Joseph J. Ellis - The Cause - Notes

My favorite early American historian's summary of our founding 1773-1783

Reading "The Cause" by my favorite early American historian Joseph J. Ellis summarizing 1773-1783 reenforces my knowledge regarding how lucky this country was to have achieved indepdence from Great Britain when and the way it did so. If the British Howe generals had mounted a frontal assault on the Continental Army at the outset on Brooklyn Heights Washington and his men would never have escaped from Long Island to Manhattan across the mile long East River in the dead of night and would have been annihilated and that would have been the end of it. Amazing and lucky indeed. 

According to Professor Ellis the Howes did not desire to annihilate the Continental army but desired an American surrender to teach them a humiliating lesson and preserve the British empire.

Even though the Brits won Bunker Hill (actually fought on Breed's Hill) the Howes were surprised by how well the Continentals fought which made them timid about a frontal assault.  

NYC was basically indefensible and there was a strong loyalist presence.

After the escape Lord How met with an American delegation which included Adams and Franklin hoping to negotiate a settlement but the Americans were dead set on not backing down from their declaration of independence.  So the war would continue.

Despite the incessant grumbling about his leadership, Washington survived until victory came in 1781.  Good thing.

"The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the greater conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes---slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants."

-Robert D. Kaplan, Earning the Rockies (2017)

P. 307

In the blame game after losing its colonies Great Britain found it difficult to explain.  They seem to settle on George Germain.  He was the scapegoat.

But King George III led the drive to keep the colonies in 1774 in a long war that he could not win without knocking out the Continentals at the outset and it really goes back to him.

Approximately 50,000 British soldiers died in the war mostly from disease.

Great Britain recovered from its humiliating loss of its American colonies.  The British Empire went on to a level of success under Queen Victoria not seen since the headiest days or Rome.  But there was no second act for Native Americans.  For roughly 100,000 living between the Appalachians and the Mississippi the American victory was a calamity with no rescue.  Native Americans were the biggest losers in the war.  It never occurred to tribal chiefs that the scratch of a pen in Paris dispossessed them of lands they had lived on for centuries.  The belief that land could be owned by mere mortals was incomprehensible.  Their choice was to surrender their lands or face perpetual war.

The Treaty of Paris defined Native Americans as a conquered people.  The white surge across the continent was unstoppable.  All treaties were temporary.

The major weapon of conquest was viruses.  The natives were vulnerable.  Native settlements were totally vulnerable when white people came close.  They could not fight biology.  It was not the march of civilization; it was annihilation in slow motion with microbes leading the way.

Treaties with Native Americans were always just temporary until the white population surge overwhelmed them.

There were about 400,000 loyalists.  Some relocated but most assimilated.

If roles had been revered and Great Britain had won the war Loyalists would have been cheering as Washington, Adams, and Franklin were led to the gallows.

Everyone knew that slavery betrayed the principles of The Cause.  They were tragically wrong thinking that slavery was on its own road to extinction.  After the 1780's Jefferson didn't have the courage to help lead the way to emancipation.  Ellis mentions Jefferson's Notes but not his disgust and disparagement of blacks.

Jefferson's tragic view was to wait and let slavery died a natural death.  So wrong he was.

Indeed, it may have appeared that slavery was dying, but that was a deluded viewpoint.

More than five thousand African Americans fought for the cause.  But eight to ten thousand of them fled to the British side in the war.

Despite abolition in the north, the slave population was exploding below the Potomac.  The emergence of the Cotton Kingdom slammed the door shut on abolition.  Slavery was not ended when there was still time.

The egalitarian principles of The Cause was incompatible with slavery.  The Cause worked its way forward without the bloodletting of the French Revolution but the big exception and what a big exception it was was slavery.  The necessary urgency to end slavery was not there.

On the last page of the book Ellis surprisingly plays up the fact that as of 1783 the states no signs of desiring to unite beyond the Confederation, yet a few years later they did unite under a new constitution.