IT MIGHT BE useful to start with something I remembered listening to from the historian and biographer Joseph Ellis, which I think sums up the situation I was referring to when I said the soldiers who fought the American Revolution had been betrayed and cheated by the United States Constitution and, in fact, they'd started to be cheated almost as soon as the ink was dry on the treaty that ended that war. Ellis's remarks are in bold italics, the interviewer's interjections in plain bold
Washington isn't that good a tactician but he comes to an elemental strategic insight. He doesn't have to win, the British have to win. And if he can sustain the Continental Army and avoid annihilation of the Continental Army, eventually the British will decide it's not worth continuing. And that's pretty much what happens. And that's an elemental insight, it's called a Fabian strategy, after the Roman General Lucius Quintatus Fabius in the Punic wars, it's quasi guerilla tactics, it's not quite guerilla because he's got a regular, conventional army there. But it's a recognition that the strategic center of the rebellion or what we might call the insurgency isn't a place it's not Boston, it's not Philadelphia, it's not Charleston, they capture all those places, not New York. The strategic center of the rebellion is the Continental Army. And if he can hold that intact and avoid fighting except when he's got superior numbers and a strategic, excuse me, tactical advantage, then ultimately the British will eventually give up.
You know, we don't really win the American Revolution, it's the British decide to go leave. And they have a lot invested in this war and the war it's most comparable with is the Vietnam war. Only the British are the Americans, in this particular case, and the Americans are like the Vietnamese.
And the British really come to the conclusion early on that this war must be won for reasons akin to the domino theory. If we lose North America we lose the Caribbean, if we lose the Caribbean we lose Ireland, if we lose Ireland we lose India. And it's this notion that everything's at stake and therefore you're willing to spend enormous amounts of money and resources. And they have a delivery system, a banking system, a logistical system, a military profession that's much more sophisticated than anything the United States has.
One of the things I got out of the research I did for this book is how unbelievably fortunate the United States was because the States often refused to meet their quotas in terms of money or troops. There's a hard core of three to four thousand young men who served for the duration. A significant portion of them are African American, about fifteen percent. It's the last war in which African Americans serve alongside whites not in segregated units until the Korean War. That's an amazing thing.
- Somehow that's a fact that's been hidden in American history.
Right, right, and that's . . . and it's also one of the reasons Washington starts thinking differently about slavery. He's commanding a lot of African American troops that are fighting bravely.
But these three or four thousand guys aren't representative Americans. They're ex-slaves, they're indentured servants, they're recently arrived Irish and or Scottish immigrants, they're fourth-sons that don't have any inheritance, they're not yeoman farmer types.
And they won the war. It's as simple as. . . if they hadn't stayed together and been the nucleus the Continental Army would have probably dissolved. And I can't understand why they did it because they didn't get anything for it. The pensions they were promised, they were never paid, they starved through out most of the war because they weren't provided with food on a regular basis. They were in rags. When the British Army marched out of Yorktown, they laughed at the Continental Army because they looked like a bunch of ragamuffins.
- Didn't they call that The World Turned Upside Down?
They say that but we're not sure that really happened. There's different sources on that. And the British commander didn't want to turn his sword over to Washington and wanted to give it to Rochambeau the French commander, instead because they were embarrassed losing to these people that looked like they were, you know, bums. And yet this is the group that won the war. And that story hasn't been told. I mean Washington won the war by being the Commander in Chief that stayed the course for seven and a half years. But these guys, the core of the Army, what he calls "the soldiery." He said it, he said at the end of the war that if someone ever tries to write the history of this, they will be accused of writing fiction because no one will believe that a group of poor young men, ill clad, ill fed sustained themselves for this long against a much superior force. And they did, so Washington gives them credit.
So much to point out, though the point that the soldiers who fought the revolutionary war, the ones that Washington, himself credited with winning the war were, undoubtedly, cheated of the equality they were promised in the Declaration of Independence, most of all the Black soldiers but also the ones who, as well, were cheated out of the pensions they were promised and the equality they were led to believe was the intention of the aristocrats and slave-owners who declared independence intended to be the result.
The Jeffersonian ideal which is, interestingly, identified by many Jefferson scholars is rule by "yeomen farmers" explicitly held up those who held ownership of land as the rightful rulers. Certainly Black People, especially those held in slavery by many such "yeomen" were excluded, probably the majority of free Black People and free men of any ethnicity were excluded from the lauded Jeffersonian ideal, the ideal which was achieved in giving land owners and owners of sufficient property the vote but which was extended only with enormous struggle, sacrifice in work, lives and even generations of struggle. As the U. S. Supreme Court is seeing to it, what progress that was made in the 20th century is being turned back on the basis of the Constitution and the Court's own self-granted powers to nullify laws such as the Voting Rights Act and, though not admitting to that, the Civil War Amendments.
I would love to know what percentage of those who fought the Revolution had any actual vote that led to the adoption of the Constitution, what is known is that in many, perhaps all of the states, in some locations, the tactic of limiting the vote on the representatives who would ratify the thing would tend to cut most of them out due to the property requirements to vote. Not even all propertied white males of voting age participated in that, in many cases by the design of those who wanted to ram adoption through. The thing was entirely short of what the Declaration of Independence promised, the document which the Reverend Martin Luther King jr. called a "promissory note" which has never been honored as of 1963, it still hasn't been honored. It won't be without facing the history of the Constitution and its adoption, the slave-power and financier-power rigging of it that has never been amended out of the thing, the very things that Trump and the Republican-fascists as the overt segregationists, the Jim Crow Senate, the Plessy Supreme Court, etc. have used to forever cheat us out of what was promised and the lie that those things were fulfilled in the Constitution.
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