Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  3. P. M. Hamer, “Fort Loudoun in the Cherokee War, 1758–61,” North Carolina Historical Review 2 (1925): 444; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 167–8, Hatley, Dividing Paths, 109–15.

  4. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 111.

  5. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 61–5; Hatley, Dividing Paths, 113–15; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 170–83.

  6. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 120–5; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 178–90.

  7. Gipson, New Responsibilities, 67–8; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 196–8; Hatley, Dividing Paths, 125–9; Alden, John Stuart, 104–5.

  8. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 124–5.

  9. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 198–205.

  10. Ibid., 208–11; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 70–2. Montgomery burned Keowee, Estatoe, Toxaway, Qualatchee, and Conasatche. “The neatness of those towns and their knowledge of agriculture would surprise you,” wrote Lt. Col. James Grant, Montgomery’s second-in-command; “they abounded in every comfort of life, and may curse the day we came upon them” (Grant to Lt. Gov. William Bull, in Hatley, Dividing Paths, 130).

  11. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 212–13; Hatley, Dividing Paths, 131; Gipson, New Responsibilities,73–4. Quotation: Amherst to Pitt, 26 Aug. 1760, quoted in Hatley, Dividing Paths, 132.

  12. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 217–19; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 75–8; Alden, John Stuart, 116–17.

  13. Quotation: South Carolina Gazette, 18 Oct. 1760, quoted in Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 220. Killings and captives: Gipson, New Responsibilities, 78–9; Alden, John Stuart, 118–9; J. Russell Snapp, John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge, 1996), 55–6. In a misdated letter from Fort Toulouse, a French naval officer described the torture of “Monsieur Dameri”: “We have just learned that a war party of Cherokees, commanded by Wolf, has captured Fort Loudon, . . . and that the commanding officer, Mr. Dameri, was killed by the Indians. They stuffed earth into his mouth and said, ‘Dog, since you are so hungry for land, eat your fill’ ” ( Jean-Bernard Bossu to the marquis de l’Estrade, 10 Jan. 1760 [1761]; in Seymour Feiler, trans. and ed., Jean-Bernard Bossu’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1751–1762 [Norman, Okla., 1962], 183–4).

  14. Theda Perdue, “Cherokee Relations with the Iroquois in the Eighteenth Century,” in Daniel Richter and James Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), 144; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 236; William Bull to William Pitt, 18 Feb. 1761, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Militaryand Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:394–6. Quotation: Amherst to Grant, 15 Dec. 1760, in Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 245.

  15. Ibid., 246, records eighty-one “Negroes” with the expedition; Gipson, New Responsibilities,82, puts the pack train at seven hundred horses and the cattle herd at four hundred head.

  16. Casualty figures and quotations from John Laurens to John Ettwein, 11 July 1761, in P. M. Hamer et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 3, Jan. 1, 1759–Aug. 31, 1763 (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 75. Executions: Hatley, Dividing Paths, 139.

  17. Perdue, “Cherokee Relations,” 144; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 255–6; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 84.

  18. On Stuart’s policies, aimed at reducing tensions by controlling white settlers, see Alden, John Stuart, 134–55; and esp. Snapp, Stuart and the Struggle, 54–67 et passim.

  19. Amherst to Johnson, 22 Feb. 1761, in James Sullivan et al., eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 3 (Albany, 1921), 345. On the policy’s significance in light of the propensity of Johnson and Croghan to bestow gifts freely, see Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: ConstructingColonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York, 1997), 146–50.

  20. “Chastizement” and “Example”: Amherst to Johnson, 11 Aug. 1761, Johnson Papers, 3:517. “Absolute necessity”: Johnson to Amherst, 24 July 1761, ibid., 513. “You are sensible”: Amherst to Johnson, 9 Aug. 1761, ibid., 515. Amherst previously concluded that, since the Indians could be no threat to a properly organized and supplied force of regulars, they could be dealt with forcibly, as a means of teaching them who was master within the empire. (See, e.g., Amherst to Johnson, 24 June 1761, ibid., 421.) On the Geneseo (or Chenussio) Senecas’ scheme and western Indian relations, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1600–1815 (New York, 1991), 271–3.

  21. John W. Jordan, ed., “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of Historyand Biography 37 (1913): 28 (entry of 21 Nov. 1761); Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 148–9.

  22. Cf. Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 232–7.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: Amherst’s Dilemma

  1. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York, 1997), 148–9; John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Comingof the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 104–5.

  2. Troop numbers, distribution, and replacements: ibid., 96–9, 112. Detachments: Pitt to Amherst, 7 Jan. 1761, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:384–7. (Amherst took action on these orders as soon as he received the letter, on 26 Feb.; see id. to Pitt, 27 Feb. 1761, ibid., 403.) Request for provincials: Jeffery Amherst, The Journal of Jeffery Amherst, ed. J. Clarence Webster (Chicago, 1931), 267 (entry of 8 June 1761), 332 (“Recapitulation”).

  3. Promotion of settlements near forts: Amherst to Pitt, 16 Dec. 1759, Pitt Corr., 2:222–3; Doris Begor Morton, Philip Skene of Skenesborough (Glanville, N.Y., 1959), 17. New York settlements: on the ten thousand–acre tract at the Niagara portage, see Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Siege of Detroit in 1763 (Chicago, 1958), xxviii–xxix; on the authorization of the Fort Stanwix settlement and the accompanying grant of ten thousand acres to “Capt. Rutherford, Lieutenant Duncan and others,” see Walter Rutherford to Amherst, 9 Apr. 1761, and Amherst to Rutherford, same date, in Louis des Cognets Jr., Amherst and Canada (Princeton, N.J. [privately printed], 1962), 310–11. Settlements along the Forbes Road: Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1939), 140–1. (Additional settlements, which Amherst did nothing to discourage, grew up in the vicinity of Fort Burd, near the site of Red Stone Old Fort, near the confluence of Red Stone Creek and the Monongahela River; and on two tracts that Croghan had acquired privately from the Iroquois—one on the Allegheny about four miles upriver from Pittsburgh, the other on the Youghiogheny about twenty-five miles south of the Forks.) Manorial ambitions: Col. William Haviland [at Crown Point] to Amherst, 5 Mar. 1760, quoted in Morton, Skene, 31 (“Major Skeen is . . . so full of the Scheme that he writes once a week to his wife [who had remained in northern Ireland], and I dare say mostly on that subject, as I am sure very little that passes here would afford entertainment so frequent to any one on the other Side of the Water; Indeed he Owned last might that his wife was looking out for People to come and Settle here”).

  4. Settlers near Pittsburgh: Alfred P. James, The Ohio Company: Its Inner History (Pittsburgh, 1959), 113; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 89–90. Development around Pittsburgh: Buck and Buck, Planting of Civilization, 140; also Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 234; John W. Jordan, ed., “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913): 28–9. Kenny noted on 20 Oct. 1761 a report that there were perhaps 150
houses outside the walls of Fort Pitt, almost all of which had been built since the fall of 1759.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE: Pitt’s Problems

  1. On Frederick, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 204–6. On George’s upbringing at Leicester House: John Brooke, King George III (New York, 1972), 23; cf. J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (London, 1956), 92.

  2. Obsessive qualities and love of order: J. H. Plumb, New Light on the Tyrant George III (Washington, D.C., 1978), 5–17 et passim. Diet: Brooke, George III, 291–2.

  3. “Horrid Electorate”: George to Bute, 5 Aug. 1759, in Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London, 1939), 28. “Blackest of hearts”: same to same, 4 May 1760, ibid., 45.

  4. On the speech, see Bute’s draft and Pitt’s revisions as reprinted in Brooke, George III, 75; and Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 170. George himself wrote the words, “Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name Briton,” in order to distinguish himself from his predecessors, who had been born and educated in Hanover and who had put the interests of that “horrid Electorate” at least on a par with those of the realm. Critics— especially Newcastle—worried that the king’s invocation of a political community that included Scotland signaled the influence that Lord Bute would exercise in the new reign. (See Stanley Ayling, George the Third [London, 1972], 70.)

  5. “He must act”: Gilbert Elliot, reporting a conversation between Pitt and Bute, 25 Oct. 1760, quoted in Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930), 120–1. “Unknown”: Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (New York, 1894), 2:9. Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 275; Middleton, Bells, 170–9; Brooke, George III, 76.

  6. Russell Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 191; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 104, 288; Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 285–96; Christopher Duffy, The Military Life of Frederick the Great (New York, 1986), 210–19. Casualty estimates for the Prussians vary from 40 percent to 60 percent. Either way, Torgau was a bloodbath that decided nothing.

  7. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:104; Middleton, Bells, 178, 180–1; Reginald Savory, His BritannicMajesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 283–308.

  8. Middleton, Bells, 182, 178; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989), 117; Browning, Newcastle, 276–8.

  9. Browning, Newcastle, 275–6; Middleton, Bells, 179; Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 280–2.

  10. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:160–70; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 181–4.

  11. Middleton, Bells, 188–9; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:141–70, esp. 150–4; Gipson, Culmination,204–52 passim. A Franco-Spanish alliance became possible after the accession to the throne of Charles III, whose Saxon queen, Maria Amalia, loathed her homeland’s conqueror. Pitt knew of the negotiations for this second Bourbon Family Compact in mid-March 1761, when British agents intercepted correspondence addressed to Madrid’s ambassador in London. The deciphered letters suggested that Spain might soon abandon neutrality for an alliance—a plausible shift in light of the aggressive tone in recent negotiations over British logwood cutting in Honduras. The cabinet’s peace party feared Spanish intervention as much as Pitt welcomed it, for exactly the same reasons.

  12. Ayling, Elder Pitt, 284; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:172.

  13. Quotation: Bedford to Newcastle, 9 May 1761, in Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:172. Gipson, Culmination, 218–21; Browning, Newcastle, 278–80.

  14. Gipson, Culmination, 248–51.

  15. Middleton, Bells, 192–4; Ayling, Elder Pitt, 289–90; Browning, Newcastle, 280–1; Gipson, Culmination, 222–3.

  16. George III to Bute, 19 Sept. 1761, Letters from George III to Bute, 63.

  17. Middleton, Bells, 198; Ayling, Elder Pitt, 282, 290–2 (quotations at 291 and 292).

  CHAPTER FIFTY: The End of an Alliance

  1. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (New York, 1894), 1:215.

  2. Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–1763 (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 248–58; Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), esp. 121–5. Grenville was the brother of Hester, William Pitt’s wife; Egremont was another of Grenville’s brothers-in-law. Grenville’s acceptance caused a deep, immediate breach within the family. Pitt severed all relations summarily; Earl Temple (George’s older brother and custodian of the family fortune) cut George’s sons out of his will.

  3. Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), 358, 364.

  4. On Townshend’s rise, see Lewis Namier and John Brooke, Charles Townshend (New York, 1964); and Cornelius Forster, The Uncontrolled Chancellor: Charles Townshend and His AmericanPolicy (Providence, 1978). On manpower shortages and the need for surprise, see Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 202.

  5. Quotation: Egremont to the earl of Bristol, 19 Nov. 1761, in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination,1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 252.

  6. Ibid., 190–6; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 218–26; Jeffery Amherst, The Journal of Jeffery Amherst, ed. J. Clarence Webster (Chicago, 1931), 280 (entry of 27 Mar. 1762). The British had 97 killed and 391 wounded; French casualties were probably comparable as a proportion of the smaller number of defenders (evidently fewer than 3,000, including militia). Amherst thought there was “surprisingly little loss” of life in the campaign.

  7. Gipson, Culmination, 196.

  8. Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 309–59.

  9. Frederick to the Gräfin Camas, n.d. [1761], quoted in Ludwig Reiners, Frederick the Great: A Biography, trans. Lawrence P. R. Wilson (New York, 1960), 215.

  10. Reiners, Frederick the Great, 216; Gipson, Culmination, 61; Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 308–10; Christopher Duffy, The Military Life of Frederick the Great (New York, 1986), 226.

  11. Reiners, Frederick the Great, 218 (quotation), 283. Frederick II had been married to Princess Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick for nearly thirty years, but the couple remained childless, his homosexuality proving an insuperable obstacle to procreation. Thus his heir, Frederick William, was the son of his brother, Prince Augustus William, whom Frederick had disgraced in 1757 after he had failed to keep the Austrians from seizing a strategic junction and supply magazine. Augustus William died in 1758, a broken man (Duffy, Military Life, 17, 133).

  12. Reiners, Frederick the Great, 219 (couplet, my translation); Duffy, Military Life, 233–4; Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 310–13.

  13. Newcastle to Hardwick, 10 Jan. 1762, quoted in Middleton, Bells, 205.

  14. Browning, Newcastle, 283–5; Middleton, Bells, 205–6. For the Treasury to issue two million pounds in Exchequer bills—short-term debt instruments usually emitted in smaller quantities, in anticipation of taxes—without the backing of the Bank of England, seemed to invite inflation, a fearsome prospect for an investing community that remembered the wartime devaluations of 1709–11. Any rift between the bank and the Treasury would have gravely shaken investor confidence, which had
already endured a shock in 1761 when the bank’s shares had fallen in value in anticipation of war with Spain. The buoyant state of trade, low bread prices in London, and military victories overcame this brief crisis, but Newcastle, an inveterate worrier, feared worse effects this time—as indeed did most of the “money’d men,” for whom the fear of default transcended rational calculation. See Reed Browning, “The Duke of Newcastle and the Financing of the Seven Years’ War,” Journal of Economic History 31 (1971): 244–77; Julian Hoppit, “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39 (1986): 39–58, esp. 48; and John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1988), 193.

  15. Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930), 353–80; quotation is from Newcastle to the marquis of Rockingham, 14–15 May 1762, at 376.

  16. George III to Bute, c. 19 May 1762, in Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London, 1939), 109.

  17. Reiners, Frederick the Great, 219–20.

  18. Ibid., 220–1; Duffy, Military Life, 236; H. M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990), 30–1; Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 318–19.

  19. Savory, Army in Germany, 360–434; Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 192.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE: The Intersections of Empire, Trade, and War: Havana

  1. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 256–60.

  2. Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740–1763 (New York, 1940), 375; Gipson, Culmination,270–2.