♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein and I'm gonna be in conversation today with Professor H. W. Brands who is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

We're gonna discuss his recent book, Our First Civil War.

Thank you very much, Professor, for being here.

BRANDS: Delighted to be with you.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, let's talk about Our First Civil War.

So, uh, the premise is that we actually had a civil war that divided the country before the official Civil War.

So what's the basic premise and how did you come to that conclusion there was a civil war in effect before we had our official Civil War?

BRANDS: Well, I'd amend your question slightly because the Civil War went on while we were having the Revolution.

And this revolution was indeed a civil war right up until the end.

But taking your point, Americans in 1763, the end of the French and Indian War, had no, no particular desire or interest in breaking free from Britain.

They were pretty happy with the British Empire, but over the next 12, 13 years attitudes changed.

Now in the shorthand version, Americans changed their mind, Americans decided that the British had become too oppressive, and they needed to break away.

But, but that's an approximation and it leaves out that large group of Americans who didn't make that decision, who said, "Okay, we don't like every law that Parliament has passed, but this is no reason to blow up the Empire."

These were the loyalists.

And so right up until the Declaration of Independence, it was, it was politically feasible, it was acceptable to argue both sides of the issue.

But once the Declaration was passed, then all of a sudden these loyalists, the ones who were just doing what they had been doing before, they became traitors in the eyes of those who had opted for independence.

RUBENSTEIN: So if there were a public opinion polling apparatus in those days right after the Declaration was issued on July the 4th 1776, what would've been the percentage who are patriots, loyalists, or just in between, they don't have a position?

BRANDS: John Adams probably had as good a sense of the mood of the American people at the outbreak of the Revolution.

He said that a third of the people were Whigs, that was a term for the patriots.

A third were Tories, those were the loyalists, and a third were in the middle and hadn't made up their minds.

Now one of the points of the war for both the patriot side and the loyalist side was to force those in the middle to take sides.

That's, in the nature of pretty much any civil war.

RUBENSTEIN: At the time of the Revolution, we had roughly two and a half million white Americans and about a half a million slaves; something like that.

And so, uh, of those two and a half million white, um, I'd say citizens of the country at the time, you're saying they were at the time of the Revolution started 1/3, 1/3, 1/3.

BRANDS: Rough, roughly speaking.

Now within those groups, there were gradations of enthusiasm for the cause.

So George Washington's Continental Army, those were the, the real hardcore in favor of independence.

It never amounted to more than about 15,000 people.

So we're talking about a relatively small group that actually took up arms.

But those who were politically in favor of independence, they were a much larger group.

RUBENSTEIN: So after the, um, French and American War, also known as the "Seven Years' War", the British said, "Well, you know, we gotta provide some defense for you American colonies.

And by the way, it costs a lot to win that war, so maybe you could contribute something, some taxes."

Were we paying any taxes, American colonies, before that to the British?

BRANDS: Americans were paying taxes but they were what Americans, especially Benjamin Franklin, called indirect taxes.

They were the equivalent of sales taxes.

So taxes that you could opt out of by not purchasing that particular thing.

So they were excise taxes, import taxes, and that sort of thing.

But there were no direct taxes where you had to pay directly to the, the taxman.

RUBENSTEIN: So, who in the British Parliament, or the king if it was the king, or the prime minister said, "You know what?

Lets has some taxes on the Americans, pay for the war, and maybe pay for their defense?

Whose idea was that?

BRANDS: So George Granville took the lead on this as prime minister.

And the ministry changed configuration over the course of the war and it's an important part of the story because from the British perspective, there was always a kind of cost benefit analysis of this war.

Because it wasn't an ex-, existential struggle for the British the way it was for the Americans.

George Washington, everybody else who took up arms against Britain, their necks were really on the line.

But for the British, there was always the option, "You know, we could say, 'Enough is enough, call it quits and come home.'"

RUBENSTEIN: So we had the first Continental Congress where there was an effort to try to convince the British to stop the taxes.

That didn't seem to work.

They had another Congress, a Second Continental Congress, and it didn't seem to work, but they did send a letter to the King of England, King George, saying, "We know the Parliament's terrible and the Parliament isn't really, uh, really representative of your brilliant decision to be our leader, but you we know will actually get rid of these taxes."

Is that right?

Is that what they tried to do?

BRANDS: Yes, but there is, there was some deliberate fictionalizing going on here.

This was, we're talking about the 1770s, this is a century after England's Glorious Revolution and everybody knows that the big decisions are made by Parliament.

But it was easier to address an individual, King George, until the decision was finally made for independence.

But even in making that decision for independence, Thomas Jefferson laid essentially all the blame for the bad things that were happening in the colonies on King George.

RUBENSTEIN: Uh, did King George ever actually see, or read, or respond to the Declaration of Independence?

BRANDS: He didn't respond in any formal way.

It took weeks or months for a copy to come to his attention.

He almost, and he knew that it had happened.

I don't know how closely he read it.

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, at the Second Continental Congress, they decide, "We're gonna issue the Declaration of Independence."

And they need to fight.

Who decides that George Washington should be the general and did he really have that much experience?

BRANDS: George Washington did not have a lot of experience.

But nobody else had anywhere near as much as experience as George Washington did.

So Washington was the obvious candidate.

Apparently John Hancock fancied that he might get the job but Washington had showed clear military leadership.

He had been, uh, a colonel in the Virginia militia at the age of 21.

And in Washington's formative years on this subject, he found himself serving in the French and Indian War alongside British officers.

And he discovered he was good at this, he was better, in fact, than nearly all the British officers he came up against.

But he also realized that he could never advance in the British Army because he was a provincial, he was an American.

So he had hit this ceiling and I would say that this is a large part of why Washington said, "I'm outta here."

RUBENSTEIN: But how great a military tactician was he?

Wasn't he in the French and Indian War captured and he coulda been, uh, he coulda been killed because he basically surrendered?

BRANDS: There is a lot to be said for nearly getting killed but not getting killed.

And in the ca... Well because you tend to think that you have some aura around you.

Winston Churchill had the same experience.

But the thing about Washington was his task as commander of the Continental Army was different from the task of the British commanders: General Howe, for example, and Cornwallis.

Washington didn't have to win the war, he simply had to keep the war going, he had to avoid losing because he knew that eventually he could wear the British out.

Sooner or later, the British were gonna come to the same conclusion that the United States came to in Vietnam and the United States came to in Afghanistan, "This is a war of choice.

We don't have to fight it.

If we lose, it's not the end of the Empire."

So all Washington had to do was to avoid a devastating defeat and he succeeded.

RUBENSTEIN: Of the battles fought in the Revolutionary War, there were maybe 28 battles or something like that, didn't he lose more than he won?

BRANDS: Uh, many more than he won.

In fact, his only really decisive battlefield victory was the last one at Yorktown.

And that was kind of the, the equivalent then of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968 where it demonstrated to the British that this war isn't nearly over, this, we might be fighting for another 10 years.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, after the Declaration of Independence, do the patriots start lobbying the loyalists and say, "Come to our side?"

Or do they just tar and feather the loyalists?

BRANDS: It depended on the reaction of the loyalists to the Declaration of Independence.

So William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin, he was Governor of New Jersey at the time and he refused to accept the validity of the Declaration of Independence.

And he treated New Jersey and the New Jersey legislature after the Declaration of Independence just as he had before.

BRANDS: And for his pains, he was accused of treason against, treason against what he thought against New Jersey, and not against the United States, but against New Jersey.

And he was imprisoned, he was house arrest at first, but then he was helping the pat...

The, the loyalists side, and so he was thrown in prison.

And he, he finally was swapped in a prisoner exchange and he wound up in New York, which was the haven for loyalists during the war, and he eventually went to England.

RUBENSTEIN: So, the war's going on and there are efforts, though, by the patriots to go after some loyalists other than putting 'em in jail.

Did they tar and feather them, did they kill some of 'em?

BRANDS: In some cases they tried to persuade them, "Talk them into joining our side.

After all, we're gonna win, we're in the right you should come join us."

Requisitions were made and then when the requisitions weren't honored, then property was simply seized.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

Now you're pointing out in your book that major cities in the United States were at one point or another occupied by the British and controlled by them.

Boston was, Philadelphia was, New York was.

So if the British are controlling these big cities, did they go hunt out the patriots and try to convert them or they just kind of put 'em in jail?

What did they do to citizens who weren't combat people?

BRANDS: The British realized that to win the war, they would have to destroy Washington's army, so they chased Washington around.

They would try to deprive him of support, provisions, and the like but they never engaged in anything like the, the destructive campaign of, say, William Sherman through the South.

BRANDS: They, perhaps it was simple humanity that prevented that, but they also would've realized that they, it would've been politically counterproductive.

And this was a problem that both the patriot side, Washington, and General Howe, the British side, had.

You can push those, that 1/3 of people in the middle only so far because if you push them too far, then they go over to the other side.

RUBENSTEIN: Now you are patriots, they're loyalists, and there's those in between, but there's also people who are on both sides at the same time more or less.

Benedict Arnold being a classic example.

Can you explain how Benedict Arnold came from being a patriot general to being a loyalist general?

BRANDS: Arnold was an enthusiast of the patriot side at the beginning of the war.

RUBENSTEIN: What was he before he went into the war?

Was he a... BRANDS: He had been a merchant.

And then he, he joined the, the patriot army, the Continental Army and it turned out that he had a gift for military command.

And Benedict Arnold was the most effective of George Washington's subordinates.

He was the best battlefield commander he had.

And Washington praised him to the skies, praised him to the Congress, tried to get Congress to promote him.

But one of the reasons that Arnold got fed up with the patriot side was the political aspect of it.

BRANDS: And the Continental Congress was really just this confederation.

I mean, they'll eventually be called the Confederation Congress.

But there was no central authority and so the states were very jealous to make sure that no one state got more generals than the other states did.

And Benedict Arnold fell afoul of this.

And he had been badly wounded in the service of his country, as he saw it, and he was quite under appreciated.

And then he fell in love with a woman who was an ardent loyalist, and she put him in contact with John André who was, who would... Who would become his British handler.

And it allowed Arnold to hear the British side from British lips.

RUBENSTEIN: So his job at one point was running or being in charge of West Point, which was not a military academy so much, but it was a part of, of a, a strategic place.

BRANDS: It was a very strategic place.

It was this fortress... RUBENSTEIN: So he's... BRANDS: That overlooks the Hudson River.

And the Hudson River was really central to British strategy because if they could control the length of the Hudson River all the way up Lake Champlain into Canada, they could cut New England off from the rest of the colonies.

RUBENSTEIN: So one of his messages to one of his British handlers is intercepted.

Is that?

BRANDS: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And so somebody realizes this and goes to George Washington and says, "Guess what?

Benedict Arnold is Benedict Arnold."

(crowd laughs).

BRANDS: Right, yes.

And Washington was thunderstruck because this man had such promise and he seemed to be such a good man.

But Washington was decisive, except in this case he was too slow, and, um, Arnold, Arnold got away.

And it would have been bad enough if Arnold had simply retired from the Continental Army, but then... Well, he still wanted to fight and so he was made an officer in the British army, and he waged war almost as effectively on behalf of the British as he had on behalf of the American patriots.

RUBENSTEIN: Ultimately, the French decide to come in and support the Americans.

Who persuaded the French to come in and support the Americans?

BRANDS: Benjamin Franklin was the diplomat in charge of conducting the negotiations and conducting the persuasion.

But as persuasive as Franklin was, it was really conditions on the ground that caused the French to take up arms on behalf of the Americans.

The, the French were still bitter and resentful about the outcome of the French and Indian War, the Seven Years' War.

And that was the really the last, the, the fourth of a series, a long series of wars going back to the 17th century.

So they were always of a mind that they would be happy to take on Britain.

The only question was, did the Americans have a chance to win?

The worst thing that can happen for the French is if they declared recognition of American independence and declared war on Britain on the American side for the Americans to say, "Ah, you know what?

That's enough.

We'll, we'll make a, a side deal."

Because the French were rebuilding their army and their navy and they thought that it would be a year or two away before they would be ready really to resume a regular war against Britain.

And so if British realized that the French might come in, then they would be tempted to offer the Americans a deal because the British didn't wanna take on the French here.

So there was a very delicate balancing act.

RUBENSTEIN: But the French wanted to make sure that the Americans had a chance of winning... BRANDS: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: Before they supported the Americans?

BRANDS: Yeah.

And so they wait till a big victory for the Americans.

RUBENSTEIN: All right, so ultimately, they provide, uh, armaments and also they send over their navy?

BRANDS: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: But their navy said, "We only have a limited amount of time so don't count on us for being there too long."

Right?

BRANDS: Yeah.

So once the French come into the war, they have their own interests.

One of their interests is to keep the British occupied with the Americans.

And so it did not serve French interests for the Americans to win the war too quickly.

Because a peace between America and Britain would mean that Britain was now free to take France on directly.

Now, in fact, written into the treaty was a deal that neither one would negotiate a separate peace.

So they're gonna make peace together but everybody understood that that was something of an elastic clause.

So the French were actually more interested in what was happening in the West Indies than what was happening in North America.

And this is why the French admiral who would have the ships that were gonna be the decisive factor of the Battle of Yorktown, he had to visit the West Indies first and make sure everything was okay there.

RUBENSTEIN: And people often forget that in the Caribbean for the French islands there and the British islands, they were more commercially valuable to the British and the French than, than our colonies 'cause they produced rum and other kinds of things, sugar and... BRANDS: Exactly.

This was a mercantilist age and there was a lot to be said for their contribution to a balance of payments.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so ultimately the French navy comes up from the West Indies and they coordinate a bit with George Washington.

He comes down from New York and he's heading south and ultimately at Yorktown, they kind of corner the British.

Is that right?

BRANDS: That's right.

So it's worth remembering that there were as many French troops at...

This is troops, not just ships, troops at Yorktown as there were American troops.

So there was this Franco-American army that was coming down and the key was the French ships.

Because for the entire war, the British had the decisive advantage of they couldn't be cornered as long as they had their back to the sea because the ships would come along, and pick them up, and away they'd go.

This happened in the first siege of the war of Boston.

So the British had been surrounded on land at Boston but they decided to leave and so the ships them, away they go to New York.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so ultimately, um, the French block the British from exiting and the British navy can't get into help the people who are there, the British soldiers.

Washington's up there with his troops, so Cornwallis decides to surrender.

BRANDS: He agreed to surrender his army and the troops marched out of Yorktown, so the key is that this army has been captured and that wasn't the entire of the British force in North America.

The British certainly had the wherewithal to continue the war if the British had wanted to do so.

But the key result of the Battle of Yorktown was to persuade British political opinion that the war has become a losing effort.

BRANDS: There was a change of ministry in London and the new government says, "Okay, we're gonna liquidate this problem."

RUBENSTEIN: All right, so this happens in 1781.

BRANDS: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: That's when Yorktown is.

BRANDS: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: The treaty isn't signed, the Treaty of Paris, until 1783 so what were they doing for the ensuing two years?

BRANDS: Well, so very much this had to do with the fact that the French weren't finished.

And the French weren't finished because the Spanish weren't finished.

Now, the United States originally had tried to get a treaty of alliance with Spain, but the Spanish didn't wanna ally directly with the Americans, so but they did ally with the French.

So the United States had said, "We will not end the war until the French are ready to end the war."

The French had said to the Spanish, "We, the French, will not end the war until Spain wants to end the war."

And Spain wanted to get back Gibraltar, which it had lost early in the 18th century.

And it turned out to be a vain hope they fought and fought, they couldn't do it.

Until finally, until finally Benjamin Franklin said, "Enough is enough."

And Franklin starts to go around behind the backs of the French to negotiate with the British.

So Franklin understood that his job was to make the best deal for the United States.

And as long as the United States needed French support, he was willing to develop favor of the French.

But when the United States no longer needed French support, they said, "Okay, let's talk to the British."

RUBENSTEIN: But the French thought that the agreement couldn't be reached with the British until the French agreed to it, is that right?

BRANDS: That's what it said on paper.

But the French were in the position where if the Americans did decide to make a separate peace, but what the French finally did was they used the American desire for peace and Franklin's so more kind of secret meetings with a British Emissary and told the Spanish, "If you guys don't agree to give up, then the Americans are gonna cut a separate deal and we're gonna have to cut you off."

And so there was negotiating this three or four way.

RUBENSTEIN: But Benjamin Franklin was he trusted at the advanced age of 70 to actually be the negotiator or do they send over other people?

BRANDS: Franklin was trusted by the French.

He was trusted by the British, but he wasn't trusted by the Americans.

So the Americans sent over John Adams and John Jay.

Basically they keep an eye on Franklin.

And Jay was suspicious of Franklin for having, as Jay thought, fallen under the spell of the French.

Franklin had had the audacity to learn French, and to develop French friends, and to become very comfortable in Paris.

John Adams was suspicious of Franklin because, and for the same reason he was suspicious of George Washington, he thought that Franklin and Washington were gonna get all the credit for winning the war, whereas he wasn't gonna get the credit to which he was entitled.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so we have the Treaty of Paris 1783.

Uh, what happened to the loyalists?

Once the, the war's over, do the people who were loyal to the British did they say, "Well, okay, we lost now we'll just go about our business?"

Or did they have to leave the country?

BRANDS: A great many of them felt that they needed to leave the country.

Those who were at all visible were, did or would have their property confiscated.

There weren't any really obvious and numerous score settlings, so there was no bloodbath at the end of the American Revolution the way there was, say, during and toward the end of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution.

And this is one of the reasons that the American Revolution seems to be less kind of revolutionary than some of these other revolutions because there's not a lot of blood flowing.

But the reason, a, a principal reason is that the loyalists had a place to go.

The...

I mean, there were some of the emigres from France, but in those revolutions that are contained within a single country, often there's no place for the losers to go.

RUBENSTEIN: So, Benedict Arnold, he, he wound up back in London?

BRANDS: Yes.

And I would, I should say so the evacuation that followed the signing of the, the Treaty of Paris, it numbered anywhere from 50 to 100,000 and this is a huge number.

The loyalists were looking for way to get out.

And the British were pretty good about finding room for them on ships that would take, go off to Canada primarily, to the West Indies, also to England.

RUBENSTEIN: Now what about if a slave, um, was basically loyal to the British and fought with the British, more or less, they were theoretically supposed to be freed by the British?

BRANDS: Not quite.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

BRANDS: The slave had to be a slave of a patriot master.

So a slave of a loyalists master, no, the offer wasn't there.

So it was the governor of Virginia who first made the offer.

And he said to...

Essentially, it was the, the same thing as Ben, as Abr... Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Only the slaves, only enslaved peoples of those in rebellion against the king.

RUBENSTEIN: All right, those who were freed and who were, um, subject to the, uh, to being freed, uh, where did they go?

Did they stay free, or they go to Canada?

Where did they go?

BRANDS: Most of them apparently got out.

Most of 'em went to Canada.

Although there was a moment of great trepidation because the terms of the Treaty of Paris said that both sides would make an effort to restore property taken during the war.

And the term property was used and Franklin chose the term property to be deliberately ambiguous.

Because okay if the patriots seized a house, or a farm, or a warehouse of a loyalist, then that's supposed to go back to his previous owner.

It didn't say specifically what would happen to the slaves, but slaves are understood to be property.

But the British ignored that part of the treaty.

And they said to all those slaves, "Okay, hop on the ships and away we go."

RUBENSTEIN: Now supposed the war had gone the other way?

Um, Benjamin Franklin, I guess, had famously said, "We're gonna, when we're signing the Declaration Independence, we have to, uh, hang together or we'll hang separately."

Meaning they, they were probably gonna be, uh, hung for what they had done in terms of, um, uh, starting the war.

Um, what do you think would've happened?

Would the British have hung the revolutionary, um, leaders and the, some of the patriot leaders?

BRANDS: The penalty on the law books for treason, which is what the American patriots are involved in, was worse than being hanged.

I mean, you were hanged until you were not quite dead, then you were cut down, and then you were disemboweled, and molten lead was poured in, and then you were drawn and quartered.

So it was really supposed to be a scary penalty.

Would they have done that?

Would they have hanged them?

I doubt it.

In part because there were just too many of them.

You can't hang 15,000 people.

Uh, this is not the days of the Roman Empire with a Spartacus rebellion or something like that.

What would have happened to George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams?

I don't know, it's hard to say.

It, but the fact that you couldn't say it was one of the reasons that people like Washington and Franklin fought as hard as they did.

Having made that choice, they knew there was no going back for them.

RUBENSTEIN: I wanna thank you for a very a interesting conversation, Professor Brands, thank you.

BRANDS: My pleasure.

(applause) (music plays through credits) ♪ ♪