The Spirit Of ’76 (February/March 2004 | Volume: 55, Issue: 1)

The Spirit Of ’76

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Authors: David Hackett Fischer

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February/March 2004 | Volume 55, Issue 1

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY IN 1777 ROBERT MORRIS, THE FINANCIER of the American Revolution, sent George Washington a letter that rings strangely to a modern ear. “The year 1776 is over,” Morris wrote. “I am heartily glad of it and hope you nor America will ever be plagued with such another. ” Washington shared that feeling. We celebrate 1776 as the most glorious year in American history; they remembered it as an agony, especially the “dark days” of autumn.

Americans have known many dark days, from the starving winters in early settlements to the attack on the World Trade Center. They have been the testing times and pivotal moments of our history. It was that way in 1776, from the decision for independence to the military disasters that followed. In early December, British commanders believed they were very close to ending the rebellion, and American leaders feared that they might be right. Yet three months later the mood had changed on both sides. By the spring of 1777 many British officers had concluded that they could never win the war. At the same time, Americans had recovered from their despair and were confident that they would not be defeated.

The cause of that great transformation lay not in a single event, or even a chain of events, but in a great web of contingency, in the sense of people making choices and of their choices making a difference in the world. The story began with the meeting of three armies in America. The American army of 1776 came mostly from middling families who cherished the Revolutionary cause but understood it in various ways: the ordered freedom of old New England; the reciprocal freedom of the Philadelphia Associators, who were raised in the Quaker tradition of extending to others the rights they demanded for themselves; the hegemonic liberties of Virginians who thought of rights as an unequal system of social rank; the natural liberty of backcountry settlers who demanded the right to be left alone. The choices these men made were an expression of their beliefs; so too were their autonomous ways of choosing.

Different patterns appeared among armies of British regulars and the German troops that fought alongside them in 1776. These were long-serving volunteers, trained by modern methods. They shared values of hierarchy, order, discipline, honor, loyalty, duty, and service. They despised the American rebels and the Revolutionary cause. Their meeting with the Americans was more than a clash of weapons and tactics. It was a conflict of ideas and institutions.

AMERICAN generals have been expected to be bold, quick, and decisive. This attitude appeared during the War of Independence and has been amplified by a free press demanding swift, clear results that could be summarized in eighteenth-century broadsides and twentieth-century headlines.

In Britain the drivers of the American war were a small circle of ministers in London who meant to break the Revolution