We rightly celebrate the glorious Fourth of July, especially this year’s 250th anniversary of when a collection of brave men declared American independence. But lost in the bunting and bombast are the truly dreadful odds against success that those men faced 250 years ago. The specifics of American weakness and British strength were not lost on clear-eyed skeptics in America or confident administrators in London.
More than a few Americans regarded the entire business as sheer madness. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania was celebrated as the “Penman of the Revolution” for his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, but he opposed declaring independence that summer. He believed that an inevitable disaster awaited Americans who challenged the world’s most powerful empire with nothing more than an improvised army and a tiny navy. In late June 1776, Edward Rutledge of South Carolina wrote to John Jay that the independence resolution being pushed in Congress was “a shew of our Spirit” by hotheads, and that “the sensible part of the House opposed the motion,” seeing “no wisdom in a Declaration of Independence” at that moment. Jay himself, away on business in New York, shared Rutledge’s reluctance to “press into this measure” too quickly, worrying that the colonies were committing the country before its military prospects and foreign support were secure. Others, such as Boston loyalist Thomas Hutchinson, who published a detailed pamphlet titled Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence and moderate Joseph Galloway in Pennsylvania, were among a surprising number of prominent Americans who saw the Declaration as a risky gamble by a misguided minority.
By 1776, the British government had come to regard the “American Problem” as a tedious argument needlessly prolonged by self-interested factions and implacable radicals. When the Declaration came to George III and his ministers about a month after its adoption, none of them saw it as a monumental turning point in colonial relations. Instead, they read it with a mixture of contempt, anger, and even some amusement. It was the work, they thought, of ingrates and upstarts, ingrates because they had grown fat and complacent under the shield of the British empire, and upstarts because they acted as if a gaggle of farmers, merchants, and mechanics could make their high-sounding words amount to anything.
They had a point on both scores. For decades, British arms had helped shield the colonies from frontier conflicts and European rivals like France and Spain. But it was the cold calculus of military, logistical, and fiscal reality that really made American defiance preposterous and pathetic. Britain controlled a worldwide system of colonies and strategic outposts that included Canada and the eastern Mississippi Valley, much of the Atlantic seaboard of North America, major Caribbean islands, and key footholds in India. In the Western Hemisphere, beyond the 13 colonies, Britain held Nova Scotia, Quebec, the Newfoundland fisheries, Jamaica, Barbados and other sugar islands, all of which could provide bases, revenue, and manpower.
Britain had the world’s strongest navy and exerted unprecedented maritime dominance over all oceans and seas. In 1776, the Royal Navy had about 270 warships of various rates, compared to about 27 warships in the fledgling Continental Navy. Approximately three‑quarters of Americans lived within 75 miles of the Atlantic coast, which meant that British naval power could project force against most major population centers, ports, and supply routes. The Royal Navy could aid in the occupation and control of key American ports, including New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and Newport. It also could rapidly transport enormous armies along the American coast.
Those armies had proved themselves virtually invincible by winning global wars and suppressing occasional rebellions within living memory of the Declaration. In short order and with frightening efficiency, Britain could deploy thousands of professional soldiers and sailors to occupy major cities and conduct simultaneous campaigns in multiple theaters.
And it could pay for such ventures without breaking a sweat. Britain’s economy had undergone a financial revolution by the late 1700s, resulting in one of the world’s strongest public credit systems. The British government could borrow extensively at relatively low interest rates to fund long wars without immediate, onerous tax increases, a technique that had already sustained lengthy conflicts against France. So in the 1770s, London could continue to prosecute a war year after year, raising funds in domestic and European markets while keeping its fiscal system largely intact. By contrast, the Continental Congress would have to improvise taxation and gamble on credit to finance a war through requisitions, an inflated paper currency, and usurious foreign loans. Because the rebellion itself began as a tax protest, Congress could hardly promote robust taxation at home.
For Britain, feeding and arming an army were routine administrative matters, while Americans lacked supplies, arms, clothing, shelter, or basic equipment for an army. Shortages of gunpowder, muskets, bayonets, artillery, tools, and textiles occurred at the outset and would persist. Even essentials like salt for preserving meat could be scarce. In July 1776, George Washington had perhaps twenty thousand men in and around New York, but they required flour, beef, blankets, shoes, tents, kettles, wagons, horses, and forage for those horses. Congress lacked a tax system to purchase such things, and the army had no centralized commissary to distribute them. The country had plenty of grain and cattle but no organized system to convert them into daily rations at the front. British armies could utilize a global network of depots and contractors and a professional supply bureaucracy, while Washington’s quartermasters would have to beg for wagons and drivers while watching prices soar. Forcing civilians to supply the army would cause disaffection at the very least, and probably disloyalty among people already wavering in their support for the cause.
There were even more British positives and American disadvantages, but these alone make it easy to see why the British establishment believed that “one active campaign” and “burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights.” More than a few Americans believed the rebellion would fail, either collapsing from internal divisions or falling to an irresistible global power.
And yet, against this ledger of British positives and American negatives, the “madness” of independence did not collapse. It hardened into something we still fumble to name—the Spirit of ’76, if one inclines to shorthand. It was not numbers, nor credit, nor logistics that carried American patriots through eight years of war. It was a stubborn conviction that a people scattered along a vulnerable coastline could nonetheless act as a continent, that farmers and merchants could call themselves a nation before they had the means to feed and clothe one. Britain weighed its advantages and saw only ingratitude and folly. The Americans weighed those same advantages and decided that, if anything, their weakness made delay more dangerous than decisiveness.
Modern lore has George III jotting in his diary on that July 4th in 1776, “Nothing important happened today.” He almost certainly wrote no such thing; the line is borrowed from a French king’s note about a failed hunt. But the myth survives because it captures the essence of British complacency. To London, the Declaration of Independence looked like one more troublesome complaint from a distant province. To the men in Philadelphia, it was a point of no return. The king did not yet understand these willful, improbable Englishmen across the sea, but he would come to—slowly, and in the end, with grudging if unspoken admiration. In that, George III became a metaphor for the entire world then and for two and a half centuries since.