Revolution Song by Russell Shorto

Author:Russell Shorto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Perhaps the most talked-about event in London during the summer of 1777 was the case of William Dodd, a popular clergyman whose taste for the good life led him to spend beyond his means. Desperate to get out of debt, he committed forgery and got caught. When a wildly excessive sentence of death was pronounced, the case catapulted to the level of an outright sensation. Samuel Johnson himself took up the parson’s cause, penning an essay under Dodd’s name that appeared while the clergyman languished on death row. When pressed to confess his authorship, with the claim that Dodd did not have the literary powers to write it, Johnson remarked (in a turn of phrase that would become an enduring part of the language), “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The essay was to no avail, and Dodd’s public hanging shocked the nation.

There was, of course, much else to occupy Londoners that summer. The carpenter John Harrison, who had recently died, was being memorialized for his invention of a device for determining longitude at sea, which would save mariners from being lost. There were new books published about the wonders of electricity and about “diseases peculiar to women.”

And there was the ongoing saga of the American war. The news had been mostly favorable of late, with accounts of Howe, the wily old general, outwitting Washington on his own turf. But the government’s finances were dire, and many continued to question the wisdom of it. One commentator gloomily compared the state of affairs in England with that in other European nations: “In France, the minister is reducing taxes. . . . In Holland, the Dutch are augmenting their navies, increasing their trade. . . . In Russia, the empress leaves no stone unturned to promote manufactures and trade . . .” while “In poor Old England, the minister is intent to find out articles that will bear fresh taxation, to support a war against her once best friends, at a time when she is least able to support it.” There was the sense that one note of sour news from America would swing the pendulum of public opinion sharply to the negative.

For much of the summer Lord George Germain had reason to bustle about Whitehall with a cheery disposition. His generals were doing their job. Soon, surely, would come news that the armies of the north and south had converged to execute his grand strategy. Roman severity was being brought to bear on the Americans.

Then, in September, came a confusing sequence of reports. General Howe had packed his men into ships and seemingly vanished. They had not sailed north. “The Howes are gone the Lord knows wither,” Horace Walpole wrote. Germain was among the most perplexed, for he had given Howe orders to move northward. In fact, it was Howe’s own idea to divert from the master plan and move on Philadelphia, and to do it by sea.

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