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Professor Adam Smith
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- [01:39]
Professor Adam Smith
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile Now. I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun
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Professor Adam Smith
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Eleanor Evans
equivalent to taxes and fees.
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Eleanor Evans
See Terms.
- [02:14]
Professor Adam Smith
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. In today's third episode of our Sunday series on the American Revolution, Professor Adam Smith and Eleanor Evans pick up the story as the revolutionaries face off against the might of of the British Empire.
- [02:30]
Eleanor Evans
It's 1776 and the new USA has declared its independence. So how did this new nation manage to survive facing the might of the British Empire? How did the revolutionaries avoid collapse? What role did leadership, luck and international alliances play? And when did victory begin to look possible? Welcome back to the History Extra Podcast. I'm Eleanor Evans and I'm joined for the third episode by Professor Adam Smith. Thank you again, Adam, for joining us.
- [02:55]
Professor Adam Smith
My pleasure.
- [02:56]
Eleanor Evans
Wonderful to have you here. Last episode, we talked about the Declaration of Independence, and the newly formed United States of America had declared themselves a nation. And the question, I guess, not particularly laden with suspense from our point in history, is can they survive as one? So I'd like to start this episode by asking if you can give us a bit of a sense of what the strategic objectives of the war were. What would winning the war look like from both sides?
- [03:19]
Commercial Narrator
Yes.
- [03:21]
Professor Adam Smith
So, you know, there's two ways of. Of looking at this, and historians have looked at it, as historians always do, from both perspectives. One is to say, and perhaps this is the more normal way within the American national mythology, is to say, what a remarkable accomplishment of these plucky rebels without proper uniforms, without any proper system of existing kind of military operation to overcome what we often now, you see, referred to as the world's greatest military superpower at the time, the British Empire. What an extraordinary accomplishment. One way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is to say the British never had a chance to win that war. They had enormously long supply lines across the entire Atlantic Ocean. They were never able or willing to deploy very large numbers of troops. They had far more important things to worry about than they didn't want to lose the 13 colonies, but they really, really didn't want to lose the Sugar Islands in the Caribbean. That was vastly, vastly, vastly more important to them or their interests in India or elsewh. So they were never gonna wholly commit to this fight. And so with the number of troops available, what were the chances of subduing a population who were determined to resist them? The British forces could march into a town and run up the Union flag and ask people to swear their loyalty to the King. And that could happen, and then the troops could move on, and then everything went back to how it had been before. They simply didn't have the manpower to occupy the American continent in the way that would have been necessary. As you can tell from the way I'm talking, I incline more to that second view. Right. I think that once hostilities had broken out, once it became clear, as it certainly had, I Think really by the middle of 1776, no compromise was likely to be accomplished. The British started to offer the Americans. There were various efforts to offer the Americans really pretty much everything that they'd been asking for up until the outbreak of hostilities. You know, full self government, effectively dominion status. But by this point, post Declaration of Independence, the thing had gone too far. I think by that point, it's really, really hard to see how Britain was ever going to successfully and effectively militarily subdue the Americans. It's possible to see, and we could talk more about this moments when the war could have gone very differently and there might have been a situation in which the Continental army, commanded by George Washington, could have been destroyed. And at least for a while, that might have looked like a British victory. But I still think the underlying reality of a bunch of colonial leaders now thinking of themselves as leaders of an independent empire, an independent nation, you know, the ship had sailed, really, and the possibility of full and effective reintegration of the British Empire was very slim. By 1776, whatever military strategy that the British had pursued, the British clearly had better trained and more experienced army. It was a very small army because, of course, the British military power rested on the navy, not on the army. So these were not armies on the scale of, you know, Frederick the Great or whatever, still less on the scale of those that, you know, the Revolutionary France and Napoleonic France would, would put into the field later. And the British army, insofar as it. It had battlefield experience, it had battlefield experience in FL and in much more densely populated Western Europe, it did have some experience of fighting in North America, of course, because of the Seven Years War there then a lot of the fighting had been done by colonial forces. So in many ways, the relatively small numbers of British soldiers who were in North America in the 1770s were really unprepared for the geographical scale, the nature of the terrain, how underpopulated it was, and by the sense that it was very difficult to see what a victory would look like. They occupied New York throughout the war. They were never defeated in Europe. The British troops only left New York after the peace treaty had been signed. They occupied Philadelphia, which was the capital insofar as there was a capital of this new independent United States. And it made not the blindest bit of difference. In the end, the British withdrew from Philadelphia because they recognized that occupying it wasn't achieving anything. Some British commanders recognized quicker than others that the best answer to the question of what victory for the British would look like militarily would be destruction of The Continental army of the army that was led by George Washington. And so that was an objective that was pursued, but it wasn't pursued very rigorously, and it was never accomplished. I think even if the Continental army had been destroyed, though, I think that. I think even then that would not have been the end of the war, though it would undoubtedly have been a very severe blow to the Americans. So the British tried other things. They tried a military extension of this political strategy that been developing since 1774 of trying to separate New England from the rest of the colonies in this notion that still that the hotbed of rebellion was around Boston. So there was an attempt to separate New England militarily. There was an attempt later on in the war to try to secure the southern colonies, which were more valuable to Britain anyway, because they were the plantation colonies where tobacco, other things were produced, to try to secure the southern colonies, even while allowing New England and the middle States to go. There were more loyal, probably in the south, in a much lower population density area, but that didn't work either. There was an attempt to blockade American ports, but that wasn't super effective because the Americans had plenty of resources in the interior. It wasn't like they were dependent on goods being brought in. So a lot of the value, the huge advantage that the British had in naval terms, it was very hard to bring that to bear in the American Revolutionary War, at least as far as the thirteen colonies were concerned. It was more useful when it comes to the Caribbean, which also was drawn into the conflict. So all of these things really made it extremely difficult in the end for the British to win. I don't think this was a war in the end, that once it had started in the way it had, the British were ever likely to win.
- [10:09]
Eleanor Evans
For all those logistical challenges, it's easy to agree with you there in terms of how it might have been impossible. But there's also the factor, I guess I would ask, how important is it as a factor that Britain's forces were fighting against people who formerly British subjects, white British subjects, who were invoking sort of England Republican rhetoric. How did that change the way in which it was fought?
- [10:32]
Professor Adam Smith
Yes, that's a really good question, Eleanor. And I think it did in ways that were subconscious as well as conscious. This is not, you know, my answer is not meant to downplay some of the brutality of that war. 18th century warfare was nasty. You know, there was virtually no medicine. The troops had to come to very close combat. Because these were smoothbore muskets, they were extremely inaccurate at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Earlier in the war, one commander, no one really quite knows who, was supposed to have asked his troops to hold back until they could see the whites of their eyes of the advancing forces. You know, so this was really nasty, brutal warfare. However, I think it is definitely true that the British were always understood that insofar as they did have any hope of retaining the colonies as part of the empire, it could only in the end be through a hearts and minds strategy, which was actually a phrase that was used at the time. And so there was always this ambivalence. On the one hand, you wanted to try to destroy the organized military resistance against the British Crown, but on the other hand, you wanted to do so in a way that wouldn't permanently alienate the entire population. That was, in the end, an impossible task. But there is a sense in which they were genuinely trying to do this. As it happens, the military commanders that Britain sent over to the American colonies were almost all, with very few exceptions, people who had been largely sympathetic to the American cause in the run up to the war. They were certainly of the view that they didn't want the British Empire to be dismembered and that they opposed American independence. But they could see why the Americans had been so upset with certain actions of the British government during the 1760s and 70s. Some of the British troops had formed close relationships with Americans. And I think if you look at the moment when most historians think that Washington's army came closest to total destruction, which was in the fall of August, September, October 1776, in the New York campaign. The British commander there, General Howe. It's difficult for me to understand Howe's decisions without thinking that on some level he's holding back a little bit. There were plenty of things that he could have done at certain moments to press home his numerical and tactical, tactical advantage in a way that could have destroyed Washington's army. The Battle of Brooklyn. Washington's army was backed up against the East River. Howe could, you would think, have pushed on and tried to destroy Washington's army. Instead, he laid a siege. Perfectly well tried, legitimate 18th century military strategy, a slow effort to strangle Washington, but that gave Washington the ability to slip away. Washington realized the importance of. Even when he conceded ground, he conceded cities. He virtually never won a clear victory on the battlefield. And Washington, in that sense was not, by any normal European measure of these things at the time, a successful general. But he was successful in that he largely kept his army intact. He snuck away, he evaded any effort by the British to really press home their adv. But as I'm saying, I don't think General Howe, at least in that instance in the autumn of 1776, pressed home his advantage as brutally, as clear sightedly as he could have if his sole aim had been a military one, if he hadn't been aware, as he was aware of the larger issues.
- [14:34]
Eleanor Evans
So that's a factor that may possibly have aided Patriot's forces and Washington's forces. I should just mention here that if any listeners are interested in reading more about any of these battles, we have a piece on historyextra.com, american Revolutionary, the nine battles that had made the United States and the link to that will be available as part of the further reading in the show. Notes if we turn to Washington as a leader, he's a totemic figure, sort of a talisman of this whole period really. Not just the war itself, but his strengths and weaknesses as a leader. If we can look at those more broadly, you've already mentioned he kind of gets the way the war is being waged. How would you characterise him in the sense as is his reputation deserved? I guess.
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Professor Adam Smith
So Washington, this is a really interesting question. And Washington is such a mythologized figure. There's enormous amounts of historical research about him, but he's such a mythologized figure and it's such an important figure politically that thinking about him as a general is sometimes quite difficult. It's difficult to disaggregate the Washington as a military leader from the Washington the father of his country and the first president and and so on. I think that the best that one can say about Washington as a military leader is, I mean his strategic success included tactical losses. Right. So the Battle of Long island, which I think was the biggest single confrontation of the war in terms of the numbers of men involved, was a clear tactical defeat for Washington. But in a broader strategic sense the army survived and that could be counted as a success. I've already talked about the Battle of Brooklyn and the same could be said of all of those battles around New York and afterwards. The mere persistence of the Continental army was Washington's great and enduring achievement. So his political skills, which were to be very evident later as he in the constitutional convention in 1787 and during his time as President was, were at least as important. While he was the commanding general of the Continental army, his ability to deal with these extremely difficult Continental Congress who were invariably refusing to provide the men and supplies and resources that Washington needed. His ability to deal with local leaders he also had a hearts and minds strategy that he had to think about, you know, as his troops needed to live off the land, they needed to use local resources. There were huge difficulties around all of that, as there always are with large armies. So I think Washington's successes were in recognizing that in the end, all the Americans needed to do to win the war was to wait out the British was to rely upon the fact that in the end, this was a war that was costing the British more in terms of political capital, in terms of men and resources, than was worth the fight. And that, in the end, was what happened. I mean, I think overall, this is like a classic essay question, but I would say that in the end that the British gave up on America. Rather than being defeated in the Revolutionary War, they, in the end, withdrew. That is often how wars end. In the end, the British position was that the cost of war was greater than they were willing to bear. And Washington understood that, and that was part of his success, I think, as a leader.
- [18:04]
Eleanor Evans
So he understood this attritional aspect of it and that it might be a waiting game. And something I also really found interesting when I was reading on this was that he, in February 1777, made the decision to have the entire army inoculated against smallpox. So I think that maybe shows a different element of him, that he's implementing essentially immunisation policy as this war's being raged. Like you say, solidifying, perhaps the idea of survival is the most important role rather than fighting.
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Professor Adam Smith
Yes, and he had a number of subordinates who were very loyal to him, and he had a number of more senior officers who were extremely disloyal to him and who he fought with, but he had a number of very loyal subordinate officers. And what they recognized was Washington's. Yes, his care for his troops, which is what you're talking about there, his practical organizational ability. He was constantly thinking in logistical terms, necessarily so mass, massive, massive challenge. I mean, one thinks about the famous encampment at Valley Forge in 77, and, you know, that's often written up as a time of extraordinary trial for the Continental Army. I mean, these men hadn't been paid. You know, the rations were reduced to almost a starvation level. There was a constant threat of disease. This is an extraordinarily difficult time. I mean, the army could just have dribbled away. I mean, people deserting all the time, incredibly hard period in this very cold winter outside Philadelphia. But it's still an accomplishment of Washington's that he managed to keep the army together during a Valley Forge. And a lot of that is his attention to, in incredibly difficult circumstances, providing his men with enough food and resources, just enough, just enough, you know, to keep them going. I mean, I think it's easier to imagine other commanders simply not being able to do that. And this is not a glamorous thing, you know, this is not. He was no Napoleon, you know, he was no Wellington. He never won these grand, strategic, you know, battles with cavalry charges and all these things. That was not what Washington was. But as a kind of manager, as an organizer, he was brilliant. And as a symbol, as you were talking about before, as somebody who kind of rose above his position to become, because of his seeming indestructibility, because the army managed time and again to kind of slip away and avoid destruction. Whether it was destruction from the British army or whether it was destruction from the cold Pennsylvania winter and the threat of starvation and disease, the army survived and endured. And so as the war went on, Washington didn't begin like this, but Washington became the personification of American heroism. Just as in the American Civil War, the destruction of General Lee's Confederate army became the only way that the Union could destroy the Confederacy. So in the American Revolutionary War, General Washington and General Washington's army, so long as it continued in the field, which it did, unlike General Lee's army, as it always did, the hopes of, of the struggle to create this independent empire would continue.
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- [24:25]
Professor Adam Smith
Got a Sam's Cafe pizza order up. You know the best part about this spicy Italian sausage? I voted for this topping. Yeah, just another perk of being a member. Come join us.
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- [24:41]
Eleanor Evans
You mentioned how British forces are strung out across the Atlantic and potentially don't have the supply chain they might normally in other campaigns. Conversely, the Patriot forces, the American forces, have a large camp following. What can you tell us about the different dimension that this brings to the way the war is fought?
- [24:57]
Professor Adam Smith
Yeah, in the end, although sometimes it seems like a weakness for the Americans, but in the end the fact that they're embedded in their communities, that the army is, you know, emerging out of the society is a huge strength. So wherever the Continental army goes, there are huge numbers of camp followers. I mean, officers often bring their wives at Valley Forge, Martha Washington was there. There are many, many more women present in and around the Continental army than would often be the case in military campaigns. And what this is a reminder of, among other things, is how far this military campaign seeped into society. I mean, it was nobody really in the American colonies could escape this conflict. Many people, I think, were deeply ambivalent about it in many ways. Many people, no doubt, as is, you know, often the case with politics, would have liked to have turned away or buried their head in the sand if they could have done. But they were all involved because they knew people who were engaged in the army and because the fact of the military campaign had such direct implications for food and provisions and where you got the cloth to mend your clothes from, and whether you could take your produce to market and sell it, and what money and what currency you use, because all of these things were up in the air and being debated and contested. What Britain became to people living in the colonies was the army. And the project became to eject, to reject the British army from the colonies. And that was a whole society project, not just one that was down to Washington and his men.
- [26:47]
Eleanor Evans
So you've given us a sense, then, of this attritional campaign that's being fought. These battles sort of springing up, not necessarily on these big battlefields, but the two sides meeting in perhaps sometimes surprising circumstances, the British forces strung out and maybe not pressing their advantage where they need to. Is there a turning point at which stage this war becomes taken more seriously?
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Professor Adam Smith
On the world stage, yes, as with any war, one can debate the turning points, But I think the battles of Saratoga on September 19 and October 7 of 1777. Now, these battles were the culmination, from the British point of view, that the miserable culmination of an attempt once again, to separate the New England colonies from the rest. So people have an idea of the geography of North America, they will know that there is what in the 18th century seemed like an invasion corridor from Canada down to New York City, the Hudson Valley. And General John Burgoyne, Gentleman Johnny, as he was known, had this idea, which, you know, was strategically sound as far as it went, that he would lead a force coming down from Canada towards Albany in upstate New York, and that General Howe would simultaneously lead a force up from New York City. They would meet at Albany and form, as it were, a human barrier separating the New England colonies from the rest. We can speculate. I've already said that I think in the end, the British were unlikely to win this war. Even if Burgoyne's plan had come off. You know, they didn't really have the troops to actually enforce a barrier down the Hudson Valley. Even if they had have done, what fundamental difference would it make? But setting that aside, it was a plausible sounding plan on its own terms. It failed. It failed in part because General Howe didn't get the memo or had a different memo that he'd written himself. And there was very poor coordination from London. Not helped by the fact that it took two or three months for the. Any messages to get across the Atlantic. But Howe. This was the point where Howe left New York City in the hands of another General Clinton and marched off to Philadelphia, which he occupied for a while before withdrawing from Philadelphia. And so the movement north up the Hudson Valley never happened. Or insofar as it did happen, it happened very late and in quite small numbers. Meanwhile, General Burgoyne is trudging down from Canada, moving incredibly slowly, partly because he's got this huge personal baggy train and lots of his other officers are bringing all their sort of musical instruments and lots of camp followers. And so they're moving very, very, very slowly. They have a key early success at Fort Ticonderoga, which they take quite quickly, misleadingly known as the. The Gibraltar of. Of North America. I mean, it. It isn't in any sense, but it's sort of imagined to be this sort of key fort which had been in British hands and then had come into American hands that sort of policed this big corridor. So, flushed with early success, Burgoyne very, very slowly marches south, encountering resistance as he's going, losing his allies, his Native American allies, for various reasons along, the morale sinks and morale sinks among his own troops. And to cut a long and rather sad story short, he in the end gets cornered near the town of Saratoga in a desperate attempt to kind of break out against the American forces that have amassed against him. He launches two unsuccessful assaults and is defeated, and the entire army has to surrender. And this is cataclysmic. I mean, you know, when the news reaches Europe, Burgoyne had surrendered an entire army of 6,000 men, down from about 10,000 that he started with. But still, 6,000 men had to be surrendered. To who? To a rebel force that previously had been difficult for people in London or Paris to take seriously. The reason why the battles of Saratoga were so important was because they persuaded the French government to formally enter an alliance with the rebellious Americans. They had been providing support of various kinds or another over the preceding 18 months or two years, but they entered into a formal alliance, making, at a stroke, the American Revolutionary War. A global war. And the Spanish were to later enter as well. From the point of view of London, this was a terrible moment because it brought into play a threat to the Caribbean sugar islands which had not previously existed, as well as a potential threat to invade Britain from across the Channel. And there were, you know, there were efforts. There was an armada formed by the French and the Spanish, which never got anywhere. But all of a sudden, Britain was now fighting a war on multiple fronts in Europe. Europe in the Caribbean, potentially in India and in the Mediterranean, as well as in North America. And of all of those things, retaining the 13 colonies, important as it was emotionally, psychologically, politically, in all kinds of ways, was, in the end less important than retaining the actual Gibraltar. Not the Gibraltar of North America, but the actual Gibraltar, which of course, the Spanish always wanted back. Not nearly as important as retaining the sugar islands in the Caribbean, not nearly as important as maintaining their presence on the Indian subcontinent against French threats. This is the only time between the mid 18th century and the present when the British have found themselves fighting without allies. And the lesson in the end that the British drew from the American Revolutionary War was we should never do this again. We will never again fight a war with the French. It was usually presumed at this point, of course, to be the French they were fighting. We will never again fight a war with the French without European allies, because the Dutch were brought in as well on the side of the French and the Spanish and the Americans. It was an incredibly isolating moment in British foreign and military history. And it amplified those increasing voices in Parliament and outside Parliament in Britain who argued that this was a profound mistake to be fighting this war. Many influential figures, especially from 1777, 78 onwards, were arguing that Britain should cut its losses, accept the independence of this new empire, these 13 colonies, and protect what really mattered elsewhere.
- [33:40]
Eleanor Evans
This sets us up really nicely to talk about the situation as we get into the final stages. You've got the ascendancy of the new USA with France on its side. You've got Britain considering cutting its losses. We will go into how this comes to an end in episode four, when we wrap up the end of the war and aftermath. But, Adam, you've got a quote for us. As ever, I want to turn to Private Joseph Plumb Martin, who's talking about the period you mentioned when Washington's army are truly under the cosh in Valley Forge. And he's talking about this very hard winter. He says we had hard duty to perform and little or no strength to perform it. I did not put a Single morsel of victuals into my mouth for four days and as many nights, except little black birch bark, which I gnawed off a stick. We've already talked about the sort of the scrappy nature of the army, I guess. But what does this illuminate for us, thinking about the forces more broadly?
- [34:33]
Professor Adam Smith
In a way, it reinforces what I was saying earlier about Washington's accomplishment in keeping this army together, because there is no doubting the enormous hardship that the Continental army had to endure. Private Martin was writing there about his experience at this winter at Valley Forge. There were other hard times as well, and other moments actually when the war seemed to be going even more badly for the Americans than it might have seemed in that Valley Forge winter. It was actually about the previous winter that Thomas Paine wrote, these are the times that try men's souls. And so it's a reminder of that, but it's also a reminder of how the mythology of the American Revolution has been built up over the years. Because if you go now to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and it's a national historic site, and the interpretation there is about the suffering, correctly. So as this quote illustrates the suffering that American soldiers endured in the name of liberty, listeners may remember, in fact, that President Biden, before he pulled out of the presidential race in 2024, went to Valley Forge to give a speech in which he said that his own reelection and the defeat of Donald Trump was necessary for the preservation of American liberty. And he went to Valley Forge. The only other place he could have gone, and in fact, he did go to make a similar point, would be Gettysburg. Those are the two places, the two actual physical places in America, Valley Forge and Gettysburg, where Americans go in order to, as it were, renew their faith and their patriotism. Gettysburg was a battle fought in the middle of the Civil War, which, had it gone the other way, might have represented the end of the United States as we know it, the division of the United States. Valley Forge is so interesting, though, because it wasn't a battle. It was a feat of endurance. And I think that probably speaks to the kind of the theme of this conversation in a way that what the Americans accomplished in the Revolutionary War was endurance. They outlasted the British. They weren't as outmanned as they sometimes thought they were, but they outlasted them. And that was their, in the end, their triumph.
- [36:53]
Eleanor Evans
Fantastic. That really underscores the point there about maybe challenging that mythology of the underdog versus this very powerful force. As you say, there was a lot more at play than that. Join us next time as we look at the end of this conflict and what it's come to mean in the 250 years since.
- [37:16]
Professor Adam Smith
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- [37:30]
Commercial Narrator
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- [37:31]
Professor Adam Smith
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