Book: The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet The Confederacy and the Transvaal
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Sydney G. Fisher >> The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet The Confederacy and the Transvaal
The American Revolution
and
The Boer War
An Open Letter to
Mr. Charles Francis Adams
on his Pamphlet
"The Confederacy and the Transvaal"
By
SYDNEY G. FISHER
Author of "Men, Women and Manners in Colonial Times"
"The Evolution of the Constitution"
"The True Benjamin Franklin," etc.
(Reprinted from the _Philadelphia Sunday Times_
of January 19, 1902)
PHILADELPHIA, January 14, 1902.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, ESQ.,
Boston, Massachusetts.
_Dear Sir:_
I have been handed a pamphlet written by you entitled "The Confederacy
and the Transvaal," the burden of which is, that the Boers ought not to
continue their irregular guerilla struggle against England, because it
is destructive of themselves and wasteful of England's resources; or to
use your own words "the contest drags wearily along, to the probable
destruction of one of the combatants, to the great loss of the other,
and, so far as can be seen, in utter disregard of the best interests of
both."
You argue that the Boers, when their regular armies were defeated some
considerable time ago, should have surrendered, given up the struggle,
and not have resorted to a prolongation of the contest by guerilla
methods. In support of this you cite the action of General Lee at the
close of our civil war, when, his regularly organized army being
completely defeated, he surrendered it, went quietly to his home and set
an example, followed by the other southern leaders, of not prolonging
the strife by those irregular methods which, as is well known, can be so
very effective for a long period in a mountainous country like
Switzerland or in a country of vast distances like the United States or
South Africa.
In other words, you go so far as to say that when a people are fighting
for their political integrity and independence, a hopeless struggle for
it ought not to be prolonged beyond what may be called the point of
scientific defeat. Rather than prolong it to desperation and death in
the last ditch it is much better and more sensible to accept a dependent
position of some sort, the position of a crown colony, or a charter
colony with more or less varying degrees of colonial control, all of
which your very unwise and altogether reckless great grandfather John
Adams, and some of his friends used to describe as "political slavery."
This doctrine of the wrongfulness of a struggle for independence against
overwhelming odds has appeared at times of late in the newspapers. I
noticed that Mr. Bourke Cockran in his speech at the recent pro-Boer
meeting in Chicago said, that the doctrine did not apply to the Boers
because their heroism had now placed them in a position to win. He did
not say positively whether or not he approved of such a doctrine. I am
myself willing to pass by a great deal of approval of it. But when the
attempt is made to render such an infamous doctrine respectable by
affixing to it the honored name of Adams, a protest is in order from all
those who are at all familiar with our own history.
I do not believe that our American people when their attention is really
brought to the matter believe in any such doctrine. But their attention
is not usually brought to it. We have been by our stupendous power far
removed for a long time from the possibility of such a struggle. We are
accustomed to the business method of settling serious disputes by
yielding at once to overwhelming power; by acquiescing in the vote of
the majority or the will of the richer man or clique that has bought up
all the stock. When the political boss informs our corporation that the
legislation we want passed must be paid for we pay without resorting to
guerilla or any other tactics. When one holds the cards that will take
all the remaining tricks he usually shows his hand saying, "the rest are
mine," and everybody assents.
But circumstances alter cases and all cases are not alike. If your
doctrine is of universal application the ravisher who presents himself
with overwhelming force must always be gently accepted without
resistance to save time and avoid danger and expense. If the European
powers, disgusted with the success of our protective tariff and rising
commercial supremacy, should unite to abolish our lynch law, burning of
negroes at the stake, municipal corruption and some other matters, their
armies and fleets would outnumber us even more than the English
outnumber the Boers; and I suppose if you are really as much of a
"quitter" as you profess to be you would then still preach your doctrine
of submission.
When you look closely at the matter and try to fix the point of
scientific defeat in the Boer war I do not know why you should place it
at the fall of Pretoria or whatever moment you decide upon for the
defeat of the regularly organized armies. I should say it was just as
well placed before the fighting began when England showed her cards; a
population of 30,000,000, without counting the population of the
colonies, against a population that does not number 2,000,000 counting
the Cape Colony rebels; an army of 250,000 regulars against 40,000
militia.
If your doctrine is sound political morality, it applied then, and in
the face of such stupendous odds, I should say, rather more than it does
now.
But I prefer to be guided somewhat in these matters by your great
grandfather, John Adams, for whom I have always had a great fancy. If
you will pardon me for saying so I think that his attention was more
closely and intensely directed to these matters than yours has ever
been. His neck was at stake as well as your own valuable existence and
reputation. The British statute of that time provided a terrible
punishment for what he was doing. Possibly you have never read it.
"That the offender be drawn to the gallows, and not be carried or
walk; that he be hanged by the neck, and then cut down alive; that
his entrails be taken and burnt while he is yet alive; that his
head be cut off; that his body be divided into four parts; that his
head and quarters be at the king's disposal."
The disposal the king was accustomed to make of the heads and quarters
of such people was to have the quarters hung about in conspicuous parts
of London like quarters of beef; and the heads were set up on poles on
Temple Bar or London Bridge to rot as a ghastly warning.
I am inclined to think that the opinion of a man who from 1765 to 1780
worked with that enactment hanging over his head is worth considering. I
find on picking up the first life of him that comes to hand, that he was
anything but blind to the consequences. England had shown her hand. She
outnumbered the colonists four to one; and, in the same proportion, she
could send a disciplined army against their undisciplined militia and
guerilla forces.
It was even worse than that. The colonists were not united in resisting
England; not nearly so unanimous as the Boers are. It was by no means
certain that our colonial rebel party had a bare majority. The loyalists
insisted and believed that they themselves had the majority. So if we
cut off from the supposed 3,000,000 population of the colonies the black
slaves who numbered about 800,000 and the loyalists who were even more
numerous, we had at the utmost only about 1,400,000 whites who were
prepared to resist the army, fleet, and 8,000,000 population of England
without counting nearly a million loyalists in their own midst.
In fact on the showing of hands it was an utterly hopeless contest, and
within a few years proved itself to be such. All that saved your
ancestor's party from complete annihilation was the assistance after
1778 of the French army, fleet, provisions, clothes and loans of money
followed by assistance from Spain, and at the last moment by the
alliance of Holland. And even with all this assistance your ancestor's
cause was even as late as the year 1780 generally believed to be a
hopeless one.
Your ancestor did not like the prospect. He was fully prepared for
misery, beggary and his family blood attainted and rendered infamous to
the last generation by the English law. Death was the least thing he
dreaded.
"I go mourning in my heart all the day long," he writes to his
wife, "though I say nothing. I am melancholy for the public and
anxious for my family. As for myself a frock and trousers, a hoe
and a spade would do for my remaining days."
"I feel unutterable anxiety," he writes again. "God grant us wisdom
and fortitude! Should the opposition be suppressed, should this
country submit, what infamy, what ruin, God forbid! Death in any
form is less terrible."
"There is one ugly reflection," he says in a letter to Joseph
Warren. "Brutus and Cassius were conquered and slain, Hampden died
in the field, Sidney on the scaffold, Harrington in jail. This is
cold comfort." (Morse's Adams, pp. 54, 60.)
Your ancestor had still other difficulties to face of which it may be
well to remind you. Long before actual fighting began in our revolution
the rebel party, or perhaps I should say, the rougher elements of it,
created by means of tar and feathers and other methods, a reign of
terror throughout the whole country. They went about in parties taking
weapons of all kinds out of loyalists' houses, although they have since
put a clause in the National and all state constitutions that "the right
to keep and bear arms shall never be infringed." Those documents also
without exception, I believe, contain a clause guaranteeing freedom of
speech and of the press; but the rebel party of your ancestor
extinguished completely and utterly both of these rights; so completely
that Rivington, the principal publisher of loyalist pamphlets, fled for
his life to a British man-of-war; and loyalists scarcely dared refer to
politics even indirectly in private letters.
If the loyalists were really a majority, as they professed to be, the
rebels were determined to break them up. Loyalists were ridden and
tossed on fence rails, gagged and bound for days at a time, stoned,
fastened in rooms with a fire and the chimney stopped on top, advertised
as public enemies so that they would be cut off from all dealings with
their neighbors; they had bullets shot into their bedrooms, their horses
poisoned or mutilated; money or valuable plate extorted from them to
save them from violence and on pretence of taking security for their
good behavior; their houses and ships were burnt; they were compelled to
pay the guards who watched them in their houses; and when carted about
for the mob to stare at and abuse they were compelled to pay something
at every town. For the three months of July, August and September of the
year 1774, one can find in the American Archives alone, over thirty
descriptions of outrages of this kind.
In short, lynch law prevailed for many years during the revolution, and
the habit became so fixed that we have never given it up. As has been
recently shown the term lynch law originated during the revolution and
was taken from the name of the brother of the man who founded Lynchburgh
in Virginia.
The revolution was not by any means the pretty social event that the
ladies of the so-called patriotic societies suppose it to have been. It
was on the contrary a rank and riotous rebellion against the long
established authority of a nation which had saved us from France, built
us up into prosperity and if she were ruling us to-day would, I am
entirely willing to admit, abolish lynch law, negro burning, municipal
and state legislative corruption and all the other evils about which
reformers fret.
But feeling that we were a naturally separated people, the rebel party
among us insisted that we had the inalienable right to rule ourselves.
We were seized with the spirit of independence, or as the people of your
way of thinking at that time called it "a chimera of patriotism."
Against this natural and inalienable right no authority, we declared, no
matter how meritorious and venerable need be respected.
The Boers, though receiving far greater provocation than we received,
have behaved much better. They have not tarred and feathered Englishmen
as we did or ridden them on rails, or suffocated them with smoke, or
burnt their houses or hazed or tortured them in any way. Their conduct
in the whole war has been most fair, honorable and meritorious, showing
the high character of their intelligence and morals and their
superiority to the British.
In our revolution, wherever the rebel party were most successful with
their reign of terror they drove all the judges from the bench and
abolished the courts; and for a long time there were no courts or public
administration of the law in many of the colonies, notably in New
England.
To people of the loyalist turn of mind all these lynching proceedings
were an irrefragable proof, not only that the rebel party were wicked,
but that their ideas of independence, of a country free from British
control and British law, were ridiculous, silly delusions, dangerous to
all good order and civilization. That such people could ever govern a
country of their own and have in it that thing they were howling so much
about, "liberty," was in their opinion beyond the bounds of intelligent
belief.
These lynching proceedings, the loyalists said, increased the loyalist
party very fast and made them sure of a majority. I shall not discuss
that question. But there is no doubt that many rebels went over to the
loyalist side; and many others who did not actually go over were shaken
in their faith and hardly knew what to think. Your ancestor belonged to
the party who did all this lynching and inaugurated the reign of terror
and he has himself told us how it staggered him. The prospect of raising
such men as the lynchers to power by a revolution was a serious matter.
A man one day congratulated him on the anarchy, the mob violence, the
insults to judges, the closing of the courts and the tar and feathers
which the patriots and their congress were producing.
"Oh Mr. Adams, what great things have you and your colleagues done
for us! We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts
of justice now in this province, and I hope there never will be
another."
For once in his life your ancestor could not reply.
"Is this the object for which I have been contending, said I to
myself; for I rode along without any answer to this wretch. Are
these the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there
in the country? Half the nation for what I know; for half the
nation are debtors, if not more; and these have been in all
countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country
should get into such hands, and there is great danger that it will,
to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, health and everything
else?" (Works of John Adams, Vol. II, p. 420.)
I have made these lengthy statements and quotations for the sake of
reminding you that the man who was responsible for your existence and
also very largely for the existence of the revolution, faced with his
eyes open the very state of affairs which you say should in conscience
and good morals compel a man to surrender and give up. He faced a far
worse state of affairs than the Boers face, and he had less excuse for
his conduct.
He, however, did not follow your advice; and one reason may have been
that his wife, whose blood is also in your veins, would have despised
him if he had. I need not quote those beautiful letters of hers which
are in print, in which she declares not only her own unalterable
affection, but her willingness, to go down with him to disaster and
poverty and labor with her hands. Among all the men of that time I do
not know of one who was more uncompromising, more obstinate, more
determined as President Kruger put it, to make Great Britain "pay a
price that would stagger humanity," or according to your own theory,
more immoral, than your own great grandfather and his wife.
During the seven years fighting of the revolution Great Britain sent out
peace commissioners and kept offering terms which steadily increased in
liberality, entire freedom from taxation, in fact almost everything the
rebel colonists had demanded, up even to a sort of semi-independence.
Your great grandfather voted down everyone of them. He attended with
Franklin the famous peace meeting with Lord Howe on Staten Island and
rejected Lord Howe's terms. And why? Because none of them contained the
one essential condition, absolute independence. Your great grandfather
was a Kruger.
But let us pass from him. Let us see what others thought and what was
the general situation during the revolution.
At the very beginning of that contest our forces were of an irregular
and guerilla character. The farmers, who attacked the British regulars
at Lexington and followed them back to Boston picking them off from
behind stone fences and trees, were the most irregular fighters it is
possible to imagine. They were not acting under the authority of any
legitimate or even a _de facto_ government. They were not even
officered, directed or authorized by the rebel Continental Congress,
which had met the year before in Philadelphia. They were acting in a
purely voluntary manner in obedience to a mere sentiment of that faction
of the colonists who resented an invasion from Great Britain and wanted
this country for their own. They were acting in the same manner and on
the same sentiment by which the Boers now act and which you say is a
crime.
It is very important to remember that the moral position of the Boers is
vastly stronger than was ours. Before the present Boer war began the
Boers were two independent nations whose independence had been
acknowledged by England on two or three different occasions and in two
or three different documents. We were not independent and never had
been. We were colonies and some of our communities were not even
charter colonies; they were crown colonies; and one of the charter
colonies, Pennsylvania, had a clause in its charter acknowledging the
right of parliament to tax as it pleased. Our revolution was an out and
out rebellion against legitimate control because we wanted to govern
ourselves; because we did not want to be governed by people who lived
three thousand miles away in another and far separated country; because
we did not want to be taxed by the outsider; because we did not want him
to maintain an army amongst us to keep us in order, because we did not
want him to regulate our commerce or our manufacturing industries;
because in short, we wanted to keep house for ourselves and believed
that the colonial position was at its best essentially a degradation to
manhood or as we called it at that time "political slavery." If the
Boers are wrong in defending against England by guerilla methods an
independence long since acknowledged, then we were ten thousand times
wrong in supporting by the same methods a rebellion for independence
against that same country which it is said can rule any people better
than those people can rule themselves.
The Boers at the beginning of the present war had the regularly
organized armies of an independent nation. With the money obtained from
the gold mines they had bought the most modern artillery, small arms and
ammunition. We on the other hand being mere rebels had none of these
things. Our guns were at first antiquated or blacksmith-made muskets and
shot guns; and we were the ridicule of the British regulars because we
had no bayonets. Whenever we had a chance we used the superior weapons
taken from British prisoners just as the Boers now use the Lee-Metford
rifles taken from their prisoners. We never were decently armed until
France sent us shiploads of guns and ammunition. Many of the straps and
cartouche boxes worn by our people had the British army letters G. R.
stamped on them. Graydon relates in his memoirs how when he was taken
prisoner a cartouche box with those letters on it was instantly wrenched
with violence off his person.
As our first meeting in arms with the British was irregular so was our
second. Bunker Hill was so much of a guerilla battle so far as we were
concerned that it is disputed to this day whether Putnam or Prescott was
in command. As a matter of fact there was nobody in particular in
command. It was a voluntary sort of affair; and the description of it
reads exactly like a Boer battle.
About fifteen hundred men, mostly farmers like the Boers, suddenly
seized an important hill or kopje dangerously close to the British
lines. They fortified themselves with breast works made of fence rails
and hay in such a bucolic manner that all the regulars in Boston
laughed. They could have been defeated very easily by sending a force on
their flank and rear. But General Gage thought that would be ridiculous
and unnecessary. A force of three thousand regulars could easily by a
front attack sweep off these farmers, show them the uselessness of their
methods, and possibly end the rebellion at once.
You know the rest. But it must be very shocking to a person of your
views to remember that the old Queen Anne muskets, shot guns and duck
guns which your forefathers in such bad taste and contrary to all
military science, levelled over those fence rails and hay at your
friends the British in beautiful uniforms, were loaded with buckshot,
slugs, old nails, and bits of iron from the blacksmith shops. That was
our Majuba Hill, our Spion Kop.
Let us move along still farther. The New England farmers for all the
rest of the summer, autumn and following winter formed themselves into a
most vulgar and absurd army and surrounded Boston, shutting in the
British. The minds of those farmers were full almost to fanaticism of
the principle of equality and the rights of man, "the levelling
principles" as they were then called which now form the foundation of
our American life. The officers among them were merely leaders and
persuaders. It was not an uncommon sight to see a colonel shaving one of
his own men. The men served a few weeks and then went home to get in the
hay or see how their wives were getting on, and others came from the
farms to take their places. In this way the army was kept up. Those who
went home were very apt to take their powder and musket with them to
shoot squirrels on the farm.
A year later at New York our army was the same guerilla force and I
shall let Captain Graydon describe it:
"The appearance of things was not much calculated to excite
sanguine expectations in the mind of a sober observer. Great
numbers of people were indeed to be seen and those who are not
accustomed to the sight of bodies under arms are always prone to
exaggerate them. But the propensity to swell the mass, has not an
equal tendency to convert it into soldiery; and the irregularity,
want of discipline, bad arms, and defective equipment in all
respects, of this multitudinous assemblage, gave no favorable
impression of its prowess. The materials of which the eastern
battalions were composed, were apparently the same as those of
which I had seen so unpromising a specimen at Lake George. I speak
particularly of the officers who were in no single respect
distinguishable from the men, other than in the colored cockades,
which for this very purpose had been prescribed in general orders;
a different color being assigned to the officers of each grade. So
far from aiming at a deportment which might raise them above their
privates and thence prompt them to due respect and obedience to
their commands, the object was, by humility, to preserve the
existing blessing of equality, an illustrious instance of which was
given by Colonel Putnam, the chief engineer of the army, and no
less a personage than the nephew of the major-general of that name.
'What,' says a person meeting him one day with a piece of meat in
his hand, 'carrying home your rations yourself, colonel! 'Yes,'
says he, 'and I do it to set the officers a good example.'"
(Graydon's Memoirs, edition of 1846, p. 147.)
We have grown into a habit of depicting all our revolutionary
forefathers, both privates and officers, in beautiful buff and blue
uniform as if we were from the start a regularly organized, independent
nation, fighting regular battles with another independent nation. There
were, I believe, at times a select few, more usually officers, who
succeeded in having such a uniform. But the great mass of our rebel
troops had no uniforms at all. They wore a hunting shirt or smock frock
which was merely a cheap cotton shirt belted round the waist and with
the ends hanging outside over the hips instead of being tucked into the
trousers. Into the loose bosom of this garment above the belt could be
stuffed bread, pork, and all sorts of articles including a frying pan.