The American Revolution Wasn’t the Main Event
America’s influence went beyond haberdashery. Several of the world’s leading revolutionaries had spent time in the country. The English-born Thomas Paine started his radical career writing “Common Sense” in Philadelphia before serving as a delegate to France’s National Convention. Tadeusz Kościuszko, Henri Christophe, Francisco de Miranda, and the Marquis de Lafayette all fought the British in America before becoming heroes in Poland, Haiti, Venezuela, and France, respectively. Lafayette named his only son Georges Washington.
Americans watched liberty’s growth with parental pride. After the French Revolution, many donned tricolor cockades and started addressing one another as “citizen” and “citizeness.” After Simón Bolívar led several of Spain’s Latin American colonies to independence, U.S. parents christened sons “Bolivar,” hence the Civil War general Simon Bolivar Buckner. All these overseas uprisings could be seen as part of the “novus ordo seclorum,” the new world order established by the United States and announced on its great seal. (Look under the eye-pyramid on the dollar bill.)
Belief in the American Revolution’s transcendent importance persists. It was “the most significant event in human history since the birth of Christ,” the documentarian Ken Burns has repeatedly proclaimed. Two recent books, however, put that to the test. “Republic and Empire” (Yale), by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy and the late Trevor Burnard, presents the Revolution from the British vantage. “Freedom Round the Globe” (Doubleday), by Sarah Pearsall, follows it all over the map—Jamaica, France, India, China. These fascinating, mind-scrambling books show familiar events from unfamiliar perspectives. But, in doing so, they lead you to wonder whether the stories Jefferson and Adams told were true. What if, in the age of revolution, America just didn’t matter that much?
To eighteenth-century Europeans, North America was essentially a wilderness. Although on paper the continent was divided into British, French, Spanish, and Russian territory, this was a preposterous cartographic fiction. In reality, the land was mainly Indigenous. Even populous British colonies like Virginia and Pennsylvania grew blurry on their western frontiers, where indistinct borders were protected by a few lonely forts.
For the British Crown, such frontiers were smudges on the edge of the map. What truly mattered was protecting Britain’s trade with the European continent against French interference. So, when French colonists built forts in the contested borderland of the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, King George III went through the motions of shooing them away. This task was unimportant enough, however, to fall to an American-born major who’d been in uniform less than a year, a twenty-one-year-old named George Washington.
Sending Washington wasn’t exactly sending the big guns. When he ordered the French to leave, they refused. He returned the next year to build a fort. As he prepared to do so, though, the Seneca leader Tanaghrisson approached Washington, warned him that the French were near, and proposed an ambush. Washington went along, and the two managed, with their combined forces, to capture a French unit. But things spun out of his control when Tanaghrisson drove a hatchet into the French commander’s skull and his men began killing the wounded. In another fates-or-hobgoblins moment, a discombobulated Washington had started a war.
A huge one. In the United States, it’s known as the French and Indian War, but that was just the American portion of the conflict. The Seven Years’ War drew in all the great Western powers. It reached Europe, Africa, and Asia, leading Winston Churchill to call it “the first world war.” As in the later World Wars, Britain’s side won. Lagos, Le Havre, Quebec, Quiberon Bay—“Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” Horace Walpole wrote.
George Washington, trudging through a muddy Pennsylvania forest, had inadvertently set cannons roaring from Prague to Manila. This surely confirmed the colonists’ sense of their own importance. But it also revealed them to be cogwheels in a vast imperial machinery, one they neither controlled nor comprehended.
