by Tom Anderson
One of these was General Sir Fairfax Washington, second son of the by now deceased Lawrence Washington and brother of James Washington, 2nd Marquess of Fredericksburg.[202] Sir Fairfax had cut his military teeth as a young lieutenant of the Virginia militia in the Indian wars, then had served as a captain of the newly created 63rd (Virginia) Regiment of Foot, which had fought under his uncle General George Washington in the Plate during the Second Platinean War. He had risen to become colonel of the regiment, then had in 1791 become Master General of the Ordnance. Sir Fairfax’s tenure was noted for his support for Henry Shrapnel and Douglas Philips’ development of a hail shot, a hollow cannonball filled with musket balls and gunpowder, which exploded in midair (in theory) and had the same bloody effect as canister on close-packed enemy troops, but at a much greater range. The hail shot was later one of the British Army’s best weapons against the close-packed French columns they faced.[203]
However, Sir Fairfax is best remembered for his participation in the recruitment crisis of 1795 and 1796. He suggested to Amherst that they increase recruitment in the Empire of North America, to which Amherst was sceptical: he pointed out that America’s open expanses of new land to be settled meant that there was less chance of producing the down-on-their-luck young men that the British Army relied on for its recruitment. Sir Fairfax countered that settlement had presently largely stalled in some of the Confederations, such as Carolina and New York, and even in those still opened up to settlement, not all young men could afford to buy their own land. The promise of plunder in a European war to finance their plans might be very attractive…
Amherst agreed and put the proposal to King George, who accepted readily. Parliament was less enthusiastic, though a slim majority favoured the proposals. However, Sir Fairfax realised that the practice of having to appeal to Parliament to raise each new regiment would hamstring and slow down the programme too much. Together with Amherst, and with Royal backing from the King, they launched the American Regiments Bill, which sought to transfer the responsibility for raising American regiments from Westminster to Fredericksburg. This was considered greatly controversial in the British political scene, but happily for Sir Fairfax, coincided with the reports of Boulanger’s shock defeat of Mozart in November. As usual a week is a long time in politics, and for that week the chattering classes were consumed with the certainty that the French Jacobin forces would carry all before them and that the Hanoverian Dominions needed all the regiments they could get. It did not matter that in a week or two, when reports of Ney’s retreat from Lorraine emerged, they became equally certain that the French Jacobin armies were doomed—because it was during that week that the American Regiments Act (1795) was passed.
The Act was somewhat watered down by the House of Lords, but passed in its original spirit. It was joined in February 1796 by the Shipping Act (1796) which, among other things, increased the authority of American dockyards to build ships to a Royal Naval standard. However, the Admiralty remained unified and based in London, it being assumed at this point that any American contribution to the naval war effort would be minor and superfluous, given British and Royal French overwhelming numerical superiority.
The grandly named Commission for Continental Regiments was created by an act of the Continental Parliament in April 1796 and took up office in the Cornubia Palace, a building originally intended for King Frederick’s royal residency in America but in practice usually empty, as when the royals visited America they usually travelled between the colonies and stayed as the guests of the local nobles. The Palace was large enough to be filled out with several other newly created Continental Commissions (essentially the early American version of departments of State) as the war wore on. In order that Westminster might be able to demand accountability of American actions, a further Act was passed in 1797 which saw a Special Commissioner for Home Affairs appointed, essentially an American minister to Britain in all but name, mirroring the Lord Deputy. The first of these was Albert Gallatin of New York, appointed by his key political ally Lord Hamilton the Lord President. As Gallatin’s and Hamilton’s great political enemy, Governor Aaron Burr of New York (and a noted anglophobe) remarked sourly, ‘Well, he has managed to gain profitable relations with the savages of the forests and rivers to the west; now let him attempt it with those on the foggy island to the east.’
At the founding of the CCR, only eight American regiments actually existed: the 80th Royal Pennsylvania Rifles, the 14th King’s Own Philadelphian Dragoons, the 63rd (Virginia) Foot, the 79th (New York) Foot, the Royal American Company of Artillery (not numbered, and recruited from across the Empire), the 84th (Carolina) Foot, the 78th New England Rifles, and the 83rd (New England) Foot. The first new regiment to be formed was the 99th (Pennsylvania) Foot, that Confederation originally having preferred to rely on its own militia than form a regiment of the Line, but the lessons learned from the Lenape War showing the folly of that approach. Five new regiments were formed between May 1796 and September 1798, when the ‘Seigneur Offensive’, the invasion of the western coast of France, was launched. The vast majority of their men were still considered green by that point, despite having been drilled by veteran American sergeants from the Second Platinean War. However, even those that were not fit to fight in France were still useful: assigned to the frontier forts, they filled the boots of the more competent troops who had originally been stuck there, freeing them up for France while still warning off Indian raids. Ironically, this was the same tactic, on Robespierre’s part, which was responsible for the immediate success of ‘Seigneur’…
The American regiments taking part in the invasion of France were the 80th, the 84th and the 78th Rifles, while the 79th New Yorkers were busy assisting Lord Mornington in quelling the USE rebellion in Ireland. Generally speaking, however, throughout the course of the war, the greatest contributions to the army came from New York and Carolina. These were the two Confederations least concerned with westward settlement, Carolina’s way mostly blocked by the Cherokee and Royal-French Louisiana, New York’s by the Great Lakes and the Iroquois. Pennsylvania was also a fairly large contributor but remained concerned with securing its newly won western lands from the Indians. Virginia and New England did contribute forces, but not in proportion to their population, and the reason for this was that they (specifically Boston and Norfolk) were centres for the new American shipbuilding programme permitted by the Shipping Act. Although the captains acceded through the usual precedence on the post-lists, the crews were often drawn locally, and thus fewer recruits were available for the Army regiments.
And of course it was one of the Boston dockyards that built the most famous American ship of them all, HIMS Enterprize…
Chapter 36: Cross of Fire, Heart of Blood
“Dieu, et mon droit.”
– Louis XVII’s first words upon setting foot on the soil of Brittany
*
From: “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)–
Looking back on the issue, many historians have found it rather strange that the French Republican government under Robespierre had not foreseen the fact that Brittany and the Vendée would be trouble spots for the Revolution. Both areas had benefited under the same quirks of the ancien régime that the urbanite supporters of the Revolution had hated. In the words of Arthur Spencer, “no farmer has ever complained about a law that makes it more difficult for him to pay taxes to the government”. As a Duchy, Brittany continued to enjoy special privileges and autonomy under the Kingdom of France, including its own relatively powerful parlement.
The Vendée, though having no such special constitutional status, possessed a nobility that was more down-to-earth and less divided from commoners than that in Paris, and the excesses of the Revolution against the First Estate shocked Vendean public opinion. But it was those against the Second Estate that really clinched it. Perhaps because it had been a battleground between Protestant Huguenots and Catholics two centuries before, the Vendeans we
re some of the more fiercely devout Catholics in all France. Anti-clerical measures on the part of the Revolution – both relatively passive ones such as stopping clerical privileges, and active ones such as Hébert’s pogroms – served to further align Vendean feeling against the Republican government.
The strange part was that there was no open rebellion for the first three years of the Republic’s existence. This was simply because, to oversimplify somewhat, no-one had ever been sent from Paris to check that the western provinces remained loyal to Paris. The idea that to possess the capital city is to possess the state (or more coloquially, ‘to hold the heart is to hold the nation’) was a cornerstone of Revolutionary thinking. The Republicans’ possession of Paris did serve to turn much undecided French public opinion to their side in the early days. However, Brittany in particular had been largely unaffected even by the trend towards centralisation during the days of Bourbon absolutism. It was not a case of rebellion in the years between the King’s phlogistication and 1798: simply that Vendean and Breton officials ignored any pronouncements coming out of Paris. Even though Robespierre feared a British invasion of the western coast of France, the Republican government did not try to enforce its authority there simply because it was focused entirely on defeating Austria.
This changed in 1798. At a meeting between the three Consuls (Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, Pierre Boulanger and Jean de Lisieux) in Christmas 1797 (a.k.a. Chien Nivôse de l’an Deux), Robespierre voiced his fear of a British invasion, noting that no real troops could be spared from the planned invasion of Germany, the Rubicon Offensive. Boulanger had suggested that the Armée républicaine françaises (ARF) instead use the western coastlands as training ground for raw recruits, marching them up and down to provide a convincing military presence for any British spies. Robespierre had agreed, noting that this would also help extend governmental control into an area that had been reported (vaguely) to be…difficult.
Ironically, it was this move that first sparked rebellion in the west. The first French recruits left their barracks in March 1798, at around the same time as the launching of Rubicon in the east. Initially Boulanger’s plan worked, with overly nervous British agents reporting that the French were moving troops in to secure the west, and that the British government’s planned Seigneur Offensive would have to be cancelled. However, even as the doddering Marquess of Rockingham hesitated, things came to a head. The recruits were drawn from all over France, practically foreigners to many of the locals, and they were led by drill sergeants often considered too undisciplined to be serving against Austria. And one of the things the troops practised was Boulanger’s strategy of living off the land. The result was a reign of terror against the local people, with looting and ‘confiscation’ rife. The troops were used to a world, by now, where one could get away with anything if one could bluff the other person into thinking one had sanction from Robespierre. The Vendeans did not dwell in that world.
Historians are divided on what incident first sparked off the Chouannerie, just as they are on the causes of the Jacobin Revolution. Many people have drawn attention to a particular crime, the rape of a mother superior, the burning down of a noble’s house with his family still inside, the desecration of a church. It is quite probable that we will never know for sure. What is known that, in an action similar to that of the Polish rebellion raging at the same time in Eastern Europe, many quietly organised rebel groups sprang into life on the same day: October 9th, the day of St Denis, patron saint of France. That day, Sarrasin Vendémiaire de l’an Trois, was also a day of celebration for the Republicans, at least before they heard about what was happening in the west. It was on this day that the French armies took Regensburg and the Holy Roman Empire breathed its last (q.v.)
Yet victory in the east came together with crisis in the west. The rebels, who called themselves chouans after their owl-call recognition signal, conducted a surprisingly organised counter-revolutionary campaign in the first few days of their existence. Drunken recruits, fat from eating off the backs of the Vendean people, had their throats cut. Captured Republican officers were executed by the same chirurgiens they had unleashed on the local nobles. Bloody Flags were burned, hastily erected Temples of Reason blown up before their mortar could dry. The white flag of the monarchy came up, and with it was another: a red cross and heart on a white field, accompanied with the words Dieu le Roi, God the King – the Sacred Heart of the Vendée. The people had issued a challenge to the Revolution, the first serious one it had faced from within since Toulon.
The Vendeans were joined by the Bretons, who raised an army under Charles Armand Tuffin, the Marquis of Rouërie (or Rogery, as it was literally and amusingly translated by English journalists). Rouërie was a veteran of the Second Platinean War[204] and was generally liked by the Breton people, who saw him as one of them. The Bretons added the Vendean heart to their own ermine flag and joined the Vendeans in their campaign against the terrorising troops. By November, the Jacobin presence in the two provinces had been virtually wiped out. Royal France was no longer merely an outre-mer idea, a government in exile with some colonies. The King effectively once again held territory in France itself.
The Chouannerie consumed the attention of both the British and Republican French press in the winter of 1798, despite Robespierre’s attempts to gag the latter. Equally, both nations’ politicians began to demand intervention. In Parliament, when Charles James Fox naively attempted to condemn the Chouans for ‘backsliding against the cause of liberty’, he was booed down. It was at this point that Richard Burke, the still youthful son of Edmund, tabled his first Parliamentary motion by asking for British intervention on the side of the Chouans. Meanwhile in Paris, even the cowed rubber-stamp that Robespierre had reduced the National Legislative Assembly to nonetheless managed to pluck up the courage to insist on action.
It was not as though Robespierre himself disagreed, though. He had always considered Britain to be a dangerous enemy to have at one’s back, and here was a blatant opportunity for the British to attack. The Consuls recognised that this would obviously have to be some sort of seaborne invasion, so one mode of action would be to attempt to intercept the British forces in the Channel (La Manche). However, when Lisieux asked Surcouf to consider a plan for such an eventuality, the pioneering sailor simply stared incredulously at him for half a minute before replying that it would be nothing more than a waste of lives. Republican France had only perhaps a third of the navy that pre-Revolutionary France had possessed, and that of often suspect loyalty and training. Too many good sailors had left with Leo Bone and joined the Dauphin in Britain. Surcouf suggested that either the Dutch or Spanish Navies could at least give the Royal Navy pause, though, if there were some way that they could be drawn into the war diplomatically.
This exchange is often used to illustrate the difference between Lisieux and Robespierre. Upon hearing this, and informing Surcouf that it was extremely unlikely that the services of the Dutch or Spanish could be acquired, Lisieux rejected the idea that the Republic could mount a serious challenge to Britain’s forces enroute. They would simply have to find a way to defeat them on land. Robespierre, however, dismissed this opinion (and indeed Lisieux had to talk him out of sentencing Surcouf to a summary trial and execution for faint-heartedness). Having been told by one sailor that it was impossible, Robespierre simply asked another and another until he got the right answer. This came from Charles Villeneuve, a character who was afterwards considered a lunatic by both French sides, but bizarrely was quite popular among the British, who have always appreciated a really dramatic futile gesture, and he was sometimes referred to respectfully in the British press as ‘Monsieur Newton’, the direct translation of his name.
Villeneuve argued that much of the Royal Navy was dispersed around the world and that the home fleet would lack experience (apparently not being aware of the Royal Navy’s practice of rotating ships between fleets fairly frequently). More sensibly, he pointed out the example of the Battle of Trafalg
ar in 1783: the British had lost to the Franco-Spanish forces, but had nonetheless achieved much of their objective (to stop the allies resupplying their forces in South America) as they had sunk many of the troop transport ships and forced others to turn back. Villeneuve suggested that the small French Republican Navy could force a similar Pyrrhic victory on the British invasion force now.
Aside from the questionable wisdom of a course of action that was assumed to end in the near-destruction of the Republican French fleet even if it succeeded, Villeneuve’s plan fell short in other ways. Seigneur, as the British operation to cross the Channel and support the Chouans was called, was a far cry from the Second Platinean War operation Villeneuve had compared it to. The Franco-Spanish in that conflict had been trying to support troops thousands of miles away, across a vast ocean. The Channel, no matter how much some among the British might wish it was, was hardly an enormous gulf separating Britain from France. The French would have a very narrow window of opportunity to attack the British fleet, and furthermore if a British troopship was damaged, it might well be able to return to port, be repaired and out again within a day or two.
