters of the main participants. But, whereas many academi
c historians find it difficult to manage the elusive transmutation of raw arch
ival material into compelling stories peopled by vivid, realistic personalitie
s, McCullough has the imaginative capacity to reconstitute the inner lives of
the long dead. Patient research, it’s true, feeds the historical imagination,
and he has consulted more than seventy contemporary diaries in 25 major colle
ctions. The book is structured around three set-piece encounters: the patriots
’ landward siege of Boston, from which the British eventually withdrew by sea
in March 1776; the successful British campaign to take the city of New York i
n the late summer of 1776; and Washington’s stunning makeshift assault on the
British across the River Delaware in the depths of the winter of 1776-77.
However conventional the storytelling, McCullough has a sophisticated – and q
uietly subversive – approach to narrative. Today’s America assumes the inevi
tability of victory in the War of Independence: in the long run, America was d
estined to become the lone global superpower, and the British Empire, given th
e effete gentility of its leaders, was fated to decline. In particular, 1776 –
the year of the Declaration of Independence – is popularly misunderstood as
the moment when independence was won. McCullough avoids the distortions inhere
nt in broad time-frames, and presents instead the events of an iconic but frus
tratingly indecisive year in the history of the conflict between the rebel col
onists and the British state. For participants in the patriot cause, he argues
, 1776 did not mark the winning of independence, but was rather ‘a year of al
l too few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowar
dice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement and fear’. In the cont
ext of a war in which Britain held the stronger hand, the Declaration of Indep
endence of 4 July was, as Americans are prone to forget, ‘no more than a decl
aration without military success against the most formidable force on earth’.
McCullough displays a marked generosity in erasing the persistent caricature o
f America’s Hanoverian loyalists as a Tory elite who considered themselves th
e social betters of the democratic herd who supported the American cause. The
loyalist community, he notes, included farmers, mechanics and ordinary tradesm
en. Social status did not define the choice between loyalty to Britain or part
icipation in the Revolution. Moreover, he understands that many loyalists saw
themselves as the ‘true American patriots’. Indeed, the British relief of Ne
w York from patriot occupation is depicted the way many contemporary New Yorke
rs saw it, as a ‘liberation’.
Loyal American subjects of the Crown were genuinely mystified by the turn of e
vents in 1775-76. McCullough gives space to the voices of British Americans di
sillusioned with the so-called patriot cause. Dr Sylvester Gardiner, for insta
nce, in a letter to his son-in-law, contrasted the benign governance of the co
lonies under British rule with the mob rule he encountered in Boston: ‘I don’
t believe there ever was a people in any age or part of the world that enjoyed
so much liberty as the people of America did under the mild indulgent governm
ent (God bless it) of England and never was people under a worser state of tyr
anny than we are at present.’ With crab-like indirectness, McCullough leaves
his readers to ponder the legitimacy of the American cause. Americans have a t
endency to equate imperialism with subjugation, to think in terms of evil empi
res. But just how oppressive was the British Empire of the mid-18th century? W
ere its fiscal policies horrendous enough to warrant the shedding of so much b
lood? By the end of the conflict, about 25,000 Americans had lost their lives:
was it really worth the sacrifice? George III was not the tyrant of popular m
ythology, but a dutiful and plain-living constitutional monarch. Besides, as M
cCullough reminds us, while later generations of Americans would, it’s true,
become even richer, ‘the Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of livin
g than any people in the world.’
Independence was not Washington’s initial objective. Rather, as he informed t
he New York Provincial Congress in June 1775, his aim was ‘the re-establishme
nt of peace and harmony between the mother country and the colonies’. McCullo
ugh reckons that most of the officers and men of Washington’s army, if asked
as late as the fall of 1775 why they had taken up arms, would have said that t
hey were defending their rightful liberties as freeborn Englishmen against inv
aders who just happened to be the British army. Although many patriots soon fo
resaw that independence was their only viable option, American identity remain
ed tentative and uncertain. McCullough records various early formulations of a
n anticipated nationhood, including the ‘United Provinces of North America’
and the ‘Grand Republic of the American United Colonies’.
Today’s America regards its 18th-century liberators as clean-cut and virtuous
. McCullough muddies this image. Washington’s was a ragamuffin army; accordin
g to one eyewitness, the patriot troops ‘would rather let their clothes rot u
pon their backs than be at the trouble of cleaning ’em themselves’. No wonde
r the army was rife with camp fever. While women accompanied the British army
to do the washing, the New England men of the patriot army wallowed in ‘infec
tious filth’. Washington’s estimation of his own troops emphasised this squa
lor, moral as well as physical. During the siege of Boston of 1775-76, the xen
ophobic Washington confessed to a correspondent back in his native Virginia th
at the New Englanders under his command were ‘exceedingly dirty and nasty’.
There was ‘an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these peo
ple’ which even affected their officers.
Since the pioneering work of Bernard Bailyn in the 1960s, American historians
have been aware that the dominant political language of Revolutionary America
was a strain of classical republicanism which stressed that a population’s en
joyment of liberty depended on its public virtue. Commitments to the common go
od took priority over private interests. Classical republican ideology also wa
rned of the dangers of standing armies – the vehicle on which Caesars and Cro
mwells rode to power, transforming republics into dictatorships. Citizen milit
ias provided a safer option for freedom-loving republican states. However, the
re was an ironic disjunction between the values enshrined in the discourse of
the Revolution and the practicalities of military recruitment. The claims of p
ublic virtue were insufficient to sustain Washington’s army. McCullough explo
res the persistent problems of desertion and defection, quoting reports that r
egimental surgeons took bribes to validate illnesses or injuries that would qu
alify for discharges. Securing re-enlistment was a problem which the Congress
solved only by way of financial inducements. On 27 December 1776, it authorise
d Washington to ‘use every endeavour’, including bounties, to keep his disin
tegrating army together. Indeed, as McCullough argues, for a period of six mon
ths the Congress had made Washington ‘a virtual dictator’.
Politically astute, Washington used his extraordinary powers wisely. Yet, in o
ther respects, his judgment was flawed. Initially, he excluded blacks from the
army, but was forced to change his mind, a pressing need for troops overcomin
g his racial squeamishness. McCullough also recounts Washington’s many tactic
al and strategic errors as a commander, noting that his generals griped among
themselves about their commander-in-chief: ‘Entre nous, a certain great man i
s damnable deficient.’ Time and again, however, Washington was prepared to co
nsult with his subordinates, to take advice which ran contrary to his own plan
s, and to learn from his earlier mistakes. Thus, while McCullough cuts Washing
ton down to size, the general’s story remains heroic, recast as an epic of pe
rseverance and stamina.
For all his honesty and even-handedness, McCullough provides only a partial an
tidote to the unquestioning cult of the founders. His muckraking in the archiv
es never verges on irreverence. In addition, there remains a curious and unexp
lained absence in this otherwise persuasive account of the progress of the war
throughout 1776. In general, McCullough is alert to the role of public opinio
n in the conflict. He shows, for example, that Washington’s achievements at t
he very end of the year, especially the victory at Trenton, significantly boos
ted the morale of the country. Within a few days, newspapers were recounting d
etails of Washington’s intrepid crossing of the Delaware and his successful s
urprise attack on the British. On the other hand, Tom Paine’s bestselling pam
phlet Common Sense is a marginal presence in McCullough’s interpretation.
After an unsuccessful career in Britain as, among several other occupations, a
corset-maker and excise officer, Paine arrived in Philadelphia in November 17
74 and soon became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Published on 10 Januar
y 1776, Paine’s outspoken republican tract sold well over 100,000 copies in i
ts first year and went through as many as 25 editions in different parts of Am
erica, at a time when most pamphlets and newspapers sold only a few thousand c
opies. McCullough records Washington’s observation that Common Sense was work
ing ‘a powerful change . . . in the minds of many men’; but otherwise he say
s nothing about the impact of the pamphlet on public morale and its role as a
catalyst for separation from the motherland.
Paine’s service to the Revolution was not only ideological. In July 1776 he j
oined the Continental Army, serving as an aide to General Nathanael Greene, th
ough he also continued to write on behalf of the cause. Yet Paine’s radicalis
m has earned his exclusion from the sacred canon. This process of ostracism be
gan in his lifetime, in the course of his topsy-turvy interlude in Revolutiona
ry France. In particular, the publication of The Age of Reason (1794), with it
s denunciation of biblical religion as a ‘pious fraud’, pushed him beyond th
e pale of acceptable opinion. When Paine returned to America in 1802 he was de
nounced as an enemy of Christianity, and he lived out his days as a non-person
in the country whose independence he did so much to obtain. He remains the fo
rgotten founding father in the attic.
Although McCullough satisfies the curiosity of his readership for knowledge of
the characters, the battles and the way of life of the founding era, he shies
away from the big question: was the patriot cause a conservative movement com
mitted to the preservation of the existing structures of colonial society, or
a radical revolution? The founders did, after all, belong to an American Enlig
htenment which nurtured religious heterodoxy of the same deistic stamp as Pain
e’s – though many Americans, I suspect, don’t want to know that their belov
ed Jefferson rejected the divinity of Christ. I’m torn in my own answer to th
e question which McCullough declines to ask; but I believe firmly that, as soo
n as you subtract political and religious ideas from your analysis, it becomes
very difficult to understand why the founders – not least as they are repres
ented in the popular memory – ever took up arms against Britain’s liberal pa
rliamentary empire. Many readers will no doubt find what they are looking for
in 1776 – clear-cut moral choices and statesmanship of the highest calibre. B
ut American history could just as easily have followed the trajectory of Canad
a’s. Deprived of a wider context, how does one tell the difference between a
noble war of independence and a reckless and irrational insurgency?
