Empire: World History - 158. The American Revolution: Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness (Ep 3)

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

The Declaration of Independence establishes the ideals on which this break away nation founds itself on. But it’s full of contradictions. It complains of white colonists being enslaved by King George III, yet its signatories own enslaved Africans. It declares all men are created equal, but what about women? Listen as Anita and William are joined by Maya Jasanoff as they explore the war, from the evacuation of Boston, to the battle of Yorktown. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, but among these are life. liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnann and me, William Durumple. And most importantly of all, with Maya Jasanoff is with us, Professor Maya

Jasanoff. On spectacular form. Completely spectacular form. Blazing. Yes, you're like a comet in the sky, Maya, and it's been just wonderful. Already we've done two episodes on American Independence. And just to recap some of what we've been talking about. And if you haven't heard those episodes, go back, go back. They're really, really, really good. And we should also say go and buy Myers' fantastic book, Liberty's Exiles, which is what we're drawing on for this series. Yeah. So we left you with this shot ringing out, the shot heard around the world, Americans now saying, identifying themselves as Americans rather than, you know, their respective colonies, but looking towards independence, looking towards cutting the umbilical court,

and being free of Britain. Should we hop straight into? the 2nd of July 1776, Meyer and the Declaration of Independence, how did that actually look to the people in the room? So nothing in history is inevitable. The emergence of this idea, as Anita put it, that the members, the citizens, the subjects, as the British would see them,

of the different colonies, were all Americans, is fluid and evolving idea. What the Declaration of Independence does is add a further wrinkle to that. It says there are, Americans, not British people. And it's that move that is cemented in July of 1776. And it was in no way inevitable. It was not even anticipated by people potentially as recently as a year before. It was

resisted by many people even in the moment. We spoke in the last episode about common sense by Thomas Payne, which had come out about six months earlier and really paved the way in many ways rhetorically and ideologically for the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Payne had signed common sense anonymously in the first instance as being by an Englishman. It was met by counter pamphlets written by people opposing Payne's set of views, including, for example, a pamphlet by a loyalist by the name of Charles Inglis, who was a bishop in New York, who said, I see in this no common sense, but uncommon frenzy. And Inglis had signed his pamphlet an American.

So the ways in which people are using these terms is very sort of, as I said, fluid. But the Declaration of Independence draws this bright line. And it says, we are Americans and Americans are not the same as British subjects. So in that sense, it was a truly revolutionary act, and it marked a point of no return in the movement that had been really underway for more than a dozen years at that point. It's important to think about what the Declaration of Independence is and isn't, what it includes and what it doesn't include. You read those absolutely resonant opening lines, Anita, and they are lines that resound through history, not just in the United States, but all around the world where the American Declaration. of independence has provided a template, as my colleague David Armitage has written, for declarations of independence on, I think, every continent. But that phrase, all men are

created equal, has obvious exceptions to it and obvious lies at its heart in terms of how it was conceived by the people who wrote it. The most obvious being that the man who authored the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was a slave-owned. as were so many of the people who signed it. Slavery was in no way challenged in the Declaration of Independence. There was no sense that being equal extended to enslaved Africans. I should say abolitionism existed in the colonies at that time. It wasn't an idea that was itself unknown to the authors of this document. It was an idea that was rejected by the authors of this document. The other thing that's striking in that very first phrase, all men are created equal is the rather obvious emphasis

on men. And this, again, was not a pure sort of rhetorical choice to use men as a catch-all for all humankind. I mean, that is it may have been for some. But for Abigail Adams, the extremely articulate and witty and wonderful wife of John Adams, she was somebody who knew perfectly well that women played an important role in American society and should in its future. And a couple months before the Declaration of Independence was written and signed, Abigail Adams quite famously wrote a letter to John saying, I long to hear that you have declared an independency, obviously leaning toward this moment, but then goes on to say, and by the way, in the new code of laws, which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies,

Remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Absolutely right. I wish listeners could see Anita at this moment who's just thrust both hands in the air and done a victory lap around her studio. No, because it's really important. And, you know, she is one of the powers behind the power, if you like. John Adams does talk to her a lot about this. So knows that they're going in and signing this document.

and there is a deficit of democracy in this document. One thing, could you just clear up with the declaration itself? We hold these truths to be self-evident. Now, that wasn't what Jefferson had wanted to write. He had wanted to write. That was Franklin's emendation, wasn't it? We would hold these truths to be sacred, and yet they decided that that was not okay.

And they also took out a few other phrases, which I think Jefferson bridles out at the time, saying there is a lot of thought put into every single word that I wrote in this document, when they revise it, where he does talk about emancipation and freedom. And the others in the room, even if they aren't slave owners, and I count Adams as one of them and Franklin as another, are saying, actually, that's just a step too far.

It will break the union. If you use, bizarre, use slave-owning Jefferson. If you're going to use the words of emancipation, we're going to lose people along the way. The idea of abolition was not new to these men and was not new in this era. Again, in Britain itself, slavery was effectively unenforceable. from 1772, and a number of the colonies would end up having gradual abolition acts, I should say a number of the states, very soon after independence.

And there were various ways in which ideas about ending the slave trade, for example, had already been discussed. But the interests were multiple and complex, and not the least of things at stake in this, was something that's embedded in the rest of the text of the Declaration of Independence, which we tend to know for its stunning preamble, but which reads otherwise like a charge sheet against King George III, listing all of the ways in which he, it is always he, it's one after another clause, he has refused, he has forbidden, he has dissolved, he has endeavored, he has

obstructed for the rest of the document. King George III has done all of these things, including he has constrained our fellow citizens, taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages whose known role of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. There's an idea in the Declaration of Independence that the king has in effect enslaved the white American colonists. And this invocation of themselves as slaves of the king is a paradoxical, not to say, hypocritical through line in a lot of the language deployed by the founding fathers.

The idea that he, the king, has encouraged the Indians to come fight them is, of course, an inversion of their resentment at the king for preventing them from being able to take over Indian lands. So this is a document that is filled with paradoxes, hypocrisy, but also political intent. Because when you make your declaration of independence a charge sheet against and, individualized enemy. It makes it much easier to galvanize people and get them behind the cause. Maya, you talked about weighing up the different interests and how some such as Adams is worried about alienating southern slave owners. Is there any sense in which putting it there that all men are created equal is a reaction to the Dunmore proclamation that the British are offering slaves' freedom? Is this part of a sales pitch against that? Certainly part of the sales

pitch is that the Patriots are very angry at the British for doing that, although the Patriots themselves will do something similar in due course. You know, I think that we could devote a whole series to the ways in which freedom and equality were figured in this era. But I think what you see in this document is a set of compromises folded under the heading of what we now refer to to as enlightenment ideals. And Franklin in particular was somebody who was very much steeped in those. And not the least startling phrase in the Declaration is we hold these truths to be self-evident. They're by no means self-evident. They're very radical. There is no major republic at that time. There had been a Republican movement in Corsica. You know, there are few places that have risen up.

But in the modern world, as it was in the 18th century, republicanism was very radical. And these truths, as they will go on to be spelled out, are not self-evident. You see, by the way, in the changing of the term sacred to self-evident, a turn very much in the direction of this kind of secular enlightenment idealism. But there is an invocation of the creator, a sort of deistic conception of God. many of these founding fathers were themselves sort of deists rather than pious Anglicans, for example. Would you explain that distinction just so that everyone understands it? Yeah.

So one of the things that we have to bear in mind about the American colonies and from 1776 states, as I've tried to emphasize, is the incredible diversity of backgrounds and attitudes. And not the least of those axes of difference as religion, which was a central plank of identity then is indeed from many people today. And in the 18th century, there were, again, as part of what we call the Enlightenment, increasing numbers of people who were eschewing some of the more established forms of Christianity in favor of a more sort of holistic idea or what they call deistic idea that there was a God who had created things, but that there wasn't a need to have these kind of, you know, formalized relationships of the sort that you would

have by going to church. You know, there's a creator and that's kind of it. And we'll just sort of leave it at that. And not even give him a name. That's right. And by contrast, you would have, you know, the established Anglican or Church of England in the colonies. And the Church of England is headed by the king. And for devout Anglicans, for example, the idea of breaking the bond with the king is not only a political statement, it's also a religious statement, potentially. And this is one reason that you see sort of disproportionate number of Anglican clergy being among the loyalists, that is, those people who never broke with royal rule. So Charles Inglis, whom I mentioned a little while ago, as an Anglican bishop. Can I just drop in a delicious little vignette? There is a marvelous

painting. Well, I mean, I say marvelous, but others may not have, and I know definitely didn't find it. John Trumbull, who's done this huge canvas. I mean, it was some years after the event, that it shows all of the founding fathers signing the declaration. You know, you've got all of the giants there standing together. You've got Washington and the forefront and Jefferson and Adams, and they all sign it. And when he unveils this, so it is a, you know, monumentally huge canvas, this thing. John Adams rails against it, saying that's not how this declaration was signed. And that's sort of the image that we have in our minds. And Adams rails at Trumbull and says it's actually a really bad picture. He said, you know, we were already at war at this time. People came in and signed it when they happened to. And to be in Philadelphia, one at a time, and then they went back to do battle. That was not the picture of sort of, you know, the Concord unity of everybody very calmly saying, this is what we're going to do. It was in haste, people popping in. Was that the document? I'll sign it. John Hancock, with his enormous flourish on the declaration, he's not the first person to sign it, but he had the biggest floweriest signature on the document, which is why in America, this is true, and you may

not know this if you're not from America, but John Hancock is a slang for your signature, because he did such a flourishing signature. But in reality, this is a huge moment. And Washington reads out the Declaration to his troops in New York. And they celebrate by pulling down a statue of George III and melting it down for bullets, which is like an amazing. You know, that's a real thing.

And the statue, even more improbably, had been put up to celebrate the end of the Stamp Act, hadn't it? Or one of those taxes. The people of New York had put it up, and it contained, I think, well, I can remember there's 20 tons of lead. That's all melted down.

Eventually, George III gets turned into Patriot Bullets, which is a lovely irony. You know, that moment that you said is so resonant, but it remains resonant through the ages. Lincoln refers to it as well. Martin Luther King refers to it as well. Would you say it's sort of the very the birth pang of the country is this signing? This is when it actually happens and remains to this day, the birth pang. It's the founding documents of the United States. That's uncontested in our national history with July 4th, of course, is our national day. and 1776 is our...

That's the day it's signed, is it? It's the date that it's formally adopted. Some of the signing had happened before. There are some people who claim that actually we should celebrate July 2nd, which is the day at which the final colony, now state, voted for independence. But July 4th, I believe, is the day that it's sent to the printer. And that's the day that we commemorate. But yes, it is the founding day in U.S. history.

And it is from then on that the fight with Britain is to... no longer about reconfiguring the relationship. It's about fighting for independence. And it is quite moving to think about the way in which these ideas do disseminate through the countryside and cities and towns across the colonies now states. It is moving to think about how many men do leave their farms and go and fight. And of course, women and children are supporting them in various ways, leave their towns and urban jobs as well. And I feel as if my lifetime and my lifetime in the historical profession, you know, for the last 20 years or so, has been a time of a lot of very necessary and in many ways deeply overdue questioning about

the limits of documents like these and an attempt to rewrite the history of this era to be far more inclusive. At the same time, I mean, I think that it had global significance and has enduring significance in the United States for very, very important reasons. And in this conflict, it marked something that it's hard to point to an equivalent for many other historical episodes, even the French Revolution, which we know of and something of the same sort of pattern of thoughts and events that we do the American Revolution. The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen doesn't have the same sort of purchase. Obviously, here we are speaking English, so that's part of it. But there are very few things that really kind of stand out

and through the ages in the way that this document does. Yeah. And I mean, the Trumbull picture may be bullshit, but it does actually symbolize something that really happened, which is all of these disparate groups coming together in one document to say, you know, what, we are free of you. But when you say you declare independence, you're also declaring war, how does Britain immediately start mobilizing on this declaration of war?

What do they do? Well, they have been at war. I mean, I think that that's a pretty important thing here. You know, they had been at war since April 1775. and the taking of Boston by the British and the holding of it was, you know, an important focal point for that war, as was the attempt by the Patriots to bring Quebec into the conflict. In 1776 already, we see some important military things also unfolding where the Americans end up essentially forcing the British to evacuate Boston in a quite important And again, like just dramatically striking episode, the Americans had captured a British fort in upstate New York.

And George Washington commissioned a bluff, energetic Boston bookseller by the name of Henry Knox to organize the transport of the cannon from the British fort to Boston so that they could use this artillery to threaten the British. and Knox ends up conveying over snow-covered countryside on oxen-pulled slays, these cannon from Fort Ticonderoga all across the Berkshire mountains, you know, into eastern Massachusetts, and then ultimately setting them up on Dorchester Heights outside of Boston and pointing them basically into the British town. And the result of this is first that Henry Knox ends up becoming the head of artillery for the Continental Army.

Does he ever see a bookshop ever again? I'm not sure. It's after him, by the way, that Fort Knox is named, which is the place that is associated with the treasury, all the gold bars. I just say that's a fabulous fact. Yeah, I love it. I just want to hold that very closer a second. I didn't know that.

That's amazing. Okay. So, Knox does well. But the other thing is that the British end up evacuating Boston, because they find that they can't really, you know, hold on to this very well. And there are these cannon sort of pointing down at them, and Boston is a sort of difficult position from which to advance, given that whole thing about

the neck of land and everything. And so instead, the fighting moves around the time of the Declaration of Independence. I should add, it's also that victory in Boston, the evacuation by the British, that's an important precursor to the Declaration of Independence, right? That happens in March. And then in July, you have this Declaration of Independence. I had mentioned earlier that there's a lot of back and forth between the British legislature the taxes and the American opposition.

Well, during the war, there's a lot of back and forth between sort of local victories and moves of a political nature, the military and the political working back and forth with each other on both sides of the Atlantic. So the Declaration of Independence marks this very important political break. It does go with military consolidation of different kinds. One of the things that the new government is going to have to do throughout the wars find money to pay for the army, which is a very difficult thing. A lot of these

men sign on for one-year contracts. So Washington has to constantly worry about whether they're all going to go home when their year contract expires. They rarely get paid. So it's a pretty tenuous business. And where are they getting the money? I mean, have they looting places? Where are they getting large sums of cash from? They're having difficulty with it. They will eventually get money partly from their allies, France and Spain, and they will get money too from a banker in New York who's sort of known for bankrolling the war effort. There's people basically available to lend them money. That's the main way they get it. They get it from loans from wealthy Americans who are willing to stand them money. Robert Morris is the name of the banker from whom they get money

in. Morris is often seen as this sort of pivotal figure in the revolutionary era because without his money, none of this might have happened. He's also accused of being a great war profiteer. And, you know, you can imagine that there's probably some truth to both of these things. And Maya, militarily, what is going wrong on the British side? They've just won the seven-year war. They've had amazing naval victories, victories on sort of enormous battles against what you would have thought were more formidable enemies than this, including the French and Canada, with, you know, fully trained up and everything like that. Why are the British Army and why are these battles failing time and again and why are they not doing better in simple military terms?

There's a lot of strategic things you can point to here. So this actually dovetails very well with what we were just talking about because after the evacuation of Boston, the British concentrate their efforts on New York. And in the summer of 1776, they sail their fleet into New York. Washington is there. They have tens of thousands of troops. They have vast numbers of ships. It's not like they're underfunded or under equipped or undermanned? Not really. We think of New York today as a place where there are the skyscrapers of Manhattan on the island that tower over everything. But in those days, of course, Manhattan was very small. I mean, the settlement at least was very small and very low-lying. And it was in fact the masts of the ships that would really have stuck out.

So the water around it is the forest. And so the British land in Brooklyn and, well, they land in Long Island. they end up forcing the Americans to evacuate across the East River from what is now Brooklyn to Manhattan. And they pause. They take all these pauses where instead of just following the Americans across and giving chase and capturing Washington, there are these moments where they just sort of wait and the Americans manage to kind of get away. So this is one of them.

Could they have captured Washington at that point if they really pushed? Absolutely. So they have the Battle of Long Island. They end up, you know, defeating the Americans. The Americans then evacuate into Manhattan. They cross over into Manhattan. Meanwhile, Washington is working his way up the island. There's another conflict which will take place at the north end of the island near today's George Washington Bridge, a spot called Fort Washington in the region of New York called Washington Heights, where again, Washington manages to get away. He crosses the Hudson and he goes into New Jersey. And this entire sequence, of events is one that I think military historians can go back in and look at and say, on the one hand, yes, Washington is a very successful commander, and he does a great job with what he has. But also, the British commander, William Howe, is just not necessarily doing a very good job here. So there's a lot of strategic things like that. There's also the fact, as I've mentioned already, that this war is a civil war. It's a war in which there's no easy unanimity on the

British side and in which the British are constantly looking for ways to make peace. So William Howe and his brother Richard Howe, who are a pair of important commanders at this time, are empowered to be peace commissioners. Already in 1776, they're tasked with this kind of joint thing, you know, to wage the war, but they're also allowed to make terms of peace if that can be agreed on with the Americans. And I think that that speaks to a certain attitude that the British have toward this military conflict, some arrogance that they think they can win it or they think they can back the Americans into a position where they'll negotiate very easily, combined with, I suppose,

some sense that they don't want to just, you know, run them all down and slaughter everybody. It's just not that kind of conflict. Would it be fair to say that the British greatly underestimate the Americans and their fervor and their desire to fight for this? I often see the term rabble use in communique at this time. Cowardly dogs. Poor species of fighting men, this sort of language. Do they just not realize what they're up against until it's too late? They don't. They also have a misconception about manpower, which is that they think that a rather high percentage of the population is loyal and will rush to the British flag when that standard is raised. And that turns out not to be the case. It never

yields the numbers that they hope it will. And by contrast, they also, imagine that the number of people rallying to the American side will not be particularly high. So that's a big misconception. I don't want to underestimate, incidentally, the difficulties that they're up against in otherwise. I mean, they have to sail thousands of miles across the Atlantic to get anything over there, right? Particularly, and we'll get to this later, after France and Spain come into the war, they have

to protect their interests all over the world. It's a very difficult feat to be sailing gigantic armies across. the ocean, deploying them all over the place and fighting in multiple arenas at once. Feeding them, arming them. And dealing with the communications. You know, you have to be from London to New York to this place to that place. You know, it's a very difficult business. Maya, in some of the sort of the cinematic versions of this, you know, the Mel Gibson version

of all this, there's a lot of British atrocities and a lot of very nasty stuff going on. In one case, I remember a whole community get put in. to a church and the church gets set on fire, is the terrible atrocities. And I've also read about the Hessians, George III's German mercenaries who were supposed to be particularly brutal. How much of that is true? There are atrocities without a doubt. There's a few particular British commanders, for example, Bannister-Tarleton is a notorious name in the South. There's fierce fighting and vengeance exacted by the British against American troops and civilians. But But it's also important to note a couple of other arenas in which there's spectacular violence.

One is in the fighting between loyalists and patriots, that is between American militias. And that is particularly pronounced in the later years of the war, especially in New Jersey and upstate New York and in the backcountry of the Carolinas and Georgia. But the other big area of atrocity is American soldiers against Indians. And this will be especially shocking in an expedition led by General Sullivan in 1779 into upstate New York, into the territories of the Hauden Ashani, the Iroquois Confederacy, which had long been allied with the British. And this was one of the biggest campaigns by the Continental Army in the war, thousands of soldiers, which marched across upstate New York,

basically savaging the Indian villages that they came across, burning them down, killing women, children, men, just sowing incredible havoc. And it's so destructive of these peoples across this region that, I mean, first of all, it sort of breaks the back of the Confederacy for a time and the Mohawks, a member of the Confederacy,

who remain, for the most part, allied against the British throughout, the war will after the war end up having, many of them will end up getting settlements over in Canada. But the point is that the homelands of these native peoples are ravaged. And it will be remembered long since by the Movaks, the Seneca and others, as a time of such destruction that George Washington, the hero of the United States, is known in these communities as the town destroyer. Oh, really?

Really? How many Native American Indians are fighting for the British? because the British do make attempts to try and enlist. I mean, are we talking hundreds, thousands? I mean, is it sort of a significant number? We're talking thousands for sure. And again, we're talking members of certain tribes and nations which have their own relationships with the British and with each other. The Haudenoshani, for example, is this Confederacy, which will end up dividing as the Oneida join forces with the Patriots and the others stay with the British. We see various divisions in the South where the Cherokee, for example, are aligned in various ways with the British.

But, you know, we have to put this, I think, into the context of decades of expansion and warfare in these native homelands in which there are different indigenous power brokers who are looking for, you know, their best way out of this situation and, you know, mobilizing the powers around them, the European interests and the colonial interests, to try to kind of find their own best way forward. At the center of all of this, and many people, as you say, in the American psyche, the hero of the hour is Washington, who's evading capture and is right at the front, fighting at the front and, you know, rallying exhausted, broke troops who sometimes might want to go back to their farms and make sure the harvesters come in. And we're going to have a break in a moment, but there is one

moment which is sort of immortalized in art, music, and film, which you think is a bit overblown, and that's Washington Crossing the Delaware. If you haven't seen this, or you don't have the picture in your mind's eyes. Him sort of at the prow of a ship, you know, and there he is, sort of leading by example, leading from the front. First of all, what does that depict? And was it such a big deal after all? Whether it was a big deal or not, of course,

depends on who you ask. If you ask fans of Washington, they'll say it was unbelievably important because what had happened is, so Washington had left New York City, he had fled into New Jersey and is attempting to sort of keep his army together while there are other campaigns going on further upstate in New York, Washington, though, is facing a ticking clock,

which is that at the end of the year, his men can go home because, not least, they're not really paid, and the conditions are pretty terrible. And he recognizes that in order to keep their loyalty and give them some reason to keep on fighting, he has to try to score something against the British. And it's on Christmas night that he decides to take a strike at the British, who are in New Jersey.

And again, the Hessians, these German troops. The Hessians, these are German, essentially, mercenaries whom the British employ, just as they have on other previous military conflicts. The Hessians are regarded as particularly savage by the Americans, not least because of their uniforms, which are designed to strike fear into them. In any event, Washington ends up crossing from where he is in Pennsylvania over the Delaware River to New Jersey, attacking a British camp on Boxing Day and scoring a victory over the Hessian British troops. And this is just enough to keep the troops, the Americans, ready to stay

on side, re-enlist, and go into the year of 1777, ready to keep on fighting for independence. Yeah, and their numbers speak for themselves. You know, he attacks the British troops. He captures more than a thousand at a cost of just four wounded Americans. So we go into the break with this enormous boost to the American psyche, that they can do this. You know, they may be outgunned, and I can't remember the Hamilton lines now, but, you know, outgunned, outmanned, but they are still fighting back and they're managing to score big victories. Join us after the break when we find out what this boost to the American psyche actually does to the ongoing war. Welcome back. So we just left you before the break with an enormous psychological victory for the Patriot side, or the

the colonial side, or the independent side, let's put it, we can call it, the independence side there, the Americans now, who have scored this great victory against the British. As Maya has so clearly pointed out, you know, wars cost money and men need to be paid. And there are some significantly absent founding fathers who are not in America at this time, but they are elsewhere in Europe. And I count among them, Benjamin Franklin, most notably, who is in France, in Paris, really cosying up and being the talk of the town. Surrounded by women in many of the pictures, flirting away. Though they love him.

They love Dr. Franklin. And he's trying to sort of chisel some more money and more importantly than that, some more naval support, to send more ships out to support this American War of Independence. John Adams, who's been a complete bust in France because he's so straight talking

that the French hate his guts and they think he's just not as charming as Franklin. And Franklin gets sick of him as well. So he sort of helps to oust him out of France. He goes to Holland, where he's tasked with getting money from the Dutch because the Dutch banks, they have a lot of money to bankroll or at least open a line of credit for this newborn country, America. And he's finding it very, very difficult because the Dutch are a canny lot and they want to see who wins before they open any kind of line of credit or extend any kind of financial help to either side.

They don't want to risk a fight. And I think Jefferson is also sort of floating around in Paris or maybe flitting in and out of Paris. But tell me this. This support from Europe is vital, isn't it? Because you can score great successes like crossing the Delaware, but you need to win a war. That's a battle, but you need to win a war and wars take money. Absolutely. And the Americans just don't have it.

I mean, they have food. They have their land and so on. But, you know, they just don't have the capital resources to rival any European country at this time. And they have to pay their men. They have to get weapons. They try even to build a navy, a fleet. and they do awfully well with what they've got. But, you know, they don't have anything to compare with the financial and material strength of the big European countries. And they don't even

have the manpower, really. I mean, that is, they get people to enlist in the army and they don't have to transport them across huge distances, which is a very important piece of this. But, you know, again, we're looking at a population that is a tiny fraction of what the populations of the European countries at this time are. And the British do not have conscription, right? So the British don't just draft everybody into the army and ship them all around the world. They hire people, the Hessians, and how do they do that? They have money to do it. And so they're able to engage in the European military labor market, as many European powers do at this time,

and just engage the troops and bring them over. And the Americans don't have anything like that ability to just raise up support. Maya, one thing I haven't got a clear picture in my head of is how many loyalist troops are the to match the Patriot troops, just domestic people drafted in, given a gun, and fighting in the line. Are the large numbers? Are we got whole regiments of loyalists? There are loyalists militias and loyalists who join the British as sort of auxiliaries. As I say, the key point about loyalists is that there's never as many as the British would like there to be, but there are absolutely loyalist regiments. And these get raised in the manner of many regiments,

even in Britain at that time by, for example, local landowners might get people together into a militia or an auxiliary force. You see those over the colonies, but you particularly see those in the South, and that will become important when the war effort really turns there. You see them in places like upstate New York. You see them in New Jersey. And a lot of these militias will end up sort of fight each other. There are a patriot and loyalist militias that will go at each other. We tend to think about war as a sequence of battles, where that idea came from, we can examine. But as I keep on stressing, this is a civil war, which means that a lot of the fighting is happening in less organized and planned ways, small encounters between relatively small numbers of

people who nevertheless represent relatively large percentages of the residents of given places. So you have these militias, for example, crisscrossing the countryside, you know, taking food, burning barns, you know, this kind of stuff. And it would have been as much a part of the experience of the revolutionary period as the set-piece battles between the Continental Army and the British. Well, that brings us up to the big set-piece battle that in many ways is the military turning point in the autumn of 1777. It's the Battle of Saratoga. Tell us about that. The British have different strategies that they tried during the revolution to win this thing. The first one had involved capturing Boston and trying to suppress everything. The next one

was to get New York and capture Washington, which they failed at. The next one is to divide and conquer. That is to have a campaign that essentially slices New England off from the Middle Atlantic in the south. And the way they plan to do that is to march an army down from Canada to join up with the forces in New York City. So the British start marching down. They go down through Lake Champlain. They have engagements at Fort Taekondiroga, Skeensboro, et cetera. And they have little branch expeditions that they run into adjacent areas, including Bennington and Vermont. And the goal of this is to, again, you know, it's a great example of how the set piece of the army moving down dovetails with British expectations of civilians coming to join them. They hope and assume

that they will get loyalists joining them as they go down. In truth and in practice, there's fewer than they expected. There's also sort of skirmishes around the edges of this whole march down with the results that by the time the army gets sort of halfway down to New York State, they've already lost a great deal of strength along the way because of these little sort of side engagements and the many very real engagements along the way. The British Army arrives at a place called Saratoga, and this is October of 1777. They're hugely depleted. They've lost a lot of manpower along the way. And the Americans have successfully managed to gain ground against them, taking up positions sort of in the area around the British. So the British are marching down.

they're losing manpower all along the way. One of the American commanders who is quite significant in this set of events is talented, general, one of the most talented by the name of Benedict Arnold, a name that will come to be. You see, normally you say that in America, people just boo and hiss. Benedict Arnold is an insult. Now, you're right old Benedict Arnold. Okay, can't wait to hear why he gets that reputation. Go on.

Yeah, but he's actually quite a successful commander for, George Washington. And so the armies end up facing off at a place called Saratoga, which is not too far from Albany, about sort of halfway down New York State, where the British army under John Bergoin is effectively just ringed by the Americans and ends up having to surrender. It's a huge defeat for the British, an entire army with one of the top generals handing itself over to the Continental Army. The captives are marched off. Borgoyne becomes a prisoner of war in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The blow to the British is so big that they have to sort of rework their strategy going forward. And above all, most significantly for the Americans, this victory at Saratoga is perfectly timed

for them to get the support that they've long been angling for from the French, who are looking toward this whole conflict, sort of curious about what might happen, eager to find a way to make up the losses that they had sustained against Britain in the Seven Years' War just a little while before, but not quite sure whether this American army really has what it takes. And then with the victory at Saratoga by the Americans, they're able to see, yes, here is a way that we can see these people actually going forward and let's get behind them and try to bring this thing to a close. What does France going all in look like?

Because, I mean, the names again, and we have Lin-Manuel Miranda to thank for this, but you've got names like Lafayette, who are often intrinsically linked with the war for independence. But who else do they send? Because it's really naval power that Franklin has been begging for, and Adams have been begging for, send ships. We need ships and their cannons to come and station themselves in these bays around the coast and blast the British to smithereens from the water. So what do the French sign up for?

Who do they send? And where is Lafayette? We've not mentioned Lafayette until now. So Lafayette is a young aristocrat. He comes to the United States to volunteer to fight with Washington. And he's really a sort of callow youth in many ways at this time. And it's worth noting that he will go on to be a very important figure in the French Revolution, partly because he's so young at the time of the American.

American Revolution, but he's, you know, has lots of life left in him, as it were, to lead the French in future years. But he comes to join the Americans, and he's taken up as a real protege of George Washington. He says something about how he comes to learn, not to teach. And he ends up really regarding Washington, I think, as a real father figure for him. But he becomes quite a successful military commander. And over the course of the war, Washington will delegate more and more to Lafayette. What are the numbers, Maya? Are it substantial troops that the French bring? Is it game-changing numbers? The biggest thing that the French do in the war is to bring in a navy and a naval power, which the Americans just did not have the capacity to mount in anything like a serious way.

There were raids, there were privateering things. There were, you know, small things happening, one or two naval engagements with American ships. But by and large, it's, It's the naval power that the French can bring, which has the capacity, for example, to blockade, which has the capacity to fight pitched battles with the British. This is payback for everything they lost in the seven-year war, 13 years earlier, right? The French bring naval power. The French bring a far wider theater of operations, which now includes very critically the Caribbean, and the French bring money, which is going to be very important for.

the Americans going forward. The French are, of course, very eager to reverse the losses that they had suffered before. And the following year, the Americans will also be joined by the Spanish, who had sustained losses too. And the Spanish, for example, and quite vividly, had lost Florida, a region which is now so central to the United States and every way politically and economically and so on. So Florida is a good example of a place that, you know, didn't ever have the kind of colonial apparatus or population that Georgia to its north did and wasn't really in play, as it were, as a colony that would join the revolution. But it was a place that was in British hands and where a lot of American patriots and loyalists alike used it as a sort of base for

operations of the Spanish, for instance, were very eager to get Florida back, which would have connected up with all of their other possessions in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. So these European And human powers had been, in one way of looking at it, in effect, waiting for their moment when it seemed like it made sense for them to go all in with the Americans, to throw in the military resources, to throw in the money, and to, above all, recognize the independence of the United States. I say above all, because from the American vantage point, that's critical. Once France, once Spain recognize American independence, it suggests that any future

peace is not going to be one in which the United States suddenly backtracks on that. not mistaken, the Americans get Florida in exchange for Havana, which was lost to the Spanish in the Seven Year War. The British get it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's sort of like major swapses going on. This is almost a rebalancing of powers, though, and it sets the scene for what arguably will be the grand finale of this face-off, which will be the Battle of Yorktown. So take us into the Battle of Yorktown and how it is decisive. And one name we've not mentioned, which will be resonant to people who followed our Empire series, even when we're talking about India, is Cornwallis. So just talk us through why Yorktown is as important and decisive as it turns out

to be. Although George Washington remains the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from start to finish of the war, the British side has quite a lot of command changes throughout. And there's the house at the beginning of the war, there's General Sir Henry Clinton later. There are various subordinate generals who are incredibly important, including John Burgoyne, who surrenders at Saratoga, and Marquess Cornwallis, who's an important officer in the Southern campaign, which is what the British turned to after Saratoga. The British, in a third strategic move, attempt to invade the South, that is Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, hoping that there they will, again, be joined by tons of loyalists. Georgia, in fact, had skewed so strongly toward Britain that it didn't even

send delegates to the first Continental Congress back in 1774. Georgia was the newest of the colonies. It was in terms of white population, relatively small, large enslaved population, very plantation heavy. It most closely resembled some of the West Indian colonies that didn't rebel. So there's a big effort to go down to the south, launch a campaign. The British successfully take the cities of Savannah and Charleston, want to go into Virginia, and this fighting really preoccupies them for the years after Saratoga. Now, the hope is that this will all come to a head by capturing Virginia, knocking out the whole sort of American South, the British throughout from 1776 onward, holds onto New York City. So, you know, they want to link in a different kind of way, this time,

across the Mid-Atlantic. And various branches of British military activity are sort of moving through the south, the largest of which is helmed by Cornwallis. So in the years immediately following Saratoga, the British sort of lose their direction in the north. And it's a period of mucking around in the Philadelphia area, fighting in upstate New York, you know, bit of this, bit of that, but they redirect quite strongly to adopt a southern strategy. The goal of this campaign is to capture the states in particular of Georgia and South Carolina, where they think they're going to get lots of loyalists to come and support them. And in fact, they do successfully capture the cities of Savannah and Charleston, which are the two largest ports in the south. They launch campaigns

into the interior. There's a lot of fighting in these years, kind of 1779, 1780 in the back country, frontiers of all of the states between militias. And it's here, by the way, that a lot of these tales of brutality come from from those campaigns in the South. But all of this fails to really add up to a truly coherent strategy, except for some basic idea that they have, that they'll try to knit together what they have at the South with what they have further north in the form of New York City. And it culminates in 1781 with an idea that, an army under Charles Marquist Cornwallis will march up into Virginia, which despite having been one of the key starting points of the revolution in terms of ideology, and of course the place

from which Dunmore had fled in 1775, had really not been the side of much fighting at all in the war. So Virginia comes into it in 1781, 1781, the British march up and are fighting, here and there and moving along and hoping that in one of these many efforts that the British constantly have to try to join forces up, that somehow the troops or the naval power in New York can join the folks in Virginia and can knock out the Americans. What ends up happening, however, is completely the opposite. Corn Wallace, again, with his men, picked off and much the way that Bergoin had found on the Saratoga campaign, all of these little skirmishes, one after another after another, just completely degrading British strength and, of course, giving confidence to

the Americans. Cornwallis ends up having to camp somewhere, hoping for and waiting for reinforcements. And the place that he ends up is near the former Royal Capital of Williamsburg, Virginia, in a peninsula called Yorktown. Which was a deep water port where he's meant to sort of hunker down and sort of hunker down and fortify himself, right? He is. It's a terrible place, though, to be digging down because it's on a peninsula and surrounded by water. And it means that if an army comes in behind you, you can just be stuck. Yeah, you're stuck. It just pushed into the deep blue sea. It just seems daft. So Cornwallis is sitting there in Yorktown, which he knows is a terrible position. I mean,

you know, he's an experience generally. He knows it's a bad place to be. Isn't he ordered to do so by some idiot commander called Clinton, who's his boss? Oh, I don't know. His boss tells him to do it. And his boss promises to send him manpower from New York. So Cornwallis is sitting there in Yorktown. He's building fortifications. He's doing all the right things.

And he's waiting for the troops to come from New York. And in fact, you can read his correspondence with Clinton in the British National Archives. You have to go into a special room to read it because I suppose they're sort of like they want to keep special secure eyes on it. But, you know, turning the pages, it's quite striking to see the alarm mounting in this man's words, you know, because he knows he's totally vulnerable sitting there. And he says to Clinton at some point, you know, if you don't send me troops, I'm going to be totally lost. Of course, I should say that they're all sort of covering their own asses because they're worried about what's going to happen when they lose and who's going to take the fall. So Cornwallis wants to blame Clinton and Clinton wants to blame Cornwallis. In any event, the point is that rather than having these British forces join, Cornwallis finds himself in an impossible position where Washington in this fast, rapid march through Virginia comes by land and the French Navy comes by sea and Cornwallis is completely locked in. And there's also French troops. And so the whole thing, he's completely surrounded and he ends up having to march out in October 1781,

surrendering an entire British army to the Americans. And what's interesting is that quite a lot of these people then go on to form the second British Empire in India, not only Commonwealth, but Lord Lake, for example, who's one of the key military figures in British Indian history is one of the others who have to surrender at Yorktown. So all these guys march out to live another day, but it's a very, very humiliating moment. There's a great cartoon by the British satirist James Gilray, which shows two kind of military camps with a big snake coiled around them. And it's called the American Rattlesnake. And out of its mouth comes a speech bubble, which says, two armies have I thus bergoined, meaning referring to bergoin from Saratoga. So it's Saratoga in Yorktown. There's a piece of folklore that the British marched out to the tune from the fifers. The world turned upside down, a popular tune at the time.

And I don't think this is true, but it's a nice little vignette because the idea that this American David had defeated the Goliath was really quite startling, but that is what happened. I mean, also just said that Lord North, when he receives the news, says, oh, God, it's all over. Another detail of this is that for the actual surrender, Cornwallis couldn't bear to do it himself, basically. So he sent out his own second in command to hand over his sword. The protocol is you'd hand over your sword and then you'd have the sword handed back to you. The second in command sense is going to hand over the sword, but George Washington refuses to take it because, hey, he's not going to meet with a second in command. So he puts his second in command on the ground, Benjamin and Lincoln, to take the sword instead.

And so it ends up being a case where, to the extent that Washington had felt slighted earlier by the British officers, he's able to get his own back in this moment. There is a poetry about this, that it ends in Virginia for Washington, that he's marching, you know, through his own sort of lands to boot the British out for the final time from his own lands. and the world is turned upside down. We're going to end it here. Join us for the next episode and the last episode

in this mini-series of Empire as we look at how a baby nation starts to grow and forge an identity for the future. And if you want to hear all the episodes, join the Empire Club, sign up at EmpirePoduk.com. Till we meet again, though, it is goodbye for me, Anita Arnan.

Goodbye for me, William Durenpool.