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No matter what happened, the American colonists were going to need a lot of help. They couldn’t change the policies of the British government, though they did try. They couldn’t stop the shiploads of redcoats who were landing in Boston to enforce the “Intolerable Acts.” They did what they could to help the people of Boston and to stand firmly for their rights, but there was only so much they could do. And so, almost a year before the war began, the Virginia House of Burgesses decided to ask for divine help:

This House, being deeply impressed with Apprehension of the great Dangers to be derived to British America, from the hostile Invasion of the City of Boston, … whose Commerce and Harbour are on the 1st Day of June next to be stopped by an armed Force, deem it highly necessary that the said first Day of June be set apart by the Members of this House as a Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer, devoutly to implore the divine Interposition for averting the heavy Calamity, which threatens Destruction to our civil Rights, and the Evils of civil War; to give us one Heart and one Mind firmly to oppose, by all just and proper Means, every Injury to American Rights, and that the Minds of his Majesty and his Parliament may be inspired from above with Wisdom, Moderation, and Justice, to remove from the loyal People of America all Cause of Danger from a continued Pursuit of Measures pregnant with their Ruin.

They knew the saying, “God helps those who help themselves,” and they weren’t going to sit around and do nothing. But they knew they would need all the help they could get.

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Source

The Spirit of ‘Seventy-Six, ed. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, 22.

It’s interesting to get a chance to see yourself through someone else’s eyes — especially if that person has a very different perspective from yours. But it’s even rarer and more interesting to get a glimpse through the eyes of someone who was once on the other side but then decided to join your side.

A lot of people deserted during the Revolutionary War. Some, especially on the American side, just went home when they got a taste of real battle, or when they didn’t feel like living under army discipline any more. But many — both British and Americans — deserted to the other side. Maybe they did it on grounds of principle; maybe it was purely self-serving; maybe they just figured the other side would win. After all, the grass is always greener on the other side, and who wants to be on the losing team anyway?

I’d like to tell a little of the story of one man who deserted in late 1774 or early 1775, before the war started. I don’t know his name or much about him, only that he deserted from a British regiment in Boston, with some help, and made his way to Charleston, South Carolina. He was evidently a young man who had some wild living in his past — “my days of folly”, he called it. In February 1775, he wrote to his father, who was a tradesman in York, England, to convince him how much he had matured, and to tell him why he hadn’t written in so long:

Honoured Father,

From the tender affection you always professed for me, your unworthy child, I can easily conceive the pangs your heart must have felt at my long but involuntary silence; know then, that I am now as happy and free as I could wish; unless being denied the liberty of returning to my native land, for the pleasure of seeing you, and convincing you that I have lived over my days of folly. How I came to this place it is necessary to inform you. After our regiment arrived at Boston, I found my wretched situation made so much worse by confinement (although I had obtained a halbert) that I resolved to take the first opportunity of leaving my colours; it was a considerable time before I could do it with safety; at last, with the assistance of a young fellow from Shields, I effected my escape; but the fatigue I suffered for the first [day], from a hurry of spirits, and the labour of walking, is as much beyond my abilities to describe, as is the infinite joy I felt the second day, when I found myself once more possessed of liberty and safety.

The hospitable kindness I received from the county people, in my way from Boston to this place, is beyond my description; if I could have rode an hundred horses I might have had them; every man that owned one offered him to me, and all brought me out their best fare. Before I knew these people, I was shocked at the thought of being sent out to cut their throats, and resolved not to turn human butcher, for it is no better, to destroy my friends and countrymen. Now I know them, I find them the best hearted, generous people in the world, ready to give everything to strangers. I am now down at Charles Town, and have several engagements offered me, to be clerk on different plantations, but I intend accepting a plot of land that is offered me, some distance from this town, where the gentlemen have proposed to build me a house, give me some tools, and lend me some negroes to settle…

We hear several regiments are coming out [from England]; if that is true, they can do nothing in this country. I understand it is determined to oppose them, though that will be unnecessary, for there were not three men in my company who would fire on the people of this country; I am sure there was not one Englishman or Irishman that would do so; be assured, if the army moves up the country, they will soon want a number of recruits, as all the men know they can change a life of beggary, as well as slavery, for liberty, and have a portion of land forever…

The people here that know most, tell me their troubles will soon be over, and some of the great men at home must suffer, and then there will be pardon for all deserters; when that happens I shall certainly come once more to Old England, to see my aged parents and dearest friends…

It sounds like this young soldier was inclined to wishful thinking. Things didn’t turn out as nicely as he hoped: there were plenty of redcoats quite willing to shoot rebels, the war dragged on a long time, and the British never issued a pardon for all deserters.

As I read his letter, I wonder whether he really got the land he had been promised, and whether he was successful at starting his own farm. I wonder whether he ever regretted his decision to leave the British army, and whether he was involved in any fighting during the war. I wonder whether he was ever caught by the British (if so, he was probably executed). And I wonder whether he ever saw his parents again.

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Source

Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, ed. Margaret Wheeler Willard, 60-62.

A lot has been said about the extraordinary marksmanship of the American colonists and how it helped win the Revolutionary War. A lot of that is exaggerated, but it is true that many Americans, having grown up in a semi-frontier land, were more proficient with firearms than many of the British soldiers. John Andrews, a Boston merchant, described an incident in Boston in the fall of 1774 that illustrated this:

It’s common for the soldiers to fire at a target fixed in the stream at the bottom of the common. A countryman stood by a few days ago, and laugh’d very heartily at a whole regiment’s firing, and not one being able to hit it. The officer observ’d him, and asked why he laughed. Perhaps you’ll be affronted if I tell you, reply’d the countryman. No, he would not, he said. Why then, says he, I laugh to see how awkward they fire. Why, I’ll be bound I hit it ten times running. Ah! will you, reply’d the officer; come try: Soldiers, go and bring five of the best guns, and load ’em for this honest man. Why, you need not bring so many: let me have any one that comes to hand, reply’d the other, but I chuse to load myself. He accordingly loaded, and ask’d the officer where he should fire? He reply’d, to the right — when he pull’d tricker, and drove the ball as near the right as possible. The officer was amaz’d — and said he could not do it again, as that was only by chance. He loaded again. Where shall I fire? To the left — when he perform’d as well as before. Come! once more, says the officer. — He prepar’d the third time. — Where shall I fire naow? — In the Center. — He took aim, and the ball went as exact in the middle as possible. The officers as well as soldiers star’d, and tho’t the Devil was in the man. Why, says the countryman, I’ll tell you naow. I have got a boy at home that will toss up an apple and shoot out all the seeds as its coming down.

Not that marksmanship won the war. Battles weren’t fought by snipers; they were fought by men standing in ranks (more or less), firing together, charging together, fighting with bayonets and with cannons loaded with grapeshot (in effect, giant shotguns). A determined charge could overwhelm a group of crack shots, as was shown time and time again. But in small skirmishes and hit-and-run actions, a good shot could make a big difference. And so, in some cases, could a shot not taken — such as when a British rifleman decided not to shoot at an American officer who was looking at the lay of the land — only to find out later that the officer he had spared was George Washington!

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Source: Letters of John Andrews, Esq., of Boston. In Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 8, 371-72.

Without having some say in the government, the people of Massachusetts wouldn’t be as able to resist British authority — at least, that was the idea. The common people were causing too many problems, and they shouldn’t be allowed to meddle in politics. Obviously, the situation in Massachusetts was out of control, and some action had to be taken to discipline the unruly colonists and bring them back under British control.

Those were some of the reasons why the British Parliament passed a law in May 1774 to change the structure of government in Massachusetts. This was another of the “Intolerable Acts” which came as a reaction to the Boston Tea Party. Up to this point, the colony’s government had operated on the basis of a charter granted by the King in 1691; now the charter was repealed and a new form of government was introduced.

For one thing, the Massachusetts Council would be appointed by the governor rather than elected by the House of Representatives. Since the governor himself was appointed by the King, this ensured that the council members would be supporters of British policies. The governor was also given control over the town meetings. And the governor who had been appointed around this time was Thomas Gage, a British general.

Lord George German, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, had no patience with the common people of Massachusetts being involved in their own government:

I would not have men of a mercantile cast every day collecting themselves together and debating about political matters; I would have them follow their occupations as merchants, and not consider themselves as ministers of that country. … You have, Sir, no government, no governor; the whole are the proceedings of a tumultuous and riotous rabble, who ought, if they had the least prudence, to follow their mercantile employment and not trouble themselves with politics and government, which they do not understand.

Germain was a haughty man, accustomed to being in authority and being obeyed, but he wasn’t exactly alone in his point of view (and we can’t say that his view has died out in our time, either). Many members of Parliament agreed that the colony’s government should be run primarily by those who took their side. They had no intention of letting the colonists get out of their control any more.

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Source: The Spirit of ‘Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants. Bicentennial Edition. Page 13.

What caused the American Revolution, anyway? Well, there were a lot of things, but one of the major dominoes in the chain was the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Not that destroying a bunch of tea was really important, but it set off a chain of events that escalated to armed warfare about a year and a half later.

When England heard of the Tea Party, the King and Parliament were furious. This was the last straw: for years they had been patient with the Americans and tried to work things out with them; they had bent farther than they wanted to; but they were not going to give in any more. In the spring and early summer of 1774, they set about punishing Boston (and Massachusetts in general) and putting the colonies in their place.

One member of Parliament put it this way: “The town of Boston ought to be knocked about their ears and destroyed. Delenda est Carthago*…I am of opinion you will never meet with that proper obedience to the laws of this country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.” Note that he didn’t say “obedience to the laws of their country,” but to the laws of this country — England. The majority of Parliament viewed themselves as the supreme legislative authority for the colonies — and to be fair, the colonies were just that: colonies. But colonies never seem to like the authority of their “mother country” once they start growing up and think they can stand on their own. Kind of like kids…

The punishment of Boston was known as the Boston Port Act. No ships could enter or leave Boston until the Bostonians had paid for the tea. (It’s strange to think that tea was on center stage in the struggle for American liberty!) The Royal Navy enforced this law. Boston depended on ships for much of its food and other supplies, and many of its citizens were merchants who made their living from importing or exporting goods by ship. Many were dockhands or sailors; many ran businesses that bought or sold the goods that came and went by ship. With no ships allowed to come or go, Boston would starve.

At least, that was the idea. But people all over Massachusetts — New England — all of the colonies rallied to support Boston. One town sent wagonloads of corn; another sent barrels of dried fish; another sent sheep. In August 1774, for example, the people of Baltimore, Maryland, wrote to the revolutionary leaders in Boston that they had chipped in and sent “three thousand bushels of corn, twenty barrels of rye flour, two barrels of pork and twenty barrels of bread, for the relief of our brethren, the distressed inhabitants of your Town,” along with another thousand bushels of corn from Annapolis. The ship that took this cargo to New England — there to be unloaded and taken to Boston by land — was appropriately named the America.

This one law, which was a direct result of the Boston Tea Party, went a long way toward uniting the colonies and stirring up resistance to British authority. There were more laws to follow, however; together they became known as the “Intolerable Acts.”

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*Delenda est Carthago is Latin for “Carthage must be destroyed.” This is a reference to the time (in ancient history) when Rome and Carthage were constant rivals and enemies; some Roman leaders argued that it wasn’t enough to simply defeat Carthage: they needed to destroy it and so eliminate the Carthaginian threat forever. Eventually, that’s just what happened.

Sources

The Spirit of ‘Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants. Bicentennial Edition. Pages 12, 32.

Although the American Revolution was a serious thing, there was plenty of humor in it, too. Even the people living through it found things to laugh at, as most of us do, even during hard times. Here’s one example from a few months before the war started:

Many British soldiers were stationed in Boston during the years leading up the revolution. Some Americans, anxious to weaken the British army, encouraged and helped soldiers to desert. They would offer money, entice them with promises of land, give them clothes to disguise themselves, and help them sneak out of town. Although these plans sometimes worked, and many soldiers did in fact desert, sometimes the plans backfired. In December 1774, a couple of people in Boston wrote about how a British corporal tricked a Yankee “recruiting officer”:

Last week a corporal of one of the regiments was asked by a countryman to desert, and offered six dollars a month to teach their militia; the corporal pretended to be willing, and the countryman procured him a good suit of cloaths, which he put on and tied up his own in a bundle. They then went to mount the countryman’s horse, when the corporal pretending he was not horseman enough to ride behind, the countryman allowed him to place himself in the saddle, and then got up behind; when they were seated, the corporal, instead of riding out of town, set the horse a galloping towards the Barracks, which when the Yankee discovered, he threw himself off, and the corporal continued his rout to the barracks. The countryman did not think fit to call for either horse or cloaths, and the matter being represented to the General, he has ordered the Corporal to keep both.

You can imagine how the two men felt: the “Yanky” would have been frightened — not to mention angry — at the fact that he could easily have been caught and punished by the redcoats for trying to help one of them desert, at the fact that he had lost his horse and the clothes he had furnished, and at the fact that the corporal had made a fool of him. The British corporal, on the other hand, would have been laughing at how he had tricked this foolish country yokel and gotten himself a horse and some good clothes in the process. I imagine him sharing the laugh with his friends, telling and re-telling the story to everyone who wanted to hear it — perhaps even making a “fish story” out of it, and enjoying it as his listeners laughed.

The problem is that so many people, then and now, consider battles and proclamations to be more important than stories like this. If more people had taken the time to write about the everyday things that made them laugh, then we’d have a much more amusing account of the Revolutionary War.

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Source: Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, edited by Margaret Wheeler Willard, pages 23-28.