by Conrad Black
From the Canadian perspective, the interesting reference in the Declaration was the complaint against the king “for abolishing the free System of English laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.” Of course, this was an outrageous allegation, even from a revolutionary trying to enflame opinion and recruit support. The British had removed the French threat over which the Americans had made themselves hoarse in alarm for more than a century, had dispensed with the barbarism of French criminal law, and had liberally accorded the French Canadians the civil law they wished, which was not in the least uncivilized, and the notion that the British proposed to expand this regime into the British colonies was fatuous. The complaint was not really the imposition of arbitrary rule in Quebec but the failure to hand the subjugation and assimilation of the French population over to the Americans. This is hypocrisy well beyond the acceptable licence of the civilized propagandist, a realm where Jefferson normally resided, and with distinction. Naturally, this was not a tocsin that enthused the Québécois, who, fifteen years after the so-called conquest, were seriously beginning to enjoy themselves. Having their English governors exchanging fire with their long-antagonistic English-speaking neighbours was not in itself a distressing event for Quebec. And at this point, for obvious reasons, the French Canadians preferred the British to the British Americans (though of course they were not then, and have not been since, over-brimming with affection for either).
The principal editorial change to Jefferson’s draft had been the removal of his claim that George III had been responsible for the importation of slavery into America, an untrue charge, and a monstrous one coming from Jefferson, who had seven children with a comely slave and (unlike Washington) did not even bring himself to emancipate his slaves in his will, which didn’t take effect until fifty years later. The British regarded the Americans as ingrates and have never, to this day, understood what they were so upset about. And they were ingrates. The Americans regarded the British as overbearing and presumptuous meddlers, and they were certainly that. Jefferson masterminded the public relations effort, with the assistance of Thomas Paine and some other propagandists, and scored an epochal propaganda knockout victory over poor old Farmer George III and his lackeys, but it was a struggle between two almost equally advanced and conditionalized democracies. It was decided by the evolving correlation of forces and leadership abilities of the two sides. Given the complexities of suppressing such widespread irritation in the colonies, as long as Washington could keep the war going long enough, the Americans were almost sure to win, as Washington and Franklin clear-headedly saw. As the Declaration of Independence was solicited by the Continental Congress in June 1776, so the Congress also called for “articles of confederation” between the colonies and an effort to recruit European allies, which was entrusted to Franklin, as the dean of the very modest American diplomatic fraternity (and he had only been an information officer in London).
This is not the place for anything but the sketchiest history of the Revolutionary War, apart from its impact on Canada. The British took the offensive, recaptured Boston, and compelled the withdrawal of Washington and his army to New York. Washington rashly projected his forces across the East River from Manhattan into Brooklyn, where they were roughly handled in the Battle of Long Island, and he was fortunate not to have his retreat interdicted by the Royal Navy back across the river, an evacuation he conducted with skill (9,500 men and their artillery on the night of August 30, 1776). Washington now adopted the tactics he would employ for the next several years, retreating inland to White Plains and then New Jersey, staying well back from the coast and compelling the British to deploy much of their forces protecting supply lines from the ports, which also required extensive occupation manpower. American irregulars were agile at harassment and British desertion rates were often high, as Franklin and Washington had predicted, as they plodded endlessly around in the interior of America, being sniped at and having their supplies burned and stolen but rarely encountering a serious enemy.
The British took 2,700 prisoners at Fort Washington at the northern end of Manhattan on November 16, and there was much premature celebrating in Britain at this news, as in Pitt’s time. Washington conducted a scorched-earth retreat to Trenton, New Jersey, and then across the Delaware into Pennsylvania, leaving nothing but ashes, rubble, and snipers behind, and then, in an act of military genius, he recrossed the Delaware on Christmas and Boxing Day with six thousand men, attacked the unsuspecting British and their Hessian mercenaries at three points, exploiting the heavily hungover (post-Christmas and prematurely triumphant) condition of the Germans, and rolled on to Princeton and Morristown, just ten miles west of Manhattan. The Congress, whom Washington detested as composed mainly of cowards and meddlers and crooks (a fair assessment), had already decamped from Philadelphia to Baltimore in fright prior to Washington’s counterattack. The opposing armies sat at Morristown and New York until the spring of 1777. Washington’s men only enlisted for six months at a time, regardless of when their six months were up, and by March he was down to three thousand men, though he carefully concealed this from his opponent, General William Howe, who had eighteen thousand. Howe partially crossed the Hudson in June, but Washington outmanoeuvred him, and Howe retired to Staten Island, then as now an improbable jumping-off point for the conquest of America.
In July, Howe embarked fifteen thousand men by ship, and Washington marched to and fro on the shore for a month until Howe landed near Philadelphia. Washington almost drew the Battle of Brandywine with Howe on September 11, 1777, and remained between the British Army and the revolutionary capital, but when Howe drew his remaining forces south from New York, Washington had to abandon the capital (the second largest English-speaking city in the world, with 35,000 people compared with London’s 750,000). Howe stationed eighteen thousand redcoats in Philadelphia in September, but it was not really a militarily useful objective. At this point, after two years of war, the British held New York and Philadelphia and almost nothing else in all of the thirteen colonies (as they had again vacated Boston). Washington almost defeated Howe again, on October 4, at Germantown, near Philadelphia, but his battle plan was too sophisticated for his rough militiamen, who were brave and were good shots, but were somewhat undisciplined and under-drilled in their field formation.
In a serious error, the British gave command of the northern force not to the able Carleton, but to General John Burgoyne, for an advance down the now well-travelled route from Montreal by Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga (Carillon). It was proposed to come all the way to New York, meeting the Royal Navy at Albany, and thus to sever the colonies in two, separating all of New England from most of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the south. The plan was well-conceived, but Burgoyne was not the man to execute it. After the Americans vacated Ticonderoga, they narrowly defeated Burgoyne at Bennington, and then smashed him at Saratoga on September 19, 1777, capturing him and much of his army, which was then deported. The victor was the treacherous General Horatio Gates, who then sought to displace Washington as commander. But Washington, despite his demeanour of austere disinterest, was a very astute politician and scotched the Conway Conspiracy, as it was known, and Gates was chastened. This was the first clear appearance of Washington the adroit politician; his third and greatest career (after soldiering and land management and accumulation) was underway. Carleton had watched impassively as Burgoyne’s badly planned mission set out to rupture the rebellion and instead squandered itself and expanded the ranks of Britain’s enemies in America. For the balance of the war, the chief Canadian activities were raiding parties into New York and Pennsylvania to destroy food and other supplies being assembled for Washington, and raids down the Mississippi, which remained entirely in Canadian hands. Carleton returned to Britain in 1778 and was replaced as governor by the Swiss adventurer
Sir Frederick Haldimand (François-Louis-Frédéric Haldimand). He had been in Quebec before, under Abercromby in the Seven Years War, and had been governor of Trois-Rivières in 1762, in which capacity he had supervised the expansion of the ironworks, the famous Forges du Saint-Maurice.
Washington went into cramped, cold winter quarters at Valley Forge, near Philadelphia, and lost a quarter of his ten thousand men to malnutrition and frostbite, but improved training with the help of German soldier of fortune Baron Friedrich von Steuben and maintained morale by his selfless example and visibly full participation with the men in rations and discomfort. As the combat had unfolded, Benjamin Franklin had carried out to perfection his mandate to seek allies, arriving in Paris on December 4, 1776, dressed in plain black and wearing a fur hat, and at once impressing the French with his puckish humour, sly wit, worldliness, familiarity with the works of the leading thinkers, and, not least, his talents at seduction around the court of the young king Louis XVI. The moralistic and oppressively worthy John Adams was sent with him, but he was so scandalized at some of Franklin’s techniques that Franklin had him sent on to negotiate a loan from the straitlaced Dutch Protestants, to whose company he was better suited. Franklin, a printer, among his many other vocations, installed a printing press in the basement of his residence in Paris and cranked out a wildly propagandistic newspaper claiming British atrocities and American victories almost every day. The American victory at Saratoga and the strong stands at Brandywine and Germantown, tempted France – despite the warnings of the king’s talented treasurer, A.R.J. Turgot, of the precarious state of the country’s finances – to seek revenge for the severe defeats it had suffered at the hands of the British in the Seven Years War. In one of the greatest feats in the history of diplomacy, Franklin persuaded the absolute monarchy of France, which had never even convened a legislature since Richelieu had dismissed the Estates General in 1614, to enter the war on the side of republicanism, democracy, and secessionism, and France did so, on March 13, 1778. It was a stunning and world-changing triumph for the seventy-two-year-old Franklin.
Following the crushing defeat at Saratoga and the entrance into the war of France (which would have done much better demanding some concessions back from Britain in exchange for staying out of the war), the British surrendered entirely to their fantasies and persuaded themselves they could win the Revolutionary War by de-escalating their participation. Howe asked for ten thousand more men and was sacked and replaced by General Henry Clinton, and Clinton was ordered to defend the West Indies. He abandoned Philadelphia and Rhode Island and repaired back to New York while disposing forces to Florida, a militarily worthless and almost unpopulated place, to defend the West Indies against the anticipated French attack. Washington engaged Clinton as he retired from Philadelphia and almost defeated the British again at Monmouth Courthouse in June 1778. The British abandoned the north except for New York and focused on South Carolina and Georgia, having reinforced their false conviction that the great majority of Americans were loyal to the British Crown and were just being coerced or swindled into neutrality, or even complicity in rebellion, by the malcontents with their wild Jeffersonian allegations. Not 10 per cent of the Americans had seen anything of the British in the three years the war had been going on. Washington made camp at West Point, on the Hudson north of New York, where he could move into New England or New Jersey, or block an approach from the north, while the action on the ground shifted to the south. Washington gave the Marquis de Lafayette a command, to encourage active French participation in the war.
Clinton had a distinct success in an amphibious attack by 3,500 men on Savannah, Georgia, but was repulsed when he marched on Charleston by the obese and narcoleptic, but yet formidable, American general Benjamin Lincoln. The French navy put in its first appearance in this war with a badly misconceived attempt to recapture Savannah. In an astounding plan, Clinton determined on an amphibious attack on Charleston from New York in late 1779. He and his naval commander, Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot, hated each other, the armada was broken up in storms and there was great discomfort aboard. There was no such concentration of loyalist support as the British imagined, as the coastal areas of South Carolina had only nineteen thousand whites and sixty-nine thousand slaves, but the landing was a success, and Charleston was taken and occupied. Clinton treated the civilians generously, but one of his cavalry commanders ran down a retreating column of Virginians, ignored a white flag and massacred 350 Americans. Washington had another grim winter at Morristown, and with the customary attrition of winter, his force of fifteen thousand was again reduced by two-thirds. The dishonesty and incompetence of the Continental Congress filled Washington with a clear vision of the need for a strong but non-monarchical government.
The devious Horatio Gates, over Washington’s objections, was appointed southern commander (Washington favoured the very able Nathanael Greene) and suffered a terrible defeat at Camden, South Carolina, in August 1780, losing more than half his army, which was twice as large as that of his British opponent, who suffered a fifth of Gates’s casualties. Gates fled the battlefield and galloped two hundred miles before stopping, when he was relieved by Greene as head of what was now “a naked and dispirited” army. Greene faced the competent British commander who had routed Gates, Sir Robert Walpole’s nephew, Lord Cornwallis. The two duelled and skirmished with the advantage to Greene and his capable understudies, Daniel Morgan and Francis Marion.
At West Point, the able General Benedict Arnold, disappointed at having been passed over too often, deserted to the British in September 1780 (escaping capture by the Americans by only a few minutes). He was placed in command of the loyalist forces and was redeployed to the south, where Cornwallis elected to make the bold move of marching north to Virginia to try to destroy the centre of the rebellion. The British held only New York, Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston and Savannah, and were suffering steady attrition chasing around after Greene and Marion and Morgan. Cornwallis arrived at Petersburg, Virginia, on May 20, 1781. The British couldn’t win the war, and fatigue with the war was much greater in Britain than in America. Nor could the British indefinitely keep most of their navy in American waters while they were at war with France, because of the danger of invasion of the British Isles, and they could never provide enough troops to quell the rebellion. There was a danger that at some point, Washington and Greene, who had come close already, would win a decisive battle and the entire British effort would collapse. France proposed a ceasefire with each side keeping what it held. This would have left the British with something and detached the French from the war. But George III would not hear of it. (If the Americans had accepted it, it would have been a very temporary arrangement, swiftly followed by the second bite of the cherry.)
Cornwallis was concentrated at Yorktown, Virginia, when Washington saw the chance to end the war. He persuaded the French to join him in the north for a quick march to the south, and to disembark 3,300 men by sea near Yorktown. Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau, commander-in-chief of the French forces, descended from north of New York to Yorktown by forced marches, leaving only 3,500 men facing Clinton in New York (they agitated and moved around and created the impression of being much more numerous). Cornwallis, with 8,500 men, was soon encircled by 15,000 Americans and French, and although Clinton had promised him reinforcements, and the British admiral Samuel Graves had promised to bring him out, neither did so, and Cornwallis was forced to surrender on October 19, 1781. It was now hopeless; the British were finished and everyone knew it. Parliament finally rebelled and refused to authorize any more offensive action in America; Lord North was sent packing after twelve disastrous years as prime minister. The Marquess of Rockingham, a close collaborator of Chatham (who had died in 1778), became prime minister, and Charles James Fox was placed in charge of negotiations. He sent Thomas Grenville to deal with Franklin in Paris.
The French wanted something for their trouble and their essential contribution, and the Americans de
manded unconditional independence and the handing over of Canada, which they had failed to take for themselves. The British would give away no more than they had to, and preferred to make concessions to their grumpy American cousins than to their foe of centuries, the French. Franklin ignored French claims, which evaporated after the great British admiral Sir George Rodney caught a French and Spanish fleet in the Caribbean and gave it the customary decisive thrashing meted out by the Royal Navy, which settled down French demands considerably. (Rodney captured the French admiral, De Grasse, who had been decisive in keeping British reinforcements away from Yorktown.) As the war ended, Governor Haldimand had been conducting extensive negotiations with the brothers Ethan and Ira Allen, who had led Vermont’s secession from New York and whom Haldimand believed were on the verge of granting free passage to British armies through Vermont into New York and New England when the end of the war became likely after the British surrender at Yorktown. The French, under the great seaman and explorer the Comte de Lapérouse, captured two of the main forts in Hudson Bay in 1782, and with them the explorer Samuel Hearne, whom Lapérouse treated very courteously. This event didn’t alter the course of the war, and Lapérouse resumed his career, taking him to all the oceans and continents of the world except Antarctica. The Americans had a number of naval successes with swashbuckling privateers, especially John Paul Jones.
