War and Myth II

Every school child in America accepts the myth that we fought the American Revolution to be free and untaxed. Well, we did fight it to be untaxed. Americans were absolutely outraged when England suggested that we contribute our share to pay for the armies and ships Britain sent to this continent to defend us against the French and their Indian allies.
We immediately turned to our old enemy, France (as the French very well knew we would), for help in not paying our taxes to England. (Poetic justice was served when we broke our treaty with France and left her, bankrupt and ripe for her own rather ghastly revolution, to fight England alone—while we made a separate peace on excellent terms.)
But taxes weren’t really the major issue. Certainly not for the New Englanders who basically started the whole thing. The completely non-mythological question was: who will control the Trade Routes To China? That question bedeviled Europeans ever since the Pope ran his Line of Demarcation across the hemisphere back in the 1490s.
The British tried to block us from the Pacific by turning the eastern Mississippi Valley over to Quebec in 1767. (That one act alone made war inevitable.) The Spanish could see it coming and began to settle Northern California with urgency the same decade.
But we fought. We got everybody who hated England to fight. France and Spain tried to invade England herself—only bad winds stopped them. Gibraltar was besieged for years. The League of Armed Neutrality made life miserable for England all over the globe—Holland, Prussia, Sweden and Russia. England quickly found herself up to her naval in alligators.
Finally the British quit—having lost another army to Washington and his French troops, artillery, and fleet (remember Lieutenant General, Commander in Chief of His Catholic Majesty’s Armed Forces in the New World?). They gave us most of what we wanted and backed out of the war.
(The one major war aim we failed to achieve was Canada. We had invaded in 1775—you can still see American cannon balls in old Quebec. We would invade again in 1812, but we would never succeed in getting it.)
But as soon as the British blockade of Boston harbor was lifted in 1783, the American ship, Star of India, set sail for China. By 1790, an American captain was plying the west coast of Spanish/British/Russian America identifying which ports we would need to control the Pacific. As we achieved our fiscal aims, we kept teaching the myths to our kids.
(We have the ports we identified today—San Diego and San Francisco , and Seattle (all obtained in the 1840s)—as a result of a successful war in which we stripped Mexico of half its territory and a near war with Britain that cost her half the Oregon territory. Two obviously victorious wars for us—when you think of all the resources in the territories involved and how much money having ports on the Pacific has made us, very victorious indeed.)
Those wars—the Revolution, 1812 (which got us everything we were promised in1783 but the British reneged on), the Mexican War and the dispute over Oregon were victorious wars or near wars indeed. Each made us money. Each is shrouded in myth.
Most of our 19th Century wars cost a relatively minimal investment in men, materiel and money—and won us almost immediately a substantial profit.
(In the Civil War we invested risked and lost much more. It was a unique war—issues of future growth and national policy failed to be settled any other way than with “blood and iron”. It caused real damage—but in the end we made more than it cost us. It too has to be rated as a won war.)
We have become so enamored of our own mythology—“No taxation without representation”, “free the impressed seamen”, “remember the Alamo”—in which pro-slavery Texans fought fiercely to overturn the Mexican constitution and make Texas a slave state—“Fifty-four forty or fight” and “His truth is Marching on”—that we have forgotten how to evaluate war in any rational way.
That has hurt us in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has made the question of whether or not we “won” in either case almost completely meaningless. Like the people who watched the value of their 401Ks plummet like a rock, we may well have to pay for that failure to see clearly.
More tomorrow on the myths that blinker us.