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- [01:25]
Professor Adam Smith
I'm Madison Skinner. I'm Eva Jovic.
- [01:27]
Eleanor Evans
I'm Decoria Moore.
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Professor Adam Smith
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Professor Adam Smith
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. It's the fourth and final installment today of our Sunday series on the American Revolution, as Professor Adam Smith guides Eleanor Evans through the final stages of this seismic global event. And if you've enjoyed this series, don't miss our next Sunday series launching next week on the Odyssey. But for now, it's over to Eleanor and Adam.
- [02:40]
Eleanor Evans
Victory was soon to be close at hand at Yorktown. The moment the war was effectively won. But what did independence actually mean in practice? Who gained, who lost? And what kind of nation emerged from the revolution? And how far did it really go? Welcome back to the fourth and final episode of this podcast on the American Revolution, the American Revolutionary War. I'm joined by Professor Adam Smith. Thank you again, Adam, for your time.
- [03:03]
Professor Adam Smith
My pleasure.
- [03:04]
Eleanor Evans
We are in the final stages, and you've provided a quote from each episode to frame a perspective or a view on this conflict. And today's episode, we're gonna start with that quote. You selected one from William Pitt the Younger, which was delivered on February 26, 1781, in the House of Commons. He said, I am persuaded and I will affirm that it is most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and most diabolical war. The expense of it has been enormous. And yet what has the British nation received in rich return? Nothing but a series of ineffective victories or severe defeats. So this gives us a window on what the British perspective is in 1781.
- [03:43]
Professor Adam Smith
Well, it's a reminder that there were many British perspectives, just as there were many American perspectives. There had been people who had opposed the war from the start, and there were people who, like Pitt, had been deeply uncomfortable with the resort to military force, might have accepted it if it had led to a very quick victory, as conceivably it might have done in 1776, but by 1781, were pleading with the government, led by Lord north, to cut their losses. That, practically speaking, it seemed very clear to Pitt that this was not a war in the continent of North America that the British could win, especially now that the French were arrayed against them alongside the rebellious colonists. Far, far more important for Pitt was retaining the Sugar Islands and the other parts of the empire, retrenching and getting back to what he thought really mattered. And he was extremely concerned by the huge amount of money that was pouring out of the treasury in order to fund this army and naval operation across the Atlantic.
- [04:57]
Eleanor Evans
And on the other side of things, America, as you say, has got France behind them. It's turned into a global war. Spain are involved. The Dutch are involved too. So what does this mean for American forces? How are they feeling at this stage by 1781?
- [05:11]
Professor Adam Smith
I think there's a gathering sense among the American elite and the people in charge of the army and George Washington and so forth, that they're not going to lose the war in the sense that they might have feared they would back in 1775, but nor do they really know how. It's going to end. You know, fundamentally, it's a stalemate. The British are still occupying New York. The main British force under Lord Cornwallis can essentially go wherever it wants, or so it seems. I mean, the British have been conducting what they call a southern strategy, an attempt to send the British army into the southern colonies in the hope and the belief that they can work with Loyalists in those colonists in order to create loyal governments there and maybe secure those colonies as part of the British Empire. Whatever happens doesn't really work. There's huge amounts of violence and irregular warfare in the southern colonies. Cornwallis never really suffers a defeat, but nor is it really clear what he's, in the end, trying to accomplish. The British can occupy cities and towns and port cities for a while, but so what? So what? It's really, really unclear what. What a proper military victory is going to look like. And Cornwallis knows this. I mean, you know, the letters he's writing back to London and privately make very clear. I mean, there's this great sense of futility.
- [06:36]
Eleanor Evans
So everyone is waiting for the stalemate to break. What is the final confrontation that really makes this a decisive outcome?
- [06:44]
Professor Adam Smith
So in the end, the French help to force the final denouement, which is when Cornwallis army. So Cornwallis is the British general who's commanding the British army that's been marching hither and yon across the southern colonies. The one thing that the British think they have, or usually think they have, is naval superiority. So the natural inclination is difficult to fight in the interior. Cornwallis needs to be resupplied. His natural inclination is to go to the coast and to connect with the Royal Navy. So he ends up on this peninsula in Virginia, and he's hoping for a connection with the Royal Navy. Unfortunately for him, in an encounter with the French Navy, the Royal Navy is blown out to sea. It's a sort of tactical loss for the Royal Navy, and this is pretty devastating for the British. It'd be like, you know, the Americans now trying to fight a military campaign without air superiority. I mean, without that kind of naval superiority, suddenly the relative weakness of their position is exp. And because Cornwallis is literally on a peninsula, it's relatively easy to corner him. And so, with the help of the French at sea and also with the help of French troops on the ground, the Continental Army, Washington's army, essentially. BOX Cornwallis in this is in September 1781, and there's a relatively short siege. And after three weeks, Cornwallis is forced to surrender his entire army. And that's the Moment when it's clear even to the most die hard supporters of the war in London, among whom you would have to count the King as the foremost, it's clear that the game is up now. They've now lost their second army in North America after Burgoyne's loss at Saratoga. They still occupy New York City. The war could still continue in some form or another. And indeed there are still skirmishes and fights after Yorktown. But they seem to have just run out of feasible military options on the continent of North America. They still need to secure the Caribbean islands from the French and the Spanish. And so there are naval engagements as part of the Revolutionary War that go on for another 18 months after Yorktown. And from the British perspective, as we've said before in this conversation, retaining Jamaica and Antigua and Barbados is much more important than retaining the 13 colonies. And so from the British perspective, the end point of the Revolutionary War is actually, in some sense, not actually Yorktown, but with the victories that they win against the French navy in the Caribbean, which enables them to be in a stronger negotiating position with the French and than they may otherwise have been when hostilities finally cease. But Yorktown marks the end of any serious effort by the British to attempt to militarily subdue their, what are now clearly their former colonies.
- [10:02]
Eleanor Evans
So it's the point at which, as you said with the Pitt the Younger quote at the start, Britain cuts its losses, essentially.
- [10:08]
Professor Adam Smith
So Pitt gave that speech in a tumultuous debate in the House of Commons months before Yorktown. But everything that happened at Yorktown proved Pitt's point. And it was a really dramatic scene at Yorktown. It was the sight of these British regular troops marching out of their defensive position at Yorktown for a mile, with the Continental army standing around them and having to surrender their weapons, by some accounts, hurling their guns down so viciously that they were attempting to kind of break them, to render them useless. But this extraordinary humiliation of this great army that never really lost a proper battle as they would see it, but had just been outmaneuvered in the end and had just run out of options.
- [10:58]
Eleanor Evans
I'd like to come back to in a moment what the outcome for Britain more broadly might look like, as you say, in the next two years, if they've secured the Sugar Islands and et cetera, what victory or loss means for them in that sense. But for George Washington's forces in the immediate aftermath after Yorktown, what does the next step of business look like for them?
- [11:16]
Professor Adam Smith
They're certainly celebrating after Yorktown. I mean, everybody recognizes that the defeat of Cornwallis is a pivotal moment and that independence of some form. You know, who knows what this new nation is going to look like? I mean, we're still some years out from the constitution that was to be written in 1787. All kinds of questions about what the borders of this new nation would look like, how it was to integrate into what was obviously still going to be a kind of British dominated Atlantic world. All of these questions remain to be resolved. But yes, there was definitely a sense in October 1781, when the news of Cornwallis's surrender spread across the colonies, that this now was the end point of this struggle that in a military sense had begun in 1775.
- [12:10]
Eleanor Evans
So it feels decisive. And yet there are two years until the negotiations proper to formally end this conflict. What do these negotiations look like in broad terms?
- [12:21]
Professor Adam Smith
So, yes, so I mean, remember, as we said in the first episode, this whole story in a way begins with the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years War in which France, humiliated in North America, gave all of its North American possessions to Britain. Exactly 20 years later, there's another Treaty of Paris that ends the American Revolutionary War. So from a British point of view, in one way, this is a full turning of the circle. In another way, though, it isn't entirely because the most interesting thing in some ways about the 1783 Treaty of Paris is how much Britain concedes, if you like, to the United States in order to annoy the French. They have been fighting a war against the French and to some degree, the Spanish and the Dutch, as well as the American rebels. And what the British managed to do in the negotiations is to pick all of those enemies off and treat with them separately, recognising that they all have fundamentally different interests. And quite early on, the British government realize that it is having lost control of the colonies, it's now in their interests for the new United States to be reasonably strong within North America. They obviously don't envisage them being stronger anywhere else to be a bulwark against the French. You know, the French and the Spanish would like ideally to repossess vast swathes of the interior of North America. They don't get that. So in a way, this story is often told as a triumph of American diplomacy and wily old Ben Franklin kind of getting one over on the British. I think the better way of looking at it is that once the British had conceded militarily in North America, their interests immediately aligned with those of the Americans in some key respects. And Definitely in terms of territorial extent, that was true. So the United States and the Treaty of Paris, when it formally came into. That's the real birth point of the United States, of course, is the ratification, actually the ratification of 1784 of the treaty of Paris. That's the real birth point in international law of the United States, not 1776. The boundaries of the United States go as far west as the Mississippi, laying claim to territory which had been under the. Which was, at this point, I'm practically speaking, under the control of indigenous nations. So what the British government, in effect, are saying, if you wanted to be cynical about it, as no doubt many people in London were, was you rebel colonists wanted this. You now have to own this right. You have to own the cost and the difficulty of managing relations with these indigenous peoples. We, the British government, since 1763, at least, have attempted to keep the white population restricted to the seaboard. There was a proclamation line drawn in 1763, basically along the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains, saying, by the British government in London saying to the American continent is thus far and no further. In practice, that was impossible to police, and the proclamation line was shifted further westward. But a lot of this story that we've been talking about in all of these four episodes over this 20 years is a story that's driven by a desire for land among white settlers pushing westward, dispossessing Native Americans into the, you know, as they move into the Ohio Valley. And the Treaty of Paris, basically, is the British saying, all right, go for it. It's not our problem anymore. You are now going to have to bear the cost, bear the difficulty, deal with the consequences of this westward migration. We will act as a sort of container. In effect, we will very clearly retain our possessions to the north of you in British North America and to the south of you in the Caribbean and Florida, where we are really making money. If you want the eastern half of the North American continent, you go for it.
- [16:35]
Eleanor Evans
I guess maybe a provocative question then is, did Britain care? How much did Britain care about this loss of the 1340s?
- [16:42]
Professor Adam Smith
Well, many people in Britain did care. I mean, psychologically, this is a huge blow. You know, this is first time this kind of thing has ever happened. This is clearly not what they wanted. They'd expended huge amounts of treasure and lives in trying to stop this happening, happening. So it would be ridiculous to claim that there were no sort of psychological consequences. And it hugely disrupted British politics. I mean, they went through, you know, three prime ministers in a year or two, which is Something that happens in Britain when there's a massive externally created political crisis and economic crisis. Huge additional debt had been accrued. I mean, this was not a good situation. I don't want to in any sense sort of overlook that. But what is also true is that the other way of looking at this and the way that many people in Britain did look at this is this could have been a lot, lot worse. We have conceded to people who are fundamentally like us, who are, you know, our cousins of our stock. You know, racially, they're us. They believe in our values. They're Protestants, you know, these are not the French we've lost to. This was a civil war within the British Empire. Okay, we've had to concede this, but we've held onto what really mattered. And we have created the basis for a long term alliance between us and these rebel colonists who defeated us, which in the bigger picture could well be in our. The British interests. And the British government learned a lot of lessons about empire building from the experience of the 1760s and 70s and 80s. In the longer span of things. This is the birth of the British Empire, you know, not the end of it. It's the end of what's sometimes called the first British Empire and the birth of the Second Empire. And there's no sense, if you look at it from a wider perspective, in which the loss of the American colonies inhibits or diminishes the rising British power, whether that's in Asia, in Africa, or even in some sense in some of the Americas, in the Caribbean and parts North America. Of course, the Industrial Revolution is beginning at this time as well. So Britain is transforming as a society, becoming richer, wealthier, in many ways more self confident. And so that trajectory continues notwithstanding the loss, and in some ways because of the loss of the American colonies.
- [19:14]
Eleanor Evans
I think that's interesting how it's reflected in what we might learn in schools now and how much this period might loom large in American schools and their history versus British schools and our history.
- [19:24]
Professor Adam Smith
Well, I don't think British people know anything about the American Revolution or think about it for a moment.
- [19:28]
Eleanor Evans
Hopefully they do now, after three episodes.
- [19:31]
Professor Adam Smith
I think just as a general thing, I mean, you know, I've been in, you know, this is not. This is not a popular topic on the curriculum in British schools and it never has been.
- [19:40]
Eleanor Evans
Whereas the Industrial Revolution, expansion of empire, et cetera, front and center.
- [19:48]
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- [23:15]
Eleanor Evans
So you've mentioned how it was a global picture by this point anyway. How does this conflict affect France, particularly in what kind of seeds might we see being sown by the end of this conflict?
- [23:27]
Professor Adam Smith
Well, so, of course, this is one of these famous moments in history where, you know, one revolution, the American Revolution, leads to another quite different revolution in France. Now, to say it leads to it is sort of oversimplifying a complex picture, but the debts that France runs up through their intervention in the Revolutionary War are a contributing factor in leading to the collapse of the government in France in 1789 and all that follows from that in France. And this is an important part of the story, really, as we go forward in terms of the Anglo American relationship as it is becoming. There are some people in the new United States, like Thomas Jefferson, who's the closest America comes to producing its own, Robespierre, who thinks that the French Revolution is a terrific thing and likes to believe it's an emulation of what they had done in 1776. There are many other people, such as Jefferson's great sort of nemesis or opposite number, John Adams, who are appalled by the destruction of property, by the radicalism of the French Revolution, especially after the execution of the King, who had been the great ally of the Americans in the Revolutionary War. And although the Americans don't join or they don't need to, there's no role for them to play in the coalition that Britain leads and creates in fighting later against revolution in then Napoleonic France. It's clear that much of the American political elite are on the British side, both certainly emotionally and politically, but also in practical ways in terms of the trading relationship and so on. So the French Revolution, actually, which follows so quickly on from the American Revolution in some respects, not in others. And it's a complicated story, but in some respects, kind of consolidates or reminds the majority of the American elite at least that in the end, when push comes to shove, they are part of an Anglo Protestant project. They, as Jefferson had said back in 1774, they had already accomplished their own independency, as they often put it. They'd been used to running their own governments. Well, now they definitely were running their own governments. Was it a fundamentally different kind of place by 1790 or so than it had been in 1770 or 1760? Well, yes, in some ways, because they'd gone through the experience of the Revolutionary War and they were now a formal republic. But in other ways, there was huge continuity. They had run their own governments before. They continued to run their own governments before. They were Protestant, anti Catholic nations with a conviction of their manifest purpose to expand westward across the continent, overwhelming indigenous peoples, marginalizing the French. That had been true in 1760, it was true in 1790, it would continue to be true in 1820 and 1850. So there are continuities across the American Revolution which to me at least, are as striking as the undoubted discontinuities that were also there.
- [26:49]
Eleanor Evans
Striking indeed. I wonder if we can pick up on a few more of the quote unquote, winners and losers of it briefly, in the sense that you mentioned John Adams in an earlier episode, and he was writing to his wife Abigail. There's a famous letter from Abigail back to her husband in their famous exchange of letters, in which she exhorts her husband to. When they are laying the foundations of this new nation to, I think she says, remember them. You probably know much better than me. But in reality, how much were different or varied groups of society remembered in this new nation building or included, and what were the limitations there?
- [27:23]
Professor Adam Smith
Yes, she wrote that letter on March 31, 1776. I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors, she writes. They have a lovely relationship, John and Abigail, as expressed through their letters. I mean, she was clearly highly intelligent, politically savvy woman who John really kind of relied on and was very kind of sort of open in his discussions, preserved in this kind of wonderful correspondence that we have. And yes, and that quote has been kind of rightly sort of latched upon over generations by historians. And it's another reminder of an issue that we talked about in episode two, about the radical potential of the American Revolution. You know, a lot of what I've been Saying has emphasized the reactive nature of what the Americans were doing in the 60s and 70s, you know, and they were reactive. They were responding to actions being taken in London, aggressive actions being taken from London as they saw it. Almost none of them set out, you know, to create a new world. These were not, you know, sort of progressive radicals. These are not 18th century Bolsheviks or anything remotely like it, or the Jacobins of the the 1790s. They were not that. There were always radical voices. There's Tom Payne, who wrote in common sense that this was a chance to begin the world anew. But John Adams, someone like John Adams, hated Tom Payne, thought this was a vacuous pamphlet, hated it. But for all their conservatism, revolutions are easier to start than to end. And now, when did the American Revolution end? Has the American Revolution ended? The potential contained in those documents, in the mere fact of overthrowing imperial power, in the mere fact of taking to arms and organizing without being given the authority from a king to do so, to successfully challenge established authority, and to do so in a new world where there was this land that appeared to be empty and waiting, where there was this abundance, where there was this potential for their growth as a society, as a people, as a race, as they would sort of later come to think of it as Anglo Saxon peoples in the new world. That kind of excitement, that sort of potential was hard to contain. None of these revolutionary leaders, or almost none of them, thought they were trying to create a democracy. That wasn't what they were trying to do. Democracy was a component in government. They understood what democracy meant from their reading of the ancient world. This wasn't a democratic revolution in intent, but it was a revolution that had democratic consequences for sure. So Abigail Adams, Remember the ladies. It's a useful reminder to us that John Adams may or may not have been remembering the ladies in formulating the documents that came to be the Declaration of Independence. But out groups found all kinds of ways in a turbulent, shifting environment to lay claim to forms of power which, just as the elite men in Boston and Philadelphia had challenged authority in London, other groups could challenge existing authority within the United states. A historian 100 years ago said that the story of the American Revolution was about who should rule at home rather than just who should rule. It's an internal struggle as much as it is a story of the overthrowing of. Of external authority.
- [31:24]
Eleanor Evans
So I think what I'm hearing and have heard throughout all of these four episodes really is how much this period in history is foundational to a lot of the struggles that have come in American history since and how much people, groups of people, will still refer back to the arguments that were being made 250 years ago. And that might be why it's still a very significant time to be revisiting now, why it's important that we do so. Is that a fair assessment to make?
- [31:52]
Podcast Guest
Yes.
- [31:52]
Professor Adam Smith
All nations need narratives about who they are and how they came to be. As I think we said in the first episode, the United States is unusual in having had this big revolution 250 years ago, which created a polity which is still now essentially. I mean, lots of constitutional lots and lots of things have happened, but in some of its essential ways, including the centrality of these founding documents, of the Declaration of 76 and the Constitution, which was later 1787. In those ways, the entity, the political entity that was created out of this revolutionary moment still exists. Right, In a way that is not so obviously true of the French Republic. And it's been very important to Americans, notwithstanding their own civil war and the dramatic changes in the borders of the United States and their expansion overseas and emergence as this great military, military superpower, notwithstanding all of these, you know, dramatic, dramatic changes, it's been hugely important to every successive generation of Americans that they identify and explain themselves in relation to this origin moment. In the 1770s, you know, that France has refounded its republic, you know, at least five times, with some, you know, imperial monarchical interludes. The United States has never formally, officially done that. It has evolved and changed and sometimes with dramatic disjunctures, such as in the American Civil war of the 1860s. But at least the pretense is that this is still the same country that Washington created. And that's one of the many reasons why this infinitely complex story that we're talking about here, with all its sort of moral and ethical ambiguities, it continues to matter. And why people still need it to be purposeful, why people, especially people in power in the United States, need the story of the revolution to do things for them, to justify what the United States now is, as different groups may see it.
- [34:05]
Eleanor Evans
Well, on that point, bringing it to what this history needs to or should do today. I found on the U.S. department of State website this Ask From Task Force 250, a government project, to look at this anniversary, which, quote, invites citizens to have a renewed love of American history, end quote. I just wanted to get your sense of what that renewed love might look like from different perspectives and your view, what's meant by that?
- [34:30]
Professor Adam Smith
Well, I imagine what's meant by that. I mean, there's been a much more so than was true in 1976 for the bicentennial. The United States was in a bit of a bad way there in post Watergate, post Vietnam, but there was much more consensus in 1976 about what they were trying to accomplish in remembering the 200th anniversary of the revolution than there is today, the 250th. Of course, the United States is now a highly, deeply polarized society. And so, you know, the answer, of course, is that people mean very different things when they're talking about American history. And American history, as history always is in all contexts and countries and places, becomes a way of arguing about contemporary politics. I mean, I imagine what the State Department means when they say that people need a rekindled love of American history is that they want them to remember a classic kind of patriotic narrative of the national triumph of the plucky Americans over the British in the 1770s and 80s, which led to the creation of this providentially ordained nation, Protestant, purposeful nation, which went on to conquer North America and hence the world, and to be this beacon of freedom and all of these things that Americans traditionally, that white Americans especially, have traditionally believed themselves to be. I imagine that's what the State Department means when it says that these things, of course, have always, in fact, been contested. Sometimes the contestation has been much more visible than at other times. And we're now at a point where the contestation over the meaning of that history is highly visible and deeply volatile.
- [36:14]
Eleanor Evans
Well, I hope that these four episodes have given people at least an insight into how complex a lot of these narratives are. We've only been able to cover so much in the sort of four half an hour episodes that we've got. Adam, you've given us lots to think about and lots of avenues to go down for further reading as well. A reminder before we sign off, of the further reading that I've put together where you can read about the battles, the individuals we've talked about, British, American, often somewhere in between there are opinion pieces and of course, great articles from Adam, too, about what happened next, the divisions that followed in the 19th century, the Discord between north and south that forced political tension to rise, and ultimately to civil war. A podcast for another time, perhaps. Thank you so much.
- [36:55]
Professor Adam Smith
It's been my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me on the podcast.
- [37:07]
Podcast Guest
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- [37:36]
Meta Glasses AI
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- [38:04]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan $15 a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending spending zero tears. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [38:26]
Quince Brand Spokesperson
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes me slow when network is busy. See terms.