Michael Kochin and Michael Taylor write:
* You are alone. You are exhausted, bruised and battered. You have no real friends and you are surrounded by enemies. You have no money to pay your bills, and you have scarcely the means to defend yourself. You have no sure way to put your house in order, but you have built this house in a vast wilderness of mountains, rivers, forests, jungle, and desert. This is no country for old men, no country for young republics. In 1781, at the moment of the British surrender at Yorktown, this was the situation of the United States of America. Victory in the Revolutionary War did not bring glory—freedom did not mean safety. One false step and this ambitious experiment in republican government would fail forever. So just how, not even fifty years later, had the United States become the undisputed master of North America and the self-proclaimed guardian of the Western Hemisphere?
The transformation of a string of rebellious colonies along the eastern seaboard into a military superpower is the most remarkable story of modern political history. Yet this rapid ascension was not the manifest destiny of the United States—there was nothing naturally ‘great’ about the new republic. Time and again, the United States came close
to disaster. What if Benjamin Franklin had not brought the French into the Revolutionary War? What if the Federalists had not forced through a constitution that could bind thirteen states into the Union? What if ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne had started a war with the British in Ohio in 1794? Or if the British had re-taken New Orleans in 1815?The Founding Fathers had no safety net. They had no reputation either, for Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson played only supporting roles on the global stage. At every turn, they were faced with problems that spelled life or death for the United States. Somehow, the Americans got it right. How did they do it? They asked the right questions about foreign affairs, the military, taxes, and trade. With skill, wisdom, experience, and no little luck, they found the right answers too.
* the United States sought to avoid open war with the British, French, and Spanish.
* the transformation of thirteen British colonies into the United States of America, and then into one of the great powers of the world, is the most remarkable story in modern political history.
* “We have not Men fit for the Times,” wrote John Adams [in 1776]. “We are deficient in Genius, in Education, in Travel, in Fortune—in every Thing. I feel unutterable Anxiety.” Nevertheless, despite Adams’s pessimism, these “United States of America”—a term first coined by Jefferson in June 1776—quickly became what George III feared, “an independent empire.” By 1826, after only five decades of independence, the American Union had become the imperial master of much of North America and the self-proclaimed guardian
of the Western Hemisphere.Diplomacy and war were essential to the creation and the survival of the United States. It was only with foreign assistance that the Revolutionary War was won. Even when independence was secured in 1783 by the Treaty of Paris, the new republic was surrounded by European colonies and hostile forces. To the north, smarting from their recent defeat, were the British in Canada. To the south, governing the Gulf of Mexico, was Spanish Florida. To the west were Native American tribes and Spanish Louisiana, which controlled the vital conduit of the Mississippi and the port of New Orleans.
* the American economy had been designed to supply the British Empire. American diplomats urgently needed to negotiate better access to British markets, to make deals with other European nations, and even to arrange the protection of American shipping from the pirates of the West Indies and North Africa.
* If the fifteenth century belonged to the Portuguese and the sixteenth to the Spanish, and if the seventeenth century was defined by la gloire of the Sun King, Louis XIV, it was in the long eighteenth century that Great Britain emerged as a global force.
* The Stamp Act also provoked the rancor of a more sophisticated constituency. By taxing printed materials such as newspapers and legal documents, it directly affected the journalists and lawyers who were best placed to articulate colonial discontent. One such lawyer was John Adams, a bustling attorney in the provincial town of Braintree, Massachusetts.
* In these, the early years of the Revolutionary War, the American situation was perilous. Foreign aid was needed desperately, but the two most likely Samaritans were the French and the Spanish, whom the Americans, due to their British history, had long regarded as natural enemies. Even with the cord to London cut, the Protestant, republican Americans still feared and hated the Catholic absolutism of these European monarchies.
