Transcript
Josie Santee (0:00)
Josie I'm Josie Santee, health coach, wellness editor and host of the Every Girl podcast where we cut through the noise with realistic, expert backed advice to help you thrive in every category of life while still loving the person that you already are. And part of loving yourself is being really authentic to you, including the clothes you wear. In partnership with Nordstrom, we are helping you update your spring wardrobe so your style is fit for your best self. Nordstrom brings you the season's most wanted brands like Skims, Mango Free People and Princess polly, all under $100. From trending Sneakers to beauty must haves, we've curated the styles that you'll wear on repeat this spring. Free shipping, free returns and in store pickup make it easier than ever. Shop now in stores and@nordstrom.com if you.
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Mr. Moore (1:23)
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Josie Santee (1:37)
Let's go.
Mr. Moore (1:38)
And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without FreeSync.
General Gage (1:44)
The numbers look good.
Dan Snow (1:45)
Brad, you're on mute.
Mr. Moore (1:46)
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Dan Snow (2:08)
There was so little room in the boats that the men had to stand bolt upright as the sailors heaved on the oars. Crossing Boston Harbor. They landed just outside Charleston, but landed is probably a misnomer here. They came ashore on marshes. They had to wade through waist deep water and then stagger through freezing mud until they truly came to land drier ground. It was spring in New England, but that can be an elastic concept, covers pretty much everything from icebound to strangely warm, and tonight was definitely closer to the former. Steam rose off the cursing, stumbling red coats as they Made for the solid ground, their legendary uniformity nowhere to be seen as the mass of young men floundered about in this unfamiliar terrain. It was midnight. They'd only received their orders two hours previously. And even then, the vast majority of them had no idea where they were going. Only that there was to be no bed or warm embrace of a lover tonight. Instead, there was the mud, the cold, and as soon became obvious, a welcome committee of angry rebels. Their secret mission had been blown before they'd even left the city. Riders had galloped through the night. Lights had shone from belfries, Church bells had rung. Warning shots had been fired in Massachusetts Bay in 1775. News could travel a lot faster even than the British light infantry. The redcoats had been hurried off the boats. They'd been chivied through the mud. But now, in the immortal tradition of the British army, they had to wait. They had to wait for the second wave of troops to be rowed over by the navy. They had to wait for their supplies. They had to wait for officers to try and impose order on the hundreds of men from different units that had been deployed. And while they waited, their enemies activated carefully laid plans. If the redcoats were tired and angry now, in 20 hours time, well, their world will be turned upside down. They would march out into the Massachusetts countryside, into a land in the grip of a tense, brittle peace. They marched back through the jaws of war. They would see comrades riddled with musket balls or beaten down with sharp edged steel. They would abandon wounded men as the starving survivors staggered back to Boston. Their mouths would be bone dry from the gunpowder as they bit through countless cartridges, firing and reloading their weapons until their ammunition was spent. Their feet would be raw after marching close to the distance of a modern double marathon. Their haversacks empty of food, cartridge bags empty of shot after hours of rolling combat. But in those early hours that morning, no one knew what lay in store for them or for the great sweep of British and American history. It was April 19, 1775, 250 years before the release of this podcast. And those redcoats were on their way to Lexington and Concord. And the world would never be the same. You're listening to Dan Snow's history Hit. This is the story of that fateful day. Enjoy. By the spring of 1775, the time for talking. Well, it was almost over. The relationship between Britain and its American colonies, well, a key group of them was almost over. Let's have a quick recap about how we got to this point. We're Talking about the 13 British colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America. So not the Caribbean colonies or the colonies in what is now Canada. We're talking about those colonies that would become the founder members of the United States of America. They spread around 1200 miles from what is now Maine to Georgia. There are about two and a half million people in those colonies. That number doubles every 25 years. High rates of childbirth and massive immigration. We should say half a million of those people were black and 90% of those black people were enslaved. Those black and white colonists massively outnumbered the indigenous population of the eastern portion of North America. There were probably by that stage only around quarter of a million, so 250,000 indigenous people living east of the Mississippi. The white population, who were socially, militarily, economically politically dominant, were overwhelmingly drawn from Britain and Ireland. But society in North America was different. It was a little bit flatter, a little bit more egalitarian. There were very few British aristocrats, the sort of massively wealthy landowners who ruled like little kings in their regions. The men who dominated Britain and Ireland politically, for example. There are also fewer utterly penniless poor people. Something like 2/3 of white Americans own land. That compares with 20% back in Britain. And related to that, importantly, it meant that whereas around 2/3 of white American men could vote in Britain, and historians like to argue about this, but certainly it was only a fraction of that in Britain. Perhaps 15% of white men could vote in England, but that figure may have been much lower, and it was certainly much lower in Scotland. Very few voters there, partly out of being a homeowner and a voter, but even more just generally. There was a spirit of individualism, of independence I think you call it in those colonies that sprang from landowning, it sprang from religion, and it sprang from geography. Many American colonials worshipped at independent churches, self governing churches. These were not enmeshed in the Episcopalian hierarchy, a world of bishops and archbishops with the king at the top that you get in the Anglican faith. They had their local pastor. They had their individual relationship with God and his scriptures. They were conditioned not to follow instructions from some distant bishop's seat or bishop's palace that could be hundreds or even thousands of miles away. That very important sense of religious autonomy that was sustained, it was sometimes created by the nature of those communities. These people had left Britain. Hell, many of these people had left Philadelphia, Boston and New York. They'd headed in land. They'd gone to clear forestry and to hack farmland out of the wilderness. To build new communities afresh. These were the very people, or certainly their descendants, who chafed under the harnesses, the restrictions of life in the old world. They often didn't want their local landowner, their local bishop, the heavy hand of government in their lives. They were happy to take their chances with their brothers and their cousins and their friends in tight knit communities on the edge of civilization. So if you or your revered granddaddy or your beloved father moved from Reading into England or Stirling in Scotland or Norfolk to rural Massachusetts, you're probably not the kind of person queuing up to take instructions to accept prayer books or to submit to a standardized prayer book or a summons to taxation from a government across the Atlantic Ocean. The more I think about it, I guess the very act of building colonies in this new world was revolutionary. Their desire to get away, to create something new for autonomy, was baked into that founding ideal. It's part of their DNA. In 1775, that spirit, that revolutionary desire for autonomy was embodied in the colony of Massachusetts Bay and in its main settlement, the city of Boston. About 15,000 people in Boston. It was a hotbed of the revolution and it was the capital of a wider province that had around 375,000 people in it. There had been a bitter dispute in the 1760s and 1770s about whether or not the British Parliament could impose taxes on the king's subjects in the Americas. The problem was that there were colonial assemblies, there were little parliaments in each colony, and they saw themselves as equal to parliament. The British Parliament, though, thought it had a sort of pan imperial role, particularly when it came to regulating imperial trade. Yes, Parliament accepted. It may not be able to sort of whack an income tax on the people of North Carolina, for example, but it could announce a tariff on sugar to regulate trade within the whole empire, to protect the whole empire, for example, from nasty French sugar from their Caribbean islands like Guadeloupe. That revenue could then go into things like ensuring imperial defence. So after much back and forth, various taxes were proposed, various taxes were abandoned, except for one. A tax on tea. An angry crowd stormed aboard ships carrying tea in Boston harbor and they threw that tea into the sea. They threw it into the water. It became known as the infamous Boston Tea Party. These Americans declared that it was the ancient inalienable right of all Englishmen to be taxed only with the consent of their representatives, only with their own consent. Basically, they would agree to pay tax if in turn, it was agreed upon by the representatives in their legislatures. Back in Britain, the king and much of the political class disagreed. In fact, they got quite angry. The Americans were famously undertaxed. Their fellow Britons in London, Shropshire and Glasgow paid more tax. Britain had spent millions of pounds protecting Americans from the French in Canada, from the indigenous people that periodically rose up in resistance to the ever expanding British colonies in North America. And now the Americans were refusing to pay anything to contribute to those efforts or contribute to imperial policing. The reason the Boston Tea Party is so celebrated today is because it really marked the point of no return. And the reason for that is the British overreaction. The British went bonkers in response to the Boston Tea Party, and Britain and America, I think, from that point were locked onto a path that led to violence. The British passed what they called the Coercive Acts, the Americans called the Intolerable Acts. And the British very foolishly believed that a strong show of force would bring the colonials back to their centre. It would divide the sort of radicals from your common and garden centrist dad, who would step up to the brink and would shy away. At that point, the Americans would be brought back to obedience through coercion. Boston port was closed now, in a world before decent roads, before canals and trains and planes, obviously that means total economic blockade. Nearly everything arrives into Boston by boat. The Brits went even further. The charter of Massachusetts, its constitution was just suspended. The assembly, so its Parliament, was disbanded. Massachusetts Bay was effectively placed under military rule. London appointed a new governor, but he was also to be commander of the British army in North America. He was an out and out soldier. His name was Lieutenant General Thomas Gage. He'd fought the French in Europe, he'd fought the Jacobite rebels in the Highlands of Scotland, he'd fought in the American wilderness. He'd weirdly fought, fought alongside. He served and befriended colonial troops, men like George Washington. He was from an aristocratic background, he had impeccable breeding and he arrived with 4,000 soldiers. Another of these Acts of Parliament specified that in certain cases, certain crimes, the people would be tried not in the place where they happened in the Americas, but back in Britain. So this was seen as interfering again in a kind of tyrannical fashion, with traditional English rights around trial and punishment. To make matters even worse, an astonishingly clumsy move, the British government really went and helped push neutrals into the rebel camp when, in what is certainly the poorest timing in history, Parliament passed the Quebec act in the summer of 1774, though this in Britain was regarded as a bit of colonial housekeeping. But in British colonies in North America, this was seen as an existential threat to their ambitions, their freedom. During the Seven Years War, sometimes called the French Indian War, a generation before, Britain had conquered all of French North America, the British had spent the intervening years just desperately trying to work out or organize this vast and unexpected new empire. Now, in this act, for administrative purposes really, they extended Canada all the way down through the Midwest, all the way to the Mississippi. And American settlement into that area was restricted, and in Quebec itself. So in this large area, formerly the French Empire, now the British, the rule of the French Catholic settlers was confirmed, was locked in. They could go on in the political and religious manner to which they were accustomed. The Americans just couldn't simply believe this. They'd fought for that country. They'd fought for the right to drive the French out and expand into this virgin terrain. As they saw it, they dreamed of settling ever further west. They were rabidly Protestant, by the way, and so this added a religious dimension to it. There was also a land shortage in the thirteen colonies. Settlers were hungry for more land. So now the Americans said to themselves, they'd fought and died for this dream of a Protestant English westward expansion. In the French Indian War, they'd fought under those British banners. And now that Britain had won the war, it had given all that land to the Catholic French anyway. So if you're a loyalist trying to claim that it's in the American colonies interest to remain part of the British Empire whilst also saying there's nothing tyrannical or arbitrary about the British government, well, things just got a lot harder after the Tea Party. All the way through 1774, things moved at breakneck speed right across the American colonies, really, but particularly in Massachusetts Bay. Here you see placid little towns across the colony gripped with the same spirit of defiance that had burned so bright in Boston. These provincials were convinced they were the heirs to the British tradition of self government. This was their ancient right as Britons. They would be governed only with their own consent, and everything else was tyranny. So when they began to organize and resist and disobey King George's royal government, they didn't see themselves as revolutionaries. It was the government in London that was experimenting with dangerous new ideas. They were the ones tipping into absolutism and tyranny. Massachusetts Bay was thoroughly gripped by the desire not to collaborate with King George's government in London. And they weren't alone. In September 1774, delegates from 12 colonies, not quite the 13 yet from those 12 colonies, met in Philadelphia and agreed to boycott all British goods until Parliament repealed the intolerable act. This meeting in Philadelphia also urged the Patriots, as they called them in various colonies, to establish unequivocally that they controlled the militia, not the king's government. Now, the militia was the colonial defence force. None of these colonies had professional militaries. They had militias made up of part time soldiers. It had been the law since right at the beginning of these colonies that any male settler should keep a weapon in good condition, handy, keep some powder and supplies, and be ready to turn out in the event of a threat, usually from the indigenous population, but also imperial adversaries like the French as well. Now, traditionally, these militias had been under the command of the governor and the assembly, but the militias were now told they would answer to a board of patriots in each colony. In Virginia, the militia, for example, elected one George Washington, a veteran of the French Indian War, to be its commander. Back in Boston, General Gage dissolved the Massachusetts Parliament. The assembly, and interestingly, the assemblyman said, fine. And they just simply moved to the town of Concord and they reformed. They became the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and they just went on ruling Massachusetts, if you like. They became a shadow government. They collected the tax, they took over the militia, and they prepared for military conflict. They stockpiled supplies and weapons. There was certainly no shortage of men who knew the business of war. 15,000 Massachusetts men had served in the French Indian War in the Seven Years War, fighting against the French, fighting against their indigenous allies. Now Loyalist officers were rooted out of the militia towns, voted new patriot officers in, usually men like Washington and Virginia with real combat experience. In Massachusetts, they set up special units. They were men who were particularly experienced in war, or they were young and fit, single and keen, and they were to be a rapid response force. In the event of trouble, they would drop the plough, they dropped their shears or smithy's hammer, and they would gallop to the sound of the guns. It was said that they would be ready at a minute's notice and they would become known as the Minutemen. As news of this arrived back in Britain, it was clear that it was a major crisis. They were faced now with the task of basically pacifying a society that was in full revolt thousands of miles away. And here is my hottest take for all the drama of the eventual victory of the Americans in this War of Independence. Actually, it was 1774, before any shots had been fired, that the British Empire in this part of the Americas was destroyed. In that year, peacefully but robustly, the Americans simply de facto dissolved their former arrangements with the British Crown. They did the most Revolutionary thing that any of us can do. It's the nuclear option. Once so seismic and yet so small and simple, they just called the bluff of government and courts and generations of accepted practice across the colonies. They just made their own governments. Is a royal governor a royal governor if everyone just ignores him and listens to someone else? Or is he just a guy with funny clothes? And in 1774, it became clear that the answer was yes. These colonies, and especially Massachusetts Bay, were effectively lost to the British in 1774. When the Americans simply said, no thanks, not anymore. The British, they tried to order them about and the Americans replied, yeah, you and what army? And the British said, this army, Britain had once had a very big army, in fact had 300,000 men under arms in the Seven Years War. But that had come very close to bankrupting Britain. And as a result, by now it had no more than 40,000 troops under arms. And most of those were required to keep the restless, unhappy people of Ireland obedient to their British masters. So there just weren't anything like the number of troops available to bring America back to its obedience then. The war that was coming is particularly interesting to historians of British politics because it's one of the few major wars in British imperial history when there was a terrible schism within the British ruling elite. Even at this early stage within Britain, there was dissension. For example, the legendary former Prime Minister, William Pitt, William Pitt the Elder, we now know him as he'd been one of the architects of victory in the mid century, one of the architects of the victory in the Seven Years War. And he rose in early 1775, he rose in the House of Lords and gave a remarkable speech in which he said, all attempts to impose servitude on such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation must be in vain. Well, his warnings, though, they were ignored by the government and enough people in Parliament who seemed to be gripped by a kind of madness, many of them seemed to want war. The Americans would never stand up to a British army. Declared one member. Well, if he was wrong, Britain had a massive problem because as I said, Britain just didn't have the troops to fight a large scale, determined, effective enemy in the Americas. Now there is another option for the British. You can see it in the wish casting here by the Secretary at War who announced, a conquest by land is unnecessary. This is in 1775, he said this when the country can first be reduced to distress and then to obedience by our marine. Throughout British history, we've usually had One strategy, and that's been to rely on the Navy. But you know, that thing about strategy is that everyone's got one till they get punched in the mouth. And the navy strategy isn't going to work, really, with these American colonies, because the navy cannot occupy great swathes of the American hinterland. They cannot bring the people of Albany to obedience. They could blockade the coast, although it's a very, very long coast indeed, with all sorts of inlets and bays and safe havens for smugglers to come and go. Smugglers, who'd been doing that for generations, knew exactly how to avoid the exciseman or the Royal Navy. But even if they did manage to blockade the coast, that strategy would take years. And meanwhile, the colonists were flouting their disobedience to the Crown. There only one way to solve that, to solve the problems of these shadow governments just operating in places like Massachusetts Bay, was to put boots on the ground. You need redcoats to go and break up those meetings and, well, restore British rule. And that's pretty much what the British decided to do, albeit with utterly inadequate resources. King George 3rd told both houses of parliament early 1775 that, referring to Massachusetts Bay, a rebellion at this time actually exists within the said province. And he wasn't wrong about that. The colonials had built their own government. They were stockpiling weapons. Gage, sitting there in Boston, could only look on in horror. These Massachusetts Bay provincials, they stripped coastal forts of their cannon and their gunpowder. They trained volunteers just right out in the open. By early 1775, Gage reported that there were 30,000 men under arms in New England. And even worse, they were developing their own artillery train that wouldn't have looked out of place on European battlefields. Now he had nothing like the number of troops he needed to deal with that. He had 7,000 troops across all of the American colonies with those 4,000 troops in Boston. Now, bear in mind, bear in mind, friends, the peacetime Prussian army at that time numbered nearly 200,000 men, and Prussia occupied a much smaller area than the rebellious colonies. The numbers just didn't stack up. But these were all just details to the bigwigs in London, Gage was told in no uncertain terms, get out of Boston and do something. Gage had been trying a bit. He'd been hitherto sort of sending very small surgical strikes out to seize military stores. He'd sent out troops, for example, to roll up mystic river and grab hold of the gunpowder in modern day Somerville. He'd launch another raid on Salem. But overall, Gage was deeply pessimistic about his ability to put down this rebellion in any conventional sense, he wrote an astonishing letter to London. He said, if you think 10,000 men sufficient, send 20. If 1 million is thought enough, give 2. You save both blood and treasure. In the end, London must have thought their man on the spot had lost his mind. But they did decide to send a few hundred marines. But, of course, Gage was completely right. Bringing the American colonies back to obedience would require a monumental military effort. Boots on the ground, garrisons in every significant town, the embers of revolution stamped out everywhere, all at once. It was, frankly, far beyond the means of the early modern British state. Gage knew it at this point, Pitt knew it at this point. And yet it would take years of bloody, disastrous, expensive war to drive that message into the brains of the key decision makers. On 14 April 1775, General Gage, sitting in Boston, received news from across the Atlantic, from Britain, that King George considered Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. And with that, he received orders to.