General Howe Hits CTRL+Z

Kevin: Today is the 4th of July and America's 250th birthday. The usual way to mark the day is a celebration of how the country began, so a retelling of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and usually something about fireworks. But this is an alternate history podcast. So what's the alternate history? Well, spoiler alert, America loses the Revolutionary War. Today we're going to celebrate America by spending an entire episode talking about. What happens if it never exists? And trust me, the ripple effects are numerous. It all comes down to one afternoon in Brooklyn, New York. A single pause by a British general is the reason our nation celebrates its 250th birthday. Let's go back to that afternoon. August twenty seventh, seventeen seventy six. The high ground above Brooklyn, New York. British and Hessian troops under General William Howe have just smashed the forward line. of George Washington's Continental Army, and they chase the survivors back into a ring of dirt and log fortifications on Brooklyn Heights. Behind them sit 9,000 exhausted American soldiers, their backs to the East River, wide and cold, with no bridge and no boats. Howe's officers can see it. One more push and the whole trapped force is his. Major General John Vaughan, leading the Grenadiers out front, Sends word that he can take it with barely a scratch. George Washington himself is inside that ring, having crossed over that morning to watch a battle he's losing. This is the perfect opportunity to end the rebellion in one fell swoop. General Howe says no. He remembers Bunker Hill 14 months earlier, where dug-in Americans killed more than a thousand of his soldiers before he finally took the summit. He decides that he can take this much more cheaply with siege lines instead of a charge. He tells his furious officers that the troops have done enough for one day, and he orders them to stand down. Two nights later, Washington ferries his entire army across to Manhattan and escapes. The war goes on for seven more years and the United States is born. But what if Howe listens to Vaughn? What if, on that ridge, he lets the Grenadiers go. Takes the fortifications, and captures George Washington and the Army of the Revolution in a single afternoon. Let's hit Control-Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where we take the biggest decisions in history and ask, what happens if they go the other way? Not random what-ifs, real 50-50 calls with alternatives that were actually on the table. One decision where we hit Control Z, try it the other way, and see what changes. In the summer of 1776, the whole American rebellion fit on one stretch of ground in Brooklyn. Roughly 9,000 soldiers, one commander, and nobody behind them. Kill or capture that army, and there's nobody left to carry the revolution. There's no second force waiting in another colony. There's no backup general. These men were the war. The commander was George Washington, and he'd made a bad bet. He had about 19,000 troops to defend New York, most of them farmers and shopkeepers who had never seen combat, and he couldn't tell where the British would land. So he split them up and put a large share on Long Island, guessing wrong. The man coming for him didn't want the job. William Howe was a British general who'd also served in Parliament, and while running for his seat two years earlier, he promised the voters back home he would never fight the Americans. Then King George gave him the command, and a general does not refuse his king. Howe and his brother Richard, the admiral in charge of the fleet, both belonged to the party in London that thought this whole war was a mistake. Their orders were strange because their bosses were divided, beat the rebels, and also offer them a pardon. Howe brought the largest invasion force in British history. Around thirty two thousand soldiers carried on hundreds of ships. landed near New York that summer. A soldier watching from the American side said the masts on the water looked like a forest. The fight came on august twenty seventh, and Howe won it in an afternoon. He found a road at the edge of Washington's line that the Americans had barely guarded, so he sent thousands of men through it overnight and hit the rebels from behind at dawn, while a second force pinned them from the front. The American line came apart. A few hundred soldiers from Maryland Threw themselves at the British again and again to hold them off, and sadly most of them died doing it, but they bought enough time for the rest to escape. What was left of Washington's army fell back into a ring of trenches on Brooklyn Heights, with the East River at their backs and no boats at their disposal. Now this is the moment. Washington is trapped, his army is beaten, cornered against deep water, and out of room. Howe's officers want to storm the trenches and finish the war that night. And Howe, thinking about a battle a year earlier where Heat sent men uphill into dug in Americans and watched a thousand of them fall, says no. He'll do it slowly and safely. He'll starve them out and dig his way in. But he never gets the chance. A storm rolls in and keeps the British ships out of the river. Fog covers the water. And over one night, George Washington ferries his entire army across to Manhattan and slips away. The rebellion survives, the war grinds on for seven more years, and America ultimately wins its independence. Now this is where we hit Control Z. This time, Howe listens to the officer at the front, a general again named John Vaughn, who's begging to attack and swears he can take the trenches with almost no losses. Howe gives the order. His men go up the slope before dark and break through, and the army trapped inside is either killed or captured. Washington had crossed the river that morning to watch the battle, and now British soldiers pull the commander of the revolution out of the wreckage alive. New York falls that night, and in a single afternoon, the rebellion loses its army and its leader. Down in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress has just declared independence and But now it has no army to defend it. Word reaches France, whose king had been quietly funneling gunpowder and money to the rebels while he waited to see if they could actually win. His answer just arrived, so France walks away. The Howe brothers finally get to be the peacemakers they came to be. A few weeks earlier, three American leaders, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge, had met with Admiral Richard Howe and refused his terms, because all he offered was a royal pardon. And the Americans wanted their independence recognized. But now the Americans have nothing left to bargain with. The men in Congress who'd wanted a deal all along get their way. So Congress dissolves, the royal governors come back, and the colonies go back to being colonies. The Declaration of Independence becomes a page with fifty-six signatures and no country beneath it. The British do hang two men. Now a year before, A British general named Thomas Gage had offered a pardon to every rebel in Massachusetts except two ringleaders he wanted punished, Sam Adams and John Hancock. Hancock had gone on to decide to stop, stop, stop, stop. Hancock had gone on to sign the declaration first, his name bigger than anyone else's, as head of the Congress. Both men go to the gallows for treason. Now, George Washington, they spare. Because a dead Washington becomes a martyr, but a living one who lost becomes a warning. So they send him home to Virginia. Washington lives out his life on his farm at Mount Vernon. Remembered, sadly, by nobody. The United States of America lasted a single summer. Something has to grow where the United States would have been. The model already exists to the north in the colonies that became Canada. Canada never fought for its freedom. It negotiated over 90 years. In 1837, colonists in the northern provinces rose up demanding control of their own government, and the British troops put them down pretty quickly. What London did next, though, mattered more than that revolt. Rather than hang the leaders and punish the rebels, the government sent a nobleman, Lord Durham, to study what had gone wrong. Durham's report in eighteen thirty nine warned Parliament to hand these colonists real authority over their own affairs before they turned into a second America. By eighteen forty eight, the northern provinces ran their own local government while Britain kept the military and foreign policy. In eighteen sixty seven, They joined into one self governing country under the king, the Dominion of Canada. Full legal independence followed way later in nineteen thirty one, without a single battle. In this timeline, the thirteen colonies to the south will travel that same road, but faster, because they hold more people and more money than the rest of British America combined. They win their own assemblies, and then self rule and then dominion status decades ahead of Canada. But there's no president and there's no constitution. A governor arrives from London to represent the king, a local parliament handles everything else, and independence never enters back into the conversation. The bigger change here is size. The 13 colonies started small, about 2.5 million people in 1776 versus 8 million in the home country. But the American population doubled every 25 years while Britons barely moved. Benjamin Franklin had run the numbers decades earlier and predicted that one day more of the king's subjects would live in America than in England. Well, that day arrives. By the middle of the 1800s, the richest and most crowded part of the British Empire sits on the far side of the Atlantic. The capital stays in London, but the weight of the empire moves to the west. The enslaved people of the American South stay in chains far longer here. The real United States ended slavery with a civil war and 750,000 people dead. British America settles the question in Parliament instead. The members there had faced it once before. In the real timeline, in 1833, Parliament outlawed slavery across the entire British Empire. That didn't take a war. The government passed a law and freed roughly 800,000 enslaved people. Then it paid those former owners to accept it. Twenty million pounds, which is close to forty percent of the government's budget for the year, went to the men who had owned human beings as the price of their cooperation. The richest slaveholders in the empire, the sugar planters of the Caribbean, fought the law for years and then took the money, and not one of those islands rebelled. Now the American South is more difficult, and that's because of cotton. By the 1850s, Southern plantations grew most of the cotton feeding British factories. The largest industry the country had. Freeing the South means cutting off the raw material that keeps those mills running. So London stalls. A government protecting its own economy is in no hurry to wreck it. Freedom does reach the American South eventually because the abolitionists in Britain are relentless and they refuse to quit. It comes late, a generation behind the Caribbean. When it comes, it takes the same form it took everywhere else in the empire. Parliament passes a law, the owners get paid, the planters sign. A slaveholder in Virginia can rage about it, but he has no vote in London to block it, and no country of his own to escape into. So he takes his money and lets his people go. Slavery in North America dies by act of law years before it died in our world, and nobody fires a shot. One afternoon in Brooklyn saves the life of a French king who never set foot in America. France paid for the American Revolution. King Louis XVI wanted revenge on Britain for beating him in a war a few years earlier, so he poured money into the rebels, quietly at first, and then in the open. By the end, his treasury had spent around 1.3 billion livres on the American cause. On top of debts the crown could already barely carry. The interest alone swallowed much of what the country collected in taxes. And by seventeen eighty nine, Louis was broke, and a bankrupt king had one move left. He summoned an assembly of the whole nation, something no French ruler had done in one hundred and seventy five years, and he did it to beg for new taxes. But the assembly turned on him instead. It became the French Revolution. And four years later, King Louis knelt under a guillotine in front of a Paris crowd. Now take the American war out of his reign, and Louis keeps his 1.3 billion livres. Money gets tight, but it never runs out, and he never has to call that assembly. So 1789 passes like any other year, and no crowd storms the Bastille, no blade falls. Louis XVI grows old and dies in his bed like a king. Napoleon Bonaparte is another interesting part of this because he owes his whole career to that revolution. It destroyed the old French army and threw the officer ranks open to talent, and a poor artilleryman from Corsica had enough of it to conquer a continent. With the old order still standing, a Corsican nobody has nowhere to climb. So Napoleon lives and dies a minor soldier, and history likely never records his name. His absence redraws America a second time. He owned the Louisiana Territory, a region covering the entire middle of the continent, and in 1803 he sold it to the United States for cash to fund his wars. That sale needed a Napoleon short on money and a buyer hungry for land, and this timeline has neither. So Louisiana stays French. British America spreads west from the coast until it runs into French ground at the Mississippi River, and then it stops. The change reaches all the way to South America through a piece of paper with Britain's fingerprints all over it. In 1823, President James Monroe told the nations of Europe to stay out of the Western Hemisphere and start no new colonies there. American school children learned this as the Monroe Doctrine, the day that their country fenced off its half of the globe. Monroe had no Navy that could actually enforce any of that. The warning really worked because Britain wanted it to work. The British Foreign Secretary George Canning had asked Monroe to issue it jointly. Merchants in London wanted the trade of the new South American markets and the Royal Navy meant to keep rival Europeans out regardless. But with the United States not in existence, Britain issues the same warning under its own name and enforces it with its own fleet. South America's freedom in real history came from the same man this timeline erased. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and dragged its king off to a French prison, that empire's authority in the Americas collapsed. Local leaders like Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin raised armies in the chaos and built independent nations out of the wreckage. Keep the Spanish king secure on his throne, and his empire stays whole. Madrid rules its American colonies for generations to come. The map Of the New World settles into a few blocks. Spain and Portugal keep the south, Britain owns the north, and the Royal Navy patrols the waters in between. The Great Wars of the 20th century grew out of a 19th century Europe that had really been built by Napoleon. Without him, that continent stays surprisingly quiet. Now let's start with Germany, which did not exist as a single country until 1871. A Prussian statesman named Otto von Bismarck assembled it out of a patchwork of smaller kingdoms, and he did it through war. In 1870, he provoked France into a fight and crushed it. And then he used the victory to bind the German states into one empire. Now the French ruler he beat was Napoleon III, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who had climbed to the throne on his famous uncle's name. In this timeline, since that uncle never rose, the nephew is a private citizen, so there's no French emperor to march on Prussia in 1870. Bismarck doesn't get his war, so he doesn't get his empire. The German states remain a loose collection of kingdoms, with Prussia the strongest, but standing alone. A divided Germany keeps the peace across the next century. Now World War I happened because Europe split into two armed camps, each side terrified of a big aggressive Germany sitting in the middle of the continent. Take that giant away, and that fear goes with it. France and Russia have no powerful enemy on their border to unite against. So these alliances don't form. When a gunman shoots an Austrian archduke in the city of Sarajevo in 1914, it stays a local Balkan region killing, and the great powers don't do anything about it. Now, after World War I, the peace treaty signed at Versailles in 1919 left Germany humiliated and broke, and a failed painter named Adolf Hitler rode that anger into power 14 years later. With no war to lose, there's no treaty to sign, and Hitler Stays a nobody just shouting in beer halls. World War II, with its 60 million people dead, never arrives. And an interesting part here is that Russia also holds together. Tsar Nicholas II lost his throne in 1917, primarily because World War I had wrecked his army and left his cities starving. If you keep Russia out of that war, Nicholas keeps his crown. And a revolutionary named Lenin grows old in exile, while the Soviet Union remains an idea. But not everything falls apart. The Industrial Revolution was already running in Britain well before 1776, powered by coal and steam, and it's gonna roll forward no matter who governs the American colonies. British engineers build the railways and they lay the telegraph lines. India stays under a company's control, won decades earlier by an officer named Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassi in 1757. And it hardened into the colony known as the Raj. And Australia is a strange one, because keeping America British erases it. For decades, Britain had shipped its convicts across the ocean to the American colonies, around 50,000 of them, to empty its overcrowded prisons. The revolution ended that, and Britain went looking for a new place to send its criminals. It found one on a coast a navigator named James Cook had charted in 1770. If you keep the American colonies British and the convicts keep crossing the Atlantic, there's no fleet of prisoners that sail for that Australian shore in 1787. So the country we call Australia is never founded in the same way that we know it today. Now let's come to the present. This is the year 2026. North America is British. The land that would have become the United States governs itself as a dominion under the crown, much like Canada, with its own parliament and a governor sent from London. Its people speak English and pledge loyalty to a monarch across the sea. No one there has ever set off fireworks on the fourth of July. The biggest change is invisible because the biggest change is an absence. American power ran the twentieth century in our world. It decided two world wars, it printed the money every other nation saved, it built the rockets that reached the moon, and it made the films that taught the planet how to picture itself. And none of that exists here. The wars never happened, and the country that would have won them stayed a set of British provinces. Britain comes nearer than any nation in our history to ruling the world alone, holding North America outright. And steering the rest of the hemisphere with its banks and warships. The map of 2026 is older, calmer, and much more British than anything we would know. George Washington dies at Mount Vernon in 1799, right on schedule. In our history, that year ends the life of the father of our nation. In this one, it ends the life of a Virginia farmer who lost his war and faded from memory. He held the entire country in his hands until one afternoon. When the army broke, every future built on it died with them. Every 4th of July, America tells the same story about itself, one built on nerve, on bravery, and the yearning for freedom from oppression. Washington crossing the Delaware, the Signers in Philadelphia pledging their lives and fortunes to one another. A ragged army who wanted that freedom badly enough that they defeated the most powerful empire in the world. It's an inspiring story, but it's not completely accurate. The country survived its worst day, and no amount of American bravery would have mattered if the British general in front of them had made the other choice. They lived, and by extension, the United States was born because he hesitated. William Howe stood one order away from ending the revolution, and instead, he pulled back. A year earlier, he had watched his soldiers climb a hill outside Boston right into American guns. And he had counted the bodies afterward, more than a thousand of them. He would not do that again. So he waited and dug in. And a storm and a fog carried George Washington across the water while the British slept. The United States exists because of that one decision. So does the Constitution. So does the country's rise into the strongest power on earth, and the century it spent remaking the world in its image. All of it. Needed the army on that hill to survive one night in August of 1776. It survived because the one man who could have destroyed it chose to spare a few hundred of his own soldiers instead. We hand the credit for this country to the men who founded it: Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and deservedly so. But the person perhaps most responsible for there being a United States at all. wasn't an American at all. He was a British general choosing to hold off on an easy victory in order to save the lives of the men he led into battle. Happy birthday America! Let's not forget to pour one out for General Howe on this Independence Day. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It helps other people find the show and allows me to understand whether people actually enjoy this. Until next time. I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Control Z with me.