David McCullough: The Story of 1776—The Year of Our Birth

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, and we love telling stories about history here on this show. And all of our history stories are sponsored by the great folks at Hillsdale College, where you can go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Up next, best selling historian and two time Pulitzer winner, the late David McCullough. He’s the author of seventeen seventy six. In this master work, he tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence. He starts the book in the beginning of seventeen seventy five. Let’s take a listen.00:01:01
Speaker 2: Washington’s own total count of letters just written in this eighteen month period totals nearly a thousand. For while this very self controlled, the very model of a leader acting as a leader in his presence before the troops, always never revealing doubt, uncertainty, or what was going on in the inner side of him. In his privacy, and particularly late at night when he was sleepless, he would pour out his innermost feelings in a way that is immensely human and very revealing. He was often full of despair, often full of doubt, very often full of self pity, and.

00:01:45
Speaker 3: Who was to blame him? I’ll read you one example.

00:01:51
Speaker 2: This was written the night of January fourteenth, late at night in his headquarters outside of Boston. The reflection upon my situation in that of this army produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep. I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulders and entered the ranks, Or if I could have justified the measure to posterity and my own conscience had retired to the back country and lived in a wigwam. If I shall be able to rise superior to these and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it. He’s afraid he’s going to fail. He wishes he didn’t have the burden of this impossible command. And he had told the Congress that he was not up to the command, that he was not sufficient for the job, and he meant it, but he also knew that he was more up to it than anybody else. And he also showed up in Congress in his uniform indicating he was available. When he spoke to Congress, he said, if circumstances go against me and this doesn’t work, remember I warned you now. Congress picked George Washington not because he was a brilliant general or he had a great war record.

00:03:27
Speaker 3: He didn’t.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: He’d served gallantly courageously in the French and Indian War, but he had been out of military life for more than fifteen years, and he had no great record as a tactician or strategist. They picked George Washington because they knew him as a man, They knew him as a fellow member of the Continental Congress, and they liked him. They trusted him, They knew his character, they knew his integrity, and they made one of the best decisions any Congress ever made in choosing him to be the commander. When we start adding up the miracles of the creation of our country. George Washington is one of them. He would serve through the entire war, and the only other general officers who would serve through the entire war were Green and Knox, these two young New Englanders, whom he spotted right at the start. Despite the fact that he didn’t like New Englanders, he overcame that bias. He thought they were dirty, He thought they were rude, and he thought they had this intolerable notion that they could decide things for themselves, like only serving if they could elect their own officers. And often the officers got elected by requiring little or no discipline or insisting on any kind of punishment for those who broke the rules. But he overcame that bias, and as it turned out, those two men were the best he had, and they would serve the entire length of the war with him. Now, the fourteenth of January, the night that he wrote these despairing letters, was probably as low a pointed as he’d ever known in his life. There was not enough gunpowder, there was not enough money. He had to replace virtually his entire army, because as of December thirty first, an entire army had been free to go home. Their enlistments were up, and most of them went home. So he had to replace that army with new, greener in listees in the face of the enemy, without the enemy knowing that he had no gunpowder, had an even greener and less experienced army taking the place of the army that had moved out, and he had no money to pay them, and winter was setting in. They didn’t have adequate clothes or adequate barracks, and so forth. He really felt, honestly that no commander had ever been put into a tougher position. Four days later, on January eighteenth, the whole situation changed. It changed because young Henry Knox had come to him in November with an idea. Now this is an extremely interesting situation for two reasons. First of all, that a young minor officer in the army could go directly to the commander in chief with an idea. That wouldn’t have happened in the British Army. And it wasn’t just the young man could go from a low rank to the top to convey this idea, but that the idea could get to the to the commander in chief. So it’s the opportunity of the individual and the opportunity for ideas, two very powerful American themes all along in our whole history.

00:06:47
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to David McCullough telling the story of seventeen seventy six and the months leading up to that important year. It’s in a way one of my favorite books of his is the Biography of a Year. But my Goodness, Washington prooved, who’s a central figure, and also that that part about good ideas getting to the top and how they could not have happened with the British army. And this has a lot to do with freedom and free enterprise and looking for the best ideas to come up rather than filter from the top down. When we come back more of the story of seventeen seventy six and its author, David McCullough here on Our American Stories lihabib here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts. Any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily again. Please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast on Apple Podcasts the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming. And we continue with our American stories and with pood Surprise winning David McCullough, the late David McCullough and his book seventeen seventy six. He made this speech at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

00:08:27
Speaker 2: The idea was to go to Taekwonderoga at the southernmost end of Lake Champlain, and fetch the great guns that were there, cannon and mortar, and haul them nearly three hundred miles back to Boston in the dead of winter, down the Hudson Valley bar as Albany, crossing the Hudson and then taking him over the Berkshire Mountains, and it was all virtually wilderness, very few roads. Again, I repeat, in the dead of winter. Washington liked the idea immediately and immediately said to Knox, you’re in charge.

00:09:08
Speaker 3: And he did it phenomenal.

00:09:11
Speaker 2: This bookseller from Boston, who never been out of Boston, never attempted anything of the kind. He was assume the authorized to spend a thousand, no more than a thousand dollars, and he could take one man with him so he took his younger brother, who was nineteen twenty five year old bookseller and a nineteen year old kid, and they set off to bring back the guns from Tykonderoga. It’s like something in a myth, and it worked. Now how they did it, well, you’ll have to read my book. And what happened, Well, what happened. One night, with massive use of manpower and oxen, nearly a thousand they put those guns on top of Dorchester Heights and the British woke up the next morning March fifth, looked up and saw what had happened and realized they had to get out. They were right under those guns, well within range, as were their ships in the harbor, which was maybe even more important. If the ships were knocked out, they had no way to escape. So a quiet, unofficial, secret deal was made. The Americans agreed they would not bombard British troops in Boston or the ships in the harbor, and that the British would be free to leave without any attack on the part of the Americans if the British agreed not to burn the city of Boston, which they were well ready to do so. On March seventeenth, the British sailed away. Evacuation Day, which in Boston often celebrated for another reason, and that rather reason is a good one, but it often eclipses what evacuation Day is about. It was an immensely important event because we had bested them with sheer manpower, ingenuity, and the capacity to do things. We couldn’t march very well, we couldn’t drill very well. We couldn’t fire muskets as rapidly as could the British. We weren’t really very good soldiers at all, unruly bush leaguers, farmers in from the fields. But we’d bested them, we’d shamed them, and it filled us with pride and unfortunately more confidence in ourselves than we should have. What followed was Washington then moved to New York to defend New York against the return of the British, which was expected to come about almost any time. Didn’t happen until the end of June first part of July, and the British sailed in in such force as to dazzle anyone who saw it. Over four hundred ships, thirty two thousand troops. That was more troops than the entire population of Philadelphia. Which was the largest city in the country at the time, determined to take New York. Washington decided on his own that he would defend New York, that he had to defend New York.

00:12:23
Speaker 3: For political reasons. It was a political decision.

00:12:26
Speaker 2: Washington was a political general, very important, important in the sense that he understood how the system worked, which was that he wasn’t the boss. Congress was boss. And it was a mistake. We couldn’t possibly defend New York. We had no ships to stop the British from bringing their fleet, their biggest ships up into the Hudson or smaller warships up into the East River. Two ships had more canon power than all the canon we had on all of New York. And he faced the British for the first time in the Battle of Brooklyn. Battle of Brooklyn was an enormous battle covered six miles. They’re forty thousand people involved, and Washington proved quite inept in his first attempt to command a battle. The British out smarted us, outflanked us, out fought us. Uh They killed over three hundred early four hundred American soldiers. They took a thousand of our men captive prisoners, and three of our generals, and left Washington trapped there on Brooklyn Heights if they could possibly bring their ships up into the East River, which they were unable to do because of the direction of the wind. If the wind had been in a different direction the night of August twenty ninth, seventeen seventy six, we’d all be sipping tea and referring to our flat in New York and singing God, Praise the Queen. I think it would have been over because nine thousand men, including their commander in chief, would have had no escape. As it was, because they couldn’t bring those ships up. Washington attempted a night withdrawal from Brooklyn. It was the dunkirk of the Revolutionary War, a phenomenal accomplishment, given that he had dispirited, defeated troops who were soaking wet, had had very little sleep, were cold, and they’d never done anything like it before. The hardest military maneuver is almost as hard as any military maneuver of all, is to organize orderly withdrawal in the face of overwhelming enemy force. They did it at night, across the East River, no running lights, and again providence, the hand of God entered in and exactly the point when it looked like the river was too rough because of the northeast wind for our little makeshift flotilla to take them start taking the men across. Suddenly the wind dropped like the parting of the Red Sea, and the boats started over. When morning came and there were several thousand men who had still not gotten off, and the whole thing was going to be revealed to the British that we were trying to escape under their very noses, a providential fog came in and covered the entire Brooklyn side of the East River, fog so dense that people couldn’t see six yards ahead of them, and there was no fog whatsoever over on the Brooklyn side. They got nine thousand men, all their equipment, horses and cannon, off of Brooklyn across the East River, which isn’t a river at all, but a tidal, straight and very treacherous currents even in the best of conditions, without the loss of a single man. But it wasn’t just providence or chance or.

00:15:52
Speaker 3: The hand of God.

00:15:54
Speaker 2: It was the skill of those mariners manning the boats under the command of a man named John Glover. They were mostly all from the north shore of Boston, Marblehead, Gloucester and such places. And they performed in a way that few men have ever performed their profession. What they knew better with larger consequences, riding on their ability. There were times when most of those boats, because they were so loaded down, the water was only a matter of inches below the gunnals. It was a phenomenal feat of navigation, seamanship.

00:16:34
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to the late David McCullough, two time Pulitzer Prize winner, author of seventeen seventy six, giving us a master class of storytelling and dragging us through what Washington and the troops faced as they tried to withdraw from Brooklyn. Nine thousand men the dunkirk of the Revolutionary War, and that is aptly stated. And that East River been to New York. You know that that’s not a river. What that is is a It’s like a roaring canyon of water that just rips and rips the tide. You can see that water moving. It’s fierce, and not a single life was lost. Nine thousand men, their equipment, the horses, everything. Providence, no doubt played a part the way David McCullough described that fog setting in just remarkable, and of course the talent involved across the board. When we come back more of this remarkable story, the Story of the Founding of our Nation the year seventeen seventy six, a biography essentially of that year by the great and late David McCullough. The storytelling continues here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and with two time pooled surprise winner David McCullough, the late David McCullough, and he’s the author of seventeen seventy six, the book that he’s describing at this remarkable talk he gave at the National Archives. Let’s take you back there, and let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:30
Speaker 2: One defeat then followed another Kip Spey who turned into a route. When the British invaded Manhattan, Washington lost his self control for one of the few times in his whole career, struck out with his riding crop, trying to stop those who were running like rabbits, throwing off their knapsacks and hats, dropping their muskets in order to run faster away from the oncoming enemy. Washington on a big horse kept charging forward, getting closer and closer to the enemy and his anger. He was in such a rage that Nathaniel Greene called it almost suicidal. So close did he get to the enemy. And it was only because two of his staff managed to get a hold of the bridle of the horse that they got him off the field. If Washington had been killed, then, if Washington had been captured at Brooklyn, it would have been over. He would be called the indispensable man later on. I don’t think that’s an overstatement. There was nobody really with the stature, with the capacity for leadership, for all of his mistakes, to take his place. He then made another grievous performance with the assault on Mount Wash Fort Washington, which stood on the highest promontory at the north end of the island of Manhattan, right where George Washington Bridge comes in today. His problem there was indecision. He couldn’t decide what to do, so he made no decision at all. General Green told him he thought the port could be held.

00:20:03
Speaker 3: Green was wrong.

00:20:05
Speaker 2: The fort fell, They lost another three thousand taken prisoner, more canon, more material, and from that point on began their Long March. The Long retreat across New Jersey. At one point, as the march got closer to Pennsylvania, the enlistments of two thousand men came up, and two thousand men said that’s it for us and went home. Don’t picture all these soldiers as heroes. They had been deserting by the hundreds all through the campaign. After every defeat, people gave up and left. Many defected, went over to the enemy. We forget that. But some didn’t leave. Some stayed with him, Some would follow him anywhere. Washington was a leader. He wasn’t a brilliant intellectual. He wasn’t a spectacular speaker, he wasn’t a brilliant general. He was the leader, and people would follow him, and some would follow him through hell. Three thousand of them stayed with him.

00:21:11
Speaker 3: It’s all.

00:21:11
Speaker 2: There were three thousand men all that stood in the way of the end of the revolution and any hope that the great words, the great ideals of the Declaration of Independence would mean anything more than words on paper. And so when we celebrate our fourth of July, we shouldn’t just think of those people who were at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the people portrayed by John Trumbull in the painting of July fourth, seventeen seventy six and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Part of our problem is that we tend to see those figures from the eighteenth century as not quite real, like figures in a costume pageant, in their silks and their powdered hair and their sort of posed statesmanlike positions. This is another side of the story. This is another kind of American, another kind of patriot, another kind of hero. Those three thousand men when they finally succeeded in putting the Delaware between them and the oncoming British army. In other words, they crossed the Delaware at night to get over to the Pennsylvania side and destroyed all the remaining boats on the New Jersey side so the British couldn’t follow.

00:22:36
Speaker 3: Immediately after.

00:22:38
Speaker 2: Charles Wilson Peel, the Great Philadelphia Peter, was part of a militia unit that had turned out to bring some support for Washington, and he walked among those troops the morning after their crossing, and he wrote in his diary that he had never seen such miserable human beings in all of his life. They were all in rags, they were half starved. They had no winter clothing, They were covered with dirt and signs of disease. And he saw one man that he describes in the diary is the most wretched mortal he’d ever laid eyes on. He said, the man was so dirty you could hardly see his color of his skin. He had nothing, He was naked except for what they called a blanket coat. His hair was long and filthy, hanging down over his shoulders, and his face was covered with sores. And then a few minutes later he realized the man was his own brother. So those are some of the people we need to remember. They stayed there on the Pennsylvania side of the river, sort of taking stock. And the only conclusion that any rational person could have come to, and most did, as had the British, as had the great majority of American citizens, is that the war was over and we had lost. But fortunately Washington chose not to see it that way. He admitted in one of these private letters, in which he is so very honest and forthcoming, that the game is about up. So when all hopes gone, he did what you have to sometimes do under those conditions.

00:24:27
Speaker 3: He attacked.

00:24:29
Speaker 2: He crossed the Delaware at Maconkie’s ferry up to the north. He crossed, as we all know, with ice ice cakes in the river. And no, he probably wasn’t standing up in the boat. And know the famous painting is filled with inaccuracies, but you know it doesn’t matter, because the painting conveys the drama, the magnitude, the importance of that event which would turn history, would change the course of the war, changed the course of American history, and consequently change world history. And as tough and as demanding as the crossing was again managed by John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners, the worst part of the night was the march to the south, down the east side of the river to strike at Trenton. The wind was howling. It was another northeaster. It was a blinding snow, sleet, hail. Heaven knows what the wind shill factor was. And they marched nine miles through the night, men with no winter clothes. They’re in rags. Many of them have no shoes. Their feet are wrapped in rags. And yes they did some of them leave bloody footprints in the snow.

00:25:46
Speaker 3: They were so.

00:25:47
Speaker 2: Cold on that nine mile march. The two men froze to death on the march, to give a rough idea of how terribly difficult it was, the suffering they endured. And the next morning, no sleep, marching all night, nine miles through the dark, they struck a Trenton with a passion such as which they had never shown.

00:26:11
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to David McCullough tell one of the greatest stories ever told about the foundation and formation of our country. And it happened in that year, and it happened in that moment, and it was real life men, not guys walking around thinking about the future, and not people knowing what the future would bring. They were living in the present. And my goodness, what Washington faced, deserters, bad weather, retreating pretty much filled now with self doubt, knowing in the end that almost all was lost. And so what do you do at that moment? You attack? And my goodness, what an attack it was. Crossing the Delaware. We’ve seen the pictures, but my goodness, this description brutal. As tough as the crossing was, the worst part of the night was that long march south nine miles to be precise. When we come back, this remarkable story continues as only David McCullough can his talk at the National Archives. The late David McCullough’s storytelling continues here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and with two time Pulitzer winner, the late David McCullough, and he’s talking about his book seventeen seventy six. Go to Amazon or wherever you pick up your books and buy seventeen seventy six. It’s essentially the biography of a year eighteen months technically, but to understand seventeen seventy six, that year had to understand the eight months before. Let’s pick up now where we last left off.

00:28:07
Speaker 2: They tore out of the fields and woods above Trenton out of this blinding blizzard early in the morning, and it was all over in about forty five minutes. It wasn’t a big battle. It wasn’t a great sort of stagy eighteenth century battle as Brooklyn had been. It was a fierce house to house combat and we won decisively, and that meant worlds because we’d never beat them at fighting, and we’d beaten them. And we turned around a few days later again in the bold night march and early morning attack and struck at Princeton and won there too, But it was the victory at Trenton after crossing the Delaware Christmas Night that changed the war because of its psychological effect, its impact on the morale of the army, and its impact on the morale of the country. The words spread like wildfire that we had won, we had won a fight with the British Empire, and maybe even equally satisfying, we had beaten the Hessians, who were the most despised of those we were fighting. I don’t think I don’t think we sufficiently understand the history of our own country, and I don’t think we sufficiently respect the history of our own country. I think we know we live in a very interesting country, and certainly we do. We also have a very interesting history, and unlike most people most countries, we know when we were born, and they called the Declaration of Independence our birth certificate. Nathaniel Greene later called George Washington the deliverer of his nation, which I think is very apt. I want to close with a scene that to me is as moving as anything in the whole story, and I’ll try to sketch it as quickly and I hope as effectively as possible. On December thirty first, seventeen seventy six, the last day of the year, again, the entire army was free to go home. All their enlistments were up, and Washington was desperate to get men to re enlist. He dreaded having to do what he’d done the previous December of putting together a whole new, even greener army, and so on December thirty first, he called the men out into formation, and, without any authority to do so, standing in front of them on his horse, resplendent in his magnificent uniform, he said that they would sign on for another see six months. He would see to it that they received a bounty of ten dollars. He had no authority whatever from the Congress to do that, but, as he wrote to Robert Morris quite bluntly, I thought it no time to stand on trifles. One of the soldiers would remember his regiment being called out, and his Excellency, as Washington was called, astride on the big horse, addressing them in what the soldier called the most affectionate manner. The great majority of these men were New Englanders. They had been with him from the start, served much longer than anybody, and they had no illusions about what they were being expected to do if they signed on again. Those willing to stay were asked to step forward. The drums rolled, and no no one moved. Minutes passed, no one moved, and then Washington turned on his horse and rode away from them, his back to them. And then he stopped and turned and came back again and spoke to them a second time. And here’s what he said, My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected. But your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all you hold dear. You have worn yourself out with fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty and to your country, which you can probably never do under any other circumstance. And the drums rolled, and this time the men began stepping forward. God Almighty, wrote Nathaniel Green, inclined their hearts to listen to the proposal, and they engaged anew. What’s so interesting there is that it’s a perfect example of what was so great about Washington, he would not give up. He speaks to them once, they don’t react. He speaks to them a second time, and they do react. The first time he’s offering them some pay which he knows they desperately need to support their families, support themselves. Realistic. It’s not just offering the money. It’s realistic. He understands that patriotism only will go so far for people who have been through hell. But then the second time he does appeal directly to what Lincoln might call their better angels, and it works. And I wonder if any of you are struck by something that has struck me about that speech, the line, if you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty and to your country, which you can probably never do under any other circumstance.

00:34:24
Speaker 3: You have a.

00:34:24
Speaker 2: Great chance, a great opportunity that others don’t have.

00:34:30
Speaker 3: Isn’t that so? Like the payments speech in Henry the.

00:34:34
Speaker 2: Fifth we few, we happy few, and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed that they were not here. Same idea, same idea, this story again from Shakespeare.

00:34:53
Speaker 3: The good man will teach his son.

00:34:58
Speaker 2: This story is something we should teach our sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters. Congress meantime, had fled taken off from Philadelphia, terrified that the British were going to attack and take Philadelphia, and they had abdicated all their control over Washington and made him virtually a dictator.

00:35:23
Speaker 3: This is very.

00:35:24
Speaker 2: Little known by most people. They’d say, we’re going You’re in charge. And in their letter transmitting this new resolution, they said, happy it is for this country that the general of their forces can safely be entrusted with the most unlimited power, and neither personal security, liberty, nor property be in the least degree endangered thereby. But even more interesting is what he wrote to them, instead of thinking myself freed from all civil obligations by this mark of their con members of Congress, I shall constantly bear in mind that as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established. And he was, as I think we all know, as good as he as his word. He went before Congress when the war finally ended, and gave back his command. No conquering general had ever done that. This magnificent moment in our history is memorialized, commemorated in a fine painting that hangs in the rotunda of the Capitol, again by John Trumbull. When George the Third was told after the war had ended by the painter Benjamin West, who was the court painter to the Crown, and who lived in London, and who was an American who’d been living there since well before the war. When George the Third was told by Benjamin West that Washington would probably do this, George the Third said, if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.

00:37:10
Speaker 3: I don’t think that.

00:37:14
Speaker 2: There’s a much more powerful story than the story of our origins, and I hope that none of us ever will ever think of them again as figures in a costume pageant.

00:37:28
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production and editing by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to the late David McCullough, two time Pooled Surprize winner, and he was giving this address at the National Archives about his book seventeen seventy six. Go to Amazon with the usual suspects and pick it up and as always, all of our history segments are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College. By the way, take their constitution one on one course. It’s terrific. I learned more in that course than I did in three years at the University of Virginia Lost. We know when we were born as a country, and we were born and birthed in seventeen seventy six, the story of this great country, David mccullus, seventeen seventy six. Here on our American stories.