Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writers.
I'm Joe Donaue.
Joseph Ellis' ability to bring our founders to life to strip away the cobwebs mythology
and hero worship and to show them as real people whose failures and frustrations merit
the same examination as their enormous successes has made his book's National Best Sellers
and earned him a National Book Award for American Spinks and a Pulitzer Prize for Founding
Brothers.
Now, in his new book Revolutionary Summer, the birth of American Independence, he turns
to the most dramatic months in the story of our country's founding.
It is a great pleasure to welcome Joseph Ellis to this week's book show.
Thank you very much for being with us.
I appreciate it.
Joe, it's my pleasure to be back with you.
We always love having you on the program.
Give us a sense of what led you to this period.
Obviously a period that has been written about many, many times and finding something new
and finding a story that you wanted to tell.
Well, that's it.
It is a story that's been told by several generations of historians.
It's a familiar story, familiar to a lot of Americans because of the popular play, 1776.
When I go about selecting a topic, I do ask myself the question, what is the story you
want to tell?
Not what is the person you want to study or the topic you want to investigate, but the
story you want to tell.
I gave myself six months to study the documents and evidence about this period in the summer
of 76 to see if I could come up with some distinctive, fresh, and even original insights.
I started to do that and so I decided to go forward with the story.
The key is to see that there is a political story that centered on the Continental Congress
in Philadelphia and there's a military story going on at the same time centered on the
Continental Army in New York.
In order to tell the real story, you've got to put those two stories together.
That's what I'm trying to do here and show the way the two sides interact and create
the kind of crescendo moment in American history.
How informed were they of one another or how much were they acting by themselves in
in a vacuum?
You mean the two side of Philadelphia and the New York side of the story?
Yes.
They were very much aware of what was going on.
I mean, it took a day or two for word to get there back and forth, but decisions being
made in Philadelphia were influenced by what happened in New York.
When the American Army, the Continental Army got defeated in August in a horrible defeat
in Long Island while the Continental Congress knew about it and the Army almost was annihilated
in that one battle.
Most of Americans didn't because the press didn't report it.
I read about 14 newspapers and they reported America's defeat as a victory to be truthful
as a journalist was treasonable at that moment in American history.
So most of the American public didn't know how bad things were going in the war, though
the members of Congress did.
You write in the book about how the support for independence came together rather quickly
in the spring of 1776, more for military reasons than for political reasons.
Exactly right.
That's another very good example, probably the best example of the inner at face between
the military and political sides of the story.
Up until the middle spring of 1776, while New England was pretty committed, they were
ready to rock and roll because they were occupied by the British Army and they felt they had
no choice.
The rest of the American colonies were divided and the dominant position was the so-called
moderate position, both within the Congress and within the countryside, namely there must
be a diplomatic way out of this and there was, though a diplomatic way, but the British
weren't willing to allow it to happen.
That is, let the colonies govern themselves in terms of taxation but remain within the
empire as economic units and under the king, sort of an early version of the British Commonwealth.
But in the middle spring of 1776, what happened is that the British decided to launch this
huge invasion, 42,000 soldiers and sailors, largest amphibious force ever to cross the Atlantic,
to crush the American rebellion in the cradle.
As news of that decision and then the sailing of the British fleet reached America, that
began to change American popular opinion.
Ironically, the British invasion was decided to crush the rebellion.
It created consensus on independence instead and the bulk of the people were really saying
and there's lots of documents to show this.
We really have no choice.
George III has declared his independence of us and we are surprised at the suddenness
of our conversion but we really have no choice but we now commit ourselves to the cause.
There obviously has to be political support that comes quickly following that military necessity.
Well, the political support is in a sense the vote in the Congress that happens not on
the fourth.
Everybody mistakes that.
It really happens on July 2nd when the resolution that these colonies are and have right to be
independent states is voted on by the 13,
13 colonies represented in Congress in Philadelphia.
Adams always thought that would be the day that we would celebrate for American independence.
He writes Abigail saying that this will be the day when parades and speeches and even
illuminations.
It gets everything right down to the fireworks but he gets the day wrong.
Truth is not a lot happened on the fourth.
What happened on the fourth was the full Congress sent the declaration to the printer but they
wrote July 4th at the top of the document because that was the day they were finished debating
it and sent it to the printer but they didn't sign it on that day either.
Again, that's where the play for dramatic reasons somewhat falsifies history.
Most of them signed it on August 2nd but there were people signing it into the fall.
These reluctant revolutionaries and the stragglers.
Yes, there have been history books written making the case for 1775 being the year of our
independence.
That's a new book.
I think if you were talking just about New England, that would really be true.
New England's opinion is congealed again because of the occupation of the British army and
because of the closing of the British port, martial law in Massachusetts.
That opinion there congeals earlier and more comprehensively than in other colonies.
But there are pockets of loyalism, about 20% of the populace is loyalist.
Then there's this group.
It's hard to know how big it was, maybe 30% of people who really just want the whole thing
to go away.
They want to remain neutral.
Once independence is formally declared, it's difficult to remain neutral.
You have to go one way or the other.
There's enormous political pressure put on people in different communities to come along
with this or else risk being persecuted.
You address this question in many different ways in the book and I think it's fascinating
how you do so.
That is the question, was there any realistic chance for the British to win?
Well, that's a different way to put the question because most of the time the question is put,
was there any way the Americans, this amateur group of continental soldiers who's average
experienced in the army was six months or less, could defeat the British army where
the average experience was seven years.
With the British Navy together with the army is the finest military force in the world.
How can this rag-tag group of amateurs beat the British army in navy?
The alternative way to see it, and I think the better way to see it, did the British ever
have a realistic chance to win.
I think that our own experience as a nation in Southeast Asia and the Middle East makes
us more aware than we would have been before of the dilemma facing the British army.
If it was just a contest of armies, they would have won easily, but it wasn't.
It was a contest for hearts and minds.
That was going to be a difficult fight for them to win.
I guess the way I'd put it is, their only real chance was to win it quickly and decisively
at the very beginning.
That opportunity presented itself in New York in the summer of 76.
They missed it.
When they missed that, it was going to be very difficult for them to win the war.
Joseph Ellis is the author of the book Revolutionary Summer, the Birth of American Independence
that is published by Knaf.
Let us talk a little bit more about that and specifically about the British misunderstanding
the colonial rebellion.
Give us some insight into that misunderstanding.
The British ministry understood that they were facing a, in New England, especially Massachusetts,
a dedicated group of patriots.
The experience of Bunker Hill really taught them a lesson.
That was a bloodbath for the British army.
They lost a thousand troops in a few hours there.
One British retired general was heard to say a few more victories like this and the British
army will be annihilated.
They basically decided, and George III is the real decider to use the George W. Bush
term here, that they were going to therefore quash this thing and they believed that outside
of New England, the support for the rebellion was skin deep.
You could isolate New England and that the support for the American rebellion would evaporate
if it was demonstrated militarily that they couldn't win.
That was their misreading of the popular opinion.
It's also wrong to say that everybody who wasn't a loyalist was a patriot.
There's this middle group of people who are very difficult to track or identify.
But the British, under the Hal brothers in their invasion of Long Island and Manhattan
really didn't want to destroy the continental army.
They wanted to teach it a lesson, to give it a stunning blow.
And then once they had demonstrated their military superiority to negotiate because they
believed that most Americans wanted to end this war diplomatically.
But that would have meant stepping back from independence and accepting some role in
the British Empire that as I said earlier is somewhat akin to what we would come to be
called commonwealth status.
That wasn't the way it's difficult to know what most Americans thought, but the leadership
in the continental conquerors, especially people like Adams and Franklin, were resolute.
Once we stepped across the line for independence, we were never turning back.
And you make the point, even with this decision by the House, to deliberately choose not to
end the war perhaps and destroy the continental army on Long Island and Manhattan.
But even if that had happened, the British still would have been in trouble.
Well that's one of those unanswerable questions.
Because it didn't happen, it's fun to talk about because Franklin and Adams both confronted
Richard Howe in the Stone House in Staten Island in September 11th.
And he said, look, we've just defeated you decisively on Long Island, you can't win, you
need to recognize that and reach some sort of reconciliation here.
And both of them said the same thing.
That look, it doesn't make any difference to us.
What happens if you destroy the continental army?
We'll just raise another army.
We have over 300,000 American males between the ages of 15 and 50.
And we will find them.
If you capture Washington, we'll find another Washington.
They were in all in and they were not turning back.
In fact, Franklin told how it was just the opposite.
That he had no way of winning the war and he should recognize that fact and take his ships
and go back to London or else his whole reputation would be destroyed.
It's impossible to know the right answer to this.
I think they could have replaced the troops.
It's difficult to know how they could have replaced Washington.
He was as close to indispensable as possible.
And so historians could disagree about this.
It's possible that there's a chance that the war would have been ended if in fact the
army, the continental army was destroyed.
And arguing that there was no possibility is a kind of active faith.
It is fascinating in the reading of this book of looking at the negotiations with Franklin
who you mentioned and where his strength came from and why he was so sure of American
success.
Well it is because Franklin was late to the revolutionary cause.
He had been living in England for 19 years and just returned to America in late 75.
And he was one of those people who believed that this conflict could never become an open
outbreak or a revolution.
That it was too obvious that the British benefited from the American colonies and that they
would not kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
And they would be a diplomatic resolution of this thing.
Sensible when men would get together and figure it out.
That didn't happen.
And in fact he was then vilified before the House of Lords in a famous scene when he
was made the epitome of colonial and transigence.
And that converted him.
And his son or his illegitimate son really was the loyalist governor of New Jersey.
And when he Franklin went over he disowned his son and he became one of the most ardent
of all patriots and kept telling to British that this was the biggest blunder in the history
of British statecraft.
In researching the book once you had the idea, once you had the concept of looking at
these two narratives, both the political and the military, then what was your point
plan for going forward and finding out the information to make that argument?
Well, I had one body of information that helped me a lot, that's buried in research libraries.
Most people don't know about them.
It's something called American Archive.
It's nine volumes put together in the 1840s by Archivist named Charles Force who wanted
to gather together all the documents from the revolutionary era before they went out
of existence.
These include letters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, congressional debates or parliamentary
debates.
They're not indexed and they're hard to use.
But what they give us, for example, in my case is in May of 76, the Congress, the continental
Congress sent out a request from every colony to rewrite its constitution and the different
colonies then sent out that request to all their towns and counties.
In American Archive, you've got the response of all those towns and counties and you can
know what people are really thinking.
That's where you get the clear sense that the invasion is what changes their mind.
And that I'm a believer in agency, meaning that people make a difference in history.
One of my goals was to tell the story in a way that brought to life again some of these
most famous characters, this time in moments that are really dire, especially Washington.
This is the worst moment in Washington's life.
He is in almost clinical depression throughout this period because he thinks that he's on
the verge of losing the war.
There's not a heck of a lot he can do about it because his army is so inferior.
So trying to track his story and his psyche, if you will, through this period is a real
opportunity and challenge at the same time.
But I would say the same thing about Adams in this moment.
This is Adams's greatest moment in American history.
His presidency is nothing compared to this.
This is when he, this is his finest hour.
And as a writer trying to recover those characters, if you will, was one of my goals.
Going back to Washington for a second, I found your portrait of him fascinating because
certainly we see his brilliance as a commander and in his leadership.
But also as you point out, there's a lot of just good old fashioned luck involved as
well.
Yeah, especially they get trapped by the British army on Long Island, on Brooklyn Heights.
And there's really no way out because of British control, the Long Island sound and the
East River.
And yet he manages the most difficult of all military maneuvers, a strategic retreat
at night.
It's really hard.
And he's lucky as the Dickens because a nor Easter comes in to create currents that make
it difficult for British frigates to cruise in the East River.
A fog comes in to cover the retreat.
It's in some ways it is the most brilliant tactical move of the entire war on the American
side.
It's not written about or painted about, if you will, because it's a defeat.
But it's a really crucial strategic move because without it the continental army would have
been annihilated.
And that might have been the end of the war.
So he's lucky.
Providence is what he would call it.
It didn't talk so much about God as Providence.
And the experience of these defeats on Long Island and in Manhattan begin to change Washington's
strategic thinking about the war.
Washington begins with a really honored driven sense of battle.
When an enemy presents itself on the field, you are required to meet him in the same way
that you're required to answer a summons to a duel.
That is a big mistake.
He should have really never tried to defend New York in the first place.
It was an archipelago that was indefensible if you didn't control the seas.
And his thought process begins to change in the late summer.
He comes to understand that what he's got to fight is a different kind of war.
A more defensive war, what he calls a war of posts in which it's not his job to win the
war.
It's his job not to lose it.
At the end of the book, you have a post script that is entitled necessary fictions.
What are some of the necessary fictions?
Well on the American side, one of the necessary fictions that begins to develop early in the
19th century as the war becomes history is that the war was won by the militia.
This is the myth of the militia.
And the minute man at Concord and Lexington and Bunker Hill were crucial in that regard.
But throughout most of the war, certainly in most of the conventional of the battles, the
militia were a disaster.
The militia ran away.
In the Battle of New York, they just desert and droves.
These are not effective troops in conventional battles.
And yet the American public wanted to believe that myth because the real truth is more difficult
to accept that the war was won by a standing army.
The war was won by the continental army of regulars.
And the animus against a standing army was really strong back then.
And therefore they wanted it to look like and sound like a victory that was in keeping
with American ideological beliefs.
On the British side, they wanted to figure out a way to explain the defeat in the war.
And the way they came up with it's somewhat similar to what the American press does in
the Vietnam War.
They find escape goat.
And this is William Howe.
William Howe becomes the West Morrowland of the American Revolution.
And they believe that if Howe had been more adventurous or more aggressive in New York,
they could have won the war at the very beginning of the war and it all would have turned out differently.
They don't have to face the fact that the British Empire itself decided to fight this war.
And for imperial reasons.
They could have had a diplomatic resolution, but they wanted to impose their will empirically
on these colonies.
And it was that decision that led to their real defeat.
The name of the new book is Revolutionary Summer, the birth of American independence.
It is an amazing volume.
It is published by Kanoff.
Joseph Ellis, a great pleasure.
I thank you so much for taking the time out to share with us.
It's my pleasure once again.
Thank you very much.
Again, the title of the book is Revolutionary Summer, the birth of American independence.
It is published by Kanoff.
Thank you so much for being with us.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show.
You can email us at book at wamc.org.
And you can listen again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org.
Sarah Laduk produces our program bookmarks for next week.
And thanks for listening for the book show.
I'm Joe Donnelly.
