Conservatism Counts the Cost [Second Article]

The Digital Age – its Smartphones, social media, websites, talk radio, and Fox News – relentlessly demands attention to the moment, impulsive reaction, and convenience.  As conservatives, though, we emerged from an older, more stable tradition of prudent thought, attention to history, and deliberate actions.  After explaining some major strands in conservatism last month, this column recalls the American Revolution, especially the summer of 1776, when orchestrated British assaults devastated impulsive colonial reaction.

Our Founding deserves being set in its context, an essential habit for historians and conservatives.  Tensions between the American colonies and Great Britain slowly built after the British expelled the French from North America in 1763, which trained young George Washington and increased the national debt for the Mother Country.  Parliament thought taxing colonists for their protection against the French and Indians to be fair.  Most Americans favored the Whigs’ view, stemming from the Glorious Revolution of 1688: “No taxation without representation.”  Regarding themselves as fully English, the colonists objected, not to taxation, but to taxes imposed without colonists sitting in Parliament.  

That body, steadfastly scorning colonists as Englishmen, passed and rescinded various measures, until taxing tea resulted in the Boston Tea Party (1773), which Parliament punished by closing that port to seaborne commerce.  In March 1775, Patrick Henry’s speech to the Virginia House of Burgesses denounced British presumption: 

Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The 

war is inevitable and let it come! […] Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be 

purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! — I know 

not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!   

In April, General Howe sent hundreds of troops to Lexington and Concord to confiscate gun powder and to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock.  Thanks to Paul Revere, thousands of colonists converged along the retreat route to Boston, devastating those troops and then encircling Boston.  In June, Howe’s reinforcements attacked entrenched colonists on Breed’s Hill (not Bunker Hill), but two waves of superb infantry were mowed down.  The third wave expelled the Americans, who had depleted their gunpowder.  

Colonial hopes rose even higher, thanks to the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775.  During the winter of 1775-76, resourceful Henry Knox dragged over 70 cannons from Ticonderoga to Boston, where Washington placed them on Dorchester Heights, thus forcing the British army to evacuate that port.  These apparent victories led to forgetting a cardinal virtue: prudence.  Lord Germain retaliated with a fleet twice the size of the Spanish Armada of 1588 and an army of 30,000 veteran troops, including ferocious Hessian mercenaries.  George Washington correctly inferred an attack at New York City, but his inexperience almost lost the war as the British encircled him by land and sea.

Coincidentally, as the Second Continental Congress agreed on independence on July 2, 1776, the armada began disembarking thousands of troops on Long Island.  On July 4, Congress approved the Declaration in Philadelphia as the last British troops landed.  Although we celebrate the victorious Revolution, American colonists were about to learn over the next seven years what conservative Richard Weaver observed in the 1950s: “Ideas have consequences.”    The Declaration’s stirring close – “We pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” – came at high cost: By 1783, thousands died, lost their homes, and severed friendships forever. 

By August, George Washington recognized the impossibility of defending New York City, but the ill-informed Congress ordered otherwise.  With complete control of the waters, General Howe placed his troops to trap the Americans on Long Island.  His August 27 attack could have finished the annihilation by evening, but he delayed.  During the night of August 29, 9,000 Americans slipped across the mile-wide East River on many small boats.  They were not finished at dawn, but heavy fog concealed their escape.  Washington attributed the fog to Providence and recognized that amateur militia assembled hastily did not defeat seasoned professionals.  The Battle of Long Island crushed the optimism built at Boston.  Contra to colonial populism, the cost of freedom was no longer quick and easy.  

In September, an American spy paid freedom’s price.  Before the British hanged Nathan Hale, he rephrased a line from Washington’s favorite drama Cato: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”  The odds for American victory worsened as Washington moved westward, losing deserters.  The Americans lost at White Plains on October 28.  American troops surrendered Fort Washington on November 16.  In December Banister Tarleton, later to scourge South Carolina, captured General Charles Lee, Washington’s second-in-command at a tavern.  Even more dismaying, most enlistments would expire on December 31.

The demoralizing 1776 ends astonishingly.  On December 26, Washington’s troops cross the Delaware River, surprising and capturing 900 Hessians at the Battle of Trenton, followed two days later by a second victory at the Battle of Princeton.  Five more years of war remain.  The Americans lose more battles than they win until Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown in October 1781. 

John Adams revered morality, a traditional conservative cornerstone, from his studying the classics, especially the Cardinal Virtues.  George Washington incarnated them: courage, prudence, temperance, and justice.  Sir Winston Churchill praised him for simply holding his army together.  By not quitting, the colonists cost England too much money and too many deaths as the war expanded into a world war.    

If our politics favors impulse and personality over character, we betray Washington, Adams, Patrick Henry, and Nathan Hale.  Conservatism, a way of life, prudently honors Edmund Burke’s pact among the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.  We are those unborn whom our Founders could not see.  Revolutionary patriots weighed the cost and bought freedom with their blood and treasure.  Let us emulate their character by thinking, speaking, and acting deliberately from principles rather than from the Digital Age’s impulses. 

Recommended reading

Ellis, Joseph J.  Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence.   Knopf, 2013.

Fischer, David Hackett.  Paul Revere's Ride.  Oxford, 1995. 

Ketchum, Richard M.  Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill.  Holt, 2014.

Maier, Pauline.  American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.  Knopf, 1997. 

McCullough, David.  1776. Simon & Schuster, 2005. 

Spalding, Matthew.  The Making of the American Mind. Encounter, 2025.

Wood, Gordon.  The American Revolution.  Modern Library, 2003.

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