Story

They Turned the World Upside Down

Authors: Richard Bell

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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| Volume 70, Issue 5

Text Complexity Grade Level

The American Revolution did not involve just thirteen of Britain’s thirty-odd New World colonies, and the colonists’ determination to seek independence. In its very gestation, the conflict was a global event that drew participants from all over the world. And in its consequences, both immediate and long range, it shook every quarter of the globe. It is not an exaggeration to say that the American Revolution set much of the world as we know it in motion. Most literally, it sent caravans of navy vessels, cargo ships, and prison transports snaking across every ocean on the planet, as part of an unprecedented migrant crisis that forced great flows of people — soldiers, sailors, refugees, fugitives, and convicts alike — out toward uncertain futures in alien lands.

Just as important, it upended the economic system, disrupting supply chains and trade routes, and shook the political order to its core, securing freedom and sovereignty for millions, while deferring or denying it for many millions more.

As a child growing up outside London in the 1980s and 1990s, I learned next to nothing about the American Revolution and its global ripple effects. The subject was conspicuously missing from classrooms and curricula. The imperatives of nationalism being what they are, it is perhaps understandable that British people would rather not be reminded of the War of Independence at all, let alone reflect upon its world-historical significance.

But after moving to the United States and becoming a naturalized citizen, I discovered that a similar form of collective amnesia has long held most Americans in its grip. Unlike the British, Americans often delight in reliving the glories of their founding moment, and as a teacher I’ve long found joy in seeing undergraduate students and public audiences light up when we talk about it. However, they usually begin from a tightly blinkered frame of reference that neglects to acknowledge all the ways that individuals and communities, then as now, are entwined. Aside from a few nods to the Marquis de Lafayette, most basic textbook histories of the Revolutionary War typically overlook, minimize, or erase its transnational scope and complexity.

This myopia dates back almost to the moment when the guns fell silent and the peace treaty was signed. As soon as American historians started writing about the Revolution, more than two centuries ago, they began to omit and oversimplify its many foreign entanglements. For political reasons, they preferred to tell a simpler story in which plucky homegrown heroes faced down all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, all on their own.

The repetition of that mythic version has buttressed the belief that the fight for American independence was an event somehow separate from world history. But it was not. In fact, winning independence required a world war in all but name. What began as a domestic dispute over taxes, trading rights, and home rule soon metastasized into something much bigger and broader, pulling in enslaved people as well as Native people and French and Spanish speakers living along

the length of the Mississippi River. And it kept expanding outward, reverberating
across every habitable continent and spreading tumult, uncertainty, and opportunity in all directions.

Recovering the reach and resonance of the American Revolution helps us better understand every major actor, event, and turning point in that too-familiar story. To tell it fully, then, is to place the Sons of Liberty, the minutemen, and the members of the Continental Congress on the same stage as Black American freedom seekers, German relief troops, Irish privateers, Chinese tea-pickers, Mohawk warriors, Sierra Leonean separatists, French sailors, Spanish blanket weavers, patriot POWs, Jamaican washerwomen, Indian rulers, loyalist war widows, and British peace activists. In short, the great task before us is to revisit and reimagine America’s founding fight as a creation story in the making of our modern world.

From its beginning, the leaders of the rebellion well understood the global reach and resonance of their great struggle. Benjamin Franklin, for example, worked tirelessly over the eight years between 1775 and 1783 to kindle the civil war within the British Empire into a worldwide blaze. In 1776 alone, he trekked to Canada to urge the Québécois to rise up against British rule, drafted a German-language handbill to provoke Hessian desertions from the king’s ranks, and set out across the Atlantic to try to secure military alliances with France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Over the ninety months he spent in Europe, Franklin would continue to widen the American war in any way he could think of, hiring Irish sailors to raid British merchant shipping, toasting the victories of George III’s enemies across South Asia, and recruiting Baron Steuben, the Prussian drillmaster, to rush to Valley Forge to whip the Continental Army into fighting shape. Franklin was also responsible for engineering the global peace settlement he signed in the French capital in 1783. His work to forge that Treaty of Paris not only secured the independence of the United States. It also authorized the new nation to push back the Spanish Empire’s encroachments into the Illinois Country and seize vast territories from Native peoples, redrawing almost every boundary line in North America and pushing his own fledgling republic’s western border a thousand miles into the continent’s vast interior.

Even the Declaration of Independence anticipated that the fight for America’s future would be the work of many hands in many places. On July 4, 1776, an Irish immigrant to Philadelphia worked late into the night to set the final text of the Declaration into type. John Dunlap had a contract to print all of Congress’s official documents, and by morning he had produced two hundred identical copies on large sheets of Dutch paper destined for distribution across North America and around the Atlantic world. Everywhere it went, the Declaration announced its grand purpose, informing the international community that thirteen British colonies had formed a new political union eager to join “the powers of the earth.”

This was not simple courtesy. The delegates knew that they would need

hard cash and generous credit from deep-pocketed trading partners as well as more boots on the ground and massive naval support to defeat Britain. Just weeks earlier, Richard Henry Lee, the Virginian who first proposed separate nationhood, had reminded his colleagues in Congress that “no State in Europe will either Treat or Trade with us so long as we consider ourselves Subjects of G[reat] B[ritain].” Lee was convinced that a global declaration of the patriots’ sincere ambitions for independence was “the only means by which foreign Alliance[s] can be obtained.”

Seen in this light, the document Dunlap printed was actually a declaration of interdependence. This translated it into multiple languages immediately night of July 4 is why the delegates and sent copies addressed to King Louis XVI of France and King Carlos III of Spain on the first ships bound for Europe on July 8. It explains why John Adams drew up talking points for treaty negotiations with both nations just ten days later. It explains why Congress dispatched Benjamin Franklin to Paris that fall.

Those printed proclamations of intention and invitation reached Spain, Austria, and the Dutch Republic by the end of August, and France, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, and the Italian states a few weeks later. It would take Franklin and his fellow envoys many months of lobbying to persuade Europe’s great powers to sign official terms of military alliance. However, his team quickly secured their covert support in the form of money and supplies. As a result, the Continental Army soon received much-needed shipments of muskets and gunpowder sourced from arsenals in the French and Dutch Caribbean and loans to pay soldiers’ wages from donors in Spanish Cuba.

The men and boys who benefited from this bounty of foreign assistance were themselves strikingly polyglot and pluralistic. The Continental Army’s senior ranks boasted volunteer officers from as far afield as South America and Eastern Europe. Many rank-and-file enlistees were also recent immigrants, and patriot regiments hummed with a cacophony of different tongues, accents, and dialects throughout the war. Among the Continental soldiers taken prisoner at the Battle of Trois-Rivières in Quebec in 1776, for instance, eighty-nine of two hundred told their redcoat captors they had been born overseas.

King George’s own coalition was no less multicultural, multilingual, and multinational. Warriors from more than a dozen Native nations in the trans-Appalachian west helped the redcoats engage rebel forces, as did perhaps twenty-five thousand Black fugitives from slavery. Nineteen thousand resident white loyalists also supplemented British troops, as did at least eight thousand Irishmen and more than thirty thousand soldiers loaned to the king by princes in the German states. When coupled with the Royal Navy’s initially uncontested command of the seas, all this manpower was enough to provide the British cause in America with a critical early advantage. Indeed, one of General George Washington’s greatest achievements was to avoid being cornered and forced to capitulate to these intimidating legions in the war’s early years.

Washington’s wartime correspondence makes clear that he understood

that the patriots’ most pressing priority was to divert British soldiers and sailors away from the American battlefront and tangle them up in costly, distracting operations elsewhere. Leaders in Congress agreed and sent out armadas of patriot privateers to do just that, plundering British shipping around the Atlantic rim and forcing Royal Navy warships to redeploy to convoy duty. But the patriots’ real breakthrough came in 1778 and 1779, when the fleets of France and Spain finally joined this contest. They set about turning all of the world’s oceans into battlefields. Spain pushed the conflict into the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea, and the English Channel, while France went on the offensive almost everywhere else.

In the Caribbean, French admirals set their sights on the conquest of sugar islands like Jamaica—the diamonds in King George’s glittering imperial crown. To garrison those vulnerable treasure houses, Britain had to reassign regiments from tours of duty in North America and abandon Philadelphia, the biggest prize the redcoats had taken so far. Over in India, French strategists succeeded in forging a pivotal new anti-British alliance with Haidar Ali, the Muslim ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore. In 1780, he dispatched no less than eighty thousand troops to try to seize a British stronghold in Madras. That Mysorean invasion force contained nearly ten times the number of soldiers General Washington would have at his command as he led the Continental Army into battle the following year against Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

The patriots’ success in drawing foreign partners into the war was essential to achieving American independence. Britain ultimately lost not only because of Washington’s extraordinary
tenacity in the war’s several mainland theaters, but also because the king’s men had to stage long sieges, wage desperate naval battles, and take mounting casualties on too many other fronts spread too far apart. Ministers in London directed the fortunes of one hundred thousand troops during the conflict’s climactic final stages. Yet those soldiers and sailors had to stretch across a vast global canvas, leaving fewer than three in ten of them to try to rout the insurgents in North America.

Still, there was nothing inevitable about the outcome of the Revolutionary War. In truth, the patriots’ path to victory was a near decade-long slog characterized by a string of strange bedfellows, strained alliances, and dramatic reversals. No one was ever certain what would happen next. That stark reality forced both sides to wage slash-and-burn propaganda campaigns designed to sow doubt and disinformation among their enemies. Britain’s loyalist supporters, for instance, tried repeatedly to weaponize their fellow colonists’ reflexive fear of foreigners, spreading ugly rumors that French Catholic soldiers had orders to persecute American Protestants, claim their lands for King Louis, and ban the speaking of English.

For their part, Samuel Adams and Paul Revere each worked hard to persuade Irishmen, Hessians, Indigenous people, and former slaves to defect to the patriot side. Meanwhile, over in Britain, a vibrant antiwar movement brought on motion after motion in Parliament to cease

fire and end all offensive operations against the rebels.

FROM THE FIRST SHOTS at Lexington and Concord in 1775 to the last cannon blasts at Cuddalore in southern India in 1783, the American Revolution broke boundaries and crossed borders. Indeed, the decisive role played by international allies like France and Spain is only one part of this sprawling story. While the United States rose from the wreckage of the war to take its place as the youngest member of the family of nations, many other communities caught up in it had to fight just as long and just as hard to find their own footing in the brave new world that followed.

For enslaved people, the Revolution was a fierce campaign to stage the largest exodus out of bondage since biblical times. For Native people, the war marked a dangerous fork in the road, stirring famine, spurring a massive refugee crisis, and permanently shifting the balance of power in the heart of the continent.

None of these men, women, and children were mere spectators to America’s great struggle for liberty; they were essential stakeholders, and the stakes were enormous. Indeed, American independence was nothing less than a geopolitical earthquake, an event of such magnitude and strength that Thomas Jefferson later described the Declaration, the new nation’s birth certificate, as “an instrument, pregnant . . . with the fate of the world.”

Within the British Empire, for instance, the war’s shocks and after-shocks demonstrated that the king’s hold over his overseas colonies was neither permanent nor invincible. That revelation prodded insurgents in British possessions from Ireland to Sierra Leone to take to the streets to assert their own ambitions for economic and political autonomy over the decades to come. American independence also cut the number of enslaved people laboring under Britain’s flag by five hundred thousand, knocking the pro-slavery lobby in London off-balance and dramatically diminishing its political power. Activists there leveraged this wholly unanticipated outcome to accelerate the rise of an organized antislavery campaign after 1783. The patriots’ dreams of liberty ricocheted around much of the rest of the planet, too, pushing questions about human dignity, popular sovereignty, and citizenship toward the top of the global agenda and equipping rights seekers everywhere with a potent new vocabulary.

Of course, the patriots’ fight for self-determination would not break the grip of every entrenched political hierarchy. In fact, in some places it produced decidedly reactionary results. In the Spanish Empire, for example, senior ministers responded to events in the Americas with an authoritarian crackdown to bolster imperial control.

Nor did the rebellion bring on the abrupt collapse of the British Empire. King George surrendered thirteen of his mainland colonies to the newly United States but held tight to more commercially valuable possessions elsewhere. The British Empire emerged from the maelstrom arguably stronger and more ambitious than ever, having off-loaded its most troublesome properties. Sixty thousand loyalist asylum seekers displaced by the war fanned out to other British colonies in its aftermath. Their arrival helped to tighten the

reins of royal rule over Canada, the Caribbean, and India, and to extend the king’s dominion farther into Africa, Asia, and Australia.

[fix] The chapters that follow trace the sinews of this great war from its familiar epicenter outward to all these corners of the Earth. This thematic, string-of-pearls approach pulls together many separate strands of research conducted by historians working in a variety of subfields and specialties to produce a wide-ranging and encompassing new narrative. [fix] My goal is to broaden and complicate a conflict too often perceived only in simple, narrow, and nationalist terms while advancing seven core arguments:

First, the Revolution stirred the mass migration and circulation of enormous numbers of people across a sweeping stage.

Second, the human cost of this eight-year war was catastrophic for many of those caught up in its tides.

Third, the war was not an inevitable march to patriot victory, but instead the highly contingent result of improbable choices and last-minute improvisations.
Fourth, naval power was an important key to military success and what happened at sea often mattered just as much as what happened on land.

Fifth, the governments, soldiers, and civilians who wrestled for global advantage often acted on the understanding that trade was power.

Sixth, the patriots’ struggle for self-determination stirred imperial authorities to increase oversight and security over their remaining colonial subjects.

Seventh, this was a conflict in which the call for liberty rang around the world as never before.
Mobility. Catastrophe. Contingency. Sea Power. Commerce. Security. Liberty. These seven essential themes come into clear focus when we frame the Revolutionary War in transnational terms.

However, this worldwide conflict was fought and felt on a human scale, and its impact is best understood through close scrutiny of the wartime experiences of individual people. Those people include, among others, Molly Brant, the Native woman who fought to preserve that fragile alliance between the Haudenosaunee and the British Crown; Baron Steuben, the flamboyant Prussian volunteer who worked to Europeanize the Continental Army; William Russell, the Boston schoolteacher-turned-privateer who was taken hostage and thrown into a black hole on the far shores of the Atlantic Ocean; Harry Washington, the Black man who escaped American slavery and later declared his own independence against British rule in West Africa; and Peggy Shippen Arnold, the Philadelphia war bride whose decision to persuade her husband to switch sides led her to flee revolutionary America in hopes of starting over in India.

In November 1773, however, all of that still lay in the future. None of these people had yet been swept up in the coming war’s ebbs and flows, nor had they embarked upon the great journeys that lay ahead of them. In November 1773, all that any of them likely knew was that tensions between Britain and the colonists were rising rapidly, and that a fleet of ships carrying Chinese tea was on its way to ports across America. What they could not have known is that what happened when those ships arrived would send the world to war and transform