World of War: A History of American Warfare from Jamestown to the War on Terror 0811773787, 9780811773782

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World of War A History of American Warfare from Jamestown to the War on Terror William Nester

STACKPOLE BOOKS

Essex, Connecticut Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania

STACKPOLE BOOKS

An imprint of Globe Pequot, the trade division of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200 Lanham, MD 20706 www​.rowman​.com Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK Copyright © 2024 by William Nester All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Nester, William R., 1956– author. Title: World of war : a history of American warfare from Jamestown to the War on Terror / William Nester. Other titles: History of American warfare from Jamestown to the War on Terror Description: Essex, Connecticut : Stackpole Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book explores the violent conflicts of the United States—on land, at sea, and in the air—with meticulous scholarship, thought-provoking analysis, and vivid prose”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023023771 (print) | LCCN 2023023772 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811773782 (cloth) | ISBN 9780811773799 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: United States—History, Military. Classification: LCC E181 .N47 2024 (print) | LCC E181 (ebook) | DDC 973—dc23/eng/20230713 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023771 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023772 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Charts v Maps vii Introduction 1  1  Colonial Wars

17

 2  Independence War

69

 3  Consolidation Wars

107

 4  Expansion Wars

149

 5  Civil War

179

 6  Imperial Wars

211

 7  World War I

237

 8  World War II

263

 9  Cold War

311

10  Postmodern Wars

367

Acknowledgments 387 Notes 389 Index 429 About the Author

453

iii

Charts

I.1  Presidents and Military Service

6

I.2  T  op Ten American Wars Ranked by Total Number of U.S. Military Deaths

14

I.3  T  op Twelve American Wars Ranked by Financial Costs in 2011 Dollars

14

2.1  Colonial America’s Population Growth

71

2.2  Colonial America’s Population Distribution

71

2.3  Colonial America’s Population Rate of Increase

71

2.4  Colonial America’s Increase in Income (1990 Dollars)

72

6.1  C  omparison of Rising American Manufacturing Power as Share of World Total (in Percentages)

221

7.1  N  ational Income, Population, and Per Capita Income of the Powers in 1914

241

v

Maps

vii

L

e ak

Hu r

on

N

F

oc

17

Richmond

54)

) 55 17 ( k

VIRGINIA

a s h i ngton (

N.H.

on

k

IA

Halifax

OT

O C E A N

TERRA NOVA

Louisburg

British victory

British forces

British fort

he r A m 75 8 ) (1

Disputed areas

French possessions

British possessions

French victory

French forces

O

VA

SC

1755

Ft. Beausejour

NEW JERSEY

A T L A N T I C

Boston

Portsmouth M

MAINE

A D I A A C

Ft. Gaspereau

French fort

New York

CONN. R.I.

MASS.

Ft. William Henry

Ft. St Frédéric Ft. Carillon

1760

Montreal

e renc Quebec aw L 1759 . St

Gulf of St. Law rence

st

Philadelphia

MARYLAND

Annapolis

PENNSYLVANIA

Bradd

N

C E

NEW YORK

Montcalm

R

A

Ft. Oswego

x (1 759 )

Forbes (175 8)

Ft. Le Boeuf

W

OHIO COUNTRY Ft. Necessity io Oh

Ft. Duquesne

Ft. Machault

L. Ontario

Ft. Niagara Pridea u

W

rie e E Lak Ft. Presqu’Isle

E

Am Ft. Frontenac

0) 176 st ( r e h

wa

(175 6)

t ta

(1757)

e (1759) Wolf

o n (17 55)

French and Indian War Campaigns

N

O

t

viii World of War

Maps Quebec Dec. 31, 1775 Carleton Three Rivers June 7, 1776 Montgomery Montreal Nov. 13, 1775

d Graves

How e

Hoo d an

Pr oc lam at io n

Ar nol d1

0

wallis

Charles Town May 12, 1780

Wilmington

n Ne wal w lis Yo rk

G reen e

se as Gr

M or g nw an al l i s

AT L ANTIC OCEAN

de

Co r

Clinton ly 1776 es Town Ju harl mC fro

Yorktown Aug. 30–Oct. 19, 1781

Cornwallis

alli s nw

NORTH CAROLINA Cor

Camden Aug. 16, 1780 C orn

Eutaw Springs Sept. 8, 1781

Savannah fell to British 1778

et te

Battles of the Virginia Capes Sept. 5–9, 1781

e Gre e n

GEORGIA

Howe

y

VIRGINIA

Guilford Courthouse Mar 15, 1781 Americans hope to defeat British by forcing Cornwallis to divide his troops Kings Mountain Oct. 7, 1780

Saratoga Burgoyne surrenders Oct. 17, 1777 Bemis Heights Oct. 7, 1777

L a fa

L i ne of 1763

ie

Cowpens Jan. 17, 1781 S.C. Ninety–Six abandoned by British June 1781

N.H.

Lexington Apr. 19, 1775 Bennington Aug. 16, 1777 Bunker Hill Newburyport June 17, 1775 ntar io MASS. eO H o we Lak Arnold Concord Albany Oriskany British retreat to Siege of Boston Gates Aug. 6, 1777 July 1775–March 1776 Nova Scotia March 17, 1776 NEW YORK 76 R.I. e 17 CONN. ow 17, H h Washington’s am arc White Plains Retreat illi M Oct. 28, 1776 . r W lifax i S s I HaBrooklyn Heights Morristown ng New York Lo from Aug. 27, 1776 Winter Quarters 1777 e Germantown Admiral How Oct. 4, 1777 g. 1776 from England Au Valley Forge Monmouth Winter Quarters Court House 1777–1778 PENN. June 28, 1778 Brandywine NJ. Princeton Sept. 11, 1777 Jan. 3, 1777 Trenton Dec. 26, 1776 MD. Philadelphia Washington and captured Rochambeau Sept. 26, 1777

L a k e Hu r o n L

St.

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA (CANADA)

Ft. Halifax

r

Burgoyne

ge Le

Ar nold

75 17

British launch invasions to detach New England

Er

Retreat of Montgomery and Arnold May 7, 1776

77 5

War of Independence Campaigns

e ak

ix

r Co nd om a fr n nto 80 Cli h 17 c r Ma

British attempt to push through Carolinas and Virginia

0

50 50

100 miles

100 kilometers

American troop movements British troop movements French troop movements American victories British victories Mixed results

World of War

x

0

100

0

200 miles

100 200 kilometers

a

CANADA e Su p e r i o r

Châteauguay Montreal Oct. 25, 1813

ssi

ILLINOIS TERRITORY

pp

iR .

American forces British forces Fort Dearborn

Battle American states

York (Toronto) Apr. 1813 MICHIGAN TERRITORY Stoney Creek Jul. 6, 1813 The Thames Harrison Oct. 5, 1813

e ak

Detroit Aug. 1812

L

Tippecanoe

American territories

Ha

INDIANA TERRITORY

Spanish colonies

Crysler’s Farm Nov. 11, 1813

Huron

rrison 18 13

ssi

Lake Michigan

Mi

Lake

Ohi

De a r b

Erie

rry Pe 813 1

OHIO

o

NEW YORK

Lake Champlain Sept. 11, 1814 NEW HAMPSHIRE Boston

MASSACHUSETTS RHODE ISLAND CONNECTICUT

New York

PENNSYLVANIA

NEW JERSEY

Baltimore Sep. 1814

Philadelphia

Bladensburg

DELAWARE

Washington, D.C.

WEST VIRGINIA

.

LaColle Mill Mar. 1814

Lundy’s Lane Jul. 25, 1814

e

Eri

MAINE (part of Massachusetts)

VERMONT 3 81

The Chippewa Jul. 5, 1814

Put-in-Bay Sept. 10, 1813

oR

St. Louis

Lake Ontario

1

Michilimackinac Jul. 1812

rn

Lak

Modern Boundary

Quebec

Pre v 18 ost 14

1812 War Campaigns

MARYLAND

VIRGINIA

Ross and

hr a C oc

1 ne

3– 18 15

NORTH CAROLINA

TENNESSEE

sissi

ppi

R.

KENTUCKY

Natchez

n1

814

Pensacola Nov. 1814

Pake n Gulf of Mexico

1 81

Savannah

GEORGIA

LOUISIANA New Orleans Jan 8, 1815

Charleston

ham

SPANISH FLORIDA 18

14 S

t

loc ka de

Horseshoe Bend Mar. 1814

Jack so

MISSISSIPPI TERRITORY

Na va lB

Mis

SOUTH CAROLINA

it Br

ish

ATLANTIC OCEAN

81

4

Maps

xi

Mexican War Campaigns OREGON COUNTRY

IOWA

UNORGANIZED TERRITORY

UPPER CALIFORNIA

Fort Leavenworth

NEW MEXICO

do

Ri

ve

r

Co

c Sto

Santa Fe Aug. 16, 1847

MISSOURI

ARKANSAS

kt

on San Diego

Gila

R iv e

rny Kea

MISS.

DISPUTED AREA

r

TENNESSEE M iss i ssippi River

Monterey July 7, 1846

Kearn y

a

l or

Bear Flag Revolt June 14, 1846

San Francisco July 10, 1846

LA.

El Brazilo Dec. 25, 1846

TEXAS

R

New Orleans

io G

nd e

ra

rph an

U.S. troop movements

o W

Taylor

Chihuahua

ol

Sacramento Feb. 27, 1847

Do

PACIFIC OCEAN

ott Sc

Corpus Christi

Matamoros

Monterrey Buena Vista Sept. 21, 1846 1846 Feb. 22–23, 1847

Gulf of Mexico

U.S. victory Tampico Nov. 14, 1846

Territory ceded by Mexico, 1848

t

U.S. territory Mexican territory

t Sco

Mexican victory

Mexico City Sept. 13–14, 1847

Veracruz Mar. 29, 1847

AL.

as

R.

TEXAS

OKLAHOMA

ns

ka

Ar

KANSAS

(1863) Natchez

R.

Vicksburg

sippi

KENTUCKY

Chattanooga

ALABAMA

Montgomery

Franklin and Nashville (1864)

.

Gulf of Mexico

Tallahassee

Augusta

FLORIDA

Jacksonville

GEORGIA

Raleigh

Savannah

Charleston

Sherman’s pursuit of Johnston’s (1865) Columbia SOUTH CAROLINA

Spartanburg

NORTH CAROLINA

Greensboro

VIRGINIA

0

0

Norfolk

Wilmington

Grant Pursuit of Lee (1865)

Trenton NEW Harrisburg JERSEY Gettysburg (1863) Philadelphia Pittsburgh Baltimore Antietam (1862) First Bull Run (1861) Second Bull Run (1862) Jackson Valley (1862) Fredericksburg (1862) WEST Wilderness (1864) VIRGINIA Chancellorsville (1863) Spotsylvania (1884) Charleston Petersburg (1864–65) Peninsular (1862) Ohio R

Sherman’s march to the Sea (1864)

Macon

Atlanta (1864) Atlanta

Chattanooga (1864)

Stones River (1862–63) Nashville TENNESSEE

Bragg’s Invasion of Kentucky

Chickamauga (1863)

Farragut (1862)

MISSISSIPPI

Greenville

Cincinnati

Columbus

OHIO

Perryville (1862) Frankfort Louisville Lexington

Mobile LOUISIANA Baton Rouge Banks (1863) Miss New Orleans Farragut (1864) is

Banks (1864)

Shreveport

Vicksburg (1862–63)

Little Rock

Shiloh (1862)

INDIANA Indianapolis

Henry and Donelson (1862)

St. Louis

Memphis

ARKANSAS

MISSOURI

Jefferson City

ppi

Missouri R.

Springfield

R.

sissi

Mis

Kansas City

St. Joseph

ILLINOIS

. Ohio R

Fort Wayne

ad

Civil War Western and Deep South Campaigns

al av N

i Pr 100

100

200 kilometers

200 miles

Atlantic Ocean

eo f ck Bl o

lS pa nc i

rn he ou t

s rt Po

xii World of War

BRUNEI (Brit.)

BORNEO (Brit.)

Hiroshima

JAPAN

Okinawa Apr.–June 1945

Leyte Gulf

PHILIPPINES

Manila

DUTCH EAST INDIES

BORNEO (Brit.)

SARAWAK

World War II Pacific Campaigns

SUMATRA

Singapore

MALAYA

Saigon

Seoul

Nagasaki

TAIWAN

Shanghai

Yellow Sea

Luchon

Vladivostok

MANCHUKUO (Manchuria)

Peking (Beijing)

Hong Kong (Brit.)

South China Sea

MACAU

Canton (Guangzhou)

CHINA DO IN

THAILAND

Bangkok

Rangoon

BURMA

Mandalay

FR

CH EN

Bay of Bengal

Calcutta

INDIA

TIBET

CHINA

MONGOLIA

Port Moresby

NEW GUINEA

Coral Sea May 1942

Guadalcanal Aug. 1942–Feb. 1943

Tarawa Nov. 1943

P A C I F I C

Saipan, Tinian & Guam Feb. 1945

Iwo Jima June–Aug. 1944

Tokyo

Midway June 1942

0

0 500

1000 miles 1000 kilometers

500

Pearl Harbor Dec. 1941

O C E A N

Battles

Allied forces

Neutral nations

Allies

Areas under Japanese control

Maps xiii

World of War

xiv

World War II European and North African Campaigns

Axis powers before World War II Extent of Axis control early Nov. 1942

ICELAND

Allies Neutral nations

RW

Major battles (Allied victories)

NO

IC

Paris

LA

NT

Paris FRANCE (Liberated Aug. 25, 1944)

Buchenwald

Dechau

SWITZ.

AUSTRIA HUNGARY YU

GO

Rome (Liberated June 4, 1944) Tunis (Occupied May 12, 1943)

Rome

TUNISIA

MOROCCO ALGERIA FRENCH NORTH AFRICA

SL

3 94

Au g. 1

944

44 19 ar.

Stalingrad (Aug. 21, 1942– Jan. 31, 1943)

Ukraine

Caucasu

ROMANIA

D e c. 1 9 44

AV

IA

s

BLACK SEA

BULGARIA

ALBANIA (IT.)

TURKEY

GREECE SICILY

Tunis Ju ly 1 9

Casablanca

y1

Dan u be R.

ITALY SPAIN

M

Auschwitz

Battle of the Bulge Vienna

GA RTU PO

Nov. 1 942

.

LUX. CZE POLAND CHO GERMANY SL OVAKIA

L

AT

VICHY FRANCE (Occupied Nov. 1942)

. Apr

Warsaw

Berlin

Moscow

SOVIET UNION

Aug. 1944

EA C

O

BEL.

5 Elb 194

Ju l

NETH.

EAST PRUSSIA (GER.)

eR

D-Day (June 6, 1944)

Berlin (Captured May 2, 1945)

Pas de Calais

N

London

Sep BALTIC SEA

44 t . 19

per R. D n ie

GREAT BRITAIN

ma

R. V o l ga

NORTH DENMARK SEA

Rhine R .

IRELAND

Ka

Allied troop movements

FIN

SW ED

400 Km

AY

0

LA ND

400 Miles

EN

0

SYRIA

43

MEDITERRANEAN SEA May 1942

IRAQ

LEBANON PALESTINE (BR.) Alexandria

JORDAN

Suez Canal

El-Alamein (Oct. 23–Nov. 5, 1942) LIBYA (IT.)

EGYPT

Red Sea

SAUDI ARABIA

Introduction

A

mericans are among history’s most war-­prone people. Over four centuries, few years passed when they were not fighting some enemy state, tribe, movement, or group, and often allies among them; the bloodiest conflict was the Civil War, in which more Americans died than in all their other wars combined. That history began when warriors fired arrows at Captain John Smith and other colonists after they first stepped ashore and they returned fire with their arquebuses. That history is as recent as the latest drone strike against a terrorist suspect or intelligence fed to Ukraine’s army to obliterate a Russian military target. As Americans warred, those wars shaped and were shaped by American identity, traditions, principles, and policies. What is worth fighting for? Americans never lacked reasons. Although a unique array of mingled interests, principles, and emotions motivated each war, sometimes one dominated. Two wars involved the nation’s existence: America’s war for independence from 1775 to 1781 established the United States, and America’s Civil War from 1861 to 1865 reestablished it. Freedom of the seas and international trade partly explained wars against France from 1798 to 1800, Tripoli from 1803 to 1805, Britain from 1812 to 1815, and Germany from 1917 to 1918. Liberating other people from oppressors (often accompanied by eliminating odious regimes) justified wars against the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865; Spain in 1898; Germany, Japan, and Italy from 1941 to 1945; North Korea and China from 1950 to 1953; North Vietnam from 1964 to 1975; Panama in 1990; Iraq in 1991; Afghanistan from 2001 to 2022; and Iraq from 2003 to 2011. Conquering foreign territories and peoples characterized wars against Mexico 1

2

World of War

from 1846 to 1848 and the Philippines from 1898 to 1903. Every Indian war from 1607 to 1890 eventually ended with the tribe’s defeat, loss of territory, and transfer to a designated “reservation.” At times a lofty ideal animated a president. Woodrow Wilson insisted that the United States enter World War I to end all wars and make the world safe for democracy, while George W. Bush sought a global war against terrorism. How a president justifies a war and why it is fought often differ. For instance, President George H. W. Bush advocated building and leading a coalition to drive Iraq’s army from Kuwait to “restore democracy to Kuwait.” Actually, Kuwait was no Jeffersonian democracy before Iraq’s invasion. Secretary of State James Baker honestly explained the national interests at stake: “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” (which oil-­rich Iraq’s conquest of oil-­ rich Kuwait threatened with skyrocketing petroleum prices and global inflation). During a cold war, each side does what it can, except directly war against the adversary, to contain, diminish, and (ideally) destroy it. That effort often involves using surrogates to fight the other. Washington waged cold wars against the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991, Cuba from 1960 to the present, Iran from 1979 to the present, and Russia from 2022 to the present. The United States backed Afghan rebels against the Soviets as they struggled to conquer Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Against Cuba, Washington recruited, trained, and landed a Cuban exile force that was decimated at the Bay of Pigs and subsequently failed to get Cubans to assassinate communist dictator Fidel Castro. Against Iran, Washington backs Israel, which conducts sabotage and assassinations in Iran. Against Russia, Washington has led NATO in imposing economic sanctions and giving tens of billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Ukraine. War is a relative term. Many of America’s “wars” involved relatively small-­scale campaigns and limited strikes. Among the larger and more prolonged “little” wars was the one against Tripoli from 1801 to 1805, which included a long blockade, a dramatic raid to destroy a captured American ship in Tripoli’s harbor, and an epic 440-mile march by eight marines and a couple hundred mercenaries led by Lieutenant William Eaton from Alexandria to capture Derna. Another was the 2,200-man American contingent that joined the 15,500-man international coalition that landed at Tientsin, China, to crush the Boxer Rebellion and rescue the besieged embassies in Beijing’s foreign quarter in 1900. President Wilson sent General John “Black Jack” Pershing and ten thousand troops against Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco “Pancho” Villa after he raided Columbus, New Mexico; the operation lasted from March 1916 to February 1917, during which the Americans clipped the tail (but never crushed the body) of Villa’s forces. Wilson deployed fifteen thousand troops to secure supply depots at Archangel, Murmansk, and Vladivostok for

Introduction

3

“White” Russian armies fighting the Red Army that had taken power from 1918 to 1920, and they got into some firefights with communist guerrillas. During the mid-­nineteenth century, Washington twice wielded gunboat diplomacy to try to force an isolated country to open itself to trade and investments, peacefully and successfully with Japan in 1854 and violently and unsuccessfully with Korea in 1876. Marines conducted around 180 landings in foreign countries, mostly in Central America and the Caribbean, from 1800 to 1934.1 Usually they went ashore to wipe out a militant group that threatened American business interests and the friendly government that protected them. The initial fighting rarely lasted long but at times was followed by long occupations, as in Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. Washington justified those interventions with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (which declared the Western Hemisphere an American sphere of influence) and the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary (which asserted the right to protect threatened American economic and strategic interests). From the late twentieth into the twenty-­first century, the United States launched scores of retaliatory missile or bombing strikes, such as against Libyan president Muamar Gaddafi for his terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 and against terrorist groups like al Qaeda, al Shabab, and Islamic State. Cruise missiles and drones let Washington hit enemies without fear of losing pilots—and subsequently public support for such strikes. As in any political conflict, victory in war goes to the side that best musters and asserts power. Power includes two vital dimensions: hard or measurable physical power like armies, navies, economies, and populations, and soft or unmeasurable psychological power like leadership, skills, morale, strategy, tactics, and intelligence gathering, assessment, and application. Smart power is a leader’s skill in selecting, mobilizing, and wielding the mix of hard- and soft-­power resources with the best chance of prevailing. If both sides have roughly equal hard power, that side with greater soft power will win. Indeed, throughout history, smaller military forces have defeated far greater ones because they excelled at soft power. Diminutive David killed the giant because his confidence and skill at slinging a stone exceeded Goliath’s size and strength, along with his confidence, reputation, and skill at wielding a sword and shield. Indeed, Goliath may have literally and figuratively lowered his guard when the shepherd boy approached, having slaughtered scores of far stronger and more skilled enemies. Any war’s object is to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. Just how to do that varies among wars and those fighting them. Military strength alone rarely wins a war unless it is overwhelming. The greatest chance of

4

World of War

success involves asserting diplomatic, economic, and political power that complements military power. Military, diplomatic, and political leaders design strategies as the longer and broader set of means for the immediate battles that they design tactics to win. Strategies and tactics can differ among wars and even during the same war. Although some scholars believe in an American type or way of war, actually there is not one but many.2 Attrition or steadily demolishing the enemy with overwhelming military and economic power was America’s broad strategy during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Some American generals waged brilliant maneuvers that outflanked and defeated the enemy, like George Washington in his Trenton and Princeton campaign; Winfield Scott in his Mexico City campaign; Ulysses Grant in his Vicksburg campaign; George Patton in his Sicily, France, and Germany campaigns; and Norman Schwarzkopf in his Kuwait campaign. Other combat leaders excelled at special operations warfare, like Benjamin Church in the Wars of King William and Queen Anne, Robert Rogers in the French and Indian War, and George Rogers Clark and Francis Marion in America’s independence war. A key choice of offensive strategies involves either a broad front that attacks the enemy at various shifting vulnerable places or a narrow front that masses forces at one vulnerable position. During the Civil War and World War II, the White House eventually adopted a broad-­front strategy that took advantage of America’s ability to mass-­produce soldiers, sailors, weapons, supplies, warships, and transportation better than the enemy. That advantage empowered army commanders to shift and concentrate troops as opportunities arose on their respective fronts. In doing so, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt rejected enormous pressure, respectively, by American general Henry Halleck and British prime minister Winston Churchill and his generals for a narrow-­front strategy. September 11 prompted America’s latest way of war. Al Qaeda was an international terrorist organization headquartered in Afghanistan with cells in around seventy countries worldwide. In Afghanistan, al Qaeda had relatively fixed positions within the ruling Taliban regime and army. The campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda was a postmodern war that combined real-­time intelligence, special forces, anti-­Taliban militants, and smart bombs and missiles. Elsewhere, America’s intelligence services and financial institutions teamed with those of other countries to track down, ideally capture, and if necessary kill al Qaeda operatives and their supporters while eliminating their sources of income. Ultimately, the United States devastated al Qaeda and killed bin Laden. Yet, from those ruins, Islamic State emerged to overrun most of northern Syria and Iraq. Eventually, the United States and other countries using similar methods devastated Islamic State.

Introduction

5

America’s ability to wage war changed over time with its expanding financial, manufacturing, invention, and innovation power. As ever more American merchants reaped riches buying and selling in markets around the world, American interests globalized with those sources of wealth. Economic expansion fueled victorious foreign wars that fueled economic expansion. The United States developed increasingly sophisticated hard and soft power to fight others. Yet America’s power is hardly unlimited. America’s recent attempts at state building and nation building failed, most disastrously in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The key reason was Washington’s failure to master counterrevolutionary warfare. A successful revolution involves simultaneous and complementary military and political strategies. As military cadres destroy an existing regime, political cadres build an alternative regime on its ruins. Mao Zedong explained a revolution’s military dimension: “The strategy of guerilla war is to put one man against ten, but the tactic is to put ten men against one.”3 This strategy involved three stages. First came “hit-­and-­run” raids by small numbers of guerillas against isolated enemy positions. Ideally, that provoked the government to launch retaliatory attacks that indiscriminately slaughtered or imprisoned civilians and provoked enraged survivors to join the insurgents. Once the rebels acquired enough troops and civilian support, they could “take and hold” ever more rural regions and city districts against enemy offensives. The final stage arrives after the insurgents have battered the enemy and now hold the initiative. They then launch offensives that “encircle and destroy” government forces in one base or city after another until they overrun the entire country. The Americans failed to develop and implement a successful strategy to prevent that outcome from happening. An unidentified American major fighting in Vietnam epitomized that failure when he insisted that “it became necessary to destroy the village to save it.”4 That statement symbolized Washington’s ultimately self-­ defeating emphasis on the hard power of attrition rather than the soft power of conversion. The standard-­issue military retort against any discussion of the counterinsurgency “hearts and minds” strategy of nurturing the population’s loyalty through economic and political development is “Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.” Leadership—good, bad, and mediocre—is power’s most crucial element. Leadership is as good as the leader’s intellect, values, courage, and charisma. America’s war leadership ultimately depends on the commander-­ in-­ chief. A president’s war duties include bringing together experts, assessing varying views of the threat and how to defeat it, making key decisions, ensuring that the administration and Congress implement those decisions, and inspiring those around him, the military, Congress,

6

World of War

Chart I.1.  Presidents and Military Service Military experience Combat experience

Generals Draft deferrals

Lincoln, Johnson, Nixon, Carter Washington, Monroe, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, T. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Bush I Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Grant, Eisenhower Clinton, Bush II, Trump

and the public with why they are fighting and how they will win. As will be seen, Abraham Lincoln was brilliant in that role, and Franklin Roosevelt was excellent; William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson provided adequate leadership; and James Madison, Lyndon Johnson, and George W. Bush were inept leaders. American generals displayed just as wide a range of abilities. Generalship involves an innate and developed mastery of strategy, tactics, logistics, administration, courage, and inspiration. Of course, no one can be equally adept in each of these areas; for instance, George Washington lost more battles than he won. Yet a few were overall brilliant, like Washington, Winfield Scott, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, William Sherman, George Patton, and David Petraeus, along with rebel generals Robert Lee, Thomas Jackson, Nathan Forrest, and J. E. B. Stuart. John Pershing competently led American forces during World War I. Controversial generals who won dazzling victories and suffered disastrous defeats include George Custer and Douglas MacArthur. George McClellan and William Westmoreland were dismal generals who failed to understand the nature of the wars they fought. As for naval leadership, there were dazzling ship-­versus-­ship battle captains like John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, and Thomas Truxtun and excellent fleet commanders like David Farragut, David Porter, Chester Nimitz, Bull Halsey, and Raymond Spruance. From the start, Americans have vigorously debated all questions related to war and peace along with other critical issues. In his book Special Providence, Walter Mead identified four political philosophies animating that perennial debate named after Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson.5 Of them, Hamiltonism is the only realist perspective compared with Jeffersonian isolationism, ­Jacksonian unilateralism, and Wilsonian internationalism. Circumstances force each president’s policies to be a mix of the four, although one usually dominates. Hamiltonians advocate a lean, muscular problem-­ solving national government dedicated to transforming the United States into a global economic power with a military strong enough to deter or, if need be, defeat

Introduction

7

any enemies. The government provides long-­term vision for and partners with the private sector to promote an increasingly diverse, dynamic economy led by financiers and manufacturers assisted by a central bank, a strong currency, sophisticated infrastructure, and incentives for innovators and inventors. The government asserts appropriate power to seize any opportunities or thwart any threats. The United States expands trade and investments with all friendly countries while allying only with those with whom Americans face a common enemy, for as long as that enemy exists. War is a last resort after all other ways to assert crucial American interests have failed. Washington, both Adamses, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon were solid Hamiltonians. Jeffersonians pursue principles that are harder to realize in an increasingly complex modern interdependent world. Jefferson insisted that the federal government’s power should be skeletal, agriculture should be the economy’s backbone, foreign trade and relations should be minimal, and military power should be confined to militia and gunboats. Yet Jefferson was a Hamiltonian when he purchased the Louisiana Territory, launched the Lewis and Clark expedition, and warred against Tripoli. Likewise, although Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover expressed neoisolationist sentiments, they practiced a mix of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian policies. Jacksonians believe that the president should be above the law and that an increasingly powerful military should crush any foreign or domestic enemies. Yet Jackson himself was as pacific a president as he had been an aggressive general. However, his administration was a spoils system, with the most notorious being the disbursement of the Second United States Bank’s assets to state banks that politically supported him. He most blatantly violated the law by ignoring the Supreme Court’s rulings on treaties with Indian tribes. Neoconservatism is Jacksonism’s recent expression, with George W. Bush and Donald Trump its avatars, tempered, respectively, by Wilsonian and Jeffersonian policies. Wilsonians believe that virtually all people desire peace and prosperity and that the United States should work with other countries to establish international organizations dedicated to those ends. To justify America’s entry into World War I, Wilson vowed that “we shall fight for . . . a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and to make the world at last free.”6 Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were Wilsonian in sentiment but followed a mix of policies. Realism, or the drive to defend or expand America’s economic and strategic interests by the most appropriate means, has animated most presidents. Theodore Roosevelt succinctly captured realism’s essence: “A nation’s first duty is within its own borders, but it is not thereby

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absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the people that shape the destiny of mankind.”7 John Quincy Adams was the early nineteenth century’s most prominent realist and expert guided by these principles: “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be her heart. . . . But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-­wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”8 America’s realists were humanists, not cynics. Henry Kissinger spoke for them when he wrote, “The true task of statesmanship is to draw from the balance of power a more positive capacity to better the human condition—to turn stability into creativity, to transform the relation of tensions into a strengthening of freedom, to turn man’s preoccupations from self-­defense to human progress.”9 Realist principles included Washington’s Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine, Hay’s Open Door, the Roosevelt Corollary, and Kennan’s containment strategy. Politics and psychology are as inseparable as war and peace. Kissinger offered this insight: “It is a delusion to believe that leaders gain in profundity while they gain experience. . . . The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.”10 In other words, learning new things cannot escape being distorted by the prejudices imprinted in younger minds. False analogies frequently cloud the thinking of those in power. Mediocre or worse generals are notorious for ignoring the reality that each war is unique and instead try to fight the current conflict as they did the previous war. Why do they do that? Any military leader is haunted by the inevitable mistakes he has made that unnecessarily lost lives and battles. He rethinks those mistakes, determined to avoid them during the next war. But often that next war poses new and unforeseen challenges that render obsolete previous strategies and tactics. Like generals, foreign policy makers fight the ghosts of costly past mistakes. The uncreative ones try a revised version of the same policy for a similar situation. The repentant try to learn from their mistakes. The Munich and Vietnam syndromes, respectively, shadowed two different generations of policy makers and publics. Munich’s lesson was that Washington should never appease but instead confront aggressors. The syndrome was that during the Cold War it led policy makers to oppose any “aggressors” anywhere and so eventually into the Indochina quagmire against revolutionary communist movements. Vietnam’s lesson was that Washington should avoid unwinnable wars in remote regions with

Introduction

9

opposed cultures and ideologies. The syndrome was that it made policy makers skittish about asserting any military power anywhere. No delusion cherished by policy makers was more catastrophic than the “domino effect.” That core concept of the global containment strategy assumed that Washington had to militarily defend every country around the world against communism, because if a revolution engulfed one, the communists would make it a fortress from which to provoke revolutions in neighboring countries. That concept denied crucial historical, political, economic, cultural, religious, ideological, and leadership differences within and among countries—in other words, reality. Global containment and the domino effect logically led to America’s crusade in Indochina and the inevitable devastating defeat for the United States across the region. President Johnson knew that America’s Indochina war was a Sisyphean debacle. Yet, rather than cut the nation’s losses and walk away, he kept doubling down. Why? Of many reasons, one likely dominated. As Johnson asserted, “I don’t want to be the first president to lose a war.” Stark images often overwhelm even the most reasoned, fact-­based analyses or speeches. Some are sources of pride, like those of soldiers surging ashore at Normandy or astronauts stepping from their spacecraft onto the moon. Others are sources of rage and desire for vengeance, like those of burning battleships at Pearl Harbor or the collapsing World Trade Center towers in New York City. There are sources of national shame, like police blasting away civil rights protestors with fire hoses or a weeping naked girl fleeing her napalmed village. People tend to project their own worst traits onto a hated other. While scapegoating others, one martyrizes oneself. One dehumanizes one’s enemies more easily to kill, rob, exploit, and exile them. All these psychological traits affect whether and how one fights others. A dynamic animates what we believe and how we behave. We build narratives about our individual and collective lives that help explain and justify them. Beliefs can be provable or mythic but often mesh facts and fantasies. Beliefs motivate and approve behavior that spans from the kindest acts of altruism and self-­sacrifice to the harshest acts of dispossessing and even slaughtering one’s enemies. Culture is to groups as character is to individuals. A culture is any group’s system of related beliefs and behaviors. As such, a culture is a type of ideology. One’s identity often has elements of idealism and even mythology. Historian Richard Slotkin offers this definition: “The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called ‘national character.’”11 Conveyed by stories and symbols, myths inevitably help construct the identity of any person or group. Myths convey deep truths

10

World of War

about human longing that transcend time and place. Slotkin explained, “Myth is history successfully disguised as archetype.” Those myths convey vital values and beliefs that guide behavior. He argued that understanding a nation’s myths is critical not just to know its history but also to make future tragedies less likely: “If we can understand where and how in history the rules of the game originated, what real human concerns and social relationships the rules conceal or distort, and what the historical consequences of playing the game have been, we may be able to respond more intelligently the next time an infantry captain or a senator or a president invokes it.”12 Historian William McNeil presented the dilemma that governments face when their power depends on refutable myths in a skeptical age: “Discrediting old myths without finding new ones to replace them erodes the basis for common action that once bound those who believed in a public body capable of acting together. . . . When assent becomes half-­hearted or is actively withheld from such myths, obedience becomes irregular, the predictability of human action diminishes, and the effectiveness of public response to changing conditions begins to erode.”13 What is the essence of American culture? Humanism, or enlightened individualism, is the core value of Western and thus American civilization. Humanism assumes that everyone at birth is a unique bundle of potentialities, mostly for good, and that our moral duty is to nurture the best and sublimate the worst in each other within a community of like-­minded individuals. Yet materialistic individualism also animates American culture, expressed by such terms as “rugged individualism,” “self-­reliance,” “rags to riches,” and “self-­made man.” Americans idealized and romanticized their history to reduce its moral complexity, paradoxes, and contradictions into a simple mythology. American history’s “triumphal” version depicts Americans as a heroic, enterprising, courageous, good-­ hearted, and progressive people who expanded across the continent, and then the world, through trade, settlers, principles, and (when vital) war, which vanquished and uplifted a series of savage, inferior, or outright evil enemies. Triumphalists recognized tragedies and mistakes like driving the Indians from their lands, importing African slaves, and discriminating against minority races and religions. But, overall, Americans progressed mostly in a “two steps forward, one or two steps back” struggle between progressive and regressive forces. A related core belief is that America is an exceptional, superior country, although others can become American by embracing its values and traditions. That belief has developed over four centuries. In 1630, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop called on his fellow settlers to see themselves as the vanguard of a new civilization in which “we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us . . . in that we are

Introduction

11

commanded . . . to love the Lord our God and to love one another . . . that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land where we go to possess it.”14 In 1765, young lawyer John Adams wrote, “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scheme and design of Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”15 In 1780, Adams explained to French foreign minister Vergennes the ideals that guided America in war and peace: “The dignity of . . . America does not consist in diplomatic ceremonials. . . . It consists solely in reason, justice, truth, the interests of mankind, and the interests of the nations of Europe.”16 Jefferson envisioned an American “empire of liberty” eventually engulfing the Western Hemisphere. Journalist and newspaper editor John O’Sullivan coined the term “Manifest Destiny” in his essay titled “Annexation,” published by the Democratic Review in 1845. Manifest Destiny was America’s right because of the might of its superior democratic system and enterprising people to expand across the continent. And that was for the betterment of all: “We must onward to the fulfillment of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business, universality of freedom and equality. . . . Who then can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity?”17 Heroes are central to American culture, as they represent the best of American individualism. America’s pantheon of heroes includes explorers like John Smith, Daniel Boone, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark; statesmen like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt; generals like Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and George Patton; and athletes like Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, and Jessie Owens. The emphasis is on physical prowess and courage. Of course, progressive Americans might list as heroes civil rights leaders like Frederick Douglass, William Garrison, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis. The Lewis and Clark expedition became America’s version of the Odyssey and the Civil War the nation’s Iliad, with an array of heroes on both sides. Frederick Jackson Turner presented a variant of the triumphant interpretation during a history conference at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892. In his “Frontier Interpretation of American History,” he argued that the frontier was central to the development of American democracy and nationalism.18 To survive, let alone thrive, frontier settlers had to be courageous, enterprising, and cooperative. The frontier symbiosis between individuals and communities nurtured the best in each better than anywhere else across the nation. Inevitably, the parade of trappers, traders, miners, farmers, ranchers, and other entrepreneurs exploiting resources succeeded in society with others. Explorers led and soldiers

12

World of War

protected that way. At times, organized violence by the army, police, and vigilantes was vital to asserting or restoring order threatened by Indians and outlaws. A frontier mentality distinguished one’s settled, secure lands from adjacent unsettled lands that concealed dangers and opportunities. Slotkin describes “the myth of the frontier” as “the conception of America as a wide-­open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-­ reliant individual to thrust his way to the top.”19 Actually, that is no myth. America’s frontier mentality has been a core historical (and thus cultural) reality for over four centuries. What has changed is the expansion of those opportunities from enterprising white males to women and minorities. One develops one’s identity often in contrast to others. Americans partly defined themselves contrasted with the enemies they fought. Americans justified conquering and exiling Indian tribes in several ways. One was that land belonged to those who improved it. Of course, most tribes east of the Mississippi lived in villages and cultivated crops. Americans dehumanized Indians as “savages” to justify subduing or killing them and taking their land. Among the earliest genres of American literature was the captivity narrative of those whom Indians seized and forced to live among them until they either escaped or were ransomed. A few captives preferred to remain with their adopted tribe. In her book Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald noted the lineage of the mind-­set that justified America’s war in Vietnam with previous wars against native peoples: “Americans were once again embarked upon a heroic and (for themselves) almost painless conquest of an inferior race. To the American settlers the defeat of the Indians had seemed not just a nationalist victory, but an achievement made in the name of humanity—the triumph of light over darkness, of good over evil, and of civilization over brutish nature.”20 Cultural symbols are part of history but rarely accurately convey it. For instance, culturally the battles of the Alamo and Little Big Horn symbolized for most Americans their brave fellow countrymen fighting valiantly to the death for noble causes. The image of Davy Crockett and George Custer leveling their firearms for one last shot is burned into the American psyche. Popular culture amplified those images. Novels and poems extolled them. Huge, framed lithographs of Cassilly Adams’s painting of Custer’s Last Stand adorned hundreds of saloons across late nineteenth-­century America. In the twentieth century, films and television shows celebrated both those battles and their leaders. Of course, then and since, Mexicans and Indians hoot at that interpretation, instead citing those battles as rare and temporary defeats of American imperialism that eventually overwhelmed their peoples.

Introduction

13

Imperialism is the conquest and colonization of one people by another. Many Americans and countless foreigners assert that the United States was born in and sustained by imperialism for its first three centuries. First as English subjects, and then as United States citizens, Americans expanded across the continent in a series of treaties with neighboring powers and native tribes, most resulting from victorious wars. The first wars were on a frontier imposed by invading English settlers. Frontier wars erupted sporadically from Jamestown’s founding in 1607 until the last battle at Wounded Knee in 1890. Then, in 1898, America acquired a small overseas empire by defeating Spain and seizing its colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Although Washington granted the Philippines independence on July 4, 1946, Puerto Rico remains a second-­class dominion rather than either the fifty-­first state or an independent nation. A country is hegemonic when it has and asserts overwhelming economic, military, and cultural power over its neighbors, across a broader region, or around the world. The only global hegemons have been Britain from 1792 to 1914 and America from 1942 to the present, during which London and New York, respectively, served as the world’s financial centers while Whitehall and the White House asserted military power around the world. Hegemonic power inspires more than it imposes. For instance, the eloquence and profundity of America’s Declaration of Independence have caused countless people around the world to seek freedom since 1776. Marxist-­ oriented critics denounce something they call “American cultural imperialism,” or the dominance of American pop culture in music, food, and clothing, but more decisively the democratic ideals of America’s Declaration of Independence. Of course, that notion of “American cultural imperialism” is false. Americans do not force foreigners to rhapsodize over jazz, blues, bluegrass, country and western, gospel, rock, folk, or show tunes. Mass consumerism, chain clothing and food stores, and credit cards may have started in America, but entrepreneurs in other countries freely embraced and marketed their own versions. Cultural power has its limits. A suicide bomber might be wearing a T-­shirt bearing the image of some American rock band just before he pulls the cord in a crowded café or bus. Genocide and ethnic cleansing differ. Genocide is the mass murder of one people by another people. Ethnic cleansing is the destruction of one people’s culture by another people. Contrary to common belief, with one possible exception, neither the English colonial governments nor the subsequent American government promoted genocide for any one Indian tribe, let alone all tribes. The exception was King Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676, when the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth governments, along with allied Indian tribes, did try to extirpate the tribes that

World of War

14

Chart I.2.  Top Ten American Wars Ranked by Total Number of U.S. Military Deaths21 War

Years

Deaths

Population

Deaths to population (%)

  1. Civil War   2. World War II   3. World War I   4. Vietnam War   5. Korean War   6. American Revolution   7. War of 1812   8. Mexican War   9. War on Terror 10. Philippine War

1861–1865 1941–1945 1917–1918 1961–1973 1950–1953 1775–1783

625,000 405,399 116,516 58,209 36,516 25,000

31,443,000 133,402,000 103,268,000 179,323,000 151,325,000 2,500,000

1.988 0.307 0.110 0.030 0.020 0.899

(1860) (1940) (1920) (1970) (1950) (1780)

1812–1815 1846–1848 2001–2014 1899–1902

15,000 13,283 6,717 4,196

8,000,000 21,406,000 294,043,000 72,129,000

0.297 0.002 0.002 0.006

(1810) (1850) (2010) (1900)

Chart I.3.  Top Twelve American Wars Ranked by Financial Costs in 2011 Dollars22 Wars

Dollars then

2011 dollars

  1. World War II   2. Iraq   3. Vietnam   4. Korea   5. World War I   6. Afghanistan   7. Persian Gulf   8. Civil War   9. Spanish-­American War 10. American Revolution 11. Mexican War 12. War of 1812

$296 billion $715 billion $111 billion $30 billion $20 billion $297 billion $61 billion $3 billion $0.283 million $0.101 million $0.071 million $0.090 million

$4.104 trillion $784 billion $738 billion $341 billion $334 billion $321 billion $102 billion $59 billion $9 billion $2.4 billion $2.3 billion $1.5 billion

warred against them by either sword or capture and sale as slaves to West Indian plantations. They succeeded in killing, enslaving, or driving off about half the Indian population of lower New England. However, the American government did pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing against indigenous peoples. The 1887 Dawes Act sought to transform Indians into Americans by pressuring them to exchange their cultural value of communal ownership of land for private property by individual families, learn to read and write, wear American rather than indigenous clothes, and pray to the Christian God rather than pagan deities. Most Americans may disdain regarding themselves as warlike, let alone imperialistic. They prefer believing they mostly fought to defend

Introduction

15

themselves, citing attacks by redcoats at Lexington Green, rebels at Fort Sumter, Japanese at Pearl Harbor, and al Qaeda at the Twin Towers and Pentagon as prime examples, or to defend, restore, or promote liberty and justice from aggressive authoritarian states in World War II and the Cold War. Regardless, the moral costs of any war are highly debatable. Usually the number of deaths and financial costs are far easier to calculate. Americans have paid and inflicted a vast toll in lives and treasure for its wars over four centuries. World of War: A History of American Warfare from Jamestown to the War on Terror is an epic journey through the nation’s array of wars for diverse reasons with diverse results over four centuries. It explores the crucial effects of brilliant, mediocre, and dismal military and civilian leaders; the dynamic among America’s expanding economic power, changing technologies, and the types and settings of its wars; and the human, financial, and moral costs to the nation, its allies, and its enemies.

1

Colonial Wars

As piety cannot be maintained without church ordinances & officers, nor justice without lawes & magistracy, no more can our safety & peace be preserved without military orders & officers. —1643 Massachusetts Militia Act I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me there is something charming in the sound. —George Washington The volley fired by a young man in the backwoods of America set the world on fire. —Horace Walpole

W

arfare shaped colonial America’s development.1 When the colonists did not wage war, they either prepared for or recovered from it. The reason was simple: they were foreign invaders determined to take ever more land from the original inhabitants, ideally peacefully but if necessary violently. The colonists fought nearly every tribe they encountered as first they established themselves on the continent’s shores and then expanded inland. Indeed, warriors unleashed showers of arrows at the Jamestown and Plymouth expeditions before they reached their first settlement sites. Although the colonists suffered as much or more death and destruction than they inflicted on the tribes from 1607 to 1775, warfare was only existential for them during their first years in the New World. Virginia 17

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World of War

faced numerous brushes with extinction from chronic disease, starvation, and Indian attacks from 1607 to 1622. The colonial era’s bloodiest conflict was King Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676, which pitted New England’s colonies and Indian allies against a coalition of tribes. Although the colonists lost a thousand dead and twenty destroyed towns, they never faced extinction but instead inflicted it on the enemy tribes. Early Americans also warred against the expanding French and stagnant Spanish empires on North America’s eastern half. In all, they fought three wars against the Spanish and their Indian allies, three wars against the French and their Indian allies, and two wars against all three. The Spanish and Indian wars included Elizabeth’s War (1585–1603), Cromwell’s War (1655–1660), and the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1744). The French and Indian wars included the Huguenot War (1628–1632); King William’s War, or the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–1697); and King George’s War, or the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–1748). Those against all three included Queen Anne’s War, or the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713), and the French and Indian War, or Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). Yet, in nearly all those wars, the fighting was confined to raids by relatively small groups to attack isolated frontier villages or forts and ideally destroy them and then escape before overwhelming numbers of the enemy converged. Americans fought European-­style sieges only at Cartagena in 1741, Oswego in 1756, Fort William Henry in 1757, Fort Frontenac in 1758, Fort Niagara in 1758, Montreal in 1760, and Havana in 1762, and open-­field battles at Lake George Camp in 1755, Fort Carillon in 1758, and Belle Famille in 1759. Colonel Henry Bouquet found a stark contrast in how wars were fought in Europe and America: Those who have only experienced the severities and dangers of a campaign in Europe can scarcely form an idea of what is to be done and endured in an American war. To act in a country cultivated and inhabited, where roads are made, magazines are established, and hospitals provided; where there are good towns to retreat to in case of misfortune; or at the worst, a generous enemy to yield to. . . . In an American campaign everything is terrible; the face of the country, the climate, the enemy. There is no refreshment for the healthy nor relief for the sick. A vast unhospitable desert . . . where victories are not decisive, but defeats are ruinous and simple death is the least misfortune.2

William Smith, who accompanied General Henry Bouquet’s 1764 campaign against the upper Ohio valley Indians, captured the essence of Indian tactics and effective American countertactics:



Colonial Wars

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The first, that their general maxim is to surround their enemy. The second, that they fight scattered, and never in a compact body. The third, that they never stand their ground when attacked, but immediately give way, to return to the charge. These principles being admitted, it follows—1st That the destined to engage Indians must be lightly cloathed, armed, and acoutred. 2nd. That having no resistance to encounter in the attack or defense, they are not to be drawn up in close order, which would only expose them without necessity to greater loss. And lastly, that all their evolutions must be performed with great rapidity, and the men enabled by exercise to pursue the enemy closely when put to flight, and not give them time to rally.3

Thomas Hutchins, who fought in Pontiac’s War, explained the dynamic between Indian culture and war: The love of liberty is innate in the savage, and seems the ruling passion in the state of nature. His desires and wants, being few, are easily gratified, and leave him much time to spare, which he would spend in idleness if hunger did not force him to hunt. That exercise makes him strong, active, and bold, raises his courage, and fits him for war, in which he uses the same stratagems and cruelty as against wild beasts, making no scruple to employ treachery and perfidy to vanquish the enemy.4

Each treaty had a tenet requiring Indians to release any captives. Returning captives provoked joy for their American families, sorrow for the Indian families who had adopted them, and often mixed feelings among the captives. William Smith witnessed such a scene: “There were seen fathers and mothers recognizing and clasping their once-­lost babes, husbands hanging around the necks of their newly recovered wives, sisters and brothers unexpectantly meeting together after long separation, scarce able to speak the same language.” Meanwhile, the Indians “delivered up their beloved captives with the utmost reluctance, shed torrents of tears over them. . . . Their regard to them continued all the time they remained in camp. They visited them . . . with . . . the most tender affection. . . . But it must not be denied that there were even some grown persons who shewed an unwillingness to return . . . and . . . afterwards found means to escape and run back to the Indian towns.”5 Frontier war was often merciless, as each side sought to massacre the other. Captain John Underhill offered this rationalization: “It may be demanded, why should you be so furious (as some of you have said). Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But I would refer you to David’s war. . . . When a people is grown to such a height of blood and sin against God and man and all confederates in the action, there he hath no respect to persons, but . . . puts them to the sword . . . the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. . . . We have had sufficient light from the Word of God for our

20

World of War

proceedings.”6 At times colonial governments offered rewards for scalps. For instance, in 1755, Massachusetts lieutenant governor Spencer Phips issued this declaration: I do hereby require His Majesty’s subjects of this Province to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians. . . . For every Penobscot above the age of twelve years that shall be taken . . . to Boston, fifty pounds. For every scalp of a male . . . above the age aforesaid, forty pounds. For every female . . . taken . . . and for every male under twelve . . . taken . . . twenty-­five pounds. For every scalp of such female Indian or male Indian under the age of twelve years . . . twenty pounds.7

Americans had to defend themselves alone through nearly the entire colonial period. Whitehall did not send over large numbers of troops until the last war from 1754 to 1760. For self-­defense, each colony established a militia that required all able-­bodied white men from sixteen to sixty years old—usually with exceptions such as ministers, magistrates, doctors, teachers, college students, and fishermen—to serve for an annual four to six days of inspection and training. Each town had one company, and cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York had increasing neighborhood companies as their populations expanded. Each company elected its captains and lieutenants, while governors usually appointed colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors. Massachusetts was probably the colony best organized for war. The governor and his council established the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston in 1638. The 1643 Militia Act stated that, “as piety cannot be maintained without church ordinances & officers, nor justice without lawes & magistracy, no more can our safety & peace be preserved without military orders & officers.”8 Initially, companies were split between one-­third pikemen and two-­thirds musketeers, but eventually all men were musketeers. Pikes were ineffective against Indians firing arrows in woods, while muskets became more reliable and cheaper as flintlocks replaced wheel-­locks and arquebuses. Americans suffered worse horrors than they inflicted on the Indians, French, and Spanish because most were amateur militiamen who lacked the training and experience to be effective. Rangers were the exception as experts at wilderness survival, hunting, and shooting. The most brilliant ranger leaders were Miles Standish, Benjamin Church, and Robert Rogers, who respectively led a dozen, couple dozen, and several score successful raids. Warfare was crucial to shaping a distinct American identity that strengthened with each generation removed from the first immigrants. Charles Tilly succinctly explained the development of European



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nation-­states with this dynamic relationship: “The state made war and war made the state.”9 If Europeans made war and war made their states, Americans made war and war made Americans. In her brilliant book The Name of War, historian Jill Lepore explored how wars forged American identity: “English colonists constructed a language that proclaimed themselves to be neither cruel colonists like the Spaniards nor savage natives like the Indians. Later on, after nearly a century of repetition on successive American frontiers, this triangulated conception of identity would form the basis of American nationalism.”10 She explained the dynamic among “the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples. . . . How wars are remembered can be just as important as how they were fought and first described. . . . Waging, writing, and remembering a war all shape its legacy, all draw boundaries.”11 She argued that the trauma, existential threat, and united efforts to destroy the Indian alliance in King’s Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676 transformed the essence of colonial identity from English to American. A century later, that American identity was so powerful that they would rebel against Britain and form their own country. What became the United States of America began with Jamestown, the first permanent settlement, established on May 13, 1607.12 However, that was not England’s first colonial venture. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth chartered a company led by Sir Walter Raleigh to establish the colony of Virginia. An expedition established Roanoke a hundred miles south on North Carolina’s outer bank on Pamlico Sound in 1585, but the settlers mysteriously disappeared, most likely carried off by Indians, by the time a supply vessel arrived in 1589. The ultimately successful effort emerged after two related investment groups received charters from King James I on April 10, 1606, with the London branch to settle anywhere between the thirty-­fourth and forty-­first parallels and the Plymouth branch anywhere between the thirty-­eighth to forty-­fifth parallels. The London group organized a voyage first. Three small vessels packed with 144 men and supplies sailed from London toward the mid-­Atlantic North American coast on December 19, 1606. Captain Christopher Newport commanded the expedition and its seven-­man governing council, whose names were in a locked box to be opened once they reached land. Virginia Company instructions included this prescient warning: “Have great care not to offend the naturals” and “in no case suffer any of the native people of the country to inhabit between you and the sea coast for . . . they will grow discontented with your habitation, and be ready to guide and assist any nation that shall come to invade you.”13 Those tenets proved to be problematic. The colonists most feared a Spanish attack. The Spanish had half a dozen

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settlements across northern Florida from Saint Augustine on the Atlantic Ocean to Pensacola on the Gulf of Mexico. England and Spain had warred throughout most of the late sixteenth century, although recently in 1604 they had signed a peace treaty. America was born in war. On April 16, 1607, five Indians fired arrows at thirty Virginia Company men as they stretched their legs on the beach at Cape Henry, Chesapeake Bay’s south entrance, their first landing in the New World. Arrows wounded two of them, while the others fired their arquebuses and then charged, driving off the attackers. That night, Newport opened the sealed box and was chagrined to find one name among the seven to govern Virginia. Ironically, the man essential for Jamestown’s survival—Captain John Smith—arrived in chains.14 Suspecting Smith of fostering mutinous sentiments, Newport had him arrested. Jealousy as well as fear motivated Newport. Smith exceeded all the others as a soldier and leader. He fought as a mercenary in the Low Countries in 1600 and the Balkans in 1601 and 1602. During the siege of Modrusch in 1602, he issued a challenge, fought, and killed a Turkish champion before the walls three mornings in a row. For that, Hungarian king Zsigmondy declared him “an English gentleman” entitled to carry a shield embossed with a “three Turks head” symbol. Later that year, the Turks captured and held Smith as a slave in various places until he escaped in Crimea in 1603 and, after many more adventures, reached London in 1604. There he invested in the Virginia Company, whose trustees welcomed his military experience. Although Smith spent only four years in the New World, his enterprise, courage, optimism, curiosity, decisiveness, independence, and vision made him the first American, an archetype. He deeply respected, liked, and increasingly understood the indigenous peoples he frequently fought. He swiftly mastered Indian warfare and diplomacy as he had earlier mastered war against the Turks. He wrote four books on his experiences: A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Happened in Virginia (1608), A Description of New England (1616), The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-­England, and the Summer Islands (1624), and The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (1630). The seven council members elected Edward Wingfield among them as the council president. The next step was to sail a hundred miles up a prominent river and settle a site with three qualities: the soil ashore must be rich for crops and pasture, the river must be narrow enough to command with musket fire from both shores, and no tribe must live downriver to the sea. The site they chose met only one of the three criteria. The soil was rich, but the Kecoughtan Indian village was downstream at the river mouth and the river was more than a mile wide. They believed that site would be easily defended because it was nearly surrounded by water,



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with the river on one side and swamps on the other sides. They named both the river and their town after King James. They began constructing a triangular palisade with hundred-­yard-­long sides and bastions with cannons at each corner. That palisade was crucial for their survival. Jamestown was located in the Powhatan Confederation of twenty-­eight villages between the James and Rappahannock Rivers from Chesapeake Bay to the fall line. The Algonquian-­speaking Powhatans faced enemy tribes like Siouan-­ speaking Manahoac and Monacan westward and Iroquoian-­speaking Susquehannock northward. The head chief was Powhatan, whose ceremonial name was Wahunsenacawh, with his capital Werowocomoco village on the York River. William Strachey, the colony’s official chronicler, described Powhatan as having “a tall stature . . . of a sad aspect . . . fat visag’d with grey hairs. . . . He hath bene a strong and able salvadge . . . active, and of daring spirit, vigilant, ambitious, subtile to enlarge his dominions. . . . Creull he hath bene and quarellous.”15 Powhatan was at once alarmed and fatalistic when he learned of the foreigners establishing a palisade within his confederation. Strachey reported a “certayne Propheseise afoote amongst the people enhabiting about us . . . which his priests continually put him in feare of . . . how that from the Cheasapeak Bay a Nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his empire.”16 The closest village was Paspahegh, just half a dozen miles away. Naturally, the intruders enraged and terrified the Paspahegh, who resolved to wipe them out. The settlers repelled an attack by one hundred Paspahegh on May 18 and two hundred on May 26, when they suffered seventeen wounded and one dead before the warriors fled from arquebus fire by men ashore and cannon fire from the ship crews. Yet thereafter disease and starvation surpassed Indians in killing settlers. They drank the brackish surrounding waters where their settlement’s filth drained, while mosquito swarms bore malaria. Half the settlers perished by September. The original seven councilors were reduced to Smith, John Ratcliffe, and John Martin, as the others either died or were deposed for various irregularities. The three made Ratcliffe the president, Martin the deputy, and Smith the military commander who led exploring and diplomatic missions. Meanwhile, Newport and his crew explored up the James River to its rapids at today’s Richmond. There they excitedly chipped what they believed was gold from the rocky banks. They descended to Jamestown with the good news and then sailed on to London to cash in their gold and gather men and supplies for the return voyage. There Newport received the crushing assay report that his men had laboriously gathered not gold but iron pyrite or “fool’s gold.” The Virginians sought to get rich by discovering gold and silver mines just like the Spanish had in the Mexico and Peru colonies of their empire

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spreading across the Western Hemisphere. They were bitterly disappointed to find “only an idle, improvident, scattered people, ignorant of . . . gold or silver, or any commodities, and careless of anything but from hand to mouth, except baubles of no worth.”17 They also hoped to discover an easy route to the Pacific Ocean, then called the South Sea, whose shores they believed lay not far beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Eventually they would be chagrined to learn that the continent was about three thousand miles wide between oceans. Smith’s first expedition was to explore the Chickahominy River that flowed into the James River five miles above Jamestown. In December, he and nine men ascended the Chickahominy in a twenty-­foot shallop. They rowed twenty-­seven miles before fallen trees blocked them. There Smith left seven men in the shallop while he ascended ashore with two others. Pamunkey Indians attacked, killed his two companions, and captured him. They presented him to Pamunkey chief Opechancanough, Powhatan’s younger brother. Smith won over Opechancanough by confidently treating him as a friend with whom he shared marvels like how a compass, map, and pistol worked and how the earth was round and inhabited by diverse peoples. His most impressive feat was his “paper could speak,” meaning a message he wrote asking the Jamestown authorities to give gifts to the couriers who carried the message. Opechancanough and his men conveyed Smith to Powhatan at Werowocomoco. Smith presented Powhatan with the same repertoire of wonders, and the chief feted him. Suddenly warriors pinned Smith facedown on two large stones; when others poised “with their clubs ready to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter, when no entreaty would prevail, got his head in her arms and laid her own upon his to save him from death.”18 Powhatan relented. Most likely the incident was a test of Smith’s courage. When Smith reacted with stoicism rather than fear, he passed. Powhatan then could display his magnanimity by sparing Smith and a few days later releasing him, accompanied by a dozen warriors, to Jamestown. There Smith heaped the warriors with gifts for Powhatan. Shortly after Smith’s return, Newport arrived on January 2, 1608, with a vessel packed with a hundred new settlers and supplies. Smith talked him into going to meet Powhatan. They sailed there, but Newport remained aboard while Smith went ashore with a score of men to negotiate. Powhatan named Smith the werowance, or his vassal chief, of Jamestown. After trading a couple of pounds of blue beads for three hundred bushels of corn, the English returned to Jamestown. In April, Newport again left for London. Smith embarked with fourteen men aboard a forty-­foot vessel to explore Chesapeake Bay in two expeditions in the summer of 1608, the first for a month, the second for seven weeks. Along the way, they traded for corn



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at most villages; repelled attacks by the Pocomoke, Massawomeck, Manahoac, and Nansemond; and befriended the “giant-­like” Susquehannock near the Susquehanna River mouth. After Smith returned, he deposed Ratcliffe for incompetence and declared himself president. That fall, Newport returned with more colonists and supplies. Newport, Smith, and a score of men visited Powhatan, during which Newport had Powhatan kneel; adorned him with a crown, scarlet robe, and jewelry; and then declared him King James I’s vassal. Powhatan delighted in the gifts without understanding the ceremony’s significance. Newport sailed back to London. That winter, Powhatan refused to trade for corn, and once again the Virginians faced starvation. Smith led an expedition that attacked and looted several villages, and then he approached Werowocomoco on January 12, 1609. When Smith asked for corn, Powhatan said he would trade twelve bushels for twelve swords. When Smith refused to give swords or any other weapons, Powhatan replied, Many do inform me your coming hither is not for trade, but to invade my people and possess my country. . . . Captain Smith . . . I know the difference between peace and war. . . . What will it avail you to take . . . by force you may quickly have by love, or to destroy them that provide you food? . . . It is better to eat good meat, lie well, and sleep quietly with my women and children, laugh and be merry with you . . . than be forced to fly from all, to lie cold in the woods, feed upon acorns, roots, and such trash, and be so hunted by you . . . my tired men must watch, and if a twig but break, everyone crieth, “There cometh Captain Smith!”19

Smith assured Powhatan of his love for him and his people but insisted on receiving as much corn as his boat could carry. He and his men returned to the boat for the night. Pocahontas later appeared to warn them of a pending attack if they lingered. The next day, Powhatan had warriors convey venison and corn mush, but Smith had them sample it before he and his men devoured it. Smith treated that as a face-­saving way to depart. He led his men to Pamunkey, Opechancanough’s village. As they approached, the warriors surrounded them but did not attack. Smith walked up to Opechancanough, grabbed and twisted his scalp lock, jammed his pistol to his temple, and demanded that he submit. The chief ordered his men to load Smith’s boat with bushels of corn. Smith’s innovation in 1609 transformed the colony: “You must obey this now for a law, that he that will not work will not eat (except by sickness he be disabled). For the labors of thirty or forty honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain a hundred and fifty idle loiterers.”20 He organized the cedar shingle, tar, pitch, and glassmaking

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industries; doubled the acreage for crops; and assigned each man a garden to nurture for himself. Only eleven of two hundred men died before the summer’s end. The largest settler influx to date arrived in August 1609, six hundred men, women, and children in nine vessels led by Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, who would rule Virginia as governor. Eventually the colonists dispersed to a half dozen nearby hamlets. Meanwhile, the sporadic skirmishes between the invaders and natives morphed into all-­out war. Nansemond was a Powhatan village on the James River’s south bank downstream of Jamestown. The Nansemonds seized, tortured, and murdered several Jamestown emissaries. That inspired warriors from other Powhatan villages to raid Jamestown. After suffering severe injury when a powder flask exploded on his thigh, Smith departed for London in October. That winter, Powhatan refused to trade corn to the colonists and launched numerous attacks. Starvation, disease, and Indians killed all but sixty settlers. A few survived through cannibalism, including one man who murdered and devoured his wife and was executed for his crime. The timely arrival of ships with three hundred more settlers and supplies in May 1610 again saved Virginia from extinction. That year, the Indians twice besieged Jamestown but dared not storm it. The colonists launched five campaigns that looted and burned villages and killed any Indians who resisted. Edward Waterhouse tried to justify the merciless warfare: “Because our hands which before were tied with gentlenesse . . . are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the savages . . . so that we, who hitherto have had possession of no more ground than their waste, and our purchase at a valuable consideration to their owne contentement . . . may now by right of warre and law of nations, invade their country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us; wee shall enjoy their cultivated places.”21 Over the next half dozen years, Virginia’s population slowly rose as the number of new settlers and births exceeded deaths, and the number of settlements rose to around twenty while Indian skirmishes diminished. Pocahontas symbolized the hoped-­for transformation of Indian culture by Virginian culture.22 Virginians fascinated her, and she often visited their settlements. In 1613, Captain Samuel Argall captured her and held her hostage, hoping that would restrain Powhatan raids. In 1616, John Rolfe married Pocahontas, renamed Rebecca, bedecked her in English-­style clothing, converted her to Christianity, and conceived a child with her. The next year, he took her to London and presented her to King James at court. Pocahontas died as they sailed down the Thames River en route back to Jamestown and was buried in a churchyard at Gravesend. For Virginia’s investors, the colony transformed from an economic burden to an asset in 1617. Over the preceding decade, Virginia had cost



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thousands of lives and £20,000. Since 1612, Rolfe had crossbred different types of tobacco until he produced one that was hardy and aromatic. That year, the value of the colony’s exports led by tobacco actually began to pay for its imports. In 1618, King James authorized the establishment of the House of Burgesses or assembly. The most important change came on November 18, 1618, when the Virginia Company abandoned communalism and began giving fifty acres of land to each new settler who paid his way to the colony. In 1619, a Dutch vessel appeared with twenty black slaves for sale. Virginians purchased the Africans not as slaves, which then were illegal, but as indentured servants to be released after seven years. Nonetheless, death continued to stalk Virginia. From 1607 to 1622, six thousand settlers arrived, but only 1,240 survived in a cluster of twenty or so settlements. Then, in 1622, the latest Indian war threatened to wipe them all out. Opechancanough became head chief when Powhatan died in 1618. He was determined to exterminate the colonists but needed an excuse. That came when the colonists killed war chief Nemattanew after he boasted of murdering an English trader and wearing his clothes. On the morning of March 22, 1622, the Powhatan attacked virtually all the settlements and killed 347 (or one in four) Virginians. But then, satiated with scalps and loot, they returned to their villages rather than continue their attacks. The war lasted another year as the Virginians received more settlers and supplies, including arms and munitions. King James made Virginia a crown colony in 1624. Meanwhile, another colony emerged around four hundred miles up the Atlantic coast. The people who founded Plymouth are known as Pilgrims or Puritans, who fled James I’s persecution in England for exile in Leiden, Holland, in 1603.23 They called themselves Separatists and Saints, rejecting any authority higher than their own community of believers who studied and followed the Bible’s Holy Scripture. For leadership, they elected a minister as the most devout and learned among themselves. In Holland, they increasingly despaired that their children were morphing from spiritually correct English into worldly Dutch. They obtained a charter from the Virginia Company to settle in America. On July 22, 1620, they boarded the Speedwell and sailed to Plymouth, where they joined another group of immigrants in the Mayflower. They abandoned the Speedwell, whose rotten hull leaked dangerously, and packed into the Mayflower. On September 6, the Mayflower sailed with 102 passengers, half Pilgrims and the rest worldly people who sought a new and better life in America. They were supposed to settle near the Hudson River mouth, but adverse winds near Cape Cod forced them north on November 9. To govern themselves, the leaders drafted (and forty-­one men signed) what was called the Mayflower Compact on November 21, whereby

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“these present solemnly . . . in the presence of God . . . covenant and combine ourselves into a civil body politick, for our better ordering and preservation, and . . . to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices . . . as shall be thought most . . . convenient for the general good of the colony.”24 They elected John Carver the governor. Although Captain Miles Standish was not a Pilgrim, he was a professional soldier who had fought in the Low Countries, so Carver and his colleagues accepted him as the colony’s military leader. Later that day, they sailed into a bay just below Cape Cod peninsula’s fist (where Provincetown was later founded). They went ashore but, finding no streams, decided to sail farther down the bay until they reached a place with fresh water and a good anchorage. On December 6, they landed in Wellfleet Bay, where some Indians were butchering a beached whale. The Indians fled. Standish and a score of men landed to inspect and loot a nearby abandoned village and camp ashore. At dawn the next morning, around thirty Indians screamed war cries and fired arrows at the colonists, who fired back and then charged, scattering them. Although no one on either side was killed or wounded, like Virginia, war inaugurated Plymouth Colony. Standish and his men hurried back to the Mayflower, and they sailed away. On December 20, they anchored before what became Plymouth. Winter storms had battered them, and they had to build shelters before snow buried them. Atop a large hill several hundred yards from shore, they began constructing the first buildings. A large stream flowed nearby, and they found corn caches in an abandoned Indian village and cleared crop fields beyond it. The Pilgrims were not the first Europeans along that coast—only the first to settle. Numerous ships bearing explorers, fishermen, or traders had visited the coast over the previous decade or so. A few years before the Pilgrims arrived, men from one or more of those vessels had unwittingly brought a plague with them. That plague devastated the tribes along the eastern Massachusetts coast. Two large tribes lived several days’ walk from Plymouth: the Wampanoag in a cluster of villages in eastern Narragansett Bay and the Massachusetts tribe in a cluster around Boston Bay. The colonists would benefit from playing those and other rival tribes against each other. The Pilgrims experienced an extraordinary visitor on March 16, 1621. Samoset was an Abenaki chief who had learned some English from traders along the Maine coast and was now visiting Wampanoag chief Massasoit. He stayed that night, left, and then five days later returned with Massasoit and twenty warriors. Among them was Squanto, a Wampanoag who spoke English and acted as interpreter, having been captured in 1614 by English traders and only recently released to his people.



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Massasoit sought English arms, munitions, and allies against his enemies: the Pequot westward, the Narragansett northwestward, and the Massachusetts northeastward. Massasoit had mixed feelings about doing so because of a long-­standing disturbing prophecy that one day “we must look for the coming of white men from the direction of the rising sun. . . . His coming will put a bar to our happiness, and our destiny will be at the mercy of events. . . . He will come to stay, and he shall want all the land, because the land will be so sweet to him.”25 But for now, the English might be helpful rather than harmful. On March 22, Massasoit and Carver signed a treaty whereby “if any did unjustly war against [Massasoit], we would aid him; if any did war against us, Massasoit should aid us.”26 Thus began an alliance between the English and Wampanoag that lasted until 1675 before terminating in a mutually catastrophic war. Learning of that alliance, Narragansett chief Canonicus sent Plymouth a rattlesnake-­skin quiver filled with arrows as a warning in November 1621. Governor William Bradford had the quiver filled with gunpowder and returned to Canonicus. That show of confidence and power may have prevented war between the English and Narragansett then and for another fifty-­five years. During its first years, Plymouth, like Jamestown, suffered disease and starvation that killed scores of colonists. Yet whenever the colony teetered at destruction’s brink, more ships packed with immigrants and supplies arrived to fill existing ranks and establish other settlements. The biggest influx came in 1630 when a thousand people led by Governor John Winthrop arrived to found Boston as the key town of the new colony of Massachusetts. Eventually farmers, fishermen, and hunters produced not just enough to feed the population but also surpluses, while artisans made a growing array of needed goods. Nonetheless, the settlers remained dependent on England for most manufactured goods, which they paid for with furs, grain, and lumber. Merchants journeyed up the coast and into the interior to swap goods for mostly beaver pelts at Indian villages. Most settlers were Puritans who saw themselves as a special people dedicated to developing a new civilization based on the biblical God’s will. Massachusetts governor Winthrop’s 1630 sermon titled “A Modell of Christian Charity” exemplified that vision: “For wee must consider that wee shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are uppon us.” What that imagined audience was watching was how truly God’s chosen people, the Puritans, adhered to his commands. Although he guaranteed that everyone would have land of their own, the shares would inevitably differ because that was God’s will: “God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed the Condition of mankind as in all time some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and

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dignitie, others meane and in subjection.” What bound them was love and devotion first to God and then to each other: Conformity with the . . . end we aime at . . . in our duty of love . . . wee must be knit together in this worke as one man, we must entertaine each other in brotherly Affection, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekenes, gentleness, patience and liberality, wee must delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne: rejoyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allways having before our eyes our Commission and our Community in the worke.27

The English, like other European conquerors, regarded land as free for the taking if those inhabiting it did not “improve it” or have legal title to it.28 Winthrop explained that the Indians were landless because “they enclose no ground, neither have cattell to maintayne it, but remove their dwelling as they have occasion.”29 Puritans saw not beauty and harmony in wilderness but instead a chaotic endless maze inhabited by dangerous beasts and savage men. They sought to transform wilderness as rapidly as possible into orderly, productive farms and towns linked by roads. They condemned any among themselves who lived with or emulated the savages. Thomas Morton was a fur trader who established a village called Merry Mount where colonists and Indians lived together freely and licentiously. Twice the Puritans arrested Morton, dispersed his followers, and burned the village. As for the “savages,” Puritans believed their moral duty was to either convert them to Christian and English ways or drive them away. Minister Cotton Mather explained, “The very best thing we can do for our Indians is to Anglicize them. . . . They can scarce retain their language without a tincture of other savage inclinations which ill suit . . . the design of Christianity.”30 John Eliot spearheaded that mission as head of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. He was a tireless proselytizer, became fluent in Algonquian, and translated the Bible into that language. By 1675, there were sixteen “praying towns” of Indian villages that embraced Christian and English ways. The Indians, of course, at times literally begged to be left alone, as Narragansett chief Stonewall John bitterly complained to Roger Williams: “You have driven us out of our own Countrie and then pursued us to our Great Miserie, and Your own, and we are forced to live upon you.”31 Narragansett sachem Miantonomi warned of the existential threat posed by the colonists: “You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of fish and fowl. But these English have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fell the trees. Their cows and horses eat the grass, their hogs spoil our clam banks; and



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we shall all be starved.”32 One warrior asserted this scornful taunt: “You English since you came into this Countrey have grown exceedingly above the Ground, let us now see how you will grow when Planted into the Ground.”33 Puritans blamed themselves when Indians warred against them, not for unjustly taking their lands and expelling them but for being worldly rather than godly in their daily lives, which provoked God’s wrath. A Massachusetts proclamation expressed that belief: “The Righteous God hath heightened our Calamity and given Commission to the Barbarous Heathen to rise up against us, and to become a smart Rod and severe Scourge to us, in Burning and Depopulating several hopeful Plantations [and] Murdering many of our People . . . hereby speaking aloud to us to search and . . . turn again unto the Lord our God from whom we have departed with a great Backsliding.”34 Indian beliefs and behaviors contrasted starkly with English ones. Indians were polytheists who believed spirits pervaded nature and that their powers could be summoned to aid oneself or one’s community. They held land in common for crops or hunting for the common good. Generosity was a core value. Men and women gained status by giving away rather than amassing wealth. Likewise, Indians shared power. Most tribes had a head chief whose role was not to command but to forge a consensus among a council of elders over how to thwart threats or seize opportunities. Women had high status for nurturing children and crops. Among the northeastern tribes, articulate wise women sometimes became chiefs or sachems, like Awashonk of the Sakonnet and Quaiapen of the Narragansett. Women regularly spoke in the Iroquois council. Warfare was a natural way of life for Indians. Tribes fought each other in disputes over hunting, trade, or territory, exacerbated by greed and fear. Young men gained status, wealth, and wives through valor on the warpath. What the Europeans did was provide technologies that made killing easier, like firearms and iron hatchets; more frequent, by playing off tribes against each other for trade, security, and domination; and more volatile, as disease devastated some tribes worse than others. The first killings between New England settlers and Indians occurred after word reached Plymouth that the Massachusetts were planning to attack in April 1623. Governor Bradford sent Captain Standish and eight men north to the settlement of Wessagusset that was close to them. Standish invited war chief Wituwamet for a talk. Wituwamet arrived with four warriors. A fight erupted during which Standish and his men killed all five. That brutal act deterred rather than provoked war with the Massachusetts and other tribes. Word reached Plymouth in April 1623 that Massasoit was mulling ending the alliance. Governor William Bradford dispatched Edward Winslow

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to solidify relations with Massasoit. Winslow gained Massasoit’s confidence by curing him of a life-­threatening disease (probably typhus). Massasoit assured Winslow, “Now I see the English are my friends and love me, and whilst I live, I will never forgive the kindness they have showed me.”35 New England’s first Indian war did not occur until 1637.36 The Pequot tribe numbered several thousand people spread among twenty-­six villages within twenty miles of the Thames River mouth. Sassacus was the head chief. Their traditional enemies were Mohegan westward and Narragansett eastward. Pequots sought to expand their trade and territory against enemies weakened by disease. Meanwhile, the English established Fort Saybrook at the Connecticut River mouth in 1624 and settlements farther upriver at Windsor in 1632, Wethersfield in 1633, Hartford in 1635, and Springfield in 1636. The Massachusetts Council exiled dissident Roger Williams, who founded Providence of the future Rhode Island colony in 1636. Colonists traded with all three tribes. The Pequots besieged but failed to capture Fort Saybrook in early April 1637, and later that month they attacked Wethersfield, killing nine settlers, capturing two, and slaughtering the cattle herd. Connecticut’s government sent appeals to Boston and Plymouth for aid. The governors devised a plan for each to send militiamen and allied Indians to converge on the Pequots. Captains John Mason and John Underhill combined forces and then led 110 militiamen and 300 Mohegan, Narragansett, and Niantic warriors against the main Pequot town of Mystic, reaching the palisaded village undetected on May 26. Plymouth governor Bradford recorded what happened next: “They approached . . . with great silence and surrounded it both with English and Indians, that they might not break out; and so assaulted them with great courage, shooting amongst them, and entered the fort with all speed. And those that first entered found sharp resistance from the enemy who both shot at and grappled with them; others ran into their homes and . . . set them on fire . . . and . . . more were burnt to death than was otherwise slain.”37 Underhill vividly described the massacre: “Many were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. Others forced out . . . which our soldiers received . . . with the sword. . . . Great and doleful was the bloudy sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick in some places you could hardly pass along.”38 He justified the slaughter by citing the Bible: “The Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. . . . We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”39 Bradford echoed that excuse: “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof: but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and



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they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.”40 As many as seven hundred Pequot men, women, and children died in the fighting or burned to death, while two militiamen were killed and twenty wounded, along with twenty or so allied Indians. Massachusetts captain Israel Stoughton led 120 militiamen into Pequot territory in June, captured a small community that had fled into swamp, killed twenty-­eight men, and captured several score women and children. The war ended with the Treaty of Hartford, signed on September 21, 1638, which forced the two hundred surviving Pequots to join either the Narragansetts or the Mohegans. Throughout most of the seventeenth century, Holland was England’s greatest rival for trade and colonies in North America, the Caribbean, the African coast, and the Indian Ocean. The Dutch government licensed companies to develop overseas trade and colonies. Henry Hudson, an Englishman working for the Dutch, sailed up what he called the Hudson River to its rapids in 1609. That trip inaugurated annual visits by Dutch ships that traded with tribes up the Hudson. The Dutch founded Fort Orange (Albany) in 1624 and New Amsterdam (New York) in 1626 on the Hudson River, followed by Fort Nassau (Gloucester, New Jersey) on the Delaware River in 1626. Despite their rivalry for trade and colonies, the English and Dutch remained at peace during the seventeenth century’s first half because they shared a common enemy. With the Protestant faith prominent in both countries, they fought Catholic Spain and France. Those struggles culminated with the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648, which involved nearly every European state. Under the Peace of Westphalia, the signatories promised to respect each state’s sovereignty, including the right to determine its own prevalent religion. The autonomy of America’s expanding colonies swelled during the English Civil War between royalists and Puritans from 1642 to 1649, the beheading of King Charles I in 1649, and a Puritan dictatorship until 1660, when the monarchy under Charles II was restored. These events overlapped with three wars the English and Dutch fought for naval and economic supremacy (1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674). England emerged victorious, having broken the back of Dutch naval power. Thereafter England’s Royal Navy and trade surpassed that of the Netherlands and other European great powers. Among the spoils was New Amsterdam, which the English renamed New York. For New York’s defense, Governor Edmund Andros received a royal commission to organize what became the first British regular army company in the colonies. Within

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two years, the company was split in two, and two other “independent” companies were formed under the command of the governor rather than a regiment. The year 1675 was the latest critical year for American development. Indian wars erupted in New England and the Chesapeake region, which resulted in the slaughter of the hostile tribes and the expansion of colonial America. The Indian war known as King Philip’s engulfed New England from 1675 to 1678.41 King Philip was the English name for Wampanoag head chief Metacom. He grew increasingly alarmed at the rapidly growing English towns and population that took ever more land and drove off game. He began a secret diplomacy effort to entice other tribes into allying and launching a sneak attack that would wipe out the settlements. A murder precipitated the war. In January 1675, John Sassamon, a Christian convert and Harvard University graduate, warned Plymouth governor Josiah Winslow that the Wampanoag intended to attack. Winslow dismissed that warning. Learning that Sassamon had betrayed their tribe, three Wampanoag killed him. Eventually Sassamon’s body and the names of his suspected murderers were discovered. Plymouth’s government had the suspects arrested, found them guilty, and had them hanged on June 8. Whether Metacom was aware of or ordered the murder is unknown. Regardless, the Wampanoag launched the war with attacks against Swansea, Rehoboth, and Taunton from June 24 to June 29. Envoys forged a loose alliance among the Wampanoag in eastern Rhode Island, the Narragansett in western Rhode Island, Pocumtuck and Nipmuck in central Massachusetts, and Abenaki in Maine. Over the next year, they attacked half and destroyed seventeen of New England’s towns. Along with Metacom, the leading sachems were Sakonnet Weetamoo; Nipmuck Ninigret, Muttawmp, Monoco, and Mattonas; and Narragansett Canonchett. Those devastating attacks kept the colonists on the defensive through most of 1675. The Massachusetts government invited envoys from other colonies to Boston to coordinate plans for offensives against the hostile tribes. They called their alliance the United Colonies of New England. Their greatest diplomatic success was enlisting the Mohegan, Pequot, and Mohawk as allies. Religious leaders called for a merciless holy war against the enemy Indians, justified with the biblical notion of a life for a life because, as they argued, “It is the Manner of the Heathen that are now in Hostility with us, contrary to the Practice of all Civil Nations, to Execute their bloody Insolences by Stealth and Skulking in small Parties, declining all open Decision of their Controversie, either Treaty or by the Sword.”42 Massachusetts issued this proclamation, and other colonies had similar versions: “It shall be lawful for any person, whether English



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or Indian, that shall finde any Indian travelling or skulking in any of our Towns or Woods . . . to command them under their Guard and Examination, or to kill and destroy them as they best may.”43 Quaker Edward Wharton lamented that “Our Rulers, Officers, and Councellors are like as men in a maze not knowing what to do; but the Priests spur them on, telling them the Indians are ordained for destruction.”44 The colonies sold captured Indians to West Indian plantations. Missionary John Eliot opposed that decision for practical and moral reasons: That the terror of selling away such Indians . . . for perpetual slaves . . . is like to be an effectual prolongation of the ware & such an exasperation of them, as we know not what evil consequences upon all the land. . . . God commands that we should enlarge the kingdom of Jesus Christ . . . that to sell them for slaves is to hinder the enlargement of his kingdom. . . . If they deserve to dy, it is far better to put to death, under Godly governors. . . . When Christ hath provided meanes of grace for them . . . we are highly obliged to seeke theire conversion.45

The war’s bloodiest battle came on December 19, 1675, when 1,000 militia and 150 Indians led by Governor Winslow surrounded and attacked Canonchett’s palisaded village at Great Swamp. In the fighting, the allies killed 97 warriors and more than 300 women, children, and old men and captured another 300, while suffering around 70 dead and 150 wounded. Prominent colonial leaders included Plymouth governor General Winslow, Major William Bradford, Captain James Cudworth; Massachusetts’ Major William Pynchon and Captains Samuel Mosley and Thomas Wheeler; Connecticut’s Major Robert Treat; and Rhode Island’s Captain Benjamin Church. Among them, only Church mastered frontier warfare. His Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War (1716) is the war’s most vivid history. He formed and led an elite company of frontiersmen and Indians that emulated the Indian way of war of swift raids, ambushes, and relentless pursuits and fought in most key battles. Yet he respected and liked Indians even as he warred mercilessly against them. He was as skilled a diplomat as he was a commander. He opposed selling defeated Indians as slaves to West Indian plantations. He condemned the incompetence and cowardice of most other militia leaders. At one exasperated point, he sarcastically asked a captain who refused to support him, “Pray Sir, please to lead your company to yonder wind mill on Rhode Island, and there they will be out of danger of being killed by the enemy, and we shall have less trouble to supply them with provisions.”46 Church pursued Metacom relentlessly. He and his men attacked his camp on August 2, 1676, and captured his wife and his only son, but Metacom escaped. On August 12, Church and his men finally cornered Metacom at Mount Hope and killed him. They decapitated Metacom,

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carried his head back to Plymouth, and gleefully impaled it on a tall pole in the town center. The war persisted for another two years until the colonists and their Indian allies crushed the last hostile tribe. No Indian war was bloodier or more destructive than King Philip’s. James Axtell tallied the carnage: “Of some 11,600 natives in southern New England in 1675, King Philip’s War claimed almost 7,900 victims or 68 percent of the belligerent population, in little more than a year: perhaps 1,250 died in battle, 625 later died of wounds, 3,000 succumbed to exposure and disease, 1,000 were sold as slaves and transported out of the country, and 2,000 became permanent refugees from their native land.”47 The colonists suffered grievously as well, with around one thousand dead. Indians attacked fifty-­two of New England’s ninety towns, destroyed seventeen, and plundered twenty-­ five. Each colony went deep into debt to pay for its campaigns, with Massachusetts alone owing creditors more than £1,000.48 The Chesapeake war began in July 1675 when a group of Virginians murdered several members of the Doeg tribe in a trade dispute on the Potomac River. The Doeg retaliated by murdering several colonists. Two Virginia militia companies mustered and pursued the raiders to their village, and then they attacked and killed twenty-­four Indians, including several visiting Susquehannock, who were the Doeg’s powerful neighbors and allies. The Susquehannock joined the Doeg in warring against Virginian and Maryland settlements. Over the next year, they killed over 350 colonists. The Virginia and Maryland militias struggled to coordinate offensives against the tribes. Meanwhile, a civil war erupted within the Indian war. Nathaniel Bacon was a charismatic plantation owner, Virginian council member, and militia captain. Rather than lead his two hundred men north against the Susquehannock and Doeg, he led them west to the Occaneechee on the Roanoke River, whose lands he coveted. They agreed to ally with the Virginians and launched a raid that brought back scalps and loot. A fight broke out over the spoils in which a dozen Virginians and fifty Occaneechee died. The Virginians burned the village and then returned to the settlement with loot and scalps. Governor William Berkeley denounced Bacon and removed him from his council. Bacon retaliated by marching against Jamestown. Berkeley fled with his followers to the eastern shore and sent word of the rebellion to King Charles II. On September 19, Bacon and his men sacked the capital and then dispersed to their homes. Dysentery killed Bacon on October 26. The king sent a fourteen-­ship flotilla packed with a thousand troops that reached Jamestown on February 11, 1677. With those soldiers, Berkeley reestablished order and had twenty-­three of Bacon’s leaders executed.



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He also negotiated the Treaty of Middle Plantation that restored peace with the tribes, now much weaker from losses they had suffered during the war. Americans cherished their rights as English subjects and resisted any royal attempts to reduce or suspend them. King James II consolidated the northern colonies into the Dominion of New England in two stages. He stripped Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Plymouth Colony of their charters and joined them in 1686, and he did the same for Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey in 1688. To Boston, he sent Sir Edmund Andros as the governor, accompanied by Colonel Francis Nicolson and a hundred troops packed aboard the HMS Rose commanded by Captain John George. Andros split the troops between Fort Hill in Boston and Castle Island in the bay. He cracked down on the rampant smuggling that evaded the lengthening list of Navigation Acts that straitjacketed colonial trade. He offended Puritans by insisting that they lend their church for Anglican services. In 1688, he left Boston with troops for the Maine frontier to repel Abenaki attacks. He appointed Nicolson as his deputy in New York. All these impositions provoked the first American rebellion against the crown. Preceding that event, a revolution engulfed the British Isles. After being crowned in 1685, James II became increasingly tyrannical by suspending rights, imprisoning dissidents, and openly espousing Catholicism over Protestantism. A group of parliamentarians and London bankers invited his daughter Mary, who had wed William, the Dutch stadtholder, to be queen and king. On November 5, William landed with fourteen thousand troops at Brixton and marched to London. After his army defected to William, James sailed to exile in France on December 23. Parliament crowned William III and Mary II on April 11, 1689, but, with the Bill of Rights and other laws, imposed restrictions to ensure that they and their successors were constitutional monarchs. After learning that Parliament had deposed James II in favor of William and Mary, Bostonians overthrew Andros on April 18, 1689. That in turn inspired a group of New Yorkers led by militia captain Jacob Leisler to rise against Nicolson on May 31. In December, Leisler declared himself lieutenant governor, suspended the assembly, and became just as tyrannical as the man he had overthrown and sent back to England. He justified doing so to mobilize New Yorkers against French and Indian attacks on the frontier. After a war party destroyed Schenectady on February 19, 1690, he called on the other colonies to meet in New York to coordinate a common defense. That conference on May 1, 1690, was the first among the colonies.

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Learning of Leisler’s takeover of New York, William and Mary named Colonel Henry Sloughter governor and dispatched Major Richard Ingoldesby with several hundred troops to secure the city and serve as lieutenant governor. On January 28, 1691, Ingoldesby and his men disembarked in New York. Leisler rejected his demand that he cede power. With roughly equal numbers of troops on either side, a tense standoff prevailed for the next two months as each commander kept his men on his side of the city. That ended on March 3 when Leisler arrested several Ingoldesby men who had strayed onto his turf. Ingoldesby demanded that Leisler release them. When Leisler refused, Ingoldesby called on New Yorkers disgruntled with Leisler’s rule to join him. A hundred or so armed men joined his redcoats. On March 17, Leisler had his men open fire on Ingoldesby’s troops near the town hall. Bullets killed two Ingoldesby men and wounded several others, the first time that Americans shed the blood of the king’s troops. Two days later, Governor Sloughter finally arrived, marched to Leisler’s position, and offered the rebels the king’s pardon if they surrendered and handed over Leisler. They did so. On May 17, a trial convicted Leisler of treason, and he was hanged later that day. Meanwhile, in the British Isles, civil war erupted when the deposed King James invaded Ireland with an army. The fighting continued until 1691, when William’s army defeated the last of the Jacobites (supporters of James). William and Mary dissolved the Dominion of New England and restored nearly all the colonial charters in 1691. The exception was Plymouth, which was added to Massachusetts. Samuel Champlain founded Quebec, New France’s first permanent settlement, in 1608, a year after the Virginia Company founded Jamestown. New France would not pose a threat to the English colonies for another seven decades. During that time, French colonists—soon called Canadians—struggled to survive. Indeed, the English briefly conquered Quebec from 1628 to 1632 during a war against France, although they returned it with the peace treaty. Thereafter Canada’s population grew slowly in numbers and settlements. The growing season in the Saint Lawrence River valley was short and frosts often destroyed crops, so Canadians had to import much of their grain from France. Like the American colonies, private companies founded Canada and later Louisiana from 1699 but bankrupted themselves, and the king made them crown colonies. By the late seventeenth century, Canadians were sending shiploads of furs and dried fish back to France, although that covered only a sliver of the colony’s costs. Louis XIV doubled Canada’s population to around three thousand when he dispatched the 1,200-man Carignan-­Salieres Regiment to Canada in 1665. Half the regiment was based in Quebec, while companies



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established Forts Sorel (where the Richelieu River flows into the Saint Lawrence), Chambly (halfway up the Richelieu), Saint Therese (where Lake Champlain drains into the Richelieu), and Saint Anne (on Isle La Motte in upper Lake Champlain). That defense in depth would deter many a mulled American campaign over the next nine decades. The number of regulars varied during those years with withdrawals and reinforcements. By 1690, Canada had about five thousand settlers, mostly along the Saint Lawrence River between Quebec and Montreal. The Canadians had good relations with most tribes since they sought furs rather than land from them. Canada’s only enemy was the Iroquois Five Nation Confederation of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca from east to west across central New York. That animosity began in 1609 when Champlain and two of his men joined an Algonquin raid against the Mohawks in the Lake Champlain valley. On July 29, they encountered a Mohawk war party at the Ticonderoga peninsula. When the Mohawks attacked, Champlain and his men opened fire and killed two chiefs. The Mohawks fled from their first terrifying experience with firearms and the bearded white men who shot them. Canadians and their Indian allies warred against the Iroquois sporadically until they signed a peace treaty in 1701. During that time, the Iroquois strengthened as they acquired firearms from the Dutch, who in 1624 established Fort Orange a few miles below where the Mohawk River flows into the Hudson River. They paid for those arms and munitions with beaver furs taken in raids against tribes farther westward. Eventually they raided as far as the Illinois country, having decimated and routed all other tribes along that warpath. Among the loot were captive children and women to replenish Iroquois who died in those “Beaver Wars.” After the English conquered New Amsterdam and renamed it New York in 1677, they also allied with the Iroquois. Canadians far surpassed Americans in Indian diplomacy. Many spoke the local languages and lived and intermarried with them. They nurtured familial relations among Indians whereby the chief of the people with more wealth became a “Great Father” who generously gave needed things to his “children.” Thus did Canada’s governor become the “Great Father” to most of the tribes that became allies in wars against the English colonies. The Canadians enjoyed another advantage. The Marine Ministry was in charge of French colonies and from 1670 sent over marine companies to defend them. Eventually forty marine companies occupied mostly frontier posts and became experts at Indian diplomacy, warfare, and wilderness survival. The American colonies defended themselves with their own militia, many of whom were ever more ignorant of wilderness warfare and survival as the frontier advanced westward. A final Canadian edge was unity in command. Canada’s governor general could muster

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and deploy the province’s meager manpower and supplies far more effectively than the American colonies with their squabbling governors, councils, and assemblies. The Americans enjoyed one advantage: Spring began earlier and winter later than in Canada. That gave the Americans a couple of weeks more to mobilize and dispatch men and supplies against the French. King William’s War between England and France lasted from 1689 to 1697. The war began when France invaded the Netherlands, and England and the Holy Roman Empire allied with the Dutch. That war soon spread to America. The two hundred thousand Americans enjoyed a stunning twenty-­to-­one population advantage over the ten thousand Canadians. Nonetheless, Canadians and their Indian allies killed and captured far more settlers and destroyed far more settlements than they suffered. Over eight years, raiders burned Schenectady, New York; Salmon Falls, New Hampshire; Fort Casco, Maine; and Fort Loyal (Portland) in 1690, followed by York and Wells, Maine, in 1692; Oyster Bay (Durham), New Hampshire, in 1694; Fort William Henry, Maine, in 1696; and Haverhill, New Hampshire, in 1697. French and Indian raids also devastated the Mohawk and Onondaga, who were American allies. In all, the French and Indians killed or captured around 650 colonists and hundreds of Iroquois while suffering perhaps one-­third as many dead, wounded, and captured. Following the devastation of Schenectady in February and Salmon Falls in March 1690, the governments of New York and Massachusetts organized twin offensives against Canada led by William Phips from Boston and Fitz-­John Winthrop from Albany. Smallpox and short supplies afflicted Winthrop’s expedition. A raiding party dispatched by Winthrop got as far as the village of La Prairie across the Saint Lawrence River from Montreal on August 28, 1690, when they killed half a dozen men, took nineteen prisoners, slaughtered 150 cattle, and burned sixteen homes before withdrawing to Albany. Meanwhile, Phips’s flotilla, packed with 736 militiamen, captured Port Royal, Acadia (Nova Scotia). He returned to Boston with his spoils and mobilized an even larger armada of 2,300 men in thirty-­two vessels to sail to Quebec. On October 16, the flotilla dropped anchor just below Quebec. The men disembarked and camped on the east side of the Charles River and its mouth on the Saint Lawrence. Early winter had already stripped most leaves from the trees and frosted the ground. Smallpox broke out to sicken and kill more invaders. Supplies ran out. After the French rejected his surrender demand, Phips ordered his flotilla to sail back to Boston. That failed expedition cost the colonies £40,000. American offensives were less ambitious in 1691. New York dispatched Major Pieter Schuyler with 120 militia and 150 Iroquois up Lake



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Champlain. On August 1, they attacked around four hundred French and Indians near La Prairie. Outnumbered, Schuyler withdrew with his men and then ran into an ambush by troops from Fort Chambly. In all, Schuyler lost twenty-­three militiamen and twenty-­two Iroquois while claiming to have killed over two hundred French and Indians. Major Benjamin Church sailed with three hundred militiamen to Casco Bay and then marched inland to destroy three Abenaki villages, kill a couple score Indians, and briefly capture Chief Moxus at Norridgewock, though he soon escaped. Over the next half dozen years, only Church spearheaded any campaigns. In 1692, he and Phips sailed with several hundred men to Pemaquid. While Phips and most of the men built Fort William Henry, Church and his company raided inland but failed to destroy any Indian villages. In 1696, Church led an expedition that attacked French and Indian villages along the Acadian coast. Other than Benjamin Church, only one American achieved fame in that war. Hannah Duston lived with her family at Oyster Bay when Abenaki attacked and destroyed the settlement in 1697. She watched helpless as the Indians murdered twenty-­seven of her family and neighbors. An Abenaki gleefully snatched her newborn baby from her arms and bashed its brains out against a wall. She, another woman, and a boy were given to an Abenaki family and herded north. One night she convinced the woman and the boy to join her in getting hatchets and attacking their captors. They crushed the skulls of ten sleeping Indians while two others escaped. Hannah scalped the dead and later received £50 when she presented the scalps to the governor. The “captivity narrative” as an American literary genre emerged in the late seventeenth century. Accounts by those “redeemed” or freed provide fascinating insights into the nature of frontier war along with Indian and colonial cultures. Mary Rowlandson’s was among the first and most revealing. She was a minister’s wife who saw her captivity as God’s punishment for her sins. Her faith in God’s ultimate grace helped her overcome abuse, hunger, and despair. King William’s War ended with the Treaty of Ryswick signed on September 30, 1697. The English and French acknowledged but did not delineate their frontiers in Acadia and Hudson Bay, while prisoners were released. For now that treaty ended French and Indian attacks against the Americans, but not against the Iroquois. In 1701, the Iroquois finally agreed to a “great peace” treaty with Canada, having lost nearly half of their two thousand or so warriors during the war. The War of the Spanish Succession erupted in 1702 as France and Austria tried to impose rival claimants on Spain’s throne.49 After France’s

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candidate took the throne as Philip V, England joined Austria, Prussia, Portugal, and the Netherlands to prevent Bourbons from ruling in both Paris and Madrid. That conflict became known as Queen Anne’s War after she declared her realm’s participation on May 4, 1702. For the American colonies, the war followed the pattern of the previous frontier war, albeit with fewer deaths and less destruction. French and Indian war parties attacked York, Wells, Saco, Casco, and Winter Harbor on the coast and Deerfield in the Connecticut River valley. The Americans launched fewer retaliatory raids with fewer successes. Colonel Benjamin Church’s expedition destroyed Grand Pre but not Port Royal in 1704. Two campaigns against Port Royal failed to capture it in 1707, but one did take it in 1710, when it was kept and renamed Annapolis Royal. The largest expedition sailed from Boston bound for Quebec in 1711, with 4,300 troops led by General John Hill packed aboard thirty-­one transports guarded by eleven ships of the line commanded by Admiral Hovenden Walker. Meanwhile, 2,300 troops led by Colonel Francis Nicolson headed from Albany toward Montreal 220 miles north. Both campaigns fell short. A storm in the Saint Lawrence River drove eight of Walker’s vessels onto the rocky shore, drowning nine hundred men, on the night of August 24. Heartbroken at the catastrophe, Walker and Hill sailed with their commands’ remnants back to Boston. The land campaign got no farther than Lake Champlain before turning back for lack of supplies. On the southern front, Carolina governor James Moore mustered five hundred militiamen and three hundred Yamasee warriors, packed them in fourteen vessels, and sailed south from Charles Town to Saint Augustine in 1702. They overran, looted, and burned the town, but the cannons failed to breach Castillo San Marcos’s coral block walls. The siege lasted two months until a Spanish flotilla appeared to blockade the American flotilla within the bay. Moore burned his ships and withdrew overland up the coast. Nonplussed, Moore massed forces and led another expedition in 1703. The fifty Americans and nearly one thousand Creeks captured and burned the Apalachee Indian mission town of Ayubade and repelled a relief force of thirty Spaniards and four hundred Apalachee. The victors enslaved over a thousand Apalachee and prodded them back to their respective homes. Thereafter, military action was confined to American and Spanish privateers preying on each other’s merchant vessels. A war erupted between Carolina and the Tuscarora in the upper piedmont in 1711 when an attack killed 120 settlers at New Bern. An expedition of thirty Carolinians and five hundred Cherokee, Creek, Catawba, and Yamasee warriors failed to capture the Tuscarora stronghold of Hancock’s Town. A larger expedition did destroy the Tuscarora town of Neoheroka in 1713. Overall, the Carolinians and their allies killed over



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fourteen hundred and enslaved a thousand Tuscarora. Two thousand survivors trekked all the way to the Iroquois Confederation, where they were embraced as the Sixth Nation. Although slave sales by the government paid some bills, the war bankrupted Carolina. The government literally papered over its debts with certificate money that was soon virtually worthless. Meanwhile, in 1711, Queen Anne split Carolina into separate south and north colonies. What mattered for England was not the deadlocked military sideshow in North America but its army campaigns with its allies in Europe and its naval campaigns to sweep the seas of enemy warships and capture key ports. In the Low Countries and Rhineland, General John Churchill (whom a grateful Queen Anne named the Duke of Marlborough) defeated the French at Blenheim in 1704, Ramillies in 1706, Oudenarde in 1708, and Malplaquet in 1709. Elsewhere, British expeditions captured Gibraltar and Minorca from Spain. The result was victory for England and its allies. Under the Treaty of Utrecht, signed on April 11, 1713, France ceded Nova Scotia, Hudson Bay, and Newfoundland to England; from Spain, England gained Gibraltar, Minorca, and the Asiento, or the right annually to sell 4,800 slaves in Spain’s New World empire for thirty years. England’s only concession was to recognize Philip V as Spain’s king. Amid the war in 1707, England transformed into Great Britain and the United Kingdom when Scotland’s parliament dissolved itself and England’s parliament expanded with one hundred seats reserved for Scots. The Utrecht treaty did not end fighting in North America. Abetted by Father Sebastien Rale at Norridgewock, Abenaki kept raiding New England’s northern frontier. In 1722, a New England expedition burned Norridgewock, but Rale and most inhabitants escaped and later returned to reestablish the village. The 1724 expedition did succeed in killing Rale and twenty-­eight Abenaki at Norridgewock as survivors fled north to missions at Saint Francis and Becancour. Meanwhile, western Abenaki chief Greylock led war parties against Connecticut River valley settlements from 1723 to 1727 before both sides agreed to a prolonged truce. On the Carolina frontier in 1715, war erupted with the Yamasee, who over the next year killed over four hundred settlers before an expedition crushed them. Elsewhere, the French tried to bolster their frontier by establishing the fortress port of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1720, Fort Niagara on the eastern shore where the Niagara River flows north into Lake Ontario in 1726, and Fort Saint Frederic at a peninsula’s tip where Lake Champlain narrows to a hundred yards in 1731. America’s frontier also strengthened at a strategic spot. In 1726, a group of Albany traders received Iroquois permission to build and fortify a trading post at Oswego, where the Onondaga River flows into Lake Ontario. For the next

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three decades, Oswego annually diverted fortunes from Canada to New York, as Great Lakes Indians with canoes packed with furs preferred to trade them where goods were better made, lower priced, and closer to their villages. Britain and Spain warred unofficially against each other from 1718 to 1721 and from 1727 to 1728; they were officially at war from 1739 to 1748. During the first two wars, the fighting was mostly at sea, although South Carolina mounted its latest expedition that failed to capture Saint Augustine’s fortress in 1728. In 1732, King George II issued James Oglethorpe a charter to found Georgia as a bulwark against the Spanish Empire. In 1733, Oglethorpe established Savannah twenty miles up the Savannah River from the ocean, followed by Augusta 120 miles farther upstream and then a string of forts south down the coast. George II officially declared war against Spain in October 1739.50 The symbolic cause was Captain Robert Jenkins presenting before Parliament his preserved severed ear that a Spanish captain had cut off eight years earlier after accusing him of smuggling. That event inspired the conflict’s name: the War of Jenkins’ Ear. An armada led by Admiral Edward Vernon captured and sacked Porto Bello, Panama, in November 1739. The Spanish fomented turmoil in the southern colonies by promising freedom to any escaped slaves. In November 1739, one hundred slaves rebelled on the Stono River in South Carolina and murdered a score of settlers until militia crushed them. A few survivors managed to reach Saint Augustine to join sixty-­six other escaped slaves. In 1740, Oglethorpe led an expedition that failed to capture Castillo San Carlos despite his 1,200 regulars and militia being aided by a British regiment and Royal Navy squadron led by Captain Peter Warren. The expedition suffered a couple hundred dead before returning to Georgia. Whitehall mobilized an immense armada aimed at Cartagena in 1741, including 6,000 redcoats, 3,600 Americans, 29 ships of the line, 22 frigates, and 120 transports jointly commanded by Admiral Vernon and General Thomas Wentworth. Around half the soldiers died during the two-­month siege from March to May before the British withdrew.51 In 1742, Oglethorpe defeated a Spanish attack on Fort Fredericka with only half as many troops. The War of Jenkins’ Ear bled into King George’s War, which was an extension of the War of the Austrian Succession. When Maria Theresa inherited Austria’s throne in 1740, Prussian king Frederick the Great exploited the controversy and uncertainty over whether a woman should rule from Vienna by invading Silesia, one of her provinces. Britain and France ended up warring against each other when George II and Louis XV respectively allied with Austria and Prussia. Britain sent armies to the



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continent, where they mostly suffered defeats. Americans won the only significant British victory. Massachusetts governor William Shirley organized an armada led by Commodore Peter Warren against Louisbourg. On March 24, a flotilla of fifty-­two vessels packed with 2,800 New England troops commanded by General William Pepperrell sailed from Boston. The New Englanders disembarked a few miles south of Louisbourg on May 11. Captain Louis Duchambon, who commanded Louisbourg’s 2,300-man garrison, contested neither the landing nor the emplaced batteries that bombarded the city, surrendering on June 28. The New Englanders suffered one hundred killed during the siege and nine hundred killed by diseases then and during the subsequent occupation under Warren’s command. Commodore Charles Knowles, who replaced Warren, was appalled by the American behavior: “These New Englanders were so lazy that they not only pulled one End of the House down to burn which they lived in, but even buried their dead under the Floors, and did their Filth in the other corners of the House rather than go out of Doors in the Cold. They were of so Obstinate and licentious a disposition that not being properly under Military Discipline there was no keeping them in order.”52 Storms and the Royal Navy thwarted two French squadrons dispatched to retake Louisbourg. Elsewhere along the frontier, this latest war mirrored previous ones. A French expedition captured and burned the fishing port of Canso in Nova Scotia in May, and war parties destroyed Saratoga, New York, in November 1745; Fort Massachusetts in August 1746; Grand Pre in February 1747; and Saratoga again in March 1747. Elsewhere on the northern frontier, Americans repelled French and Indian attacks against Great Meadows, Fort Keene, Saint George’s, and Fort Number 4 on the Connecticut River in 1745, and against Keene and Fort Number 4 in 1746. Meanwhile, the few American expeditions failed to reach (let alone destroy) any enemy villages. Some bloodshed was among British subjects. In American ports where British warships anchored, violence erupted when captains tried to impress sailors. The worst was three days of rioting in Boston after Admiral Charles Knowles sent press gangs after deserters and local men in 1747. Under the Treaty of Aix-­la-­Chapelle, signed on October 18, 1748, Britain and France returned their respective captures of Louisbourg and Madras and released all prisoners. That treaty brought not peace but a truce before the next war erupted four years later. The British and French formed a commission to determine their exact boundary in North America, but the members never agreed. Meanwhile, a conflict worsened in the upper Ohio River valley that led to violence and war.

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What is called the French and Indian War in America and the Seven Years’ War in Europe was the first global war.53 The war lasted from 1754 to 1763, beginning on the American frontier and then spreading to Europe, the West Indies, India, Senegal, Argentina, the Philippines, and the seas linking those distant lands. George Washington ordered the war’s first shots fired. For years before 1754, tensions rose in the upper Ohio River valley as American merchants won ever more trade with tribes in a region that the French insisted was within their empire. The Iroquois also claimed that region by conquest, although the Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo living there denied their claim. In the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster, the Iroquois sold that claim to Virginia and Maryland. In the 1748 Treaty of Lancaster, the Miami sold their own claim to that region to Pennsylvania. In 1748, Virginia granted the Loyal Land Company eight hundred thousand acres in the upper Ohio valley. In 1749, Parliament granted the Ohio Company five hundred thousand acres in the region. That same year, Canadian governor Roland-­Michel de La Galissoniere dispatched Captain Pierre Celeron de Blainville with 265 troops to journey over the divide between Lake Erie and the upper Allegheny River, then down it to the Ohio River, and down it to the Great Miami River, and then up it and over the divide back to Lake Erie. Along the way, he tried to negotiate treaties with the tribes to retake that trade for France and posted on prominent trees on riverbanks lead signs that declared French ownership of the region. He no sooner left than the Americans and Indians resumed their mutually advantageous trade. The Miami village of Pickawillany led by Chief Memeskia (nicknamed Old Briton) most openly defied the French. French marines and Ottawa and Ojibwe warriors led by Captain Charles Langlade wiped out that village and killed an American trader in June 1752. Governor Ange Duquesne dispatched 1,500 troops and militia led by captains Joseph Marin de la Malgue and Francois Le Mercier to build three forts—Presqu’il on Lake Erie, Fort Le Boeuf on the divide, and Fort Venango on the upper Allegheny River—in 1753. Duquesne planned a fourth fort where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers form the Ohio River in spring 1754. On learning of those forts, Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie dispatched George Washington, then a twenty-­one-­year-­old militia major, with a message warning the French that they were trespassing on British territory and should depart. Washington’s mission took nearly three months in midwinter and a thousand miles from Williamsburg to those forts and back. The commanders politely received him but explained that the territory was French, so Washington and American merchants were the trespassers. After Washington returned, Dinwiddie promoted him to lieutenant colonel of the 1st Virginia Regiment that he would form, with Colonel



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Joshua Fry the commander. Dinwiddie dispatched a forty-­two-­man expedition led by Ensign Edward Ward to build a fort at the Ohio River forks. On April 17, over a thousand French marines, militia, and Indians led by Captain Claude Pecaudy de Contrecoeur appeared and forced them to withdraw to Virginia. Contrecoeur had his men build a large fort at the site he named Duquesne. When Fry died after his horse threw him, Washington commanded the regiment. By May 24, he and around three hundred men reached Great Meadows, where they built a small circular palisade that he called Fort Necessity. He received conflicting instructions from Dinwiddie. One missive read, “You are warranted by the king’s instructions to repel any hostile attempt by force of arms. . . . You should defend to the utmost of your power all his possessions within your government against any invader. But at the same time, as it is the king’s resolution not to be the aggressor, I . . . strictly enjoin you not to make use of the force under your command, excepting within the undoubted limits of his majesty’s province.”54 Another called on him “to act on the defensive, but in Case any Attempts are made to obstruct or interrupt our Settle[men]ts by any Persons whatsoever, You are to restrain all such Offenders, & in Case of resistance to make Prisoners of or kill & destroy them.”55 Contrecoeur dispatched Ensign Joseph de Villiers de Jumonville with thirty-­five men to spy on the Americans. After an Indian scout informed him of that lurking enemy, Washington led forty troops and twelve Mingo warriors toward them. On the morning of May 28, he deployed his men on heights overlooking the gorge where Jumonville and his men were camped. Someone fired a shot. Washington ordered his men to open fire. After bullets killed ten of his men, Jumonville surrendered with the survivors, except for one who escaped to carry word of the attack back to Fort Duquesne. To Washington’s horror, Mingo chief Tanaghrisson sank his tomahawk into Jumonville’s skull. Washington had his troops protect the other French soldiers. One Virginian was killed and several wounded in the firefight. Washington’s first battle was a victory, but that atrocity would haunt him. He led his troops and prisoners back to Fort Necessity. This skirmish would have enormous consequences. As Sir Horace Walpole colorfully put it, “the volley fired by a young man in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.”56 Reinforcements raised Washington’s force to 450 troops. Six hundred French and Indians led by Captain Nicolas Coulon de Villiers surrounded Fort Necessity and opened fire on July 3. The palisade was within musket shot of the woods, and only a few men could shelter within it; most men crouched in a shallow trench around the palisade that steady rain filled with water in addition to soaking gunpowder. Within a day, bullets killed or wounded nearly one of every three Virginians, and their ammunition

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was nearly exhausted. Villiers sent word that if Washington surrendered, he and his men could return to Winchester. Washington agreed and signed Villiers’s written terms on July 4. Unable to read French, he later learned to his shame that the text included a line calling him “Jumonville’s assassin.” Meanwhile, he gloried in the combats he had fought, writing, “I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me there is something charming in the sound.”57 To promote united colonial efforts in the war, Benjamin Franklin and New York governor James Delancey organized a congress of twenty-­three delegates from New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Maryland at Albany from June 19 to July 11, 1754. Although they agreed in principle to form a formal alliance with a grand council of delegates and a crown-­appointed president general, no colony ratified the Albany Plan. Instead, each governor, council, and assembly raised men, matériel, and money for that war with little heed for what the others were doing. Annually, each issued calls for recruits for its provincial regiments, which usually served until the campaign season ended late that year, when most men were dismissed. As if the colonial burdens of waging war were not arduous enough, Whitehall required each government to support regular regiments posted in the colony with housing, firewood, and transport. British commanders bitterly condemned the provincial assemblies for providing little or nothing to their men. General Edward Braddock complained of the “difficulty in obtaining from ’em . . . such assistance as His Majesty expects, and their general Interest requires” because of the “Jealousy of the People, and the Disunion of the several Colonies, as well as among themselves.”58 On learning of the fighting, George II and his prime minister organized four offensives designed to decisively defeat the French and advance the frontier in 1755. General Braddock would command the campaign from Virginia to capture Fort Duquesne. Massachusetts governor William Shirley’s expedition from Albany would capture Fort Niagara. Indian superintendent William Johnson would lead an army up the Hudson River and over the divide to capture Fort Saint Frederic on Lake Champlain. Colonel Robert Monckton would seize Forts Beausejour and Gaspareaux on Nova Scotia’s frontier. Braddock brought two understrength British regiments with around eight hundred redcoats between them to Virginia. Eventually 2,200 or so American volunteers joined the expedition, and Washington served as Braddock’s aide. On April 15, Braddock; Governors Dinwiddie, Horatio Sharpe of Maryland, and William Shirley of Massachusetts; Indian superintendent Johnson; Colonel Washington; and Benjamin Franklin met at Alexandria to coordinate strategy and mobilize supplies. Braddock



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proved to be the worst obstacle. Franklin spoke for the Americans when he said Braddock was “a brave man and might probably have made a figure as a good officer in some European war. But he had too much self-­ confidence, too high an opinion of the validity of regular troops, and too mean a one of both Americans and Indians.” Braddock angrily dismissed efforts by Franklin and other colonial leaders to explain the nature of wilderness warfare, haughtily insisting that “these savages may indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia but upon the king’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.”59 Oneida chief Scarouady later bitterly recalled how Braddock treated him and his warriors: “He was a bad man when he was alive; he looked upon us as dogs, and would never hear anything what was said to him. We often endeavored to advise him of the danger he was in with his Soldiers, but he never appeared pleased with us and that was the reason that a great many of our Warriors left him and would not be under his Command.”60 Braddock’s quartermaster general, General Arthur St. Clair, rivaled Braddock in arrogance, ignorance, and vile temper. When Pennsylvania’s assembly balked at his requisition demands, he threatened “to march his Army . . . to cut the Roads, press Horses, Wagons . . . that he would not suffer a Soldier to handle an Axe but by Fire and Sword oblige the Inhabitants to do it . . . that he would kill all kind of Cattle and carry away the Horses, burn the Houses . . . and that if the French defeated them by the delays of this Province that he would with his Sword drawn pass through the Prince and treat the inhabitants as a parcel of Traitors.”61 Franklin managed to mobilize 150 wagons packed with supplies, draft animals, and teamsters and dispatch them to Braddock. After reaching the wilderness, Braddock’s army advanced only a couple of miles daily as the men laboriously widened and flattened the trail for the wagons. Impatient at the snail-­like pace, Washington proposed that Braddock split his army between a fast-­moving advance force of 1,450 men and leave the rest to guard the wagons. Braddock agreed. By July 9, those troops were just nine miles from Fort Duquesne. At the fort, Captain Contrecoeur dispatched Captain Daniel Beaujeu with 108 marines, 146 militia, and 637 Indians to intercept the enemy. The French and Indians caught the redcoats packed on the trail by surprise and then curled through the forest on either side to slaughter them. As Washington rode about trying to rally and direct the troops, bullets killed first one horse and then another beneath him. He later recalled with pride that “the Virginians behaved like men and died like soldiers” and with disgust “the dastardly behavior of the English soldiers . . . [who] broke and ran as sheep before the hounds.”62 The remnants of Braddock’s army streamed down the trail until they reached the supply train. The

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French and Indians killed 456 and wounded 520, while suffering only 9 and 20 deaths, respectively.63 Mortally wounded, Braddock died on July 13, muttering these words: “Who would have thought it?”64 That statement exemplified the arrogant British attitude toward Indians and Americans that led to the Monongahela disaster and eventually pushed the Americans into independence. Of the other expeditions, only Monckton’s was a complete success. On May 19, he departed Boston with 270 regulars and 2,000 New England troops commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Winslow of Massachusetts, packed in thirty-­one vessels. On June 2, they disembarked at the mouth of the Missaguash River that split Nova Scotia from western Acadia. That was the only place on the continent where French and British forts were within a day’s march of each other. After enduring a two-­week siege, Captain Louis de Vergor surrendered Fort Beausejour and his 150man garrison on June 16. Nearby Fort Gaspareaux surrendered the same day. Winslow lauded his men: “The Troops in General have behaved Well and I Cant but be of opinion Equal to any New raised Forces in the World and for Fatigues better than the regulars.”65 The French called that region Acadia. Nova Scotia governor Charles Lawrence ordered all French Acadians evacuated who refused to swear allegiance to King George II. Eventually around four thousand were shipped to exile in many foreign lands, with the largest group settling in Louisiana (where they became known as Cajuns). Shirley’s expedition got no farther than Oswego on Lake Ontario. There Shirley learned that his son was among the dead on the Monongahela. Deeply aggrieved and short of supplies, Shirley called off the campaign. William Johnson was an excellent choice for the Lake Champlain campaign.66 Although he lacked military experience, he was brave, enterprising, and a natural leader. He was also among the few Americans who mastered Indian diplomacy, in which eloquence, patience, and generosity were critical. To that end, he at once accepted and lamented that his mansion was “Continually full of Indians of all Nations each individual of whom has a thousand things to say, & ask, and any person who chuses to engage their affections or obtains ascendancy over them must be the greatest Slave living & listening to them all at any hour.”67 Johnson developed his skills after arriving in 1733, at age eighteen, in the Mohawk River valley to manage the estate of his uncle, Admiral Peter Warren. He steadily acquired wealth, land, and status as a businessman and medium between settlers and Iroquois. The Mohawk made him a sachem named Warraghiyagey, or “Doer of Great Things.” He was Indian superintendent for both New York and the northern colonies thanks to appointments by the governor and the king. He served on the governor’s council. During the war, as a commander he won two



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vital victories and as Indian superintendent kept the Iroquois loyal and recruited hundreds of them for campaigns. For that achievement, George II named him a baronet. Johnson met with the Iroquois at his mansion from June 24 to July 3. To his dismay, he “found all the Nations except the Mohawks extremely averse to taking part with us. This Arose from two Principal Sources: the Most prevalent was their Fear of the French, owing to our long passiveness & their Activity, & the shameful hand we have always made of our former Expeditions. The other was from a real attachment in many of their most leading Men to the French Interest.”68 Mohawk chief Hendrick explained why his people mostly trusted Johnson: “He has large ears and heareth a great deal and what he hears he tells to us; he also has large eyes, and sees a great way, and conceals nothing from us. . . . We had him in wartime when he was like a tree that grew for our use. . . . His knowledge of our affairs made us think him one of us.”69 Johnson led three thousand New York and New England troops and around two hundred Mohawks up the Hudson River. Where the river bends westward, he left five hundred to build Fort Lyman (later called Edward) on the north side and marched with the rest fourteen miles northwest to Lake George’s south shore, where he had the men build breastworks around the camp. Lake George runs thirty-­two miles north and empties into the La Chute River that curls northeast two and a half miles to Lake Champlain. From the peninsula there called Ticonderoga, it is fourteen miles north to Fort Saint Frederic, the objective of Johnson’s campaign. Versailles dispatched several thousand troops commanded by General Jean-­Armand Dieskau to Canada. By August, Dieskau reached Fort Saint Frederic with 700 troops, 1,300 militia, and 700 Indians. Rather than passively await the enemy, he embarked south up Lake Champlain with 220 grenadiers, 600 militia, and all 700 Indians. They reached the road between Johnson’s camp and Fort Lyman on September 3. When scouts brought word of the enemy’s approach, Johnson dispatched one thousand troops and the Mohawks down the road to intercept them. The French and Indians ambushed and routed them before advancing on Johnson’s camp. The Americans fired volleys into the attackers and then counterattacked and scattered them; a wounded Dieskau was among the captured. Each side suffered more than three hundred casualties. Johnson had won a critical victory but did not follow it up. A bullet wounded his thigh, and he judged the season too late for an advance as far as Fort Saint Frederic. During 1755, America’s greatest master of frontier warfare received his first command.70 In February, Massachusetts governor William Shirley

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commissioned Robert Rogers a captain for recruiting a fifty-­man ranger company. Rogers had no military training but grew up on New Hampshire’s frontier, where he became adept at hunting, trapping, and wilderness survival. From 1755 to 1764, he conducted over fifty patrols, raids, and combats. In 1758, he won promotion to major and command of a ranger battalion that eventually included eight companies. He ensured that each man was equipped with a musket, sixty rounds, hatchet, and knife; in winter, they had a wool blanket coat, ice creepers, ice skates, snowshoes, and a small sleigh to carry necessities. The men wore mostly civilian clothing until 1758, when they received dark green uniforms. Rogers developed twenty-­eight rules for warfare with which he trained and led his men. Flexibility and creativity were critical: “Such in general are the rules to be observed in the Ranging Service; there are, however, a thousand occurrences and circumstances which may happen that will make it necessary in some measure to depart from them, and to put other arts and stratagems in practice; and which cases every man’s reason and judgment must be his guide.”71 He revealed his genius through other writings, including The Journals of Major Robert Rogers, A Concise Account of North America, and even a play, Ponteach, or, The Savages of America, that was sympathetic to Indian leader Pontiac and his followers. Rogers usually tightly controlled his men during operations but let them blow off steam with drinking and relaxed military protocol in between. General Jeffery Amherst was among those with very mixed feelings about Rogers and his rangers: “Althou’ I have a very good Opinion of You, & shall Readily Employ You when the service may permit me I have a very Despicable One of the Rangers in General.”72 Two years after fighting began, the British and French governments finally declared war on each other in May 1756. That war spread across Europe when Prussian king Frederick II and Austrian grand duchess Maria Theresa went to war over Silesia, which Prussia had taken from Austria in their previous war. The British along with eventually the Dutch and Russians allied with Prussia, while France allied with Austria and eventually Spain.73 The British and Americans spent most of 1756 on the defensive. Word of Braddock’s devastating defeat inspired thousands of warriors to raid the settlements. By the year’s end, warriors killed over a thousand Americans and destroyed scores of settlements along the frontier.74 In March, a force of 166 Canadian militia and 136 Indians captured Fort Bull guarding the divide between the Mohawk and Oswego River watersheds. They killed sixty defenders and captured thirty while suffering only four dead. They looted the fort of what they could carry and then destroyed it by sparking a fuse to the power magazine.



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Louis XV sent Louis Joseph de Montcalm to command France’s army in Canada after learning of Dieskau’s capture. Montcalm led an army of 1,300 regulars, 1,500 militia, 137 marines, and 260 Indians up the Saint Lawrence River into Lake Ontario. On August 9, that army came ashore just a few miles east of Oswego, which was protected by three forts garrisoned by 1,100 mostly American troops commanded by Colonel James Mercer. Montcalm set up batteries that opened fire against Fort Ontario on the Oswego River’s east bank on August 13. That night Mercer withdrew Fort Ontario’s garrison to the two forts on the west bank. On August 14, the French occupied Fort Ontario and turned its cannons against the forts across the river. A cannonball obliterated Mercer. His deputy, Lieutenant Colonel John Littlehales, promptly raised the white flag. Montcalm won a great victory at the small cost of thirty casualties. Around 150 Americans were killed or wounded, including scores slaughtered after the surrender when Indians surged into the fort. Montcalm had Oswego’s garrison and supplies hauled away and the three forts burned. John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, the latest British commander, proved utterly inept at warring against the French and Indians but brutally efficient against the Americans. When colonial governments balked at his demand for supplies and quarters for the swelling number of redcoats, Loudon ordered his troops to seize them. He issued an order preventing all American vessels from leaving port unless they were licensed to carry supplies or troops. Loudoun hated Americans, whom he called “an Obstinate and Ungovernable People, Uterly Unacquainted with the Nature of Subordination.”75 Animosities between Britons and Americans worsened throughout the war.76 The British certainly had grounds for some complaints. Captain Peter Wraxall complained that American “Officers of this Army with very few exceptions are utter Strangers to Military Life and most of them in no Respect superior to the Men they are put over.”77 General James Wolfe was openly contemptuous: “Americans are in general the dirtiest and most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no depending on them. They fall down dead in their own dirt and desert by battalions, officers and all. Such rascals as these are rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an army.”78 Americans bitterly resented British condescension. Washington countered British complaints about the lack of American military professionalism with this principle: “When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.”79 He protested to Governor Dinwiddie, “We can’t conceive that being Americans should deprive us of the benefits of British subjects, not lessen our claim. . . . And we are very certain that no body of regular troops ever before served in a bloody campaign without

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attracting royal notice. As to those idle arguments which are often times used—namely, ‘You are defending your own properties,’—I look upon to be whimsical and absurd. We are defending the King’s dominions.”80 American officers resented being treated as inferior by British officers of the same rank. That became official policy with a royal edict on November 12, 1754. Yet more than snobbery lay behind that distinction. Legally, British officers received their commissions from the king, American officers from the governors of their colonies. Practically, British officers were immersed in the professionalism of regular regiments, while American officers struggled to assert order and training in amateur regiments. Americans at once recognized that they needed the Royal Army and Navy to conquer New France and resented British condescension and relegating them to dirty work. Massachusetts colonel Israel Williams captured that dilemma: “We run on great resk if we go on without em for if we should not then succeed we shall never be paid from home [England] and if we go on with em we shall lose the Glory if we do succeed.”81 Washington pleaded for Americans to unite in common purpose: “Nothing I more sincerely wish than a union to the colonies in this time of eminent danger.”82 New Jersey governor William Livingston deplored colonial divisions and called for union in a book on the war published in 1757: The strength of our colonies . . . is divided . . . [over] the concurrences of all necessities both for supplies of men and men. Jealous are they of each other—some ill-­considered—others shaken with intestine divisions—and . . . parsimonious even to prodigality. Our assemblies are diffident of their governors, governors despise their assemblies, and both mutually misrepresent each other to the Court of Great Britain. . . . Without a general constitution for warlike operations, we can neither plan nor execute. We have a common interest and must have a common council, one head and one purse.83

The French launched the first offensive in 1757. The governor’s brother, Francois-­Pierre Rigaud, led 250 regulars, 300 marines, 650 militia, and 300 Indians against Fort William Henry with 450 defenders at Lake George’s south end. They burned boats and woodpiles but, without artillery, could not breach the fort’s wall. That spring, Colonel George Monro led 2,100 regulars and provincials to Fort William Henry and deployed most on a nearby low ridge that they fortified. In late July, he sent a reconnaissance party of 350 Jersey Blues in bateaux led by Colonel John Parker north down the lake. On July 23, at Sabbath Day Point around twenty-­ five miles north, four hundred Indians attacked, killing around fifty and capturing around two hundred of them. French colonel Louis Bougainville reported that



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“the Indians who were on shore fired at them and made them fall back . . . they jumped into their canoes, pursued the enemy. . . . The Indians jumped into the water and speared them like fish, and also sinking the barges by seizing them from below and capsizing them. We had only one man slightly wounded. The English, terrified by the shooting, the sight, the cries, and the agility of these monsters, surrendered almost without firing a shot.”84 Montcalm led an army of 2,570 regulars, 526 marines, 2,546 militia, and 800 Indians, with most packed into 250 bateaux and 150 canoes, south up Lake George. On August 2, they deployed around the two forts, William Henry on the bluff above Lake George’s south end and the camp on the low ridge a couple hundred yards southeast. Montcalm massed his cannons to bombard the fort. On August 9, Monro agreed to surrender if he and his men could march away with honors of war after laying down their arms and promising not to fight again until they were exchanged for French prisoners. As they had at Oswego, Indians swarmed into the fort to loot and slaughter around a hundred soldiers before Montcalm asserted control with his troops. Montcalm won a limited victory. Fort Edward was fourteen miles southeast on the Hudson River. Had he marched there with his troops, Indians, and cannons, he likely would have forced General Daniel Webb, who commanded the 2,500-man garrison, to surrender. Instead, Montcalm returned to Fort Carillon after destroying the two forts. Prime Minister William Pitt replaced Loudoun with General James Abercromby as North America’s commander in early 1758. He tried to alleviate animosities with the Americans by giving the colonial governments subsidies and instructions directly from Whitehall rather than as orders imposed by British generals. He agreed that American generals, colonels, and majors could enjoy equal status with the same-­ranked regular officers, although captains and lieutenants would remain one step below their regular equivalents. In doing so, Pitt transformed the Americans, whom he admired, from lackeys into partners. He approved plans for offensives to capture Louisbourg, Fort Pitt, and Fort Carillon. Of those, two captured their objectives, and the third was a disastrous defeat, although an unplanned offshoot destroyed a key French fort. Abercromby commanded the campaign against Fort Carillon.85 By early July, he had six thousand regulars, twelve thousand provincials, four hundred Indians, and hundreds of bateaux, barges, and canoes at Fort William Henry’s ruins at Lake George’s south end. It took nearly a week just to pack aboard first all the supplies and cannons, followed by the men. That armada headed north on July 5 and the following day reached Lake George’s north end thirty-­two miles away.

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Montcalm deployed his 3,526 troops in five positions: a small guard at the lake edge, several companies on a forested mountain on the lake’s northwest side, two regiments at a sawmill midway down the two-­and-­ a-half-­mile trail paralleling the La Chute River flowing from Lake George into Lake Champlain, three regiments building a huge horseshoe-­shaped breastwork on a low plateau a quarter mile from the fort, and a regiment in Fort Carillon. That deployment made no sense. The best defense would have massed all the troops and cannons at Lake George’s narrow north shore to blast any enemy attempt to land. Southward, steep forested hills rise high on either bank. The nearest alternative landing spot was Sabbath Day Point, five miles south on the west side, with a trail leading through the forest behind the hills and eventually angling around to join the trail leading to Fort Carillon. At the sight of the vast armada rowing down the lake, the shore guard and the companies on the hill withdrew. General George Howe and Major Robert Rogers spearheaded the landing with light infantry and rangers. As they filed down the trail, they ran into the withdrawing French companies. In the firefight, a bullet killed Howe, but the rangers and light infantry killed or captured nearly two hundred French. Montcalm massed his troops behind the breastwork on the plateau. The British regulars, provincials, and Indians took all of July 7 to establish themselves ashore with their supplies. On the morning of July 8, Abercromby had his regiments march to the breastworks, deploy, and attack. The result was slaughter as the French poured volley after volley into the regulars and provincials struggling through fallen trees before the breastwork. Massachusetts private David Perry described the disastrous order to run to the breastwork and get in if we could. But their lines were full and they killed our men so fast that we could not gain it. We got behind trees, logs, and stumps, and covered ourselves as we could from the enemy’s fire. The ground was strewed with the dead and wounded. . . . I could hear the men screaming. . . . A man could not stand without getting hit. . . . One of the men raised his head a little above the log and a bullet struck him in the centre of the forehead. We stayed there till near sunset and . . . crept off, leaving the dead, and most of the wounded.86

The British suffered 547 dead, 1,356 wounded, and 77 missing to French losses of 104 killed and 273 wounded. Abercromby withdrew his shattered army to the Lake George landing. Montcalm did not send his troops after the defeated enemy but instead kept them in the breastwork, awaiting a second attack that never came. On July 9, Abercromby packed his army on the flotilla, and they rowed back to Lake George’s south shore.



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Abercromby’s catastrophic incompetence appalled virtually everyone. American colonel John Bradstreet openly criticized him and requested a command to take Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario. Abercromby relented, probably just to rid Bradstreet from camp. Bradstreet was a master of logistics, transport, and tactics. He led 2,622 troops (of whom all were provincials except for 133 regulars) down the Hudson, up the Mohawk, over the Great Carrying Place, downstream to Lake Ontario to Oswego’s ruins, and then across to Fort Frontenac. Bradstreet led his men ashore just beyond range of Fort Frontenac on August 25. After a short exchange of gunfire, Captain Pierre Payen de Noyan surrendered his 110-man garrison. Bradstreet had his men pack the fort’s supplies into his bateaux and two captured sloops and then headed back. That year’s most decisive British campaign was against Louisbourg, which crowned a peninsula on the bay’s south horn.87 By June at Halifax, General Jeffery Amherst amassed a vast armada with 13,239 troops, including 529 American rangers, aboard 150 transports protected by 24 ships of the line and 19 smaller warships bristling with 3,548 cannons and manned by 27,275 sailors.88 Governor Augustin de Drucour commanded the garrison’s 3,000 troops and 2,600 sailors and marines. On June 8, the British landed on a beach several miles south of Louisbourg. The siege lasted six weeks as Amherst extended parallel trenches and batteries closer to the fortress and bombarded it while sending troops to capture other positions around the bay. Drucour surrendered on July 26. That victory cost the British 172 dead and 363 wounded, a relatively light price for a strategic fortress and five thousand prisoners, four destroyed ships of the line, and one captured ship of the line. General John Forbes’s expedition included 1,700 regulars, 5,000 provincials, and 700 Indians; Colonel George Washington commanded one of two Virginia regiments. They spent most of the summer constructing a road westward from Carlisle. Captain Francois Lignery, Fort Duquesne’s commander, sent French and Indians to harass the advancing enemy army. On September 11, Forbes agreed to Major James Grant’s plan to lead eight hundred Highlanders, Royal Americans, and Virginian troops rapidly against Fort Duquesne. What happened resembled the Monongahela disaster three years earlier. French and Indians ambushed the British, killed around 275, and routed the rest while suffering only eight dead. With only several hundred troops and Indians, Lignery could not defend the fort. On November 11, with Forbes’s army a dozen miles away, Lignery withdrew his men to Fort Machault on the upper Allegheny River while ordering the powder magazine exploded to destroy the fort. Forbes’s advance guard reached Fort Duquesne’s smoldering ruins the next day. Forbes renamed it Fort Pitt to honor the prime minister.

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French general Louis Antoine de Bougainville noted how the war’s nature had changed over the years: “Now war is established here on the European basis. Projects for the campaign, for armies, for artillery, for sieges, for battles. It no longer is a matter of making a raid but of conquering or being conquered.”89 That was also Prime Minister William Pitt’s understanding. In early 1759, he organized the logistics and plans for what he hoped would be Canada’s conquest by that year’s end. Like the previous year, there were three offensives: one against Fort Niagara, a second against Forts Carillon and Saint Frederic, and a third against Quebec. He replaced Abercromby with Amherst as North America’s commander. General John Prideaux, with William Johnson second in command, led 2,200 regulars, 3,300 provincials, and 945 Iroquois to Oswego on June 27. He left 1,800 troops there, packed the rest with supplies on bateaux, and headed west to Fort Niagara. The army disembarked a mile east of the fort on July 6. Captain Pierre Pouchot, who commanded Fort Niagara’s 486-man garrison, sent appeals for help to Captains Charles Aubry at Fort Presqu’il and Francois Lignery at Fort Machault. On July 20, during the siege, Prideaux stepped before a mortar just as the gunner fired it, and the ball shattered his head like a pumpkin. Johnson replaced him as commander. Lignery gathered eight hundred troops and five hundred Indians and then advanced toward Fort Niagara. Learning of the enemy’s approach, Johnson deployed five hundred redcoats and one hundred Americans commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Eyre Massey at La Belle Famille, a mile from Fort Niagara on the westward road, and had them construct breastworks. The Indians from each side conferred and agreed to sit on the sidelines while the British and French fought. Lignery led an attack that British and American volleys decimated, killing and wounding 344 and capturing 96, including a wounded Lignery, while losing only 12 dead and 40 wounded. Pouchot surrendered on July 25. Amherst captured Forts Carillon and Saint Frederic nearly without firing a shot. On July 22, he embarked with 11,376 troops, half regular and half provincial (including 700 of Rogers’s rangers), at Lake George’s south shore. General Francois Bourlamaque commanded 2,300 troops at Fort Carillon. Learning of Amherst’s advance, he left four hundred troops with Captain Louis d’Hebecourt and withdrew north to Fort Isle-­aux-­Noix, where Lake Champlain drains into the Richelieu River. Unopposed, Amherst’s army disembarked and marched to the abandoned breastworks on the low plateau a quarter mile from Fort Carillon. The siege lasted from July 21 to July 26. Cannon shots from the fort killed five and wounded thirty-­one Britons. During the night of July 26, d’Hebecourt and his men rowed away after leaving a fuse burning toward the powder magazine. The explosion destroyed the fort. Amherst



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deployed his men at Fort Carillon and abandoned Fort Saint Frederic fourteen miles north. Amherst rejected the pleadings of most British and American officers to continue north to besiege Fort Isle-­aux-­Noix and then head to Montreal during the four months before winter’s first frosts. Instead, he sat tight, massed supplies for next year’s campaign, and renamed Forts Carillon and Saint Frederic, respectively, Ticonderoga and Crown Point, while scapegoating the Americans. He complained, “The provincials have got home in their heads & will now do very little good. I hear they are deserting from every Post where I have been obliged to leave some. . . . The Disregard of Orders, and Studying of their own Ease, rather than the good of the Service, has been too often Just Grounds for Complaint Against Some of the Provincial Officers, and all their Men.”90 The only campaign with the potential to strike a mortal blow against Canada was that against Quebec.91 General James Wolfe commanded 8,500 troops, including 400 American rangers, aboard a fleet of warships and transports commanded by Admiral Charles Saunders. On June 28, the armada dropped anchor, and the troops began disembarking on Isle d’Orleans a few miles east of Quebec. To defend Quebec, Montcalm had about 13,390 troops, but only 3,000 were regulars or marines, with the rest militia. Over the next two and a half months, Montcalm thwarted every attempt by Wolfe to approach the city, except his last. On July 12, the French killed and wounded 443 British out of several thousand that Wolfe sent ashore against the Beauport lines east of the city. British gunners steadily bombarded Quebec, reducing it to rubble, while detachments looted and burned villages along the Saint Lawrence valley. Saunders increasingly worried that winter would trap him in the river and pressured Wolfe to call off the campaign. Wolfe learned of a path from the river that led 175 feet up the bluff to the Plains of Abraham west of Quebec. On the night of September 11, he led 4,400 ashore and up that path to mass them on the plain. The next morning, Montcalm marched from Quebec with 1,900 regulars and 1,300 militia. British volleys decimated the French, killing 116 and wounding 600, and the redcoat advance captured another 350 while they suffered 58 dead and 600 wounded. Bullets killed Wolfe and mortally wounded Montcalm. Governor Pierre Rigaud de Vaudreuil-­Cavagnal withdrew with most surviving troops north and then west to join General Bougainville and his two thousand troops a dozen miles up the Saint Lawrence valley. General George Townshend took command of the British army and received Quebec’s capitulation on September 18. To avoid being trapped by winter ice, the fleet sailed away along with most troops to be fed and housed in Halifax rather than in devastated Quebec.

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Prime Minister Pitt’s 1760 plan for North America had three armies converge on Montreal. That eventually happened, although not without an early spring scare at Quebec. General James Murray commanded Quebec’s garrison of four thousand troops. General Francois Levis was determined to retake Quebec. On April 27, he appeared with five thousand regulars and militia at Saint Foy half a dozen miles west of the city. The next day, Murray marched out with 3,800 troops. Levis outflanked and routed Murray in what was the war’s second-­bloodiest battle, with the British and French suffering 1,104 and 833 casualties, respectively. Levis deployed his troops on the Plains of Abraham beyond cannon shot of the city but lacked heavy cannons for a proper siege. All either side could do was wait to see which side’s warships reached Quebec first. The garrison’s provisions and munitions were nearly exhausted. If a French fleet appeared, Murray would have to surrender. A flotilla appeared on May 12, but flags atop the vessels bore the Union Jack rather than the fleur de lys. Levis withdrew his army to Trois Rivieres. The three campaigns did not begin until late summer, after each received as many troops and supplies as it could carry. On July 13, Murray advanced with four thousand troops, including several hundred rangers, up the Saint Lawrence River valley’s north shore, flanked by a flotilla. From Oswego on August 11, Amherst departed with four thousand regulars and provincials packed in bateaux (along with seven hundred Iroquois led by General William Johnson) across Lake Ontario and then down the Saint Lawrence River. From Crown Point on August 12, General William Haviland set off north down Lake Champlain with 3,500 regulars and provincials aboard several hundred bateaux bound for Isle-­aux-­Noix. Outnumbered three or four to one, each front’s French commander could merely fight delaying skirmishes and briefly hold forts before escaping. In early September, the three British armies joined at Montreal. Governor Vaudreuil surrendered on September 8. That ended the war for Canada but not war in North America. The Cherokee numbered around ten thousand people split among three clusters of villages: the Lower in the Carolina piedmont, the Middle in the Smoky Mountains, and the Overhill in the upper Tennessee River valley. Two isolated forts stood among the Cherokee—Prince George in the Lower and Loudoun in the Middle region. Around 450 Cherokee joined General Forbes’s campaign against Duquesne. Forbes dismissed them when they proved more a burden to feed and equip than an asset against the French. They looted American farms and hamlets and murdered several score settlers while returning to their distant homes. South Carolina governor William Lyttleton retaliated by cutting off firearm and munition sales to the Cherokee in August 1759.



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Chief Attakullaculla (or Little Carpenter) and Oconostota were the respective peace and war chiefs. Little Carpenter sent a delegation to Charleston for talks with Lyttleton. The governor ordered them arrested and held as hostages until Little Carpenter sent him those who had murdered the settlers. Lyttleton then led 1,300 militiamen and the hostages to Fort Prince George in the Lower region. That action enraged rather than intimidated the Cherokee. Short of supplies, Lyttleton withdrew with most of his men. From mid-­January 1760, Cherokee besieged Forts Prince George and Loudoun in Cherokee territory, and Forts Dobbs and Ninety-­Six farther east, and slaughtered scores of settlers and destroyed their homes. After an attack on Fort Prince George killed the garrison’s commander and several other defenders, the survivors murdered the hostages. Lyttleton sent a desperate plea to General Jeffery Amherst for troops. Amherst dispatched Colonel Archibald Montgomery with 1,300 Highlanders, regulars, and Major Robert Rogers and his ranger battalion. The expedition burned the deserted town of Estahoe and other Lower villages and the deserted town of Etchoe among the Middle villages. Along the way, skirmishes cost the British seventeen killed and sixty-­six wounded and around fifty Cherokee killed. The expedition then withdrew without relieving Fort Loudoun, whose commander surrendered on August 7, 1760. The Cherokee broke their promise to let the troops and noncombatants depart safely and instead captured two hundred of them and murdered twenty-­five—the number equal to the murdered hostages. William Bull, South Carolina’s new governor, organized an expedition led by Major James Grant with 2,800 regular and provincial troops and supplied Catawba and Creek war parties against the Cherokee. During June, Grant’s troops relieved Fort Prince George and then destroyed fifteen towns and fourteen hundred acres of corn in the Lower region. The Cherokee shadowed the advance and withdrawal, killing a dozen and wounding a couple score invaders. An expedition of a thousand Virginia troops led by Colonel William Byrd advanced from Fort Chiswell to Long Island on the Holston River, a tributary of the Tennessee River. Little Carpenter met Grant for peace talks at Fort Prince George in August, and they agreed to a truce, prisoner exchange, and extending the frontier twenty-­five miles farther west. The Cherokee concluded peace with Virginia with the Treaty of Long Island on the Holston in 1761 and with South Carolina with the Treaty of Charleston in 1762. However, the frontier would not remain peaceful for long. The war continued in Europe and elsewhere around the world. In a secret treaty signed on August 15, 1761, Spanish king Carlos III agreed to go to war with France against Britain if the war had not ended by May

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1, 1762. Learning of that deal, Britain, now led by King George III and Prime Minister John Stuart, Earl of Bute, declared war against Spain on January 4, 1762. British expeditions captured the Spanish fortresses of Havana, Cuba, and Manila in the Philippines; Americans numbered half the Havana campaign’s troops. In the West Indies, British expeditions captured the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Grenada. In Europe, Britain’s allies Prussia, Hanover, Portugal, and the Netherlands inflicted defeats on France, Austria, and Russia. British troops and supplies helped Portugal repel an invading Spanish army. To varying degrees, each belligerent was exhausted financially, materially, and psychologically. After Tsarina Elizabeth died, Tsar Peter III flipped Russia’s alliance from Austria to Prussia. Peace talks opened and after months concluded. British, French, and Spanish envoys signed the preliminary Treaty of Paris on November 3, 1762, and the definitive Treaty of Paris on February 10, 1763.92 France ceded to Britain Canada and all its land except New Orleans east of the Mississippi River; its West Indian colonies of Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago; and its India conquests since 1749. Canadians could choose whether to become British subjects or leave for France. Britain returned the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Belle Isle, Goree, Saint Pierre, Miquelon, and its pre-1749 India colonies to France, while Cuba and the Philippines went to Spain. France ceded to Spain its Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi and New Orleans. Spain ceded East and West Florida to Britain. As for Europe, under the Treaty of Hubertusburg, signed on February 15, the Austrians and Prussians agreed to accept what each held when the war began, or the status quo ante bellum. For Americans, one war no sooner ended than another engulfed them. What is called Pontiac’s War was a massive Indian revolt against the redcoats who replaced the French in the Great Lakes and upper Ohio River valley regions.93 It was partly inspired by word of the initially successful Cherokee war against the southern colonies and the message of Delaware prophet Neolin that the Master of Life called on all Indians to unite in exterminating the whites in their country. The war was named after Ottawa chief Pontiac for his role in sending envoys with war belts to other tribes to coordinate the initial uprising and for Fort Detroit’s siege. The war might better be called Amherst’s after Britain’s North American commander, whose insulting and punitive policies provoked the revolt. He rejected advice by Indian superintendent William Johnson and other experts that as the “Great Father” he and his representatives must be generous rather than stingy in distributing goods and conciliatory rather than contemptuous during councils with his “children.” He then dismissed



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warnings by Johnson and his deputy George Croghan that the Indians were secretly mobilizing for war. Amherst sent contingents of British regulars to occupy France’s forts in the Great Lakes region after receiving Governor Vaudreuil’s surrender of Canada in September 1760. What he did not do was supply post commanders with goods for diplomacy. He hoped to save money and force Indians to gather more furs to trade with merchants for essential products they depended on like gunpowder, muskets, iron traps, and steel knives. A Shawnee chief bitterly recalled the prevailing attitude of the British, who “regard us as dogs, that they are masters of all the Land, that they have overthrown our French father and they regard him as a dog.”94 Strategically, and thus diplomatically, the most vital forts were Detroit (on the Detroit River linking Lakes Huron and Erie) and Pitt (where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers form the Ohio River). The respective commanders were Major Henry Gladwin and Captain Simeon Ecuyer. Both provoked outrage among neighboring Indian villages for their stinginess, insults, and cruelty. Gladwin had an Indian woman hanged as an accessory to murder. Ecuyer had Indian thieves publicly whipped. The Indian onslaught in early summer 1763 was stunningly successful. They captured Forts Sandusky on May 16, Saint Joseph on May 25, Miami on May 27, Ouiatenon on June 1, Michilimackinac on June 2, Venango on June 16, Green Bay on June 15, Le Boeuf on June 18, and Presqu’il on June 21. Indians wiped out Lieutenant Cornelius Cuyler and ninety-­six provincials rowing bateaux packed with supplies at Point Pelee on May 28. They besieged Forts Detroit and Pitt but failed to take them. Pontiac was the leading chief among the five hundred or so Ottawa, Huron, Pottawatomie, and Ojibwe warriors sniping at Detroit. The garrisons in those forts were too numerous to be overwhelmed by an assault and could only be starved into submission. That in turn depended on Indians capturing any supplies sent to Forts Detroit and Pitt and defeating any armies coming to rescue them. Boats packed with supplies and troops led by ranger Major Robert Rogers and Captain James Dalyell reached Detroit on July 16. Dalyell talked Gladwin into letting him lead an attack with 247 troops against Pontiac’s camp on the night of July 31. Although Rogers opposed the plan, he joined the attack. The Indians ambushed the attackers, killing twenty-­one and wounding forty-­seven; Dalyell was among the dead. Rogers escaped with the survivors back into Detroit. One especially vulnerable link in the supply chain was the twenty-­mile-­ long road running north–south along the Niagara River’s eastern shore between Lakes Ontario and Erie. Seneca ambushed and captured twenty-­ five wagons guarded by thirty-­one redcoats at Devil’s Hole on September

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14. Only two soldiers escaped. A nearby column of eighty troops marched to the sound of those guns and into an ambush from which only twenty-­ nine fled to Fort Niagara. Despite their victories in 1763, the Indian alliance faced insurmountable challenges in 1764. Most critical was a lack of gunpowder, shot, and serviceable muskets. They had hoped that their Great Father in Paris would supply them and were crushed to learn that he had surrendered their land to the British. Another issue was disease. Around five hundred Shawnee, Wyandot, Mingo, and Delaware besieged Fort Pitt. On June 24, 1763, with Amherst’s approval, Captain Ecuyer gave blankets of smallpox victims among his garrison to two Delaware chiefs as a peace token. Smallpox spread among the besiegers and eventually reached their villages to devastate the populations.95 On learning of the uprising, Whitehall responded with two critical decisions. George III recalled Amherst and replaced him as North America’s commander with General Thomas Gage. On October 7, he issued what became known as the 1763 Proclamation, which forbade colonial governments from purchasing land and Americans from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains and strictly regulated how merchants traded with Indians. The 1764 “Plan for the Future Management of Indian Affairs” elaborated those policies. Whitehall approved Gage’s plan to organize and dispatch two armies respectively to rescue Forts Pitt and Detroit, crush the Indian revolt, and negotiate peace, along with an expedition up the Mississippi River to occupy forts still held by the French on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Colonel John Bradstreet led 1,400 regular and provincial troops from Albany in June 1764 all the way to Detroit and, along the way, sent Indian runners to villages calling for peace. A treaty signed at Presqu’il on August 12 required the tribes to send all prisoners to Sandusky, where they would be exchanged. On October 18, Bradstreet’s expedition reached Detroit to break the siege and relieve Gladwin of his command. He opened peace talks with the local chiefs, including Pontiac. From Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Colonel Henry Bouquet advanced with 460 regulars, a score of rangers, and 340 horses packed with supplies to relieve Fort Pitt. Around five hundred Shawnee, Mingo, and Delaware attacked Bouquet’s column at Bushy Run, twenty-­six miles east of Fort Pitt, on August 5 and 6. On the second day, Bouquet ordered a bayonet charge that routed them. Bouquet suffered fifty men killed, sixty wounded, and five captured. The column resumed its march and reached Fort Pitt two days later. In October, Bouquet advanced from Fort Pitt toward the Muskingum River villages. A delegation of chiefs asked him not to proceed. Bouquet agreed to withdraw with fourteen hostages until a formal treaty was signed at Fort Pitt in the new year.



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From New Orleans, Major Arthur Loftus led 320 troops and two score or so merchants and family members up the Mississippi River in late January. During autumn, the troops peacefully occupied Fort de Chartres and Cahokia on the Mississippi River and Fort Vincennes on the Wabash River. A series of diplomatic councils determined who got what from the war. Indian superintendent William Johnson negotiated with two thousand Indian delegates from tribes across the Great Lakes, Ohio River, and Mississippi River regions at Fort Niagara in July and August 1764. They agreed to a peace with no punishment, the resumption of trade and annual diplomatic gifts, recognition of tribal territories, and the 1763 Royal Proclamation forbidding Americans from settling west of the Appalachians. That understanding was reiterated at Detroit from August 23 to September 4, 1765, when Captain John Campbell and deputy Indian superintendent George Croghan met with chiefs from an array of tribes, but not Pontiac, who left for exile with the Illinois tribes. During this latest frontier war, Indians killed over two thousand troops and settlers and drove thousands more from their destroyed homes; they may have suffered a quarter as many deaths in combat, but disease killed hundreds more. Merciless frontier warfare warped many participants. A militia group called the Paxton Boys vented pathological rage on the peaceful Christian Conestoga Indian community that lived on the Susquehanna River far from the frontier. On December 14, they murdered six Conestogas, and the rest fled to Lancaster. The Paxton Boys followed them and murdered another fourteen on December 27. Around 140 Conestogas fled to Philadelphia. After Pennsylvania governor John Penn called for their arrest for murder, five hundred Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia in January 1764. Benjamin Franklin acted decisively to mobilize militia to protect the Conestogas and negotiated with the Paxton Boys to disperse to their homes after receiving the governor’s pardon. With mingled irony and contempt, Colonel Bouquet observed that “they have found it easier to kill Indians in a Goal [jail] than to fight them fairly in the woods.”96 On Pennsylvania’s frontier, the Black Boys led by James Smith attacked supply trains carrying trade goods and diplomatic gifts for the tribes. They justified their seizure or destruction of those goods as preventing them from empowering the tribes, especially arms and munitions, which they then used to defend their own communities. The worst attack came at Sideling Hill on the trail between Carlisle and Fort Pitt, where over two hundred men accompanied eighty-­one packhorses. On March 5, 1765, the Black Boys shot dead the first horse and ordered the escort to leave the animals and return eastward. Although most teamsters were armed, they obeyed.

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Treaties protecting Indian lands west of the Appalachians were ephemeral. Two new treaties in 1768, respectively negotiated by southern and northern Indian superintendents John Stuart and William Johnson, won vast swaths of territory for the crown. Under the Treaty of Hard Labour signed on October 17, the Cherokee ceded their claim to all land between the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers. Under the Treaty of Fort Stanwix signed on November 5, 1768, the Iroquois ceded all land south of the Ohio to the Tennessee River. The crown paid huge sums to the Iroquois and Cherokee for their cessions of territory hunted and inhabited by other tribes. The Shawnee, Mingo, and Delaware tribes living in clusters of villages north of the Ohio rejected those cessions to land they considered their own and had never sold. War erupted in 1774 in the upper Ohio River valley and was called Dunmore’s after Virginia’s governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, whose investments in land companies encouraged several large surveying and settling parties to penetrate deep into the region called Kentucky.97 The reasons were familiar. A growing influx of first hunters and trappers, then traders, and finally settlers in violation of previous treaties provoked worsening animosities with the tribes that a murder provoked into war. Kentucky stretched among the Cumberland River, Ohio River, and Appalachian Mountains. Tribes did not live in Kentucky but hunted there, especially Shawnee from north of the Ohio and Cherokee from south of the Cumberland. They robbed and sometimes killed American trespassers. A 1750 expedition led by Thomas Walker passed over Cumberland Gap and explored a stretch of Kentucky. “Long Hunters” from western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia like Daniel Boone followed that route after the 1763 Treaty of Paris transferred the territory from France to Britain, and then the 1768 treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labour partly opened it. The easier way to Kentucky was down the Ohio River from Fort Pitt and the growing town of Pittsburgh. That was the route that James Harrod and forty-­two men took to the Kentucky River, then up it and subsequently up the Salt River, to found the first settlement, Harrodsburg, in June 1774. Not long after that expedition passed, Daniel Greathouse and half a dozen followers gratuitously murdered ten Shawnee and Mingo, including several members of Mingo chief Logan’s family, near the mouth of Yellow Creek on the upper Ohio River. Logan and Shawnee chief Cornstalk retaliated by leading a series of war parties against Americans across that region. Dunmore organized two forces to attack their villages on the Scioto River. From Fort Pitt, he would lead one thousand down the Ohio River while Colonel Andrew Lewis and one thousand militiamen descended



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the Kanawha River valley to the Ohio, where they would join. In late September, Lewis and his men reached the confluence called Point Pleasant and impatiently awaited Dunmore, who struggled to mass enough men and supplies at Pittsburgh. Dunmore sent word that he would head overland toward the Scioto villages, where Lewis should meet him. Before that message arrived, Cornstalk led several hundred Shawnee, Mingo, and Delaware to attack Lewis’s camp on October 10. In desperate fighting, the Indians killed forty-­six and wounded eighty Americans while suffering forty-­ one dead and many wounded. After expending their ammunition, they withdrew north across the Ohio River. As Dunmore’s army approached the villages, Cornstalk sent word that he wanted peace. The result was the Treaty of Camp Charlotte, signed on October 19, whereby the Shawnee ceded Kentucky. Word of that treaty encouraged Richard Henderson, the Transylvania Company’s director, to sign with some Cherokee chiefs the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals on March 19, 1775, whereby he bought their claim to Kentucky. Chief Dragging Canoe rejected that treaty and warned that the Americans would find Kentucky “a dark and bloody ground.” Henderson dismissed the warning and assigned Daniel Boone the mission of leading twenty-­eight frontiersmen to clear a road to the Kentucky River and establish a settlement. On April 1, Boone and his men founded Boonesborough. A couple of months later, Boone and his men received disturbing news that war had broken out between Americans and the mother country.

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Suppose a military force is sent into America. They will find nobody in arms. What are they then to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion. They may make one. —Benjamin Franklin The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. . . . We have the power to begin the world over again. —Thomas Paine We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again. —Nathanael Greene

A

t times people provoke what they most fear. With the French threat destroyed, the British worried that as Americans swelled in numbers, wealth, and nationalism, they would eventually assert independence.1 John Russell, Duke of Bedford, the Southern Department secretary, explained, “I don’t know whether the neighborhood of the French to our Northern American colonies was not the greatest security of their dependence on their Mother Country, who I fear will be slighted by them when their apprehensions of the French are removed.”2 Benjamin Franklin clearly saw this fact: “If the visionary Danger of Independence in our Colonies is to be feared, nothing is more likely to render it substantial than the Neighborhood of Foreigners at Enmity with the Sovereign Government, capable of giving either Aid or Asylum as the Event shall 69

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require.”3 British fears were fervent French hopes, as one astute observer predicted: “There will come in time a revolution in America which will put England into a state of weakness where she will no longer be a terror in Europe. . . . The very extent of English possessions in America will bring about their separation from England.”4 So Whitehall embarked on a series of policies that its perpetrators sincerely believed would forestall that outcome.5 With no appreciation of the irony, absurdity, and folly, they imposed taxes on the colonists to pay for the upkeep of soldiers in their midst to enforce payment of those very taxes. Whitehall estimated that the annual cost of stationing 7,500 troops in the colonies would be £225,000; the actual average cost from 1763 to 1775 turned out to be £384,000. That sum did not include the cost of providing the troops housing, firewood, and alcoholic libations, all of which Whitehall forced the colonists to donate.6 The result was to hasten rather than stifle American independence. Franklin explained that ultimately self-­destructive vicious policy cycle: “The more the people are dissatisfied, the more rigor will be thought necessary; severe punishments will be inflicted to terrify; rights and privileges will be abolished; great force will then be required to secure execution and submission; the expense will be enormous; it will then be thought proper . . . to make the people defray it; thence the British nation and government will become odious; the subjection to it will be deemed no longer tolerable; war ensues.”7 Fear of American independence aside, Whitehall definitely needed more revenues. Britain’s bill for nine years of war against France and its allies came to £82,000,000. That caused Britain’s national debt nearly to double from £74,600,000 in 1754 to £122,603,336 in 1763. Interest payments soared with the debt, reaching £4,409,797 during the war’s last year. When the war began, government revenues actually exceeded costs by £6.8 million to £6 million; by the war’s end, costs exceeded revenues by £14.2 million to £9.8 million. During the war, to cover expenses, Whitehall mostly borrowed money but also sharply raised taxes in the British Isles, but not the colonies. Those advocating higher taxes for colonials cited fairness among the justifications. By 1763, taxes amounted to an average twenty-­six shillings for each Briton, a rate twenty-­six times more onerous than the average one shilling each American paid.8 Whitehall was actually quite generous to the Americans during the war by underwriting about half their military expenses with £1,544,830.9 During the colonial era, Americans steadily acquired more wealth to finance and more manpower to fight their wars, even if few were adept at practicing it.10 The average American was nearly twice as wealthy as the average Briton, was comfortably middle class rather than poor, and was much better housed, clothed, schooled, and nourished; Americans



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towered over Britons, with the average male five foot, eight inches (three inches taller).11 Atop all that, America’s population was steadily catching up. By 1770, Americans had increased from the hundred or so men who stepped ashore at Jamestown in 1607 to 2,132,900, or nearly one-­quarter the size of the nine million or so people then living in England, Wales, and Scotland. America’s largest cities were Philadelphia with forty thousand, New York with twenty-­five thousand, Boston with sixteen thousand, Charleston with twelve thousand, and Newport with eleven thousand.12 That population growth led Franklin in his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” to foresee the time when “the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the water. What an accession of power to the British empire by sea as well as by land. What increase in trade and navigation! What numbers of ships and men!”13 Chart 2.1.  Colonial America’s Population Growth14

White Black Total

1610

1630

1650

1700

1750

1770

300 — 300

4,600 100 4,700

38,000 1,200 39,200

239,000 21,100 260,100

934,000 242,100 1,176,100

1,674,300 456,900 2,131,200

Chart 2.2.  Colonial America’s Population Distribution15

New England Mid-­Atlantic South Atlantic

1700

1770

39% 19% 42%

28% 26% 46%

New England: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island Mid-­Atlantic: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware South Atlantic: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia

Chart 2.3.  Colonial America’s Population Rate of Increase16

New England Mid-­Atlantic South Atlantic

1700–1710

1770–1780

20% 53% 29%

21% 31% 27%

New England: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island Mid-­Atlantic: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware South Atlantic: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia

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Chart 2.4.  Colonial America’s Increase in Income (1990 Dollars)17

Per Capita Income Gross Domestic Income

1650

1720

1774

$677 $27,000,000

$964 $455,000,000

$1,264 $3,070,000,000

Rampant smuggling enhanced American wealth by providing consumers more products and conveyers more profits, while each saved money by finessing middlemen and taxmen. During the 1760s, Americans annually bought £700,000 worth of illegal foreign products, more than what they bought legally via mandatory British merchant intermediaries. For tea, Americans consumed 1.2 million pounds, of which only 275,000 pounds came via official sources.18 Whitehall was dead set on making the Americans pay their “fair share.” Many taxes actually cost more to collect than what was collected. For instance, the 1733 Molasses Act annually garnered only around £1,800 in revenues but cost £7,600 to administer and should have reaped £200,000 in revenues given the estimated eight million gallons traded.19 Smuggling and corruption chiefly caused those measly results; smugglers generously paid customs officials and jurors to turn a blind eye to their illicit cargoes. American merchants complained that officials unjustly accused them of smuggling and then dismissed the charges after pocketing bribes. Whitehall tried to overcome those problems with the 1764 Sugar Act, which raised penalties for corruption and created in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Vice Admiralty Court for All America, whose officials would presumably be immune to pressures and temptations experienced by bureaucrats in the eleven vice admiralty courts in the colonies. The Sugar Act imposed a £7 tax on a ton of wine directly imported from Portugal’s island of Madeira but only ten shillings a ton if Americans bought it from British middlemen. That blatant attempt to crimp one of their few sources of free trade infuriated Americans. The Sugar Act failed spectacularly to fulfill its promises. Smuggling persisted since profits still remained high at three pence a gallon. The Treasury predicted that the tax would annually reap £78,000 for its coffers. The harsh reality was that the tax yielded only £5,200 in 1764 and even less (£4,100) in 1765. In 1766, Whitehall lowered the tax to a penny a gallon. That finally ended molasses smuggling, although practitioners still made fortunes by supplying colonial demand for an array of other goods. Revenues did rise to fluctuate between £30,000 and £40,000 annually, although that covered only about 10 percent of the costs of keeping troops and warships in the colonies.20



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The 1764 Currency Act expanded the 1751 Currency Act that prevented the colonies from issuing paper money to cover their debts. The governments had to raise taxes to retire all existing paper money. That law was especially onerous given the postwar depression as Whitehall ended its subsidies and withdrew most regiments and warships, whose troops and sailors bought local goods and services. Meanwhile, George III and his cabinet were more determined than ever to bring the colonists to their knees and make them accept anything the crown imposed on them. The king signed two acts in 1765 that further enflamed relations between Britons and Americans. The Stamp Act extended to the colonies taxes that had existed in the British Isles since the seventeenth century. Now Americans would pay fees for a list of items that required the royal seal, including legal documents like business licenses, marriage certificates, property deeds, shipping clearance papers, and university degrees, along with newspapers, pamphlets, books, broadsides, and even playing cards. After it passed both houses by huge majorities, the king signed the act on March 22 and then began appointing officials to administer the law after it took effect on November 1, 1765. Meanwhile, on May 15, 1765, he signed the Quartering Act that empowered the army to house its soldiers in private homes if public facilities were unavailable and to requisition firewood, bedding, candles, salt, and daily rum or beer rations. Word of these laws enraged most Americans. Moderate patriots limited their resistance to legally accepted expressions like protests, boycotts, and petitions. Radical patriots formed Sons of Liberty groups to intimidate and even assault crown officials; Boston had two Sons of Liberty groups, one each from the city’s rival north and south sides. Patriots dominated each colonial assembly and formed committees of correspondences to share information and coordinate efforts among them. The most prominent early protest came on May 29 when Patrick Henry gave an impassioned speech in Virginia’s House of Burgesses condemning the Stamp Act that culminated with his cry, “No taxation without Representation!” Henry introduced five “resolves”: (1) that the colonists who settled Virginia carried their rights as Englishmen with them, (2) which were confirmed by the charter, (3) which included the right of the colonial assembly’s elected representatives to impose taxes on Virginians, (4) a right that had been repeatedly acknowledged by the king and Parliament, and (5) that any attempts by others to violate the General Assembly’s “sole exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the Inhabitants of this Colony . . . has a Manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.” As Henry presented his case, a conservative shouted, “Treason!” To that Henry replied, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”21 The House of Burgesses approved all five

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resolves on May 30. Governor Francis Fauquier promptly dissolved the assembly. Newspaper accounts of Virginia’s Resolves and the governor’s dismissal spread across the colonies. Eight other assemblies issued resolutions supporting Virginia’s. The boycott movement arose on October 31, 1765, when two hundred prominent New York merchants vowed not to order more British goods until the Stamp Act’s repeal. That decision inspired four hundred Philadelphians and two hundred Bostonians to declare boycotts on November 14 and December 9, respectively. Elsewhere across the colonies, groups signed similar pledges. The boycott was a potentially powerful weapon. Not only did British merchants, manufacturers, and financiers stand to lose vast profits, but they also feared that Americans might stop servicing the £4,450,000 they collectively owed British creditors. If that happened, Britain’s economy would collapse.22 Perhaps the most striking anti–Stamp Act protest came from the Pennsylvania Journal, a weekly newspaper. The front page of the October 31 edition displayed a tombstone with this notice below: “I am sorry to be obliged to acquaint my Readers, that as the Stamp Act is . . . obligatory upon us after the First of November ensuing. . . . The Publisher of this paper unable to bear the Burthen, has thought it expedient to stop a while, in order to deliberate whether any Methods can be found to elude the chains forged for us, and escape the insupportable Slavery.”23 The first anti–Stamp Act riot erupted in Boston on August 14, 1765, when a mob hanged an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the colony’s stamp distributor, on a limb of a massive ancient elm known as the Liberty Tree in the commons or central park. That evening the mob first burned the building designated to house the colonial stamp administration and then surged on to smash the windows of Oliver’s home. Oliver resigned the next morning. The mob pillaged the homes of two other officials and then rampaged through Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s home, smashing furniture and china and ripping up or burning documents. Word of that violence inspired riots elsewhere. In Rhode Island, a mob trashed the homes of three prominent officials. In New York, a mob reacted to a rumor that the British intended to enforce the Stamp Act with redcoats by breaking the windows of Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden’s coach and Major Thomas James’s home. Sons of Liberty groups harassed officials throughout the colonies. By November, all Stamp Act officials then in the colonies had resigned; the final official did so after reaching Georgia two months later. Massachusetts’ assembly wrote to all other colonial assemblies asking them to send delegates to a congress to discuss what to do about the Stamp Act and other officious British policies. Rounds of letters forged a consensus about where and when to meet. Twenty-­seven delegates from



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nine colonies—New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and South Carolina— joined in New York City for the Stamp Act Congress on October 7–25, 1765. Delegates from other colonies might well have been there had not the governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia forbade anyone to attend, although undoubtedly distance was also an inhibiting factor. Delegates from nearby Delaware and New Jersey defied similar restrictions by their respective governors. The Stamp Act Congress debated and signed fourteen resolutions protesting the Stamp Act for violating American rights as British subjects and calling for its remission, and the group issued a Declaration of Rights. “No taxation without representation” was the key underlying argument. Only colonial assemblies could impose taxes on their respective inhabitants. They sent their petitions to King George and both houses of Parliament. When Parliament convened on January 15, 1766, the members were well aware of the protests, boycotts, and violence against the Stamp Act, culminating in the Stamp Act Congress’s petitions. Atop that American resistance came twenty-­four petitions by groups of prominent British merchants, financiers, and ports calling on Parliament for repeal. That response only stiffened the resistance of George Grenville, who had sponsored the Stamp Act. In a speech in the House of Commons, he insisted that Americans enjoyed “virtual representation” in Parliament and dismissed any distinction between “internal” and “external” taxes. He then argued, “That this kingdom has the sovereign, the supreme legislative power over America, is granted. It cannot be denied, and taxation is a part of that sovereign power. . . . Protection and obedience are reciprocal. Great Britain protects America; America is bound to yield obedience.”24 Countless Americans and many Britons begged to differ with Grenville’s assertions. William Pitt was among Parliament’s leading dissidents who called for ending all efforts to repress the Americans. He retorted to Grenville, “I rejoice that America has resisted. . . . The gentleman asks, when were the colonies emancipated? But I desire to know when they were made slaves. . . . The Americans have been wronged. They have been driven to madness by injustice . . . the Stamp Act should be repealed absolutely.” Nonetheless, Pitt did acknowledge that “parliament has a right to bind, to restrain America. Our legislative power over the colonies is sovereign and supreme.”25 Benjamin Franklin’s finest political hours unrolled as he was interrogated in the House of Commons in mid-­February 1766. He parried each thrust and then struck back hard. When asked why Britain should protect America if Americans did not help pay for their own defense, he asserted that Americans protected themselves; during the last war, they had raised twenty-­five thousand troops and underwrote them by raising millions

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of pounds sterling in revenues. When asked how Americans could do without British manufactured goods, he explained that within a few years Americans would manufacture anything they now imported from Britain. When asked whether Americans would resist the imposition of British troops, he replied curtly, “Suppose a military force is sent into America. They will find nobody in arms. What are they then to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion. They may make one.” When asked the likely results if the Stamp Act was not repealed, he predicted that Americans would lose their remaining respect and affection for the mother country. When asked whether the Americans would acknowledge Parliament’s right to tax the colonies if the Stamp Act were repealed, he replied “never.”26 Parliamentarians bowed to the pressure and rescinded the Stamp Act with a Repeal Act, though they asserted their power with the Declaratory Act of parliamentary supremacy over the colonies in all matters. Both bills passed the House of Commons with overwhelming majorities on March 4 and the House of Lords on March 17, and the king signed them on March 18, 1766. Americans celebrated when they received the news. Hard-­ liners could not leave well enough alone. Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townsend proposed an array of taxes on paper, lead, glass, paint, and tea that he estimated would annually reap £40,000 in revenues. Parliament passed the Revenue Act. Parliament also passed the Suspension Act that voided the New York assembly’s right to pass laws after September 1, 1767, and required the governor to veto any bills until it agreed to uphold the Quartering Act. That act provoked the latest resistance of protests, petitions, boycotts, and eventually violence. John Dickinson penned influential essays condemning the taxes and asserting American rights as “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” which newspapers printed from 1767 to 1768. Massachusetts’ assembly passed a circular letter condemning the Townsend Act and sent it to the other colonies. By December 1769, every colonial assembly except New Hampshire’s had passed nonimportation resolutions. Tensions between Sons of Liberty and redcoats in New York worsened. On January 16, 1770, a riot erupted after troops chopped down a “liberty tree” or pole that the Sons of Liberty had erected before their headquarters. The two-­day Battle of Golden Hill led to numerous injuries, broken windows, and one death. In Boston, several days of brawls between Sons of Liberty and redcoats led to a mob taunting sentries outside the customhouse on March 5, 1770. Captain Thomas Preston led seven troops out to support the sentry. The mob pelted them first with snowballs and then paving stones. One soldier after another lowered his musket and fired into the crowd, killing five



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men and wounding six. Governor Thomas Hutchinson had the captain and his men arrested and tried for manslaughter. Moderate patriot John Adams actually joined the defense team to promote a fair trial. The jury found Preston and most soldiers innocent but convicted two of manslaughter and had their thumbs branded. The “Boston massacre” helped precipitate the parliamentarians’ decision to repeal the Townsend Act, except for the tea tax to symbolize their authority. Once again, Americans initially celebrated, but British authorities soon provoked renewed resistance. The Admiralty ordered a crackdown on smuggling. In March 1772, Lieutenant William Duddingston of HMS Gaspee seized several vessels in Narragansett Bay, including one owned by powerful merchant John Brown. On the night of June 9, on learning that the Gaspee had run aground chasing a suspected smuggler, Brown and his men rowed out, swarmed over the vessel, subdued the crew, and shot Duddingston when he resisted. They then had the crew and lieutenant packed into a longboat and burned the Gaspee. Parliament rekindled American passions with the Tea Act that the king signed on May 10, 1773, which tried to rescue the East India Company from bankruptcy by giving it a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies along with a three-­pence duty. That provoked colonial assemblies to announce tea boycotts. The East India Company sent tea-­packed ships to the colonies. By December 16, three had anchored in Boston harbor. That night, Sons of Liberty dressed like Indians swarmed aboard the vessels and dumped ninety thousand pounds of tea worth £10,000 into the sea. That violent act of vandalism enraged virtually all members of Parliament. They responded with what patriots condemned as the five Coercive or Intolerable Acts. The laws closed Boston to all trade except food and firewood, let the king determine the colonial council’s five members, allowed royal officials accused of capital crimes to be tried in London, let troops be quartered with private families, and extended Quebec’s southern border to the Ohio River, thus violating the claims of several colonies for that territory. Whitehall would lift the restrictions on Massachusetts if it paid for the destroyed tea. George III replaced Governor Hutchinson with General Thomas Gage, who arrived on May 13, 1774. Whitehall hoped to make an example of Massachusetts with the Coercive Acts. Instead, the harsh treatment inspired colonial unity. George Washington expressed the prevailing view with these words: “The cause of Boston . . . now is and ever will be considered as the cause of America.”27 Massachusetts’ assembly drafted and circulated to other assemblies a “Solemn League and Covenant” that boycotted all trade with Britain and the Caribbean colonies from August 31.

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The assemblies joined the league and scheduled a congress to convene at Philadelphia. The First Continental Congress met from September 5 to October 26, 1774. They declared the Intolerable Acts unconstitutional; formed a Continental Association to boycott all imports from Britain starting December 1 and embargo all exports to Britain from September 1, 1775; issued a Declaration of Rights; and agreed to reconvene on May 10, 1775. Governor Gage dissolved Massachusetts’ assembly in October. The assembly defied him by convening at Cambridge just a few miles up the Charles River from Boston. The delegates established a Committee of Safety as an executive; appropriated £20,000 to buy muskets, cannons, munitions, and other weapons; and instructed each militia company to prepare to march and fight within a minute.28 Gage asked Whitehall for twenty thousand more troops to help him restore order. He dispatched troops to seize patriot arms depots at Cambridge on September 1, 1774. New Hampshire militia captured a British arms depot at Fort William and Mary guarding the approach to Portsmouth on December 14. Massachusetts militiamen thwarted a British attempt to capture an arms depot by raising a drawbridge on February 27, 1775. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts assembly moved to various towns and in April met in Concord, twenty miles west of Boston. Whitehall authorized Gage to take all necessary measures to repress the assembly, including arresting its members and dismissing the militia. Gage massed the eight hundred combined troops of each regiment’s light and grenadier companies into an elite strike force led by Colonel Francis Smith with the mission of marching overnight on April 19 to Concord to arrest the assemblymen and seize their arms depot.29 Patriots learned of the expedition and dispatched Paul Revere and William Dawes to gallop west by different routes and warn each town’s militia company that regulars were coming. Lexington’s sixty-­ five militiamen led by Captain John Parker gathered on the green just before dawn on April 19. Major John Pitcairn led the four hundred light infantrymen into Lexington, deployed them to face the militia across the green, and shouted, “Lay down your weapons you damn rebels and disperse!” Parker dismissed his men and they began to withdraw when someone fired a shot and an officer yelled, “Fire, by God, fire!” The redcoats volleyed and charged. Bullets killed eight and wounded ten Americans, and the rest fled. The grenadier companies caught up with the light infantry, and they resumed their march to Concord. There Smith deployed companies on the north, west, and south roads while other companies searched the town and found military supplies. Militia companies converged from different directions. Colonel James Barnett’s home overlooked North Bridge, and around four hundred men from several companies deployed across



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his land. When smoke rose from Concord, Barnett feared the British were burning the town and ordered his men to advance. The British and Americans opened fire across the river; then the militia charged over the bridge, and the redcoats fled back to town. Smith ordered his men to retreat to Boston. The result was a series of firefights between the pursuing and converging militia companies against the redcoats. The Americans might have killed or captured all of Smith’s redcoats had Gage not sent a relief column of one thousand troops led by General Hugh Percy that met the exhausted raiders three miles east of Lexington. The Americans killed 73 and wounded 174 British and suffered 49 killed and 39 wounded.30 The Americans followed up their victory by besieging Boston as ever more companies from Massachusetts and eventually other colonies massed there, with General Artemas Ward in nominal command. Three British generals—William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton— reached Boston on May 26. Meanwhile, Benedict Arnold, a New Haven, Connecticut, merchant and shipowner, received a colonel’s commission and permission to seize Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point in upper New York province. Captain Ethan Allen, who led the Green Mountain Boys militia, conceived the same idea. On meeting, Arnold and Allen agreed to cooperate. They captured Fort Ticonderoga’s forty-­five-­man garrison without violence on May 10, followed by Crown Point’s on May 12. General Ward ordered General Israel Putnam to lead a thousand troops to construct redoubts and batteries on Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill in Charlestown across the Charles River from Boston. Ward later sent General John Stark with five hundred troops to reinforce Putnam. Gage had Howe pack 2,500 troops in longboats, row across, land, and then capture those heights on June 17. The Americans decimated the first two British attacks but, with their ammunition exhausted, fled the third assault that outflanked them. That victory cost the British 253 dead and 891 wounded, while the Americans suffered 138 killed, 276 wounded, and 31 captured. Whitehall replaced Gage with Howe as the British army’s commander. Congress convened at Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. The congressmen organized themselves into committees of war, diplomacy, and ways and means. Equality and unanimity prevailed for congressional decisions. Each colony and later state had one vote no matter the relative size of its population. For revenue, Congress had no power to raise taxes from the states, only the power to impose tariffs on international trade. The delegates established the American or Continental Army on June 14 and appointed George Washington to command it on June 15. They appointed fourteen generals. They sent Canada’s assembly a letter inviting them to

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join the struggle and appointed General Philip Schuyler to mobilize an army to liberate Canada. They first designated the army uniform as a brown jacket with red facings, but later they received so many dark blue jackets with red facings from France that they made that the official uniform from October 2, 1779. Congress established a seven-­man naval committee on October 20 and the Continental Marine Corps on November 10, 1775. Congress and each colonial assembly issued privateer letters of marque for enterprising sea captains to seize enemy merchant and war ships. On December 13, Congress commissioned thirteen frigates for construction at different ports. Eventually Congress commissioned around sixty vessels for America’s navy. Congress’s toughest challenge was paying for an army and navy. Most hard coin came from foreign grants and loans over the next eight years. Congress had the power to print and borrow money and impose tariffs (but not taxes). Congress eventually printed $200 million in Continental dollars, which, unbacked by gold or silver, soon became worthless. On March 18, 1780, Congress declared forty paper dollars equal to one silver dollar. That act helped reduce the debt to $5 million.31 Militarily, the Americans faced the world’s most powerful navy and, man-­ for-­ man, army. When the war began, Britain’s army numbered 48,000 troops, including 39,294 infantry, 6,869 cavalry, and 2,484 artillerymen. Whitehall expanded the army both by recruiting in Britain and by hiring twenty-­five thousand German mercenaries, including eventually 12,000 from Hesse-­Cassel, 6,000 from Brunswick, 2,400 each from Hesse-­ Hanau and Anspach-­Bayreuth, and 1,000 each from Anhalt-­Zerbst and Waldeck. Among the Germans were Jaeger or “hunter” companies of riflemen trained in light infantry tactics. Their rifles were shorter and had slightly less range than American long rifles. Jaegers wore green jackets while other Germans wore navy blue jackets.32 The British would tap two other sources of manpower, both American. During the war, they recruited thousands of loyalists into regiments and Indian warriors as auxiliaries to scout and raid. Choosing George Washington as general-­in-­chief ranks with declaring independence as the most crucial decisions Congress made during the war. The Americans probably would have failed to win independence without Washington.33 During the French and Indian War, he led troops in three campaigns, during which he learned the fundamentals of leadership, administration, logistics, strategy, and tactics. He explained his strategy for winning independence: “Our hopes are not placed in any particular city or spot of ground but in preserving a good army to take advantage of favorable opportunities and waste and defeat the enemy by



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piece meal.”34 He understood that this strategy demands years of struggle, for “the resources of Britain were . . . inexhaustible . . . her fleets covered the ocean and . . . her troops had harvested laurels in every quarter of the globe.” Nonetheless, he was confident that the Americans would eventually prevail given “the unconquerable resolution of our citizens, the conscious rectitude of our cause, and a confident trust that we should not be forsaken by heaven.”35 Britain’s navy bedeviled Washington more than its army: “The amazing advantage the Enemy derive from their Ships and the Command of the Water, keeps us in a State of constant perplexity and the most anxious conjectures.”36 Washington was a bold and imaginative commander: “Enterprises which appear Chimerical often prove successful from that very Circumstance. Common Sense & Prudence will Suggest Vigilance and care, and when the Danger is Plain and obvious, but when little Danger is apprehended, the more the enemy is unprepared and consequently there is the fain’d prospect of success.”37 What he usually lacked was enough well-­ trained troops and officers to pull off his plans. However, with that vision he brilliantly conceived and won his Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown campaigns. The burden of command weighed heavily on him: “No man perhaps since the first Institution of armies ever commanded one under more difficult Circumstances than I have done. To enumerate the particulars would fill a volume—many of my difficulties and distresses were of so peculiar a cast that in order to conceal them from the enemy, I was obliged to conceal them from my friends, indeed from my own army.”38 Washington was an excellent spymaster who developed networks of agents in New York and other occupied cities. His greatest military weakness was surprising for such an acclaimed equestrian and spymaster: he failed to develop a small, well-­mounted cavalry corps that could screen, scout, and raid the enemy. Howe trounced him with flank attacks at Long Island and Brandywine that well-­positioned cavalry pickets would have detected in time to provide warnings. Washington took command of 16,600 troops in camps and redoubts ringing Boston on July 2. He assembled a staff to devise and impose standards of drill, rations, sanitation, and discipline. He saved countless lives then and thereafter by having his soldiers inoculated with the smallpox vaccine. The siege was a standoff, as neither side dared attack the other. Washington’s key immediate strategic decision was to launch a two-­ pronged invasion of Canada. Colonel Benedict Arnold would lead 1,050 troops via the Kennebec River and Chaudiere River route to join forces with General Richard Montgomery’s 2,000 troops taking the Lake Champlain route. That invasion at first succeeded. British general Guy Carleton had only eight hundred regulars in Canada initially deployed by company in different towns. Montgomery’s army

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captured Fort Chambly on October 18, Fort St. Johns on November 2, and Montreal on November 10. Meanwhile, Arnold had only 675 men when he reached the Saint Lawrence River upstream of Quebec on November 8; the rest had turned back as supplies dwindled and the river and overland journey became increasingly grueling. Montgomery joined Arnold on December 5. Together they had only 975 troops and no siege artillery to Carleton’s 1,500 regulars and militia in Quebec. They devised a plan to capture Quebec by a sneak attack. Before dawn on December 31, Arnold and Montgomery respectively attacked the walled city’s north and south gates. The British repulsed both assaults, killing 62, wounding 42, and capturing 426 Americans, while suffering 19 casualties; Montgomery was killed and Arnold was wounded with a musket ball in his thigh. Meanwhile, the Americans eliminated the last British toehold in Virginia. On June 8, 1775, Governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, fled Williamsburg to a British flotilla in the James River. He organized raids against American forces in the region and on November 7 issued a proclamation calling on slaves to flee to the British, who would free them if they joined an Ethiopian Regiment. In early December, with reinforcements, he occupied Norfolk and established a fort at Great Bridge over the Elizabeth River nine miles south of Norfolk. On the south side, Colonel William Woodford, with 861 troops, established breastworks. On December 7, Dunmore ordered 409 soldiers, marines, sailors, loyalist militia, and blacks to charge across. The Americans poured volleys into the attackers, killing and wounding 102 of them. They then followed the British retreat to Norfolk. Dunmore and his men hastily embarked and sailed away. On January 1, 1776, Dunmore had the flotilla returned gleefully to bombard Norfolk to ashes. For diplomacy and espionage, Congress established a five-­man Committee of Secret Correspondence on November 19, 1775.39 Securing foreign aid, trade, recognition, and alliances was critical to victory. To gain that, the Americans had to manipulate Europe’s imbalance of power, rallying those governments most fearful of Britain and eager to see its defeat. No country was more potentially vital than France, Britain’s perennial enemy. For international trade, John Adams was instrumental in devising and getting Congress to approve a “Model Treaty” for its envoys to negotiate with France and other foreign powers. The underlying principles were mostly high-­sounding but vague “Rights, Liberties, Privileges, Immunities, and Exemptions” for commerce, along with the concrete “most favored nation” status, whereby each automatically granted the other better terms than those negotiated with other countries.



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Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, saw the American rebellion as an ideal way to weaken Britain. He did not then want war with Britain and sought to keep secret any supplies or subsidies sent to the Americans. To spearhead that operation, he tapped Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, author of the play The Barber of Seville. In May 1775, Beaumarchais set up Rodrigue Hortalez and Company as a front to buy and ship military supplies to the Americans. Beaumarchais went to London, where he met Arthur Lee, an American agent, and informed him of the operation. Lee sent word back to Congress. Vergennes convinced King Louis XVI to authorize sending one million livres in war supplies to the rebels on May 6, 1776. What Vergennes lacked was official representatives of America’s government to implement that policy. Congress dispatched Silas Deane to Versailles to solicit French help in March 1776, and he arrived in July. Congress reinforced him with Benjamin Franklin, who reached Paris in December 1776. Franklin swiftly superseded his colleagues in status and influence with Vergennes and many in the French court.40 He did so with his fame as an essayist and scientist magnified by his charm and wit. But initially he faced two daunting conditions vital for France to openly ally with the rebels: their failure to declare independence and to win a decisive victory. Independence came first. Washington’s siege of Boston continued. The Americans received a vital supply of munitions when privateer Captain John Manley’s Lee captured the British transport Nancy packed with 3,000 twelve-­pounder and 4,000 six-­pounder rounds, 10,500 flints, 2,000 muskets, and tens of thousands of musket balls on November 25. Washington dispatched General Henry Knox, his artillery chief, to transport forty-­three cannons, sixteen mortars, and munitions by forty-­two sleds drawn by 160 oxen from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. The extraordinary effort took from December 5 to January 26. Knox then organized a 635-man artillery corps.41 On the night of March 4, 1776, Washington had oxen pull the dozen largest cannons and hundreds of earth-­filled barrels atop Dorchester Heights to establish batteries protected by two thousand troops. Howe mobilized two thousand troops to attack that position, only to cancel the order when a storm erupted. Intermediaries between Washington and Howe arranged a key bloodless American victory. If the Americans did not bombard the fleet and town, the British would leave. The British began their evacuation on March 17, and the last of 8,900 troops and 1,100 loyalist men, women, and children sailed away to Halifax on March 27. Washington and his staff concluded that the British would next try to capture New York City and began transferring the army there.

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The first invasion targeted the southern colonies, where the British believed that most provincials were loyalists intimidated by radicals.42 Patriot militiamen had driven the royal governors of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina (along with their entourages) into exile. Before fleeing, North Carolina governor Josiah Martin promoted retired major Donald MacDonald to brigadier general and authorized him to muster an army and lead it to Wilmington to join a Royal Navy expedition. Whitehall dispatched two flotillas, one from Boston led by General Henry Clinton with two thousand redcoats and the other by Admiral Peter Parker from Cork to rendezvous with them. By early February 1776, MacDonald gathered around 1,400 men at the piedmont hamlet of Cross Creek and headed toward the coast. Brigadier General James Moore, with 1,900 troops, barred their route at Moore Creek Bridge eighteen miles from Wilmington. The loyalists marched into an ambush in which patriot volleys killed or wounded around 50 of them, and around 850 surrendered. That encounter ended the loyalist threat to North Carolina for three years. Clinton was dismayed to see Wilmington occupied by rebels after his flotilla dropped anchor beyond cannon shot on March 12. After Parker’s flotilla arrived on May 3, the commanders decided to sail to Charleston, hoping to take that vital seaport. Two forts at opposite ends of Sullivan Island guarded Charleston Bay’s entrance. On June 28, Parker led nine warships to bombard Fort Sullivan, also called Fort Moultrie after its commander, Colonel William Moultrie. The warships’ cannonballs mostly bounced off the fort’s walls, constructed of palmetto logs and sand. Gunners of the thirty-­one American cannons devastated the warships, sinking the frigate Acteon, killing 64 and wounding 165 sailors, while suffering 12 dead and 26 wounded. Clinton, Parker, and the armada sailed away, bound for New York City. For now, the colonies were virtually free of redcoats. That interlude was fleeting. During the fifteen months following Lexington and Concord, a series of events transformed most colonists from British subjects into American citizens.43 When the fighting erupted, American patriots split over the idea of independence, with a minority advocating it and most backing autonomy within the British Empire. On July 6, 1775, Congress sent the “Olive Branch Petition” to George III, asking him to restore relations between them. In October, the delegates learned that the king had instead declared them rebels, ordered the Royal Navy to blockade their ports and capture their merchant ships, and called on his generals to crush them. A critical boost to independence was the publication of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense on January 8, 1776. Paine’s arguments were electrifying. He castigated the “tyrannical” British monarchy for a long list of crimes against Americans. He asserted that the time for reconciliation



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was long past and that Americans must now declare independence and rule themselves because “a government of our own is a natural right.” He explained America as the “asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.” As for national policy, “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe, because it is in the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” His most stirring lines read, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. . . . We have the power to begin the world over again.” Common Sense articulated what countless Americans thought. One hundred thousand copies were sold in 1776 alone.44 Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee formally proposed before Congress on June 7, “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” Congress approved and appointed a committee of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston to draft the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote the first draft, which the committee refined and submitted to Congress on June 28. The delegates scrutinized each line and then voted on whether to accept or amend it. They unanimously approved the document on July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence has three parts. The second and longest is a list of twenty-­eight violations of American rights by the British crown that collectively justified American independence. The first is the most eloquent expression of natural law ever written, and the third is the actual declaration of independence: When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature & of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to this separation. We hold these truths to be self-­evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their happiness and safety.

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The final paragraph asserts: We therefore the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled do, and in the name & by the authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce all allegiance & subjection to the kings of Great Britain & . . . we utterly dissolve all political connection which may heretofore have subsisted between us & the parliament or people of Great Britain . . . and that as free & independent states they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, & to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

As Jefferson later famously said, the Declaration of Independence was “the expression of the American mind.” That “mind” had developed during the preceding seventeen decades as English subjects morphed into American citizens while their values morphed from communitarianism and theocracy into humanism and individualism. Two days before the Declaration of Independence, Washington issued these words to his army at New York: “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves. . . . The fate of unborn millions will now depend . . . on the courage of this army.”45 Washington had about ten thousand troops, with most deployed along a ridgeline that rose a hundred feet above the bay a couple of miles south of Brooklyn and ran east for several miles. Other troops constructed redoubts on Brooklyn Heights and high ground on Manhattan facing the Hudson and East Rivers and at Paulus Hook, New Jersey. Heading toward New York were contingents of a vast armada of 73 warships and 370 transports manned by thirteen thousand sailors and two thousand marines.46 Packed aboard those ships was overwhelming British military power. The thirty-­two thousand troops included eight thousand German mercenaries. Not only did the redcoats and bluecoats vastly outgun Washington’s men, but they also enjoyed far superior training, morale, equipment, and supplies. Commanding that fleet and army were brothers Admiral Richard and General William Howe, to whom the king had issued conflicting orders to destroy and negotiate with the rebels. The brothers sympathized with the Americans and sought to suppress the rebellion with minimal bloodshed. That professional army should have swiftly crushed the rebels over the next month or so. Two forces kept that from happening—superior American luck and leadership. Although Washington made numerous mistakes, Howe made more. The British defeated the Americans in a series



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of battles, but Washington always managed to withdraw before being extinguished. Meanwhile, Admiral Howe refused to bombard American positions or even to sail most of his warships up the Hudson River to cut off Washington from retreating to New Jersey. The armada’s first contingent of ships arrived on June 29, and over the next two months ever more anchored in the bay. British troops secured Staten Island on July 2, and thereafter more troops disembarked and rows of white wedge tents spread across the fields. Howe’s troops were split among three divisions, with Generals James Grant and Charles Cornwallis commanding the British and General Philipp von Heister the German regiments. Howe sent Cornwallis with four thousand troops of the light and grenadier companies packed in longboats to Gravesend several miles south of the American position on August 22. After they secured that position, Howe had the rest of the army rowed across. He and his generals devised and perfectly implemented a plan whereby during the night of August 26, Cornwallis led his division east to Jamaica and then north through an undefended pass and finally west to hit the Americans from the rear as Grant and Heister attacked the front. The British and Germans routed the Americans, killing 312 and capturing 1,095 men while suffering 63 dead, 314 wounded, and 31 captured. The Americans fled to Brooklyn Heights fortifications. During the night of August 29, Colonel John Glover’s regiment of tough Marblehead, Massachusetts, fishermen rowed nine thousand troops from Brooklyn to safety in Manhattan. After a naval bombardment, Howe’s army rowed across the East River to land at Kip’s Bay on September 15. That forced American troops in New York to race north to avoid capture. Washington scored a minor victory when he launched 1,500 troops against Howe’s advance guard of 1,600 troops at Harlem Heights on September 16; the Americans killed 14 and wounded 157 British while suffering 30 dead and 100 wounded. Howe landed 4,000 troops at the Throg’s Neck peninsula on October 12, but Colonel Edward Hand’s Pennsylvania rifle regiment, backed by 1,500 other troops, blocked their advance. Howe outflanked that position with a landing at Pelham Point on October 19. Washington withdrew to hilltops near White Plains. Howe launched 7,500 troops against Washington’s 3,100 on October 28; the British killed around 50 and wounded 150 Americans while suffering 47 dead and 183 wounded. After Washington withdrew north, Howe returned to Manhattan. Washington split his army. With 2,000 troops, he crossed the Hudson at Peekskill and marched to Fort Lee on November 9. He left General William Heath with 3,200 troops at Fishkill Creek. Washington made a disastrous mistake when he chose to reinforce rather than evacuate the garrison at Fort Washington on Manhattan. Howe invested the fort and

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attacked on November 16. The British killed 53, wounded 100, and captured 2,858 Americans while suffering 84 killed and 374 wounded. Even worse, at Fort Washington and later at Fort Lee, the British also captured 146 cannons, 12,000 cannonballs, 2,800 muskets and pistols, and 400,000 cartridges.47 Cornwallis landed with four thousand troops and took abandoned Fort Lee on November 19 and then pursued Washington across New Jersey. Washington withdrew across the Delaware River from Trenton to Pennsylvania on December 7. Cornwallis deployed 7,000 troops in a string of towns across New Jersey, including Fort Lee, Amboy, Newark, New Brunswick, Princeton, Trenton, Burlington, Bordentown, and Mount Holly. Colonel Johann Rall and 1,500 Hessians occupied Trenton, and Colonel Carl von Donop and 1,000 Hessians occupied Mount Holly. Washington fought his most brilliant campaign when he faced extinction.48 He devised a four-­pronged attack to cut off and destroy the Germans at Trenton and Mount Holly the day after Christmas. With 2,400 troops, he would cross the Delaware at McConkey’s Ferry nine miles north of Trenton and march south. General James Ewing, with seven hundred troops, would cross a mile below Trenton and block any German retreat that way across Assunpink Creek. General John Cadwalader, with 2,000 troops, would cross at Bristol and attack Donop. General Thomas Mifflin, with 1,600 New Jersey militiamen at Moorestown, would also attack Donop. Snow swirled and ice formed on the river on Christmas night. Glover’s men ferried Washington’s army across the Delaware. The army then marched south split between two parallel roads, with John Sullivan’s division along the river and Nathanael Greene’s inland. Neither Ewing nor Cadwalader crossed the river, claiming the ice was too thick. At Trenton, the Americans attacked after dawn and routed the Germans, killing 22, wounding 83, and capturing 834 troops and 6 cannons, while suffering 2 dead and 5 wounded. Unfortunately, without Ewing blocking the way, around five hundred Germans reached Donop. Without Cadwalader’s troops, Mifflin prudently did not attack Donop. Washington withdrew his army, prisoners, and captured supplies across the Delaware. Washington led 3,300 troops back across the Delaware on January 2 and deployed them south of Trenton along Assunpink Creek. Cadwalader, with 1,800 militiamen, joined him. Hearing of Washington’s crossing, Cornwallis advanced south from Princeton with 5,500 troops. American riflemen delayed his march with ambushes. Late that day, he deployed his troops along the creek and assaulted the bridge and two fords. The Americans repulsed the British, inflicting 365 casualties and suffering around 100. Cornwallis intended to attack again the next morning.



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That night Washington led his army south on a parallel road to Princeton and routed Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mawhood’s 1,200 troops, killing 100, wounding 70, and capturing 280 while losing 44 dead and 40 wounded. Washington then faced a tough choice. He could march to New Brunswick and capture Cornwallis’s supply depot but risk being trapped by Cornwallis quick-­marching after him. Or he could withdraw to the heights around Morristown for the winter. He chose the latter. Cornwallis withdrew his army to New Brunswick. Washington’s two winter campaigns inflicted nearly three thousand casualties on the British, liberated most of New Jersey, and inspired the American cause. Prime Minister Frederick North, American secretary George Germain, and General John Burgoyne devised a three-­pronged offensive against the rebels in 1777. Three armies would converge at Albany—Burgoyne’s from Canada down Lake Champlain, Howe’s up the Hudson River, and Colonel Barry St. Leger’s from Oswego on Lake Ontario. Unfortunately, they never clearly informed Howe of the plan or his critical role in it. As a result, while Burgoyne and St. Leger headed toward Albany, Howe went in completely different directions. Howe initially advanced toward Washington at Morristown in mid-­ June, hoping to entice him down for a battle.49 Washington prudently kept his army in its fortifications on the heights, which Howe prudently chose not to attack. Instead, Howe withdrew to New York and on July 9 packed his army aboard 267 transports bound for Philadelphia. Doldrums kept his men confined aboard for weeks. The armada did not sail until July 23, and the army did not stumble ashore at Head of Elk, Maryland, sixty miles from Philadelphia, until August 25. Bizarrely, Howe squandered most of the summer keeping his army confined in miserable conditions. The march from Paulus Hook, New Jersey, across from New York City to Camden across from Philadelphia is just ninety-­three miles. His army could have leisurely marched that in a week and begun emplacing siege guns. Washington, eight thousand regulars, and three thousand militia awaited the enemy overlooking fords along Brandywine Creek about halfway to Philadelphia. Once again, Howe snookered Washington. On September 11, General Wilhelm von Kynphausen and six thousand German and British troops demonstrated before the Americans while Howe, Cornwallis, and 6,500 redcoats hooked to a ford half a dozen miles north and then south to punch through the American right flank. The British routed the Americans, killing 250, wounding 600, and capturing 400 while suffering 93 killed and 488 wounded. Washington and his battered army withdrew to Malvern and deployed for battle on September 16. As Howe approached, a violent storm broke

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and soaked virtually everyone’s musket cartridges. Washington withdrew his army beyond the massed British and German bayonets. On the night of September 20, General Charles Grey’s 1,200 men surprised and routed with a bayonet attack General Anthony Wayne’s 1,500 troops at Paoli, killing 201 and capturing 17 while suffering 4 dead and 7 wounded. Washington withdrew through Philadelphia to Shippack Creek twenty-­ five miles west while Congress fled to York, Pennsylvania. Howe led his army into Philadelphia on September 26. Washington was determined to defeat Howe. On October 4, he had four columns converge on nine thousand British troops deployed at Germantown five miles north of Philadelphia. One column got lost in the fog, and two briefly fought each other. The attack on the British center forced it back, but Washington halted the advance to besiege redcoats defending a stone mansion. The British rallied, counterattacked, and routed the Americans, inflicting 152 killed, 521 wounded, and 438 captured while suffering 71 killed, 446 wounded, and 14 captured. Washington withdrew to White Marsh while Howe pulled back into Philadelphia. Howe’s army suffered dwindling supplies as half a dozen miles south of Philadelphia the Americans held two forts straddling the Delaware River, Mifflin west and Mercer east, with a gunboat flotilla supporting them; they prevented the British fleet from sailing to Philadelphia. General Howe had those two forts besieged while Admiral Howe engaged the flotilla. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Smith and 450 troops held Fort Mifflin from September 26 before finally abandoning it and rowing across to Fort Mercer on November 16. Admiral Howe wiped out the American flotilla led by Captain John Hazelwood on October 20, but the Americans sank the sixty-­four-­gun Augusta and eighteen-­gun Merlin. Colonel Christopher Greene and his 400 men at Fort Mercer repelled an attack by General von Donop’s 1,200 Hessians on October 22, killing 82, wounding 226, and capturing 60 while suffering 14 dead and 23 wounded. Greene and his men abandoned Fort Mercer on November 20. With his army resupplied, Howe marched north against Washington at White Marsh on December 4. Bad weather and the entrenched American army convinced Howe to return to Philadelphia. On December 18, Washington led his army to Valley Forge, a low plateau overlooking the Schuylkill River twenty miles west of Philadelphia, and had his men build huts for the winter.50 General Philip Schuyler commanded the American army in upper New York from his Albany headquarters.51 The previous autumn he had overseen the thwarting of the first British invasion on that front. In spring 1776, General Guy Carleton received reinforcements at Quebec that gave him ten thousand troops. He led them up the Saint Lawrence valley, routing



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American forces before him. By June, the American army’s remnants withdrew to Fort Ticonderoga, having lost over five thousand troops from combat, disease, desertion, and capture over the previous year. Each side built fleets on Lake Champlain, the British led by Captain John Pringle at St. Johns and the Americans led by General Benedict Arnold at Skenesboro. In early October, Arnold sailed north to Valcour Island, where he hoped to ambush the British fleet as it sailed south. On October 11, Pringle’s thirty-­three warships attacked Arnold’s fifteen, eventually that day and the next two sinking 11 vessels and killing 80 and capturing 120 sailors, while losing 3 vessels and 40 casualties. But that battle and the late season convinced Carleton to cancel his campaign.52 Burgoyne and 8,300 troops, packed aboard hundreds of boats, began rowing south up Lake Champlain on June 17, 1777. The army included 3,700 British led by General Simon Fraser, 3,000 Germans led by General Friedrich von Riedesel, 650 loyalists, and 400 Indians. Awaiting them were General Arthur St. Clair and three thousand troops at Fort Ticonderoga, with most troops deployed behind breastworks across a low plateau a quarter mile north. A pontoon bridge linked Fort Ticonderoga across Lake Champlain to one thousand troops atop the plateau called Mount Independence. Burgoyne’s army landed at Crown Point on June 30 and then advanced south and deployed just beyond cannon shot of the breastworks. Rather than assault that line, Burgoyne dispatched a regiment to build a road to the top of Mount Defiance that overlooked Fort Ticonderoga and placed cannons there. St. Clair abandoned Fort Ticonderoga on the night of July 5, withdrew his army across the bridge, abandoned Fort Independence, and hurried south. Burgoyne pursued. The British advance guard of 750 troops led by General Simon Fraser caught up to America’s rear guard of 1,000 troops led by Colonel Seth Warner at Hubbardton on July 7; the British routed the Americans, killing 41, wounding 96, and capturing 230 while suffering 49 dead and 141 wounded. The British captured Skenesboro at Lake Champlain’s south end on July 9. The American army was twenty-­three miles south at Fort Edward. It took Burgoyne’s army three weeks to advance along that road, clearing hundreds of trees felled to impede its progress. Burgoyne and his army reached the abandoned Fort Edward on July 30. Schuyler withdrew to Stillwater twenty miles north of Albany. Distressed at Schuyler’s failure to fight Burgoyne, Congress replaced him with Horatio Gates on August 4. After reaching the army on August 19, Gates led it north five miles to the broad plateau of Bemis Heights overlooking the Hudson and had his men erect fortifications. Burgoyne sent Colonel Friedrich Baum with 723 German troops southeast to capture the supply depot at Bennington, followed a day later by

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Colonel Heinrich von Breymann with 650 Germans. Three miles from town, Generals John Stark and Seth Warner, with two thousand troops, surrounded Baum and his men, destroyed them, and then routed Breymann and his men as they approached. In all, the Americans killed 207 and captured 700 Germans and 6 cannons while losing 30 killed and 40 wounded. Meanwhile, St. Leger, 750 British, and 800 Indians advanced from Oswego to begin a siege of Fort Stanwix on the divide between the Mohawk and Oswego River watersheds on August 2. General Peter Gansevoort commanded Fort Stanwix’s 750-man garrison. At Albany, Schuyler ordered Colonel Nicholas Herkimer to lead his 800 Mohawk valley militia to relieve Fort Stanwix. The British and Indians ambushed Herkimer and his men at Oriskany, three miles east of the fort. They routed the Americans, killing 392, wounding 68, and capturing 39 while the British suffered 8 killed, 47 wounded, and 41 captured and the Indians 32 killed and 31 wounded. During the battle, Gansevoort sent his troops out to raid the besiegers’ camp. After the Oriskany debacle, Schuyler sent General Benedict Arnold west, accompanied by two thousand troops. Learning of that advance and short of supplies, St. Leger ended the siege on August 22 and withdrew to Oswego. Burgoyne and his army crossed to the Hudson’s west side ten miles north of Bemis Heights and marched south on September 13. Arnold was second in command to Gates and advocated attacking the advancing enemy on September 19. Gates reluctantly gave his consent. Arnold led General Enoch Poor’s division infantry, Colonel Daniel Morgan’s riflemen, and Colonel Henry Dearborn’s light infantry against Burgoyne at Freeman’s Farm a mile north of the heights. The Americans repulsed a British attack and then counterattacked and were repelled. Arnold withdrew his troops to the heights. The Americans suffered around 80 dead and 220 wounded but inflicted nearly twice as many losses, 160 killed and 364 wounded. General Henry Clinton received a letter from Burgoyne requesting relief. Clinton dispatched General John Vaughan with 2,100 troops packed on transports up the Hudson. On October 6, the British captured Forts Montgomery and Clinton, defended by 600 troops jointly led by brothers George and John Clinton, and killed 73 and wounded 263 while suffering 41 dead and 142 wounded. They sailed to Esopus (Kingston) to loot and burn it on October 18. Clinton then recalled Vaughan after receiving Howe’s request for reinforcements at Philadelphia. Burgoyne launched another attack on October 7. Once again, the Americans led by Arnold drove them back. Gates had actually confined Arnold to quarters for insubordination, but Arnold dashed to the front and took command after firing erupted. The Americans killed 278, wounded 331,



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and captured 285 British and Germans while losing 30 dead and 100 wounded. Burgoyne withdrew, and Gates began a slow pursuit that cut off the enemy’s retreat on October 12. Burgoyne surrendered with his surviving 5,800 troops and 27 cannons on October 17. In Paris, Benjamin Franklin learned of Saratoga on December 4 and hurried to tell Foreign Minister Vergennes. That decisive victory gave Vergennes the confidence to ally France openly with the United States. The result was two treaties on February 6, 1778. The alliance treaty bound them in a defensive alliance, prevented either from making a separate peace with Britain without the other’s consent, required France to forgo any opportunities to reestablish its North American colonies, and required the United States to recognize France’s West Indies conquests. The trade treaty guaranteed between them the most-­favored-­nation and freedom of the sea principles. France’s entry into the war against Britain completely changed its dynamic. The British now had to stretch their forces to defend vulnerable colonies in the West Indies. Whitehall’s first reaction was to replace Howe with Clinton to command British forces in America on May 8 and order Howe to abandon Philadelphia and return to New York City. Some of those troops and warships would be transferred to the Caribbean. American diplomats in other European capitals redoubled their efforts to cut similar deals. The only substantial success came in June 1782 when John Adams secured a Dutch loan of nine million guilders, or $3.5 million—too late to fund military operations but vital for Congress to service existing debts in the postwar years. Meanwhile, Paris talked Madrid into a bilateral alliance with the Treaty of Aranjuez, signed on April 12, 1779. Congress sent John Jay to Madrid to join that alliance, but Foreign Minister Don Jose Monino y Redondo, Count of Floridablanca, refused officially to see him, fearing that might encourage rebellions in Spain’s own empire. In informal talks, Floridablanca rejected not only an alliance but also Jay’s request for navigation rights on the Mississippi River to the sea. Meanwhile, the Spanish retook West and East Florida from Britain in several campaigns. During the winter of 1777–1778, Washington had a German volunteer, Captain Friedrich von Steuben, train the troops in marching and fighting in close order. With mingled admiration and frustration, Steuben noted the difference between American and European troops: “The genius of this nation is not . . . to be compared with the Austrians, Prussians, or French. You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he doth it, but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and he does it.”53

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When Washington learned that Clinton, with 18,000 troops and 1,500 wagons, was marching slowly back to New York, he pursued with his 8,200 troops. Along the way, militia contingents swelled Washington’s army to 14,300 men. His advance guard caught up to Clinton’s rear guard at Monmouth on June 28. Washington ordered General Joseph, Marquis de Lafayette, to lead the attack. General Charles Lee opposed the attack and then demanded, as Lafayette’s senior, to lead it. Washington reluctantly agreed. The British repelled the attack and then counterattacked, routing the Americans. Washington rallied his troops and dismissed Lee; with reinforcements, the Americans fought the British to a standstill. Each side suffered at least four hundred casualties. The next day, the British resumed their withdrawal, and Washington halted his pursuit. On July 1, the British reached Sandy Hook, where the navy transported the army to New York City. Clinton narrowly avoided a disaster. French admiral Charles d’Estaing arrived with twelve ships of the line, four frigates, and transports packed with four thousand troops off Sandy Hook on July 11. He blockaded New York until July 22, when he sailed to Newport to assist General John Sullivan and his eleven thousand troops in retaking that port from General Robert Pigot and three thousand troops who had seized it in December. Sullivan and d’Estaing did not get along and failed to coordinate an attack. Admiral Richard Howe arrived with his fleet and prepared to attack d’Estaing when a storm scattered and damaged both fleets on August 10 and 11. Howe and d’Estaing respectively sailed to New York and Boston, where they repaired their battered vessels. On August 15, Sullivan launched an attack against the British lines but was repulsed, and four days later he withdrew. America’s war for independence had stalemated by late 1778. The British held only New York and Newport. General Henry Clinton, Britain’s North American commander, was determined to systematically crush the rebellion. He received Whitehall’s approval to invade the southern colonies, whose populations were believed to be mostly loyal, and conquer northward. Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell spearheaded that campaign when he landed with 3,500 troops near Savannah on December 23. Colonel Robert Howe defended Savannah with 750 regulars and 150 militia. A slave led Campbell and his troops into Savannah, and they routed the defenders, killing 83 and capturing 453, while losing 7 dead and 17 wounded, on December 27. General Augustine Prevost arrived to take command at Savannah in January 1779. He dispatched Campbell with an expedition to capture Augusta and recruit loyalists. Campbell accomplished that task and then withdrew with around a thousand recruits as patriot forces converged. The British took over most Georgian coastal towns and garrisoned them with loyalist companies.



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General John Ashe led 1,110 American troops down the Savannah River toward Savannah. Prevost dispatched Colonel Mark Prevost, his younger brother, with 1,016 troops to drive them off. On March 3, the British attacked and routed the Americans at Briar Creek, killing or wounding 150 and capturing 227 while suffering 5 dead and 11 wounded. Prevost then invaded South Carolina with 2,000 troops on April 29 and marched toward Charleston. General William Moultrie withdrew before him, fighting a series of rear-­guard skirmishes. By the time Moultrie reached Charleston, he had over 3,100 troops. Prevost sent his brother Mark with 1,100 troops that reached Charleston’s outskirts, drove in a screen of defenders, and issued a surrender demand on May 11. When Moultrie refused, Prevost withdrew to the main British army. General Benjamin Lincoln, who had advanced with three thousand troops toward Augusta, returned to follow the British army. On June 20, he launched an attack on the British rear guard, eight hundred troops led by Lieutenant Colonel John Maitland, at Stono River. The British repulsed the Americans, inflicting 34 dead and 112 wounded while suffering 26 killed and 103 wounded. The British army returned to Savannah. Admiral d’Estaing, with twenty-­two ships of the line and transports packed with 4,567 troops, anchored off the Savannah River mouth on September 1. On September 11, he began landing his troops to link with Lincoln’s 3,155 troops and besiege Savannah, defended by Prevost’s 4,813 troops. Had d’Estaing conducted a proper siege, the allies likely would have forced Prevost to surrender. Instead, d’Estaing, worried that a hurricane might destroy his fleet, urged Lincoln to jointly assault the British lines. That attack on October 9 was a disaster for the allies. From their redoubts and breastworks, the British poured volleys into them, killing 58 and wounding 181 Americans, as well as 59 and 526 French, while suffering only 16 killed and 39 wounded. Over the next few days, d’Estaing withdrew his battered army to the fleet and sailed away, while Lincoln retreated to Charleston. Monmouth was the last large battle in the northern tidewater region. The Americans won two battles in 1779, both attacks on British forts, from New York City, Stony Point, forty-­six miles up the Hudson River on the west bank and Paulus Hook across the Hudson in New Jersey. On July 16, General Anthony Wayne led 1,500 light infantry in a night attack against Fort Stony Point, garrisoned by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Johnson and 750 redcoats. The Americans killed 20, wounded 74, and captured 472 of the defenders while suffering 15 killed and 83 wounded. On August 19, Major Henry Lee, with 300 troops, attacked Fort Paulus Hook garrisoned by 250 redcoats led by Major William Sutherland. The Americans

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killed or wounded 50 and captured 158 British while suffering 2 killed, 3 wounded, and 7 captured. A bloody frontier war paralleled and at times overlapped with the mostly conventional war on the eastern seaboard.54 The most vulnerable region was the cluster of settlements in central Kentucky, with Boonesborough and Harrodsburg the largest. At Detroit, Indian superintendent Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hamilton supplied and often sent officers to accompany Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and Mingo war parties against Kentucky. Hamilton became known as the “Hair Buyer” for the bounties he paid Indians for scalps. Boonesborough and its founder were critical for Kentucky’s defense against British and Indian attacks. Daniel Boone was the quintessential frontiersman with his brilliance at wilderness survival, warfare, and diplomacy, along with his insatiable curiosity and courage to explore.55 He genuinely liked and respected Indians despite suffering robberies, beatings, and the deaths of loved ones at their hands. He was born near Reading, Pennsylvania, but as a boy migrated with his family down the Great Wagon Road to the North Carolina frontier. During the French and Indian War, he fought in the Braddock and Cherokee campaigns. He and his brother conducted their first “long hunt” of several months in Kentucky in 1767 and then, with several others, spent nearly two years there from 1769 to 1771. Richard Henderson of the Transylvania Company assigned Boone to build a road into Kentucky and found Boonesborough in 1775. When Shawnee captured his daughter and two other girls in 1777, he led a pursuit that killed their abductors and rescued the girls unharmed; that incident later inspired James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo character. In February 1778, a Shawnee war party captured Boone and thirty other men and took them north, eventually to Hamilton in Detroit. Boone escaped to lead Boonesborough’s defense during a nine-­ day siege by British and Indians in May. He was a captain in the summer 1780 campaign that crossed the Ohio River and destroyed the Shawnee village of Chillicothe. On August 19, 1782, he survived the British and Indian ambush at Blue Licks that killed seventy-­two and captured eleven Kentuckians, with his son among the dead. He eventually migrated to the lower Missouri River frontier, where he died in 1820. George Rogers Clark also brilliantly waged frontier war and diplomacy during the independence war.56 He was a Virginia militia captain who fought in Dunmore’s War and then helped defend Kentucky’s settlements over the next two years. In December 1777, he got Governor Patrick Henry’s approval to lead a campaign against British forts in the Mississippi and Wabash valleys. At Redstone on the Ohio River below Pittsburgh, he gathered 175 men and supplies, packed them aboard



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keelboats, and headed downstream on May 1, 1778. They captured Fort Gage at Kaskaskia on the Mississippi River and then Fort Sackville at Vincennes on the Wabash River in July. Clark negotiated peace treaties with the region’s tribes. Hamilton led an expedition that recaptured Vincennes on December 17. After learning of that loss, Clark trekked with 170 frontiersmen from Kaskaskia nearly two hundred miles to Vincennes during February 6–23, 1779. After two days of sniping at Fort Sackville, they forced Hamilton to surrender with his seventy-­nine-­man garrison on February 25. Clark led annual campaigns against tribes north of the Ohio River from 1780 to 1782. Elsewhere, New York’s Mohawk River valley suffered the worst British and Indian attacks.57 For instance, during 1780 alone, “between February and September, 59 war parties killed 143, captured 160 (including 81 women and children who were released), destroyed 4 forts and 157 houses, and captured 247 horses and 422 cattle.”58 Of the Six Nation Iroquois League, the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, and Seneca warred against not just the Mohawk valley but also the middle Susquehanna settlements, while only the Oneida backed the Americans. Fort Niagara supplied the British and Iroquois raids. Washington conceived a plan to crush the Iroquois in autumn 1779.59 Three armies would join to devastate the Iroquois heartland—General John Sullivan with 2,500 troops from Eaton, Pennsylvania; General James Clinton with 1,500 troops from Albany; and Colonel Daniel Brodhead with 600 troops from Fort Pitt. Sullivan and Clinton met at Tioga on the Susquehanna River on August 22 and then marched westward. On August 29, several hundred Iroquois and several score British blocked that advance at Newtown, but the Americans routed them, killing twelve Indians and five British while losing eleven dead. Over the next two months, the Americans destroyed around forty villages in the Finger Lakes region before withdrawing. Meanwhile, Brodhead’s expedition burned several villages on the upper Allegheny River before returning to Fort Pitt. Clinton led the next stage of Britain’s attempt to conquer the southern colonies.60 He, his deputy Cornwallis, and 8,500 troops packed aboard an armada led by Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot came ashore at Simmons Island thirty miles below Charleston on February 11, 1780. General Lincoln commanded 4,500 regulars, militia, and sailors in Charleston. He did not march against Clinton or escape into the countryside but instead sheltered in the city. Clinton opened a siege on March 29 and received the surrender of Lincoln, 2,571 regulars, 800 militia, 3 frigates, 5 sloops, 30,000 cartridges, 6,000 muskets, 376 gunpowder barrels, and 343 cannons on May 12; the British imprisoned the regulars and paroled the militia.

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During the siege, the British suffered 76 dead and inflicted 89 dead and 138 wounded on the Americans. Charleston’s surrender was America’s worst defeat during the war.61 Clinton departed for New York on June 5, leaving Cornwallis to command the southern British army. Cornwallis loosened Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his Legion to scour the countryside for patriot militia companies and supplies, recruit loyalists, and fortify strategic posts like Ninety-­Six, Camden, Rocky Mount, Cheraw, and Georgetown. Cornwallis also sent Major Patrick Ferguson to recruit loyalists in the piedmont. Congress dispatched General Horatio Gates to command 1,400 regulars and 2,500 militia at Hillsboro. Gates led his army to Camden, a strategic crossroads in central South Carolina, where Cornwallis with 2,100 troops awaited him on August 16, 1780. Cornwallis attacked and routed the militia that Gates had placed on his left and then routed the regulars on the right. The British killed or wounded around 900 Americans and captured 1,000 more (along with all eight cannons) while suffering 68 killed and 245 wounded. Gates galloped away and did not stop until he was safely at Charlotte sixty miles away. Meanwhile, the American cause nearly suffered a catastrophic blow in September 1780. General Benedict Arnold, West Point’s commander, secretly agreed to surrender that fort and George Washington to a British expedition dispatched by General Henry Clinton up the Hudson River. On September 21, Arnold worked out final details of the plot with Major John Andre, dressed in civilian clothes sent by Clinton. As Andre returned to New York, American troops captured him and found incriminating documents on him. On September 23, Arnold learned of the capture and fled to New York hours before he was supposed to meet Washington and his staff. Clinton rejected Washington’s offer to trade Andre for Arnold. A military tribunal found Andre guilty of espionage and had him executed on October 2. The British awarded Arnold a generalship, £6,315, and a £350 annual pension. Arnold’s first British command was to attack Virginia. The British capture of one American army and destruction of another did not end resistance in the south. Francis “the Swamp Fox” Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens each led several hundred troops who conducted a guerilla war of attacks against isolated British forts and supply trains. Britain’s invasion and conquest of ever more of the southern colonies increasingly worried the “over mountain” frontier settlers in the upper Tennessee River valley. Learning of Ferguson’s swelling, approaching army, they gathered and rode east against him. On October 7, around 900 frontiersmen led by Isaac Shelby, John Sevier, and William Campbell surrounded Ferguson and 1,105 troops atop King’s Mountain



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and killed 240, wounded 163, and captured 665; Ferguson was among the dead. Congress appointed General Nathanael Greene to rebuild an army in the south. Greene ranks with Washington and Arnold as a first-­rate general.62 Like Washington, Greene followed a Fabian strategy against the British in the Carolinas. He evaded British offensives; detached commands to pick off isolated British forts, forces, and supply trains; and squared off in pitched battles against the enemy army when he enjoyed the military edge. Tactically, the British drove his army from the field at Guilford Courthouse, Hobkirk’s Hill, and Eutaw Springs, but each victory proved pyrrhic. Greene explained, “I have been obliged to practice that by finesse which I dared not attempt by force. There are few generals that has run oftener, or more lustily than I have done and commonly as fast forward, to convince our Enemy that we were like a Crab, that could run either way.” As for major battles, “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.”63 Greene took command of the army’s remnants at Charlotte, North Carolina, on December 2, 1780. His most vital subordinate was General Daniel Morgan, an outstanding combat leader who had fought in the Boston, Canada, and Saratoga campaigns.64 Greene gave Morgan an independent command with six hundred regulars and any militia he could muster. Cornwallis led most of the army against Greene while sending Tarleton and his Legion after Morgan. Tarleton caught up to Morgan at Cowpens near the Broad River on January 16, 1781. Morgan organized his troops in four lines, with riflemen first, militia second, regulars third, and cavalry last. As Tarleton attacked, the riflemen fired two rounds and then retreated through the militia, who fired two rounds before retreating through the regulars, who fired two volleys and then charged along with the cavalry that struck both enemy flanks. Morgan’s men decimated the British, killing 110 and capturing 702 while suffering 12 killed and 60 wounded. No general on either side during the war conceived and conducted a finer battlefield victory. Tarleton escaped to rejoin Cornwallis. For two months, Cornwallis chased Greene as far as the Dan River before turning back for lack of supplies. Reinforced, Greene followed with 4,200 regulars and militia to square off against Cornwallis and 2,100 regulars at Guilford Courthouse on March 15. Greene tried a strategy similar to Morgan of having his militia fire a few rounds to weaken the enemy and then withdraw through the regulars. Tragically, the militia panicked and fled. Fortunately, the regulars held and drove off the British before withdrawing. The Americans killed 93, wounded 413, and captured 26 British while suffering 94 dead, 216 wounded, 75 captured, and 1,046 missing, mostly militia who deserted. Although Cornwallis held the field, he lost a quarter of his army. He withdrew to Wilmington and then

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marched north to join forces with a British invasion of Virginia’s James River valley. Greene did not pursue Cornwallis but instead reconquered most of the Carolinas and Georgia. Over the next six months, American forces captured Fort Watson, Fort Motte, Fort Granby, Ninety-­Six, Augusta, and Camden. He fought two major battles in which the British briefly held the field but soon retreated. With 1,550 regulars and militia, he fought General Francis Rawdon-­Hastings’s nine hundred regulars at Hobkirk’s Hill near Camden on April 25. The Americans killed 39, wounded 210, and captured 12 British while suffering 19 dead, 113 wounded, and 89 captured. After Rawdon withdrew toward Charleston, Greene led his troops into Camden. With 2,200 regulars and militia, Greene fought General Alexander Stewart’s 2,000 regulars at Eutaw Springs thirty miles northwest of Charleston on September 9. The Americans killed 85, wounded 297, and captured 500 British while suffering 11 dead, 392 wounded, and 78 captured. Stewart retreated to Charleston. The British now held only Charleston, Savannah, and a few adjacent towns. Cornwallis and his men trudged into Petersburg on May 20. There he combined his troops with an army that had been led by General William Phillips until five days earlier, when a disease killed him. Cornwallis now had about 7,200 troops. In December 1780, Arnold, with 1,500 troops, had invaded the James River tidewater region, defeated local militia, and burned Richmond. In March, Phillips, with 1,500 troops, joined forces with and assumed command from Arnold, who returned to New York. Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson sent pleas to Congress and Washington for help. At one point, Tarleton’s Legion nearly captured Jefferson at his Monticello plantation near Charlottesville. Washington sent first General Friedrich von Steuben, then General Joseph Lafayette, and finally General Anthony Wayne, each with five hundred or so troops. With eight hundred regulars, Wayne followed Cornwallis and his army as they withdrew toward Portsmouth. Cornwallis laid a trap for Wayne at Green Spring, leaving a small force in the open while deploying regiments out of sight nearby. On July 6, Wayne led his men against the rear guard, routed it, and then fought off converging British regiments before retreating. The Americans lost 24 dead and 122 wounded while inflicting 75 casualties. On August 1, Cornwallis led his army into Yorktown, where, six weeks later, he would surrender. During the summer of 1781, Washington and most of his army were deployed north of New York City while General Jean Baptiste Rochambeau, with four thousand French troops, and Admiral Louis de Barras, with eight warships, were at Newport, Rhode Island. On August 14, Washington received word from Barras that Admiral Francois de Grasse,



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with twenty warships and 3,200 troops packed aboard transports, was heading to Chesapeake Bay. That inspired Washington to devise and assert a plan with Rochambeau to march their armies south against Cornwallis while Barras and de Grasse bottled him up.65 De Grasse’s fleet sailed into Chesapeake Bay and anchored beside the entrance on August 26. Barras joined him on September 5. Admiral Thomas Graves, with nineteen ships of the line, appeared on September 5. The French sailed against the British, and they battled that day and the next. Finally the French drove off the British and then returned to block the bay’s entrance. The allied army appeared beyond cannon shot of Yorktown on September 28. There they deployed in an arc, with the French stretched leftward and the Americans rightward, the flank of each anchored on the York River. They began constructing the first of two parallels or lines of entrenchments studded with artillery batteries. North of the York River, General Thomas Nelson besieged the British garrison at Gloucester. The allied army included around 5,700 American regulars, 3,200 militia, and 7,800 French regulars, while the British army numbered around 6,000 redcoats and 3,000 bluecoats. During the night of October 11, French and American special assault teams respectively captured Redoubts 9 and 10; Colonel Alexander Hamilton led the Americans. That development forced Cornwallis to withdraw into his inner line. Cornwallis sent a request to talk on October 17 and agreed to surrender on October 19. During the siege, the Americans suffered 28 dead and 197 wounded, the French 60 dead and 194 wounded, and the British 309 dead and 595 wounded. Cornwallis surrendered 8,091 troops and 244 artillery pieces.66 With that decisive victory, British official acceptance of American independence was only a matter of time and terms. Peace talks opened in Paris between the Americans and British, with Benjamin Franklin and Richard Oswald leading the teams. They would not sign a final treaty until two years after Yorktown. Meanwhile, Washington had to quell two mutinies as the war lulled toward its end. The first erupted at Morristown, New Jersey, spurred by Pennsylvania and New Jersey regiments that threatened to march against Congress to get back pay and supplies in January 1781. Washington finessed the situation by releasing supplies and having several mutiny leaders executed. The second took place at Newburgh, New York, on March 10, 1782, when a group of officers met to draft a list of grievances and send it to Congress. Washington appeared suddenly before them and asked them to listen while he read them a prepared speech, as well as a letter from Congress. He squinted at the paper and then reached for glasses in his pocket, remarking, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put

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on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.”67 With many in tears, the officers assured Washington that they would remain loyal to him and Congress. The American and British delegations signed the preliminary Treaty of Paris on November 30, 1782, and the definitive version on September 3, 1783. Under the terms, Britain recognized the independence of a sovereign United States of America westward to the Mississippi River; southward to the thirty-­first parallel; northward to the midpoint through Great Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario; and then down the Saint Lawrence River and eastward to the Atlantic Ocean that formed its eastern border. The British also granted Americans the “liberty” (not the “right”) to continue fishing in the cod-­rich Grand Banks off Newfoundland and navigation down the Mississippi River from its source to the ocean. The Americans agreed that British financiers could seek repayment on £5 million in loans made to colonists before 1775, and loyalists could seek compensation for their property that rebels had seized or destroyed. The American delegation had negotiated and signed this treaty without France’s approval, as required by their alliance treaty. Nonetheless, Vergennes not only graciously accepted the fait accompli but also agreed to Franklin’s request for yet another loan, this one six million livres. French, Spanish, and British diplomats signed a treaty on January 20, 1783, whereby Britain ceded Minorca, East Florida, and West Florida to Spain. The French and Spanish joined the Americans and British in signing the definitive treaty on September 3, 1783. Americans won independence at an enormous human cost. With access to crucial documents, Secretary of War Henry Knox estimated in 1790 that 396,000 men served, with around 100,000 in the Continental Army and the rest militia. Washington’s army peaked at 18,472 on October 1, 1778.68 At least 25,000 American soldiers died, with 8,000 from combat, 7,000 as British prisoners, and 10,000 from disease; the real figure may be 30,000. Around 85,000 British and 30,000 German troops fought in the war. Deaths from all causes cost the British and Germans around 21,000 and 7,500 lives, respectively. The British lost another 8,000 men in the Caribbean. The Royal Navy lost 1,243 men from combat and 18,541 from disease. The French and Spanish lost around 20,000 and 1,000 soldiers and sailors.69 As for Indians, most tribes fought with the British against the Americans. War parties killed hundreds of men, women, and children; captured hundreds more; and looted and burned hundreds of homes and a dozen or so villages. They suffered hundreds of dead and dozens of burned villages. The worst was John Sullivan’s 1779 campaign that ravaged Iroquois country.



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American patriots fought an international war against the British and a civil war against colonial loyalists. Although patriots outgunned British loyalists in every state, the numbers were close in South Carolina and New Jersey, where the civil war was especially vicious. Around ten thousand American colonists joined either regular British or loyalist regiments. Some people straddled the political fence while trying to stay out of the cross fire. Quakers and Moravians were pacifists opposed to violence. Most blacks were slaves who followed their masters’ will but longed to be free. Around twenty thousand slaves escaped to British lines during the war. Around five thousand free blacks served in American (mostly northern) regiments. How did the Americans win independence? The United States would not have won independence when and how it did without France’s massive (initially secret) shipments of supplies and loans, followed from 1778 onward by an open alliance, sending an army and fleet to join forces with the rebels. In all, Versailles directly gave the Americans $8,167,500 worth of subsidies and supplies, while Madrid contributed another $611,328.70 Outstanding American generals were the other crucial reason. George Washington was the best all-­around general for both sides, a first-­rate strategist, administrator, spymaster, and motivator, with varying tactical abilities. Other brilliant American generals included Nathanael Greene, Daniel Morgan, George Rogers Clark, and (until he switched sides) Benedict Arnold. Henry Knox organized a professional artillery corps. Of course, incompetents plagued America’s war effort, most catastrophically Benjamin Lincoln (who surrendered 3,500 troops at Charleston to Henry Clinton) and Horatio Gates (routed by Charles Cornwallis at Camden). Conversely, bad British generalship aided American independence, most critically when John Burgoyne and Cornwallis blundered their armies into dead ends and surrenders at Saratoga and Yorktown, respectively. Of British generals, William Howe, Cornwallis, and Grey were the best tacticians. John Simcoe and Banastre Tarleton were outstanding combat commanders without a general’s rank. The American cause faced formidable challenges. Transforming civilians into army officers was a critical and daunting challenge. Congress and the state governments appointed generals and colonels, while troops elected their officers up to major. General Knox lamented, “There is a radical evil in our army—the lack of officers . . . the bulk of officers . . . are . . . ignorant, stupid men, who might make tolerable soldiers, but [are] bad officers.”71 Washington and virtually all generals perceived militia to be as much a curse as an asset. With minimal military training or experience, combat

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unnerved them and they spooked easily, although there were exceptions when militia fought bravely, as at Bunker Hill and Bennington. Washington gave this assessment: “I never was witness to a single instance of Militia or raw troops being fit for the real business of fighting. I have found them useful as light parties skirmishing the Woods, but incapable of making or sustaining a serious attack.”72 America’s victory depended on Washington and other generals building a professional army that, man for man, was just as good at marching, maneuvering, volleying, charging, and courage as the British and Germans. Eventually they achieved that goal, with special thanks to Friedrich von Steuben, the Continental Army’s drillmaster from 1778. As in all American wars, patriotism animated most men initially to enlist, but the bonds they formed sustained them. Private Joseph Martin explained his and his comrades’ mixed feelings at the war’s end: “There was as much sorrow as joy. . . . We had lived together as a family of brothers for several years . . . had shared with each other the hardships, dangers, and suffering incident to a soldier’s life.”73 As for firearms, initially most Americans shouldered a British .75 Short Land Pattern or “Brown Bess” musket but increasingly one of twenty-­three thousand French .69-caliber Charleville muskets shipped over and distributed. A few men carried rifles that were expensive, took longer to load, and could not mount a bayonet. With two exceptions, America’s saltwater navy did not distinguish itself during the war. The British blockade prevented ten of the thirteen frigates from the open sea. Captain Esek Hopkins led a six-­vessel flotilla packed with two hundred marines to capture Nassau and seize two hundred barrels of gunpowder on March 3 and 4, 1776. Captain John Paul Jones was the war’s most brilliant American naval commander.74 He captained several increasingly larger warships with which he captured several dozen British merchant vessels in the British Isles. With the fourteen-­gun Ranger, he battered and captured the fourteen-­gun Drake on April 24, 1778. With the forty-­four-­gun Bon Homme Richard, he fought the fifty-­gun HMS Serapis commanded by Captain Richard Pearson on September 23, 1779. After Serapis broadsides ravaged the American ship, Pearson shouted for Jones to surrender. Jones shouted back, “I have not yet begun to fight!” He then closed with the Serapis and led a boarding party to capture it. Each side suffered around 150 casualties of 350-man crews. With his own ship sinking, he transferred his flag to the Serapis. Aside from Hopkins and Jones, scores of privateer captains captured hundreds of British vessels during the war. Two other Americans made critical contributions to victory, although far from any battlefield. Robert Morris was a financial genius who somehow scraped up enough hard coin to keep the army alive and literally papered over the new nation’s worsening debts.75 Benjamin Franklin



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was an outstanding diplomat in the areas of both negotiations and, more important, representing the quintessential American as entrepreneur, inventor, innovator, philosopher, scientist, journalist, essayist, sensualist, and humorist. Winning independence was the American Revolution’s first crucial step. The next was establishing a viable national government to promote peace and prosperity, as well as an army and navy to defend the nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

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I know that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demands from these pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical & more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing their insolences. —Thomas Jefferson Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds, and the great sea as well as the earth! —Tecumseh We have met the enemy and they are ours. —Captain Oliver Perry

H

aving won independence, America’s prevailing strategic challenges for the next two generations were consolidating control within and trade routes beyond the nation.1 The guiding principles were “national sovereignty” and “freedom of the seas.” To those ends, the United States fought a series of wars against an array of foes for differing reasons from 1789 to 1815. Asserting freedom of the seas was the most common cause. To that end, Americans squared off against France, Tripoli, Britain, and Algiers. Crushing hostile Indian tribes led to wars against coalitions supplied by the British in the Northwest and by the British and Spanish in the Southwest. Avenging humiliations accompanied all these wars. British and Tripolitan insults and depredations especially scorched American pride. 107

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The results were equally varied. The international wars against the French, Tripolitans, and British were essentially draws; only the war against Algiers was a decisive American victory. On land, the greatest generals were Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Winfield Scott, along with Major William Eaton. At sea, captains Stephen Decatur, Thomas Truxtun, Oliver Perry, and Edward Preble won the most battles. The Indian wars all eventually ended triumphantly for the United States, although only after devastating initial defeats by Northwest Indians in 1791 and 1792. Each subsequent treaty forced the tribes to yield huge swaths of land and withdraw to smaller reservations. In the Indian wars, the most effective commanders were Generals Anthony Wayne, Harrison, and Jackson. Diplomacy won the era’s greatest American victory, and initially it was bloodless. President Thomas Jefferson took advantage of an opportunity to nearly double the nation’s landmass by purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France. Winning independence ended the American Revolution’s first phase. The second involved transforming the confederation among thirteen sovereign nation-­states into one sovereign nation-­state with a republican government. Four years after the war, Congress authorized a convention to propose reforms to the existing government. From May 14 to September 17, 1787, delegations from every state except Rhode Island debated and crafted a constitution.2 The Constitution’s preamble explained the federal government’s source of sovereignty, duties, and vital national interests: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the Common Defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Depending on circumstances, each of those American values and goals was worth fighting for. As “the supreme law of the land,” the Constitution empowered the federal government to ensure that every state remained a republic and to suppress any insurrections. The president was head of state and government and the chief military commander and diplomat. He was elected by an electoral college that included delegations from each state equal to its two senators and number of representatives; each state delegation voted for the presidential candidate that received the most popular votes. Congress would have two chambers: a House of Representatives, with members allocated to each state proportionate to its population and popularly elected, and a Senate, with two members from each state elected by the state assembly. Congress was empowered to declare war, establish an army and navy, regulate the militia, raise revenues through taxes and



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tariffs, regulate trade and immigration, create a national currency and determine its value, appropriate money for any purpose, and investigate and pass laws for anything for any reason. The Senate had the power of advice, consent, and denial for officials proposed by the president, and it ratified treaties if two-­thirds or more members approved. The Supreme Court had no explicit foreign policy power, only implicit with its judicial review power to determine whether a law was unconstitutional. To explain the Constitution and promote its ratification, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote fifty-­one, twenty-­nine, and five respective essays that collectively became known as the Federalist Papers, which were published in newspapers from October 1787 to April 1788.3 Those who favored the Constitution became known as Federalists; their opponents were Anti-­Federalists. The Constitution took effect on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it. The first national election took place from December 15, 1788, to January 10, 1789, during which each state’s assembly chose senators and presidential electors, and citizens eligible to vote chose representatives. New York City was America’s first capital under the Constitution, with Federal Hall the government’s seat. On February 4, the Electoral College met to vote unanimously for George Washington as president and, by thirty-­four of sixty-­nine delegates, for John Adams as vice president. On March 4, Congress convened with twenty Federalists and two Anti-­Federalists in the Senate and forty-­eight to eleven in the House of Representatives. Washington took the oath as the first president under the Constitution on April 30, 1789. He named Alexander Hamilton treasury secretary, Thomas Jefferson secretary of state, Henry Knox war secretary, and Edmund Randolph attorney general. He had John Jay serve as secretary of state until Jefferson returned from his ambassadorship in Paris. In Congress, Virginia representative Madison led the effort to amend the Constitution with a list (or “bill”) of rights guaranteed to all American citizens, which he introduced on September 25. That First Congress’s other key measure to strengthen American democracy was to require all federal civil and military officials to swear to defend America against “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Two diametrically opposed notions of government split Americans then and since, represented by Hamilton and Jefferson.4 Regarding the Constitution, Hamilton believed that it empowered the federal government to do anything the document did not explicitly forbid, while Jefferson insisted that government could do only what it explicitly allowed. Hamilton, of course, was at the convention and wrote fifty-­one of the eighty-­ five Federalist Papers explaining the Constitution; Jefferson was then

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ambassador in Paris extolling France’s unfolding revolution. Hamilton sought an increasingly diverse, dynamic, and internationally competitive economy of entrepreneurs, financiers, manufacturers, inventors, innovators, miners, and large-­scale farmers whose exports far exceeded their imports. To facilitate that end, he advocated federal government policies that established a public-­private federal bank to lend money to entrepreneurs, regulate the money supply and a strong national gold/silver-­based currency, and service the national debt; built infrastructure like roads, bridges, ferries, and ports; imposed tariffs for revenue and to protect “infant” American industries until they were strong enough to compete with foreign rivals; and promoted inventions, innovations, and higher education. Jefferson’s ideal was an agrarian republic of small landowners who made most of their own necessities with minimal foreign trade. To that end, he insisted on a skeletal federal government that presided over the states that ruled themselves. Hamilton advocated a small professional army and navy that deterred foreign or domestic threats and could be rapidly expanded to win wars. Jefferson deplored a standing army and navy; instead, he limited defense to state militia and gunboats. He believed that Britain was more dependent on American trade than Americans on British trade and that that power should be exploited to America’s advantage. Jefferson and his followers soon organized themselves into the Democratic-­Republican Party with their powerful newspapers, Benjamin Bache’s Aurora General Advertiser in Philadelphia and Philip Freneau’s National Gazette in New York. In response, Hamilton and his followers established the Federalist Party, whose most powerful newspapers were John Fenno’s United States Gazette in Philadelphia, Noah Webster’s American Minerva in New York, and Benjamin Russell’s Columbian Centinel in Boston. Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s policies revitalized America’s economy, transforming it from a vicious cycle of depression, poverty, joblessness, inflation, and debt into a virtual cycle of expanding wealth, trade, innovation, diversity, and prosperity. He researched, wrote, and submitted a series of reports to Congress, on subjects such as public credit, duties on imports, national bank, and manufactures. His key policy was establishing the Bank of the United States as a public-­private partnership that Congress founded with $10 million (it also owned 20 percent of the shares); the bank invested in viable businesses, lent the government money at low rates, and financed the national debt. Hamilton also founded the U.S. Mint and the dollar with a fifteen-­to-­one silver/dollar mix. He set tariffs at varying levels to protect and nurture American manufacturers. He had government finance infrastructure like improved roads, bridges,



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ports, and ferries. America’s economy annually expanded an average 3.8 percent, and the industrial index or share rose from 4.291 to 7.293 from 1790 to 1800. Merchandise trade led that expansion with exports rising from $19 million to $71 million and imports from $29 million to $91 million from 1791 to 1800. America’s balance-­of-­payment deficit fell from $8 million to $1 million during those years.5 American merchant ships sailed to the ends of the earth. The Empress of China became the first American ship to reach China a year after departing New York in February 1784. The Columbia from Boston was the first American ship to sail around the world, with stops to trade along North America’s west coast and China from 1787 to 1789. Captain Robert Gray commanded the Columbia during its next voyage and discovered and named the Columbia River in 1792. That established an American claim to the Pacific Northwest that conflicted with Spanish, British, and Russian claims. A chronic American national security problem eventually became a war in 1804.6 For centuries, the North African Barbary states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli had extorted payments from Europe’s states by threatening to seize their merchant ships, cargoes, and crews; those countries that refused to pay suffered Barbary piracy. Even the most powerful states like Britain knuckled under because a war’s costs would exceed the extortion payments. The thirteen colonies had benefited from British payments to sail unhindered. With independence, the United States faced that tough choice of bribing pirates or enduring depredations. Initially, the new government was too poor to pay. By 1794, the Barbary states had captured thirteen American merchant ships with their cargoes and 122 sailors; Algiers took most of those prizes. On March 27, Washington signed the Act to Provide a Naval Armament that would build and man six frigates (four of forty-­four guns and two of thirty-­six guns) to help protect American interests in that part of the world and elsewhere. The initial construction cost was $688,888 and thereafter annually $350,000 to maintain and $500,000 to man. Washington ensured that the frigates were built in different ports to spread the benefits—and thus political support—as widely as possible.7 Meanwhile, Washington negotiated a deal whereby, for $642,000, Algiers released eighty-­five captives and promised not to capture more; thirty-­seven died as slaves. The ransom cost nearly as much as the frigates to deter Algiers from seizing more vessels. The United States paid $56,486 in bribes to Tripoli in 1796 and $107,000 to Tunis in 1797. American frigates patrolled the Mediterranean and nearby Atlantic.

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One critical duty for the new government was to consolidate and settle lands west of the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which regulated territory north of the Ohio River and west of the Allegheny River. That Northwest Territory could be split among up to five smaller self-­governing territories and eventually states. When a region’s population surpassed five thousand settlers, they could apply to Congress to become a territory with a president-­appointed governor and a nonvoting representative in Congress. When a territory’s population surpassed sixty thousand settlers, they could write a constitution and apply to Congress for statehood. The Northwest Ordinance also forbade slavery, encouraged good relations with Indian tribes, and required settlers to establish a public school in every district. The 1790 Southwest Ordinance had similar tenets for land south of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachian Mountains and Georgia, but it allowed slavery. The new government inherited an ongoing frontier war.8 British agents in the northwest and southwest territories supplied arms and munitions to the tribes and encouraged them to drive out American traders and settlers and reject demands to cede territory. The Americans won vast cessions in New York and Pennsylvania from the Iroquois in the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix; in southern and eastern Ohio from the Shawnee and Delaware in the 1785 Treaty of Fort McIntosh; and in southern Ohio and Indiana from the Shawnee in the 1786 Treaty at the Mouth of the Great Miami. The trouble was that American bribes to a few chiefs to sign those treaties enraged other chiefs, who renounced them—most powerfully Miami chief Little Turtle and Shawnee chief Blue Jacket. The Miami lived in clusters of villages in the upper Wabash and Maumee River valleys, and the Shawnee in a cluster of villages in the Mad River valley of western Ohio. Their war parties haunted the Ohio River valley and stalked deep into Kentucky. The Americans launched two expeditions against the Shawnee and Miami in autumn 1786. General George Rogers Clark led 1,200 militiamen from Louisville to Vincennes and then up the Wabash, but desertions, low water, and dwindling supplies forced him to turn back without attacking any village. General Benjamin Logan led 790 militiamen from Limestone, Kentucky, in an attack on the Shawnee town of Mackachak, which killed Chief Moluntha and ten others, took thirteen prisoners, burned the village, and destroyed the crops. They marched on to burn the central deserted village of Wapatomica and six other villages. Those expeditions incensed rather than intimidated the tribes. The British hosted a council at Detroit of the Shawnee, Miami, Huron, Wyandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Chippewa, Pottawatomi, Wabash Confederacy, and Cherokee from November 29 to December 18, 1786. The most prominent



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leader was Joseph Brant, a Mohawk war chief who led numerous raids against the Americans during their independence war. The British equipped war parties against the American frontier to kill, capture, loot, and burn. The war did not stop land companies from buying swaths of territory and selling segments to settlers. The largest purchases were the Ohio Company’s wedge of southeastern Ohio, the Symmes Company’s wedge of land between the Great and Little Miami Rivers, and the Scioto Company’s wedge of land in southern Ohio. Congress issued land grants in that disputed territory to war veterans. Washington appointed General Arthur St. Clair the Ohio Territory’s governor and dispatched Colonel Josiah Harmar, with one hundred troops, to establish Fort Harmar at the Muskingum River mouth on the Ohio River in 1788. The Ohio Company founded Marietta near Fort Harmar. The Symmes Company founded Cincinnati in December 1788. St. Clair signed the Treaty of Fort Harmar with minor Seneca, Wyandot, and Delaware chiefs on December 13, 1788, but that did not end the war because those tribes’ other chiefs, along with chiefs of other hostile tribes, kept leading raids against the settlements. Army detachments constructed Fort Washington at Cincinnati and Fort Finney across the Ohio River from Louisville in 1789. St. Clair and Harmar moved to Fort Washington. The army was miniscule, only 672 troops and plagued by bad morale, pay, food, and equipment in 1790. Washington urged Congress to double the army to 1,216 troops. Congress complied with a law on April 20, 1790. Washington authorized St. Clair to plan an Indian campaign. St. Clair launched expeditions led by Harmar from Cincinnati against the Maumee Miami and Major John Hamtramck from Vincennes against the Wabash Miami. Harmar set forth with 320 regulars and 1,113 militia on September 26 and approached the Miami villages on October 11, but the people had fled. Hamtramck departed with 50 regulars and 270 militia on September 30 and reached the deserted village of Vermillion on October 10. He lingered there four days and then burned the village and returned to Vincennes. Harmar’s men burned five deserted villages and then suffered after October 17 when Indians drove off one hundred of their packhorses. Harmar split his troops to double-­envelop the central town of Kekionga on October 19. Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and their warriors ambushed the advance guard, killed around fifty troops, and routed the rest. On October 22, Harmar advanced again, but the Indians hit the Americans from different directions, killed 129, wounded 94, captured several hundred packhorses, and drove them back. Washington recalled Harmar and ordered St. Clair to prepare an expedition for 1791. Congress approved the president’s request to raise the

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army’s authorized strength from 1,216 to 2,128 troops split between two regiments. The actual number rose only to 1,674 that year. War Secretary Henry Knox funneled most new recruits to St. Clair. Not one but three expeditions penetrated Northwest Indian country in 1791. Kentucky militia formed most of the first two—General Charles Scott’s from the Kentucky River mouth and Colonel James Wilkinson’s from Cincinnati that respectively attacked the Wea town of Ouiatenon and the Kickapoo town of l’Anguille on the middle Wabash River. Each fought skirmishes and burned deserted villages. Initially St. Clair led 600 regulars and 1,400 militiamen when he began his slow advance north from Cincinnati in early September. Desertions and garrisons at Forts Hamilton and Jefferson that he established left him with only 920 troops on November 3 when they reached the Wabash River’s headwaters. There Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, with over a thousand warriors, attacked the invaders with the river behind them. The Indians slaughtered 636 and wounded 277 troops while suffering 21 dead and 40 wounded; St. Clair escaped with the few survivors. That was the greatest Indian victory in American history. War parties lurked around Forts Jefferson and Hamilton and ambushed supply columns along the wilderness road linking them with Cincinnati. Washington replaced St. Clair with General Anthony Wayne as the army’s commanding general and promoted James Wilkinson to brigadier general and gave him command at Cincinnati on April 13. He got Congress to more than double the army to 5,186 troops and to include a rifle regiment and cavalry squadron. “Mad” Anthony Wayne was a Revolutionary War veteran renowned for his aggression to the point that some questioned his sanity.9 He established his headquarters at Fort Fayette in Pittsburgh and there steadily recruited what he called the American Legion, equipped its needs, and trained the troops to maneuver and fight as professionals, with infantry, artillery, and cavalry supporting each other. Meanwhile, in 1792, the Indian confederacy defeated a small raiding expedition launched by Wilkinson from Fort Washington. Wayne and his Legion’s 1,300 troops descended the Ohio River to Fort Washington in spring 1793. His strategy was to establish an unbreakable chain of forts leading to the heart of Indian country. That year, he deployed his troops to assert control over the road leading north to Forts Hamilton and Jefferson and then build Fort Greenville five miles north and Fort Recovery at the site of St. Clair’s defeat in December. All along, Wilkinson, the deputy commander and a paid Spanish agent, undermined Wayne by diverting supplies and troops and by bribing congressmen to attack him in Philadelphia.10 Atop that treason, the Indian confederacy received a major boost in spring 1794 when the British constructed Fort



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Miamis on the lower Maumee River as a supply source for their war parties that raided the American forts and the supply columns linking them. British agents like Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliott, and Simon Girty accompanied war parties. Fort Recovery’s garrison repulsed assaults by several hundred warriors on June 30 and July 1. Wayne led two thousand regulars and one thousand mounted Kentucky militiamen beyond Fort Recovery on July 29, detached a couple hundred troops each to build Fort Adams on the Saint Mary’s River and Fort Defiance at the confluence of the Maumee and Auglaize Rivers, and then advanced down the Maumee. Around 1,200 Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa, Huron, Wyandot, Delaware, and Chippewa, led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, deployed at Fallen Timbers, a tangle of forest a tornado had devastated just six miles from Fort Miamis. On August 20, Wayne launched his troops against the Indians, sending most around their right flank to pin them against the river. After hard fighting, the Indians fled, having suffered around forty-­five dead and wounded while killing thirty-­ three and wounding one hundred soldiers. Wayne marched his army to Fort Miamis, commanded by Major William Campbell, on August 22. He did not attack, even though Fort Miamis not only violated American sovereignty but actively aided enemy tribes. Instead, he demanded that Campbell withdraw to Detroit, although that, too, was American territory. Campbell refused and warned that his troops would fire on the Americans if they came within range. Short of supplies, Wayne withdrew the legion to Fort Defiance. There he gathered supplies and sent friendly Indians with invitations to the tribes to join a peace conference at Fort Greenville on June 15, 1795. In September, he departed with most of his troops to establish Fort Wayne on the upper Maumee River. Congress appropriated $25,000 for treaty gifts to the participants. Delegations from all the region’s tribes slowly trickled to Fort Greenville in June and July 1795. Wayne announced a new date of July 15. Of the chiefs present, Little Turtle and Blue Jacket were the most vital. Under the Treaty of Greenville, signed on August 3, 1795, the chiefs ceded territory east and south of a line from the Cuyahoga River to its headwaters, then west to the Miami River headwaters, and then south to the Ohio River opposite the Kentucky River mouth, in return for $9,500 in annual gifts. That treaty kept the peace on the northwest frontier for about a dozen years until violations led to the next war. Meanwhile, Americans split over France’s increasingly violent and convulsive revolution, with Hamiltonians appalled and Jeffersonians inspired. Hamilton sought to abrogate and Jefferson to fulfill the 1778 bilateral defensive alliance. Fortunately, the United States was not legally obliged to ally with France because Paris declared war first against the

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Prussians and Austrians in April 1792, the British and Dutch in February, and the Spanish in April 1793. Paris dispatched Edmond Genet to the United States as ambassador with the mission of winning American aid and alliance against Britain. President Washington proclaimed American neutrality on April 22, 1793.11 Despite that announcement, Genet issued letters of marque, cannons, and munitions to the captains of fourteen American ships to prey on British shipping. Washington had Jefferson ask Paris to recall Genet. The French government did so. As in previous wars against France, Britain’s first campaign was to sweep the seas of French shipping and sever France’s international trade. On November 6, 1793, Whitehall issued an Order in Council for the Royal Navy to capture any neutral ships with “contraband” bound for French ports. Over the next year, British warships seized over three hundred American ships and sold them in prize courts, claiming that they carried war supplies to France. Aggrieved American shipowners and merchants demanded that Washington and Congress seek compensation or vengeance for their losses. Washington dispatched John Jay to London to resolve those issues. On November 19, 1794, Jay and Foreign Minister William Grenville signed the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation whereby Britain would evacuate the northwest forts by June 1, 1796, and let American ships up to seventy-­five tons burden trade in its West Indian colonies; the United States would pay for claims by British creditors against American debtors; and both countries agreed to most-­favored-­nation status for trade, mutual rights to travel in each other’s territory, and joint navigation on the Mississippi River. What the treaty did not include was British compensation to the Royal Navy’s victims. Nonetheless, the Senate ratified Jay’s treaty by twenty to ten on June 22, 1795.12 Under the 1783 peace treaty, Britain granted America navigation rights on the Mississippi River from its source to the sea. The trouble was that the Mississippi River flowed through Spain’s colony of Louisiana, so Britain’s “grant” was meaningless there. The Spanish imposed high taxes on American flatboats packed with goods that arrived in their territory and confiscated the cargoes of entrepreneurs who could not pay. Even worse, the Spanish encouraged American settlers west of the Appalachian Mountains to break away from the United States and join their empire. Word of growing secessionist sentiments reached the federal government. Washington worried that “the western settlers . . . stand as it were upon a pivot; the touch of a feather would almost incline them any way.”13 He sent Thomas Pinckney to Madrid to overcome those problems. Months of negotiations led to a treaty signed on October 27, 1795, whereby for the next three years Spain let Americans trade down



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the Mississippi River through their territory to the sea and deposit goods in warehouses at New Orleans.14 Americans suffered the first insurrection against their national government from 1791 to 1794.15 The excuse was an excise tax on hard liquor that Congress passed in March 1791. That tax fell heaviest in corn-­growing areas on the frontier where farmers distilled their excess crop into liquor. Pittsburgh became the epicenter of that “Whiskey Rebellion.” On September 7, 1791, a group of distillers and their supporters in Pittsburgh vowed “to obstruct the operation of the law until we are able to obtain its total repeal.”16 Later that month, mobs tarred, feathered, and expelled federal tax collectors. This situation posed a terrible dilemma for the Washington administration. Ignoring those crimes would establish a precedent for mob violence on other unpopular issues. Yet the miniscule army was bogged down in an Indian war and had suffered humiliating defeats. If the rebels defeated any regulars and militia sent against them, the federal government would suffer a devastating blow to its legitimacy. Washington issued a proclamation calling on the rebels to “desist from all unlawful combinations . . . to obstruct the operations of the laws” but would need two more years to muster enough military power to enforce those laws and punish the rebels. Congress passed a bill that charged seventy-­five distilleries in western Pennsylvania with breaking the law, reduced the tax for small-­scale distilleries, and dispatched federal marshals to enforce the law. Around fifty rebels besieged the home of General John Neville, the federal excise inspector for western Pennsylvania, on June 5, 1794. A dozen troops defending the home opened fire on the mob, wounding five (one of whom later died). Around seven hundred rebels surrounded Neville’s home on July 17. Firing erupted. The soldiers killed or wounded a half dozen and suffered one dead. The soldiers surrendered, but somehow Neville escaped. That victory inspired the rebel army to swell to over seven thousand men in Pittsburgh by August 1. Washington and his cabinet decided on August 2 to make a conciliatory gesture followed by tough action. The president appointed a three-­ man commission including the federal attorney, Pennsylvania’s supreme court justice, and a senator to talk with the rebels. On August 7, he publicly warned the rebels to disperse by September 1 or he would lead an army against them, and he called up 12,950 militiamen from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to prepare to march if the rebels remained defiant. The commissioners promised amnesty if the rebels complied with the law. The rebel leaders rejected that offer, and by September twenty counties in four states supported the rebellion.

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Washington marched at the army’s head to Carlisle, where he turned over command to General “Light-­Horse” Harry Lee, overseen by Alexander Hamilton. The rebels dispersed by the time the army marched into Pittsburgh. Lee had his troops arrest around 150 rebels to be tried in Pennsylvania courts; two rebels died resisting arrest. Juries found only two rebels guilty of insurrection, and Washington swiftly pardoned them. He then dismissed the militia back to their homes in November. Had Washington appeased rather than marched decisively against the insurgents, the Whiskey Rebellion would likely have permanently crippled the legitimacy and power of the federal constitution and government, thus drastically changing the history of not just the United States but also the world. Washington issued his “Farewell Address” on September 17, 1796, half a year before he actually left office. Hamilton wrote the address after prolonged discussions with Washington that forged their common outlook. The key foreign policy principle was “in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Specifically, “Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence . . . it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves . . . in the . . . ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.” Americans must especially guard within the United States against “foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.” Otherwise, “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. . . . It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”17 America’s resolution of conflicts with Britain and Spain atop its distant relations with France provoked French fears that the United States might join the coalition against them. Yet, bizarrely, rather than try to entice the Americans with trade concessions, in July 1796 the revolutionary government had its naval and privateer captains capture American merchant ships. Washington left the decision on what to do about worsening French depredations to whichever presidential candidate won that year’s election. Federalist John Adams beat Democratic-­Republican Thomas Jefferson by 35,726 popular votes (53.4 percent) and 71 electoral votes to 31,115 (46.6



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percent) and 68 electoral votes. Federalists also dominated Congress with fifty-­seven to forty-­nine House of Representatives seats and twenty to ten Senate seats. Adams was inaugurated on March 4, 1797.18 The national security priority was to end France’s war against American shipping that had seized millions of dollars’ worth of vessels and cargoes. Adams tried diplomacy by dispatching to Paris Thomas Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry. They eventually left Paris enraged when three foreign ministry officials whom they code-­named X, Y, and Z tried to shake them down for £50,000 for themselves and Foreign Minister Charles Maurice Talleyrand-­Perigord, along with the United States guaranteeing a huge loan to France from the Netherlands. Pinckney’s indignant reaction was “No, no, not a sixpence!” News of that “XYZ” insult enflamed public opinion against France. Adams took a series of steps to prepare America for war and then to launch a naval war against France if that government refused to yield.19 In the spring and summer of 1798, Congress approved his requests to permit the arming of merchant ships, establish the Navy Department, void all existing treaties with France, build three more frigates, increase the army, recall George Washington as commanding general, issue letters of marque to privateers, and authorize American warships and privateers to retaliate against French war and merchant ships. What he did not do was ask for a formal war declaration. The result was the so-­called Quasi-­War that raged across the seas over the next two years. Directing that war was Benjamin Stoddert, a Georgetown merchant who became America’s first naval secretary on June 12, 1798. In all, American warships and privateers captured one French frigate, one brig, two corvettes, and 118 privateers while suffering no sinkings and one capture, a schooner. Shipping insurance rates dropped from around 30 percent to 10 percent. Captain Thomas Truxtun’s thirty-­ eight-­gun Constellation scored the two greatest victories. It captured the forty-­gun L’Insurgente after broadsides killed twenty-­nine and wounded forty-­one of her crew while suffering two deaths and two wounded on February 9, 1799. It also battered the fifty-­four-­gun La Vengeance with twice as many shots and four times as many casualties on February 1, 1800; Vengeance escaped when a shot toppled the Constellation’s main mast. Napoleon Bonaparte took power in a coup that unfolded on November 9 and 10, 1799. On his crowded agenda was ending war with the United States. After receiving word that he was willing to negotiate, Adams sent over Williams Van Murray, William Davie, and Timothy Pickering. Bonaparte had his brother Joseph negotiate with the American team. In the Treaty of Mortefontaine, signed on September 30, 1800, France agreed to nullify the 1778 alliance, pay $20 million in compensation, and recognize neutral shipping rights. That agreement ended the Quasi-­War.

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No presidential election took longer to resolve than that of 1800. In their rematch, Jefferson thoroughly trounced Adams by 45,467 popular votes (60.5 percent) and 73 electoral votes to 29,621 (39.4 percent) and 65 electoral votes. The trouble was that each elector had two votes and split them among not just the presidential candidates but also their running mates, Democratic-­ Republican Aaron Burr and Federalist Charles Pinckney, who received seventy-­three and sixty-­four, respectively. Thus did Burr tie Jefferson for the presidency and refuse to accept the vice presidency. There were thirty-­five deadlocked votes before one elector switched his loyalty to Jefferson to make him president.20 Congress also was split. Democratic-­Republicans dominated the House of Representatives with sixty-­eight to thirty-­eight seats while Federalists held seventeen to fourteen Senate seats. Jefferson’s cabinet initially included James Madison at state, Albert Gallatin as treasury secretary, Henry Dearborn at war, Robert Smith at navy, and Levi Lincoln as attorney general. As president, Jefferson’s ideals often conflicted with the threats and opportunities facing the United States. He believed that America represented an “empire of liberty” that would spread first across the continent and then throughout the Western Hemisphere.21 Along the way, Americans would transform poor, ignorant, savage tribal peoples into productive, civilized peoples. He was an idealist when he imposed the trade embargo against Britain and a realist when he bought Louisiana and dispatched the Lewis and Clark expedition. Jefferson had two initial priorities. One was to fix the Constitution’s election fluke before the next presidential election. The Twelfth Amendment (which limited electoral votes to the presidential candidates) was proposed on December 9, 1803; passed both chambers by more than two-­ thirds votes; and was ratified by three-­fourths of the states by June 15, 1804. The other priority was to reduce the national debt, which stood at $83 million in 1800; budget cuts and tariff increases nearly halved the debt to $45 million in 1808. Most cuts came from the military. Jefferson sought to pare back the army and navy to skeleton forces while defending the nation with militia and gunboats. To that end, he worked with Congress to slash the army from 5,400 to 3,300 troops in two infantry regiments and one artillery regiment. He increased funding for coastal defenses with $2.8 million spent from 1801 to 1812, three times more than during the Federalist 1790s. He argued that a gunboat cost merely $10,000 to build, equip, arm, and man compared to $300,000 for a frigate. Starting in 1805, shipyards eventually produced 176 of Jefferson’s cherished gunboats, each fifty feet long with one cannon in the bow, with the total cost $1.5 million. Nearly all of them rotted in harbor without firing a shot.



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Confirmation of a disturbing rumor led to a doubling of American territory.22 In a secret treaty signed on October 1, 1800, France swapped the Duchy of Tuscany to Spain for six ships of the line and the Louisiana Territory that stretched west from the Mississippi River to its Rocky Mountain watershed. In doing so, Bonaparte hoped to revive France’s New World empire if he could recapture the colony of Saint Domingue, with its lucrative sugar production, from the former black slaves who had taken over in a revolt. In October 1802, America’s minister to France, Robert Livingston, got Foreign Minister Talleyrand to admit to the transfer and sent word to Jefferson. That was troubling news. Jefferson and most Americans had not viewed Spain’s corrupt, inefficient, and lightly defended empire as a threat. They assumed that the United States would gradually consume East and West Florida and Louisiana as more Americans settled there and eventually outnumbered Spain’s subjects. But if Bonaparte took over and developed those colonies, he would block American expansion and threaten invasion if war ensued. In a letter to Livingston, Jefferson captured that potential threat’s essence: “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-­eighths of our territory must pass to market. . . . France, placing herself in that door, assumes to us the attitude of defiance. . . . The day that France takes possession of New Orleans . . . we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”23 Jefferson had Livingston offer to buy New Orleans for $10 million and sent over James Monroe to lead negotiations. By the time Monroe arrived, Bonaparte was eager to sell. His New World imperial dream had become a nightmare, as yellow fever and black resistance had decimated thirty thousand troops dispatched to reconquer Saint Domingue. He offered to sell not just New Orleans but also the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States for $15 million. The French and American diplomats sealed that deal in a treaty signed on April 30, 1803. Bonaparte presciently remarked, “This accession of the territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have just given England a maritime rival that sooner or later will lay low her pride.”24 Even before Jefferson learned that France owned the territory, he got Congress to appropriate funds for a “Corps of Discovery” to explore a stretch of the continent all the way to the Pacific, with Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark appointed to command the expedition. Their mission was to map their journey, negotiate peace treaties with the Indians, and describe the tribes, animals, and geology they encountered. They gathered a force of wilderness-­hardened soldiers and hunters, packed a keelboat with vital supplies, and headed up the Missouri River from Saint Charles on May 21, 1804. A thousand miles later, they

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stopped at a Mandan village, where they sent the keelboat and their findings downstream while they built a fort for the winter. When the ice melted, they resumed their journey in dugout canoes. They bought horses from the Shoshone for their trek over the Rockies to the Columbia River watershed and then by canoe descended various rivers all the way to the Columbia River mouth, where they passed their second winter. In spring, they headed east and triumphantly reached St. Louis on September 23, 1804. During their two-­and-­a-half-­year journey, appendicitis killed one man, and a party led by Lewis killed two Blackfeet of half a dozen who tried to kill them. Their efforts reinforced America’s claim to the disputed “northwest territory” of the Columbia River watershed between the Rockies and the Pacific by traversing it. News of their successful expedition encouraged entrepreneurs to form companies that headed west for beaver furs and buffalo robes. Jefferson’s other expedition to explore the West ended ignominiously. Captain Zebulon Pike led a score of men up the Arkansas River to find its source and then crossed the divide to the upper Rio Grande valley. Spanish troops captured them on February 26, 1807; took them to Mexico City; and eventually sent them back to the United States on July 1. American payments and naval patrols did not prevent Barbary state insults. On September 17, 1800, Captain William Bainbridge of the thirty-­ two-­gun George Washington appeared before Algiers dey Selim III. Selim had the captain seized and threatened to slaughter him and his crew if he did not sign a document promising to convey in his ship (topped by an Algerian flag) an Algerian diplomatic mission to Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire’s capital. Bainbridge complied. News of that gross affront enraged Americans. Jefferson grimly concluded, “I know that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demands from these pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical & more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing their insolences.”25 He authorized navy captains to resist any more insults. Tripoli dey Yusaf Karamanli summoned American consul James Cathcart on March 13, 1801, and demanded that the United States pay him $225,000 then and annually $25,000 thereafter. When Cathcart refused, Karamanli had his troops invade America’s consulate and chop down the flagpole on May 14, 1801. On learning of that affront, Jefferson ordered a blockade of Tripoli by a flotilla led by Commodore Richard Dale. Captain Andrew Sterett’s Enterprise battered and captured the fourteen-­gun Tripoli after it attacked on August 1. But, like most blockades, tedium enveloped the flotilla year after year as ships patrolled for periods before being replaced and sailing for their homes ports until their time came to patrol again.



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That tedium ended on October 31, 1803, when Captain William Bainbridge’s thirty-­eight-­gun frigate Philadelphia ran aground outside Tripoli Bay. A flotilla of Tripoli warships surrounded the Philadelphia and opened fire. With the cannons on one side pointed skyward and on the other side seaward, the Americans could not fire back. Bainbridge abjectly surrendered himself and his 307-man crew. In a sea surge, the Tripolitans refloated the Philadelphia, renamed her Gift of Allah, and added it to their fleet. Commodore Edward Preble ordered his flotilla to bombard Algiers, but fire from the shore batteries forced them to withdraw. Preble offered $50,000 for the crew’s release, but Yusaf gleefully refused and demanded $1,690,000. Jefferson dispatched more warships to join the blockade until five frigates and seven smaller warships anchored just beyond range. The dreary standoff persisted month after month. Two officers led missions that inspired Americans. Captain Stephen Decatur was the most aggressive naval officer. Disguised as Arabs, Decatur and a score of men sailed aboard a captured vessel into Tripoli harbor, anchored alongside the Philadelphia, swarmed aboard, and slaughtered the crew on February 16, 1804. They ignited a fuse leading to the powder magazine, scrambled back onto their vessel, and sailed away under fire as the Philadelphia exploded behind them. Major William Eaton’s mission was the first American attempt to overthrow a hostile government and replace it with a friendly one. With seven marines and Hamid Karamanli, who claimed Tripoli’s throne from his younger brother, Eaton sailed to Alexandria, recruited a couple hundred mercenaries, and headed west along the coast 440 miles to Derna, Tripoli’s easternmost port. Along the way, he recruited other contingents until his army numbered around seven hundred when he reached Derna on April 25, 1804. Three American warships blockaded Derna. To Eaton’s demand to surrender, the governor replied, “My head or yours.” The April 27 attack overwhelmed the defenders, captured the port, and much later inspired the Marine Corps Hymn line, “to the shores of Tripoli.” The final American victory came on August 3, 1804, when Decatur led six gunboats against nineteen Tripoli gunboats and captured three while the others hastily withdrew beneath Algiers’ 115 cannons and 25,000 troops. Derna as a potential bargaining chip was squandered. On June 10, 1805, Tobias Lear, Jefferson’s special envoy to Yusaf, signed a treaty whereby the United States paid $60,000 to ransom the hostages. Congress authorized a $2,500 payment to Hamid Karamanli and thereafter $200 monthly in compensation for not winning him the throne. That was atop the $3 million that Congress appropriated for the war from 1802 to 1806. The United States essentially lost its first war in the Arab world and, compounding that tragedy, many more lost wars, coups, and allies lay ahead.

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As if the array of international threats were not daunting enough, enemies lurked within the United States. Jefferson received two alarming letters from General James Wilkinson, then at New Orleans, in November 1806. One was an explanation from himself of a letter from former vice president Aaron Burr, who was plotting to provoke a rebellion among westerners for an independent trans-­Appalachian country with himself the dictator.26 What Wilkinson did not admit was that he had been Burr’s co-­conspirator since a New York City meeting between them on May 23, 1804, but now betrayed him, realizing the plot had little chance of success and, if caught, he might face a hangman’s noose for treason. Burr was most notorious for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel on July 11, 1804, but was also reviled for his incessant corruption, intriguing, and backstabbing. After his term as vice president ended on March 4, 1805, he devoted himself to the conspiracy, building a network of adherents in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Like Wilkinson, Burr was a paid foreign agent for Spain and Britain. After consulting with his cabinet, Jefferson issued a proclamation exposing the conspiracy and calling on all federal, state, and local civil officials and military officers to thwart it on November 29. He submitted the plot’s evidence to a grand jury that indicted Burr for treason and conspiracy on December 11. Facing overwhelming odds, Burr surrendered with 120 men at Vicksburg in January 1807, managed to escape, but was captured on February 19 and delivered to a jail and court in Richmond, Virginia, on March 26. Judge John Marshall presided over the trial that began on April 1 and ended with Burr’s acquittal on September 1, 1807. During that time, the jury heard testimonies from 140 witnesses but concluded that reasonable doubt prevented conviction. Burr, along with Wilkinson, got away with treason and plotting secession for a region of the United States. They did not, however, conspire to take over America’s government in an insurrection and become dictators. America would not face allegations of treason at the highest level of government for another two centuries. British depredations against Americans steadily mounted during Jefferson’s two terms as president. They supplied both the northwest and the southwest tribes with arms and urged them to wage war against the United States. At sea, the Royal Navy captured merchant ships sailing to France and its allies, sold the ships and its cargoes in Britain, and impressed any sailor who failed to prove he was not British. Officially, 9,991 Americans suffered that fate from 1796 to 1812, while from 1803 to 1812 the British and French respectively captured 917 and 558 American merchant ships.27 Jefferson and a congressional majority sought to punish the British and encourage American manufacturing with the Non-­Importation Act that



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passed on April 18, 1806. That law forbade Americans to buy from Britain a long list of goods that they might make for themselves, thus developing their own country rather than their rival. Hamilton would have heartily approved had he still lived. The pressure worked. On December 31, 1806, James Monroe and Thomas Pinckney signed a treaty with their counterparts in London whereby the British explicitly agreed to seize fewer American cargoes and implicitly to impress fewer American sailors. That would have vastly reduced bilateral tensions and American losses, but Jefferson rejected the treaty because the British did not explicitly renounce impressment. A murderous, unprovoked British naval attack on an American warship might have caused war but did not. On June 22, 1807, Captain James Barron’s forty-­four-­gun Chesapeake sailed from Hampton Roads across Lynnhaven Bay, where Captain Salusbury Humphreys’s fifty-­two-­gun HMS Leopard, prepared for battle, sailed alongside. Humphreys called on Barron to halt and accept aboard marines to search for deserters. When Barron refused, Humphreys ordered his crew to fire three broadsides into the Chesapeake. With three of his men dead, eighteen wounded, and his main mast splintered, Barron had the American flag lowered in surrender. British marines boarded, questioned the crew, and hauled away four prisoners. News of that horrendous attack outraged Americans and stunned the president. Jefferson and his cabinet debated day after day over how to respond. Finally, on July 2, Jefferson announced the closure of American waters to British warships until Whitehall apologized, paid compensation, and promised to end impressment. He also publicly called on all American war and merchant ships to return to the United States. Whitehall greeted those demands with contemptuous silence. Jefferson asked Congress in December to expand the number of gunboats and triple the army’s size but did not ask then or later for a war declaration. Instead, he got Congress to pass the Embargo Act on December 22. Hamilton would have vociferously protested. The Embargo Act outlawed American engagement in international trade. That law devastated America’s economy, as exports plummeted from $108 million in 1807 to $22 million in 1808, and imports from $138 million to $57 million. Rather than pressure the British, it enriched them and other foreign merchants by ceding them market shares held by Americans. Yet Jefferson denied that reality and instead clung to his delusion that the embargo would force the British to yield. On March 1, 1809, three days before he left office, he did grudgingly sign into law the Non-­Intercourse Act that let Americans trade with any foreign country except Britain and France.

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James Madison followed his mentor into the White House. During the 1808 election, he defeated Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney of South Carolina by 124,732 popular votes (64.8 percent) and 122 electoral votes to 62,431 popular votes (32.4 percent) and 47 electoral votes. Madison enjoyed overwhelming congressional support, with Democratic-­ Republicans holding ninety-­seven to forty-­eight Federalist House of Representative seats and twenty-­seven to seven Senate seats.28 The economy was the vital issue. When the Non-­Intercourse Act failed to strongly revive America’s maritime economy, Madison accepted Macon Bill Number 2 that resumed trade with Britain and France for three months after becoming law on May 14, 1810. The United States would continue trading with the first country that promised to stop seizing American merchant ships and end trade with the recalcitrant country. Emperor Napoleon had Foreign Minister Jean Baptiste Nompere de Cadore send Madison a letter agreeing to do so starting November 1, 1810, while Whitehall remained silent. Meanwhile, British agents persisted in supplying the northwest and southwest tribes with firearms and munitions and encouraged them to resist the Americans. Nonetheless, the Americans played off many chiefs against each other, often with generous bribes. Indiana governor William Henry Harrison bought twenty-­nine million acres with the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne, signed by chiefs of the Wea, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Delaware, and Miami tribes. Shawnee chief Tecumseh was the most prominent holdout. When Harrison pressured him to yield, he angrily replied, “Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds, and the great sea as well as the earth!”29 Tecumseh journeyed among the northwest and southwest tribes, trying to forge an alliance among them against the Americans. When Tecumseh was away, Harrison led nine hundred troops toward his village, then led by his brother, Tenskwatawa, the Prophet. Around six hundred mostly Shawnee but also contingents of Wyandot, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Ojibwe, Piankeshaw, and Huron attacked the American camp near Prophetstown at Tippecanoe Creek on November 7, 1811. In desperate fighting, the Americans repelled them, suffering 62 dead and 120 wounded while killing 38 and wounding probably a couple score others. The Prophet and his people fled west, and Harrison burned the village behind them. The Americans partly avenged themselves against the British on the night of May 16, 1811. On learning that the frigate HMS Guerriere had impressed an American sailor in New York Bay, Captain John Rodgers prepared his forty-­four-­gun President for battle. In the dark, the President’s crew mistook the twenty-­gun HMS Little Belt for the Guerriere and exchanged broadsides that killed nine and wounded twenty-­three British sailors, while no Americans were harmed. A different American frigate



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would catch up to and inflict a harsh vengeance on the Guerriere a couple of years later. Madison asked Congress to declare war against Britain on June 1, 1812. As justifications, he cited persistent British depredations at sea and British-­incited Indian attacks against the frontier. Congress voted in favor by seventy-­nine to forty-­nine in the House of Representatives and nineteen to thirteen in the Senate. The votes largely reflected party differences, with Democratic-­Republicans for and Federalists against. Madison signed that declaration into law on June 18. What explains this decision?30 War hawks in Congress and beyond had loudly called for a declaration for years, citing as reasons the nation’s honor sullied and wealth stolen by the British, to be compensated by Canada’s future conquest as a lucrative spoil. They also wanted to prove themselves as heroic, honorable, and manly as the revolutionary generation that preceded them. Henry Clay and Richard Johnson of Kentucky, John Calhoun of South Carolina, Peter Porter of New York, and Felix Grundy of Tennessee were Congress’s leading war hawks. House Speaker Clay captured their fervor in a speech before Congress: “What are we to gain by war, has been emphatically asked? In reply, he would ask what are we not to lose by peace?—commerce, character, a nation’s best treaties, honor!”31 Captain Decatur exclaimed the war hawk mind-­set: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”32 Madison and other war supporters also sought to take advantage of Napoleon’s pending invasion of Russia, which they assumed would be as successful as his previous campaigns. If Russia succumbed, Napoleon’s threat to Britain would be greater than ever and would surely rivet Whitehall’s attention on Europe rather than North America. Most of Britain’s army was already deployed under General Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, fighting France for supremacy in the Iberian Peninsula, while most Royal Navy warships blockaded Napoleon’s empire. Ironically, America enjoyed an economic advantage over Britain that Madison never used. American farmers fed Britain’s Iberian campaign with grain whose shipments soared from 80,000 bushels in 1807 to 983,000 bushels in 1811.33 Merely threatening to end those shipments might have forced Whitehall to bow to American demands. Unfortunately, the Jeffersonians inflicted a devastating financial blow to America on the war’s eve. In 1811, Congress voted not to renew the United States Bank; when the Senate tied, Vice President George Clinton voted against the measure. The army numbered only 6,744 troops when the war began. During the preceding months, Congress had passed a military bill and supplements that, to entice recruits, raised the enlistment bonus from $12 to $31 and

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160 acres of land; increased the army’s official numbers to 35,603 regular troops and 30,000 twelve-­month volunteers; authorized the president to mobilize up to 100,000 of 525,000 militiamen enrolled across the states; and appropriated $1.9 million to buy ordnance. Madison had never served in the army and knew little of military matters. Politics rather than expertise determined his war and naval secretaries. Squabbles with each led to three war secretaries (William Eustis, John Armstrong, and James Monroe) and three naval secretaries (Paul Hamilton, William Jones, and Benjamin Crowninshield). The result was often deadlock, confusion, and delay on crucial decisions. None of the secretaries had significant military or administrative experience, and Hamilton was an alcoholic. Fortunately, Treasury Secretary Gallatin was as brilliant as his colleagues were plodding or worse. Typically, the Democratic-­Republican zeal for war did not extend to higher taxes to help pay for it. Gallatin proposed raising tariffs and taxes and borrowing $11 million. The war hawks rejected Gallatin’s tax proposals in 1812 and only grudgingly accepted them in 1813. Washington borrowed most of the money to fund the war. Gallatin and his successor, Alexander Dallas, from February 8, 1814, financed the war mostly by borrowing money and partly with higher taxes and tariffs. Merely paying and feeding ten thousand troops for a year cost $1.5 million.34 As in other wars, contractors reaped predatory profits while troops suffered from shoddy or nonexistent arms, equipment, uniforms, shoes, blankets, food, and medicine. Under Jefferson’s advice, Congress had eliminated the quartermaster and commissary departments to save money in 1802. Congress had to reestablish those departments with the ensuing incompetence and corruption. Armories at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, manufactured the .69-caliber 1795 Model musket and other firearms. Eventually Congress raised the enlistment bonus to $124 and 320 acres, along with privates’ pay raised from $5 to $8 and sergeants’ from $7 to $9; recruitment remained voluntary and increasingly unpopular throughout the war despite the pay and bonus raises. As for officers, although the Military Academy at West Point, New York, opened in 1802, only seventy-­one cadets had graduated as second lieutenants from its limited curriculum and teachers by 1812. Ironically, as the Americans went to war, the British announced concessions that robbed its justification. Whitehall would finally apologize and compensate for the Chesapeake attack, withdraw warships from America’s coast, suspend the Orders in Council that authorized seizures of neutral ships and licenses that let them trade in Napoleon’s empire, and suspend impressments of Americans. On learning of those concessions in August, Madison and the war hawks did not declare victory



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and revoke the declaration. They were determined to win glory as war leaders. America was a very weak David against the mighty British Goliath, especially at sea. In 1812, the Royal Navy boasted 583 warships, including 102 ships of the line and 124 frigates. Admiral Herbert Sawyer commanded the northwest Atlantic fleet (based at Halifax) of twenty-­five warships, including a ship of the line, eight frigates, and the rest smaller vessels. America’s navy numbered seven frigates, seven brigs, and three sloops for the open sea and 172 gunboats to help defend ports, manned by 4,000 sailors and 1,800 marines. America’s obvious naval strategy was mobilizing as many privateers as possible to pick off British merchant vessels and inferior warships while fleeing encounters with any larger enemy forces. Navy Secretary Hamilton split the fleet into two squadrons. Commodore John Rodgers aboard the President led the New York–based squadron, which also included Captain Stephen Decatur’s United States and Captain William Bainbridge’s Congress, sloop Hornet, and brig Argus. Captain Isaac Hull aboard the Constitution led the Boston-­based squadron that later included the Chesapeake and Constellation. Those frigates usually operated alone and sought shelter where they needed it, including each other’s home ports. Their orders were to seek and destroy warships of similar power across the Atlantic and Caribbean. The war’s first shots exploded at sea on June 23 when the forty-­four-­gun President caught up to the forty-­four-­gun HMS Belvidera; Rodgers touched off a bow gun, and the enemy replied with its stern guns. Belvidera got away after one of President’s cannons burst, killing and wounding sixteen men, including Rodgers. On July 17, Hull’s fifty-­four-­gun Constitution fled before four frigates and a ship of the line into Boston Bay. After resupplying, the Constitution sailed on August 2 and encountered Captain James Dacres’s forty-­nine-­gun Guerriere on August 19. They closed and opened fire. Constitution’s broadsides devastated Guerriere, killing fifteen and wounding seventy-­eight while suffering only seven dead and seven wounded. Dacres struck his colors, and his surviving crew boarded the Constitution as Guerriere slowly sank beneath the waves. On October 25, Decatur’s fifty-­six-­gun United States and Captain John Carden’s forty-­ nine-­gun Macedonia battled south of the Azores Islands. Decatur’s crew outsailed and outshot the British, killing thirty-­six, wounding sixty-­eight, and devastating the Macedonia before Carden struck his colors; the American suffered only five dead and seven wounded. A prize crew sailed the Macedonia to Newport, where it was patched up and commissioned into the fleet. On October 25, the eighteen-­gun USS Wasp battered sixteen-­gun HMS Frolic into surrender. On December 13, Bainbridge’s Constitution and Captain Henry Lambert’s forty-­nine-­gun HMS Java squared off near

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the Cape Verde Islands; once again, an American frigate blasted apart a British frigate, killing 22 and wounding 102, while suffering 9 dead and 57 wounded, including Bainbridge. The Java was so devastated that Bainbridge had her burned. That series of American victories so rattled Britain’s Admiralty that it ordered lone frigate captains to flee rather than fight warships of equal firepower. It replaced Admiral Sawyer with John Warren in command at Halifax and sent him ever more warships. Meanwhile, British insurance rates soared as America’s warships and privateers captured 219 prizes. The Royal Navy did capture around 150 American privateers but no warships.35 War hawks hoped to compensate for America’s weakness at sea with overwhelming land power. That proved to be a delusion. Over the next two and a half years, the army suffered many humiliating defeats and few glorious victories. The War Department included Secretary William Eustis and eleven clerks. Generals Henry Dearborn, Stephen Van Rensselaer, and William Hull initially commanded the northern regions headquartered at Albany, Fort Niagara, and Detroit, respectively. Dearborn and Hull had fought without distinction in the independence war and now doddered overweight at sixty-­one and fifty-­nine years; Van Rensselaer had no combat experience and led only militia. War hawks dreamed of swiftly conquering Canada. Jefferson imagined that deed bloodlessly accomplished after “a mere matter of marching.” Clay declared “the object of the War being the redress of injuries, and Canada being the instrument by which that redress was to be obtained.”36 With 7.5 million people, the United States certainly outgunned Canada’s five hundred thousand residents. Although the frontier between the countries was long, actual invasion paths were few—namely, from Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain, Sackets Harbor and Fort Niagara at Lake Ontario’s far east and west shores, Buffalo on Lake Erie, and Detroit. It would take months to mass enough troops, supplies, transports, and warships at any of those towns for an offensive into Canada. George Prevost was Canada’s governor general, while General Francis de Rottenburg commanded 5,600 regulars and 75,000 militia in Lower Canada, and General Isaac Brock 1,200 regulars and 11,000 militia in Upper Canada. Each would try to rally several thousand warriors from each region. Upper Canada’s Shawnee chief Tecumseh would be Britain’s most important Indian ally. Madison and Eustis concocted a plan for a three-­pronged invasion of Canada, with Hull coming from Detroit across the Detroit River, Van Rensselaer from Lewistown across the Niagara River, and Dearborn down Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River. Hull’s effort ended with



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his surrender, Van Rensselaer’s with disastrous defeat, and Dearborn’s never began. Hull reached Detroit with 400 regulars and 1,200 militia on July 5. He led his regulars and most militia across the river to besiege Fort Malden, with 860 regulars commanded by Colonel Henry Procter, on July 12. He panicked when he learned that Tecumseh, accompanied by several hundred warriors, had crossed the river to capture a supply train and rout its escort of 150 troops led by Major Thomas Van Horne near the Raisin River thirty-­five miles south of Detroit. Hull ordered six hundred militia to reopen the road, but Tecumseh and his warriors routed them. Fearing being cut off, Hull recrossed the river and holed up in Detroit. Procter emplaced a battery of siege guns across from Detroit. Meanwhile, British captain Charles Robert led 46 regulars, 180 militia, and 400 Indians ashore at Mackinac Island, approached Fort Mackinac, and demanded that Lieutenant Porter Hanks surrender his fifty-­seven-­ man garrison on July 26; Hanks surrendered the following day. When Hull learned of Fort Mackinac’s loss, he sent word to Fort Dearborn (at the future city of Chicago) for Captain Nathan Heald to withdraw with his fifty-­four regulars, eleven militia, nine women, and eighteen children. As they did so, around five hundred Potawatomi and Winnebago warriors led by Potawatomi chief Black Bird massacred nearly all of them. General Brock sailed with several hundred regulars and militia from Fort George on August 3, arrived at Fort Malden on August 14, and crossed over with 330 regulars, 400 militia, and 6 cannons to join Tecumseh and 600 Indians astride the road south of Detroit on August 16. He demanded that Hull surrender, warning that while he was disinclined “to join in a war of extermination . . . you must be aware, that the numerous body of Indians . . . will be beyond control the moment the contest commences.”37 Rather than fight, Hull surrendered with his 582 regulars and 1,606 militia, 39 cannons, and the brig Adams, soon renamed Detroit. Brock paroled the militia and sent the regulars to a Quebec prison. The British and their Indian allies had punched back America’s northwest frontier to Fort Wayne on the upper Maumee River, Fort Harrison on the upper Wabash River, and Fort Madison two hundred miles above St. Louis on the Mississippi River. Indians surged on to attack all three forts, although the defenders repulsed them. Madison appointed General William Henry Harrison to command the northwest front. With 2,500 troops, Harrison relieved Fort Wayne in September. Meanwhile, Brock returned to Fort George on August 23. The thirty-­ two-­ mile Niagara River runs north–south, with the falls fourteen miles upstream. At the north end where the river flows into Lake Ontario, American Fort Niagara and British Fort George faced each other just within cannon shot. At the south end where the river drains from

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Lake Erie, British Fort Erie guarded the west bank across from Black Rock a few miles downstream and Buffalo half a dozen miles east on Lake Erie. American troops were split among General Stephen Van Rensselaer’s 900 regulars and 2,650 volunteers at Lewiston on the Niagara River, General Alexander Smyth’s 1,650 regulars at Buffalo, and several hundred troops garrisoning Fort Niagara. Colonel Solomon Van Rensselaer, the general’s cousin, led the regulars and most militia across the Niagara River on the morning of October 13 to attack Queenstown. Brock issued orders for British forces in the region to converge and assault the invaders. The British eventually routed the Americans, killing 60, wounding 170, and capturing 436 regulars and 489 militia while suffering 20 killed and 85 wounded; Van Rensselaer was among the wounded and Brock among the dead. Generals Roger Sheaffe and Alexander Smyth, respectively, took command of the British and American armies. The British released the militia on parole and sent the regulars to prison.38 Smyth received Dearborn’s approval for an offensive. On November 28, three detachments crossed the river. Colonel William Winder’s one hundred troops captured the battery across from Black Rock; Colonel Charles Boerstler’s two hundred troops failed to capture and destroy French Creek bridge; and Lake Erie’s fifty-­man garrison repulsed an attack by two hundred troops. Smyth recalled rather than reinforced them with his three thousand other troops deployed along stretches of the river. Smyth resigned before Madison relieved him. Dearborn gathered six thousand troops at Albany and then marched them to Plattsburgh near the Canadian border by early November. Facing the Americans were 2,500 regulars and 3,000 militia led by General Rottenburg. As elsewhere along the frontier, the three thousand militia refused to cross into Canada, thus limiting Dearborn to advancing with only three thousand regulars on November 20. After some skirmishes, Dearborn withdrew to Plattsburgh, where he dismissed the militia, and the regulars spent a miserable winter in freezing log huts. The year’s last fighting was in the Northwest Territory. Harrison ordered Lieutenant Colonel John Campbell to lead six hundred cavalry from Fort Greenville against the cluster of Miami Indian villages on the Mississinewa River. Campbell and his men attacked villages on December 17 and 18, killing thirty-­eight and capturing seventy-­six Miami while losing twelve killed and forty-­six wounded. The Americans and their captives suffered the most during the withdrawal to Fort Greenville, with over three hundred cases of frostbitten feet and other extremities. Amid America’s disasters on land and victories at sea, Madison won a second term with 140,431 popular votes (50.4 percent) and 128 electoral votes to New York governor DeWitt Clinton’s 132,781 (47.6 percent) and 89 electoral votes, while war hawks remained embedded in Congress,



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with 28 Democratic-­Republicans to 8 Federalists in the Senate and 114 to 68 in the House of Representatives.39 By early 1813, Admiral Warren’s North American fleet, headquartered at Halifax, Nova Scotia, numbered fifteen ships of the line, fifteen frigates, twenty sloops, and thirty smaller warships. His strategy was to divide his fleet into blockade squadrons that outgunned any American warships. That strategy limited Royal Navy losses. Facing overwhelming enemy power, American warships either stayed in port or fled rather than seeking battle on the high seas. The British bottled up Chesapeake at Boston, United States and Macedonia at New London, Constellation at Norfolk, and President at Newport. Constitution was still at sea but would eventually slip past the blockade to refit at Boston. On distant high seas in 1813, Royal Navy warships captured some small American warships, including fourteen-­gun Nautilus, twelve-­gun Viper, fourteen-­gun Vixen, and ten-­ gun Argus, while USS fifty-­four-­gun Constitution and sixteen-­gun Enterprise respectively took HMS fourteen-­gun Pictou and fourteen-­gun Boxer. Warren led the main flotilla into Chesapeake Bay, where it blockaded ports and captured scores of merchant vessels. There he unleashed Captain George Cockburn with a flotilla to loot and burn his way around the bay. Cockburn and his men gleefully devastated Frenchtown, Havre de Grace, Georgetown, Fredericktown, and Hampton. The Americans repelled an attack on a fort defending Norfolk, killing sixteen and capturing sixty-­two British marines on June 22. Anaconda-­like, the Royal Navy’s blockade steadily squeezed America’s economy with worsening scarcities, prices, and joblessness. Ports became ghost towns with near lifeless vessels, warehouses, shops, brothels, and taverns. Most interregional trade was seaborne, so cotton prices soared for northern factories and flour prices for southern households in coastal cities. The trade collapse did encourage Americans to manufacture for themselves what they could not buy at cheaper prices from Britain, which strengthened America’s economy over the long term. Captain James Lawrence’s brig USS Hornet blockaded brig HMS Bonne Citoyenne in Salvador, Brazil, in December 1812. The British captain rejected Lawrence’s challenge to sail forth for combat. Hornet sailed away when a British seventy-­four-­gun ship of the line appeared. Lawrence and his crew triumphantly sank the brigs Resolution and Peacock off Guyana’s coast in February. For those victories, Lawrence received command of the Chesapeake in Boston. Captain Philip Broke’s HMS Shannon was part of the blockading British squadron. Broke sent in an insulting challenge to Lawrence for single ship-­to-­ship combat, taunting him “that it is only by continued triumphs in even combats that your little Navy can now hope to console your Country for the loss of that Trade it can no longer protect.”

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Lawrence accepted the challenge even though he had commanded his vessel only two weeks, half his crew was new, and Chesapeake’s resupply was incomplete. On June 1, Broke scored the first significant British naval victory as his crew outsailed and outshot Lawrence, killing 49, wounding 99, and capturing 232 sailors while suffering 23 dead and 56 wounded. Lawrence’s dying words were “Don’t give up the ship!”40 That became a rallying cry for American sea captains and their sailors. The new year of 1813 began with the latest American debacle on land. Harrison dispatched General James Winchester and 850 troops from Fort Meigs to attack Frenchtown on the River Raisin. The Americans drove off the Canadian militia holding the town at a cost of fourteen killed and fifty-­three wounded. General Procter mustered 334 regulars, 212 militiamen, and 600 Indians to circle and assault Winchester and his men on January 21, 1813, killing 292 and capturing 592 (including Winchester), while losing 24 dead and 158 wounded. The Indian massacre of sixty captives later provoked the American battle cry “Remember the River Raisin!” From Prescott on the north shore, Major George Macdonell led 150 regulars and 230 militiamen across the frozen Saint Lawrence River and attacked the American garrison at Ogdensburg on February 22. The British routed the Americans, killing twenty and capturing seventy while losing seven dead and forty-­eight wounded. The British burned the town and withdrew. Throughout 1813, the Americans and British strained to build superior armies and navies on Lake Ontario. Commodores Isaac Chauncey and James Yeo engaged in a naval arms race from their respective headquarters of Sackets Harbor and Kingston. By summer, Chauncey’s flotilla included 3 warships and 14 gunboats with 111 cannons and Yeo’s 6 warships with 96 cannons. Chauncey assigned Captain Oliver Perry the mission of constructing a fleet at Presqu’il near Erie, Pennsylvania, to assist General Harrison’s offensive later that year in the western Lake Erie region. Meanwhile, General Zebulon Pike massed 4,000 regulars at Sackets Harbor. In April, Pike packed 1,700 regulars into seventeen vessels to sail across Lake Ontario against York, Upper Canada’s capital and today’s Toronto. On April 27, the Americans landed beyond cannon shot and advanced against York. With only three hundred regulars and three hundred militiamen, General Sheaffe fought a delaying action and then withdrew toward Kingston. The Americans killed 82 and captured 274 British while suffering 55 dead and 265 wounded; the worst losses came when a powder magazine exploded, killing 38 men (including Pike) and wounding 222 others. The Americans burned the town and the vessels and supplies that they could not carry away, justifying that as vengeance



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for Ogdensburg’s burning. The following year, the British would justify burning Washington as retaliation for York’s burning. Canada governor general Prevost replaced Sheaffe with Rottenburg. Yeo landed 750 regulars led by Colonel Edward Baynes near Sackets Harbor on May 29. General Jacob Brown fended off the attack with 400 regulars and 500 militia, inflicting 47 dead, 154 wounded, and 16 missing while suffering 22 dead, 85 wounded, and 154 captured. Unfortunately, an officer panicked and burned most of the American supplies, fearing the British would capture them. That act stymied any American offensive on that front for the year’s remainder. On the Niagara front, the opposing commanders were now British general John Vincent and American general Henry Dearborn. Vincent’s headquarters and 1,100 troops were at Fort George, while another 750 troops deployed at key points up the valley anchored by Fort Erie at the end. Dearborn had around 4,500 regulars, volunteers, and militia scattered in camps along the valley. Among them, one man was critical. Winfield Scott was the war’s most outstanding professional American soldier to emerge.41 He won a captain’s commission in the light artillery in 1808 and then rapidly rose through the ranks to lieutenant colonel when the war began. He was highly intelligent, courageous, and, at six foot, four inches and 230 pounds, towered over his fellow officers and soldiers. He was captured at Queenstown, exchanged, and determined never to suffer that fate again. By May 1813, he was a colonel and Dearborn’s chief of staff. He ensured that the troops drilled daily for hours. Dearborn’s second in command was General Morgan Lewis. Dearborn, Lewis, and Scott devised a plan to capture Fort George spearheaded by Scott with one thousand troops, followed by the brigades of Generals John Boyd, William Winder, and John Chandler with one thousand troops each to land two miles west at Newark. Commodore Chauncey commanded the fourteen schooners that bombarded Fort George and the collection of boats that conveyed each wave. On May 27, Scott and his men ground ashore and advanced toward Fort George. Vincent emerged with most of his troops to flee south. Scott’s troops routed and hotly pursued the redcoats when Morgan ordered them to halt. What could have been a decisive victory was limited, as the Americans inflicted 52 dead, 44 wounded, and 272 captured on the British and took Fort George while suffering 47 dead and 42 wounded. Vincent withdrew all 1,600 troops along the Niagara front to Burlington Heights at Lake Ontario’s northwest corner. After the Americans advanced south and captured Fort Erie, Dearborn sent Chandler and Winder with 3,400 troops west as far as Stony Creek. Vincent dispatched Colonel John Harvey with seven hundred troops to attack the Americans at night on June 6. The British captured Chandler and Winder along with

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100 Americans and killed 55 while suffering 23 killed, 136 wounded, and 55 captured. Most important, they spooked Dearborn into ordering all forces to retreat to Fort George and Queenstown. On the evening of June 22, Lieutenant James FitzGibbon, with forty-­six regulars and four hundred Indians, attacked Colonel Charles Boerstler and six hundred troops at Beaver Dams near Queenstown, killing 25 and capturing 462 while losing 15 dead and 25 wounded. The British raided across the Niagara River, destroying depots at Fort Schlosser and Black Rock. Dearborn withdrew all troops to America’s side of the Niagara River except for a 250-man garrison at Fort George. Meanwhile, Harrison marched with 1,200 troops down the Maumee River valley to the rapids, where he had Fort Meigs built in February. He then withdrew to Fort Wayne, leaving behind a 550-man garrison. Procter advanced with 463 regulars, 482 militia, and 1,200 warriors headed by Tecumseh against Fort Meigs on April 26. General Green Clay led 1,200 Kentucky militia to Fort Meigs, but the Indians ambushed them and killed, wounded, or captured half while routing the rest on May 5. Procter withdrew on May 9, having inflicted losses of 320 killed and wounded and 600 captured while suffering only 14 dead, 47 wounded, and 41 captured. After resupplying, Procter led five thousand regulars, militia, and Indians back across the lake in late July. This time he split his men to besiege Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson, with 160 troops led by Major George Croghan on Sandusky Bay. On August 2, Fort Stephenson’s defenders repelled a British assault, inflicting ninety-­eight casualties and suffering eight. With his supplies dwindling, Procter withdrew. The Americans won that war’s greatest naval victory on fresh rather than sea water. By early September, Perry sailed from Presqu’il with the twenty-­gun brigs Lawrence and Niagara and four smaller warships; a banner reading “Don’t Give Up the Ship” flew above Perry’s flagship, the Lawrence, named to honor that fallen hero. In Amherstburg harbor, Captain Robert Barclay, a Trafalgar veteran, commanded the twenty-­one-­gun Detroit, the eighteen-­gun Queen Charlotte, and seven smaller warships. Learning of Perry’s approach, Barclay sailed to prevent being bottled up with the British supply line severed. On September 10, the two fleets spotted each other near the Bass Islands and closed for battle off Put-­in-­Bay. Perry’s fleet gained the weather gauge (or wind) at its back and attacked. At first the British fleet pounded Perry aboard the Lawrence, unsupported by the other ships. Perry transferred his flag to the Niagara and sailed against the British. Barclay surrendered after suffering 41 dead and 94 wounded among 306 survivors. The Americans captured the entire British flotilla while losing 27 dead and 96 wounded. Perry’s battle report included the immortal line “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”



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With American command of Lake Erie, Harrison marched north with 200 regulars, 1,000 volunteers, and 2,300 regulars and militia. The Americans retook Detroit and then crossed the river to capture Fort Malden and Amherstburg. Outnumbered, Procter withdrew in front of Harrison’s advance before deploying his eight hundred troops and five hundred Indians at Moraviantown on the Thames River on October 5. The Americans routed the British, killing 18, wounding 35, and capturing 579 while losing 27 killed and 57 wounded; Tecumseh was among 33 Indian dead. Procter withdrew east with 246 survivors. Tecumseh’s death, the British retreat, and the end of British supplies demoralized the Indians and splintered their coalition. Madison made his latest wretched choice when he replaced Dearborn with General James Wilkinson as the northern commander on July 6, 1813. Wilkinson was not just a lackluster independence war veteran with a cowardly, inept, and corrupt character but also a traitor who had conspired with Aaron Burr to detach the trans-­Appalachian West from the United States from 1804 to 1807 before turning on him, as well as a paid Spanish spy since 1788.42 Madison and War Secretary Armstrong devised a plan with Wilkinson and 7,000 troops at Sackets Harbor and General Wade Hampton and 4,500 troops at Plattsburgh to march toward each other along the Saint Lawrence and, after joining, invade Canada and capture Montreal. The campaign did not begin until October. When Wilkinson failed to appear, Hampton invaded Canada and attacked 1,530 British led by Lieutenant Colonel Charles de Salaberry behind breastworks at Chateauguay on October 26. The British drove off the Americans, inflicting eighty-­five casualties and suffering twenty-­two. That lost skirmish was enough for Hampton to withdraw into winter quarters at Plattsburgh. Wilkinson, often stoned on laudanum, slowly advanced and only reached the Saint Lawrence on November 5. He allocated two thousand troops to General John Boyd and had him attack eight hundred redcoats led by Colonel Joseph Morrison at Crysler’s Farm on November 11; the British drove off the Americans, inflicting 102 dead, 237 wounded, and 100 captured while suffering 22 dead and 148 wounded. Wilkinson retreated to winter quarters at French Mills. On the Niagara front, the Americans abandoned Fort George, their west-­bank toehold, on December 10, and General Gordon Drummond replaced Vincent as Britain’s commander on December 16. Drummond launched two attacks across the frozen river on the night of December 18; at the cost of 6 dead and 5 wounded, 562 redcoats captured Fort Niagara and 350 Americans and killed 65, while General Phineas Riall overran a battery of five six-­pounders and burned Lewistown. British raiders torched Black Rock, Buffalo, and four schooners on the night of December 30.

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The war’s most distant land action took place at the Columbia River mouth’s south shore. In 1811, John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Company established Fort Astoria near the ruins of Fort Clatsop, where the Lewis and Clark expedition had wintered from 1805 to 1806. From that headquarters, they reaped a fortune in beaver and sea otter pelts from the surrounding land and sea. On October 7, seventy-­one North West Company trappers forced Duncan McDougall, Fort Astoria’s factor, to surrender. Captain William Black of HMS Raccoon appeared to take formal control on November 30. The British renamed the site Fort George.43 Around five thousand Creek Indians lived in a cluster of villages in central Alabama. Visits by Tecumseh in 1811 and British agents at various times inspired a group among them, called Red Sticks, to go to war against the United States.44 A war party joined Tecumseh to fight at Raisin River in January 1813. Another group of Red Sticks visited Pensacola, where they met Spanish officials and British agents and received war supplies in July 1813. Learning of that visit, 180 Mississippi militia attacked them on July 27 as they headed back to their villages. On August 30, 750 Creeks retaliated by overrunning Fort Mims and slaughtering or capturing around 260 militia and 250 civilians, while losing perhaps 100 warriors. The governments of Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi mobilized their militias to converge and crush the Creeks. Only Tennessee general Andrew Jackson’s campaign actually reached the Creek heartland. Jackson was a lawyer, planter, Tennessee’s representative to Congress from 1796 to 1797 and senator from 1797 to 1798, a Tennessee Supreme Court justice from 1798 to 1804, and from 1802 the state’s militia commander, but his military experience was limited to serving as a courier during the independence war.45 During that war, he lost most of his family to battle or disease and was himself captured. A British officer slashed Jackson’s face and upraised hand with his sword when the thirteen-­year-­old refused his demand to polish his boots. Jackson carried his rage for those tragic deaths and his own brutal treatment to his grave. He was short-­fused with a prickly sense of honor, killing one man in a duel and carrying a ball near his heart and having his shoulder broken as a result of two other duels. Jackson led 2,500 militiamen south from Nashville in mid-­October, detached troops to build Fort Strother on the Coosa River, and sent General John Coffee with nine hundred to attack Tallushatchee on November 3. The Tennesseans slaughtered around two hundred Creeks and captured one hundred (mostly women and children) while suffering fifty casualties. Jackson then marched with his army to attack one thousand Red Sticks besieging the friendly Creek village of Talladega on November 9, inflicted three hundred casualties while suffering one hundred. Short of



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supplies, he withdrew to Fort Strother. Most of his militia returned home, and he spent the next two months massing more recruits and supplies. In January, he marched south with one thousand militiamen, scattered Red Sticks at Emuckfau and Enotachopco Creek, and then returned to Fort Strother for more supplies; he inflicted around two hundred casualties and sustained one hundred. Jackson’s decisive campaign began in early March as he headed south with four thousand troops, including six hundred regulars. On March 27, Jackson cornered one thousand Red Sticks at their fortified village at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River and slaughtered around 900 of them while suffering 47 dead and 159 wounded among his troops and 23 dead and 47 wounded among his Indian allies. His troops followed up that victory by killing or capturing scores more Red Sticks, including Chief Red Eagle (or William Weatherford), who surrendered. In the Treaty of Fort Jackson, signed on August 9, 1814, Jackson forced all Creek chiefs, including his allies, to cede twenty-­ one million acres, or half their land, to the United States. That done, Jackson turned his guns against the British. Wilkinson and four thousand troops spent a miserable winter at French Mills in upper New York. Facing worsening criticism for his lethargy, he led his army north into Canada in mid-­March to attack 180 troops defending fortified La Colle Mill on March 30, 1814. The redcoats inflicted 144 casualties while suffering 13 killed and 50 wounded. Wilkinson retreated to New York. British captain Richard Coote commanded a small flotilla patrolling Long Island Sound. On the night of April 7, he packed 136 marines and sailors into six longboats to ascend the Connecticut River a half dozen miles to land at Essex, a shipbuilding port. No American troops or Connecticut militia manned either Fort Saybrook at the river mouth or Essex. The British burned twenty-­five ships and dozens of warehouses packed with naval supplies and towed away two vessels. That a small British raiding party could inflict such a devastating blow without any American resistance typified the utter military incompetence of the Madison administration and most statehouses throughout the war. On Lake Ontario, Yeo’s flotilla conveyed 750 troops and Drummond to land beyond cannon shot of Fort Oswego defended by 300 troops led by Colonel George Mitchell. The British captured and destroyed the fort on May 6 then sailed away. British captain Stephen Popham led two hundred troops in longboats after fifteen barges packed with cannons under Captain Melancthon Woolsey heading toward Sackets Harbor. When Woolsey’s barges sought shelter in Sandy Creek, Popham and his men followed, only to be ambushed by 150 riflemen and 125 Oneida Indians led by Captain David Appling on May 30. Popham lost 19 dead and 140

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captured (including 30 wounded), two gunboats, and two cutters to two dead Americans. Intrepid American sea captains continued to scour the seas for British merchants and occasionally square off against British warships in 1814. For instance, after taking twenty-­seven prizes around the British Isles, Captain James De Wolf’s sixteen-­gun True Blue Yankee fell to Captain James Weddell’s twenty-­ gun Hope. Elsewhere, the American twenty-­ gun Peacock battered into surrender the eighteen-­gun Epervier while the twenty-­gun Wasp defeated first the eighteen-­gun Reindeer and then the eighteen-­gun Avon. HMS twenty-­gun Orpheus and twelve-­gun Shelburne captured the twenty-­gun Frolic. America’s farthest and longest military venture was Captain David Porter’s forty-­six-­gun Essex that sailed from New York in July 1812 in an odyssey of cruises, battles, exotic ports, and even combat with Marquesas Islands cannibals in the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific that ended abruptly on May 28, 1814. During that time, the Essex captured twenty British merchant and whaling vessels and the ten-­gun Alert. The Admiralty dispatched the thirty-­six-­gun Phoebe and twenty-­six-­gun Cherub to hunt Essex. The British caught up to the Americans in Valparaiso, Chile, and attacked after a storm damaged the Essex. Porter finally struck his colors after British broadsides killed fifty-­eight and wounded sixty-­six of his men. Alarming news reached America that Britain and its allies had finally defeated Napoleon and forced him to abdicate on April 6, 1814. Now the British could turn virtually all their guns against the United States. Madison sent an all-­star diplomatic team including Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, James Bayard, and Jonathan Russell to negotiate with the British at Ghent, Belgium. After arriving in June, those envoys received a series of disheartening reports from America that weakened their diplomatic hand. General Jacob Brown led 3,535 regular troops and 600 militia led by General Peter Porter across the Niagara River to land near Fort Erie on July 3. The regulars were split between two brigades. General Winfield Scott had daily drilled for hours to maneuver and fire as one the 2,125 troops of his four regiments clad in gray jackets and black shakos. General Eleazer Ripley’s 1,410 troops in two regiments had not received the same intense training. Brown had Scott and Porter march north toward Fort George while Ripley invested Fort Erie whose 170-man garrison swiftly surrendered. At Fort George, General Phineas Riall mustered 2,500 troops and marched south. On July 5, a mile south of the Chippewa River, Riall spotted the Americans and deployed his troops in line with his left anchored



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on the Niagara River and his right on woods. Brown deployed Scott’s brigade on the right and center and Porter on the left near the woods. Riall ordered his artillery to open fire and then his troops to attack. His right flank routed Porter and then turned against Scott, but the Americans held and poured volleys into the advancing enemy. Riall ordered his army to retreat after losing 108 dead, 321 wounded, and 46 prisoners to the American 73 dead and 249 wounded. Brown massed supplies and reinforcements before resuming his advance, spearheaded by Scott, on July 25. Drummond joined Riall and deployed 3,500 troops across a ridgeline at Lundy Lane with two cannons central. Scott attacked his left flank and pushed it back while a regiment overran the cannons. The Americans took the field after suffering 173 killed, 571 wounded, and 117 captured to British losses of 84 killed, 559 wounded, and 193 captured. Bullets wounded Brown, Scott, Drummond, and Riall, who was also captured. Rather than pursue, Brown withdrew his army to Fort Erie. The British followed and opened a siege on August 13. Colonel Hercules Scott led 2,100 redcoats in a bayonet assault on August 15. American musket volleys decimated the attackers, killing 59 and wounding 309, and then counterattacked and captured another 539 while suffering 84 casualties. On September 17, after the British brought up siege guns, Brown ordered 2,000 regulars and militia to attack. The Americans overran and spiked the cannons and inflicted 115 killed, 178 wounded, and 316 captured while suffering 72 dead and 432 wounded. The British retreated to Chippewa. General George Izard replaced Brown and on November 5 withdrew the army across the Niagara River and had Fort Erie’s powder magazine detonated. On Lake Champlain, the British launched an offensive against Plattsburgh in August with a flotilla of four warships and twelve gunboats led by Captain George Downie over water and eleven thousand troops led by General Prevost over land. The Saranac River flows into Lake Champlain through Plattsburgh. General Alexander Macomb deployed 3,454 regulars and 2,900 troops south of the river while Captain Thomas Macdonough anchored four warships and ten gunboats stern-­ to-­ bow across Plattsburgh’s harbor. On September 11, Downie sailed against the American flotilla as the British army attacked across the river. After fierce fighting, the Americans defeated both assaults. The sailors captured all four warships, killed 80, and wounded 100 British while suffering 52 killed and 58 wounded; Downie was among the dead. The troops killed 37, wounded 150, and captured or accepted as deserters 355 British while suffering 38 killed, 64 wounded, and 20 captured.

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Madison’s latest tragic appointment was General William Winder for the region that embraced Washington City. Winder had revealed his incompetence on numerous occasions, with the worst at Stony Creek, where a smaller British and Indian force captured him and most of his men. Politics motivated Madison to ensure that Winder was exchanged and promoted rather than cashiered. That decision led to America’s most humiliating and destructive defeat of the war. Admiral Alexander Cochrane replaced Warren as Chesapeake Bay commander in 1814. Cochrane’s deputy, Commodore Cockburn, issued these instructions to his warship captains: “You are at perfect liberty . . . to act with utmost hostility against the shores of the United States.”46 His captains gleefully did so, repeatedly landing marines to loot and burn towns all around that vast bay, including Leonardstown, Nominy Ferry, Saint Clement, Machodoc, Hamburg, and Chaptico. General Robert Ross commanded 4,500 British troops packed aboard the flotilla. Ross led those redcoats ashore at Benedict, Maryland, on August 19 and headed north. Winder had scattered troops throughout the region and now ordered them to converge at Bladensburg, forty-­five miles north of Benedict and eight miles east of unfortified and undefended Washington. On August 24, the redcoats approached Winder’s 6,300 mostly militiamen nervously awaiting them. Ross ordered an attack and the Americans fled, although they were more numerous and suffered only 26 killed and 51 wounded to 64 killed and 185 wounded British. Learning of the debacle, Madison and other federal administrators fled to Virginia. The British marched into Washington that evening. Ross, Cockburn, and their staff devoured a dinner that had been prepared at the White House and then ordered it (along with the Capitol, all other public buildings, and the navy yard) burned. The worst losses were the documents at the Library of Congress and other departments. In all, the British inflicted $1.5 million of damage and the next morning began a leisurely march with two hundred cannons, five hundred barrels of gunpowder, and one hundred thousand cartridges back to the fleet. That was not the last blow. Captain James Gordon’s squadron sailed up the Potomac, bombarded Fort Washington below the capital, captured twenty-­one vessels near Washington, and then descended with the prizes on August 27. The British armada sailed to Baltimore. General Samuel Smith commanded eleven thousand regulars and militia deployed in forts around the city. The key defense was Fort McHenry, which guarded the half-­ mile-­wide bay leading to the city. On September 12, Ross and his troops landed at North Point fourteen miles from the port and routed 3,200 militia led by General John Stricker, inflicting 46 killed and 295 wounded and suffering 24 killed, 139 wounded, and 50 captured; Ross was among the dead. Colonel Arthur Brooke assumed command and advanced slowly



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toward Baltimore over the next three days as the fleet bombarded Fort McHenry and a battery at Lazaretto Point. The Americans refused to surrender. Cochrane and Brooke withdrew on September 14. At Ghent, the American diplomats tried to make the most of a poor hand. The British held far more American territory than the Americans held British territory. The British retained Fort Niagara, and in September 1814 Admiral Edward Griffith led a flotilla packed with 2,500 marines and soldiers that occupied a hundred-­mile stretch of Maine coast that included Castine and Machias. In contrast, the Americans occupied only Canada’s side of the Detroit River. There were two rounds of negotiations, the first taking place on August 8–19 and the second December 1–23. The first one ended in stalemate, as the Americans rejected British demands for an Indian buffer state in the northwest, Fort Niagara, Fort Mackinac, and most of Maine. During the second round, the exhausted envoys finally agreed to status quo ante bellum, or returning to what one held before the war. The exception was Fort George (formerly Fort Astoria) at the Columbia River mouth, which the British retained. They left some issues for future negotiations, most notably Maine’s exact borders. They signed the treaty on December 24. Prince Regent George ratified the treaty and presented it to Parliament. Madison received the treaty on February 13 and submitted it to the Senate, which unanimously ratified it on February 16. Tragically, the peace treaty did not catch up with the war’s last campaign until it was too late. Jackson was the southwest’s senior commander. After crushing the Creeks, he marched to Mobile and garrisoned 160 regulars in Fort Bowyer at the bay’s entrance. Fort Bowyer’s defenders repulsed British attacks on September 14 and 15, destroyed the twenty-­two-­gun Hermes, and killed thirty-­four and wounded thirty-­five British while suffering four dead and five wounded. Jackson led his army unopposed into Pensacola, Spanish territory but a haven for British agents and warships, on November 7. After learning that the British had abandoned and blown up their forts on Pensacola Bay and the Apalachicola River mouth, he withdrew to Mobile on November 19. Intelligence of a British expedition heading toward New Orleans prompted Jackson’s march toward the city on November 22 and arrival on December 3. Over the next month, he declared martial law, gathered troops and supplies, and strengthened the city’s defenses. Three water routes lead to or near New Orleans. The city is 105 miles up the Mississippi River from the sea, with Fort St. Philip and Fort St. Leon fifty and seventy respective miles upstream; that is the only way navigable by ships. A dozen miles east of New Orleans begins a shallow

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stretch of sea called Lake Borgne that extends twenty-­five miles to the open Gulf of Mexico. Shallow Lake Pontchartrain begins six miles north of New Orleans and reaches the Gulf twenty miles east. The intelligence that Jackson had received was correct. Sixty-­five hundred redcoats led by General Edward Pakenham were packed aboard a flotilla sailing toward Lake Borgne. Guarding that route were five gunboats led by Captain Thomas Jones. On December 12, the armada dropped anchor and lowered hundreds of longboats that troops and supplies filled. Captain Nicholas Lockyer commanded forty longboats packed with one thousand marines and sailors that chased Jones and his men. The pursuit lasted thirty-­six grueling hours until the British captured all five gunboats and a sloop that joined them, after suffering 19 killed and 75 wounded. The main body of longboats caught up and began filing through Bayou Bienvenue and then Bayou Jumonville, which ended a mile from the Mississippi River at Villere plantation, seven miles southeast of New Orleans. There Colonel William Thornton and 1,800 troop disembarked on December 23. On learning of the British presence, Jackson ordered a night attack of 1,500 troops by land and the sloops fifteen-­gun Carolina and sixteen-­gun Louisiana by river. The sloops anchored parallel to the British camp in the swift current and opened fire. That signaled the troops to assault the camp. In the wild melee, the Americans killed 46, wounded 167, and captured 64 British while suffering 24 killed and 115 wounded. They withdrew having bloodied and terrorized the enemy. Jackson had breastworks studded with artillery batteries erected behind a shallow canal that ran fifteen hundred yards from the river to a swamp five miles from the city. Across the river, he placed seven hundred troops and an artillery battery. Jackson’s army eventually numbered 3,500 men and was the most diverse in American history, including regular regiments; militia regiments from Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi; separate companies of French, Spanish, free blacks, and Choctaw Indians; and an artillery company of Jean Lafitte’s pirates from their haven at Barataria, forty miles southwest of the city. Pakenham and the rest of the army and supplies disembarked by December 25. Pakenham’s first step was to set up a battery that opened fire on the two sloops; that barrage sank the Carolina and forced the Louisiana to sail upriver on December 27. He then had batteries erected to bombard the American line. In the artillery duel on December 31, American gunners killed twenty-­three and wounded forty-­one British while suffering eleven killed and twenty-­three wounded. Most British shots plopped harmlessly in the thick mud. Pakenham ordered simultaneous assaults on both sides of the river after dawn on January 8, with 5,300 troops against the canal and 1,500



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troops against the battery on the west bank. The attack across the river routed the defenders. The canal defenders lowered their muskets, rifles, and cannons to devastate the main assault, inflicting 291 dead, 1,262 wounded, and 484 captured while suffering 13 dead, 39 wounded, and 19 captured; Pakenham was among the dead. Jackson and his men won that war’s most lopsided victory. During the entire campaign, the British suffered 2,450 casualties. General John Lambert took command of the British army. His challenge was to evacuate his army while staving off a massive American attack at his rear. However, Jackson was content to let the British go. The British expedition packed aboard the flotilla and sailed away in late January. A contingent captured Fort Bowyer on February 12 after a five-­day siege. Nature gave the British a final and unique naval victory. A storm drove Decatur’s President aground on Long Island Sound on January 14, 1815. Although the crew managed to refloat the ship, it was badly damaged. A squadron of British warships caught up to the President and bombarded it, killing twenty-­four and wounding sixty Americans; Decatur ordered the flag lowed in surrender. This was the sole British capture of an American frigate during the war. However, the Americans ended the naval war with victory. Captain Charles Stewart’s Constitution squared off against the twenty-­four-­gun Cyane and eighteen-­gun Levant a hundred miles northeast of Madera on February 20 and battered both into surrender. The War of 1812 was among the most senseless in American history. The United States went to war against Britain for no good reason, fought the war ineptly, suffered far more humiliating and disastrous defeats than scored uplifting triumphs, and gained nothing of economic or strategic value with the peace treaty. The only clear victory was crushing the northwest and southwest tribes, confining them to small reservations, and opening their land to settlers. During the war, the United States mobilized 528,000 troops, including 57,000 regulars, 10,000 volunteers, 3,000 rangers, and 458,000 militia, along with 20,000 sailors. The war’s human cost for the United States was 2,260 dead and 4,505 wounded in combat and around 17,000 dead from disease. Thousands more men suffered grievous, often crippling wounds and injuries.47 The war’s financial cost was $158 million in government expenses, including $93 million for the army and navy, $16 million in interest on the national debt, and $49 million in pensions. Washington borrowed most of that. America’s national debt skyrocketed from $45 million in 1812 to $127 million in 1815. Treasury Secretaries Gallatin and Dallas were masters at

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negotiating and servicing loans and at getting Congress to raise taxes and tariffs.48 The war devastated America’s economy with inflation, bankruptcies, lost trade, and destroyed property. Trade plummeted from 948,000 tons, $61.3 million in exports, and $53.4 million imports in 1811 to 60,000 tons, $6.9 million in exports, and $6 million imports in 1814. The elimination of the First Bank of the United States in 1811 resulted in $7 million in coin repatriated to European investors and the mushrooming of unreliable state banks from 117 in 1811 to 212 in 1815 and, with them, mostly unsecured bank notes from $66 million to $115 million.49 Nonetheless, some American merchants profited enormously. Contractors made fortunes selling (often poorly made) firearms, uniforms, shoes, and blankets to the army. Indeed, some Americans were the nation’s worst enemies. The Madison administration allowed grain sales to the British army fighting the French in Iberia and cattle and flour sales to the British army fighting Americans along the Canadian frontier. General Izard angrily protested that were “it not for these supplies the British forces in Canada would soon be suffering from famine, or their government subjected to enormous expense for their maintenance.” Canadian governor Prevost reported to Whitehall that “two-­thirds of the British Army in Canada are, at this Moment, eating Beef provided by American Contractors drawn principally from the States of Vermont and New York.”50 Army leadership was America’s worst handicap. The seniority system for regulars and political appointments for volunteers saddled the army with inept, plodding, easily rattled officers from lieutenant to commanding general. Madison tried to correct that problem by firing incompetents and promoting enterprising officers. The average age for generals plummeted from sixty years in June 1812 to thirty-­six years in June 1814.51 Winfield Scott was the most outstanding regular officer who mastered the art of war. Gifted amateurs who quick-­learned on the job and ruthlessly sought to destroy the enemy included Generals Jacob Brown, William Henry Harrison, and Andrew Jackson. In contrast, America’s naval leaders were mostly brilliant, with Captains Oliver Perry, Stephen Decatur, and David Porter the greatest. In ship-­to-­ship duels, the Americans scored two for each British victory. American warships and privateers captured 1,175 British merchant ships, lost 373 to recapture, and so enriched themselves with 802. Those losses hurt investors but inflicted little damage amid twenty-­five thousand registered British merchant vessels. British warships captured twelve and burned at anchor three American warships and captured 714 American merchant vessels.52 Amid the economic ruin and humiliating defeats, Congressman Henry Clay found an emotional victory, at least for himself and his fellow war



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hawks: “Let any man look at the degraded condition of this country before the war; the scorn of the universe, the contempt of ourselves; and tell me if we have gained nothing by the war? What is our present situation? Respectability and character abroad—and security and confidence at home.”53 Those who returned from the war crippled or who suffered the deaths of loved ones or the destruction of their businesses or homes might be forgiven for not sharing such sentiments. Peace with Britain let the United States fight Algiers, which had allied with Britain during the war. Aboard the forty-­four-­gun Guerriere, Decatur led a flotilla of nine other warships off Algiers on June 17, 1815. Alone with his Guerriere, he squared off against the forty-­ six-­ gun Mashuda, which his gun crews devastated and took. Two days later, the Guerriere captured an Algerian brig. On July 3, Dey Omar the Aga signed a treaty whereby he promised to release ten American prisoners, pay the United States $10,000 in compensation, and never again capture Americans or their property. Decatur sailed first to Tunis and then Tripoli, whose deys respectively paid $46,000 and $25,000 and promised the same. Spearheaded by Decatur’s brilliant leadership, the United States decisively won its second war in the Arab world. What followed was a century-­and-­ a-half hiatus in American relations with the Middle East as the nation’s interests multiplied and deepened elsewhere around the world.

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Expansion Wars

We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits on our onward march? —John O’Sullivan The United States cannot in silence permit any European interference on the North American continent, and should any interference be attempted [the United States] will be ready to resist it at any and all hazard. —James Polk

A

call for a crusade to realize a venerable American belief appeared in 1839. In an essay for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, newspaper editor John O’Sullivan argued that “our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of a new political system, which . . . as regards the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity. . . . We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits on our onward march?”1 In an 1845 editorial for his Morning Star newspaper, O’Sullivan declared that the United States had a “Manifest Destiny” to expand across the continent to the Pacific and beyond. Manifest Destiny was the latest avatar of American exceptionalism and expansionism first articulated by Massachusetts governor John Winthrop in his “City on a Hill” sermon two centuries earlier. Thomas Jefferson’s vision for America to become an “empire of liberty” was the 149

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revolutionary generation’s version. All along during the colonial and early republic eras, statesmen, entrepreneurs, explorers, settlers, and soldiers pursued that mission, animated mostly by material self-­interest but at times by lofty ideals. From 1815 to 1861, the United States completed its expansion across the continent through assertive diplomacy, an industrial revolution, victorious wars, and an increasingly brilliant and celebratory high culture.2 During that time, America fought one big war—with Mexico—and numerous smaller conflicts within and beyond the United States. In just the two decades before the Civil War, marines landed twenty-­four times in foreign lands.3 The navy expanded with the nation’s foreign trade to protect merchant ships from pirates, suppress the slave trade, and occasionally wield gunboat diplomacy to open markets, as in Japan.4 During the early nineteenth century, John Quincy Adams carried that banner as a diplomat, secretary of state, president, and congressman.5 Adams was a realist who asserted America’s concrete economic and thus strategic interests around the world. As secretary of state, he convinced President James Monroe to expand America territory with Florida, jointly occupy (with Britain) the Pacific Northwest, and assert a sphere of interest over the entire Western Hemisphere. Adams cited compelling reasons why the United States had to take East and West Florida. Ever more Americans had settled there while the British and Spanish instigated Indian attacks against American settlements across the border. In March 1818, General Andrew Jackson led his troops after Indian raiders to Saint Marks, where they captured two Britons. A military tribunal charged them with inciting the attacks and had them hanged. Jackson then led his men to capture Pensacola without a fight. That got the attention of Washington and Madrid. Negotiations ensued between Adams and Ambassador Luis de Onis. Under the Adams-­Onis Treaty, signed on February 22, 1819, Spain sold East and West Florida to the United States for $5 million to settle private American claims against Spanish debtors and designated the frontier as the Sabine River, then by steps up the Red and Arkansas Rivers to the forty-­second parallel and westward to the Pacific Ocean. The Adams-­Onis Treaty was a good deal for Spain. In 1810, a revolt erupted in Mexico and inspired others across Spain’s empire despite Madrid’s increasingly desperate efforts to crush them. At least those annoying American creditors would no longer pester Madrid. The collapse of Spain’s empire and the emergence of weak independent states were certainly in the interests of the United States along with Britain. By 1821, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and La Plata had effectively won independence and opened themselves to international trade and immigration.



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President Monroe recognized and opened diplomatic relations with those governments. The fear in Washington, along with London, was that the Quadruple Alliance of France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia that had crushed liberal and nationalist revolutions in Europe might either back Spain’s reconquest or conquer those rebel realms for themselves. That fear was exaggerated. Of those countries, only France had enough naval and troop power potentially to mount such an expedition, but in fact it was too overextended and had no interest in doing so. Atop that came a declaration by Tsar Alexander I on September 16, 1821, that Russia claimed Alaska down to the fifty-­first parallel and forbade all foreigners to journey north of that line within a hundred miles of the coast. That proclamation challenged a joint claim by Britain and America in their 1818 Convention for land north of the forty-­second parallel along the Pacific coast with no upper limit. Oftentimes a practice precedes a clearly stated principle. Adams asserted the Monroe Doctrine six months before Monroe declared it. On July 17, 1823, he summoned Russian ambassador Diederik Tuyel van Serooskerken and “told him that we should contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent, and that we should assume distinctly the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European establishments.”6 Foreign Minister George Canning sent Adams a letter suggesting their two governments issue a joint statement that condemned any European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. Adams seized this chance to assert American interests in the Western Hemisphere and against Britain’s overwhelming economic and military power. He drafted a statement that Monroe presented to Congress on December 2, 1823. What was soon called the Monroe Doctrine asserted, “as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” In return, American “policy in regard to Europe . . . is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none.”7 The Monroe Doctrine was a stunning assertion of chutzpah and foresight. At the time, American trade with Latin America was only 2.3 percent of its exports and 1.6 percent of its imports.8 Atop that, America’s navy remained miniscule and could not resist an effort by France, Russia, or even lesser powers to conquer a Latin American country. Of course, with time, American trade and investments with the rest of the

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hemisphere grew, and as they grew in economic importance, the more they were worth disputing and even warring over. The Monroe Doctrine was soon a core American foreign policy principle.9 America’s acquisition of the Louisiana Territory and the Lewis and Clark expedition’s journey to the Pacific Ocean and back opened the trans-­ Mississippi West to entrepreneurs, adventurers, and eventually settlers. Business companies mostly headquartered at St. Louis launched fur-­ trapping and trading ventures up the Missouri River and its tributaries into the Rocky Mountains and beyond. The most powerful firm before the War of 1812 was the Missouri Fur Company, with Manuel Lisa the dominant partner. From his New York headquarters, John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company reaped a fortune from the fur trade in the Great Lakes region. In 1808, he formed the subsidiary Pacific Fur Company to capture the Columbia River mouth trade. He sent two expeditions there, one overland, the other overseas, that established Astoria in 1811. All along, the Americans faced the rival British Northwest Company and Hudson Bay Company separately until the latter bought out and subsumed the former in 1821. The Northwest Company captured Astoria in 1813. The War of 1812 depressed the St. Louis fur trade for nearly a decade. Then, in 1821, the Missouri Fur Company, Columbia Fur Company, and French Fur Company launched expeditions up the Missouri valley to establish trading posts with the tribes. That same year, William Becknell led a dozen men from Franklin, Missouri, to Santa Fe to profit from Mexico’s independence and opening for trade. Annually thereafter, more merchants and trappers took to the Santa Fe Trail to seek their fortunes. Taos, seventy miles north of Santa Fe, became headquarters for “free trappers” that formed makeshift companies to trap and trade across the Southwest and some even into California. Good relations with the tribes were essential for fur company operations. Indians supplied a large share of beaver pelts and nearly all buffalo robes. Yet inevitably conflicts arose. Trading with one tribe alienated its enemies. Tribes sought to be middle merchants between Americans and other tribes. Some tribes, like the Blackfeet and Comanches, warred relentlessly against any Americans who entered their territory. The United States fought its first Indian war beyond the Mississippi River in 1823.10 The Arikara lived in earth lodges within two neighboring palisaded villages on the middle Missouri River and benefited by exchanging buffalo robes for an array of products from passing traders. William Henry Ashley and seventy men aboard a keelboat appeared in late May 1823. His plan was to split his men into two parties. He would lead one



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party upriver to the Yellowstone River valley while a land party headed west to join them after buying horses from the Arikara. Then, on the night of June 1, the Arikara murdered an Ashley man in a dispute in their village, and the next morning, June 2, they attacked the adjacent camp, killed fifteen trappers, wounded a dozen, and looted the supplies while the survivors fled aboard the keelboat. Ashley withdrew downriver and sent word of the attack to Colonel Henry Leavenworth, who commanded Fort Atkinson on the Missouri River twenty-­five miles above the Platte River mouth. Leavenworth ascended the Missouri with 230 6th Infantry soldiers marching overland as keelboats carried their supplies and cannons. Eventually Ashley and his men, Joshua Pilcher and 50 Missouri Fur Company employees, and 750 Yankton Sioux joined Leavenworth. They arrived before the Arikara villages on August 9. When Chiefs Grey Eyes and Little Soldier refused to compensate Ashley for his losses, Leavenworth ordered his artillerymen to bombard and the riflemen to fire on the villages, killing around thirty Arikara, including Grey Eyes. That convinced Little Soldier to sign a peace treaty with Leavenworth on August 11. That night, the Arikara fled onto the plains, fearful that the Sioux would massacre them after the Americans left. Against Leavenworth’s orders, Pilcher had his men burn the villages. The Arikara sheltered first with the Pawnee and then with the Hidatsa and Mandan, fellow earth lodge dwellers a couple hundred miles farther upriver. The fur companies resumed their operations. That was the last Indian war west of the Mississippi for another generation. Meanwhile, the United States fought three Indian wars east of the Mississippi: the Black Hawk War against the Sauk and Fox in 1832 and conflicts with the Seminole from 1816 to 1819, 1836 to 1842, and 1855 to 1858. Vicious worsening cycles of broken promises; greed; influxes of American hunters, merchants, and settlers; mutual hatreds; and murders caused those wars. The 1830 Indian Removal Act empowered the government to void existing treaties with Indian tribes east of the Mississippi and move them to reservations west of the river. President Jackson gleefully enforced that law. He and other advocates cynically argued that whites and Indians alike benefited from their removal to avoid bloodshed between them and eventually to civilize the tribes. But vast profits for investors to reap from former Indian lands, rather than altruism, was the chief motive. Jackson expressed the prevailing attitude: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry

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execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion.”11 Actually, Americans referred to those nations as “civilized tribes” because many, especially the Cherokee, emulated them by adopting written constitutions and laws, establishing individual farms and businesses, and promoting literacy. The Cherokee had the potential to become very wealthy when gold was discovered on their land in 1828. Georgia promptly passed a law that dispossessed their land and sold it to investors. The Cherokee disputed that law, and the Supreme Court supported them. In the 1831 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall argued that Indian tribes were “domestic dependent nations” that “have an unquestionable . . . right to the lands they occupy, until that right may be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government. . . . Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian. They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the president as their great father.”12 Whether Jackson actually replied, “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it,” is disputed.13 What Jackson did do was to pressure each tribe to sign a new treaty that extinguished their claim to their current land in exchange for reservations on western prairies. Underlings bribed leaders and factions to accept the treaties. Contingents of troops escorted around sixty thousand Indians from a dozen or so tribes on various “trails of tears” westward; perhaps four thousand died from disease along the way. The Black Hawk War erupted after Chief Black Hawk led a thousand Fox and Sauk east of the Mississippi to reoccupy land that an 1804 treaty forced them to cede to the United States.14 Word of their appearance at Saukenuk, at the Rock River mouth on the Mississippi, on April 5 provoked a crisis. Jackson had General Henry Atkinson, the region’s commander, mobilize regulars and militia to converge on the tribe and expel them by diplomacy or force. After nervous militia fired on Black Hawk’s envoys, he withdrew and then attacked militia at Stillman’s Run, killing twelve and routing the rest on May 4. Black Hawk led his people north through western Illinois and Wisconsin, hoping to shelter with Ojibwe in northwest Wisconsin. Along the way, they fought a dozen skirmishes with local militia. On July 21, Colonel Henry Dodge with seven hundred militia attacked and routed a war party, killing around seventy while suffering one dead and eight wounded. The decisive battle came at Bad Axe on the Mississippi River, where Black Hawk tried to return to the west bank on August 2. Dodge’s 1,300 regulars and militia attacked and slaughtered 150 and captured 75 Indians while losing 5 dead and 19 wounded. Black Hawk escaped with several hundred followers. He



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surrendered at Prairie du Chien on August 27. Jackson had him and five other chiefs imprisoned at Fort Monroe and imposed a series of treaties on the Sauk, Fox, and other tribes in the upper Mississippi River valley that ceded more land and forced them into smaller reservations. The Seminole were an offshoot of the Creek nation who settled in northern Florida, where escaped slaves joined them and they raided American settlements.15 General Jackson led the first war against them from 1816 before finally subduing them in 1819. In doing so, he invaded Spanish Florida and thus pressured Madrid to sell East and West Florida to the United States. The next two wars, from 1836 to 1842 and 1855 to 1858, resulted from Americans settling deeper south into Florida and pushing the Seminole before them. In both wars, the Seminole frustrated the Americans with their hit-­and-­run strategy while their villages sheltered far in the forest. The 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek gave the Seminole a vast reservation in central Florida. Jackson had the Seminole bullied and bribed into accepting the Treaty of Payne’s Landing, signed by seven chiefs on March 28, 1833, which surrendered their Florida territory, moved them west to join the Creek reservation in return for annual subsidies, and gave them three years to comply. In March 1835, agent Wiley Thompson warned the Seminole to prepare to move. A series of murders of Americans and Seminole came to a head on December 26 when Chief Micanopy and 180 warriors wiped out 110 troops led by Major Francis Dade marching from Fort Brooke (Tampa) to Fort King (Ocala). The resulting war lasted seven years, during which over ten thousand regulars and thirty thousand militia fought initially a thousand warriors that diminished to a hundred. The Seminole, led by Micanopy, Osceola, Billy Bowlegs, Wild Cat, and Alligator, thwarted a series of generals and colonels alone or in concert, including Edmund Gaines, Duncan Clinch, Winfield Scott, Thomas Jesup, Zachary Taylor, and William Worth. The war may have cost as much as $40 million to fight while 1,486 regular soldiers died, most from disease but 328 from combat. There were no decisive victories, just a steady attrition of Seminole whose bands succumbed and were transported to Oklahoma. Around a thousand Seminole in two bands led by Billy Bowlegs and Assinawar evaded submission and withdrew to southern Florida. Eventually land-­hungry Americans caught up to them. A cycle of tensions and violence led to the final war that began on December 20, 1855, when Billy Bowlegs and forty warriors killed the guards and captured a supply column near Fort Myers. On a smaller scale, this war resembled the previous one, as the Seminole launched hit-­and-­run attacks on isolated American forces while avoiding their search-­and-­destroy campaigns. The most prominent American leaders were General William Harney and

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Colonel Gustavus Loomis. On May 4, 1858, Billy Bowlegs, Assinawar, and their 163 surviving followers agreed to surrender in return for payments of $500 for each man and $100 for each woman. They were transported to the Oklahoma reservation. A great opportunity to assert Manifest Destiny appeared in 1821 when Mexican patriots won independence from Spain and opened their country to foreign trade and immigrants. Ever more Americans settled in Mexico’s provinces of California, New Mexico, and especially Texas. Those in New Mexico were mostly fur trappers and in California fur trappers and sailors, but they remained minorities. Those in Texas were mostly settlers from the southern United States who soon became a majority. Moses Austin was the first American who received a huge land grant in Texas proportional to the number of settlers he brought with him—in his case, three hundred families. Two restrictions on settlers soon appeared. Mexico’s 1824 constitution established a republic but maintained Catholicism as the official religion. In 1829, the government abolished slavery. Thereafter foreigners could settle in Mexico only if they converted to Catholicism and owned no slaves. Nonetheless, within a decade, thirty thousand settlers—mostly Americans and slave owners or sympathizers from the southern states—settled in Texas, outnumbering Mexicans by ten to one. Most cynically pledged to be Catholic but retained and practiced their Protestant faith, while slave owners kept their chattel. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna won the presidency in 1834, the fifth of his eleven stints.16 He was a brilliant politician and courageous, but cunning, corrupt, mendacious, and inept, losing two wars with Americans, first over Texas and then the Southwest. His abolition of the 1824 constitution and assertion of a dictatorship provoked rebellion. The Texans established a congress, captured Mexican garrisons in their midst, and repelled invasions by Mexican generals leading forces to crush the rebellion from October to December 1835. The rebel leaders issued the “Declaration on the Causes of Texas Taking Up Arms” on November 7 and appointed Samuel Houston general-­in-­chief on November 12, 1835. Houston was a Creek War veteran, Andrew Jackson protégé, lawyer, Tennessee representative in Congress from 1823 to 1827, and governor from 1827 to 1829, but also an alcoholic who nearly beat a rival to death and whose first wife left him after only eleven days of marriage.17 Beset by scandals, he resigned as governor and lived for years with the Cherokee before going to Texas in 1832 to seek his fortune. Houston assembled an army while calling on Colonel William Travis at San Antonio and Colonel James Fannin at Goliad to join him with their garrisons. Santa Anna gathered five thousand troops and marched north, crushed a revolt in Zacatecas, and then crossed the Rio Grande in late



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February 1836. Texas’s Congress declared independence on March 2. After a thirteen-­day siege, Santa Anna’s troops overran and slaughtered the two hundred defenders of the Alamo, a walled church outside San Antonio, on March 6. Americans soon commemorated the Alamo as their nation’s Thermopylae, with Travis, Davy Crockett, and Jim Bowie the valiant leaders who died fighting for liberty; Mexicans and slaves had opposed versions. Santa Anna then led his army to capture and execute Fannin and his 440 defenders of a walled monastery near Goliad on March 27. Houston withdrew with his small army eastward, hotly pursued by the Mexicans. On June 21, Santa Anna’s 1,380 troops caught up with Houston’s 910 Texans at the San Jacinto River. Crying “Remember the Alamo!” Houston and his men charged and routed the Mexicans, slaughtering 650, wounding 208, and capturing 300, including Santa Anna, while suffering merely 11 dead and 30 wounded. On May 14, Santa Anna signed two treaties of Velasco. The public treaty established an armistice during which the Mexican army would withdraw from Texas and release all prisoners. The private treaty recognized Texas independence. Although General Vicente Filisola led his troops south toward Mexico on May 26, Mexico’s Congress repudiated both Santa Anna and Texas independence.18 Texas’s Congress voted for annexation by the United States and sent that offer to Washington. Jackson reluctantly did not open negotiations for annexation terms. By then the United States had split bitterly between northern states that opposed and southern states that embraced slavery. The 1820 Compromise admitted Maine and Missouri as a free and a slave state, respectively, to keep equal numbers of northern and southern senators, and drew a line westward from Missouri’s southern boundary permitting slavery south and freedom north for future states. Admitting Texas as a slave state would enflame animosities because a clause of Texas’s constitution let it be divided into as many as five smaller states. Those ten new senators from slave states would decisively shift the political tide for slavocracy. Instead, Jackson recognized Texas’s independence. Texas was an independent nation from 1836 to 1845. Mexico did not recognize that status and warned the United States that war would result if it annexed Texas. James Polk was a Tennessee representative in Congress for fourteen years, governor for two years, and a Jackson protégé. In the 1844 election, he won the Democratic Party’s nomination and then defeated Whig senator Henry Clay by 1,339,494 popular votes (49.5 percent) and 170 electoral votes to 1,300,005 (48.1 percent) and 105 electoral votes. Polk enjoyed Democratic Party control of Congress with 142 to 79 Whig and 6

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Know Nothing Party members in the House of Representatives and 27 to 24 Whig senators.19 Polk had two overriding foreign policy goals: acquiring the Northwest from Britain and the Southwest from Mexico, thus expanding the United States to the Pacific.20 He would win both by threatening forcefully to take what the other side would not willingly give. Ultimately the British yielded and the Mexicans resisted. Through a skillful assertion of diplomacy and war, Polk expanded American territory by one-­third (or more than 1.2 million square miles). In the Northwest, relations between the United States and Britain remained distant but constructive during the decades following the War of 1812. In 1817, the Rush-­Bagot Treaty bolstered peace by limiting each side’s warships in the Great Lakes to three of the same class; that was the world’s first arms reduction treaty. The 1818 Convention extended the American-­Canada border along the forty-­ninth parallel west to the Rocky Mountain divide, let Americans fish off the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts, and allowed joint ownership and exploitation of the Pacific Northwest for thirty years. The 1842 Webster-­Ashburton Treaty settled the disputed Maine boundary at its present location but failed to designate the international boundary west of the Rocky Mountain divide. The United States and Britain nearly went to war over that dispute. Swelling numbers of American boots on the ground there reinforced Polk’s position. By 1845, Americans outgunned Britons in the handful of settlements along the lower Columbia and Willamette River valleys by five to one. Before 1842, most were retired trappers and sailors who became farmers and entrepreneurs. That year, the first wagon train with hopeful eastern settlers arrived after traversing the Oregon Trail. That American presence was so overbearing that in 1845, chief factor John McLoughlin of the Hudson Bay Company made a critical decision. He abandoned his headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River across from the Willamette River mouth and moved to Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. The obvious way to settle the Northwest boundary dispute was simply to extend the existing forty-­ninth parallel boundary from Minnesota’s Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains westward to the Pacific. Instead, Polk demanded that Britain render all territory north to the fifty-­ fourth parallel, forty degrees, where Russia asserted its southern boundary. That line was arbitrary, unbacked by any American settlements from there south to the Columbia River valley. Nonetheless, when the British adamantly rejected that notion, war hawks took up the cry “Fifty-­four forty or fight!” Citing the Monroe Doctrine, Polk warned that the “United States cannot in silence permit any European



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interference on the North American continent, and should any interference be attempted [the United States] will be ready to resist it at any and all hazard.”21 Polk soon backed off that unreasonable demand. Mexico’s government had rejected his request to purchase the Southwest. He faced the likely catastrophic prospect of warring simultaneously against Britain and Mexico. In February 1846, he had Secretary of State James Buchanan inform British ambassador Richard Pakenham that he would accept the forty-­ ninth parallel boundary. After Pakenham received Whitehall’s approval, Polk asked the Senate’s advice. On June 12, the Senate approved that proposal by thirty-­eight to twelve. On June 15, Buchanan and Pakenham signed a treaty that extended the forty-­ninth parallel to Puget Sound where it curled south below Vancouver Island. Three days later, the Senate approved that treaty by forty-­one to fourteen. By that time, the United States was at war with Mexico. As in Texas, American immigrants to Mexico’s other northern provinces greatly eased their later conquest. Traders and trappers began settling in New Mexico after the Santa Fe Trail opened in 1821, although Mexicans remained the vast majority. Trappers, sailors, and, from 1843, folks coming over the California Trail swelled the American community in California, although Mexicans outnumbered them by ten to one.22 Polk completed the annexation of Texas that his predecessor, John Tyler, initiated.23 Representatives of the United States and Texas signed an annexation treaty on April 12, 1844, but the Senate rejected it by sixteen for and thirty-­five against on June 8. Tyler had the treaty amended to overcome objections and submitted it as a joint resolution that required only simple majorities. The House voted 118 to 101 in favor on January 23, 1845, and the Senate 27 to 25 on February 27. Tyler signed it on March 1. Texas’s Congress approved the revised treaty on July 4, and a referendum confirmed that result on October 13. Polk signed a bill accepting annexation on December 29, 1845, and Texas formally became a state on February 19, 1846. Meanwhile, Polk sent first John Parrott and then John Slidell to Mexico City with a proposal that Mexico recognize America’s annexation of Texas and sell most of the Southwest for $25 million.24 Presidents Jose Herrera and Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, backed by Mexico’s Congress, respectively refused to meet Parrot and Slidell after they reached the capital. The Mexicans rejected both the Texan assertion of independence and its claim to territory that extended to the Rio Grande in all directions. The Mexicans insisted that Texas’s southern border was the Nueces River. Most important, the Sabine River formed the boundary between Mexico and the United States.

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After learning of Slidell’s rebuff, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to march his two thousand troops from Corpus Christi on the Nueces River 160 miles south to the Rio Grande’s north bank across from Matamoros. Taylor was a first-­rate general who had fought in the 1812, Black Hawk, and Seminole wars.25 He was a soldiers’ soldier, laconic, casually dressed, implacable under fire, nicknamed “Old Rough and Ready,” whose favorite tactic was a bayonet charge straight at the enemy. On reaching that site on March 24, Taylor detached four hundred men to construct Fort Texas and then led the rest to Port Isabel, twenty-­five miles away on the coast. On April 24, General Mariano Arista, who commanded 5,000 troops at Matamoros, had Taylor informed that their nations were at war and dispatched 1,600 troops under General Anastasio Torrejon across the river fourteen miles upstream. That evening, Taylor ordered Captain Seth Thornton and his sixty-­three dragoons to patrol up the valley. The Mexicans ambushed the Americans, killed eleven, and captured Thornton and the rest. Taylor hurried a courier with that news aboard a steamship bound for Washington. Mexico started the war by being first to declare and attack. On May 9, Polk and his cabinet debated whether to send Congress a war message and, if so, on what grounds. Then that courier arrived with the justification they lacked. Polk called on Congress to recognize that “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are at war.”26 On May 11, the House and Senate overwhelmingly favored war against Mexico by 174 to 14 and 40 to 2, respectively. Typically, the Americans got into a war that they were ill prepared to fight. The army’s authorized strength was 8,613 troops in eight infantry regiments, four artillery regiments, and two dragoon regiments; the actual number was around 5,300 because recruiters failed to fill ranks thinned by desertion, disease, accidents, and combat death and wounds. A regiment rarely combined, as its companies were usually scattered in twos and threes at several score army posts. On May 13, Congress passed and Polk signed the War Bill that authorized increasing the regular army to 15,540 troops; raising the number of privates in infantry and artillery companies from forty-­one to one hundred, and in dragoon (cavalry) companies from fifty to one hundred; recruiting fifty thousand volunteers organized in state regiments; and appropriating $10 million to provide weapons, equipment, uniforms, transport, and provisions for volunteer regiments.27 Infantry regiments had ten companies and dragoon regiments five to seven companies. Infantry and artillery uniforms included a dark blue



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jacket and light blue pants for officers and light blue jacket and pants for soldiers, while dragoon officers and troopers wore dark blue jackets and light blue pants. Men had to shave several times weekly and keep their hair collar length; only cavalrymen could sprout moustaches. Monthly pay ranged from $7 for privates to $75 for colonels in the infantry and artillery, and from $8 for privates to $90 for colonels in the dragoons and engineers, while brigadier generals pocketed $105 and major generals $200. As for weapons, most regiments were armed with .69-caliber 1842 Model percussion-­cap muskets with a fifty-­yard accurate range, while a few regiments carried the .54-caliber 1841 Model flintlock rife with a two-­ hundred-­yard accurate range; bayonets could be attached to muskets, not rifles. Tactically, those differences made rifle regiments best for firing at the enemy from a distance, while musket regiments advanced to fire a volley and then charge with lowered bayonets. Dragoons carried a saber, .54-caliber 1843 Hall carbine, and two .69-caliber Model 1806 flintlock pistols. A dragoon squadron was two companies. Congress authorized a Regiment of Mounted Riflemen armed with the 1841 Model rifle. Field artillery included the Model 1841 bronze six-­pounder and bronze twelve-­ pounder cannons and the Model 1841 bronze twelve-­pounder mountain howitzer and iron twelve-­pounder howitzer, with respective ranges of 1,520, 1,663, 1,005, and 1,680 yards. Siege artillery included Model 1839 iron eighteen-­ pounder and twenty-­ four-­ pounder cannons, the Model 1841 bronze twenty-­four-­pounder, and the Model 1841 iron ten-­inch mortar with respective ranges of 1,592, 1,901, 1,500, and 2,100 yards.28 Gun crews usually numbered eight. General Winfield Scott mastered both managing the army as general-­ in-­chief from 1841 to 1861 and establishing rules to govern it. He wrote the 1825 General Regulations of the Army and the three-­volume Infantry Tactics; or, Rules for the Exercise and Maneuvers of the United States Infantry, published in 1840. For artillery, the Americans borrowed from foreigners: Captain Robert Anderson’s 1839 translation of the French Instruction for Field Artillery and Major Samuel Ringgold’s 1845 Field Artillery, Horse and Foot adapted from British manuals. Horsemen had Cavalry Tactics with an uncertain providence. The War Department included the secretary, deputy secretary, general-­ in-­chief, and departments of adjutant general, inspector general, commissary, medical, ordnance, pay, quartermaster, subsistence, engineers, and topographical engineers. The rank of brevet was a temporary promotion for war and other extraordinary circumstances. Congress authorized three new regular and five volunteer brigadier generals on June 26, 1846, and two major generals and five more brigadier generals on March 3, 1847. Unfortunately, Polk mostly tapped Democratic Party stalwarts rather than outstanding younger officers to fill those posts.

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With a swelling army, the question now was how to win the war. Polk ultimately made the war’s key decisions after conferring with War Secretary William Marcy, Navy Secretary George Bancroft, and General-­in-­ Chief Scott, who then put them into action. Bancroft had the Pacific and Atlantic squadrons blockade Mexico’s ports. Polk had Taylor promoted to major general, reinforced, and ordered to capture Matamoros and eventually Monterrey in northeastern Mexico. Colonel Stephen Kearny would mobilize an army of regular and volunteer regiments at Fort Leavenworth and subsequently march across the Santa Fe Trail to conquer first New Mexico and then California. Standing orders with America’s Pacific fleet commander, Commodore Robert Stockton, had him seize California as soon as he learned of war with Mexico. His predecessor had actually rehearsed the scenario. Commodore Thomas Jones occupied Monterey, California’s capital, on October 19, 1842, after hearing a rumor of war, and then sheepishly restored it to Mexican sovereignty after learning the news was false. Another American imperial agent was somewhere in California. Colonel John Fremont was there on the third of what would be five expeditions that mapped swaths of the West.29 On October 30, 1845, Polk sent Lieutenant Arnold Gillespie by American warship to Veracruz, Mexico, across to Mazatlan, and then by warship to Monterey, California, with instructions to both Consul Thomas Larkin and Fremont to lead an American takeover of the province after war erupted. Polk recruited another agent, this one Mexican, former president Santa Anna, then exiled in Havana. In February, he sent an intermediary to the White House with an offer to sell New Mexico and northern California for $30 million if the United States helped him regain power. Polk agreed and had Navy Secretary Bancroft inform Commodore Daniel Conner, whose squadron blockaded Mexico’s Caribbean coast: “If Santa Anna endeavors to enter the Mexican ports, you will allow him to pass freely.”30 With 3,709 troops and twelve cannons, General Arista crossed the Rio Grande and besieged Fort Texas on May 3. From Port Isabel, Taylor marched with 2,288 troops and eight cannons to the fort’s relief. Arista deployed his army across the road at Palo Alto. On May 8, Taylor’s army repelled a Mexican assault and then counterattacked and punched through the enemy’s left flank, killing 102 and wounding 129 while losing 5 dead and 48 wounded. Arista reformed his men several miles down the road at Resaca de la Palma. On May 9, Taylor again attacked and this time routed the Mexicans, who suffered 154 killed, 205 wounded, and over 1,000 captured to 33 dead and 89 wounded Americans. Arista retreated across the Rio Grande, abandoned Matamoros, and withdrew to Monterrey.



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Taylor led his army across the Rio Grande and occupied Matamoros on May 17. Ships steamed fifteen miles up the Rio Grande to deposit reinforcements and supplies amid the encamped army. On July 6, Taylor began his campaign’s next phase, advancing as far as Camargo one hundred miles up the Rio Grande valley. Having established a chain of fortified depots along the valley, Taylor turned toward Monterrey, ninety-­five miles southwest, in mid-­August. The intense summer heat, scarce water, and skirmishes with Mexican cavalry forced the 6,220 troops, 1,500 draft animals, and 180 wagons to move no more than half a dozen or so miles daily. Taylor’s army deployed beyond cannon shot of Monterrey, defended by 7,307 troops now led by General Pedro de Ampudia, on September 19. The next day, Taylor sent General William Worth’s division north and west of the city to cut it off, while massed artillery bombarded the forts guarding Monterrey’s eastern approaches followed by an assault by the divisions of Generals David Twiggs and William Butler. During the next two days, the troops captured outlying positions. On September 24, Taylor launched an all-­out attack, and this time Worth’s troops broke into the city and advanced within several blocks of the Plaza Mayor. Inexplicably, on September 25, Taylor agreed to Ampudia’s request for an eight-­week truce as his troops withdrew south to Saltillo. Instead of bagging the entire Mexican army, Taylor merely won Monterrey at the cost of 120 killed, 365 wounded, and 43 missing while inflicting 367 casualties. The trail from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe was 856 dusty miles. On June 22, Kearny’s army departed with 1,458 troops, 12 six-­pounders, 4 twelve-­ pounder howitzers, 1,556 wagons, 459 horses, 3,658 mules, and 14,908 cattle and oxen. New Mexico governor Manuel Armijo had Colonel Manuel Pino mobilize 4,000 mostly poorly armed and fed peasant militia and Indians at Apache Canyon, a dozen miles east of Santa Fe. Lieutenant Governor Diego Archuleta and most officers wanted to accept rather than resist the Americans. Armijo dispersed that crowd at Apache Canyon and fled with his followers to Chihuahua. The Americans began trudging into Santa Fe on August 19. Kearny issued a proclamation that the United States would annex the province and protect the population’s religion, property, and other rights on August 22. He summoned town mayors and Pueblo Indian chiefs to directly reassure and ask them for loyalty to the United States. He sent envoys to negotiate treaties with Ute, Navajo, and Apache bands. For governor, he appointed Charles Bent, one of the partners at Fort Bent, a trading post on the Arkansas River. On September 25, bound for California, he led three hundred dragoons down the Rio Grande valley. Ten miles south of Socorro, he encountered Kit Carson and nineteen men

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heading toward Washington with a dispatch from Commodore Robert Stockton reporting that California was conquered. Kearny sent two hundred dragoons back to Santa Fe, while he headed with Carson and one hundred others to California. News of California’s conquest was premature. Astonishingly, on May 9, 1846, Lieutenant Gillespie finally reached Fremont and his sixty men around 450 miles north of Monterey fighting Klamath Indians in southern Oregon. Two months earlier, on March 5, Fremont reacted to a demand by General Jose Castro that he and his men leave California by unfurling the American flag atop Gavilan Peak thirty miles from Monterey. Just what inspired Fremont’s quixotic gesture is unclear. Castro and two hundred Mexican troops surrounded the Americans, and after three days Consul Thomas Larkin convinced Fremont to leave peacefully. Gillespie did not know whether war had erupted but carried spoken messages from Polk and Fremont’s father-­in-­law, Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri, that he should position himself for that possibility. Fremont and his men fought their way out of Klamath country and down through the Central Valley. A group of American settlers led by William Ide and Ezekiel Merritt revolted at Sonoma and captured General Mariano Vallejo, northern California’s commander, at his estate on June 10. Learning that Fremont was returning, they sent a courier to ask him to lead them. He readily agreed. Castro sent Lieutenant Joaquin de la Torre and sixty men to crush the rebels. The Americans scattered them in a skirmish on June 23. Fremont and his 224 men declared independence for the Bear Flag Republic, named after the crude grizzly bear on their banner, on July 4, 1846. They got supplies at John Sutter’s trading post at Sacramento, journeyed to secure San Francisco, and then headed to Monterey. Meanwhile, word of war reached Commodore John Sloat aboard the USS Savannah at Mazatlan. He sent orders to all American naval commanders to steam to Monterey. By July 7, the Savannah and four other American warships had anchored off Monterey. Sloat led 225 marines and sailors ashore, where Larkin welcomed him. Before the customhouse, Sloat declared America’s annexation of California. Facing overwhelming American firepower, General Castro and Governor Pio Pico fled south with their men. Commodore Stockton arrived to replace Sloat as the Pacific squadron’s commander. Fremont and his California Battalion reached Monterey on July 19. Stockton and Fremont planned southern California’s conquest. The USS Cyane conveyed Fremont and his men to San Diego, which they secured, and then headed north to join Stockton and Gillespie in taking port San Pedro and subsequently Los Angeles a dozen miles inland. Meanwhile, other American forces captured Santa Barbara and Ventura. On August



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15, Stockton established a government and named Fremont the governor. Fremont and his men returned to Monterey. Stockton dispatched Kit Carson and nineteen men east to carry word of the conquest across the continent to Polk in Washington. Stockton established his headquarters at San Diego. Governor Pico and Captain Jose Flores rallied several hundred Mexican troops and militia. They captured Gillespie’s garrison at Los Angeles on September 29 but let him and his men withdraw to San Pedro. Learning of the revolt, Fremont led three hundred men south on November 17. The Mexicans controlled the interior between Los Angeles and San Diego, while Americans held the ports of San Diego, San Pedro, and Santa Barbara. Kearny, Carson, and one hundred dragoons reached Warner’s Ranch thirty miles east of San Diego on December 2. Learning of the revolt, Kearny stayed at the ranch to rest his exhausted men. On December 6, he felt confident enough to attack Captain Andres Pico and his 160 lancers at nearby San Pascual. The result was a debacle, as the lancers killed eighteen and wounded thirteen Americans, including Kearny, and then besieged them. During the night, Carson slipped through the Mexican lines to carry word to Stockton. The commodore dispatched two hundred marines and sailors led by Lieutenant Andrew Gray to rescue them. By December 12, the Americans were safely in San Diego. Stockton sent word for all American forces to break through any Mexican forces before them and converge on Los Angeles. Fremont cornered Pico, Flores, and their men at Rancho Cahuenga and on December 12 got the governor to sign a surrender treaty whereby the United States annexed California and guaranteed rights of religion and property to all residents. That permanently ended Mexican resistance. Reinforcements established overwhelming American power over all California towns. American control over New Mexico also proved tenuous. The shock and awe of Kearny’s army soon dissipated as he and most of his troops marched elsewhere. A conspiracy developed to free New Mexico from the invaders. New Mexican governor Bent was at his home in Taos on January 19, 1847, when rebels murdered him and fifteen other Americans there and across the region. The province’s senior commander, Colonel Sterling Price, was then at Albuquerque with his regiment. He marched with 479 troops and four howitzers north, scattering rebel forces along the way. On February 3, he bombarded Taos Pueblo and then led an attack. His men slaughtered around 150 men, women, and children while suffering 7 dead and 45 wounded. That ended the revolt. Polk and his advisors devised a two-­pronged offensive to capture Chihuahua in northern Mexico. General John Wool gathered 1,400 troops, 6

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cannons, and 118 wagons at San Antonio, Texas. The expedition set forth on September 2, reached Monclova on November 3, rested twenty-­three days, and then resumed the march. On December 5, they reached Parras, where Wool received orders to join Taylor at Saltillo. In Santa Fe, Colonel Alexander Doniphan with 856 troops headed south with the mission first to capture El Paso 330 miles away, followed by Chihuahua 230 miles beyond. The Americans scattered five hundred Mexicans at Brazito thirty miles north of El Paso on December 25 and marched unopposed into El Paso on December 27. With supplies and reinforcements, Doniphan and 924 troops resumed their advance on February 8. General Jose Heredia, 1,500 infantry, 1,300 cavalry, and 119 gunners manning a dozen cannons defended a ridge with the Sacramento River behind them fifteen miles north of Chihuahua. On February 28, Doniphan split his troops, cannons, and wagons into four separate columns and advanced. Heredia launched his cavalry against the enemy, but cannon and musket fire decimated them, killing or wounding over six hundred and capturing all the cannons, while only nine Americans were killed or wounded. Heredia retreated into Chihuahua pursued by the Americans. As Doniphan massed his cannons for a bombardment, Heredia abandoned the city, and the Americans entered Chihuahua on March 2. Doniphan received orders on April 23, 1847, to join Taylor’s army at Saltillo. Meanwhile, Commodore Conner reported that Santa Anna passed the blockade at Veracruz on August 16, 1846. When Santa Anna reached Mexico City on September 15, President Jose Salas named him general-­ in-­chief. As might be expected, Santa Anna broke his promise to the Americans to negotiate a mutually profitable peace. On October 8, Santa Anna reached San Luis Potosi, where the Mexican army had retreated after Monterrey. Over the next four months, he rebuilt the army and, on December 23, was reelected president. After the truce expired on November 15, Taylor sent Worth’s division to Saltillo fifty miles south and a month later Wool’s divisions to Agua Nueva a half dozen miles beyond Saltillo. Learning of the Mexican army’s advance, Taylor rushed all his available troops to deploy across high ground overlooking the north–south road that ran through Agua Nueva, although the battle would be called Buena Vista for a nearby town. Santa Anna led his 20,910 troops from San Luis Potosi on the 280 desert miles to Saltillo on January 28, 1847. One of four of his men either deserted or fell ill along the way, so the army numbered only 15,152 troops when Santa Anna deployed his troops before the Buena Vista heights on February 22. Yet the Mexicans outgunned the 4,594 Americans by more than three to one. After an artillery duel, Santa Anna launched a massive attack



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against Taylor’s left that pushed it back but failed to shatter it. When the Mexicans resumed their attack the next day, Taylor sent two reserve regiments against their exposed flank and routed them. The Americans inflicted their latest devastating defeat, killing 591, wounding 1,037, and capturing 1,854 Mexicans while suffering 272 killed, 387 wounded, and 6 missing. Santa Anna led his battered army back to San Luis Potosi, losing more men from desertion and exhaustion along the way. He arrived with about five thousand troops, having lost fifteen thousand during his disastrous campaign. Learning that another American army had invaded Mexico, he hurried to the capital to organize an army to march against it.31 Polk appointed Scott to command an expedition to take Veracruz and then march to Mexico City.32 Scott is among America’s greatest generals, excelling at strategy, tactics, logistics, training, organization, and combat leadership.33 He assembled ten thousand troops split among the infantry divisions of Generals William Worth, David Twiggs, and Robert Patterson and William Harney’s cavalry brigade. Commodore Conner initially commanded the fleet of twenty warships and seventy-­six transports until Commodore Matthew Perry replaced him on March 21. Scott issued strict orders that any soldiers who committed robbery, rape, or murder would be severely punished. The Americans would purchase any labor, food, other provisions, or services from the Mexicans. The armada dropped anchor off Veracruz on March 5, 1847. Scott chose Collada Beach seven miles south of the city for the landing. Two storms delayed the landing until March 9, when Worth’s division led the way ashore. Fortunately, the Mexican commander, General Juan Morales, chose not to attack the invaders with his 3,360 troops in the city and 1,030 in San Juan de Ulua fortress on an island half a mile away. By evening all the troops were ashore. The next day, Scott advanced his divisions to hem in Veracruz with Twiggs north, Patterson central, and Worth south. Scott massed the siege artillery in Worth’s sector. By March 22, those guns were ready to fire along with those of the warships. Scott gave the order after Morales rejected his surrender demand. Over the next three days, the Americans fired 6,700 balls and shells at the city and its three forts, killing around eighty soldiers and one hundred civilians while suffering thirteen dead and fifty-­five wounded. On March 29, Morales surrendered, accepting Scott’s generous terms for the garrison to march out with war honors and paroles. Unfortunately, most officers and soldiers broke their promise not to fight again. Scott sought to begin the 270-mile march to Mexico City as soon as possible to avoid the yellow fever season. Jalapa was seventy-­five miles west and, at 4,880 feet, above yellow fever–bearing mosquitoes. He also wanted to advance as far as possible before his volunteers’ twelve-­month

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enlistments expired. He hoped that the farther inland they marched, the more among them might reenlist rather than head for home. But first he had to gather as many wagons, draft animals, and supplies as possible. For that, he sent brigades around the region to round them up and bring them back to Veracruz. Skirmishes erupted with guerrilla bands. Dysentery and malaria weakened or killed ever more Americans. Harney’s cavalry led the army’s westward advance, followed by Twiggs, Patterson, and John Quitman’s brigade on April 2; Worth’s division stayed behind a few days until it massed enough supply wagons and pack mules. Accompanying the army was the 2nd Regiment of Texas Rangers led by Lieutenant Colonel Jack Hays that fought guerrillas and escorted supply trains. The Americans followed the footsteps of Hernando Cortez and his conquistadors four centuries earlier. Santa Anna massed twelve thousand troops atop a ridge with Rio del Plano guarding his right and jungle his left flanks at Cerro Gordo, seventy miles from Veracruz. Scott’s advance guard approached on April 11, and the rest of the army deployed there over the next four days. Captain Robert Lee, Scott’s chief engineer officer, discovered a trail through thick forest that could outflank the Mexican position. On April 18, Scott had Twiggs push up that trail while Patterson feinted against the enemy’s front and Worth’s division waited in reserve. The Americans routed the Mexicans, killing over a thousand and capturing 3,036 while suffering 63 killed and 368 wounded. The next day, the Americans marched into Jalapa, elated to have defeated the Mexicans before them and evaded the mosquitoes behind them. On May 6, the army resumed its advance with Worth’s division leading. The Americans marched unopposed into Puebla on May 15. Scott now had 7,113 troops, of whom 5,820 were fit, having lost most volunteers and left behind garrisons at Veracruz, Jalapa, and Perote. Scott made a crucial decision. He would bring up the troops from Jalapa and Perote to Puebla and thereafter live off the land all the way to the capital. He would tarry at Puebla for nearly three months while he received more reinforcements and supplies from the United States. General Gideon Pillow’s division arrived on July 8. Quitman became a division commander when a fresh brigade joined his existing brigade. Another arrival was Nicholas Trist, a veteran State Department diplomat, whom Polk had appointed to negotiate peace with Mexico. Throughout the war, each American military victory exacerbated a debate over what territory, if any, to take from Mexico. Most northern politicians wanted no acquisitions, fearing that they would eventually become slave states. For that, nearly all southern politicians wanted at the very least the Southwest, some advocated territory deep into Mexico, and a few the whole



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country. In August 1846, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced the Wilmot Proviso, which declared that in any “acquisition of any territory . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist.”34 The Wilmot Proviso passed the House but failed in the Senate, again in February 1847, and finally in December 1847. Polk’s written instruction to Trist included paying up to $30 million for all of New Mexico, California, and Baja and free passage for Americans across the Tehuantepec isthmus. Trist used British ambassador Charles Bankhead as an intermediary. Much to their disgust, the Americans recognized that the prickly Mexican notion of “honor” did not prevent them from demanding bribes whose price rose with the transaction’s value. Santa Anna sent word that for $10,000 he would conclude a mutually satisfactory peace treaty. After pocketing the money, he claimed that Congress forbade him to negotiate with the enemy. When Scott’s army resumed its march on August 7, it numbered 8,061 healthy and 2,235 sick soldiers. Awaiting them around Mexico City were 30,000 troops led by Santa Anna. On August 10, the Americans trudged over the 8,500-foot pass to behold the dazzling view of Mexico Valley’s oval basin, forty-­seven miles east–west and seventy-­eight miles north– south at around 7,200 foot in elevation. Mexico City and its two hundred thousand people was central, with Lake Texcoco beginning east a couple of miles, and a half dozen miles southeast first narrow Lake Xochimilco stretched ten miles and then broad Lake Chalco another half dozen miles. Santa Anna massed his army around El Penon, a 450-foot-­high, 1,000-foot-­long ridge fifteen miles from the city on the south side of the Veracruz road, near Lake Texcoco’s southeast shore. Scott outflanked the Mexican army by leading his troops along the south side of Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco and approaching Mexico City from the south. Santa Anna hastily redeployed his army on either side of Pedegral, a jagged stone lava bed three miles across that began a dozen miles south of the city, personally commanding ten thousand troops eastward for two miles to Lake Xochimilco, and General Gabriel Valencia with ten thousand troops westward for a couple of miles to the west basin’s rugged foothills. Scott devised a plan for attacks on both sides of Pedegral on August 20. Westward, Twiggs’s division pinned down Valencia from the front while Pillow’s division outflanked him after crossing a stretch of the lava bed reconnoitered and cleared by intrepid Captain Lee. The troops perfectly executed that plan by routing the Mexicans, inflicting over 700 dead and wounded, and capturing 813 while suffering around 300 casualties. Meanwhile, Worth and Quitman probed Santa Anna’s troops eastward to keep them from reinforcing Valencia. After routing Valencia, Pillow

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and Twiggs attacked Santa Anna’s right flank as Worth and Quitman assaulted his front. Once again, the Americans routed the Mexicans, this time killing 263, wounding 460, and capturing 1,261 while suffering 133 killed, 865 wounded, and 40 missing. Yet Scott ordered his troops to halt rather than rush after the fleeing enemy into the city. The following day, he sent Santa Anna conciliatory appeals for a truce and peace talks. Santa Anna accepted an armistice on August 24, and Trist began negotiations three days later. Cynically, Santa Anna used the truce to reinforce his decimated army while rejecting Trist’s peace terms. Instead, he demanded that the Americans withdraw from Mexican territory, lift the blockade, and pay an indemnity for Texas with the Nueces River as the international border. Frustrated with Mexican intransigence, Scott gave Santa Anna notice that the armistice would expire on September 7. Mexico City was surrounded by marshy ground crossed by causeways. Two miles southwest of the city atop a three-­hundred-­foot hill was Chapultepec Castle that housed the military academy, with Molino del Rey (a mill falsely rumored to be a cannon foundry) a couple hundred yards west; four thousand Mexican troops defended the castle, mill, and the area between. On September 8, Scott ordered Molina del Rey bombarded and then assaulted by the divisions of Worth, Pillow, and Quitman. After vicious, often hand-­to-­hand fighting, the Americans finally drove out the Mexicans, killing 269, wounding 500, and capturing 685 while suffering 116 killed, 671 wounded, and 18 missing. Scott had the castle bombarded on September 12 and 13 and then attacked by Worth, Pillow, and Quitman while Twiggs’s division probed eastward. The Americans took the castle and then advanced across causeways to capture the city’s south and two southwest gates, losing 138 dead, 673 wounded, and 29 missing while inflicting 600 casualties. Santa Anna retreated from Mexico City with his army’s remnants. Scott led a victory parade to the city’s central square on September 14, 1847. He then deployed his troops to occupy Mexico City and the region and forced local officials to provide provisions and other needs. A marine battalion guarded the presidential palace. Meanwhile, Santa Anna joined forces with guerilla leader Joaquin Rea to besiege Puebla, defended by Colonel Thomas Childs Reguena. Scott sent troops led by General Joseph Lane to rescue the garrison. Lane drove off the Mexicans at Huamantla to reestablish the Mexico City–Veracruz supply line on October 9. Trist resumed negotiations. Although over the preceding eighteen months the Mexicans had endured a series of humiliating, devastating defeats, including the conquest of California and New Mexico capped by their capital’s capture, they rejected any serious concessions. When Polk



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received Trist’s report on the deadlock, he ordered him to break off talks and return to Washington. Trist refused and instead redoubled his efforts to reach an agreement. Meanwhile, a group of Mexican politicians and generals offered Scott $1.25 million to be their country’s dictator for six years and transform their country from mass poverty and autocracy into prosperity and democracy. Scott politely declined the offer.35 Under the Treaty of Guadeloupe-­Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, Mexico recognized America’s annexation of Texas and sold the Southwest to the United States for $15 million plus $3.25 million of Mexican debts owed to American investors that Washington would pay. The Senate ratified the treaty by thirty-­eight to fourteen on March 10. American and Mexican envoys exchanged ratifications on May 30, and the American occupation ended on June 12, 1848. With the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, the United States paid Mexico $10 million for a wedge of land below the Gila River in New Mexico and Arizona that surveyors concluded was level enough for a future transcontinental railroad. That completed the territory for all future forty-­eight states between Canada and Mexico. The United States won a stunning victory with a relatively small sacrifice of treasure and blood. The war cost $58 million to fight, $64 million in pensions, and $18.25 million to settle with Mexico. Of 104,556 men mustered during the war, 73,260 served in state volunteer regiments, including 1,390 in three-­month, 11,211 in six-­month, 18,210 in twelve-­ month, and 33,596 for the war. Of these, perhaps one in four actually experienced combat.36 The 12,876 who died included 1,192 from combat, 529 from wounds, and 11,155 from disease, while 4,102 were wounded in action, 9,754 were discharged for disabilities, and 9,207 deserted. Perhaps as many as fifty thousand Mexican soldiers and civilians died from combat, disease, or starvation.37 American army leadership during the Mexican War was as dazzling as it had been dismal during the War of 1812. The 1802 foundation of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, was crucial to that transformation. Four decades’ worth of graduates hardened by frontier wars against various tribes provided an excellent set of officers. America’s army far surpassed Mexico’s army in morale, discipline, marksmanship, artillery fire, and supply. Of the 523 West Point graduates who fought in the war, “49 were killed, 92 were wounded, and 452 won brevet rank.”38 Most veterans would become generals and colonels in the Civil War a dozen years later. Nicknames of the best generals—“Fuss and Feathers” Scott and “Rough and Ready” Taylor—revealed personality quirks that obscured each man’s mastery of strategy, tactics, logistics, and leadership. Each won every battle he fought. Their weakness was being conciliatory rather than ruthless. They failed to follow up victories with rapid, relentless

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advances that might have destroyed enemy armies. Instead, each gave his adversary a chance to get away, hoping that might lead to peace talks. The Mexican generals took advantage of Taylor’s eight-­week truce after Monterrey and Scott’s prolonged lulls after Cerro Gordo, Churubusco, and Chapultepec to rebuild their armies. In contrast to the army’s metamorphosis, the navy was just as outstanding during the Mexican War as it had been during the War of 1812. Operations included transporting troops and supplies, blockading Mexican ports, and sending marines and sailors ashore to seize ports. What was missing in the Mexican War were the 1812 war’s ship-­to-­ship duels in which America’s captains and crews scored twice as many victories as defeats against the Royal Navy. Historian Joseph Wheelan cites key American “firsts” from the Mexican War: “the first successful offensive war, fought almost entirely in the enemy’s country; the first large-­scale amphibious landing; the first occupation of an enemy capital; the battlefield debut of the U.S. field artillery; the first time that large numbers of West Point graduates led troops in combat; and the first war in which the public read about developments in reporters’ dispatches, not government announcements.”39 Swelling numbers of Americans heading west along the transcontinental trail slaughtered wildlife, especially buffalo. Tribes that lived along that way resisted by stealing livestock and killing trespassers. From 1840 to 1860, 253,397 emigrants reached Oregon or California, and 42,852 Mormons settled in Utah. Along the trail during those two decades, Indians killed 362 emigrants, and emigrants killed 426 Indians.40 None of those killings caused a war. Under the treaties of Fort Laramie in 1851 and Fort Atkinson in 1853, the plains tribes agreed to peace among themselves, designated territories, free passage of Americans through their land, restitution for any robberies or murders of Americans, and American forts (if needed on their land) in return for an initial payment and thereafter annual annuities. As with any war, each trans-­ Mississippi West Indian war had its own unique set of causes, phases, and results.41 Ironically, a butchered cow sparked America’s second war on the Great Plains. Captain Hugh Fleming commanded Fort Laramie’s garrison. The Brule Sioux band led by Conquering Bear was camped nearby waiting for the annuities. On August 18, 1854, an emigrant demanded that Fleming arrest the Indian who killed and butchered his lame cow. Fleming ordered Second Lieutenant John Grattan to take thirty troops and a howitzer to bring the miscreant to justice. Conquering Bear offered to pay a horse for the cow but refused to hand over the man who butchered it. Grattan ordered his troops to open fire. The fusillade killed Conquering Bear, but his warriors



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slaughtered Grattan and his men, looted a nearby warehouse, and then, led by Little Thunder, fled north. Brule and other Sioux war parties killed a score of emigrants along the trail. On learning of the battle and killings, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had Forts Laramie and Kearny reinforced. When the raids persisted, he authorized Colonel William Harney at Fort Kearny to pursue the Brule Sioux with six hundred dragoons, infantry, and artillerymen. They caught up with the Sioux at Ash Hollow on September 3, 1855. Little Thunder displayed a white flag and asked to talk. Harney ordered his men to attack. The soldiers killed eighty-­five and wounded five Sioux and captured seventy children while losing four dead and seven wounded. Little Thunder escaped with around 150 others. Harney resumed his pursuit but this time failed to find the band. Across swaths of the West, the army fought other tribes with similar inconclusive results in the decade preceding the Civil War: Shasta, Umpqua, Klamath, and Calapooya in 1851 and 1853; Jicarilla Apache and Utes from 1854 to 1855; Cheyenne in 1855; Comanche and Kiowa from 1856 to 1859; Yakima from 1855 to 1858; Cayuse, Walla Walla, Umatilla, Spokane, and Palouse from 1855 to 1858; Mescalero Apache from 1855 to 1860; Mojave from 1858 to 1859; and Navajo from 1855 to 1860. Usually the army established new forts at strategic sites to wage war against that tribe or tribes. Commanders hired friendly Indians as scouts. Sooner or later the hostile bands promised to bury the hatchet, either with a formal treaty or through a spoken understanding. American trade with the Far East began when the merchant ship Empress of China dropped anchor at Canton in 1785.42 That vessel’s return with a fortune’s worth of tea, porcelain, silk, and other exotic products encouraged other entrepreneurs to organize voyages. The trouble was finding products that the Chinese wanted to buy. Eventually, American ship captains traded their way westward around the world, stopping at a series of ports to exchange products for greater profits. First they sailed down and around Latin America and up the west coast as far as the Northwest, where they bought sea otter skins; then they traveled to the Hawaiian Islands for fragrant sandalwood before going on to Canton, where the Chinese eagerly traded for the pelts and wood. The captains sailed westward to ports around the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and Europe, and finally back to America. The British found a product that ever more Chinese could not do without: opium. Although China’s government outlawed opium, British and eventually American merchants smuggled it in past bribed officials. In 1839, a scrupulous Chinese official arrested British smugglers and publicly burned a fortune’s worth of opium. That action prompted Whitehall

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to declare war against China. Over three years, Britain’s warships and troops repeatedly devastated China’s poorly trained, motivated, and armed sea and land forces, capturing one port after another. In the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, China yielded Hong Kong Island to Britain, opened five ports to trade, granted Britons accused of crimes in China extraterritoriality or the right to be tried in British courts, and paid a $21 million indemnity. Through diplomacy, Washington won the same terms as Britain with China (except for an indemnity) in the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia, and in the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin they received the right to open an embassy in Beijing, to trade in ten more ports, and for American missionaries to preach in China. After the Taiping Rebellion erupted in 1850, American warships joined the Royal Navy in operations that routed rebel forces threatening traders in April 1854 and Chinese forces in November 1856. Popular American interest in the Pacific and Far East steadily rose. Wealthy churches, most in New England, sponsored missions to countries in those regions.43 The missionaries sent back regular letters informing their congregations of their efforts. Local newspapers often printed those letters. Soaring American riches reaped from the Pacific basin made them increasingly worth fighting for. From 1836 to 1841, 358 American merchant vessels traded with the Hawaiian Islands compared to only 82 British and 7 French vessels. On December 30, 1842, President Tyler informed Congress that American profits from Hawaii’s sandalwood had become so great that the United States should defeat any other nation’s attempt to colonize those islands. Evangelical Christians backed the Tyler Doctrine. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions began sending missionaries to Hawaii in 1819, and by 1842 they had established seventy-­nine churches, six schools, and two printing presses and converted twelve thousand natives and educated fifteen thousand children.44 In 1851, the French tested the Tyler Doctrine by attempting to assert a protectorate over Hawaii. On July 14, Secretary of State Noah Webster issued a formal warning to Paris not to do so. Meanwhile, American consul Elisha Allen and Navy Lieutenant R. E. Johnson secured Hawaiian King Kamehameha’s pledge to transfer his sovereignty to the United States for safekeeping. France backed down, and America’s annexation would not occur for another forty-­eight years. Japan became a mystery realm in the public imagination and a source of endless profits in the minds of entrepreneurs.45 Fearing foreign influences, Japan’s government outlawed virtually all international trade in 1603 and Christianity in 1614. The Japanese allowed only the Dutch and Chinese a restricted trade in Nagasaki. Japanese officials turned away any foreign ships that attempted to enter Japan’s ports for trade, water, food, or coal and imprisoned shipwrecked sailors. American merchants pressured the



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White House to open Japan’s thirty million potential consumers for trade. In 1852, President Millard Fillmore gave Commodore Matthew Perry that mission and had Congress allocate his expedition funding for supplies. He instructed Perry, “In his intercourse with this people, who are said to be proud and vindictive . . . he should be courteous and conciliatory, but at the same time, firm and decided. He will . . . submit with patience . . . to acts of discourtesy . . . but . . . will be careful to do nothing that may compromit . . . his own dignity, or that of his country. He will . . . do everything to impress them with . . . the power and greatness of this country.”46 Along the way to Japan, Perry signed trade treaties with the kingdoms of Siam and Okinawa. The Japanese did not open fire when he appeared with four warships in Edo (Tokyo) Bay in July 1853. After a tense standoff, the Japanese accepted Perry’s presentation of a letter from Fillmore requesting trade and his promise to return in the spring for a response. He then sailed away to winter in Okinawa. Meanwhile, Japan’s leaders debated whether to accept or reject that request. Conservatives called for war, arguing that their samurai warrior spirit would defeat the foreigners. Realists argued that Japan had no choice because the United States and European countries had overwhelming military power. Britain had defeated the mighty Chinese empire. Japan’s cities were mostly on the sea and were composed of wooden buildings; foreign bombardments would ignite conflagrations that burned the cities to ashes. Realism prevailed. Negotiations opened when Perry and his now nine-­ship flotilla reappeared in early March 1854. Under the Treaty of Kanagawa, signed on March 31, the Japanese agreed to open the tiny ports of Shimoda and Hakodate for trade and coal deposits, exchange consuls, and recognize most-­favored-­nation status. America’s first consul, Townsend Harris, succeeded in negotiating the Treaty of Shimoda that opened other ports, transferred his consulate to the capital Edo (Tokyo), and established a tariff list for goods. Other foreign countries followed America’s lead by signing similar treaties with Japan. Fighting piracy and the international slave trade were two interests that the United States shared with Britain. Their naval officers coordinated to repress piracy in the Caribbean and the slave trade along the African coast. Against pirates, America’s navy was superior, as its warships captured 80 vessels with 1,300 crew, while the Royal Navy chalked up 13 vessels with 300 crew. American warships were far less successful at quelling the slave trade, seizing only 24 vessels to the Royal Navy’s 595 from 1842 to 1861.47 Americans also fought to defend and enhance trade against pirates in the Far East that included both outlaw gangs and states. During the

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1820s into the 1830s, those pirates shook down or attacked increasing numbers of American vessels. This prompted President Jackson to dispatch the first American warship to those waters. On February 5, 1832, the forty-­four-­gun USS Potomac glided into the pirate lair of Quallah Battoo controlled by Aceh’s sultan on Sumatra and bombarded three small forts ringing the bay. The next morning, under covering cannon fire, 282 sailors and marines led by Captain Jack Downes packed into longboats and rowed ashore. They stormed the forts, killed around a hundred defenders, and routed the rest, while suffering two dead and eleven wounded. They blew up the forts and burned dozens of pirate vessels. That was America’s first combat in that region. Unfortunately, that easy victory did not deter the sultan and his minions. After renewed pirate attacks, American warships retaliated by bombarding Quallah Battoo in 1838 and 1839. Meanwhile, America’s slavocrats eyed Latin American countries for purchase or conquest. In 1848, President Polk offered Spain $100 million for Cuba, but Madrid rejected the offer. In 1854, President Franklin Pierce upped the bid to $130 million but received the same rejection. Inspired by those efforts, a group of American diplomats in Paris, including James Buchanan, soon to be president, sought to encourage and justify them. In 1854, they issued the Ostend Manifesto that asserted America’s destiny to expand through the Western Hemisphere and demanded Cuba’s purchase for no more than $120 million. If Madrid refused, “we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain.”48 Meanwhile, several American adventurers and imperialists called filibusters sought to take over several Latin American countries.49 None succeeded. Narciso Lopez tried to foment revolution in Cuba from 1849 to 1850. John Quitman launched an expedition against Cuba in 1855. Government forces eventually captured and executed both men and most of their followers. Of the filibusters, none was more quixotic than William Walker. In 1854, he led an expedition that tried to detach Baja and Sonora from Mexico. He succeeded in taking over Nicaragua from 1856 to 1857, during which he reinstituted slavery. He was deposed and then captured and shot when he tried to retake power in 1860. American culture increasingly both reflected and fueled national expansion as essayists, novelists, and painters celebrated and romanticized it. Ralph Emerson captured that spirit when he jubilantly declared in 1844, “America is the country of the Future. It is the country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”50 A few artists like George Catlin and Alfred Miller actually accompanied fur trade expeditions into the Rockies and painted realistic scenes of Indians, trappers, and wildlife. Charles King and Henry Inman painted



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portraits of Indian chiefs who visited Washington. Charles Deas, William Ranney, and Arthur Tait painted idealized versions of mountain men and westbound emigrants. George Bingham’s most iconic paintings included Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), Boone Leading Settlers to Kentucky (1852), and The Jolly Flatboatmen (1857). Horatio Greenough celebrated Daniel Boone’s rescue of his daughter and another girl from Indians with a group of five sculptures that Congress commissioned for the Capitol in 1838 and were finished in 1851. Most celebratory of all was Emmanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire (1861) of emigrants reaching the promised land of possibly California or Oregon. Several popular nonfiction books explicitly advocated expansion. Timothy Flint’s Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone was a best seller. Washington Irving wrote two histories of the western fur trade, Astoria (1836) and Bonneville (1837). During the 1840s, three works by participants excited countless readers. Richard Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840) vividly described his adventures as a seaman along California’s coast and the opportunities for enterprising Americans. Captain Charles Wilkes’s five-­ volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1844) detailed the round-­the-­world voyage he led charting waters and recording exotic peoples and animals along the way from 1838 to 1842. John Fremont provoked similar acclaim and interest with the 1845 publication of his Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842; and To Oregon and North California in the Years 1843–44. If Daniel Boone was a reserved introvert happiest alone in wilderness, David Crockett was an exuberant extrovert and storyteller who loved being the center of adoring attention. Crockett was a skilled hunter who fought in the 1813 Creek War and later was a congressman from 1827 to 1831 and from 1833 to 1835. His autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, appeared in 1834. A Broadway play was based on his book, and he had the pleasure of attending several performances. His death at the Alamo in 1836 helped galvanize Americans who wanted to annex Texas. Settlers naturally saw wilderness as both an obstacle to overcome and an opportunity to exploit for wealth. Americans clear-­cut forests and transformed land into buildings, plowed fields for crops, and fenced off pastures for livestock. A radically different view of wilderness emerged in the early nineteenth century, although heralds had appeared in previous centuries. Transcendentalists envisioned sublime beauty and spirituality in nature, especially wilderness. The Hudson River school of painters like Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Jasper Cropsey, and Frederic Church depicted that vision during the 1820s through the 1850s, as did Emerson through his essay collections of 1851 and 1844 and Henry Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854).

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Fiction blossomed with novels by Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and poetry by Poe, Henry Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Walt Whitman. The greatest novels of Hawthorne and Melville, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Moby Dick (1851), both take place on the frontier— respectively, in New England and on the sea. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales—The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), and The Deerslayer (1841)—present a panorama of frontiersmen and settlers, including hunters, trappers, Indian fighters, farmers, merchants, bankers, sheriffs, and judges, along with squatters, half-­breeds, and noble and evil Indians like Chingachgook and Magua. The series’ central hero, Natty Bumppo, called Hawkeye, is a courageous, resourceful, and free-­spirited frontiersman whose life is depicted in stages from youth to old age. Daniel Boone inspired Cooper’s character and especially his rescue of captured girls in The Last of the Mohicans. The irony of Hawkeye’s life is that he leads the way for settlers to transform wilderness into a civilization for which he is unfit and has fled. That irony plagued Boone and countless other frontiersmen who sought “elbow room” and headed farther west when smoke first curled from a neighbor’s chimney. New printing and papermaking techniques sharply dropped the price of books and other publications. “Dime novels” of frontier and war heroes became increasingly popular. Mountain man and guide Christopher “Kit” Carson had the horrific experience of failing to rescue a woman whom Apache murdered as she read a fictional story of him rescuing a girl captured by Indians.51 That’s era’s best-­selling novel explored not American expansion but American slavery: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The novel exacerbated chronic animosities between those who supported and opposed slavery. When President Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe at an 1862 White House reception, he quipped, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”52

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No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to advance immediately on your works. —Ulysses Grant We must not be enemies. . . . The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-­stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. —Abraham Lincoln

A

merica’s most devastating war was between Americans.1 The Civil War began with traditional efforts by both sides to limit death and destruction to combatants while sparing civilians. Eventually, President Abraham Lincoln reluctantly accepted the assertion by Generals Ulysses Grant, William Sherman, and Philip Sheridan that victory depended on waging “total war,” which meant destroying not just the rebellion’s armies but also its economy and popular will to resist. Sherman explained, “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor feel the hard hand of war, as well as the organized armies.” He added, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”2 By the war’s end, rural swaths of rebel states and cities like Richmond, Columbia, and Atlanta were in ruins, with countless warehouses, railroad tracks, mills, factories, barns, wharfs, and bridges burned and livestock 179

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and poultry slaughtered or driven off. More Americans died in the Civil War than in all the nation’s other wars combined. Battle and disease killed at least 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers and perhaps as many as 750,000, including civilians who died directly or indirectly. America’s Civil War was the world’s first modern war, as railroads, steamships, and telegraph networks revolutionized transportation and communications; factories revolutionized production for war; and mass-­produced rifles revolutionized killing distances on battlefields. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when rebel gunners opened fire on federal Fort Sumter flying the American flag in Charleston harbor, after its commander refused to surrender. That attack was the war’s immediate cause. Ultimately, slavery—or the nation’s bitter divisions over its morality—caused the Civil War.3 In the preceding months, seven southern slave states had seceded, with independence declarations citing their defense of slavery as why they seceded. Those states held a convention at Montgomery, Alabama, where delegates declared the independent Confederate States of America. The Confederate government demanded that the United States render all its forts in Confederate territory. The Constitution then did allow slavery, if not secession. Although the word does not appear in the text, three clauses allude to it—namely, the counting of slaves as three-­fifths of a person to determine a state’s quota of congressmen; the right of slaveholders to recapture slaves that escaped to free states; and the requirement that the nation’s international slave trade could not be ended before 1808. Yet the Constitution’s framers did not consider slave owning an inviolable natural right. The framers left the decision over whether slavery is right or wrong in the hands of each state government. Slavocrats fiercely defended (and abolitionists just as fiercely condemned) slavery. In 1860, of thirty-­four states, nineteen outlawed and fifteen legalized slavery. Lincoln’s election as president that year was the catalyst for slavocrats in seven of those states to assert secession. They did so despite Lincoln’s repeated assurances during the election campaign that he and the Republican Party accepted slavery where it existed and solely opposed its spread where people now were free. Lincoln declared the Confederacy unconstitutional and, after the Confederates fired the war’s opening shots, dedicated his administration to crushing that rebellion and reuniting the nation. Eventually he realized that America could truly become one again only if slavery was abolished. He took a series of steps that diminished slavery to extinction, most vitally the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared free all slaves in rebel states, and the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery across the nation, which took effect on December 6, 1865.



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Yet, for Lincoln, reuniting the country and abolishing slavery were essential preliminary steps for realizing all of America’s founding principles. He articulated that vision in many speeches, most eloquently in the Gettysburg Address: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. . . . It is . . . for us to be . . . dedicated . . . that this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”4 For all that, Lincoln understood that only total war could win total victory. Paradoxically, American democracy and slavery developed together.5 The first English settlers brought over notions of political rights and representation that led to nascent republican governments in each colony, with an elected assembly and constraints on royal-­ appointed governors. Meanwhile, from 1619, ever more colonists bought African slaves, initially as indentured servants released after seven years but by the mid-­seventeenth century held for life. During the colonial era’s seventeen decades, democratic institutions, laws, and customs became deeply embedded in each colony. Slavery, however, varied considerably in its virulence, with slaves around 2 percent of New England’s population, 5 percent of the middle colonies, and 40 percent of the southern colonies. When the Americans declared independence, of 2.1 million people, blacks numbered one out of five, of whom nine in ten were slaves. From the beginning, many (perhaps most) Americans believed slavery was wrong, and yet most tolerated it. Slavocrats justified slavery on biblical and broader moral grounds. They cited passages from the Old and New Testaments that endorsed slavery. They argued that American slaves enjoyed a far better life than Africans, enslaved or not. They also insisted that blacks were mentally and morally inferior to whites and so needed white protection and discipline. Abolitionism developed slowly. A Quaker congregation condemned slavery in 1688. The 1776 Declaration of Independence provoked ever more thinking people to want America to realize its principles of equal rights for all. Abolitionist groups swelled in numbers and members, including Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, both former slave owners. One by one, the northern states abolished slavery, and Congress’s 1787 Ordinance forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory. In 1817, Henry Clay and James Monroe were the most prominent founders of the American Colonization Society to free slaves and resettle them in Liberia, Africa. Those abolitionist efforts increasingly worried and enraged slavocrats. The assertion that slavery was morally wrong attacked their deepest

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beliefs, while abolition threatened their wealth and status, chronically shadowed by the dread that their slaves might rebel and murder them. Slavocrats in Congress pushed through the 1790 Southwest Ordinance that permitted slavery in that territory to counter the 1787 Northwest Ordinance outlawing slavery. An understanding arose that there should be equal numbers of free and slave states to keep a power balance in the Senate to prevent any region from overpowering the other. The first national crisis came in 1820 when Missouri’s territorial government applied to become a state with legal slavery. Free state politicians protested that Missouri’s admission as a slave state would tip the Senate’s balance toward slavocrats. Henry Clay engineered the 1820 Compromise that admitted Maine as a free state to offset Missouri and established a line drawn from Missouri’s southern boundary westward; henceforth any new states north or south of the line would be free or slave, respectively. Meanwhile, enterprising Americans were realizing Alexander Hamilton’s 1790s vision of the United States as a powerful financial, manufacturing, trading, innovating, inventing, and educated nation.6 America’s industrial revolution of mass factory production took off during this era. New modes of transportation and communication accelerated industrialization, including steamboats from 1807, railroads from 1827, and the telegraph from 1838. Inventions expanded the development of American wealth and power, like Cyrus McCormick with his reaper, John Deere with his steel plow, Elias Howe with his sewing machine, and Samuel Colt with his six-­shooter. America’s trade soared from $20 million in 1789 to $334 million in 1861. That economic revolution occurred mostly across northern free states, where the middle class swelled steadily in wealth and numbers as careers and jobs diversified and railroads and canals knit the region together. Wealth in southern slave states was mostly in the hands of plantation owners whose chattel mass-­produced crops, with cotton that fed textile factories in northern states and Britain the most lucrative. Slavery depressed wages for white southern laborers and hardscrabble farmers. Literacy also starkly varied between regions, with nearly twice as many white northerners able to read, write, and do sums as white southerners. Tensions over slavery soared during the 1850s. America’s 1848 victory in the Mexican War and acquisition of the Southwest sparked the latest crisis over whether new territories and eventually states should be free or slave. Of that vast realm, one small region soon became incredibly profitable, at least for some people. On January 28, 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California’s Sierra Mountains foothills. Word of that discovery sparked the “gold rush” in which tens of thousands of (mostly) men journeyed to California to get rich. Few did, at least from mining



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gold. Many more did by selling supplies to miners. By 1850, California’s population had soared past one hundred thousand, and the territorial government formally requested statehood from Congress. That request provoked a new crisis. Slavocrats demanded that California should be divided north and south, free and slave, with that line from Missouri’s southern boundary. The trouble was that there were few slaves or proponents in southern California, and most Californians wanted a unified state. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky initiated and Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois consummated the “1850 Compromise” that made California a free state while settlers in other territories won from Mexico would determine whether they would be slave or free. In doing so, the 1850 Compromise canceled the 1820 Compromise. Another compromise was the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which strengthened legal powers initially granted by its 1793 version for slave owners to capture escaped slaves by requiring local authorities to collaborate with them and imposing harsh penalties on those who refused. Abolitionism grew steadily during the nineteenth century’s first half with groups like the American Anti-­Slavery Society founded in 1833, the Liberty Party founded in 1840, and leaders like William Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Arthur Tappan, and Frederick Douglass, to name a few. Yet most northerners were indifferent until 1852, when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was published and quickly became a best seller. The novel boosted abolitionism and aggravated regional animosities, as it depicted slave owner cruelties and slave sufferings. The toleration of most northerners for slavery was increasingly troubled. The 1854 Kansas-­ Nebraska Act exacerbated animosities between slavocrats and abolitionists. That law let a territory’s residents determine whether their state would become free or slave. Although Nebraska had no slaves, Kansas had some. For the next half dozen years, slavocrats and “free soilers” struggled, at times violently, to shift that future state into their respective column. Boston abolitionists formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company to encourage free soilers to settle in Kansas. Free soilers may have outnumbered slavocrats, but slavocrats outgunned them. Slavocrats won an early lead when Senator David Atchison of Missouri led a thousand armed men, dubbed “border ruffians” by free soilers, to invade Kansas and vote overwhelmingly for slavery in a referendum held in November 1854. Kansas split between the official territorial government dominated by slavocrats at Lecompton and a free-­soiler government at Topeka. Kansas became increasingly “bloody” as radical slavocrats and free soilers beat and even murdered each other. The worst violence came on May 24, 1856, when abolitionist John Brown, his five sons, and three

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other men murdered five slavocrats on Pottawatomie Creek. Over two hundred politically motivated murders plagued Kansas from 1854 to 1860. Violence spread to Congress when, on May 22, 1856, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks viciously beat with a cane Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner after his speech condemning slavocracy. Politically, the Democratic Party, with its slavocrat and tolerant wings, continued to dominate the nation. That party originated with Jeffersonism and anti-­federalism around 1790 as the Democratic-­Republican Party opposed by the Federalist Party founded by Alexander Hamilton with his muscular problem-­solving federal state outlook. The Federalist Party steadily diminished to extinction due to its leaders’ failure to create a popular grassroots organization, compounded by Federalist president John Adams’s authoritarian Alien and Sedition Acts in the late 1790s. For a generation after 1815, America had a political “era of good feelings” as the now simply named Democratic Party dominated. The 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, with his authoritarian attitudes and anti–United States Bank policy, inspired Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and others to form the Whig Party dedicated to Hamiltonism in 1832. For twenty years, numerous Whigs won election to Congress, and two (William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor) won the presidency. But the Whig Party died in 1852, with Millard Fillmore its last presidential candidate. The party collapsed from the dismal support for Fillmore and Whigs at the polls. Many Whig voters backed recent alternatives like the anti–mass immigrant Know Nothing Party and the abolitionist Liberty Party. Yet the Whig Party was reborn in 1854 as the Republican Party, much as the Federalist Party was reborn in 1832 as the Whig Party. Over the decades, Hamilton’s vision remained virulent even if its adherents failed to uphold it with a popular party. Republicans called for a muscular problem-­solving government that helped develop the economy with a national bank, tariffs that protected American manufacturers, and subsidies for railroads. In the 1856 election, the Republican Party nominated John Fremont, whose campaign slogan was “Free soil, free speech, free men, Fremont!” The Democrats nominated James Buchanan, a former secretary of state and Pennsylvania congressman and senator, while Fillmore ran with endorsements from remnants of the Whig and Know Nothing Parties. Buchanan won with 1,836,072 popular votes (45.3 percent) and 174 electoral votes to Fremont’s 1,342,345 (33.1 percent) and 114 and Fillmore’s 873,053 (21.3 percent) and 8. Thus did Fillmore “spoil” what might have been a decisive Hamiltonian victory had he endorsed rather than opposed Fremont. Instead, Buchanan, a weak leader strongly tolerant of slavery, became president. One slave’s fate further embittered the nation in 1857. Dred Scott was a slave who lived in St. Louis and whose master had taken him to military



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posts in Illinois and Minnesota. In 1846, after his master died, Scott filed a petition with the Missouri Circuit Court in St. Louis for freedom based on the “once free, always free” principle for his free state sojourns. He lost his first suit in 1847 and then won a retrial in 1850. His owner appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court, which overturned the lower court decision. Scott appealed to America’s Supreme Court. On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney rendered the seven-­to-­two decision in Dred Scot v. John Sandford. He rejected the appeal, asserting not only that slaves lacked legal standing in courts but also that no blacks, slave or free, could be citizens. That latter assertion provoked the worst condemnation, both from abolitionists and from those who argued that the Constitution does not explicitly bar anyone from citizenship. Radical abolitionist John Brown committed his worst violence on October 16, 1859, when he and twenty-­two other men, including five blacks, captured America’s arsenal at Harper’s Ferry with the plan of distributing arms to slaves for a rebellion. Virginia militia converged on the arsenal, and President Buchanan sent Colonel Robert Lee and eighty-­eight marines to restore order. On October 18, Lee and his marines stormed the arsenal, killed eleven rebels, and captured Brown and six others while five escaped in the confusion. The rebels killed one marine and six civilians and wounded one marine and nine civilians. Brown and his six co-­conspirators were indicted and found guilty of treason, murder, and inciting an insurrection. Before his execution by hanging on December 2, Brown issued these chilling and prophetic last words: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood.”7 Four candidates vied for the presidency in 1860.8 The Democrats could not have chosen a more radical slavocrat setting for their convention than Charleston, South Carolina. When most delegates backed Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, slavocrats stormed out and nominated Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky. The Constitutional Union Party nominated Senator John Bell of Tennessee. At Chicago, the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was an astonishing choice.9 Few men bore a skimpier resume to the White House. Until then he had served four terms as an Illinois assemblyman and one term as a congressman. It was the profundity and eloquence of Lincoln’s words that propelled him to the presidency. As first a Whig and then a Republican, he articulated the Hamiltonian vision that animated those parties. Recently he had achieved national renown for his arguments in seven debates with Stephen Douglas in the contest for senator from Illinois in autumn 1858 and for his address before New York’s Cooper Institute in February 1860.

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Lincoln and the Republican Party ran on the Hamiltonian agenda of a national bank, protective tariffs for industry, a transcontinental railroad, a homestead act to give western lands free to settlers, and public schools. Lincoln won a plurality with 1,865,908 popular votes (39.8 percent) and 180 electoral votes to Douglas’s 1,380,202 (29.2 percent) and 12, Breckinridge’s 846,610 (18.1 percent) and 72, and Bell’s 589,901 (12.6 percent) and 39.10 Across the Deep South, slavocrat “fire-­eaters,” their era’s war hawks, reacted with rage to Lincoln’s victory and rallied their statehouses to secede. First was South Carolina on December 20, followed by Mississippi on January 9, Florida on January 10, Alabama on January 11, Georgia on January 19, Louisiana on January 26, and Texas on February 1. Each sent delegates to a convention at Montgomery, Alabama, that met on February 4 and declared themselves the independent Confederate States of America, drafted a constitution, and elected Jefferson Davis president by February 9. Davis swore the presidential oath to the Confederacy on February 16. During this time, Lincoln was at his home in Springfield, Illinois, trying to put together a cabinet and searching for ways to reunite the nation. During his inaugural address, he declared secession unconstitutional, arguing that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution established one nation whose sovereignty was “we the people” represented by the federal government, with the states subordinate. He called on Americans to unite: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. . . . The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-­stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”11 When the Confederate government demanded that Fort Sumter and other federal forts surrender, Lincoln sought to resupply the garrison. Rebel batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12. Major Robert Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter the next day. On April 15, Lincoln called for seventy-­five thousand three-­month army volunteers to suppress the rebellion. President Davis upped the ante by summoning one hundred thousand volunteers to defend the Confederacy. The middle tier of southern slave states joined the Confederacy, Virginia on April 17, Arkansas on May 5, North Carolina on May 20, and Tennessee on June 8. The border slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware stayed tenuously in the United States. The Confederacy moved its capital from Montgomery to Richmond, a hundred miles due south of Washington, on May 8. As if the Confederacy’s swelling numbers and expanse were not daunting enough, the Lincoln administration faced an insurrection in Maryland



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that threatened to isolate the capital. Rebel sympathizers cut telegraph lines and pried up railroad tracks. On April 19, a Baltimore mob attacked the 6th Massachusetts as it marched through, and a dozen rioters and six soldiers died and thirty were wounded in the fighting. Lincoln deployed regiments to secure and restore the rail and telegraph lines, suspended habeas corpus, and had authorities arrest hundreds of suspects. For Lincoln and his advisors, the crucial decisions over the next four years involved how to muster enough men and matériel, as well as enough leaders brilliant at motivating, training, equipping, logistics, strategy, and tactics to crush the rebellion. As with nearly any war, neither side’s victory was inevitable. Each had its array of hard- and soft-­power advantages and disadvantages, with leadership the most critical. Certainly the North enjoyed far greater people and production power. In 1860, of 31,443,321 people, 22,339,989 were northerners to 5,449,462 white southerners, 3,521,110 slaves, and 132,760 free blacks. The North’s effective manpower advantage was five to two. As for manufacturing, the North boasted 110,000 factories with 1,300,000 workers to the South’s 18,000 factories with 110,000 workers. The North and South had 21,973 and 9,283 respective miles of railroad. Northern factories produced 96 percent of the nation’s locomotives and 97 percent of its firearms. The North had eight hundred thousand draft animals to the South’s three hundred thousand.12 During the war, the North’s army mustered 2 million men, including 500,000 foreign-­born and 180,000 blacks, while the South’s army mustered 800,000. The initial rush of volunteers dwindled with time as the war’s horrors, tedium, and uncertainties became increasingly pressing. Both sides eventually resorted to drafts, the South in 1862 and the North in 1863. Among the paradoxes of slavery and the Confederacy was that most southerners initially enthusiastically supported both, even though three of four men owned no slaves and slavery depressed wages for white workers. Eventually half of southern men from eighteen to forty-­ five years old fought in the war, one of four of them died, and two of four suffered often crippling wounds. When the war began, America’s army numbered 1,105 officers and 15,259 enlisted men in ten infantry, two cavalry, two dragoon, and four artillery regiments, mostly scattered by companies at seventy-­nine military posts across the country. Of the officers, 239 resigned to accept Confederate commissions. Of West Point graduates then serving or retired, 754 fought for the North and 283 for the South. Of the navy’s 1,554 officers, 373 fought for the South.13 West Point conferred mixed educational experiences on its graduates. The Military Academy’s curriculum emphasized engineering and

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fortifications rather than leadership, strategy, tactics, and logistics.14 Warfare’s chief teacher was Dennis Mahan, who graduated from West Point in 1824, undertook advanced studies in France, and returned to become a professor in 1832. Having never experienced war, he could teach it only as an abstract theory. His two greatest influences were writers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz, and their respective books The Art of War and On War. Alas, Mahan misinterpreted those writers and emphasized defending and taking positions rather than destroying the enemy’s army, economy, and will to fight. He expounded those views to two generations of students until his death in 1871 and in his ponderous tomes Complete Treatise on Field Fortifications (1836), Summary of the Course of Permanent Fortifications and of the Attack and Defense of Permanent Works (1850), Descriptive Geometry as Applied to the Drawing of Fortifications and Stereotomy (1864), and An Elementary Course on Military Engineering (1866). Among Mahan’s most diligent students was Henry Halleck, who would write his own textbook, Elements of Military Art and Science (1846). Halleck was a hypercautious field general and later advisor to Lincoln during the Civil War. Those views did not indoctrinate every graduate. Among the powers of both presidencies was conferring generalships. A frustration both Lincoln and Davis faced was having to appoint generals with political influence but little or no military experience. That task was the greatest in 1861 when both sides were rapidly building vast armies. That year, the candidate’s military professionalism determined 65 percent of Lincoln’s 126 picks and 50 percent of Davis’s 89, while politics determined the rest. Of that year’s generals, 12.7 percent of the North’s and 7.9 percent of the South’s had no military experience.15 Regiments ideally numbered a thousand men split among ten hundred-­ man companies, plus another fifty or so command staff and band. Usually death, desertion, and failures to fill empty ranks left units with half or even a third as many troops. A Union army disadvantage was forming new regiments with recruits rather than reinforcing existing regiments. The result was that regiments steadily diminished in manpower below their authorized strengths. Regardless, customarily four regiments formed a four-­thousand-­man brigade, three brigades a twelve-­thousand-­man division, two divisions a twenty-­ four-­ thousand-­ man corps, and three corps a seventy-­ two-­ thousand-­man army. Army command staffs included officers charged with personnel (G-1), intelligence and security (G-2), operations and training (G-2), and logistics (G-4). Most corps, division, and brigade commanders assigned similar tasks to their staff officers. As always, supply and strategy were inseparable. On campaign, a one-­hundred-­thousand-­ man army needed 2,500 wagons and 35,000 draft animals or mounts and daily devoured six hundred tons of supplies.16



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A Confederate advantage was forming an army’s cavalry into a separate corps rather than splitting it among divisions as in the Union army. That let brilliant generals like Nathan Forrest, J. E. B. Stuart, John Morgan, and Joe Wheeler literally run circles around Union troops. The Union did not form cavalry corps until 1864. Until then, division commanders usually subordinated their cavalry to reconnaissance or protecting supply trains rather than raiding deep in the enemy’s rear to destroy supply depots, railroads, and telegraph lines. Union and Confederate grand strategies were asymmetrical.17 The Union could win only with offensives that crushed the Confederacy while the rebels won as long as they defeated those offensives. That, of course, did not stop the North from defending and the South from attacking when it was to their respective advantages. Lincoln and his cabinet secretaries were all novices at war. Fortunately, Winfield Scott, the army’s commander, was a brilliant soldier and general who had fought in the 1812, Seminole, and Mexican Wars. He emphasized that victory was uncertain and was possible only after years of steadily building America’s army, navy, and industrial production to overwhelming numbers that crushed rebel armies on land (assisted wherever possible by gunboats) and blockaded rebel harbors. The Lincoln administration eventually embraced that total war strategy, dubbed the “Anaconda Plan” for systematically squeezing the life from the Confederacy. The navy faced the enormous challenge of blockading 3,500 miles of rebel coast that included 10 major ports and 180 river mouths and bays ideal for smugglers.18 That required a vast number of warships, support ships, sailors, and marines. The navy expanded from 42 commissioned vessels in April 1861 to 626 warships, including 65 ironclads in April 1865. Ironclads were the war’s chief naval innovation. Eventually the Union and Confederacy built fifty-­eight and twenty-­one respective ironclads. The blockade eventually included over 500 vessels, of which around 150 hovered offshore at one time waiting for blockade-­runners and relief from their replacements with fresh stores of munitions, provisions, and fuel. Over four years and eight thousand voyages, five in six smugglers evaded capture, although the chances worsened with time as the number of blockaders steadily rose; nine out of ten smugglers made it in 1861 and only one of two in 1865. They conveyed half a million cotton bales to purchase and bring back half a million rifles, a thousand tons of gunpowder, several hundred cannons, and a million pairs of shoes.19 The blockade steadily reduced vital southern exports and imports. Prices climbed steadily as shortages of goods worsened. Rebels hoped that Britain would ally with the Confederacy for access to cotton vital for its textile industry. The British made up their loss of the southern supply with cotton from India, Egypt, and other countries.

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As always, technologies determined tactics.20 Mass-­produced rifles that mounted bayonets revolutionized warfare. The killing range of the Union army’s .58-caliber Springfield rifle and the British .577-caliber Enfield that armed tens of thousands of Confederate troops was a couple hundred yards, compared to a musket’s couple score yards. A successful massed attack over open ground was unlikely with both sides armed with muskets—and virtually suicidal with rifles. Cavalry was a key component of battles during the musket era and peripheral during the rifle era. Cavalry was still critical for scouting, screening, pursuing, and raiding, but no longer for charging massed enemy troops. Most northerners and southerners initially viewed warring against each other with glee, not utter despair and sorrow. They longed to resolve definitively decades of smoldering regional animosities spiked with crises that nearly shattered the nation. They assumed their side would swiftly vanquish the other to prevail, leading to independence for Confederates, reunion for Unionists. Hundreds of thousands of males, from peach-­fuzzed teens to white-­haired veterans, eagerly crowded volunteer regimental recruiting offices, with their worst dread being that the war would end without them firing a shot. Indeed, had each side strictly adhered to its initial three-­month volunteer enlistments, that might have happened. That looming deadline animated northern newspaper editors to blare the front-­page banner, “On to Richmond!” By July, the North and South each had two armies in northern Virginia. General Irvin McDowell’s thirty-­ five thousand troops at Fairfax near Washington faced General Pierre Beauregard’s twenty thousand troops fifteen miles southwest at Manassas. In the Shenandoah Valley, General Robert Patterson’s fifteen thousand troops near Harper’s Ferry faced General Joe Johnston’s eleven thousand twenty-­five miles southwest at Winchester. Lincoln urged McDowell to march against the rebels before the men’s three-­month enlistments expired. To McDowell’s protests that his men were too green to fight, Lincoln replied, “You are green, it is true, but they are green, also; you are all green alike.”21 Lincoln instructed each general to attack the enemy army before it. McDowell advanced, but Patterson stayed put. That let Johnston move his army by train to join Beauregard when McDowell’s army attacked on July 21. Each tried to turn the other’s right flank. The rebel left held while its right routed the Union troops. The Confederates inflicted 625 dead, 950 wounded, and 1,200 captured while suffering 400 killed and 1,600 wounded.22 The Battle of Bull Run disillusioned those who believed that American forces would quickly smother the rebellion. Lincoln and his cabinet adopted Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” to crush the Confederacy slowly,



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steadily, over years. Lincoln got Congress to send him two bills each authorizing recruitment of five hundred thousand troops, or together one million, for three-­year terms. Lincoln replaced McDowell with General George McClellan to command and rebuild the demoralized army. Lincoln soon regretted that choice. McClellan had presided over a minor campaign that drove rebels from western Virginia whose political leaders seceded to form the state of West Virginia. Although McClellan was adept at organizing, training, equipping, and motivating what he called his Army of the Potomac, he shunned actually leading that army on campaign, let alone battle. He constantly complained (falsely) that the enemy outnumbered him and so he could not move until his army was greater.23 Beyond Virginia, Missouri was the only other state with critical battles in 1861. At Jefferson City, Missouri’s capital, Governor Claiborne Jackson was a slavocrat who sought to join his state with the Confederacy. He named Sterling Price, a former governor and Mexican War general, commander of Missouri’s militia. The decisive acts of Captain Nathaniel Lyon kept Missouri in the Union. He commanded the arsenal packed with twenty-­one thousand rifles and tons of munitions at St. Louis. When slavocrat militia threatened to capture the arsenal, he gave them boxes filled with obsolete muskets and secretly had the rifles transported across the Mississippi River to safety in Illinois. After Lincoln promoted him to general and sent him reinforcements, Lyon led 1,700 troops against Price, who with Jackson and their militia fled first to Boonville, then Springfield, and finally Fayetteville in northwest Arkansas. Lyon pursued the rebels to Springfield, where he called off the chase to rest and resupply his 5,500 exhausted troops. Reinforced, Price marched with 18,000 troops north. Rather than withdraw before the enemy’s superior force, Lyon split his army and attacked Price’s front and left flank on August 10. The rebels repelled the attacks, inflicting 1,317 casualties while suffering 1,230; Lyon was among the dead. General Franz Sigel took command and withdrew the army’s remnants toward St. Louis. Lincoln sent General John Fremont to St. Louis to take command of the Missouri front. Fremont ignored Lincoln’s order to march against Price. Instead, he issued a proclamation that freed Missouri’s slaves on August 30. Lincoln revoked that proclamation, fearing it would push not just Missouri but also Kentucky, led by its slaveholders, into the Confederacy. Price followed up his victory by marching to Lexington on the Missouri River and capturing its 3,500-man garrison on September 20. Fremont refused Lincoln’s repeated orders to cut off Price with his 38,000 troops. Price withdrew to Springfield. Fremont slowly followed and occupied

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Springfield while Price led his army back to Fayetteville, Arkansas. Lincoln relieved Fremont of command and eventually replaced him with General Henry Halleck, renowned for his book on warfare. Halleck soon proved himself merely a theorist and not a skilled practitioner of war. During his own stint, Fremont did commit one act that proved decisive in winning the war. He appointed a then unknown general to command a brigade forming at Cairo, Illinois, the strategic juncture where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers mingled. Ulysses Grant was a West Point graduate who fought valiantly in the Mexican War but resigned from the army in 1854 after a humiliating drunken binge at an isolated California fort far from his beloved family then in St. Louis.24 For the next seven years, he failed as a farmer, horse trader, and firewood cutter and was tending his father’s store in Galena, Illinois, when Lincoln called for volunteers. A friend, Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, got him a colonel’s commission to raise a regiment. His talent for organization, strategy, logistics, and, most vitally, taking the initiative won him promotion to brigadier general. Grant launched his first campaign in November 1861. Two rebel forces straddled the Mississippi River a dozen miles downstream: General Leonidas Polk’s 5,000 troops at Columbus, Kentucky, and General Gideon Pillow’s 2,700 at Belmont, Missouri. On November 6, Grant sent General Charles Smith with two thousand troops up the Ohio to seize Paducah, Kentucky, and then march toward Columbus to distract Polk. On November 7, he packed 3,114 troops aboard transports preceded by two gunboats. As the gunboats shelled Polk’s troops, he landed his troops north of Belmont to attack and rout Pillow. Then things went wrong. Smith never marched to distract Polk. Rebel batteries drove off the gunboats. Polk ferried several thousand troops to reinforce Pillow. Many of Grant’s troops scattered to pillage the abandoned rebel camp. Pillow counterattacked and pushed back the federal troops. Grant was the last to reembark to steam back to Cairo. He had suffered 607 casualties, and his men had inflicted 641. Technically, the rebels won that battle. Yet psychologically Grant’s bold thrust was a victory for him, his men, and the northern cause as word of it spread. He received more troops and gunboats. Captain Andrew Foote commanded the eight gunboats and a score of transports. Grant carefully studied the region’s strategic map. In January 1862, the rebels had three small but swelling forces across Kentucky: Polk’s 20,000 at Columbus, General Albert Johnston’s 25,000 at Bowling Green, and General George Crittenden’s 6,000 at Mill Springs. Forts Henry and Donelson lay a dozen miles apart, respectively guarding the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in western Kentucky. Facing them were his



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15,000 men at Cairo, General Don Carlos Buell’s 25,000 at Louisville, and General George Thomas’s 4,500 at Lebanon. On January 18, Thomas routed Crittenden at Logan’s Crossroads, inflicting 529 casualties and securing eastern Kentucky at the cost of 246 casualties. Grant realized that if he captured Forts Henry and Donelson while Buell marched against Johnston, he would force Polk and Johnston to withdraw from Columbus and Bowling Green to avoid being cut off if Grant then marched either westward or eastward. On February 7, Foote’s gunboats preceded transports packed with Grant’s 15,000 troops up the Tennessee River. As Grant led his troops ashore, the gunboats bombarded Fort Henry. General Lloyd Tilghman abandoned Fort Henry and led his 2,500 troops to Fort Donelson. Grant marched his troops across to besiege Fort Donelson as Foote and the gunboats steamed upstream to destroy the railroad bridge linking Memphis with Nashville; then they headed back and around all the way up the Cumberland River to Fort Donelson. On February 11, as Grant deployed his troops to hem in Fort Donelson, General John Floyd attacked with his seventeen thousand troops. Grant’s men blunted the attack. Reinforcements swelled Grant’s army to twenty-­ four thousand troops. Rebel gunners repelled Foote’s gunboats as they bombarded Fort Donelson. On the night of February 15, Floyd turned over command to General Simon Buckner and escaped with a couple thousand troops, which most vitally included then colonel Nathan Forrest. On February 16, Buckner asked his former West Point roommate for terms. Grant famously replied, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to advance immediately on your works.” Buckner bitterly complied. During the siege, Grant’s troops killed 372, wounded 1,127, and captured 12,291 rebels while suffering 507 dead, 1,776 wounded, and 208 captured. An elated Lincoln promoted him to major general. Grant followed up his victory by having a contingent steam up the Cumberland and take Clarksville, Tennessee, with its industrial complex and warehouses packed with supplies. Polk and Johnston withdrew across Tennessee and joined forces at Corinth, Mississippi. Buell slowly followed Johnston and took Nashville unopposed on February 25. Foote led his gunboats to join General John Pope’s twenty-­ three thousand troops in a siege of Island Number Ten’s seven thousand defenders from February 28 to April 8, when they surrendered. Grant marched his now 42,682-man-­ strong army up the Tennessee River and in early April deployed them from the river’s west bank along a half-mile front between two creeks with Shiloh church in the center. There he awaited Buell for a combined advance against Corinth twenty miles south. Johnston struck first with his 40,235 troops on the morning of April 6. The initial assault routed two of Grant’s six divisions, but two others

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held, eventually reinforced by two others in reserve. That night Buell’s lead division reached Savannah Landing on the east bank and was ferried across to Pittsburg Landing. On April 7, Grant launched an attack that drove off the rebels. Each side lost nearly identical killed and wounded, 1,754 and 8,408 federal and 1,724 and 8,012 rebel, but the Union lost more captured, 2,885 to 950; Johnston was among the dead. Grant was preparing to follow up his victory by marching on Corinth when Halleck, the regional commander, arrived. Had Halleck quick-­ marched that combined army of 70,000 that with reinforcements reached 110,000 against 30,000 rebels, now commanded by General Beauregard, he would have overwhelmed the enemy. Instead, Halleck advanced only a mile or two daily and had his troops build breastworks each afternoon. That let Beauregard’s men construct extensive entrenchments around Corinth. Halleck finally arrived before Corinth and began a siege on April 29. Beauregard tricked Halleck into believing that reinforcements had swelled his army by having his men cheer each arriving train when actually he was steadily evacuating his troops to Tupelo fifty miles south. The Union troops occupied the abandoned lines on May 30. Then, rather than march against the rebel army, now led by General Braxton Bragg, Halleck broke up his combined army into separate armies to occupy and hold parts of Tennessee with Grant’s west and Buell’s central. Elsewhere across the western theater, Union forces scored significant advances. Two key southern cities fell to armadas: New Orleans on April 29 and Memphis on June 6. Captures of forts and sinkings of gunboats preceded each capture, with Foote most prominent leading to Memphis and Captain David Farragut against New Orleans. Farragut steamed up the Mississippi River to capture Baton Rouge and Natchez but lacked the firepower and troops to take Vicksburg; he abandoned Natchez and withdrew to Baton Rouge. The rebels still controlled a two-­hundred-­ meandering-­mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Beyond the Mississippi, General Earl Van Dorn replaced Price to command the sixteen-­thousand-­man rebel army at Fayetteville, Arkansas. With eleven thousand troops, General Samuel Curtis advanced. On March 7, Van Dorn tried to cut Curtis off at Elkhorn Tavern, but the federal troops held and repelled the Confederates, with each side suffering 1,300 casualties. Van Dorn withdrew to Little Rock, and for now Curtis was too understrength to follow. General Henry Sibley led 2,600 troops from Fort Thorn, near Mesilla, up the Rio Grande valley, hoping to conquer New Mexico. General Edward Canby with 3,800 barred the way at Fort Craig, about halfway to Albuquerque. Sibley’s troops trounced Canby’s at the Battle of Valverde on



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February 20. When Sibley advanced north, Canby feared to follow. Sibley’s men trudged unopposed into Albuquerque on March 2 and Santa Fe on March 13. The last significant Union force in northern New Mexico was Colonel John Slough with 1,300 troops at Fort Union. Sibley and Slough marched toward each other and battled at Glorieta Pass from March 26 to 28. An attack by Union troops that destroyed the rebel supply train forced Sibley to retreat. Pursued by Slough, Sibley withdrew all the way to El Paso, Texas. Union troops occupied Mesilla on the border in early July. Naval operations opened campaigns in the eastern theater. General Ambrose Burnside with 1,200 troops packed aboard a flotilla captured Roanoke Island with its 2,675-man garrison on February 8, 1862. Occupying Roanoke Island gave the navy a base to blockade Pamlico Sound with its ports of New Bern, Elizabeth City, and Beaufort. At Hampton Roads, Virginia, the Confederates converted a scuttled American warship into the ironclad Virginia bristling with ten cannons. On March 8, the Virginia attacked the five-­warship blockade squadron and sank two of them before withdrawing upriver to replenish its coal and munitions. That evening arrived the ironclad USS Monitor with two cannons within a revolving turret. On March 9, the Virginia and Monitor battled for hours, with each’s shots bouncing off the other. The result was a tactical draw as each withdrew, but a Union strategic win, as the Virginia never again steamed against the fleet. In northern Virginia, McClellan delayed moving his one hundred thousand troops against Joseph Johnston’s forty-­five thousand at Manassas. Under Lincoln’s pressure, he finally landed fifty thousand troops at Urbana that forced Johnston to withdraw to Fredericksburg. Rather than pursue, he persuaded a reluctant Lincoln to let him land his army near Fort Monroe at the peninsula’s tip formed by the York and James Rivers flowing into Chesapeake Bay. Richmond lay eighty miles west. McClellan’s army began disembarking near Fort Monroe on March 17. Twenty-­three miles away at Yorktown, General John Magruder had entrenched ten thousand troops. McClellan would have overwhelmed Magruder had he marched his army rapidly against him. Instead, McClellan did not begin to besiege Yorktown with fifty-­eight thousand troops until April 4. Johnston arrived with reinforcements to take command. Over the next month, reinforcements swelled McClellan’s army to 102,620. Johnston withdrew thirteen miles to Williamsburg on May 3. McClellan ordered his army to advance and attack on May 5. The Union troops eventually forced the Confederates to retreat, inflicting 1,681 casualties while suffering 2,283. Johnston withdrew to Richmond’s defenses. McClellan timidly followed. By May 31, McClellan’s army straddled the Chickahominy River

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that flows north of Richmond southeast into the James River, with two corps north and two corps south. That day, Johnston hurled thirty-­nine thousand troops against the thirty-­four thousand Union troops south of the Chickahominy at Fair Oaks and Seven Pines. The fighting raged for two days before the Union drove back the attackers, inflicting 6,134 casualties and suffering 5,031; Johnston was among the severely wounded. Meanwhile, two Union armies converged on General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s seventeen thousand troops in the Shenandoah Valley, General John Fremont with twenty thousand from Monterey and General Nathaniel Banks with twenty-­five thousand from Harper’s Ferry. In a brilliant whirlwind campaign, Jackson hit advanced enemy forces at McDowell on May 8, Front Royal on May 23, Winchester on May 25, Cross Keys on June 8, and Port Republic on June 9. Those victories inflicted 5,317 casualties and cost 2,677. Strategically, he diverted tens of thousands of troops that otherwise could have marched against Richmond from the north to join McClellan from the east. Jackson then received orders to join the army defending Richmond. He departed on June 17. President Davis replaced Johnston with Robert E. Lee as the army’s commander. Lee was among America’s greatest strategists and tacticians. He was a model soldier for self-­discipline, diligence, courage, intelligence, and gravitas and second in his West Point class.25 During the Mexican War, he was on General Scott’s staff and twice returned from perilous scouting missions to report ways to attack the Mexican army from exposed flanks. Lee sought to destroy General Fitz-­John Porter’s corps isolated north of the Chickahominy after McClellan withdrew the other corps south. The plan was for General James Longstreet to pin down Porter while Jackson smashed his right flank. For now, Jackson left behind in the Shenandoah Valley the speed and decisiveness he displayed there. Longstreet attacked, but Jackson failed fully to support him at Mechanicsville on June 26, Gaines Mill on June 27, Savage Station on June 29, Glendale on June 30, and Malvern Hill on July 1. Nonetheless, Union forces withdrew either immediately or the next day from each onslaught. McClellan retreated to Harrison Landing on the James River. Lee’s Seven Days campaign had demoralized McClellan and most of his troops, inflicting sixteen thousand casualties at the cost of twenty thousand. That feat was brilliant enough, but Lee’s next campaign was even greater. Having thoroughly cowed McClellan, Lee turned his back on him. He left around twenty thousand troops to man Richmond’s defenses and marched north toward Washington, whose approach General Pope with eighty thousand troops guarded. With 16,868 troops, Jackson spearheaded the advance and trounced Banks’s 8,030-man division at Cedar Mountain on August 9, inflicting 2,353 casualties while suffering 1,338. Lee concentrated fifty-­five thousand troops at Gordonsville and then sent



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Jackson on an arc to fall on Pope’s rear and huge supply depot at Manassas Junction. Pope hastily withdrew twenty-­five miles to attack Jackson but was repulsed on August 28. Lee and Longstreet caught up to crush Pope’s left flank on August 30. Pope withdrew with his bashed army to Washington’s outskirts. Lee’s fifty thousand troops had routed Pope’s seventy-­seven thousand, inflicting twice as many casualties as suffered, 14,462 to 7,298. Jackson attacked Pope’s rear guard at Chantilly on September 1, inflicting 1,300 casualties and suffering 800. Meanwhile, McClellan abandoned the peninsula and shipped his army back to Washington. Lincoln relieved Pope and gave McClellan command of all available troops. Once again, Lee turned his back on McClellan and marched away, this time with Longstreet to a ford across the Potomac into Maryland while he dispatched Jackson to capture Harper’s Ferry. South Mountain is a ridgeline that runs north–south around thirty miles. Lee dispatched troops to occupy its three passes while he scattered the rest of his troops to occupy Frederick, Hagerstown, and other towns westward. After a three-­day siege, Jackson captured Harper’s Ferry with its 12,631-man garrison and supply depot on September 15 at the cost of 286 casualties. McClellan did not know where Lee was or what he intended to do until he enjoyed an extraordinary stroke of luck. A soldier found Lee’s campaign plan wrapped around some cigars and showed his colonel, who sent it to McClellan. For the first time in his military career, McClellan acted decisively. On September 14, he sent his corps against the three passes, and after hard fighting his men captured them, inflicting 2,685 casualties and suffering 2,325. He then descended and marched toward Sharpsburg, where Lee had concentrated his army behind Antietam Creek. McClellan launched his corps in a succession of uncoordinated attacks on September 17. Lee’s troops repelled those onslaughts even though they numbered only thirty-­eight thousand to the Union’s eighty-­seven thousand. The result was America’s deadliest day of combat, with 12,410 Union and 10,315 Confederate casualties, nearly the same as Shiloh over two days. McClellan did not renew his attack the next day, even though a fresh corps arrived and Lee’s back was to the Potomac River just a few miles away. Nor did he attack Lee as he withdrew his army to Virginia the following day. Indeed, McClellan refused to cross the Potomac for nearly a month despite Lincoln’s urging. General Jeb Stuart led his cavalry corps around the Union army and drove off 1,200 horses and destroyed supply depots from October 12 to 15, while McClellan did nothing to stop him. McClellan’s timidity toward the enemy and arrogance toward the president increasingly frustrated Lincoln, who wrote him to say, “You remember

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my speaking to you of what I called your over-­cautiousness. Are you not over-­cautious when you assume that you cannot do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess and act upon the claim?” He called on McClellan to act on the maxim of war as to “operate upon the enemy’s communications as much as possible without exposing your own.”26 Lincoln finally relieved McClellan of command and replaced him with Burnside on November 7. Meanwhile, Lincoln inflicted his own economic and moral blow against the Confederacy when he announced the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, effective January 1, 1863, that henceforth the United States recognized the freedom of all slaves in rebel states. In doing so, he hoped to encourage slaves to liberate themselves to shelter behind Union lines and thus deprive the Confederacy of their labor. As for slaves in states still loyal to the United States, he offered compensation to the owners for their freedom but got few takers. The Union faced another Confederate invasion elsewhere. In June, Bragg split his army in two, left thirty thousand troops under Van Dorn in northern Mississippi against Grant, and marched east with thirty thousand against Buell. Bragg unleashed Generals Nathan Forrest and John Morgan each with a couple thousand cavalry for separate raids deep behind enemy lines. Then, in August, Bragg from Chattanooga and Kirby Smith with twenty thousand troops from Knoxville invaded central Kentucky with the goal of capturing the supply center of Louisville on the Ohio River. Initially the invasion was a stunning success. First Smith’s army captured six thousand green troops at Richmond, then Bragg’s army captured four thousand troops at Munfordville, and finally they joined forces. Buell’s sixty-­ thousand-­man army moved north to head them off. On October 8, they fought at Perrysville, where Buell’s army finally pushed Bragg’s from the field after suffering 4,200 to 3,400 casualties. Bragg withdrew to Chattanooga. Meanwhile, Grant tried to trap Price’s fifteen thousand troops at Iuka between the corps of Edward Ord and William Rosecrans. Price blunted Rosecrans’s advance on September 19 while Ord failed to arrive in time. Price and Van Dorn joined forces and with twenty-­two thousand troops attacked Rosecrans with twenty-­one thousand troops at Corinth on October 3. Although his men repelled the attack, Rosecrans refused Grant’s order to pursue the rebel army. Word reached the White House that Grant was dissatisfied with Rosecrans. After Buell failed to follow Bragg after Perryville, Lincoln replaced him with Rosecrans. Rosecrans marched from Nashville with forty-­three thousand troops toward Bragg with thirty-­five thousand at Murfreesboro on December 26. Bragg set loose Joe Wheeler and two thousand cavalry, who circled the



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Union army, destroying supply trains. Nonetheless, Rosecrans appeared before Bragg on December 31. Bragg ordered an attack that punched back the Union army nearly into Stones River. On January 1, 1863, Bragg resumed the attack, but the Union troops repulsed it. Neither side attacked or withdrew the next day. Bragg retreated with his army on January 3, thus technically yielding victory to Rosecrans. Their respective casualties of 11,730 and 12,900 were the highest portion for armies during the war. Meanwhile, Grant marched south with forty thousand troops into Mississippi, hoping to capture Jackson while he sent William Sherman with thirty-­two thousand troops down the Mississippi River to take Vicksburg. On December 20, Van Dorn with 3,500 troops captured the 1,500-man garrison guarding $1.5 million worth of supplies at Holly Springs; he paroled the troops and burned the supplies. That forced Grant to withdraw north. Meanwhile, on December 26, Sherman deployed his army before Chickasaw Bluffs held by twelve thousand troops led by John Pemberton. On December 29, after an ineffectual bombardment, he sent his troops against the bluffs, but the Confederates easily repulsed them, inflicting 1,776 casualties while suffering 207. Burnside moved his one hundred thousand troops south of the Potomac and advanced as far as the Rappahannock River with Fredericksburg on the south bank. A mile beyond the town along a low ridge, Lee deployed his seventy-­five thousand troops. On December 11 and 12, he had his troops erect pontoon bridges and drive rebel sharpshooters from the town. On December 13, he ordered his army to attack the ridgeline. The result was slaughter as massed rebel rifles and cannons inflicted 12,653 casualties while suffering 5,377. Lincoln replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker on January 26. In late April, Hooker kept one corps across the river from Fredericksburg while he marched seventy thousand troops up the Rappahannock and crossed at fords leading toward the rebel army’s rear. On May 1, Hooker deployed his army around the crossroads hamlet of Chancellorsville, just eleven miles from Fredericksburg. Learning of the advance, Lee left ten thousand troops under Jubal Early in Fredericksburg, sent Longstreet’s fifteen thousand troops directly at Hooker, and curled Jackson’s thirty thousand around the Union right on May 2. The rebels drove in the Union forces. Lee continued the attack the next day. Hooker withdrew across the river. Lee then turned back to Fredericksburg, where John Sedgwick’s corps had driven off Early’s troops. Lee’s attack forced Sedgwick to retreat to the far bank. Lee had won his latest victory, this time inflicting 17,287 casualties and suffering 12,764. The worst rebel loss was Jackson, who suffered a mortal wound from rebel pickets accidentally at night as he rode back from a reconnaissance.

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Lee gambled again by invading the North, hoping that a decisive victory there could force the Lincoln administration to open peace talks or induce European powers like Britain and France to intervene for the Confederacy. Lincoln replaced Hooker with Gordon Meade on June 28. Lee’s corps marched across central Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Meade tried to keep his army between Lee and the capital. On July 1, a division of rebel troops attacked a Union brigade at Gettysburg, a crossroads town. Lee and Meade ordered their respective corps commanders to converge there. The 104,000-man Union army deployed in a fishhook with the barb southeast of town on Culp Hill, the curve on Cemetery Hill a few hundred yards from town, and the shaft on Cemetery Ridge ending in Little Round Top with the seventy-­five-­thousand-­man rebel line running parallel. The Union troops repelled a series of rebel attacks for three days, culminating on July 3 when fifteen thousand troops led by George Pickett assaulted the center after a two-­hour bombardment by 150 cannons. Gettysburg was the war’s bloodiest battle, with 23,046 Union and 28,000 Confederate casualties. Lee lingered on July 4 for a Union attack that never came. He then slowly withdrew toward the Potomac River, swollen with steady rain for several days after the battle. Like McClellan after Antietam, Meade let Lee get away when he could have vigorously pursued him with a fresh corps that had not fired a shot and attacked the rebel army with the river at its back. Once again, Lincoln was devastated “by the escape of Lee across the Potomac, because the substantial destruction of his army would have ended the war, and . . . I believed that General Meade and his noble army had expended all the skill, and toil, and blood, up to the ripe harvest, and then let the crop go to waste.”27 Grant conceived a plan to take Vicksburg by bypassing it. He sent his three corps to Louisiana above the city and marched them inland until they reached a landing across from Bruinsburg, Mississippi. He had his gunboats and transports run the batteries around Vicksburg. The rebel gunners sank only two transports. The transports conveyed his army across the river. Rather than march forty-­two miles north to Vicksburg defended by Pemberton and thirty thousand troops, he headed seventy-­ five miles northeast to Jackson, where Joe Johnston was forming an army. His army defeated rebel forces at Port Gibson on May 1, Raymond on May 12, and Jackson on May 14. He then turned west to defeat Pemberton at Champion Hill on May 16 and Black River on May 17. During that time, his troops marched 180 miles, won five victories, and inflicted 7,200 casualties while suffering 3,400. Grant deployed his troops in an arc around Vicksburg, emplaced heavy cannons, and began a bombardment. Pemberton surrendered on July 4, rendering 2,166 rebel officers, 27,130 soldiers, 172 cannons, 60,000 firearms, and a key strategic position. During



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the siege, Union and Confederate forces suffered 4,910 and 2,872 respective casualties. Grant had won a decisive victory at a relatively light cost. The Confederacy had only one stronghold left on the Mississippi River: Port Hudson, 130 miles south of Vicksburg. Nathaniel Banks led twenty thousand troops to besiege seven thousand rebel troops at Port Hudson on May 22. After learning that Banks captured Port Hudson on July 9, Lincoln reflected, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”28 Copperhead was the name for northern politicians and their supporters who sought peace at any price with the Confederates, including recognizing their independence and slavocracy. Democrat congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio was the most infamous copperhead. During Vallandigham’s 1683 campaign for governor, the region’s commander, Burnside, had him arrested for sedition. Vallandigham argued that the Constitution’s First Amendment protected his calls for peace and that a military court could not prosecute civilians. Lincoln finessed the problem by having him escorted to the rebel lines. The Democratic Party nominated him anyway, although he lost to the Republican candidate. Lincoln reacted to criticism of his treatment of Vallandigham by arguing, “Must I shoot a simple-­minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? . . . I think that . . . to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional but withal a great mercy.”29 The antiwar movement metastasized after the Enrollment Act became law on March 3, 1863. That law established a draft whereby provost marshals oversaw a lottery of all eighteen- to forty-­five-­year-­old eligible men in each congressional district and drew 20 percent of them to enter the army. The ineligible included those who were physically or mentally handicapped, paid a $300 fine, or found a substitute. Eventually only 46,000 of 207,000 drawn names were actually drafted, while 87,000 paid the fee and 74,000 paid for substitutes, and 800,000 men either enlisted or reenlisted from 1863 to 1865. Fees amounted to $500,000.30 Riots erupted against the draft in New York from July 11 to July 16 before authorities reimposed order. The rioters were mostly poverty-­ stricken Irish immigrants who competed with blacks for menial jobs and resented being drafted. The 105 people who died in the fighting included 86 rioters, 11 blacks, and 8 soldiers.31 Rosecrans with 60,000 troops and Burnside with 24,000 led parallel campaigns against Bragg’s 45,000 troops at Chattanooga and John Frazer’s 2,300 troops at Knoxville in June 1863. By threatening those cities’ supply lines, they forced the enemy to retreat with skirmishes but no major battles. After a short siege, Burnside captured Knoxville on September 9,

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the same day Rosecrans’s army occupied Chattanooga. President Davis sent Longstreet’s corps to reinforce Bragg’s army at Dalton just a score of miles southeast of Chattanooga. Rosecrans advanced his army to Chickamauga Creek. With sixty-­five thousand troops, Bragg attacked on September 19. The Union repelled those assaults that day, but a mistaken order the next day opened a gap in the line that the Confederates punched through. Only George Thomas’s corps held while the other troops streamed back to Chattanooga. Thomas and his men followed after dark. The Confederate victory cost them 18,454 casualties to the Union’s 16,170. Bragg led his army forward to occupy Missionary Ridge a couple of miles east of the city and Lookout Mountain south. Supplies dwindled for the Union troops. Lincoln replaced Rosecrans with Thomas, had Joseph Hooker’s corps from Meade’s army and William Sherman’s corps from Grant’s army reinforce him, and gave Grant overall command. Grant’s first step was to secure the supply line to Chattanooga. On November 24, he had Hooker and Sherman attack Lookout Mountain and the rebel right flank. Hooker captured Lookout Mountain, but the rebels drove back Sherman. The following day, Grant ordered Sherman to renew his attack on the rebel right while Hooker assaulted the left and Thomas the center. The Union troops routed the Confederates from Missionary Ridge, inflicting 6,667 casualties and sustaining 5,825. Bragg withdrew to Dalton. At Knoxville, Burnside’s troops repelled an attack by Longstreet’s corps on November 29. Lincoln appointed Grant general-­in-­chief and had Congress name him lieutenant general on February 29, 1864. Grant’s orders to the army commanders was simple—each was to wage total war by attacking the main rebel force on his front and destroying it, along with the region’s economy and popular morale that sustained the rebel cause. To Meade he wrote, “Lee’s army will be your objective. . . . Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.”32 To ensure that happened, Grant not only went everywhere with Meade but also treated that cautious general as his chief of staff to implement his own strategies. He appointed Philip Sheridan, a brilliant infantry division commander, to command the cavalry corps with orders to seek and destroy the rebel cavalry corps. To Sherman he wrote, “You I propose to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can upon their war resources.”33 In all, Grant and Meade would lead 110,000 troops against Lee’s 60,000 in Virginia while Franz Sigel’s 10,000 troops marched against John Breckinridge’s 5,000 in the Shenandoah Valley; Ben Butler’s 25,000 against Beauregard’s 15,000 defending Richmond; Sherman’s 90,000 against Johnston’s 50,000 in



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northern Georgia; and Nathaniel Banks’s 30,000 against Richard Taylor’s 15,000 up the Red River in Louisiana. In early May, Grant had the Army of the Potomac advance through the Wilderness a dozen miles west of Fredericksburg. Lee converged his corps to block the Union advance. The battle raged during May 5 and 6 before Grant tried to sidestep Lee by marching his men to the crossroads at Spotsylvania half a dozen miles southeast. Once again, Lee quick-­ marched his men there first and formed a horseshoe-­shaped breastwork. Union assaults from May 8 to 20 finally punched in the salient. Meanwhile, Grant sent Sheridan against Richmond. Lee dispatched Stuart to head off Sheridan. They fought at Yellow Tavern just a few miles north of the rebel capital on May 11. The Confederates repelled the Union cavalry, but Stuart was among the dead. Grant tried to outflank Lee by racing troops to the North Ana River. Lee’s army again got there first. The armies battled there from May 22 to May 27. Grant pivoted his army around the rebel right. Lee shifted his army to Cold Harbor and had them erect breastworks. On June 3, Grant launched an assault that massed rebel rifles and cannons decimated, inflicting 7,000 casualties while suffering 1,500. In just a month, Union and Confederate casualties numbered forty-­four thousand and twenty-­ five thousand, respectively. Grant sent Sheridan against Wade Hampton, who replaced Stuart as cavalry commander. The cavalry fought at Trevilian Station on June 11 and 12, with Sheridan finally withdrawing. Meanwhile, the other campaigns had mixed results. On the Red River, Taylor drove back Banks at Mansfield on April 8 and Pleasant Hill on April 9. Beauregard repulsed Butler’s attack on May 13 and then bottled up Butler’s army within Bermuda Hundred, a peninsula on the James River ten miles south of Richmond. On May 15, Breckinridge’s army routed Sigel’s at New Market and drove it north to Winchester. Grant replaced Sigel with David Hunter. Hunter led fifteen thousand troops all the way to Lynchburg, where Jubal Early’s troops repulsed them on June 18. The only successful campaign was Sherman’s. In a series of wide flanking maneuvers, he forced Johnston to abandon a series of positions and withdraw closer to Atlanta. Sherman tried only one assault against rebel entrenchments, at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, which the Confederates repulsed, inflicting three thousand casualties while losing one thousand. On July 9, Sherman’s army crossed the Chattahoochee River and approached Atlanta. That advance cost Sherman seventeen thousand casualties to Johnston’s fourteen thousand over six weeks. Davis replaced Johnston with John Hood on July 17. Hood launched a series of attacks that failed to drive Sherman off.

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Grant devised his boldest maneuver yet. He had a 2,100-foot pontoon bridge erected across the James River and began crossing his army on June 14. The objective was Petersburg twenty miles south of Richmond. On June 15, the lead division fought its way into Petersburg’s outer defense and then stalled. Each side poured reinforcements into Petersburg. The Union line’s right flank rested on the Appomattox River that flowed north of town, and then the line arced around south of the town before turning westward. Every time Grant extended the line west, Lee did the same. The result was stalemate as each side built more elaborate entrenchments. The colonel of a Pennsylvania regiment filled with coal miners suggested digging a tunnel beneath a rebel fort, igniting gunpowder packed at the end, and then charging. Grant approved. On July 30, the explosion destroyed a rebel fort and left a huge crater. A brigade of Union troops charged but went into rather than around the crater. The rebels counterattacked and routed the Union troops, inflicting 3,798 casualties and suffering 1,491. Meanwhile, Early pursued Hunter back into the Shenandoah Valley and then sidestepped him and invaded Maryland. Early’s 14,000 troops drove off Lew Wallace’s 5,800 at Monocacy on July 9 and approached Washington’s defense ring of forts the next day. Early eventually withdrew into Virginia after forcing several Maryland towns to pay him tens of thousands of dollars in protection money and having Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, burned when its citizens failed to pay. Grant replaced Hunter with Sheridan. With thirty-­seven thousand troops, Sheridan advanced against Early’s fifteen thousand to defeat them at Winchester on September 19 and at Fisher Hill on September 22. Sheridan then deployed his troops in different directions to devastate the valley’s crops and livestock. On October 7, he reported to Grant that the men “destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements, over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4,000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep.”34 Meanwhile, Early gathered reinforcements and with 21,102 troops attacked Sheridan’s 31,610 at Cedar Creek on October 19. The surprise rebel onslaught routed the Union troops, but Sheridan rallied them, counterattacked, and drove them off. Early’s men inflicted nearly twice as many casualties as they sustained, 5,667 to 2,910. Price led twelve thousand troops from Arkansas into Missouri toward St. Louis in September. They attacked a fort garrisoned by 1,451 bluecoats at Pilot Nob on September 27 but were repulsed and suffered 1,000



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casualties. Price then veered northwest toward Kansas City. His army routed or captured detached Union forces along the way before reaching Westport, half a dozen miles southeast of Kansas City, on October 20. Samuel Curtis launched his 22,000 troops against Price’s 8,500 and eventually drove off the rebels, with each side suffering 1,500 casualties. Curtis pursued Price’s diminishing army all the way to Indian Territory before stopping. Sherman finally broke Atlanta’s defense by sending two corps to capture Jonesborough, a rail juncture twenty miles south of the city, on August 31. That forced Hood to abandon Atlanta and fight his way out of the trap. Hood cut westward and then angled north to threaten Sherman’s railroad supply line to Chattanooga. Sherman pursued, and Hood withdrew into Alabama. Sherman dispatched Thomas and his fifty-­ thousand-­man Army of the Ohio to defend Tennessee while he returned to Atlanta. Lincoln won reelection by soundly defeating George McClellan, the Democratic Party candidate, with 2,218,388 (55.02 percent) of the popular vote and 212 electoral votes to 1,812,807 votes (44.96 percent) and 21 electoral votes. Lincoln was especially elated to receive 78 percent of the soldier vote, 119,754 votes to McClellan’s 34,291, across the twelve states that allowed absentee ballots.35 Good news arrived from two fronts. With sixty-­two thousand troops, Sherman began his “march to the sea” to Savannah 285 miles away as Atlanta burned behind him on November 15. He spread his corps out to trek parallel roads and loot and torch anything of military value before them. They entered Savannah on December 21. Sherman triumphantly sent Lincoln a telegram announcing his Christmas gift of Savannah. With twenty-­seven thousand troops, Hood invaded Tennessee, pursued John Scofield with twenty-­seven thousand troops, and then caught up and attacked at Franklin on November 30; he won a pyrrhic victory with 6,252 casualties to 2,326. He then marched to Nashville’s outskirts. Thomas ignored Grant’s repeated orders to destroy Hood until December 15, when he launched his fifty-­five thousand troops against twenty-­two thousand. After two days of fighting, he finally drove Hood from the field, inflicting 6,000 casualties while suffering 3,061. Thomas’s victory was limited, as he failed to relentlessly pursue Hood until he wiped out his army. The war’s decisive campaigns came in March and April 1865. Sherman marched with sixty thousand troops north from Savannah on February 15. Over the next two months, they marched through central South Carolina and then into North Carolina, where Johnston had

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around twenty thousand troops. Along the way, his troops fought no large battles, only scattered skirmishes, with a large one at Columbia, which the rebels burned. His immediate object in North Carolina was Goldsboro, where he would link with Union troops and supplies from Wilmington, captured on February 22. Johnston briefly checked Sherman’s advance at Averasborough on March 16 and Bentonville on March 20 and 21. Grant’s army numbered 120,000 to Lee’s 55,000. Lee knew that with good weather Grant would send Sheridan’s cavalry and an infantry corps west to cut off his retreat. He prepared to abandon Petersburg and Richmond and join Johnston in North Carolina. To distract Grant, he launched an attack on Fort Stedman on the Petersburg Union line on March 25. Although the rebels captured the fort, Grant ordered a counterattack that retook the fort along with around five thousand rebels. Grant then did exactly what Lee predicted. On March 29, he sent Sheridan and his cavalry galloping west followed by an infantry corps. Lee ordered his troops to retreat westward. Before fleeing, President Davis ordered troops to destroy anything of military importance in Richmond; the resulting explosions and fires devastated the city. Union forces routed Confederates at Five Forks on April 1. On April 2, Grant ordered an attack along the line that captured around five thousand rebels withdrawing from their trenches. Advanced Union troops cut off Lee’s retreat at Appomattox on April 7. Grant sent Lee a request to surrender. Lee asked for terms. They met at the McLean House in Appomattox on April 9. Grant was generous. He paroled all thirty-­five thousand soldiers, let men with horses keep them, let officers retain swords and sidearms, provided train passes for those who could use them, and distributed three days’ worth of rations to the starving, ragged men. Lincoln joyfully learned of Lee’s surrender and knew that soon the other rebel forces would surrender. Johnston surrendered not just his own troops in North Carolina but also the rest of that department, which included South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, with eighty-­nine thousand troops, on April 26. Richard Taylor surrendered the department that included East Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama on May 4. Union cavalry captured Davis on May 10. There were a half dozen other minor surrenders. In Washington, the Army of the Potomac marched in a victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on May 23, followed by Sherman’s army the next day, over two hundred thousand troops altogether. Tragically, Lincoln’s murder by John Wilkes Booth on April 14 deprived him of of the chance to savor all those triumphs along with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery on December 6, 1865.



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Haunting any celebrations of the war’s end and America’s reunification were at least 618,222 soldiers, 360,222 Union and 260,000 Confederate, who died, and possibly around 750,000 soldiers and civilians, during four years of war.36 Officers including generals led from the front and accordingly suffered 15 percent and 50 percent higher casualties than enlisted men. Disease killed twice as many soldiers as combat. Better medical care explains why the Union’s death rate for wounded of 14 percent was lower than the Confederate’s 18 percent. Prisoner of war camps were charnel houses for inmates. By one count, 30,218 (or 15.5 percent) of 194,743 Union prisoners and 26,976 (12 percent) of 214,865 Confederate prisoners died in captivity of disease or starvation. The deadliest rebel prison was Andersonville; a military tribunal convicted and had hanged Henry Wirz, its commander, for war crimes.37 The war devastated swaths of the South, with much of Richmond, Atlanta, and Columbia burned ruins. The South’s economy fell by 46 percent, and its share of the national economy from 30 percent to 12 percent, from 1860 to 1870. During four years of war, inflation rose a mind-­ boggling 9,000 percent in the South. Much of the economic loss was the value of slaves who disappeared after emancipation. Another was the decimation of military-­age southern men, of whom one out of four died and another one was grievously wounded.38 The Civil War accelerated, deepened, and diversified America’s ongoing industrial revolution.39 The North’s economy expanded by 50 percent from 1860 to 1870. Wealth generated by that expansion, however, mostly benefited those who owned factories, railroads, steamships, and warehouses. Inflation soared 80 percent in the North during the war, with wages trailing far behind. Secession had one silver lining: Hamiltonian Republicans dominated Congress as obstructionist southern Jeffersonian Democrats left. Over four years, Congress passed and Lincoln signed a series of laws that boosted American wealth and power and thus ultimately the potential ability to finance a military strong enough to fight and win wars. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase worked with key members of Congress to enact laws that developed a national currency, banking, and revenue system. The 1861 Internal Revenue Act imposed a federal income tax of 3 percent for those annually making more than $800. The 1862 Internal Revenue Act established the Internal Revenue Bureau to assess and collect an income tax rate of 3 percent on incomes from $600 to $10,000 and 5 percent over that. Businesses making more than $600 had to pay value-­added and receipt taxes. Households and businesses making less than $600 paid no taxes. The 1863 National Banking Act was the latest version of the First and Second United States Banks that Jeffersonians and Jacksonians had eliminated. The Treasury Department issued charters to

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banks that agreed to buy bonds equal to at least one-­third of their capital and let them issue banknotes up to 90 percent of the value of the bonds. A federal tax of 10 percent on state bonds forced most of them to seek federal charters. The 1862 Legal Tender Act established a national paper currency, “greenbacks,” backed by gold. Several laws helped develop America by educating young people and farmers, settling the West, and building a railroad across the nation. The 1862 Morrill Act granted each state thirty thousand acres of public lands for each senator and representative that they could sell to pay for public lower schools and colleges that promoted “agriculture and the mechanical arts,” and it established the Department of Agriculture to provide farmers with innovative technologies for planting and harvesting and with the most bountiful seeds for crops. The 1862 Homestead Act gave settlers 160 acres of land in return for farming it for five years and paying a small filing fee. The 1862 Pacific Railroad Act helped finance a transcontinental railroad from Omaha to Sacramento by granting companies a checkerboard of 6,400 acres (later doubled) of public land per mile, loans of $16,000 per mile, and $48,000 of government bonds per mile. In any war, winning depends on not just vanquishing one’s foe but also constructing an enduring peace that secures one’s interests. That is never more essential than in a civil war. Lincoln understood that American victory depended on first destroying rebel resistance and then reconstructing in each state a democratic political system with slavery abolished.40 He made significant progress before his murder, first by appointing governors of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas and having men who signed loyalty oaths devise for each a constitution when they reached 10 percent of the population, and then with the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery. Tragically, his successor, Andrew Johnson, vetoed bills passed by a liberal Republican-­dominated Congress that gave blacks equal civil rights with whites and provided them economic aid. Congress did pass (and the states ratified) the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process to all Americans. Johnson survived an impeachment process that in the Senate was one vote short of conviction. In 1868, Ulysses Grant won the presidency against Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour with 3,013,308 votes (52.7 percent) and 214 electoral votes to 2,706,829 (47.3 percent) and 80 electoral votes. Republicans retained solid control of Congress with 57 to 9 Senate and 171 to 67 House seats.41 The result was the Fifteenth Amendment that guaranteed voting rights for all males, along with a number of other civil rights bills, most importantly empowering the president to crush terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.



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Reconstruction symbolically ended in 1877 when Republican president Rutherford Hayes withdrew the last federal occupation troops from southern states in a deal whereby his Democratic rival Samuel Tilden agreed to accept disputed electoral votes in four states. That let conservative southerners impose Jim Crow laws that deprived blacks of civil rights but also let Washington policy makers expand an array of policies that enhanced America’s economic and strategic interests around the world.

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I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight and I am not ashamed to tell you gentlemen that I went on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance. And one night late it came to me . . . that there was nothing left to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them. —William McKinley I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn, the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities to the United States. —General Jacob Smith Our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. . . . Let us boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully . . . that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness. —Theodore Roosevelt

E

nforcing the Monroe Doctrine was the first post-­Civil War foreign priority. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s administration faced a distracting and worrisome potential threat from neighboring Mexico. In 1862, President Benito Juarez’s government defaulted on loans to a consortium of lenders. Defying America’s Monroe Doctrine, the French 211

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landed an army that marched to Mexico City and installed Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as Mexico’s ruler. Juarez led the resistance that the French never crushed. After America’s Civil War ended, President Andrew Johnson marched 50,000 troops to the Rio Grande while Secretary of State William Seward pressured French emperor Napoleon III to withdraw his army. Napoleon III did so in 1867. Juarez’s army captured Mexico City and Maximilian, who was executed on June 19. Seward scored America’s largest land deal after Louisiana when, on March 30, 1867, he signed a treaty that paid Russia $7.2 million for Alaska.1 Although critics dubbed that deal “Seward’s Folly,” the Senate ratified the treaty by thirty-­seven to two on April 9. The rich minerals, furs, and fishes along with its strategic location in the north Pacific made Alaska a priceless acquisition. Seward tried to acquire the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $7.5 million in October 1867. A hurricane that devastated those islands caused Senate support for taking them to plummet; the United States eventually acquired the Virgin Islands in 1917. Seward asked the Dominican Republic to sell the United States Samana Bay, whose deep sheltered waters could hold a mighty fleet, before some other great power took it. The Dominicans rejected his $2 million offer. Shortly after taking office in 1869, President Ulysses Grant also proposed buying Samana Bay, while some in Congress and beyond called for taking the Dominican Republic for its rich minerals and forests.2 This time, the Dominicans reconsidered. They won independence from Spain in 1821, were conquered by neighboring Haiti from 1822 to 1844, freed themselves, were reconquered by Spain from 1861 to 1865, and freed themselves again as the Dominican Republic, with a system modeled on that of the United States. Tragically, like other Latin American countries, the Dominicans had democracy’s institutions but not its culture. The result was corruption, incompetence, and violence. President Buenaventura Baez sent word that he would be happy to sell his country to America. Grant had his secretary, Orville Babcock, work out the terms with Baez. On November 29, they signed two treaties, one whereby the United States annexed the Dominican Republic by assuming the $1.5 million debt it owed American investors and the other whereby the United States paid $2 million for Samana Bay. Grant and Babcock figured that if the Senate rejected taking all of that country, surely they would want to take Samana Bay. Neither treaty won the support of the two-thirds of senators needed for ratification. The Senate split twenty-­eight to twenty-­eight in the votes. Carl Schurz of Missouri argued that taking that benighted country would destroy American democracy “through military rule . . . rapacity, extortion, plunder, oppression, and tyranny.”3



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International trade across the Far East grew increasingly frenzied as more merchants from more nations jostled for profits. American gunboat diplomacy expanded with American trade and investments. As European powers and Japan colonized more of the region, the pressure grew on Washington to establish its own colonies or else get squeezed completely out. American territorial expansion began in 1867 when Captain William Reynolds of the USS Lackawanna stepped ashore to officially claim the strategic uninhabited Midway Island halfway across the Pacific. Congress approved that claim. One large market of ten million potential consumers remained untouched by foreign merchants—Korea, known as the “hermit kingdom.” Fearing Western influences, Korea’s rulers had sealed themselves off from the world by outlawing foreign trade and Christianity. Officials severely enforced those laws by executing Christians and imprisoning shipwrecked sailors. In 1866, the Koreans slaughtered twenty-­seven crew members from an American ship that a storm wrecked ashore.4 Admiral John Rodgers commanded the Asiatic Squadron of five warships stationed at Nagasaki, Japan. In 1876, he received orders to bring Korea into the modern world of international trade and diplomacy. America’s consul to China, Frederick Low, accompanied Rodgers. The two hoped to win as much fame for opening Korea as Commodore Matthew Perry did for opening Japan. Perry never threatened violence, let alone ordered a shot fired during his expedition, but instead conducted Japanese-­style diplomacy of patience, deference, and generosity. Rodgers and Low did just the opposite and failed miserably. In May, the squadron dropped anchor outside Chemulpo (Inchon), Seoul’s port. No officials came out to greet them, and they feared sending anyone ashore. Instead, for safety’s sake, Rodgers dispatched men in longboats to chart the bay and the Han River leading up to Seoul. When gunners from three forts opened fire on the surveyors, he ordered a bombardment that silenced those cannons. Low sent a demand for an apology, which the Koreans rejected. On June 10, Rodgers ordered 542 sailors and 109 marines to capture those forts. They overran the forts, killing over three hundred defenders while suffering only three dead and ten wounded.5 That victory was empty because it only bolstered the Korean resolve to resist. Rodgers finally recognized the futility of staying, and the squadron steamed away on July 3. It was Japan that opened Korea in 1876. The United States would not sign a treaty with Korea that established trade and diplomatic relations until 1882, when Commodore Robert Shufeldt emulated Perry rather than Rodgers and Low. American trade, investments, and even territory expanded overseas although Americans had not yet finished consolidating their conquests

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at home. A succession of presidents insisted that “peace” grounded their Indian policies. As the “Great Father,” a president sought to keep peace among and with the tribes and resorted to war only when a tribe or tribes attacked Americans.6 A mix of hard interests and lofty sentiments animated that policy. Profits flourished best when peace prevailed for merchants to trade with the tribes, while it was much cheaper for the government to feed than fight the Indians. More thoughtful Americans debated whether or how to “civilize” an otherwise “doomed race.” In 1824, Congress established within the War Department the Bureau of Indian Affairs to negotiate treaties, dispense annuities, and oversee reservations; the bureau was later transferred to the new Interior Department in 1849. Of course, most Indians viewed Americans as rapacious invaders, not benevolent guardians. The American demand for beaver pelts, buffalo robes, and other animal skins decimated the wildlife they depended on to feed and clothe themselves. American greed for gold, silver, and other precious metals led them to expel or murder any Indians living on those lands. That slaughter combined with disease and starvation was worst in California, where the Indian population plummeted from 150,000 to 30,000 between 1846 and 1870.7 No president ever approved a policy of genocide or the extermination of any one tribe, let alone all Indians. Nonetheless, American troops did deliberately or unwittingly slaughter most people of nonhostile Indian villages, including Black Kettle’s Cheyenne band at Sand Creek in 1864, Heavy Runner’s Piegan Blackfoot band at the Marias River in 1870, and Spotted Elk’s Sioux band at Wounded Knee in 1890. The horrors the survivors endured likely shadowed them the rest of their lives. Overall, like tribes east of the Mississippi River, the western tribes inflicted far more death and destruction on the invading trappers, hunters, traders, miners, settlers, and soldiers than they suffered. But with far smaller populations, their losses from combat, disease, and starvation devastated them while the Americans swelled in population. The federal government, however, was guilty of ethnic cleansing, or trying to destroy tribal cultures. The 1887 Dawes Act forced tribes to privatize their reservation lands and send their children to boarding schools where they were forced to shed their Indian clothes and language and were punished for any reversions. The slogan justifying that policy was “Kill the Indian and save the man,” backed by an alliance of genuinely compassionate people and callous cynics eager to exploit Indian lands. That policy eventually resulted in about 40 percent of reservation lands being bought by white speculators and countless cases of child abuse. Whether tribes resisted or acquiesced, inevitably the Americans forced their chiefs to sign treaties that diminished their territories The Supreme



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Court legally assisted that process by ruling in 1868 that Congress could revoke Indian treaties without tribal permission. The annual goods or annuities that Indians received rarely matched those distributed to entice their chiefs to accept treaties or promised in the treaties. Inevitably, tribes west of the Mississippi River suffered the same fate as eastern tribes, confined to small reservations dependent on annuities often plundered by corrupt Indian agents. The Dakota Santee Sioux lived in a narrow reservation along the middle Minnesota River. Indian agent corruption and ineptness provoked them to revolt in August 1862.8 They were starving because the Indian Bureau failed to send the annuities. When they complained, storekeeper Andrew Myrick retorted, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” When Chief Little Crow learned that four warriors had murdered a nearby farm family that refused to feed them, he called for an all-­out war to wipe out Fort Ridgely, New Ulm, and settlers down the valley. The initial attacks slaughtered from 450 to 800 Americans and besieged but failed to capture Fort Ridgely or New Ulm. Governor Alexander Ramsey commissioned fur trade leader and Indian expert Henry Sibley a colonel and had him lead 1,400 Minnesota troops against the Santee. Sibley relieved New Ulm and Fort Ridgely while most Santee fled northwest onto the plains. Some of them attacked Fort Abercrombie on the upper Minnesota River, but the troops repelled them. President Lincoln responded to Ramsey’s plea for help by assigning General John Pope and a brigade to join Sibley against the Santee. The relentless pursuit by Pope and Sibley eventually forced 1,700 Santee to surrender and release scores of captured settlers. Based on testimony, a five-­man army commission indicted 392 warriors on charges of murder and rape, sentenced 16 to prison and condemned 307 to death. Lincoln carefully reviewed each case and reduced the number to thirty-­eight. The largest hanging in American history took place on December 19, 1862. The Indian Bureau eliminated the Santee reservation and transferred the Santee to Sioux reservations on the Missouri River. That did not end the war. Those Santee that escaped joined Yankton and Teton Sioux bands. For the summer of 1863, Pope launched General Alfred Sully with 2,200 troops from Fort Randall on the Missouri River and Sibley with 3,300 troops from Camp Pope on the Minnesota River to scour the northern plains for any hostile bands. The Sioux suffered defeats from Sully at Whitestone Hill and from Sibley at Big Mound, Dead Buffalo Lake, and Stony Lake. Although the army killed scores and captured hundreds of Sioux, hundreds more escaped. Sully from Fort Sully and a second force led by Colonel Minor Thomas from Fort Rice resumed the campaign in the summer of 1864. The only army victory was Sully’s at

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Killdeer Mountain. Sully’s 1865 campaign failed to defeat any Indians but did encourage some bands to return to their reservations. Elsewhere, numerous tribes took advantage of America’s Civil War and diminishment of troops across the West to raid isolated wagon trains, stagecoaches, ranches, and army patrols. Columns of federal and state troops chased Cheyenne and Arapaho on the central plains, Comanche and Kiowa on the southern plains, Ute and Shoshone in the central Rockies, and Apache and Navajo in the Southwest. Only two campaigns succeeded in capturing and confining bands on a reservation: Colonel Patrick Connor’s against the Shoshone and Ute and Kit Carson’s against the Navajo. The other columns failed decisively to defeat any hostile bands. The latest round of treaties with those tribes proved mostly to be truces before war again erupted. The Sand Creek massacre occurred amid these campaigns. On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington and 667 Colorado troops attacked Cheyenne chief Black Kettle and his 150 people at Sand Creek even though an American flag and a white flag flew high over his tipi. They killed 28 men and 105 women and children while losing 24 dead and 52 wounded, mostly from friendly fire. Black Kettle and a score of his people escaped. Indian wars following the Civil War persisted for thirty years until the final battle at Wounded Knee in 1890.9 When a war erupted, the War Department coordinated the concentration and convergence of forces to crush the tribe or tribes. That usually took considerable time because regiments were generally dispersed over large regions, with a company or more deployed at each fort. Those companies were unused to operating as a regiment. The prevailing outlook of officers and enlistees alike was of small-­unit strategy and tactics. The army split the West into two divisions, the Pacific west and the Missouri east of the Continental Divide, that peaked with 111 forts at strategic sites between them. The Indian Bureau divided the West into fourteen superintendencies with sixty-­one agencies among them. Congress disbanded all volunteer regiments after the Civil War and reduced the regular army from thirty-­seven thousand troops in 1866 to twenty-­ seven thousand in 1874, although real numbers were about two-­thirds of those. The quality of troops and their morale, training, discipline, weapons, equipment, and supplies varied but was mostly deficient. Annually for every one thousand troops, disease killed eight and combat five, but doctors treated 1,500 for diseases and 250 for wounds. A few cavalry regiments were lucky to carry seven-­shot .50-caliber Spencer carbines, but most were stuck with single-­shot .50-caliber Sharps carbines. The .45-caliber 1872 Colt “Peacemaker” six-­shooter was a reliable revolver. Four regiments, the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry, had black



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troops and white officers. The army had two exceptional attributes. One was companies of Indian scouts that led troops to hostile villages. The other was that most generals who led Indian campaigns were competent and some excellent, like George Crook, Nelson Miles, and Ranald Mackenzie. The strategy was to hem in tribes with forts that dispensed annuities and from which army columns set forth to search for and destroy hostile villages and return survivors to their reservation. The Americans eventually defeated the tribes in every war except one. Red Cloud, head chief of the Oglala Lakota Sioux, actually won his war against the United States, although his victory was fleeting.10 The Bozeman Trail ran from Fort Laramie northwest to Virginia City, a settlement near Montana’s goldfields. Red Cloud’s band mostly lived between the Powder and Bighorn Rivers, and the Bozeman Trail passed through the heart of their homeland. Hunkpapa and other Lakota bands, along with a Cheyenne and an Arapaho band, lived in the region. War parties from those bands attacked emigrant parties on the trail. Three army columns marched into that region in the summer of 1865: Colonel Patrick Connor with 2,500 troops to establish a fort on the Powder River in August, while those of Colonels Nelson Cole and Samuel Walker sought bands to attack. The bands evaded and their war parties harassed the columns. In 1866, Colonel Henry Carrington led seven hundred troops to build two more forts on the trail that war parties continually harassed by attacking patrols, woodcutting parties, and horse guards. On December 21, the Sioux lured Captain William Fetterman and his eighty troopers into an ambush and wiped them out. The raids persisted through 1867 into 1868. Meanwhile, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa returned to the warpath on the central and southern plains. Throughout much of 1866 and 1867, army columns vainly searched for villages to attack. In October 1867, commissioners negotiated and signed separate treaties with most bands at Medicine Lodge Creek that established diminished reservations and annuities with them. Under the Fort Laramie Treaty with the northern plains tribes, negotiated and signed from April to November 1868, Washington would abandon its three forts on the Bozeman Trail, cede the territory to the tribes that lived there, and provide half a million dollars in annuities spread among the tribes at their reservations. As usual, those treaties produced truces, not lasting peace. Not all the bands submitted. The war against the southern plains tribes persisted until 1875. Annually, army columns trudged across swaths of bleak landscape while mostly failing to find and destroy any villages. An exception came on November 27, 1868, when Lieutenant Colonel George Custer’s 7th Cavalry with 574 men tracked a raiding party to a cluster of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Comanche villages on the Washita River and

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attacked the immediate village. That village was Black Kettle’s, still committed to peace and yet harboring the raiders. The troops overran and burned the village, killing scores of warriors along with old men, women, children, and Black Kettle among the dead, while suffering twenty-­one killed and thirteen wounded. They withdrew as warriors gathered from other villages and pursued them. The army finally subdued the tribes with five converging columns in 1874 and 1875. Of Great Basin tribes, the Modoc resisted the longest. For decades, the Modoc, led by Kintpuash, or Captain Jack, had sporadically attacked miners, settlers, and soldiers who invaded their territory in northeastern California. Kintpuash reluctantly agreed to a reservation but led his people back to their traditional land in 1872. The war began on November 29, 1873, when the Modoc attacked an army company that sought to escort them back to the reservation. Kintpuash and his 150 people fled to the rugged Lava Bed region. During a peace conference on April 11, 1873, Kintpuash and several other chiefs murdered General Edward Canby and four other commissioners and then escaped. They held out until Kintpuash finally agreed to surrender on June 4. During that time, they killed eighty-­three soldiers and wounded forty-­six while suffering seventeen dead. All the Modoc except six returned to the reservation. A military commission tried, found guilty of murder, and had executed Kintpuash and three followers and imprisoned for life two others. Greed for gold provoked the latest war with the Lakota Sioux and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies.11 After conquering the Black Hills region from other tribes in the late eighteenth century, the Lakota considered that region sacred. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty included the Black Hills in their reservation. In 1874, an exploring expedition led by Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills. That led to a gold rush with thousands of miners, merchants, gamblers, prostitutes, and others invading the region and founding towns like Deadwood. President Grant, War Secretary William Belknap, and Interior Secretary Zachariah Chandler agreed to a policy of recalling the bands to their reservation headquarters by January 31, 1876, and negotiating with the Lakota a treaty whereby they ceded the Black Hills. The Lakota and their allies defied that demand and deadline. The White House called on General George Crook to lead nine hundred cavalry and infantry from Fort Fetterman to subdue the tribes. Lakota led by Crazy Horse defeated Crook’s troops at Powder River on March 17, and the column withdrew to Fort Fetterman to resupply. The White House then organized three columns to converge on the tribes, Crook with 1,100 troops and 280 Indian scouts from Fort Fetterman, Custer with 700 7th Cavalrymen from Fort Abraham Lincoln, and General John Gibbon with 450 troops from Fort Ellis. General Alfred Terry was in command of Custer’s expedition but let



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him go ahead while he followed with two hundred infantry and the supply train. Led most prominently by Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the Lakota defeated Crook at Rosebud Creek on June 17. Crook withdrew to replenish supplies. Custer’s Indian scouts brought word of a massive encampment along the Little Bighorn River on June 25.12 Perhaps five thousand, mostly Sioux but also hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho, inhabited that series of villages. Rather than wait for the other columns, Custer chose to attack. His plan was for himself to assault the center with five companies while Major Marcus Reno with three companies attacked the village’s south end and Captain Frederick Benteen with three companies guarded the packhorses and supported either attack as needed. The warriors swarmed out to wipe out Custer and his men and drive back Reno, who joined Benteen. In all, the Indians killed 268 troops and wounded 55, five mortally, while suffering 31 dead and 160 wounded. Americans were celebrating the centennial of their independence and all their political, economic, and cultural achievements since then when the stunning word arrived that Indians had wiped out Custer and much of his regiment. Swiftly, the Little Big Horn culturally joined the Alamo as a symbol of Americans fighting for a great cause to the last bullet. Most Americans extolled Custer as a hero rather than a narcissist who led his men to their deaths. Following the battle, the bands dispersed in different directions. From that time to 1881, one by one they gave up, with Sitting Bull’s the last. Army columns did find and attack some bands, like Colonel Mackenzie’s against Dull Knife’s Cheyenne at Red Fork on November 25, 1876, and General Nelson Miles’s against Crazy Horse’s Oglala Sioux at Wolf Mountain on January 8, 1877, and Lame Deer’s Miniconjou Sioux at Muddy Creek on May 7, 1877. But starvation rather than combat forced most to submit. The steady destruction of the bison herds that the plains tribes depended on for sustenance ultimately drove them back to the reservations for food. The decimation of the bison was not a deliberate Washington policy, even though officials recognized its crucial utility. Bison supplied Americans with robes, tough leather belts for machinery, and bones ground to powder for fertilizer. Meanwhile, another tribe revolted that traditionally was friendly to Americans, but greed for its land drove it to desperation.13 On November 13, 1876, General Oliver Howard informed Nez Perce chief Joseph that the government had revoked that tribe’s existing reservation in the Wallowa Valley, Oregon, and would transfer them to a reservation in Idaho in return for a generous payment and annuities and gave them thirty days to move. Joseph and his chiefs refused. The standoff persisted until June 14, when four Nez Perce murdered four whiskey peddlers. Knowing that would

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allow the army to attack them, Joseph and his chiefs chose to lead their seven hundred people eastward to join Sitting Bull and his band that had escaped to Canada. What ensued was a four-­month, 1,170-mile odyssey as the Nez Perce won a half dozen battles and skirmishes along the way until Miles, with 520 troops, cornered them at Bear Paw Mountain, Montana, just forty-­two miles from Canada on September 30. During five days of fighting, the Nez Perce killed twenty-­four soldiers and wounded forty-­nine while suffering twenty-­three killed and forty-­six wounded. With ammunition and food exhausted, Joseph surrendered his 431 surviving followers, declaring, “From where the Sun now stands I will fight no more forever.” Across southern New Mexico and Arizona, Americans fought Apache bands in a series of wars from 1849 to 1886.14 With leaders like Mangas Coloradas, Victorio, Cochise, and Geronimo, the Apache were brilliant at hit-­and-­run attacks that devastated ranches, wagon trains, stagecoaches, and army patrols. The final war pitted five thousand troops and five hundred Indian scouts, with Miles in overall command, against Geronimo and thirty followers, who, after years of raiding, finally surrendered on September 5, 1886. An inspiring prophecy led to the last Indian battle. Wovoka was a Paiute shaman whose visions revealed a future for Indians forever reunited with their loved ones in peace and happiness if they purified themselves by returning to their traditional lifestyles, loving, praying, dancing the “Ghost Dance,” and committing no violence against each other. Two Sioux, Short Bull and Kicking Bear, met Wovoka and brought back the Ghost Dance but devised a “ghost shirt” that made the wearer immune to bullets. The Ghost Dance cult spread through Sioux country in 1890. Pine Ridge Indian agent Daniel Royer feared that the Ghost Dance would provoke a revolt and called for the army to repress it. President Benjamin Harrison authorized General Miles to move several regiments into the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations. That provoked the Oglala and Brule to flee and prepare to fight. Fearing Sitting Bull would lead them, Miles had tribal police arrest him, but a fight erupted and Sitting Bull was killed. Learning that Hunkpapa chief Big Foot and Miniconjou chief Spotted Elk were leading two hundred people to join the Oglala and Brule, Miles had troops intercept them. Ironically, it was the 420 men of the 7th Cavalry led by Colonel James Forsyth who caught up with them at Wounded Knee on December 29. As the troops tried to disarm the warriors, a rifle discharged, and each side opened fire, leading to around ninety Sioux and thirty-­one soldiers killed and a score of Sioux and thirty-­three soldiers wounded. Miles convinced the Brule and Oglala to surrender peacefully. Wounded Knee was not a deliberate army massacre but ever since has symbolized the tragic history of American treatment of Indians over four centuries.



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Two years after Wounded Knee, a then obscure University of Wisconsin professor gave what was eventually recognized as the nation’s most influential scholarly presentation. Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his “A Frontier Interpretation of American History” during a history conference at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Turner noted that the 1890 census reported the disappearance of America’s frontier. No longer was the frontier a seemingly endless territory to exploit but had become a metaphor for enterprise in new fields. Turner called on Americans to identify other frontiers in which to devote their energy and enterprise. Otherwise, America would lose its essence. What Turner did not note was that American energy and enterprise were increasingly constrained, and the frontier’s end had nothing to do with that. The paradox of “free markets” is that the freer they are at the national level, the sooner they self-­destruct. That inevitably happens in two ways. Not just supply and demand but also greed and fear shape markets. Greed drives speculators to bid up stock or real estate prices to heights far above their actual value; then fear takes over and prices plummet with ever more frenzied selling, with most losing far more than they previously gained. Another is that large firms buy up small firms and then each other until monopolies and oligopolies throttle the economy with high fixed prices, shoddy goods and services, and miserable wages and work conditions. Those market failures devastated America in the late nineteenth century. Americans suffered prolonged depressions from 1873 to 1878 and from 1893 to 1897, each provoked by financial “panics.” “Robber barons” like John Rockefeller in oil, Andrew Carnegie in steel, James Hill in railroads, and, above all, John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan controlled vast swaths of the economy. During this “gilded age,” the rich got opulently richer while the middle class stagnated and the urban poor got poorer. Immigration boosted wealth for the rich and depressed wages for the poor. From 1880 to 1914, America’s population doubled from 50,189,209 to 99,111,000, with twenty million immigrants and their offspring accounting for much of that. Chart 6.1.  Comparison of Rising American Manufacturing Power as Share of World Total (in Percentages)15

United States Britain Germany France Russia Rest of World

1870

1896–1900

1913

23.3 31.8 13.2 10.3 3.7 17.7

30.1 19.5 16.6 7.1 5.0 21.7

35.8 14.0 25.7 6.4 3.5 24.6

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Yet overall, despite the worsening inequities and prolonged depressions, America’s economy expanded.16 Manufacturing, exports, and innovations led that growth. America’s share of global manufacturing rose from 23.3 percent in 1870 to 35.8 percent in 1913, or equal to the combined totals of the three next largest manufacturers, Germany, Britain, and France, with 36 percent. The United States annually ran a trade surplus from 1874 to 1934 except 1888, and exports composed from 6 to 8 percent of the economy. Brilliant inventors were critical to America’s growth. Thomas Edison established a research and development complex at Menlo Park, New Jersey, that won over 1,500 patents for inventions. Among those was the lightbulb that illuminated electricity as a source of energy and light. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone revolutionized communications. America’s economy was at once increasingly a growth engine for and dependent on the global economy. In 1894, Treasury Secretary John Carlisle explained that “the prosperity of our people, therefore, depends largely upon their ability to sell their surplus products in foreign markets at remunerative prices.”17 American corporations increasingly invested overseas to capture markets, mines, livestock, and fruits. For instance, the United Fruit Company monopolized banana production in Central America and the Dole Company pineapples in Hawaii. National Cash Register and Singer Sewing opened factories overseas to dominate markets for those products in those countries. Americans diverted only a fraction of their wealth to the military. After demobilizing over a million men after the Civil War ended, Congress maintained a regular army of about twenty-­ eight thousand troops deployed mostly on the frontier. The navy also sharply declined in numbers. It emerged from the Civil War with 626 warships, including 65 ironclads, up from 68 four years earlier. In numbers, firepower, and armament, the United States rivaled Britain as the world’s greatest naval power. At the time, no prominent people advocated keeping that power. What would have been the point? Instead, Congress voted to scrap most of those ships until the navy reached prewar levels. In 1881, the navy numbered only fifty warships. From 1861 to 1881, the marines landed only twelve times in hostile lands.18 A swelling group of influential thinkers was determined to change that.19 These unabashed imperialists argued that the United States had to carve out its own overseas empire because foreign empires denied American merchants access to their markets. They espoused social Darwinism that characterized international relations as an endless but progressive struggle whereby more powerful (and usually more civilized) peoples subjected less powerful (and usually less civilized) peoples. British



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thinker Herbert Spencer expressed that outlook in his ten-­volume System of Synthetic Philosophy (1862–1894), influenced by the ideas of natural selection and evolution developed by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. America’s leading social Darwinian philosopher was William Graham Sumner. “Survival of the fittest” was a popular idea even if few people read deeply into the ponderous tomes of Spencer or Sumner. Theodore Roosevelt was a leading proponent of American nationalism, expanding trade and investments around the world, and a powerful military to protect those global interests.20 He racked up extraordinary achievements before he was forty years old. Born into a wealthy New York family, he graduated from Harvard and was a state assemblyman from 1882 to 1884, a Dakota rancher from 1884 to 1887, a civil service commissioner from 1889 to 1895, New York City police commissioner from 1895 to 1897, and assistant navy secretary from 1897 to 1898, before resigning and winning national acclaim commanding the Rough Rider cavalry regiment in the Spanish-­American War. He was a prolific writer who celebrated American power and expansion through his The Naval War of 1812 (1888) and three-­ volume The Winning of the West series (1885–1894). Admiral Stephen Luce fathered America’s modern navy in two ways. He founded the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1884 and tirelessly advocated for a fleet of cutting-­edge warships constructed with reinforced steel, powered by the largest steam engines, and mounting the longest-­range and most destructive cannons. From 1883 to 1889, Congress funded thirty-­ three increasingly powerful warships, including the state-­of-­the-­art battleship USS Maine. From 1889 to 1893, Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy accelerated that program by getting Congress to appropriate money for four even more sophisticated battleships, the Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Massachusetts, to be launched in the mid-1890s. Captain Alfred Mahan was the son of Dennis Mahan, the West Point instructor who influenced two generations of cadets. He defied his father by joining the navy rather than the army. He graduated from the naval academy at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1859 and served at sea or on various naval bases until 1884, when he became a professor at the Naval War College (and then its president in 1886). Like his father, Mahan was an influential scholar but profound and eloquent rather than pedantic and theoretical. His most important books included The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890), The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 (1892), and Sea Power in Its Relation to the War of 1812 (1905). He advocated capturing strategic ports around the world and massing naval forces for battles of annihilation against the enemy’s fleets.

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The imperialist proponents increasingly influenced policy. The Hawaiian Islands were among the world’s strategic stepping-­stones that expansionists wanted in American hands. Americans began trading with the Hawaiian Islands governed by a monarchy in the early nineteenth century.21 Gradually Americans colonized the islands as ever more settlers bought land, started businesses, and dominated the economy. Investors established huge sugarcane and pineapple plantations and cattle ranches. When they could not employ enough Hawaiians, they brought in Japanese and Chinese laborers. Americans established a web of political organizations with overlapping memberships, such as the Hawaiian League and its militia group the Honolulu Rifles, and the Annexation Club with its Independent Party and thirteen-­member Committee of Safety. Many married Hawaiians and their children grew up to take important economic and political positions. They pressured Hawaii’s kings to accept a series of constitutions in 1840, 1850, and 1887 that developed a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature, with a noble upper house and an elected lower house for commoners, and a list of rights. The 1887 constitution established an elected presidency and let American residents vote and run in elections. An 1887 treaty gave the United States exclusive control over Pearl Harbor with its wide, deepwater, sheltered bay. King Kalakaua acquiesced to America’s growing domination during his reign from 1874 to 1893. Queen Liliuokalani took power after her brother died and opposed the growing American takeover. The Americans overthrew the queen in a coup on January 16, 1893, when Ambassador John Stevens and 162 marines from the USS Boston forced her to abdicate and then declared the Republic of Hawaii headed by Sanford Dole, the provisional president. They drafted an annexation treaty and sent it to Washington. President Benjamin Harrison signed the treaty and passed it to the Senate just before leaving office. President Grover Cleveland condemned the coup and withdrew the treaty from consideration. Among the thirteen Samoan Islands in the southwest Pacific is deepwater Pago Pago Bay, perfect for anchoring a large fleet that steamed among a chain of similar island strongholds across the Pacific. American merchant ships began trading there in 1835, and eventually word spread of Pago Pago’s strategic worth. In 1873, Americans signed a treaty with Samoa’s chiefs that granted the United States a protectorate over the islands and the right to build a base and anchor warships in the bay. Britain and Germany won similar terms with other chiefs in other bays in 1879. A three-­way rivalry to sway the chiefs grew increasingly fierce. A typhoon dampened rising tensions among the three powers when it devastated their warships in 1889. In the Treaty of Berlin, signed on June 14, 1889, the three powers agreed to cooperate in maintaining order in the islands, including crushing revolts against them. Tensions flared again



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in 1898 as they smothered a rebellion but backed different candidates for a new government. In the Tripartite Treaty, signed in Washington on December 2, 1899, Britain agreed to cede its concession while Germany and the United States split the Samoan Islands between them.22 Cleveland wielded power when he believed that American ideals rather than venal interests were at stake. For decades, Britain had asserted for its Guyana colony land that Venezuela claimed for itself. Recent gold strikes there made the territory worth fighting for. On February 22, 1895, Cleveland signed a bill that called on London and Caracas to submit their dispute to an international arbitration committee. Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-­Cecil, Lord Salisbury, ignored that bill. In July 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney presented Cleveland a report that condemned Britain for militarily threatening Venezuela to cede that region. Cleveland authorized Olney to send Britain a warning to stand down. Citing the Monroe Doctrine, Olney declared that “no European power or combination of European powers shall forcibly deprive an American state of the right and power of self-­government and of shaping for itself its own political fortunes and destinies.”23 Salisbury rejected the warning. On December 17, Cleveland asked Congress to establish a boundary commission to recommend the dispute’s just settlement; if Britain rejected its finding, the United States would impose it by “every means in its power.” Congress complied. Whitehall informally agreed to accept American arbitration in January 1896, but it took over a year for British and Venezuelan diplomats to formally accept that with the Treaty of Washington, signed on February 2, 1897. It took more than two and a half years before the commission completed its work on October 3, 1899. Rebellions in neighboring Cuba threatened American economic, strategic, and humanitarian interests. Cuban patriots revolted against Spanish rule in 1868 and petitioned Washington for annexation. President Grant rejected the offer and encouraged the rebels to seek reform rather than independence. The Spanish finally crushed that revolt in 1878. A new revolt erupted in 1895, and this time America eventually intervened.24 The rebel strategy was to evade the sixty-­thousand-­man Spanish army and instead destroy the economy to render Cuba worthless. General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the Spanish commander, countered by trying to separate civilians from rebels by herding around five hundred thousand into huge concentration camps where disease and starvation killed around one hundred thousand of them. Those brutal strategies threatened American economic and humanitarian interests. Between the revolts, American investments in plantations, railroads, and other businesses in Cuba climbed to $50 million while bilateral trade reached $100 million. War’s resumption stymied those

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profitable enterprises. Individually and in association, those businessmen pressured the White House and members of Congress to pressure Madrid either to issue reforms or to accept independence to end the fighting. Among the most outspoken hard-­liners against Spain were newspaper publishers William Hearst of the New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt, the navy’s undersecretary. Meanwhile, humanitarian groups condemned Madrid for its concentration camp policy. President William McKinley was a Civil War veteran who hated war.25 To those who pushed for American military intervention in Cuba, he replied, “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”26 Nonetheless, he accepted Navy Secretary John Long’s advice to steam the USS Maine to Havana as a show of strength. The Maine dropped anchor in Havana Bay on January 25, 1898. Pressure soared on McKinley when Hearst’s Journal published a front-­ page article with the inflammatory title “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History” on February 9. What followed was the text of a letter stolen by a Cuban agent working at Spain’s embassy in Washington. The letter from Ambassador Enrique de Lomé to Foreign Minister Jose Canalejas described McKinley as “weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd, besides being a would-­be politician who tried to leave a door open behind him while keeping on good terms with the jingoes of his party.”27 Embarrassed and humiliated, McKinley thereafter struggled to assert a stronger image through tough talk and actions. An explosion sank the Maine, killing 266 of the 354 crew, on February 15. McKinley ordered an investigation. The report concluded that an external explosion sank the Maine, most likely a mine. The question was who did it—rebels who wanted to provoke the United States to go to war against Spain or Spaniards enraged at America’s interference in their colony. War hawks blamed Spaniards and chanted the jingle, “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” McKinley asked Congress for $50 million to prepare the army and navy for war on March 6. Vermont senator Redfield Proctor returned from a fact-­finding trip to Cuba to tell McKinley harrowing stories of the mass misery and death he witnessed in Spain’s concentration camps: “Torn from their homes, with foul earth, foul air, foul water, and foul food or none, what wonder that half of them have died and that one-­quarter are so diseased that they cannot be saved.”28 McKinley still wanted to avoid war and secretly offered Madrid $300 million to buy the island. The Spaniards rejected the offer. On March 27, McKinley called on Madrid to accept an immediate armistice and negotiations with the rebels that the United States would arbitrate if they failed to strike a deal by October 1. Although Madrid ignored American mediation,



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it did announce a truce on April 9. To pressure Madrid, McKinley asked Congress to authorize force to end the war, one step short of a blunt war declaration, on April 11. On April 19, Congress recognized Cuban independence, demanded that Spain withdraw, and authorized the use of force if Spain refused; the Teller Amendment renounced any American acquisition of Cuban territory. On April 21, Madrid severed diplomatic relations, and McKinley ordered the navy to blockade Cuba, an act of war. Spain declared war against the United States on April 24. Congress reciprocated by declaring war against Spain on April 25. America’s navy numbered 74 warships, including 5 battleships, and 123 auxiliaries manned by 24,123 sailors and 1,751 officers. The army had only 28,183 troops in twenty-­five infantry regiments, ten cavalry regiments, and five artillery regiments. Congress doubled the number of regular troops to 58,688 while recruiters accepted 216,500 volunteers for the duration and organized them into regiments. Among them was Roosevelt, who resigned as navy undersecretary to receive a lieutenant colonel’s commission to recruit (with Colonel Leonard Wood) the 1st Volunteer Cavalry regiment, which he called the “Rough Riders.” Roosevelt would ride the acclaim he received for heroically leading that regiment to New York’s governorship, the vice presidency, and finally the White House. Admiral George Dewey commanded a flotilla of four cruisers and two gunboats then anchored at Hong Kong. Dewey’s flagship was the USS Olympia, captained by John Gridley. On February 25, Navy Undersecretary Roosevelt instructed Dewey that when war began with Spain, he should steam to Manila, destroy the Spanish fleet, and capture that city. He got word on April 25, ordered his warships to lift anchor on April 27, and the fleet approached Manila on May 1. With Dewey’s laconic order, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” the warships bombarded Admiral Patricio Montojo’s seven cruisers and five gunboats. The Americans sank all seven cruisers and killed 161 and wounded 210 Spanish sailors while suffering 1 dead and 9 wounded. Governor General Fermin Jaudenes rebuffed Dewey’s demand to surrender Manila with its fifteen thousand defenders. Dewey landed marines to link with Filipino rebels and sent a gunboat to Hong Kong to retrieve Emilio Aguinaldo, an exiled Filipino revolutionary leader. On May 18, after Aguinaldo appeared, Dewey asked him to organize a Philippine army that the United States would arm and train. Aguinaldo and other prominent leaders declared independence for the Philippines on June 12, but Dewey did not recognize that act. On June 30, the first contingent arrived of eventually 10,844 troops commanded by General Wesley Merritt to besiege Manila. Secret emissaries between Merritt and Jaudenes arranged a face-­saving way for the Spanish to surrender after a

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bombardment on August 13, although that cost six American and forty-­ nine Spanish lives. Dewey and Merritt pointedly did not include Aguinaldo in the surrender ceremony, although his ragtag troops constituted nearly half the besiegers. America’s strategy toward Cuba was to seize the eastern cities and bays of Guantanamo and Santiago with overwhelming numbers of warships and troops to cut off Spain’s forces westward. Admiral William Sampson commanded the warships blockading those and other ports in the region. The first step came in June 10, when 647 marines seized Guantanamo at the cost of six dead. Although more than six thousand Spanish troops were in the region, none dared to try to recapture that port. Tampa, Florida, was the staging area for the armada bound for Santiago. General William Shafter commanded the 16,977-man army packed aboard twenty-­nine transports and six support ships protected eventually by thirteen warships. A lack of transports and fodder kept nearly all the cavalry’s horses on shore; only officers’ horses were aboard. The armada steamed out on June 14 and dropped anchor near Sampson’s flotilla off Santiago on June 20. Shafter, Sampson, and General Calixto Garcia, the local Cuban commander, planned to land the army at Daiquiri beach, eighteen miles east of Santiago, and then march northwest to join forces with the rebels and besiege the city. On June 22, the fleet bombarded the beach, and the army began landing as the six hundred defenders fled. The Spanish had 24,550 troops in the region, including 9,430 defending Santiago, but the commander, General Arsenio Linares Pombo, failed to concentrate them and attack the invaders. The army marched to the small port of Siboney five miles west on June 23 and then to Las Guasiamas two miles inland on June 24. The Spanish first fought at Guasiamas, but the Americans routed them by advancing on parallel trails. The tropical heat was so exhausting that the troops could not pursue the fleeing enemy. Santiago is on the northeast side of a long bay. Linares deployed most of his troops on the semicircle of hills that run north and east a mile or so beyond Santiago, with the most important, first San Juan Hill and then Kettle Hill, flanking the east road. By June 30, most of the American army had advanced to an arc of positions east of Santiago. On July 1, Shafter ordered an attack that eventually overwhelmed the Spanish defenders, first at El Caney, then Kettle Hill, and finally San Juan Hill. Roosevelt’s dismounted Rough Rider regiment was among four regiments that spearheaded the attack. That victory cost the Americans 205 dead and 1,180 wounded while the Spanish suffered 215 killed and 376 wounded. With those heights in American hands, Santiago’s defense was doomed. Artillery placed on those hills would soon reduce the city to rubble. On



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July 3, Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete’s fleet tried to break through the blockade, but Sampson’s four battleships and two cruisers sank all four cruisers and two destroyers, killed 343 sailors, wounded 151, and captured 1,889 while suffering 1 dead and 1 wounded. General Jose Toral, who had taken over Santiago’s defense, agreed to capitulate on July 16, and the Spanish army marched out the next day. Santiago’s surrender ended serious Spanish resistance in the Caribbean. General Nelson Miles landed 15,472 troops, split among Guanica, Ponce, and Arroyo, on Puerto Rico’s south coast on July 25. Facing him were 8,233 Spanish regulars and 9,107 Puerto Rican volunteers. The American columns fought a series of skirmishes as they marched north, losing 7 dead and 36 wounded while inflicting 17 dead, 88 wounded, and 324 captured before Governor General Manuel Macias y Casado surrendered on August 12. Mosquitoes were the deadliest enemy, sickening and killing ever more Americans. Shafter wanted to deploy regiments across the island, but Roosevelt and other commanders pressured him to send them home as soon as possible. Roosevelt warned that “to keep us here . . . will mean an appalling disaster, for the surgeons have estimated that over half the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die.”29 McKinley authorized the army’s withdrawal beginning with the volunteer regiments. Spain desperately agreed to an armistice on August 12. Peace negotiations soon opened in Paris. Americans split bitterly over what spoils, if any, to take. The Teller Amendment put Cuba off the table, but Spain’s other colonies were fair game. Many Americans had opposed the war and wanted no acquisitions from it. Some formed the Anti-­Imperialist League, whose most prominent members included former president Cleveland, Massachusetts senator George Hoar, corporate and philanthropist leader Andrew Carnegie, American Federation of Labor (AFL) chief Samuel Gompers, Harvard president Charles Eliot, Harvard professor William James, Democratic Party populist William Jennings Bryan, author Mark Twain, and social reformer Jane Addams.30 Three groups favored colonization: imperialists, who sought markets, resources, and strategic bases; humanitarians, who sought to improve life for the colonized; and those, like Roosevelt, who embraced all those reasons. McKinley agonized over whether to keep or free the Philippines with its seven million people and 7,108 islands. To a group of clergymen he admitted, “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight and I am not ashamed to tell you gentlemen that I went on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance. And one night late it came to me . . . that there was nothing left to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them.”31 British writer and imperialist Rudyard Kipling called on

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Americans to accept that same duty in his poem “The White Man’s Burden” published in the New York Sun on February 4, 1899. Later, Governor General William Howard Taft described his joy at elevating his “little brown brothers.” Under the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam as colonies and Cuba as a protectorate in return for paying Spain $20 million. On February 6, 1899, the Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris by fifty-­seven to twenty-­ seven votes. That short war cost Americans 5,482 dead, of whom combat killed only 379 while diseases killed the rest. Secretary of State John Hay jubilantly declared that conflict with Spain “a splendid little war!” American officials backed by troops prepared Cuba for independence from January 1899 to May 1902.32 During that time, a formal American protectorate over Cuba advanced in two stages. War Secretary Elihu Root and Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut collaborated to draft the Platt Amendment to the 1901 army appropriation bill. The Platt Amendment committed the United States to upholding Cuba’s independence and militarily intervening if Cuba dissolved into anarchy or autocracy that threatened American interests; to that end, Cuba had to grant the United States power over its foreign and financial policies. The Americans pressured the Cubans to include the Platt Amendment in their 1902 constitution. Washington rewarded Havana with the 1902 Reciprocity Treaty that lowered tariffs on bilateral trade. American investments more than quadrupled from $50 million in 1898 to $220 million in 1913. Cuban exports to the United States, mostly sugar owned by American investors, soared from $31 million in 1900 to $722 million in 1920.33 In a bilateral treaty signed on May 22, 1903, Havana reaffirmed adherence to the Platt Amendment and ceded Guantanamo Bay at Cuba’s east end as an American base in perpetuity. Amid the war, the United States peacefully acquired territory with vital strategic and economic importance without firing a shot. Congress approved a bill accepting Hawaii’s annexation petition by 290 to 91 in the House and 42 to 21 in the Senate on July 7, 1898. McKinley signed the bill into law making Hawaii an American territory. He had long favored that act, arguing, “We need Hawaii. . . . It is Manifest Destiny.”34 The United States soon found itself in a new war. Tensions skyrocketed between General Elwell Otis’s twelve thousand American troops and Aguinaldo’s twenty thousand Filipinos encamped around Manila after word arrived that the United States would colonize rather than liberate the islands. A firefight between patrols erupted on February 4, 1899. The next day, Otis ordered an attack that routed the Filipinos.



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The subsequent war lasted more than three years.35 Although the Americans were better organized, armed, and supplied, the Filipinos mustered more fighters and supporters, were better adapted to the tropical climate and diseases, and could withdraw to sanctuaries deep in the jungle and mountains. The Americans eventually poured over 126,000 troops into the Philippines to crush that rebellion. Twenty-­six of the thirty generals who led them were Indian war veterans. For most of the war, an average of twenty-­four thousand Americans fought eighty thousand rebels in the field, while other troops manned garrisons and conveyed supplies.36 Troops captured Aguinaldo on March 23, 1901. Less than a month later, on April 19, Aguinaldo proclaimed his acceptance of American rule and called on the rebels to give up. The last serious resistance ended when General Miguel Malvar surrendered with his demoralized remaining men on April 16, 1902. President Roosevelt officially proclaimed the war’s end on July 4, 1902. That war cost the United States 4,234 dead, of whom combat killed 379, and 2,818 wounded of the 126,468 who served there. The taxpayers’ bill was $160 million. From 1898 to 1902, the American army killed around sixteen thousand guerillas in combat while two hundred thousand civilians died either directly in cross fires and murders or indirectly from starvation and disease. Tens of thousands died in the camps in which the Americans eventually herded over three hundred thousand civilians to separate them from the guerrillas.37 General Jacob “Hell-­Roaring Jake” Smith actually ordered his men to commit mass murder: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn, the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities to the United States.”38 Ultimately, American soft rather than hard power caused over seven million Filipinos to accept colonization enthusiastically or bitterly. Roosevelt appointed Taft as governor general to implement economic, political, and social reforms. Taft and his successors built roads, schools, ports, hospitals, electrical grids, and sewage and water systems. The Americans nurtured Filipino leaders, political parties, and civic societies and organized a political system for eventual independence, promised by the 1916 Jones Act. The United States granted the Philippines independence on July 4, 1946. Meanwhile, the United States joined a short war against China. What was worth fighting for there?39 Although Americans had traded with China since 1785, the volume was low even after more than a century. By 1900, the United States exported to China $15 million in goods, mostly raw cotton, cheap cloth, and kerosene. China accounted for only 2 percent of American foreign trade and 3 percent of foreign investments, and within

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China only 9 percent of foreign trade and 2.5 percent of foreign investments. About five hundred American missionaries served in China, but after a generation they counted merely 1,300 converts, 1,400 assistants, 9,000 students, and $5 million worth of property.40 Diplomatic relations were not much better. The bilateral 1868 Burlingame Treaty established consular relations and allowed largely unrestricted Chinese immigration to America. Opposition rose against Chinese immigrants with claims that they undercut American businesses and organized crime through networks of brothels and opium dens. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended immigration and denied citizenship to Chinese already living in the United States. Congress eventually paid China $424,367 for twenty-­ eight Chinese murdered by a mob at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885. Despite these grave issues, the United States was the least of China’s worries. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia had forced China to cede “spheres of influence” along its coast, while, after defeating China in a short war from 1894 to 1895, Japan acquired the island of Taiwan as a colony. That infuriated China’s governing elite, but they could only bow before overwhelming foreign power. Further affronting traditional-­ minded Chinese was the growing presence of Christian missionaries, who now numbered over two thousand. Washington shared one fear with Beijing. The other great powers mulled splitting all of China among themselves into outright colonies. If that happened, they would eliminate America’s investments and trade with China. McKinley authorized Secretary of State Hay to issue an identically worded message to each of those countries on September 6, 1899. The Open Door Note warned them against colonizing China and asserted that all foreign countries had the equal right to trade and invest in every Chinese region. A rebellion against the foreigners led by the “Society of Righteous Fists,” secretly backed by China’s government headed by Dowager Empress Tz’u-­hsi, erupted in 1900 and besieged the walled quarter sheltering the eleven foreign delegations in Beijing. In Beijing and elsewhere, those “Boxers” eventually slaughtered over 100,000 Chinese civilians, including 32,000 Christians and 240 foreign missionaries. The United States contributed 2,100 troops to a 15,500-man eight-­nation force that landed at Tientsin on June 9, quick-­marched the eighty-­five miles to Beijing, and rescued the diplomatic corps on August 14. Meanwhile, rebels captured Tientsin on June 15, and American troops were among the coalition that retook that city on July 13. Eventually over fifty-­six thousand troops, including 245 American marines and 3,125 soldiers, deployed in Beijing and Tientsin and along the road linking them. The allies suffered 1,002 dead, including around 250 Americans, and killed over 2,000 Chinese troops and rebels and around 5,000 civilians. Under the Protocol



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of Peking, signed on September 7, the coalition forced China to pay $335 million in reparations and to execute any officials who abetted the rebellion. Worried that this was the first step toward China’s partition, Hay issued another Open Door Note on July 3, 1900.41 Meanwhile, Theodore Roosevelt returned from the Spanish-­American War a popular hero. He capitalized on his fame to run for and win New York’s governorship in 1899. As governor, he pushed through the assembly a series of reforms affecting antitrust, labor, public heath, infrastructure, railroads, taxes, and conservation. In an 1899 speech, he condemned ignorant, timid, lazy, unimaginative men and called on Americans to lead a “strenuous life” of vigorous work, exercise, learning, and patriotism: “Our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. . . . Let us boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully . . . that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.”42 McKinley chose Roosevelt as his running mate in the 1900 presidential election. They decisively won that election with 7,228,864 popular votes (51.6 percent) and 292 electoral votes to Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan’s 6,370,932 votes (45.5 percent) and 152 electoral votes. The victors enjoyed overwhelming Republican power in Congress with 200 to 161 Democrats and 6 from minor parties in the House of Representatives and 48 to 28 Democrats and 9 from minor parties in the Senate.43 An anarchist shot McKinley on September 5, 1901, and he died on September 14. Roosevelt was now America’s president. Roosevelt was a master of power. As president, he resolved a half dozen or so international crises that at once avoided violence and enhanced American interests. His efforts with business titan J. P. Morgan to boost assets and confidence twice shored up the financial system at the brink of collapse. His Justice Department issued forty-­four antitrust suits to break up monopolies and oligopolies. He mediated a national coal strike that threatened to shut down the economy. He pushed through a Pure Food and Drug Act that regulated health and safety for products in those industries. He got Congress to enact the 1906 Antiquities Act that empowers the president to protect federal lands with exceptional historic, cultural, or aesthetic value. In all, he set aside 380 million acres with 5 national parks, 4 nature preserves, 18 national monuments, 51 bird sanctuaries, and 150 national forests. As a striking display of peace and power, he had a fleet painted white and sailed around the world, anchoring at key ports along the way. No one had ever won the highest honors for both war and peace. He received a posthumous Medal of Honor for his bravery on San Juan Hill and a Nobel Prize for helping mediate the

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Russo-­Japanese War’s end. His most consequential act was organizing the coup that led to Panama’s independence from Colombia and a treaty with that government guaranteeing America’s right to build and defend a canal across the isthmus. Roosevelt was determined to secure America’s right to build a canal across Central America.44 The question was where and for what terms. Tens of thousands of people journeying to California’s goldfields traversed the Panama or Nicaragua routes. Panama was then a province of Colombia. In 1846, Washington and Bogota signed a treaty that permitted an American owned and defended railroad across the forty-­eight-­mile-­wide isthmus from Colon north on the Caribbean to Panama City due south on the Pacific Ocean. In 1860, 1873, 1885, and 1887, American troops landed and deployed to protect the railroad against rebels. The largest operation was in 1885, when an eight-­ship armada landed two thousand marines and sailors to crush a revolt. Meanwhile, under the 1850 Clayton-­Bulwer Treaty, the United States and Britain agreed not to build a Central American canal or colonize any part of Central America without the other’s permission. The French beat the Americans to the diplomatic punch by acquiring from Colombia the right to build a Panama canal. Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had overseen the Suez Canal’s construction, received the Panama project. He failed, defeated by yellow fever that decimated his workforce and by equipment and explosives too weak to tear through the earth. The New Panama Canal Company bought the canal rights, with William Cromwell and Philippe Bunau-­Varilla the key leaders. France’s failure gave the United States an opportunity if it could free itself from Clayton-­Bulwer. McKinley had Secretary of State Hay negotiate with British ambassador Julian Pauncefote Clayton-­Bulwer’s cancellation. Under the Hay-­Pauncefote Treaty, signed on February 5, 1900, the British ceded the right for the United States to unilaterally build but not fortify a canal. After becoming president, Roosevelt had Hay get Pauncefote to accept America’s fortification and defense of any canal in the Hay-­ Pauncefote Treaty of November 18, 1901. Roosevelt authorized Hay to negotiate with Colombian ambassador Tomas Herran the right to build a canal. Under the Hay-­Herran Treaty, signed on March 17, 1903, Colombia ceded the right in return for $10 million immediately and thereafter $250,000 annually. The Colombians then tried to force the New Panama Canal Company to pay it $10 million. After Cromwell and Hay rejected that demand, the Colombians demanded that the United States pay $15 million rather than $10 million. When the White House rejected that demand, Colombia’s Congress rejected the treaty on August 12, 1903. That news infuriated Roosevelt, who had Hay orchestrate with Cromwell and Bunau-­Varilla a Panamanian rebellion against Colombia. The



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plan was for Panamanian officers and officials to declare independence as a flotilla of American warships packed with marines arrived. The USS Nashville dropped anchor off Colon on November 3. The Nashville’s Captain John Hubbard had orders to prevent Colombian troops from landing. He faced a quandary when he learned that five hundred troops led by General Juan Tovar had already disembarked the previous day and camped around the train station. Learning of the pending coup, Tovar demanded that he and his men be conveyed to Panama City by train. The train superintendent replied that he could only take the general and his staff, while the rest of his men would have to await a later train. The coup leaders led by General Esteban Huertas captured Tovar and his staff after they reached Panama City. The USS Dixie packed with four hundred marines led by Major John Lejeune reached Colon on November 5. Lejeune led his men ashore and marched them to the train station. The Spanish commander surrendered. An $8,000 bribe convinced Tovar to embark all his troops and steam away with all the ships to Cartagena. Hay announced America’s recognition of Panama on November 6. On November 18, Hay and Bunau-­Varilla signed a treaty that permitted the United States to build, fortify, and defend a Panama canal in a zone ten miles wide in return for guaranteeing Panama’s independence, $10 million immediately, and thereafter $250,000 annually. The Senate ratified that treaty by a 66 to 14 vote on February 23, 1904. The hard part lay ahead. It took a decade for Americans to build the canal. The Panama Canal officially opened on August 15, 1914. Strategically and economically, the Panama Canal was as vital for American security as the Egyptian canal was for Britain. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine warned European powers not to intervene politically or militarily in the Western Hemisphere, which was an American sphere of influence. Before Congress on December 6, 1904, Roosevelt asserted America’s right to intervene in any Latin American country when autocracy or anarchy threatened American interests: “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly . . . to the exercise of an international police power.”45 That “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine identified and justified a policy that the United States had pursued for several generations. American marines had restored order in a number of Latin American countries, including Argentina in 1833, 1852, and 1890; Chile in 1891; Mexico in 1870; Nicaragua in 1852, 1853, 1854, 1896, and 1899; and

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Colombia’s province of Panama in 1860, 1873, 1885, and 1895. They would continue to do so for the next century and beyond. Under the Roosevelt Corollary, the United States intervened in Cuba from 1898 to 1902, 1906 to 1909, in 1912, and from 1917 to 1924; the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1921; Haiti from 1915 to 1934; Nicaragua from 1909 to 1920, 1912 to 1925, and 1926 to 1934; Honduras from 1924 to 1926; and Mexico from 1916 to 1917.46 Typically the incursions followed an invitation by one or more sides, involved little or no fighting, and ended soon after diplomats forged the latest truce among the rivals. While the occupation lasted, officials did what they could to improve infrastructure, health, education, policing, and morality. Inevitably, the Americans favored some individuals and groups over others and provoked animosity among those who did not directly benefit.

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The world must be made safe for democracy . . . and we shall fight . . . for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world at last free. —Woodrow Wilson You are now to go against a victorious enemy under new and harder conditions. All our Allies will be watching to see how you conduct yourselves. I am confident that you will meet their best hope. —General John Pershing

F

our extraordinary men fought it out in the 1912 presidential election: Republican William Howard Taft, Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist Eugene Debs. Wilson won with 6,296,284 votes (41.5 percent of the total) and 435 electoral votes, followed by Roosevelt with 4,122,721 (27.4 percent) and 88, Taft with 3,436,242 (23.2 percent) and 8, and Debs with 901,551 (6 percent). The Republicans would have won had Roosevelt backed Taft rather than leaving the Republican Party to form the Progressive (or, as he preferred calling it, Bull Moose) Party. President-­elect Wilson would enjoy a Democratic Congress with 291 to 134 Republicans and 10 Progressives in the House of Representative and 47 to 45 Republicans in the Senate.1 237

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Wilson had been a politician only three years before becoming president.2 He grew up the son of a conservative Presbyterian minister in Virginian and Georgian small towns, but his intellect won him admission to and graduation from Princeton University and then Johns Hopkins with a doctorate in political science. He taught at Princeton and served as its president from 1902 to 1910. Looking for a clean, articulate, well-­known candidate for governor, New Jersey’s Democratic Party asked Wilson to run. He agreed and won. As governor from 1911 to 1913, he pushed through reforms that ameliorated corruption, improved work conditions, and boosted schools. Wilson had deep, self-­defeating character flaws. Many Americans and foreigners alike who worked with him deplored his self-­righteousness, rigidity, blind idealism, hypocrisies, and narrow-­mindedness. His policy victories depended on congressional majorities that already backed his positions. He wanted to be a peacemaker and so appointed pacifists William Jennings Bryan and Robert Lansing as secretary of state, Josephus Daniels as navy secretary, and Newton Baker as war secretary. He was aloof from most of his cabinet and truly trusted only his political advisor, Edward House (nicknamed “Colonel” although he never served in the military). Emotion and even capriciousness often guided his policy choices. For instance, referring to the British fleet’s overwhelming power, Wilson quipped to House, “Let’s build a navy bigger than hers and do what we please.”3 His inability to compromise lost him some vital struggles, with ratification of the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations being the most heartbreaking for him. Despite his aversion to violence, Wilson soon involved America in an undeclared war in Mexico.4 A civil war there erupted in 1911 shortly after Francisco Madero overthrew President Porfirio Diaz, Mexico’s dictator from 1876. Washington had backed Diaz because he opened the economy to American traders and investors. By 1910, Americans owned $1.5 billion, or 40 percent, of Mexico’s economy, including nearly all its railroads and oil fields; over forty thousand Americans worked and lived in Mexico. After Madero had America’s investments nationalized, Ambassador Henry Wilson got General Victoriano Huerta to overthrow him. After Huerta had Madero executed, General Venustiano Carranza rebelled against him. The coup, murder, and worsening anarchy appalled Wilson. In July 1913, he replaced Wilson with John Lind as ambassador with the mission of reconciling the warring factions. After that failed, he lifted an arms embargo on Mexico in February 1914. He sent a flotilla of warships commanded by Admiral Henry Mayo to anchor at Tampico near a major oil field. On April 9, Huerta’s officials arrested and soon released some



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American sailors who had come ashore. Mayo demanded that Huerta have a twenty-­one-­gun salute fired to compensate for insulting America’s flag and “honor.” Huerta refused. On April 20, Wilson asked Congress for authorization to use military force to assert “the fullest recognition of the rights and dignity of the United States.”5 Learning of a German arms shipment heading to Huerta’s regime, Wilson had Admiral Frank Fletcher, who commanded the squadron observing Veracruz, capture the port. On April 21, Fletcher landed eight hundred marines and sailors to secure the city whose defenders General Gustavo Maas commanded. Fighting broke out that left 22 Americans dead and 126 Mexicans dead and 105 wounded before their commanders agreed to a cease-­fire, Mexican withdrawal, and American takeover. Three thousand reinforcements led by General Frederick Funston arrived to occupy the city. To help win hearts and minds while protecting his own troops’ health, Funston supervised improvements for the sewage, water, and garbage removal systems and cracked down on corruption and street crime modeled on similar occupation policies in Manila and Havana. Huerta resigned, and Carranza replaced him at Mexico City’s presidential palace in July 1914. Two ambitious generals broke with Carranza and took over regions: Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south. Wilson refused to recognize Carranza’s regime and had arms shipped to Villa. Tens of thousands of refugees fled to the United States. After Carranza took over the oil fields and promised to protect them, Wilson recognized his government and ended arms shipments to his opponents on October 19, 1915. That infuriated Villa, who led an attack against Camp Furlong manned by 240 troops of the 13th Cavalry at Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916. The Americans drove off Villa and his men, suffering eight dead and fifteen wounded soldiers and ten dead civilians while killing sixty-­seven invaders and wounding over a hundred. Wilson received Congress’s authorization to send a 4,800-man “Punitive Expedition,” later reinforced to 12,000 troops, led by General John “Black Jack” Pershing into northern Mexico to hunt down and destroy Villa and his men. Pershing and his troops chased two opposed rebel armies, the Carrancistas or Constitutionalists and the Villistas or Conventionalists, from March 14, 1916, to February 5, 1917. During that time, the Americans suffered 65 killed, 67 wounded, 3 missing, and 24 captured while killing 169, wounding 115, and capturing 19 Conventionalists and killing 81 and wounding 51 Constitutionalists. Lieutenant George Patton, one of Pershing’s staff officers, scored the highest-­ranking kill. On May 16, 1916, he led ten men packed in two trucks to the ranch of General Julio Cardenas, Villa’s right-­hand man, hoping he might be on leave there. He was with two guards. In the shootout, Patton may have killed all three

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and hauled the bodies back to camp to display them to Pershing. The expedition never caught up with Villa, however. In January 1917, Wilson ordered Pershing to withdraw to the United States as American participation in the war that had raged in Europe since August 1914 became increasingly likely.6 Tensions across Europe over previous generations caused two alliances to form.7 The Central powers initially included Germany, Austria-­Hungary, and Italy, and the Allies France and Russia, with Britain an associate. Russia also allied with Serbia. Those great powers peacefully settled several crises among them that might have provoked war over Morocco in 1906 and 1911 and the Balkans in 1912 and 1913. They failed to do so during a crisis in the summer of 1914. The terrorist act that precipitated history’s second-­deadliest war happened on June 28, 1914, when Serbian Black Hand agent Gavrilo Princip shot to death Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie as their limousine slowed in a narrow turn in Sarajevo, Bosnia-­Herzegovina’s capital. Bosnia-­Herzegovina was a former Ottoman Empire province with roughly equal numbers of Catholic Croats, Orthodox Christian Serbs, and Muslims. In 1878, neighboring Serbia won independence from the Ottoman Empire and sought to expand its territory to embrace Serbian regions of Bosnia-­Herzegovina. Instead, in 1908, Austria annexed Bosnia-­ Herzegovina over Serbia’s protests. The Serbs organized the terrorist group Black Hand to undermine Austrian rule. Austrian police arrested Princip and other Black Hand members. Interrogations revealed Serbia’s complicity. On July 23, Vienna sent Belgrade an ultimatum of ten demands. The Serbs agreed to nine of the ten. The Austrians used that as an excuse to declare war on July 28.8 That triggered Russia to mobilize its army to support its ally Serbia against Austria, Germany for its ally Austria against Russia, and France for its ally Russia against the Central powers. After Germany formally declared war on August 4 and violated Belgium’s neutrality, Britain joined France and Russia. Italy announced that it would remain neutral since its treaty with Germany and Austria was defensive, not offensive. Wilson declared American neutrality on August 4. Germany’s war plan involved holding the line against Russia while launching a massive offensive through Belgium that outflanked France’s defenses along their mutual frontier and captured Paris. That plan nearly succeeded, but a small British army delayed the German advance at Mons, and a massive French counterattack drove back the Germans along the Marne River valley. Each side then began digging elaborate networks of trenches that eventually stretched 470 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border. A similar stalemate soon snarled the eastern front, where



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Chart 7.1.  National Income, Population, and Per Capita Income of the Powers in 19149

United States Britain France Japan Germany Italy Russia Austria-­Hungary

National income

Population

Per capita income

$37 billion $11 billion $6 billion $2 billion $12 billion $4 billion $7 billion $3 billion

98,000,000 45,000,000 39,000,000 55,000,000 65,000,000 37,000,000 171,000,000 52,000,000

$377 $244 $153 $36 $184 $108 $41 $57

Germans and Austrians fought Russians, as well as the Austria-­Serbian front. Two technologies, the machine gun and barbed wire, caused that stalemate. Within a sandbagged bunker covered with rolls of barbed wire, two machine gunners, one firing and the other feeding clips of hundreds of rounds, could cut down hundreds of soldiers struggling across the shell-­ pocked “no-­man’s-­land” before them. Generals on each side ignored that reality and ordered mass attacks that led eventually to millions of dead and maimed soldiers. Despite that worsening carnage, other governments concluded that their interests compelled them to fight. Joining the Central powers were the Ottoman Empire in November 1914 and Bulgaria in September 1915, and joining the Allies were Japan in September 1914, Greece in March 1915, Italy in May 1915, and Romania in August 1916. Although Wilson was determined to uphold American neutrality, powerful forces beyond his control pushed the United States toward the Allies. The most vital was economic. The United States was the world’s growth engine in 1914, with an economy larger than the combined economies of the four next largest, Germany, Britain, Russia, and France. Throughout the war, America’s economy increasingly depended on an Allied victory. American exports to Britain and France soared from $754 million in 1914 to $2.75 billion in 1916, while those to Germany plummeted from $374 million to $2 million. Meanwhile, all the belligerents sold their assets in America, often at fire-­ sale prices, and brought their desperately needed money home. America’s payments balance with Europe seesawed from a $3 billion deficit to a $10 billion surplus. From 1914 to 1917, American financiers loaned Britain and France $2.3 billion and Germany a mere $27 million. Yet Wilson could not justify asking Congress for a war declaration for economic reasons alone. Preserving freedom of the seas eventually became another vital reason. Britain’s surface fleet far outgunned Germany’s, although in the one battle at Jutland from May 30 to June 1, 1916,

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Germany’s fleet inflicted more damage. But Britain hemmed in Germany’s war and merchant ships by blockading and mining German ports. Submarines were Germany’s only naval advantage. The fleet expanded from 21 submarines in 1914 to peak at 127 in October 1917. On February 4, 1915, Berlin announced a zone around the British Isles in which its submarines would sink Allied vessels and warned neutral ships not to steam there and neutral nationals not to board Allied or neutral ships; although Germany would respect neutral rights, it could not guarantee that its submarines could distinguish neutral from enemy shipping. German submarines sank ninety ships in that zone from February 1915 to May 1915. Of those, only one was American owned, the Gulflight with two citizens killed on May 1, 1915. Then, on May 7, a German submarine torpedoed the British cruise liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. War hawk politicians and newspaper editors demanded that Wilson ask Congress to declare war. On May 10, Wilson dismayed his supporters and enflamed his critics when he publicly mouthed these puzzling words: “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”10 The next day Wilson did send Berlin a diplomatic note asserting the right of Americans to travel safely and freely overseas and calling for compensation for the victims’ families and an end to unrestricted submarine warfare. In his reply, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-­Hollweg justified the sinking because the Lusitania was carrying munitions. Wilson met German ambassador Johann Bernstorff to promise that if Germany gave compensation and ended unrestricted submarine warfare, he would pressure Britain to end its blockade and then convene an international conference of neutral states to present the belligerents a peace proposal grounded on no territorial or monetary gains for anyone, freedom of the seas, and arbitration of all colonial conflicts. Bernstorff was noncommittal. Wilson’s cabinet split, with some supporting and others opposing that offer. Secretary of State Bryan urged Wilson to send London a note criticizing its blockade of Germany. Most members rejected pressuring Britain and instead favored a tougher note to Berlin. Wilson did send a more strongly worded message to Germany on compensation and suspension. Berlin ignored that demand. On August 19, 1915, a submarine sank the British cruise liner Arabic, with two Americans among the dead. Bernstorff publicly declared that Germany would no longer target cruise liners. Wilson asked Congress for $500 million to expand the navy; Congress eventually approved that request. On February 4, 1916, a year after Berlin launched unrestricted submarine warfare, it issued a statement offering sympathy for the Lusitania’s victims and compensation, but without an apology or specific indemnity amount. On July 30, German saboteurs



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blew up an arms depot with two million pounds of explosives at Black Tom Island in New York Bay; Berlin was the prime suspect, although investigators then found no proof. Wilson sent advisor Edward House to Britain to present Foreign Secretary Edward Grey with a peace plan. On February 22, 1916, they issued the House-­Grey Memorandum whereby Washington offered to mediate peace at a conference, and if London and Paris agreed to join and Berlin declined, the United States would consider going to war against Germany. But the British and French governments refused to endorse that conference, fearing the enemy would view that as a sign of weakness. A German torpedo damaged the French cruise liner Sussex on March 24, killing eighty people and injuring many others, including four Americans. On April 18, Wilson sent Berlin an ultimatum warning that he would end diplomatic relations if Germany did not stop sinking cruise and merchant ships. In May, Wilson asked Congress to expand the army and National Guard to 200,000 and 440,000 men, respectively; Congress agreed. On May 6, Berlin announced its suspension of unrestricted submarine warfare in what was called the “Sussex Pledge.” Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 with the slogan, “He kept us out of the war!” Voters with Irish, German, and Polish heritage, who mostly lived in big cities and supported the Democratic Party, opposed policies that favored (let alone allied with) Britain, France, and Russia. Most Irish and Poles detested Britain and Russia, respectively, while Germans naturally rooted for their old country. Wilson won a solid victory with 9,126,828 popular votes (49.2 percent) and 277 electoral votes to Republican Charles Hughes with 8,548,728 (46.1 percent) and 254 electoral votes. Congress split. Democrats solidly controlled the Senate with 54 to 42 Republican seats. In the House of Representatives, Republicans had 215 to 214 Democratic seats, although six minor-­party seats often voted with the Democrats.11 Germany committed acts in early 1917 that provoked the United States to go to war against it. On January 31, Berlin announced its resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson reacted by declaring Germany “a madman that should be curbed.”12 He broke diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3. German submarines sank American merchant vessels on February 6 and 16. On February 26, Whitehall presented the White House with an intercepted and decoded message from Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to Germany’s ambassador in Mexico dated January 16. Zimmermann instructed the ambassador to talk Mexico into declaring war against the United States, in return for which Germany would help Mexico regain all the land that it lost with the 1848 Guadalupe-­Hidalgo Treaty. Wilson released that message to the public,

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which mostly shared his outrage. On March 1, Wilson asked Congress to authorize merchant ships to arm themselves. A Senate filibuster killed that resolution. Wilson angrily issued an executive order for armed merchant ships. German submarines sank three American merchant ships from March 16 to 18. During a cabinet meeting on March 20, every member favored declaring war. Wilson stood before a joint session of Congress and asked for a war declaration on April 2.13 His justifications appealed to realists and idealists alike. For realists, he cited a litany of German provocations and predations against American national security interests. For idealists, he declared, “The world must be made safe for democracy . . . and we shall fight . . . for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world at last free.”14 He left unexplained just what an assumed lack of democracy had to do with the war or how he intended to ameliorate that. That speech vividly displayed Wilson’s Janus-­sided nature. The Senate voted 82 to 6 in favor on April 4, and the House 373 to 50 in favor on April 6. It was one thing to declare war and quite another to successfully fight it. Victory was uncertain. Germany and Austria might still defeat the Allies before America mobilized and sent enough troops and supplies to the western front to prevent that outcome, an effort that would consume enormous time and resources.15 Wilson expanded the general staff first under General Hugh Scott, and then General Tasker Bliss, from 55 to 1,072 personnel by the war’s end. War Secretary Baker tried to get the bureaus of adjutant general, ordnance, engineers, and quartermaster to coordinate their efforts. America’s regular army numbered only 127,588 troops, National Guard units then under federal control 66,594 troops, and state National Guard units 101,174 troops. Wilson asked Congress to approve a Selective Service Act that passed on May 19, with the first drawing on July 20. That draft was a stunning success. In all, 24,234,021 men registered, of which 3,764,000 received draft notices and the army selected 2,820,000. During the war, 4,744,000 men served in the army, navy, or marines. The navy and marines only took volunteers. The Marine Corps expanded from 13,725 to 73,000, of whom 24,555 fought in France.16 Troops received rudimentary training at a nationwide network of camps in the United States and then advanced training in France. A critical need was officers and noncommissioned officers. Dr. Robert Yerkes, the president of the American Psychological Association, developed an intelligence quotient (IQ) test to find the brightest men for those positions,



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although military leadership depends much more on character, courage, and charisma. Wilson tapped General John Pershing to command what was called the American Expeditionary Force. Pershing’s Mexican expedition was his latest command, in which he displayed competence, if not brilliance.17 He graduated from West Point in 1886, battled Sioux Ghost Dancers, taught tactics at West Point, commanded the 10th Colored Cavalry (which got him the nickname “Black Jack”), led his men up San Juan Hill, fought in the Philippines, was a military attaché to Japan and an observer of the Russo-­Japanese War, and was promoted to brigadier general in 1906. Pershing and his staff arrived in Paris on June 13. It would take nearly a year for him to build the army along a stretch of front and then begin launching offensives. During that time, among his worst challenges was keeping his expanding army together and staving off pressure from the British and French governments and their commanders to break it up and feed divisions into their armies. At one point, an exasperated Pershing told Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied supreme commander, “You may insist all you please, but I decline absolutely to agree to your plan. While our army will fight wherever you decide, it will not fight except as an independent American army.”18 Nonetheless, Pershing commanded only thirty of the forty-­two divisions in France, with eight and two others, respectively, detached to the French and British. Pershing moved his headquarters from Paris to Chaumont in Lorraine behind the assigned front. American troops and supplies funneled into France via three west coast ports of Saint Nazare, La Pallice, and Paulliac and then on to the army’s staging area around Chaumont. Eventually 2,081,000 Americans served in France and 1,380,000 experienced combat; among them in segregated regiments were two hundred thousand blacks, of whom fifty thousand fought. As regiments arrived, they received training from British and French instructors before being dispatched to the front. Soldiers initially carried the bolt-­action Springfield M-1903 30.06 rifle with a five-­shot clip, followed by the 1917 American Enfield 30.06 semiautomatic rifle with a five-­shot clip. The French supplied most artillery, munitions, trucks, tanks, and aircraft, and the British 1.5 million steel helmets. As more divisions arrived, Pershing organized them first into corps and then the 1st Army commanded by General Hunter Liggett. All along, the navy performed the critical roles of escorting convoys and hunting submarines. Eventually 373 American warships, including 85 destroyers, served on the Atlantic front. They conducted 256 attacks on German submarines, although how many they sank is unknown. Astonishingly, German submarines failed to sink any American troopships, although they picked off more merchant vessels.19

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Mobilizing the economy for war was as critical as mobilizing men. Fortunately, the Wilson administration had taken some critical steps over the preceding year. In August 1916, Congress established the Council of National Defense, with cabinet secretaries, professors, industrialists, financiers, and labor leaders to plan mobilization. Their Industrial Preparedness Committee surveyed two hundred thousand factories to determine what and how much war material they could make. The Army Appropriations Act of 1916 empowered the president to assume control of the nation’s transportation systems if necessary during wartime. In 1917, Wilson nationalized the railroads. Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to mobilize public opinion behind the war and named George Creel, an influential progressive pundit, to head it. Creel set up the Official Bulletin, a daily newspaper with 115,000 copies filled with inspiring stories about American soldiers and civilians fulfilling their war roles. He had writers pen patriotic essays that were mass copied and distributed, the most famous being “The Meaning of America.” Eventually they produced thirty pamphlets with seventy-­five million copies. He enlisted seventy-­ five thousand volunteer “four-­minute men” to explain in workplaces, theaters, and churches why America was fighting in Europe. He got Hollywood directors to produce propaganda movies, the most popular being D. W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World. He got artist Charles Gibson, famous for his “Gibson Girl” illustrations, to create a team that eventually produced 700 posters, 310 newspaper advertisements, 287 cartoons, and 122 streetcar advertisements. The most famous was James Flagg’s poster of a stern Uncle Sam saying, “I Want You!” Treasury Secretary William McAdoo established the Liberty Loan Campaign and got Hollywood stars like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin to urge adoring crowds to buy war bonds. Meanwhile, singer-­songwriters composed and performed popular pieces, like John Philip Sousa with “Liberty Bond March,” George M. Cohan with “Over There,” and Irving Berlin with “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.”20 Support for the war was hardly universal. Draft dodging was rampant, with 337,649 men refusing to report for duty. Radical socialist and anarchist groups protested and occasionally rioted against the war. Wilson signed several laws that empowered Washington to investigate and prosecute spies and traitors, including the Espionage Act on June 17; the Trading with the Enemy Act on October 8, 1917; and the Sedition Act on May 16, 1918. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs was the most prominent American convicted for sedition and received a ten-­year prison term. The Justice Department targeted the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) with mass arrests and prosecutions, eventually winning convictions and prison for 113 of them. The postmaster general oversaw



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the suspension of second-­class mailing privileges for dozens of radical publications. The American Protective League was a private group that eventually included 250,000 members who worked with law enforcement to identify spies, saboteurs, anarchists, and communists. Wilson sought to bolster the morale of the American people and Allied nations with his vision of a just peace. Typically, he combined practical goals and lofty ideals in his “Fourteen Points” speech before Congress on January 8, 1918. Eight points involved specific territorial adjustments, and six asserted principles, including freedom of the seas, self-­determination for national minorities, free trade, open diplomacy and no secret treaties, adjustment of colonial claims, and “a general association of nations” dedicated to “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small countries alike.” As America entered the war, Russia was exhausted militarily, economically, and socially. From the war’s opening barrages, Tsar Nicolas II and his council displayed utter incompetence at logistics and strategy. The German, Austrian, and Turkish armies inflicted a series of devastating defeats on the Russians that drove them farther eastward. On March 17, 1917, a coup forced Nicolas to abdicate. The new government, led by Social Democrat Alexander Kerensky, failed to reverse Russia’s losses. On November 7, 1917, the communist Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power in a coup, suspended the national assembly, established a dictatorship, and promised to win peace for the war-­ravaged people. The communist regime negotiated an armistice with the Germans on December 2 and under the Treaty of Brest-­Litovsk, signed on March 3, 1918, ceded 1,267,000 acres of western Russia, sixty-­two million people, and mostly productive farmland to Germany and Austria. That treaty freed a couple million German and Austrian troops to transfer to the western and Italian fronts. Russia’s peace was fleeting, as “White” (or noncommunist) generals battled the “Red Army.” The communists enjoyed interior lines among the expanding cluster of cities they controlled. The British and French sent small forces and supplies to White armies they could reach. The Japanese took advantage of the chaos to land an army at Vladivostok on the Pacific that spread along the coast and westward on the Trans-­Siberian Railroad to exploit eastern Siberia’s rich natural resources. Stranded on that railroad around Irkutsk was a Czechoslovakian army of former Austrian-­Hungarian army prisoners who won freedom for pledging to join the Allies. Wilson sent troops to Archangel, Murmansk, and Vladivostok to guard depots of American supplies for the Russian army. He secretly funneled $50 million to White armies battling the Bolsheviks. Eventually fifteen

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thousand American troops served in Russia before Wilson ordered their withdrawal on January 16, 1920. That undeclared war against the Reds cost 222 American lives.21 Those Allied attempts to aid the White armies were in vain. The Red armies routed the Whites and consolidated the communist dictatorship over Russia, which they renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on December 30, 1922. That regime posed a threat to countries far beyond its borders. Nearly two years earlier, on March 2, 1919, Lenin established the Communist International (Comintern) whereby Moscow organized, supplied, and directed Communist Party revolutions around the world. But all of that lay beyond the Allied victory and World War I’s end far in the west. World War I was unlike any war that preceded it, and those who fought it struggled to adjust to that reality. Machine guns, barbed wire, and rapid-­firing cannons rendered massed attacks suicidal. That did not prevent commanders from repeatedly ordering them. The result was mass slaughter and “victories” measured by a hundred or so yards’ advance. By one count, artillery inflicted 58.51 percent of casualties, machine guns and rifles 38.98 percent, and bayonets only 1 percent.22 Tactically, only the Germans adapted effective tactics using fourteen-­man “storm trooper” squads that infiltrated weak parts of the enemy line and enfiladed troops into their trenches. Serving in the trenches was chronic hell for the soldiers, with the stench of rotting corpses and excrement, scurrying rats, buzzing flies, biting fleas, itching lice, and long stretches of tedium broken by the terror of bombardments or “going over the top” to charge across a lunar-­ like landscape of cratered earth, barbed wire, and gruesome corpses. A new weapon appeared in 1917 that had the potential to end the stalemate and transform warfare from static defense to swift maneuver. The tank was Winston Churchill’s brainchild when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. Initially tanks could only support infantry by wiping out machine-­gun nests, but their ponderous, slow speed and mechanical fragility led to mass breakdowns rather than mass breakthroughs. With reinforcements from the eastern front, German general Erich Ludendorff massed 3,575,000 in 192 divisions on the western front by March 1918. He launched a series of eventually five offensives against different sectors from March 21 to July 17. Although each gained ground, none punched through. The last two offensives hit stretches of front where Americans were deployed. Before the first, Pershing issued this statement to his troops: “You are now to go against a victorious enemy under new and harder conditions. All our Allies will be watching to see how you conduct yourselves. I am confident that you will meet their best hope.”23



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The 1st “Big Red One” Division scored America’s first victory at Cantigny on May 28 when troops captured that devastated town, killing and wounding around 1,400 Germans and capturing 250 while suffering 1,603 casualties. The scale of battle steadily climbed. The next victory was by the 2nd and 3rd Divisions at Belleau Wood from June 1 to June 26. The 4th Marine Brigade attached to the 2nd Division fought the fiercest and suffered the most. The Americans eventually captured the woods and inflicted ten thousand casualties, including 1,600 captured Germans, while losing 1,816 dead and 7,866 wounded. Alongside France’s 10th Army, the 1st Army repelled a German attack and then counterattacked and advanced fifteen miles from Chateau Thierry to Fismes from July 15 to 26, suffering 11,269 casualties but inflicting around 20,000. The Americans eliminated the Saint Mihiel salient from September 12 to September 15, inflicting 15,550 casualties and suffering 7,000. That was Pershing’s best-­planned battle, with the attack preceded by the war’s largest artillery barrage and accompanied by the war’s largest air offensive of bombers and fighters. America’s biggest and longest battle was Meuse-­Argonne from September 26 to November 11. The Americans fought their way north alongside France’s 3rd and 4th Armies. The Americans outperformed the French by advancing through twenty-­ five miles and penetrating the Hindenburg Line. On October 11, Pershing detached two hundred thousand troops from Liggett’s 1st Army to create the 2nd Army led by General Robert Bullard. By commanding an army group, Pershing now equaled the French and British commanders, Henri Petain and Douglas Haig. By November 6, the Americans were poised to capture Sedan. To Pershing’s fury, French General Ferdinand Foch insisted that only French troops could take Sedan to avenge a French army’s surrender there during the Franco-­Prussian War. The Allies inflicted 126,000 casualties on the Germans while the Americans suffered 26,277 dead and 95,786 wounded, and the French 70,000 casualties. Meanwhile, some Americans deployed in two revolutionary new weapons, tanks and airplanes. Tanks played little role in the fighting as they tended to swiftly bog down or break down. Lieutenant Colonel George Patton was shot through the thigh while leading an attack by his 1st Brigade of 142 Renault tanks on September 26; he would master tank-­led warfare in the next war. In contrast, America’s air force played a vital role in reconnaissance and dogfights. The Army Air Service steadily expanded under General Billy Mitchell. By the war’s end, the Air Service numbered 58,090 men in 71 squadrons with 740 planes split among 78 aerodromes. They mostly flew first French biplane Nieuports and then Spads. American pilots conducted 150 bombing missions and shot down 756 planes and 76 balloons while losing 289 planes and 48 balloons. The

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Naval Air Service flew 5,691 combat missions, attacked forty-­two submarines, and possibly sank two.24 Bethmann-­Hollweg sent a desperate plea via the neutral Swiss government to Wilson for an armistice based on his Fourteen Points on October 4. Wilson replied on October 23 that the United States would only negotiate with a democratic Germany and on November 5 advised the Germans to ask Foch for an armistice. One by one Germany’s allies accepted armistices: Bulgaria on September 29, Turkey on October 30, and Austria-­Hungary on November 3. A communist-­led mutiny erupted at Keil’s naval base on October 29 and spread to other ports. Communist-­led riots erupted in cities. Bethmann-­Hollweg resigned, and Kaiser Wilhelm appointed Maximilian von Baden chancellor. On November 9, Wilhelm abdicated and fled to neutral Holland. Von Baden handed power to Social Democratic Party leader Friedrich Ebert, who dispatched a delegation through the lines for an armistice. Under the armistice, a cease-­fire would occur at eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11, followed by Germans withdrawing their forces thirty miles east of the Rhine River and letting Allied forces occupy the Rhine valley. Berlin also had to surrender its surface and submarine fleet, 5,000 locomotives, and 150,000 train cars. Pershing vainly protested against the armistice, arguing, “If they had given us another ten days we would have rounded up the entire German army . . . humiliated it. . . . The German troops today are marching back into Germany announcing they have never been defeated. . . . What I dread is that Germany doesn’t know it has been licked.”25 Pershing was prescient. German nationalism, led by Adolf Hitler, would revive based on the myth that Germany could have won the war but had been stabbed in the back by liberals, socialists, and Jews. American troops racked up impressive feats during 150 days of combat, including capturing 63,000 prisoners, 485,000 square miles of enemy-­ held territory, 1,300 artillery pieces, and 10,000 mortars and machine guns.26 Eventually, 95 men won Medals of Honor and 6,153 received Distinguished Service Crosses. The war’s two greatest American heroes were Sergeant Alvin York (who during Meuse-­Argonne killed 25 and captured 132 Germans) and Eddie Rickenbacker (who shot down 26 enemy planes). The war cost the United States $30 billion, paid for with two-­thirds loans and one-­third taxes; 122,500 lives, 48,909 from combat and the rest disease; and 227,135 wounded. Horrific as America’s losses were, they were a sliver of the total. At least 14,663,400 people died in the war, including around 7,450,200 troops and 6,600,000 civilians. Russia suffered 3,700,000 dead, Germany 2,600,000, France 1,400,000, Austria-­ Hungary 960,000, Britain 939,000, and Italy 780,000. The war crippled



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another fifteen million men, including one hundred thousand Americans. Although the Central powers lost, they inflicted far more casualties than they suffered, 10.3 million to 7.1 million, and were more cost effective at killing, $11,345 to $36,485 for each life. The Germans excelled at small-­unit tactics that infiltrated and decimated the enemy.27 Wilson was determined to win a just peace, rejecting advice that he stay in the White House and let professional diplomats handle that.28 He and an entourage sailed from New York on December 4, docked at Brest on December 13, and motorcaded into Paris amid jubilant crowds lining the streets on December 15. Adoring crowds also greeted him during trips he took to Rome and London before the conference began, swelling his already bloated ego into a messiah complex. Wilson spent nearly six months in Europe. He left from February 24 to March 14 to deal with political issues piling up in Washington. During the 1918 midterm election, Republicans recaptured the Senate, with seats rising from 43 to 49 (Democrats dropped from 53 to 47), and expanded their lead in the House of Representatives, with their seats rising from 216 to 240 while Democrats dropped from 214 to 190. Republicans now dominated all committees, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that would handle any treaty that Wilson brought back from France. Although delegations from thirty-­three countries gathered in Paris, only the “Big Four” great powers of American President Wilson and Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy determined the peace. As the only head of state, Wilson presided over all meetings. Wilson wanted a generous peace without spoils to the victors. The British, French, Italians, and other Allies wanted a vindictive peace that imposed huge indemnities and territorial loses on Germany and its allies. Eventually Wilson lost every battle with his colleagues except one, for a League of Nations. For that concession, Clemenceau expressed the very mixed feelings of most European leaders: “I liked the League, but I do not believe in it.”29 Ironically, Wilson’s victory led the Senate to reject the treaty back in Washington. Wilson designed the treaty to put the League of Nations first and the specific war settlements after. The League would have a council of ten, with the Big Four permanent members and the other six annually elected from the assembly, where each country had one vote. Of the League tenets, the most controversial were Articles 10 through 16 that empowered the League to assert economic and military power against aggressors and submit disputes to an arbitration commission. The most powerful was Article 16 whereby a war by one country against a League member would be considered a war against all members and automatically trigger financial and trade sanctions by all members. Even then, the council

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could only recommend that the members vote to wage war against the aggressor. Most of the treaty’s tenets penalized Germany, which was stripped of 13 percent of its land, 10 percent of its people, and all of its colonies. Militarily, it had to abolish its air force; surrender its fleet and never again have submarines, battleships, or cruisers; and cap the army at one hundred thousand soldiers. Legally, it had to admit guilt for starting the war and pay reparations, a bill that eventually totaled $33 billion. Economically, it had to demilitarize the Saar and Rhine industrial regions and accept Allied occupation and confiscation of its production if it failed to pay reparations. It was forbidden to annex Austria. Naturally, Germans deeply resented that treaty they were forced to sign. They vainly protested being scapegoated for a war that no government then wanted but each was responsible for entering. German feelings of rage and vengeance would make a future war likely. Of Wilson’s principles, his “self-­determination for all nations” provoked the most controversy because it threatened every imperial state’s colonial holdings. Lansing presciently observed, “It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end, it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late.”30 Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando pressured Wilson to apply self-­determination only for the defeated enemy nations. The Versailles and other treaties stripped the empires from Germany, Austria, and Turkey. New states rose from those ruins, including in Europe, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. The “mandate system” split Germany’s overseas colonies among Britain, France, South Africa, and Japan, and Turkey’s Middle East provinces between Britain and France. The Big Four pointedly chose June 28, the fifth anniversary of the assassination that preceded the war, as the date for the treaty’s signature. Clemenceau ensured that the signing location was also richly symbolic. The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles Palace was where Prussia and other German states formed a united Germany on January 18, 1870. Wilson submitted the treaty to the Senate on July 10. Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that would examine the treaty before sending it to the floor for a vote. Lodge and Wilson despised each other. Lodge eventually devised fourteen reservations to the treaty, a number intentionally mocking Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The Senate split into four groups over the treaty. Forty Democratic senators known as “non-­reservationists” backed Wilson and the treaty as it was. Republican senator Frank Kellogg of Minnesota led thirteen “mild reservationists” who wanted relatively minor



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revisions. Lodge led twenty “strong reservationists” who wanted extensive revisions. Finally, the “irreconcilables” numbered sixteen, including isolationists like William Borah of Idaho, Hiram Johnson of California, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and George Norris of Nebraska. Wilson’s health deteriorated. On July 19, he suffered a stroke that enflamed his natural rigidity; thereafter he rejected all reservations, no matter how reasonable or mild. That, of course, spiked any chance of getting the two-­thirds vote needed for ratification. Wilson sought to pressure opponents by appealing behind their backs to their constituents. On September 3, he embarked on a ten-­thousand-­mile speaking tour around the country to convince Americans to pressure their senators to ratify the treaty. By the time he reached Pueblo, Colorado, on September 26, he had made forty speeches at various cities but suffered severe headaches and sore throats. That night a massive stroke paralyzed his right side and slurred his speech. He reluctantly agreed to return to Washington. For six weeks, he was bedridden, attended only by his wife, Edith, and his personal doctor, Cary Grayson. Wilson rejected Grayson’s advice that he resign. The Senate voted on two versions of the treaty on November 19, 1919. In the first vote, thirty-­nine senators favored and fifty-­five opposed the treaty with reservations. In the second vote, thirty-­eight favored and fifty-­three opposed the treaty without reservations. Both fell short of the two-­thirds of votes needed for ratification. A final vote came on March 19, 1920, with forty-­nine supporters and thirty-­five opponents. Meanwhile, although most American troops had shipped back to the United States and were dismissed from service, 240,000 remained as the 3rd Army, led by General Joseph Dickman, to occupy a stretch of the Rhine centered on Koblenz and up the Moselle River to Trier. The League of Nations opened at Geneva on January 10, 1920. The United States and Germany signed a peace treaty on August 25, 1921. The last American occupation troops withdrew in 1923. The initial rage against Germany by most Americans that propelled the nation into the war steadily transformed into worsening despair as the number of dead and maimed soared, capped by acrimony over the Treaty of Versailles. Ever more Americans questioned whether the war was worth the horrific human costs. That provoked a political reaction. Three Republican presidents served from 1921 to 1933: Warren Harding from 1921 to 1923; then, after he died, his vice president Calvin Coolidge from 1923 to 1929; and Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933.31 All three were committed to expanding American trade and investments around the world while minimizing America’s involvement in foreign conflicts. Despite their lack of interest in foreign affairs, Harding and Coolidge authorized several proposals by their secretaries of state, Charles Evans

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Hughes and Frank Kellogg, to initiate naval arms reduction talks and an antiwar treaty, respectively. Coolidge and Hoover approved measures in 1924 and 1929 respectively that prevented the global financial system from collapsing when Germany threatened to default on its reparations payments. All three kept military spending low and the army capped at 118,750 men. America’s postwar decade was called the “Roaring Twenties” for its expanding economy and increasingly prosperous middle class. American economic power reigned supreme, with 44 percent of the world’s total, 70 percent of the world’s oil sales, and 40 percent of coal sales in 1929. American exports rose from $2.5 billion to $5.4 billion and foreign investments from $3.5 billion to $17.2 billion between 1914 and 1929.32 Harding put one foreign country’s humanitarian needs before American economic interests. After the communists took power, the regime repudiated Russia’s foreign debt, including $192 million it owed Washington and $107 million it owed private American banks. Washington refused to recognize the regime unless it paid what it owed. That did not prevent Americans from giving massive aid to Russia when it suffered famine in 1921. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover established the American Relief Administration that dispensed $50 million to the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1924.33 Harding accepted Secretary of State Hughes’s idea for America to host a naval disarmament conference. That conference took place at Washington from November 12, 1921, to February 6, 1922.34 The delegates negotiated and signed three treaties. Under the Four-­Power Pact, the United States, Britain, France, and Japan agreed to respect the territorial integrity of all sovereign states and all colonies in the Far East and Pacific basin, while Japan and Britain dissolved their alliance. Under the Five-­Power Pact, the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy agreed for ten years to maintain a ratio of tonnage for their battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers, respectively, of 5–5–3–1.75–1.75, which required each country to demolish a number of its warships. Hughes led by example. He announced that the United States intended to scrap thirty vessels and then turned to the other great powers and asked how many they intended to scrap. The British and Japanese envoys cited twenty-­three and twenty-­ five, respectively. That news inspired a journalist to quip, “Hughes sank in thirty-­five minutes more ships than all the admirals of the world have sunk in a cycle of centuries.”35 Under the Nine-­Power Pact, the United States, Britain, Japan, France, Italy, China, Belgium, Portugal, and the Netherlands agreed to uphold the Open Door principle and China’s territorial integrity. In side deals, Tokyo promised to withdraw its troops from the Soviet Union’s Siberia and Sakhalin Island’s northern half and from China’s Shandong Peninsula.



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Hughes organized a Pan-­American Conference held at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in September 1922. On September 8, he reassured the delegates, “We covet no territory; we seek no conquests; the liberty we cherish for ourselves we desire for others and we assert no rights for ourselves that we do not accord to others.”36 World War I, the Red Scare, and twenty million foreigners who immigrated to the United States from the 1880s provoked a political backlash. Ever more Americans feared that they were losing their national identity to alien peoples and ideologies like communism. Books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Theodore Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920) and The Revolt against Civilization (1922) expounded those fears and called for restricting new immigrants and assimilating those already within America. Congress and Presidents Harding and Coolidge responded with the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts that sharply cut back annual numbers of immigrants with strict quotas for different nationalities. The 1921 act’s quota was 3 percent of an immigrant country’s population in the United States for the 1910 census. The 1924 act’s quota was 2 percent of 1890 census figures, with 165,000 foreigners from outside the Western Hemisphere allowed to immigrate. The law’s benchmark shifted from the 1910 to the 1890 census to cut back Italian and eastern European immigrants while encouraging northwestern European immigrants. The final figure included 83,575 from Britain and Ireland and 23,370 from Germany and Austria-­ Hungary, but only 6,000 Poles and 5,500 Italians. The Asian Exclusion Act virtually ended immigrants from that part of the world except Filipinos, who as colonists could settle in the United States.37 General Billy Mitchell organized and commanded the army’s air force in France during World War I.38 After the war, he recognized the growing military potential of airplanes as they got larger and flew farther. He had the navy transform a coal ship into the aircraft carrier Langley in 1920. In July 1921, he arranged a demonstration of what bombers could do against warships with the successful sinkings of a surfaced submarine, a destroyer, a cruiser, and a battleship; most naval officers reacted with anger rather than gratitude. He learned that Japan was constructing aircraft carriers and worried that would make them invincible against America in a future war unless the navy built more of its own carriers. The navy’s establishment dismissed his 1924 report on that growing threat. He resigned in 1926 after being court-­martialed and suspended from duty on trumped-­up charges of disorderly conduct. The War Debt Commission, established by Congress in 1922, was empowered to supervise foreign repayments of American loans but ended up easing the terms or outright forgiving most of them. The Allies repaid the United States only $2.6 billion from 1918 to 1931. Nonetheless,

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Berlin announced its suspension of reparations in 1924. That led France and Belgium to send troops to occupy the industrial Ruhrland as the Treaty of Versailles permitted. Without the reparations payments, London, Paris, and Brussels had trouble making their interest payments to the United States. The global financial system teetered on the brink of collapse. Coolidge authorized Secretary of State Kellogg to negotiate a deal among the Europeans and the lending banks. Kellogg tapped financier Charles Dawes to forge that compromise. Under the Dawes Plan, the J. P. Morgan Company loaned Germany money to repay what it owed while reducing the annual bill and interest and overseeing Germany’s replacement of old with new reichsmarks at a ratio of a million to one backed by gold. When a similar crisis erupted in 1929, industrialist Owen Young negotiated a deal whereby the Allies agreed to cut Germany’s reparations bill from $33 billion to $9 billion in return for Washington canceling the remaining Allied debts. That did not prevent the global economy from collapsing, with American policies the primary cause.39 America’s unregulated markets encouraged speculators to promote stock prices that skyrocketed in 1929. In October, the greed that goaded ever more people frantically to buy ever more stocks turned to panic as the gap widened between stock prices and company assets. Speculators dumped their stocks and the market collapsed, leading to worsening bankruptcies, joblessness, homelessness, crime, and despair across the nation. By 1930, one in four previously working Americans was jobless, and the economy was half its previous size. With their party’s worship of “free markets” and the “gold standard,” Hoover and Republican leaders in Congress rejected any policies that might break that vicious economic cycle. Instead, in 1930, Congress globalized the Great Depression with the Smoot-­Hawley Act that imposed up to 50 percent import tariffs. Foreign nations retaliated by raising their tariffs, and the global economy collapsed. From 1929 to 1933, world trade plummeted 40 percent in value, American exports from $5.4 billion to $2.1 billion, and American foreign investments from $17.5 billion to $13.5 billion. During the two interwar decades, America’s military fought two wars. One was in Nicaragua, where American investors dominated the economy, especially its banks, railroads, and plantations.40 Protecting those investments and bilateral trade was Washington’s primary goal. That end included pressuring Nicaragua’s rival Liberal and Conservative parties and militias to uphold a very illiberal democracy by curbing corruption, election fraud, and violence. The small marine contingent in Managua, the capital, was there to deter those parties from openly warring against



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each other and to crush any violence that threatened America’s economic interest. The marines, bolstered with reinforcements, restored order when civil war engulfed Nicaragua in 1912 and from 1926 to 1934. A new political party arose in 1926. Augusto Sandino was the illegitimate son of a plantation owner and a peasant girl. From his late teens, he dedicated himself to alleviating Nicaragua’s dismal poverty, repression, and exploitation perpetuated by the elite, first as a liberal and then as a communist. He was a charismatic, natural leader. In November 1926, he led a revolt dedicated to overthrowing the government and replacing it with communism. A swelling force of American marines joined the National Guard struggling to crush that budding revolution. Despite this, the communist movement, called the Sandinistas after their commander, steadily strengthened in numbers across the country. Moscow dispatched Comintern agents to help supply, organize, and motivate the Sandinistas. Coolidge sent General Frank McCoy to lead and reinforcements to raise American forces in Nicaragua to five thousand marines and soldiers in 1928. McCoy’s central mission was to protect the 1928 presidential and congressional elections against communist disruptions. McCoy and his men succeeded. Experts viewed the election as the nation’s cleanest, with 88 percent voter turnout and their votes fairly counted. Liberal Party candidate Jose Moncada won the presidency while the Liberal and Conservative parties split Congress, with nineteen to twenty-­four in the Chamber of Deputies and twelve to twelve in the Senate. Although that election clearly repudiated the communists, they kept fighting. The Americans and National Guard, led by General Anastasio Somoza Garcia, routed the communist forces and killed Sandino’s chief of staff, General Manuel Giron, in February 1929. Sandino and his surviving coterie fled to Mexico. Hoover reduced the Americans to 1,500 marines now commanded by General Lewis “Chesty” Puller. In 1930, Sandino and his followers returned to Nicaragua to revive the revolution, targeting American businesses to burn and their personnel to terrorize with torture and execution. Puller and his marines worked closely with the National Guard against the Sandinistas, systematically searching for and eliminating the communists in firefights. A devastating earthquake struck Managua and killed 1,500 people on March 31, 1931. Marines restored order, rescued those trapped beneath the rubble, and set up field hospitals and tent cities to care for thousands of injured and homeless. The November 1932 election was as clean as its predecessor, with high turnout, a congressional power balance between the parties, and Liberal candidate Juan Sacasa elected president. Puller’s marines routed a Sandinista force that tried to attack the president’s inauguration in December. Sandino finally agreed to peace negotiations. Hoover ordered home all the marines except a small embassy contingent. Sandino signed a formal

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armistice with amnesty for him and his 1,800 remaining troops at Managua on February 2, 1933. The Americans had defeated a communist revolution and upheld Nicaragua’s democracy at the cost of 136 dead marines, with 47 killed and 66 wounded in combat from 1926 to 1933.41 That victory’s democracy element was fleeting. On February 21, Somoza had Sandino, his brother, and two of his generals abducted and executed. Somoza had the December 1936 election rigged so that he won it by 107,201 to 100. After his inauguration on January 1, 1937, he established himself as Nicaragua’s dictator. American investments would enjoy protection for another forty-­two years under Somoza, his son Luis Somoza Debayle, his grandson Anastasio Somoza Debayle, or close allies in the presidential palace. That situation eventually led to another undeclared American war in Nicaragua. Washington also intervened in Haiti to protect threatened American interests by trying to save Haitians from themselves.42 Haiti was the most impoverished and coup-­prone country, having suffered virtually nonstop violence that seesawed between tyranny and anarchy from the revolt against French rule in 1792 to 1915. That ended when Americans arrived to give Haitians nineteen years of relatively efficient, honest, peaceful rule. In all, the Americans built 1,000 miles of roads, 210 bridges, 1,250 miles of telephone lines, 82 miles of irrigation canals, 11 modern hospitals, and 147 rural clinics. While officials tried to stabilize the cities, 2,000 marines fought rebels called Cacos in the countryside, killing 2,250 and capturing 11,600 while suffering 13 dead from 1915 to 1920.43 Tragically, Haitians resumed their horrendous levels of corruption, repression, exploitation, violence, and incompetence after the Americans left in 1934. Meanwhile, American diplomats sought to alleviate worsening international tensions. French foreign minister Aristide Briand asked Secretary of State Kellogg for a bilateral security pact in 1928. Kellogg replied by proposing an international treaty that outlawed war “as an instrument of national policy” and was open for any country’s signature. They signed the Kellogg-­Briand Treaty on August 27, 1928, the first two diplomats for thirty-­one countries, including Japan, Germany, and Italy whose aggression led to World War II. Under the London Naval Treaty signed on April 22, 1930, the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy agreed to varying tonnage and armament restrictions on submarines, cruisers, and destroyers. The Japanese would blatantly violate this treaty along with all the other treaties it previously signed on disarmament, peace, and nonaggression. As other great powers realized that Japan was cheating, they followed suit. America faced a worsening threat across the Pacific during the 1920s and 1930s that would culminate in war.44 Japan’s empire expanded



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enormously during and after World War I. The Japanese swiftly and bloodlessly captured Germany’s Far East empire, the Shandong Peninsula in China and the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline Islands across the western Pacific Ocean. The Japanese also sent a military expedition to conquer and exploit Russia’s Far East region. Eventually the Soviets forced the Japanese out of Russia, but the League of Nations granted Japan those three island groups as a “mandate.” The Japanese asserted their own version of fascism that transformed the political system from a nascent democracy into an autocracy from 1925. Like that of Italy and later Germany, Japanese fascism mingled nationalism, authoritarianism, and imperialism but without a charismatic dictator like Mussolini or Hitler. Emperor Hirohito was revered as a demigod, but he held only symbolic power. Tokyo’s long-­term vision was to expel the United States and other Western powers from the Far East and western Pacific and expand their empire over that vast region. Tokyo first turned its guns against China, whose breakup into warring states and ideologies made it an easy target. Sun Yat-­sen was a doctor inspired by the liberal ideals and high living standards he found during his service in Western realms like Hong Kong and Hawaii. In 1894, he founded the Revive China Party, dedicated to bringing to China the “Three Principles of the People” (democracy, nationalism, and socialism). In 1911, that movement overthrew the Manchu dynasty that had ruled China since 1644, but it failed to form a national government. Instead, China broke up among regional warlords. Sun’s military commander, General Yuan Shi-­kai, called himself the president but was the dictator of the southeastern region with its capital at Guangdong (Canton). After Yuan died in 1916, Sun and another general, Chiang Kai-­shek, struggled to expand their power beyond that region. In October 1919, they transformed the Revive China Party into the National Party (Kuomintang, KMT), and Sun was China’s president until his death on March 12, 1925. Chiang established the Whampoa Military Academy to train his officers. Sun accepted Comintern agents as advisors and sent some of his staff to Moscow for training. Comintern agents helped found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai in 1921 and forged a “popular front” alliance between the CCP and KMT in 1923. Chiang took over as president when Sun died. In July 1926, Chiang led eighty thousand troops north to reunify China. His troops fought their way into Nanjing and captured it on March 23, 1927. During the siege, Lieutenant Commander Roy Smith of the destroyers USS Noa and USS Preston evacuated most American residents and threatened to bombard Nanjing if Chiang did not protect and send out the 150 remaining Americans. After a tense standoff, Smith and his men were able to extract the other Americans, including writer Pearl Buck.

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Chiang wanted an alliance, not animosity, with the Americans, along with the British, French, and Japanese. On April 12, 1927, he had his KMT attack the CCP in cities where they coexisted across southeastern China. The result was the CCP’s decimation and rout, whose remnants began the “Long March” that eventually reached Yanan, a small city in north China near the Mongolian border. Meanwhile, from 1927 to 1931, Chiang led his KMT army peacefully to reunify much of northern China, including Beijing, and then turned west, determined to wipe out the CCP. Amid this campaign, he received outrageous news. Japanese agents detonated a bomb on the Japanese-­owned South Manchurian Railroad on September 18, 1931. Tokyo claimed that Chinese revolutionaries were responsible and used that as an excuse to take over all of Manchuria. Chiang demanded that the Japanese withdraw and appealed for League of Nations support. The League established a five-­ man committee led by Victor Bulwer-­Lytton to investigate. In February 1932, Tokyo renamed Manchuria Manchukuo and insisted that it now belonged to Japan’s empire. It took the Lytton Commission more than a year to thoroughly determine what happened, write an extensive report, and present it to the League on October 2, 1932. The report detailed Japan’s aggression. After the League voted to accept the report’s findings but before debating what sanctions (if any) to impose against Japan, Tokyo withdrew its membership on March 27, 1933. Thus did Japan commit and get away with the first blatant aggression and defiance of the League by a fascist power. Japan’s Manchuria conquest violated not only the League of Nations Covenant that America’s Senate had not ratified but also the Nine-­Power Pact, Four-­Power Pact, and Kellogg-­Briand Pact that it had. That enraged Hoover and most of his administration. Secretary of State Henry Stimson privately explained Japanese imperialism as resulting from Tokyo being “in the hands of virtually mad dogs who are running amok.”45 On January 7, 1932, he sent diplomatic notes to Japan and China warning them to uphold the “Open Door” policy and that the United States would not “recognize any treaty or agreement . . . that may impair the treaty rights of the United States and its citizens in China.” On February 23, 1932, he publicly called on Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair William Borah to “encourage China, enlighten the American public, exhort the League, and warn Japan.”46 The Stimson Doctrine of nonrecognition and other symbolic steps were the only ones Washington could take given its rejection of League membership and the deep isolationism embedded among Americans. Soon Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany would link arms with Japan in conquering a series of other countries over half a dozen years. Geneva and Washington separately condemned each aggression but failed to act in concert



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decisively against them. In doing so, they appeased and thus encouraged rather than deterred more aggression. Assistant Secretary of State Hugh Wilson explained that paradox: “Condemnation creates a community of the damned who are forced outside the pale, who have nothing to lose by the violation of all laws of order and international good faith.” He stated that Washington and other governments that “feel strong enough to condemn . . . should feel strong enough to use force.”47 Tragically, the United States was politically incapable of resolving that conundrum. A new president would struggle for seven years against the isolationism embraced by most Americans. That ended only after Japan’s devastating attack against America’s fleet at Pearl Harbor.

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Our civilization cannot endure unless we as individuals realize our responsibility to and dependence on the rest of the world. —Franklin Roosevelt I am a soldier, I fight where I am told and I win where I fight. —George Patton

F

ranklin Roosevelt defeated President Herbert Hoover by a landslide in the 1932 election with 22,821,277 votes (57.4 percent) and 472 electoral votes to 15,761,251 (39.6 percent) and 59 electoral votes. Democrats beat Republicans just as decisively in Congress with 58 to 37 Senate and 313 to 117 House seats.1 That victory reflected the despair afflicting most Americans after four years of the Great Depression that the Hoover administration failed to overcome. During his subsequent twelve years as president, Roosevelt asserted decisive, progressive leadership to first defeat the Great Depression and then win World War II.2 His character was critical to his leadership. He was naturally optimistic, open-­ minded, and pragmatic. When he was thirty-­nine, polio paralyzed his legs. With leg braces, he was soon cheerfully back on the campaign trail and held a series of public offices. Although he was born into great wealth, he had the ability to explain complex problems and solutions with words that reassured and inspired most Americans. He was adept at forging political compromises that resolved often deep-­ rooted problems. As New York’s governor from 1929 to 1933, he alleviated the state’s depression with an array of welfare 263

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and infrastructure programs. As president, he pushed through Congress fifteen “New Deal” bills within his first three months that saved the banking system, relieved poverty, provided jobs, expanded electric and hydroelectric power, revived the financial system, and encouraged entrepreneurs to invest and consumers to buy. Each year thereafter, he worked with Congress to enact more laws that developed the economy and bettered most American lives, including social security for retired and handicapped people. Roosevelt’s toughest challenge before Pearl Harbor was trying to transform America’s prevailing isolationism into internationalism.3 He offered numerous versions of this appeal: “Our civilization cannot endure unless we as individuals realize our responsibility to and dependence on the rest of the world.”4 He promoted trade through two laws, the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Act that empowered the president to reduce tariffs up to 50 percent with countries that reciprocated and the 1934 Export-­Import Act that established the federal Export-­Import Bank to loan corporations money to facilitate trade. But, turtle-­like, Americans retreated further into their isolationist shell as the aggression of fascist Japan, Italy, and Germany worsened. Congress hobbled Roosevelt’s foreign policy powers with neutrality laws in 1935, 1936, and 1937, which respectively forbade American arms sales to any side involved in a war, even victims of aggression, after the president declared American neutrality; forbade American loans to any side in a war; and required foreigners to pay cash and carry away in their own ships any war goods purchased from the United States. American isolationism contributed to the League of Nations’ weakness. Without the presence and backing of the world’s largest economic power and democracy, the British and French governments mostly acquiesced to rather than contained a series of imperialist advances by Japan, Italy, and Germany from September 1931 to September 1939. Each act of League appeasement encouraged increasingly blatant fascist aggression. Adolf Hitler took power in Germany just five weeks before Roosevelt entered the White House. He did so democratically after his National Socialist Workers (Nazi) Party won a plurality of parliament seats and President Paul Hindenburg appointed him chancellor, or prime minister, on January 30. Hitler was a World War I veteran who won two Iron Crosses for valor and, like countless other Germans, detested Germany’s humiliating defeat. His Nazi Party advocated an authoritarian state that glorified German culture and people, a mixed economy of public and private enterprise, the elimination of Jews and other “undesirable” groups, the repudiation of the Versailles treaty’s restrictions on German power, a massive military buildup, and the nation’s expansion to include all German-­speaking peoples. The Nazi Party’s popularity expanded as the



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global depression worsened, with its number of Reichstag seats soaring from 12 with 2 percent of the vote in May 1928 to the largest share, with 230 seats and 37 percent of the vote, in July 1932. Hitler inspired a vote of 441 for and only 94 against the Enabling Act that gave him dictatorial powers on March 23, 1933. With that, he abolished all parties except his Nazi Party. Over the next decade he amassed more power, including requiring that all military personnel swear a loyalty oath to him rather than Germany from August 2, 1934. He issued a series of laws that established the concentration camp system, stripped Jews and other targeted groups of their rights and property, imprisoned them, and eventually executed around six million of them. Hitler forged closer ties with Japan and Italy, whose fascist governments espoused similar policies. The League’s failure to force Japan to withdraw from its conquest of China’s northeast Manchuria region encouraged both Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to embark on their own conquests. Hitler’s first step was to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations in October 1934. That same month, Mussolini ordered his army in Italian Somalia to invade neighboring Ethiopia. Although the League condemned the invasion and imposed limited economic sanctions, that did not impede Italy’s eventual conquest of Ethiopia. Hitler blatantly violated the Treaty of Versailles when he marched ten thousand troops into the demilitarized Rhineland on March 7, 1936. He wanted to test the will of the French and British to uphold the treaty and was prepared to withdraw if they resisted. London and Paris protested but did not threaten war if he did not retreat. After a civil war erupted in Spain in July 1936, Hitler and Mussolini backed (with military aid, advisors, and volunteers) the fascist side led by General Francisco Franco while the Soviet Union backed the socialist-­liberal coalition. That war became a proving ground for German, Italian, and Soviet weapons and tactics. Japanese and Chinese patrols opened fire at each other at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing on July 7, 1937. Japan’s fascists used that as the excuse to conquer all of China. They launched three carefully pre– planned and supplied invasions, from Manchuria to engulf Beijing and northeast China, from Shanghai up the Yangtze River valley, and from Guangdong across southeast China. Within six months, the Japanese had overrun most of China’s eastern third and captured Nanjing, during which they may have slaughtered several hundred thousand Chinese. Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai-­shek withdrew his armies’ remnants westward and established his headquarters at Chungking high up the Yangtze River. That war persisted from 1937 to 1945 as Japanese troops gleefully fulfilled a “Three All” policy of “Kill all, burn all, loot all!” The result was the deaths of 447,000 Japanese and twenty million Chinese, including four million soldiers.5

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Hitler bloodlessly took over Austria in March 1938. He demanded that Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg hold a plebiscite on Austria’s unification with Germany. After Schuschnigg reluctantly agreed, Hitler demanded that he postpone the plebiscite and resign, to be replaced by Interior Minister Arthur Seyss-­Inquart, the Austrian Nazi Party leader. Schuschnigg and all other ministers resigned, except Seyss-­Inquart, who invited annexation. Hitler marched the German army into Austria and announced Germany’s annexation on March 13. Once again, London and Paris acquiesced in Hitler’s latest gross violation of the Versailles treaty. Hitler then demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the western, mostly German-­ speaking region of Sudetenland to Germany. After several rounds of talks, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, French prime minister Edouard Daladier, and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini met with Hitler at Munich and signed a treaty that granted Germany Sudetenland on September 29, 1938. Notoriously, Chamberlain returned to London and declared that he had achieved “peace in our time.” That time was brief. Hitler immediately had his troops occupy Sudetenland, and on March 15, 1939, the German army took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. The British and French governments protested but did not declare war against Germany. Roosevelt viewed worsening fascist aggression with impotent rage. Yet the prevailing isolationism of the country forced him to be circumspect even in expressing American national security interests. In a speech in Chicago on October 5, 1937, he condemned “the epidemic of world lawlessness” and then drew a parallel that a community quarantines sick patients, implying that America should join with other countries to quarantine the aggressors. Prominent isolationist congressional members and newspaper editors condemned his “quarantine speech.” In January 1939, he asked Congress to revise the Neutrality Acts to allow support for aggression victims, but isolationists killed the proposed amendment in committee.6 The best that Roosevelt could do was not declare neutrality after Japan invaded China, thus letting the United States send aid to the beleaguered Chinese. On February 1, 1939, he provoked more criticism when newspapers leaked his off-­the-­record assertion that “the frontiers of the United States are on the Rhine.” Chiang begged for American aid against Japan. Roosevelt had the State Department announce a “moral embargo” of products that could strengthen Japan’s military on January 14, the cutoff of credit to Japan on February 7, and abrogation of the 1911 bilateral trade treaty with Japan on July 26, 1939. Through their foreign ministers, Hitler and Stalin formed an alliance and agreed to split Poland between them on August 23, 1939. The German



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and Soviet armies invaded Poland on September 1 and 17, respectively, and within a month destroyed the defenders and overran the country. Britain and France declared war against Germany on September 3, but not against the Soviet Union. Roosevelt reacted to Germany’s invasion on September 3 by announcing, “This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well.”7 On September 21, he asked Congress to repeal the Neutrality Act’s ban on arms sales. On November 4, Congress complied, with the House voting 243 to 181 and the Senate 63 to 30 in favor. Britain and France began openly buying American arms, munitions, and other military supplies. Meanwhile, during the Pan-­ American Conference held at Panama from September 23 to October 3, the Americans convinced the other delegates to proclaim their neutrality and to extend neutral zones three hundred miles from their shores to sea; only Canada, allied with Britain, was exempt. What followed for half a year was called the “phony war” because neither side attacked the other. The German army did occupy Denmark and Norway. Then, on May 10, 1940, the German army invaded France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The main assault was through the Ardennes Forest in southern Belgium and then arced north to cut off the British army and a French army at Dunkirk. Winston Churchill replaced Chamberlain as prime minister on May 10, but he could only extract 332,236 mostly British but including 139,997 Allied troops from Dunkirk and view in disgust the collapse of France’s military and government and their surrender on June 22. Hitler imposed a treaty that reduced France to a rump state in the south with its capital at Vichy, governed by a puppet fascist regime headed by Marshal Henri Petain, while Germany’s military occupied the northern and western halves and Italy’s army occupied the southeast. Hitler now planned to invade Britain, but only after his air force achieved supremacy. The British, however, won the Battle of Britain as fighter pilots and antiaircraft crews decimated waves of German bombers and escort fighters from July 10 to October 31. As in World War I, Berlin sought to isolate Britain with submarines that sank ships packed with supplies. The Battle of the Atlantic lasted nearly the rest of the war. Tokyo exploited France’s defeat by demanding that Vichy let twenty-­ five thousand Japanese troops occupy northern Vietnam. Roosevelt responded by forbidding American sales of iron, steel, and aviation fuel to Japan on July 26, 1940. Vichy conceded on September 22, and Japan’s occupation was complete by September 26. Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite or Axis Pact on September 27, 1940.

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Roosevelt strengthened American geopolitical power through a series of bills in late 1940. On September 14, he signed into law the Selective Service Act, America’s first peacetime draft, that the House passed by 233 to 124 and the Senate by 47 to 25. On September 30, American and British diplomats signed a treaty whereby the United States swapped fifty destroyers for eight British military bases in the Western Hemisphere. That let military forces in those bases withdraw to bolster Britain’s defense. Roosevelt announced on November 30 that the United States would lend China $100 million, provide fifty P-40 fighter planes, and let American volunteers advise and fight alongside China’s military. Colonel Claire Chennault went to China to form the Flying Tigers squadron of American pilots that fought the Japanese. Roosevelt committed the United States to becoming “the arsenal of democracy” on December 29, 1940. Roosevelt was a brilliant communicator who could convey controversial and complex policies to the American people in ways that they could understand and support. For instance, to justify the Lend-­Lease Act whereby America sent military supplies to aggression victims, Roosevelt likened it to lending a garden hose to a neighbor when his house catches fire, helping him extinguish it before it endangers one’s own home. Roosevelt signed the Lend-­Lease Bill into law on March 11, 1941, after the Senate passed it by 59 to 30 and the House by 260 to 165. The bill empowered the president to “sell, transfer title, exchange, lease, or otherwise dispose” military supplies “to any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Eventually the United States gave $50.1 billion in military aid, including $31.4 billion to Britain, $11.2 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.7 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and $2.6 billion spread among other allies. That aid was vital to keeping those allies in the war and eventually winning it.8 Secretary of State Cordell Hull conducted a series of talks with Kichisaburo Nomura after he arrived as Japan’s ambassador in February 1941. The result was a classic dialogue of the deaf as Hull insisted that Tokyo withdraw from all its conquests since Manchuria while Nomura was just as insistent that Washington recognize those conquests. Hitler had his army invade the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Although the Germans and their allies circled and destroyed or captured millions of Soviet troops, they failed to take either Moscow or Leningrad before winter bogged down the fighting. Britain now had another ally against Germany. On July 14, Tokyo issued Vichy an ultimatum to let Japan’s military occupy southern Indochina. Vichy conceded on July 21, and Japanese troops began occupying airports on July 24. Roosevelt replied on July 26 by freezing Japan’s financial accounts in the United States that they



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used to purchase products. Over the next two days, Britain, the Philippines, and New Zealand also froze Japanese assets. That embargo was a crisis for Japan’s leaders. Japan depended on American oil for 80 percent of its total consumption and had only a year and a half’s supply of oil stored. Japan’s seven-­man war council included the army, navy, and air force commanders and the prime minister, treasury minister, and foreign minister, presided over by Emperor Hirohito. They agreed to go to war against America, Britain, and the Netherlands. The military would complete its planning and supply for that war in December, when it would launch overwhelming offensives in different directions to cripple American naval power at Pearl Harbor and capture the Philippines from the United States; Malaya, Singapore, and Burma from Britain; and Indonesia from the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Roosevelt and Churchill held their first summit at Argentia, Newfoundland, from August 9 to 14, 1941. They immediately bonded in what became a close friendship and partnership dedicated to winning the war and subsequent peace.9 On August 14, they announced the Atlantic Charter that jointly committed America and Britain to uphold the principles of collective security, self-­determination for nationalities, freer trade through international treaties, freedom of the seas, the disarmament of aggressor states, lower armaments for responsible states, no territorial gains for any states, and territorial changes only with the consent of those living there. What Roosevelt wanted was to emulate President Wilson in articulating a set of principles worth fighting for to inspire the American people and foreign allies. Roosevelt and Churchill also agreed that American warships would escort convoys to the mid-­Atlantic, where the Royal Navy would convey them to a British port. Over the past two years, Congress had passed a series of bills by two-­ thirds votes that boosted America’s military and provided supplies for aggression victims. Despite those successes, Roosevelt worried that a similar vote for a war declaration would be too divisive. He needed overwhelming support for a global conflict against the fascist powers, and yet surveys revealed that four out of five Americans opposed going to war. That kept him from asking Congress for a war declaration when a German torpedo damaged the destroyer USS Kearny, killing eleven sailors, on October 17 or after one sank the destroyer USS Reuben James, killing over a hundred sailors, on October 31. He did get Congress to pass a law that let American merchant ships carry war supplies in November, but passage came by way of the typically split votes of 50 to 37 in the Senate and 212 to 194 in the House. He admitted to Britain’s ambassador that “if he asked for a declaration of war, he wouldn’t get it, and public opinion would swing against him.”10

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Japan’s military surpassed America’s in several key dimensions in 1941. First, the Japanese had warred for a decade, during which they acquired skills and corrected flaws in training, logistics, weapons, strategy, and tactics. Japan’s carrier fleet outnumbered America’s by ten to seven. Japan’s Zero fighter plane was light, fast, and deadly and could literally fly rings around America’s carrier plane, the slow and heavy F4F Wildcat, before closing for a kill. Japan’s torpedo bombers, the Nakajima B5N and Aichi D3A, far outclassed America’s plodding Douglas TBT Devastators. Japan’s bombers, along with the submarine fleet, fired the world’s most accurate, reliable, and long-­ranged torpedoes, the “Long Lance,” propelled by oxygen, compared to America’s compressed-­air-­driven torpedoes that mostly shot below enemy hulls. It took the Americans two years to understand and correct that flaw. The United States did have an excellent heavy bomber, the B-17 Flying Fortress, with a two-­thousand-­mile range, 250-mile-per-hour top speed, and Norden bombsight that dropped bombs from three miles up that hit within two hundred feet of targets. Neither the Japanese nor the Germans had any bombers of comparable power. Germany produced several first-­ rate warplanes, including the ME-109 and FW-190 fighters, the Stuka dive bomber, and medium bomber JU-88, all superior to America’s equivalents when it entered the war. But by 1944, American pilots were flying the B-29 Superfortress, the P-51 Mustang fighter plane, and the F6F Hellcat carrier fighter plane, each the war’s best aircraft of its kind. America’s army and navy had contingency plans for wars against an array of possible enemies, including Orange for Japan, first drafted in 1904 and thereafter annually modified to address the latest intelligence reports.11 Plan Orange envisioned Japan’s swift conquest of America’s western Pacific colonies, a slow steady buildup of American sea and land forces in Hawaii, followed by an offensive to defeat Japan’s fleet and retake the islands. Admiral Chester Nimitz later recalled, “The enemy of our games was always Japan—and the courses were so thorough that after the start of WWII—nothing that happened in the Pacific was strange or unexpected and . . . we were well prepared for the fantastic logistic efforts required to support that operation of the war.”12 Code breaking was a decisive American advantage.13 Initially, the State, War, and Navy Departments had their own code-­breaking sections, but during World War II they combined their efforts in the Research Bureau. The Navy Department purloined a Japanese navy codebook in 1923 and broke the new 1930 navy code, nicknamed Purple, in 1932. In 1939, the Germans shared a modified version of their Enigma code with the Japanese. Eventually the Americans succeeded in breaking that code in early 1942. Meanwhile, the Navy Department broke Japan’s diplomatic code in August 1940. Magic and Ultra were the respective code names for



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the programs decrypting Japan’s diplomatic and military secrets. Those breakthroughs led to the decisive naval victory of Midway in June 1942.14 Intelligence analysts concluded on November 24, 1941, that the Japanese were planning a massive attack but could not determine where. That day, the War and Navy Departments issued the first of several warnings to General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel, Hawaii’s commanders, and General Douglas MacArthur, the Philippines’ commander, to prepare for possible Japanese attacks. Short and Kimmel assumed that meant sabotage by agents among the Japanese community that numbered one of four Hawaiians. Each posted more guards around the periphery of planes and warships. MacArthur ignored the warnings. A vast fleet that included six carriers packed with 354 attack planes under Admiral Chuichi Nagumo steamed from Etorofu Island in Japan’s Kurile Islands on November 26. That fleet halted 220 miles north of Pearl Harbor at Honolulu, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7. The Japanese launched two attacks that sank four battleships and severely damaged four others anchored by twos, destroyed 188 planes and damaged 159 others, killed 2,335 and wounded 1,143 servicemen, and killed 68 and wounded 35 civilians while suffering only 29 planes destroyed and 79 damaged and 5 midget submarines sunk.15 Yet Nagumo could have inflicted a worse defeat on America had he sent in a third wave that destroyed oil storage tanks or, far more decisively, invaded and conquered the island. The following day, Roosevelt appeared before Congress to call for a war declaration against Japan, declaring December 7 “a day that will live in infamy.”16 The Senate voted 82 to 0 and the House 388 to 1 for war. On December 11, Hitler and Mussolini declared war against the United States. The question now for Roosevelt and his administration was how best to win a world war.17 Fortunately, Roosevelt had gifted advisors with whom to make and implement critical decisions. He organized an American version of Britain’s staff system, with Admiral William Leahy chief of staff, General George Marshall army chief, Admiral Ernest King navy chief, and General Henry “Hap” Arnold army air force chief. In February 1942, they formed with the British the Combined Chiefs of Staff to coordinate strategy and logistics in Washington. General Alan Brooke was Britain’s chief of staff. Several hundred personnel served in the Combined Chiefs of Staff organized into committees, of which the most vital were Joint Staff Planners, Joint Strategic Survey, and Joint War Plans.18 Eventually sixteen million American men and women served in the military during World War II. The 1940 Selective Service Act required all men from twenty-­one to thirty-­six to register, but an amendment in

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1942 expanded that from eighteen to sixty-­five years old. The army took virtually no one over forty-­five and established 6,443 local draft boards to screen those summoned. The average soldier was twenty-­six years old, five foot, eight inches tall, 144 pounds, and a junior high school graduate. One in ten had graduated from college, one in three only from high school, and one in three had a grade school education. The army took six out of ten men, rejecting those too short, fat, nearsighted, flat-­footed, toothless, sexually deviant, or pacifist. Monthly pay ranged from $50 for privates to $96 for master sergeants. Most soldiers and marines carried the .30-caliber semiautomatic M-1 Garland rifle with an eight-­bullet clip. Strategy depends on supply, which depends on a nation’s ability to obtain and transport all that is needed. America excelled at this task.19 Roosevelt and Congress established an array of organizations to mobilize America’s economy for the war. The Office of Production Management (OPM) encouraged cooperation among industries for war production. The War Production Board (WPB) replaced the OPM, with sweeping powers to allocate resources among industries, promote mergers, and shut down inefficient or unneeded production. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) provided low-­interest loans to corporations vital for military production. The National War Labor Board (NWLB), renamed the National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB), imposed resolutions on any labor disputes and even seized and ran plants with crippling strikes. The War Manpower Commission (WMC) transferred workers among plants and industries as needed. The Supply Priorities and Allocation Board (SPAB) ensured that the most important war industries received what resources they needed. The Office of Price Administration (OPA) controlled prices to prevent price gouging and hyperinflation. The Small War Plants Corporation (SWPC) protected production of vital parts or products that small firms made. The Office of War Information (OWI) promoted popular support for the war through films, publications, and radio broadcasts. Military spending skyrocketed from $3.6 billion, or 2 percent of the economy, in 1940 to $93.4 billion, or nearly 50 percent of the economy, in 1944. Production grew steadily in volume and efficiency. In all, the United States produced 6.5 million rifles, 40 billion bullets, 88,410 tanks, 1,559 warships, 5,777 supply ships, 634,569 jeeps, 2,383,311 trucks, and 299,293 aircraft, including 18,000 B-24s, 12,692 B-17s, and 3,763 B-29s. The largest aircraft production complex was at Willow Run, Michigan, which turned out a B-24 every sixty-­three minutes. The time to construct a Liberty supply ship plummeted from 355 days in 1941 to 41 days in 1943. Much of that production ended up in Allied hands. America shipped to its allies 37,000 tanks, 800,000 trucks, 43,000 planes, and 2 million rifles. The Soviet



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Union would have collapsed without American aid that provided 10 percent of its war equipment, including 1,966 locomotives, 350,000 trucks, 77,900 jeeps, 7,669 miles of track, and 956,000 miles of telephone lines.20 Congress appropriated $296 billion for the war, and those were just the up-­front costs. Of that, taxes paid 45 percent and treasury bonds 55 percent. The 1942 Tax Revenue Act lowered the threshold for those who had to pay income tax from $1,500 to $624 and increased the tax depending on income from 6 percent to 94 percent. The result was ever larger government revenues and less inequality, as the rich paid far more than the middle class.21 One key American weakness was that it lacked a central intelligence agency. Instead, the State, War, and Navy Departments each had an intelligence bureau, but they rarely shared or coordinated their gatherings with the others. Roosevelt changed that. William Donovan was a World War I Medal of Honor winner, lawyer, and businessman with extensive foreign experience, and he was Roosevelt’s friend. Roosevelt sent Donovan on two intelligence-­gathering missions to Europe in 1940, established the Office of Coordinator of Information and named Donovan its head in July 1941, and transformed that into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) with Donovan as chief in June 1942. The OSS was modeled on Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), which not only gathered intelligence but also organized resistance and conducted sabotage behind enemy lines. SOE trained OSS operatives and worked closely with them throughout the war.22 Roosevelt authorized the establishment of a secret program to create an atomic bomb, code-­named the Manhattan Project, on October 8, 1941. He did so after two years of listening to and reading the reports of scientific experts, starting with a letter from Albert Einstein in October 1939. The experts concluded that the controlled splitting of the U-235 nuclear atom or a synthetic plutonium atom could create a bomb with unprecedented destructive power, and if an enemy like Germany or Japan mastered that technology, it could defeat the United States. The Manhattan Project eventually cost $2 billion and employed 120,000 people in a network of sites, with the most important at Los Alamos, New Mexico.23 Under international law, a government can intern enemy civilians. In a series of executive orders, Roosevelt ordered Japanese, German, and Italian residents interned. Nearly all of the 11,567 German and 1,811 Italian internees were foreigners, but, in the worst violation of constitutional rights in American history, 80,000 of the 120,000 Japanese interned were naturalized citizens. On March 2, 1942, the War Department declared a Military Exclusion Zone in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and warned Japanese living there to go elsewhere or face internment. Only a few Japanese were able to sell their homes and businesses

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and move elsewhere before the March 27 deadline. Nearly all of those rounded up had to sell their possessions at a fraction of their value and suffer the tedium of the camps for the war’s duration. Around four thousand Japanese American men joined the 442nd Regiment and fought bravely for the nation that had upended their lives.24 After devastating America’s fleet at Pearl Harbor, Tokyo launched a series of campaigns that conquered America’s Wake Island by December 23, Britain’s Malaya and Singapore by February 14, Holland’s Indonesia by March 9, America’s Philippines by May 8, and most of Britain’s Burma by May 17, 1942. The resources they exploited from those conquests were a fraction of what they once paid for. The worst shortage was oil, of which the new sources fueled only 35 percent of Japan’s needs. The Japanese called their empire across the western Pacific and East and Southeast Asia the “Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere.” In reality, they ruthlessly exploited its natural resources and labor and executed anyone who resisted. Indeed, Americans never faced a more merciless national foe than Japan, whose generals ordered millions of Asian civilians and thousands of American prisoners of war slaughtered and had their own troops fight to the death rather than surrender.25 The minimum number of Asian civilians killed by the Japanese included 10 million Chinese, 4 million Indonesians, 1.5 million Bengalis, 1 million Vietnamese, 180,000 Indians, 120,000 Filipinos, and 100,000 Malayans. Japan’s war against China may have inflicted twenty-­two million dead, including eighteen million civilians and four million soldiers. Of 24,992 Americans captured by the Japanese, 8,634 (or 35 percent) died in captivity, countless by execution or by being worked or starved to death, the rest by disease.26 MacArthur’s defense of the Philippines was catastrophic.27 He not only refused to heed Washington’s warnings but also, even after learning that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, rejected his air force commander’s plea to send the B-17 squadron to bomb Japan’s air base in Taiwan. Instead, waves of Japanese bombers flying from Taiwan destroyed twelve B-17 bombers and forty P-40 fighters at Clark Air Field north of Manila. MacArthur commanded 23,000 American and 125,000 Filipino troops and 108 tanks. The Japanese invaded north Luzon, the island where the capital is located, on December 22 and quickly routed the defenders. Within a week, the Japanese landed 129,435 troops and ninety tanks to drive on Manila. MacArthur abandoned Manila and withdrew his army to the Bataan Peninsula west across the bay while he established his headquarters on Corregidor Island in the bay. The soldiers scornfully dubbed MacArthur “Dugout Doug.” That was unfair since MacArthur had proven his courage leading from the front in World War I. Nonetheless, MacArthur is among America’s most controversial generals; he



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racked up as many devastating defeats as victories and was a notorious showboat and narcissist who grabbed all the credit for any successes and scapegoated others for any failures.28 He ensured that 109 of 142 communiqués issued by his headquarters between December and March lauded only himself.29 Fearing the capture of such a prominent (if inept) general, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to flee by patrol boat to Australia. MacArthur did so on March 11. After suffering twenty-­five thousand killed, twenty-­one thousand wounded, and tens of thousands of men sickened by malaria, General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered one hundred thousand troops on May 8. Japan quickly sent troops to occupy other important islands. Japan’s conquest cost only 11,225 casualties. The Japanese murdered as many as 18,650 American and Filipino prisoners while transporting them to prison camps and murdered thousands more in those camps. Roosevelt treated December 7’s incompetent commanders differently. Kimmel and Short received court-­martials, while MacArthur received a Medal of Honor and command of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific. Then, in Roosevelt’s worst strategic decision, he bowed to MacArthur’s pressure to let him attack across the southwest Pacific back to the Philippines while Admiral Chester Nimitz advanced across the central Pacific. Those twin-­front offensives essentially doubled the financial and human cost of defeating Japan. The sensible strategy would have been Nimitz’s island-­ hopping toward Japan while MacArthur, with minimal forces, blocked any further Japanese advances in the southwest Pacific. The navy blunted a Japanese offensive to sever the sea-­lanes between the United States and Australia. Admiral Frank Fletcher commanded the fleet of two carriers, eight cruisers, and fourteen destroyers that intercepted Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue’s two carriers, nine cruisers, and fifteen destroyers in the Coral Sea. During the battle from May 4 to May 8, the Japanese inflicted more damage, sinking a fleet carrier and destroyer while losing a light carrier and destroyer, and each lost around sixty-­nine planes. Strategically the Battle of the Coral Sea was an American victory because the Japanese never again attacked in that direction. The Pacific war’s turning point came during the Battle of Midway from June 4 to June 7.30 Admiral Nagumo’s fleet of four carriers, two battleships, two cruisers, and transports packed with several thousand troops sought to capture Midway Island. By then American cryptanalysts had cracked Japan’s naval code and learned the plan. Nimitz, among America’s most brilliant naval commanders, devised a daring plan to steam with three carriers and seven cruisers north and ambush Japan’s carriers after the pilots left to attack Midway.31 The Americans sank all four Japanese carriers and a cruiser, shot down 248 aircraft, and killed 3,057 Japanese sailors while losing a carrier, a destroyer, 150 aircraft, and 307 men killed.

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The Japanese launched an invasion of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on June 3 and eventually captured and held Kiska and Attu until August 15, when the Americans completed operations that recaptured them. Tokyo ordered the attack to forestall a possible American offensive from Alaska. The result was a sideshow that diverted American and Japanese forces from the decisive central Pacific front. MacArthur launched America’s first Pacific offensive when the 1st Marine Division captured Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands on August 7 and then fought off repeated Japanese attempts to recapture it until February 9, 1943.32 Admiral Robert Ghormley and General Millard Harmon were the respective naval and marine commanders. During that time, the Americans killed 19,200 Japanese soldiers, captured 1,000, sank two battleships and four cruisers, and shot down 687 planes while suffering 7,100 dead, 7,789 wounded, two carriers and eight cruisers sunk, and 615 planes shot down. Guadalcanal’s strategic importance was its proximity to Papua New Guinea, a densely jungled island split east–west by a mountain range, with Japanese troops north and American and Australian troops south. MacArthur’s battle for New Guinea and adjacent Admiralty, Bougainville, Hollandia, and New Britain islands began on January 23, 1942, and only ended with the war on August 15, 1945. The Americans and Australians suffered 12,291 and 7,000 respective dead while the Japanese lost 202,100, who mostly died from tropical diseases or starvation.33 The Americans and British had diametrically opposed strategies for Europe. Roosevelt and his military chiefs advocated an early landing in northern France and then a drive straight to Berlin. Churchill and his staff sought first to secure the Mediterranean Sea basin and then attack the Axis “soft underbelly” (as the prime minister put it) in Italy and the Balkans.34 As such, they followed their respective national traditions. The Americans recalled the campaigns of Winfield Scott in the Mexican War and Ulysses Grant in the Civil War that sought to destroy the largest enemy army defending the capital. The British recalled their strategy during the war against Napoleon of sweeping the seas of French shipping, capturing French colonies in the West and East Indies, and sending their largest army to the Iberian Peninsula rather than Flanders as other great powers battled the French in central Europe and eventually eastern France. Naturally, Stalin insisted on a “second front” in northern Europe as soon as possible to draw off strength from their desperate fight against the German Wehrmacht. Roosevelt and Churchill kept promising to do so but needed years to build up enough forces to win.35 Meanwhile, Roosevelt made a series of concessions on strategy to Churchill and his war staff.



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A disastrous British defeat decided the strategy. In North Africa, Erwin Rommel launched an offensive that captured thirty-­five thousand British troops at Tobruk on June 21, 1942, and then raced to the Egyptian border, where the British 8th Army managed to blunt them. Churchill asked for an American army to land in Morocco and Algeria before pushing east to link with the 8th Army fighting westward. Roosevelt and his Joint Chiefs agreed. Roosevelt acted on Marshall’s advice to tap Dwight Eisenhower to command the North African campaign. Eisenhower had never experienced combat.36 Instead, he had spent his career as a staff officer under various commanders including MacArthur and Marshall. He was renowned for his organizational and diplomatic skills, along with being a first-­rate bridge player. He was number one in his army staff college class. He grew slowly, unsteadily into his new role as commander, acting more like a committee chair. He was used to diligently serving those above him and following orders. Now crucial decisions were his alone. No one was more scathing of his leadership than Alan Brooke, Britain’s chief of staff: “Eisenhower as a general is hopeless! He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I am afraid, because he knows little if anything about military matters. . . . My opinion never changed . . . as regards his tactical ability or his powers of command. . . . Where he shone was in his ability to handle Allied forces, to treat them all with strict impartiality . . . by the charm of his personality.”37 Planning for the invasion, code-­named Torch, began on July 13.38 The 1st Army, commanded by British general Kenneth Anderson, included 107,000 troops split among three American-­led corps to land in pincers on beaches alongside key ports: Charles Ryder’s thirty-­nine-­thousand-­ man corps near Algiers; Lloyd Fredendall’s thirty-­three-­thousand-­man corps near Oran, Algeria; and George Patton’s thirty-­five-­thousand-­man corps near Casablanca, Port Lyautey, and Safi. From British ports, the corps of Ryder and Fredendall sailed aboard 500 transport ships escorted by 350 warships commanded by British admiral Andrew Cunningham. Patton’s corps came from Norfolk and Hampton Roads, Virginia, aboard a flotilla led by Admiral Henry Hewitt. Although the troops led by Patton and Fredendall were all Americans, Britons composed about half of Ryder’s troops. Tragically, Eisenhower assigned the American army’s most aggressive and imaginative general, Patton, the farthest away from the main German and Italian army. French forces numbered fifty-­five thousand in Morocco, fifty thousand in Algeria, and fifteen thousand in Tunisia. Ideally, secret diplomacy with their commanders in Algeria and Morocco would convince them to welcome the Americans as allies rather than resist them as enemies.39 British spies recruited General Henri Giraud with a promise to command French

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forces in North Africa, got him aboard a submarine off the French Riviera, and carried him to Gibraltar. American ambassador Robert Murphy in Algiers tried to convince French administrators and generals to switch sides. He succeeded with General Charles Mast. Eisenhower assigned his deputy, Mark Clark, an especially daring mission. On the night of October 22, Clark, with five American aides and four British commandoes, arrived off Cherchell, a town a few miles from Algiers, aboard a submarine and then paddled to shore in rubber boats. There Clark met Mast and won his promise to do whatever he could to aid the pending invasion and accept Giraud as the French commander. The corps landed at their beaches at first light on November 8. The surf was especially rough on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, leaving the men seasick as they stumbled ashore. The French fought the invaders at each landing but eventually fell back. Over the next week, the Allies battled their way into each port. Murphy convinced Jean Darlan, Vichy’s general in chief, to surrender on November 16, for governing North Africa. In all, the Americans and British respectively suffered 526 and 574 dead and together 756 wounded, while killing 1,346 French and wounding 1,997. The Allies lost an escort carrier and six troopships while sinking one French light cruiser, five destroyers, and six submarines, along with eight German and two Italian submarines. On hearing of the American invasion and Darlan’s capitulation, Hitler ordered divisions to overrun and secure Vichy France and begin fortifying the Mediterranean coast. Darlan pleaded with French admiral Jean de Laborde to steam with his fleet to North Africa. Instead, Laborde ordered his captains to scuttle seventy-­seven warships, including three battleships, seven cruisers, and thirty-­two destroyers, to prevent the Germans from seizing them. Hitler sent eleven thousand reinforcements, the first of over one hundred thousand, and eventually 850 warplanes to Tunisia with Walther Nehring in command. That invasion against a second-­rate army was an excellent opportunity to learn lessons for the far tougher landings that lay ahead. Historian Rick Atkinson identifies America’s North Africa campaign as “a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to act as a great power—militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically. Along with Stalingrad and Midway, North Africa is where the Axis forever lost the initiative in World War II. It is where Great Britain slipped into the role of junior partner in the Anglo-­American alliance, and where the United States first emerged as the dominant force it would remain into the next millennium.”40 Meanwhile, Bernard Montgomery’s 8th Army launched a series of attacks against Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein from October 23 to November 11, 1942.41 Eventually the sheer weight of the 8th Army’s



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195,000 troops and 1,029 tanks routed Afrika Korps’ 116,000 troops and 547 tanks, inflicting 35,000 dead, wounded, and captured, and around 500 destroyed tanks, while suffering 13,560 casualties and as many tanks lost. Montgomery’s advance after El Alamein was plodding; the 8th Army did not capture Tripoli until January 22. That allowed Rommel to fortify the Mareth Line manned by 80,000 troops near the Tunisian-­Libyan frontier, with his rear protected by Hans-­Jurgen von Arnim’s 110,000 troops. After securing Morocco and Algeria, the campaign’s next phase was to turn east and overrun Tunisia. The 1st Army advanced on three parallel roads, one along the coast and two inland. The campaign’s spearhead began at Algiers on the 560 miles of bad road leading to Tunis. American troops elsewhere in Algeria and Morocco were shipped to Algiers and eventually other ports eastward as they were captured. Nehring deployed his army along escarpments from the coast forty miles west of Bizerte and from there a hundred miles south to the Sahara. Truck and fuel shortages and winter rains slowed the Allied offensive. Even worse, German panzer Mark IIIs and Mark IVs with their respective 50-­millimeter and long 75-­millimeter cannons, and even more recently developed Mark V “Panthers” and Mark VI “Tigers” with their long 75-­millimeter and 88-­millimeter cannons outgunned the American Stuarts and Grants with their 37-­millimeter and short 75-­millimeter cannons. In the spring, the Americans began deploying Shermans with a faster speed and longer range than the Grants and a short 75-­millimeter cannon in a full rather than half revolving turret, and yet they were just as outgunned. German 88-­millimeter cannons dug in on heights decimated advancing Allied tanks and trucks with armor-­piercing shells, and troops with high-­explosive shells. The Americans struggled to coordinate attacks by infantry, tanks, and warplanes against the enemy, tactics the Germans had perfected, and tended to assault positions head-­on rather than outflanking them. German counterattacks trounced the Allies with double envelopments at Tebourba on December 1 to 3, Medjez-­el-­Bab on December 6 to 10, Longstop Hill on December 22 to 26, and Oueslatia on January 18 to 23. Arnim won all but the first of these victories, having replaced Nehring on December 8. Those defeats forced Anderson onto the defensive and a slow buildup of troops and supplies. Atop humiliating defeats, the Americans had to endure sneering British condescension. Colonel Harold Macmillan’s remarks were typical: “You will find the Americans much as the Greeks did the Romans—great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt.”42 General Harold Alexander lamented “the poor fighting value of the Americans. They simply do not know their job as soldiers and this is the case from the highest

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to the lowest. . . . Perhaps the weakest link . . . is the junior officer who . . . does not lead, with the result that their men will not fight.”43 Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff met at Casablanca from January 12 to January 23, 1943. Two crucial decisions emerged from the conference, one on strategy, the other on surrender terms. Marshall, Eisenhower, and King were the highest-­ranking Americans. Eisenhower poorly delivered an account of operations from the November landings to the present with possible future offensives. After he left the room, the British seized the initiative. Churchill pressured Roosevelt to agree first to clear the Mediterranean basin of Axis forces before considering a landing in northern France and then turned to Brooke to promote his plan for a series of campaigns beginning with Sicily. During a break, Marshall huddled with his staff to deplore the British obsession with frittering away Allied power in strategic sideshows and dead ends when victory was possible only after conquering Berlin. They proposed a compromise whereby they captured Sicily but deferred on invading Italy or elsewhere in the Mediterranean for now until they better understood the deployment of Axis forces. The British grudgingly agreed. Later, Roosevelt and Churchill appeared before reporters, and the president announced, “The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan. It does not mean the destruction of the population . . . but it does mean the conquest of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and subjugation of other people.”44 Anderson ordered Fredendall’s II Corps to launch an offensive on January 30 with the objective Sfax a hundred miles away on the coast. Arnim’s troops blunted that offensive at Faid Pass and Maknassy and then counterattacked and punched it back by February 2. Rommel and Arnim then planned a joint attack against Anderson. The assault came on February with hammer blows along the line. German and Italians troops drove back Allied troops in the north and center ten and twenty miles, respectively. The most decisive thrust was by Rommel’s twenty-­two thousand troops against Fredendall’s thirty thousand troops, first at Sidi Bou Zid and then farther northwest at the Kasserine Pass, where double envelopments by the 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions routed II Corps. By February 24, the Americans had retreated eighty-­five miles to the Algerian border. In all, the Americans suffered 3,300 dead and 4,026 captured, along with 183 destroyed or captured tanks, 208 cannons, and 616 vehicles while the German lost 989 killed, 608 captured, and 20 tanks, 67 vehicles, and 14 cannons destroyed.45 Those defeats led to a leader shakeup as Harold Alexander took command of both Anderson’s 1st and Montgomery’s 8th



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Army and Eisenhower replaced Fredendall with Patton. Rommel suffered an array of health problems, so Hitler withdrew him to a German hospital and replaced him with Giovanni Messe. On the Mareth Line, Montgomery built up the 8th Army to over two hundred thousand troops and 743 tanks to Messe’s eighty-­five thousand troops and 142 tanks. He launched a series of flanking attacks from March 16 to 28 that eventually forced Messe to withdraw to another defensive line thirty miles north. The 8th Army inflicted nine thousand casualties and suffered four thousand.46 Patton was America’s most brilliant World War II army commander of first the 7th Army in Sicily and then the 3rd Army from Normandy to Czechoslovakia.47 He excelled at a war of rapid movements, seeking continuously to circle and destroy the enemy. He masked insecurities with flamboyance, profanity, and boasts. Many of his troops and officers hated him for being a martinet, bitterly quipping, “his glory and our guts.” Yet he exemplified this claim: “I am a soldier, I fight where I am told and I win where I fight.”48 On taking command of II Corps on March 6, Patton pressed Alexander to let him punch east to capture Sfax and cut off Afrika Korps before Messe withdrew to join Arnim for a last stand around Tunis and Bizerte. Alexander ordered him to keep two new green divisions in reserve and support John Crocker’s 9th Corps against Fondouk north and Montgomery southeast against the Mareth Line. Patton saw a chance to hit the Germans in the flank at Gafsa. On March 17, the 1st Division, led by Colonel William Darby’s ranger battalion, captured Gafsa and then advanced seventy-­five miles to El Guettar, where they repelled attacks by the 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions on March 23 and 30. Meanwhile, 1st Armored captured Sened and then Maknassy just twenty miles from the coast road. During that campaign, the American inflicted six thousand casualties and knocked out thirty-­seven tanks while suffering five thousand casualties and twenty-­two lost tanks.49 Messe withdrew Afrika Korps to the Tunis-­ Bizerte perimeter, and the 8th Army pushed up the coast road in pursuit. The Germans repelled Crocker’s initial attacks on Fondouk until Messe was safely past by April 10, when they abandoned it and withdrew to the perimeter. Patton was preparing his campaign’s second phase when on April 22 Eisenhower recalled him to command the 7th Army and plan the invasion of Sicily. Alexander’s plan for the offensive against the Tunis-­Bizerte salient once again had the Americans support British attacks, even though they now numbered 60 percent of the Allied army. He shifted II Corps, now commanded by Omar Bradley, north to capture Bizerte while the 8th Army pushed toward Tunis. Command of the air was critical to the ground offensive. Allied warplanes destroyed 432 enemy aircraft while losing only

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35 during the campaign’s last three weeks. The Allies fought their way into both cities by May 8, and Arnim and Messe surrendered on May 13. In all, the Allies captured 238,243 unwounded and 40,000 wounded prisoners, while 8,500 Germans and 3,700 Italians died during the campaign; German killed, wounded, and captured totaled 166,000. The 1st and 8th Armies suffered seventy thousand casualties during the six-­month campaign from the landings on November 8 to the capitulation on May 13.50 Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff met in Washington from May 12 to May 25, 1943. Each side got a firm commitment from the other on a cherished goal. The Americans reconfirmed a previous understanding that the Allies would next invade Sicily, code-­named Husky. The British reluctantly agreed to an Allied invasion of northern France on May 1, 1944. For Sicily, the British tried to relegate the Americans to a supporting role as they had in Tunisia.51 Eisenhower and Patton had proposed simultaneous landings of the 7th Army near Palermo and 8th Army near Syracuse to converge at Messina. The senior army, navy, and air force commanders in the Mediterranean were all British—respectively, Alexander, Cunningham, and Arthur Tedder. They, along with Montgomery, criticized that plan for dispersing Allied strength and instead insisted that the 8th Army land near Syracuse and drive north along the coast toward Messina while the 7th Army landed westward to protect that flank, with both under Alexander’s command. In their respective landing zones, 8th Army would enjoy the deepwater port of Syracuse while 7th Army had nothing more than fishing villages. The 7th Army would face three formidable, veteran German divisions, the Herman Goring, 15th Panzer Grenadier, and 29th Panzer Grenadier Divisions commanded by Hans Hube, while the 8th Army fought mostly Italians. No thought was given to landing the 8th Army at Messina and Reggio on either side of the straits to cut off the enemy retreat. Typically, Eisenhower gave in to the British. Like many World War II generals who had fought in World War I’s trenches, Montgomery was obsessed with fighting attrition battles that he might win only after massing overwhelming numbers of troops, munitions, tanks, artillery, and supplies. His 8th Army defeated Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein with a two-­to-­one advantage, although even that took more than two weeks. With victory, he preferred regrouping his forces rather than urging them forward to annihilate the enemy’s remnants. He was pompous, vain, boastful, theatrical, and petty, and he despised Americans. Churchill described him as “indomitable in retreat, invincible in advance, insufferable in victory.”52 The 7th and 8th Armies each had about eighty thousand troops, respectively split among three and four divisions. They faced two hundred



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thousand Italian and thirty-­two thousand German troops and 159 German tanks, with Italian Alfredo Guzzoni in overall command and Hube commanding the German forces; thirty thousand German reinforcements reached Sicily during the campaign. The Italian navy posed little threat to the Allies with its six battleships and eleven cruisers split between Taranto and La Spezia, anchored for want of fuel. The Italian air force had obsolete planes that lacked skilled pilots and fuel for a sustained offensive. Allied fighter planes and antiaircraft guns had shot down more than 2,200 Italian planes over the previous year. During the two months before the invasion, Allied fighter planes shot down 323 German and 105 Italian aircraft over Sicily while losing 250 planes. The Americans learned vital lessons from the 1942 landings at Guadalcanal and North Africa. The most important was designing a landing craft with much greater capacity that could get much closer to the beaches. The result was the shallow-­draft Landing Ship, Tank (LST) that could lower its hinged front ramp down, from which troops, tanks, vehicles, and supplies were disgorged, and then back away, turn, and return to large ships for another load. British intelligence concocted a fake 12th Army to attack the Balkans and dumped a body dressed as a British marine major with an attaché case handcuffed to his wrist on a Spanish beach; the hope was that Spanish officials would read the documents for that fake landing and send word to Rome and Berlin. Astonishingly, that happened. Meanwhile, a propaganda bombardment preceded the invasion, eight million leaflets around Italy urging the troops and civilians to abandon Mussolini and Hitler and instead join the Allies. The American 82nd Airborne led by Matthew Ridgway and the British 1st Airborne Brigade respectively dropped behind the American and British beaches during the night of July 9. The armadas departed from an array of North African ports. The warships and waves of warplanes bombarded enemy positions ashore. The 8th Army landed on a thirty-­ five-­mile stretch along the southeastern shore between Pachino at Cape Passero and the large port of Syracuse. Hewitt commanded the armada that carried Patton’s army to the beaches of southern Sicily, a forty-­five-­ mile stretch between the fishing villages of Licata and Scoglitti. The troops packed into landing craft and began wading ashore after dawn on July 10. Darby’s 1st Ranger Battalion landed near Gela and secured that small port. Casualties for seaborne troops that landed on beaches were relatively light, but airborne troops suffered terribly. About half the 150 gliders bearing British troops crashed into the sea or the ground, killing or injuring hundreds of men. Even more tragically, naval gunners mistook the squadrons of C-47 planes bearing American paratroopers for German bombers and shot down twenty-­three and damaged thirty-­seven others.

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During that operation, the 82nd Airborne lost 1,400 of its 5,300 men, mostly from “friendly fire.” With new weapons, the Americans narrowed the German edge in tanks and artillery. The main battle tank, the Sherman with a short 75-­millimeter cannon, was nearly as deadly as the German Mark IV and Mark V with a long 75-­millimeter cannon, and had a longer cruising range and better transmission, although outgunned by Mark V Panthers and Mark VI Tigers with their 88-­millimeter cannons. The 155-millimeter Long Tom field cannon shot a deadlier shell farther as accurately as German 88-­millimeter cannons, although its large size made it harder to transport and easier to spot and hit. Under Patton’s leadership, the 7th Army pushed north and west while Montgomery typically consolidated 8th Army’s positions and supplies. The 7th Army captured Palermo on July 22, the northwestern ports of Trapani and Marsala on July 23, and Santo Stefano on the northern coast midway between Palermo and Messina, along with Cerami eight miles inland, on July 31. The 8th Army battered its way no farther than Catania and the Etna Line south of the volcano by July 31. Meanwhile, Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs made their latest critical decision. The next logical Allied operation would have secured lightly defended Sardinia and Corsica. Bombers and fighters from air bases on those islands would have dominated the western Mediterranean. Troops, warships, and transports from those islands’ ports could have sailed to beaches along the French and Italian coasts, where German and Italian troops were stretched thin to defend. The actual invasion would be in southern France to push north and link with an Allied army that landed in Normandy. Eventually that happened, but only after the Allies were nearly a year into a strategically disastrous campaign. Once again, Roosevelt and his Joint Chiefs succumbed to pressure by Churchill and his Joint Chiefs, this time to invade Italy’s foot and fight their way 850 miles north to dead-­end at the Swiss Alps. The British argued that doing so might provoke an Italian civil war and even a coup against Mussolini. That actually soon happened but did little to alleviate what became an Italian quagmire.53 The Fascist Grand Council summoned and fired Mussolini on July 24. Il Duce had steadily lost his legitimacy in his fellow Fascists’ eyes as he led Italy into a series of worsening catastrophes, with the latest the mass surrender in Tunisia and the pending Allied conquest of Sicily. Victor Emmanuel III summoned Mussolini to meet him at the royal palace on July 25. With Chief of Staff Pietro Badoglio beside him, the king informed Mussolini that the general would replace him as prime minister while he would be taken under guard for a much-­needed rest at the Hotel Imperatore at Gran Sasso in the central Apennine Mountains.54



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Patton raced and Montgomery plodded to capture Messina. Twice when German forces blocked the coast road, Patton outflanked them by seaborne troops that landed in their rear. The battle for Troina against the 15th Panzer Grenadier on the inland road lasted six days before the Americans took it on August 6. Troops of the 7th Army reached Messina on August 16, and Patton and an honor guard greeted Montgomery when he and his staff arrived the next day. The Americans suffered 2,237 dead, 5,946 wounded, 589 missing, and 13,000 hospitalized for illnesses, and the British 2,271 dead, 7,137 wounded, and 2,644 missing. The Germans lost 4,323 killed, 4,583 missing, 5,532 captured, and 13,500 wounded, and the Italians 4,678 killed, 36,072 missing, 32,500 wounded, and 116,681 captured. Montgomery’s failure to take Messina a week or so earlier let remnants of the German Herman Goring, 15th Panzer Grenadier, and 29th Panzer Grenadier Divisions escape to mainland Italy, where they were rebuilt to bloody the Allied advance up the peninsula. Patton’s triumph was fleeting. Word reached Eisenhower that he had slapped two soldiers suffering combat fatigue that he accused of malingering in field hospitals. Eisenhower agonized over what to do. He recognized that “in any army one-­third of the soldiers are natural fighters and brave. Two-­thirds inherently are cowards and skulkers. By making the two-­thirds fear possible public upbraiding such as Patton gave during the campaign, the skulkers are forced to fight.”55 That in turn would save American lives, inflict more enemy casualties, and thus help shorten the war. But, as usual, Eisenhower put politics first, fearing the impact on public opinion if a general got away with slapping soldiers. He forced Patton to publicly apologize for the incidents and later elevated Bradley over him to command the American 1st Army that would invade France. The Allies launched several landings and then a massive invasion in southern Italy.56 Montgomery sent a division to occupy Reggio at Italy’s toe on September 3. Had he done so a month earlier, he would have blocked the Axis escape from Sicily and bagged tens of thousands more enemy soldiers. He landed a division at Pizzo sixty-­five miles north up the coast on September 7. Those advances encountered few enemy soldiers, which fled north. That same day, Clark’s American 5th Army landed at Salerno. Clark was an unimaginative, indecisive, acerbic commander who, like Montgomery, preferred campaigns of attrition rather than maneuver.57 German forces immediately converged to block a breakout. Six weeks earlier, on July 25, Victor Emmanuel had sacked Mussolini and made Chief of Staff Pietro Badoglio his prime minister. Had he then radio-­broadcasted a declaration of Italy’s neutrality, demanded that German troops leave Italy, and ordered Italian troops to resist any invaders, he would have spared Italy vast subsequent death and destruction. That action would have also shortened the war. The half million Allied troops

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backed by tens of thousands of vehicles, thousands of planes, hundreds of ships, and millions of tons of supplies would have been diverted to the French Rivera for a landing several months before Normandy. Those two pincers could have crushed German resistance in the west by late 1944 and then raced to take Berlin months before the Soviets actually took it. Tragically, that did not happen. The king and prime minister dithered as Hitler massively reinforced existing German troops in Italy. Badoglio did have envoys in Vatican City, Madrid, and Lisbon inform American and British diplomats that Italy might leave the war. On August 19, he sent Giuseppe Castellano to Lisbon to meet Beetle Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, and offer to join the Allies if they landed an army at the port of Civitavecchia forty-­five miles northwest of Rome to secure the capital. Smith gave Castellano a secret radio transmitter and code to take back to Rome for direct talks with Eisenhower’s headquarters at Algiers. Eisenhower and Alexander rejected Castellano’s request, citing their immediate lack of supply, sea, air, and troop power to do so. Instead, they offered to drop the 82nd Airborne Division outside Rome to fight with the Italians against the Germans. Badoglio said that would not be enough to survive counterattacks by thirty-­six thousand German troops deployed near Rome. On September 7, Eisenhower sent Maxwell Taylor and an aide to Rome to secretly negotiate with Badoglio, who again rejected any landing by the 82nd Airborne. Eisenhower scrubbed that mission just before takeover on September 8. That same day, Badoglio broadcast a declaration of Italy’s surrender but did not order German troops to leave or Italian military commanders to resist if they did not. Instead, Hitler ordered the German army, commanded by Albert Kesselring, to disarm the Italian army, which mostly passively surrendered, and send the troops to Third Reich labor camps. Victor Emmanuel, Badoglio, and their staffs and families fled first to Pescara on the Adriatic and then by ship to the port of Brindisi in Italy’s heel that British troops had secured. On September 12, a German commando team led by Colonel Otto Skorzeny flew in light planes to Gran Sasso, rescued Mussolini, and brought him north to safety. Meanwhile, Germany’s 10th Army, led by Heinrich von Vietinghoff, counterattacked the 5th Army at Salerno. After a week of intense fighting, the Germans withdrew on September 18. Meanwhile, Montgomery landed the rest of the 8th Army at Taranto that combined with divisions coming from Italy’s toe. The Allies pushed north, with 8th Army east and 5th Army west of the Apennine Mountains. That advance stalled in early October at a German line behind the Volturno River west of the Apennines to the Gargano Peninsula east of the mountains. The 5th and 8th Armies eventually enjoyed the deepwater ports of Naples, Taranto,



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Brindisi, and Bari after the weeks it took engineers to clear them of mines and scuttled ships. From the air base near Foggia, B-17s and Liberators flew long-­range bombing missions in an arc against targets in Italy and the Balkans. In early November, the 5th Army battered its way through the Volturno Line, but the Germans merely withdrew to the Gustav Line centered at Cassino twenty miles north that extended across the peninsula to Ortona. There the Italian ground war stalemated for the next half year as about three hundred thousand Germans pinned down twice as many Allied troops. That represented an enormous Axis victory and Allied loss. Eisenhower and Montgomery departed for England to begin planning the Normandy invasion with Bradley. Alexander commanded the Mediterranean front and tapped Richard McCreery to head 8th Army on October 1. American military personnel were split nearly equally between the enemies by December 31, 1943, with 1,810,367 against Germany and 1,817,152 against Japan.58 Historian Rick Atkinson tallied America’s stunning war production in 1943 alone “that included 86,000 planes, compared with 2,000 in 1939. Also, 45,000 tanks, 98,000 bazookas, a million miles of communication wire, 18,000 ships and craft, 648,000 trucks, nearly 6 million rifles, 26,000 mortars, and 61 million pairs of wool socks. Each day another 71 million rounds of small-­arms ammo spilled from U.S. munitions plants.”59 Mobilizing all those troops, weapons, and supplies was challenging enough. Getting them to distant fronts and allies through submarine-­ infested seas was the navy’s duty. Germany’s submarine fleet was highly destructive, although ultimately it failed. The Battle of the Atlantic lasted throughout the war. In all, German submarines sank 14.5 million tons of Allied merchant and war ships. Allied warships and planes eventually sank 781 of 1,100 German submarines and killed around thirty-­three thousand of the forty thousand crew.60 With time, the Americans and British became more effective at finding and sinking submarines. Deploying protective ship convoys, coordinating air and sea power, and developing sonar and cracking Germany’s Enigma military code were critical to that transformation by late 1943. Nimitz launched his island-­hopping offensive through the central Pacific against the tiny but strategically sited islands of Tarawa and Makin. Raymond Spruance and Holland Smith were the respective naval and marine commanders against Tarawa. Eighteen thousand marines landed on November 20, 1943, and wiped out the last defenders three days later, killing 4,690 Japanese and capturing only 17, while suffering 1,049 dead and 2,101 wounded. Richard Turner and Ralph Smith were the respective naval and army commanders against Makin. Six thousand five hundred

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soldiers landed on November 20 and took four days to kill 395 defenders and capture 17 while suffering 763 dead, 185 wounded, and a sunk escort carrier. The next step was assaults by 46,670 marines and soldiers against Kwajalein and Roi Namur islands that began on January 4, 1944, and ended on February 3. The Americans killed 4,300 and captured 166 of Kwajalein’s defenders at the cost of 142 dead and 845 wounded and killed 3,500 and captured 87 of Roi Namur’s defenders while suffering 206 dead and 617 wounded. A series of bombing and fighter attacks against Truk Island, Japan’s regional headquarters, on February 17 and 18 destroyed around 250 aircraft, sank 15 war and support ships, and killed around 2,500 troops while suffering around twenty-­five lost planes. The next lunge was longer, all the way to Saipan Island, 1,459 miles from Tokyo, well within a B-29’s round-­trip fuel range.61 Smith commanded the seventy-­one thousand marines and soldiers whose first wave hit the beach on June 15 against twenty-­nine thousand Japanese troops commanded by Yoshitsugu Saito. The Americans wiped out the last resistance on July 9, killing around 24,000 Japanese as 5,000 committed suicide, while suffering 3,426 dead and 10,301 wounded; of 25,000 Japanese civilians, 22,000 died in the fighting and 1,000 committed suicide. Jisaburo Ozawa led a fleet of three carriers, six light carriers, five battleships, and eleven cruisers to Saipan’s relief. Spruance headed him off with seven carriers, eight light carriers, seven battleships, and eight cruisers in the Battle of the Philippine Sea on June 19 and 20. The Americans sank two carriers and a light carrier and destroyed 645 warplanes while losing only 29 warplanes. The first wave of eventually 41,314 marines landed on Tinian defended by 8,038 Japanese on July 24; the last resistance ended on August 1, with all soldiers dead except 252 captured, along with around 4,000 Japanese civilians dead, many from suicide, while the Americans suffered 326 dead and 1,593 wounded. On both islands, engineers constructed airfields and facilities for B-29 Superfortresses. The next stepping-­stone was Peleliu, defended initially by 10,900 Japanese troops, that the 1st Marine Division invaded on September 15, 1944. The marines, reinforced by the 61st Army Division, did not eliminate the last resistance until November 27. During that time, the 47,561 American troops killed around 14,000 Japanese and captured 400 while suffering 9,594 killed and wounded. As MacArthur had fled the Philippines on March 11, 1942, he promised, “I shall return.” He fulfilled that vow on October 20, 1944, when his 6th Army, commanded by Walter Krueger, invaded Leyte in the archipelago’s southern realm. Around 250,000 troops commanded by Tomoyuki Yamashita initially defended the Philippines, eventually receiving 100,000 reinforcements. After securing Leyte, the Americans invaded Mindoro Island on December 15, and Luzon, where Manila was sited, on January 9,



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1945. Robert Eichelberger’s 8th Army joined Krueger’s 6th Army, bringing over half a million troops against the Japanese. The fighting lasted until Japan’s government surrendered on August 15, 1945. The Philippines campaign cost 336,352 Japanese and 13,982 American lives, while 12,523 Japanese surrendered and 48,541 Americans were wounded.62 What was decisive about the Philippines was the naval battle of Leyte Gulf that raged from October 23 to October 26, the largest in history.63 Three main fleets under William Halsey, Thomas Kinkaid, and Clifton Sprague included 8 carriers, 8 light carriers, 18 escort carriers, 12 battleships, 24 cruisers, and 166 destroyers and were deployed in different directions to screen the invasion. The Japanese sought to fight through the American fleet and attack the invaders with three fleets that among them included 1 carrier, 3 light carriers, 7 battleships, 19 cruisers, and 35 destroyers. The Americans eventually sank one carrier, three light carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers, and eleven destroyers and shot down 350 planes while losing one light carrier, two escort carriers, two destroyers, and 255 planes. That battle eliminated most of Japan’s remaining warships. America’s war against Japan depended on keeping Chiang Kai-­shek’s regime at Chungking in the fight. Over a million Japanese troops occupied much of eastern and central China, and Washington wanted them to stay there. The Nationalist Chinese army also numbered about a million troops, but most were poorly equipped, trained, and motivated. Chiang’s Nationalist Party regime was notoriously corrupt, inept, and brutal. In contrast, Mao Zedong’s communist regime at Yanan steadily expanded its guerrilla war against the Japanese in northern China. In February 1942, Roosevelt sent “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell to Chungking to ensure that American military and economic aid was efficiently used and that the Chinese army battled the Japanese. Stillwell oversaw the training of two divisions and then deployed them against the Japanese in northern Burma to reopen the supply line to British India. The Japanese eventually repelled Stillwell’s offensive from August to November 1943. In October 1944, Roosevelt replaced Stillwell with Albert Wedemeyer, but the new commander was no more successful in cutting corruption and boosting the Chinese army’s military prowess. Chiang undercut Wedemeyer’s efforts to forge relations with Mao and coordinate offensives by the Nationalist and Communist armies against the Japanese. In Italy, Clark, the 5th Army commander, did not conceive of trying to envelop the Germans with a seaborne landing until mid-­December 1943, four blood-­soaked months after his initial invasion at Salerno. He originally imagined landing one division near Anzio forty miles southwest of Rome but earmarked the five-­division VI Corps of forty-­seven thousand troops

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after planners explained that German forces would converge and destroy only one division. Indeed, they nearly wiped out the five divisions that began landing on January 22, 1944. Meanwhile, the 5th Army launched an offensive at the Gustav Line’s Rapido River and Monte Cassino front to link with Anzio, but the Germans repelled it with heavy losses.64 Tragically, VI Corp’s commander, John Lucas, was a plodder like Clark and Montgomery. Rather than race eastward and cut off the German retreat on parallel north–south two-­lane Highways 6 and 7, Lucas dithered indecisively on the beach as supplies and troops massed in a huge target. Kesselring had eight German divisions converge on the beachhead and attack it in between artillery barrages and bombing raids. As in previous campaigns, Colonel William Darby’s ranger battalion took key positions that threw off German attacks. Clark admitted to Alexander that Kesselring was a superior general: “He is quicker than we are, quicker at re-­grouping his forces, quicker at thinning out a defensive front to provide troops to close gaps at decisive points . . . quicker at reaching decisions on the battlefield. By comparison, our methods are often slow and cumbersome.”65 It is a commander’s duty to change that difference in one’s favor after recognizing it. Clark merely complained about Kesselring’s brilliance rather than trying to emulate it, let alone surpass it. Typically, no one explained Anzio and the entire Italian campaign better than Churchill: “We hoped to land a wildcat that would tear out the bowels of the Bosche. Instead, we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.” The stalemate at the Monte Cassino line between the sea and the Apennines was just as prolonged and even bloodier. From January to mid-­ May, 140,000 Germans repeatedly repulsed attacks by 240,000 5th and 8th Army troops, inflicting fifty-­five thousand casualties while suffering twenty thousand. Meanwhile, at Anzio, Clark replaced Lucas with Lucian Truscott on February 17. Unlike Lucas, Truscott was a bold, imaginative, decisive tactician and strategist adept at commanding both armor and infantry. Nonetheless, he inherited a demoralized corps trapped in a killing zone by enemy dug in on high ground. It took Truscott three months to rebuild the corps and prepare an offensive to begin whenever Clark cracked the Monte Cassino line. After three previous failures by other troops, the II Polish Corps captured Monte Cassino on May 17, forcing the Germans to withdraw to the sea-­to-­mountain Caesar Line centered twenty-­five miles south of Rome. On May 23, Truscott’s VI Corps crushed the German line’s center and then, over the next two days, staved off counterattacks on either flank, double-­enveloped the fleeing enemy, and pushed northeast toward Highway 6 to cut off the main German army’s retreat. Instead, Clark ordered him to head north up Highway 7 toward Rome, a political rather than military objective. Clark was determined



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to beat Oliver Leese, who now commanded the 8th Army, into Italy’s capital. Truscott reluctantly obeyed. Most Germans evaded the converging enemy forces by sidestepping Rome to the east while leaving behind enough troops to delay both enemy advances. The 5th Army reunited before Rome, and advance units entered the capital on June 4. Kesselring withdrew his battered army to the latest prepared sea-­to-­mountain line, this one across southern Tuscany and Umbria. For security reasons, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) periodically changed locations but stayed longest in London and at Southwick House near Portsmouth. What never ended was the debate between the top American and British generals over the best strategy to defeat Germany. Eisenhower and his staff favored a broad-­front strategy with two key thrusts toward the industrial Ruhr and Saar valleys that would stretch the German army to the breaking point. Montgomery and his staff insisted on one powerful British-­led thrust toward the Ruhr. Despite their differences, Eisenhower charged Montgomery with planning the Normandy invasion, code-­named Overlord. Two armies, the American 1st and British 2nd, commanded respectively by Omar Bradley and Miles Dempsey, would land side by side along a fifty-­mile stretch of Normandy’s coast. Five infantry divisions, two airborne divisions, and an airborne brigade would spearhead the invasion on the first day scheduled for June 6. It would take weeks for each army’s other divisions to come ashore and reach the advancing front line. Canadian divisions would eventually be concentrated under the 1st Canadian Army led by Harry Crerar. Eventually, Patton’s 3rd Army would follow but would not become operational in France until August 1. When the four armies were on the continent, they would be split between Montgomery commanding the 21st Army Group of the 2nd British and 1st Canadian Armies and Bradley commanding the 12th Army Group of the 1st and 3rd American Armies, with Eisenhower in overall command.66 The “Westwall” was the German coastal defense network of mines, barbed-­wire rolls, and fortifications. Germany’s top commanders sharply disagreed on how best to defend that front. Gerd von Rundstedt, in overall command, wanted to keep armored divisions in reserve to converge on any landing. Rommel, who commanded the coast from the Loire River to Calais, advocated dispersing armor with infantry on the beaches to immediately overwhelm any enemy assault. Two armies guarded that front, the 15th and 7th, respectively, in the Calais and Normandy sectors, with five hundred thousand troops between them, along with 6.5 million mines at sea and on the beach, five hundred thousand foreshore obstructions, and twenty thousand concrete bunkers and pillboxes. Hitler backed Rundstedt, who in Normandy kept the 12th and 21st Panzer Divisions a

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dozen miles inland. German intelligence knew of all three Allied armies and the vast armada they would embark, but not when or where they would land. In the weeks preceding the invasion, Allied bombers decimated bridges, supply depots, train stations, the two panzer divisions, and 120 radar stations at forty-­seven sites across Normandy. The night before D-­Day, 1,350 B-17s and B-24 Liberators pounded positions along and beyond the landing beaches; a later assessment found that only 2 percent of the bombs landed within the enemy zone, and virtually none hit an enemy position. Following the bombers were twenty-­thousand paratroopers and glider-­ troopers dropped at zones protecting the invasion’s flanks. The 6th British Airborne Brigade landed east of the Orne River that edged the eastern landing beach, while the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions landed west and south of the western landing beach. After sunset on June 5, the armada sailed from Portsmouth, Plymouth, and half a dozen other ports, with 130,000 troops, 2,000 tanks, 12,000 vehicles, and hundreds of tons of supplies. Preceding the armada were 255 minesweepers to clear paths to the five separate landing zones. From west to east, the beaches and divisions included Utah with one American, Omaha with two American, Gold with one British, Juno with one Canadian, and Sword with one British. As the armada steamed within a dozen miles of shore, the eight hundred cannons aboard the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers opened fire with eventually 140,000 shells at the beaches; like the bombers, the warships hit few enemy positions. The Americans and British clamored gingerly down rope nets from transport ships to landing craft eleven and seven miles, respectively, from shore. The first assault wave included thirty thousand troops along with tanks, vehicles, and supplies packed in a thousand landing craft, with twenty thousand troops to follow in the second wave. German resistance was fiercest at Omaha Beach, where increasing numbers of Americans huddled amid ever more dead comrades at the dunes most of the day. The troops on the other beaches eventually broke through the enemy positions and secured perimeters several hundred yards inland. None reached that day’s objectives a few miles from shore. Over a thousand fighter planes dominated the skies above the beaches and far inland to pounce on any German bombers or fighters, but only a few appeared to get shot down. That first day, the Americans suffered 6,603 casualties, the British 2,700, and the Canadians 946. Over the next six weeks, the Germans exploited a particular feature of Normandy’s countryside: bocage, or earthen ridges topped by thick hedges that separated farms. The Germans fought fiercely for each hedgerow and, when overwhelmed, withdrew to the next. Tanks were useless in that terrain until several weeks later when engineers began



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welding serrated steel to the front that tore through the hedges. Rundstedt reinforced the 7th Army by ordering the 5th Panzer Army’s divisions deployed in southern and central France to converge on Normandy. Hitler refused to approve sending any reinforcements from 15th Army, believing that the Normandy landing was a diversion from the pending main landing by Patton’s 3rd Army at Calais. The 1st American and 2nd British Armies slowly fought their way inland, daily reinforced with more troops, tanks, vehicles, and supplies landing on the beaches behind them. Facilitating that flow were two artificial harbors, code-­named Mulberry A and B, one for each army, which had been towed across the English Channel and anchored offshore. On June 21, a storm destroyed Mulberry A, the American harbor, and damaged Mulberry B, sharply curtailing the supply flow. Waves of heavy bombers daily blasted German positions while mostly P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-­bombers sought mobile tank, transport, train, or troop targets, and mostly American P-51 Mustang and British Spitfire fighters prowled the skies for enemy aircraft. Two Spitfires strafed Rommel’s car and severely wounded him near his headquarters at La Roche-­Guyon on July 17. The 1st Army captured Cherbourg on June 22, but engineers would spend two months clearing the harbor of mines and scuttled ships before troops and supplies could begin unloading there. The 1st Army captured Saint Lo on July 19 and the 2nd Army Caen on August 6, respectively twenty-­eight and eight miles from the beaches. Over the campaign’s first two months, the Allies inflicted over one hundred thousand German casualties while suffering as many. Bradley devised the plan, code-­named Cobra, for the Normandy breakout. Bradley now commanded 12th Army Group with Courtney Hodges heading 1st Army at the front and Patton whose 3rd Army was massing in the rear. Six 1st Corps divisions attacked on a narrow front at Saint Lo, steamrolled the Germans, and dashed forty-­two miles to Avranches, a town at the hinge between Normandy and Brittany, on July 24 to 27. Patton’s 3rd Army barreled through the Avranches gap on August 1, with VIII Corps heading west to capture Brittany’s ports, XX Corps south to the Loire River and then eastward along the north bank, and XV Corps arching east behind German lines toward Le Mans, 7th Army’s headquarters. Rather than withdraw to a defensible line, on August 7 the Germans counterattacked at Mortain, hoping to punch through 1st Army and cut off 3rd Army. The 1st Army repelled the Germans as 3rd Army’s XV Corps fought its way eastward and captured Le Mans on August 9. The plan then was for the Canadian 1st Army to fight south and Patton’s XV Corps to fight north, join forces at Argentan, and trap one hundred thousand Germans in what was called the Falaise pocket. The 3rd Army captured Argentan on August 13, but 1st Canadian failed to break through

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at Falaise a dozen miles north. Bradley rejected Patton’s plea to fight his way to Falaise and sear shut the gap, since that was Montgomery’s 21st Army Group sector. As a result, eighty to one hundred thousand troops of the 7th and 15th German armies fled east through that gap over the next few days. Patton received Bradley’s permission to turn XV Corps eastward to race parallel to the fleeing Germans, edge ahead, and then cut them off at the Seine River bridges. Meanwhile, in Brittany, VIII Corps captured Nantes on August 6, Saint Malo on September 2, and Brest on September 18; then they besieged Saint Nazare and L’Orient with their submarine bases for the rest of the war. Eisenhower had planned to bypass Paris, but word of a Parisian uprising against the twenty thousand German occupying troops on August 19 forced him to reconsider. Charles de Gaulle, who led the Free French government in exile, urged Eisenhower to divert French general Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division to liberate Paris. Eisenhower agreed to Leclerc’s mission backed by the American 4th Infantry Division, which entered Paris on August 24 and August 25, respectively. German commander Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered late on August 25. The following day, Charles de Gaulle appeared in Paris to lead a victory parade and set up a provisional government for France. By late August, the Allies had inflicted over 400,000 German casualties, with about half captured, while the Americans had suffered 134,000 casualties and the British, Canadians, and other nationalities 93,000 casualties. The Allies had lost over two thousand aircraft out of half a million sorties but had shot down or destroyed thirteen thousand German planes.67 The Germans had retreated to a meandering line east of the Seine. If the Allies punched through that line, they would withdraw to the Siegfried Line of thousands of concrete bunkers and pillboxes, thousands of “dragon’s teeth” of concrete antitank barriers, and hundreds of thousands of mines stretching along Germany’s western border. Meanwhile, Alexander Patch landed 66,000 troops of his 151,000-man 7th Army on a twenty-­mile stretch of the Riviera between Saint Tropez and Saint Raphael against light resistance on August 15. He split his army into two pincers, with one corps headed west first to capture the ports of Toulon and Marseilles, followed by the lower Rhone River valley and finally up it, and the other corps heading northwest through the mountains with one division to hit the Rhone south of Valence while the other two divisions captured Grenoble. With his eighty-­thousand-­ man 19th Army scattered throughout the region, Friedrich Wiese could merely order his units to retreat and concentrate up the Rhone valley. Both sides received reinforcements (for the Americans, most significantly the 1st French Army led by Jean de Tassigny and French resistance



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fighters throughout the region). On September 14, the 7th Army linked with the 3rd Army at the village of Saulieu in Burgundy and elsewhere stopped short of the German defensive line below Chaumont and Belfort eastward. Over the previous month, Patch’s troops had inflicted 159,000 casualties, including 7,000 dead, 9,000 wounded, and 131,000 captured, while suffering 25,574 casualties, including 15,574 Americans.68 By mid-­ September, Montgomery’s 21st Army Group and Bradley’s 12th Army Group had liberated most of eastern France. First Canadian had captured Antwerp, Belgium, while leaving behind units to besiege the ports of Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. Second British had advanced a dozen miles beyond Brussels. First American Army had captured Liege, Bastogne, and Luxembourg City in the Ardennes Forest region. Third Army halted just beyond Nancy and short of Metz, while, in Brittany, VIII Corps besieged Saint Nazare and L’Orient. Patton fumed that he could have bypassed heavily fortified Metz and pushed on through the undermanned Siegfried Line but had stalled for lack of fuel. For instance, on August 30, the army received just thirty-­two thousand gallons of its daily four-­hundred-­thousand-­gallon need. With a full allotment, the 3rd Army would have swiftly broken through at key points to circle and destroy the German divisions and then surge toward the Rhine. Two forces beyond Patton’s control caused that shortage. One was that the amount of fuel shipped from Britain and then to various fronts fell far short of demand. The other was Montgomery, who badgered Eisenhower into diverting most available gasoline to his front. He cited two justifications for doing so: the need to capture Antwerp as a supply port and to overrun Germany’s V-1 and V-2 rocket sites that were bombarding London. Those were just the first phases of a campaign that Montgomery intended to lead in a single thrust toward the Ruhr industrial valley and then Berlin. The Germans eventually fired 10,492 V-1s, of which fighters or flak shot down around 4,000 while 2,400 hit the London area to kill around 6,000 people and wound 18,000 more, and 1,402 V-2s at London that killed 2,754 and wounded 6,523 people. After the Allies captured Antwerp, the Germans fired 4,248 V-1s and 1,712 V-2s there, destroying or damaging two of three buildings. The V-1’s vulnerability to being shot down by flak or fighter planes magnified its strategic impact because Britain diverted so many antiaircraft and fighter commands to that mission. Ironically, the V-2’s invulnerability lessened its strategic impact because London did not divert manpower and other resources to a threat it could not destroy. The cost of the V-2 program was equal to building twenty-­four thousand fighter planes or tens of thousands of tanks. Thus did the highly sophisticated V-2 program weaken and the relatively primitive V-1 strengthen

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Germany. British counterintelligence undermined the V-2 onslaught by forcing captured German agents to transmit false information to Berlin that the V-2s were firing beyond London; the “correction” caused the V-2s to fall short.69 Montgomery presented Eisenhower with Operation Market Garden as a single thrust to reach the Rhine.70 The 101st Airborne Division would land along a stretch of road between Son and Uden in the Netherlands, the 82nd Airborne from Grave to Nijmegen, and the 1st British and 1st Polish Airborne Brigades at Oosterbeek and Arnhem on the Rhine River, as Brian Horrocks’s XXX Corps raced north on the two-­lane highway linking those towns and cities. Critical to the campaign’s success would be the thirty-­five thousand paratroopers of the 1st Airborne Army seizing and holding seven bridges along the way to the two Rhine bridges. Eisenhower and his staff worried that the plan was too ambitious given German defenses and the boggy terrain along that route that limited tank and truck-­borne infantry maneuvering to outflank enemy strongholds. The plan also required that the other armies along the line halt offensive operations for at least a week no matter what opportunities opened before them. Eventually Eisenhower gave in. Market Garden nearly succeeded. From September 17 to September 25, the 101st and 82nd Airborne captured their objectives and Horrocks’s corps advanced sixty-­five miles along the route, but the Germans decimated the British and Polish airborne brigades and blunted the advance short of the Rhine. The Allies paid a severe cost for that salient, including 12,000 airborne casualties, 261 planes shot down with 658 crew killed, and 5,500 casualties and 88 tanks lost for Horrocks’s corps, while inflicting 13,300 casualties on the Germans.71 That was the last significant Allied advance on the western front for nearly six months. Each army launched limited offensives to capture nearby strongpoints in bloody attrition struggles. The 1st Canadian Army took Antwerp on September 4 but then needed until November 29 to clear Germans from Walcheren Island that formed part of the Scheldt River leading to the sea. First Army took Aachen, Germany, after a two-­ week slugging march from October 7 to October 21 and then squandered 33,000 casualties among 120,000 troops and three months trying to capture the strategically pointless Hurtgen Forest south of Aachen against eighty thousand Germans, who eventually suffered twenty-­eight thousand casualties.72 William Simpson’s 9th Army squeezed into the line between 2nd British and 1st American. Third Army encircled Metz on November 19 and captured it on November 22 before resuming its drive against the Siegfried Line. The farthest advance was by Jake Devers’s 6th Army Group of 7th Army and the 1st French Army all the way to Strasbourg, although the Germans retained a bulge southward around



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Colmar and Mulhouse to the Swiss border and the Siegfried Line began on the Rhine twenty miles north. Eisenhower rejected Devers’s request to cross the Rhine and cut off the Colmar–Mulhouse pocket, fearing that the Germans would converge and annihilate any Allied troops on the far bank. That was his latest controversial decision in which his attrition strategy trumped a proposed fast-­paced maneuver to seize an opportunity strategy. As the Red Army relentlessly pushed westward, the Soviets imposed communist regimes in each country they conquered from the Germans. Two exiled Polish groups claimed to be Poland’s legitimate government, a democratic one in London and a communist one in Lublin after the Red Army captured that town. Stalin ensured that the Lublin regime asserted control over ever more of Poland taken by the Red Army. With increasing dismay, the London Poles received reports of that communist takeover. The Red Army had overrun most of Poland east of the Vistula River, including just across from Warsaw, by late July 1944. On August 1, learning of the Soviet approach, the Polish underground in Warsaw rebelled against German rule to assist the Red Army in capturing that city. Instead, Stalin ordered his commanders not to aid the Poles because most were anticommunist. It took the Germans sixty-­three days to destroy the Polish resistance, along with around 200,000 civilians and 85 percent of the city, while suffering vast losses. With one enemy destroyed, the other weakened, and the city devastated, the Red Army did not bother to take Warsaw until January 17, 1945. Churchill grew so alarmed by the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe that he flew to Moscow to cut a deal with Stalin in October 1944. He presented a formula for control that gave London 90 percent and Moscow 10 percent over Greece, Moscow 90 percent and London 10 percent over Romania, Moscow 75 percent and London 25 percent over Bulgaria, and 50–50 percent over Hungary and Yugoslavia; he did not include Poland and Czechoslovakia. Stalin smiled cynically, put a large blue check on the paper, and handed it back. Hitler devised a panzer offensive that he believed would knock the Western Allies out of the war.73 By mid-­December, Sepp Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army with seven tank and thirteen infantry divisions numbering 557 tanks, 667 assault guns, and 200,000 troops massed east of the Ardennes Forest, backed by 200,000 troops and hundreds more tanks in two reserve armies. Crews for over 850 bomber and fighter planes waited at air bases for good weather to support the assault. Colonel Otto Skorzeny, who had rescued Mussolini, formed a special commando unit of two thousand troops who spoke American-­accented English to infiltrate enemy lines

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and mislead, kill, and destroy. The plan was to punch west through the hilly forest guarded by 1st Army VIII Corps’ three understrength infantry divisions with 68,822 troops; seize bridges over the Meuse, especially at Liege; then push on to capture Antwerp, the Allied supply port. Bastogne, where seven roads converged, was the southern region’s most vital objective. Allied intelligence missed that buildup. Thick winter snow and rain clouds grounded or limited vital reconnaissance flights, while that remote rural region was a low intelligence priority. Patton sensed that the Germans were planning something.74 Fourteen German divisions were missing from normal radio communications. Where were they hiding, and what were they plotting? He had his intelligence chief redouble his efforts and his chief of staff prepare for a possible German attack through the Ardennes. The German onslaught began on December 16 and swiftly blasted through American positions on five winding parallel roads through the forest. The two southern columns deployed along a thirty-­mile front to blunt any 3rd Army attack that way and threaten Luxembourg City forty miles south. The Americans in Bastogne repelled an initial middle column assault. The next column deployed at crossroads along a thirty-­mile front to repel inevitable attacks by Hodges’s other 1st Army corps. The final column raced toward the Meuse. Eisenhower and Bradley were at SHAEF headquarters at Versailles when the offensive began. The only reserves near Ardennes were the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions that they rushed by truck to the front. They ordered Patton to attack north and relieve Bastogne, and Hodges to attack south. On December 19, Eisenhower and Bradley flew to Verdun, where Patton and Devers joined them. Patton assured his colleagues that three of his divisions would attack north three days later on December 22 and that three days later three more divisions would join that offensive. Eisenhower had Devers keep his 7th American and 1st French Armies on the defensive and feed Patton any needed reinforcements. Likewise, Simpson’s 9th Army would stay put and send reserves to 1st Army fighting south. Finally, Eisenhower gave Montgomery command of all forces north of the bulge and Bradley all those south. Losing 1st and 9th Armies infuriated Bradley, but he obeyed. On December 26, Devers reacted with outrage to Eisenhower’s order that he withdraw 6th Army Group to the Vosges Mountains and cede the lowlands to the Germans until the Americans destroyed the German bulge. First French Army general Jean de Lattre de Tassigny and Free French leader Charles de Gaulle angrily protested abandoning territory for which thousands of their men had died. De Gaulle threatened to withdraw the 1st French Army from the war. Eisenhower finally canceled that order.



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Meanwhile, Anthony McAuliffe’s 101st Airborne fought its way inside Bastogne just before the Germans could cut it off. The Germans launched repeated attacks around the perimeter from December 21 to December 26, but the Americans repelled each. McAuliffe famously rejected a German surrender demand with one defiant and puzzling word: “Nuts!” Patton’s 4th Armored Division blasted its way into Bastogne on December 26. Elsewhere across the Ardennes, German tanks and trucks running short of gas had to stop and await supplies. The Americans withdrew to defensive positions and then, reinforced, counterattacked. At its height, the German bulge was forty miles wide and sixty miles deep. Patton urged Eisenhower to let him sever the bulge’s base beginning at Bitburg northeastward and bag the entire enemy army. Typically, Eisenhower rejected maneuver for attrition. The Americans would punch back rather than cut off the enemy. That was why he wanted Montgomery, a master of building up forces to overwhelming numbers before launching them, directing the northern front. The tragic result was that the campaign took much longer, cost more Americans casualties, and let more Germans escape than if Eisenhower had adopted Patton’s plan. Montgomery’s counterattack did not begin until January 3, two weeks after Patton’s. At the height, the Americans massed over seven hundred thousand troops against the Germans in the bulge. The last Germans did not withdraw beyond the Siegfried Line until January 25, six weeks after the offensive began there. The Germans lost 63,222 men, 554 tanks and tank destroyers, and 780 aircraft but inflicted far heavier destruction: 19,000 American dead, 47,500 wounded, 23,000 captured, 733 tanks and tank destroyers, and 1,000 aircraft.75 Hitler’s vast gamble was disastrous for both the Third Reich and postwar Europe. Had he massed and launched those 400,000 troops and 1,200 tanks at the Soviets, he would have delayed their advance on Berlin for months, thus letting the Americans and British get there first. Instead, the Soviets advanced a couple hundred miles deeper into Western Europe. The Red Army launched an offensive in Poland in January 1945 that routed the Germans and advanced as far as the Oder River, fifty miles from Berlin. Most Western Allied troops were far from the Rhine, with only a few divisions around Strasbourg and Nijmegen. Nonetheless, there were 3.7 million American, British, Canadian, and French troops in eight armies along the 729-mile front, with two of three soldiers Americans. But those armies would not be ready to resume a united offensive for another month. Despite the harsh fighting, physical wounds inflicted only about four in ten casualties during the winter of 1944 to 1945. The American army was unprepared for Europe’s harsh weather. Only half the needed overcoats, sleeping bags, and wool caps, socks, and underwear reached frontline

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troops. The worst winter affliction was trench foot of damaged blood vessels and skin from soaked, frozen feet. By spring, trench foot hospitalized over forty-­six thousand troops, or 40 percent of all casualties. Neuropsychiatric causes or combat fatigue hospitalized another 25 percent of all casualties.76 Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt won his latest overwhelming electoral victory with 25,612,916 popular votes (53.4 percent) and 432 electoral votes to Republican Thomas Dewey’s 22,017,929 votes (34.2 percent) and 99 electoral votes. The Democrat domination of Congress persisted with 224 to 189 Republican and 2 minor party seats in the House of Representatives and 57 to 38 Senate seats.77 Roosevelt recognized that winning the war would be a hollow victory unless the Allied leaders constructed an enduring peace. To that end, he devised a strategy with three key components. First, all the world’s states would establish a set of international economic and political organizations that promoted prosperity and peace. Second, the Allies would demilitarize and democratize Germany, Italy, and Japan. Finally, the world’s “Four Policemen” would each dominate its own sphere of influence and not interfere in others, with the United States over the Western Hemisphere, the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe, Britain over its former empire, and China over East Asia. He developed and presented these ideas through and between a series of international conferences. He hosted envoys of twenty-­six countries that on January 1, 1942, declared themselves the United Nations dedicated to defeating the Axis powers. Envoys of forty-­four Allied countries signed a treaty establishing the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) at the White House on November 3, 1943. He got tenuous commitments from the Allied leaders for his vision during two conferences in late 1943, first at Cairo among himself, Churchill, and Chiang from November 22 to November 26 and then at Tehran among himself, Churchill, and Stalin from November 29 to December 1. The United States hosted 730 envoys of forty-­four countries at the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from July 1 to July 22, 1944. Two complementary international organizations to manage the global economy and provide international finance and stability emerged from the Bretton Woods Conference. Each is a bank whose members are countries that pay an initial fee and can borrow from the common pool under certain circumstances. A country’s vote on issues is proportional to its share of money lent to the bank. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) gives short-­term loans to countries suffering balance-­of-­payments deficits; each country’s currency was fixed to the dollar that was fixed to gold at $32 an ounce. The International Bank for Reconstruction and



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Development (IBRD, or World Bank) gives loans to countries for long-­ term development projects in infrastructure and health. The next key wartime international conference came at Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Washington, DC, from August 21 to October 7, 1944, when American, British, Soviet, and Chinese envoys drafted the charter for the United Nations, the League of Nations’ new and hopefully improved successor. The charter or constitution dedicates the organization to global peace, economic development, and human rights. A Secretariat headed by a secretary general administers the United Nations. In the General Assembly, each country has one vote on non–legally binding resolutions. A fifteen-­member (initially ten) Security Council includes five permanent members—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China, each with veto power—and ten nonpermanent members elected by the General Assembly for two-­year terms. Security Council resolutions are legally binding. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) includes nine justices who accept cases submitted by countries against other countries. A Trusteeship Council would manage Japan’s colonies for eventual independence. The Economic and Social Council was the umbrella agency for an increasing number of related international organizations like the UNRRA, IMF, World Bank, and so on. Stalin hosted Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, Crimea, from February 4 to February 11, 1945.78 Roosevelt and Churchill sought Stalin’s commitment to the United Nations, warring against Japan within three months of Germany’s defeat, holding free elections in Eastern European countries overrun by the Soviets, recognizing Chiang Kai-­shek’s regime as China’s legitimate government, and giving France an occupation zone in Germany. Stalin insisted that Roosevelt and Churchill accept Soviet control over Eastern Europe and one-­third of Germany, with Poland’s frontiers moved westward to the Oder River and the communist Lublin government in power; German reparations; acquisition of Sakhalin Island’s southern half and all but the four southernmost Kurile Islands from Japan; and sixteen votes in the United Nations General Assembly. The three achieved clear understandings on Germany’s four occupation zones; German reparations; Soviet war against Japan; Chiang’s regime in China; Poland’s borders; and Soviet UN votes, reduced to three, but Eastern Europe’s fate remained ambiguous. Although Stalin promised “free elections,” he meant communist-­style elections whose results are predetermined and implemented. From his new headquarters at Reims, Eisenhower launched an offensive to eliminate all Germans west of the Rhine in late February 1945.79 Within two weeks, each army had overrun swaths of riverfront, but most Germans escaped across and blew up every bridge behind them except one.

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The 1st Army captured the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen on March 7. Patton massed a brigade in boats and crossed them at Oppenheim, midway between Worms and Mainz, on March 23. Engineers erected a pontoon bridge over which a steady stream of tanks and trucks packed with troops and supplies rumbled. Typically, Montgomery’s crossing involved weeks of planning and massing overwhelming numbers of infantry, paratroopers, supplies, artillery, and air power. His offensive began on March 24 with drops of the 17th American and 6th British Airborne Divisions that secured positions several miles beyond the river as infantry packed in boats crossed at lightly defended points. Within four days, elements of Crerar’s 1st Canadian, Dempsey’s 2nd British, and Simpson’s 9th American had overrun German defenses, with the farthest advance twenty-­five miles eastward. Bradley’s 12th Army Group now included the newly formed 15th Army led by Leonard Gerow north of 1st Army and 3rd Army. While Gerow’s 15th and Hodges’s 1st overran the Ruhr valley from the south, Patton’s 3rd raced northeast and east, capturing Frankfurt on March 29. Devers’s 6th Army Group of Patch’s 7th Army and Tassigny’s 1st French Army crossed the upper Rhine and fought through the Black Forest. Each Allied general naturally wanted to lead his army into Berlin. All were chagrined to learn that Eisenhower had conceded that to the Soviets, Patton most of all: “Ike, I don’t know how you figure that one. We had better take Berlin quick, and then go on to the Oder.” Eisenhower replied, “It has no strategic or tactical value.”80 Instead, Eisenhower had the armies spread out to secure the rest of Germany, with 1st Canadian advancing to the North Sea, 2nd British to the Baltic Sea, and 9th Army to the Elbe between Luneberg and Bitterfield, then 1st and 3rd on a rough line south, 7th Army to Linz and Salzburg, 1st French south to the Alps foothills, and 15th left behind to secure the Ruhr. The farther each army advanced, the fewer Germans resisted and the more surrendered. The Allies had to disarm and intern a million enemy troops, somehow feed and shelter millions of homeless people, and find and arrest Nazi leaders. On April 25, American and Soviet troops joyfully greeted each other at Torgau on the Elbe. Two special operations unfolded with that advance. Operation Airmail involved finding as many of Germany’s missile and nuclear program scientists and engineers as possible and encouraging them to settle in America or Britain. The “Monuments Men” searched for art stolen by the Nazis.81 The most horrific discoveries were the concentration camps with the heaps of rotting dead and skeletal survivors. After grimly viewing one camp, Eisenhower exclaimed to a soldier, “Still having trouble hating them? We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.”82



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The two men who launched war in Europe and Africa escaped legal justice. Italian partisans captured Benito Mussolini and his mistress, executed them, and strung up their battered bodies for display in Milan on April 28. Adolf Hitler and his mistress committed suicide on April 30, the Fuhrer with a pistol shot through his mouth into his brain. Admiral Karl Donitz replaced Hitler to head Germany. He sent Admiral Hans von Friedeberg to Reims to ask Eisenhower to accept the surrender of all German troops. When Eisenhower refused, Donitz sent Alfred Jodl with the same plea. Jodl signed a similar surrender on May 7, to be effective on May 8. All Allied troops received an order to halt all movement and combat operations unless fired on. SHAEF moved to Frankfurt to coordinate occupation policies among the four zones: American, British, French, and Soviet. Meanwhile, American offensives advanced farther across the Pacific toward Japan. Iwo Jima Island lies 750 miles from Tokyo. P-51 Mustangs with belly fuel tanks based there could escort B-29s to Japanese cities and back. B-29s damaged or low on fuel could land there rather than try to reach Saipan or Tinian seven hundred miles farther. Seventy-­five thousand marines swarmed ashore on Iwo Jima on February 19, and the survivors eliminated the last resistance on March 11. That deadly month cost 24,891 marine casualties, or one of three, and included 6,821 dead. The marines killed nearly all 21,000 Japanese defenders.83 The bombing of Japan intensified after Iwo Jima’s airfields were secured. The B-29 Superfortress had a seven-­thousand-­mile range, twenty-­ thousand-­pound bomb load, five electronically controlled machine-­gun turrets, 365 mile per hour top speed, and thirty-­ one-­ thousand-­ foot-­ high ceiling. Initially, Haywood Hansell commanded the B-29 fleet and followed a daylight strategy of hitting factories and ports with high explosives from several miles up to minimize losses. That strategy was ineffective. In January 1945, Roosevelt replaced Hansell with Curtis LeMay, who advocated a strategy of low-­level night flights that dropped incendiary bombs. That strategy eventually destroyed sixty-­four Japanese cities and killed over 126,762 people. The deadliest attack was against Tokyo on March 9, which killed 83,793, wounded 40,918, rendered a million homeless, and burned a quarter of the city.84 An armada of 1,200 vessels packed with the 10th Army’s 180,000 soldiers and marines led by Simon Buckner dropped anchor off Okinawa Island on April 1. After a massive bombardment by warships, the troops began landing. Defending Okinawa were 120,000 troops led by Mitsuru Ushijima. The battle for Okinawa lasted until June 22, during which the 10th Army suffered 7,374 killed, 31,807 wounded, and 238 missing, and the navy 4,907 killed and 4,824 wounded. The Japanese lost 7,380 aircraft

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along with around 110,000 soldiers and 60,000 civilians killed. Japanese kamikaze or “divine wind” suicide attacks by pilots sank 36 ships and damaged 268 others, although the largest vessel was a destroyer; the Japanese launched their first kamikaze attacks on May 27, 1944, and eventually 3,913 airmen died while sinking 47 and damaging 368 ships, and killing 4,900 and wounding 4,800 Americans.85 America’s next campaign would be against Japan’s home islands, starting with 6th Army’s 767,000 troops invading Kyushu on November 1.86 To defend their homeland, the Japanese had 2,903,000 soldiers while tens of millions of civilian men aged fifteen to sixty and women aged seventeen to forty received rudimentary military training, spears, mines, and grenades to kill invaders and blow themselves up rather than surrender. The Japanese had over ten thousand planes and enough aviation fuel, explosives, and pilots to make each a kamikaze. The invasion of Honshu, the main island, by the 1st, 8th, and 10th Armies with 1,026,000 troops was scheduled for March 1, 1946. If the 35 percent casualty rate on Okinawa prevailed, the Americans would lose over 250,000 on Kyushu and 350,000 on Honshu. Destroying all resistance would take several years and inflict at least 1.7 million American casualties and cost 5 to 10 million Japanese lives.87 A revolutionary new weapon prevented that catastrophe from happening. Tragically, Roosevelt did not live to see Germany and Japan defeated. A massive cerebral hemorrhage killed him on April 12. Vice President Harry Truman took the presidential oath and carried on Roosevelt’s monumental efforts to win the war and peace. Eight hundred fifty delegates from fifty countries worked out lingering debates over the United Nations’ powers, members, duties, and rights during the San Francisco Conference from April 25 to June 26, 1945. The Senate ratified the United Nations Treaty by eighty-­two to two on July 28, 1945. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met at Potsdam, an elegant and relatively undamaged Berlin suburb, from July 16 to August 2, 1945. Truman impressed Churchill, who described him as “a man of exceptional character and ability with . . . simple and direct methods of speech, and a great deal of self-­confidence and resolution.”88 Truman received stunning news on July 16. The atomic bomb tested in New Mexico’s desert near Alamogordo produced an explosion equal to twenty thousand tons of TNT. Truman informed Stalin that America now had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin expressed no surprise, nor did he ask for details. Spies within the Manhattan Project kept him informed of its progress. On July 26, Truman and other Allied leaders issued the Potsdam Declaration calling on Tokyo to surrender



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unconditionally or face complete destruction; Japan would be occupied, demilitarized, and democratized; its colonies would be liberated and war criminals tried; and then the occupation would end. Tokyo replied with one word, Mokusatsu, which means to view something with utter contempt and loathing. Truman ordered the air force to drop the bombs. Over the preceding months since he became president, he and his key advisors had debated how to use them. They mulled and rejected the idea of demonstrating a bomb, fearing it might be a dud or, if it worked, the Japanese would put war prisoners in their cities to deter an attack. They felt that only the shock of a city obliterated by one bomb would force Japan’s leaders to end the war. Over three million soldiers and tens of millions of armed civilians were prepared to die fighting to defend their emperor and nation in the home islands, while another two million were deployed across China, Southeast Asia, and Pacific islands. More than one and a half million Japanese had already died, often fighting to the last man even for tiny coral islands far from their homes. Millions of Japanese and hundreds of thousands of Americans would die in an invasion of Japan, and the fighting could persist for years until the invaders wiped out the last resisters. They also debated and rejected the notion of wielding atomic bombs to pressure the Soviets to make concessions. Certainly, if the bomb worked, the Americans no longer needed the Soviets as an ally against Japan, which would limit their expansion in Northeast Asia. But even after learning of the successful test, Truman wanted the Soviets to attack in case the bombs were not as effective against a city. The morality of dropping one or more bombs on Japan was clear to those who made the decision. Truman later said he never lost sleep over the decision since it saved at least “half a million” American lives. Henry Kissinger explained how policy makers viewed nuclear weapons: “We added the atomic bombs to our arsenal without integrating its implications into our thinking. Because we saw it merely as another tool in a concept of warfare which knew no goal save total victory, and no mode of war except all-­out war.”89 The atomic bombs abruptly ended the Pacific war. An atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima on August 6. Truman announced the bombing and warned that the United States would continue dropping them until Japan’s government surrendered. With no response from Tokyo, another atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki on August 8. The Soviet Union declared war on August 9 and launched massive offensives against Japanese forces in China and Korea. Estimates of deaths by different authorities vary, but the best estimate is that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki initially killed around 92,133 and 25,677 people, respectively.90

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Even then, Japan’s war council split over what to do, with the three civilians arguing that Japan had to surrender and the three military leaders insisting that the Japanese people must fight to the death. On August 10, Hirohito sided with the civilians, thus forcing the military leaders bitterly to go along. Nevertheless, after word got out that the government was preparing to surrender, there were two abortive coup attempts to prevent that outcome. The foreign ministry sent word via neutral channels to Washington that it would accept the Potsdam Declaration as long as the emperor could continue to reign. The White House ambiguously replied that the emperor would be under the Supreme Allied Commander’s authority. The emperor accepted this condition and on August 15 radio-­broadcasted a statement that the war had ended. That spared the lives of hundreds of thousands more Japanese since the air force planned three drops in late August and three in September. A fleet of three hundred war and support ships dropped anchor in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. Aboard the battleship USS Missouri was a delegation of generals and admirals led by Douglas MacArthur, who would head Japan’s occupation. A Japanese delegation led by Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the document whereby Japan formally surrendered to the United Nations, thus formally ending World War II. Sixty million people died from combat, bombing, starvation, disease, or execution during World War II, and that may be an underestimate. The Soviet Union suffered the worst, with 27 million dead, followed by China with 20 million, Germany with 7 million, Poland with 6 million, Japan with 2 million, France with 600,000, and Britain with 450,000. During World War II, 16,112,566 American men and women served in the military, of whom 405,399 died, 291,557 in combat and 113,842 from accidents and diseases, while a million suffered wounds. The tooth-­to-­tail ratio was long. About 14 percent of the military’s personnel sustained 70 percent of casualties. Against the Germans, the Americans lost one and a half men for every one they killed because of superior German tactics, training, and organization. Against the Japanese, the Americans killed ten for every man they lost because of their superior tactics, training, and organization.91 During the war, the military hospitalized 929,000 troops for “neuro-­ psychiatric problems” (better known as combat fatigue) and discharged half a million more for “personality disturbances.”92 Although the stress of war affected every soldier differently, most noticeably declined in effectiveness after a month on the front line. Affliction naturally became more likely with each day exposed to the horrific stress of combat and seeing people literally blown apart all around while killing and maiming others.



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During just three and a half years, America’s military transformed from inferior to superior weapons in some critical categories, most notably in aircraft with the B-17 and B-29 heavy bombers, B-24 and B-25 medium bombers, P-38 Lightning and P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-­bombers, and P-51 Mustang ground-­based and F6F Hellcat carrier-­based fighters. The P-51 Mustang was the war’s best fighter plane with its maneuverability, firepower, and 850-mile range, with a drop tank dumped at the appearance of enemy fighters. Yet, of all the warplanes, the B-29 was the most effective. It delivered America’s ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb, whose devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Japan’s abrupt surrender. By the war’s end, there were 2,123 B-29s deployed in forty groups.93 America’s submarine fleet expanded steadily in numbers and deadliness: in 1943, submarines sank 21 warships and 291 merchant ships aggregating 1,369,179 tons; in 1944, 104 warships and 529 merchant ships aggregating 2,810,307 tons. American submarines sank over 1,300 Japanese ships, including a battleship, eight aircraft carriers, and eleven cruisers. American submarines and mines caused Japanese imports of vital resources to plummet from 1941 to 1945, including coal from 24,144,617 tons to 1,780,565, iron ore from 4,874,674 tons to 129,955, rubber from 31,818 tons to 0, and fertilizer from 1,136,942 tons to 137,470. Rice production fell from 10,027,274 metric tons in 1942 to 6,355,000 in 1945.94 For most weapons, America’s superiority was in numbers of machines and trained men to run them. Tank to tank, Germany’s Mark V Panther with its long 75-­millimeter cannon and thicker armor outgunned America’s Sherman with its short 75-­millimeter cannon. American tankers best survived by reconnaissance, maneuver, and ambush, with shots aimed at the Panther’s treaded wheels and thinner sides. The Germans devised two revolutionary weapons: the ME-260 jet and the V-2 ballistic missile. The Allies diverted forces to overrun and capture those weapons and, more important, the scientists and engineers who designed them. Roosevelt’s war leadership was not flawless. On both the European and the Pacific fronts, he succumbed to pressure from supposed experts and approved campaigns that squandered vast numbers of lives and supplies in strategic dead ends that delayed ultimate victory. The Italian campaign lasted 608 days and cost the Allies 312,000 casualties, or 40 percent of all they suffered in Europe. Of that, the Americans lost 23,521 dead and 120,000 wounded. They inflicted at least 435,000 casualties on the enemy, including 48,000 killed. Most German casualties were troops that surrendered, and those mostly during their last few demoralized weeks.95 The Italian campaign diverted vast amounts of Allied power that would have ended the war months earlier had it been

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massed on critical fronts in France.96 Historian David Kennedy denounced the Italian campaign as “a needlessly costly sideshow, a grinding war of attrition whose costs were justified by no defensible military or political purpose.”97 Roosevelt’s capitulation to MacArthur’s insistence on leading an offensive in the southwest Pacific wasted enormous amounts of men, machines, and supplies and resulted in tens of thousands of casualties. Just the Philippines invasion alone cost the Americans 20 sunk ships, 24 severely damaged ships, 34 partly damaged ships, 8,140 dead, 29,557 wounded, and 157 missing. The Americans could have avoided most of that death and destruction by not invading the Philippines and instead severing the enemy’s supply lines with naval and air power. In the central Pacific, Japan’s defenders of strategically worthless Peleliu inflicted 7,919 casualties, including 1,500 dead, on the 1st Marine and 81st Army Divisions.98 Allied carpet bombing of enemy cities provoked harsh criticism then and since on strategic and moral grounds.99 The day and night bombing of German cities by 8th American and Royal Bomber Command flying from Britain and 15th Air Force from Italy, respectively, killed at least 405,000 people, wounded 780,000, left 7 million people homeless, and devastated 131 beautiful cities. American B-29s killed around four hundred thousand Japanese, wounded twice as many, and destroyed sixty-­six cities. The most deadly and destructive bombs were twenty-­ two-­inch hexagon magnesium-­zinc rods that burned for eight minutes at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The Allies dropped eighty million of those incendiary rods on Germany alone. The Allies suffered horrendous losses in their strategic bombing campaign against Germany and other European targets. The Americans and British, respectively, lost 79,265 and 79,271 killed or wounded, as well as eighteen thousand and twenty thousand aircraft destroyed. Two out of five British and one out of five American airmen died in combat. Thousands more were wounded. In 1944 alone, the Germans shot down 6,400 Allied planes and damaged 27,000 others. Only one in four American airmen finished his twenty-­five missions and flight home, and fewer when the air force extended the goal first to thirty and then thirty-­five missions. The Americans lost 3,000 airmen and 136 B-29s flying against the Japanese. British marshal Arthur Harris and American general Curtis LeMay championed the merciless air war against the enemy. The rationale for that mass death and destruction was that cities, with their factories, warehouses, train stations, businesses, government bureaucracies, and employees, supplied enemy armies, navies, and air forces; the greater that devastation, the weaker the military forces on the front. For instance, the European air campaign forced Berlin to deploy 1.2 million air defense



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troops that might otherwise have been decisive on either front. The inaccuracy of the bombs, especially when dropped at night, meant, in Harris’s words, “that in order to destroy anything it is necessary to destroy everything.”100 Patton vehemently disagreed, confiding to his diary, “We all feel that indiscriminate bombing has no military value and is cruel and wasteful and that all such efforts should always be on purely military targets and on selected commodities that are scarce. In the case of Germany, it would be oil.”101 America emerged from World War II a superpower with around half of all global production and petroleum and two-­thirds of its gold. America’s economy more than doubled during the war from $90.5 billion in 1939 to $211.9 billion in 1945, while most other economies were either devastated or diminished. Washington would tap deeply into that wealth to wage its next global conflict.

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We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. —John F. Kennedy Korea taught us that all warfare from this time forth must be limited. It could no longer be a question of whether to fight a limited war, but of how to avoid fighting any other kind. —General Maxwell Taylor Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies . . . a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. —Dwight Eisenhower

I

n a cold war, the adversaries wield every strategy except violent war between them to undermine and ideally destroy the other. Of history’s many cold wars, none is better known than that between Washington and its shifting allies versus Moscow and its shifting allies from 1947 to 1991.1 Within eighteen months after World War II ended, the alliance of America, Britain, and France with the Soviet Union transformed into cold war. That Cold War was eventually global and directly or indirectly affected every country. It ended with the collapse of communism and the 311

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Soviet Union. Three interrelated forces—ideology, geopolitics, and psychology—explain why the Cold War began.2 Ideologically, the United States and the Soviet Union were diametrically opposed. America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution respectively expressed its liberal democratic principles and the political system for realizing them. The Soviet Union asserted communism or the Communist Party’s totalitarian control over all political, economic, and social relations; the subjection of all individuals and groups; and violent revolutions around the world until communism ruled every country and person. Those ideological differences did not matter after the communist takeover in Russia in November 1917 until April 1945 for three reasons. The initial attempts at provoking revolutions elsewhere by the Communist International (Comintern) headquartered in Moscow failed. After Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, Stalin eliminated his rivals to assert total power by 1928. He followed an isolationist strategy of building communism within the Soviet Union as a model for the world. Imposing communism killed directly or indirectly at least twenty million and perhaps as many as thirty million people, but as Stalin put it, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Then came the German onslaught in June 1941 that forced Stalin to ally with Britain and from December 1941 the United States. Massive American military and economic aid to Moscow prevented the Germans from destroying the Soviet Union. Geopolitics after American and Soviet troops met in central Europe was critical to the Cold War. The Soviets imposed communist regimes on the Eastern European countries and the eastern German region they had overrun. They systematically shipped back to the Soviet Union virtually anything of economic value, including entire factories, as “reparations.” That increasingly alarmed American, British, and French commanders and diplomats. In Northeast Asia, from their attack on August 8, the Red Army quickly overran Japanese forces and transferred captured arms and supplies to China’s Community Party and imposed Kim Il Sung as the communist dictator of their occupation zone in Korea, split at the thirty-­ eighth parallel. However, the first crisis was over oil-­rich Iran, where the Red Army remained after token American and British forces departed. Churchill and Stalin agreed jointly to occupy Iran to prevent pro-­Hitler Shah Reza Pahlavi from allying with Germany in 1942. They forced the shah to accept Soviet and British troops, who would leave within six months after Germany’s defeat. The Americans contributed a small contingent. When the shah died in July 1944, his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, replaced him. Under the amended agreement, each would withdraw within three months after Germany’s defeat. The British and Americans complied; the Soviets did not. Stalin finally agreed to do so in



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April 1946 after signing a deal with Tehran for a joint Iranian-­Soviet oil company and embedding agents to provoke a revolt in Iran’s Azerbaijan region. With American and British aid, the Iranians eventually crushed that revolt and repudiated the oil company deal. Washington and London increasingly viewed Moscow’s aggressive behavior in Europe, Northeast Asia, and Iran as parts of a master plan to fulfill communism’s goal of global conquest. President Harry Truman despised and feared both German Nazism and Soviet communism. He saw a brilliant chance to devastate both after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”3 Germany’s war declaration against the United States after Pearl Harbor made the Americans and Soviets natural allies. Truman accepted that alliance as crucial to vanquishing Germany and hoped to maintain constructive relations with Moscow after the war, but he increasingly bristled at what seemed to be Soviet aggression. Psychology compounded the ideological and geopolitical conflicts. The lesson of the 1938 Munich pact was not to appease but to confront aggressors. Washington and Moscow locked themselves in a vicious security dilemma whereby each interpreted the other’s acts in the worst way and then took countermeasures that the other viewed as belligerent. For instance, the White House abruptly ended Lend-­Lease after Germany’s surrender on May 8. Although that cutoff applied to all allies, the Kremlin viewed it as an attempt to undercut Soviet advances. Churchill was the first Western politician to openly declare cold war. He did so after accepting Truman’s invitation to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. His speech made history: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” He called for America, Britain, and all other Western democracies to unite against the Soviet Union to deter any farther imperial expansion. The worst American worry was that the Soviets would acquire a nuclear bomb. Truman authorized diplomat Bernard Baruch to present Moscow a nuclear arms control proposal in July 1946. The United States would give up its nuclear arsenal if the Soviet Union and other states agreed to end their nuclear programs and open their laboratories to inspection by an international organization that promoted nuclear energy’s peaceful use. Moscow replied that it would only give up its nuclear program after the United States openly abandoned its program. The intransigence of both sides killed the chance to eliminate nuclear weapons, although, with the knowledge and facilities then existing, that absence likely would have been fleeting.

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Truman and his advisors debated how to interpret Soviet behavior and goals, and what to do about them. In January 1946, they turned to America’s top expert on the Soviet Union.4 George Kennan graduated from Princeton University with a history degree in 1925 and then passed the Foreign Service exam and served in Switzerland, Germany, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, and the Soviet Union from 1933 to 1938 and from 1944 to 1946. During his latter Moscow stint, he headed the embassy in Moscow while Ambassador Averell Harriman spent long sojourns back in the United States. He would head the State Department’s Policy Planning Program from May 1947 to May 1949. Kennan explained Soviet and communist intentions and the containment strategy to thwart them through two documents, the 5,540-word “Long Telegram” he sent the State Department from Moscow on February 22, 1946, and the article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” that he anonymously wrote for the July 1947 edition of Foreign Affairs journal. Soviet foreign policy continued Russia’s twelve-­hundred-­year struggle against a succession of invaders. The Russians secured themselves by developing an autocratic state to mobilize human and material resources for defense and expansion outward to protective seas, rivers, and mountain ranges. Over time, Russia championed the Orthodox Church and Slavic peoples, with Moscow the capital. Russian political culture is rooted in authoritarianism, xenophobia, messianism, and nationalism. The duty of every individual and group is to fight and, if need be, die for the state, which protects them and the Russian people. Communism transformed an authoritarian state into a totalitarian state that controlled all property and lives. Communism suppressed the Orthodox Church but was even more messianic because it provided Moscow with a global revolutionary mission. The postwar Soviet threat was not a military invasion but political takeovers of countries by communist parties loyal to Moscow. Communism breeds in mass poverty, corruption, violence, and chaos. Washington could eliminate the appeal of communist parties in the war-­shattered industrial countries of Europe and Japan by transforming mass poverty into mass prosperity through humanitarian and development aid and through international institutions that promoted markets, finance, investments, and trade. Containment was “selective” in both where and how it was asserted. The United States would use economic means to develop Western Europe and Japan and integrate them into a dynamic global economy with America the growth engine. Washington should not worry about or oppose communist revolutions in poverty-­stricken, agrarian, non-­Western countries like China, where the regimes were so corrupt, inept, and brutal that they had no popular appeal and would eventually collapse. When that happened, Washington



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should promote trade with the communist regimes. Communism was doomed to eventual self-­destruction. Communism is the world’s most effective system for a tiny tyrannical minority to suppress and exploit a mass population, but in doing so it smothers the entrepreneurship and creativity essential for economic development. Communist countries would economically fall farther behind the rest of the world before eventually imploding and being transformed by liberal revolutions into free countries. Until that happened, Washington and its allies must together patiently and firmly resist any Moscow provocations and exploit any opportunities to befriend communist countries like Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia, disillusioned with Soviet manipulation. Communism was a veneer that temporarily hid nationalism. If China became communist, Washington should play off traditional Chinese nationalism against traditional Russian nationalism. Truman embraced Kennan’s containment strategy and essentially declared the Cold War before a joint congressional session on March 12, 1947. What prompted that decision was London’s plea to Washington to take over its traditional sphere of influence in the eastern Mediterranean, where a civil war raged in Greece between communists and noncommunists, and Moscow pressuring Turkey to surrender its eastern provinces to the Soviet Union. He explained, “At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. . . . One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies on terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.”5 He insisted that America must “support free peoples who are resisting attempts by armed minorities or outside pressures.” He called for $400 million in economic aid to Greece, Turkey, and other countries facing communist insurgencies. Congress approved Truman’s spending request by 62 to 23 in the Senate and 287 to 107 in the House. Central to Kennan’s containment strategy was humanitarian and development aid. By 1947, Washington had distributed $9 billion in humanitarian aid to Europe through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) program. Secretary of State George Marshall advocated a massive development aid program in a commencement speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. He explained: The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down. . . . Aside from the demoralizing

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effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health to the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Any government that is willing to assist in recovery will find full co-­operation on the part of the United States. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.6

On April 3, 1948, Truman signed into law the Economic Cooperation Plan that Congress previously passed by 69 to 17 in the Senate and 329 to 74 in the House. Eventually the United States distributed $14 billion in Marshall Plan aid.7 The National Security Act that Truman signed into law on July 26, 1947, established four institutions vital to fighting the Cold War. The Defense Department (DOD) united the four military services under one administration. The Joint Chiefs of Staff included a chief, deputy chief, and commander for each of the four services as a committee to coordinate military planning. The National Security Agency (NSA) was a mini-­version of the State Department with a national security advisor and eventually several hundred experts split among geographic and functional bureaus within the White House to give the president critical information to debate and decide vital foreign policy decisions. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was the hub for the intelligence community of related institutions that collected and analyzed its own information and that from other members and directed operations. The CIA became America’s most crucial institution to wage cold war.8 Operatives recruited foreign agents and conducted covert actions. A covert action was anything that influenced a foreign country or group in America’s favor, including “propaganda; political action; economic warfare; escape and evasion and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups including assistance to underground resistance movement, guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups; support of indigenous and anti-­communist elements in threatened countries of the free world; deception plans and operations; and all activities compatible with this directive necessary to accomplish the foregoing.” The covert action budget rose from $4.7 million in 1949 to $82 million in 1952, the number of operatives from 302 to 2,812 aided by 3,142 contractors, and the number of operations from 7 to 47.9 Meanwhile, America’s defense budget plummeted from $83 billion (37 percent of the economy) in 1945 to $9.1 billion (3.5 percent of the economy)



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in 1948 and then rose slightly to $13.7 billion (5 percent of the economy) in 1950.10 That “peace dividend” helped spur an economic expansion that persisted until 1973, broadening and deepening America’s middle class and providing Washington the revenues, educated minds, technologies, and industries to wage cold war around the world. During the late 1940s into 1950, the Soviets and communist regimes elsewhere committed a series of acts that challenged selective containment. The first came on June 24, 1948, when East German troops blockaded the land routes from West Germany to West Berlin that American, British, and French troops jointly protected. Stalin ordered that act to pressure the Western powers into abandoning West Berlin. Truman and his advisors sought a policy that avoided both appeasing and warring against the Soviet Union. The result was the Berlin Airlift, in which a steady stream of planes flew supplies to West Berlin. Stalin finally ordered the blockade lifted on May 12, 1949. The formation of an American-­led Western alliance the previous month likely pressured him to do so. Eleven countries—the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Canada, and Iceland— established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with its headquarters at Paris, on April 4, 1949. Under the treaty’s Article 5, the members pledged “that an armed attack against one or more . . . would be considered an attack against them all.” A wag succinctly described NATO’s purpose as “keeping the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” The Senate ratified the treaty by eighty-­two to thirteen on July 21, 1947. The Allies also established the Federal Republic of Germany with its capital at Bonn on May 23, 1949; the three West Berlin sectors were combined under a German-­run government. Moscow reacted by forming the People’s Republic of Germany with its capital East Berlin on October 7, 1949. Germany and Berlin appeared to be permanently divided. Selective containment’s second challenge was intelligence that the Soviet Union had tested a nuclear bomb, thus ending America’s monopoly, on August 29, 1949.11 Until then, Washington and its allies assumed that America’s overwhelming nuclear power deterred a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. That deterrence would weaken as the Soviets acquired more nuclear power and the means to detonate it at European and eventually American targets. Atop that shock came another. At Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced its conquest of mainland China on October 1, 1949. A communist victory in China was inevitable after 1945. The Soviet offensive against Japanese forces launched on August 8, 1945, achieved all its goals. The Red Army decimated and routed the Japanese armies.

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After Japan’s surrender, the Soviets disarmed and herded a couple million prisoners into camps. Although Stalin had promised to support Generalissimo Chiang Kai-­shek, the Soviets turned over Japanese arms, munitions, and supplies to China’s Communist Party. After the Soviets withdrew from China in August 1946, the communists controlled all the territory formerly occupied by the Japanese. Truman sent three special envoys to pressure Chiang into sweeping economic and political reforms that might generate some popular support for his corrupt, inept, and brutal regime: Ambassador Patrick Hurley in autumn 1945, Secretary of State Marshall in January 1946, and General Albert Wedemeyer in July 1947. Chiang rejected the admonitions of all three and instead got them to deliver his regime more military supplies. Eventually the Americans gave $3.2 billion to Chiang’s regime, with most of it squandered, stolen, or actually sold to the communists. Meanwhile, the communists steadily gained territory and supporters no matter how much military equipment the Americans shipped to ­Chiang. Mao followed a classic revolutionary strategy. Militarily his troops systematically destroyed the incompetently supplied, armed, trained, and led Nationalist forces. Politically, his cadres systematically infiltrated villages and city districts, transforming them into communist strongholds with reforms and threats. By October 1949, the communists had taken over mainland China while Chiang and the remnants of his followers and army fled to the island province of Taiwan off China’s southeast coast and prepared to make a last stand. It seemed only a matter of time before the communists gathered enough troops, ships, and supplies to invade and overwhelm Taiwan’s defenders. In Washington and across the United States, Republicans blasted Truman and the Democratic Party with the slogan “Who lost China?” Kennan had anticipated the communist takeover of China along with a Soviet atomic bomb and challenges to the West in Berlin and elsewhere. He had argued that Washington and its allies should firmly resist Soviet pressure while trying to co-­opt communists in China and other countries with promises of trade and support against Moscow. On January 1, 1950, Paul Nitze replaced Kennan as head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. He agreed with his predecessor’s goals: “The policy of ‘containment’ . . . seeks by all means short of war to (1) block further expansion of Soviet power, (2) expose the falsities of Soviet pretentions, (3) induce a contraction of the Kremlin’s control and influence and (4) . . . foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system.” But he considered inadequate Kennan’s selective containment strategy that focused on developing Western Europe and Japan through aid, investments, and trade within an expanding global economy, of defeating communism with prosperity, not arms.



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Instead, Nitze advocated a global military-­led containment strategy that tried to crush every communist insurgency in any country no matter how remote or poor. Otherwise, a communist revolution in one country would sponsor revolutions in neighboring countries, a dynamic soon called a “domino effect” as communists took over one country after another. He and his staff elaborated the global containment strategy in NSC-68, completed in April 1950. The report cited the growing military threat that the Kremlin and its allies posed around the world, with most worrisome the Berlin crisis, Soviet development of nuclear weapons, and China’s communist revolution. The key passage justifying global containment was that “the assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.”12 Truman and his inner circle debated whether to adopt global containment when the outbreak of war in Korea decided the issue. In August 1945, Washington and Moscow agreed to split Korea at the thirty-­eighth parallel, with respective American and Soviet occupation zones south and north of that line to disarm the Japanese army and repatriate those soldiers and Japanese colonists.13 Each imposed an allied dictator on his zone—the Americans Rhee Syngman in Seoul and the Soviets Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. With American pressure, Rhee held the first National Assembly elections on May 10 and transformed his regime into the Republic of South Korea on August 15, 1948. Both Rhee and Kim publicly pledged to reunite Korea, each anticipating reunification under his leadership. During the Berlin crisis, the Truman administration withdrew forty-­five thousand occupation troops from South Korea and redeployed most to Europe. Kim infiltrated troops into South Korea to conduct sabotage and provoke rebellions. With American military and CIA advisors, South Korea’s army eliminated most insurgents. On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson actually left South Korea, along with Taiwan, out of America’s “offshore” Far East defense perimeter that included Japan and the Philippines. Stalin hosted a summit with China’s Mao and North Korea’s Kim from December 1949 to February 1950. During that time, he promised to send massive economic and military supplies to his communist brothers and backed the plans of Mao and Kim to capture Taiwan and South Korea, respectively. Apparently they did not agree on specific invasion plans and timetables. Nonetheless, the 135,000-man North Korean army, spearheaded by 126 tanks, invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, shattered the unprepared and ill-­trained 100,000-man army, captured Seoul on June 27, and pushed south down the peninsula.14 Truman and his advisors debated how to respond.15 They quickly concluded that Moscow was behind the attack as a diversion before

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launching another crisis in Europe. They embraced Nitze’s global containment conception and strategy. They got the UN Security Council to declare the invasion a breach of peace and to authorize the United States to organize a coalition to drive out the North Koreans. Truman appointed Douglas MacArthur, who headed Japan’s occupation, commander of the army that would fight in Korea.16 The 7th Pacific Fleet received orders to steam between mainland China and Taiwan to prevent the communists from invading that island. Truman asked Congress to approve a military aid package for France that was fighting a communist-­led independence war in Indochina. America’s defense budget quadrupled from $13.7 billion, or 5 percent of the economy, in 1950 to $52.8 billion, or 14.2 percent, in 1953.17 As Truman later put it, “If history has taught us anything, it is that aggression anywhere in the world is a threat to peace everywhere in the world. When that aggression is supported by the cruel and selfish rulers of a powerful nation who are bent on conquest, it becomes a clear and present danger to the security and independence of every free state.”18 The Americans won the Security Council’s authorization to form an alliance and drive out the North Korean invaders because the Soviet delegation was not present to veto it. Stalin was boycotting the Security Council in protest that the Nationalist rather than Communist regime occupied China’s seat. Clearly, the Soviets would have been there to veto the resolution had they known the North Korean invasion date. Yet Truman and his advisors ignored that critical evidence and instead clung to the idea of Moscow directing a strategy of worldwide communist revolutions and wars. The South Korean army’s remnants fled to the port of Pusan. MacArthur hurried troops to bolster a defense perimeter around Pusan. Meanwhile, he mobilized a 260-ship armada packed with 8th Army’s seventy thousand troops commanded by General Walton Walker. The Americans landed at Inchon, Seoul’s port; routed the two thousand defenders; and pushed inland on September 15. That forced the North Koreans 180 miles southeast at Pusan hastily to retreat north. On September 27, Defense Secretary George Marshall authorized MacArthur to pursue the enemy north of the thirty-­eighth parallel as long as the Chinese or Soviet armies did not support the North Koreans. MacArthur had Walker order his division commanders to overrun North Korea. On October 7, the United States got the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution authorizing Korea’s reunification by forty-­seven to five, with seven abstentions. MacArthur committed four mistakes in his offensive that led to catastrophe. He ignored instructions that only Korean forces should advance beyond the narrow waist in North Korea while the American and other foreign troops halted there. For his offensive, he initially united all American, South Korean, and other allied troops into the 8th Army commanded



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by Walton Walker, but during the offensive he split the army among columns separated by high mountain ranges that prevented them from reinforcing each other. He did not fully equip his troops for the harsh approaching winter. Most grievously, he ignored intelligence reports that Chinese troops were crossing the Yalu River that divides China and North Korea. The Chinese launched an initial attack on October 26 that the allies repelled and a massive attack that routed them on November 26. The allies retreated to a meandering line scores of miles below the thirty-­eighth parallel. When Walker died in an automobile accident on December 23, Truman replaced him with Matthew Ridgway. That was an excellent choice.19 Ridgway had fought brilliantly during World War II as first commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and then the 18th Airborne Corps in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. With massive reinforcements, he launched an offensive on January 25, 1951, that punched back the communist forces, retook Seoul on March 24, blunted several massive Chinese counterattacks, and advanced to a meandering line mostly north of the thirty-­eighth parallel by June 24. For the next two and a half years, America’s strategy was to hold that line along which fighting periodically flared. That limited-­war strategy infuriated MacArthur, who made several public statements in March and early April 1951 that called for massively bombing China and reunifying Korea. On April 11, Truman fired MacArthur, elevated Ridgway to theater commander with his headquarters at Tokyo, and had James Van Fleet head the 8th Army. Meanwhile, the United States successfully demilitarized, democratized, and economically reconstructed neighboring Japan. On September 8, 1951, Tokyo signed two treaties, one for peace with the United States and forty-­seven other countries, the second for a bilateral alliance with the United States. America’s occupation formally ended six months later on April 28, 1952. Japan’s strategic position, dynamic economy, 100 million people, and 110,000 military personnel significantly bolstered Washington’s global containment policy. Elsewhere, Washington extended its alliance system to the southwest Pacific in 1951 by forming the Australian, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) Pact. Dwight Eisenhower succumbed to pressure to run as a Republican for president in the 1952 election. Since World War II, he had served as army chief of staff from November 1945 to February 1948, Columbia University’s president from 1948 to 1953, and then Supreme Allied Commander for Europe from April 1951 to May 1952. He decisively won the Republican Party nomination. As a presidential candidate, he wisely expressed crowd-­pleasing bromides about promoting prosperity,

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peace, and security. As for the Korean War, he promised that, if elected, he would go to South Korea and determine how best to honorably end it. Eisenhower trounced Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson by 34,075,529 popular votes (55.2 percent) and 442 Electoral College votes to 27,375,090 (44.3 percent) and 89. Republicans also captured Congress with 49 to 47 Democratic senators and 221 to 213 Democratic and 1 independent representatives.20 Eisenhower entered the White House with outstanding administrative skills and foreign policy expertise.21 He worried that America was mired in a cold war without a clear goal or way to get there: “That cold war must have some objective, otherwise it would be senseless. And that objective had to be more than ‘victory’ because a victory gained without regard to costs and effects, especially in a nuclear age, could be as devastating as defeat.”22 Unfortunately, Eisenhower chose as his secretary of state not a worldly realist who could have helped him find answers to crucial existential geopolitical questions but a zealous idealist. John Foster Dulles resembled President Woodrow Wilson in many ways.23 Both had stern Presbyterian minister fathers and were Princeton graduates and lawyers. They were very bright but moralistic, narrow-­minded, and controlling. They sought not to understand the world’s complexities but to blanket them with their visions. Dulles refused to negotiate with communists because he thought them evil, and one could not negotiate with evil. So the White House missed possible opportunities to alleviate some Cold War tensions. The most infamous came at an international conference at Geneva in 1954 when Dulles turned his back to snub Chinese foreign minister Chou Enlai as he approached extending his hand. A massive stroke killed Stalin on March 5, 1953. Four powerful members of the Politburo or cabinet replaced Stalin as a governing quad: Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lavrenty Beria. Khrushchev first allied with Malenkov and Molotov to have Beria executed and eventually forced them to retire and thereafter ruled alone.24 During the Twentieth Communist Party Conference in February 1956, Khrushchev revealed and denounced Stalin’s genocide and tyranny and promised to de-­Stalinize the Soviet Union and pursue “peaceful coexistence” with the West. Although Eisenhower summited with Khrushchev at Geneva in 1955 and Camp David in 1959, while Dulles met Foreign Minister Molotov in Berlin in 1954 and in Vienna once and Geneva twice in 1955, in addition to meeting Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Geneva in 1959, the “no compromise” rule spiked any possible deals. Although rhetorically the Eisenhower White House was committed to “rolling back” communism and “liberating” repressed peoples, it avoided confrontations and crises with Moscow while asserting global



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containment. Yet, no matter what the United States did, the communists appeared to advance steadily on all fronts. In a 1954 letter to Churchill, Eisenhower bleakly assessed related geopolitical and psychological defeats: “We have come to the point where every additional backward step must be deemed a defeat for the Western world. In fact, it is a triple defeat. First, we lose a potential ally. Next, we give to an implacable enemy another recruit. Beyond this, every such retreat creates in the minds of neutrals the fear that we do not mean what we say when we pledge our support to people who want to remain free.” A 1955 National Security Council report was just as pessimistic: “As the lines between the Communist bloc and Western coalition have come to be more clearly drawn over the last few years, a situation has arisen in which any further Communist territorial gain would have an unfavorable impact within the free world that might be out of all proportion to the strategic or economic significance of the territory lost.”25 American policy makers had long recognized that capturing hearts and minds was as critical as capturing cities and regions in a struggle against an enemy ideology.26 To that end, Congress established three radio broadcasters: Voice of America in 1942, Radio Free Europe in 1949, and Radio Liberty in 1953, as well as, that latter year, the United States Information Agency (USIA) to coordinate those and other propaganda sources. Also in 1953, Congress issued its first annual “Captive People’s Resolution” that called on repressed and exploited Eastern Europeans to revolt against the Soviet empire and its puppet communist dictators. Washington expanded its aid programs to the Third World, including establishing the Inter-­ American Development Bank with $500 million in 1959. Meanwhile, a battle over hearts and minds raged within the United States. From 1950 to 1954, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin made a series of accusations that communists had infiltrated the State Department, army, CIA, defense industries, and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, and viciously attacked scores of individuals.27 Although he claimed knowledge of a “conspiracy so immense, so black, as to dwarf any in the previous history of man,” he never produced any evidence for any of his claims. In 1950, the Senate Tydings Committee investigated his accusations and pronounced them “a fraud and a hoax.” Yet he kept getting away with his pathological lies because he was popular with many people and feared by countless others. McCarthy’s reign of terror lasted four years before opponents mustered the courage and numbers to fight back. Seven Republican senators publicly issued a “Declaration of Conscience” essay against McCarthyism on June 1, 1954. During a Senate hearing on June 8, lawyer Joseph Welch condemned McCarthy’s “cruelty and ruthlessness” and then demanded, “Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last?” That turned the political tide. The Senate censured

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McCarthy by sixty-­seven to twenty-­two on December 2, 1954. McCarthyism deeply damaged America’s democratic political culture and paved the way for future demagogues, most disastrously Donald Trump’s presidency and his instigation of the insurrection against America’s government on January 6, 2021. Eisenhower’s priority was to end the stalemated Korean War. He fulfilled his campaign promise to go to South Korea with a secret trip in early December 1952. He concluded that victory was impossible and that only diplomacy could end the war. Starting in June 1951, a United Nations commission had engaged in several negotiation rounds with the North Koreans and Chinese. On November 27, 1951, they agreed to a demilitarized zone two miles wide along the existing front and a permanent negotiation site at Panmunjom on that line. One unresolved issue was the fate of North Korean and Chinese prisoners. The allies insisted that they be free to decide whether to stay in South Korea or return to communism. The communists insisted that all prisoners must be repatriated. Eisenhower had envoys negotiate a face-­saving deal to establish a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission (NNRC) that would exchange all prisoners and by a majority vote decide any issues that arose. President Rhee opposed that deal and on June 18 authorized the release of twenty-­five thousand North Korean prisoners who wanted to remain in South Korea. Eisenhower sent Rhee a public letter rebuking him for that act. Beijing and Pyongyang accepted that gesture, and on July 23, 1953, their envoys and America’s signed an armistice document that officially ended the fighting but not the war. That armistice followed a devastating war in which 2 million North Korean civilians, 520,000 North Korean soldiers, 900,000 Chinese, 1 million South Koreans, 47,000 South Korean soldiers, and 36,574 Americans died and 105,000 suffered wounds. Although non-­Korean allies fought in the peninsula, Americans accounted for 90 percent of the ground, 90 percent of the air, and 80 percent of the naval forces. The allies returned 75,823 war prisoners, including 70,183 North Koreans and 5,640 Chinese, while the communists returned 12,773 allies, including 7,862 South Koreans, 3,597 Americans, and 946 Britons. Over 23,600 mostly Chinese refused to be repatriated along with 359 allies, including 333 South Koreans, 23 Americans, and 1 Briton.28 During that war, two Soviet weapons proved to be especially deadly. MIG-15 fighter jets proved superior to F-86 Sabre fighter jets in firepower and speed. MIG-15s and advanced surface-­to-­air missiles (SAMs) shot down America’s B-29 propeller-­driven bombers that had been state of the art in World War II. For the first time, Soviets and Americans directly, although secretly, fought each other as Soviet pilots in MIG-15s and



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American pilots in F-86s swirled in dogfights and shot each other down over the Korean Peninsula. Ridgway explained the Korean War’s lessons for Cold War strategy: “Before Korea, all our military planning envisioned a war that would involve the world. . . . But Korea taught us that all warfare from this time forth must be limited. It could no longer be a question of whether to fight a limited war, but of how to avoid fighting any other kind.”29 Eisenhower actually cut the defense budget from $52.8 billion, or 14.2 percent of the economy, in 1953 to $49.6 billion, or 9.4 percent, in 1961 and reduced the army a third from 1,404,598 to 898,925 troops.30 He did so to protect America’s prosperity and democracy, warning that the arms race imposed “a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden . . . draining the wealth and labor of all peoples. . . . Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies . . . a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”31 Once again, a peace dividend stimulated the economy that expanded an average 3.35 percent from 1953 to 1961. Eisenhower supplemented American forces by expanding NATO with new members like Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955 and by establishing new alliances like the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) with Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan in 1954 and the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), or the Baghdad Pact, with Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan in 1955. Yet he understood the paradox that simply recruiting more allies without assessing their relative worth could actually backfire: I have held that it is a very grave error to ask some of these nations to announce themselves as being on our side. . . . Such a statement on the part of a weak nation like Burma, or even India, would at once make them our all-­ out ally and we would have the impossible task of helping them arm for their defense. Moreover, if a country would declare itself our ally, then any attack made by Communist groups would be viewed . . . as more or less a logical consequence. . . . On the other hand, if the Soviets attacked an avowed neutral, world opinion would be outraged.32

One region that did not worry Eisenhower was Western Europe, because it had fully recovered from the war’s destruction, was economically expanding, and was starting to integrate. With the 1951 Treaty of Paris, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg agreed to establish the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) that integrated those industries to make them more efficient and globally

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competitive. With the 1957 Treaty of Rome, those countries established the European Economic Community (EEC) that eliminated trade barriers among themselves and established common external trade barriers. Treaties in 1955 let West Germany join NATO and Austria become neutral as the Americans and Soviets withdrew their occupying forces. Communism posed the greatest threat to Third World countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia suffering mass poverty, corruption, incompetence, brutality, and violence.33 There Eisenhower viewed CIA covert actions as critical to waging cold war. In doing so, he recognized the moral dilemma that involved but reasoned that the ends justified the means: “I have come to the conclusion that some of our traditional ideas of international sportsmanship are scarcely applicable in the morass in which the world now flounders. Truth, honor, justice, consideration of others, liberty for all—the problem is how to preserve them, nurture them, and keep the peace . . . when we are opposed by people who scorn . . . these values.”34 To that end, he authorized an array of CIA covert actions, most notably coups against anti-­American governments in Iran and Guatemala. In Iran, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi appointed Mohammad Mosaddegh prime minister after his National Front coalition of his own Socialist Party, the communist Tudeh Party, and small parties won a majority of seats in parliament in 1951. Parliament then voted to nationalize the Anglo-­Iranian Oil Company that controlled Iran’s oil reserves. Britain economically boycotted Iran in retaliation. In 1953, Mosaddegh had parliament pass a law granting him the power to issue decrees and limit the shah to ceremonial duties. Britain’s MI-6 and America’s CIA talked the docile shah into dismissing Mosaddegh and replacing him with General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister. When Mosaddegh refused to relinquish power, the CIA and MI-6 organized mass demonstrations against him from August 15 to August 19. On August 19, the army arrested Mosaddegh, and Zahedi took power as prime minister. The shah assumed power with his prime minister as his deputy. He opened Iran’s oil reserves to exploitation by British Petroleum, Dutch Shell, and five American corporations; formed Savak, the secret police, to arrest political opponents; and let the CIA set up electronic listening posts along the border with the Soviet Union. The shah’s pro-­Western government lasted a quarter century until an Islamist revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew it in 1979.35 Socialist candidate Jacobo Arbenz Guzman won Guatemala’s 1951 election with the promise of reforms that alleviated poverty, including distributing land to peasants. In 1952, he nationalized about one-­quarter of Guatemala’s huge plantations, including four hundred thousand acres



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owned by the American United Fruit Company. Arbenz offered $1.2 million for land that the United Fruit Company insisted was worth $19 million. The fear in Washington was that unless America made a lesson of Arbenz, his nationalization policy would spur other Latin American governments to do the same, thus delivering devastating blows to American profits and power throughout the Western Hemisphere. The White House declared Arbenz’s regime communist and got the Organization of American States (OAS) to vote seventeen to one for a resolution that condemned communism in the Western Hemisphere. Arbenz cut a deal with Czechoslovakia to supply Guatemala with arms. The CIA organized a coup against Arbenz that prepared the ground with a disinformation campaign through newspapers and radio broadcasts that denigrated his regime, generous bribes to army officers to oppose him, arms drops for coup supporters on United Fruit Company lands, and Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to take over. On June 18, 1954, Arbenz and his followers fled into exile after learning that Armas and several hundred armed followers had crossed the border from Honduras headed for Guatemala City, the capital. After taking power, Armas restored the nationalized lands to the United Fruit Company and other owners.36 The Eisenhower administration dealt with twin crises in October 1956 that challenged global containment’s assumptions and policies, one in the Middle East and the other in Eastern Europe.37 The Middle East was an increasingly vital Cold War front. In 1952, General Mohammad Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew pro-­Western Egyptian king Farouk and established a dictatorship; Nasser forced Naguib to retire in 1953. He promoted himself as the Arab world’s leader through Radio Cairo broadcasts that denounced Israel and its Western backers, including the United States. Secretary of State Dulles conceived an idea that might restore American influence over Egypt.38 In December 1955, he offered Nasser a $1.5 billion World Bank loan and expertise for Egypt to build a dam at Aswan high up the Nile River to control flooding and generate electricity. Nasser accepted but also signed treaties whereby the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia supplied Egypt with arms while the Arab frontline states strengthened their alliance against Israel. Dulles canceled that World Bank deal on July 19, 1956. Nasser reacted by seizing control over the Suez Canal Company from its British and French shareholders that had acquired the right to run and defend it in 1882. He also asked Moscow for a Soviet loan and expertise to build the dam. Khrushchev eagerly agreed to a deal that inevitably would greatly strengthen Soviet influence over Egypt. Britain, Israel, and France secretly devised a plan to retake the canal and ideally topple Nasser’s regime. On October 29, Israel invaded Egypt

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and raced toward the canal while the British and French governments warned both Cairo and Tel Aviv to cease fire. Although the Israelis routed the Egyptians, Nasser had ships sunk in the canal to block passage. On November 5, British and French paratroopers landed at the Suez Canal’s north end to link with Israeli troops. Eisenhower condemned that aggression and threatened to sever aid with all three countries if they did not withdraw. The three sheepishly did so. The United Nations agreed to impose a peacekeeping force on the Israeli-­Egyptian border. Meanwhile, across Eastern Europe, word of Khrushchev’s embrace of de-­Stalinization and peaceful coexistence during the Twentieth Communist Party Conference in February 1956 leaked and spread. That gave hope to suppressed liberals across Eastern Europe longing to free their countries from Soviet imperial and communist horrors. Inspired, a group of Hungarian students organized a protest of twenty thousand people demanding sixteen liberal reforms in Budapest on October 23, 1956. The next day, Hungary’s Politburo, or governing committee, made Imre Nagy prime minister. Nagy agreed to most demands, including withdrawing Hungary from the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact alliance, demanding that all Soviet troops leave the country, and promising to hold free elections. Initially Premier Khrushchev ordered the troops to withdraw while massing more from neighboring countries on the frontier. The Soviet army invaded Hungary on November 1, fought its way into Budapest on November 4, and crushed the last resistance by November 9. The Eisenhower White House could merely protest. Washington’s largest Third World commitment was in Indochina. Eventually nothing ultimately discredited the global containment strategy worse than the Vietnam War.39 Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist who journeyed to the United States, Britain, and France as a young man. America’s freedoms and enterprise deeply impressed him. Yet in France he joined the Communist Party because he believed that could best liberate his country from French colonial rule. He received Comintern training in Moscow from 1924 to 1927 before heading to Southeast Asia. He founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1929 and led a revolt in 1930, but the French crushed the uprising. During Japan’s occupation of Indochina, he formed the Vietminh, a coalition of groups including communists to fight the latest colonizers. America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had a station in Kunming, China, during the war. In 1944, Ho visited Kunming and asked for support. The OSS promised aid but did not deliver on that promise until July 1945, when a five-­man OSS team led by Major Allison Thomas reached Ho. In August 1945, Major Archimedes Patti reached Ho’s headquarters shortly after Tokyo announced that it would surrender. Ho asked Patti to help him draft Vietnam’s



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independence declaration. Patti happily complied after Ho assured him that he was a “progressive-­nationalist-­socialist” and that Emperor Bao Dai in Hue, the Imperial City, had abdicated sovereignty to the Vietminh. Another seven-­man OSS team led by Lieutenant Colonel Peter Dewey arrived. On September 2, 1945, OSS officers stood beside Ho in Hanoi, where he declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, justified by the principles of America’s Declaration of Independence, not the Communist Manifesto. On September 26, Dewey became the first American to die in Vietnam when Vietminh guards shot him in a dispute at a checkpoint. Ho sent a letter of condolence and regret for the tragedy to President Truman. Ho’s declaration of independence provoked a debate between the State Department’s Asian and European experts. Asianists argued that Washington should embrace Ho and the Vietminh and pressure France to grant independence. Ho was a deep nationalist and shallow communist. A constructive relationship with Ho could be a model for relations with other communist nationalists like Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito. If Washington backed France’s attempt to reassert colonialism, they would drive Ho and his nationalist-­communist movement, along with others around the world, to Moscow for support. Europeanists countered that France’s fate was critical and Vietnam’s peripheral to American security. Forcing France to abandon its empire would bitterly split the country. France’s Communist Party was a Moscow puppet that could take power if the mainstream political parties fragmented. That debate anticipated the future debate between Kennan’s selective and Nitze’s global versions of containment strategy. Truman ultimately sided with the Europeanists. However, Washington did not begin sending military aid directly to France’s counterinsurgency campaign until after the White House adopted the global containment strategy following communist North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. Yet, no matter how many troops the French sent to Vietnam and how many American supplies they received—an amount that totaled $2.6 billion and 78 percent of the French war costs from 1950 to 1954—the Vietminh steadily strengthened.40 The Vietminh received increasing Chinese military aid and volunteers after communists took power in October 1949. General Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho’s brilliant deputy, commanded the Vietminh army.41 The decisive battle came at Dien Bien Phu in the mountains 240 miles west of Hanoi, where eighty thousand Vietminh forced fourteen thousand French troops to surrender on May 7 after an eight-­week siege. That news arrived at an international peace conference in Geneva, where from April 26 parallel negotiations unfolded between diplomats of France and the Vietminh and those of North and South Korea, with the United States, the Soviet Union, and China observing both. On July 20, France

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and the Vietminh signed a treaty whereby France granted independence to Vietnam, to be divided temporarily at the seventeenth parallel between a communist north and noncommunist south before national elections in 1956 and the country’s reunification. The Eisenhower administration made a critical decision to support South Vietnam’s government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, a rich Catholic and bachelor, as the prime minister for Emperor Bao Dai, who had repudiated the Vietminh and embraced the South Vietnamese regime. The three-­hundred-­man Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) that had assisted the French now served Diem. The White House pressured Diem to repudiate the scheduled 1956 election and solidify his power over South Vietnam. Washington gave South Vietnam $1.65 billion in military and economic aid from 1955 to 1961, while MAAG increased from 342 to 746 men headed by General Samuel Williams, and trained and equipped the 150,000-man Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Much of the aid was squandered or stolen and resold. Although Diem was personally austere and honest, corrupt officials and groups, including his brother and right-­hand man Ngo Dinh Nhu, pervaded his Can Lao Party. As if the communists were not threatening enough, Diem faced three powerful groups that were, like his Can Lao Party, essentially organized crime gangs of protection, prostitution, gambling, narcotics, and embezzlement. Two were religious cult–political parties, Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, with about two million and one million respective followers, along with Binh Xuyen, with fifteen thousand militiamen that controlled a region northwest of Saigon. Colonel Edward Lansdale became Diem’s most important American advisor, a former OSS officer who had recently helped Philippine president Ramon Magsaysay crush a communist insurgency. Although Diem respected Lansdale, he rarely followed his advice. Lansdale tried to broker a coalition among the three parties, but Diem’s refusal to compromise provoked them to rebel in 1955. With American support, South Vietnam’s army routed those rebels. Diem and his brother Nhu accepted the loyalty of many of the defeated leaders, especially from Cao Dai, into their Can Lao Party. A rigged referendum recorded that 98.2 percent of voters favored deposing Emperor Bao Dai and establishing a republic with Diem president. In 1956, the army defeated Vietminh forces in most of the country. Diem’s regime appeared secure for now. During those same years, Ho established the communist People’s Republic of North Vietnam, nationalized all land and businesses, and imprisoned several hundred thousand and executed over one hundred thousand “class enemies.” More than 880,000 civilians and 190,000 former soldiers fled south.42 Ho aided the small but growing Vietminh



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movement in the South, eventually called the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), or Viet Cong. In December 1960, he renamed the Vietminh the National Liberation Front (NLF), spearheaded by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Elsewhere, the communist movements Pathet Lao in Laos and Khmer Rouge in Cambodia steadily gained support and territory. Meanwhile, in America’s geopolitical backyard, communism engulfed Cuba.43 Fidel Castro was a charismatic lawyer and radical leftist who hated Cuban president Fulgencio Batista and his corrupt, authoritarian regime. Castro gathered a group of like-­minded radicals and on July 26, 1953, tried to overthrow the government in a Hitler-­style putsch. The police killed or captured most of Castro’s followers, but he escaped into the mountains. There he formed another revolutionary group called the “26th of July Movement,” which received secret Soviet money, arms, training, and advisors. In 1956, he launched a guerrilla war against government forces. He wielded the dual communist strategy of militarily demolishing the government’s armed forces, institutions, economy, and support while politically building an alternative populist government from the villages and city districts upward to himself at the top. In December 1958, Batista and his followers fled into exile, and on January 1, 1959, Castro and his cabal occupied the presidential palace in Havana. All along, the Eisenhower administration remained aloof from the civil war. Batista’s corruption and incompetence appalled the president and his advisors. The regime squandered or pocketed much of the military and economic aid Washington provided. Castro claimed to be not a communist but merely a reformer dedicated to alleviating poverty. Castro revealed his true nature and that of his movement after he took power. He was a hard-­core communist who nationalized foreign investments without compensation and eventually received billions of dollars’ worth of Soviet aid. Yet Eisenhower did not authorize the CIA to overthrow Castro until March 1960. In Operation Mongoose, the CIA organized a sabotage campaign against Castro’s regime and began training a brigade of exiled Cubans at a secret base in Nicaragua for an eventual invasion to liberate their homeland. These operations were still at a low level when Eisenhower’s second term ended and John Kennedy won the 1960 election to replace him. Eisenhower’s White House promoted a “more bang for the buck” and “new look” military policy that hopefully deterred a Soviet invasion of Europe or elsewhere with an increasingly powerful nuclear force. From 1953 to 1961, America’s nuclear arsenal soared nearly ten times from 1,200 to 22,229 bombs that enabled “massive retaliation” against a Soviet attack. The Americans enjoyed another strategic edge. In 1956, supersonic

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high-­ altitude U-2 spy planes began flights over swaths of the Soviet empire containing industrial complexes and military bases, at heights so great that Soviet fighter planes and missiles could not reach them. The United States received nuclear allies when Britain and France tested their first bombs in 1952 and 1960, respectively. The switch from liquid-­fuel to solid-­fuel propellants at once made nuclear missiles safer and launchable on command. Although the Soviets lagged in numbers, they scored two temporary advances during the 1950s, by detonating a thermonuclear bomb in 1953 and beating the Americans into space by launching the Sputnik satellite on October 5, 1957. The thermonuclear bomb briefly gave Moscow a nuclear propaganda but not a military edge. A thermonuclear bomb would create blast, heat, and radiation many times larger than a hydronuclear bomb, and thus destroy more people and things, but, like all nuclear weapons, that destructive power mattered only if it deterred an enemy attack, which was impossible to determine. Thermonuclear bombs were just bigger bombs. In contrast, launching Sputnik was a true military breakthrough. That first satellite was basketball sized, 184 pounds, and circled the earth before falling into it. With time, Moscow would improve the launchers and replace satellites with nuclear bombs. Nuclear-­tipped missiles outflanked America’s layers of air defenses that could shoot down any nuclear-­armed Soviet bombers. Yet Moscow’s space lead was brief. The Americans launched their own Explorer satellite on January 31, 1958. Congress followed that with a bill that established the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) in July 1958. Eisenhower hoped to significantly alleviate (if not end) the Cold War before he left office. Khrushchev was also eager for treaties that promoted “peaceful coexistence.” In September 1959, the premier accepted the president’s invitation to travel across the United States for ten days followed by a two-­day summit at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains fifty miles northwest of Washington. They amiably agreed that Khrushchev would host Eisenhower in Moscow in May 1960. That “Spirit of Camp David” went well until two things spiked it. First, Khrushchev rejected Eisenhower’s insistence that he retract an ultimatum he had made in November 1958 that the West must transfer West Berlin to East Germany. Then, on May 1, 1960, a Soviet missile shot down an American U-2 spy plane and captured the pilot, Gary Powers. On May 6, Khrushchev displayed photos of the shot-­down plane and pilot. That scuttled the scheduled summit at Paris later that month. In his farewell address, Eisenhower issued this dire warning to the American people:



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Our military organization today bears little resemblance to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime. . . . We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. . . . The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military-­industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. . . . Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense . . . so that our security and liberty may prosper together.44

Popular culture mostly reflected and shaped prevailing conservative views of American history and masculinity during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.45 As for Hollywood, John Wayne became a movie star in the 1940s, playing western and military characters that exemplified social Darwinism and vigilantism, and remained popular throughout his career and after his death in 1979. Director John Ford produced the most morally ambiguous films starring Wayne, like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande (1957), and The Searchers (1956). That subtlety disappeared in movies that Wayne directed and starred in like The Alamo (1960) and The Green Berets (1968). Two films from the early 1950s offered thought-­provoking versions of the reluctant hero who alone fights the outlaws and saves townspeople too timid or weak to defend themselves: High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953), respectively starring Gary Cooper and Alan Ladd. The Magnificent Seven (1960) used a similar plot, this time with seven fighters who rally the people against rapacious outlaws. Those themes reflected and justified America’s attempts to work with beleaguered governments against communist insurgencies across the Third World, especially in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Hollywood produced traditional war films about American heroism like The Longest Day (1962) and The Great Escape (1963). Frontier, western, and war shows filled television during the 1950s and 1960s, such as Gunsmoke (1955–1975) and Daniel Boone (1964–1970). Ayn Rand wrote two influential novels—The Fountainhead (1943), made into a film in 1949, and Atlas Shrugged (1957)—that celebrated uninhibited materialism and individualism. Colonel Edward Lansdale, who advised Philippine president Magsaysay and South Vietnam prime minister Diem on how to fight communist insurgencies, inspired two novels: The Quiet American (1955) by British author Graham Greene and The Ugly America (1959) by American journalists William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. Both novels questioned the efficacy (and thus the morality) of America’s

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support for South Vietnam’s corrupt, inept, and brutal regime against the communist insurgency. With Eisenhower’s retirement, the 1960 election was an open contest. Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts, respectively, won the Republican and Democratic Party nominations. During the campaign, Kennedy insisted that the Eisenhower administration had allowed a “missile gap” to widen with the Soviet Union that threatened the United States. He was half right. The gap actually favored America, which had ten times more nuclear-­tipped missiles than the Soviet Union. Nixon knew that reality but could not cite statistics that revealed intelligence sources and methods to Moscow. The election was a squeaker for the popular vote, with Kennedy getting 34,220,984 (49.72 percent) and Nixon 34,108,157 (49.55 percent), but Kennedy won a solid Electoral College victory by 303 to 219. Vitally, Democrats dominated Congress with 64 to 36 Republicans in the Senate and 262 to 175 Republicans in the House of Representatives.46 In his inaugural address, Kennedy issued this clarion call for global containment: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”47 In a different speech, he offered this vision for Americans that tapped deep into their culture’s deepest values and archetypes: “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort, and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. . . . We stand today on the edge of a new frontier . . . a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. . . . For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand on this frontier at a turning point in history.”48 He faced west across the Pacific and what would become a quagmire war in Vietnam. Yet Kennedy appreciated the world’s complexities and paradoxes. He replaced Woodrow Wilson’s call for America “to make the world safe for democracy” with the idea that “if we cannot now end our differences at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”49 Kennedy assembled a cabinet of dynamic leaders dubbed “the best and the brightest,” “action intellectuals,” and even “whiz kids,” even though most were middle aged. His right-­hand man was his younger brother Robert Kennedy, whom he named attorney general. The most charismatic and dynamic among them was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who, as Ford Motor Company’s president, raised profits through a rigorous mathematical matrix of trimming costs and maximizing production and sales. For him, hard power measured by statistics was the only way to measure success. “Give me something I can put in a computer,”



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he once barked at a subordinate. “Don’t give me your poetry.”50 That approach applied to the Vietnam War would be catastrophic. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was more even keeled. He understood that passions often trumped reason in shaping how people perceived and acted in the world. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy was a former Harvard University dean who provided a scholarly approach to exploring foreign challenges and opportunities and crafting policies that best advanced American interests. Kennedy first used Maxwell Taylor as his military advisor and then made him chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kennedy excluded Vice President Lyndon Johnson from foreign policy, wielding him mostly to lobby key congressional members to support or craft desired bills. For many Americans and other people around the world, Kennedy’s charisma, good looks, and eloquent speeches, culminating in his promise to put a man on the moon, exemplified America’s “can-­do” spirit.51 He promoted both the Green Berets and the Peace Corps to defend and develop Third World countries threatened by communist insurgencies. Yet shortly after he entered the White House, he suffered a humiliating defeat. Kennedy inherited a secret CIA war against Castro’s communist regime in Cuba. Under Operation Mongoose, agents spread anticommunist propaganda, burned supply warehouses and sugarcane fields, and tried to assassinate Castro. Meanwhile, a brigade of 1,453 Cuban-­exile troops in Nicaragua was preparing to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, an isolated beach a hundred miles from Havana on the south coast. That plan was utterly quixotic and doomed to failure. Less than 1,500 men stood no chance against Cuba’s twenty-­five-­thousand-­man army, two hundred thousand militiamen, and one hundred T-34 tanks. Spies had permeated the exiles, so Havana knew all about the pending invasion’s date, numbers, and site. After the exiles landed on April 17, Cuban army and militia units converged and attacked. During three days of fighting, the exiles killed 176 and wounded 500 regulars and killed or wounded around 2,000 militia, while suffering 118 killed and 360 wounded before the 1,202 survivors surrendered.52 Kennedy and Khrushchev met tensely to discuss Berlin, Laos, a proposed test-­ban treaty, and other geopolitical conflicts on June 4, 1961, but talked past each other and struck no understandings, let alone deals. Berlin was the most acrimonious issue. West Berlin was a dynamic island of democracy, entrepreneurship, and markets 110 miles within communist East Germany. Each day, freedom-­loving East Germans and visiting East Europeans escaped to West Berlin by easily evading checkpoints. From 1949 to 1961, over three million East Europeans defected. That brain drain was both a propaganda and an economic loss for communism. Moscow

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was determined to plug that gaping hole. For Khrushchev, West Berlin provided only one Soviet advantage: “Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”53 On August 11, 1961, he drastically reduced the brain drain into West Berlin by having East German troops encase it within coils of barbed wire before building a high wall with watchtowers manned by troops bearing machine guns. Castro savored his Bay of Pigs victory but feared that the Kennedy administration would now invade Cuba with overwhelming American military forces. To deter that possibility, he asked Khrushchev to station nuclear missiles in Cuba.54 At that time, the United States had ten times more nuclear weapons capable of obliterating sites in the Soviet Union than the Soviets had capable of doing the same to American sites. In May 1962, Khrushchev agreed to station in Cuba forty-­eight SS-4 and thirty-­ two SS-5 intermediate-­range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), with respective ranges of 1,020 and 2,200 miles, and forty-­ eight IL-28 nuclear-­ armed bomber jets protected by 144 surface-­to-­air missiles, MIG-21 fighter jets, and forty-­two thousand troops. That would double the number of nuclear weapons targeted at the United States, thus halving the Soviet strategic disadvantage from 1:10 to 1:5. The Kremlin began shipping all those weapons, equipment, and personnel to Cuba. A U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba photographed the nuclear missile sites on October 14. CIA analysts concluded that within two weeks the sites would be finished and the missiles capable of being fired. Kennedy assembled his closest advisors, called the Executive Committee, to debate how to respond. The options ranged from doing nothing to bombing them, with a blockade of Cuba in between. They swiftly agreed that they wanted the missiles out without a war with the Soviet Union. Bombing the sites would kill Soviet personnel and would certainly trigger a Soviet retaliatory attack somewhere, probably Berlin. If American and allied troops died, NATO would be compelled to retaliate, which could escalate to World War III and a nuclear holocaust. A consensus formed around the middle option. A blockade had two problems, one legal, the other practical. Legally, a blockade was an act of war and might escalate the conflict to violence. Practically, a blockade might prevent more missiles, equipment, supplies, and personnel from getting in, but it would not affect those already in Cuba. Also, war could result if the Soviets tried to muscle through the blockade. Nonetheless, Kennedy ordered a blockade, euphemistically called a “quarantine.” The navy mustered 180 warships for the blockade, while B-52 bombers, fighter wings, and tens of thousands of troops deployed in Florida. The public first learned of the Cuban missile crisis on October



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22, when Kennedy appeared on television to explain what the Soviets had done and his countermeasures and then called on Khrushchev to “halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”55 The crisis diminished when Soviet ships turned back on October 24. Nonetheless, the military fired shots despite orders by Kennedy and Khrushchev not to pull any triggers. A SAM downed a U-2 spy plane on October 27. American destroyers dropped depth charges near a Soviet submarine, forcing it to surface. Meanwhile, diplomats negotiated a deal that let each side declare partial victory and step back from nuclear war’s brink on October 28. Each leader publicly issued a promise, Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles and Kennedy not to invade Cuba. Privately, Kennedy also agreed to withdraw obsolete Jupiter IRBMs based in Turkey but would reinstall them if that withdrawal became public knowledge and it appeared that Moscow gained two concessions to one rather than one to one. The Cuban missile crisis prompted the Kennedy administration to shift America’s nuclear deterrent strategy from massive retaliation to flexible response. No longer would the White House vow to respond to any Soviet attack on Western Europe by emptying its nuclear arsenal at the Soviet Union. From now on, the United States would respond up the “escalation ladder.” Ideally NATO’s conventional forces would defeat a Warsaw Pact conventional attack. Only if the enemy threatened decisive breakthroughs would the United States attack those forces with tactical nuclear weapons. If the Soviets responded with their own tactical nuclear weapons, the United States would use IRBMs, and if the Soviets also used IRBMs, the United States would fire intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-­launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) against targets across the Soviet Union. Flexible response advocates claimed that strategy enhanced deterrence. The Kremlin vowed that it would massively retaliate if the United States launched one nuclear weapon, even a tactical one. Yet, ultimately, nuclear weapons were too horrific to use. Their only practical purpose was deterring their use. “Rattling the nuclear saber” or hinting at their use, as Truman did against China during the Korean War and Eisenhower did against China during its bombardments of Taiwan’s islands of Quemoy and Matsu, lacked credibility. America’s defense spending changed little from $49.6 billion, or 9.4 percent of the economy, in 1961 to $53.4 billion, or 8.9 percent, in 1963.56 Nonetheless, Washington’s global military power by 1963 included “275 major bases in 31 nations, 65 countries hosted U.S. forces, and the United States military trained soldiers in 75 countries. Also 1.25 million military-­ related personnel were stationed overseas. America’s ICMBs rose from 63 in 1961 to 424 in 1963. During 1961–1963, NATO’s nuclear firing power increased 60 percent.”57

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Swelling communist insurgencies in South Vietnam and Laos grabbed more of Kennedy’s attention. As a senator, he described Vietnam as “the cornerstone of the free world in southeast Asia, the keystone of the arch, the finger in the dyke.”58 Now he was privy to CIA reports warning that North Vietnam, backed by Soviet and Chinese military and economic aid, would send more troops and mobilize more southern insurgents faster than American-­trained South Vietnamese forces could kill or capture them. That meant that America’s national interest involved finding some understanding with Hanoi. But if he did so, Kennedy feared that Republicans would attack him and the Democratic Party with the question “Who lost Vietnam?” So he ignored the CIA’s warnings and instead increased the number of American military advisors from 746 in January 1961 to 16,700 in November 1963. He justified the expansion by getting Diem to nearly double his army’s size from 150,000 to 275,000, which required far more American advisors and aid. He also sent ever more advisors and aid to the neighboring kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia, which were facing worsening respective threats by the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge communist movements. Diem’s intransigence and incompetence increasingly frustrated the Kennedy administration. One percent of South Vietnam’s population owned half of all agricultural land, and yet Diem rejected American pressure to institute land reform that let peasants own what they farmed. As a fervent Catholic who favored Catholics with lucrative positions and contracts, he alienated 90 percent of the population that was Buddhist. His abolition of village councils and imposition of outside leaders on them alienated peasants. Most provincial leaders he appointed used their power to enrich themselves rather than to alleviate harsh conditions. Meanwhile, the Viet Cong infiltrated ever more villages and won their allegiance with promises to end corruption, poverty, and exploitation. A face-­saving way out of that unwinnable war appeared in the summer of 1963.59 Diem and Nhu sent word to Ho that they were interested in negotiating a peace and political settlement. French president Charles de Gaulle proposed a settlement that included an American withdrawal, South Vietnam’s neutralization, the country’s reunification, and a coalition government between Hanoi and Saigon. How different history would read had the Kennedy administration backed those peace proposals. Instead, Kennedy and his advisors agreed on a plan to replace Diem, but how it was done horrified them. On November 1, 1963, a cabal of generals captured and executed Diem and Nhu and then replaced them in the presidential palace. Three weeks later, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy on November 22. The new president would drastically change American policy toward Vietnam.



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Lyndon Johnson was highly intelligent and a skilled politician but felt inadequate with his humble origins and teachers’ college schooling before the East Coast elite with their Harvard degrees manning the White House and cabinet.60 Although he retained most of Kennedy’s men, he used them differently. Kennedy enjoyed convening his advisors for free-­flowing policy debates in which he acted as devil’s advocate until they forged a consensus. Johnson wanted yes-­men, and to get them he wielded the “Johnson treatment” of bullying others into compliance. He was tall, over six foot, four inches, and would loom over an advisor, literally grasp him by the lapels, and pull him forward as he cajoled him with reason, passion, and expletives to take Johnson’s position. On Vietnam, he short-­circuited policy making with his “Tuesday lunch group,” where he forcefully stated his views and then turned to someone immediately beside him and said, “Now you agree with me on that, don’t you?” After receiving the usually qualified reply of yes, he turned to the next man with the same demand, and so on. The result was stultified group think rather than free debate.61 Johnson tried at once to fight two wars, one against poverty and racism in America and the other against communism in Vietnam, with mixed results for the former and a decisive defeat in the latter. He lamented the dilemma that he had thrown himself into: “I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved in that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. . . . But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”62 Johnson promised to transform the United States into a “Great Society” that ended poverty and racism. His antipoverty policies included the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, the 1964 Food Stamp Act, and the 1965 Social Security Act that established Medicare and Medicaid. Although those policies did drop the poverty rate several percentage points, critics denounced the “welfare state” that discouraged personal initiative and responsibility. Johnson genuinely wanted to end discrimination against African Americans demanded by the swelling and increasingly violent civil rights movement led most prominently by Martin Luther King Jr. To that end, he got Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act that legally demolished racism across the United States. More controversially, he implemented an “affirmative action” program that some accused of being “reverse racism” because it accepted black applicants for colleges and jobs with lower qualifications than nonblacks. Riots worsened in black city districts

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despite all the new welfare and rights programs. The violence culminated with the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Meanwhile, the hippie movement challenged traditional authority and behavior with free love, communes, marijuana and LSD, and folk and psychedelic music.63 Magnifying the breakdown of law and order across the nation was the growing peace movement against the Vietnam War that Johnson had instigated and was determined not to lose.64 Shortly after becoming president, he had a resolution drafted whereby Congress granted him the authority to take “all measures to repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” All he needed was an excuse to present it to Congress. That excuse came on August 2, 1964. Ten miles off North Vietnam’s shore and thus within its territorial waters, the destroyer USS Maddox supported a CIA-­backed South Vietnamese commando raid against an installation ashore. Three North Vietnamese patrol boats approached, each fired a torpedo that missed, and then they withdrew. The Maddox and several fighter jets opened fire and sank one of the boats. On the night of August 4, another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, joined the Maddox, and they opened fire in the direction of twenty-­two torpedoes that radar tracked coming toward them, although a glitch caused by stormy weather probably explained the readings; regardless, there were no explosions. Johnson authorized retaliatory strikes against North Vietnamese patrol boat bases that destroyed twenty-­five vessels but cost two downed warplanes.65 With that, Johnson went before Congress to present his Tonkin Gulf Resolution that essentially gave him a blank check to wage war as he wished in Vietnam. Astonishingly, the House approved it by 416 to 0 and the Senate by 88 to 2 with virtually no debate on August 7. In a classic rally-­ around-­ the-­ flag phenomenon, Johnson’s popularity soared thirty points from 42 percent to 72 percent, while 85 percent backed his Vietnam policy.66 In a 1965 speech, he asserted the domino effect to justify that war: “Why must this nation hazard its ease, its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away? We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny, and only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure. . . . Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Vietnam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied.”67 To command that war, Johnson replaced Paul Harkins with William Westmoreland, a World War II and Korean War veteran, in June 1964.68 Westmoreland faced an enormous challenge. The communists then



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controlled about 50 percent of South Vietnam’s population and 40 percent of its territory.69 Westmoreland’s strategy was to win the war with overwhelming American hard power. Each year, Congress rubber-­stamped Johnson’s defense budgets and reinforcements to Vietnam that swelled from 16,500 advisor troops in November 1963 to 543,000 combat troops when he left office in January 1969. America’s defense burden rose during Johnson’s presidency from $53.4 billion, or 8.9 percent of the economy, in 1963 to $81.9 billion, or 9.4 percent, in 1968.70 The warfare was asymmetrical. The Vietnamese communists followed Mao’s three-­stage strategy of escalating hit and run, take and hold, and circle and destroy while hiding among and mobilizing rural and urban populations against the enemy. At each stage, Giap instructed his commanders, “If the enemy advances, we retreat; if he halts, we advance; if he avoids battle, we attack; if he retreats, we follow.”71 The Americans followed a hard-­power strategy that maximized their superior production, fuel, and supply; superior mobility with helicopters, ships, transport planes, and trucks; and superior firepower with heavy bombers, fighter-­ bombers, tanks, and artillery. Westmoreland had each unit conduct daily search, destroy, and withdraw missions in its area, with “victory” measured by body counts of enemy forces. The military designated “free-­fire zones” where communists dominated and Americans could kill anyone there. Yet, no matter how many enemy troops died, Hanoi replaced them from the population’s annual 200,000 new eighteen-­year-­old men, with 120,000 fit for duty, and any able-­bodied male from sixteen to forty-­five years old who could be drafted, while the Soviets and Chinese supplied them with weapons, uniforms, equipment, fuel, and transportation. The ratio between supply and combat troops was five to one. The number of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops climbed steadily in South Vietnam. For instance, from January 1965 to December 1967, the communists suffered 344,000 killed, wounded, missing, or defected, and yet their total strength swelled by 80,800 troops, while 8,400 troops infiltrated monthly from north to south, and the Viet Cong recruited 3,400 men from the South into their ranks.72 Meanwhile, air force commander Curtis LeMay vowed “to bomb them back into the stone age.”73 The Americans eventually dropped two and a half times more bomb tonnage on Indochina than they did during all of World War II. Targets included ports, bridges, railroads, supply depots, and electric power plants in North Vietnam; the thousand-­mile Ho Chi Minh Trail complex of roads, depots, fuel stations, barracks, repair shops, and antiaircraft batteries through mountainous western North and South Vietnam and eastern Laos and Cambodia; and enemy positions across South Vietnam. Many bombs contained the defoliant and carcinogen Agent Orange to destroy the jungle where the enemy lurked. Yet that

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campaign was extremely inefficient, as it cost America $9.60 to inflict $1.00 worth of damage. The North Vietnamese dispersed their industries and supply centers, built elaborate networks of bomb shelters, reused duds as booby traps, and received and fired an unending stream of Soviet surface-­ to-­air missiles. From 1965 to 1968 alone, the North Vietnamese shot down 950 American planes worth $6 billion. Helicopters were much more vulnerable—the United States lost nearly five thousand helicopters with six thousand crew killed during the war, or one in ten of all combat losses.74 Westmoreland’s attrition strategy unwittingly played into Hanoi’s “hearts and minds” strategy. Giap explained, “We maintain that the morale factor is the decisive factor in war, more than weapons, tactics, and techniques. Politics forms the actual strength of the Revolution: Politics is the root and War is the continuation of politics.”75 The American obsession with “body counts” encouraged indiscriminate killing and adding the scattered anatomy of obliterated victims. Five million of seventeen million South Vietnamese either fled or were forced from their homes into refugee camps or strategic hamlets by 1968. The “strategic hamlet” strategy of concentrating a district’s peasants into one or more fortified camps alienated them, as authorities herded them away from their family homes, religious shrines, and ancestors’ graves. Communist cadres infiltrated and converted the inhabitants of one strategic hamlet or city district after another. By August 1967, they controlled 3,978 of 12,537 hamlets and the South Vietnamese army only 168.76 Meanwhile, a series of coups replaced one corrupt, inept, brutal coterie after another in Saigon until September 3, 1967, when Nguyen Van Thieu took and held power until fleeing the final communist onslaught on April 21, 1975. Only three American programs achieved some success because they tried to balance hard and soft power at the village and city district level.77 The Combined Action Program (CAP) that began in 1965 paired a dozen-­man marine platoon with a thirty-­man South Vietnamese platoon. General Victor Krulak proudly recalled, “No village protected by a Combined Action Platoon was ever repossessed by the Vietcong and 60 percent of the marines serving in Combined Action units volunteered to stay on with their marine and Vietnamese companies for an additional six months when they could have returned to the United States.”78 Yet, at its peak, only 2,500 marines participated in CAP. Military historian Max Boot writes that Westmoreland claimed he lacked the troops to fully implement it, but “even putting a squad ‘in every village and hamlet’ would have required no more than 167,000 U.S. troops—a fraction of the 540,000 eventually deployed.”79 Then there was the counterinsurgency operation Phoenix, devised and led by CIA officer William Colby from 1967.80 As an OSS officer during World War II, he parachuted behind enemy lines in France and Norway; in Saigon, he was station chief and



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opposed assassinating Diem. Phoenix officially killed around twenty-­six thousand cadres, captured thirty-­three thousand, and turned twenty-­two thousand.81 Awards of $11,000 for live and $5,000 for dead comrades may have skewed the results, with many accused communists actually being rival gang members. One study found that only 3 percent were actual communist cadres.82 Finally, Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) was the strategic hamlet program of helping to concentrate peasants in villages and arm them to defend themselves, although it may have alienated nearly as many Vietnamese as it protected. The communists broke a truce and launched a massive offensive against the South’s cities and major towns during the Tet Lunar New Year’s holiday of January 30 to 31, 1968. Over the next two months, 325,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops attacked five of six major cities, thirty-­six of forty-­four provincial capitals, sixty district capitals, and even America’s embassy in Saigon. The result was a communist tactical defeat and strategic victory. Although initially caught by surprise, the Americans and South Vietnamese rallied and decimated the attackers. By the time the communists called off their offensive on March 28, they had 45,267 dead, 61,267 wounded, and 5,070 missing to America’s 4,124 dead, 19,295 wounded, and 1,530 missing; South Vietnam’s 4,954 dead, 15,917 wounded, and 925 missing; and 14,000 civilians killed, 24,000 wounded, and 100,000 refugees.83 Yet most Americans perceived it as a defeat. CBS journalist Walter Cronkite captured the press corps’ pessimistic outlook: “It seems now more than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”84 On watching the reporter’s stark conclusion, Johnson wailed, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”85 Johnson’s approval rating plummeted to 26 percent. On March 31, 1968, Johnson appeared on national television to announce two bombshells—he would seek peace through negotiations, but he would not seek reelection. Meanwhile, Westmoreland demanded 206,000 more troops to reinforce the 500,000 already in Vietnam. Johnson sent him another ten thousand. On June 10, Johnson replaced Westmoreland with Creighton Abrams, a West Point graduate who served in the 4th Armored Division of George Patton’s 3rd Army that spearheaded the Normandy breakout and relief of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, and a headquarters staff general during the Korean War.86 Support for the war steadily dropped and the antiwar movement rose with the number of young Americans drafted and soldiers killed or maimed and as the “credibility gap” widened between the White House’s claims to be winning and the obvious stalemate. Over one hundred thousand protesters filled Washington and another thirty-­five thousand converged on the Pentagon on October 31, 1967. Young men burned their draft cards. Not just the FBI but, illegally, the CIA conducted surveillance

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on the antiwar movement. Of the 21 million men eligible for the draft from 1964 to 1973, 16 million found ways to dodge the draft, 8,769,000 received permanent deferments, and 172,000 registered as conscientious objectors. The Vietnam War inspired some popular antiwar songs like Phil Ochs’s “Draft Dodger Rag,” Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” Bob Dylan’s “The Masters of War,” John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” and Neil Young’s “Ohio,” among thirty-­four others, including twenty-­six that were in the top one hundred hits.87 Throughout the 1960s, a series of novels and films questioned the morality of all wars, not just Vietnam. Two veterans wrote satires about their war experiences, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) for World War II and Richard Hooker’s M.A.S.H.: A Novel about Three Army Doctors (1968) was the first of fifteen based on his own Korean War experiences in a mobile army surgical hospital. Films that addressed war’s moral dilemmas included dramas like Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Fail Safe (1964) and satires like Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and M.A.S.H. (1970). Ever more films appeared that questioned or outright disputed the mythology of the American West. Among the first was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), in which the newspaper editor said, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” rather than the complex, morally ambiguous truth. Among the most popular or critically acclaimed other films were A Fistful of Dollars (1964), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Hang ’Em High (1968), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), and Little Big Man (1970). Critics denounced a cultural “John Wayne syndrome” of machismo and mythology that warped public opinion and policy makers alike. In contrast to John Wayne’s heroic characters, Clint Eastwood’s outlaw and detective characters exuded dark amorality, violence, cynicism, and nihilism during the 1960s and 1970s. The 1968 election was open with Johnson’s announcement that he would not run. Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey respectively won the Republican and Democratic nominations for president. Alabama governor George Wallace also ran as the American Independent Party candidate. Nixon won a close race with 31,783,783 popular votes (43.4 percent) and 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 31,271,839 votes (42.7 percent) and 191 electoral votes and Wallace’s 9,901,115 votes (13.5 percent) and 46 electoral votes. However, he faced a Democratic Congress with 58 to 42 Republican senators and 243 to 192 representatives.88 Nixon was highly interested, knowledgeable, and experienced in foreign policy, having served as a representative from California from 1947 to 1950, a senator from 1950 to 1953, and vice president from 1953



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to 1961.89 He recognized that America’s foreign policy ambitions far exceeded its powers. He sought to cut back those burdens and share some with America’s allies. On July 25, 1969, he announced what would be called the Guam or Nixon Doctrine whereby Washington would only help defend countries that displayed the will to shoulder most of their own defense. He pressured NATO’s members and Far East allies Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand to raise their military budgets while from 1968 to 1973 he reduced America’s military from 3.5 million personnel to 2.3 million and the defense budget from $81.9 billion, or 9.4 percent of the economy, to $76.7 billion, or 5.8 percent.90 To counter America’s worsening trade and payments deficits, he devalued the dollar 10 percent, imposed a 10 percent surcharge on imports, and suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold on August 15, 1972, and then let the dollar float in December 1972.91 Nixon was determined to restore America to a selective containment strategy. To develop that, he appropriately tapped as national security advisor Henry Kissinger, a Harvard University government professor and realist like Metternich, Talleyrand, and Bismarck about whom he studied and wrote.92 Central to selective containment’s new version was playing off the communist giants against each other by manipulating their historic fears and pursuing détente, or relaxed relations built on developing mutual interests with each.93 Kissinger explained, “Détente encourages an environment in which competitors can regulate and restrain their differences and ultimately move from competition to cooperation.”94 That strategy recognized that traditional nationalist animosities far surpassed the recent ideological brotherhood between Soviets and Chinese. They shared a 4,150-mile border that the Chinese angrily denounced as resulting from a series of “unequal treaties” that Russian imperialism imposed from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Mao’s ambition was to become the world’s communist leader after Stalin died, and his genocidal Great Leap Forward policy for total communism in 1957 and 1958, with perhaps forty-­five million dead, provoked the Kremlin to minimize its ties with Beijing. Mao’s nearly as disastrous Cultural Revolution from 1966 further frazzled ties, culminating in a border war over the Ussuri River valley from March 2 to September 11, 1969, before Moscow and Beijing agreed to an armistice. Nixon got a perfect chance to begin his détente strategy during that war. Premier Leonid Brezhnev asked how he would react if the Soviets used nuclear weapons against China. Nixon replied that the United States adamantly opposed any use of nuclear weapons. The Soviets held fire. American and Soviet diplomats negotiated two nuclear arms control treaties, signed on May 26, 1972. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) froze existing forces at 1,330 Soviet and 1,054 American ICBMs

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and 950 Soviet and 656 American SLMBs. The treaty did not limit multiple warheads on a missile, ponderously called “multiple interdependently targetable reentry vehicles” (MIRVs). America then had 5,700 MIRVs to the Soviet’s 2,500. Nor did it limit strategic bombers, of which the Americans had 450 and the Soviets 200. The Anti–Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty initially limited any future anti-­missile defense to two sites for each, with one guarding ICBMs and the other the capital; a later amendment limited each to one site at either the ICBMs or the capital. For each nuclear weapons system, America’s qualitative advantage in accuracy, reliability, and, most important, relative invulnerability far exceeded the crude Soviet quantitative advantage. About 60 percent of Soviet nuclear weapons were ICBMs in land-­based silos that American ICBMs could destroy thirty minutes after launch, 10 percent were bombers, and 30 percent were SLBMs. In contrast, America’s triad was a more diverse 50 percent ICBMs, 30 percent SLBMs, and 20 percent bombers and cruise missiles. Although the Soviets had eighty submarines with SLBMs to forty-­two American, the Soviets could keep only one in ten at sea, while the Americans kept half of theirs at sea. American bombers and cruise missiles were a generation or so ahead of their Soviet counterparts. A bilateral trade deal caused American exports to soar with the Soviet Union. Kissinger hoped the geopolitical profit would be even greater: “Over time trade and investment may leaven the autarkic tendencies of the Soviet system, invite gradual association of the Soviet economy with the world economy, and foster a degree of interdependence . . . that adds an element of stability to the political equation.”95 He sought to nurture “linkage” or interdependence as a web of related economic, nuclear, and cultural relations that entangled and so contained Moscow. Brezhnev embraced détente as a means of putting the inevitable global struggle between liberalism and communism “onto a path free from the perils of war, of dangerous conflicts, and an uncontrolled arms race.”96 Nixon and Kissinger hoped to develop a parallel web of linkages that entangled China.97 Nixon sent Kissinger to China in July and October 1971 to prepare the way for Nixon’s visit from February 21 to February 28, 1972. The most important result was the promise by General Secretary Mao and Foreign Minister Chou that they would peacefully resolve the conflict with Taiwan, where the Nationalist Party had retreated in 1949 after losing the civil war for mainland China. By agreeing to a “one China, two governments” slogan, Nixon acknowledged the legitimacy of both Beijing and Taipei, while reserving the right to keep trading with, aiding, and arming the latter. The global economy received a devastating blow in October 1973. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur on October 6. Washington sent massive aid and key intelligence to



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Israel that enabled the Israelis to counterattack and rout the attackers on October 14. However, that became the excuse for the twelve-­nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to nationalize its oil from foreign investors and sharply cut back production, and for its half dozen Arab members called the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) to end sales to the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal, which supported Israel. As a result, global oil prices quadrupled from around $2.75 a barrel to around $12 a barrel by March 1974. Nixon sent Kissinger to negotiate a cease-­fire among the Israelis, Egyptians, and Syrians, which took effect on October 22. That did not halt the devastation that OPEC and OAPEC inflicted on the global economy. For the next decade, while petro-­states reaped enormous profits, the rest of world suffered stagflation—low growth and high prices. Meanwhile, Nixon did what he could to withdraw America’s military from Vietnam while leaving behind a South Vietnamese army and government capable of defending itself, a process called Vietnamization. The number of South Vietnamese troops rose from 819,200 to 1,100,000 as Nixon steadily withdrew American troops. He launched two offensives against communist sanctuaries westward. The Americans led an offensive into Cambodia from April to June 1970, and the South Vietnamese army advanced into Laos from January to March 1971. The communists withdrew before the Americans and routed the South Vietnamese. The Cambodian offensive provoked the latest massive antiwar demonstrations across the United States. National Guard troops shot dead four protesters and wounded nine others at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970. That provoked protests at 1,300 other universities. Compounding the antiwar movement was revelation of the horrific My Lai massacre by American troops of 351 to 504 unarmed men, women, and children ordered by Lieutenant William Calley on March 16, 1968. Calley and thirteen others received murder indictments, but the jury only convicted Calley on March 29, 1971. As for other atrocities from 1965 to 1973, Pentagon investigators uncovered seven massacres with 137 total victims, 57 individual murders of noncombatants, 15 rapes, and 141 cases of tortured prisoners. Of 260 personnel charged with murders, 95 soldiers and 27 marines received convictions.98 The New York Times began publishing a secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, called the Pentagon Papers, on June 13, 1972. Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department employee, had copied those thousands of classified documents and given them to the New York Times. The most damning revelation was the widespread deception over the debilitating weaknesses of South Vietnam’s government and army, the enemy’s swelling power, and America’s inability to reverse either.

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Meanwhile, the air force continued ineffectively bombing North Vietnam, often churning the rubble of previously destroyed sites, along with sites in South Vietnam and eastern Cambodia and Laos. Kissinger observed that the bombing was “powerful enough to mobilize world opinion against us but too half-­hearted and gradual to be decisive.”99 Giap launched a massive offensive with 125,000 troops into northern South Vietnam from March 31, 1972. Thanks to massive American bombing, the South Vietnamese largely held out and decimated the attackers, eventually inflicting seventy-­five thousand dead and destroying seven hundred tanks. Formal peace talks in Paris had begun on May 13, 1968, under the Johnson administration but soon deadlocked. Kissinger conducted a series of secret talks with Vietnamese envoys and eventually Le Duc Tho in Paris from August 4, 1969. He sought a treaty with this goal: “It seemed to me important for America not to be humiliated, not to be shattered, but to leave Vietnam in a manner that even the protestors might later see as reflecting an American choice made with dignity and self-­respect.”100 He also had to negotiate with South Vietnamese president Thieu, who opposed any talks, let alone concessions to the communists. Eventually Kissinger gave up and simply presented Thieu with the agreement. The Paris Peace Accord, signed by Kissinger and Le on January 27, 1973, established a cease-­fire and a National Commission of Conciliation and Concord to monitor it, hold elections in the South, and reunify the country; required each side to release its war prisoners; and required Washington to withdraw all American troops from Vietnam within sixty days, remove all mines from North Vietnam’s waters, and give Hanoi $4.75 billion in reconstruction funds.101 That so-­called “peace with honor” cost 20,553 American lives from 1969 to 1973 for largely the same deal that the Americans could have gotten in 1969. During those same years, the South Vietnamese and communists, respectively, suffered 107,503 and 500,000 killed. Nixon’s character flaws ultimately destroyed his presidency. His paranoia and vengefulness led him to authorize a secret group called the “plumbers” to undermine any Democratic Party opponent in the 1972 election. A security guard caught a group breaking into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17. An investigation unraveled other illegal acts and eventually implicated Nixon for obstruction of justice. The vote of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee to send an impeachment resolution to the floor, along with private word from Republican leaders that they would not support him, prompted Nixon to resign on August 9, 1973. Gerald Ford was the latest vice president to occupy a vacant presidency. He had been a highly respected representative from Michigan from 1949



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to 1973 and House minority leader from 1965 to 1973. Nixon appointed him vice president on December 6, 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned after being indicted for corruption. Ford presided over an important Cold War agreement on August 1, 1975, when envoys of thirty-­five nations signed the Helsinki Accords that recognized Europe’s existing boundaries as permanent and the civil rights of all inhabitants. He also presided over the communist takeover of Indochina. His predecessor had recognized that the communists would eventually conquer South Vietnam. What Nixon sought was a “decent interval” between America’s departure and the Saigon regime’s collapse. Congress accelerated that inevitability by sharply cutting military and economic aid to South Vietnam from $2.3 billion in 1973 to $1 billion in 1974 and $700 million in 1975. Without a bombing deterrent to Hanoi’s aggression, the cease-­fire was fleeting. Fighting escalated and ebbed over the next two years until March 10, 1975, when the communists launched their coup de grâce that routed the South Vietnamese army and captured Saigon on May 1. Elsewhere, the Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao respectively overran Cambodia and Laos on April 17 and December 2, 1975. For Americans, the war’s last televised images were a crowd of terrified Americans and Vietnamese atop the embassy roof pushing their way onto a helicopter, and an aircraft carrier far from shore whose crew tipped helicopters over the side to clear the space. The Vietnam War cost American taxpayers $170 billion, while 58,219 troops died, 303,704 were wounded physically, and countless suffered grievous psychic wounds. Three million Americans served in the Indochina region and 2.1 million in Vietnam during the war. Of those, one in ten experienced combat on land, air, or water. Most veterans had constructive postwar lives, careers, and families. Countless others struggled with rage, drug addiction, alcoholism, criminality, or depression for their remaining lives and inevitably harmed others. Loved ones of veterans often experienced collateral damage. More broadly, the war split the American people into bitterly opposed camps and eroded faith in its political institutions, laws, and culture.102 The Indochinese suffered far worse, with at least 1,435,000 Vietnamese and 1 million Cambodians and Laotians dead, millions more maimed, and 10 million forced to flee their homes. More than fifty thousand Amerasians fathered by American troops suffered harsh discrimination. Across Vietnam, the bombing and nineteen million gallons of herbicides devastated twelve million hectares of forest, twenty-­five million hectares of farmland, and 4,000 of 5,800 agricultural communes; the chemical Agent Orange sprayed on 4.5 million acres was the most destructive to people, leading to countless cases of cancer and deformed fetuses.103

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Indochina’s communist movements may have won those wars, but the horrors of mass violence, poverty, and misery merely entered a new phase for that region’s peoples. Pham Van Dong, North Vietnam’s prime minister from 1955 to 1976, admitted, “Yes, we defeated the United States. But now we are plagued by problems. We do not have enough to eat. We are a poor, undeveloped nation. Waging war is simple, but running a country is very difficult.”104 Communism multiplies those difficulties. Communism is an efficient system in which a tiny elite mobilizes masses of people to fight or labor, and imprisons or murders anyone who resists, but is wretched at genuine economic development. Pham ruefully reflected, “Our belief in a Communist utopia had nothing to do with reality. We tried building a new society on theories and dreams. . . . Instead of stimulating production by giving people incentives, we collectivized them. Imagine!”105 Two million Indochinese fled the communists to safety overseas, mostly in the United States. In Vietnam and Laos, the communists executed tens of thousands of “class enemies” like government officials, military officers, landlords, and business leaders and put 1.3 million people in “reeducation camps” for years. After taking power in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge murdered all “class enemies,” eventually one of four or two million people, to achieve pure communism.106 Why did America lose the Vietnam War?107 The overweening hubris, ignorance, deceit, groupthink, and delusions permeating the White House and Pentagon made defeat virtually certain. The “global containment strategy,” with preventing a “domino effect” at its core, warped perceptions of the nature of the enemy, war, ends, means, and results. American conservatives insisted that the United States would have won that war, but antiwar movement socialists and hippies, abetted by the “liberal mainstream media,” poisoned the minds of the American people. Another conservative claim is that Johnson failed to use all American power against the communists, while Nixon cut and ran rather than continue the war.108 Those two “stab-­ in-­ the-­ back” conspiracy theories remain popular contrary to all evidence. American support for the war began high, with four out of five in favor, but sank steadily with the soaring number of Americans sent there and those who returned in body bags. Ever more Americans exercised their right to protest what they believed was an unjust and unwinnable war. As journalist Leslie Gelb put it, “the real domino effect in Indochina was American public opinion.”109 As for military strategy, the White House tried all but two—the Americans neither invaded nor nuclear bombed North Vietnam. An invasion would have prompted China’s intervention and a World War I–type stalemate with millions more deaths. Dropping a nuclear bomb on Hanoi might



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have prompted the Chinese to try to destroy Saigon with one of their own nuclear bombs. Certainly hard communist power played a critical role in their victory. The Soviet Union and China supplied North Vietnam with billions of dollars’ worth of military supplies, while over 320,000 Chinese support troops deployed across northern Vietnam and thousands of Soviet and Chinese military advisors permeated North Vietnam. The White House avoided bombing Chinese troops and the supplies steadily streaming from China down through North Vietnam to avoid provoking Beijing into an all-­out war. West of South Vietnam’s lowlands, where most people lived, were forested highlands, a perfect hiding ground for swelling communist forces. In reality, the United States was incapable of militarily winning the Vietnam War. The enemies asymmetrically fought each other, with the Americans emphasizing hard and the communists soft power. Giap explained, “We were not strong enough to drive out a half-­million American troops, but that wasn’t our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American Government to continue the war.”110 The Americans violated the fundamental principle of Sun Tzu’s Art of War: “Know your enemy, know yourself.” Maxwell Taylor later admitted, “We didn’t know our ally, we knew even less about the enemy. And, the last, most inexcusable of our mistakes, was not knowing our own people.”111 Much earlier, in 1965, Taylor offered this candid bafflement: “The ability of the Viet-­ Cong continuously to rebuild their units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. . . . Not only do the Viet-­Cong units have the recuperative power of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale.”112 Giap partly revealed that mystery: “Without the people we have no information. . . . They hide us, protect us, feed us, and tend our wounded.” He further explained, “The primary emphasis is to draw Americans into remote areas and thereby facilitate control of the population of the lowlands.”113 The communists gained the people’s loyalty by strictly following eight rules: speak politely, pay fairly for what you buy, return everything you borrow, pay for everything you damage, do not hit or swear at the people, do not damage crops, do not take liberties with women, and do not ill treat captives.114 Yet terror was also a critical strategy. The communists were utterly ruthless to anyone who opposed them, including bureaucrats, police, landlords, and businessmen. They conducted at least 36,725 assassinations and 58,499 abductions from 1957 to 1972.115 As for a “hearts and minds” strategy of rallying the people, the American military riposte was “Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow!” That attitude was the essential reason why America lost the Vietnam War. Krulak explained his frustration trying to change

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the hearts and minds of the top brass running the war: “Westmoreland told me, however, that while the ink blot [hearts and minds] idea seemed to be effective, we just didn’t have time to do it that way. I suggested to him that we didn’t have time to do it any other way; if we left the people to the enemy, glorious victories in the hinterland would be little more than blows in the air—and we would end up losing the war.”116 Lansdale explained in 1964 why South Vietnam was losing: “There must be a heartfelt cause to which the legitimate government is pledged, a cause which makes a stronger appeal to the people than the Communist cause, a cause which is used in a dedicated way by the legitimate government to polarize and guide all other actions—psychological, military, social, and economic—with participation by the people themselves, in order to bring victory.”117 The cause of virtually all South Vietnamese officials and officers was to enrich themselves, their families, and their coteries as much as possible. Corruption, incompetence, and brutality riddled South Vietnam’s government and military from top to bottom no matter how much military and economic aid and advisors Washington sent them. Army death, wound, and desertion rates were so high that the average battalion annually had to replace half its manpower. Not surprisingly, the communists far exceeded the Americans in espionage, as they either became or recruited government officials and military officers from the lowest to near the very top. America’s army was almost as dysfunctional.118 The rotation of officers and troops continually rid the army of experienced veterans and replaced them with fearful amateurs. John Vann explained the result: “The United States has not been in Vietnam for nine years, but for one year nine times.”119 The average soldier’s age was nineteen, seven years younger than the average World War II soldier. That relative immaturity was itself costly. Atop that were the frustrations of fighting a guerrilla war with no clear front, rear, or victories compared to the conventional World War II fighting of mostly American advances and victories. The military suffered widespread heroin addictions, racial animosities, insubordination, and even 730 cases of “fragging,” or grenades tossed into in the tents of the officers leading field operations, with 83 killed from 1969 to 1971.120 Yet the war was most likely unwinnable even had the Americans fought it with mostly soft power of protecting and nurturing hearts and minds rather than the hard power of munitions expended and dead bodies counted. Atop the communists’ skill in winning hearts and minds was their utter heartlessness. In 1946, Ho Chi Minh warned a French colonial official, “You may kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.” General Giap was indifferent to any losses: “The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.”121



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That genocidal attitude disgusted the morality of all but the most callous Americans. The Vietnam syndrome of “no more Vietnams” muscled aside the Munich syndrome of “don’t appease aggressors” in the national consciousness. Kissinger was typically eloquent and insightful in expressing the war’s legacy for America: “Vietnam is still with us. It has created doubts about American judgment, about American credibility, about American power—not only at home, but throughout the world. It has poisoned our domestic debate. So we paid an exorbitant price for the decisions that were made in good faith and for good purpose.”122 The Vietnam syndrome of self-­doubt, indecisiveness, and skepticism about America’s assertion of military power lasted just a generation. A short victorious war with minimal casualties against a brutal aggressor restored American confidence. After the American-­led coalition routed the Iraqi army from Kuwait in early 1992, President George H. W. Bush exuberantly exclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”123 Meanwhile, Americans refought the war through books, films, television, and art. Veteran soldiers and journalists wrote memoirs or novels that revealed the Vietnam War’s horrors, like C. D. B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire (1976), Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976), Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977), Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), James Webb’s Fields of Fire (1978), Gustav Hasford’s The Short-­Timers (1979), Al Santoli’s Everything We Had (1981), Mark Baker’s Nam (1981), Lynda Van Devanter’s Home before Morning (1983), and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990). Films that explored the Vietnam War’s moral dilemmas and tragedies for America appeared from the late 1970s like Coming Home (1978), The Deerhunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Two television series reminded viewers of the Vietnam War. M.A.S.H. (1972–1983) satirically depicted doctors treating wounded during the Korean War with professionalism toward their patients and cynicism toward abusive authority figures, attitudes that better reflected the Vietnam era. China Beach (1988–1991) dramatically depicted a Vietnam MASH unit inspired by Nurse Lynda Van Devanter’s memoir. Maya Lin designed the most moving artistic work. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a 250-foot V-­shaped polished black granite wall inscribed with the names of the Americans killed during the war. It is located on Washington, DC’s park mall amid other monuments and museums that commemorate America history. Conservatives culturally counterattacked. Revisionists insisted that America could have won the war had the antiwar movement and liberals not stabbed the nation in the back with their protests that heartened the enemy and demoralized Americans. They cited actor Jane Fonda’s 1972

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visit to Hanoi as personifying the antiwar movement’s “treason.” Hollywood reverted to simplistic good-­versus-­evil narratives in which heroes played by Sylvester Stallone in Rambo (1982) and Chuck Norris in Missing in Action (1984) slaughtered evil communists. When Stallone’s character received the combat mission to return to Vietnam, he replied, “Sir, do we get to win this time?” Meanwhile, during the 1976 election, Democratic Party candidate Jimmy Carter, Georgia’s governor from 1971 to 1975, defeated sitting president Ford by 40,831,881 popular votes (50.1 percent) and 297 electoral votes to 39,148,639 (48 percent) and 240 electoral votes. Democratic control of Congress persisted with 61 to 38 Republican and 1 independent senators and 292 to 143 Republican representatives. Carter was an increasingly rare type of Christian evangelical who emphasized and tried to emulate Jesus’s pacifism and compassion. He promised to make human rights rather than geopolitics central to his foreign policies. He deplored “that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.”124 He selected legalist Cyrus Vance as his secretary of state balanced by realist Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security advisor.125 Carter scored one unambiguous diplomatic victory during his four-­ year presidency. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat initiated peace with Israel by asking Prime Minister Menachem Begin for permission to propose a plan before the Knesset, or parliament. On reviewing his speech, the Israeli government approved. On November 20, 1977, Sadat called for a peace based on UN Resolution 242 that involved the Arab states diplomatically recognizing Israel and a return to the 1967 borders. That courageous gesture provoked nearly universal condemnation of him across the Arab world. Begin, a hard-­core conservative, relished Sadat’s isolation and refused to negotiate with him. To break the impasse, Carter invited Sadat and Begin to the presidential retreat of Camp David, where he helped them negotiate during September 5–17, 1978. Eventually they agreed to two Camp David Accords. One called for talks over Palestinian self-­government in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, the other for a phased Israeli army withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. Sadat and Begin signed a peace treaty on March 26, 1979. That caused the twenty-­one other members of the Arab League to condemn Sadat and move the league’s headquarters from Cairo to Tunis. Israel did withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula by 1982 but destroyed anything of potential military value before leaving. Carter meekly returned what a predecessor had triumphantly taken seven decades earlier. Under the 1903 treaty with Panama, the United States could build a canal across that country within a ten-­mile-­wide zone



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and then run and defend it for ninety-­nine years. As part of his idealistic approach to foreign policy, Carter chose to give back the canal a couple of decades before its due date. He did that with two treaties signed on September 7, 1977; the first voided the 1903 treaty, and the second transferred ownership to Panama, although the United States retained the right to keep bases in the zone and defend the canal against any threats. Ironically, despite Carter’s human rights outlook, the White House negotiated those treaties with Panamanian dictator Omar Trujillo. The next year, on March 16 and April 18, respectively, the Senate ratified those treaties by sixty-­eight to thirty-­two, just one vote beyond the two-­thirds threshold. Although critics denounced that deal, the Panama Canal’s importance had shrunk steadily over the decades as ship sizes expanded. Aircraft carriers and oil supertankers could not squeeze through the canal, while only 10 percent of America’s trade did. Regardless, Brzezinski insisted that the canal was still a vital American interest worth fighting for. When asked what he would do if the Panamanians euphemistically closed down the canal for repairs, he quipped, “Close down the Panama government for repairs.”126 Indeed, a dozen years later, George H. W. Bush’s administration did just that. Carter was determined to normalize relations with communist Cuba. He denounced previous American attempts to overthrow that regime and initiated bilateral talks in March 1977. Each side made a concession, Carter allowing Cuban Americans to send money to and visit Cuba, and Castro to release 3,600 political prisoners. That encouraged more Cubans to try to escape the communist dictatorship and worsening economy. Castro finally reasoned that his regime was more secure with the disaffected outside of Cuba. He authorized the small port of Mariel for the exodus and allowed Cuban Americans to sail there and transport refugees to Florida ports. From April 15 to October 31, 1980, 125,000 exiles reached the United States. Among them were around ten thousand criminals that Castro released from prison. As Miami’s mayor put it, “Castro has flushed his toilet on us.”127 Although Carter initially welcomed the refugees, soaring crime rates forced him to negotiate Mariel’s closing. Castro had cunningly manipulated Carter’s idealism to transfer a political burden from Cuba to America. For a quarter century, Iran was an American ally. That alliance began with the CIA and MI-6 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh’s government and promoted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from a figurehead into a dictator on August 19, 1953. It ended when an Islamist revolution destroyed his regime on February 1, 1979. During that time, the shah served American interests by encouraging investments, letting the CIA run electronic listening posts of Soviet communications along the border, repressing Iranian communists and Islamists, and

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buying $20 billion worth of military ships, planes, and equipment from American manufacturers. He tried to modernize Iran by secularizing government offices and schools. The trouble was that his secularization policies alienated devout Muslims while his economic policies mostly made the rich richer and soaring inflation made the middle and lower classes poorer. His secret police, the Savak, brutally cracked down on the increasing mass protests with mass arrests, imprisonment, and torture. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the head of Islam’s Shiite denomination, was in exile from 1964 to 1979, during which he radio-­ broadcasted a stream of messages calling on Iranians to be fervent Muslims and overthrow the shah’s regime. The shah had become a weak, vacillating leader dying of cancer. On January 16, 1979, he flew into exile to Egypt. Islamist protests grew, and Savak could no longer repress them. On February 1, Khomeini triumphantly returned to Tehran and imposed an Islamist revolution on Iran. An Islamist mob instigated by the government overran America’s embassy and took sixty-­six personnel hostage on November 4, 1979.128 They demanded that Carter send them the shah, who was undergoing cancer treatment in a New York City hospital, in return for which they would release the hostages. Carter refused and had Iran’s international financial accounts frozen. He tried to negotiate the hostages’ return, but the Islamists insisted on the shah. Carter severed diplomatic relations with Iran on April 7, 1980. Khomeini taunted the president by declaring, “Why should we be afraid? . . . Carter does not have the guts to engage in military action.”129 On April 10, Carter approved a Pentagon plan to rescue the hostages.130 The plan involved eight Sea Stallion helicopters from the carrier USS Nimitz and six C-130 cargo planes packed with Delta Force and rangers and armored vehicles from a Sinai airfield converging at a desert landing site two hundred miles southeast of Tehran on April 24. From there the commandos would drive into Tehran, capture the embassy and foreign ministry where the hostages were kept, and escape to a second landing site outside Tehran from which they would be flown to safety. The helicopters flew through a sandstorm that forced one to turn back. Then, on the ground, a C-130 smashed a helicopter, and eight crewmen burned to death. Carter aborted the mission. The deaths of those eight crewmen undoubtedly prevented the deaths of probably all the hostages and rescuers. As Colonel Charles Beckwith, one of the planners, colorfully put it, “the only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett did not have to fight his way in.”131 Khomeini did not release the hostages until January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president.



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One rich family dominated Nicaragua’s government and economy, with Anastasio Somoza Garcia president from 1937 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1956, his son Luis Somoza Debayle from 1956 to 1963, and his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle from 1967 to 1972 and from 1974 to 1979; when the Somozas did not rule from the presidential palace, one of their allies did. The CIA used Nicaragua as the staging area for the successful coup in Guatemala in 1954 and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. During that time, the rich got richer and nearly everyone else poorer, while corruption, incompetence, and brutality prevailed. The communist Sandinista movement, led by Daniel Ortega, began an insurgency in 1974 that overthrew the Somoza regime on July 17, 1979, and took power. Carter rejected advice to support Somoza or resist the communists and pledged good relations with the new regime. Moscow and Havana forged close ties and gave military and economic aid to the Sandinistas. Managua became the headquarters for revolutionary movements across Central America, most virulently in El Salvador. The 1972 SALT nuclear arms control treaty failed to stop the arms race. Washington and Moscow took advantage of the MIRV loophole to expand their arsenals, respectively, to 2,059 missiles with 8,500 warheads and 2,500 missiles with 4,000 warheads by 1978. Carter made shutting those loopholes in a new treaty a priority. Under the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), signed on June 19, 1979, the Americans and Soviets agreed that each side would have no more than 1,200 missiles capped with 2,250 nuclear bombs by 1982. Carter’s hopes that SALT II would inaugurate a new phase of détente died when the Soviet Red Army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The Soviets did so to aid the pro-­Moscow Communist Party in power that an anti-­Moscow Communist Party threatened. Although the Soviets soon secured most major cities, a jihadist insurgency rose against them. On January 24, 1980, Carter proclaimed what would be called the Carter Doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf will be regarded as a direct assault on the interests of the United States of America and will be repelled by use of any means necessary, including military force.”132 Carter gave limited economic and military aid to the jihadists, who called themselves Mujahideen, or holy warriors. During the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood star and California governor from 1967 to 1975, won the Republican Party nomination and then the presidency with 43,903,230 popular votes (50.7 percent) and 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 35,480,115 (41.3 percent) and 49 electoral votes and independent candidate John Anderson’s 5,719,850 (6.6 percent). Congress split, with Democrats controlling the House of

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Representatives by 242 to 157 Republicans, 1 conservative, and 1 independent, and Republicans the Senate with 53 to 46 and 1 independent.133 Reagan was a man of simple conservative beliefs about good and evil, shaped by years in Hollywood, evangelical advisors, and his limited intellect.134 He disdained books, briefing papers, and intelligence reports for lighthearted movies and television shows. As such, he resembled most Americans, who adored him as a cultural icon of traditional America.135 When his mind fixed on some notion, it rarely yielded to alternatives no matter how powerful their reasoned evidence. He had trouble distinguishing facts and fantasies, preferring the latter if they bolstered his beliefs. At times, to back his positions, he made up stories and claimed they were true. He relied on his own instincts and beliefs and resented experts who pestered him with inconvenient facts. He went through six national security advisors, three treasury secretaries, two defense secretaries, and two secretaries of state. Reagan believed that massive tax cuts targeted for the rich would eventually pay for themselves, a notion called “trickle-­down economics.” He believed that the “magic of the marketplace” could cure all problems, and so the more he slashed health, safety, and environmental regulations, the wealthier, safer, and cleaner Americans and America would become. A combination of Reagan tax cuts and spending hikes tripled America’s national debt from $998 billion in 1981 to $2.857 trillion in 1989, while the rich got much richer and incomes stagnated or worsened for most Americans.136 As for the Soviet Union, Reagan tightly gripped a set of beliefs that nearly provoked a nuclear war. He was convinced that the Soviets enjoyed a “missile gap” with the United States. He insisted that the United States could drive the Soviet Union to economic collapse with a massive nuclear arms buildup. He believed that missiles once launched could be recalled and that the United States could shoot down incoming missiles. Most disturbing of all, he was confident that America could win a nuclear war with the Soviets. Although all those beliefs were delusions, the Republican Party and many Democrats backed him. Reagan terminated the peace dividend that America had enjoyed over the previous half dozen years from 1974 when the defense budget was $79.3 billion and 5.5 percent of the economy to 1980 when, because of inflation, it was $134 billion but was down to 4.4 percent of the economy. Reagan steadily raised the defense budget to $303.6 billion, or 5.6 percent of the economy, when he left office in 1989.137 Yet Reagan was no warmonger. His administration’s only large-­scale offensive use of America’s military was invading the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada with six thousand troops on October 25, 1983. The excuse was the Marxist government’s threatening rhetoric, near completion by Cuban engineers of an airport that Soviet and Cuban aircraft might use, and protection for a thousand Americans living there. Although the threats were



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all theoretical, the Americans ousted the regime and replaced it with a pro-­Washington government. Reagan’s other assertion of military force was a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon that became a humiliating and deadly lost war. Overlapping civil and international wars engulfed Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. The war began between Muslims and Christians but soon became a three-­ way war among Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shiite Muslims backed respectively by Israel, Syria, and Iran. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), backed by Syria, launched terrorist attacks against Israel from southern Lebanon. Tehran developed the revolutionary movement Hezbollah with military and political wings devoted to imposing an Islamist regime on Lebanon. In June 1981, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon, routed the PLO, and raced north to corner the PLO’s remnants at Tripoli. The Reagan administration helped negotiate a deal whereby the PLO withdrew to Tunisia, the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, and the United States contributed troops to a peacekeeping mission that upheld a cease-­fire among the warring parties. Hezbollah opposed that plan and launched a war against the United States in Lebanon. A bomb exploded at America’s embassy, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans of whom seven were CIA officers and the station chief, and wounding 160 others on April 18, 1983. On the morning of October 23, 1983, a jihadist drove his truck packed with explosives into the airport hangar the marines used as a barracks. The blast killed 241 marines and wounded scores more. That same hour, another jihadist suicide bomber killed ten French troops. The Reagan White House had no idea who to fight, let alone how to fight them. General Colin Powell, a White House advisor, described America’s intervention as having “stuck its hand in a thousand-­year-­old hornet’s nest.”138 Terrorists murdered Americans beyond Lebanon. On October 7, 1985, four Palestinians hijacked the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro amid a Mediterranean voyage and executed a Jewish American passenger. They released the ship at Alexandria, Egypt, in return for a promise to be flown to a safe haven in Tunis. Reagan authorized American fighter planes to intercept the plane and force it to land in Italy. Jurisdictional disputes among a half dozen countries eventually let the terrorists escape to Yugoslavia and from there back underground. On April 5, 1986, a bomb exploded in a Berlin nightclub, killing three people (including an American soldier) and wounding 229 others. Intelligence linked that bombing to a Libyan-­backed group. Reagan called Libyan dictator Muamar Gaddafi “the mad dog of the Middle East” and authorized a retaliatory American air strike against his regime. On April 15, the attack destroyed fourteen MIG fighter-­bombers and killed around forty-­five soldiers and thirty civilians, including Gaddafi’s baby daughter, but missed the dictator, at the cost of one F-111.

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The Reagan administration backed Iraq in its war against Iran that began in 1981. Washington supplied President Saddam Hussein regime’s with economic, military, and intelligence aid and had American warships escort oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. An Iraqi fighter-­bomber fired two missiles into the destroyer USS Stark, killing thirty-­seven crewmen, on May 17, 1987. Saddam claimed that the pilot acted alone and was executed, and he later agreed to pay $400 million in compensation to the victims’ families. The White House claimed that Tehran was behind the attack. On July 3, 1988, fearing that it was an Iranian warplane, the destroyer USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner and killed all 290 passengers. Washington later paid $131 million in compensation for the victims’ families. Reagan approved an ingenious plan designed simultaneously to improve relations with jihadist Iran, free hostages held by jihadists in Lebanon, and fund the Contras opposed to Nicaragua’s communist Sandinista regime. That involved selling arms to Tehran in return for the hostages’ release and then giving the profit to the Contras. There were just two problems with that plan, one legal, the other geopolitical. Funding the Contras violated Congress’s 1982 Boland Amendment and a 1984 law that outlawed doing that. Ransoming hostages sharply raises the price of future ones and the likelihood that terrorists will take more. After months of denial, Reagan finally admitted on March 4, 1987, that he had “told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it’s not.”139 The Reagan administration’s anticommunist policies in Central America eventually succeeded. Washington kept El Salvador’s dictatorship in power with $4.5 billion worth of funds, arms, and advisors against a communist insurgency. The White House’s creation of the Contras to fight Nicaragua’s communist regime was eventually critical to pressuring Sandinista president Daniel Ortega to hold elections in 1990.140 The result was that Ortega lost the presidency to liberal candidate Violeta Barrios de Chamorro while noncommunists displaced Sandinistas in most congressional seats. However, the legal and moral costs of how the Reagan White House won those victories were high. For instance, a study revealed that Salvadoran government troops and hired “death squads” killed 85 percent of the seventy-­five thousand civilians who died in the civil war. Although Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers,” investigative reporters revealed them as ineffective and infrequent fighters whose leaders siphoned off tens of millions of dollars to enjoy luxurious lifestyles in Miami far from the front.141 Although Reagan was not personally corrupt, he did break the law as president by authorizing the Iran-­Contra operation. Reagan was not



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alone as a lawbreaker. Eventually, 190 officials in his administration received criminal convictions or indictments.142 For Reagan, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives considered but decided not to impeach him for various “high crimes and misdemeanors.” In doing so, they put politics before the law. They reasoned that impeaching another Republican president a dozen years after beginning that process with Nixon, leading to his resignation, would worsen America’s political animosities. An expert disillusioned Reagan of one belief. The president was astounded and angered to learn that America could not defend itself against nuclear missiles. He brightened when advisors told him about a proposed missile defense program. Reagan eagerly embraced it, ignoring the explanation that the idea was unworkable and merely a bargaining chip to be traded away for something of substance from the Soviets in nuclear arms talks. Reagan explained the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in a televised speech on March 23, 1983.143 The scheme, soon dubbed Star Wars, involved four layers of anti-­missile laser weapons. Three were space based, with one high above clusters of Soviet missile silos, another about halfway along the Soviet missiles’ trajectory, and the third two-­thirds along that trajectory. The fourth was grounded in the United States. Reagan’s announcement appalled realists within and beyond the administration. Secretary of State George Shultz privately muttered that Star Wars was “lunacy.”144 Experts explained that Reagan’s Star Wars scheme would be impossible to achieve, any version would be easily crippled by the Soviets, the costs would bankrupt the United States, and, finally, it might provoke Moscow to launch a massive nuclear assault before it was operational. First, only nuclear power might produce a laser beam strong enough to penetrate a warhead’s reinforced steel casing, at least in a laboratory, but doing so in space would be as likely as someone firing a bullet that hit an oncoming bullet. To render that impossible, the Soviets could simply pack chaff around the cone that launched with the missile and whited out satellite radar screens. Building, launching, and orbiting hundreds of nuclear powered and armed satellites would cost at least half a trillion dollars and probably a trillion, a lot of money in those days. At a sliver of the cost, the Soviets could deploy a basketball-­ sized space mine packed with ball bearings alongside each satellite and detonate them in a crisis; the ball bearings would destroy the satellites. Finally, Star Wars would provoke rather than deter the Soviets. Indeed, Moscow nearly did empty its nuclear arsenal against the United States. Reagan’s nuclear buildup, Star Wars, and rhetoric about winning a nuclear war terrified Soviet leaders. They knew that SDI was unworkable and easily destroyed, but they feared that Reagan was building it as a

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shield behind which to launch an American first strike against the Soviet Union. If so, perhaps Star Wars might shoot down any remaining Soviet ICBMs and thus deter a Soviet retaliatory strike against America cities, knowing that the Americans would destroy many more Soviet cities with their remaining missiles. In November 1983, the Soviets put their nuclear forces on the highest alert during NATO’s Able Archer exercise that they believed masked a first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Although they debated preempting that by launching their own first nuclear strike against the United States, they finally decided to hold fire. A television series did what legions of experts failed to do. In November 1983, Reagan and his wife Nancy watched The Day After about the hellish existence for survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Thereafter, Reagan sincerely and publicly repeated Nancy’s whispered words: “A nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought.” Reagan believed that “if I could ever get in a room alone with one of the top Soviet leaders, there was a chance the two of us could make some progress. . . . I have always placed a lot of faith in the simple power of human contact in solving problems.”145 The Kremlin’s literally tottering leadership contributed to dismal relations and lack of serious negotiations. Atop that, the Soviet leaders kept dying on him: Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, Yuri Andropov in 1984, and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. Reagan got his wish after Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet premier in March 1985. Despite all his failures, Reagan did enhance American security in two crucial ways, one existential. He proposed and eventually Gorbachev accepted the “zero option” of removing all IRBMs from Europe. The Soviets had already deployed their SS-4s, SS-5s, and SS-20s. The White House demanded that Moscow withdraw those weapons or else the United States would deploy Pershing and cruise IRBMs. The Kremlin did not respond until after Washington paid the huge price of building and siting the Pershings. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev on December 8, 1987, required each side under international inspectors to withdraw and destroy all its IRMBs from Europe. The Senate ratified the INF by ninety-­five to five votes. The INF transformed the nuclear arms race from buildup to build-­down. Subsequent administrations would sign with Moscow their versions of a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) to drastically cut back each side’s nuclear arsenal. Reagan nearly precluded INF and the START process with a deal with Gorbachev to eliminate all nuclear weapons. That came during a stroll through the woods with just an interpreter at their Reykjavik, Iceland, summit in October 1986. Gorbachev actually made the proposal, but contingent on Reagan agreeing to also eliminate SDI. Although excited by the chance to rid the earth of nuclear weapons, Reagan angrily refused to give



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up his beloved Star Wars. Once again, a Reagan proposal appalled realists who favored each side retaining minimal nuclear forces without defenses against them as a deterrent to war between the superpowers. Reagan’s other geopolitical success was in Afghanistan. The United States and Saudi Arabia agreed jointly to aid the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets with $1 billion each in weapons. Most vital were the handheld American Stinger antiaircraft missiles that eventually broke Soviet control over the air. The Mujahideen then encircled and besieged Soviet and Afghan troops in cities and towns and cut off roads linking them. Gorbachev steadily withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, with the last leaving on February 15, 1989. The Soviets left behind a pro-­Soviet regime but paid an enormous cost over that decade of war, around $50 billion and, of 650,000 troops who served, 14,453 dead, 53,753 wounded, and 415,930 sick. That disastrous war was among the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed a few years later.146 Meanwhile, the American people elected a new president in November 1988. Vice President George H. W. Bush trounced Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis by 48,881,597 popular votes (53.4 percent) and 426 electoral votes to 41,809,074 (45.6 percent) and 111 electoral votes. However, he faced a Congress in which Democrats far outgunned Republicans by 55 to 45 in the Senate and 260 to 174 in the House of Representatives.147 When Bush exchanged the vice president’s mansion for the White House on January 20, 1989, no president could boast more foreign affairs experience, including John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and few presidents had endured more combat. In World War II, he joined the air corps, flew fifty-­eight missions in the Pacific, was shot down, and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. Although he was the scion of a rich Connecticut family, he moved to Texas, made his own fortune as an oil company executive, and then entered politics, serving in Congress from 1969 to 1971 and as UN ambassador from 1971 to 1973, U.S. representative to China from 1974 to 1975, and CIA director from 1976 to 1977. Although Reagan beat Bush for the Republican Party nomination in 1980, he named him his vice presidential candidate. Bush was a pragmatist who denounced Reagan’s economic proposals during the 1980 Republican Party primary campaign as “voodoo economics” and then embraced them as Reagan’s vice president. As president, he recanted and returned realism to the White House.148 He raised taxes to help pay for skyrocketing national debt inflicted by Reaganomics. He also lowered defense spending from $303.6 billion, or 5.6 percent of the economy, in 1989 to $298.4 billion, or 4.8 percent, in 1992.149 For that, Reaganites blistered him.

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Bush’s legacy was to preside over the Cold War’s end and the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union. His policies facilitated but did not cause that to happen.150 Two generations earlier, George Kennan explained that selective containment would hasten communism’s inevitable self-­destruction from its internal contradictions. Two Soviet leaders were most responsible for when and how that implosion happened. Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was one of them.151 Gorbachev was determined to save communism through three related painful but vital reforms. Glasnost was openly acknowledging and understanding the grave problems afflicting the Soviet Union. Perestroika was the restructuring policies to alleviate those problems. Democracy permitted free elections for officials within the Communist Party, replacing the old system whereby the elite imposed one candidate for each office that everyone should vote for or, to one’s peril, vote against. Gorbachev’s talks with Reagan and other American leaders helped open his mind to a critical reality that a communist system suppresses. He reported to the Politburo, “In Washington, probably for the first time we clearly realized how much the human factor means in international relations. Before . . . we treated such personal contacts as simply meetings between representatives of opposed and irreconcilable systems. . . . But it turns out that politicians, including leaders of government if they are responsible people, represent purely human concerns, interests, and hopes of ordinary people—people who vote for them in elections and associate their leaders’ names and personal abilities—with the country’s image and patriotism.”152 When Gorbachev expressed these sentiments to Reagan at the end of their first meeting, the president sent Secretary of State Shultz to Moscow in November 1985 and April 1987 to brief Gorbachev on not just the wonders of democracy but also a market economy. Shultz’s core lesson was the vital importance of “human capital, what people know, how freely they exchange information and knowledge, and the intellectually creative product that emerges.” To that, Gorbachev replied, “We should have more of this kind of talk.”153 Those talks spurred Gorbachev’s commitment to realizing glasnost, perestroika, and democracy. But political reforms without economic reforms eventually destroyed rather than saved the Soviet Union. He knew that the tiny gardens, chicken coops, and pigsties that the state let rural people nurture produced 40 percent of Soviet food, but he never dared privatize the vast, wasteful, corrupt state agricultural communes. His travels to the West revealed how private enterprise and markets promote mass prosperity, but he dared not let Soviet subjects start their own businesses and freely exchange goods and services. Ever more people increasingly vented decades of pent-­up rage at the communist system



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that repressed and exploited them and that imprisoned or outright murdered any who resisted, and the Communist Party could neither crush them nor satisfy them by liberalizing the economy. One American message likely echoed above all through Gorbachev’s mind. On June 12, 1987, Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall to give a speech that celebrated human liberty and ended with the demand “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Gorbachev had actually first informed the Eastern European tyrants in September 1985 that Moscow would no longer help them crush any revolts. He recognized that the Soviet defense budget, as much as one-­third of the economy, was crushing the Soviet Union. In December 1988, he sought to lighten that burden by announcing the withdrawal of five hundred thousand troops and ten thousand tanks from Eastern Europe. He also ended the Soviet war in Afghanistan, with the last troops departing that devastated country in February 1989. Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union what Vietnam had been for America, a demoralizing and humiliating defeat. One by one, the captive peoples of communist Eastern Europe broke their chains with mass protests. Hungary’s government opened its border with Austria in May 1989. Eastern Europeans, especially Germans, hurried to Hungary and then on to freedom in Austria and beyond. West Germany counted over two hundred thousand refugees by October. In August 1989, one million freedom-­loving Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians formed a four-­hundred-­mile-­long human chain to protest their conquest by the Soviets. East Germany’s government announced on November 9 that the following day all barriers between East and West Berlin would open. That provoked an outpouring of joyous Berliners who swarmed around and atop the wall and began demolishing it. West German chancellor Helmut Kohl engineered Germany’s reunification with its capital at Berlin on October 3, 1990. In doing so, he got Gorbachev to accept Germany’s NATO membership. Each East European communist regime peacefully rendered power to the liberal opposition—except Romania, where fighting erupted and dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were executed. Then the Soviet Union itself began breaking up as Lithuania’s government announced its independence from the Soviet Union on March 11, 1990, followed by Estonia on March 30 and Latvia on May 5. Amid these revolutions, the White House and the Kremlin negotiated the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that Bush and Gorbachev signed on July 31, 1991. Within a decade, each side would reduce its arsenal to 6,000 warheads, including 4,900 ICBMs or SLBMs, and 1,100 cruise missiles or bombers. Russian president Boris Yeltsin was the other Soviet leader critical for the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire.154 A coterie of Kremlin

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hard-­liners kidnapped Gorbachev at his Crimean residence on August 18, 1991, and tried to force him to renounce all his reforms. In Moscow, Yeltsin responded by organizing mass demonstrations in the square before Russia’s parliament building (called the White House). The coup leaders released Gorbachev and accepted arrest by the police. Gorbachev flew back to Moscow and appeared alongside Yeltsin before Russia’s parliament on August 21. Russia’s parliament voted to suspend the Communist Party on August 29. In what was history’s greatest Christmas present, Gorbachev announced the Soviet Union’s dissolution on December 25, 1991. The Cold War ended with a total victory for America and humanity.

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Postmodern Wars

A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam. When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming. —George H. W. Bush One of the greatest regrets of my presidency is that I didn’t get him for you, because I tried to. —Bill Clinton to George W. Bush

W

ith the Cold War’s end, President George H. W. Bush expressed his vision for “a new world order . . . in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can live in harmony. . . . A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibilities of freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”1 That new world order was fleeting. The Cold War’s finale overlapped with the return of traditional wars over geopolitics followed by wars over an imperialistic ideology, Islamism. Bush himself launched the first two of those geopolitical wars. Manuel Noriega was Panama’s dictator from August 12, 1983, to December 20, 1989. During that time, he enriched himself and his cronies with tens of millions of dollars skimmed from the international cocaine trade with a channel through Panama. In 1988, a Miami court indicted Noriega on drug charges while the Reagan White House offered him unmolested retirement in Spain. Noriega defied both. In 1989, the Bush 367

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administration pressured him to go into exile. He reacted by provoking anti-­American rallies in Panama City. The murder of an American marine by Panamanian troops was the excuse for Bush to order the elimination of Noriega’s regime. On December 20, 22,500 American troops invaded Panama, quickly routed the 16,000-man Panamanian army, and surrounded Noriega, who had fled to the Vatican embassy. Noriega surrendered on January 3, received ten felony convictions by a Miami court on July 10, 1992, and spent the rest of his life in prison until his death in 2017. Meanwhile, Bush’s popularity soared with the short Panama War. That victory cost Panama over a billion dollars’ worth of damage and 500 civilian deaths atop 314 soldiers killed and 1,908 captured; 23 American troops died and 315 were wounded during the operation.2 That short war had limited regional results but proved to be the warm-­up for the next war with global consequences. The Iraqi army invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and swiftly conquered it. President Saddam Hussein ordered that conquest because he wanted Kuwait’s vast oil fields and believed that the United States and the rest of the world would acquiesce rather than resist. Indeed, it took the Bush administration three days of debate to decide what to do. Almost all his advisors advocated doing nothing because Iraq had become a friendly counter to Iran and, anyway, American forces in the Persian Gulf were too weak to drive out the Iraqis. Two voices advocated war against Iraq: National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who promised full military support. They argued that appeasement would likely encourage Hussein to conquer Saudi Arabia, letting him dominate global oil production and sending prices skyrocketing. That convinced Bush, who appeared before television cameras on August 5 and announced, “This will not stand.”3 What followed was a brilliant diplomatic offensive followed by a brilliant military offensive. The Bush administration secured fourteen UN Security Council resolutions that condemned Iraq’s conquest, demanded that Iraqi forces withdraw by January 15, and authorized the United States to build and lead a coalition to go to war against Iraq if its army violated the deadline. The coalition numbered 956,000 military personnel from thirty-­five countries, including 700,000 Americans. The deadline passed. On January 17, 1991, the coalition began a bombing campaign that methodically destroyed Iraq’s air defense, logistics, and troops. On February 23, the coalition ground attack began with feints by a marine division in the Gulf and divisions along Kuwait’s southern border while a mobile force curled through the desert west of Kuwait against the Iraqi rear and routed the enemy.



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Bush called off the offensive a hundred hours later. In doing so, he resisted demands by conservatives to race to Baghdad and destroy the Iraqi military and Saddam’s regime. Bush, Scowcroft, and other realists explained that the army and Saddam kept the artificial Iraqi state together. Without them, Iraq would collapse into anarchy as Arabs fought Kurds and Sunnis fought Shiites. In that war, Shiite Iran would control the 65 percent of Iraqis who were Shiite, especially the southern region around Basra that might become an independent nation-­state. Although only one out of five Iraqis were Kurds, they were concentrated in the north and would fight for their own independent nation-­state and encourage revolts by Kurds in neighboring Iran, Syria, and Turkey. With relatively equal numbers of Sunnis and Shiites in central Iraq around Baghdad, the fighting might last indefinitely. Coalition forces devastated Iraq’s military during the eight-­ week campaign in one of history’s most lopsided victories. At the cost of 292 dead, 467 wounded, and 31 destroyed tanks, they may have killed as many as 50,000 Iraqi troops, wounded 75,000, and captured 80,000, while destroying or capturing 3,300 tanks, 2,100 armored personnel carriers, 2,200 cannons, and 110 aircraft, while Iraqi pilots in 137 aircraft flew to Iran. The Gulf War was the first that personified the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that applied innovative micro-­electric technologies including “smart” bombs and missiles, laptop computers, and satellites to pinpoint and destroy enemy forces swiftly with minimal troops and casualties.4 Saddam agreed to an armistice that let UN inspectors dismantle his chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. The Bush administration imposed a triple containment policy on Iraq. The United States and the United Nations jointly contained Iraq with no-­fly zones and weapons inspections while the regime brutally repressed Islamism within Iraq and offset neighboring Iran. The result was a stable power balance in the Persian Gulf. Tragically, that lasted only a dozen years before another president, George W. Bush, opted for a crusade that destroyed Saddam Hussein’s regime and opened a Pandora’s box of wars seemingly without end across the Middle East. Bush’s decisive leadership in the Persian Gulf was not enough to win him reelection. Democratic candidate Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election with 44,709,889 votes (43 percent) and 370 electoral votes to Bush with 39,104,580 votes (37.4 percent) and 168 electoral votes and independent candidate Ross Perot with 19,743,821 votes (18.4 percent). Democrats continued to dominate Congress with 57 to 43 Republican Senate seats and 258 to 176 Republican and 1 independent seats in the House.5

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Bush left two immediate legacies for the incoming Clinton administration, one negative and one positive. Somalia and its capital Mogadishu had collapsed into anarchy among warlords. Bush committed 28,150 troops to the UN peacekeeping mission. They began landing in mid-­ December, and their overwhelming presence along with humanitarian aid quelled the fighting. That lull would be fleeting. On January 3, 1993, Bush and Yeltsin signed START II that committed them to a decade-long reduction to 3,500 American and 2,997 Russian warheads by 2003. Clinton was a masterful, charismatic politician who served as Arkansas’s governor from 1979 to 1981 and from 1983 to 1992.6 Although he had minimal foreign policy experience and knowledge, he was a highly intelligent former Rhodes scholar and quick study. He split his key foreign policy advisors between low-­key realists like first Anthony Lake and then Sandy Berger as national security advisor, George Tenet as CIA director from 1997, and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell and legalists and moralists like First Lady Hillary Clinton, UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The realists generally opposed and the moralists backed humanitarian interventions. Clinton’s greatest success was reviving America’s global economic power. His policies of cutting back federal spending and streamlining the bureaucracy, while raising taxes on the rich and lowering taxes for the middle class and poor, stimulated the economy. From 1993 to 2001, the economy annually expanded by 4 percent, compared to 3.7 percent under Reagan from 1981 to 1989. Meanwhile, median family income in 2020 dollars rose from $65,377 to $75,312, or $9,965, under Clinton compared to $61,354 to $69,152, or $7,798, under Reagan. While Reaganomics tripled America’s national debt, the huge influx of revenues under Clintonomics caused the national debt to decline sharply compared to the economy, from $4.411 trillion (or 63 percent) in 1993 to $5.807 (55 percent) by 2001. Had Clinton’s successor followed those same fiscally sound policies, America’s national debt would have disappeared by 2011.7 The Clinton White House inherited a military commitment to leading the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission in Somalia. Warlord Mohammad Farah Aidid bedeviled that effort as he sought to drive out the peacekeepers and take over the country. On June 5, 1993, his militia ambushed a Pakistani patrol, killing twenty-­four and wounding fifty-­seven. Clinton sent Task Force Ranger special forces to Somalia with the mission of wiping out Aidid and his militia. In September, the rangers launched six raids that diminished the warlord’s forces without losing a man. On October 3, learning that Aidid was in Mogadishu’s center, they tried to trap him but instead ran into a trap. Thousands of militiamen converged and shot down two Black Hawk helicopters flying overhead. In the firefight, the Americans killed over a thousand besiegers but suffered eighteen dead



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and eighty-­two wounded. The 10th Mountain Division fought its way through the maze of streets and rescued the rangers.8 Military historian Max Boot nicely summarized how the Vietnam syndrome haunted and warped the decisions of those who led the Gulf War and Somalia operations: “The irony of Somalia was the opposite of what it had been in the Gulf War. In the Gulf, fear of a small war (the occupation of Iraq) had prevented a big war from being carried out to a completely satisfactory conclusion; in Somalia, fear of a big war prevented a small war from being waged effectively. These are the yin and yang of the Vietnam Syndrome, still a prominent part of U.S. military thinking decades after the fall of Saigon.”9 Clinton and his advisors had no sooner extracted themselves from one disastrous humanitarian operation than they blundered their way into another. Jean Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest, won election and became Haiti’s president on February 7, 1991. His social reform program paid for by military budget cuts provoked General Raoul Cedras to overthrow and exile him on September 29, 1991. The Bush administration was indifferent to the coup, but humanitarians within and beyond the Clinton administration pressured the president to return Aristide to power. Clinton received legal authority to do so when UN Security Council Resolution 940 passed on July 3, 1994. Clinton dispatched the transport USS Harlan County packed with American rangers and Canadian troops. A jeering mob awaited them on the dock. That posed a dilemma. Should the peacekeepers attack, wait, or withdraw? Clinton ordered them back. Republicans pilloried Clinton for what they called a humiliating retreat. Clinton then sent Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Powell and former president Jimmy Carter to negotiate with Cedras. They convinced Cedras to leave Haiti and allow the deployment of twenty thousand American peacekeeping troops. After regaining the presidential palace on October 15, 1994, Aristide launched a reign of terror by his followers against his enemies, with scores murdered and hundreds beaten and arrested. The Clinton administration nearly went to war against North Korea over its nuclear weapons program in 1995. Diplomacy prevented that. The United States, Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan negotiated a deal with North Korea. Kim Jong Il agreed to give up his nuclear weapons program and allow constant video and sniffer monitoring and periodic International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of sites in return for those countries supplying $4 billion worth of energy aid including fuel oil and building two light-­breeder nuclear reactors for electricity. Yugoslavia broke up into its six provinces for the same reasons as the Soviet Union; it was an artificial state concocted from alien and often enemy nations and religions artificially subdued by a harsh communist regime. One by one, provinces declared independence, Slovenia and

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Croatia on June 24, 1991, Bosnia-­Herzegovina on March 1, 1992, and Macedonia on September 8, 1992, until only Serbia and Montenegro remained. Violence between varying groups marred each assertion. Bosnia-­Herzegovina had three overlapping groups vying for autonomy—Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croatians, and Muslims—and the result was a war of all against all. It was not an equal fight. Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic backed the Serbs with arms and troops. Over two hundred thousand people, most Muslims, died in the fighting. The Serbs committed horrendous war crimes including mass rapes and massacres, the worst at Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic had his men murder 8,372 Muslim men and boys. The Serbs besieged Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, from April 2, 1992, to February 29, 1996. When pressure rose for Washington to do something to stem the worsening violence and chaos, Secretary of State James Baker issued this classic realist reply: “We’ve got no dog in that fight.”10 The Bush administration had already decided to send peacekeepers to another war without a clear American interest, Somalia. That was a big enough boulder to leave in the White House garden for the incoming Clinton administration. Nonetheless, Bush did forge a consensus between NATO and the United Nations for the alliance’s warplanes to monitor a “no-­fly zone” over Bosnia that supported UN peacekeepers on the ground from July 1992.11 In the Clinton White House, Madeleine Albright insisted that America intervene to stop the violence. When Colin Powell explained the many practical reasons for not doing so, she retorted, “What’s the point of having this superb military . . . if we can’t use it?”12 NATO forces committed the first combat in its history on February 28, 1994, when warplanes shot down four Serbian planes in the no-­ fly zone. On April 10, the UN and NATO, led respectively by Boutros Boutros-­Ghali and Wesley Clark, agreed that the UN peacekeepers could request NATO close air support. Pressure on the Clinton administration for an all-­out air war against Serbia soared after revelation of the Serbs’ Srebrenica massacre in July. Clinton agreed. The campaign lasted from August 30 to September 20, with strikes against 338 targets, during which only one NATO plane, a French Mirage, was shot down and its two pilots captured. The Serbs agreed to a cease-­fire and peace talks. Clinton assigned Richard Holbrooke the mission of negotiating a peace agreement among presidents Milosevic of Serbia, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, and Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia-­ Herzegovina. The talks took place at Wright-­Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, from November 1 to 21, 1995. Under the Dayton Peace Accords, signed on December 14, 1995, the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia-­Herzegovina each received an autonomous region and sent representatives to a federal government. The



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United States contributed twenty thousand troops to the sixty thousand peacekeepers that began deploying in December 1995.13 Meanwhile, violence worsened in Serbia’s province of Kosovo between the nine in ten Muslim inhabitants against the ruling Orthodox Christians. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), claiming to represent the Muslim population, revolted in July 1995. The war raged for three years until Serbia followed a policy of provoking the Muslim population to flee to neighboring Muslim Albania. Once again, the UN and NATO coordinated attempts at peace talks backed by military force. Milosevic rejected any negotiations. The bombing campaign lasted from March 24 to June 11, during which the Serbs shot down an F-111 and F-16, although the American pilots were rescued. On June 13, Milosevic agreed to a settlement whereby he withdrew the Serb army and thirty thousand NATO troops deployed as peacekeepers. Kosovo became an independent country in 2008. One human catastrophe the Clinton White House avoided was Rwanda, where in April 1994 the majority Hutu began massacring the minority Tutsi and eventually over seven hundred thousand died in the fighting, with Tutsi nine of ten victims. All along, Clinton and other officials avoided using the word “genocide” to describe the slaughter. Under international law, had they equated the violence with genocide, they would have been legally obliged to intervene. A UN peacekeeping force began restoring order in July 1995.14 Meanwhile, the United States and the Western world came under the latest wave of attacks by Islamists, or fundamentalist Muslims.15 The first wave came in Lebanon in the mid-1980s led by Hezbollah, a Shiite revolutionary movement sponsored by Iran; Hezbollah defeated the United States and its allies in Lebanon. The second wave during the 1990s was led by al Qaeda, a Sunni terrorist organization piloted by Osama bin Laden, and hit targets in New York City, Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, and Tanzania. That campaign culminated with the attacks on America’s World Trade Center towers and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Jihad is every Muslim man’s duty to fight infidels and spread the true faith. Mohammad founded Islam through jihad or holy war, and his successors faithfully executed that duty. Within a century of Mohammad’s death in 632, Muslim armies had conquered the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula, and within a thousand years had subjected southwest, south, and central Asia and southeastern Europe. Meanwhile, peaceful proselytization converted much of Southeast Asia and central Africa. That expansion ended with the rise of European empires around the world and the global economy. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 unwittingly provoked jihad’s revival. Muslim leaders declared jihad against the Soviet

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infidels and their Afghan puppets. Washington aided the jihadists, called Mujahideen, with arms, most vitally Stinger antiaircraft missiles, that let them drive out the Soviets by 1989 and eliminate the Soviet-­backed regime by 1992. Osama bin Laden, the scion of a rich Saudi family, used his wealth to fund and lead the Service Bureau that recruited, armed, and dispatched to the front Muslim jihadists from around the world. He joined the fighting from 1986 to 1988. As the Afghan war wound down, he established al Qaeda, “the Base,” to carry on three relatively short-­term jihadist goals that led to the ultimate goal, universal Islam. Al Qaeda would spearhead the jihad to eliminate the United States and other Western states from the Muslim world, impose fundamentalist Islamist revolutions on all fifty-­ seven states with majority Muslim populations, and destroy Israel. Al Qaeda attacks against the United States began in 1993, in firefights against American and other UN peacekeeping troops in Somalia and with the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in New York that left a dozen dead and a thousand injured. A hiatus of five years followed before the next attack as bin Laden steadily expanded a network of operatives, eventually to include three thousand in over seventy countries, and transferred his headquarters to Khartoum, Sudan, and then back to Afghanistan, where he issued calls for global jihad in 1996 and 1998. Then, on August 8, 1998, suicide truck bombers simultaneously detonated their loads against American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, murdering 224 people, including a dozen Americans, and wounding a thousand others. On receiving intelligence that confirmed al Qaeda’s culpability, Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks that killed a couple score operatives at an Afghanistan training camp and destroyed a chemical plant in Khartoum. Washington later paid compensation to Sudan for the chemical plant after receiving proof that it was unaffiliated with al Qaeda. Clinton authorized the killing of bin Laden and then spiked three chances when intelligence of his presence was uncertain and civilians would likely die, including a hotel near a mosque, his family compound outside Kandahar, and a hunting party with United Arab Emirate princes. Al Qaeda struck again on October 12, 2000, with a suicide boat attack that crippled the USS Cole, killed seventeen sailors, and wounded a score more in Aden, Yemen. That occurred just four weeks before the presidential election. Clinton left any retaliation debate to the next president. George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential election victory was the most controversial in American history. More Americans actually voted for his rival, Democratic candidate and former vice president Al Gore, who received 50,999,897 popular votes (48.4 percent), 533,895 more than Bush’s



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50,456,602 (47.9 percent). More people also tried to vote for Gore than Bush in Florida, but irregular ballots failed to record all their attempts. Instead, the count gave Bush an edge with 537 votes. The Supreme Court’s five conservative members voted to end a recount called for by the Gore campaign, thus handing the election to Bush.16 The Bush administration’s neoconservative political philosophy was also highly controversial. Neoconservatives insist that the president’s powers are above the law and that the United States should emphasize the assertion of ever larger military might to protect national interests. Of Bush’s predecessors, only Andrew Jackson had so vehemently championed those principles. Neoconservatives outgunned realists by two to one in Bush’s inner policy circle, starting with the president himself, followed by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Realists included Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, CIA director George Tenet, and counterterrorist tsar Richard Clarke. Rumsfeld aside, not only had no neoconservative male served in the military, but all were draft dodgers during the Vietnam War.17 The outgoing Clinton administrators briefed their incoming Bush equivalents on the most pressing problems they would inherit. Every official involved with national security, including the Defense Department, State Department, National Security Council, and CIA, grimly explained that al Qaeda was America’s number-­one threat. Clinton lamented to Bush, “One of the greatest regrets of my presidency is that I didn’t get him for you, because I tried to.”18 Bush dismissed any notion of retaliating (let alone warring) against al Qaeda as “swatting flies.” National Security Advisor Rice had not even heard of al Qaeda and, after being briefed, dismissed the terrorist organization as “chump change” despite its devastating attacks against Americans and others in Mogadishu, New York, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Aden. In July, she was just as disdainful after Tenet and a CIA expert told her that al Qaeda was planning a “spectacular” attack. On August 6, more than a month before the attack, the headline for Bush’s daily CIA brief was “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US.” Bush told the briefer, “Alright, you’ve covered your ass now.”19 To justify its huge defense buildup, the Bush administration had to point to “dangerous enemies.” They got in a spy war with Moscow, and each expelled several of the other’s intelligence officers. A Chinese fighter pilot collided with an American spy plane in international airspace; the Chinese pilot crashed into the sea, while the crippled American plane had to land on China’s Hainan Island, where the crew was imprisoned. That provoked a crisis with China that Powell finally resolved by expressing

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regret for the pilot’s death. China then released the crew. All along, the neocons sought to provoke a war with Iraq, whose dictator Saddam Hussein they sought to destroy. Then, on the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen al Qaeda operatives split among four teams each hijacked a jetliner and flew it toward a different target.20 Three succeeded, hitting the twin World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon; passengers aboard the fourth rushed the cockpit, and the jetliner crashed in Pennsylvania’s countryside. The 110-story Twin Towers pancaked, crushing those who remained inside. In all, the terrorists murdered 2,927 Americans. The Bush administration spent the next two days debating how to respond. CIA director Tenet identified al Qaeda as the perpetrator, said the agency could begin a counteroffensive within forty-­eight hours, and nodded to Operations Chief Cofer Black to explain the plan. Astonishingly, the neocons rejected that intelligence, insisted without any evidence that Iraq was responsible, and called for war against Iraq. Eventually the realists broke the deadlock by cutting a Faustian deal with the neocons. They agreed to back a later war against Iraq if the neocons backed the immediate war against the enemy who devastated America on September 11. Before a joint congressional session on September 20, Bush declared war not against al Qaeda and its affiliates but on terrorism itself and vowed to “rid the world of evil.”21 Few dared to note the irony of the president’s speech. Bush and his neoconservative coterie had dismissed repeated warnings that al Qaeda was planning a “spectacular attack” against America and so did nothing to try to thwart or prepare the nation for that attack. Yet no enraged calls for impeachment sounded from within or beyond Congress. Democratic Party leaders put national unity before the Bush administration’s culpability of gross neglect of its duty to protect America. Later the bipartisan September 11 Commission Report briefly noted but whitewashed the Bush team’s rejection of the overwhelming evidence of an imminent and devastating attack.22 The September 11 attacks united not just most Americans but also most countries around America. German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder spoke for countless people when he declared the atrocities “a declaration of war against the whole civilized world.” The French left-­leaning newspaper Le Monde headlined, “We Are All Americans Now.” For the first time in its history, NATO invoked the Article 5 principle that an attack on one member was an attack on all.23 Bush did approve the CIA plan to invade Afghanistan and exterminate al Qaeda and its host, the Islamist Taliban movement, and work with other governments to capture operatives embedded in over seventy



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countries. CIA Special Activities and military special forces teams infiltrated Afghanistan to join forces with the Northern Alliance that opposed the Taliban regime. From early October, those operatives directed American bombing and missile attacks against around forty thousand Taliban and four thousand al Qaeda soldiers, followed by Northern Alliance attacks that routed the remnants and captured ever more of Afghanistan. By mid-­December, several hundred al Qaeda militants and bin Laden were holed up at their Tora Bora defense complex on the Pakistan border. CIA field officers begged the Bush administration to cut off al Qaeda’s retreat with overwhelming numbers of troops. The White House rejected that plea and told them to keep using local tribes; the neocons were already massing American troops for war against Iraq and had none to spare. The CIA tried, but al Qaeda outbid them, paying tribal chiefs $5,000 for each fighter, including bin Laden, to disappear to safety within Pakistan. There, Pakistan’s Inter-­ Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) dispersed al Qaeda’s fighters to secure sites, including bin Laden, who eventually received a compound in Abbottabad, just forty-­ five miles from Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Had the Bush administration focused on eliminating al Qaeda, the United States would have won rather than eventually lost its Afghanistan war and thus saved several thousand American and over 170,000 Afghan lives, along with 2.3 trillion American taxpayer dollars. To fight its “Global War on Terror,” the Bush administration worked with Congress to establish laws and institutions that enhanced presidential powers. The 2001 Patriot Act expanded the federal government’s authority to spy within the United States, use military trials for terrorists, and increase penalties for those convicted. The 2002 Homeland Security Act created the Homeland Security Department, cobbled together from twenty-­two agencies and 180,000 employees. The 2004 Intelligence Act supplanted the CIA with a Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) at the intelligence community’s hub. The Justice Department authorized use of “enhanced interrogation methods” to extract information from terrorist suspects just short of “massive organ failure or death,” which could include beatings, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. The neocons called due the reluctant pledge realists had made to them for backing the war against al Qaeda. The realists now had to lockstep with the neocons in war against Iraq.24 In his January 2002 State of the Union address before Congress, Bush claimed that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea had formed an “axis of evil” against America and the free world. That was simply untrue. Islamist Iran under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and secular Iraq under Saddam Hussein were mortal enemies, while neither had close ties with communist North Korea. Rhetorically, the “axis of evil”

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slogan was part of a public relations campaign to rally ignorant, fearful Americans behind the neocon crusade against Iraq. The Bush administration claimed two initial reasons to wage war against Iraq: Iraq had helped al Qaeda commit the September 11 attack, and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that imminently threatened the United States. Both “reasons” were blatant lies. Later, the neocons promised that by overthrowing Saddam, they could establish a democracy in Iraq that would inspire similar democracies across the Middle East and beyond. That was a blatant delusion. The Bush team pressured the CIA to concoct false intelligence reports linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and September 11. That request enraged CIA professionals. One Middle East expert angrily replied, “If you want us to go after that son of a bitch to settle old scores, be my guest, but don’t tell us he is connected to 9/11 or terrorism because there is no evidence to support that.”25 CIA analysts were just as adamant that Iraq had neither nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons nor programs to develop them, but merely debris from previous efforts. However, CIA director Tenet let the neocons sweep him into their delusions. To Bush, he declared the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction “a slam dunk.” What explains Tenet’s conversion from telling the truth to telling lies? That resulted from Tenet’s character flaw of an overwhelming need to be a likable team player, combined with his fear of being fired for presenting truth to power.26 Virtually all of America’s allies and the rest of world were skeptical or outright scornful of the Bush administration’s excuses for its pending Iraq crusade. Of America’s most powerful allies, only British prime minister Tony Blair joined the Bush team. Bush dispatched Powell, with Tenet seated just behind him, to make the case for war before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Powell’s charismatic delivery made the most of the “evidence,” which was either circumstantial or outright false.27 The army that invaded Iraq on March 19 included 250,000 troops, mostly American but also 45,000 Britons and smaller contingents from other countries that provided support. The Iraq war’s initial phase brilliantly asserted the Revolution in Military Affairs that the Pentagon had developed over a dozen years. Smart missiles and bombs first destroyed Iraq’s air defense and logistics system and then massed troops and equipment. Special forces dropped behind enemy lines destroyed or captured key defenses. Armored and mechanized divisions raced forward to envelop and decimate enemy forces before them. Tank columns converged at Baghdad’s center on April 19. In one of history’s most lopsided and fast-­paced wars, America’s military machine systematically destroyed Iraq’s army in three weeks while suffering only 161 combat deaths. On May 1, President Bush landed in a



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jet atop the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, emerged before a cheering crowd, and, with a huge banner worded “Mission Accomplished” behind him, proclaimed victory. In reality, America’s Iraq war had merely ended its first phase, but, geopolitically speaking, that war had already been lost. Only Iran benefited from and thus won the Bush administration’s crusade against Iraq. Neoconservative Bush had abandoned the successful triple containment policy imposed by his realist father a dozen years earlier. From 1991 to 2003, the United States and the United Nations had jointly contained Iraq with no-­fly zones and weapons inspections while the regime brutally repressed Islamism within Iraq and opposed neighboring Iran. The result was a stable power balance in the Persian Gulf. The destruction of Saddam’s regime shattered Iraq into wars between Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, and Iraqis and occupying Americans. Mobs in Baghdad and other cities ransacked government offices and warehouses along with private businesses and homes. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards asserted control over Shiite communities whose total populations comprised two of three Iraqis. Iraq became a magnet for jihadists from around the world eager to kill Americans and their allies. Bush’s response to swelling attacks against American and allied forces was “Bring ’em on!” The White House established a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) headed by Paul Bremer that struggled to govern Iraq, establishing a democratic Iraqi government to eventually take power and quell worsening insurgencies. Meanwhile, around 1,400 UN inspectors spread out across Iraq, vainly searching for weapons of mass destruction. In January 2004, chief inspector David Kay admitted, “We were all wrong.” The final inspection report concluded that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs “were nascent, moribund, or non-­existent.”28 Troops did capture Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003, and turned him over to Iraq’s new government. The government indicted and found him guilty of an array of crimes and had him executed on December 30, 2006. But for realists that seemed a hollow victory as war engulfed ever more of Iraq. America was losing its war against the insurgencies. The Bush administration’s authorization of “enhanced interrogation methods”—a euphemism for torture—damaged American honor after hundreds of photos emerged of prisoners being abused. The most notorious came from Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, where American soldiers threatened captives with vicious attack dogs, piled naked men atop each other, attached leashes to their necks and walked them like dogs, and put atop a stool a black-­hooded captive with arms outstretched and electric wires attached to his body. The Bush administration’s popularity steadily declined as the

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war ground on and American casualties soared, along with evidence of torture, profiteering, and incompetence. Militarily, the war’s turning point came after General David Petraeus took command of Iraq in 2007. He understood that the prevailing “search, destroy, withdraw” strategy actually caused the enemy to proliferate because it embittered survivors whose families, homes, and businesses were destroyed as American and allied troops systematically kicked in doors, shot anyone who appeared threatening, and dragged away military-­age men for interrogations. He sought to finesse that “hydra dilemma” with a “take, hold, and build” strategy whereby troops remained in a town or city district and protected civilian teams that rebuilt the shattered electricity, water, sewage, police, and school networks. Progress was measured by how many businesses operated and kids attended school, along with fewer killings. In Sunni regions and city districts, that strategy depended on paying off and supplying militia groups to support rather than oppose the government. That strategy worked. Violence steadily declined, which allowed the United States and its allies to steadily withdraw their troops. On December 15, 2011, American and Iraqi officials held a ceremony in Baghdad marking the end of America’s military involvement. From 2003 through 2011, the Iraq war cost 4,492 American military lives and around 460,000 total direct or indirect Iraqi deaths and heaped $1.927 trillion on American taxpayers.29 Atop that, the announcement of no more American fighting was premature. America’s Iraq crusade disrupted the Middle East as millions of refugees and thousands of jihadists spread across the region. To varying degrees, corruption, incompetence, brutality, and poverty afflicted every Arab country. Generations of misrule and exploitation by harsh regimes alienated ever more people. In December 2011, a Tunisian street vendor poured gasoline on himself, struck a flame, and killed himself in protest at being robbed and beaten by local officials. That inspired mass protests against Tunisia’s regime that spread to Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya. Civil wars erupted in Syria, Yemen, and Libya that persist today. A democratic revolution appeared to transform Tunisia’s government, but it reverted to authoritarianism in 2021. Then, in 2014, Islamic State, a jihadist movement with military and political wings, launched a military offensive from its headquarters at Raqqa, Syria, and swiftly overran much of northern Syria and northern Iraq.30 Their offensive succeeded because they combined merciless terrorism and good governance, murdering anyone who opposed them while solving practical problems in neighborhoods and villages. President Barack Obama got Congress to approve a strategy of aid to Iraq’s military along with bombing and missile strikes and special operations forces



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attacks on Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria. Russia and Turkey sent their own troops into regions of Syria. The military might of those overlapping offensives steadily demolished Islamic State. American special forces killed Islamic State’s emir, Abu Bakr al-­Baghdadi, on October 27, 2019. By December 2019, Islamic State’s remnants were in hiding. Meanwhile, American forces fought jihadist groups elsewhere in alliance with the governments, most intensely in Somalia. As Washington and its allies battled jihadists for two decades, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by anti-­American regimes posed a worsening threat. Ironically, the Bush administration warred against Iraq, which did not have a nuclear weapons program, while accepting communist North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. In 1994, the Clinton administration had worked with regional states to pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program and agree to IAEA cameras, radiation sniffers, and inspections of sites in return for yearly supplies of oil and the building of two light-­breeder nuclear reactors for electricity. The Clinton administration hoped to negotiate a stronger inspection system but ran out of time. The incoming Bush administration broke diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, and Bush labeled North Korea part of an enemy “axis of evil” with Iraq and Iran. Pyongyang resumed its nuclear weapons program and successfully tested its first nuclear bomb in 2006, and since then it has steadily expanded its number of nuclear bombs to at least sixty, along with increasingly sophisticated and longer-­ range missiles to deliver them. Neither the Bush and Obama administrations’ policies of international sanctions against North Korea nor President Donald Trump’s policy of appeasing dictator Kim Jong Un with three fawning summits slowed (let alone reversed) that nuclear weapons buildup. The Obama administration did get Iran to shelve its nuclear program. It did so by combining tougher international sanctions against and negotiations with Iran. After years of talks, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany signed with Iran an agreement whereby Tehran agreed to dismantle 66 percent of its centrifuges that refined uranium, give 98 percent of its enriched uranium to Russia, and allow IAEA cameras, sniffers, and inspections of its nuclear sites in return for lifting trade and financial sanctions. Then, on May 8, 2018, Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the agreement and reimposition of sanctions against Iran. Iran resumed its nuclear program and may eventually wield nuclear weapons. Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia from December 31, 1999, through the present, during which his threat to America and Europe steadily

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expanded.31 So far, five American presidents have dealt with him. Clinton was wary but cut no deals during the brief time their administrations overlapped. In contrast, Bush gushed, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”32 Bush and Putin signed a two-­page understanding at the Kremlin on May 24, 2002, whereby each pledged to reduce its nuclear forces to somewhere between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012, although, without verification, each had to accept the other’s word that he complied. The Bush administration mildly protested Russia’s conquest of Georgia’s provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia during a brief war from August 1 to 12, 2008. Obama was skeptical and aloof from the beginning. Then, on February 24, 2014, the Russian army invaded Ukraine after a democratic revolution overthrew corrupt, authoritarian, and pro-­Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych. The Russians captured Crimea bloodlessly and conducted a plebiscite on March 26 in which 98 percent voted for annexation. Russian troops also overran parts of the eastern, mostly Russian-­speaking provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk and set up a puppet people’s republic in each. In September 2014, the Obama administration, the European Union, and Japan issued separate and limited sanctions against select Russian banks and oil companies. During the 2016 election, Democrat Hillary Clinton won 65,853,514 popular votes (48.21 percent) to Republican Donald Trump’s 62,984,828 (46.1 percent), but Trump triumphed in the Electoral College with 305 to 227 votes.33 The Kremlin tried to influence that election with a massive cyber-­ misinformation campaign that denigrated Clinton and America’s electoral system and celebrated Trump. Allegations of Trump collusion with Putin prompted a Justice Department investigation led by Robert Mueller. The Mueller Report, released in May 2018, concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict Trump on collusion charges but did find ten instances when Trump obstructed justice.34 Democrats did not immediately impeach him then for obstructing justice but did so in December 2019 for Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to declare false corruption charges against likely 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. On February 5, 2020, the Senate voted forty-­eight for and fifty-­two against convicting Trump for abuse of power and forty-­seven to fifty-­three for obstructing Congress. Most of Trump’s other foreign policies also provoked controversy. He was fawning toward adversaries during summits with Russian president Putin and North Korean general secretary Kim. He denigrated American military and economic allies, especially NATO, the EU, and NAFTA. He withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris Accord that required every country to cut back its global warming pollution. He withdrew



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from the international agreement whereby Iran agreed to reduce its nuclear development and allow IAEA inspections to ensure it complied. On February 29, 2020, Trump signed a deal with the Taliban to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan by May 31, 2021, in return for the Taliban’s promise not to attack American forces as they did so. Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the 2020 election by 81,268,924 popular votes (51.3 percent) and 305 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 74,216,154 (46.9 percent) and 232 electoral votes. For the year preceding that election, Trump had insisted that he would lose only with massive election fraud, and after he lost he called on his zealous followers to “stop the steal.” The Democrats impeached him again for inciting the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, by a thousand Trumpians who vandalized the Capitol and tried to prevent the Senate from officially accepting the presidential election results. This time eight Republicans joined Democrats in voting to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection, but those fifty-­seven votes fell short of the two-­thirds needed, as forty-­three Republicans voted not guilty.35 The House of Representatives voted 222 to 190 on June 20, 2021, to form the “Select House Committee on the January 6 Attack.” The committee’s nine members included seven Democrats and two Republicans, with Democrat Bennie Thompson the chair and Republican Liz Cheney the vice chair. Over the next year and a half, the committee interviewed over one thousand witnesses and amassed over 125,000 documents for evidence. On December 22, 2022, the committee issued an 845-page report that provided overwhelming proof that Trump had committed felonies, including obstructing an official procedure, conspiring to defraud the United States, and conspiring to commit insurrection against the United States. Thereafter the key question was whether the Justice Department would indict and convince a jury to convict Trump of his crimes against American democracy. As for actual justice, by August 2023 four separate investigations against Trump altogether issued ninety-one felony charges against him. Jack Smith, the Justice Department Special Counsel, developed two cases against Trump. For Trump’s attempted January 6 coup d’état, Smith indicted him for conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, defrauding the federal government, and disenfranchising voters. For stealing over thirteen thousand federal documents, including over three hundred marked “top secret,” he indicted Trump and two co-conspirators for violating the Espionage Act, retaining federal documents, making false statements, and obstructing justice. The Manhattan district attorney indicted Trump for election law violation. The Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor charged Trump and eighteen co-conspirators for racketeering in trying to overthrow the 2020 election. Meanwhile, Biden abruptly ended one American war by fulfilling Trump’s promise to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan,

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although he extended the withdrawal deadline to August 31, 2021. The Taliban launched a massive offensive that routed Afghan forces and frightened President Ashraf Ghani and his underlings and family to flee to foreign exile. The Taliban completed their conquest by capturing Kabul on August 15, 2021, but fulfilled their promise not to attack remaining American troops, whom Biden swiftly evacuated along with several thousand Afghan collaborators. America’s lost war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2022 cost 2,324 American military lives of 176,000 total dead and cost taxpayers $2.313 trillion.36 After losing that war, the Americans did score one final victory: The Taliban violated its promise not to aid al Qaeda and other anti-­Western terrorist groups. On July 31, 2022, a CIA drone fired a hellfire missile that obliterated Ayman al-­Zawahiri, al-­Qaeda’s leader, on the balcony of a Taliban safe house in Kabul. Half a year after Biden abandoned one ally, he embraced another. Putin ordered his army to attack Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Biden worked with NATO and the EU to give massive military and economic aid to Ukraine and impose steadily tougher economic sanctions against Russia. Under President Zelensky’s inspiring and decisive leadership, Ukraine’s military and people fought valiantly and skillfully against the Russians. Over the next year, they repelled an offensive against the capital Kyiv, fought to standstills offensives on other fronts, and then launched a campaign that retook much land in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. By April 2023, the Russians had suffered around 223,000 casualties including 43,000 killed, and the Ukrainians 131,000 casualties with 17,500 killed, while over fourteen million Ukrainians, or nearly one in five, fled their homes.37 The Russians deliberately and systematically destroyed Ukrainian cities, infrastructure, and culture. Economic and military aid from the United States and other countries was crucial to Ukraine’s success. From January 23, 2022, to January 15, 2023, alone, the United States provided Kyiv $2.9 billion in humanitarian aid, $26.4 billion in financial aid, and $46.6 billion in military aid, including weapons, equipment, supplies, and training, and promised twice that amount, while other countries gave or promised nearly as much. The deadliest weapons systems were Javelin antitank missiles, Stinger antiaircraft missiles, 155-millimeter howitzers, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), and Patriot anti-­missile systems.38 Putin’s imperialism backfired. The war became a stalemate that drained Russian military and economic power. Putin’s invasion provoked greater NATO solidarity and Sweden and Finland to join. However, a bloody stalemate is likely to prevail, with neither side powerful enough to decisively defeat the other.



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As for the future, one thing is certain—Americans will never lose enemies to fight directly or indirectly, at home or abroad. The questions are, who are those likely enemies and how can the United States prevail? The cold war with Russia will undoubtedly persist. Authoritarianism is an integral part of Russian political culture, along with xenophobia and imperialism, so even if Putin loses power, someone similar will replace him. However, the Ukraine war and sanctions steadily erode Russian power while NATO’s power rises. In contrast, China’s economic, military, and diplomatic power will steadily swell. Yet Beijing faces a dilemma. The growth of Beijing’s power depends on its membership in the global economic system that Chinese aggression jeopardizes. China’s attempts to expand its territorial sea by building artificial islands in the western Pacific has alienated its neighbors and pushed them into closer relations with Washington. The worst danger is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan if its government declares independence. That would provoke American-­led international sanctions against China, massive military aid to Taiwan, and a rising chance that an unwanted clash between Chinese and American forces would lead to an all-­out conventional or even nuclear war. Taiwan is strategically important not just because it lies only a hundred miles off China’s coast but also because it produces 95 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips, on which America’s economy (and especially its military) depends. China’s conquest of Taiwan would imperil American national security. North Korea’s massing of ever more nuclear weapons and ever more sophisticated missiles to deliver them poses an existential threat to neighboring South Korea and Japan (and probably eventually the United States). Yet although Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s communist dictator, is an erratic megalomaniac, he is not suicidal. Knowing that the United States would obliterate his regime if he launched a nuclear attack may deter him from doing so. By comparison, two other threats are serious but not existential for the United States. By denouncing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Trump freed Tehran to develop nuclear weapons. That development certainly threatens Israel’s existence, and the Israelis will likely strike Iran when that program nears completion. Biden and future presidents will continue to support Israel and other Middle East countries opposed to Iran. As for jihadism, although American-­led wars against first al Qaeda and then Islamic State shattered them, the latest version could emerge from those ruins and strike American targets. If so, Washington will muster appropriate forces to crush that latest threat. Global warming poses the worst long-­term threat to the United States and all other countries. The world’s population will likely peak at around ten billion by mid-­century and then plummet as apocalyptic droughts,

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floods, fires, freezes, rising seas, and prolonged deadly heat waves devastate societies, crops, livestock, and fisheries, causing worsening famine, disease, death, and violence. Around the world, regions will suffer domino effects of countries imploding and soaring millions of refugees fleeing to overwhelm the tottering political, economic, and social systems of other countries, including the United States. America peaked as the world’s hegemon just before the millennium. Since then, America’s power has relatively declined by most economic and political measures. The United States spent trillions of dollars trying to defeat jihadists and impose democratic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to suffer a pro-­Iranian regime taking power in Baghdad in 2005 and the Taliban retaking power in Kabul in 2021. Meanwhile, American democracy is increasingly imperiled, mostly by growing right-­ wing extremists, culminating in the aborted insurrection on January 6, 2021. Even before that attempted coup, Freedom House found that America’s “freedom index” declined twelve points from number thirteen, with ninety-­five of one hundred points, in 2010 to number seventeen, with eighty-­three of one hundred points, below Argentina and Mongolia, in 2020.39 As for the future, the same vicious political, economic, and environmental cycle imperiling other regions around the world will likely ravage the United States. Yearly, millions of refugees illegally enter the United States, a number that will steadily swell. Global warming is devastating America’s southwest, with dwindling water, crops, and livestock. Undoubtedly, violence will rise within the United States as ever more people demand scarcer and more expensive food, water, and other vital resources, and as radical left- and right-­wing anti-­American ideologies and groups gain more adherents. In the worst case, radicals destroy America’s democracy and impose an authoritarian regime amid worsening violence. Regardless, America’s wars, foreign and domestic, will likely proliferate as the nation’s hard and soft power to win those conflicts steadily diminishes.

Acknowledgments

I

was fortunate to have a wonderful editorial team at Stackpole Books. I am deeply grateful to Dave Reisch for his strategic vision; to his assistant, Stephanie Otto, for her attention to detail and help with the process; and to both for their kind patience with my limited internet skills. I am likewise grateful to Patricia Stevenson and Matt Evans for their meticulous editing of my manuscript; to Melissa Baker for her excellent maps; and to Sally Rinehart for designing the vivid cover.

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INTRODUCTION 1.  Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xiv. 2. For the best-­ known proponent, although he never clearly defined and argued it, see Russell Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). See also H. W. Crocker, Don’t Tread on Me: A 400 Year History of America at War from Fighting Indians to Hunting Terrorists (New York: Crown Forum, 2004); David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Antulio Echevaria, Reconsidering America’s Way of War: U.S. Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2014). 3. Anthony Jones, Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 12. 4.  Anthony Campagna, The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991), 29. 5.  Walter Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). 6. “President Woodrow Wilson’s War Message, 1917,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, ed. Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 2:40. 7.  Michael Cox, Timothy Lynch, and Nicholas Bouchet, eds., US Foreign Policy and Democracy Promotion from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama (New York: Routledge, 2013), 41. 8.  “John Quincy Adams Warns against the Search for ‘Monsters to Destroy,’” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Policy, 1:167.

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 9. John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 340. 10.  Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 54. 11.  Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1973), 3. 12.  Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 20. 13.  William McNeil, “The Care and Repair of Public Myths,” Foreign Affairs 61, no. 1 (Fall 1982): 1–13, 27. 14.  Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, eds., Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 1:31. 15. Walter Hixon, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 37. 16.  Jan Schulte, The Dutch Republic and American Independence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 190. 17.  “John O’Sullivan Proclaims America’s Manifest Destiny, 1845,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:232. 18.  John Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover, 1996). For the most prominent elaborations of Turner’s theme in subsequent generations, see Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (1931; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981); Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (1951; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); and Ray Billington and Martin Ridge, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1949; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1982). 19. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 5. 20.  Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1972), 484–85. 21.  Wikipedia, s.v., “United States Military Casualties of War.” 22. Stephen Daggett, Costs of Major U.S. Wars (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2010); Robert D. Hormats, The Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 2007).

CHAPTER 1 1.  For the overviews of colonial warfare, see Howard Peckham, The Colonial Wars, 1689–1762 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Douglas Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Ian Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012); William Nester, The Struggle for Power in Colonial America (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017).

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 2. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1973), 232.   3.  Timothy Todish, ed., The Annotated and Illustrated Journals of Major Robert Rogers (Fleischmanns, N.Y.: Purple Mountain Press, 2002), 259.  4. Todish, Journals of Major Robert Rogers, 255.  5. Todish, Journal of Major Robert Rogers, 250–51.  6. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 222.   7.  “Bounty on Penobscot Scalps, 1755,” in Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England, ed. Colin Calloway (Boston: University Press of New England, 1991), 168.  8. Peckham, Colonial Wars, 26.   9.  Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State Making,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42. 10.  Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1998), xiv. 11. Lepore, Name of War, x–xi. 12.  Ivor Hume, The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to Jamestown, an Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (New York: Knopf, 1998); William Kelso, Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018). 13.  “Instructions, by way of advice for the intended Voyage to Virginia,” 1606, in The Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Edward Arber, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910), 1:34. 14.  Philip Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964); J. A. Lemay, American Dream of Captain John Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991); David Price, Love and Hate at Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation (New York: Knopf, 2003). 15.  William Strachey, The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia (1612), ed. Louis Wright (London: Hakluyt Society, 1849), 57–58. 16. Strachey, Historie of Travaile into Virginia, 101. 17.  John Thompson, ed., The Journals of Captain John Smith (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2007), 133. 18. Thompson, Journals of Captain John Smith, 26. 19. Thompson, Journals of Captain John Smith, 116–18. 20. Thompson, Journals of Captain John Smith, 139. 21.  David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation (New York: Vintage, 2004), 210. 22.  Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). 23.  For the best overview, see Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Penguin, 2005). 24.  Jeffrey Schultz, John West, and Iain Mclean, eds., The Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999), 275. 25. Calloway, Dawnland Encounters, 29. 26. Philbrick, Mayflower, 99.

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27.  Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, eds., The Literatures of Colonial America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), 244–50. 28.  For the best overview of cultural differences between Indians and colonists, see James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 29. Philip Mulder, Colonial America and the Early Republic (New York: Routledge, 2007), 60. 30.  Harold Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646–1730,” New England Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 1990): 424, 396–428. 31.  Roger Williams, April 1, 1676, in The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn LaFantasie (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1988), 2:273. 32. Philbrick, Mayflower, 179. 33.  George Winship, ed., A Farther Brief and True Narrative of the Great Swamp Fight in the Narragansett Country December 19, 1675 (Providence, R.I.: Society of Colonial Wars, 1912), 3–4. 34. Lepore, Name of War, 102. 35. Philbrick, Mayflower, 146. 36.  Laurence Hauptman and James Wherry, The Pequots of Southern New England: The Rise and Fall of an American Indian Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). 37. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 331. 38.  Hauptman and Wherry, The Pequots of Southern New England, 73. 39. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 76. 40. Bradford, Plymouth, 331. 41. Douglas Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England’s King Philip’s War (East Orleans, Mass.: Parnassus Press, 1958); Russell Bourne, The Red King’s Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675–1678 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Lepore, Name of War; Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias, King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (New York: Countrymen Press, 2017). 42.  Charles Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675–1699 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959), 33. 43. Lepore, Name of War, 183. 44. Lepore, Name of War, 102. 45.  John Eliot to Massachusetts governor and council, August 13, 1676, Plymouth Colony Record, 10:451–52. 46. Colonel Benjamin Church, Diary of King Philip’s War, 1675–76 (Guilford, Conn.: Pequot Press, 1975), 91. 47.  James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 293. 48. Bourne, The Red King’s Rebellion, 36, 242–43. 49.  James Falkner, The War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–1714 (London: Pen and Sword, 2021). 50.  Robert Gaudi, The War of Jenkins’ Ear: The Forgotten Struggle for North and South America, 1739–1741 (New York: Pegasus, 2021).

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51. Craig Chapman, Disaster on the Spanish Main: The Tragic British-­American Expedition to the West Indies during the War of Jenkins’ Ear (Lincoln, Neb.: Potomac Books, 2021). 52. Leach, Roots of Conflict, 74. 53.  For the most comprehensive and systematic overview, see William Nester, The Great Frontier War: Britain, France, and the Imperial Struggle for North America, 1607–1755 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000); William Nester, The First Global War: Britain, France, and the Fate of North America, 1756–1775 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000). For French strategy in the last war, see William Nester, The French and Indian War and the Conquest of New France (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). See also Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Vintage, 2001). 54.  Holderness to Dinwiddie, August 28, 1753, in The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792: A Chapter in the History of the Colonial Frontier, by Kenneth Bailey (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur Clark Company, 1939), 202–3n408. 55.  “Instructions to Washington,” January 1754, in The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, ed. W. W. Abbott, Dorothy Twohig, and Philander Chase, 10 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981–1983), 1:65. 56.  Peter Henriques, Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 6. 57.  George Washington to John Washington, May 31, 1754, in George Washington: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), 48. 58. Leach, Roots of Conflict, 80. 59.  Nathan Goodman, ed., A Benjamin Franklin Reader (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971), 173–74. 60.  Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988), 152. 61. Douglas Cubbison, On Campaign against Fort Duquesne: The Braddock and Forbes Expeditions, 1755–1758 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2015), 63. 62.  George Washington to Robert Dinwiddie, July 18, 1755, in George Washington: Writings, 58. 63. Paul Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 211. 64. Goodman, Franklin Reader, 175. 65. Leach, Roots of Conflict, 114. 66.  James Flexner, Mohawk Baronet: A Biography of Sir William Johnson (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1979). 67.  James Sullivan and A. C. Flick, eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1921–1965), 4:370; 10:370. 68. Wilbur Jacobs, Diplomacy and Indian Gifts: Anglo-­French Rivalry along the Ohio and Northwest Frontiers, 1748–1763 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1950), 149–50. 69. Flexner, Mohawk Baronet, 107. 70.  John Cuneo, Robert Rogers of the Rangers (Ticonderoga, N.Y.: Ticonderoga Museum, 1988); Todish, Journals of Major Robert Rogers; Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (New York:

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Da Capo, 2004); John Ross, War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier (New York: Bantam, 2009). 71. Todish, Journals of Major Robert Rogers, 78. 72. Ross, War on the Run, 334. 73. For the best overview, see Franz Szabo, The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 1756–1763 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2008). 74. Steele, Warpaths, 198. 75. Anderson, Crucible of War, 288. 76.  For good books on British and American military culture, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and the Society in the Seven Years’ War (New York: Norton, 1985); Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and the War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 77.  Stanley Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1763: Selected Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1969), 141. 78.  Beckles Willson, ed., The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (London: Heinemann, 1909), 392. 79.  Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 193. 80.  George Washington to Robert Dinwiddie, March 10, 1757, in George Washington: Writings, 86. 81. Leach, Roots of Conflict, 118. 82. George Washington to Robert Morris, April 9, 1756, in Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, 2:345. 83. William Livingston, Review of Military Operations in North America: From the Commencement of the French Hostilities on the Frontiers of Virginia in 1753, to the Surrender of Oswego, on the 14th of August 1756 (Dublin: printed for P. Wilson and J. Exshaw, 1757), 187. 84.  Edward Hamilton, ed., Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 142. 85.  William Nester, The Epic Battles for Ticonderoga, 1758 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 86.  “Life of David Perry,” Bulletin of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum 14, no. 1 (Summer 1981), 6, 4–8. 87.  For the best books on this campaign, see J. S. McLennan, Louisbourg: From Its Foundation to Its Fall (Halifax: Book Room Limited, 1994); A. J. B. Johnston, Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of the Louisbourg Campaign (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 88. Johnston, Endgame, 292–93, 295–96. 89.  Edward Hamilton, ed., Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 252. 90. Anderson, Crucible of War, 372. 91.  For the best books on the campaign, see Stuart Reid, Quebec 1759: The Battle That Won Canada (London: Osprey, 2003); Dan Snow, Death or Victory: The Battle of Quebec and the Birth of Empire (London: Harper Press, 2009); C. P. Stacey, Quebec

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1759: The Siege and the Battle (New York: Robin Brass, 2014). Unless otherwise noted, all statistics come from Reid. 92.  Colin Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 93.  For the most comprehensive analysis, see William Nester, “Haughty Conquerors”: Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000). See also Gregory Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indians Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Its Cause, Course, and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2007); David Dixon, Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac’s Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). 94. Dowd, War under Heaven, 64. 95. Matthew Ward, “The Microbes of War: The British Army and Epidemic Disease among the Ohio Indians, 1758–1765,” in The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814, ed. David Skaggs and Larry Nelson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 63–78. 96. Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 79. 97.  Glen Williams, Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of the Colonial Era (Yardley, Penn.: Westholme, 2018).

CHAPTER 2 1.  For good overviews, see Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983); Jack Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994). Michael Stephenson, Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was Fought (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007); John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victor in the War of Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); William Nester, The Revolutionary Years, 1775–1789: The Art of American Power during the Early Republic (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011). 2.  Thomas Slaughter, Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014), 125. 3.  David Kennedy and Thomas Bailey, eds., The American Spirit: United States History as Seen by Contemporaries (Boston: Cengage, 2016), 75. 4.  Richard Van Alstyne, Empire and Independence: The International History of the American Revolution (New York: Wiley, 1965), 43. 5.  For good overviews of the critical events from 1763 to 1775, see Lawrence Gipson, The Coming of the Revolution, 1763–1775 (New York: Harper and Row, 1954); Merrell Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Ian Christie and Benjamin Labaree, Empire or Independence, 1760–1776 (New York: Norton, 1976); Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Norton, 1992); Jon Butler, Becoming

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American: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Thomas P. Slaughter, Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014). For good overviews on British administration, trade, and tax policies, see Thomas Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Dora Clark, The Rise of the British Treasury: Colonial Administration in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Archon Books, 1969); Oliver Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974); Robert Becker, Revolution, Reform, and the Politics of American Taxation, 1763–1783 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980). For good books on American class divisions and their broader economic, social, and political dynamics, see Marcus Jernegan, Laboring and Dependent Class in Colonial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931); Jackson Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965); Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Alice Jones, The Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).   6.  Peter Thomas, “The Reorganization of Empire: British,” in Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, ed. Jacob Cooke, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1993), 3:689.   7.  Nathan Goodman, ed., A Benjamin Franklin Reader (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971), 616–17.  8. Walter Dunn, The New Imperial Economy: The British Army and the American Frontier, 1764–68 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001), 4, 15–16.   9.  Julian Gymn, “British Government Spending and the North American Colonies,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8, no. 2 (1980): 74–84; Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-­Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 55. For an excellent book that puts these financial problems in perspective, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Knopf, 1988). 10.  John McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607– 1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 11.  Russell Menard, “Growth and Welfare,” Billy Smith, “Poverty,” in Cooke, Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, 1:467–82, 483–93. 12.  B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 5. 13.  “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind,” in Goodman, Franklin Reader, 335. 14. McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 54; Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 69; Russell R. Menard, “Growth and Welfare,” in Cooke, Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, 1:470–71.

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15.  McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 54; Bruchey, Enterprise, 69; Menard, “Growth and Welfare,” 470–71. 16.  McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 54; Bruchey, Enterprise, 69; Menard, “Growth and Welfare,” 470–71. 17.  McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 54; Bruchey, Enterprise, 69; Menard, “Growth and Welfare,” 470–71. 18.  Christie and Labaree, Empire or Independence, 28–29. 19.  Christie and Labaree, Empire or Independence, 32; Peter Thomas, “The Grenville Program, 1763–1765,” in Greene and Pole, Blackwell Encyclopedia, 108. 20.  Thomas, “Reorganization of Empire: British,” 693. 21.  George Morrow, The Greatest Lawyer That Ever Lived: Patrick Henry at the Bar of History (Williamsburg, Va.: Tetford Publications, 2011), 11. 22.  Thomas, “Stamp Act Crisis,” in Greene and Pole, Blackwell Encyclopedia, 121. 23.  Everett Emerson, ed., American Literature: The Revolutionary Years, 1764–1789 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 7. 24.  Lawrence Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York: Knopf, 1956), 378. 25.  Pitt reply to Grenville, January 14, 1766, William Taylor and John Pringle, eds., The Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2:369–73. 26. Goodman, Franklin Reader, 575–602. 27.  George Washington to George Fairfax, June 10, 1774, in The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, ed. W. W. Abbott, Dorothy Twohig, and Philander Chase, 10 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981–1983), 10:96. 28.  Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976). 29.  David Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 30.  Unless otherwise indicated, numbers of battle combatants and casualties come from Stephenson, Patriot Battles. 31. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 293. 32. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 123, 130. 33. For biographies, see Willard Randall, George Washington: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010). For leadership, see Richard Smith, Patriarch: George Washington and the New Nation (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Mark Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 1775–1783 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998); Bruce Chadwick, George Washington’s War: The Forging of a Revolutionary Leader and the American Presidency (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebook, 2005); Stephen Brumwell, George Washington: Gentleman Warrior (New York: Quercus, 2012). 34. Randall, George Washington, 299. 35. Chernow, Washington, 177. 36.  George Washington to John Hancock, July 25, 1777, in The Writings of George Washington, ed. John Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931–1944), 8:470. 37.  Washington to Rhode Island governor Nicolas Cooke, August 4, 1775, in Fitzpatrick, Writings of George Washington, 3:386–87.

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38.  George Washington to John Washington, March 31, 1776, in Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, 4:569. 39.  Samuel Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957); Jonathan Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). 40.  Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2005). 41.  Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 39. 42.  David Wilson, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775–1780 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics on troops and casualties for the southern campaigns come from this book. 43. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1997). 44.  Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick, eds., The Thomas Paine Reader (New York: Penguin, 1987), 92, 65, 109. 45. General Orders, July 2, 1776, in The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, ed. Philander D. Chase (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985–2021), 5:180. 46.  John Gallagher, The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776 (New York: Castle Books, 1995); Barnet Schecter, The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2002). 47. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 308. 48.  David Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 49. Thomas McGuire, The Philadelphia Campaign: Brandywine and the Fall of Philadelphia (Mechanicsville, Penn.: Stackpole, 2006); Thomas McGuire, The Philadelphia Campaign: Germantown and the Roads to Valley Forge (Mechanicsville, Penn.: Stackpole, 2007). 50.  John Buchanan, The Road to Valley Forge: How Washington Rebuilt the Army That Won the Revolution (New York: Wiley, 2007). 51.  Richard Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of the American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); John Luzader, Saratoga: A Military History of the Decisive Campaign of the American Revolution (New York: Savas Beattie, 2008). 52.  James Nelson, Benedict Arnold’s Navy: The Ragtag Fleet That Lost the Battle for Lake Champlain but Won the American Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007). 53.  Paul Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 104. 54.  William Nester, The Frontier War for American Independence (Mechanicsville, Penn.: Stackpole, 2004). 55.  John Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1992). 56.  William Nester, George Rogers Clark: “I Glory in War” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012). 57.  Richard Berleth, Bloody Mohawk: The French and Indian War & American Revolution on New York’s Frontier (New York: Black Dome, 2010).

Notes

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58. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 329. 59.  Glenn Williams, Year of the Hangman: George Washington’s Campaign against the Iroquois (Yardley, Penn.: Westholme, 2005). 60.  John Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the South (New York: Wiley, 1997); John Pancake, This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780–1782 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003). 61.  Carl Borick, A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012). 62.  Terry Golway, Washington’s General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). 63. Weigley, American Way of War, 36. 64. Albert Zambone, Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life (Yardley, Penn.: Westholme, 2018). 65.  Richard Ketchum, Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Jerome Greene, The Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown, 1781 (New York: Savas Beattie, 2005). 66. Greene, Guns of Independence, 307–9. 67. Chernow, Washington, 435–36. 68. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 389, 390. 69. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 558–59. 70. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 235. 71. Puls, Henry Knox, 63. 72. Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 274. 73. George Scheer, ed., Private Yankee Doodle: Being a Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, by Joseph Plumb Martin (New York: Eastern Acorn Press, 1993), 280. 74.  Evan Thomas, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). 75.  Charles Rappleye, Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

CHAPTER 3 1.  For the three best overviews, the first two political, the third military, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 2.  Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986); Leonard Levy, Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution (New York: Macmillan, 1988); Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution

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(New York: Vintage, 1996); Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009).   3.  Benjamin Wright, ed., The Federalist: The Famous Papers on the Principles of the American Government, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996).   4.  For two insightful biographies, see Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004); Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Knopf, 1998). For two insightful overviews of each’s dominant era, see William Nester, The Hamiltonian Vision, 1789–1800: The Art of American Power during the Early Republic (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012); William Nester, The Jeffersonian Vision, 1801–1815: The Art of American Power during the Early Republic (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013).   5.  William Lerner, ed., Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1975), 2:886, 868; Joseph Davis, “An Annual Index of U.S. Industrial Production, 1790–1915,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 119, no. 4 (November 2004): 1177–215.  6. Robert Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).  7. Ian Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (New York: Norton, 2006), 36, 43, 80–81.  8. Wiley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790–1795 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985). Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics for this section come from this book.  9. Mary Stockwell, Unlikely General: “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020). 10.  Andro Linklater, An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (New York: Walker, 2009), 81–163. 11.  Albert Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-­American Diplomacy during the Federalist Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974). 12.  Jerald Combs, The Jay Treaty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Todd Estes, The Jay Treaty Debate and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). 13.  Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Viking, 2005), 183. 14.  Samuel Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960). 15.  Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 16.  James Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 94. 17.  “George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, ed. Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 1:74–75. 18.  Jeffrey Pasley, The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013); National General

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Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 19.  Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-­War (New York: Scribner, 1966). 20.  James Sharp, The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 21. Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottes­ville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). 22. Peter Kastor, Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). 23.  Chris Magoc and David Bernstein, eds., Imperialism and Expansion in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-­CLIO, 2015), 523. 24. “Napoleon Bonaparte Explains the Need to Sell Louisiana to the United States, 1803,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:99. 25.  Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 12. 26.  Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Viking, 2007), 271–366; Linklater, Artist in Treason, 214–88. 27. Toll, Six Frigates, 271; Paul Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the 1812 War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 28.  National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 29. Patrice Higonnet, Attendant Cruelties: Nation and Nationalism in American History (New York: Other Press, 2007), 68. 30.  For the best book on the war’s reasons, see Reginald Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962). For the war’s best overviews, see J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); Donald Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); John Elting, Amateurs to Arms! A Military History of the War of 1812 (New York: Da Capo, 1991); Walter Borneman, 1812: The War That Forged a Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004); Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway, eds., Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare on Anglo-­America, 1754–1815 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); John Latimer, 1812: War with America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). Unless otherwise indicated, battle and force statistics come from Latimer’s 1812. 31.  “Henry Clay Articulates U.S. Grievances against Britain, 1811,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:133. 32.  Charles Lewis, The Romantic Decatur (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937), 183. 33. Latimer, 1812, 32. 34. Hickey, War of 1812, 228. 35. Hickey, War of 1812, 90–99; Latimer, 1812, 101.

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36.  Both quotes from Hickey, War of 1812, 72, 73. 37. Hickey, War of 1812, 83–84. 38.  Robert Malcomson, A Very Brilliant Affair: The Battle of Queenstown Heights, 1812 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003). 39.  National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 40. Toll, Six Frigates, 401–17. 41.  John Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott (New York: Free Press, 1997). 42. Linklater, Artist in Treason. 43. James Rhoda, Astoria & Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). 44.  Howard Weir, A Paradise of Blood: The Creek War of 1813–14 (Yardley, Penn.: Westholme, 2016). 45.  H. W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times (New York: Doubleday, 2005). 46. Latimer, 1812, 249. 47. Hickey, War of 1812, 302. 48. Hickey, War of 1812, 303. 49. Hickey, War of 1812, 215, 224. 50.  Both quotes from Latimer, 1812, 263, 264. 51. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny, 76. 52. Latimer, 1812, 242, 348. 53. Toll, Six Frigates, 455.

CHAPTER 4 1. “John O’Sullivan Proclaims America’s Manifest Destiny, 1839,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, ed. Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 1:231. 2. For balanced overviews, see Daniel Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); William Nester, The Age of Jackson and the Art of American Power, 1815–1848 (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013); William Nester, The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848–1876 (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013). For a psycho-­cultural approach, see Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3.  Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 57–59. 4. Kenneth Hagan, American Gunboat Diplomacy and the Old Navy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973); John Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829–1861 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985). 5. Samuel Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York: Knopf, 1949); Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England

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and the United States, 1812–1823 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 2014).   6.  Dexter Perkins, “Defense of Commerce and Ideals,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:175.   7.  “The Monroe Doctrine, 1823,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:170–71.   8.  Dexter Perkins, “Defense of Commerce and Ideals,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:178.  9. Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narrative of U.S. Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Macmillan, 2012); Alex Byrne, The Monroe Doctrine and American National Security (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 10.  William Nester, The Arikara War: The First Plains Indian War, 1823 (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 2001). 11.  James Seelye and Steven Littleton, Voices of the American Indian Experience (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2012), 252. 12.  “Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia, 1831,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:202. 13.  Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008), 204. 14. Kerry Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2005). 15.  John Missall, Seminole Wars: America’s Longest Indian Conflict (Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 2016). 16.  Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 17.  Marshall De Bruhl, Sword of San Jacinto: A Life of Sam Houston (New York: Random House, 1993). 18.  Jeff Long, Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo (New York: Morrow, 1990); Albert Nofi, The Alamo and the Texas War for Independence: Heroes, Myths, and History (New York: Da Capo, 2001); Randy Roberts and James Olson, A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory (New York: Touchstone, 2001). 19. John Bicknell, America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion, and the Presidential Election That Transformed the Nation (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014); National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 20.  Walter Borneman, Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America (New York: Random House, 2009); Robert Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009). 21. Borneman, Polk, 168. 22. John Unruh, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-­ Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); David Dary, The Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends, and Lore (New York: Penguin, 2000); Stephen Hyslop, Bound for Santa Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

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23.  David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973). 24. John Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Doubleday, 1989); Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Richard Winders, Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997); Joseph Wheelan, Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: Avalon, 2007); Spencer Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Mexican-­American War: A Political, Social, and Military History, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-­CLIO, 2013). Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics on armies, navies, finance, and casualties come from Bauer’s Mexican War. 25. Jack Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). 26. “Polk’s War Message, 1846,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:236. 27. Winders, Polk’s Army, 9–10. 28. Winders, Polk’s Army, 90. 29.  William Nester, The Old West’s First Power Couples: The Fremonts, the Custers, and Their Epic Quest for Manifest Destiny (Tucson, Ariz.: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2020). 30. Eisenhower, So Far from God, 91. 31. Fowler, Santa Anna, 261–62; Bauer, Mexican War, 217. 32. Timothy Johnson, A Gallant Little Army: The Mexico City Campaign (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). 33.  John Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott (New York: Free Press, 1997). 34. “The Wilmot Proviso, 1846,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:236. 35. Wheelan, Invading Mexico, 389–90. 36. Winders, Polk’s Army, 72. 37. Bauer, Mexican War, 397–98. 38. Wheelan, Invading Mexico, 389. 39. Wheelan, Invading Mexico, 417. 40. Unruh, Plains Across, 85, 144. 41.  Robert Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indians, 1848–1865 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981). Unless otherwise indicated, all Indian war statistics in this section come from this book. 42. James Thomson, Peter Stanley, and John Perry, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1981); David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Involvement: American Economic Expansion across the Pacific, 1784–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). 43.  William Hutchinson, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 44. Kenneth Shewmaker, “Commercial Expansion in China, Hawaii, and Japan,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:284.

Notes

405

45. Charles Neu, Troubled Encounter: The United States and Japan (New York: Wiley, 1975); Joseph Henning, Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American-­Japanese Relations (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 46.  “Instructions to Commodore Matthew Perry for His Expedition to Japan, 1852,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:278. 47. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 45, 51. 48. James Arnold and Roberta Wiener, Understanding U.S. Military Conflicts through Primary Sources (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-­CLIO, 2016), 272. 49. Robert May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 50. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, xiii. 51.  Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West (New York: Anchor, 2006), 320–21. 52.  David Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 542.

CHAPTER 5 1.  For the best overviews, see James McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); William Nester, The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848–1876 (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013). 2.  William Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman (New York: Library of America, 1990), 601. 3.  Elizabeth Veron, Disunion! The Coming of the Civil War, 1789–1857 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). 4.  Philip Van Doren Stern, ed., The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 788. 5.  James Horton and Lois Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6.  Douglas North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1961); Thomas Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early American Industrialization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 7.  Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 35. 8. Douglas Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); Michael Holt, The Election of 1860: A Campaign Fraught with Consequences (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017). 9. Phillip Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); David Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999); Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); William Miller, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (New York: Knopf, 2008).

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10.  National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 11. Lincoln Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, in Van Doren Stern, Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, 657, 646–57. 12.  Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 17–18. 13. Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, 9–10; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 313. 14.  Wayne Wei-­siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). 15.  Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, 29–30. 16. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 325. See also John Clark, Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004); Earl Hess, Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017). 17.  Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won; Archer Jones, Civil War Command and Strategy: The Process of Victory and Defeat (New York: Free Press, 1992); Donald Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 18.  David Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000); Craig Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 19.  Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, 33; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 380–82. 20. Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984); Earl Hess, Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small Unit Effectiveness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). 21. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 336. 22.  Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics on troops and casualties come from McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. 23. Stephen Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Da Capo, 1999). 24. Ulysses Grant, Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters (New York: Library of America, 1990); Jean Smith, Grant (New York: Touchstone, 2001); Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin, 2017). 25.  Allen Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2021). 26.  Lincoln to McClellan, October 13, 1862, in Van Doren Stern, Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, 729–30. 27.  Lincoln to General Oliver Howard, July 21, 1863, in Van Doren Stern, Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, 767. 28.  Lincoln to James Conkling, August 26, 1864, in Van Doren Stern, Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, 779–80. 29.  Lincoln to Erastus Corning, June 12, 1863, in Van Doren Stern, Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, 761–72. 30. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 601, 605.

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31. Adrian Cook, Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014), 193–94. 32. Grant, Memoirs, 428. 33. Grant, Memoirs, 479. 34. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 778. 35. David Johnson, Decided on the Battlefield: Grant, Sherman, Lincoln, and the Election of 1864 (New York: Prometheus, 2012). 36.  For the traditional carefully calculated lower figure, see Thomas Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War, 1861–65 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900). For the higher recent estimate, see David Hacker, “A Census-­Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 54, no. 4 (December 2011): 307–48. 37. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 330, 485, 802. 38. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 447, 818–19. 39.  Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006); Mark Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Baron Hacker, Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the American Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Scholarly Press, 2016). 40. For the best overview of Reconstruction, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). 41.  National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website.

CHAPTER 6 1.  Ronald Jensen, The Alaska Purchase and Russian-­American Relations (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975); Norman Saul, Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763–1867 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). 2.  William Nelson, Almost a Territory: America’s Attempt to Annex the Dominican Republic (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990). 3.  Andrew Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 118. 4. Yur-­Bok Lee and Wayne Patterson, eds., Korean-­American Relations, 1866– 1997 (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990). 5.  Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 59. 6.  Francis Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 7.  Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016), 3. 8.  Kenneth Carley, The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1976).

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 9. Robert Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866– 1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973). Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics come from this book. 10.  Bob Drury, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). 11.  Paul Hedren, ed., The Great Sioux War, 1876–77 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1991); Jerome Green, ed., Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876–1877 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). 12.  James Donavan, A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn (New York: Little, Brown, 2008). 13.  Daniel Sharfstein, Thunder in the Mountain: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (New York: Norton, 2018). 14. David Roberts, Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo and the Apache Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993); Paul Hutton, The Apache Wars (New York: Crown, 2016). 15.  Thomas Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations: A History, 2 vols. (New York: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 1:171. 16. Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); David Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). 17.  Walter LaFeber, “Preserving the American System,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, ed. Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 1:358. 18. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 56. 19. David Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); Ernest May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Mark Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882–1893 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995); Robert Hannigan, The New World Power: American Foreign Policy, 1898–1917 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Lisle Rose, Power at Sea: The Age of Navalism, 1890 to 1918 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 20.  William Nester, Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of American Power: An American for All Time (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2019). 21.  Merze Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965); Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 22.  Paul Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-­German-­American Relations, 1878–1900 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974). 23. “Richard Olney Responds to the Venezuelan Crisis and Trumpets U.S. Hegemony in the Hemisphere, 1895,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:319. 24. Philip Foner, The Spanish-­Cuban-­American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 2 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Louis Perez, The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); David Trask, The War with Spain in 1898

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(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Thomas Schoonover, Uncle Sam’s War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003). Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics for the Spanish-­American War come from Trask, War with Spain. 25.  John Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Richard Hamilton, President McKinley, War, and Empire (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2006). 26. Warren Zimmermann, The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a Great Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 252. 27. “The De Lomé Letter, 1897,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:350. 28.  “Senator Redfield Proctor Condemns Spain’s Deconcentrado Policy, 1898,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:351. 29. Trask, War with Spain, 331. 30.  Robert Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Mayers, Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 31.  Spencer Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-­American and Philippine-­ American Wars, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-­CLIO, 2009), 1:929. 32.  David Healy, The United States in Cuba, 1898–1902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963); R. H. Fitzgibbon, Cuba and the United States, 1900–1935 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964); Allan Millett, The Politics of Intervention: The Military Occupation of Cuba, 1906–1909 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1968); Louis Perez, Cuba between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983); Louis Perez, Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Louis Perez, The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 33.  Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations, 1:245. 34. Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 111–12. 35.  Henry Graff, ed., American Imperialism and the Philippine Insurrection (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969); Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Ballantine, 1990); H. W. Brands, Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Brian Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989); Brian Linn, The Philippines War, 1898–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). 36. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 127. 37. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 125. 38. Karnow, In Our Image, 191. 39.  Thomas McCormick, The China Market: America’s Informal Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967); Michael Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); David Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861 to 1898 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Jean Pfaelzer,

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Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Warren Cohen, America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-­ American Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 40.  Michael Hunt, “The Open Door Constituency’s Pressure for U.S. Activism,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:432–33. 41.  Diana Preston, The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China’s War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900 (New York: Walker, 2000); Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 69–98. 42.  “Theodore Roosevelt Preaches the Manly Virtues of Overseas Expansion, 1899,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:461. 43.  National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 44. David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977); Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael Conniff, Panama and the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). 45.  “The Roosevelt Corollary, 1904,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:466. 46.  Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1867–1907 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937); Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963); Jenny Pearce, Under the Eagle: U.S. Interventions in Central America and the Caribbean (Boston: South End Press, 1982); Ivan Musicant, Banana Republics: A History of the United States Military Intervention in Latin America from the Spanish-­American War to the Invasion of Panama (New York: Macmillan, 1990); Frederick Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). For books on American intervention in the Caribbean, see Dana Munro, Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900–1921 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964); Dana Munro, The United States and the Caribbean Republics, 1921–1933 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974); Whitney Perkins, Constraint of Empire: The United States and Caribbean Interventions (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981); David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1917 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). For books on American intervention in Central America, see John Findling, Close Neighbors, Distant Friends: United States–Central American Relations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987); Thomas Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 1860–1911 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); Lester Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880–1930 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995).

CHAPTER 7 1. James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs—The Election That Changed the Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005).

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 2. Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York: Harper, 1953); Jan Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Frederick Calhoun, Uses of Force and Wilsonian Foreign Policy (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993); John Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lloyd Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).  3. Link, Woodrow Wilson, 190.  4. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); John Eisenhower, Intervention! The United States and the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1917 (New York: Norton, 1993); John Hunt, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).  5. Mark Gilderhus, Diplomacy and Revolution: U.S.-Mexican Relations under Wilson and Carranza (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 11.  6. Eileen Welsome, The General and the Jaguar: Pershing’s Hunt for Pancho Villa; A True Tale of Revolution and Revenge (New York: Little, Brown, 2009); Jeff Guinn, War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021).  7. Edward McCullough, How the First World War Began: The Triple Entente and the Coming of the Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Black Rose Books, 1999).  8. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Perseus, 1999); John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage, 2000); G. J. Meyer, A World Undone: the Story of the Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Bantam, 2015).  9. Paul Kennedy, “The United States’ Rise among the Living and Dying Powers,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, ed. Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 1:324. 10.  Jan Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 151. 11.  Lewis Gould, The First Modern Clash over Federal Power: Wilson versus Hughes in the Presidential Election of 1916 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016). 12.  Thomas Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations: A History, 2 vols. (New York: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 1:283. 13.  Byron Parwell, The United States in the Great War, 1917–1918 (New York: Norton, 1999); John Eisenhower, Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I (New York: Free Press, 2001). 14. “President Wilson’s War Message, 1917,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 1:500. 15.  Gary Mead, The Doughboys: America and the First World War (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 2000). 16.  David Traxel, Crusader Nation: The United States in Peace and the Great War, 1898 to 1920 (New York: Vintage, 2007), 296; Byron Farwell, Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917–1918 (New York: Norton, 1999), 38, 70.

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17.  Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Gene Smith, Until the Last Trumpet Sounds: The Life of General of the Armies John J. Pershing (New York: Wiley, 1998). 18. Eisenhower, Yanks, 186–87. 19. Farwell, Over There, 76, 78. 20. Farwell, Over There, 122–24. 21.  David Foglesong, America’s Secret War against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Donald Davis and Eugene Trani, The First Cold War: The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S.-Soviet Relations (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). 22. Farwell, Over There, 46. 23. Eisenhower, Yanks, 122. 24.  Bert Frandsen, Hat in the Ring: The Birth of American Air Power in the Great War (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 2010); Farwell, Over There, 190, 205. 25. Farwell, Over There, 258. 26. Farwell, Over There, 19. 27. Ferguson, Pity of War, 445–46; Farwell, Over There, 267. 28.  Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 (New York: Random House, 2002). 29. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 86. 30. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 11. 31. Ethan Ellis, Republican Foreign Policy, 1921–1933 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1968); Joan Hoff Wilson, American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920–1933 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); Benjamin Rhodes, United States Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918–1941 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001); Patrick Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain, and the Stabilization of Europe, 1919–1932 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 32.  Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations, 2:120. 33.  Leo Bacino, Reconstructing Russia: The Political Economy of American Assistance to Revolutionary Russia, 1917–1922 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1999). 34.  Thomas Buckley, The United States and the Washington Conference, 1921–1922 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970). 35. Buckley, Washington Conference, 73. 36. Eugene Trani and Edward Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1977), 137. 37.  Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Hsu, and Maria Garcia, A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restrictions, 1924 to 1965 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 38.  Alfred Hurley, Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006). 39. Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1993). 40.  Daniel Kovalik, Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance (New York: Clarity Press, 2023). 41.  Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 251–52.

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42.  May Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 43. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 175–76. 44.  Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor (New York: Atheneum, 1967); Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-­American Relations, 1931–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); Jonathan Utley, Going to War against Japan, 1937–1941 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). 45.  John Miller, American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan: From Perry to Obama (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014), 65. 46.  Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-­ American Relations, 1931–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 30. 47. Hugh Wilson, Diplomat between the Wars (New York: Longmans Green, 1941), 280.

CHAPTER 8 1.  National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 2.  For the best overview of the Great Depression and World War II, see David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); for the best political biography, see Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (New York: Penguin, 2018); for the best overview of his New Deal policies, see William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); for the best overview of his foreign policy, see Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); for the best book on his wartime leadership, see Roger Daniels, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). 3. Robert Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II (New York: Wiley, 1979); David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War: The Extraordinary Story of the Transformation of a City and a Nation (New York: Knopf, 1988); Justus Doenecke and John Wilz, From Isolation to War, 1931–41 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1991). 4. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 116. 5.  Alvin Coox and Hilary Conroy, eds., China and Japan: Search for Balance since World War I (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-­CLIO, 1978); Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival (New York: Penguin, 2014). 6. Wayne Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–45 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 7. Daniels, Roosevelt: The War Years, 33. 8. Warren Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-­Lease, 1938–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).

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 9. Warren Kimball, Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Second World War (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 10.  Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 44. 11.  Paul Koistinen, Planning War, Pursuing Peace: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1920–1939 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). 12.  E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2013), 136. 13.  David Alvarez, Secret Messages: Codebreaking and American Diplomacy, 1930– 1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). 14.  Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962). 15. John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982); Craig Nelson, Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness (New York: Scribner, 2017). 16.  For the Pacific war’s best overview, see Ronald Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage, 1985). 17.  For good overviews of World War II, see Basil Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (Old Saybrook, Conn.: Konecky and Konecky, 1970); Victor Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (New York: Basic Books, 2020). 18.  Mark Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and United States Strategy in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mark Stoler, Allies at War: Britain and America against the Axis Powers, 1940–1945 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007). 19.  Alan Gropman, ed., The Big L: American Logistics in World War II (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1997); Robert Coakley and Richard Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1943–1945: The United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army, 1989). 20. Elberton Smith, The Army and Economic Mobilization (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1949), 9–22; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 650, 654–55; Rick Atkinson, Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 7. 21. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 623–26. 22. Douglas Waller, Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Free Press, 2011); Patrick O’Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II’s OSS (New York: New Press, 2014). 23. Cynthia Kelly, The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2020). 24.  Richard Reeves, Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II (New York: Picador, 2016). 25. John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Random House, 1986). 26.  Richard Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999), 162–83, 160.

Notes

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27. Richard Connaughton, MacArthur’s Defeat in the Philippines (New York: Abrams, 2003). 28.  Michael Schaller, Douglas MacArthur (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Arthur Herman, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior (New York: Random House, 2017). 29. Spector, Eagle against the Sun, 118. 30.  Craig Symonds, The Battle of Midway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 31.  E. B. Parker, Nimitz (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008). 32.  Joseph Wheelan, Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal—The World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War (New York: Da Capo, 2017). 33.  James Duffy, War at the End of the World: Douglas MacArthur and the Forgotten Fight for New Guinea, 1942–1945 (New York: Dutton Caliber, 2017). 34. Michael Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in World War II (London: Greenhill, 1993). 35.  Mark Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front: American Military Planning and Diplomacy in Coalition Warfare, 1941–1943 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977). 36.  Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe: A Personal Account of World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Stephen Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight Eisenhower (New York: Doubleday, 1970); E. K. G. Sixsmith, Eisenhower as Military Commander (New York: Da Capo, 1972); Carlo D’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2002); Jean Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012). 37. Alex Danchow and Daniel Todman, eds., Field Marshal Lord Alan Brooke: War Diaries, 1939–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 351. 38. William Brewer, Operation Torch: The Allied Gamble to Invade North Africa (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988); Norman Gelb, Desperate Venture: The Story of Operation Torch, the Allied Invasion of North Africa (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992); Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002); Orr Kelly, Meeting the Fox: The Allied Invasion of Africa from Operation Torch to Kasserine Pass to Victory in Tunisia (New York: Wiley, 2002). 39.  Arthur Funk, The Politics of Torch: The Allied Landings and the Putsch at Algiers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974). 40. Atkinson, Army at Dawn, 3. 41.  Bryn Hammond, El Alamein: The Battle That Turned the Tide in the Second World War (London: Osprey, 2012). 42.  John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-­American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 17. 43.  Jean Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), 263. 44.  William Martel, Victory in War: Foundation of Modern Strategy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 179. 45.  Martin Blumenson, Kasserine Pass: Rommel’s Bloody, Climactic Battle for Tunisia (New York: Cooper Square, 2000). 46. Atkinson, Army at Dawn, 420–30. 47. Martin Blumenson, Patton: The Man behind the Legend, 1885–1945 (New York: Morrow, 1985); Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York: Harper

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Perennial, 1996); Stanley Hirshson, General Patton: A Soldiers’ Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Gary Bloomfield, George S. Patton: On Guts, Glory, and Winning (Guilford, Conn.: Globe Pequot, 2017). 48. Bloomfield, George S. Patton, 118. 49.  Leo Barron, Patton’s First Victory: How General George Patton Turned the Tide in North Africa and Defeated the Africa Korps at El Guettar (Mechanicsville, Penn.: Stackpole, 2017). 50. Atkinson, Army at Dawn, 536–37. 51.  Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (New York: Henry Holt, 2007); Carlo D’Este, Bitter War: The Battle for Sicily, July–August 1943 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). 52.  Michael Arnold, Hollow Heroes: An Unvarnished Look at the Wartime Careers of Churchill, Montgomery, and Mountbatten (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2015), 50. 53.  George Botjer, Sideshow War: The Italian Campaign, 1943–45 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1996). 54.  Elena Agarossi, A Nation Collapses: The Italian Surrender of 1943 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 55. Atkinson, Day of Battle, 170. 56.  Angus Konstam, Salerno 1943: The Allied Invasion of Italy (London: Pen and Sword, 2007). 57.  Jon Mikolashek, General Mark Clark: Commander of America’s Fifth Army in World War II and Liberator of Rome (New York: Casemate, 2020). 58.  Russell Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 271. 59. Atkinson, Day of Battle, 450. 60. Hanson, Second War Wars, 160. 61.  James Hallas, Saipan: The Battle That Doomed Japan in World War II (Mechanicsville, Pa.: Stackpole, 2019). 62.  Robert Smith, Triumph in the Philippines: The War in the Pacific (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2005). 63. Thomas Cutler, The Battle of Leyte Gulf, 23–26 October 1944 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). 64.  Carlo D’Este, The Fatal Decision: Anzio and the Battle for Rome (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); John Ellis, Cassino, the Hollow Victory: The Battle for Rome, January–June 1944 (New York: Arum, 2003); Lloyd Clark, Anzio: The Friction of War, Italy and the Battle for Rome, 1944 (New York: Headline Publisher, 2007). 65. Ellis, Cassino, 465. 66.  Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Max Hastings, Overlord: D-­Day and the Battle for Normandy, 1944 (New York: Pan Books, 2005); Stephen Ambrose, D-­Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 67. Rick Atkinson, Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 2013), 182, 350. 68.  Robin Cross, Operation Dragoon: The Allied Liberation of the South of France, 1944 (New York: Pegasus, 2019); Antony Tucker-­Jones, Operation Dragoon: The Invasion of Southern France, 1944 (London: Pen and Sword, 2020). 69. Atkinson, Guns at Last Light, 107–10, 331, 405.

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70.  Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974); Simon Forty and Leo Marriott, Operation Market Garden, September 1944 (New York: Casemate, 2018). 71. Atkinson, Guns at Last Light, 286. 72.  Gerald Astor, The Bloody Forest: The Battle for the Hurtgen, September 1944 to January 1945 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 2000). 73. John Toland, The Story of the Bulge (New York: Meridian, 1985); Charles MacDonald, A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge (New York: Morrow, 1997); Peter Caddick-­Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944–45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Christer Bergstrom, The Ardennes: Hitler’s Winter Offensive, 1944–45 (New York: Casemate, 2014). 74.  John Rickard, Advance and Destroy: Patton as Commander in the Bulge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). 75. Bergstrom, Ardennes, 424–25. 76. Atkinson, Guns at Last Light, 339–40. 77.  David Jordan, FDR, Dewey, and the Presidential Election of 1944 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2011). 78.  Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2009). 79.  John Toland, The Last 100 Days: The Tumultuous and Controversial Story of the Final Days of World War II in Europe (New York: Modern Library, 1994). 80. Atkinson, Guns at Last Light, 590. 81.  Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men (New York: Center Street, 2009). 82. Toland, Last 100 Days, 371. 83. Richard Newcomb, Iwo Jima: The Dramatic Account of the Epic Battle That Turned the Tide of World War II (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). 84. Frank, Downfall, 334. 85. Weigley, American Way of War, 308–9; Adrian Stewart, Kamikaze: Japan’s Last Bid for Victory (London: Pen and Sword, 2022). 86. Frank, Downfall. 87. Frank, Downfall, 340. 88.  Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy: The Second World War, 6 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 6:548. 89. Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1957), 12. 90. Frank, Downfall, 286–87, 334. 91.  Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (New York: Scribner, 1987); Gerald Linderman, The World within War: America’s Combat Experience in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1997); Gerald Astor, The Greatest War: Americans in Combat, 1941–1945 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1999). 92. Atkinson, Day of Battle, 508. 93. Weigley, American Way of War, 372. 94. Spector, Eagle against the Sun, 487; Frank, Downfall, 81, 350; Weigley, American Way of War, 305. 95. Atkinson, Day of Battle, 581. 96.  For the best critical account, see Botjer, Sideshow War. 97. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 596.

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 98. Weigley, American Way of War, 306, 301.  99. Richard Davis, Bombing the European Axis Powers (Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air University Press, 2006); Juan Vasquez Garcia, Storm over Europe: Allied Bombing Missions in the Second World War (London: Pen and Sword, 2020); Edwin Hoyt, Inferno: The Fire Bombing of Japan, March 9–August 15, 1945 (New York: Madison Books, 2000); Daniel Schwabe, Burning Japan: Air Force Bombing Strategic Change in the Pacific (Lincoln, Neb.: Potomac Books, 2015); Philip O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-­Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 100. Atkinson, Guns at Last Light, 356. 101. Hanson, Second World Wars, 102.

CHAPTER 9  1. Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, The Cold Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ralph Levering, The Cold War (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2005); Odd Westad, The Global Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); John Gaddis, The Cold War (New York: Penguin, 2005); John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Alan Axelrod, The Real History of the Cold War: A New Look at the Past (New York: Sterling, 2009).  2. John Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); James Gormley, The Collapse of the Grand Alliance, 1945–1948 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Ralph Levering, Debating the Origins of the Cold War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).   3.  John Carroll and George Herring, eds., Modern American Diplomacy (Lanham, Md.: SR Press, 2004), 129.  4. George Kennan, American Diplomacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); John Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2012).  5. John Bronson, The Cold War Strategy of the United States: Strategy, Weapons Systems, and Operations (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2019), 8.  6. Philip Marguilies, America’s Role in the World (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 156.  7. Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Europe, 1947–1952 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).  8. Joseph Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005); Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor, 2009).  9. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 156, 155. 10.  United States Office of Management and Budget, The Budget: The Historical Series (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004).

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11.  David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Raymond Ojserkis, The Beginning of the Cold War Arms Race (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003). 12.  “National Security Council Paper, No. 68 (NSC-68), 1950,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, ed. Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, 2 vols., 5th ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 2:223–26. 13. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990). 14.  Burton Kaufman, The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986); Matthew Ridgway, The Korean War (New York: Da Capo, 1986); William Stueck, The Korean War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Stanley Sandler, The Korean War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999); William Stueck, ed., The Korean War in World History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004). 15.  Glenn Paige, The Korean Decision, June 24–30, 1950 (New York: Free Press, 1968); Glenn Paige, ed., 1950: Truman’s Decision (New York: Chelsea House, 1970); Paul Pierpaoli, Truman and Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 16.  Michael Schaller, Douglas MacArthur (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Arthur Herman, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior (New York: Random House, 2017). 17.  U.S. Office of Management and Budget, The Budget. 18.  “Truman Defends U.S. Policy,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 2:311. 19. George Mitchell, Matthew B. Ridgway: Soldier, Statesman, Scholar, Citizen (Mechanicsville, Penn.: Stackpole, 2002). 20.  John Greene, I Like Ike: The Presidential Election of 1952 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017). 21.  Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). 22. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 133. 23. Richard Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in United States Foreign Policy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 24.  Klaus Larres and Kenneth Osgood, eds., The Cold War after Stalin’s Death (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York: Norton, 2006). 25.  Both quotes from Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 129. 26.  Reinhold Wagnleitner, Cocacolanization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States and Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999); Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000). 27. Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994). 28. Kaufman, Korean War, 341. 29. Ridgway, Korean War, vi. 30.  U.S. Office of Management and Budget, The Budget.

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31. Ambrose, Eisenhower, 325. 32. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 152. 33. Kathryn Statler and Andrew Johns, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 34. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 157. 35.  Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Conspiracy and the Roots of Middle East Terrorism (New York: Turner Publishing, 2008); Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: New Press, 2015). 36. Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 37.  Alex Von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). 38.  Peter Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Nigel Ashton, Eisenhower, Macmillan, and the Problem of Nasser (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); Barry Turner, Suez 1956: The Inside Story of the First Oil War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2012). 39.  For overviews of the French and American wars in Vietnam, see Anthony Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War (New York: Routledge, 1989); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Philip Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997); Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War—A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999). For America’s Vietnam War, see Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972); George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: Knopf, 1986); Jayne Werner and Luu Doan Huynh, eds., The Vietnam War: Vietnam and American Perspectives (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993); Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1994); Robert MacMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Maurice Isserman, Vietnam: America at War (New York: Facts on File, 2003); John Tully, Matthew Masur, and Brad Austin, eds., Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). 40.  Gerald DeGroot, A Noble Cause? America and the Vietnam War (New York: Longman, 2000), 36. 41.  Peter MacDonald, Giap: The Victor in Vietnam (New York: Norton, 1993). 42. DeGroot, Noble Cause?, 55. 43. Jules Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Thomas Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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44. “Eisenhower Warns against the ‘Military Industrial Complex,’ 1961,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 2:352–53. 45.  K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture during the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005); Margot Henrikson, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 46.  W. J. Rorabaugh, The Real Making of the President: Kennedy, Nixon, and the 1960 Election (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). 47. Mark Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 68. 48.  Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy and the White House (New York: Mariner, 2017), 60. 49. Willard Matthias, America’s Strategic Blunders: Intelligence Analysis and National Security Policy (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001), 192. 50.  Ben Buley, The New American Way of War: Military Culture and the Political Utility of Force (New York: Routledge, 2008), 60. 51.  Thomas Paterson, ed., Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–63 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); James Giglio and Stephen Rabe, Debating the Kennedy Presidency (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); John Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Robert Dallek, John F. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 52.  Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 53. Axelrod, Real History of the Cold War, 277. 54.  Mark White, ed., The Kennedys and Cuba (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1999); Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Pearson, 1999); James Nathan, Anatomy of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001); Myra Immell, The Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Greenhaven, 2011). 55. Immell, Cuban Missile Crisis, 32. 56.  U.S. Office of Management and Budget, The Budget. 57.  Thomas Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations: A History, 2 vols. (New York: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 2:331. 58.  Giglio and Rabe, Debating the Kennedy Presidency, 59. 59.  Fredrik Logeyall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 60.  Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (New York: Penguin, 2005); Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2019). 61.  Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988); Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995); H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 62.  Maurice Isserman, Vietnam: America at War (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 52.

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63.  Amity Shlaes, The Great Society: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2019). 64.  George Herring, LBJ and Vietnam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Michael Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 65.  Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 66.  Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 130. 67.  “President Lyndon B. Johnson Explains Why Americans Fight in Vietnam, 1965,” in Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 2:449–50. 68. Lewis Sorley, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011). 69. Herring, America’s Longest War, 117–18. 70.  U.S. Office of Management and Budget, The Budget. 71. MacDonald, Giap, 82. 72. Lewy, America in Vietnam, 83–84. 73.  Werner and Huynh, Vietnam War, 135. 74. Herring, America’s Longest War, 149; DeGroot, Noble Cause?, 281. 75. Kolko, Anatomy of a War, 139–40. 76. DeGroot, Noble Cause?, 160. 77. Richard Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995). 78.  Simon Dunstan, The 1st Marine Division in Vietnam (New York: Zenith Press, 2009), 47. 79.  Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 307. 80. Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA’s Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1997); Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: Open Road Media, 2016). 81. Moyar, Phoenix, 236. 82. Hunt, Pacification, 249. 83.  James Willbanks, The Tet Offensive (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 84.  John Maltese, Spin Control: The White House Office of Communications and the Management of Presidential News (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 14. 85. Davidson, Vietnam at War, 29. 86. Lewis Sorley, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 87. DeGroot, Noble Cause?, 311–15, 317. 88.  Michael Nelson, Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014). 89. Michael Genovese, The Nixon Presidency (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990); Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Conrad Black, Richard Nixon (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007).

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  90.  U.S. Office of Management and Budget, The Budget.  91. Francis Gavin, Gold, Dollars, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).  92. Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Patterns in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).  93. Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995); Richard Crowder, Détente: The Chance to End the Cold War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2020).   94.  Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11.  95. Stephan Kieninger, Dynamic Détente: The United States and Europe, 1964– 1975 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016), 94.  96. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 310.   97.  William Kirby, Robert Ross, and Gong Li, eds., The Normalization of U.S.China Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).  98. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).  99. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 232. 100.  Michael Clarke, American Grand Strategy and National Security: The Dilemma of Primacy and Decline from the Founding to Trump (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 323. 101.  Pierre Asselin, Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Accord (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 102.  Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999). 103.  David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai, Vietnam: A Portrait of Its People at War (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996); Fred Wilcox, Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011). 104. Karnow, Vietnam, 9. 105. Karnow, Vietnam, 36. 106. James Harrison, Endless War: Vietnam’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 107.  Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1998); Marc Gilbert, ed., Why the North Won the Vietnam War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); DeGroot, Noble Cause? 108.  Harry Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (New York: Dell, 1984). 109. Karnow, Vietnam, 24. 110. Karnow, Vietnam, 20. 111.  Thomas Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: From Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 169. 112. Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, 305. 113.  Victor Krulak, First to Fight: An Inside Look at the U.S. Marine Corps (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2013), 189, 217. 114.  Michael Lansing and Dan Cragg, Inside the VC and NVA (New York: Fawcett, Columbine, 1992), 331. 115. Lewy, America in Vietnam, 272.

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116. Krulak, First to Fight, 186. 117. Edward Lansdale, “Vietnam: Do We Understand Revolution?” Foreign Affairs 4, no. 1 (October 1964): 77, 75–86. 118. Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 119.  John Gentry, How Wars Are Won and Lost: Vulnerability and Military Power (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2012), 83. 120. DeGroot, Noble Cause?, 290–91. 121.  Both quotes from Karnow, Vietnam, 20. 122.  Graham Slater, Preponderance in U.S. Foreign Policy: Monster in the Closet (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 96. 123.  Jayne Werner and Luu Doan Huynh, eds., The Vietnam War: Vietnam and American Perspectives (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 225. 124.  David Skidmore, Reversing Course: Carter’s Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, and the Failure of Reform (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 41. 125. Skidmore, Reversing Course; Scott Kaufman, Plans Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); Daniel Williams, The Election of an Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020). 126.  Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: The Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 136. 127.  Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations, 2:403–4. 128.  Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis, the First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam (New York: Grove Press, 2006). 129.  David Carlton, The West’s Road to 9/11: Resisting, Appeasing, and Encouraging Terrorism since 1970 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 112. 130. Paul Ryan, The Iranian Hostage Mission: Why It Failed (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1985). 131. Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah, 232. 132.  Alex Edwards, “Dual Containment” Policy in the Persian Gulf: The USA, Iran, and Iraq, 1991–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 31. 133.  Andrew Busch, Reagan’s Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). 134.  Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005); Paul Kengor and Peter Schweizer, eds., The Reagan Presidency (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 135.  Troy Gil, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). 136. Stephen Rouseas, The Political Economy of Reaganomics: A Critique (New York: Routledge, 2012). 137.  David Wirls, Buildup: The Politics of Defense in the Reagan Era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 138.  Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 281. 139.  Brian Harward, ed., Presidential Power: Documents Decoded (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-­CLIO, 2016), 200.

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140. Robert Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977– 1990 (New York: Free Press, 1996). 141.  Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations, 2:436–47. 142.  Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations, 2:429. 143. Donald Baucom, The Origins of SDI: 1944–1983 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 144.  James Paterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 194. 145. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 364. 146.  Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–1989 (London: Profile Books, 2012). 147.  John Pitney, After Reagan: Bush, Dukakis, and the 1988 Election (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). 148. John Greene, The Presidency of George Bush (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Timothy Naftali, George H. W. George (New York: Times Books, 2007); Robert Strong, Character and Consequences: Foreign Policy Decisions of George H. W. Bush (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2020). 149.  U.S. Office of Management and Budget, The Budget. 150. John Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995); Jeffrey Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (New York: Mariner, 2018). 151.  Robert Kaiser, How Gorbachev Happened (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 152. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 367. 153.  George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: Diplomacy, Power, and the Victory of the American Deal (New York: Scribner, 2010), 892–93. 154.  Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2022).

CHAPTER 10 1.  “President George Bush Declares a New World Order during the Persian Gulf Crisis, 1990,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, ed. Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 2:607. 2.  Edward Flanagan, The Battle for Panama: Inside Operation Just Cause (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2002). 3.  Michael Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf: A History of America’s Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf, 1833–1992 (New York: Free Press, 1992); Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The General’s War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).

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 4. Ron Matthews and John Tredderick, Managing the Revolution in Military Affairs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Colin Gray, Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History (New York: Routledge, 2004); Dima Adamsky, The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the US, and Israel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Security Studies, 2010); Andrei Martyanov, The Real Revolution in Military Affairs (New York: Clarity Press, 2014); Emily Goldman, Information and the Revolution in Military Affairs (New York: Routledge, 2015).   5.  Thomas Defrank, Mark Miller, Peter Goldman, and Andrew Murr, The Quest for the Presidency, 1992 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1998).  6. Nigel Hamilton, Bill Clinton: An American Journey (New York: Arrow, 2004); Todd Shields et al., The Clinton Riddle (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004); Donald Phillips, The Clinton Charisma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  7. Joseph Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World’s Most Prosperous Decade (New York: Norton, 2004); Jack Godwin, Clintonomics: How Bill Clinton Reengineered the Reagan Revolution (New York: Amacom, 2009).  8. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Grove Press, 2010).  9. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 324. 10.  Wayne Bert, Reluctant Superpower: United States Policy for Bosnia, 1991–1995 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 189. 11. Bert, Reluctant Superpower; Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Conflict (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001); Elizabeth Pond, Endgame in the Balkans: Regime Change, European Style (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006); David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003). 12.  Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 576–77. 13. Clark, Waging Modern War. 14.  Samantha Powers, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 15.  Brian Williams, Counter Jihad: America’s Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); William Nester, America’s War against Global Jihad: Past, Present, and Future (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018). 16.  James Caesar and Andrew Busch, The Perfect Tie: The True Story of the 2000 Election (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Alan Dershowitz, Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 17. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004). 18. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report on the Terrorist Attack on the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), 199. 19.  Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 289; Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep

Notes

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Inside the Pursuit of America’s Enemies since 9/11 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 2. 20.  For overviews of America’s war against al Qaeda, see Suskind, One Percent Doctrine; Peter Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al Qaeda (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); William Nester, Hearts, Minds, and Hydras: Fighting Terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, America, and Beyond; Dilemmas and Lessons (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012). 21. Bergen, The Longest War, 57. 22. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report. 23.  Peter Merkl, The Rift between America and Old Europe (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1. 24. William Nester, Haunted Victory: The American Crusade to Destroy Saddam and Impose Democracy on Iraq (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012); Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (New York: Mariner, 2015). 25.  George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 307. 26.  Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 249. 27.  John Prados, Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (New York: New Press, 2004). 28. Prados, Hoodwinked, xi. 29.  Cost of Iraq War, Watson Institute, Brown University website. 30.  Andrew Mumford, The West’s War against Islamic State: Operation Inherent Resolve (London: I. B. Tauris, 2021). 31. William Nester, Putin’s Virtual War: Russia’s Subversion and Conversion of America, Europe, and the World Beyond (London: Frontline Books, 2019). 32.  Robert Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Free Press, 2007), 133. 33.  National General Election Voting Eligible Population Turnout Rates, 1789 to Present, United States Election Project, website. 34.  Robert Mueller, The Mueller Report (New York: Scribner, 2019). 35.  William Crotty, ed., The Presidential Election of 2020: Donald Trump and the Crisis of Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2021). 36.  Cost of Afghanistan War, Watson Institute, Brown University website. 37.  Anton Toianovski, Aric Toler, Julian Barnes, Christian Trebent, and Malanchy Browne, “New Leaked Documents Show Broad Infighting among Russian Officials,” New York Times, April 13, 2023. 38. Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much Aid Has the U.S. Sent Ukraine? Here Are Six Charts,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 22, 2023. 39.  Sarah Repucci, “From Crisis to Reform: A Call to Strengthen America’s Battered Democracy,” Freedom House Special Report 2021, website.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to charts. 1763 Proclamation, 64, 65 1820 Compromise, 157, 182 1850 Compromise, 183 Abenaki tribe, 34, 41, 43 Abercromby, James, 55–57 ABM. See Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty abolitionism, 181–85 Abrams, Creighton, 343 Abu Ghraib prison, 379 Acheson, Dean, 319 Act to Provide a Naval Armament, 111 Adams, John, 7, 11, 77, 82, 93, 109, 118–19 Adams, John Quincy, 7, 8, 150 Adams-Onis Treaty, 150 Afghanistan: Soviet invasion of, 363, 373–74; war in, 376–77, 383–84, 386 Agent Orange, 341, 349 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 227–28, 230–31 Aidid, Mohammad Farah, 370 air warfare. See specific wars and battles Alamo, 156–57 Alaska, 212, 276 Albright, Madeleine, 370, 372

Alexander, Harold, 279–82, 286 Alexander I, 151 Algeria, 147, 277–78, 279 Alien and Sedition Acts, 184 Allen, Elisha, 174 Allen, Ethan, 79 al Qaeda, 373, 374, 375, 377, 378, 384 American Colonization Society, 181 American Expeditionary Force, 245 American Protective League, 247 American Relief Administration, 254 American war for independence: about, 1; battles and offensives, ix, 89–93, 94–96, 97–101; British army’s strength, 80; British policies leading to, 69–77; Committee of Secret Correspondence, 82; early actions, 82, 83–84; First Continental Congress, 78; France’s alliance treaty, 93; frontier wars overlapping with, 96–97; German mercenaries, 80, 86–87, 102; human cost of, 102–3; map, ix; peace talks and treaty, 101–2; reasons for winning, 103–5; training of militia,

429

430

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103–4; transforming colonists into American citizens, 84–86; troop training, 93; Washington’s role in, 80–82, 84, 86–90, 101–2, 103–4; Yorktown, 100–101 Amherst, Jeffery, 52, 57, 58–59, 61, 62–63, 64 Ampudia, Pedro de, 163 “Anaconda Plan,” 189, 190–91 Anderson, Kenneth, 277, 279, 280 Andre, John, 98 Andros, Edmund, 33–34, 37 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, 346 Anti-Imperialist League, 229 antipoverty policies, 339 Antiquities Act, 233 anti–Stamp Act riots, 73–75 antiwar protests, 340, 343–44, 347, 350, 353–54 ANZUS. See Australian, New Zealand, United States Pact Apache bands, 220 Apalachee Indians, 42 Arapaho tribe, 217, 219 Arbenz Guzman, Jacobo, 326–27 Arbuthnot, Mariot, 97 Argall, Samuel, 26 Argentina, 235 Arikara tribe, 152–53 Arista, Mariano, 160, 162 Aristide, Jean Bertrand, 371 Armas, Carlos Castillo, 327 Armijo, Manuel, 163 army forces: after Civil War, 216–17; as handicap in War of 1812, 146; Jefferson paring back, 120; strength of, 160–61; War Bill, 160. See also specific wars, battles, and offensives Arnim, Hans-Jurgen von, 279–82 Arnold, Benedict, 79, 81–82, 91, 92, 98, 100, 103 Arnold, Henry “Hap,” 271 art and culture: about, 9–12; captivity narratives, 12; The Day After television series, 362; during expansion, 176–78; fictional

and nonfictional works, 177–78, 333–34, 344, 353; films, 333, 344, 353–54; heroes depicted in, 11, 333; paintings, 177; symbols, 12 Art of War (Sun Tzu), 351 Ashe, John, 95 Ashley, Henry, 152–53 Asian Exclusion Act, 255 Assinawar, 155–56 Astor, John Jacob, 138 Atchison, David, 183 Atkinson, Henry, 154 Atkinson, Rick, 278, 287 atomic bomb, 273, 304–5. See also nuclear arms Austin, Moses, 156 Australian, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) Pact, 321 Austria, 41–42, 44–45, 266, 365 “axis of evil,” 377–78 Axtell, James, 36 Babcock, Orville, 212 Bacon, Nathaniel, 36 Badoglio, Pietro, 284, 286 Baez, Buenaventura, 212 Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al-, 381 Bainbridge, William, 122, 123, 129 Baker, James, 2, 372 Baker, Newton, 238, 244 Bancroft, George, 162 Banks, Nathaniel, 196, 201, 203 Barbary Wars, 111, 122–23, 147 Barclay, Robert, 136 Barnett, James, 78–79 Barras, Louis de, 100–101 Barron, James, 125 Baruch, Bernard, 313 Baum, Friedrich, 91–92 Baynes, Edward, 135 Bay of Pigs, 335 Beaujeu, Daniel, 49 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de, 83 Beauregard, Pierre, 190, 194, 202, 203 “Beaver Wars,” 39 Becknell, William, 152

Index Beckwith, Charles, 356 Begin, Menachem, 354 Belgium, 254, 267, 295–96 Bell, John, 185 Bent, Charles, 163 Benteen, Frederick, 219 Benton, Thomas, 164 Berger, Sandy, 370 Berkeley, William, 36 Berlin Airlift, 317 Berlin Wall, 364 Bernstorff, Johann, 242 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 242, 249 Biden, Joe, 382, 383–84, 385 Big Foot, Chief, 220 bin Laden, Osama, 373, 374, 377 Black Bird, Chief, 131 Black Boys, 65 Black Hawk War, 154–55 Black Kettle, Chief, 216, 218 Blainville, Pierre Celeron de, 46 Blair, Tony, 378 Bliss, Tasker, 244 Blue Jacket, Chief, 112–15 Boerstler, Charles, 136 Boland Amendment, 360 Bolshevik Party, 247–48 bombs, 303, 308–9. See also atomic bomb; nuclear arms Bonaparte, Napoleon, 119, 121, 127, 140 Boone, Daniel, 67, 96, 178 Boot, Max, 342, 371 Borah, William, 260 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 240, 372–73 Boston massacre, 77 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 54–55, 58, 59 Bouquet, Henry, 18, 64, 65 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 372 Bowlegs, Billy, 155–56 Boxer Rebellion, 2 Boyd, John, 137 Bozeman Trail, 217 Braddock, Edward, 48–50 Bradford, William, 29, 31–33

431

Bradley, Omar, 281, 293–95 Bradstreet, John, 57, 64 Bragg, Braxton, 194, 198–99, 201–2 Breckinridge, John, 185, 202, 203 Bremer, Paul, 379 Bretton Woods Conference, 300–301 Breymann, Heinrich von, 92 Brezhnev, Leonid, 345, 346 Briand, Aristide, 258 Britain: Combined Chiefs of Staff, 271; condescension toward American military, 53–54; London Naval Treaty, 258; military power, 80, 86–88; naval disarmament conference, 254; naval strength, 241–42; wars on European continent, 33, 44–45. See also American war for independence; Churchill, Winston; French and Indian War; Iraq; War of 1812; World War I; World War II; specific leaders Brock, Isaac, 130–32 Brodhead, Daniel, 97 Broke, Philip, 133–34 Brooke, Alan, 277 Brooke, Arthur, 142–43 Brooks, Preston, 184 Brown, Jacob, 135, 140–41 Brown, John, 77, 183–84, 185 Brule Sioux tribe, 172–73 Bryan, William Jennings, 233, 238, 242 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 354, 355 Buchanan, James, 159, 184, 185 Buckner, Simon, 193 Buell, Don Carlos, 193–94, 198 Bull Run, Battle of, 190–91 Bunau-Varilla, Philippe, 234–35 Bundy, McGeorge, 335 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 214 Burgoyne, John, 79, 89, 91–93, 103 Burlingame Treaty, 232 Burnside, Ambrose, 195, 199, 201–2 Burr, Aaron, 120, 124 Bush, George H. W., 2, 353, 355, 363–64, 367–70, 372 Bush, George W., 2, 7, 374–81, 382

432

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Butler, Ben, 202, 203 Butler, William, 163 Cadore, Jean Baptiste Nompere de, 126 Cadwalader, John, 88 California, 162, 164–65, 182–83, 214 Calley, William, 347 Cambodia, 331, 338, 347–48, 349, 350 Campbell, Archibald, 94 Campbell, John (Earl of Loudoun), 53, 65 Campbell, John (Lieutenant Colonel), 132 Campbell, William, 98–99, 115 Camp David Accords, 354 Canada: colonial war’s end, 59–60; in French and Indian War, 59; Indians and, 39–40; Quebec, 38–39, 40, 59–60; in War of 1812, 130–32; Washington’s invasion of, 81–82; in WWII, 291, 293–94, 295, 296, 302 Canby, Edward, 194–95 Canning, George, 151 Canonicus, Chief, 29 CAP. See Combined Action Program Captain Jack (Chief Kintpuash), 218 “captivity narrative” as literary genre, 41 Carden, John, 129 Carignan-Salieres Regiment, 38–39 Carleton, Guy, 90 Carlisle, John, 222 Carlos III, 61–62 Carrington, Henry, 217 Carson, Kit, 163–64, 165, 178, 216 Carter, Jimmy, 7, 354–55, 356, 357, 371 Carter Doctrine, 357 Carver, John, 28, 29 Casablanca Conference, 280 Castellano, Giuseppe, 286 Castro, Fidel, 331. See also Cuba Castro, Jose, 164 Cathcart, James, 122 CCP (Chinese Communist Party), 259–60, 317–18 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 365 Cedras, Raoul, 371

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 273, 316, 326–27, 331, 335 Cervera y Topete, Pascual, 229 Champlain, Samuel, 38 Chandler, John, 135–36 Chase, Salmon, 207 Chauncey, Isaac, 134 Cheney, Liz, 383 Chennault, Claire, 268 Cherokee, 60–61, 154 Chesapeake war, 36–37 Cheyenne tribe, 217, 219 Chiang Kai-shek, 259–60, 265, 289, 318 Chile, 235 China: alliance treaties, 321; Boxer Rebellion, 2; casualties in war with Japan, 274; CCP, 259–60, 317–18; as future threat, 385; Hainan Island crisis, 375–76; Manchuria region, 260, 265; at naval disarmament conference, 254; post-WWI, 259–60; Taiwan, 232, 318, 346, 385; trade with, 173–74; U.S. joining short war against, 231–33; in Vietnam War, 351; in WWII, 265, 268 Chinese Exclusion Act, 232 Chivington, John, 216 Chou Enlai, 322, 346 Christopher, Warren, 370 Church, Benjamin, 35, 41, 42 Churchill, John, 43 Churchill, Winston: at Casablanca Conference, 280; declaring Cold War, 313; Potsdam Declaration and, 304–5; quotations, 290; replacing Chamberlain, 267; Roosevelt’s friendship and partnership with, 269; WWII decisions, 284; at Yalta, 301. See also World War II CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), 343 Civil Rights Act, 339 civil rights movement, 339–40 Civil War: about, 1, 179–81; antiwar movement, 201; army and navy

Index comparisons and challenges, 187–90; battles, 191–92, 195, 198–205; copperheads, 201; costs and results, 1, 207–8; end of, 205–6; Grant’s strategies, 192–93; Indians taking advantage of, 216; Lincoln’s strategy, 190–91; map, xii; McClellan’s army, 195–98; naval operations, 195; reconstruction and Jim Crow laws, 209; regional animosities fueling, 190; secession bringing about, 186–87 Clark, George Rogers, 96–97, 103, 112 Clark, Mark, 278, 285, 289–90 Clark, Wesley, 372 Clark, William, 121–22 Clay, Green, 136 Clay, Henry, 127, 146–47, 181, 183 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 234 Clemenceau, Georges, 251, 252 Cleveland, Grover, 224, 225 Clinton, Bill, 7, 367, 369–74, 382 Clinton, DeWitt, 132 Clinton, George, 127 Clinton, Henry, 79, 84, 92, 94, 98, 103 Clinton, Hillary, 370, 382 Clinton, James, 97–98 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), 379 Cochrane, Alexander, 142 Cockburn, George, 133, 142 code breaking, 270–71 Coercive (Intolerable) Acts, 77 Colby, William, 342–43 Cold War era: about, 2, 312; beginnings, 311–13; containment strategy, 314–16, 318–19; end of, 364–66; fears of political takeovers, 314–15; Grenada offensive, 358–59; in Iran, 355–56; Iraq War, 360; in Lebanon, 359; in Middle East, 353; in Nicaragua, 357, 360; in Panama, 354–55; Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 363, 373–74; U.S. institutions and spending for, 315–17. See also communism;

433

Korean War; nuclear arms; Vietnam War Cole, Nelson, 217 colonial era wealth, 70–73, 72 colonial population, 71, 71 colonial wars: in Canada, 38–40; Carolina and Tuscarora conflict, 42–43; Chesapeake War, 36–37; Dunmore’s War, 66–67; European wars compared to, 18–19; first American rebellion, 37–38; King George’s War, 44–45; King Philip’s War, 34–36; King William’s War, 40–41; militia, 20; Pequot War, 32–33; Pontiac’s War, 62–66; Puritans and Indians, 28–29, 30–32; shaping American identity, 20–21; against Spanish, French and Indians, 17–18; War of Jenkins’ Ear, 44; War of the Spanish Succession, 41–43. See also French and Indian War Comanche tribe, 217 Combined Action Program (CAP), 342 Committee of Secret Correspondence, 82 Committee on Public Information (CPI), 246 Common Sense (Paine), 84–85 communism: CCP, 259–60, 317–18; collapse of, 364–66; in Cuba, 331, 355; democracy versus, 312; Eastern Europe’s freedom from, 365–66; effects of, 350; in Guatemala, 326–27; in Hungary, 328; Indochina War and, 328–31; in Iran, 326; Korean War and, 319–21; McCarthy and, 323–24; Nicaragua and, 256–58; psychology of, 313, 323; Russia’s Red Army, 247–48; U.S. propaganda against, 323. See also Cold War era; nuclear arms; Soviet Union; Vietnam War concentration camps, 302 Conner, Daniel, 162 Connor, Patrick, 216, 217

434

World of War

consolidation efforts and wars: about, 107–8; Adam preparing for, 118–19; Barbary Wars, 122–23, 147; frontier wars, 112; Indian wars, 112–15; Jefferson and, 120–25; naval war and Jay Treaty, 116–17; Quasi-War, 119; Tripolitans and, 107–8, 111; Whiskey Rebellion, 117–18. See also War of 1812 Constitution, 108–9, 120, 180, 206, 208 containment strategies: global, 9, 319–20, 321, 327, 328, 329, 334, 350; selective, 317, 318, 345, 364 Contrecoeur, Claude Pecaudy de, 47, 49 Coolidge, Calvin, 7, 253–54, 255, 256, 257 Coote, Richard, 139 copperheads, 201 CORDS. See Civil Operations and Rural Development Support Cornstalk, Chief, 66–67 Cornwallis, Charles, 87–88, 89, 97–100, 101, 103 Council of National Defense, 246 CPA. See Coalition Provisional Authority CPI. See Committee on Public Information Crazy Horse, Chief, 219 Creek Indians, 138–39 Crimea, 382 Crittenden, George, 192–93 Croatia, 372 Crocker, John, 281 Crockett, David, 177 Croghan, George, 65, 136 Cronkite, Walter, 343 Crook, George, 217, 219 Cuba, 176, 225–27, 228–29, 230, 236, 335, 336–37, 355 culture. See art and culture Cunningham, Andrew, 277, 282 Currency Act, 73 Curtis, Samuel, 194, 205 Custer, George, 217–19 Czechoslovakia, 266

Dade, Francis, 155 Dakota Santee Sioux, 215 Dallas, Alexander, 128, 145–46 Dalyell, James, 63 Daniels, Josephus, 238 Darby, William, 290 Darlan, Jean, 278 Davie, William, 119 Davis, Jefferson, 173, 186, 196, 202, 203, 206 Dawes, Charles, 256 Dawes, William, 78 Dawes Act, 14, 214 The Day After (television series), 362 Dayton Peace Accords, 372–73 Dearborn, Henry, 92, 120, 130–31, 132, 135–36 Debs, Eugene, 237, 246 Decatur, Stephen, 123, 129, 145, 146, 147 Declaration of Independence, 13, 85–86 Declaratory Act, 76 Defense Department (DOD), 316 de Gaulle, Charles, 294, 298, 338 Delancey, James, 48 de Lesseps, Ferdinand, 234 democracy versus communism, 312 d’Estaing, Charles, 94, 95 détente, 345–46 Devers, Jake, 296–97, 298–99 Dewey, George, 227–28 Dewey, Peter, 329 Dewey, Thomas, 300 De Wolf, James, 140 Dickinson, John, 76 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 330, 338, 343 Dien Bien Phu, Battle of, 329–30 Dieskau, Jean-Armand, 51 Dinwiddie, Robert, 46–47, 48 Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI), 377 disease, 167–68, 209, 229 DOD. See Defense Department Dodge, Henry, 154 Doeg tribe, 36 Dominican Republic, 3, 212, 236

Index Dominion of New England, 37, 38 “domino effect,” 9, 319, 340, 350 Doniphan, Alexander, 166 Donitz, Karl, 303 Donop, Carl von, 88, 90 Donovan, William, 273 Douglas, Stephen, 183, 185 Downes, Jack, 176 Downie, George, 141 draft for armed services, 201, 244, 268, 271–72, 343–44 Dragging Canoe, Chief, 67 Dred Scott v. John Sandford, 185 Drucour, Augustin de, 57 Drummond, Gordon, 137, 139, 141 Duddingston, William, 77 Dulles, John Foster, 322, 327 Dunmore’s War, 66–67 Duquesne, Ange, 46 Duston, Hannah, 41 Early, Jubal, 199, 203, 204 East India Company, 77 Eaton, William, 2, 123 Economic Cooperation Plan, 316 economic issues: of Bush (G. H. W.) presidency, 363; of Clinton presidency, 370; costs of wars, 14, 15; defense spending and military power, 337; freezing of Japanese assets, 268–69; fuel prices and shortages, 269, 295, 312–13, 347; growth under Hamilton, 110–11; Indian lands and profits, 153–54; in late 1800s, 221, 221–22; Lend-Lease Act, 268; of Nixon presidency, 345; post-Civil War, 207; of Reagan presidency, 358; in “Roaring Twenties,” 254; WWI affecting, 241, 241, 246, 255–56; WWII affecting, 268–69, 272–73, 287, 309 ECSC. See European Coal and Steel Community Ecuyer, Simeon, 63–64 Egypt, 327–28, 346–47, 354 Eisenhower, Dwight: at Casablanca Conference, 280; on Cold War,

435

311, 332–33; on communism, 326; cutting defense budget, 325; as Hamiltonian, 7; presidential election, 321–22; supporting South Vietnam, 330; views on Cold War, 322, 323; in WWII, 277, 282, 291, 298–99. See also Korean War Eliot, John, 30, 35 Ellsberg, Daniel, 347 El Salvador, 360 Emancipation Proclamation, 180, 198 Embargo Act, 125 Emerson, Ralph, 176, 177 Emmanuel, Victor, 285, 286 Enabling Act, 265 English Civil War, 33 Enrollment Act, 201 Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War (Church), 35 Espionage Act, 246 Ethiopia, 265 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 325–26 Eustis, William, 130 Ewing, James, 88 expansion policies and wars: about, 149–50; art and culture romanticizing, 176–78; California territory, 162, 164–65; Florida territory, 150; Indian wars, 152–56, 172–73; Manifest Destiny, 149; Monroe Doctrine, 151–52, 158–59; Pacific Northwest, 158–59; politics of, 168–69; trade issues, 173–74. See also Mexican War Export-Import Act, 264 Fair Housing Act, 339 Fannin, James, 156–57 Farragut, David, 194 Federalist Papers, 109 Ferguson, Patrick, 98–99 Fetterman, William, 217 Fifteenth Amendment, 208 Fillmore, Millard, 175, 184 Fire in the Lake (FitzGerald), 12 First Continental Congress, 78, 79–80

436

World of War

First Gulf War, 368–69, 371 FitzGerald, Frances, 12 FitzGibbon, James, 136 Five-Power Pact, 254 Fleming, Hugh, 172–73 Fletcher, Frank, 239, 275 Flores, Jose, 165 Floyd, John, 193 Foch, Ferdinand, 245 Foote, Andrew, 192, 194 Forbes, John, 57 Ford, Gerald, 348–49 Forrest, Nathan, 193, 198 Four-Power Pact, 254, 260 “Fourteen Points” speech, 247, 250 Fox tribes, 153, 154–55 France: allied status and revolution, 115–16, 118; in American war for independence, 82–83, 93, 102, 103; defying Monroe Doctrine, 211–12; in King William’s War, 40–41; London Naval Treaty, 258; and Louisiana, 121; pacts during disarmament conference, 254; Panama canal and, 234; Quasi-War, 119; War of the Spanish Succession, 41–43; in WWII, 267. See also French and Indian War Franklin, Benjamin: as abolitionist, 181; in American war for independence, 69–70; during colonial wars, 48–49, 65; in French court, 83; peace talks and, 101, 102; on Stamp Act, 75–76; strengths, 104–5 Fraser, Simon, 91 Fredendall, Lloyd, 277, 280–81 Fredericksburg, Battle of, 203 “freedom index,” 386 Fremont, John, 162, 164–65, 184, 191–92, 196 French and Indian War: about, 46; animosities between Britons and Americans during, 53–54; Cherokee in, 60–61; early campaigns, 48–52; ending of, 61–62; first offensive by France, 54–55; first shots fired in,

47–48; Louisbourg campaign, 57; map, viii; Quebec campaign, 59–60; spreading across Europe, 52; taxes supporting, 70; tensions leading to, 46; Washington in, 46–49, 53–54, 57, 80 “A Frontier Interpretation of American History” (Turner), 11, 221 frontiers: art celebrating, 176–78; as central to American democracy, 11–12; disappearance of, 221; wars of, 13, 96–97, 112 Fry, Joshua, 47 fuel and oil issues, 269, 295, 312–13, 347 Fugitive Slave Law, 183 Funston, Frederick, 239 Gaddafi, Muamar, 359 Gadsden Purchase, 171 Gage, Thomas, 64, 77, 78–79 Gallatin, Albert, 120, 128, 145–46 Gansevoort, Peter, 92 Garcia, Calixto, 228 Gates, Horatio, 91, 92–93, 98, 103 Gelb, Leslie, 350 Genet, Edmund, 116 genocide, 13–14, 214, 322, 373 George II, 44, 48, 51 George III, 62, 64, 73, 77, 84 Germain, George, 89 Germany: East and West, 317, 335–36, 364; end of communism in, 365; mercenary fighters, 80, 86–87, 102; revolutionary weapons, 307; submarines, 287; Tripartite (Axis) Pact, 267; in WWI, 241–44, 252; in WWII, 266–67, 303. See also World War I; World War II Geronimo, Chief, 220 Gerry, Elbridge, 119 Gettysburg, Battle of, 200 Gettysburg Address, 181 Ghormley, Robert, 276 Giap, Vo Nguyen, 329, 341, 342, 348, 351, 352 Gibbon, John, 218

Index Gillespie, Arnold, 162, 164 Giraud, Henri, 277–78 Gladwin, Henry, 63 glasnost, 364 global containment strategy, 9, 319–20, 321, 327, 328, 329, 334, 350 global warming, 385, 386 global wars. See French and Indian War; World War I; World War II Glover, John, 87, 88 Golden Hill, Battle of, 76 “gold rushes,” 182–83, 218 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 362–63, 364–66 Gordon, James, 142 Grant, James, 61, 87 Grant, Ulysses, 179; in Civil War, 192–94, 198–99, 200–201, 202–3, 204, 206; as president, 208, 212, 225 Grasse, Francois de, 100–101 Graves, Thomas, 101 Gravier, Charles (Comte de Vergennes), 11, 83, 93, 102 Gray, Andrew, 165 Greathouse, Daniel, 66 Greece, 315 Greene, Christopher, 90 Greene, Nathanael, 69, 99–100, 103 Grenada, 358–59 Grenville, George, 75 Grey, Charles, 90 Grey, Edward, 243 Grey Eyes, Chief, 153 Gromyko, Andrei, 322 Guadalcanal, 276 Guam Doctrine, 345 Guatemala, 326–27 Guzzoni, Alfredo, 283 Haiti, 3, 236, 258, 371 Halleck, Henry, 188, 192, 194 Halsey, William, 289 Hamilton, Alexander: as abolitionist, 181; in American war for independence, 101; on French Revolution, 115; on government, 6–7, 109–10; killed in duel, 124; Lincoln running on agenda of,

437

185–86; as treasury secretary, 110–11; writing Washington’s Farewell Address, 117 Hamilton, Henry “Hair Buyer,” 96–97 Hampton, Wade, 137, 203 Hamtramck, John, 113 Hanks, Porter, 131 Hansell, Haywood, 303 Harding, Warren, 7, 253–54, 255 Harmar, Josiah, 113 Harmon, Millard, 276 Harney, William, 155–56, 173 Harriman, Averell, 313 Harris, Arthur, 308–9 Harrison, Benjamin, 220, 224 Harrison, William Henry, 126, 131, 132, 136, 137 Harrod, James, 66 Harvey, John, 135 Haviland, William, 60 Hawaiian Islands, 174, 224, 230 Hay, John, 230, 232, 234–35 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 234 Hays, Rutherford, 209 Heald, Nathan, 131 “hearts and minds” strategy, 351–52 Heath, William, 87 Heister, Philipp von, 87 Helsinki Accords, 349 Henderson, Richard, 67, 96 Hendrick, Chief, 51 Henry, Patrick, 73–74 Heredia, Jose, 166 Herkimer, Nicholas, 92 Hewitt, Henry, 277, 283 Hezbollah, 359, 373 Hill, John, 42 Hirohito, Emperor, 269, 306 Hiroshima, 305 Hitler, Adolf: background, 264–66; suicide, 303; views on WWI, 250; in WWII, 278, 297–99. See also World War II Ho Chi Minh, 328–30, 331, 352 Holbrooke, Richard, 372 holy wars. See Islamic extremists; jihadists

438

World of War

Homeland Security Act, 377 Homestead Act, 208 Honduras, 236 Honshu, invasion of, 304 Hood, John, 203, 205 Hooker, Joseph, 199, 200, 202 Hoover, Herbert, 7, 253–54, 257, 263 Hopkins, Esek, 104 House, Edward, 238, 243 Houston, Samuel, 156 Howard, Oliver, 219 Howe, George, 56 Howe, Richard, 86, 94 Howe, Robert, 94 Howe, William, 79, 81, 83, 86–88, 89–90, 93 Hudson, Henry, 33 Huerta, Victoriano, 238–39 Huertas, Esteban, 235 Hughes, Charles Evans, 253–54 Hull, Cordell, 268 Hull, Isaac, 129 Hull, William, 130–31 humanists, 8, 10 Humphrey, Salusbury, 125 Hungary, 328, 365 Hunter, David, 203, 204 Hurley, Patrick, 318 Hussein, Saddam, 360, 368–69, 377–78, 379 Hutchinson, Thomas, 77 IAEA. See International Atomic Energy Agency IBRD. See International Bank for Reconstruction and Development Ide, William, 164 IMF. See International Monetary Fund Immigration Acts (1921 and 1924), 255 imperial interests and wars: about, 12–15; Alaska purchase, 212; China, 231–33; Cuba, 225–27, 228–29, 230, 236; economic issues, 222–23; Far East trade, 213; Hawaiian Islands, 224, 230; Indian policies, 214–20; Monroe Doctrine and, 211–12, 235–36; naval power in

late 1800s, 222; Panama, 234–35, 236; Philippines, 227–28, 229–31; Samoan Islands, 224–25; social Darwinism and, 222–23 impressment of sailors, 124–25, 128 Indian Bureau, 216 Indian Removal Act, 153 Indians: allies, 39–41; and American war for independence, 102; beliefs and culture, 18–20, 30, 31; ethnic cleansing, 214; identity of Americans versus, 12; Puritans and, 28–29, 30–32; Queen Anne’s War and, 42. See also specific tribes Indian wars: about, 2, 18–20, 107–8; with Arikara, 152–53; Black Hawk War, 153, 154–55; during expansion, 152, 172–73; as imperial wars, 214–20; Seminole wars, 153, 155–56. See also French and Indian War individualism, 10 Indochina, war in, 9, 320, 328–31. See also Vietnam War Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 246 INF. See Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty Ingoldesby, Richard, 38 Inoue, Shigeyoshi, 275 Intelligence Act, 377 Inter-American Development Bank, 323 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 362 Internal Revenue Act, 207 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 371 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), 300–301 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 300 Iran: backing Shiite Muslims in Lebanon, 359; communism, 326; hostage situation, 356; leaders of, 312, 326, 355–56; nuclear weapons, 381, 383, 385; oil and, 312–13; as

Index part of “axis of evil,” 377–78; war with Iraq, 360 Iran-Contra operation, 360–61 Iraq, 353, 360, 368–69, 377–81, 386 Iroquois, 39, 40–41, 43, 46, 97 Islamic extremists, 373–74, 376–81 isolationism, 264, 266, 267 Israel, 327–28, 346–47, 354, 359, 385 Italy: campaign in south, 285–87; fascist government of, 265; London Naval Treaty, 258; at naval disarmament conference, 254; results of campaign in, 307–8; Sicily, 281, 282–85; Tripartite (Axis) Pact, 267. See also World War II Iwo Jima, 303 IWW. See Industrial Workers of the World Izard, George, 141, 146 Jackson, Andrew, 7, 138–39, 143–45, 150, 153 Jackson, Thomas “Stonewall,” 196–97, 199 James II, 37 Jamestown settlement, 21–27 January 6 insurrection, 383, 386 Japan: aggression toward China, 259–60, 274; fascist government of, 265; gunboat diplomacy, 3; London Naval Treaty, 258; at naval disarmament conference, 254; opening Korea for trade, 213; outlawing trade, 174–75; post-WWI, 258–59; post-WWII, 321; Soviet’s Red Army decimating, 317–18; Tripartite (Axis) Pact, 267; in WWII, 267, 268–69, 270–71, 274–76. See also World War II Japanese internment, 273–74 Jaudenes, Fermin, 227–28 Jay, John, 93, 116 Jefferson, Thomas: in American war for independence, 100; drafting Declaration of Independence, 85–86; election loss, 118–19; on French Revolution, 115; on

439

government, 7, 109–10; on pirates, 107; as president, 120–25; as secretary of state, 109; vision for America, 11, 149–50 Jenkins, Robert, 44 jihadists, 357, 373–74, 379, 385, 386 Jodl, Alfred, 303 Johnson, Andrew, 208, 212 Johnson, Henry, 95 Johnson, Lyndon, 335, 339–41, 343, 344 Johnson, R. E., 174 Johnson, William, 48, 50–51, 58, 62–63, 65, 66 Johnston, Albert, 192, 193–94 Johnston, Joseph, 190, 195–96, 202–3, 206 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 316 Jones, John Paul, 104 Jones, Thomas, 144, 162 Joseph, Chief, 219–20 Juarez, Benito, 211–12 Jumonville, Joseph de Villiers de, 47 Kansas, 183–84 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 183 Karamanli, Hamid, 123 Karamanli, Yusaf, 122–23 Kay, David, 379 Kearny, Stephen, 162, 163–64, 165 Kellogg, Frank, 252–53, 254, 256, 258 Kellogg-Briand Treaty, 258, 260 Kennan, George, 314–16, 318, 364 Kennedy, David, 308 Kennedy, John F., 311, 334–38 Kesselring, Albert, 286, 290, 291 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali, 377 Khmer Rouge, 331, 338, 349, 350 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 356 Khrushchev, Nikita, 322, 328, 332, 335–37 Kim Il Sung, 312, 319 Kim Jong Un, 381, 382, 385 Kimmel, Husband, 271, 275 King, Ernest, 271, 280 King George’s War, 44 King Philip’s War, 13–14, 21, 34–36 King William’s War, 40–41

440

World of War

Kinkaid, Thomas, 289 Kintpuash, Chief (Captain Jack), 218 Kiowa tribe, 217 Kipling, Rudyard, 229–30 Kissinger, Henry, 8, 305, 345, 346, 348 KMT. See Kuomintang Knowles, Charles, 45 Knox, Henry, 83, 102, 103, 109, 114 Kohl, Helmut, 365 Korea, 3, 213 Korean War, 319–21, 324–25 Kosovo, 373 Krulak, Victor, 342 Kuomintang (KMT), 259–60 Kuwait, 2, 353, 368–69 Kyushu, invasion of, 304 Laborde, Jean de, 278 Lafayette, Joseph Marquis de, 94, 100 Lake, Anthony, 370 Lakota Sioux, 218–19 Langlade, Charles, 46 Lansdale, Edward, 330, 352 Lansing, Robert, 238, 252 Laos, 331, 338, 349, 350 Larkin, Thomas, 162, 164 Lawrence, Charles, 50 Lawrence, James, 133–34 League of Nations, 238, 251, 253, 259, 260, 264 Leahy, William, 271 Leavenworth, Henry, 153 Lebanon, 359, 373 Leclerc, Philippe, 294 Le Duc Tho, 348 Lee, Charles, 94 Lee, Harry “Light-Horse,” 117 Lee, Henry, 95–96 Lee, Richard Henry, 85 Lee, Robert E., 196–97, 199–200, 202–3, 204, 206 Legal Tender Act, 208 Leisler, Jacob, 37–38 Lejeune, John, 235 LeMay, Curtis, 303, 308, 341 Lend-Lease Act, 268, 313 Lenin, Vladimir, 312

Lepore, Jill, 21 Levis, Francois, 60 Lewis, Andrew, 66–67 Lewis, Meriwether, 121–22 Lewis, Morgan, 135 Lignery, Francois, 57, 58 Linares Pombo, Arsenio, 228 Lincoln, Abraham: on Civil War, 179–81; election of, 185–86; as Hamiltonian, 7; on Lee’s escape across Potomac, 200; on McClellan, 197–98; murder of, 206; reelection of, 205; on Stowe, 178; on Vallandigham, 201. See also Civil War Lincoln, Benjamin, 95, 97, 103 Lincoln, Levi, 120 Lind, John, 238 Little Big Horn, 219 Little Carpenter, Chief, 61 Little Cow, Chief, 215 Little Soldier, Chief, 153 Little Turtle, Chief, 112–15 Livingston, Robert, 121 Livingston, William, 54 Lloyd George, David, 251, 252 Lockyer, Nicholas, 144 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 226, 252–53 Loftus, Arthur, 65 Logan, Benjamin, 112 Logan, Chief, 66–67 London Naval Treaty, 258 Long, John, 226 Longstreet, James, 196–97, 199, 202 Loomis, Gustavus, 156 Louis XIV, 38 Louis XV, 44, 53 Louisiana: as Spanish colony, 116–17; traded to France, 121 Low, Frederick, 213 Lucas, John, 290 Luce, Stephen, 223 Ludendorff, Erich, 248 Luxembourg, 267 Lyon, Nathaniel, 191 Lyttleton, William, 60–61 Lytton Commission, 260

Index MacArthur, Douglas, 271, 274–75, 288, 306, 308, 320–21 MacDonald, Donald, 84 Macdonell, George, 134 Macdonough, Thomas, 141 Macias y Casado, Manuel, 229 Mackenzie, Ranald, 217, 219 Macmillan, Harold, 279 Macomb, Alexander, 141 Madison, James, 109, 120, 126, 132–33. See also War of 1812 Magruder, John, 195 Mahan, Alfred, 223 Mahan, Dennis, 188 Maitland, John, 95 Manchuria, 260, 265 Manhattan Project, 273, 304–5 Manifest Destiny, 11, 149. See also expansion policies and wars Manila, battle for, 227–28 Manley, John, 83 Mao Zedong, 318, 345, 346 Marion, Francis “the Swamp Fox,” 98 Marshall, George, 271, 280, 315–16, 320 Marshall, John, 119, 154 Martin, Joseph, 104 Mary II, 37–38 Mason, John, 32 Massachusetts colony, 27–32 Massachusetts Militia Act, 17, 20 Massachusetts tribe, 28–29, 31 Massasoit, Chief, 28–39, 31–32 Mast, Charles, 278 Mather, Cotton, 30 Mawhood, Charles, 89 Mayflower Compact, 27–28 Mayo, Henry, 238 McAuliffe, Anthony, 299 McCarthy, Joe, 323–24 McClellan, George, 191, 195–98, 205 McCoy, Frank, 257 McDowell, Irvin, 190–91 McKinley, William, 211, 226–27, 229, 230, 232, 233 McLoughlin, John, 158 McNamara, Robert, 334–35 McNeil, William, 10

441

Mead, Walter, 6 Meade, Gordon, 200, 202 Memeskia, Chief, 46 Merritt, Ezekiel, 164 Merritt, Wesley, 227–28 Messe, Giovanni, 281 Metacom, Chief, 34, 35–36 METO. See Middle East Treaty Organization Meuse-Argonne, 249 Mexican War: about, xi, 156; Alamo, 156–57; California, 164–65; Chihuahua capture, 165–66; costs of, 171; “firsts” during, 172; leadership in, 171–72; map, xi; politics of territory expansion and, 168–69; Scott’s expeditions, 167–68, 169–70; Taylor’s army, 162–63, 166–67; Texas annexation, 159–60; Treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo, 171; Trist’s negotiations, 168–69, 170–71 Mexico: Civil War threat from, 211–12; “little war” in, 2; Roosevelt Corollary and, 3, 236; undeclared war preceding WWI, 238–40; in WWI, 243–44. See also Mexican War Miami Indian villages, 46, 112, 132. See also Little Turtle, Chief Miantonomi (sachem), 30–31 Micanopy, Chief, 155 Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), 325 Midway Island, 213, 271, 275 Mifflin, Thomas, 88 Miles, Nelson, 217, 219, 220, 229 “military-industrial complex” warning, 332–33 Milosevic, Slobodan, 372 Miniconjou Sioux, 219 Mitchell, Billy, 255 Mitchell, George, 139 Moduc tribe, 218 Mohawk tribe, 39, 50–51 Molasses Act, 72 Monckton, Robert, 48, 50 Monmouth, Battle of, 94, 95 Monro, George, 54–55

442

World of War

Monroe, James, 125, 150, 151, 181 Monroe Doctrine, 3, 151–52, 158–59, 211–12, 235–36 Montcalm, Louis Joseph de, 53, 55, 56, 59 Montgomery, Archibald, 61 Montgomery, Bernard, 278–79, 281, 282, 284–85, 286, 291, 294, 295, 296, 298–99, 302 Montgomery, Richard, 81–82 “Monuments Men,” 302 Moore, James, 42 Morales, Juan, 167 Morgan, Daniel, 92, 99, 103 Morgan, John, 198 Morino y Redondo, Don Jose, 93 Morocco, 277–78, 279 Morrill Act, 208 Morris, Robert, 104 Morrison, Joseph, 137 Morton, Thomas, 30 Mosaddegh, Mohammad, 326 Moultrie, William, 95 Moxus, Chief, 41 Mueller, Robert, 382 Munich Pact, 313 Munich syndrome, 8, 353 Murphy, Robert, 278 Murray, James, 60 Murray, John (Earl of Dunmore), 66–67, 82 Mussolini, Benito, 265, 284, 285, 286, 303 Myrick, Andrew, 215 myths, 9–10, 12 Nagasaki, 305 Nagumo, Chuichi, 271 Nagy, Imre, 328 The Name of War (Lepore), 21 Napoleon III, 212 Narragansett tribe, 29, 30, 34 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 327–28 National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), 332 National Banking Act, 207 National Party (Kuomintang), 259–60

National Security Act, 316 National Security Agency (NSA), 316 National Security Council reports, 323 National Socialist Workers (Nazi) Party, 264–65 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Navajo, 216 naval forces and warfare: Act to Provide a Naval Armament, 111; aircraft carriers, 255; in American war for independence, 104; disarmament conference, 254; Jefferson paring back, 120; in late 1800s, 222; submarines, 287, 307; in War of 1812, 129–30, 133–34, 136, 139–40, 141, 142, 145, 146; in WWI, 241–44, 245; in WWII, 307. See also specific naval vessels; specific wars and battles Nazi. See National Socialist Workers Party Nehring, Walther, 278, 279 Nelson, Thomas, 101 Nemattanew, Chief, 27 neoconservatives versus realists, 375–76, 379 Netherlands (Holland), 33, 254, 267 Neutrality Acts, 266, 267 Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission (NNRC), 324 Neville, John, 117 New Deal, 264 New Orleans: in War of 1812, 143–45; purchase of, 121 Newport, Christopher, 21–22, 23, 24–25 Nez Perce tribe, 219–20 Nhu, Ngo Dinh, 330, 338 Nicaragua, 235, 256–58, 357, 360 Nicolson, Francis, 37, 42 Nimitz, Chester, 270, 275, 287 Nine-Power Pact, 254, 260 Nipmuck tribe, 34 Nitze, Paul, 318–19, 320 Nixon, Richard M., 7, 334, 344–45, 348 Nixon Doctrine, 345

Index NNRC. See Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission Nomura, Kichisaburo, 268 Non-Importation Act, 124–25 Non-Intercourse Act, 125, 126 Noriega, Manuel, 367–68 Normandy, 292–94 North, Frederick, 89 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 317, 325, 362, 365, 373, 382 North Korea, 371, 377–78, 381, 385 Northwest Ordinance, 112, 182 Noyan, Pierre Payen de, 57 NSA. See National Security Agency nuclear arms: 1946 proposal for controlling, 313; during 1950s, 331–32; Able Archer exercise, 362; ABM Treaty, 346; Cuban missile crisis, 336–37; Eisenhower reducing, 325; INF Treaty, 362; in Iran, 381, 383; “military-industrial complex” warning, 332–33; “missile gap,” 334; in North Korea, 381; potential repercussions in Vietnam War, 350–51; Reagan’s delusions about, 358, 361–63; SALT I and II, 345–46, 357; SDI, 361–63; Soviets developing, 317; START, 362, 365, 370; thermonuclear bomb, 332. See also atomic bomb; containment strategies OAPEC. See Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries Obama, Barack, 7, 380–81, 382 “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (Franklin), 71 Oconostota, Chief, 61 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 328–29 Oglala Sioux, 217, 219 Oglethorpe, James, 44 Okinawa, 303–4 “Olive Branch Petition,” 84 Oliver, Andrew, 74 Olney, Richard, 225

443

OPEC. See Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Opechancanough, Chief, 24, 25, 27 Open Door policy, 232, 233, 254, 260 Operation Airmail, 302 Operation Market Garden, 296 Operation Mongoose, 331, 335 opium, 173–74 Ord, Edward, 198 Oregon Trail, 158 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), 347 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 347 Orlando, Vittorio, 251, 252 Ortega, Daniel, 360 OSS. See Office of Strategic Services Ostend Manifesto, 176 O’Sullivan, John, 11, 149 Oswald, Richard, 101 Otis, Elwell, 230 Ozawa, Jisaburo, 288 Pacific Northwest expansion, 158 Pacific Railroad Act, 208 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza, 312, 326, 355–56 Pahlavi, Reza, 312 Paine, Thomas, 69, 84–85 Pakenham, Edward, 144–45, 159 Pakistan, 377 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), 359 Panama, 234–36, 354–55, 367–68 Pan-American Conferences, 255, 267 Papua New Guinea, 276 Paris Accord (global warming), 382 Paris Peace Accord, 348 Parker, John, 78 Parrott, John, 159 Patch, Alexander, 294–95 Pathet Lao, 331, 338, 349 Patriot Act, 377 Patterson, Robert, 190 Patti, Archimedes, 328–29

444

World of War

Patton, George: on bombing, 309; on fighting, 263; injuries, 249; offensives led by, 239–40, 277, 281–85, 291, 293–95, 298–99, 302 Paxton Boys, 65 Peace of Westphalia, 33 Pearl Harbor, 269, 271 Peleliu, 288, 308 Pemberton, John, 199, 200 Pentagon Papers, 347 Pepperrell, William, 45 Pequot War, 32–33 perestroika, 364 Perry, David, 56 Perry, Matthew, 167, 175, 213 Perry, Oliver, 107, 108, 134, 136, 146 Pershing, John “Black Jack,” 2, 237, 239–40, 245, 248–49 Petersburg, siege at, 204 Petraeus, David, 380 Pham Van Dong, 350 Philippines, 2, 13, 227–28, 229–31, 274–75, 288–89, 308 Phillips, William, 100 Phips, Spencer, 20 Phips, William, 40, 41 Phoenix Program, 342–43 Pickens, Andrew, 98 Pickering, Timothy, 119 Pickett, George, 200 Pico, Pio, 164–65 Pierce, Franklin, 176 Pigot, Robert, 94 Pike, Zebulon, 122, 134 Pilgrims, 27–32 Pillow, Gideon, 192 Pinckney, Thomas, 116, 119, 120, 125 piracy, 175–76 Pitcairn, John, 78 Pitt, William, 55, 60, 75 Plan Orange, 270 Platt, Orville, 230 PLO. See Palestinian Liberation Organization Plymouth colony, 27–32 Pocahontas, 24, 25, 26 Pocumtuck tribe, 34

Poland, 266–67, 297, 299 Polk, James, 149, 157–58, 159–60, 162, 164–66, 167, 168–69, 170–71, 176 Polk, Leonidas, 192, 193 Pontiac’s War, 19, 62–66 Poor, Enoch, 92 Pope, John, 193, 197, 215 Popham, Stephen, 139–40 Porter, David, 140–41, 146 Porter, Fitz-John, 196 Portugal, 254 postmodern wars: Afghanistan, 376–77, 383–84, 386; decline of U.S. power and, 386; First Gulf War, 368–69, 371; global warming and, 385–86; Hainan Island crisis, 375–76; in Haiti, 371; Islamic extremists, 373–74, 376–81; Islamic State, 380–81; jihadism, 385, 386; neoconservatives versus realists, 375–76, 379; in Panama, 367–68; right-wing extremists, 386; Second Gulf War, 377–81; Somalia, 370–71, 381; Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 363, 373–74; in Syria, 380–81; threats of, 371, 381–82, 385–86; in Tunisia, 380; in Ukraine, 382, 384, 385; in Yugoslavia, 371–72 Potsdam Declaration, 304–5 Pouchot, Pierre, 58 Powell, Colin, 359, 370, 371, 372 Powhatan (Wahunsenacawh), 23, 24–25 Preble, Edward, 123 Preston, Thomas, 76–77 Prevost, Augustine, 94–95 Prevost, George, 130, 135, 141, 146 Prevost, Mark, 95 Price, Sterling, 165, 191–92, 198, 204–5 Prideaux, John, 58 Princip, Gavrilo, 240 Pringle, John, 91 Proctor, Henry, 130, 135 Proctor, Redfield, 226 Protocol of Peking, 232–33 Puerto Rico, 13, 229–30 Puller, Lewis “Chesty,” 257

Index Puritans, 27–32, 33, 37 Putin, Vladimir, 381–82, 385 Quadruple Alliance of France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, 151 Quartering Act, 73, 76 Quasi-War, 119 Quebec, 38–39, 40, 59–60 Queen Anne’s War, 42 Rale, Sebastien, 43 Randolph, Edmund, 109 Ratcliffe, John, 23, 25 Rawdon-Hastings, Francis, 100 Reagan, Ronald, 357–63, 364–65 realism, 7–8 Reciprocal Trade Act, 264 Reciprocity Treaty (1902), 230 Red Army, 297, 299. See also communism; Soviet Union Red Cloud, Chief, 217 Red Eagle, Chief (William Weatherford), 139 Red Sticks, 138–39 Reno, Marcus, 219 Repeal Act (for Stamp Act), 76 Revere, Paul, 78 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 368 Reynolds, William, 213 Rhee, Syngman, 319 Riall, Phineas, 140–41 Ridgway, Matthew, 283, 321, 325 Rigaud, Francois-Pierre, 54 Ripley, Eleazer, 140 Roanoke settlement, 21 Robert, Charles, 131 Rochambeau, Jean Baptiste, 100–101 Rodgers, John, 129, 213 Rogers, Robert, 52, 56, 61, 63 Rolfe, John, 26–27 Romania, 365 Rommel, Erwin, 277, 278–79, 280–81, 282, 291, 293 Roosevelt, Franklin: at Casablanca Conference, 280; and Churchill, 269; as Hamiltonian, 7; leadership

445

and character, 263–64; peace plan, 300–301; presidential election, 263, 300; at Yalta, 301. See also World War II Roosevelt, Theodore: accomplishments, 223; as Hamiltonian, 7; as president, 231, 233–35; on realism, 7–8; running as Progressive, 237; on work, 211. See also “Rough Riders” Roosevelt Corollary, 3, 235–36 Root, Elihu, 230 Rosecrans, William, 198–99, 201–2 Ross, Robert, 142 Rottenburg, Francis de, 130, 132, 135 “Rough Riders,” 227, 228–29 Rowlandson, Mary, 41 Royer, Daniel, 220 Rundstedt, Gerd von, 291–92, 293 Rush-Bagot Treaty, 158 Rusk, Dean, 335 Russell, John (Duke of Bedford), 69 Russia, 212, 247–48. See also Putin, Vladimir; Soviet Union Rwanda, 373 Ryder, Charles, 277 Sadat, Anwar, 354 Saito, Yoshitsugu, 288 Salaberry, Charles de, 137 SALT and SALT II. See Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties Samoan Islands, 224–25 Samoset, Chief, 28 Sampson, William, 228, 229 Sandinista movement, 357, 360 Sandino, Augusto, 257–58 Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de, 156–57, 162, 166–67, 168, 169–70 Sassamon, John, 34 Saudi Arabia, 363 Sauk tribes, 153, 154–55 Sawyer, Herbert, 129 Scarouady, Chief, 49 Schroeder, Gerhard, 376 Schurz, Carl, 212 Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 266

446

World of War

Schuyler, Philip, 90–91, 92 Schuyler, Pieter, 40–41 Scofield, John, 205 Scott, Charles, 114 Scott, Dred, 184–85 Scott, Hercules, 141 Scott, Hugh, 244 Scott, Winfield, 161; Civil War, 189, 190–91; Mexican War, 162, 167–68, 169–70, 171–72; War of 1812, 135, 140–41, 146 Scowcroft, Brent, 368, 369 SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative SEATO. See Southeast Asian Treaty Organization Second Gulf War, 377–81 Sedgewick, John, 199 Sedition Act, 246 selective containment strategy, 317, 318, 345, 364 Selective Service Acts, 244, 268, 271–72 Selim III, 122 Seminole wars, 153, 155–56 September 11 attacks, 373, 376, 378 Serbia, 240, 372–73 Seven Years’ War. See French and Indian War Sevier, John, 98–99 Seward, William, 212 SHAEF. See Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Shafter, William, 228 Shawnee, 96, 112. See also Blue Jacket, Chief; Tecumseh Sheaffe, Roger, 132, 134–35 Shelby, Isaac, 98–99 Sheridan, Philip, 202, 203, 204, 206 Sherman, William, 179, 199, 202–3, 205–6 Shigenitsu, Mamoru, 306 Shirley, William, 45, 48, 50, 51–52 Short, Walter, 271, 275 Shoshone tribe, 216 Shufeldt, Robert, 213 Shultz, George, 361, 364 Sibley, Henry, 194–95, 215 Sigel, Franz, 202, 203

Simpson, William, 296 Sioux tribes, 172–73, 215–16, 217, 218–19, 220 Sitting Bull, Chief, 219, 220 Skorzeny, Otto, 297–98 slaves and slavery: 1820 Compromise, 157; American democracy developing with, 181–85; blacks in American war for independence, 82, 103; Civil War slavocrats, 180–85; defeated Indians sent to West Indies, 35; indentured servants in Virginia, 27; Northwest Ordinance forbidding, 112; slave trade during expansion, 175, 176; Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, 178. See also Emancipation Proclamation; Thirteenth Amendment Slidell, John, 159–60 Sloat, John, 164 Slotkin, Richard, 9–10, 12 Slough, John, 195 Sloughter, Henry, 38 Smith, Beetle, 286 Smith, Charles, 192 Smith, Francis, 78–79 Smith, Jack, 383 Smith, Jacob, 211, 231 Smith, James, 65 Smith, John, 22, 23, 24–26 Smith, Kirby, 198 Smith, Ralph, 287–88 Smith, Robert, 120 Smith, Roy, 259 Smith, Samuel, 90, 142 Smith, William, 18–19 Smoot-Hawley Act, 256 Smyth, Alexander, 132 social Darwinism, 222–23 Socialist Party, 237 Somalia, 370–71, 374, 381 Somoza Garcia, Anastasio, 257–58, 357 Somoza Debayle, Anastasio, 357 Somoza Debayle, Luis, 357 Sons of Liberty groups, 73, 74, 76, 77 Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), 325

Index Southwest Ordinance, 182 Soviet Union: Afghanistan, 363, 365; aiding Cuba, 331; famines, 254; forming, 248; Red Army offensive in Poland, 297; reforms leading to Cold War’s end, 364; in Vietnam War, 351; West German blockade, 317; in WWII, 268. See also communism; Korean War; Russia; Vietnam War; specific leaders of the Soviet Union Spain: Adams-Onis Treaty, 150; during American war for independence, 93, 102; American wars with, 18; civil war in, 265; colonists fearing attack by, 21–22; Cuba, interest in, 225–27, 228–29, 230; declaring war in 1898, 226–30; England’s unofficial wars with, 44; Louisiana as colony of, 116–17; War of the Spanish Succession, 41–43 Special Providence (Mead), 6 Spencer, Herbert, 223 Spotted Elk, Chief, 220 Sprague, Clifton, 289 Sputnik, 332 Squanto, 28 Srebrenica massacre, 372 Stalin, Joseph: Churchill’s deal with, 297; Cold War and, 312–13; death of, 322; Potsdam Declaration and, 304–5; supporting China and North Korea, 319; at Yalta, 301. See also World War II Stamp Act, 73–75 Standish, Miles, 28, 31 Stark, John, 92 START and START II. See Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties “Star Wars.” See Strategic Defense Initiative St. Clair, Arthur, 49, 91, 113–14 Steuben, Friedrich von, 93, 100, 104 Stevens, John, 224 Stewart, Charles, 145 Stillwell, “Vinegar Joe,” 289 Stimson, Henry, 260

447

St. Leger, Barry, 89, 92 Stockton, Robert, 162, 164–65 Stoddert, Benjamin, 119 Stonewall John, Chief, 30 Stoughton, Israel, 33 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 178, 183 Strachey, William, 23 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT and SALT II), 345–46, 357 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START and START II), 362, 365, 370 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 361–63 “strategic hamlet” strategies, 342, 343 Stricker, John, 142 Stuart, Jeb, 197, 203 Stuart, John, 66 Sudetenland, 266 Sugar Act, 72 suicide attacks, 304, 374 Sullivan, John, 94, 97, 102 Sully, Alfred, 215–16 Sumner, William Graham, 223 Sumter, Thomas, 98 Sun Tzu, 351 Sun Yat-sen, 259 Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), 291, 298 Susquehannock tribe, 36 “Sussex Pledge,” 243 Syria, 346–47, 359, 380–81 Taft, William Howard, 230, 231, 237 Taiwan, 232, 318, 346, 385 Taliban regime, 376–77, 383, 384, 386 Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice, 119 Tarleton, Banastre, 98, 99, 100 Tassigny, Jean de Latte de, 298, 302 taxes, 72–73, 117, 128, 207–8, 273 Taylor, Maxwell, 311, 335, 351 Taylor, Richard, 203, 206 Taylor, Zachary, 160, 162–63, 166–67, 171–72 Tea Act, 77

448

World of War

Tecumseh, 107, 126, 130–31, 136, 137 Tedder, Arthur, 282 Teller Amendment, 227, 229 Tenet, George, 370, 376, 378 Terry, Alfred, 218–19 Texas, 156–57, 159, 171 Thatcher, Margaret, 368 Thieu, Nguyen Van, 342, 348 Thirteenth Amendment, 180, 206, 208 Thirty Years’ War, 33 Thomas, George, 193, 202, 205 Thomas, Minor, 215–16 Thompson, Bennie, 383 Thornton, Seth, 160 Thornton, William, 144 Tilghman, Lloyd, 193 Tilly, Charles, 20–21 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 340 Torrejon, Anastasio, 160 Tovar, Juan, 235 Townsend, Charles, 76 Townsend Act, 76–77 Townshend, George, 59 Tracy, Benjamin, 223 trade issues: in Far East, 173, 174–75, 213; freedom of the seas, 1; internationalism and, 264; Trading with the Enemy Act, 246 Travis, William, 156–57 Treaties of Lancaster, 46 Treaties of Paris: 1762 and 1763, 62; 1783, 102; 1898, 230; 1951, 325 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 45 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, 116 Treaty of Aranjuez, 93 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 247 Treaty of Camp Charlotte, 67 Treaty of Charleston, 61 Treaty of Fort Atkinson, 172 Treaty of Fort Jackson, 139 Treaty of Fort Laramie, 172 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 66 Treaty of Fort Wayne, 126 Treaty of Greenville, 115 Treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo, 171 Treaty of Hard Labour, 66

Treaty of Hartford, 33 Treaty of Hubertusburg, 62 Treaty of Kanagawa, 175 Treaty of Long Island, 61 Treaty of Middle Plantation, 37 Treaty of Moultrie Creek, 155 Treaty of Nanking, 174 Treaty of Payne’s Landing, 155 Treaty of Rome, 326 Treaty of Ryswick, 41 Treaty of Shimoda, 175 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, 67 Treaty of Tientsin, 174 Treaty of Utrecht, 43 Treaty of Versailles, 251–53, 256, 264, 265–66 Treaty of Wangxia, 174 Treaty of Washington, 225 “trickle-down economics,” 358 Tripartite (Axis) Pact, 267 Tripoli, 2, 107–8, 111, 122–23 Trist, Nicholas, 168–69, 170–71 Trujillo, Omar, 355 Truman, Harry, 7, 304–5, 313, 315, 316, 319–20, 329 Trump, Donald, 7, 381, 382–83, 385 Truscott, Lucian, 290–91 Truxtun, Thomas, 119 Tunisia, 279, 280–82, 380 Turkey, 315 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 11–12, 221 Turner, Richard, 287–88 Tuscarora war, 42–43 Tuyel van Serooskerken, Diederik, 151 Twelfth Amendment, 120 Twiggs, David, 163, 167–68, 169–70 Tyler, John, 159, 174 Ukraine, 382, 384, 385 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 178, 183 Underhill, John, 19–20, 32 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 248. See also Soviet Union United Colonies of New England, 34 United Fruit Company, 327 United Nations: attempting peace talks, 373; Relief and Rehabilitation

Index Administration, 300, 315; Security Council, 320, 368, 371, 378; treaty ratification, 304 Ute tribe, 216 Vallandigham, Clement, 201 Vance, Cyrus, 354 Van Dorn, Earl, 194, 198–99 Van Fleet, James, 321 Van Murray, Williams, 119 Vann, John, 352 Van Rensselaer, Solomon, 132 Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 130–31 Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, Pierre Rigaud de, 59 Vaughan, John, 92 Velasco, treaties of, 157 Vergennes, Comte de. See Gravier, Charles Vergor, Louis de, 50 Vernon, Edward, 44 Vicksburg, taking of, 199, 200–201 Vietnam in World War II, 267 Vietnam syndrome, 8–9, 353, 371 Vietnam War: antiwar movement, 340, 343–44, 347, 350, 353–54; atrocities, 347; Cambodian offensive, 347–48; cease-fire as fleeting, 349; communist versus U.S. strategies, 338, 340–43, 345–46, 347–48, 349–50; cost of, 349–50; legacy, 353–54; McNamara approach, 334–35; Paris Peace Accord, 348; peace proposal in 1963, 338; reasons for loss in, 350–53; refighting through art and culture, 353–54; Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 340; U.S. antipoverty policies and support for, 339. See also Indochina, war in Villa, Francisco “Pancho,” 2, 239 Villiers, Ncolas Coulon de, 47–48 Vincent, John, 135, 137 Virginia Company, 21–22 Virgin Islands, 212 Voting Rights Act, 339

449

Wahunsenacawh. See Powhatan Wainwright, Jonathan, 275 Walker, Hovenden, 42 Walker, Samuel, 217 Walker, Thomas, 66 Walker, Walton, 320–21 Walker, William, 176 Wallace, Lew, 204 Walpole, Horace, 17, 47 Wampanoag tribe, 28–29. See also Metacom, Chief Warner, Seth, 92 War of 1812: Battle of New Orleans, 143–45; British depredations leading to, 124–27; British march into Washington, 142; declaration of war against Britain, 127–29; economic issues, 128, 133, 152; human and financial costs, 145–46; land battles, 130–32, 134–36, 137–38, 146; map, x; naval battles, 129–30, 133–34, 136, 139–40, 141, 142, 145, 146; negotiations at Ghent, 140, 143 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 44 War of the Austrian Succession, 44–45 War of the Spanish Succession, 41–43 Warren, John, 130, 133, 142 Warren, Peter, 44, 45 Washington, George: in American war for independence, 80–82, 84, 86–90, 101–2, 103–4; Farewell Address, 118; in French and Indian War, 46–49, 53–54, 57, 80; as Hamiltonian, 7; as president, 109, 111, 113–14, 116, 117–18; Rochambeau and, 100–101; on war, 17, 103–4 Waterhouse, Edward, 26 Wayne, Anthony, 90, 95, 100, 114–15 Wayne, Harrison, 131 Wayne, John, 333, 344 Wayne, Madison, 131 weaponry: aircraft, 249–40, 270, 281–82, 283, 307, 308; in Civil War, 190; in Korean War, 324–25; muskets and musketeers, 20, 104, 161, 190; post–Civil War, 216;

450

World of War

submarines, 287, 307; tanks, 248, 249, 279, 284, 307; for Ukraine, 384; weapons of mass destruction, 378; in WWI, 245; in WWII, 272–73, 279, 307. See also nuclear arms; specific wars and battles Webb, Daniel, 55 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 158 Weddell, James, 140 Wedemeyer, Albert, 289, 318 Welch, Joseph, 323 Wellesley, Arthur, 127 Wentworth, Thomas, 44 West, Thomas (Lord De La Warr), 26 West German blockade, 317 Westmoreland, William, 340–41, 352 West Point graduates, 171, 187–88 “Westwall,” 291 Wharton, Edward, 35 Wheelan, Joseph, 172 Whiskey Rebellion, 117–18 Wiese, Friedrich, 294 Wilkinson, James, 114, 124, 137, 139 Willa, Francisco “Pancho,” 239–40 William III, 37–38 Williams, Israel, 54 Williams, Roger, 30, 32 Wilmot, David, 169 Wilson, Henry, 238 Wilson, Hugh, 261 Wilson, Woodrow, 2–3, 7, 237, 238–40, 241, 242–45, 246–47, 250, 251–53 Winchester, James, 134 Winder, William, 135–36, 142 Wingfield, Edward, 22 Winslow, Edward, 31–32 Winslow, John, 50 Winslow, Josiah, 34, 35 Winthrop, Fitz-John, 40 Winthrop, John, 10–11, 29–30, 149 Wirz, Henry, 207 Wituwamet, Chief, 31 Wolfe, James, 53, 59 Wool, John, 165–66 Woolsey, Melacthon, 139 World Bank, 300–301 World Trade Center, 373, 374

World War I: air warfare, 249–50; armistices, 250; battles, 248–50; black soldiers in, 245; costs of, 250–51; draft, weapons, and troop training, 244–45; economic issues, 241, 241, 246; German provocations, 242–44; opposition to, 246–47; peace treaty, 251–53, 256, 264, 265–66; postwar decade, 253–56; propaganda, 246; Russian political challenges during, 247–48; terrorist act precipitating, 240; trench warfare, 240–41, 248; undeclared Mexican war preceding, 238–40; U.S. declaring war, 244. See also specific battles; specific military leaders World War II: air warfare, 270, 281–82, 283, 307, 308; Ardennes offensive, 297–99; Casablanca Conference, 280; early German invasions in Europe, 266–67, 268; European campaigns, xiv, 276–77, 282–87, 289–300, 301–3; European front, 307–8; fascist aggression leading to, 264–67; Japanese internment, 273–74; Japan’s entry into, 267, 268–69; Japan’s surrender, 306; Manhattan Project, 273; maps, xiii, xiv; military and economic aid to Soviet Union, 312; North African campaigns, xiv, 277–82; Pacific campaigns, xiii, 269, 271, 274–76, 287–89, 303–6; propaganda, 283; Sicily/Italy invasion, 281, 282–87, 289–91; total casualties, 306; U.S. entering, 269–71; weaponry, 272–73, 279, 307; during winter of 1944–1945, 299–300. See also specific battles; specific military leaders Worth, William, 163 Wounded Knee, 216, 220 Wraxell, Peter, 53 WWI. See World War I WWII. See World War II Yalta Conference, 301 Yanukovych, Viktor, 382

Index Yeltsin, Boris, 365–66 Yeo, James, 134–35, 139 Yerkes, Robert, 244 Yorktown, 100–101. See also Cornwallis, Charles

Yugoslavia, 371–72 Zawahiri, Ayman al-, 384 Zelensky, Volodymyr, 382, 384 Zimmermann, Arthur, 243

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About the Author

William Nester, professor at the Department of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, is the author of more than forty books on national security, military history, and the nature of power. His book George Rogers Clark: “I Glory in War” won the Army Historical Foundation’s best biography award for 2013, and Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon won the New York Military Affairs Symposium’s 2016 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award.

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