Scars of Independence America’S Violent Birth

HOLGER HOOCK SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE AMERICA’S VIOLENT BIRTH How famous fi gures and lesser-known characters featured in Scars of Independence experienced the violence of revolution and war ON SALE MAY 2017 AMERICAN FOUNDERS AND BRITISH LEADERS GRAPPLE WITH THE VIOLENCE UNLEASHED BY CIVIL WAR IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN GEORGE WASHINGTON THOMAS JEFFERSON (1706–1790) (1732–1799) (1743–1826) It was within his own family that The commander in chief of the Thomas Jefferson confronted Benjamin Franklin experienced Continental Army was deeply violence at various points in the the Revolution as America’s fi rst concerned with the codes of war. Revolution. As a key author of civil war. Until the eve of the When General George Washington the Declaration of Independence, Revolution the British Empire’s was fi rst appointed, Congress Jefferson centered America’s best friend in America, Franklin instructed him “to regulate your founding document on an exten- turned into one of its angriest and conduct in every respect by the sive catalogue of King George III’s most implacable foes. But his son William, New Jersey’s rules and disciplines of war.” Washington had absorbed political crimes and aggressively violent acts against the last royal governor, was a passionate leader of American the codes of war pertaining to the capture, treatment, colonies. This now little-remembered, longest section of Loyalists. During the 1782/83 peace negotiations with and exchange of prisoners of war when fi ghting alongside the Declaration helps us understand how, in Patriot eyes, Britain, Franklin was implacably opposed to any conces- British offi cers in the Seven Years’ War. Now, Washington it was British violence that justifi ed both independence sions to the American Loyalists. But a few years later, went out of his way to observe—and, crucially, to be seen and the harsh means by which it would be achieved. when he served as president of the Supreme Executive observing—the codes of civilized warfare. Washington After the war, the memory of the extreme suffering of Council of Pennsylvania, he shepherded legislation per- was adamant that defending “the sacred Cause of my American captives prompted the United States to begin mitting Americans who had refused to take Patriot oaths Country, of Liberty” required him and his army to thinking creatively about international law. When during the Revolution to become citizens upon swearing embrace Enlightenment ideals and practice what John Jefferson helped negotiate a treaty of amity and com- a loyalty oath. Franklin’s newfound magnanimity did Adams called a “policy of humanity.” After the war, merce between the United States and Prussia in 1785, the not, however, extend to his own son, whom he effectively Washington was among those leaders who insisted document included an unprecedented clause setting disinherited for the “part he acted against me in the that America must abide by its treaty obligations and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners of war in future late War.” show magnanimity toward the Revolution’s losers, confl icts. Jefferson boasted that they were “humanizing by America’s Loyalists. degrees” the law of nations. At the moment of her violent birth, the United States led with the power of moral example—at least on the international stage. ALEXANDER HAMILTON GEORGE III GEORGE GERMAIN (1755–1804) (1738–1820) (1716–1785) At the start of the Revolution, Having ascended to the throne in As he put the country on a war when Alexander Hamilton was 1760 at the age of twenty-three, footing in 1775, King George a precocious student at King’s by the eve of the American III named George Germain his College (today’s Columbia Revolution, King George III had secretary of state for the Ameri- University), he witnessed grown into a seasoned politician. can department. Germain was a anti-Loyalist violence in New After insurgents destroyed private controversial choice. A high- York City. After he had spent property in the Boston Tea Party fl ying career offi cer in the British much of the war as a close aide to General George in 1773, the king embraced a harsh, punitive approach. Army, in 1759 Germain had been accused of disobeying Washington, Hamilton returned to New York to practice When, in August 1775, King George III declared the a superior during the Seven Years’ War and was dismissed law. Hamilton took a strong stance on reintegrating the American insurgents to be in “open and avowed Rebel- dishonorably. He later rebuilt a career in public life, Loyalists. He warned of the diplomatic, political, and lion,” he specifi cally condemned their “Oppression of establishing himself as a staunch advocate of fi rm moral costs of further persecuting the Revolution’s losers. Our loyal Subjects” and vowed to shield Loyalists from measures against the rebellious colonies. Germain had He insisted that law, order, and justice must prevail over the “Torrent of Violence” that was engulfi ng them. After gained fi rsthand experience with the brutal suppression “the little vindictive selfi sh mean passions of a few.” The more than seven years of war, with the thirteen American of domestic insurrection during the Jacobite rebellion in future U.S. Treasury secretary also feared the drain of colonies lost and Ireland stirring, George III drafted an the Scottish Highlands thirty years earlier. When he later capital if Loyalists left en masse, and worried that such an abdication speech. Feeling he was “no longer of utility to directed the war in America, Germain opposed propos- exodus could hinder the revival of Anglo-American trade. this Empire,” George offered to resign his crown to the als for granting amnesty to insurgents, pushed for the Throughout the 1780s, Hamilton’s law practice fl ourished Prince of Wales. As we know, instead of retiring to his controversial suspension of habeas corpus for American as he defended dozens of Loyalists under what he ancestors’ German lands, two years after war’s end, the captives, and helped Britain pivot psychologically toward considered discriminatory legislation. At the Treasury, dutiful monarch graciously received John Adams as the a new kind of unlimited war against the American rebels. Hamilton later appointed a former Loyalist as his United States of America’s fi rst ambassador to the Court assistant secretary. of St. James’s. CROWN EDMUND BURKE (1729–1797) Edmund Burke was a keen interpreter of the American crisis. In March 1775, just weeks before Lexington and Concord, the Irish-born MP for the English port city of Bristol gave a powerful speech advocating reconciliation with the colonies. A policy of coercion, Burke argued, must necessarily fail in America–– in part because the colonists were descendants of freedom-loving Protestant Englishmen and in part because of their sheer distance from central government. Throughout the confl ict, Burke decried illegitimate and ill-advised violence wherever he saw it. When the British government prepared to suppress the rebellion with London’s full military might, Burke vehemently opposed “the predatory, or war by distress,” which would only strengthen the rebels’ resolve. And when the British government in 1777 suspended habeas corpus for American captives, Burke opposed the distinction that the law made between subjects: “Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of all the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery.” All subjects on both sides of the Atlantic must live under the same regime of both liberty and security. The proposed law, Burke warned, undermined time-honored English constitutional checks on oppression and violence. ORDINARY PEOPLE— MEN, WOMEN, AND YOUTH, WHITE AND BLACK, PATRIOT, LOYALIST, UNCOMMITTED AMERICAN, AS WELL AS BRITONS— ARE SWEPT UP BY THE VIOLENCE OF REVOLUTION AND WAR. LORENDA HOLMES ABIGAIL PALMER WALTER BATES A NEW YORKER AIDING THE BRITISH A TEENAGER RAPED BY BRITISH SOLDIERS A LOYALIST TEENAGER TORTURED IN CONNECTICUT At one point during the war, the New Yorker Lorenda In December 1776, Abigail Palmer, a thirteen-year-old Holmes “was stripped by an angry band of committee- girl from Hunterdon County, New Jersey, was at the In 1776, Walter Bates––the teenage son of an Anglican men and dragged ‘to the Drawing Room Window . house of her grandfather, Edmund Palmer, who farmed Loyalist family in today’s Darien, Connecticut––was exposing her to many Thousands of People Naked.’” near Pennington, New Jersey, when several British arrested on suspicion of knowing the whereabouts of Lorenda had been smuggling letters in her underwear soldiers took control of the premises. They raped fugitive armed Loyalists, including his own brother. His from a British warship to Long Island. When it was Abigail for “three Days successively” as more soldiers kept interrogators, Walter later recounted, “threatened [him] discovered that Lorenda also guided Loyalist refugees coming and going. They also assaulted Edmund Palmer’s with sundry deaths,” including by drowning, unless he to a British camp, an American soldier came to her married and pregnant daughter, Mary Phillips, as well as confessed. At night, an armed mob took Walter to a local house, made her remove her shoe, and took “a shovel of Elizabeth and Sarah Cain, fi fteen and eighteen years of salt marsh, stripped him naked, and tied him by his feet Wood Coals from the fi re and by mere force held [her] age, who happened to be visiting the Palmer family. and hands to a tree. He despaired

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