Disclaimer: I am now retired, and am therefore no longer
an expert on anything. This blog post
presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.
In my retirement, I have, without great enthusiasm, looked
at various books on American History. My
lack of interest stems from my impression that most of these, in the past, were
(a) overly impressed by certain personalities (Jefferson and Lee spring to mind)
and (b) had no ability to take the point of view of foreign actors or even
African and Native Americans.
As it turns out, that is changing, although not universally,
and so there are, imho, some fascinating re-takes on some of the historical
narratives such as those I found growing up in my American History
textbooks. I’d just like to call
attention here to two “new thoughts” about that history that I recently ran
across. I will state them first in
abbreviated and provocative form:
1.
President John Tyler may have played the largest
role in making the Civil War inevitable.
2.
The most dangerous part of the American
Revolution for the American cause was AFTER Valley Forge.
Now, let’s do a deeper dive into these.
John Tyler Did It
The time from the War of 1812 to the Mexican-American War
has always been a bit of a blank spot in my knowledge of American History. The one event I remember that seems to mean
much is Jackson’s termination of the Bank of the United States, which subjected
the U.S. to severe rather than mild recessions for a century – including, of
course, the effect on the Great Depression.
A recent biography of John Quincy Adams adds a great deal to
my understanding of this period, even if it is (necessarily) overly focused on
Adams himself. As it turns out, Adams
was both involved in American diplomacy abroad from the Revolution to 1830, and
also in its politics from 1805 to 1848, when he died. In that span, he saw three key developments
in American politics:
1.
The change in slavery’s prominence in politics
from muted to front and center. We tend
to see the Compromises leading up to the Civil War as springing out of the
ground at the end of the Mexican War; on the contrary, it appears that the key
event is the formation of a pro-slavery Republic of Texas in the early 1830s,
along with (and related to) a new, much more uncompromising anti-slavery
movement arriving around 1830. That, in
turn, was a reaction to a much more expansionist slave-state politics after the
War of 1812.
2.
A change in the Presidential election system
from “election by elites” (electors were much less bound to particular parties)
to a much more widespread participation in elections as new states arrived
(although, of course, the electorate still remained male, white, and Northern
European).
3.
A related change in the overall political system
from “one-person” parties to a real two-party system. For the value of that, see modern Israel,
whose descent from a two-party system to one in which most if not all parties
are centered around one person and mutate or vanish whenever that person leaves
the scene has brought dysfunction, short-term and selfish thinking, and
paralysis to policy-making.
The way in which these changes occurred, however, had a
great deal to do with the ultimate shape of the Civil War. Here’s my take at a quick synopsis: From 1812 to 1830, the old style of politics,
in which each Democratic President effectively “crowned” his successor by making
him Secretary of State, was dominant.
During that time, also, there was a kind of “pause” in westward
expansion during which the rest of the continent east of the Mississippi became
states. And Adams during his time as
Secretary of State arranged with Mexico the acquisition of the territory that
later became the Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho, and (most importantly) Oregon and
Washington.
When Adams was elected, Jackson was the closest competitor
(more electoral votes but actually fewer popular votes) in a four-person
race. Inevitably, in the next election,
as the power of the new Western states made itself felt, Jackson was a clear
victor – but parties were still one-person things. Jackson as a slave-holder and
anti-Native-American bigot certainly did African and Native Americans no favors
personally, but did not strengthen the slave states’ political power
significantly. Moreover, his successor,
Martin van Buren, is credited as the true founder of the two-party system, very
much along today’s lines: a party of Federal-government
spending on “improvements” to supplement state and local spending (the Whigs)
vs. a party along Jefferson’s lines of small government (the Democrats) – and
these things cut across slavery and anti-slavery positions.
Inevitably, the Whigs quickly won an election vs. the
Democrats, ushering in William Henry Harrison, a governor from the Northwest
who promised to rein in the political power of the slave states via the
Democrats (for example, they had imposed a “gag rule” to prevent Adams, who was
now in Congress, from speaking out against slavery). And this was important, because between the
1820s and the early 1840s, settlers had created a “slave-state Republic” in
Texas with uncertain boundaries, and the slave states were clamoring to accept
Texas as a state, effectively upsetting the balance between slave and free
states.
Unfortunately, Harrison died shortly after election, and
John Tyler, a slave-state “balanced ticket” politician, took over. He had no interest in the Whig party –
rather, he sought to carve out a position close to the Democratic one, in order
to create his own political party and get re-elected. Thus, he splintered his own party and
sectionalized it as well. What followed,
as Polk and the Democrats accepted Texas and acquired the Southwest during the
Mexican-American War, simply made inevitable and immediate the “irrepressible
conflict.”
But let’s imagine
Harrison hadn’t died, and had instead served two terms. It is very possible that the slave states
would have benefited from “improvements”, and slavery expansion would have
become less a matter of absolute necessity in their politics. It is then possible that the notion of
secession would not have been so universally accepted, nor the excesses of
slaveholding immigrants in Missouri as easily excused, nor the pressure to make
the North conform as extreme. Thus,
Kentucky and Tennessee would not have been as up for grabs as the Civil War
started, the Confederacy weaker, and the result less bloody and quicker.
All this is speculative, I know. But to me, the biggest what-if about the
Civil War is now: What if John Tyler had
never gotten his mitts on the Presidency?
It’s Not About Valley Forge
Up until recently, my view of the Revolutionary War,
militarily speaking, was that Washington simply hung on despite financial
difficulties, defeats, and near-victories squandered by subordinates, until he
surmounted his troops’ starvation at Valley Forge and the British, frustrated,
shifted their focus to the South. Then,
when Cornwallis in the South failed to conquer there and desperately marched
North, Washington nipped down, wiped out his troops at Yorktown, and the war
was effectively over, 2 years before the peace treaty got signed.
However, a new book called “The Strategy of Victory” (SoV)
presents a different picture. It does so
by (a) more completely presenting the British point of view, and (b) probing
deeper into the roles of militia and regular army in the fighting.
SoV suggests that the overriding strategy of Washington was
(a) keeping a trained regular army in existence so that the British in
venturing south beyond New York could be defeated on its flank and in detail
where possible, and (b) combining that regular army with militia who would, more
or less, take the role of long-distance sharpshooters at the beginning of a
battle. At first, that strategy was
highly successful, and led to the “crossing the Delaware” victories, followed
by a British conquest of Philadelphia that backfired because Washington sat on
the communications and supply lines between New York and Philadelphia. So the British went back to New York.
However, Clinton, the British general in New York, next
devised a strategy (and this is after Valley Forge) to catch Washington out of
his well-defended “fortress area”, by landing his troops in mid-New Jersey and
heading inland. In fact, he came
surprisingly close to succeeding, and only a desperate last stand by a small
portion of the militia and army allowed Washington to slip away again. That was Closest Shave Number One.
Attention then shifted to the South, where a nasty British
officer named Tarleton basically moved faster than any colonial resistance and
steadily wiped out militia resistance in Georgia, then South Carolina, then
into North Carolina. Had he succeeded in
North Carolina, it is very possible that that he would have succeeded in
Virginia, and then Washington would have really been caught between two
fires. But a magnificent mousetrap by
Daniel Morgan that again combined regulars and militia to firstly tempt Tarleton
into battle, and secondly ensure he lost it, saved the day: Closest Shave Number 2. Without Tarleton’s regulars to maintain it, the
British pressure on the inland Carolinas and Georgia collapsed, and Cornwallis’
move into Virginia had no effect beyond where his army moved, making the
Virginia invasion pointless and allowing Washington to trap him. Meanwhile, General Greene moved into the
southern vacuum, his main concern being to preserve his regulars while doing so
(again, Washington’s strategy), and was able to take over most of the Carolinas
and Georgia again – as SoV puts it, he “took over all of Georgia while losing
every battle.”
However, Yorktown was not the end of the fight for the North. It was always possible that the British would
again sally from New York – if Washington were no longer there. And so the next two years were a colossal
bluff, in which a regular army of a couple of thousand was kept together with
spit, baling wire, and monetary promises just to keep the British afraid to
venture again out of New York.
Washington’s last address to his troops was not, says SoV, his thanks
for faithful service; it was his apology for the lies he told them in order to hold
the army together, meant to keep them from revolting rather than disbanding.
And one other point of this narrative that applies to the
historical American “cult of the militia” that still hangs over us in today’s
venal legal interpretations of the Second Amendment. SoV makes it very clear, as the other
American History books through to the Civil War also do, that America could not
have survived without a regular army, and that militia without a regular army
are not sufficient to maintain a free society – whereas, in the Civil War, a
regular army without militia made us more free.
