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American Revolution - Native Americans, African-Americans, and Women - Woody Holton
98 Plays1 year ago
Ep 005 - Nonfiction. My discussion with Woody Holton about his book, "Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution."
Wow, did you know there was an 'emancipation proclamation' issued long before Lincoln? I didn't, and I learned so much. Woody was fascinating to talk to, and his research of the ‘overlooked people’ of the revolution was incredible.
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Transcript
Introduction and Author Background
00:00:02
Speaker
Hi, everyone. I'm A.J. Woodham's host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I'm here with Woody Holton with his new book, Liberty of Sweet, The Hidden History of the American Revolution. Woody Holton is the Peter and Bonnie McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. His 2009 book, Abigail Adams, which he wrote on a Guggenheim fellowship, won the Bancroft Prize
Debunking Myths of the American Revolution
00:00:33
Speaker
And Woody, I love this line in your bio. His books have required reading on more than 200 college campuses, which is good news because I found your book so insightful. Uh, so that's, uh, that's, that's good to hear. But anyway, how are you doing today, Woody? I'm good. I'm good. I'm really grateful for this chance to talk about a little bit about the military history of revolutionary war. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
00:01:01
Speaker
I learned so much about the American Revolution from your book, and obviously it's about the history of the overlooked people of the American Revolution, Native Americans, African Americans, women, religious dissenters, but also small
Inspiration and Interest in the Revolutionary War
00:01:16
Speaker
things that I didn't think I'd be coming across. For example, Paul Revere.
00:01:23
Speaker
he would have never said the British are coming because people still considered themselves British at the time. And I was like, huh, I guess that makes sense. But my whole life, you know, that's a story, a myth that we've got, that we've built up. And your book talks a lot about these myth makers who've really told a lot of stories about the American Revolution.
00:01:48
Speaker
So I really, I just, I found your book so insightful. I got to confess to a myth, to doing some myth making of my own by mistake. I've been teaching for 30 years and I think I spent about the first 20 of those saying, oh yeah, that myth about Revere saying the British are coming, that comes from the famous Paul Revere.
00:02:07
Speaker
a poem by Longfellow, you know, the one that also has one if I land, two if I see. And I finally read the whole poem and it's not from there. Even the myth busters are often myth makers sometimes inadvertently. No, no, that's fine. Well, I mean, your book has just like a ton of myths that you dispel. So I think we'll give you a pass on that one because you have pointed out all these others. But yeah, like a really fascinating read, really enjoyed it.
00:02:37
Speaker
Kind of before we dive into your book, first, I'm always kind of interested in historians and what makes them tick. What got you interested in this time period in the first place? This isn't your first book about the revolutionary period. What got you interested in it?
00:02:56
Speaker
Well, if you mean in the very first place, I'll tell you what a lot of people have been saying about the musical Hamilton, which, you know, is soon to be a major motion picture, but many years before that motion picture was 1776. And my brother is a little bit younger than me and I basically memorized it. It's so fun. You know, there's very sad scenes in it and gripping scenes that really remind us that slavery was a Northern as well as a Southern
00:03:26
Speaker
phenomenon that you know that northern colonies like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts depended on slavery economically as much as Virginia and South Carolina did because that was their market. But anyway we saw 1776 and both of us got very excited about it and so that was sort of planted as an interest of
Challenges Faced by the British in the Revolutionary War
00:03:45
Speaker
mine. And then I got to grad school at Duke in 1982 and everybody there was not talking about the founding fathers so much as
00:03:55
Speaker
saying, you know, we've got enough on them. Let's study the other 99% enslaved people and women, Native Americans and so forth. So my interest has always been trying to connect my 12 year old interest with my 25 year old interest and since I was 25 in ordinary people. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. My father was a big fan of Thomas Jefferson. I think he became more ambivalent about Jefferson as he learned more about the other side of Jefferson.
00:04:24
Speaker
But we still all admire his principles, if not always what he did. And so I picked that up from that and from that amazing play slash movie, 1776. But the overlay for me has been trying to not throw that thought out out when getting into social history, but trying to connect the two kinds of history.
00:04:47
Speaker
That's really great and really interesting that you say that. So I'm a, myself, I'm a fiction writer and of course I've always loved books and I've always loved fiction. And I think a lot about like my 14 year old self, just like how cool I thought it would be to be a novelist and to write books.
00:05:09
Speaker
to live in that world. And it is like a really, it's a thing I think about a lot. I don't know if it's a driving force, but it is like, it's definitely an origin story going back even to when I was a teenager. So it's interesting to hear you say that. Well, what inspired you then to write this book, The Hidden History of the American Revolution? Like I said, you've written a couple of other books on this topic previously.
00:05:38
Speaker
What inspired you to write this one? An insane delusion. And that delusion was that having written, I'd done a book, it was kind of about class, my first book called Force Founders. One, it was kind of about gender, the Abigail Adams book, and one that was mostly about race.
00:05:57
Speaker
Well, actually, the Forest Founders book was race and class, but did one about gender and then did a constitution book that was really sort of a class interpretation of the origin of the constitution. So I figured with all of that and with teaching the American Revolution for 20 years, I thought, oh, this will be a piece of cake. I can wrap this up in a couple of years. What I didn't anticipate was how ignorant I was of the military history.
00:06:23
Speaker
of the Revolutionary War. And I was lucky enough to get a contract with a great publisher, Simon & Schuster, but, you know, they have, as a commercial press, unlike, say, the University of Virginia Press, where a lot of friends of mine have published, or University of Harvard's Press, a great press.
00:06:41
Speaker
they knew their readers wanted to hear about the battles. And I said, well, I don't know that much about the battles. And my editor said, well, learn. And that took me 10 years really to just catch up on what other people had said about the battles, but then beyond that to say something new about them. But I'm really glad I was deluded because probably if I had, you've probably had this with books you've worked on, if you'd known how long it would have
00:07:06
Speaker
it was going to take, you never would have started. That's true of Columbus, by the way, so we have good company. If he'd known there was this big pair of continents between him and China, which was his destination, he never would have set out on that trip. I think delusions could be dangerous, but delusions can also be quite helpful because I ended up
00:07:28
Speaker
my favorite part, I don't know if you could tell this reading at AJ, but of course I'm interested in the origins of the revolution and the long-term results, and I do have my little economic take on the Constitution that I'm proud of, but the part where my juices were really pumping was the part that I hadn't really wanted to write initially, and that is of the military history, because I discovered A, this just sort of inherently fascinating, and B, it is so full of myths, as you said, so there's lots of myths to combat, and C,
00:07:58
Speaker
I had participated with a lot of other people who have PhDs in this.
00:08:04
Speaker
very snotty delusion that military history is just stories. You know, oh, if you really want to analyze, then you should do intellectual history or, and there are all these cool movements that I've taken place of, taken part in, or one of my grad students wrote a great dissertation that classifies as the history of emotions. And so that stuff is brainy, but you can write a brainy history of the battles as well, you know, where you're making arguments about the battles.
00:08:33
Speaker
And i know i didn't always succeed at that but that was a fun goal to pursue and i really. As i said i enjoyed it's about half a half the battles and i enjoyed that half a lot a lot more than the other half actually. Well let's dive right into the book then it first kinda talking about. Military history.
00:08:54
Speaker
Right off the bat, I want to ask you, this is something that I thought was very surprising. I'm not a historian of the American Revolution, but I'm sure I've never heard this, that something you say is the British never had a chance of winning the Revolutionary War. Why is that?
00:09:11
Speaker
Well, first let me say that's one of those things that I think there's lots of evidence for, but I wouldn't bet my house on it. And certainly of other people have disagreed with me about that. So I'd love it if some of your viewers looked at my version of it and then looked at some of the critiques of it and made up their mind. But here's where that comes from. It comes from the British generals themselves. So William Howe,
00:09:37
Speaker
was the leader really the hero of the battle of bunker hill as everybody knows the british won that battle they drove the americans off that hill near boston but five days after he won this great victory you can imagine people carrying him on their shoulders yeah he's our hero he led us to victory
00:09:58
Speaker
Five days after that victory, that's when William House said, we cannot win this war. Because he saw what happened when he drove the Americans off of Bunker Hill. They went down that hill. A few of them were killed, of course. But then they went to the next hill and climbed up on top of that hill where their buddies had already started building fortifications. And so after conquering
00:10:20
Speaker
Bunker Hill, he was just going to have to go take the next hill. And I've left out the most important part of this, which is in conquering Bunker Hill with 2,000 soldiers, he lost half of them. That's not 1,000 dead people, but 1,000 casualties. And in battle, a wounded person is worse than the dead person because you've got to carry them off.
00:10:40
Speaker
And so he saw that the Americans were just going to win a war of attrition by just retreating to the next hill. And actually there was something in the imagination of these British officers that exaggerated the difference between Europe and America.
00:10:57
Speaker
If you've been to Europe, you know there's lots of hilly places over there too, but people like Howe had fought most of their, had done most of their previous fighting in what we call the Low Countries still today, what's now Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and it is quite flat over there, and so you can't go entrench on a hill, and that's how these soldiers got in the habit of fighting out on a
00:11:19
Speaker
on a plane. It's a myth that some people have that the Americans fought a guerrilla war. If you watch the movie The Patriot, you'd get that idea that there almost was no Continental Army, that there's only these militiamen hiding behind trees and stone walls. That is how the Americans fought it.
00:11:36
Speaker
fought the British on their way home to Boston from Concord on April 1775, the battle that's in Concord. But the Americans were not going to fight a guerrilla war the whole time, partly candidly as a matter of ego, because that seemed unfair. It seemed like what we would call terrorism today. So the Americans were going to fight the British in a somewhat conventional way, but there was nothing
00:12:04
Speaker
shameful for them about entrenching on a hill and saying, to quote one of their famous phrases, come and take it. And how, and Burgoyne, who would
00:12:16
Speaker
lose the most important battle of the Revolutionary War a couple of years later, they both understood in 1775 that we can beat them in any particular battle, but they're just going to retreat to the next hill and inflict 50% casualties on us as we take that hill, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next.
Native Americans' Role and Impact on Revolution
00:12:37
Speaker
And I'll tell you that I was partly influenced by living when I live, when we tried so hard to conquer the Taliban in Afghanistan. And I think some large percentage of the Afghan people were with us even on that one. You're talking about being an American.
00:12:54
Speaker
Yes, about we, Americans in the present. We failed in Afghanistan. The British, I think, had failed twice there. The Russians had failed there. And of course, we failed in Vietnam. And the Russians, thank God, are failing in Ukraine today.
00:13:09
Speaker
There are ways of defeating insurgency that the British could theoretically have used and won the war here, but they were only theoretically possible because what it would have meant is what some Brits were talking about doing, and that is just carrying fire and sword throughout the continent. That is attacking civilians as well as
00:13:32
Speaker
armies and the British had defeated Native American revolts and slave revolts, revolts in Ireland. They had defeated those revolts, but only because they had no compunction about slaughtering Irish and native and African and black people. They had no compunction about just slaughtering them. I mean, I think one of the most telling moments of the Revolutionary War happens, what is it, six months after, five months after
00:14:02
Speaker
Bunker Hill. There's a town that's now Portland, Maine, but within Falmouth, Massachusetts. And the British bombed the hell out of Falmouth. I mean, there was something like 300 buildings and none of them was left standing after this bombardment from the British fleet. But guess how many people in Falmouth were killed in that bombardment? And the answer is zero, zero injured, because the British said, we're going to bomb your city. You've got five minutes to get the hell out of town. And everyone got out of town.
00:14:30
Speaker
And why did they do that? Because had they massacred their own white colonists, the way they'd massacred Indians and people in the other India, and real Indians as well in India, and Blacks and so forth,
00:14:47
Speaker
they would have turned the British people against them. So there was a phrase that some conservatives used describing why we lost in Vietnam, and that is that we fought the war with one hand tied behind our backs. And that's true, that US could have used nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Thank God we didn't. For all the millions of innocent lives that would have cost and just think what it would have done to our reputation in the world.
00:15:14
Speaker
But you see what I mean? That there was a limit placed on the British when fighting their own white colonists that wasn't placed on them when they were fighting them. This is not me speaking, of course, but them, damn Catholics in Ireland or people of color.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, and this is what I thought was so insightful about your book was, and of course today, attitudes thankfully are very different, but throughout your book, you get a sense of the things that the colonists and the Europeans were willing to do to the native populations, to African Americans that just really
00:15:58
Speaker
You write at one point, and this is actually a question I had later on, but since we're talking about it, you write at one point that the colonists were, and this is pre-revolution, the colonists were meeting with some Native American leaders. And one of the traditions is to give them a gift when they leave. And the gift that the colonists gave these Native American leaders were blankets.
00:16:26
Speaker
Now these blankets just so happened to have come from a smallpox ward and they were using germ warfare against the Native Americans because they knew how vulnerable they were to disease, which I thought I was just, I was shocked.
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a lot of aspects of white's treatment of Native Americans because we only have one side's documents we're speculative about, but here we literally had the receipts, that is the people who sold the blankets.
00:17:02
Speaker
to replace those in the hospital, you know, said, OK, we're selling these blankets to the British Army for this is at Pittsburgh. It was then called Fort Pitt. We're selling you these blankets to replace the ones from the smallpox hospital that you gave to kill the Indians. So we literally have to see. And the amazing thing about that is the commander at Fort Pitt, his name was Bouquet. He was Swiss, I think, who gave that order, but working for Britain.
00:17:28
Speaker
who gave that order, he didn't know it, but his commander in chief, Thomas, I'm sorry, Jeffrey Amherst over in New York, was at that exact moment writing him a letter suggesting the same thing. So, evil minds think alike.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah, and there's instance after instance. Maybe let's talk about, I guess, the overlooked groups. Maybe we'll just talk a little bit more about Native Americans. Maybe just can you tell, give us some context right now for Native Americans before the Revolution and the decades leading up to it.
00:18:08
Speaker
What was going on between the Native Americans and the colonists? Well, one of the things I'll plug about my book is that with the help of an amazing graduate student here named Riley Sutherland, I compiled the first ever population table
00:18:28
Speaker
from many sources so that we know how many black and white people lived in each of the 13 colonies, but also all the British colonies in the Caribbean. There were 26 British colonies in America in 1776, only 13 of which rebelled, but also we got the best estimates we could of native populations as well. If you add that all up,
00:18:50
Speaker
There's still something like 100,000 Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River. So they've been much reduced by smallpox and other diseases and by being hunted with dogs and enslaved and sold off into slavery and dying on plantations while working alongside African slaves and so forth. So their populations have been decimated, but have actually recovered a little bit. So there are 100,000 of them.
00:19:15
Speaker
But they are not, of course, one tribe. They're a bunch of different Indian nations often at war with each other. And that was the great advantage. You hear about the British strategy of divide and conquer. They didn't have to be smart for that to work because these nations were already divided. And so you'd get some align with the French and some align with the British and so forth.
00:19:37
Speaker
But this was one of the really fun discoveries that I made while researching the book. Remember, my big theme is to connect the traditional political and military history, Washington, Jefferson, Hancock, Adams, with the more hidden history of Native Americans and women and so forth. And this was one of those points of connection, because if you walk out your front door and just ask people on the street,
00:20:03
Speaker
What's one phrase you remember from the American Revolution? Just about everybody's going to call up from their third grade class, no taxation without representation. There were lots of other issues that I write about in the book, but tax is the one we all understand. The first big tax was the Stamp Act, and I make the case in liberty of Sweden. I think I've got good evidence for it.
00:20:25
Speaker
that had there been no Native Americans, there would have been no Stamp Act. And to explain that, the British were determined in 1763 to avoid another expensive war against Native Americans. War then is now is the most expensive thing government did. And the previous war, which ended in that year, 1763, had doubled the British debt. So they didn't want to go to war against Indians again. So they say, well, what do we need to do to placate them?
00:20:55
Speaker
They drew a line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains saying, we're not going to steal any more of your land west of that line. We're going to turn it into a giant Indian reservation. And again, the British aren't doing this out of humane kindness. They're doing it because they don't want to pay for another war. So we're going to draw this line. But then to enforce that line, they made an extraordinary decision that they'd never done before. After all these other wars in America, the British had fought four or five of them.
00:21:22
Speaker
they had pulled their troops home, you know, bring the troops home. But this time they left 10,000 troops in America mostly to guard that line, to keep the Indians from attacking the colonists, you know, from blowing up into a bigger war, and also to keep the colonists from attacking the Indians, which again, it sounds really humane, but the British wanted the colonists to leave the Indians alone so the Indians wouldn't attack and start a war, the Big Brother, that is the British government.
00:21:51
Speaker
would have to come and put down. And it's expensive to have those troops out there on the Western frontier. I think of them as a wall of troops, just mostly so I can make the following joke, which is the British government figured, okay, we're going to build this wall of troops out there on the frontier to protect
00:22:12
Speaker
Indians from the colonists, colonists from the Indians. But if we're going to build this wall on the western border, we think it's reasonable to make the colonists pay for it. And that's the Stamp Act. And so if you actually read the Stamp Act, it says not that what most teachers tell, including me for 20 years, telling students, oh, the Stamp Act is there to help pay off the
00:22:33
Speaker
British government's debt from that previous war that ended in 1763. But that's not what the Stamp Act says. The Stamp Act says this money is to pay for those 10,000 troops. So I would go so far as to say no Indians, no Stamp Act. And the Stamp Act was the first, it was sort of the entering wedge of this whole series of taxes like the famous one on tea that the British would adopt later.
00:22:57
Speaker
And so even if you don't care about Native Americans one bit, you can't understand the origins of the American Revolution without knowing what Native Americans were up to and how the British government was responding to them.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah, and that's so interesting because so then your argument is that the British argument at the time was, hey, colonists, we're defending you against the Native Americans right now. We're holding this line. Without us, you would be overrun by all these Native warriors.
00:23:39
Speaker
And so because of that, you should pay your fair share. Also a little naive because the colonists didn't want to be protective of the Indians. They were happy to go to war with the Indians because every time they did go to war against the Indians, they got more of their land.
00:23:54
Speaker
And so the British were kind of deluding themselves in saying, oh, the colonists are going to be so grateful for us holding the line. And remember, as the annual register, which was kind of an official newspaper of the British government, said those Indians were there to, I mean, those troops were there on the Western border of the colonies to quote, all and protect the Indians. And I really liked that formulation to all the Indians, you know, keep them subjected, but also to protect the Indians from the colonists.
00:24:23
Speaker
for all the reasons that you understand. If the colonists attack the Indians, the Indians are going to hit back and then it's just like, you know, your little brother picks a fight and the big brother has to come rescue him. That's what the British were trying to avoid. Well, talk a little bit about how the relationship evolved between, so leading right up to the American Revolution and then during the Revolution.
00:24:50
Speaker
How did the relationship between the Native Americans and the colonists evolve, and then also between the Native Americans and the British? Right. Well, one of the fascinating things that happened in the
00:25:04
Speaker
in the late 1760s as all these battles over smuggling and taxes on the money supply were happening on the east coast, something was happening out west. And that really began with a group of women living on the Wabash
00:25:21
Speaker
river on the border of what's now Indiana and Illinois. They looked at that diverse situation I described to you a minute ago of all these Indian nations who were often at war with each other and said, you know what, this isn't working. You know, if the British attack the Cherokees and the Choctaw's don't help, or if the Choctaw's say, oh, this is our chance to hit the Cherokees from the other direction because we hate them too. United, we stand divided, we fall. Basically, these Native women were saying they said it not
00:25:51
Speaker
through written communications, which they didn't have, but through wampum belts, you know, those beaded belts. These native women who were called the female peace chiefs, at least by whites, they sent wampum belts all around to other native society saying, let's, to use the modern phrase, bury the hatchet among ourselves and form a coalition of former enemies.
00:26:14
Speaker
to combat the encroachment on our land, because even though the British drew this line along the crest of the Appalachians and put troops there to keep it, the white Americans were just so determined to get past it that they did get past it. Anyway, these native women say, native people need to unite as one people. They started to think of themselves as the red race. We think of the myth of Indians as red came from whites.
00:26:41
Speaker
Jeannie, a professor friend of mine has really made a strong case that it was natives who helped think
00:26:50
Speaker
start thinking of themselves as the red race. And they did that on purpose. You know, let's focus on what we have in common with each other as the red Indian native people as against the whites. My point about this is while those native women were organizing, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and others were petitioning the British government to get rid of that line along the Cressey Appalachians and let them have all that Western land. And, incredibly, the British government ignored all these wealthy
00:27:20
Speaker
white American colonists and listened to the Indians instead and stuck by that line. And so that shows up in the Declaration of Independence, all those grievances they mentioned against the King. They mentioned taxes, which I agree was important once. They mentioned Native Americans and their land three times in the Declaration of Independence. So that is definitely one of the grievances that certainly not the only one.
00:27:43
Speaker
but one of the big grievances that provoked the colonists to rebel. But then,
African Americans' Contributions and Dunmore's Emancipation
00:27:48
Speaker
let me say briefly what happens once the war gets started. Even while the Americans were winning the war in the East, most famously at Yorktown, in the West, it's really the Native Americans who won the war.
00:28:06
Speaker
launched constant raids into Western New York and Pennsylvania, Western Virginia, which is now Kentucky, into the Carolinas where I live. They really had the Americans like Daniel Boone, who they captured twice and killed one of his sons, captured his daughter.
00:28:23
Speaker
They really had the Americans back on their heels. The big reason for that was that these Native Americans who had been resisting the British and the British colonists all these years now have the British on their side because the British in their desperation
00:28:41
Speaker
We've talked about all the challenges that the British faced in trying to conquer the colonists. In their desperation, the British made alliances with Native Americans, and we could talk later if you want about another even more controversial alliance that the British made with African Americans. But this alliance that they made with Native Americans was quite effective in stopping
00:29:04
Speaker
the further westward expansion of the colonists during the Revolutionary War because the British A supplied the Native Americans with guns and ammunition, which obviously are crucial and which they didn't make any more than most colonists knew how to make lead bullets and gunpowder and weapons to fire them from.
00:29:27
Speaker
So the British supply them with guns and ammo but then the British supply them with something even more important than that and that is unity. That is a very interesting political dynamic took place where you had all these native society that had been trying to unite.
00:29:45
Speaker
But they were very suspicious of each other because the Cherokees did make peace with the Iroquois in the 1760s, but they didn't want to become subservient to the Iroquois. So if there's a coalition being created and the Iroquois at the head of it, well, no, I'm not sure. We think we should be at the head of it. Well, we think we should be at the head of it.
00:30:06
Speaker
But one thing they could agree on was letting the British head it, because the British, not because the British were so powerful, but just sort of the opposite reason, because the British were symbolic and didn't have a lot of troops on the ground in the West. And so they weren't as much of a threat. And so, you know, I think I should lead the coalition. You know, we're the chair, because we should lead it. And you're the Air Corps. You think you should lead it. Well, the one thing we should agree on is to let the British lead it, because at least I'm not being led by you. At least you're not being led by me.
00:30:34
Speaker
So that happened, and they really did achieve pretty good unity during the war. And the white Americans fighting the Native Americans on the west, at the same time they were fighting the British in the east,
00:30:47
Speaker
they understood that they were losing in the West. They also understood that merely by having all these Native American attacks, it was preventing Western white men from joining the Continental Army. And so, you know, there was a labor crisis as early as 1776 on the American side. And then throughout the war, they just could not get enough soldiers. They would constantly send out quotas, okay, we need this many from Pennsylvania, this many from New Jersey, and nobody
00:31:15
Speaker
Hardly ever met their quotas. So anyway, so it's depriving the Americans of soldiers to fight in the east, and it's depriving the Americans of the western land they want, and they completely blame the British. And so they set one goal in the west, which they knew would encompass all the others, and that was to capture Fort Detroit, now the city.
00:31:36
Speaker
of Detroit at the Straits up there in the Great Lakes. And so the Americans like George Washington, George Rogers Clark, Thomas Jefferson when he was governor of Virginia and others that you've heard of, they came up with over the course of the war about a dozen plans to capture Fort Detroit. But then here's the big news about that.
00:31:58
Speaker
not one of those plans was successful. They never got to Detroit because those same Native Americans whom the colonists were so worried about didn't let the colonists get anywhere near Detroit. And so there's a real sense in which the natives won with their allies, the British won the war in the West. But then the tragic part of this is the way the British completely sold out their native allies at the bargaining table. Because of course, Native Americans were not
00:32:28
Speaker
represented in Paris in 1783 when they finally signed a treaty, the Brits and Americans signed a treaty. And the Brits just signed away everything east of the Mississippi, almost none of which except these few forts they controlled, but they can said you can have that land. It wasn't theirs to give, of course, it was Native Americans. And I will say for the Native Americans, they didn't take this lying down, okay, the British have given away our land, we'll move west of the Mississippi. They continued to fight for that land for well into the 19th century.
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah, you really get the sense that the Native Americans, their relationship with the British was that they were useful for a brief period of time and that's it, which is really awful.
00:33:14
Speaker
You so you mentioned that I could I could keep going about some of the stuff you wrote about Native Americans But I want to talk about the African Americans in the revolution Because I know where we've got about 13 minutes left, so Let's start with the African Americans similarly right before the revolution and then during the revolution and
00:33:41
Speaker
Okay, just to start with the demographics, one in five Americans was enslaved by some other Americans. And in South Carolina, where I'm talking to you from today, a slight majority of the human beings in South Carolina were black slaves. They were always gonna be part of the equation. They were 90% of the people in the British colonies in the Caribbean, and that had the understandable effect
00:34:10
Speaker
preventing those Caribbean colonies from joining in the rebellion. They were also subjected to the Stamp Act because they got some of those troops and to other British measures. And so they did protest on these measures, but as things started to really heat up, they dropped out of the Patriot Coalition and ended up remaining loyal, as you know, well into the 20th century. Some of those were still, and they're still part of the British Commonwealth today, many of those places like Jamaica.
00:34:36
Speaker
So in that case where you have 90% enslaved, that's a real discourager of whites to rebel because they knew, and of course this would happen later in Haiti, if whites rebel against whites, then that gives blacks a chance to rebel against whites as well.
00:34:51
Speaker
But in places like Virginia, they had all these other grievances, and by 1774, 1775, they were furious at the British, but they really weren't ready to go to war. And so there's a big question about what was it that pushed the colonists over the edge, but then independence didn't come until July of 1776. So the big question is, what drove the colonists to declare
00:35:18
Speaker
from being just angry at the British Empire to wanting to get all the way out of it. And I'd say the single biggest factor, if you look at all 13 colonies, was the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which we rightly described as the first battle of the Revolutionary War, but it was also the final argument for independence. About 70 colonists were killed that day. And they'd already called it a massacre when five people had been killed by the Brits five years earlier without authorization.
00:35:48
Speaker
But here we have commanders telling their guys to fire and killing 70 Americans. And so that really pushed a lot of New Englanders, especially over the edge into saying the hell with it, we're ready to declare independence. But in the South, the sort of the Southern equivalent of Lexington and Concord was an emancipation proclamation issued in November of 1775 by the governor of Virginia. That's one of the things I had no idea
00:36:16
Speaker
that there was an Emancipation Proclamation way before Abraham Lincoln. I was so surprised to read that. And you are not alone, AJ. It's amazing how many well-read people that I speak to. It's kind of fun for me because I'll give a speak to a GAR group or a history roundtable and they'll be astonished at this and they'll think I'm the one who discovered it. Well, a Black historian named
00:36:41
Speaker
Benjamin Quarles wrote a wonderful book called The Negro in the American Revolution. You can see how old it is by its title, 1961. Everything I'm going to tell you, he had worked out in 1961, and there have been people noticing it even earlier than that. But it has not gotten out beyond historians for some reason. And I will say, they talked about this in the 1619 project, the New York Times project.
00:37:07
Speaker
And that got it out to a wider audience and it became so controversial because there are a lot of historians who didn't really want that part of the revolution story told. Now, they didn't tell it perfectly the first time in the magazine. The 1619 Project later came out as a book where they got it, in my opinion, exactly right.
00:37:25
Speaker
But I am very thankful to the 1619 Project for finally getting this story beyond those of us who teach college, basically. But let's share the story with your viewers, many of whom will have heard it, but as you say, many haven't. So Governor Dunmore was a slaveholder himself, the last royal governor of Virginia, the largest of the British colonies. And so when he issued this emancipation proclamation, it wasn't because he cared about
00:37:54
Speaker
that slavery was an evil, it's because he was desperate. In Virginia, unlike some of the other states like South Carolina, New Jersey, and Long Island, all of those were places where there were a lot of loyalists who wanted to stay with Britain, but there were very few
00:38:10
Speaker
white loyalist in Virginia. In November 1775, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It wasn't identical to Lincoln's, but it had a lot in common. It only applied to the slaves owned by rebels. Lincoln's Proclamation only applied to slaves in the area that the Union Army hadn't conquered yet.
00:38:30
Speaker
A lot of people say it didn't free a single slave. Well, that's kind of true of Dunmore's proclamation too. You had to be owned by a rebel, somebody like Jefferson or Washington or Patrick Henry, all of them did lose slaves to the British. And more importantly, you had to get to Dunmore so the onus was on the enslaved people to reach him.
00:38:51
Speaker
He said the line was, you have to be able and willing to bear arms, which implies men, although several people, including me, have done the stats, and the majority of the people who joined Governor Dunmore were actually women and kids. Men were a plurality, but then women and then kids joined them as well. Here's my point about connecting what African Americans were doing to the traditional story of the Jeffersons and Washingtons, is that
00:39:19
Speaker
by issuing that Emancipation Proclamation done more infuriated white Americans, because they thought his number one job was to protect them from their slaves. Their slaves were their biggest threat. Again, 40% of Virginians are enslaved, and they want to be free constantly, and their owners are terrified of them. And so the British, and represented by Governor Dunmore, are supposed to protect them from their slaves, and here they are doing just the opposite.
00:39:48
Speaker
as one Virginian put it, aiming a dagger at our throats through the hands of our slaves. And actually, I found five other quotes from other colonies where the governor and the Royal Navy ship captains and others were informally cooperating with the British, four or five other quotes using that same phrase. They're inspiring our slaves to slit our throats.
00:40:11
Speaker
And I ended up finding more than 76, but I put 76 on Twitter. So if anybody ever wants to go to, I have a bitly called Countdown to 1619, where I listed all of these quotes and the documents of just showing how angry the colonists were. And one of the clearest statements, you know, Payne said at Madison,
00:40:34
Speaker
Washington, and one of the clearest statements of anger at the British for forming this alliance with slaves was Thomas Jefferson in his original rough draft of Declaration of Independence. His longest paragraph, his angriest paragraph, the only paragraph where he accused the British of being bad Christians in all upper case was his one denouncing the British. First he blamed them for forcing people like him to have slaves, which was visible, but then also said
00:41:03
Speaker
You're now making an alliance with these slaves, and that becomes the capstone grievance. The expression, we still have saved the best for last. That's what a good orator did in those days, was hold back on the winning argument. When you're making your final summation at the end of the trial, your final thing to nail it into the coffin,
00:41:25
Speaker
In this case, it was Jefferson's anger at the British for this alliance with the slaves. The Continental Congress turned this into a seven-word euphemism. He has excited domestic insurrection amongst us so that it's true the word slave and slavery, neither of those appears in the Declaration of Independence. Well, everyone knew at the time what it meant.
00:41:49
Speaker
But there's just so much evidence that in the South, especially, although there's plenty of these quotes from Abigail Adams in Massachusetts, who was anti-slavery herself, but was even more anti-slave British coalition and Ben Franklin and others, but especially in the South, it really was the last
Women's Crucial Roles in the Revolutionary War
00:42:08
Speaker
straw. And you have people who were loyalist or neutral, and then they went over to the Patriot camp after Dunmore
00:42:14
Speaker
issued his Emancipation Proclamation. So there really was... African Americans also played a big role. This is an invert role. They weren't trying to get their masters to rebel against the British, but that was the effect of African Americans seeking their own freedom.
00:42:30
Speaker
And it was so interesting to read. I have always thought about the fear of a slave revolt as being more associated with the US Civil War and leading up to that. And it was very interesting for me to read about, no, this goes way back before then. So I thought that was fascinating.
00:42:51
Speaker
Lastly here, let's talk a little bit about women before and during the Revolutionary War. Can you talk a little bit about the role of women?
00:43:03
Speaker
Yes. I've already mentioned these native women who played such a crucial role, but so did white women and African-American women. As I mentioned, the majority of the African-Americans who joined Dunmore, and this was true more broadly across the war, something like 10,000 African-Americans went over to the British side, and a majority of them were women and kids, and they weren't just sitting around refugee camps. They were working
00:43:29
Speaker
And women, as in all armies, played such a crucial role for the British army. For instance, I'd like to remind people that laundresses save lives because one of the things they do is boil water and put the soldiers' shirts in them to clean that. And they were doing it.
00:43:47
Speaker
to make them nice and fresh and clean, but as they did that, they were killing lice. And lice are what convey typhus. And typhus was the number two killer of soldiers on both sides in the army after smallpox. Actually, number one among the British, because a lot of them had smallpox as kids, and so they were immune to that.
00:44:07
Speaker
And so after American, as well as white women, played really crucial roles fighting on both sides. A few actually donned men's clothing and fought in the war. And you had some cool stories here in South Carolina of women who acted as Paul Revere's road ahead of British cavalry units to warn
00:44:30
Speaker
people to warn American militiamen that the British were coming. But at that point, they really were saying the British are coming, the British are coming. So you had women doing those dramatic things, a small number doing those dramatic things, taking over the cannon after their husband died. You've heard the mythical story of Molly Pitcher. And we don't think it really was a Molly Pitcher, but there were so many other women that she was a composite of. That's a myth not because there was no Molly Pitcher, but because there were so many Molly Pitchers that they sort of folded into one story, a mythical figure.
00:44:59
Speaker
So women were doing all that dramatic stuff, but they were also doing this sort of day-to-day, as I said, feeding the soldiers and keeping them. Typhus was really not a big killer of continental soldiers, as it often was, or much on the British side as well. It was a big killer on the prison ships.
00:45:21
Speaker
You can kind of see why because there's no women on the prison ships to boil the guy's shirts and you know, the prison guards weren't interested in handing fire to their to their prisoners anyway, because that's you know, if you let them boil water, they can they can throw it in your face. And so so I think I think you could say the biggest reason those those British ships were such killers was that they were so crowded. But another reason they were so such killers was that there were no women on them to wash those shirts. Yeah. And I think I remember reading in your book that
00:45:52
Speaker
The word, I think it's the word, is it gaunt that comes from? Oh, gall, as in galling. Gall, gall, yeah. The gall, so American, I believe in your book you were talking about American soldiers who were out in the field. In 1781, at different times in 1781,
00:46:18
Speaker
both Lafayette and Washington marched troops from New York to Virginia, and both of them faced mutinies over tropical disease. These soldiers, most of whom were from northern colonies, were terrified. We're gonna get to Virginia, we're gonna get malaria or yellow fever, and we're gonna die. And it was a reasonable worry. The only thing people didn't know is that you could have yellow fever in Pennsylvania. It was a major epidemic there in 1793.
00:46:45
Speaker
and again in 97, but they were correct that the farther south you go, the more you're getting into tropical diseases. And so that was an issue with the
00:46:55
Speaker
the soldiers' shirts. In addition to that, Lafayette soldiers were worried about getting gall, as he put it, from their shirts. And so he convinced the women of Baltimore to make new shirts for his soldiers. And he was just copying an idea that a woman in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had had the year earlier, where she got the women of Philadelphia to go out and raise money. She wanted to give cash to the soldiers, but Washington was afraid they'd spent it on beer, so instead,
00:47:22
Speaker
The women used that money to buy cloth and make shirts for the soldiers. So that was yet another way in which women had contributed to the war effort. But I couldn't resist mentioning this fear that these northern soldiers had of southern disease because that's the next book I'm working on.
Closing Remarks and Where to Find More Information
00:47:37
Speaker
This was a very broad general book trying to get everybody into the story.
00:47:41
Speaker
My next one's on disease and the revolution because I really got fascinated in how much that affected things, and so I'm going to delve deeper into that for the next one. That is fascinating, and you've definitely got a reader for that.
00:47:58
Speaker
You might, you might actually mention this at the beginning of your book, but a few months ago, I also remember hearing this that when, um, when the colonizers came to the Americas, 90% of the entire population was wiped out by disease. And I mean, just imagine 90% of your own town. I mean, that's apocalyptic. It really is.
00:48:23
Speaker
Well, and these colonists would move right into these towns that had been abandoned by Indians. They didn't have to build houses. The Indians had basically left the lights on for them as they just dropped flies from those. And it's because there had been no smallpox here before 1492. So as the demographers put it, they were virgin soil. Well, I'll be really interested in your next project.
00:48:50
Speaker
Woody, thank you so much for taking some time to talk to me. I loved your book. This was a terrific interview. I've learned so much. Where can folks want to find you?
00:49:04
Speaker
I don't know if you're on social media, but- I am. On Twitter, I'm Woody Holton USC. Somebody else had gotten Woody Holton first, so just add USC, which is the name of my university. Not the one in California, we call that USC light, but we're at the traditional USC, University of South Carolina. So Woody Holton USC on Twitter, and they can also find me on the University of South Carolina history department's webpage too.
00:49:31
Speaker
Wonderful. This is on there. Okay. Well, again, thank you so much. For 12 years in the archive, AJ, as you can see, I really enjoy being out of the archive and in talking to you, so thank you. Oh, no. Well, the joy was all mine. Well, thank you so much.