157. The American Revolution: The Shot Heard Around the World (Ep 2)
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durham-Poole. And once again, we are so lucky to have Maya Jasanoff, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University, who is holding our hand and taking us through the choppy waters leading up to the American Revolution. And waters is a good place to start because we ended the last episode talking about the Boston Massacre. I mean, called a massacre, I mean, a handful of people dead. It was kind of Paul Revere's

of what happened there and Sam Adams disseminating it, saying this is a massacre, this is a massacre that really caught people's attention. But you've got a febrile atmosphere then running into late November, early December 1773 when East India Company ships are docking in Boston Harbour carrying cargoes of tea. Now, this is going to be the biggest flashpoint yet. Take us through it, Maya. And what do the East India Company do?

doing in American waters in the first case? So we've had by this point, 1773, eight years of conflict over both the practice and the principle of taxation.

in the colonies by Britain. And we've also had quite a bit of on the ground back and forth, like the skirmishes that resulted in the Boston Massacre. In this back and forth, the next big provocation, and of course, we should add that no one at the time sort of understands the trajectory to be what it is, but it ends up coming to us this way. Another act is passed by Britain,

which again shows the British Parliament attempting to balance the interests of its global empire. In this case, trying to placate the merchants of the East India Company, who themselves have expanded their footprint a great deal in India over the past decade or so, and who trade in chiefly tea and textiles from Asia to Britain and Britain's colonies.

So the parliament is trying to balance their interests with those of the American colonists. And what they decide is that rather like the Sugar Act earlier, in which you had a situation where the American colonists were getting their sugar and sugar byproducts from a bunch of other sources other than British merchants,

Likewise with tea, they're getting their tea from channels that are not all authorized by the British government and specifically the East India Company, which has a monopoly on this trade. And we should say behind this that the East India Company has just gone bust and that the British government had to bail it out. So yet another sort of hole in the government's finances.

And they see, again, America as a way of recouping some of that money. The East India Company had to bring its tea to Britain. And then in Britain, it would auction the tea. And then people would sell the tea in the colonies. But meanwhile, there was a whole lot of smuggling that was going

on that was bringing in tea to the colonies at cut rate. And so what the Tea Act does is it essentially tightens up the enforcement, but it also, for what it's worth, lowers the official price of the non-Black market tea. So it's an ironic thing where on paper, when everything is done legally, it actually lowers the price of tea for the colonists. But because the colonists have been getting their tea from all sorts of other sources in practice, it's a problem for them.

There is another thing too, isn't there, Maya? I know this extraordinary horrors that have taken place recently in India, the Bengal famine of 1772. And there have been many whistleblower accounts appearing in British periodicals like The Spectator and The Gentleman's Magazine, which are read on the Eastern Seaboard, describing the rapaciousness of the East India Company. So some

of the colonists in America reading that the East India Company is now going to be sailing directly into their harbors and their water are worried, in the words of John Dickinson, who we met in the last episode, the patriot Quaker.

He says that the East India Company, having plundered India, was now casting their eyes on America as a new theater whereon to exercise their talents of rapine, oppression, and cruelty. And Dickinson describes the tea as a cursed trash, he says.

and compared the prospect of oppression by the corrupt East India Company in America to being, quote, devoured by rats. So they're not very excited at the idea of these ships turning off their coast. No.

Not at all. And the ships show up toward the end of 1773, the first ships to come under this new disposition. They're going to go to a bunch of places. They're going to Charleston. They're going to Philadelphia. They're going to New York. These are the other big ports along the East Coast. And in each of those places...

The Patriots managed to get the consignors to send the ships away. Ah, so it's not just the Boston Tea Party. There are other tea parties taking place in Charleston and so on. So the ships under this act are bound for all of the major ports on the eastern seaboard, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, Boston. In Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York...

the ships managed to be somehow resisted insofar as the consignors resigned and the captains returned to England with the carcass. So the resistance sends them away before they even really kind of get going. But in Boston,

the tea ships actually come and drop anchor in Boston Harbor. This happens end of November. And for a couple of weeks, there's a very tense sort of standoff in Boston, where, by the way, you know, again, there are lots of smugglers, you know, people who are making their money off of smuggling in the tea. And obviously, they're not at all happy to have these other ships sitting there in the harbor. There was a deal where there were something like 20 days,

that the ships had to pay duties for. And so as the calendar kind of ticks down after this period expires, it means that the officials get to seize the tea and then make sure that it goes through the channels and so on. And so there's a sense among the Patriot resistance that they have basically three weeks to act.

And what that means is that about three weeks later, after these ships have arrived, on the night of December 16th, 1773... Have they been unloading tea already? Is there a certain amount of...

So the tea is in the ships, the ships are in the harbor, and as this all comes to a head, the throngs of Boston and the surrounding area, you know, mass into the Old South meeting house in Boston for a meeting about what to do about these ships.

And it is in the course of this meeting that, as the folkloric rendition has it, a group of young men who are dressed up as Indians in the meeting house cry out, Boston Harbor at teapot tonight, and lead a crowd out. And they go right out to the harbor. You know, Boston is a small city, right? So the distances are just negligible. They go to the harbor, board the ships.

And then they, you know, with hatchets or whatever, they break open the chests, they dump the tea into the harbour, 342 chests in all. £10,000 worth, which is a vast fortune in those days. And again, we hear it led by Sam Adams. Again, that name Adams, you know, the second president of the United States, his own cousin is part of this throng and they are dumping the tea over the side, which is...

in so many ways, a tweaking of the king's nose and two fingers up to the British Parliament. Absolutely. More than that, it's also an actual destruction of a good deal of property in which manifestly the East India Company has an interest, but so does the British government. And this destruction of property, as your listeners may know, is one of the high crimes, as it were, in the British...

canon of law. I mean, if not formally, then certainly in principle, because property ownership, the right to have it is just a bedrock principle of English law. So the destruction of this property lands very, very heavily with the British authorities. And it's in response to this episode, which we know now as the Boston Tea Party, that early in 1774, Parliament will pass a series of acts called

the Coercive Acts, which the patriots know as the Intolerable Acts. They include closing Boston Harbor until the cost of the tea is made up for by the town. And they include changes to the nature of the Massachusetts legislature that essentially takes away autonomy from the colonists and puts it more into the hands

of the British in particular. General Thomas Gage, a military officer, is made governor of the colony. And of course, whenever you have a general who's made a governor, you want to think about the overlap of authority there. This is the man we'd met earlier fighting alongside George Washington. And a final piece of this that is incredibly provocative is a fresh version of the Quartering Act that

which means that the British have the right to commandeer civilian property and civilian houses and make sure the townspeople of Boston house the British soldiers who are their, by now, increasingly determined enemies. And Maya, I mean, this is interpreted by the good people of Boston as collective punishment. Whether they were with the

In some minds, and they're described by some in Boston at the time as hoodlums or the mob who throw the tea over the side into the harbour. But all of Boston will suffer because of this. And if anything, this further galvanises this sense of resistance in Massachusetts where they're saying, what the hell is going on here? How can you collectively punish even those who may have been on the fence or who were outright loyal to Parliament and to the King?

And you're punishing all of us and making us second, not second class, third class citizens in a place that we have fought, sweated and bled to colonize here. And protect, in their view. It is collective punishment. There's no question about that. The entire town of Boston is made to pay for the tea and made to pay through these people.

different acts. And it's because of this that we again see this sort of back and forth between the collectivization of the colonists by Britain and the collectivization of the colonists by themselves.

In terms of resistance, we've talked about the Sons of Liberty, which formally, I should say, is disbanded after the repeal of the Stamp Act. But a lot of these kind of popular rough justice groups stick around. But one thing that has entered into the picture by 1773-74 are the so-called committees of correspondence. And these are groups that John Dickinson actually has a hand in of people around the

the colonies exchanging ideas with each other. And it is out of these committees of correspondence that the idea to have a whole gathering of delegates from across the colonies comes into being in the form of the so-called Continental Congress, which is to be held in Philadelphia in 1774.

And this is the first real, what could we say, sort of collective political gathering of a body out of which we can trace really the beginnings of the American Congress. Maya, do you feel that the British reaction to the Boston Tea Party was,

was a sort of final mistake which lost America? Or do you think at this stage, there are other outcomes that could have happened? We could imagine a very different reaction from colonial America if the British had reacted less vociferously and less aggressively. It's definitely an authoritarian move. I think that the real question is,

as I see it, at least as a historian of the British Empire, is why the colonists react as they do when equivalently authoritarian things, which are done in, for example, Ireland, do not meet with the same kind of organized resistance.

So from a British point of view, they're doing the kinds of things that they'll do across the colonies around the empire. But it's the nature of American society and colonial society that means that these authoritarian moves kind of land a bit differently. You know, it might be a good moment to mention that the difference between English and British radicals and British

American colonial radicals is not that great. That is to say, we have in the 1760s in Britain, for example, the figure of John Wilkes, who's a populist, whose rallying cry is Wilkes and Liberty, whose followers consider themselves patriots.

And a lot of that sort of Wilkesite energy can be tracked as well in the colonies of the 1760s. There's a town in Pennsylvania called Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. The Wilkes is for John Wilkes. The family of actors known as the Booths will have a child named after John Wilkes, John Wilkes Booth. Wilkes Booth. Oh, we've heard of him. He'll be famous. Yes. Yes.

Just to say that the kinds of actions that are being undertaken by the British Parliament, which are seen as authoritarian by the American colonists, are actions that have parallels in the British Isles and have parallels elsewhere, and are seen also by British subjects elsewhere as authoritarian. Just this First Continental Congress, I mean, just...

to name check some of the rock stars of what will become American independence. There are 56 delegates who are there and they include John Adams, George Washington, Sam Adams, Benjamin Franklin. I think Dickinson is there as well.

It's a kind of patriot supergroup. It's sort of Eric Clapton. It's cream or something, isn't it? It is, yeah. You've got these sort of, the correspondence has now become flesh. You have got all these men in the room together talking, comparing war wounds, if you like. I don't know whether it's here or a bit later that you see outward show of solidarity. I think it might be this one where George Washington turns up with a black armband on and he's wearing a black armband for the collective punishment of the people of Boston.

what they're going through. And suddenly you've got this really tangible visual aid that actually, you know what? Virginians are with Bostonians. They are with the Massachusetts men. So that must have been incredibly powerful to be in that room. Is there any reason to believe that they would have known each other? I mean, would Adams have met Washington before? Is this the first time they've all been together in a room? It is absolutely the first time that they're in the room together. The way Adams describes his first meeting and laying eyes upon these people

He's also overwhelmed, you know, that he's surrounded by these greats, these great names. But they do know of each other because of this correspondence that Maya was telling us about. The links are already made, but you put these men in a room together comparing grievances and you suddenly have a union. That's what you have, you know, the first signs of a union in a place that was otherwise disparate colonies with their own concerns, their own identities, their own loyalties, their own problems, you know, all of these things. But they suddenly become friends.

one in a room saying, you know what, the British have gone too far. And that must have been an absolute migraine for the people back in Westminster, right? It's an incredible gathering of minds and voices. And yeah, it's also worth underscoring that for many of these men who gathered together, who were joined in horror at what the British were doing,

They did not yet consider themselves to be the founders of a new independent nation by any means. What were they after? What did they consider themselves to be after at this stage? So the key thing that they all agreed on was that they wanted to get the so-called intolerable acts done.

rescinded. They wanted to reconfigure the relationship between Britain and the colonies. They wanted some considered even a joint parliament of some sort, an imperial parliament that would include representatives from the 13 colonies. They imagined all sorts of ways of refashioning the relationship between Britain and the colonies, but how they did it was different. The futures that they envisioned were different. And some of the figures in

in the First Continental Congress, including John Dickinson, would be considered by others later to be more on the kind of conservative end, being more conciliatory toward Britain. And then some of those there, like, say, Samuel Adams or Patrick Henry, would be considered far more proto-revolutionary, if you will. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting at that time, Dickinson is saying, look, we can complain. And

That distinction you drew in the last episode was so important. There is a difference between blaming the king and blaming his parliament. And Dickinson really wants to make it clear. We are loyal subjects of the king. If we can just get into his ear and tell him what's going on in his name, he will forgive us. I mean, he uses that kind of language when he's debating on the floor with John Adams, who says, John Adams very, very clearly saying, this is just the start, my friend. This is what's going to happen to all of you. And you've got to help us resist this in Massachusetts or we're going to get flattened.

as a result of this. And Dickens says, we do not want to see the parents slaughter his children. I mean, it's that kind of language that he uses all the time, having faith, informed by his Quakerism, I guess, that he doesn't want to have a fight, but that the king will be reasonable. The king is our father. The king will look after us and he doesn't know. It is an extraordinary actually set of exchanges that goes on in this First Continental Congress.

Absolutely. The outcome of it, though, that's critical for the future of the colonies is that the representatives sign an association with one another. It does bring all these people literally into the same room in a critical way. And they agree on a few things, including chiefly a boycott of British goods. And this boycott is to go on until Parliament agrees to rescind

the Intolerable Act. And that is just not going to happen. So we end up going into 1775 with this kind of standoff between the boycotting, radicalized, or I should say united and resisting colonies and the British government. And you have in Boston, which is the epicenter of the provocative acts,

a town that is in effect under military occupation with a governor in charge who is also a general, and you have a population that is increasingly recognizing that it needs to defend itself by force of arms if necessary.

Right. And General Gage, I mean, he does everything that Adams warns them he's going to do. He starts arresting ringleaders. He starts handing out sort of summary justice. There is, again, this real martial sense of a martial law going on in Massachusetts. Everything Adams said would happen. Dickinson really thought that they would row back. If you just get them to see reason, they won't do this to us. And it continues to build and build. So it all sort of

builds to a head where Gage is informed at some point in April 1775 that, look, you know, there is a weapons cache and gunpowder that's stored in a place called Concord. And so he moves 700 of his men to go and destroy it. And this is a big troop movement in what is, you know, we think of these big cities as they are now, but these are sort of little homesteads, which are sort of dotted around a small sort of town. And you see that many red coats,

marching through and they are determined to destroy whatever weaponry or your right to bear arms as it will become. But these local militias have really relied on these stores

And this then turns into a big kaboom. Talk about the kaboom that exists. So you have in Boston this General Gage, and he is understood by the people of Boston and the surrounding areas as a complete authoritarian and military dictator. Of course, on the British side, these subjects are being completely obstreperous, and there's no reason, as a person like Gage sees it, not to use the powers of the British government and army to hold them into check.

By 1775, you also have the colonists having mustered themselves into militias, something which, of course, they had been doing for decades. They had had militias, you know, back in the period of the Seven Years' War. But these militias are stockpiling weapons and ready to resist further infringements, as they see it, by the British on their rights.

So this will come to a head in April of 1775. There's a famous signal which is meant to be given about how the British will be marching on the weapons stockpiles, and it's to be issued by lanterns being held up in the steeple of a church.

The signal is one if by land, two if by sea. And the idea is whether or not the British are going to march along a neck of land, very narrow neck, which is no longer so narrow because it's been filled in by Boston's Back Bay, but to get over closer to Concord or whether they're going to come over by boat. And the signal is given. And then Paul Revere, the silversmith, whose engraving of the Boston Massacre had also been a huge success, goes galloping off on

horseback to have his so-called midnight ride to Concord to alert the residents of Concord that the British are coming, the British are coming. That's the cry, the British are coming, the British are coming. He sort of screams it supposedly, according to folklore, all the way along until his throat is shredded to warn the people and the local farm boys and everyone to basically rally up the local militia, the British are coming. If you talk to Americans, and I know you do because you live there, but it is a massively,

proud thing that they say, this one rider riding out saying, the British are coming, the British are coming. And then Boston rallies itself and Massachusetts rallies itself to fight back. Yes. So these militias which had been formed are much better organized than they had been. And they have a

quick way of getting their men together and getting them out onto the field. The field in this case is the town of Lexington that's on the way to Concord. And the militia mobilize on Lexington Green. The British arrive on Lexington Green. It's before dawn, but as the light is coming up, these two

groups of armed men are facing one another. And in short order, a shot is fired, which will be immortalized in poetry as the shot heard around the world, because it touches off the American Revolution. But rather poignantly, it is totally unknown which side fired the first shot, because in fact,

the American colonists and the British had a lot in common. And this was, from the very beginning, as much a civil war as any other kind of conflict. All of these things.

They are like instruments in an orchestra that are rousing a country to a battle anthem in a way, you know. If the big question leading up to around 1775 is how do the colonies stitch together and sort of find common cause, the big question that's going to hang over from 1775 onward into the war is how did the British manage to lose this thing?

Because on the face of it, you have this gigantic military power, one of the greatest in the world, that is squaring off against a bunch of relatively haphazardly armed and virtually untrained militias in the colonies. Many of whom, I'll add, do have military experience from the Seven Years' War, but nonetheless, we're talking about a huge imbalance here.

especially, of course, when it comes to, say, naval power. And if we want analogies for today, we can just think about what it would be like to try to fight a war against a major power, as we're seeing in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, where one side has an air force and the other one doesn't. So this conflict, which begins on April 19, 1775, is one that the British imagine that they will very easily win.

After these skirmishes in Lexington and Concord, of course, later celebrated as great battles, the British end up finding themselves essentially blockaded into Boston. Even their return journey is a bit of a nightmare, isn't it? On their way back from effectively winning this skirmish, they're peppered at every farm they pass, and they begin to commit atrocities, which only makes everything worse. They go to houses, set houses on fire, all that sort of stuff.

thing that would be great we can't do on a podcast is to show a map here. But again, the city of Boston, it's hard to imagine now, but it really is just this sort of bulb of land on the end of a little spit. And if you control access on that spit, it's very hard for people to get in and out, except, of course, by sea, which the British are better at than the Americans for obvious reasons. However, the Massachusetts militia are

pretty good at sort of blocking the British in. And we have the Continental Congress, which has been meeting in Philadelphia, and which is now able to empower a continental army. And this is going to be the formal fighting force, which is commanded by George Washington. He is appointed commander in chief right away. And he takes charge of this small but very dedicated fighting force

to try to squeeze the British out of their stranglehold on Boston. I mean, you've got Washington now leading this Continental Army. And I think it is John Adams who persuades him to do it as well. Again, it's the same names again and again, the first president and the second president who will become massively

figures. So Washington is leading and Bunker Hill is going to be a hugely important chapter in this. So tell us what happens at Bunker Hill, June 1775, that's where we're at. So a little bit of a flavour of how difficult it's going to be for the British to fight this war comes really early in the conflict when the Continental Army is able to restrict British movement around Boston and the

unexpectedly so, in order to regain control of Boston. This comes to a head at what we now know as the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of 1775, when the British are trying to unseat the Americans from

a position in Charlestown, just opposite Boston. And it's an unbelievable pyrrhic victory for the British. They march up, attack the Americans, get mowed down, come down. They march up again, get attacked by the Americans, get mowed down, come down, and go up a third time. And it's only then that they manage actually to take this position. But it's with huge losses.

Ultimately, they will find that holding on to the city of Boston is really just not an easy thing for them to do. They have sea power, which is critical, of course. You can get away when you have ships.

But they can't really advance from Boston very well because Washington ends up digging himself in in Cambridge just to chase him. And the British are in many ways sort of trapped in this spot. And the numbers are really quite considerable. Out of a force of 2,500 on the British side,

228 were dead and 800 wounded, while the Americans lost only 100 and 270 wounded. These are the worst British casualties of any engagement in the war.

They're very serious. And there's a phrase that comes out from the Battle of Bunker Hill, whether it is true or apocryphal, who knows. But it's that the order that the Americans were given was not to fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Is that what that comes from? Yes. And the idea was that the British had to come really close before the Americans fired. But the point of it is to say that the Americans were...

I guess it captures two things. One, that they had some strategic advice, which was perhaps not bad. But the other is about courage, I think, which is that they were willing to stand there and wait for the British to come.

and then fire. But it takes a lot of courage to do that. Yeah. So, I mean, you have now the establishment of Washington as the leader of men and the leader of resistance. I mean, okay, albeit he's persuaded to do this by John Adams, but he's there, he's leading a continental army. That idea of the union and the union fighting back is now cemented. Also, there is the romance of, you know, these are farm, a lot of them are just farm boys or, you know,

older men who have left their smithies and their farms and whatever it is to fight for their land. Let's take a break right now. And when we come back from the break, we'll talk about what happens in the other colonies as a result of this out and out conflict between Britain and colonial America. Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.

Welcome back.

So we've just had the Battle of Bunker Hill. It's been a pyrrhic victory for the British. They have lost incredible number of men, far more than they thought.

While today we see this as the moment of absolute no return, there is in fact attempts to make peace. You're absolutely right, William. But what's really interesting here is that it's not an outcry for independence that is unified here to get rid of the British. So you've got, you know, we've talked about John Dickinson a fair bit in these podcasts. But John Dickinson is the one who keeps separating the evils of the British Parliament from the King himself because he keeps referring to the King as a father figure.

And he writes this olive branch petition in July 1775. I'll read a bit of it, saying, look, there can be a reconciliation. You know, we don't want to fight. Let's just stop fighting. Why can't we just get along? Your Majesty, ministers, persevering in their measures and proceeding to open hostilities for enforcing them have compelled us to arm in our own defence and have engaged us in a controversy so peculiarly abhorrent

abhorrent to the affections of your still faithful colonists, that when we consider whom we must oppose in this contest, and if it continues, what may be the consequences, our own particular misfortunes are accounted by us only as parts of our distress. Basically, you're hurting us. Please, if you stop hurting us, then we can go back to being your good children. And it's something that really chafes against the Massachusetts.

party because they're like, hang on, we're the ones bleeding. We don't care. But there is a dissonance here. And still a lot of voices saying, look, independence, we're not talking about independence. We're just talking about fairness here. Does George III come out of this as a listening father, which is what Dickinson wants him to be, or an out-and-out nutter, which is what the Hamilton musical sort of, you know, I will send my battalions just to remind you of my love. You know, who is George III at this time?

It's probably somewhere in between, but George III, who had only come to the throne in 1760 as quite a young man and who faced, as we've already touched on, quite a bit of popular resistance within Britain itself from people who wanted more rights, is staunch on the American colonies. He does not want them to be independent, and he is very keen to ensure that their obstreperousness be kept in check.

At the same time, George III understands these people to be his subjects. He is their king, and he will be the recipient, of course, of petitions from them, as he is from all of his subjects. And he understands the British Empire and British rule to be a good thing. So I think his attitude about all of this is, well, why do these people want to rebel? Of course they shouldn't rebel. They should understand that this is a good thing.

set of arrangements for them. But he's in no way enthusiastic about the kinds of recalibration that the American colonists want, and he is certainly not comfortable with the sense of military opposition that's getting increasingly galvanized.

In Boston, George Washington arrives on the scene, having been empowered as the head of the Continental Army. He actually arrives on the scene in Massachusetts in July of 1775. And we end up finding a lot of kind of organized American military action up in the North as the Americans then try to send a whole flank up into Canada, where they're hoping to get Quebec

to join the revolution as well. And so this kind of American momentum really seems to be taking off at the very time that George III and his ministers are supposed to be contemplating this possible resolution with the colonists. And I don't know, if you face a bunch of people who say, oh, we want to make peace, but they're actually marching on another one of your provinces, you might not fully buy

Doubt their sincerity. Right, right, right. But I mean, how much has he, Porphyria, rattled George? I mean, he hasn't got that reputation of being nuts quite yet, because as you say, he's a fairly young man at this point, isn't he? To my best recollection, George III's first bouts of Porphyria will occur in the 1780s after the American Revolution. And this gives rise to the popular idea that it's the revolution itself that triggers his madness.

So no, he does not have that reputation at this point. But he does have a reputation among the more radical contingent in Parliament for being an authoritarian. And you will have, again, you know, I cannot say it enough that the American Revolution is a civil war. It is a civil war between Americans and Britons. It is a civil war between factions of Americans. And it is a civil war between factions of Britons.

You will have people in Parliament, notably Charles James Fox, who are sympathetic to the American cause, who favor conciliation. And by the 1780s, Fox has the habit of dressing in buff and blue, which are the colors of the Continental Army that Washington himself wears. I didn't know that. God, I didn't know that. Wow. So there's a lot of opposition at every turn.

And to the, again, big story of these wartime years, which is how does Britain end up losing? I think one way that it ends up losing is that there's very little consistency in the political vision of what should happen. And there's always a contingent within Parliament, which is arguing for greater conciliation. And in fact, for much of the war, you will find that there are actually peace commissions, peace commissioners who impact.

who are empowered by Parliament to seek terms with the Americans. The Dunmore Proclamation is a real sign, I think, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, of British panic. Like, you know, we need numbers. And is that what it is? Because they do something which is, I think, pretty extraordinary, which is directly appealing to the kind of people that George Washington has working on his plantation saying, if you rise up,

and you slaughter your masters in the name of the British crown, you will have freedom. It seems like an extraordinary thing. Is it made in good faith? And how many people reply to this? I mean, tell us first of all about the Dunmore Proclamation. How is it made? Who does it reach? I think we need to do jumping over fences before we should. But what is the Dunmore Proclamation?

proclamation, how does it land, who hears it, and who heeds it? And who is Dunmore? The fighting begins in Massachusetts, but there's also fighting very quickly in Virginia. This is the other great sort of seat of American money, power, etc. And the governor of Virginia at this time is a fellow called Lord Dunmore, who's a Scottish aristocrat, rather colorful figure in various ways. He is effectively chased out of Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, and

and sets himself up on a bunch of ships that are floating in the waters off of Williamsburg. It is in the wake of this crisis

I've got a picture of Lord Dunmore and he's swathed in tartan. He's a splendid looking guy with a sort of kilt. Another one of yours, William. All the villains are yours, really, pretty much. Maya, tell us more. So at around the same time that we're seeing the Lexington Concord Bunker Hill actions up in Massachusetts, we see in Virginia that Lord Dunmore is getting attacked in Virginia and he ends up having to leave

his capital and basically take shelter on a ship in the waters off of Norfolk, Virginia. And it's from this ship that Lord Dunmore will end up issuing

issuing a proclamation which doesn't get the same sort of airtime in traditional histories of the American Revolution as it, I think, is starting to now and definitely should, but which, again, reminds us of the complexities of this conflict. The proclamation that he issues in November of 1775 at once establishes martial law in Virginia, which is an important sign of his authoritarianism, but also extends an offer of freedom

to all enslaved people belonging to patriots. It's very clear to distinguish that it's people belonging to patriots, not loyalists, those who remain loyal to the British.

that if they run to join British troops and agree to fight with the British, they will be freed by British forces and get to live out the rest of their lives in freedom. This will end up being the first of a series of repeated promises made by British commanders to enslaved people in the colonies that they can seek their freedom by fighting with the British. And over the course of the war,

Tens of thousands of enslaved men, women, children will run to the British, chiefly in Savannah, Charleston, Virginia, parts of the South. And ultimately, and I'm sure we'll be talking about this more in future episodes, ultimately, many of these so-called Black loyalists will indeed receive their freedom and go on to live after the war itself.

in British territories freed. So Dunmore's proclamation is a remarkable sort of gesture. It's super cynical insofar as it's aimed only at the enslaved people who live on Patriot plantations, but it's also quite- Oh, it doesn't count if they're British plantations. They're not offered anything. It doesn't.

It's also rather canny because it touches on a longstanding fear of all white slave owners in the colonial territories at this time, which is of slave rebellions that can unseat them from their power. And it yields actual numerical strength. And so over the coming months, thousands of enslaved people will run to Dunmore's so-called floating town, this kind of capital that he builds on ships floating in the Chesapeake.

And they'll come from plantations owned by some of the founding fathers themselves over the course of the war. Including George Washington. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, many of these very familiar household names that we know of as founding fathers. Well, actually, the enslaved people belonging to them will find that a chant like, say, Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death is

It doesn't mean a lot to them coming from a Patrick Henry who keeps them enslaved. They'll get the liberty from the British. Maya, when you wrote about this in your wonderful book, Liberty's Exiles, what sort of reaction did you get in the States? Did people know this very well or was it a surprise?

There was a surge of scholarship about this in the 1970s, a terrific book, for example, by Sylvia Fry, and efforts to edit the documents related to the Black Loyalists have been going on for some decades. Shortly before I published my book, there were books by Simon Schama, Rough Crossings, and particularly the Australian scholar Cassandra Pibus.

an excellent book called Epic Journeys of Freedom. And there had also been increasing attention to one of the important preconditions for Dunmore's proclamation, which is the so-called Somerset Decision in 1772 in Britain, which effectively makes slave-owning

illegal in Britain itself. And there's an excellent book by Christopher Brown, a historian at Columbia called Moral Capital on this subject. So there's scholarship about it, but I would say that the question of how well known and the, again, the sort of popular consciousness, how much, for example, historic sites reflect this history and so on, that has really grown a lot only I'd say over the last, say,

15 years or so, I'm guessing, indeed I know, that heading into the 250th anniversary of independence in 2026, we're going to see a lot more attention, a lot more attention.

to the story of enslaved Africans in the revolution. And of course, the 1619 Project from the New York Times also talks about this experience quite a bit. Until I read you, I didn't know that, you know, Dunmore had a Royal Ethiopian Regiment. I mean, they were labelled...

clearly identifying that this is a black regiment and they're fighting on our side. This kind of dovetails really nicely, Maya, this Dunmore Proclamation, which is at the end of 1775 with the beginning of 1776. And another very, very important name to some of the founding fathers and anathema to others. But Thomas Paine, he publishes his pamphlet Common Sense.

How important is that to the independence struggle of the colonies? Hugely, in a word. Common Sense is a publishing sensation. It was a pamphlet. It appears in January of 1776. It's written by Thomas Paine, who's a radical Englishman. In fact, when the pamphlet is first published, it's not with his name on it. It's simply signed, An Englishman, which

which is quite telling because the argument that it makes is by far the most compelling argument for the independence, outright independence of the American colonies that has yet been put forward. The pamphlet is well worth reading today. I assign parts of it regularly to my students. It's a very widely assigned text.

in American history classes because it gives you a flavor of why it was such a bestseller then. It's very readable. You have to, of course, correct if you're a 21st century reader for the language in various ways, but the arguments are crisp,

compelling, passionate, and very radical. Not only does Paine argue that there's no possible way in which it makes sense for the colonies to remain part of the British Empire, but he goes on to say that the right form of government for those future colonies is that of a republic.

And this is a word that, of course, has been batted around. It's been around, you know, we've already had figures like Rousseau and we've had these ideas, you know, churning around for a while. But the case that America should be independent and that it should be a republic is.

is going really far from the position of a 1774 Continental Congress person like, say, Joseph Galloway, a figure from Pennsylvania who was floating ideas for an imperial parliament. It goes really far from the ideas of people who are appealing to the king to try to get them a better government. This is suggesting a complete break

Again, it's doing it in this galvanizing, electrifying, compelling, seemingly highly at once rational and emotional set of arguments that are very hard to resist. It sells 100,000 copies. Even today, that's quite a figure, but for that period, it must be unprecedented.

Remember, this is a time when, again, there are two and a half million American colonists, about 500,000 enslaved people in the colonies. So this is a concept and a set of words that makes its way around this society to a truly remarkable extent. And many of the phrases from it, including the title, are ones that we remember to this day.

Yeah, I mean, just a couple of quotes. We have the opportunity and every encouragement before us to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. Oh, wonderful. I mean, that's quite stirring. And the other one, the cause of America is the cause of all mankind. Now, this kind of talk speaks to the very heartstrings of people like Thomas Jefferson, but there are others who really don't like it very much. Including your friend John Adams. Yeah.

Well, I've got a soft spot. I keep being mocked for having a soft spot for John Adams, but he wasn't a slave owner and he had a lot going for him. And he had a nice wife. A wonderful wife and a really equal marriage. Thank you very much. That's exactly what I'm saying. A wholly radical idea about existing with women. Who knew? But what did he say? He wrote to Abigail about this and he said that Paine had a better hand at

pulling down the building. That's what he was worried about. He was so radical. He was going to destroy anything that was of any merit. And writing to Abigail, again, I love this, he sort of tested his ideas with his wife, who he thought had an intellect that was worth referring to from time to time. He says, you know, the writer seems to have an inadequate idea of what is proper and necessary to be done in order to form a new country enterprise. I think I've

fudge the end of it, but it's something along those lines. But it is the thing that all the young people are clutching in their hands, common sense. It is the thing that in the different colonies, certainly, it is yet another magnet that is pulling people towards, we are fighting for something much bigger than ourselves. Look, it's a good point to end this episode. If you want to hear

All of our episodes in this American Independence miniseries. You can join our club. Just sign up at empirepoduk.com. The next episode, and we will still have Maya Jasanoff because we've locked the doors and we've put furniture on the other side of those doors. She's not allowed out until she's done four.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, windows have been nailed shut. Poor woman. Poor Maya's sitting in Lisbon where she could be sitting in delicious bars. She could be having a glass of wine by the seafront. But no, she's next to her microphone and her laptop. And we are so grateful, Maya, because it does bring this to life. But the next episode is going to be all about America as it achieves independence. So whenever you do join us and until you do join us, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Duru.

the RIMPOL.