Political and Historical Context

Historical Context
While Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” was once read as a mythic escape from history, it is now being read as the irrevocable presence of history in America. Irving delves into various European and American “pasts”, using them to enhance his representation and interpretation of a variety of national, ideological, and thematic issues, suggesting in a story of change, that nothing has changed at all. Access to information regarding these pasts and histories facilitates the analyzation and interpretation of the text.

An Understanding of the American Revolution
Beginning in the 1680’s the expanding royal government of England, to make it more powerful, tried to direct the colonials more intently in the imperial interest. The colonials resisted through their elected assemblies and began to see their royal governors in the same harsh colors that seventeenth-century Englishmen had painted the royal Stuarts. As the colonies grew explosively, they became so rich that Britain saw them as necessary to her strength. As early as the 1740’s, the British began to assert control more vigorously, and in exasperating ways.

Long before the 1760’s, local American grandees quarreled with imperial officers stationed in America about the wisdom of royal policies, whether on sea borne trade, on military quotas, on Indian policy, or on crown lands. They could run the empire in a better, more effective manner.

After a few more years of acid exchanges, the British eventually tired of edicts and persuasion. The answered American riots and uproars with statutes (now called Coercive or Intolerable Acts) to remove any constitutional barriers to the use of force to compel obedience to imperial policy. The shocked Americans united in the Continental Congress, a body intended at first as a protest group, but which, in time, became a government to enforce disloyalty to Britain as patriotism in America.

Accumulating interest on the very large national debt arising from foreign wars from France, prompted British Parliament to reshape their imperial administration and use it effectively to get revenue from America. Americans, the British said, were virtually represented by the British Parliament where every member represented every subject of the king, an idea that most Americans could not accept because they clung to medieval notion of a representative as a kind of personal attorney. Thus, Anglo-American elites saw every new British policy as a weakening of the Americans’ only real power, the purse power.

When the British attacked the problem of costs, they decided to make the Angle-Americas pay for a large part of the standing army, to levy American customs and internal taxes, and to make the Americans pay for their administration. The colonials had a reasonable fear that the number and kinds of taxes would rapidly multiply. They had been grudgingly paying trivial regulatory taxes, but without admitting their lawfulness. In fact, their representative bodies had always denied parliamentary authority to tax America. The British legal reply was to ask the Americans to prove their tax exemption.

Americans also mistrusted Britain for ecclesiastical and moral reasons. Evangelical Protestants always feared the imposition of Anglican bishops. Worse, British behavior seemed evidence of the same papistical, absolutist corruption they had fought in the recent long wars with France. George III was beginning to seem as benighted and tyrannical as a Bourbon.

The character of the British Ministry and its servants in America served to irritate rather than mollify. American working people and the British soldiery despised each other. British army officers showed contempt for the colonial middle class. Royal Navy seamen behaved like pirates, while their captains impressed young men who had influential friends. A fourth of the new American revenue went to make soft jobs for friends of government. Governors filled their councils with flexible sycophants instead of respected local leaders. One the one side, the colonial leaders stood stubbornly against yielding their power and their standing in America. On the other hand, it was psychologically impossible for Britain to invent some new kind of imperial relationship; there was no precedent for the British to follow.

The intervention of the Parliament in colonial business made the crown seem alien. Between American politicians defending English liberty as it ought to be, and British politicians defending English law as it really was, the two sides had taken positions from which they could not back down without shame. To most Americans the dangers from Britain began to seem greater than the risks of war. In their minds only two alternatives remained: the extinction of self-government in America, or separation fro Britain.

Most Americans chose rebellion or loyalism in the 1770’s. Rebels tended to venerate abstract ideals—virtue, duty, the common good—above friends and blood ties. Loyalists’ codes were personal, clannish, placing highest values and families and friends. The rebels were a majority, were skilled in self-government, and knew how to bring a majority to action. Unlike some other rebels, they were constructive. They were not out to destroy an old regime but to preserve what they thought was an acceptable older order.

American loyalist leaders, regardless of origins, wished to preserve the notion of a hierarchal society, but social sanding was not grounded on royal support in America as it was in Britain. The top royalists ornamental personages, but not true leaders. Loyalists were less than a fifth of the white population in America at the time. In the north, loyalists were passive, or huddled behind the British army. Only south of Virginia were they vigorous. The worst British mistake of the Revolution was to overestimate the strength of loyalism.

"Military" Power
The military aspect of the war also played an important role. The native force at the disposal of the rebels was the Continental Army. They were ignorantly overconfident, fearing the British army not at all, but without overconfidence there would have been no Revolution. As a lose league of equals the states ran a very poorly organized war. If the military men had been in charge they would have run a disciplined Prussian kind of war, but the rebels always intended to prevent the United States from becoming a new Prussia.

The most important single ingredient of the military victory was the temperament of George Washington. His sturdy character made up for his lack of brilliance and panache. As a seasoned Virginia politician he knew how to keep the favor of the Congress. As a strong-willed Potomac valley baron he was stubborn enough to stay on duty continuously for eight ears. As a soldier taking charge of sixteen times as many men as he had ever commanded he used his port for on-the-job training.

Opposed to the Continentals was a professional army with mostly amateur officers who did not know the useful tactical lessons learned in previous American wars. The Indians generally sided with the British for they had nothing to gain from a farmers’ republic. One can list twenty-eight important battles, of which two were indecisive; thirteen were British victories, and thirteen American. All told, there were not more than five thousand combat deaths, but there were tens of thousand of prisoners taken.

The rebels could not supply enough arms and gunpowder. The solution was an alliance with France, which cared nothing for the Americans but wished revenge against Britain. The French were self-servingly generous to the rebels. While expecting no gratitude, they spent more than twice as much for American independence as the Americans spent. Some help came from the Dutch and from Spain. Tsarina Catherine of Russia made a gesture at protecting neutral shipping from the Royal Navy. After France came openly into the war, in1778, Britain was in grave trouble. Every important Atlantic seafaring nation was an enemy of the unfriendly neutral. That alone is almost enough to explain the result.

Britain had offered peace at frequent intervals from the start. The rebels always refused to talk unless Britain recognized independence or withdrew its forces. Although still powerful, Britain quit the war after the Battle of Yorktown out of sheer frustration. In Paris the American envoys, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, negotiated a splendid treaty. They secured independence from Britain without making the United States a French satellite. At home there was no great peace celebration, and it was just as well, because this was not an end but a beginning.

Independence
In the time following the war, the Americans were able to build thirteen workable state governments. The builders were not levelers or democrats, but powerful men suspicious of powerful executives. Out of antagonism toward the idea of monarchy, the Americans made strong legislatures with figurehead governors, believing that the legislature, as the whole people, would rarely be tyrannical. To their new state constitutions they appended bills of rights. These state governments were built to win home rule for thirteen separate states.

The Congress published a Declaration of Independence, which at the time, the publishers thought of as an episode of their diplomatic practice. They included an appeal to natural law principles, and added a rejection of the King and a certificate of their existence. The Congress also organized a loose league under the Articles of Confederation. The strength-giving instrument was, of course, the Constitution of the United States, a venerated paper with, so far, enough strength to hold the nation together.

Major Literature and Authors