As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at the British general who coined the phrase “hearts and minds” as a military strategy. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors
One man had come to America to bring peace through negotiations. The other had come to impose peace through war. Two hundred fifty years ago this week, Lord Drummond, a Scottish noble acting as an unofficial peace emissary, and Henry Clinton, a high-ranking British general, met on a warship in New York Harbor. The surprise is how much they agreed upon. During their conversation, Clinton summed up his preferred strategy this way: “To gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.”
With that turn of phrase, a British general fighting to thwart the American Revolution articulated the doctrine that the nation born out of the struggle would later deploy itself in places such as Vietnam and Iraq: winning hearts and minds. Max Boot, in his book about the history of guerrilla warfare, credits Clinton with “the first recorded use of ‘hearts and minds’ in a counterinsurgency context.” No less of an authority than General David Petraeus has written that the phrase remains the “most succinct explanation for how to win a counterinsurgency.”
