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with George Washington, deserves much more recognition than he has ever received.
    As to why Virginia and South Carolina are identified as vanguard colonies and North Carolina is not, the latter was neither an old colony nor a national leader. But its rarely recognized importance in discouraging the 70-ship and seven-regiment southern expedition set in motion by King George and Lord North in October 1775 deserves a special mention.
    The years 1774 and 1775 have more than their share of unsung heroes. Some of these have provided a further, welcome refreshment in this era of political disappointment.
    Kevin Phillips
Litchfield County, Connecticut
April 2012

PART I
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1
The Spirit of 1775
    In one sense it is doubtless true that nobody, in 1775, wanted war; in another sense it is almost equally clear that both the Americans and the British were aching for a showdown.
    Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris,
The Spirit of ’Seventy-six,
1958
    How do we account for the hostilities on Lexington Green?…Simple, in that control of munitions was crucial to both sides—to the Americans for making war, to the British for avoiding it.
    Don Higginbotham,
The War of American Independence,
1971
    S uch was the arousal and spirit of 1775 that
rage militaire
—a patriotic furor, a passion for arms—swept the thirteen colonies that spring and summer, giving the American Revolution its martial assurance and its vital, if somewhat delusionary, early momentum. Great hopes took hold, and sedentary lawyers, publishers, and preachers pored over their libraries of English political and revolutionary precedents.
    Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill sowed confidence, and by summer, scarlet-coated military might had shrunk back to encircled Boston and a few fast-deserting companies in New York. Following these initial successes, Patriots soon developed “a national conceit of born courage in combat with a sudden acclaim for a superior form of military discipline, easily acquired”—that of a valorous and virtuous citizen soldiery. 1 It was all very heady.
    Virtue, the old Roman credo, clad itself in a uniquely American garb. Hunting shirts, belts, and leggings became fashionable, what a later era might term militia chic. Even gentry-minded Virginians cast aside their imported velours and joined in. Before the opening of a June 1775 legislative session in Williamsburg, burgesses were recommended to attend inshirtmen’s garb—frontier-type apparel—“which best suits the times, as the cheapest and the most martial.” And “numbers of the Burgesses” did indeed come wearing “coarse linnen or canvas over their Cloaths and a Tomahawk by their Sides.” 2 New Englanders, informed by Harvard and Yale scholars, boasted that no plausible European army could be large enough to overcome the combination of American space and just cause. In Pennsylvania, even erstwhile pacifist Quakers marched in a volunteer light infantry company nicknamed the “Quaker Blues,” for which some were quickly read out of their monthly meetings.
    Three thousand miles away, many British policy makers suffered from an opposite “empire militant” style of conceit. No colonial riffraff could hope to stand up to the professional armies of the world’s preeminent imperium. The revolutionaries would scatter in panic after two or three of their well-known leaders were hung as traitors. General James Grant told amused listeners that he could march from one end of the American colonies to the other with 5,000 British regulars. The king’s aide-de-camp, General Thomas Clark, thought he could do it with 1,000 men, gelding colonial males as he went. 3 Boston radicals, “Oliverian” at heart, were the trouble spreaders, subverting loyal and unwary subjects elsewhere. Through much of 1774 and 1775, even as British ministers transferred troops to hostile Boston, they naïvely emptied barracks elsewhere.
    Clearly both sides misread some military and