Cumberland’s resignation, the previous relegation of Henry Fox to the profitable oblivion of the paymaster generalship of the forces, and the king’s willingness in the aftermath of Kloster-Zeven to listen to Pitt’s advice with a new respect left Pitt better able than ever before to shape and implement policy. Cumberland’s disgrace deprived his supporters of influence to such an extent that all responsibility for financing and supplying the war effort now fell into the hands of the duke of Newcastle, while control of the navy, army, and diplomatic corps fell more or less exclusively to Pitt. Without real restraint from any quarter in Parliament or at court, Pitt could direct the war in accordance with his “system,” as he would come to call the pragmatic, fluid mixture of strategies that he was now free to apply. Although it marked a less radical departure than he was apt to claim in later years, Pitt’s system would finally reverse the balance that had hung so heavily against Britain.11
The heart of Pitt’s system was his intention to hold the line against France where it was strongest, in Europe, while striking at its weakest point, North America. To do so, Pitt planned to take advantage of Britain’s greatest strength, its navy, to achieve naval superiority on the Atlantic and thus to prevent France from resupplying its troops overseas; this would in turn enable Britain’s relatively small army to cooperate with its much more numerous American colonists to overwhelm Canada’s defenders. Pitt’s ultimate goal, the elimination of France as an imperial presence in North America, was by far the most original and distinctive aspect of his plan, for no one before him had conceived of any Anglo-French war as an opportunity to strike at the sources of French wealth. Indeed, Pitt intended to attack French colonies not only in North America, but anywhere—in the West Indies, West Africa, India—that opportunities to profit from French weaknesses might present themselves.
To be free to concentrate British force on France’s empire, Pitt had to insure that the British army would not be drawn into the fighting on the Continent, where French and Austrian armies inevitably had the advantage. To sustain his resolve not to send “a drop of our blood . . . to be lost in that sea of gore” which was Germany, Pitt’s system required that Britain subsidize its German allies—most of all Prussia—virtually without limit, so as to keep France preoccupied while British forces conquered its empire. There was, of course, nothing new in British subsidies to European allies. What made Pitt’s approach unusual was the scale on which he proposed to subsidize, for he would soon ask Parliament to approve payments to Frederick and other German princes that vastly outstripped any Britain had ever made. 12
Pitt also proposed, as he had argued was necessary since 1755, to defend the home isles not with the army, but rather to rely upon a reformed militia or territorial force based in the counties. This measure conformed nicely to the preferences of many backbench M.P.s, country squires who disliked the standing army both because it was expensive and because it could be used to exert direct control over their localities. Their support for a militia defense, then, was critical to sustaining Pitt’s program in the Commons. The militia was crucial for another reason, too: it would free up army units stationed in England to cooperate with the home fleet in making “descents,” or raids, on the French coast. If the French wished to protect their Atlantic ports, he reasoned, they would have to divert troops from their operations against Germany. Pitt had gotten this idea from Frederick, who as early as 1756 had pointed out that “if France strips her Channel coasts to form her army [for Germany], the English fleet can profit by it and . . . spread an alarm the whole length of Brittany and Normandy.” The descents would employ only a few thousand men and sailors, Pitt thought, and by lessening French pressure on the Prussians might indefinitely forestall the need to send troops to Frederick’s support.13
Pitt’s approach to the war in the colonies essentially inverted every policy Braddock and Loudoun had pursued. Because everything in his plans depended upon the conquest of New France, Pitt needed to tap America’s strengths as never before, and particularly its manpower. He knew that Halifax had long before advocated raising large numbers of provincials to use against Canada, only to have the idea discarded by Cumberland, who preferred to use regular troops. Moreover, he had talked to experts on the colonies—notably Sir Charles Hardy, governor of New York, whose opinion of Loudoun had taken a turn for the worse after the Louisbourg expedition, and Thomas Pownall, who never hesitated to serve his own interest at the expense of former patrons—and from these had concluded that Loudoun’s efforts to unify the colonies had served only to antagonize the colonists and frustrate the war effort.14
By mid-December 1757, Pitt knew that if the American assemblies were to be transformed from centers of resistance into sources of men and money, he would have to reverse entirely the course of colonial policy. Instead of treating the colonies like subordinate jurisdictions and requiring them to finance the war effort by forced contributions to a common fund, Pitt resolved to treat them like allies, offering subsidies to encourage their assemblies to aid in the conquest of New France. Rather than continuing to demand that civil authority, in the persons of the colonial governors and legislatures, submit to military power in the person of His Majesty’s commander in chief, Pitt resolved to withhold from Loudoun’s successor direct authority over the provinces. In the future, as always in the past, the governors would receive their instructions directly from the secretary of state for the Southern Department. By this new grant (or more properly, restoration) of autonomy to the provinces, by offering inducements to cooperation rather than by seeking to compel union among them, Pitt hoped to create a patriotic enthusiasm that had not been much in evidence since 1756.15
Finally, because not only provinces but provincials would need to demonstrate this enthusiasm, Pitt also decided to reverse the policy that had made all provincial field officers rank only as eldest captains while on joint service with regular units. In the campaigns of 1758, he decreed, provincial majors, colonels, and generals would enjoy a status equivalent to their counterpart ranks in the regular army, ranking as juniors only to the regular officers of comparable grades.
In order to implement these policies, Pitt needed supporters not only in the Commons and at court, but in the armed forces, and these he also found in the fall and winter of 1757. He had already nominated George, Lord Anson, to the post of first lord of the Admiralty. This was a politic choice in that Anson was an important ally of Newcastle; but it was also a prudent one, for Anson was a capable administrator who fully supported Pitt’s navalist approach to the war. As a replacement for Cumberland at the head of the army, Pitt secured the appointment of another Newcastle supporter, General Sir John Ligonier—at an astonishingly vigorous seventy-seven not only an immensely experienced officer, but probably the ablest general to wear a red coat between Marlborough’s time and Wellington’s. Together Anson and Ligonier would serve as chiefs of staff to Pitt and, in an unprecedented example of cooperation between army and navy, implement the strategic system by which Pitt proposed to win the greatest victory in English history.16
WHEN WILLIAM PITT gained control of strategy and policy late in 1757, the war entered a new phase. Thereafter the army and navy would conduct descents on the French coast—a series of militarily indecisive operations that would indeed diminish the proportion of its army that France could commit to Germany. At Pitt’s urging, the king would renounce (probably illegally, on a technicality) the Convention of Kloster-Zeven. Thereafter George II, acting as elector of Hanover, would appoint one of Frederick’s most capable military protégés, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, as commander of the Hanoverian army; and Parliament, at Pitt’s insistence, would take the Hanoverian army into British pay as a continental proxy for British troops. Great Britain would begin to pour vast quantities of subsidy money into Hanover’s and Prussia’s treasuries. Despite predictions to the contrary, Parliament would meekly submit to every request for funds—in part because Newcastle controlled patronage distribution and
could ensure support for the ministry’s money bills in the Commons, and in part because the financiers in the City of London were usually delighted to float the loans that Newcastle required. The members of the ministry would begin to work together well, largely because Pitt’s energy and willingness to accept responsibility for the war earned him Newcastle’s admiring support. Although relations between the two were never free of strain, their complementary activities would impart a momentum to the war effort that it had never before seen. 17
On the Continent, the fortunes of war would favor Frederick once more. At the Battle of Rossbach, on November 5, Frederick overwhelmed a French army under the prince de Soubise, inflicting casualties at the unheard-of rate of ten to one. Rossbach literally turned the tide against France, which now evacuated Saxony. With barely a pause, Frederick marched his army nearly two hundred miles eastward into Silesia, where he engaged the forces of Count von Daun at Leuthen on December 5. This battle, the tactical masterpiece of Frederick’s career, left one-third of Daun’s army dead, wounded, or captured, and forced the Austrians to withdraw from Silesia. Meanwhile, in Hanover, Prince Ferdinand had given Richelieu formal notice of the renunciation of Kloster-Zeven and moved his army into the field. Before the end of the year the French withdrew to the Aller River and dug in at the town of Celle, abandoning half the territory they had conquered during the summer. 18
Thus stood politics in Britain, and the war in Europe, at the end of 1757 when William Pitt informed North America’s colonial governors of the new course he intended to pursue in North America. He had had Ligonier canvass the army for the most capable young field officers available, to be sent to America in the spring; he had approved elaborate plans for the coming year’s campaigns. Everything would now depend upon the war in America. Surely Pitt realized more acutely than anyone else that his whole system rested upon the supposition that British arms could succeed there, where British arms had as yet achieved nothing. But would new measures and new men mobilize the latent strength of the colonies and redeem the losses of Braddock, Shirley, and Loudoun? To the man who in an unguarded moment had said that he knew that only he could save his country, no question could be more important; no answer awaited with more dreadful anticipation.
PART IV
TURNING POINT
1758
Pitt’s new direction breaks a deadlock between the colonial governments and Lord Loudoun. New commanders and approaches revitalize the British war effort. Crises in Canada and changes in French strategy. Montcalm defeats the British yet again at Ticonderoga, but this time they reply with victories at Louisbourg and Fort Frontenac. Indian diplomacy and the success of the Forbes expedition against Fort Duquesne. The war as a formative experience.
CHAPTER 22
Deadlock, and a New Beginning
JANUARY-MAY 1758
TO THE MASSACHUSETTS provincial soldiers huddled against the cold in huts near Stillwater, New York, the year 1758 dawned bleakly, and not only because they remembered the previous summer’s defeats. The eighty men of Captain Ebenezer Learned’s company had come to think of their enemies not so much as the Indians and French as cold weather, short rations, and their own British superiors. Learned’s provincials—farmers, laborers, and artisans from central and western Massachusetts—had enlisted in the spring of 1757 to serve for a campaign that they understood would last only until November 30. Because their notions of military obligation were no less contractual than those of New Englanders generally, it had come as “a greate & unexpected disappointment” to learn, as their tour of duty was about to end, that Lord Loudoun had ordered them to remain in service until Candlemas (February 2, 1758).1
Loudoun had extended the enlistments of Learned’s and three other Massachusetts companies because he needed men to garrison the blockhouses and forts north of Albany. The fall of Fort William Henry had laid the region open to enemy raids, and in September he had asked the assemblies of New York, New Jersey, and the New England colonies to recruit rangers to defend it over the winter. Nobody questioned the need—had anyone done so, the French and Indian destruction of German Flats in early November, a raid that resulted in the deaths of 50 settlers and the seizure of 150 more, would have made it undeniable—and despite their lack of enthusiasm for the additional expenditure, most of the assemblies acceded to Loudoun’s demand. But Massachusetts, unlike the other colonies, garrisoned a chain of forts and blockhouses along its own frontier, and its general court refused to raise the men Loudoun asked because the province was already carrying more than its share of the burden. With the German Flats incident on his mind, Lord Loudoun found this even more exasperating than the usual colonial obstinacy and so dealt with it directly. On November 18, as the provincials were disbanding, he detained 360 Massachusetts soldiers, advanced them two months’ pay from his own funds, and ordered them to remain in service—or suffer the consequences.2
Captain Learned’s men had acquiesced but among themselves agreed not to serve beyond the time for which they had been paid. Learned had returned to Massachusetts on sick leave, and when he returned in early January his men told him that they planned to march for home on February 3. Rather than upbraiding them for their lack of loyalty or warning them of the consequences of desertion, Learned offered to represent their case to Captain Philip Skene, the regular who commanded at Stillwater. If Skene refused to make some reasonable accommodation, Learned said, he would lead the “retreat” himself. In the meantime his men continued to save food out of their rations to provision the journey home and improved their leisure hours by making snowshoes. According to a nineteen-year-old private in the company, Rufus Putnam, when Candlemas (“the day . . . that we wished for”) arrived, we were all ordered into the Fort whe[re] Capt. Skean read a part of a letter to us, that Major General Abercrombie sent to him, the contents of which was this. You are hereby required to persuade the Massachusetts [men] that are under your care to tarry a few days longer, till I shall hear from their government, to know what the government intends to do with them. To these orders, there was answer made by some of our Company, that they looked upon him to be a good soldier, that tarried till his time was out; and that the Province had no business to detain us any longer; neither would we be detained any longer by any power that they could raise. He told us that if any man had been duly enlisted into His Majesty’s service and should leave the same, without a Regular Discharge, he should Suffer Death. We told him we did not value that, for according to our Enlistment, neither they not the Province could hold us any longer, and that we did not break the Court Act by going off.3
At three o’clock the next morning, leaving behind only a second lieutenant to care for ten men who were too sick to walk, Ebenezer Learned’s company—with its captain and first lieutenant in the lead—marched for home. Seven days later, half-starved, frostbitten, and minus their mascot (“a large dog” they had eaten two days earlier) they staggered into Hawks’s Fort in Charlemont, Massachusetts. The garrison received them “very Kindly,” offering the deserters food and a place to rest before sending them on their way. No one at the fort seems to have thought that Learned’s men had done anything wrong. Indeed, the hospitality they offered gives us every reason to believe that the provincials at Charlemont admired the deserters’ willingness to brave the winter woods rather than remain at Stillwater without enlistment contracts to protect them from enslavement.4
“He is a good Soldier that Serves his time out” was a maxim as transparently true to the soldiers of the Bay Colony as it was unmeaning and pernicious to Captain Philip Skene and his fellow regular officers in America, adherents of a military system based on the gospel of subordination and discipline, men with neither time nor sympathy for contractualist sophistry. That whole companies of soldiers, together with their officers, would defy the king’s officers in the name of a supposed principle, was a fact significant in ways Lord Loudoun never quite grasped. Soon, however, he would discover that soldiers who defied his authority to preserve wha
t they called their rights were the least of his problems.5
THE SMALL SAGA of Ebenezer Learned’s company bears retelling because it illuminates the larger pattern of resistance to imperial authority that was emerging in New England at the beginning of 1758. Even as Learned’s men floundered through the snowdrifts of the Green Mountains, politicians in the Massachusetts Assembly were gathering their resolve to challenge Lord Loudoun on issues that went to the very heart of his power as commander in chief. Already they had refused to recruit rangers for winter duty in New York. Now they were actually attempting to revive the form of intercolonial military union that had prevailed in previous wars, a system in which each assembly had appointed military commissioners to meet with the commissioners of the other colonies to determine by negotiation the level of support their respective provinces would provide for each campaign.
Lord Loudoun looked on this development with horror. If the assemblies could decide for themselves what they would contribute to the common cause, even if the numbers of men and pounds sterling exactly matched what he would have asked of them anyway, the legislators would in effect nullify his authority as the representative of the king in Parliament. Loudoun knew that if he surrendered to such pretensions as these, he would be allowing the colonists to determine the nature of the empire itself, and that would be a loss to the Crown far more grave than any military defeat. Thus as the year 1758 opened, the question was not whether but when the confrontation would come between a man unsuited by temperament to compromise and a colonial assembly unwilling to go on complying with demands that took no account of local conditions and laws.
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