 For the next four and a half hours of lectures, we're going to have the privilege of listening to George Smith, who I mentioned all of our speakers are somewhat interdisciplinary. George in particular is, in fact, he used to give the Ethics of Liberty lectures here and could probably give about all of the lectures. We're pleased to have him working on American history over the next four and a half hours. George is a former director of the Forum for Philosophical Studies, and he was a former associate editor of the Academic Associates Book News. He's been a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, and he lectures at their conferences on a regular basis. He is a prolific writer, having contributed to Reason Magazine, Libertarian Review, Book News, Journal of Libertarianism, The Case Against God, which was published in 1974. And he is working, or will soon have published a major work on voluntary education that he's co-authored with Jack Hyde. He's also editing a book of revolutionary pamphlets, Cato's Letters, for the Cato Institute, and has received a grant to write a book on the theory of justice. So with that, by way of background, I'd like to welcome George Smith. Thank you. We have a lot of material to cover. I want to give you a brief idea of how I plan to cover it. I'm not going to give you a who crossed what bridge, when kind of history, the kind of history you could get as easily from reading a Barnes and Noble Outline series. Rather, what I shall be doing is concentrating on intellectual history, the history of ideas. And specifically, I'll be concentrating on those areas of intellectual history in America, which I believe to be a particular interest to libertarians. There are a great many libertarian themes throughout American history, especially in early American history. And it's those kinds of themes that I wish to develop. I'll be spending most and probably all of the first lecture on the American Revolution. And a good deal of that will be devoted to the ideological background of the American Revolution. The second lecture, if we're on time, will take us up through the Civil War. And the third lecture will take us from the post-Civil War period up through the Progressive Era. That's how the theory is. Let's see how it works out in practice. Now, to begin the discussion of the American Revolution, I would like to read to you a brief quotation, a very famous quotation, by John Adams, who, as you know, was the second president of the United States. This is an interesting passage, and it comes from a very interesting correspondence. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were friends, and they were collaborators in the American Revolution. Subsequent to the successful completion of the American Revolution, especially when Adams became president, they became rather bitter political enemies. John Adams was in power when the Healing and Sedition Acts were enforced, which were aimed primarily at the Jeffersonian Republicans. I'll be dealing with that later. However, after Adams retired from the presidency and after Jefferson had served his two terms, they initiated a very famous correspondence, which went on for some time, where these two old revolutionaries reflected back on the meaning of the American Revolution. And John Adams philosophically inclined, as was Jefferson, in 1815 wrote a famous letter to Jefferson, where he reflected on the meaning of the American Revolution. Here's what Adams said in this famous passage. Quote, what do we mean by the revolution? The war, that was no part of the revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was affected from 1760 to 1775 in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington. Close quote. This assessment of the American Revolution, that the real American Revolution was a revolution in ideas and that this revolution was successfully completed before the war even began, was an assessment shared by Thomas Jefferson and other American Revolutionaries as well. And I think it tells us a couple of things. It tells us first how these people saw the American Revolution, and it tells us secondly, the extremely high regard they had for ideas and the role of ideas in social and political change. And if there is a general characteristic of all of the revolutionary writers during this period, it has to be their extremely high regard for the importance of principles and the importance of ideas. Let me give you just two other brief examples of this. Thomas Paine, you've probably all heard of, a very important writer, the author of Common Sense, which had much to do with sparking the Declaration of Independence, wrote, and this is after the revolution, but it's really irrelevant because this reflects Paine's attitude all along, he wrote in his work, agrarian justice, quote, an army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. It will succeed where diplomatic management would fail. It is neither the Rhine, the channel, or the ocean that can arrest its progress. It will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer. Close quote. Now those are presumably good principles, good ideas. Listen now to Thomas Jefferson on the effect of bad principles, bad ideas. Jefferson, as many revolutionary writers, had a particular dislike for the writings of David Hume and William Blackstone, the famous English legal jurist. And he regarded the writings of these men for various reasons. He considered both of them to be Tories and anti-revolutionaries to be extremely harmful to American readers. And this will give you an idea of how harmfully thought these people were. Now I dare say, I don't think Jefferson was exaggerating in this statement. It sounds quite remarkable when you consider what he says. Jefferson wrote in 1814, in truth, Blackstone and Hume have made Tories of all of England that are making Tories of those young Americans whose native feelings of independence do not place them above the wily sophistries of a Hume or a Blackstone. These two books, he argues, but especially the former, have done more towards the suppression of the liberties of man than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will stand loaded before the judgment seat of his maker, close quote. Now that may sound a bit harsh on poor Blackstone and Hume, but this again illustrates the crucial importance of ideas, the high regard, the high esteem that these revolutionaries held for ideas, regarding wrong ideas, destructive ideas, as being even more destructive than the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. That's quite a statement. Granting that the American Revolution was, in many respects, a revolution in ideas, what more specifically do we mean by that? And secondly, where did these ideas come from? They just didn't spring up out of nowhere. OK, taking the first question, what do we mean or what did Adams and Jefferson mean when they talked about a revolution in ideas? It's fair to say that around 1763, which marked the end of the Seven Years War, which I'll be discussing later, marked the end of the French dominance in America and Canada, the colonials, for the most part, saw themselves as loyal British subjects. There was not really much radical opposition to British rule at this period. In fact, there was a good deal of gratitude to the British for driving the French threat out of North America. And yet, within a span of some 12 or 15 years, there were a good many Americans who were willing not only to resist the mother country, but to take up arms against it. Now, this is an extraordinary change when you think about it. Within a span, depending on how you date it, from 12 to 15 years, we see a transition from loyalty to Britain to outright armed opposition to Britain, from regarding the British monarchy as a legitimate sovereign in the American colonies to regarding it as a usurper and subject to violent rebellion. Now, that is a dramatic shift in attitude within that short span of time. And Adams was quite correct in pointing out that this was an ideological shift. What accounts for it? Where were the ideas? What was the root of these radical ideas that led so quickly to an American feeling of the justification of revolution? Well, I can't give a whole lecture on the ideological background. All I'm going to do is run through some things very quickly and try to then break down the basic ideas that underlay this radical ideology. It's very libertarian, as you will see. Libertarians have a good deal of affinity with this late 18th century way of looking at the world in general and looking at politics in the state in particular. Now, I've put some secondary sources on the top board. I may not even be mentioning these. I just put them up there for your information if you care to look some references up. And I've put some more primary sources on the bottom board. These are some of the early writers who were influential on the American revolutionaries. Let me give you a brief background in terms of what is meant by the common wealthman tradition or the radical Whig tradition, which is where these ideas came from. The common wealthman tradition refers to what was known as the common wealth period during the Puritan Revolution. This was the revolution led by Oliver Cromwell against Charles I, which led eventually to the beheading of Charles I by the Puritans. Now, there was a brief period. This is in the late 1640s, early 1650s. There was a brief period known as the common wealth period, where you had the long parliament sitting. This was later dissolved by Cromwell, and he took over more or less in a one-man rule known as the protectorate. In 1660, you have the restoration of Charles II. You have the restoration of the monarchy, the stewards to the throne of England. But this period of the common wealth period was looked back upon by later radicals as a very, very significant period in world history. It was during this period that many of the early libertarian radicals wrote and flourished. Among the earliest of these were a group, which I think we can safely say constituted the first self-conscious libertarian movement that we know of in Western civilization. This group was known in general as the levelers. There are many figures associated with this group. The best two known probably are Richard Overton and John Lilburn. They wrote primarily in the 1640s, early 1650s. They fought on the side of Cromwell in the Puritan Revolution. John Lilburn, for example, had spent a good many years in prison under the stewards. They then turned against Cromwell when he became very authoritarian. They turned against the Long Parliament as well. They insisted that the ideals of the revolution be implemented. They were very much in favor of private property. They were against government privilege, government monopoly. Down the line, they read pretty much like minimal government advocates today. They had a very good libertarian program. They were strong natural rights advocates also. Lilburn found himself then imprisoned under Cromwell. This happens in a lot of these sorts of revolutions. The radicals end up being imprisoned. So they did not fare well, but they set the tone for the Commonwealth ideology that was to follow. You have later writers like James Harrington, Henry Neville. Writers that are important, but I won't deal with. The next really important figure is Algernon Sidney. Now, Algernon Sidney's book, and by the way, he came from the Commonwealth period, was eventually executed by the stewards for sedition on the basis of a manuscript they found, which was later published posthumously called Discourses Concerning Government. Sidney, the significance of Sidney was he was widely read in the colonies, very much admired, and he was called Sidney the martyr, because he was considered a martyr for liberty. And the significance of Sidney's work, although it's far less well known today than John Locke's, is that he regarded violent revolution not only as a right, but as a duty when oppression becomes insufferable. So the significance of Sidney is he was regarded as the philosopher of revolution, because he had a very elaborate and well-defined theory of legitimate revolution. Now, going to a name that's more familiar, we have John Locke writing around the same period. His second Treatise of Government becomes, as I'm sure you all know, one of the most read and most influential works concerning natural rights and contract theory of government on the American colonials as well. Finally, there is the collection of essays known as Cato's Letters, after which Cato Institute is named. And this is perhaps least known to lay persons, although it's well known to scholars. But Cato's Letters provides an essential link to understanding how these abstract philosophical works filter down to the common population in America and in England. After all, people then weren't that much different than people today. And the common man in the 17th and 18th centuries didn't generally read the more abstract philosophical works like Algernon, Sydney, and John Locke. Where, then, did he get his ideas? Well, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon were a team of common wealthmen, or they were also called radical Whig writers, in the early 1700s in England. And they published a series of articles in the London Journal called Cato's Letters. They published under the pseudonym of Cato. Cato was the name of a famous Roman senator who, rather than submit to the tyranny of Caesar, committed suicide. Cato was viewed by these individuals as a paragon of Republican virtue, a person who would rather die than to submit to governmental tyranny. And this is where the name Cato came from. The significance of Cato's Letters is that it translated the philosophy of Algernon, Sydney, John Locke, and this radical Whig tradition generally. It translated it into more popular terms and related it to the issues of the day, attacking the British government. Almost immediately as these letters appeared in the early 1720s, they were reprinted in many, many, many American newspapers. They are commonly reprinted throughout the period from the late 1720s all the way up to the American Revolutionary Period. You find Cato's Letters in most American libraries during this period. You find Cato's Letters quoted again and again and again. There's little doubt, but that probably many Americans learned their radical ideology from their reading of the journalistic style in Cato's Letters. This is very well pointed out by Bernard Balin in his very important book called The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. There is also, I don't think I put it up there, an edited version of Cato's Letters by David L. Jacobson called The English Libertarian Heritage, which is a rather nice selection of Cato's Letters. Now with that chronological background, what can we say about the ideas of this tradition? Well, I want to run through five or six categories quickly indicating what some of the essential principles of this tradition were. First of all, there was the idea of natural rights. Now Roy has discussed natural rights philosophically. I'm not going to do that. I just want to indicate that a strain that runs throughout this entire tradition is the concept of natural inalienable rights. Let me give you just a few examples. It's interesting to note that these radical Whig writers and later the American Revolutionary writers did not just talk about natural rights. They had a distinctive way of putting that idea, that concept. They usually formulated it in terms of self-proprietorship or self-ownership. That is, they had a property conception of rights, a proprietary theory of rights. And the idea of self-ownership or self-proprietorship as a distinctively libertarian approach to rights emerges very early in this literature. It emerges in the writings of the Levellers in the 1640s. Let me give you one example. The Leveller Richard Overton, whom I mentioned previously, in a pamphlet entitled, An Arrow Against All Tyrants, written in 1646, said the following. Now, the wording here is a bit antiquated, but listen to the type of phrasing that he uses and the conception of rights that he has. Quote, to every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any. For everyone as he is himself, so he hath a self-propriety, else could he not be himself? And on this, no second person may presume to deprive any of, without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Close quote. A very good, concise statement of the Leveller conception of natural rights formulated in terms of self-proprietorship. This idea of property in one's person as the basis for the natural rights theory was clearly put later by John Locke in his Second Treaties of Government when he wrote that, quote, every man has property in his own person. This nobody has any right to, but himself. Close quote. Now, this sort of theory of proprietary theory of rights translates all the way into the American Revolutionary period. If you read, for example, some of the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Madison in particular when he argues against sabbatarian laws, that is laws restricting certain types of activities on Sundays, bases his argument on what he calls the property of a person in his own time. And these arguments are often cast in these terms. Freedom of religion was defended by referring to property in one's conscience. That is, moral jurisdiction, the right to say how one's conscience shall be used, which shall be done with it. This is what was meant by property in such and such. Now, the idea of self-ownership becomes extremely important in later American history during the anti-slavery abolitionist crusade in the 1800s. I won't be getting into that now. That'll be the subject of another lecture. But I just wanted to point out that this idea of self-ownership becomes extremely important all throughout American history in the libertarian movement. The libertarians were at the vanguard of the anti-slavery movement. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you were to offer a moral argument against slavery, what would it be? Well, slavery is essentially the ownership of one person by another, the claim of property rights in another person. The clearest moral objection to that is to say that one cannot own a slave, one cannot own another person, because everyone is a self-owner. And therefore, slavery was viewed as a kind of theft, theft on a grand scale. That's why slave owners were commonly condemned as, quote, man steelers. They were viewed as thieves. That is, they stole an individual's liberty and an individual's autonomy. OK, so much for the idea of self-ownership. The second major theme that is at least implicit throughout much of this early writing but becomes explicit after the 1770s is the idea of what we now call spontaneous or unplanned order. Now this is a concept that's usually discussed by economists. The idea that, for example, a free market brings about results that are the result of human action but not the result of human design. In fact, this idea of spontaneous or unplanned order has far many more implications than simply in economics. It has implications for political theory as well. This was evident to the early opponents of monarchy in England, because whenever these people would object to monarchy or whenever they would attempt to change the form of government under which they lived, what do you suppose the answer was that they got, in essence? Well, the answer they got or the reply they got was, well, look, we can't do away with this government. Granted, it may have some problems. But if we got rid of this government, chaos would result. Social chaos would reign. So as bad as things may be, this government, this form of government, this regime, is absolutely necessary to preserve social order. That has been the stock and trade answer of every government which attempts to resist any sort of revolutionary change. That without them, society would collapse into social chaos. So the opponents of monarchy had to address this problem. They had to address the question, could a society eliminate a monarch without collapsing into some kind of social chaos? And to answer this question, they needed really some concept of spontaneous order. That is, an order that could arise from the free interaction of individuals without the authoritarian hand of a government planning things. Now, this sort of conflict becomes evident, even as early as Algernon Sidney in his book Discourses Concerning Government. Here's what Sidney says about the argument that you couldn't go away with a monarch because a monarch is essential for social order. Sidney said, quote, stability is only worthy of praise when it is than that which is good. No man delights in sickness or pain because it is long or incurable, nor in slavery and misery because it is perpetual. Much less will any man in his sense commend a permanency in vice and wickedness. He, meaning the defender of monarchy, must therefore prove that the stability, the social stability he boasts of, is in things that are good or all that he says of it signifies nothing. Close quote. Now, Sidney is actually making a different point here. He's not really arguing for spontaneous order, but it's an important point nonetheless. What he's saying basically is this. He's saying, true, governments can provide a kind of order, but so does a concentration camp. You get order in a concentration camp. That's really not the issue whether or not you have some sort of regimented order. The real question is, is it a good order? What is the value judgment we pass regarding that kind of order? So it's not a matter that we can simply look out in the world and have value-free conceptions of order. We have to pass value judgments on the kind of order. If your goal was simply some sort of visible coherent order, then why not make the world into one vast concentration camp? Now, the defenders of the American and the French revolutions found themselves also accused of disintegrating the fabric of social order. Now, I'm going to be dealing with a little bit, for a few minutes, with Thomas Paine's work called The Rights of Man, part two. And here I'm dealing, again, with a post-revolutionary writing. This is a work that was written concerning the French Revolution, which began in 1789. So we're dealing with the post-American revolution period. But again, it reflects, I think, very well the idea of spontaneous order that was prevalent among these writers. Now, I don't know how much you know about Thomas Paine, but if you know anything, you probably know the engage in a very famous debate with an English quig named Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke had written a scathing attack on the French Revolution called Reflections on the Revolution in France. And Paine had replied to Burke in his Rights of Man, part two. And much of the debate between Burke on the one hand and Paine on the other had to do with the role of the monarchy in France in preserving social order. And in responding to Burke, Paine gave what I think is the clearest expression in this period of time on the idea of a natural order, a spontaneous order. And this is how he put it. Great part of that order, which rains among mankind, is not the effect of government. It had its origins in the principles of society and in the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government. And it would exist if the formality of government was abolished. Let me interrupt here and point out the significance of that statement. It existed, its social order existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished, a very radical claim that you have social order even if you had no government. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man and all parts of a civilized community upon each other create that great chain of connection which holds it together. In fine, Paine concludes, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government. Close quote. Now, in concluding his argument towards the end, he said, a great part of that which is called government is mere imposition. He argued the true social order depends on the laws of mutual and reciprocal interest. But governments argued Paine, through the imposition of force, destroy this natural cohesion. These are Paine's words. Consequently, again quoting Paine, government so far from being always the cause or means of order are often the destruction of it. Close quote. Now, I hope I didn't go by that so fast that you missed the significance of what Paine is saying. It's very important. He's saying in reply to Burke, he's saying, look, Edmund, you and I have different concepts of order. You are saying that you require this strong centralized French government for order. I am saying to you that there is a natural order that exists from the mutual interaction of individuals in a marketplace, this natural spontaneous economic order, and that governments, far from being the preserver of this kind of order, are more often than not the destroyers of it. So government is often an impediment to social order, putting it in more modern economic terms when government intervenes, it disrupts the economy, it disrupts the natural spontaneous order, and causes all sorts of dislocations. This is essentially what Paine was getting at. Now, let's move on to another general idea that these people had. This was, the third thing is a certain conception of the danger of power, and by power here, I mean political power. All throughout this writing, from the very earliest to the very latest writing in this radical Whig tradition, one finds constant references throughout to the dangers of political power. The issue of power versus liberty was seen by these writers as the fundamental political issue throughout the history of mankind. There were those who wished to live in peace, live in peaceful interaction, live in liberty, and there were those who wished to gain power for themselves through the instrumentality of the state. Let me give you a sample of Cato's letters and how they approach this subject, just to give you an indication of, and there are literally hundreds more passages like this that you could get. But here's what Cato's letters had to say about the nature of power, meaning political power. Power is naturally active, vigilant, and distrustful, which qualities in it push it up upon means and expediences to fortify itself, and upon destroying all opposition and even all seeds of opposition and make it restless as long as anything stands in its way. It would do what it pleases and have no check. Now because liberty chastises and shortens power, therefore power would extinguish liberty and consequently liberty has too much cause to be exceedingly jealous and always upon her defense. Close quote. This is the idea that liberty has to maintain a constant vigilance over power to keep it from exceeding its proper bounds. Throughout the writing of this period, one finds references to the encroaching nature of power. One finds warnings that if you don't stop the encroachment of power right away, it will exceed its bounds until it suddenly subdues the whole. Power is sometimes depicted in the metaphor of a clutching or a grasping hand, or it's referred to as a cancer that eats away at the social body, or it's referred to as a ravenous appetite that devours all. Let me give you another passage from Cato's letters on this theme. Power is like fire. It warms, scorches, or destroys according as it is watched, provoked, or increased. It is as dangerous as useful. Its only rule is the good of the people, but because it is apt to break its bounds and all good government's nothing or as little as may be ought to be left a chance or the humors of men in authority. All should proceed by fixed and stated rules and upon any emergency new rule should be made. This is the constitution and this is the happiness of Englishman. Close quote. So here we have the idea of trying to limit power through some sort of written constitution. Sam Adams once said that, quote, the ambition and lust of power above the law are predominant passions in the breasts of most men. This idea was universally agreed to. It was agreed that power has a pernicious corrupting effect. Adams went on to say that it converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office. He said it is intoxicating and liable to abuse. This is again another theme that we find throughout this writing, that even the best men once they attain power are invariably corrupted by it. This was the idea in this tradition behind having very short terms of office, having what was called rotation in office, that is you couldn't serve a term more than one year. There were very tight controls in this tradition that when someone was elected they wanted him subject to recall. They wanted him not to be able to serve more than a year at a time. There were a lot of safeguards that were attempted to be put into place in this tradition to keep the corrupting effects of power from taking place. Now, let's move on to another basic theme very briefly. It follows from what I've said so far about rights and this way of looking at the dangers of power. You probably all know this so I won't spend much time on it. But the theory of government developed by this whole school is sometimes called a social contract theory of government. I refer to it personally as an agency theory of government. These individuals stated very clearly that government was in effect nothing more than an agent of the individual. That governments had no rights which were not specifically delegated to it by individuals. That governments could not have rights over and above the rights of individuals. I'll give you just one passage here. This comes from John Lilburn writing in the 1640s, he was a leveler and listen to how clearly Lilburn expresses this idea. This is a radical idea even for today let alone in the 1640s. Addressing the English parliament, Lilburn said quote, we possessed you with the same power that was in ourselves to have done the same for we might justly have done it ourselves without you if we had thought it convenient choosing you for avoiding some inconveniences. This was only of us but a power of trust. We are your principles and you are our agents. If you or any other shall assume or exercise any power that is not derived from our trust and choice thereunto that power is no less than usurpation and an oppression from which we expect to be freed. Close quote. An explicit statement that the relation between the individual and government is nothing more than a trust. It's a principle agent relationship and the only reason for it is one of convenience. And if the individuals decide that they can do the functions better themselves then they have the right to take back the power in their own hands from government. Well you can see the radical implications of this sort of theory. Now last couple of points that I want to make about general theories. One is a distinct and important theory of revolution. And I refer to this briefly regarding Algernon Sydney. I want to go through just briefly though what theory of revolution these people had. Now of course there are differences among these writers. I don't want to make out that from the 1640s all the way up to 1775 that everyone agreed on every point. They didn't. This is a general trend. This is a general tradition. And that's what I'm talking about. The theory of revolution actually was a fairly detailed theory. This comes out very clearly in Pauline Mayer's book From Resistance to Revolution which is a superb discussion of the ideology of revolution during this period of time. I'm going to put it just very simply. I'm going to skip over the details and just give you the outline of this theory. The theory was that in order to justify a revolution it wasn't enough to show that a government committed occasional acts of injustice. It wasn't enough to show that once in a while a government stepped out of line. To justify a revolution you had to show in effect a design to subvert the liberty of the citizens. You had to show what was called a conspiracy to undermine liberty. You had to show a regular pattern which indicated a design, a purpose to undercut the liberty of the citizens. Now, those of you who have read any of this literature during this period know very well that there's a good deal of talk about conspiracies. There's a good deal of talk about ministerial conspiracies. Conspiracies of George III and his ministers. And some historians have interpreted this as a kind of paranoia. These people were conspiratorially minded. They always saw conspiracies everywhere. Well, that was much in the tradition of the 18th century generally, but specifically for ideological reasons these people had to show not just isolated acts of injustice by the British government, they had to show a concerted and systematic conspiracy by the British government before in fact they could justify a violent revolution. Now, this thinking went through a number of different stages which Pauline Mayer discusses. I'll just give you an example of the sort of stages that this went through. In the 1760s, let us say 1764, 65 around the time of the Stamp Act crisis, the major predominant theory regarding what was happening with the British government, the theory held by the Colonials was basically that George III was a good king and there wasn't even much opposition to the parliament at that time. The theory predominant that was dominant then was the idea that the political appointees in the colonies, the colonial governors and their agents in the colonies for selfish reasons were sending back a good deal of false information to England and therefore the correct view, the facts were not getting back to the parliament and the crown. And during this period you have a lot of petitions from the Colonials in effect saying to the king, we think you're getting the wrong information, we wanna give you the straight facts. So there was this idea that it was not the king's fault, it wasn't even the parliament's fault. Later as you get into the early 1770s, 1770s you find a difference of perspective. Suddenly the parliament becomes more and more criticized but still the king himself is not criticized. Then you find the king's ministers, the advisors around the king, suddenly they are fingered as being the culprits. It's now argued that for their own selfish reasons they are giving the good king false information. And you keep, you see the escalation here in terms of theory, but none of this really justifies revolution at this point. It justifies resistance which was going on but not revolution. Okay then what happens around 75, 76? There's the appearance of Thomas Paine's common sense. Now you've all heard of Thomas Paine's common sense and how it sparked the Declaration of Independence, but maybe you don't know why it sparked the Declaration of Independence. Was it just that Paine had hopped everyone up and they got real excited? Well these radical pamphlets had been coming out for years and Paine's in some respects is not any more fired up than some of the previous ones. What was theoretically significant about Thomas Paine's common sense was that he in effect fingered the monarch. He in effect said George III himself is the culprit. And he went further than that. He said in general the institution of the monarchy itself should be abolished, which was a very, very radical step. And the real significance of common sense, the reason why it led from resistance to revolution was that it provided the last connecting link that justified a theory of revolution. These people took their theories very seriously and they were very concerned that they should not undertake a violent revolution until it was justified by their own principles. And when Paine convinced many people, many of the readers in the colonies, that in fact George III himself was an evil king and that the institution of the monarchy itself was an evil institution, then in their view violent resistance became justified. That is the theoretical significance of Thomas Paine's common sense. Now you can find this theory of revolution actually stated quite clearly in the Declaration of Independence. Sometimes people read the declaration as if it's just a nice polemical document, but actually it's a very philosophical document. And I want to illustrate that by quoting a passage from the declaration and I want you to listen to this philosophically. I want you to listen to it in view of what I have just said concerning the theory of revolution held by these people. Thomas Jefferson in this declaration wrote, quote, prudence indeed will dictate that government's long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, now here comes the long train idea, pursuing invariably the same object that is the same purpose, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such a government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient's sufferance of these colonies and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain, I notice it refers to the king specifically, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object, again a design, at the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. Then the specific grievances are listed against George III. So you see this theory comes out even in the documents meant for public consumption. It's hard to communicate exactly how ideologically concerned these people were. As I said before, they took their principles very, very seriously. Now, in conclusion, I want to mention on this ideological aspect, I want to cover something which is a bit more amorphous. It's hard to pin down. It's what could perhaps best be described as an attitude. I mean, we know that during this period there was virtually no government by today's standards. I mean, if you look at the, it's ridiculous. You have people like Jefferson complaining about big government, but even what he called big government would be considered almost anarchy today. There was clearly a very low tolerance that these people had for taxation and other sorts of government intrusion. An example of this, but what is the difference? What sort of mindset did they have? What did they regard as, say, too high of taxation? An example of this jumping ahead in time, after Jefferson was out of office and Madison was involved in the War of 1812 with Britain, Jefferson was speculating on how high taxes could be raised in an emergency wartime situation. Now, you understand what he's talking about here. He's talking about emergency war taxes. This is just to fight the war. What do you, he's saying to Madison, how high do you think we could raise the taxes just for the duration of the war without throwing the country into a tax rebellion? Jefferson speculates that he thinks that maybe they could get by with a 1% general tax and maybe even as high as one and a half percent. But he's certain that anything above that will simply not be stood for and that they'll find they'll have a revolution on their hands. Well, that tells you something about the mindset of that period. We're talking about one and one and a half percent total tax in wartime as an emergency. In many cases, the only contact these people had with their government was in the form of a mail carrier. I mean, they didn't, you know, if you're out in the boondocks somewhere as a yeoman farmer, you hardly ever had any contact with the government at all. And therefore, when this fellow came around on his horse saying, you owe us such and such in taxes, you didn't tend to take it very well because you weren't used to this sort of thing. You hadn't been acclimated to this sort of tax pain. One quote I like to use, and unfortunately, this is not even a quote from an American, it's a quote from an Englishman, but it's around the same period of time. It's from the late 18th century. And as you may know, smuggling was rampant in both America and in England in violation of various customs laws. And I like this quote because although it's not American, it communicates very well what we might call the common man's attitude towards these various restrictions on trade that were put into place by the British. Now this is not a philosophical statement of free trade. This is not a philosophical statement of liberty. This is just a man who makes his living by smuggling. And indeed, whole towns in England made their living that way. And it was considered, they call themselves free traders. And it was considered a very respectable occupation. This is what I'm trying to communicate. These people who were smugglers who broke the law when the laws were unjust, saw themselves as perfectly justified. They had no sense of guilt or shame or wrongdoing in that. And this is illustrated very well by an English smuggler whose ship, whose smuggling ship had been confiscated on the high seas by an English revenue cutter. He wasn't aboard his smuggling ship at the time, but his men were captured and imprisoned. So this English smuggler wrote to the captain of the revenue cutter, which was called the Speedwell. And here's how this plain Englishman expressed his dissatisfaction with what had occurred. Quote, sir, damn thee and goddamn thy two pure blind eyes, I bugger thou death looking son of a bitch. Oh, that I had been there with my company for thy sake when thou tookest them men of mine on board the Speedwell cutter on Monday, 14th of December. I would drove thee and thy gang to hell where thou belongest thou devil incarnate. See, he's not very reticent or anything. I would drove thee and thy gang to hell where thou belongest thou devil incarnate. Go down thou hellhound into the kennel below and bathe thyself in that sulfurous lake that has been so long prepared for such as thee. For at his time the world was rid of such a monster. Thou art no man but a devil, thou fiend or Lucifer. I hope that will soon fall into hell like a star from the sky, there to lie unpityed and unrelentered of forever and ever which God grant of his infinite mercy, amen. So there you have kind of a common man's view of customs officials, sound view. Now, with about half the time taken up, I'm going to leave the ideological side and discuss somewhat the more historical or real world side of the American Revolution, what it entailed, it's good and it's bad points. I'll necessarily be doing this in very general terms but I think there's some important points that can be made. Okay, what really started the whole revolutionary way of thinking in the colonies? Well, I referred to this briefly before in its common knowledge. Basically, you have in English history a period which was called by Edmund Burke, salutary neglect. Now what this meant was that for many years, for many decades, the English government, although it had many mercantilist regulations on the books which restricted the trade, restricted trade in the colonies, these restrictions were for the most part ignored for many decades. Now this policy of salutary neglect really occurs or becomes entrenched, shall we say, under the administration of Robert Walpole, who was first lord of the treasury from 1722 to 1742. Now Walpole was kind of a complex figure. He was viewed by many and in fact, Cato's letters were written in sometimes an opposition to Walpole. Walpole was viewed as the quintessential corrupt politician because basically he liked to live well, he got into office as the first lord of the treasury which they didn't have a prime minister then but it's the equivalent of being the prime minister. It was the most important cabinet position. And Walpole, basically what he did, he believed in free trade, he thought free trade benefited both the colonies and the mother country. He was, he disliked war, he knew that protectionism led to war but he didn't try to go in and reform the government particularly. He didn't go in and try to repeal these various restrictive mercantilist regulations. He didn't try to repeal the navigation acts, for example. So what did he do? Well, he went in, he put his whole family just about in various important offices, particularly the offices pertaining to the regulation of colonial commerce and he just gave them a nice cushy salary and they just kind of didn't do a lot. They just kind of sat around on their hands. And in this way, although the law stayed on the books, they were not enforced. And the colonials over a period of years grew very used to having these unenforced laws. The laws that were enforced, they could usually, the high customs duties, they could simply bribe a customs official and get by for only a fraction of what the law would say they have to pay. So the colonials from a period, for a period of many decades, were not used to having these restrictions enforced. And this was what was, Edmund Burke called a period of salutary neglect. That the laws were neglected and Burke thought it was very salutary that they were neglected because it commerce prospered as a result between Britain and the colonies. Now what happened to change this? Well what happened to change it was basically what is known as a seven years war. The seven years war was actually a world war of sorts. In America it was called the French and Indian War. But as far as it pertains to the North American continent, it was basically a war between Great Britain on the one hand and France on the other, a war for empire. It officially ended in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris, although the fighting was in effect over by 1760. The results of it were a gigantic victory for the British, the British Empire. The French were thrown out of North America, most of India and other parts of the world. It was a devastating loss for the French Empire and the most glorious victory up to that point for the British Empire. And it really put Britain on the map as the great world colonial empire. But this great victory had a very, very, very high price. It more than doubled the national debt of England. England was already very much in debt and this doubled their national debt. So it was a very serious political problem in England as to how to pay off this enormous war debt that they incurred during this long seven year war. They felt that they could not tax the English people more because they were already heavily taxed. And some of the hardliners in the British cabinet felt that the thing to do was to increase taxes in America or not even increase to implement taxes in America. Up to this point, there had been no real direct taxation in America by the mother country. Great Britain had gotten its revenues from customs laws, not by taxation. And there were various plans and most of them you're probably familiar with through the period of around 1763 all the way up until 1775, there were various attempts to impose various sorts of taxes on the colonies. This is all pretty much common knowledge. One of the first was the so-called Revenue or Sugar Act and what this act did was actually cut the revenue on sugar and the importance of that was the importation of molasses in the colonies from the West Indies. It actually cut the revenue and the tax in half but it's insisted on a strict implementation. So you can see how much the salutary neglect, how much that had an effect because even cutting the tax in half but enforcing it strictly was considered onerous by the colonials because they never paid even half of what the law said they should pay. I should mention that these various acts, these revenue acts, had a rather serious impact on the colonies. The colonies themselves were feeling a post-war depression, particularly areas like Boston. They had during the Seven Years War this influx of British soldiers, they had a lot of industry created by that and when a lot of these soldiers left and for various other reasons, they found that some of their major cities went into severe depressions and Boston was among them and things like these revenue acts merely exacerbated that financial problem by taking more money out of the cities than was already to just add to their problems. The most famous act was the Stamp Act which was passed in 1765 under the administration of Grenville. Grenville was one of the hardliners along with Lord Halifax and some others in the early part of this. By hardliners I mean those British officials who were convinced that the colonial should really pay their fair share and we have to crack down on them. There are a bunch of lawbreakers, there are a bunch of ingrates because here we save them from the French threat and they aren't even willing to pay their share. Now the Stamp Act led to the Stamp Act resistance which is discussed in the excellent book by the Morgans, The Stamp Act Crisis. And the Stamp Act Crisis is perhaps the best way to illustrate in 1765 the methods that were used this early by the colonials to resist, not to revolt but to resist the imposition of these sorts of acts. Now this is where individuals like Sam Adams become very, very important because Sam Adams was really one of the brilliant strategists of the early period of resistance during the period from 1763 to 1775. Now what were the basic ways in which the colonials resisted the imposition of the Stamp Tax? Well first of all you have to understand what the Stamp Tax was. It was basically a tax on paper. That is to say anytime you use paper in the colonies whether it was for bills of lading and shipping for legal documents, whatever the paper had to be of a special kind imported from Britain to which was a fix to special stamp indicating that a tax had been paid on that paper. So it drastically affected the shipping industry thus bringing the ire of merchants. It also brought the ire of lawyers because of legal documents that you needed. And one thing you shouldn't do is probably get a lot of lawyers mad at you and because these people started writing very prolifically arguing against the right of Britain to tax America. Okay given that what did the colonials do basically in terms of strategy? Well what Sam Adams realized was that there had to be some type of organized opposition to the British to stop this. So this is where Adams in Boston organized what became known as the Sons of Liberty which was specifically organized to resist the stamp tax. How did the organized opposition work? Well first of all they had a propaganda wing and I'm not using propaganda in a bad sense here I simply mean that they wrote a lot of articles against it in various newspapers and such. But what they did and what they also did is they got non importation agreements among various colonial merchants. That is they got merchants in the colony not to trade at all with any British merchants until the Stamp Act was repealed. That ultimately was successful because the British merchants felt the pinch in England and put pressure on the English parliament to repeal the tax and that's what led to the repeal. But the most interesting in a way strategy they used was the use of organized mob violence and this is what I want to discuss briefly because this became a very important tactic throughout this whole period. I call it organized mob violence the opponents the English just called them insurgents and mobs, wild mobs but the interesting thing about this so-called mob violence is it was highly organized and for the most part very disciplined. What Adams did in his cohorts in Boston did and this was repeated throughout a number of other colonies like in New York and South Carolina. What they did was organize the townspeople and this included all strata of the townspeople included the upper intellectual types the merchants the street people and so forth. They organized the people into bands and here's to generalize somewhat here's basically the sort of thing that would happen. Say you've just been newly appointed stamp tax collector for Boston, right? You get up one morning you look out your window and there's a hill in the commons area and hanging on the hill is a figure in effigy and it's got a name on it and it's your name, right? And there's a bunch of people kind of chanting carrying signs around this figure hanging in effigy and they're chanting things like liberty, property and no stamp tax. Okay, pretty soon they come down to your home and they're obviously not very happy and they suggest that you resign your commission as stamp tax collector and you say no you can't do that you owe your duty to God and country so forth. So they leave. What they then do is go down where you've constructed this little building from which to administer your stamp tax and they engage in an old colonial pastime which was called pulling down the house. That is they simply pull down the building from which you were going to administer your stamp tax. They then return to your house and suggest that now you should resign and you still say no I can't do that. So then they make it very clear that your house is next. Usually you would, if you that time if you wouldn't renege you would flee with your wife and children and all the possessions you could carry and down comes your house. At that point you usually got the message. They did this a few times and pretty soon they didn't even have to pull down too many houses. It was made clear what would happen. Now I want to stress to the extent this was done there was a very much despised character named Thomas Hutchinson who for many years was the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Hutchinson had a long history of antagonism with the Boston radicals even going back long before the American Revolution. Well at one point during this crisis the mobs approached Hutchinson's house and actually tore down his house. They pulled it down. This is the governor of Massachusetts. He had a very sturdy house and took them a long time to disassemble it brick by brick. Historians look back on this and kind of go oh gosh it was such a nice house they shouldn't have done that. They destroyed some of his papers. They drank up all the wine in his very ample wine cellar. But for the most part all of these crowds could get out of hand from time to time. They were very well orchestrated. They did not for the most part involve any third parties who were innocent. They were aimed specifically at governmental officials who were directly involved in the implementation of this onerous stamp tax. That's the important thing to realize. This was not uncontrolled mob violence where they went around breaking windows and destroying property. They were very, very specific and directed. Moving ahead a bit in the so-called Boston Tea Party which happens in the 1770s when the East India Company has given a monopoly on tea in the colonies and they bring their first shipment in. Well of course you know what happens. It was a famous Boston Tea Party. But the way they did it is very interesting. Again it was very selective mob violence. Even to the point that when they had to go on ship and at some point get these sons of liberty type stressed as Indians had to go aboard a ship and had to break a lock to get in they replaced the lock because it was private property. I mean that's how careful they were. That's how concerned they were that the only object of their attack be the source of the injustice and that innocent persons or an innocent property should not be harmed. So that gives you again and this wasn't always true in practice because sometimes these people would get a little out of hand and once you get a mob going they're sometimes hard to control. But the remarkable thing about this period of mob violence during this resistance period is the extent to which it was very, very controlled and many historians have pointed this out. It's a very interesting facet of this period. Now with that brief indication I'm not going to go through all the revenue acts and so forth. I think that would be rather pointless. Let me just say that after the Boston Tea Party there was the so-called intolerable acts. The Port of Boston was blockaded by the British until indemnities were paid and various other repressive measures were put against Boston. And this is what basically fired up the Bostonians. It led to the attempt by the British Army to get the ammunition stores at Lexington and Concord which of course led to those battles. Then you have an escalation into a full scale war. What I want to do is just discuss in very general terms a few aspects of the American Revolutionary War. Some of the military aspects of it, why the British did not win or at least what the many scholars today think are the reasons the British did not win and finally some of the consequences of it and even some of the undesirable consequences of it. First of all to understand the American Revolution and the way it was fought, the way the British fought it, you have to understand something about the concept of warfare in the 18th century. This is called by historians today the period of civilized war. Now what do they mean by civilized war? Well they mean that owing to a number of factors, warfare in the 18th century had become relatively and I stress relatively civilized. In comparison to previous centuries where civilians were considered fair game, where foraging that is ravishing the countryside for supplies was considered perfectly acceptable as a means of supporting the army. This was commonplace for centuries and centuries throughout Europe. In the 18th century however things changed owing to various legal writers and of just war theory as well as to certain problems in terms of financing and a number of factors went into determining this. But the result was that you had highly disciplined armies in Europe who fought in very close drill formation using muskets and I'm sure you've all seen this in the movies where they line up in these close formation rows, maybe three deep and then they, one rule won't go down, the other rule will fire, they'll reload and they'll fire, they're using these muskets. Now these close formation, now if you've ever seen this you might think that's kind of a silly way to fight. Why would you stand out in an open field and shoot at each other like that? Well one reason was that there was a concern about keeping civilians out of it as much as possible, confining warfare to just uniform combatants. That was one of the good motives behind it. Another thing to realize is that there wasn't that much actual shooting that went on during a lot of these wars. The military manuals of the time stressed tactics and maneuvering. There was a lot of jockeying for position and it was relatively rare. It happened but it was relatively rare that you would have these open battles where you'd start shooting each other down in droves. That was to be avoided as much as possible. In many cases what you would find is that one army would outmaneuver the other and the other would simply surrender or leave the field and there wouldn't be an engagement. So sometimes these were decided without even so much as a shot being fired. Another reason for the close formation was that although the officers typically came from the heuristic classes in Europe, the soldiers themselves came from the common people. And many of these common people, some were volunteers but some weren't. And it's not easy to get anyone to stand up in front of a whole row of rifles and be shot at. In fact, between the French and the British during the Seven Years' War, there were reported cases of, for example, a gallant French officer saying to the British officer, your men can shoot first, right? And we'll shoot next and this gallantry. Of course the officers were standing off to the side, as you see, it was the poor common soldier here that had to take the bullets. See this was also one of the rules of civilized warfare is you don't shoot at the officers. The officers stand here and they direct and the soldiers shoot at each other. One of the reasons that the American fighters were viewed as such bad sportsmen is because especially the riflemen, their first rule of warfare was pick off the officers. The British viewed this as exceedingly bad taste and showed absolutely no sense of class at all. They really had a very low opinion of American fighting because they thought it was very barbarian. They'd sit in trees and shoot at you from hiding behind bushes. It was just very uncivilized. It was like Indians. They reminded them of Indian fighting and who could be more savage than Indians. In any case, you had to keep your men in pretty close formation because it's the only way to keep track of them. If you gave them all rifles and said, go out in the bushes, they're gonna desert. So the way you keep them from deserting is keep them in very close formation. One of the functions, and I'm serious about this, of the officer standing over the side was to shoot the first man who looked like he was gonna step out of line, break ranks. So you would be shot even in drills if you broke formation. So these tight drills were important for that. These tight formations were important for that reason as well. And finally, they were important because of the weaponry involved. The muskets that were used were extremely inaccurate in anything more than just a moderate range. A musket was virtually useless as a single weapon because you're talking about a smoothbore musket. We're not talking about rifles where you have this rifling inside the barrel that spins the projectile and then gives it more accuracy. You're talking about just a smoothbore musket. And they just tended to go every which way and you couldn't really hit much with them beyond say 50 or 60 yards. So the only way to have effective firepower was to mass your firepower in lines and shoot all at once. So here you would get a massive firepower that was effective, but the soldiers would not aim their guns. They simply point them in a general direction. There was no individual aiming of guns. And that was another reason for the close formation. There are other tactical elements that I can't go into here, but they're quite interesting if you wish to look into this area and examine the reasons for this sort of warfare. Okay, now what about, let's go back to the British view of the American way of fighting. The British had a very, very low opinion of American fighting capability. This went back to the Seven Years War where the Americans were not willing to be under the direction of British officers. They were kind of unruly. They wanted to go back to their farms to do the harvesting. They weren't willing to put up with long enlistments. There was a good deal about the independently minded American farmer, his attitude towards military service that was very contrary to the British way of thinking about the military. So you had these Jomon farmers, the Jeffersonian type farmers in America who saw themselves as free men. They were not conscripts and yet when they were fighting side by side with British soldiers, here you were dealing in many cases with conscripts. And you were dealing on the one hand that British soldiers could take several years to train. The farmer, he had just learned to shoot a rifle perhaps from early age and he was a good shot but he wasn't interested in a lot of military drill and training. And because of this, the British had a very low opinion of American fighting ability and certainly one of the reasons for a British failure to win is their understanding of American fighting capabilities. They really thought and they sincerely believe this, most of them did, that once they flashed their bannettes at the American rabble as they were called, they would simply flee and disperse and they could stop the revolution very quickly. This is why the British sent relatively few troops over to America. They didn't think it would really take that many to subdue the country. Plus they also underestimated the number of rebels there were. Like most people fighting a revolution against them, they were convinced that the revolutionaries were just a small cabal who were insurgents who were inflaming a bunch of other people but if you just exercise this core of rebels, say in Boston, the insurgents, you could then stop the whole revolution. The British underestimated the extent to which revolutionary fervor had spread throughout the colonies. Now, there was a conflict that sometimes not known among lay people in America as well concerning the way the war should be fought. Now this again is a whole topic in itself. I'll just give you the outlines. The major, there are basically two proponents of each view, two major proponents, one major proponent of each view on this. There was on the one hand, the school which held that the American army, the Continental Army, should model itself after European armies and tactics. That the Americans needed a real, highly trained, disciplined army just like the British had and this was the way to fight the British. The major theorist in this school, the major force behind this way of thinking was George Washington. George Washington was convinced that the Americans needed a permanent, full-time army with long-term enlistments, clear differentiation between the officers and the enlisted men because in the colonial militia there was no pay difference and the militia usually elected their own officers. He wanted a clear class distinction between the officers and the enlisted men for disciplinary reasons. He wanted severe, extremely severe punishment for deserters including, and they even countered his deserters, those men who wanted to go back home after their enlistment expired. If you signed up for six months or a year and you wanted to leave, they could lash you for desertion. In fact, the Continental Congress had to stop George Washington from inflicting his idea of punishment which would be like 50 lashes for various sorts of infringements. He had a very severe idea of punishment and this was not sitting very well with a lot of these farmer soldier types. Let's take the issue of enlistments. These people fighting in the Revolutionary War could not sign up for two or three year enlistments. They were farmers. They had crops that they had to harvest. The militia system which was the other model that I'll get to in a second, in that type of system you could sign up for maybe three months, maybe six months and you could go back home and tend to your family and your crops. And Washington seemed to have no real conception of this and therefore there were some very serious problems created by Washington's conception of how to fight a war. The other major school was the school that emphasized more the militia system rather than a regular army. The militia system goes back a long ways in American history. It goes back a long way in English history. Basically, the militia system represents the ideal of a citizen army. It is the idea that individual townspeople drill every once in a while and if in case of war they get together and form a military force to defend themselves. And after the war is over, after the need is no longer there, they disband and go back to their occupations. The militia system sometimes did have an element of conscription in them. They weren't purely libertarian in that sense. If you lived in a town, it was expected that you would do your particular share of military service. But they were nothing nearly as owners as we understand by later forms of conscription. And they were relatively easy to get out of. Now, the major proponent of this style of fighting was an individual named Charles Lee, General Charles Lee. He was basically third in command under Washington. He was a British officer who was sympathetic to the American cause and came over from England to fight on the side of the Americans. Now, I don't want to make out like Lee wanted nothing but a militia. Lee also wanted an army. He also wanted an army, a continental army. But there are several important differences. Lee thought that although an army was needed, it could basically learn what it needed to learn in just a few months rather than going through all these close drill formations that took European armies years to learn. He thought that it was suicidal for the most part for American soldiers to stand up in open field combat with British soldiers and fire exchange rounds and try to face up to a British bayonet charge. He thought this was absurd. He advocated more what in those days were called partisan warfare tactics. It's today what we would call guerrilla warfare. That is, hitting the supplied lines, hitting the stragglers, hitting the flanks that were straggling behind, hit and run tactics, not meeting the British in open combat for prolonged battle, but hitting and then retreating, hitting and then retreating, using your forces as effectively as possible in that manner. That was more the Charles Lee way of thinking about things. And he thought there was a way to combine the militia and the regular army in such a fashion as to use both effectively. Washington, on the other hand, had very little use for the militia system. He thought the militia were basically terrible fighters. And moreover, he had very little use for things like cavalry, which were very important in Lee's way of thinking for reconnaissance. And he had very little use for riflemen. Now this is another curious thing. There were rifles, of course, during this period. And they weren't just muskets. There were rifles. These back woodsmen in Pennsylvania, for example, were expert marksmen with rifles. I mean, they could hit something from hundreds of yards away. They were legendary in their use of rifles. Now you would think that would be an extremely valuable asset in a native army opposing the British because you could really do a lot of severe damage with these riflemen hiding in trees. Washington had a very low opinion of riflemen. He didn't, they were disorderly. They would come into a military camp. They would get drunk. They would be very disobedient. I mean, these are really back woodsmen's types. And they're not gonna take orders from some stupid lieutenant, right? They're gonna do pretty much what they wanna do. Washington thought that was just terrible. They have no discipline. And for the most part, he wanted to get rid of them. Washington made some terrible mistakes strategically in this regard. He was disliked by a lot of his men for a long time. In fact, it was a general consensus among many of the officers for a good period of time that Charles Lee really should have had the top job of military commander. They knew that Washington was basically a political appointee. He was appointed because the radicals wanted to bring Virginia into the revolution. Washington was a prominent Virginian. And they thought by appointing Washington as commander in chief, they would assure the cooperation of Virginia in the revolution. Washington didn't have that much military experience previous to that. And contrary to the often repeated stories about Washington that he was a very humble man and he didn't really want the position and had to be forced on him. You've all heard these stories, right? Well, one kind of cynical observer reported that Washington showing up at the Continental Congress before his appointment, he said, you know, here he is, George Washington kind of going, oh shucks, I don't want the job, you know, but if my country calls. Well, the cynical observer pointed out that Washington was the only person who showed up every day in full military array, thereby dropping a subtle hint that he would like to get a high military post. There are so many stories about Washington that we could go on forever about him. As a strategist, he wasn't particularly good. He learned as the war went on, but he suffered a string of disastrous defeats beginning with the Battle of Long Island. He was traced all the way by the British down through New Jersey. Virtually the only good battles he fought were the battles of Trenton and Princeton, which were fought very much along irregular lines. That's when they crossed the Delaware and surprised the Hessians. And that was done what on Christmas Eve, which was considered in very poor taste again by the European armies. Because on Christmas Eve, you don't fight, you get drunk, right? And so all the German mercenaries were drunk. Well, that was a good tactic on Washington's part. But apart from that, he lost virtually every other battle he fought. He lost the Battle of Brandywine, and then this goes on and on. In fact, it's been said that rarely has a military figure been so honored who's lost so many battles. He had very little to do in some respects with the military victories of the Continental Army. The real brilliant strategist, now there's several phases of the war which I'm not going into, but when it shifts to the last phase of the war, when it shifts from the North to the so-called Southern Campaign, the real brilliant strategist here was a man named Nathaniel Green who was actually a protege of Washington's, but a far better strategist. And Green was assisted by Daniel Morgan and his famous rifleman. And it was basically the tactics of Green fighting with inferior forces to the British that led to the eventual victory at Yorktown. Washington really had nothing to do with it. He just came down after the British were boxed in at Yorktown. What Green did, to put it very simply, was Green used these hit-and-run tactics that had been advocated by the partisan warfare advocates. He wouldn't really stand up to the British. He would kind of just wear them down through attrition, wear them down, wear them down. It was a very successful tactic. Another thing he did that was very significant at a battle called Cowpens in South Carolina was he utilized, well this is actually Daniel Morgan who did this, but it was their way of thinking. They utilized very intelligently the use of riflemen with the use of the regular army, that is, with the Continental Army. You see, one of the problems that the Americans had in fighting was that the British were expert in the use of bayonets. They were really expert in this. This was what they were most feared for. Oftentimes, when the British would charge, they wouldn't even load the rifles. They would, for example, when going up Bunker Hill, actually it was Breed cell, what we call the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British did not load the rifles. What they intended to do was get close enough so they could simply do a bayonet charge. Usually what happened with these muzzle-loading muskets is that you could get around or so off before the British line got to you, but they're so slow loading that you couldn't get a lot of shots fired within, say, 50 yards before the British finally got to you. There were some problems with rifles. They didn't, as opposed to muskets, they were a bit more unreliable. They didn't work well in wet weather. They tended to malfunction. They did take longer to load because the lead ball had to fit much tighter in the groove and therefore it took longer to stuff it down into the barrel. There were some problems with it, but essentially, the way the riflemen were used before and the reason Washington had a low opinion of them was that they could only get one round off essentially before the British bayonet attack would get to them and therefore they just take off and run rather than stand there and be killed by British bayonets. I mean, this was not a very soldierly thing to do in the eyes of Washington to just retreat. What Morgan did that was really brilliant was he put, for his first couple of lines, he used riflemen and told them fire one round off and then retreat as the British attack. He didn't expect them to stand there and get stabbed to death. So he used them intelligently and they mowed down a lot of Tarleton's Raiders, they were called, in the first couple of lines of fire and then they retreated as the British came after them. They had the regular army winning on the other side of a hill. The regular army then came over and made the British retreat and disarray. It was a very intelligent, it was a decisive victory and a very intelligent combinational use of the riflemen on the one hand and the militia and the regular army on the other. There are many more examples like that. We could do a whole military analysis, but that gives you a rough idea. Okay, now I gave some reasons already why the British did not win, the underestimating the American fighting ability and resolve, the number of American rebels and so forth. A few other things I might mention. Of course, is the entry of the French on the side of the Americans after the Battle of Saratoga. The French were decisive, particularly at the Battle of Yorktown because they stopped any British ships from getting in to resupply or to take away the British troops there. There were a number of other serious things that British did wrong. One thing they did was they resorted sometimes the foraging, that is they resorted to living off the countryside and sometimes they alienated their own loyalist supporters in the countryside. There were many pro-British supporters in the colonies, you understand. It's been estimated that up to a third of the colonials were pro-British, actively pro-British. Cities like New York were predominantly loyalists. Cities like Philadelphia had many loyalists in them. The question for the British was how could they best utilize this native fighting force, these loyalists on their side. They really did a bad job of it. They never were able to, first of all, they overestimated the number of loyalists and secondly, the loyalists they did have, they kept alienating through confiscating their goods, their property and so forth to fight the war, through foraging. Another mistake they made was they would go into a town, they would capture the town, the loyalists would come out in the support of the British but rather than garrisoning troops there, the British would take off in pursuit of Washington or someone and leave the loyalists who have now exposed themselves as being loyalists to suffer the revenge of the rebels in that particular town. The loyalists learned very quickly that when the British came in, you shouldn't be too quick to run up to them and say, hey, I'm on your side because they may take off very quickly. They didn't fortify, they didn't secure the towns that they captured in many cases and the loyalists simply got more and more disillusioned with the British army and we must also remember that the British didn't have that many of their own troops in America, they relied a good deal on mercenaries, particularly German mercenaries and the German mercenaries were particularly feared, they were considered savages and barbarians, they had little respect as many problems as there were with the British army, there were even more with the German mercenaries because they would really loot and pillage with a good deal of savagery, as did some of the Indians who also fought on the side of the British. Now, let's say, and finally about some of the effects of the Revolutionary War. Well, I think it's easy to point to the good effects. I mean, that is fairly common knowledge, so I'm not even gonna spend some time on that. It was a fight for liberty in many ways, but we have to remember that the Revolutionary War was a real war and more than that, it was a civil war. It was a war fought among people themselves. The British were involved in it, but there were a good many loyalists, there were good many neutrals, and there were a good many rebels. And these people, of course, were fighting against each other. And in civil wars, tend to be the most brutal and destructive of all wars because when you're fighting a civil war, you have the problem of enemies in your own midst. I mean, look at the problem, look at what they did to the Japanese and turning the Japanese on the West Coast during World War II. And that's with a population from a country that's a long ways away. Imagine a civil war where your next door neighbor might be an enemy agent or a potential enemy soldier. What does that require? It requires things like loyalties, which were imposed by both sides during the war. It requires things like committees to detect conspiracies, they had this, the rebels had this in New York. There were a lot of anti-libertarian features to the Revolutionary War. There was wide-scale confiscation by the rebel armies of property for fighting the war. There was brutality against various loyalists. If you were a loyalist, your property could be confiscated. The rebels, for the most part, did not recognize the idea of a neutral. This is one of the really sad parts of this. Some people, particularly the Quakers, the Philadelphia Quakers got caught up in the war. They were legitimately anti-war. They didn't take either side. They wouldn't allow their people to participate in the war. They wouldn't even allow their people to participate in the manufacture of war goods. They would exclude them from the church if they did so. Nonetheless, these people were viewed as essentially Tories by the Americans. Thomas Paine in his book, his papers on the crisis papers, has a good deal of condemnation of the Quakers saying, in effect, you're either for us or you're against us. We do not recognize the idea of neutrals. So one way of looking at the way a war is fought is to ask yourself, what is the fate of neutrals in that war? And in the American Revolutionary War, unfortunately, neutrals did not fare very well. There were a number of other effects of the war that were extremely harmful. There was what we might call the militarization of culture that always occurs in a war, the glorification of fighting, the sanctification of war heroes, and of war itself, which is an unfortunate aspect of the war. Perhaps more importantly, in a sense, is the centralization of government that inevitably occurs in any war and also occurred in the Revolutionary War. To fight a war, at least to fight it around regular warfare principles, that is with a centralized army, you need some sort of centralized government. And this is what happened. This is why the Continental Congress came into existence. And later, the Articles of Confederation were drawn up, although they weren't actually ratified until after the war. But there was an impetus here to create a centralized government in order to carry on the war. There's also the problem of financing the war. Wars are expensive. Who pays for them? Particularly, how do you pay for them if what you're fighting against is taxes? Are the people going to stand for even higher taxes? If what they're fighting against to begin with is taxes, it's not very likely. What did the Americans do? The first thing they tried, as you all know, probably was continental currency. They put out this worthless paper money, which within a couple of short years had inflated beyond all bounds. It was getting to $50 to every $1 in specie. It got to $100 to $1. It just became virtually worthless. It just flooded the country over a period of a couple of years with this paper currency. They soon realized after this stuff became worthless that that wouldn't work. Then what did they do for money? Well, in effect, they forced loans out of people. They would go to a merchant. They would say, we need your goods. If they couldn't pay for them, they would simply take the goods and then give him a bill of credit. That is, a bill which could be cashed in after the war, perhaps with interest. And many of these certificates, the certificates of indebtedness, were passed out during the war. I mean, millions of dollars worth probably of these things were passed out. And this created a very serious problem of paying off the war debt after the war. That is to say, once the war was over, where does the money come to pay for all this war debt? And as we shall see in the next lecture, this issue of the war debt became the primary argument which was used by the federalists, by the big central government people to justify the establishment of a highly centralized government under the Constitution with taxing power. So the war debt issue carried well over into the confederation in the constitutional period. And the lingering problem of the war debt, as I said, was probably the big issue which eventually led to the centralization of the American government under the Constitution. Okay, with that, I think we've got a few minutes for questions for a break. Yes? There was militia conscription, the same old militia conscription they'd had for years. Now, I'm not familiar with the details of what militia conscription entailed. I do know you could buy your way out of it, you could have substitutes. It was a fairly lenient form of conscription, but there was militia conscription, yes. It's nothing like we think of today as national conscription though. It's a much different. National conscription in America doesn't really come into place until the Civil War where you have this national system of conscription. But yes, there was militia conscription, yes. Was there ever a income tax prior to the revolution? It was just individual taxes. The British just levied individual taxes on particular. What the British did was when they tried to push through the Stamp Act, certain mendacious figures like Benjamin Franklin in England who was the agent, American agent England, suggested to the British Parliament that the real objection the Colonials had was not to taxation per se, but to what were called direct taxes like the Stamp Tax and that they would stand for things like indirect taxes. That was not true. Why Franklin said that isn't exactly clear. He should have known better. There was a good deal of opposition to any form of taxation. So what the British then did was they said, okay, Franklin tells us that we can levy indirect taxes. That's when they start doing, trying to raise various sorts of revenues through increasing customs duties. You see, there always were customs duties, but those were customs duties for the regulation of trade, not for the raising of revenue. The Colonials drew a very sharp distinction between customs duties, which they considered legitimate, which were not for raising money as such, but for simply for the regulation of trade based on the mercantilist trade regulations that they had with Britain. But when the British started to actually try to raise revenue by raising customs revenue, that form of indirect taxation was also not stood for. Yes. Well, there are some conflicting claims about this and no one really knows. One claim is that one third were loyalist, one third were rebels, and one third were neutrals. Some historians dispute that. Some think it's probably a reasonable guess. From what I've seen, it's probably as good a guess as anything else. It's just hard to say because a lot of these people, again, you're dealing with a diverse country of 13 colonies spread out over many, many miles with a very sparse population, and many of these people, over 90% of the American population at that time was rural and they lived out in farms and so forth very far apart. And I imagine a lot of these people, they just didn't think much about the war until it maybe came to their door. And so as to how you classify those people, it's very, very difficult to say. Yeah, we talked about that before. There's a book written by Joseph Lewis some years ago called Thomas Payne, Author of the Declaration of Independence, and this thesis has been offended before Lewis. I read the book some years ago, I haven't frankly looked at it recently. Some of, as I recall, some of Lewis's arguments were interesting, although the particular argument he used regarding the slavery issue was not a very convincing one. One of Lewis's arguments was in the early draft of the declaration, there was a very ringing denunciation of slavery, and Payne was anti-slavery and Jefferson was a slave owner. But Jefferson, although he owned slaves, was philosophically opposed to slavery and in fact wrote other things against slavery throughout his life. And frankly, although it may be possible that Payne had some input, because they were good friends to Jefferson regarding the content of the declaration, we don't know for sure, it's possible I suppose. The thing that keeps me from accepting that thesis as plausible at all is the fact that among the things that Jefferson wished to be remembered for on his tombstone, one of them was author of the Declaration of Independence. And having read a good deal of Jefferson's writings and correspondence, it simply seems inconceivable to me that a man with Jefferson's integrity could claim for himself the Declaration if in fact he had not written it and wanted it engraved on his tombstone. And knowing Payne fairly well also and the kind of egotism of Thomas Payne, it seems inconceivable to me that Payne, particularly after he returned from France to America and was very ill treated by Americans because he had written The Age of Reason, which was an anti-Christian work, that Payne would have kept silent all those years and not said to Americans, look how badly you're treating me. After all, I wrote the Declaration of Independence. It doesn't come up in their correspondence. It doesn't appear any way. There's no hint. And it seems to me just on those grounds alone an implausible thesis. Okay, let me take one more in the room. Well, what were they using for money at the time? You mean generally? We have between the Declaration of Independence and, say, two years. Well, you had various forms of currency. You had, of course, species. We were going to risk four coins and such. They used these English coins, they also used French coins. There was no standardized currency. You had some states which issued their own paper money, like Rhode Island was perpetually issued a paper money. Some of this money was backed by species, some of it wasn't. So you had no really standardized currency until later on. I'm not well familiar with when the currency became standardized, frankly. I don't know much about the history of the currency. But the problem with the continental currency was that it had nothing backing it. It wasn't a species backed paper money. It was just a t-out money. And by the way, what they did with this currency was particularly vicious, is what do you do with worthless currency? People won't take it for their supplies. You then pass legal tender acts. And the first legal tender acts occurred during the American Revolution. And one heroic stand the Quakers took was they refused to accept this paper money on two grounds. They said, A, it's a war currency and therefore it, to accept it, goes against our principles of anti-war. And B, it has no species backing it therefore it's a former fraud. And therefore we cannot accept it on those grounds. And there were very severe penalties if a merchant refused to accept paper currency. What basically the American army could do to you if it came up and tried to pay you in continental currency and you refused, it could simply take the goods for nothing. That's in fact what they did. Another less likable aspect of the way the war was fought. Okay, let's take a break. Thank you.