 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Woody Holton about his new book, Liberty is Sweet, which looks at the overlooked factors of the American Revolution and the roles of marginalized peoples. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view later this month on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, October 20th at 1 p.m., Francesca Morgan will talk about her new book, A Nation of Descendants, which traces Americans' fascination with tracking family lineage and explores how genealogy has always mattered in our country. And on Friday, October 22nd at noon, NASA astronaut Nicole Stott will discuss her work on the International Space Station and share insights from scientists, activists, and change makers who are working to solve our greatest environmental challenges. Her new book is Back to Earth. The study of history explores the questions of why and how things happened. Sometimes what seems to be familiar is revealed to possess many facets. In his new book, Liberty is Sweet, Woody Holton seeks out the hidden history of the American Revolution. Holton used more than 1,000 eyewitness accounts to construct this history. Many of those are freely available online for you to read for yourselves. The original words of leading figures of the revolution may be found on Founders Online, a website hosted by the National Archives through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Children in elementary schools across America learn of the Declaration of Independence and the battles led by George Washington. Looking back nearly 250 years, the American Revolution and its outcome can appear inevitable. But engaging and defeating a military power such as Great Britain required the involvement of people for many walks of life. Liberty is Sweet uncovers the roles played by women, Native Americans enslaved Africans and African Americans, and religious dissenters. Holton also focuses on often overlooked factors such as weather, geography, and disease. Too often we jump from July 4, 1776 to Washington's first presidency, ignoring over seven years of warfare. Liberty is Sweet gives us a fresh look at the American Revolution and the many people up and down the social spectrum who influenced it. Woody Holton is McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches and researches early American history, especially the American Revolution. He's the author of several books including Abigail Adams, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize. The second book, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Joining him in conversation is Nicole Maskeel, Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, where she is also the Director of the Public History Program, a Peter and Bonnie McCausland Fellow and a Faculty Associate in African American Studies at the Walker International Institute. Now let's hear from Woody Holton and Nicole Maskeel. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome and thank you so much for being here. I'm here with Woody Holton, and I'm really excited to talk about his new book, Liberty is Sweet, the Hidden History of the American Revolution. Woody, one of your big claims in this book is about the hidden influences on the American Revolution. So I really want to talk about some of those. And I really want to just start out first here talking about the different groups that you highlight in this narrative, this incredibly, engrossing narrative about, as you term this hidden history. So let's jump into it. What are some of these major groups and these hidden influences, and why have they come to shape your research so heavily? Well, first, Nicole, I want to thank you for doing this all University of South Carolina program with me. I have a lot of reasons to be proud of our history program at USC, but the fact that we have two early Americans who can have a conversation like this is really cool, and I appreciate your, I know you have a class right after this, so I really appreciate you taking the time. So some of the groups that I am talking about are Native Americans, who of course still occupied most of the continent in 1776. The guys who declared independence called themselves the Continental Congress, but they occupied about a sixth of it, and Native Americans about five, six, and they're of course significant in their own life, but they also really helped get the revolution started, and I'd actually argue that there's a sense in which they won the war in the West, indigenous people did. Now, one in five people in the 13 colonies that rebelled were African-Americans, and they too both hugely influenced the revolution. In fact, I'd argued that if it hadn't been for some of the things they were up to, the revolution might not have ever come to the South, which is where the wealth, the great wealth of North America was and a lot of the people, the largest colony was my home, the colony or state of Virginia. So I think African-Americans had a huge impact on the revolution and it in turn hugely influenced them, as you know from your own work, both positively and negatively. So that's another group of African-Americans, and people will probably be least surprised when I say that women of all ranks and races have a huge impact because they always do in war. But you and I share a graduate student, a former undergrad, now a graduate student of ours who's done amazing work on women's role in the Continental Army. So maybe we'll be able to talk a little bit about Riley's work on that, but I also have followed through with something your dissertation advisor, Mary Beth Norton, wrote about a few years before you were with her there at Cornell about Esther Reed, who formed a group in Pennsylvania of women to help the soldier, but she ended up getting into some rals with George Washington that are worth talking about. So the big three groups that I'd mention are Native Americans, African-Americans and women. Yes, and I wanted to, I definitely want to get to talking about Esther Reed, but I really want to start with this kind of compelling view and the way that you open the book, this compelling view of this map that shows the continent as being a place, an indigenous place, right? And I think that I'm really compelled by how, why you chose this image as a way to kind of come into this and also how you set your book in this history of the Revolution, you're starting it in what is known in the United States. As the French-Indian War, but is known internationally as the Seven Years War, which as you point out is also a misnomer. Tell us a little bit about why you chose to highlight or centralize the continent as an indigenous place first and why you so focused on starting this kind of history of the Revolution with the conflict on the forks of the Ohio. Okay, great, thanks. Hey, Brian, why don't we go ahead and put up that map that Nicole is talking about of America in 1776. Oh, yes, there's Parliament. I do want to make a quick point about that since the slide is there. There's a real sense that when we ask why did the American Revolution happen, we're asking the wrong question. I'm sorry, when we ask why did the colonists rebel, we're asking the wrong question because there's a sense in which Parliament rebelled. That is, white colonists, the people in power, John Hancock and John Adams in Massachusetts, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, they were pretty satisfied with their role in the British Empire as of the year 1762. And it's these guys, the House of Commons, in their old meeting chamber here, who were dissatisfied and said, we want to make changes. And so I want to put that slide in the list just to frame the whole discussion that we're really talking about the British grievances against the colonies and things they wanted to change and Parliament did try to change and the colonists' resentment of those changes that would ultimately lead to revolution. So we'll get to those, but Brian, if you'll go on straight to the next one. The next slide is the image that Nicole was talking about, which is, this is just North America, east of the Mississippi River, but as Nicole pointed out and I did too, most of that territory, even east of the Mississippi is still occupied by Native Americans at this time. And I based this map primarily on an atlas done by a scholar named Helen Hornbeck Tanner, but then she was mostly focused on the Midwest, so many people helped me fill in other Native nations. And one thing that I want to point out is that there are boundaries between those Native nations. The old maps used to have the word Cherokee out there somewhere and the word Iroquois out there somewhere north of the word Cherokee, but it's only the words are on the map and not the boundaries, as though Native Americans didn't have boundaries. They did. Now, those boundaries were contested just as they were in Africa and Europe and most of the rest of the world, but I think it's important to see that these were nations in the sense of having boundaries. And also, I was face-limited because there's only two pages in the book, but to put some of the Native towns in there, because so many of the maps that accompany books on the Revolution have Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Wibsburg, maybe Charlestown, South Carolina, which is now Charleston, and zero Native towns as though they didn't live in towns and the vast majority of them, used to the Mississippi, did. So just their presence is really important, but I want to make the case that even if you were, and this is, I hope, an imaginary person, but if you were some imaginary person who didn't really care about Native American history at all, but you did care about why the American Revolution happened, then you've still got to go look at Native Americans because of the huge role they played. And to answer your question about that, Nicole, one role that they played was resisting encroachments on their land, and that leads the British to draw a line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. You can actually see it in this map. The shaded area is west of the mountains, and as of 1763, the British government said, if you're a white settler or land speculator, like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, if you're a land speculator or settler, you can't go into the shaded area. You got to stay. I didn't choose these colors, but the map maker makes a point. You got to stay in the white, basically the white area, although it's also an African area. And you can understand why the British did that because this goes to the other part of your question, Nicole. The British had just finished this nine-year war that we call the Seven Years War, or the French and Indian War against the French and Spanish, and their many Native allies. So almost all of the Natives that you see on here, the Cherokees were one big exception, but most of the other Native nations that you see on here, if they took a side in that war, it was the French side. And of course the British eventually won, and the French almost entirely left North America except for two tiny islands off of Newfoundland. So the British are thrilled to have won that war, but it was a long, expensive war that nearly doubled their debt. And so they, British officials and parliament understood something that people forget sometimes today, which is the most expensive thing a nation ever does is go to war. And they doubled their debt. They didn't want to do that again. And they said, how can we make sure, or decrease at least the possibility of going to war against Native Americans when one is by not stealing their land? And so we get the proclamation line of 1763. There's also, a lot of people have heard of the proclamation line, but there's something else that people haven't heard so much of, and that is to enforce the proclamation line to keep colonists away from Indians and Indians away from colonists. The British government made a really pivotal decision in December of 1762. And that was the war is over. They wouldn't sign the treaty with the French until, for another two months, but basically the war was over in December 1762. What you usually do, if you're a country like Britain, you've been fighting a war overseas. You've won the war. You bring the troops home. But the British government decided to leave 10,000 soldiers in North America as basically peacekeeping troops. And Brian, if you'll show us the next slide, this one obviously was a contemporary map made by the amazing map maker, Jeff Ward, but this one was done at the time. And those red rectangles, you can download this, people watching at home, you can download this document as I did from the Library of Congress. And there's other versions of it in other places. But the red rectangles represent the cantanmen, that is where the troops were placed. And of course they had some in New York. They had to have a lot in Canada because they just conquered Canada, so Nova Scotia, for instance. But the bulk of the, and they had some in the Caribbean, but the bulk of them are what I would call peacekeeping troops as a sort of a human wall to keep the Indians and colonists apart. And then the question came up, how do you pay for that? And that's what led the British Parliament to adopt the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Sugar Act, the year before that, laying taxes on those in order to come up with the money to fund these 10,000 troops. A lot of the textbooks that you and I learned on, Nicole told us that, oh yeah, the reason for the Stamp Act was to pay off the big debt that the British government had paid, had run up during the French and Indian War. But that's not true. If you read the Act, it says very clearly, this isn't for paying off old expenses. This is paying off future expenses. That is the expense of maintaining these troops that are there to maintain peace between the colonists and the Indians. And so I can't resist the line borrowing from modern political rhetoric that the British had decided to build this human wall on the western border and to make the colonists pay for it. And that's why we get the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act. So there's a real sense in which these things that we all did learn about, no taxation without representation, might not have happened if the Indians hadn't been there or if they'd been completely passive or irrelevant as we used to be taught. So I think those are a couple of ways that Native Americans are having a huge impact and why you've got to start with the French and Indian War because during the French and Indian War, American colonists were making the colonists, I'm sorry, were making the Indians mad and American colonists were smuggling, trading with the enemy in the French islands like Saint-Domingue which has become Haiti or Cuba and Puerto Rico and so forth. And the colonists were, the white colonists were doing all sorts of things that infuriated the British Parliament during the French and Indian War. During the war, the French, during the French and Indian War, the British government couldn't do anything about these things because Britain knew they couldn't win the war without the British Americans on the ground to do most of the fighting. And so there's this real tension in London where they're just getting mad, it's almost like a balloon blowing up as they're getting madder and madder, they're colonists but that anger can't be released because we've got to appease the colonists till we beat the French, but as soon as they do beat the French, pop! That blows the balloon and now we can tell the colonists what we're mad at them about and we're mad at your provoking war with Indians and so we're going to draw a line and we're going to enforce it with soldiers paid for by you in the form of the Spam Pack and the Sugar Act. So I would maybe go so far even as to say no Indians, no Stamp Act. So something you've heard of is powerfully influenced by a group that you may have heard of in different contexts but not in the context of helping cause the American Revolution. Yeah, you have this really, really evocative moment and there are many evocative moments in your book but where you say that if all of the sugar islands had sank into the sea like Atlantis to the continent and I really think that seeing that connection that these actions of smuggling during this war was so hugely important and this of course is a reaction to the colonists. Also they were fighting as you said for they thought they were going to get something out of this. They thought they were going to be able to get. So they felt this kind of this, they felt betrayed to a certain extent but they were being curtailed and I really loved that part of it and I do think that in some ways and you use kind of modern language it really does resonate for what we're going through. It really does read in a way that doesn't feel like it's been so long that some of these same issues, some of these same political maneuvers that you see happening within 18th century America doesn't read as so descent in the past and thinking of that and thinking of the place of this hidden history that you bring up. Talk a little bit too about the place of African Americans within this world. Now there's been a lot of discussion on the place obviously of black history of the history of enslavement in the founding of America and of course not to throw a giant bomb into this discussion. You can't avoid this and you don't, you don't avoid it at all and I want you to elaborate on this other front of the war the black Americans, the African Americans presence within the colonial orbit and as you point out and others have that this is, we're not talking about 13 colonies we're talking about 26 and this kind of presence of black people of slave rebellion is so incredibly important so please tell us more about let's start with that about the 26 because I think some of the people watching us on YouTube will say wait a minute these guys are college professors and they think there were 26 colonies they know there were 13 there were 13 that rebelled but as Nicole mentioned Britain alone had 26 colonies in America in 1776 several in Canada, Count Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and Quebec, Bahamas there were two Florida's at the time, Bermuda but the real jewels in the British crown were the ones that Nicole has already mentioned and those were the sugar islands in the Caribbean especially Barbados and Jamaica and as much as I as a Virginian want to talk about tobacco because that was the number one crop grown in North America and of course that was grown mostly by enslaved people in North America tobacco was not the number one crop exported by the colonies sugarcane was partly for candy bars but really because that's where you get molasses and molasses makes rum and that's the we were talking about this today what's the big early industry in North America before you have steel and even before steel mills the big industry is distilleries turning molasses into rum and that's molasses from sugarcane raised by slaves in the Caribbean and it's a reminder I come as a Virginian I come from a state that was built on slavery people know that but Massachusetts was built on slavery as well in New York which you've written about in your book Bound By Vonage which is going to be out on my birthday June 15th of 2022 shows just how dependent New York was on slavery and all of these places really from Virginia on up are dependent not only on the labor of the enslaved people that they claim to own but on the labor of the enslaved people in the Caribbean who are producing that molasses and then also they're the market half the fish in New England New England's big crop was fish half of it goes to Catholic countries where they ate a lot of fish because they're not allowed to eat meat on Fridays and St. Stays and the refuse fish as they called it what an amazing, evocative term the refuse fish is what feeds enslaved people in the Caribbean so economically we can start there you can't name a colony where enslaved people were significant even a place like Vermont which is going to be the 14th state there were enslaved people not a lot but even Vermont is dependent on sending livestock down to the Caribbean so economically they're significant I think they become hugely significant African Americans do late in the process of the origins of the revolution but it's a reminder to me that we've got to talk when we talk about the origin of the revolution that somebody made one day like I said at the beginning you can't ask the question if you start asking why did the Connists decide to rebel you're already going down the wrong road because it was Britain first who rebelled against the relationship and tried to change things I talked about the territory aspect of that and the taxes aspect of that it's convenient for me with my students because they're all teased taxes, territory trade which we've talked about the foreign islands that is San Domain slash Haiti and Cuba and so forth taxes, territory trade and we don't need to get into the day because it gets boring quick paper money or treasury notes the four teeth but in all those cases it's parliament that once changed and all the colonists the white colonists want is no change or they want to go back to the way things were and so to me one of the great questions is what happens around 1774 or 1775 and again Mary Beth Norton she's always the first on the scene because she wrote a great book called 1774 about the massive change that happened in that year but during that year and she agreed because she went into 1775 that a lot of this is going into 1775 as well what turned the colonists from just wanting to go back to forgive the Barbara Streisand the way we were from nostalgia really to wanting to separate from Britain those are totally different things and what makes them want to jump the cliff into independence and I'd say in the north the biggest factor was the battle of Lexington and Concord which we correctly think of as the first battle of the Revolutionary War but it's also the final argument for independence among New Englanders because yes the Boston massacre had happened but that was kind of a one off and only five people were killed but at Lexington ten people were killed and more in Concord and many more as the British made their way home and so many New Englanders what turned them from this rational calculation of oh no we don't want to pay the sugar tax we don't pay the stamp tax and they got rid of the sugar the stamp tax but not the sugar tax and we don't want to have the tax on tea so we'll throw the tea in the heart all that those are kind of rational calculations about how we can get back the good times we had in 1762 what drove those people from wanting to get back to the good old days to wanting to be a separate nation many many many factors of course but the biggest factor in New England is the battle of Lexington and Concord and so that raises the question what's the south version of the battle of Lexington and Concord and I would say the answer to that is Dunmore's Emancipation Proclamation Lord Dunmore was the last the last royal governor of Virginia and in 1775 he was massively outnumbered that is there were a few whites in Virginia who were loyal to the crown but very few the vast majority of free people in Virginia were supporting the revolution they still they weren't ready for independence yet but they were mad about all these changes that parliament was trying to impose and so he's outnumbered among whites but he doesn't have to be outnumbered because 40% of Virginians were enslaved it's important to remember this demography 40% of southerners in general were enslaved our state South Carolina as you know Nicole had a black majority at this time so demographically we know as well as economically which we already talked about African Americans are important but also politically because here's what happened Dunmore in November of 1775 and I do think it's ironic that it was forescored seven years before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 November of 1775 Dunmore is so outnumbered he's so desperate for soldiers for his side that he issued an Emancipation Proclamation telling black men I'm kind of hesitating on that because he said he didn't say men he said able and willing to bear arms and the 18th century that implied men although it's interesting to see that the majority of the African Americans who joined Dunmore were women and children but also a lot of men who were ready to hold muskets and something like 800 joined him in the first few months and there are a lot of differences but there's a lot of similarities too between Dunmore's Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's in that both were only targeting the rebel area that is Dunmore himself it's not like he issued this Emancipation Proclamation because he suddenly read a book and discovered that slavery was horrible he had slaves himself and he kept them and so this was not a humanitarian gesture on his part it was a war measure but of course so was Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that's how he got to do it he kind of wanted to do it all along but he got to do it because there was a war on and likewise when Dunmore issued his Emancipation Proclamation it was because he needed labor but the big thing that I would qualify about that it's mentioned in the Declaration of Independence very euphemistically he has excited domestic insurrection amongst us which we can translate as the British have stirred up our slaves against us but the big thing I want to do and it seems very creepy to be doing this at the National Archives where the Declaration of Independence is protected today and seen by millions of people a year I want to correct the Declaration of Independence on this one point because it was not the British who stirred up the slaves it was if we look at the chronology the slaves who stirred up the British because Dunmore issued that Emancipation Proclamation in November of 1775 didn't he in November of 1774 is when my fellow Virginians, black Virginians started to notice this yawning, this gap that's opening up between the white loyalist minority and the white patriot majority and black Virginians said in that gap between those two factions white there's opportunity for us and they the first record we have comes from James Madison the future author of the Constitution and President he noticed this meeting in the fall of 1774 and then there were more meetings in there was a week in April of 1775 when there were reports all up and down the James River watershed from Williamsburg down to Norfolk and then up to where Petersburg is today of enslaved people organizing and being ready for the British and long story short Governor Dunmore in April of 1775 made white colonists mad at him and so they started threatening him and so he played the race card he said if you touch a hair on my head I will declare freedom to the slaves and reduce the town of Williamsburg to ashes so here he is not actually freeing slaves this is April 1775 not November but he's threatening to do it and so some enslaved people literally came and knocked on the door of the Governor's Palace and said okay man put us to work you promise us freedom we'll fight like demons on your side because we want to be free and what did he do he turned them away and he said if you come back I'll whip you but enslaved people kept coming just as blacks were turned away by the Union Army in the early months of the Civil War and they also kept coming and eventually after they proved their usefulness to Governor Dunmore then and only then did he issue his Emancipation Proclamation so it was really the slaves who put him up to it rather than he had put the slaves up to it but of course he asserted this as the British are supposed to be protecting us from our slaves not having our slaves rebel against this one white Virginian said they're aiming a dagger at our throat through the hands of our slaves and they were furious and there it is as the sort of capstone grievance in the Declaration of Independence not the only reason of course that the colonists went from wanting to restore the British Empire to where it had been in 1762 the major reason they went from that to jumping off the cliff and declaring independence getting back into the Declaration of Independence and some of the kind of more really eye-opening things that you talk about in terms of the Declaration and thinking about how the way that we remember the Declaration today the things that resonate with us may or may not as historians have said than what people were really focused on during the time but this idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that being pulled out not, I mean obviously it was written by Thomas Jefferson but it became popularized by black thinkers and veterans of the war specifically Lemuel Haynes and I wanted to get your thoughts about him when you go to the next slide Brian I think that is Lemuel Haynes that we don't have time to talk about I've talked too much so let's go to Lemuel Haynes in this is after he'd become the first African-American minister of the congregational faith but before that in 1776 Lemuel Haynes was a free black soldier mixed racial parentage but people referred to him for serving in the continental army in 1776 when Congress issued the Declaration of Independence and here's another provocative thing I'm going to say at the home of the Declaration of Independence and that is there's a real sense in which the Declaration of Independence failed it failed at its initial goal which was to get a French navy and a French army of American waters by the end of the summer of 1776 that's the real reason that Congress finally got its act together and was receiving a lot of instructions as Pauline Mayer talked about from other places as well but the reason they put it off they've been fighting a war for more than a year but they finally declared independence in July 76 the record is clear to come into the war on their side because they had no navy they had an army but they didn't have much equipment especially not much gunpowder and I just recently discovered that these conversations that delegates were having in June of 1776 saying if we can declare independence fast enough we will have a French navy in American waters fighting our battles for us by the end of the summer of 1776 so let's declare independence and get the French here on July 2nd 1776 and then issue the press release on July 4th and we rightly celebrate that because the act of declaring independence on July 2nd that's significant but it didn't achieve its goal it did not get a French navy in American waters by the summer of 1776 in fact the French didn't come in the fall in 1777 or until February 1778 and those troops actually didn't make it until the summer of 1778 so toward its immediate goal it was a failure but it also had a phrase we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal that most people who quoted the declaration in the early years passed over that because they were focused on its justification of one nation's right to secede from another or break off and alliance with another and so I think your question is really perfect it meant something completely different to white Americans at that time from what it means today it was then a strategic move justifying secession so that we can get French aid but Lemuel Haynes of course he was interested in that he was in the continental army he was glad to have French aid too but it was done before and that was quote that phrase all men are created equal and then as Eric Slaughter at University of Chicago says the majority of the people who quoted the declaration of independence who quoted the now iconic phrase unable right to right life liberty and pursuit of happiness the majority of the people who quoted that between 1776 when Jefferson wrote it and 1799 those first quarter century black as well as white and so they really made the Declaration of Independence what it is today it's no longer thought of of course it just the name is independence and so it's no longer mostly thought of as something of the moment to get French aid it's thought of as a universal declaration of human rights and we really owe it to first abolitionists like Lemuel Haynes and later women's rights activists in the 19th century who did the same thing who turned it into the freedom document that it is now I really am really kind of intrigued by another one of your claims in the book and I don't want to jump over too many of I'm hoping that I'm not going to get us off in terms of the order of the slides but I do want to know because we're talking about and then you open the book so evocatively you know general Washington he's in Cambridge and he's just he's sure that Gage is going to attack him and that then you kind of drop this knowledge bomb on us that they had been they fought on the same side and that's the way you began so I want to know what kind of general was George Washington what would you say where would you come out on this well having having set my path on this provocation being provocative I'm going to not turn back and say that in the first year of the war George Washington he was a great manager because he was experienced managing large numbers of people he was a large scale he owned hundreds or claimed to own he enslaved hundreds of people so he was a great manager in terms of getting getting the basic few supplies they had out but as a general as a strategist Washington in my opinion and other historians not all agree terrible because he was stuck in fifth year that is he was all about taking the initiative being aggressive going on offense and the British had figured out that I do have a slide for this which we could show briefly Brian when you go to the next one I think it's the very next one the both the British and colonists other than Washington had figured out at Bunker Hill Brian hit the next oh oh yeah that's that's the very first use of the phrase all men are created equal by anyone anywhere is by this enslaved formerly enslaved person free black guy but let's move on to the next one oh shoot we don't have time for us to read today or maybe we can come back to her there they are this is a modern depiction obviously of the battle of Bunker Hill the British technically won the battle of Bunker Hill because they captured the hill actually breeds Hill and that's how they define victory in those days but it cost them 50% casualties and the man who commanded the troops on the British side at Bucker Hill said afterwards basically crap because yes we won but what did the Americans do they ran away to the next hill and that one cost us 50% casualties the next one is going to cost 50% casualties and so on and so this is in 1775 at the very beginning of the war the guy who was going to be commander in chief for most of the war said the war is unwinnable and so and and various others as they became the commander in chief after Hal was Henry Clinton arrived at the same conclusion that they understood that all the Americans had to do was hide behind those dirt wall they were going to win the war with dirt basically more than with gunpowder for one thing they had a lot more dirt than gunpowder and the other thing is you you're much more vulnerable if you're out in open field attacking a wooden fort or a redoubt like this one then the guys in the redoubt so the Americans did not have 50% casualties here's my larger point which is almost everybody understood that the Americans could win the Revolutionary War if they basically just fall on the football that is if they don't become aggressive and Washington just couldn't stand that he was restless in rest he had to be doing something and you can take us to the next slide if you will please Brian which is this is a map of the Boston area and many people watching have heard of the battle of the American occupation of Dorchester Heights so there's there's Boston the pink part over on the left and we're reminded by this map that Boston at the time was pretty much an island just fairly connected to the mainland towards the bottom of the map and there's another peninsula to the south of it to the right on our map and that's Dorchester Heights Boston Washington did a great job of sneaking men up there to occupy Dorchester Heights on the night of March 4th 1776 and that's the famous for chasing the British out and it's seen as Washington's first victory chasing the British out of Boston but guess what word Washington used to describe the battle of his occupying of Dorchester Heights he talked about his disappointment disappointment because he didn't want them to walk away from a fight he wanted to fight him and so what he was hoping I asked to follow me on the map here okay we'll put our guys on Dorchester Heights that threatens Boston so the British troops are gonna come try to take Dorchester Heights back from the American troops and while they are doing that the American troops who are across the river you see Charleston here or more to our left is Cambridge where you went to undergraduate school he had thousands of American troops over there ready to row across the river in an amphibious attack basically this would have been Washington's D-Day this launch his big amphibious attack very ambitious and Washington himself after the British had left toward Boston saw just how this is his word impregnable the British defenses were how much they built it up and how they had made barricades in every street house to house street fighting that even he pretty much admitted that had he carried out his aggressive plan then it would have been a disaster for his side and the fascinating thing for me is he kept making aggressive plans Brian we take us to New York City on this next map it'll take people a while to get oriented but if you see the red stuff you're seeing the one part of Manhattan Island that was actually New York City in 1776 the British capture that city on September 15th of 1776 and held it for the rest of the war and they really turned it into fortress New York Washington was outside New York for most of the rest of the war it's been a winter in Valley Forge as we all know but he's outside New York Jonesing to attack New York but he never did he never tried this amphibious assault because he realized how disastrous it would have been had he gotten his druthers and had he had his chance to do an amphibious assault back in Boston and so he would make these plans and I think he was sincere about them but he would always find a reason to cancel them at the last minute and we as Americans can be glad he did because had he done a disastrous assault that's the sort of thing that would have really hurt the American cause and so I started off this section by saying that Washington started off the war as a bad general he became a great general because he learned sometimes the most effective thing for a general to do is nothing and his big contribution was his self restraint yeah and I think this is so compelling to think about a lot of times too I think that the American Revolution is portrayed as as this revolution that people are surprised that the Americans win but you make it seem like in your book that this is that it's nearly unwinnable more than British and that you know all the Americans had to do basically at the end of their own way and the revolution would be one one that was so hard to learn because I'm really sympathetic with Washington he had what he called chimney corner heroes we would refer to as you know Monday morning everyone was saying oh come on you can get this over with quickly and he's a very very proud guy you know and that's part of the enslaver mentality is to think of yourself as one of the patriarchs to quote to quote another slave holder and he's very sensitive about his reputation and nobody likes to be called a coward but that guy least of all but that to me was his real strength was that he didn't allow people to go into doing something that may have made glory for him or it may have been but more likely to have led disaster to disaster for the cause and again Dorchester Heights he was ready to go into Boston and it was only because the British disappointed him by leaving that he didn't do it but he learned his lesson to his great credit well one question I want to add I do want to get back to the kind of the incredible contributions of women during the American Revolution of course as a student of Mary Beth Norton I would be remiss not to talk more about and you have got some really you kind of have of course there's the kind of usual people that we talk about during the American Revolution but you really talk about during this revolutionary time starting with this conflict that begins you know in what we know as the French Indian War it's a seven years war that there are troops there are groups of women going into battle and actually being killed I want you to talk a little bit more about that in the place of women in this narrative in this military history narrative as well Yes and as you know our shared student Riley Sutherland has educated me unfortunately not all of it came in time for my book so you got to look out for an article of hers that's under consideration out there now called industrious women about the women of the army and the amazing contributions they made and I'll just mention one thing to start it off with because it was so stunning to me a laundress does for an army you know if you think hierarchically a laundress is pretty low in your hierarchy if you're that kind of thinker but Riley Sutherland persuaded me that laundresses saved lives in the Revolutionary War because you know the number of guys on the American side who got shot and died and the Revolutionary War was about seven thousand fewer than died in three days at Gettysburg but like all wars until World War II the big numbers the big numbers are from disease and after George Washington famously had the men as Riley qualifies because not the women but the men of his army inoculated against smallpox in 1777 the way my friend Elizabeth Finn talks about in her book Pox Americana after smallpox was kind of off the table the big killer was typhus and typhus is spread by lice especially lice in people's shirts and so if you're washing clothes you are saving lives so you start with seemingly menial tasks that have huge significant but then you end up with women for instance since we're now looking at this map of New York I said that the British captured New York City on September 15, 1776 but they didn't capture the rest of New York Island until the following November the last fort they captured was Fort Washington and it's right where the GWB the George Washington Bridge crosses over into New York today there was an American fort there and one of the defenders was a guy named Corbin working a cannon and he was cut down by enemy fire and so his wife Hannah took over and ran that battery for him and she was also injured but not killed she ended up staying in the army and she was in the invalid corps they called it because of her injury she got a pension and Riley and others including Mary Beth Norton have found pensions by other women lots of women who would file revolutionary war pensions as widows but there were a lot also who filed pensions for their own service and Riley's great discovery was there were these women who would file a pension application a widows pension application but then when you read the narrative where they're describing why they deserve this application they would talk about all the heroic things they did as well so technically I'm asking for this because my husband served widows benefits now but then they were bragging about the amazing things that they did as well this is such compelling stuff and I think that the narratives that come out the lives, the everyday lives that come out and are woven within this broad and sprawling history of this moment that we think we know is really compelling and I know we've only got about 7 minutes left now but we do have an audience question and we have a request to talk about the Quebec Act can you give us some insight on that Yes and actually Brian if you're still able to do images you can take us back to the second image the big map that with Native Americans that will help people a little bit because it is on the one hand it's really important to say that there was no march to independence in the sense that an army marches in a good army marches in lockstep because different colonies got mad at different things that British were doing at different times and so they're sort of straggled out along the road with New York didn't even come along thanks Brian but New York didn't even come along in time to vote for independence on July 2nd it was unanimous vote but not 13 to nothing, 12 to nothing the state that you wrote about in Bound for Bondage was the colony wasn't ready to be a state quite yet they did come along in time to sign eventually but anyway so on the one hand we want to notice what stragglers there were in front and there were people way behind on the other hand there were a few things the British did that were truly unifying acts and the Quebec Act was one of those because it affected just about all of the free colonists it was seen as establishing the Catholic faith in Quebec and I have to say from our modern perspective we really have to admire the British government for being willing to allow Catholics in Quebec to continue worshiping as Catholics because Britain was very much a Protestant country at the time and Catholics for instance couldn't even vote in the mother country and they didn't give Catholics in Quebec the right to vote but they did give them the right to basically tax themselves to pay for the church most of the colonies most of all out of all 26 colonies in most of them there were church taxes and you had to pay for the established church and so that's the Anglican or Episcopal church in Virginia and it's the Puritan church in Massachusetts and so forth but the big church of the colonists not Native Americans although some Native Americans belong to in Canada was the Catholic church and the British government tolerated that allowed them to have church taxes for the Catholic church well that infuriated the Puritans of New England Puritan doesn't mean sexual purity it means purify our church of any Catholic vestiges they were bigots against Catholics and so they were furious that the Catholic faith was going to be tolerated there and there was also a political problem if we're not going to let Catholics vote then we're only going to let this tiny percentage of the Quebec population who were Protestant vote and that doesn't seem fair so the parliament decided that they'd have an appointed council running things so that's a very undemocratic system it is undemocratic but it's the only solution they could think of but that makes everybody mad because as Jefferson said oh they're using Quebec as a fit instrument that is sort of a model for what they want to do the rest of us but then the thing that really unified the colonists against the Quebec Act of 1774 was that it took all of that land basically the land that's shaded here west of the Ohio river and gave it to a Quebec and you can't name anybody in Virginia who was a leader of the revolution Jefferson Washington Franklin in Pennsylvania Patrick Henry you can't name anybody who was a leader of the revolution in places like Pennsylvania Virginia who wasn't also a land speculator and taking all that land and making a part of Ohio and making a part of Quebec all that area that is now the state of Ohio Indiana and Illinois that really cut the legs off of the land speculators and made them really mad so that was certainly a factor well I want to as we are getting closer to the end I wanted to open it up for you to say any closing thoughts I know there were some other things we want to talk about in terms of where do you come down in the debate whether it was militia or regular army soldiers who won the war let's do that one Brian will you go to the very I think it's maybe the second to last slide or the last slide it's got two images one is the same map but you can't tell they're the same map but one is an aerial photo that's it so guys this is what I think it sort of encompasses the whole thing I was trying to do in the book so these are the bottom one is an aerial map of the battle of Calpins where that was fought and the top one is a drawing that was published in a great book by the way by Comedier and Morris called Spirit of 76 but they're both reflecting on something that General Morgan who was on the American side there and who ended up winning that battle but he also almost lost it early on and he lost had he lost and the reason he did poorly at the start was that he was fighting the British in an open field and people said damn you know congratulations on winning but how dumb of you to fight them in an open field he said oh no no and they go why didn't you cross the Broad River he said oh I didn't have time to cross I'm sorry he said I deliberately didn't cross the Broad River I backed my militiamen up against the Broad River because they were cowards and had I crossed the river they would have all run away and so I forced my men to fight by backing them up against the Broad River and so it's sort of a mean thing for him to say about the guys who actually helped him win the battle it's also false because here's an undocked photo from the air do you see the green circle at the bottom that's the Kalpins battlefield you see the North Carolina South Carolina line and then way north of that is the Broad River also with a green oval around it the Broad River is actually five miles away but everybody almost who does maps of this battle makes it seem like the Broad River is right behind the American lines because that's what General Morgan said and that's the kind of myth that we need to penetrate this was really unfair to the militia look militia did screw up at various times we all screw up at various times but they didn't screw up in Kalpins and it was really unfair of Morgan to throw them under the buses what you would say today and we can fix that with aerial photos in this case oh that is so fantastic I love how you can see how kind of mapping now and these guys can make these types of questions about the 18th century come alive well thank you so much and this book is a compelling read I can't put it down so I really highly encourage everyone to get Liberty is sweet a hidden history of the American evolution it really is wonderful thank you so much Woody for your time and for really breaking open this moment in history that is still so present for us in a way that is engaging and really compelling well I really appreciate you're talking to me about it Nicole it's been a lot of fun thank you