From These Truths, pages 91-108
THE CONTINENTAL Congress neither suffered the disunion and chaos of the Albany Congress nor undertook the deferential pleading of the Stamp Act Congress. Preparing for the worst, this new, more ambitious, and more expansive—continental—Congress urged colonists to muster their militias and stockpile weapons. It also agreed to boycott all British imports and to ban all trade with the West Indies, a severing of ties with the islands.
...
The Declaration that Congress did adopt was a stunning rhetorical feat, an act of extraordinary political courage. It also marked a colossal failure of political will, in holding back the tide of opposition to slavery by ignoring it, for the sake of a union that, in the end, could not and would not last.
...
DURING THE war, nearly one in five slaves in the United States left their homes, fleeing American slavery in search of British liberty.
...
Not many succeeded in reaching the land where liberty reigned, or even in getting behind British battle lines. Instead, they were caught and punished. [See Tidbits #1]
...
the shrewdest observers expected Britain to win the war, not least because the British began with 32,000 troops, disciplined and experienced, compared to Washington’s 19,000, motley and unruly. An American victory appeared an absurdity. But the British regulars, far from home, suffered from a lack of supplies, and while William Howe, commander in chief of British forces, set his sights first on New York and next on Philadelphia, he found that his victories yielded him little. Unlike European nations, the United States had no established capital city whose capture would have led to an American surrender. More importantly, time and again, Howe failed to press for a final, decisive defeat of the Americans, fearing the losses his own troops would sustain and the danger of heavy casualties when reinforcements were at such a distance.
...
Then, too, Britain’s forces were spread thin, across the globe, waging the war on many fronts. For the British, the American Revolution formed merely one front in a much larger war, a war for empire, a world war. Like the French and Indian War, that war was chiefly fought in North America, but it spilled out elsewhere, too, to West Africa, South Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean. In 1777, Howe captured Philadelphia while, to the north, the British commander John Burgoyne suffered a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Saratoga. This American victory helped John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, serving as diplomats in France, to secure a vital treaty: in 1778, France entered the conflict as an ally of the United States, at which point Lord North, keen to protect Britain’s much richer colonies in the Caribbean from French attack, considered simply abandoning the American theater. Spain joined the French-American alliance in 1779. Germany entered the conflict by supplying paid soldiers called, by Americans, Hessians. And, partly because the Dutch had been supplying arms and ammunition to the Americans, Britain declared war on Holland in 1780. The involvement of France brought the fighting to the wealthy West Indies, where, beginning in 1778, the French captured the British colonies of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, Montserrat, Tobago, St. Kitts, and Turks and Caicos. The cessation of trade between the mainland and the British Caribbean exacted another kind of toll on Britain’s profitable sugar colonies: Africans starved to death. On Antigua alone, a fifth of the slave population died during the war.
…
In 1781, in hopes of taking the Chesapeake, the British general Lord Cornwallis fortified Yorktown, Virginia, as a naval base. His troops were soon besieged and bombarded by a combination of French and American forces. The French were led by the dazzling Marquis de Lafayette, whose service to the Continental army and impassioned advocacy of the American cause had included lobbying for French support. Cornwallis was vulnerable because British naval forces were occupied in the Caribbean. He surrendered on October 19, not realizing that British forces were that very day sailing from New York to aid him.
Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown ended the fighting in North America, but it didn’t end the war. The real end, for Great Britain, came in 1782, in the West Indies, at the Battle of the Saintes, when the British defeated a French and Spanish invasion of Jamaica, an outcome that testified not to the empire’s weaknesses but to its priorities. Britain kept the Caribbean but gave up America.
...
While American exiles struggled to survive in Canada, Benjamin Franklin was in Paris, negotiating the terms of the peace.
...
In September 1783, the American delegation signed the Treaty of Paris. Britain agreed to recognize the independence and sovereignty of the United States. The Americans agreed to make good on debts to British creditors. There were arrangements made for Loyalists and their property, and for the release of prisoners of war. Spain and France were largely cut out of the negotiations, and got very little from them, while Britain ended up with a very different and more far-flung empire than it had in 1775.
...
The terms of the peace cut the number of African slaves in Britain’s empire in half, which meant that the antislavery movement in England gained a more attentive audience, and the proslavery lobby was vastly weakened. Quite the reverse applied in the United States. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, slave owners in states like South Carolina gained political power, while slave owners in the West Indies lost it. West Indian planters were outraged by Britain’s decision to forbid trade between the islands and the United States, a decision that led to riots. A sizable number of the freed slaves who left the United States for other parts of the British Empire ended up in the Caribbean. In Jamaica, they began demanding the right to vote: they argued that taxation without representation was tyranny. In the end, the American challenge to empire contributed to a political and moral critique of slavery that was felt far more deeply in the British Empire than in the United States.
...
England would have no slaves. And America would have no king.