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
We of course do not like to have a picture of one of our ancestors
painted in such a garment. It would not look well. It is better to have
some theoretical uniform, the uniform that our fathers would have had if
they had had the money and time to get one, painted on top of a picture
of our ancestor.
Lafayette has described in his memoirs the rebel army he found in this
country on his arrival in the summer of 1777:
"Eleven thousand men, but tolerably armed and still worse clad,
presented a singular spectacle in their parti-colored and often
naked state; the best dresses were hunting shirts of brown linen.
Their tactics were equally irregular. They were arranged without
regard to size except that the smallest men were the front rank."
When the French officers appeared among us after the alliance, our
officers were often unable to entertain them for lack of decent clothes
and food. Washington in an order of July 24, 1776, said:
"The general, sensible of the difficulty and expense of providing
clothes of almost any kind for the troops, feels an unwillingness
to recommend, much more to order any kind of uniform; but as it is
absolutely necessary that men should have clothes and appear decent
and tight, he earnestly encourages the use of hunting shirts with
long breeches made of the same cloth, gaiter fashion about the legs
to all those yet unprovided." (Force 5th Series, Vol I, pp. 676,
677.)
That was the sort of army Washington commanded; an army to which he
could seldom give orders but only recommendations and suggestions. It
often melted away before his eyes without any power on his part to stop
desertion. At New York in 1776 he collected as you know by the utmost
exertion about 18,000 men, but so afflicted with camp fevers and disease
that only 14,000 of them were effective, and these were more of a rabble
than an army. At the battle of Long Island and other engagements round
New York they were easily beaten by General Howe's huge army of 34,000,
and as is generally believed could have been annihilated or exterminated
if that general had chosen to do so. As it was they were so broken up
and scattered that they disappeared to their homes, and Washington fled
across New Jersey and crossed the Delaware with only 3,300 men.
The Continental Congress fled from Philadelphia. It was a migrating
congress for many a day afterwards; travelling from one place of refuge
to another with its little printing press and papers carried in a wagon.
If you had been living in those days you would have said that the
rebellion had now certainly reached the point of scientific defeat and
should be abandoned and all hope of independence given up. Thousands of
people at that time said so. The loyalists of course said so; and many
who had been rebels, or had been watching to see if the rebellion had
any chance at all, now turned against it and took the British oath of
allegiance. That is unquestionably what you would have done if you had
been living at that time with your present opinions. Your great
grandfather however was not of that mind, nor was Washington.
In fact, Washington prepared to become the worst kind of a guerilla; and
you will find his letter on the subject in the second volume of Irving's
life of him, chapter XLI. In case of being further pressed he said, "We
must then retire to Augusta county, in Virginia. Numbers will repair to
us for safety and we will then try a predatory war. If overpowered we
must cross the Allegheny mountains."
What do you think of that? What a wicked man he must have been. He
intended to abandon the seaboard colonies, taking with him all the
rebels who would follow him; and a great many including your ancestor
would have to follow him, for if they remained behind they would be
hung. He proposed a "grand trek" to get away from those British who are
said to govern so well, just as the Boers "treked" away from them into
the deserts of South Africa nearly a hundred years ago, because they did
not fancy what they had experienced of that supposed excellent
government.
Having secured a refuge for the rebel congress and his followers on the
edge of what was then the Western Wilderness, Washington proposes to
maintain himself there by what he calls "predatory war," and I suppose
you know what that is. If unsuccessful in that, he intended to cross the
Allegheny mountains and plunge into that vast unknown region with the
Indians and the buffaloes, which stretched away 3,000 miles to the
Pacific ocean. There, assisted by the great distances he could play
havoc with an invading British force; cut their slender communications
and their cordons of blockhouses as the Boers are doing to-day in South
Africa.
This last resort of the rebel colonists was so obvious that it was often
discussed not only in the colonies but in England. It was greatly feared
by the tory ministry, because it might indefinitely prolong the war. The
whigs prophesied disaster from it; and Burke in one of his speeches
refers to it in an eloquent passage in which he describes the rebel
colonists retreating to that vast interior of fertile plains where they
would grow into marvels of hardihood and desperation; how they would
become myriads of American Tartars and pour down a fierce and
irresistible cavalry upon the narrow strip of sea coast, sweeping before
them "your governors, your councillors, your collectors and comptrollers
and all the slaves that adhere to them."
In other words the tories dreaded what not so very long afterwards they
accomplished in South Africa. They forced the Boers out of Cape Colony
and they went by the grand trek into the interior plains where they
founded two fierce and free republics, such as Washington might very
readily have founded west of the Alleghenies. A turn of the hand, the
failure of the French Alliance might have placed the United States in a
position somewhat similar to that of South Africa or to that of Ireland
if you like. The effect of British brutal and stupid violence on a high
strung and independence-loving people will always be very much the same
everywhere.
But to return to Washington's letter. You very likely read it when as a
young man you read Irving's life of him; but it never occurred to you to
think that his "predatory" and guerilla war was wicked. It was on your
side; you believed that his desire for the independence of the country
was just and right, and being so, could be rightfully supported by
predatory as well as regular warfare. Your youthful instinct was sound.
You had not then learned to worship mere financeering. You had not then
imbibed a passion for that part of the British constitution which
declares that any resistance whether in support of independence, home
or anything else which interferes with the operations of a financial
clique in London is a crime.
But when you see the principles and tactics of Washington and your own
great grandfather repeated in a country far off they seem different, and
when you see them turned against a country which gradually has come to
embody in your mind fashionable society, you think them very dreadful.
From your great grandfather's time to yours is a very short distance in
history but a long distance, it seems, in political morals.
The proposition for which you contend, or for which you profess to
contend, for I decline to believe that anyone of your name really
accepts such stuff, is nothing but the old principle of the bully and
brute. The little man must yield where his case is shown to be hopeless
and save the brute's time and money. After every battle of the
revolution the British and the loyalists thought that your ancestor and
his friends ought to give it up, and this went on for over seven years
in spite of the assistance of France.
I am inclined to think that if you were really put to the test you would
not live up to your own principles. I am inclined to think that if I and
several others, outnumbering you in the proportion of the English to the
Boers, should present revolvers and say that being men of better
business capacity we would now kindly take charge of your private
affairs and manage them for you to your great advantage, you would not
act quite as piously as you preach. The one or two drops of the blood of
old John, which are still hidden in your veins, somewhere down in your
boots, would suddenly rush to your heart and inflame it. You would duck
under those revolver muzzles and come at our stomachs in a way that
would keep us moving. We should undoubtedly very soon have your dead
body with which to conduct some sort of brutal and stupid British
triumph; but we should never be able to say that we had made a political
slave of a living Adams.
I have not space here to take you all through the revolution and remind
you of every scene in which your ancestor figured. But I shall finish
what I was saying about Washington when his army was reduced to 3,300
and he was prepared for a grand trek to the Alleghenies. He did not have
to resort to that because General Howe did not press him any further.
For political reasons, which we cannot go into here, Howe preferred that
Washington should raise another army if he could.
Howe retired to New York and spent the winter there with his large force
of 30,000; but at Trenton and Bordentown on the Delaware River some
fifty miles away he placed two isolated outposts of about 1,500 Hessians
each. Washington collected more men until his 3,300 had become 6,000 and
with these raw militia he gobbled up those Hessian outposts just as the
Boers have been gobbling up similarly placed British outposts. When a
force of 8,000 British came out from New York to reoccupy Trenton,
Washington cut in behind them, and at Princeton, finding some more
British coming up widely separated and unable to support one another, he
beat them in detail.
This was brilliant, irregular Boer warfare on outposts and weak
detachments. Washington was able to do it because his whole system was
like that of the Boers, an irregular one. If he had had a regularly
organized army and it had been reduced down to 3,300 it would never have
been brought together again. He would have been done for. But his army
was always one of the come and go kind. He had a small nucleus that
could be relied upon to stay; but most of his force was composed of men
who came from all parts of the colonies to serve three weeks, three
months or six months then return home and have others come in their
places. It was by this Boer method that all the armies of the rebel
party during the revolution were kept going. When seriously defeated or
when they had accomplished an object they would scatter as the Boers do
and make it very difficult to destroy that which did not exist.
Now that we have settled down and become a great nation all this seems
like very foolish business to some of us who cut off coupons or sit at
roll top desks endorsing the backs of documents until we have lost the
natural feeling of vigorous manhood so characteristic of the Boers and
the followers of Washington. We have forgotten our revolution. Our own
acts in it now seem too heroic for our stomachs when we see others
practicing them. Ireland has been practicing similar methods against
England for hundreds of years. It may be a foolish game, but it can be
made a very long one. It has lasted some seven hundred years in Ireland
without success on either side. It lasted some thirty years in Cuba and
was successful and we have set the seal of our approval on that success.
I shall now restore to your recollection the famous Duche letter which
was written in the autumn of 1777. Duche was a brilliant young clergyman
of the Church of England and was settled in Philadelphia. He was
inclined to take sides with the rebel colonists, and would have been
very glad to see them attain what they wished if it could have been done
peaceably and in the manner of ordinary business negotiations; and he
was even willing to go a little farther than this and have the rebel
colonists make a certain amount of armed resistance up to a certain
point, not beyond the bounds of good taste. In short he was very much of
your professed way of thinking, and he represented a large class of
people who were of that way of thinking. At the meeting of the first
Continental Congress he opened the session with a prayer so eloquent and
suitable that it attracted universal attention, and gave him at once a
political standing of some little importance.
But after three years of Boer tactics, irregular methods, hopelessness,
evident failure, the rise into power of men who were not gentlemen,
petty peculation and fraud in the rebel army, apparent deterioration in
character of the men in the rebel congress, the undignified runaway,
wandering habit of that congress with its papers hauled from one refuge
to another in a wagon, and similar things which make a deep impression
on men of a certain kind of education and refinement, he saw so clearly
the unutterable folly and wickedness of the attempt at independence that
he could stand it no longer.
There were many others who thought just as he did; but they usually
either went to live in England or Canada or kept quiet in
semi-concealment waiting until the power of Britain should restore order
and good government to the colonies. But Duche, feeling that he was in
somewhat of a public position, argued out the whole subject in a long
letter to General Washington, calling on him in the name of God and
humanity to put an end to the frightful state of affairs so mutually
destructive to the best interests of both the colonies and England.
He was horrified he said to find that rather than give up the idol
independence the rebels "would deluge this country in blood." In short
he was horrified at the Krugerism of Washington who intended to make
England "pay a price that would stagger humanity." As to the rebel army
its existence depended on one man. Most of its officers were from "the
lowest of the people." "Take away those who surround your person, how
few are there that you can ask to sit at your table." The rebels had
hoped for aid from France: but after three years of waiting it had not
come and there were no signs of it. The whig party in England was
growing smaller. The whole English nation, "all orders and ranks of men
are now unanimous and determined to risk their all on the contest."
"Under so many discouraging circumstances, can virtue, can honor,
can the love of your country prompt you to persevere. Humanity
itself (and sure I am humanity is no stranger to your breast) calls
upon you to desist. Your army must perish for want of common
necessaries, or thousands of innocent families must perish to
support them. Wherever they encamp the country must be
impoverished. Wherever they march the troops of Britain will pursue
and must complete the devastation which America herself has begun."
"Perhaps it may be said, 'it is better to die than to be slaves.'
This indeed is a splendid maxim in theory: and perhaps in some
instances, may be found experimentally true. But where there is the
least probability of a happy accommodation surely wisdom and
humanity call for some sacrifices to be made to prevent inevitable
destruction."
It reads almost as if you had written it yourself, does it not? It
raised the whole question fairly and squarely, the whole question of the
moral right of a naturally separated people to struggle for independence
to the bitter end, the last ditch, extermination or whatever name you
choose to give it, or as in the case of Ireland, the Armenians and the
Poles without end.
I do not mean to say that that was the only time that Washington had had
the question brought squarely before him. It was a question that came up
all over the country every day for seven years down to within a few
months of the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781; for the year 1780 was as
you know the darkest hour in our revolution. Every individual in those
seven years had that question before him every day and hour, and as
individuals settled it for themselves one way or the other they dropped
in and out of the two sides of the contest.
How did Washington settle it with Duche? The young clergyman made a
powerful appeal to him. He said that the whole solution of the war
rested with Washington alone. He alone could stop the fighting. He alone
could persuade the other leaders in the name of God and humanity to give
up a hopeless contest. This was somewhat of an exaggeration. The war was
deeper than Washington just as the Boer war is deeper than Kruger. But
never mind that. Duche's idea was that Washington should at the head of
his army negotiate for some settlement short of independence.
Independence, England would never grant.
Awful and wicked as it now no doubt seems to you, Washington declined
this honor. He sent Duche's letter to the wandering congress. It was
copied and given a wide publicity. Your ancestor and the men of that
time never dodged the question raised by that letter. Washington also
sent a copy to Duche's brother-in-law, Francis Hopkinson, and if you
want to read a stinging letter I can recommend the letter Hopkinson
wrote to his perverted relative. The whole correspondence including
Duche's letter is printed in the appendix to the edition of 1846 of
Graydon's Memoirs. I shall quote just one passage from Hopkinson's
letter:
"The whole force of the reasoning," he says to Duche, "contained in
your letter tends to this point: that virtue and honor require us
to stand by truth, as long as it can be done with safety, but that
her cause may be abandoned on the approach of danger; or in other
words, that the justice of the American cause ought to be squared
by the success of her arms."
The moral or principle contained in that passage is repudiated by you
and by every one who lives in England; by the Russians also, most of
the Germans, many Frenchmen and in fact Europe generally. If you fear
numbers you do well, no doubt, in repudiating it. But it was on that
moral principle that our revolution was put through. Whoever denies that
principle denies the United States, denies our foundation principle and
our validity, denies the justice and righteousness of the struggles
which created Switzerland, and all the South American republics
including Cuba, struggles which are still carried on by the Armenians
after seven hundred years of failure and by the Irish for the same
period, struggles which in fact, originally created England, France,
Germany and all the powers which now affect to despise them, struggles
which create nationalities and all that is useful, honorable or valuable
in civil or political life. When you deny the right of a naturally
separated people to struggle without end for independence, you deny the
most fundamental and necessary, the most powerful and far reaching, the
most scientific and well settled principle of moral conduct that history
has disclosed.
I do not wish to take up too much space accumulating instances in our
revolutionary history, but Franklin's conduct is perhaps worth
considering. He was not what is called an enthusiast or fanatic. He was
on the contrary one of the shrewd calculating kind. He had full
knowledge of all the conditions. He resided in England as agent of
Massachusetts and of the rebel cause in general from 1764 to 1775. It
cannot be said that he did not know the power and merit of England. He
admired the English political system. He was very fond of English life
and preferred a residence among learned and cultivated people in England
to one in America. Under these influences he at first believed that the
colonists should submit after trying ordinary peaceful and so-called
legal measures. In a word Franklin was at first of your opinion.
But when he returned to America in 1775 and the spirit or influence of
independence touched him he became the most unrelenting, obstinate and
as you would say unreasoning, fanatical and blind stickler for absolute
and unqualified independence at any price or at the price of
extermination.
The Continental Congress of which your ancestor was a member was, as
late as the year 1780, so determined to keep up the struggle although in
that year it was regarded as hopeless, that they arranged to have
pictures prepared with short descriptions of what they considered
British atrocities, but which were the milk of human kindness compared
with Kitchener's Spanish concentration camps and other benevolences
inflicted on the Boers. These pictures and descriptions were to be shown
and taught to every American rebel child forever so as to burn into
their minds eternal hatred and a struggle without end against the
independence hating British brute.
Just at the close of the revolution Franklin was preparing to have
thirty-five of these pictures designed and engraved in France "in
order," as he wrote to an Englishman, "to impress the minds of children
and posterity with a deep sense of your bloody and insatiable malice and
wickedness." If Franklin could apply such adjectives to England's
comparatively mild attempts to suppress a rebellion, what would he say
to-day of her worse than inhuman efforts to destroy two independent
nations. Franklin believed that the success of our revolution had
destroyed forever the inherent cruelty and despotic brutishness of the
English tory. But the tory has gone on developing; and even the English
liberal has less of the courage, intelligence and character which were
such a brilliant and saving grace to him in the days of Burke, Chatham
and Barre.
I shall now consider what you say about the action of General Lee and
the leaders of the confederacy. You assume that they were struggling for
independence; and that is most extraordinary. It is an insult, as it
seems to me, to the intelligence of the whole American people. I never
before heard our civil war described in that way. That Lee or the
confederacy were struggling for independence in the sense in which the
American colonists of 1776, or the Boers of to-day or the Swiss or the
Irish struggled for that object I most positively deny. If Lee and the
confederacy had been struggling in that sense the civil war would not
yet be over. The eleven southern states would be now either independent
or in the condition of Ireland.
First of all the southern states were not a naturally separate people.
They were contiguous territory. There was no natural boundary dividing
them from the North. They were of the same race, language and social
status as the north. They had taken part with the north in making the
whole country independent of England and with the north they had made
the National Constitution.
They had quarrelled with the north simply about the question of slavery.
At one time they had disapproved of slavery in the abstract as much as
the north did; but as their slaves were more profitable than slaves in
the north they were slower about abolishing slavery than the north had
been. Their slaves were guaranteed to them by the Constitution. The
rising moral sentiment against slavery in the north, which seemed to
them to threaten the abolition of slavery in the south by violence
without regard to the Constitution and without compensation to owners
drove them into war. Their confederacy which they formed was a mere
make-shift to protect millions of dollars worth of slaves. There is no
evidence of any passion for independence among them, such as has
characterized the people already described, and as a matter of fact
there was nothing in their unseparated situation that would cause that
passion.
High strung, intelligent men such as the southerners are, will fight a
long time over millions of dollars worth of slaves, if they think they
are to be suddenly and unfairly deprived of them, but not as they would
fight for independence, for political existence. There was so little
moral righteousness in slavery and they had always known so well its
unrighteousness that when the point of scientific defeat was reached,
when their regularly organized armies were formally defeated they gave
up the game. The inspiration of the cause was not perennial. There was
none of the eternal justness in it which inspired the cause of
Washington and your ancestor, which has kept the Cubans struggling for
thirty years, and the Irish and the Armenians for seven hundred.
General Lee, who, as you say, set the example of giving up, was a man
of peculiar views on the civil war. He was not a believer in slavery. He
described it as a "moral and political evil" and "a greater evil to the
white than to the colored race." He did not even believe in the right of
secession. He spoke of it as an absurdity, and said that it was
impossible to suppose that the framers of the Constitution could have
contemplated anything of the sort. He had great misgivings and much
mental struggle when Virginia seceded and he finally decided to go with
his state because as he put it, "I have not been able to make up my mind
to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home." He cared
little or nothing for the confederacy. It was the invasion of Virginia
against which he fought and he always commanded the army in Virginia.
"Save in defence of my native state," he said, "I hope I may never be
called on to draw my sword."