WHY INDEPENDENCE WAS NECESSARY
By William Urban
Too often we think the Revolution was about taxes. In reality it was because Americans refused to be reduced to second class subjects. In 2007 Anthony Scotti, Jr, wrote a powerful short book, “Brutal Virtue, the Myth and Reality of Banastre Tarleton.” The name Tarleton probably means little to readers in Illinois, but few citizens of South Carolina would fail to recognize it.
Movie-goers of 2000 might have seen The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, in which the hero tried to remain neutral in the American Revolution, but was inevitably drawn into the conflict by Tarleton’s misdeeds. This reflected Scotti’s argument that Tarleton was no worse than anyone else in this part of the war, but patriotic propagandists used him to illustrate why Americans had to join the fight.
Another movie, Sweet Liberty (1986), made a additional point. A comedy written and directed by Alan Alda (who also had the lead role except when being upstaged by Michael Caine and Michelle Pfeiffer), the story centered on a small-college historian who had written a scholarly study of Tarleton’s meeting with Mrs. Mary Slocomb, and who was frustrated by the director’s efforts to turn that into a love story. When Tarleton came to her farm to burn it, he asked where her husband was and whether he was a rebel. She retorted, “He is in the army of his country, and fighting against our invaders, and therefore not a rebel.”
Every observer of the colonial scene agreed that South Carolina and Georgia were more loyalist than the other colonies. This was partly because the plantation owners with numerous slaves and the commercial class selling tobacco, rice and indigo saw themselves much like the English nobility and merchant capitalists. However, without British armed assistance, the loyalists could not challenge patriot control of politics.
This changed when Cornwallis was sent to Charles Towne (as it was known then) with 14,000 redcoats and Hessians; after a long siege he forced General Benjamin Lincoln to surrender the city and his 5,000 men. It was the greatest defeat the Americans had suffered yet — the loss of an entire army.
Cornwallis set out to occupy the rest of the colony, but he found it difficult to locate guerilla forces such as those of the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion. His answer to this problem was to recruit loyalists for a mixed light cavalry and mounted infantry body that he called the British Legion; he named as commander the brightest cavalry officer in the army, young Banastre Tarleton.
The British Legion became famed (or infamous) for its long, swift marches and deadly attacks. It would fall on patriot forces at dawn, slaughtering the sleepy men, or charge unsteady units so suddenly that the men would fly for their lives. Not that many got away. No man on foot can outrun a horse. He would demand that enemy forces surrender, and if they did not, his men would kill everyone they caught. This became known as “Tarleton’s Quarter.”
The green uniforms that the British Legion wore are a symbol of pride, but also of what was wrong with British policy. Britons chose to believe that all Americans were dirty, lazy and cowardly. Therefore, they were not worthy of holding government posts or being allowed to buy a commission in the army. They were not even allowed to wear red coats.
A far-sighted government would have made George Washington into a professional officer and rich Americans into aristocrats. But no, the government saw Americans as the equivalent of the Irish and the South Asian Indians, that is, as a lower class of human being. When Americans complained that taxation policies and changing the royal charters were reducing them to slaves (something they knew something about), more than a few Britons thought that would be a good thing.
Benjamin Franklin had gone to London as a lobbyist for the government of the Pennsylvania Colony. World-renowned scientist, philosopher and humorist, honored by British universities, he was nevertheless repeatedly humiliated by the government ministers. Before he returned to America he wrote a satirical tract, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One.”
It was no accident that the founders of Monmouth College, South Carolina Presbyterians, were solid patriots. (The college hymn starts “Loyal to God and Native Land.”) Later they concluded that freedom should not depend on a person’s color or sex. Unable to remain in the Slavocracy that South Carolina had become, they moved to Western Illinois and put down roots in all the towns and villages round about. Their Monmouth College admitted women from the beginning, accepted the first Black student who applied, and the first Asian.
That is what the 4th of July meant.
Galesburg Register-Mail (July 3, 2014).
