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New Light on 1776 and All That
by Richard Bissell
Notice!
Two score and five years ago, in March 1930 to be specific, English speaking peoples as well as many Americans began to laugh at a slim volume, a parody of English history, called 1066 And All Thatat. Written by two funny fellows down from Oxford (or is it up?), the book sold for $1.75 U.S.A. on a money back guarantee that it contained “one hundred and three good things, five bad kings, and two genuine dates.” The World has been chuckling over it ever since except for a few time-outs to produce some new history such as wars, abdications, the mini-skirt, et cetera.
In presenting an historical work of the present kind the greatest demand on an author is not the dogged, meticulous research but the seeking out of an answer to the question “Where can I steal a good title?”
After fasting, retreat, and transcontinental meditation I have rejected as unsuitable the following titles: War and Peace, Advise and Consent, Summer and Smoke, and Penrod and Sam.
Ultimately, in an altruistic desire to extend “hands across the sea,” I have decided to promote friendship and brotherhood by borrowing three quarters of Messrs. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s title.
So it’s Rule Britannia and long live Betsy Ross! God save the Queen and bless Mr. President! For England never shall be slave but Yankee Doodle always macaroni. Homage to apple pie and the patriotic hot dog and long live overcooked brussels sprouts!
All is forgiven, George, and you too, Cornwallis, you fathead.
R. B.
Chapter 1
Preposterous! Upstatarts! Pipsqueaks! Codfish eaters! Hicks! Wamblers! Noddles! Oafs!
Childish Colonials all — how did we do it? How did we knock off King George’s crown, the actual crown first worn in 1662 by Charles II (‘Old Rowley’)? His crown which contains to this day rosettes and circlets of rubies and diamonds, four crosses-patés and four fleur-de-lys adorned with diamonds, with two complete arches of gem-encrusted gold surmounted by a mound of gold and a richly jeweled cross?
That kind of regal headgear is hard to come by. Yet seventy Colonial rubes and a drummer boy in the puny pathetic village of Lexington, Massachusetts, sent it tumbling across the palace parquetry to crash against the fire tongs. Taking out the crimps and resetting various priceless gems cost the Treasury 34 pounds, 8 sovereigns, 6 guineas, 4 crowns, 5 half-crowns, 12 shillings, 6 sixpennys, 5 pennys, 32 ha’pennys, 254 farthings, and 12 tweedlies (a very small coin).
France and Spain couldn’t do it. How could a passel of rustics with their toes sticking out of holes in their shoes pull it off?
What was the matter with the King’s troops when they stepped on our unsophisticated soil? Why did they behave so like boobies? Why did that great royal warrior Lord Howe spend the winter of 1777-1778 playing Winkum and Postoffice in Philadelphia? Why didn’t he go 20 miles out to Valley Forge and wipe the slate? He could of been back in town in time for the matinee.
There were only 2.5 million people here, stretched from Passamaquoddy to Key Biscayne, and west to the Alleghenies and the Ohio River Valley where the human beings resembled trained bears. The population was 90% hayseeds, who chewed on straws while their wives improved their time in preparing for the next Arts and Crafts Show by spinning, weaving, doing cross stitch, fabricating dreary ‘samplers’ and making up folklore. The production of manufactured goods was pathetic. How could this bunch of counter-culture candlemakers expect to fight a war with the dragon of St. George which would require thousands upon thousands of bullets, Band-Aids, and bottle openers?
Britain was the greatest power on earth and very scary. She had all the ships and all the shoes and sealing wax and 9 million people. In far off places the sun usually set on Britons sloshing down Pimms Cup. And by 1769 Captain James Cook had visited Tahiti, where he left the beach littered with Gordon’s gin bottles. Britain also had formidable apparatus such as Dr. Samuel Johnson, the most terrifying and scrofulous lexicographer the world has ever known.
And on top of it all, the colonists themselves were split three ways. One third were Tories, one third didn’t give a damn one way or tother, and only one third of the population were Noble Patriots breathing fire and spitting buck shot.
Teacher doesn’t tell the Fifth Grade about it but there was plenty of fistfights and eye gouging right inside the colonial regiments. Virginians hated Bay Staters, Nutmeggers loathed North Carolinians, Rhode Islanders sneered at Vermonters, Pennsylvanians despised New Hampshiremen, and Everybody spit on New Yorkers. John Adams and the New England fire-eaters never did like George Washington — he was one of those high tone Virginians.
The colonial forces spent most of the war years in retreating. The colonial armies had the full military clout of thirteen Mexican policemen arguing politics on a streetcorner in Vera Cruz. When they stopped retreating and engaged in battle they usually got slugged. The number of battles lost to the British is very depressing.
After getting crumped at Hobkirk’s Hill in April of 1781, General Greene stated: “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.”
This inelegant mulishness is the reason why today we drive on the right side of the road, and don’t eat with our fork in the left hand and upside down. With mashed potatoes smeared on top of the forkful of meat (overcooked.)
But it also so happened that our boys won a few Saturday afternoon upsets and two or three of the Big Ones that count.
You might say some of these were not big league battles but to the boys who didn’t eat supper that night and who didn’t go home they were battles.
As you can see it was often a long time between wins for the foes of St. George.
The War, in fact, was 1 1/2 years old and England had had two general transport strikes, three general post-office strikes, as well as crippling strikes in digestive biscuits, cricket stumps, and trivets, before the Continentals could claim a victory in the field. It was G. Washington’s surprise attack on Trenton, on Christmas night of 1776. This victory proved to the British that it is a very poor idea to hire a General who will get loaded on Christmas day when G. Washington is in the neighborhood.
Then after our lads with the help of crazy-o Benedict Arnold had defused Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne at Saratoga in October ‘77, it was three painful years until they could toss their funny tri corner hats in the air again, cry ‘huzza’, and issue other quaint period outcries of exultation over a genuine First Class Victory. It was a decidedly downish three years which saw not only disaster at Brandywine and Germantown, calamity at Charleston, and humiliation at Camden, but actual mutinies in the armies under G. Washington. (It seems these troops wanted something to eat besides turnips and they thought it would be nice to get six months of their back pay so they could buy some rum and get soused like everybody else.)
American Revolution
1775-1782
Battles, Sieges, Skirmishes, etc.
| Final Score | ||
| We | They | Draw |
| 1775 | ||
| Siege of Boston Moores Creek Bridge Fort Sullivan Trenton | Bunker Hill Falmouth Quebec The Cedars Trois Rivieres Valcour Island Long Island Kips Bay White Plains Fort Washington Fort Lee | Lexington-Concord |
| 1777 | ||
|
Princeton Fort Stanwix Bennington Saratoga | Danbury Metuchen Ticonderoga Hubbardton Fort Ann Oriskany Brandywine Paoli Philadelphia Germantown Fort Mifflin White Marsh | |
| 1778 | ||
| Kaskaskia | Wyoming Quaker Hill Cherry Valley Savannah | Monmouth |
| 1779 | ||
|
Vincennes Stony Point Paulus Hook Kettle Creek | Penobscot Expedition Siege of Savannah | |
| 1780 | ||
|
Hanging Rock Kings Mountain | Young’s House Siege of Charleston Moncks Corner Waxhaws Camden Fishing Creek | |
| 1781 | ||
|
The Cowpens Glorious YORKTOWN | Guilford Court House Hobkirks Hill Ninety Six Cane Creek Eutaw Springs | |
Valley Forge also fell into this period and has always been a godsend to patriotic poets, tunesmiths and scripters of elementary school dramas.
It was mighty unpleasant there and they kept running out of Sterno. One feels that a more intelligent leadership would have marched south and wintered at someplace more like Coral Gables or Daytona Beach. New Jersey was just as infinitely depressing in colonial days as it is now, and Washington’s winter quarters at Morristown provided tortures as bad as Valley Forge; but the Forge purloined the headlines on bloody footprints in the snow and Morristown has, like our 37 1/2th President, never gotten a square deal from the press publicitywise.
It wasn’t until October of 1780, at a time when the glorious autumnal foliage of the Carolinas was receiving its annual editorial comment in the Charlotte and Gastonia papers, that victory came again to the patriot cause and it was as sweet as Catawba Valley apple squeezings. It was at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, that Isaac Shelby and Richard Campbell with their Carolina and Virginia sharpshooters blasted Major Patrick Ferguson off the rock, together with his 1100 crack Tory riflemen.
This felicitous issue was followed in four months by another grand slam, at the Cowpens, over that bloody limey bastard, cold-steel Banastre Tarleton, who was soundly thumped this time and chased 18 miles through the woods instead of vice versa. But we were not home free yet by a long shot of canister — ahead lay further humiliation, woe at Eutaw Springs, and more hamburger at Guilford Court House.
Until that jocund occasion when Charles, Earl Cornwallis, from the playing fields of Eton, husband to witty, willowy and charming Jemima Tullikens, wandered out to Yorktown-sur-Mer and decided it would be a nice place to camp. He was a bum picker of camp sites and it was all so Typical of this whole strange war.
The Britons are a curious race indeed, and for losing the colonies and General Motors forever, Lord Charles Cornwallis was rewarded with a Marquessate, Governor Generalship of India, became Master General of the Ordnance with Cabinet Rank, and was made Viceroy of Ireland. But as a dub Cornwallis was not alone.
Let’s face it, fellow Amurricans, the generalship on both sides in the glorious American Revolution was Katzenjammer stuff. It was ‘Mutt and Jeff at the Front’ or ‘Abbott and Costello Meet the Redcoats’.
The British at home thought that George Washington as a general was a dodo. When it became apparent that their own sleepy General Howe couldn’t beat Washington they came to the conclusion they were both dodos.
A crusty British major-general with the gout and a purple nose wrote in 1778: “In short, I am of the opinion that any other General in the world than General Howe would have beaten General Washington; and any other General in the world than George Washington would have beaten General Howe.”
But long before the hot lead began to fly in 1775 Americans already had an opinion on King George’s regal redcoats. They had had one ever since July, 1755, when that musical-comedy military dunce, General Edward Braddock, late of the Coldstream Guards, marched his army in close order formation into the charnel house of the forest primeval before Fort Duquesne on the Monongahela.
“This whole transaction,” Benjamin Franklin remarked of the event years later at a stove jobbers’ convention in Altoona, “gave us Americans the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regulars had not been well founded.”
But every time we won a battle it was always to the complete amazement of the English and European warriors on the field, and of King George, Parliament, and the folks in Stoke Poges, Lyme Regis, and Tarfington-on- Thames, who not only were using the upside-down fork in the left hand but were referring to stagecoach ‘shed-yules’.
And for generations American schoolboys in the 4th and 5th grades have been quitting school and going to work at the box factory to escape hearing any more about Bunker Hill and the good ole Townshend Acts (which believe me will not be mentioned again).
In the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson:
“Sir, your War is like a one-legged cordwainer. Sir, your Battles are desipient gullery in a jiggery-pokery of foolsprock. Sir, please to pay the check.”
Now I Lay Me . . .
Brookfield. Lodged with Mrs. Baldwin and you may guess for ye rest.
Colonel Jeduthan Baldwin,
enroute home from the Battle of Germantown.
