Struggle for Sea Power : A Naval History of American Independence (9781782397403)

by Willis, Sam

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  A careful understanding of the British response to the Gaspee attack also highlights many problems with the wider British response to rebellion that ultimately led to revolution.

  The basic point was that the British government misunderstood the motivation for rebellion. For all the American moderation in their rebellion and the reasonableness of their requests, the American rebels were continually portrayed in Britain as mindless thugs, pirates, smugglers, law-breakers, anarchists – as an infestation of radicals that needed to be exterminated. There was no room for negotiation in London, and so the rebels’ actions condemned them even when those very actions had been deliberately chosen to convey a message of moderation. The highest-ranking British military officers, General Thomas Gage and his naval counterpart Admiral John Montagu, must share responsibility for this misinterpretation, but if one reads their correspondence, the role that Montagu played stands out.

  Montagu had arrived in 1771, when the rebellion was yet to reach crisis point, and his fear of rebellion served to realize his worst nightmares. He saw rebels in shadows and anarchy in well-meant demonstration; he turned his back when he should have opened his eyes and ears; he encouraged an iron fist when a kid glove was required. His letters back to the Admiralty were entirely devoid of any understanding and full of condemnation of American treachery and insurgency.15 The role of Montagu and other Royal Naval officers in propagating this belief is an unmistakable part of the British failure in America. It is a reminder that, when policing and administering distant colonies, especially in times of crisis, the subtle mind of an experienced diplomat was required, when in fact that role too often fell to the highest-ranking naval officer on station, regardless of his abilities in that field.

  To make matters worse, sea power was a particularly sensitive tentacle of empire and perhaps the most effective way to send a message directly to London. After all, this was not just the navy: it was the Royal Navy. The navy itself was big and impressive, but the idea of the navy was even bigger and even more impressive. The link between the monarch and his navy had existed from the time of Henry VIII, but in the 1770s it had grown particularly close thanks to the careful nurturing of that relationship by the Earl of Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty. To attack the Royal Navy was directly to provoke the king.

  The point about the Gaspee attack, therefore, was not just that British authority had eroded, but that it had eroded to the point that the Americans had burned a ship of the Royal Navy. That message got through loud and clear. In fact it worked so well that the Americans were about to discover just how very sensitive the British were about their navy.

  * * *

  No blame was attached to Dudingston, who was sent to a French spa to recover from his wounds while the British politicians stamped and cursed. Unable to see the burning of a British warship as anything other than piracy or treason, they decided to impose British authority, symbolically as well as in effect, by declaring that those responsible would be dragged 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to be tried in Britain. To identify those responsible, a Royal Commission was set up in Newport, the capital of the Rhode Island colony, and given extraordinary powers of investigation.16 An enormous sum of £500 was promised to anyone who could identify any of the rebels, and £1,000 to anyone who would betray the leaders and the man who shot Dudingston.17 This was the first time that British politicians in London had acted to punish any of the numerous examples of violence that had taken place against British maritime authority in North America.18

  The constitutional principle behind the inquiry – that the British were going to extradite the offenders – was widely despised in America.19 Appointed to a commission that was openly ridiculed, the Commissioners, who were all prominent men with personal interests in New England, ensured that it remained toothless and did everything in their power to irritate Montagu. When the Commissioners summoned him from Boston, he at first refused, but when he did arrive flying his admiral’s broad pennant, the fort on Goat Island summarily ignored his presence. Montagu was incensed.20 Realizing what was afoot, he understood that, in spite of the best intentions, nothing would ever come of the inquiry. He was quite right. The inquiry did not obtain sufficient evidence to apprehend a single suspect.21

  Meanwhile, false stories circulated concerning the summary powers of the Commission of Inquiry and Montagu’s intent to lay waste to Rhode Island.22 Eleven of the thirty-eight newspapers in colonial America had reported the Gaspee incident within weeks of it happening, and it became the subject of one of the most influential and bestselling pamphlets of the revolution. In Boston a little-known minister named John Allen used the Gaspee affair as a basis to launch an attack on greedy monarchs, corrupt judges and conspiracies – all key concerns in the subsequent ideological hype over independence. His sermon An Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty, or the Essential Rights of the Americans was reprinted seven times in four colonial cities and became one of the most popular pre-independence pamphlets of colonial British America. It was also the most widely read sermon and the most popular public address in the years before independence.23

  The story of the Gaspee affair thus became a cause célèbre, a flame in its own right to heat American blood. The burning pyre that had lit up the Rhode Island night now persisted through print, guiding Americans towards rebellion. Boston patriot Samuel Adams, who could see as clearly as anyone the significance of the burning of a British warship at that time and in that location, wrote six months after the attack, ‘Such an Event as this will assuredly go down to future Ages in the page of History’,24 but he never could have imagined the scale, depth and complexity of the story that page would tell.

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  The stringency of the measures taken against the Gaspee attackers was exactly mirrored in British policy towards America in the subsequent years, culminating in what became known in Britain as the ‘Coercive Acts’ but in America as the ‘Intolerable Acts’. The most significant legislation, the Boston Port Act of 31 March 1774, closed the port of Boston until the East India Company had been repaid for its tea lost in the Boston Tea Party, brought the Massachusetts government under direct control of the British government, and made the extradition of Americans to Britain for trial explicitly legal.

  This policy of aggressive coercion was the brainchild of the Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, who spoke in rousing terms quoting none other than Gustavus Adolphus, the famed Swedish warrior king: ‘My lads, you see these men. If you do not kill them, they will kill us.’25 Everyone in Parliament loved this rhetoric and newspapers soon joined in. Boston was a ‘nest of locusts’,26 and ‘a canker worm in the heart of America, a rotten limb which (if suffered to remain) will inevitably destroy the whole body of that extensive country’.27

  The only measured far-sighted thinkers were the Duke of Grafton, the previous prime minister and now Lord Privy Seal, and Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Dartmouth’s pacific tendencies were restricted by loyalty to his stepbrother, the prime minister Lord North, which meant that Grafton was the only man to make any detailed conciliatory proposal. His suggestion, for peace commissioners to be sent to America to settle grievances on the spot, was roundly ignored and eventually led to his resignation in 1775.28

  The policy of aggressive coercion was also assumed with the poor condition of the British economy in mind: matters were so bad that, as the embers of rebellion flared, the British actually reduced their naval budget.29 There wasn’t enough money for an overpowering campaign, but there was enough for a stinging slap in a single location – Massachusetts. Boston, therefore, was blockaded by sea from 1 June 1774. Any ship caught running the blockade was to be seized, along with her cargo. The only exceptions were ships carrying supplies, food or fuel for British troops and Boston’s civilian population.30

  The British, however, simply did not have the naval power to back up their strategy. British ships were too few and of the wrong type. The mighty ships of th
e line that constituted the heart of the British battlefleet and which had won the previous war were useless in sheltered, shallow inlets like Narragansett Bay and Boston Harbour. Even frigates were too large. To blockade Boston and police the entire coast of North America, Montagu had at his disposal no more than one significant ship of force, three or four small frigates, and a dozen sloops and schooners.

  In an attempt to enforce the Boston Port Act, he stationed eight of his precious ships in Boston Harbour, which might seem like sufficient force to blockade a single harbour but was woefully inadequate. The term ‘Boston Harbour’ is misleading. It suggests an enclosed space, perhaps accessed through a narrows, but in practice Boston Harbour was actually defined as stretching from Nahant Point in the north at the very end of modern Nahant Island, all the way to Point Alderton in the south, the modern town of Pemberton.31 The entrance alone to this ‘harbour’ is almost eight miles wide and at its farthest point is some eight miles from land. That area of sea itself was a navigational nightmare, strewn with at least forty small islands and smaller sand-banks that littered the approaches to Boston.32

  The tiny squadron was further cursed by manning and supply problems and the poor condition of its ships. Boston may have been the centre of British naval power in this period, but there was no dockyard there; in fact there were no major British naval docking facilities anywhere on the coast of North America. The nearest limited facilities were in Halifax, Nova Scotia.33 The constant sea-time thus wore out both ships and crews, and this in turn led to impressment, which further infuriated the Americans.34

  Even though the British naval force was inadequate, this was a key moment in the changing relationship between the Americans and the Royal Navy. These ships were now part of a hostile fleet, and Montagu was a hostile flag officer rather than a friendly station commander.35 At the end of June he was replaced by Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, who had no more success than Montagu in keeping Boston closed. His ships repeatedly ran aground on hidden mudflats, and he cursed at how small boats passed freely in the shadows of the British warships, ‘creep[ing] up and down to and from Boston, in and out of the harbour in the night’.36 Meanwhile, the naval focus on Boston meant that the rest of the New England coast was left wide open to smugglers. From the summer of 1774, Rhode Island, Connecticut, the Delaware River and Philadelphia had no naval presence at all, and by now the customs service was impotent.37

  Landed in an extraordinarily difficult position, it certainly did not help that Graves, like Montagu, was easily provoked and suspicious, was unable to get on with his counterpart in command of the British troops in Boston, General Thomas Gage, and was unwilling to take any initiative to tackle the problems that he faced. A close friend of Lord North condemned Graves as ‘a corrupt admiral without any shadow of capacity’.38 It is likely that Graves’s appointment was the result of his friendship with the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich, who should shoulder some of the blame for his failure.39 This issue of competence in command of the North American station was to become a recurring theme.

  This early period of rebellion is therefore characterized by a curious and contradictory effect of British political and military power: it occurred and then endured in American consciousness because of British military and political strength, but also because of British military and political weakness. By taking advantage of transient weakness in specific locations, the Americans revelled in their defiance of a British naval power that had crushed other countries, but the failure of the British then to do anything about those acts of rebellion lessened American respect for British military power, particularly for her naval power, and encouraged the colonies to come together.

  A direct response to the Intolerable Acts was the formation of the first Continental Congress of September 1774, held in Philadelphia. Though never conceived as a permanent body, this was still a major step towards state formation for the rebellious colonies.40 Representatives of twelve colonies* met to consider their response to the Intolerable Acts and determined on a boycott of trade designed to take advantage of their significant position in the Atlantic trade system – a tactic they had previously used to help force the repeal of hated legislation.41 Indeed, the Americans believed themselves to be in a position of strength. One contemporary commented: ‘America, impressed with the exalting sentiments of patriotism and of liberty, conceived it to be within their power, by future combinations, at any time to convulse, if not to bankrupt the nation, from which they sprung.’42 The Americans had no army and no navy, but they certainly were not going to lie down in the face of this new British aggression.

  * Georgia did not send a representative, hoping for British help against Indians on their frontier.

  3

  EUROPEAN GUNPOWDER

  Here are some interesting facts about gunpowder. On home service a British First Rate man of war – that is to say, a three-decked ship of 100 guns – would stock somewhere around 525 barrels of powder. Each barrel was of uniform size and contained 100 pounds of powder. There were 2,240 pounds in a British (long) ton, so we can work out that a single First Rate man of war carried more than 23 tons of gunpowder on home service. Even a small sloop, of the type that patrolled the coasts of America in the 1770s, carried 126 barrels of powder, a little over 5½ tons. On foreign service, where there was less opportunity to renew the stock, the figure was even higher for all ships.1 For the single period for which we have decent figures, the Napoleonic Wars, we know that the Royal Navy consumed some 80,000 barrels of powder every year. The implication is clear: if a state was going to wage a war in the eighteenth century, it had to be able to source a great deal of gunpowder for a long period of time.

  It also had to be able to source good-quality powder. Old powder was less potent than new powder; powder that was manufactured with good-quality ingredients was more potent than powder that was not; powder that was well mixed to the proportions appropriate for the chosen ingredients was more potent than powder that was not. Those ingredients, in name at least, were always the same: saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur. In practice the quality of the charcoal depended on the type of wood that was burned, the best being alder, dogwood or hazel, and also on the technique of the burning. Similarly, the quality of the saltpetre and sulphur depended on the source and the extraction and purification techniques. Each raw ingredient was ground and weighed before being mixed, milled, sieved, dried and then re-formed into large or fine grains depending on its intended use. Finally it was glazed with graphite to make it more durable.2 If the manufacturing process was incorrectly carried out at any of these crucial stages, the quality of the gunpowder would suffer.

  The biggest problem that the Americans faced at the start of their revolution was access to these materials. Saltpetre could be manufactured or dug out of the ground domestically, but the manufacturing process took considerable time and salt-petre found naturally in the ground was always insufficient in quantity.* The best-quality saltpetre in the largest quantities came from India. Other good sources were found in Russia, Germany and Spain. Sulphur was also very difficult to access, and the single best source of good-quality sulphur available in commercial quantities was Sicily. Even if these ingredients were found in America, the colonial powder-making industry was far too immature to produce the amount of powder necessary to ignite a revolution.3

  This all meant that, if the Americans were going to rebel, they would need to import vast quantities of gunpowder by sea. Other military stores were important, of course, not least lead for shot, flints for flintlocks and the firearms themselves, but the principal problem was powder. With no powder there would be no revolution. At this critical stage, therefore, the ability of the colonies to rebel became in large part a question of sea power, focused on their ability to smuggle gunpowder by sea past British warships or to transport British powder, seized in maritime raids on forts and ships, safely up rivers into the interior. All of this began to happen while the British were trying to impose the Coercive
Acts on Massachusetts.

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  A group of European maritime powers were more than willing to trade in military stores with the Americans. The British had become so dominant in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) that France and Spain, their traditional enemies, were happy to see the balance of European power shift away from Britain back towards them, and neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Russia were more than happy to profit from a British civil war – a contentment shared by merchants everywhere. This was a period characterized more by entrepreneurial sharks exploiting pre-existing maritime trade contacts than by political ideologists inciting others to rebellion.4

  What made matters worse for the British – and a significant enabling factor for the American rebels – was that several European countries had a presence in the Caribbean which, because of the direction in which the north-easterly trade winds blew, was directly en route between Europe and North America. Each of these countries, moreover, had a large and established mercantile marine with time-honoured trading routes and long-standing American trading partners. Crucially, each also had a significant navy to bolster any stance they took in relation to the British–American conflict. In 1770 the combined French and Spanish navies were 14 per cent larger than the British, and by 1775 that figure had risen to 25 per cent. The Dutch navy, very roughly a third of the size of the French and half that of the Spanish, was also a significant force.5

  The British, faced with a rebellion 3,000 miles away and a crippled economy, were desperate to avoid provocation of any of these countries. The threat of French, Dutch, Russian and Spanish sea power, imposed by their navies doing nothing more than sitting in their dockyards, hung like a cloud over British policy towards America. By their mere existence, these distant navies all influenced this embryonic stage of rebellion.