Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

We turn now to an examination of Washington’s fervent commitment to revolution and its possible roots in his personal net worth. We then assess presidential choices in several of America’s other most important wars, including Madison’s decision to turn to Congress and its deeply partisan perspective to design the conduct of the War of 1812; Lincoln’s campaign to divide the Democratic Party in 1860 to advance his own personal political fortunes and its readily anticipated consequences for the nation; Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to forge in the United States an arsenal of democracy while avoiding entry into the Second World War; Lyndon Johnson’s failed effort in Vietnam, George W. Bush’s campaigns against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Afghanistan’s Sheikh Omar; and a comparison of Barack Obama’s efforts on the Iraq and Afghan war fronts to JFK’s during the Cuban missile crisis. We close finally with ideas about how to promote the importance of peace and prosperity and war, when necessary, to protect the security and well-being of Americans.

Chapter 1

George Washington’s Wars: In Pursuit of Life, Liberty and . . . Avarice!

What Inducements have Men to explore uninhabited Wilds but the prospect of getting good Lands?

—George Washington

ON JULY 4, 1776, FIFTY-SIX AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES DECLARED independence from Britain’s “absolute Tyranny over these States.” In doing so, they formally launched the founding war of the United States. They did so against tremendous odds. Their British adversary was arguably the greatest power in the world. Britain’s population (estimated at 6.4 million in 1770) was approximately three times the size of the colonial population (estimated at 2.15 million in 1770). At the time of the revolution, Britain’s per capita income in today’s dollars was roughly equivalent to $1,540, second only to the Netherlands. The comparable figure for the colonies was only $990.1 Britain had unsurpassed naval strength. The colonists had no navy. Britain had a well-drilled, well-trained, and combat-experienced military leadership as well as the resources to recruit, provision, and pay a standing army. The colonists had irregular militias with no professional military training and they rarely had funds to maintain soldiers in the field. Even the commander in chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, had no formal military training and limited military experience. These few men and their supporters must have been most profoundly aggrieved, believing that there was no other path open to them to protect and improve their future than to fight such a desperate war against so great an adversary.2

With hindsight we know the War for Independence turned out well for the colonists, although only after long years of suffering and deprivation. Beginning with the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and, in 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, it did not end until 1783. Tallies of American fatalities vary, with twenty-five thousand dead from combat and war-related exposure to disease being a modest estimate.3 Some calculate the death toll ran to almost three times this. The revolution stands out as unusual on almost every front. Most wars last months. The length of the American War for Independence surpassed that of either of the two World Wars and was about equal to that of the Vietnam War. Relative to population size, it was one of America’s deadliest fights. It was expected to be—and proved to be—a long, costly, and difficult war entered into as a last resort and with significant long-term consequences. The revolution’s importance to American history is so far reaching that it demands our attention. Our revisionist attention it shall get.

After more than two centuries in which details of the war have been recounted to each new generation, average Americans are imbued with confidence that they know the particulars behind the tyranny of Britain’s King George III (1738–1820) and the courage and integrity of the founding fathers in freeing the colonies to follow a new and remarkably successful form of government, one that has become an exemplar for much of the world.

The standard accounts of the War for Independence as a great struggle between colonists and Britain, endowed as they are with many important but only partial truths, miss an appreciation of critical elements that turn our attention from the founding fathers’ heroism to their prosaic pursuit of their own personal interests. That they were self-interested should not surprise us—who isn’t? Self-interest is, after all, a crucial ingredient in innovation, whether in the arts, the sciences, or government. That they were demonstrably self-interested should not detract from their remarkable ideas and accomplishments. However, America’s founders were real, flesh-and-blood aristocrats with, to borrow again from William Shakespeare, all the ills that flesh and blood is heir to. They were hardly the sort of people one stereotypically thinks of as revolutionaries. They were not political or social outcasts, the downtrodden yearning to be free; they were not the religiously oppressed seeking freedom of conscience; nor were they men craving government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” They were, in fact, exceptionally rich and influential men: community leaders and political figures elected to the governing bodies of their colonial governments—the colonial elite, the privileged few in a rising society. As such, for the most part they disdained the idea of democracy, which was, as they saw it, government by the mob. In a time and place of great opportunities and great ambition for advancement, these were men hungry to secure their own substantial fame and fortune.

If today we were to observe a comparably small group of enormously wealthy and powerful men conspiring to overthrow their government, we would refer to them suspiciously, maybe even derisively, as oligarchs. We would surely wonder at how they were using their personal power and wealth for their own personal gain and how that affected everyone else. That we do not probe these concerns when assessing the founding fathers means that we risk glossing over their flaws and thereby constructing a distorted understanding of the first defining event in American history. It means misunderstanding what drives political elites to wage war. It perpetuates the mythology of war and revolution as a noble endeavor, the last resort of the righteous against the unrighteous. To begin to rectify the varnished account of American history, we will try to modify the general understanding of the causes of the American War for Independence.

To do so, we focus on two critical aspects of the conditions that produced the American Revolution: what the revolutionaries were after, and why they needed a war to achieve their objectives, as they explained unabashedly within the Declaration of Independence.

We will see that, in addition to possessing high ideals, the founders, or at least many of them, were keen to protect their personal wealth. For some signatories of the Declaration, such as Virginia’s Carter Braxton, this meant resisting war until its resistance had clearly become a politically losing cause. For others, such as the Lee brothers, Thomas Jefferson, and for many of the Declaration’s supporters, including George Washington, it meant having to rid themselves of two groups of people who threatened their fortune and their future prospects: the British and the Indians. They could get rid of neither without a revolution. Indeed, the immediate postrevolutionary history of the United States is a history of expulsion of the British followed by more than a century of war aimed at the expulsion or destruction of the sovereign Indian nations of North America.

George Washington: The Rise to Prominence