Posted on 07/08/2007 7:39:21 AM PDT by Pharmboy
In the popular mind, the American Revolution was mostly about liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- and the war that followed the Declaration of Independence wasn't much of a war. We imagine toy soldiers in red coats chasing picturesque rebels.
Actually, the War of Independence was horrific, according to John Ferling, a leading historian of early America. It was a grinding conflict that rivaled, and in some ways exceeded, the Civil War in its toll on American fighters when looked at on a per-capita basis. Ferling chronicles the suffering in his new book, "Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence" (Oxford University Press).
"There's a sense that there was a great deal of gallantry," Ferling told me, "and the Revolution was a war unlike modern wars." Not so.
Ferling offers a gritty, boots-on-the-ground account of a war that subsequent generations had melted into a patriotic story suitable for children. The reality was that combatants on all sides committed atrocities and the body count turned ghastly.
One in four men who served in the Continental Army lost his life, a higher percentage death toll than in the Civil War, where one regular in five perished. In World War II, one in 40 American servicemen died.
Almost half the American rebels taken prisoner died, mainly from disease and malnutrition. The mortality rate among Union soldiers held at the infamous Andersonville POW camp in Georgia was a far lower 37 percent.
Ferling challenges other misconceptions about the period. One is that the War of Independence came upon a previously peaceful land.
By 1754, Virginia had already fought five wars against the Indians. In the North, the Puritans and their descendents had fought six wars. (Some of them involved European powers vying for the control of America.) Before sailing for America, settlers would hear sermons warning them to prepare for war.
In these earlier hostilities, Ferling writes, the colonists "not infrequently adopted terror tactics that included torture; killing women, children, and the elderly; the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies; and summary executions of prisoners or their sale into slavery in faraway lands." English soldiers would refer to such methods as the "American way of war."
Another flawed impression is that the War of Independence was an overwhelmingly Northern phenomenon. (Before World War II, most of the historians writing about the Revolution came from the Northeast.) Ferling, who grew up in Texas City, Texas, devotes about half the book to the war in the South, where the rivalries were perhaps the most brutal.
"The only real instances of guerilla warfare are in the South," Ferling notes. After the British took Charleston in 1780, the Carolina backcountry erupted into a civil war. At King's Mountain, rebels massacred loyalists -- and the carnage was such that a shocked Virginia colonel asked his officers "to restrain the disorderly manner of slaughtering . . . the prisoners."
In trying to find a winning strategy, British officers and American loyalists entered familiar debates on whether they should terrify the rebels or try to win their hearts and minds. A Pennsylvania Tory named Joseph Galloway urged Britain to drop its "romantic sentiments" in dealing with Washington's army and to turn the redcoat into a "soldier-executioner."
But others worried that excessive cruelty would hurt efforts to bring colonists back into the fold after Britain's expected victory. British General Henry Clinton, for example, said it was necessary "to gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America."
"Almost a Miracle" provides a needed corrective to the idea that the fighting unleashed by the fine words of July 4, 1776, was mild by modern standards. The War of Independence, it turns out, was no cakewalk.
Froma Harrop writes for the Providence Journal. Her column is distributed by Creators Syndicate, 5777 W. Century, Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90045. Reach her at fharrop@projo.com.
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I would like to add my 2 cents here. Another reason the battles in the north tended to get more ink was the Washington was in the north for most of the war, and any battle that he was in or near assumed greater importance. But I agree: in some ways, the war in the south was more interesting than the one in the south.
Another reason the battles in the north tended to get more ink was that Washington was in the north for most of the war, and any battle that he was in or near assumed greater importance. But I agree: in some ways, the war in the south was more interesting than the one in the north.
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That’s probably the next book I’m going to read.
More Revolutionary War battles fought in SC than any other state. Not MA, not NY, not NJ...
In other words, they adopted the Indian war culture. Native Americans were doing this to each other long before White Man came on the scene.
And for interest's sake, Westchester County in NY was a microcosm of what most of the south was like in that Westchester County during the war was a no-man's land and skirmishes between "the cowboys" (Loyalists who supplied beef and other food to the Brits in NYC) and Patriots were common (and I'm not speaking of The Battle of White Plains).
Agreed.
As long as you forget the reign of terror unleashed upon the Northeast by Gentleman Johnny and the others. The Indians didn't exactly practice conventional warfare, just ask Jane McCrea.
NVA on a roll today. Yes—the killing of Jane MCrea (even though she was on her way to meet her Loyalist/Officer lover) was a key issue that got many men from the surrounding countryside (NY, CT, MA,) to join Granny Gates at Saratoga.
This sounds like a great new book.
While watching “The Revolution” on The History Channel on Independence Day, I looked up some of the speakers on the web. I wound up buying “The Road to Guilford Courthouse” by John Buchanan and just started reading it. I haven’t previously read much about the campaigns in the south except for “Decision at the Chesapeake” by Harold Larrabe.
Do you know what is Washington’s DNA haplogroup?
Other than the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies, the sentence should read “infrequently” instead of “not infrequently.”
Killing women, children and elderly in sneak attacks on isolated farms; raping women; torture, including running the gauntlet; the burning of farmsteads; taking some as captives who would be put to work in the Indian village (though many did become adopted Indians in a Stockholm syndrome); summarily killing captives who had difficulty traveling back to the Indian village; this was the typical way in which Indians made war on the colonists.
For the colonists, while one can find examples here and there of such activities as reprisals, these tactics were not their normal approach to war (other than burning villages and destroying crops, which was a standard tactic against Indians who fled instead of standing and fighting a militia force). The attempt by some colonists to sell Indians captured in war as slaves was generally abandoned fairly early on.
A note to men named O'Neil or O'Neal, etc.: It is likely that you share a Y-chromosome with the Father of Our Country. Not bad.
The big takeaway, however, is that The General comes from a Celtic male line and not Anglo-Saxon or Norman French (and yes, all, I realize that the Y-chromosome is a small part of our genome and other tribes may have contributd more to Washington's makeup).
Talk about an insurrection waiting to happen!
Sun rises in east. Rain wet. Pope Catholic.
. . . I know, I know. I majored in military history so I have inside information so to speak. But there never were any "gentleman's wars", at least from the point of view of the participants.
There are of course moments of gentility. My father served with a British unit in WWII (how a boy from Rome GA wound up in the 79th Cameron Highlanders is a long and complicated story that will wait for another day), and he told us that they would be tearing along somewhere in a column, and all of a sudden, "Right, 4 o'clock, time for tea!" and all the trucks and Bren carriers would pull over and stop, out would come the little stoves, everybody would brew up and enjoy their tea. 4:30, "Right, war's back on," and everyone would pile back into the trucks and go on their way.
If you thought that was bad... wait until the Next Civil War here in the States.
Perhaps interesting enough, but this professor’s lecture topics include:
Lecture topics:
Flawed Icon: Reassessing General Washington
Myths of the Revolutionary War
America’s First Band of Brothers: Common Soldiers in the Revolutionary War
America’s First Pivotal Election: The Election of 1800
BTTT
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