Peter Charles Hoffer The Brave New World, A History of Early America Second Edition (2006)

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.As one minister thundered: Our fathers trusted and the Lorddid deliver them.even so may it be with us.let us still under the banners ofliberty, and with a Washington for our head, go on from conquering to conquer.The officers saw their participation in the war as a proof of their personal honor, andbelieved that their cause was the vindication of American liberty against Britishtyranny.The common soldiers would never lose their faith that God was on their sideand saw themselves as patriots.The Revolutionary War required the utmost exertions from the British people.Once relatively small and marginal institutions in British life, the British army andnavy found themselves almost as transformed by the war as did the American mili-I NDEPENDENCE, WAR, AND REPUBLI CANI SM, 1776 1783 467tias.From a standing army of no more than forty thousand or so in 1775, in thecourse of the war the number of regular troops tripled.The Royal Navy expanded its numbers from under 20,000 to over 180,000 men inthe course of the war, distributed over 350 vessels.Many of these seamen were im-pressed into service against their will, and life on a ship of the line in the Royal Navywas only a step away from prison for some of the sailors.The officers and crews couldamass small fortunes from capturing prizes, sometimes an incentive to go lookingfor private gain when public duty dictated otherwise.By the end of the war, perhaps more than 450,000 British and Irish subjects hadborne arms as home guards (the British militia), in the navy, or in the regular army.Not all served in North America, but together they reflect a total commitment to thestruggle akin to that of the revolutionaries.Ideology motivated the British troops, for they served the greatest empire in earlymodern history and were proud of it.Indeed, the rapid mobilization of the Britisharmy and navy could not have taken place without a truly national commitment tothe war.The British taxed themselves unmercifully to put these forces in the field,but Britons willingly loaned the nation even more the national debt rising from�127 million in 1775 to �232 million in 1783.No Safe HavenOther participants and witnesses to the combat found their lives changed almostas profoundly as the lives of the men in the armies and navies.There were no safehavens from the fighting, as Indians, women, and loyalists discovered.Most Indi-ans would have preferred to remain neutral in the war.It was a quarrel, as one Iro-quois leader termed it, between two brothers of one [white] blood. The OneidaIroquois petitioned Connecticut governor John Trumbull, Take no umbrage that weIndians refuse joining in the contest.We are for peace.But many northern Indians were still dependent on British traders or resentedcolonial settlers forcible occupation of Indian lands and joined the British in the war.The Iroquois split their allegiance the Oneidas supporting the revolutionaryforces, and the Mohawks allying with the British.Mohawk war parties raided NewYork farmsteads, and Shawnee warriors attacked revolutionary settlers along theOhio River.Militiamen called to protect the settlers could not tell neutral Indiansfrom hostile ones, and by indiscriminately attacking the former drove them intothe arms of the British.Farther south, older Cherokee leaders urged neutrality, butthe younger war chiefs fought for the crown.Creeks and Choctaws served with theBritish.Thus a war of state militias against pro-British Indians raged alongside the warof Continentals with British regulars.There were no massed armies and few uni-forms in frontier war.Instead, it pitted Indian villages against small and isolated set-tlements of revolutionary farmers.In this sense, it was a continuation of the kind of468 FROM PROVI NCES OF EMPI RE TO A NEW NATI ONfrontier conflict that had raged on and off from the inception of European settlementof the North American continent.Women and children suffered alongside their menfolk.Mary Jemison, a Senecawife and mother taken as a teenager from her white family but living happily withher Indian captors, recalled the carnage of one of the revolutionary army s foraysthrough Indian country: They destroyed every article of the food kind that they couldlay their hands on.A part of our corn they burnt, and threw the remainder into theriver.They burnt our houses, killed what few cattle and horses they could find, de-stroyed our fruit trees, and left nothing but the bare soil and timber.There wasnot a mouthful of any kind of sustenance left, not even enough to keep a child oneday from perishing with hunger. Revolutionary accounts of Indian attacks for ex-ample, in the Cherry Valley of New York were equally gruesome.Whatever choice they made, Indian life in the revolutionary era changed pro-foundly.Even Indians who had remained on the sidelines or supported the Revolu-tion found that they had lost their ancestral lands to the new United States.Thosewho supported the English did not understand why England abandoned their inter-ests in the peace negotiations.The destruction of Indian towns and the dislocationof Indian life through the loss of so many warriors drove many survivors to alco-holism and despair.Some Indian groups responded as Indians had after the arrivalof the first Europeans by moving west and joining with other Indian groups [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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