We all know how and when the American Revolution ended, right? The Continental Army and its French allies besieged the forlorn redcoats at Yorktown, leading to the astonishing British surrender in October 1781. And the band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Game over.
Well, not quite.
In “The Perils of Peace,” Thomas Fleming reminds us that things were pretty sticky between Yorktown and the peace treaty signed in Paris in 1783. Nothing less than the revolution itself was in the balance.
According to Fleming “the most crucial weeks of the American Revolution,” weren’t the battles near Saratoga, N.Y., in 1777 – often described as the turning point of the war – or the Continental Army’s fateful march through New Jersey in December, 1776.
Instead, he is referring to events in London and Paris in early 1782, when British politics were in turmoil and the struggling United States was trying to figure out how to pay its bills, including to its own soldiers. Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador in France, was so wary of British intentions he warned the American secretary for foreign affairs, Robert Livingston, that George III “hates us . . . and will be content with nothing short of our extirpation.” In Fleming’s telling, it’s a wonder the Paris peace talks didn’t lead to all-out war.
Meantime, despite the joy of victory on the battlefield, things weren’t going so smoothly in Philadelphia. Fleming describes how Arthur Lee, a delegate to the Continental Congress, was “working overtime to ruin Superintendent of Finance [Robert] Morris, impeach Benjamin Franklin and dismantle the alliance with France.”
By showing us how British domestic politics, American debt and diplomatic intrigue made the journey from Yorktown to Paris so perilous for the fledging United States, Fleming argues persuasively that full independence was very much in doubt until Franklin, John Adams and John Jay signed the peace treaty in September, 1783.
Taking readers from the court of King George III to the contested back country of the American South to the salons of Paris, Fleming also serves up memorable personalities – his treatment of young James Madison is particularly good – revealing anecdotes and solid scholarship that make for terrific narrative history.
When Fleming describes the death of Martha Washington’s 27-year-old son, Jack, just days after Yorktown, we understand that for the Washingtons, sadness shadowed the great American victory.
But Jack was hardly the last casualty, and the fighting didn’t end because Lord Charles Cornwallis ordered his men to lay down their arms. The British still held New York, Charleston and Savannah – three strategically significant garrisons. The American commander in the South, Nathanael Greene, kept his troops prepared for renewed conflict. And hundreds of miles north, meanwhile, George Washington struggled to keep his army from marching on the Continental Congress to demand back pay. Threatened with mutiny in Pennsylvania in 1783, Congress fled to Princeton, New Jersey, to the disgust of Alexander Hamilton and many others. “Our prospects are not flattering,” Fleming notes Hamilton told John Jay.
Somehow it all worked out, but Fleming reminds us it wasn’t an easy journey.
Terry Golway teaches U.S. history at Kean University in Union, N.J.
The Perils of Peace: America’s Struggle for Survival after Yorktown
by Thomas Fleming
Collins/Smithsonian Books