United States History
Mr. Bekemeyer
"Yorktown: If the British Had Won"
by Gerald Clarke, Monday, Nov. 2, 1981 TIME Magazine
Each year at this time, Sir Geoffrey Gabb, George III professor of history at
Cornwallis University, lectures his freshman students on a little-known but
decisive episode in American history. Last week marked the 200th anniversary of
that event. To commemorate the occasion TIME went to Cornwallis to record Sir
Geoffrey's idiosyncratic and provocative comments:
You have all heard of the battles of Hastings and Agincourt, and I doubt that there
is anyone in the room who doesn't know all about the defeat of the Spanish
Armada in 1588. But I suspect that only a handful of you have even heard the
name of what I believe is the most important—and glorious—victory in our
nation's history: the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781.
You can learn the details of the fighting in Chapter 7 of my book The Triumph of
British America: 1776-1843, which sells for a modest £5.6 in the Coop. It is
enough to say here that British forces, led by Charles Earl Cornwallis, for whom
this university is named, soundly defeated the much larger forces of the French
and rebellious Americans and took prisoner their commander, George
Washington. If you're interested in such peculiarities, you can see his brandystained teeth, which were fashioned out of hippopotamus tusk, in Prince Charles
Hall, right next to Pocahontas' feathered headdress.
With the capture of Washington—he was, poor chap, taken to London and hanged
as a traitor—the rebellion collapsed, and no one else had the stature or the
stomach to start it up again. That ancient rogue Benjamin Franklin, who had
persuaded King Louis XVI to bankrupt his treasury in the rebel cause, was content
to remain in Paris, for instance, chasing young ladies and flying kites in
thunderstorms. Thomas Jefferson, the greatest propagandist of the age, also sought
refuge in Europe, where he lived with his beautiful black mistress and continued
his mischief-making for another 43 years. A fascinating, tragic figure, Jefferson
became an inspiration to generations of novelists, poets and composers. Sir Walter
Scott used him as the hero of Monticello, and after one apparently jolly dinner at
Jefferson's Italian villa, Shelley was moved to write:
Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Man thou never wert, That from Heaven, or
near it, pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of invigorated art.
And in my opinion the loveliest sounds in all opera occur in the final act of Verdi's
Tommaso Jefferson, when the desolate exile sings an aria to a lost ladylove in
America: "O, Susannah, non piangere per me!"(O, Susannah, don't you cry for
me!). But I am an old man and I digress. If you want to know more about these
colorful characters, you can purchase my book Romantic Rebels, which is a mere
£4.9 at the Coop.
Once the leaders of the rebellion were executed or dispersed, the British
government admitted its previous errors—tacitly, of course—and sought to
redress old wrongs. King George III, who had complained that he would go mad if
his American colonies were lost, regained his spirits and proved a forgiving
monarch. No more than a third of the colonists had supported the insurrection, in
any event, and six years of bloodshed and privation were quickly forgotten in the
era of good feeling that followed the war. The colonies were placed under a
unified government for the first time, and a new capital was established across the
East River from Manhattan, in the fertile fields of Brooklyn. Some had wanted to
put the new city farther south, along the banks of the slothful Potomac, but wiser
heads decided that reason would never prosper in those hot and foggy bottoms.
Safely settled in Brooklyn, the new government slowly evolved into the
parliamentary democracy we know today, with full independence coming only in
1843.
Before that occurred, however, the British did one magnificent deed: in 1833 they
abolished slavery, here as elsewhere in their empire.
Hotheads in the South, which depended on that despicable institution, threatened a
second insurrection, but the combined weight of the northern provinces and the
British army and fleet was enough to chill even their overheated indignation.
Another cooling factor may have been the British offer of financial restitution for
freed slaves: a total of £20 million, a considerable sum, I might remind you, in
those days.
The peaceful solution of a problem that could have led to civil war might well be
called Britain's greatest gift to its Atlantic colonies. Blacks were brought slowly
into white society and, as a result, race is not a major issue in the America of 1981
as it is in so many other countries.
Not everything the victorious British did was so wise, and if they had not been so
shortsighted in some ways, America might now be a much larger country than it
is. Not wanting to offend the Indians—or interfere with the lucrative fur trade—
London continued to prohibit settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. The
Appalachian Barrier Act was often ignored, but it nonetheless slowed
development of the Far West—that vast area between the Appalachians and the
Mississippi River. Only in this century have Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, for
example, had populations large enough to qualify for provincehood; until 1908
they had territorial governors appointed directly by the Prime Minister's office on
Flatbush Avenue.
Another unfortunate consequence of the Barrier Act was to encourage the French
to try to push their frontier east of the Mississippi. The Emperor Napoleon had
been tempted to sell all of France's New World holdings—for as little as £ 3
million—but Jefferson, that consummate troublemaker, convinced him not only to
keep his 828,000 square miles but to populate them with the landless peasants of
France and Southern Europe. If it had not been for Jefferson—non piangere per
me, indeed!—America, our British America, might now extend from the Atlantic
to the Rocky Mountains. It would then be nearly as large as Mexico, which
inherited from Spain not only the southwest but almost everything west of the
continental divide.
Only the Earl of Liverpool, who was then the British Prime Minister, can be
blamed, however, for the failure to purchase Florida and the lands along the Gulf
Coast, which the Spanish, hard up as always, put on the market for £1 million in
1819. If Lord Liverpool had not been so foolishly parsimonious, that sun-favored
peninsula would now be a law-abiding and God-fearing American province
instead of the petty dictatorship it is, whose only exports are drugs, disease and
depravity.
Ah well, back to the Mississippi, where the French and the British waged constant
warfare along their river boundary. In fact, the final battle of the Mississippi War
took place as late as 1865. Only then, at the Battle of Prairie du Chien, did the
combined British and American armies, under the leadership of General Sir
Ulysses S. Grant, persuade the French and their Indian allies to stay on their side
of the water. After that, Paris seemed to lose interest in its third of the North
American continent, and with French blessing, the newly independent nation of
Louisiana unfurled its flag on July 14, Bastille Day, 1870. Now those unhappy
days of strife are long forgotten, and America and Louisiana are friendly
neighbors. Our own population is 75 million, according to the 1980 census, just 7
million less than that of Louisiana and its Indian protectorate, Amerinda. Our
gross national product, however, is considerably larger: £439 billion, compared
with their combined total of £369 billion.
Both of us are loyal to the countries that nurtured us and protected us from
rebellion and other follies. Indeed, America, like New Zealand, is often accused of
being more British than Britain is, while Louisiana, like Quebec, hearkens back to
an earlier and in many ways more pleasant France. No Englishman could show
more excitement over a cricket match than the average sports-loving American,
and last week's beginning of the World Cricket Series was a national ritual for
most Americans. Louisiana, in turn, has retained that raffish, somewhat off-center
charm we associate with all things French: good food, good conversation and a
fine contempt for conventional morals. It has also retained some unfortunate
reminders of its frontier heritage. Unlike America, where handguns are outlawed,
Louisiana allows every ten-year-old a six-shooter. No one is safe on its streets.
Both of us have shown our loyalty to Europe in material ways too, and when
Germany threatened Britain and France with war in August 1914, Brooklyn and
St. Louis jointly rushed to the support of their mother countries. That show of
strength was sufficient to persuade Kaiser Wilhelm II to back down, and Europe,
as you know, has remained at peace ever since.
The same cannot be said of Asia, of course, where the intermittent conflict
between two great autocratic empires—Japan and Russia—endangers the entire
world. After it broke its self-imposed isolation at the end of the 19th century,
Japan proved all but invincible. With no country in the area strong enough to
stand in its way, Tokyo gained its present domination over the Pacific, invading
the Hawaiian Islands in 1910 and forcing a weak Mexico to cede the Catalina
Islands, off the coast of Southern California, in 1913. Santa Catalina is now the
Japanese Hong Kong, a center of industrial activity whose smoggy air often fouls
the otherwise clear skies of sleepy Los Angeles. Defeated by Japan at the Battle of
Tsushima Strait in 1905, Russia was forced to give up Russian America,
sometimes known as Alaska. Now, under its young and aggressive new Tsar,
Nicholas VII, it seems determined to regain that conquered territory and plunge
the world into what could well be the first world war.
What does all that have to do with the Battle of Yorktown? you ask. Who can say
for sure? All I can tell you for certain is that if Washington had won instead of
Cornwallis, the past 200 years would have been very different. Which brings me
to next week's assignment. In 1,200 words, or four typewritten pages, write a
history of an independent United States. Use your imagination, and be guided by
only one rule: nothing is inevitable.