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Death Before Glory

Page 3

by Martin Howard


  All West India Regiments had a lieutenant colonel (two after 1808), and two lieutenants and one ensign per company regardless of size. At the heart of each regiment was a cadre of white European sergeants, corporals and drummers. At least in the early years, there were some white soldiers in the ranks; muster rolls for the First and Fourth Regiments show men ‘enrolled in England’, but it is likely that the majority were Irish.

  Recruitment relied both on the purchase of slaves and the enlistment of free blacks. Each island was expected to contribute a specified quota of slaves. On the arrival of the slave ships, the men were lined up in the port and examined to establish whether they were fit to bear arms. They were required to be at least sixteen years of age and five feet three inches in stature. Those selected were led away to be given a regimental name and to be kitted out as a redcoat. Between 1795 and 1808 the British Government purchased more than 13,000 slaves for its West India Regiments at a cost of almost a million pounds. For an oppressed slave already on the islands the inducements to become a soldier included a full stomach and the prestige of the uniform. The army diet and the relative wealth were more than he could ever expect whilst working on a plantation.

  Most of the recruits came from various West African countries, the number of mulattoes gradually diminishing. Many of the companies appear to have been formed from diverse nations, perhaps intentionally to reduce the likelihood of conspiracy and mutiny. African recruits were favoured as they were ‘wholly unacquainted with and uncontaminated by the Vices which prevail among the Slaves in the Towns and Plantations, having no acquaintance or connection of any sort…’ A commentator writing in 1801 believed that the typical newly arrived African recruit was able to adapt to military life as he had never had to suffer the ‘debased state’ of the slave.

  The role of the West India Regiments in specific campaigns will be discussed in the next section but, as a generalisation, we can say that they performed creditably. The mutiny of the 8th Regiment on Dominica in 1802 was troubling, but apparently an isolated event. Their role in the period 1795 to 1797 was limited by poor recruitment, there still being reliance on the Ranger corps. In later years, for instance between 1804 and 1807, the reduction in white troops in the region was offset by the augmentation of black regiments. Actions in which the West India Regiments displayed particular gallantry included the 8th at St Martin in 1801, the 3rd at St Lucia in 1803, the 6th at Surinam in 1804, the 1st on Dominica in 1805, and the 3rd and 8th at The Saints in 1809. Open-minded British officers such as John Moore were quick to acknowledge the advantages of black troops over white Europeans.

  In this country [St Lucia] much may be made of black corps. I have had occasion to observe them of late; they possess, I think, many excellent qualities as soldiers, and may with proper attention become equal to anything. Even as they are at present they are for the West Indies invaluable.

  Lieutenant Colonel William Dyott, serving on Grenada in the same year, lamented the ineffectiveness of European soldiers in the climate and expressed the opinion that the garrison should be made up entirely of black troops. Not all were so approving. Captain Thomas Henry Browne witnessed the drill of the 1st, 3rd and 4th West India Regiments on Martinique in 1809. He admitted that the men were ‘tall, well built fellows’ but he judged them dirty and also clumsy in their movements.

  It is not within the scope of this book to analyse the wider social and political repercussions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the West Indies, but it must be acknowledged that the establishment of the West India Regiments had non-military significance. Buckley, whose Slaves in Red Coats is the definitive work on the subject, believes that the policy of purchasing slaves as soldiers impacted both on the wider slave trade and the status of individuals. Although the legal status of the black soldiers was not explicit, it is clear that they regarded themselves as equal to their white comrades in arms. After all, they wore the same uniform, received the same pay and allowances, and were treated in the same hospitals. In 1807, all black troops in British service were declared free ‘to all Intents and for all purposes whatever…’9

  To conclude this review of troops in British service we must also briefly consider the local militias of the islands and the diverse auxiliary colonial corps. The militias were usually composed of able-bodied whites and free blacks. Wealthier whites would generally form cavalry units and free black units would usually have white officers. Local legislative assemblies often provided the arms and equipment and the men were expected to train regularly, but perhaps only once a month. The essential roles of what was effectively a policing body were to protect the island from invasion and to deter slave uprisings. The largest of all the militia forces was on Jamaica. Here, every free male between the ages of 16 and 60 was liable to service in the organisation. Each infantry regiment included one or two companies of free blacks and a company of mulattoes. Jews might also serve in separate units. In 1793, the total militia force was 8,000 strong of which approximately 3,000 were free blacks. Similar arrangements were made on other islands. The Tobago militia of 1803 was formed ‘for the sole purpose of Defence against Internal Insurrection and Repelling the Attacks of Marauders’. On Grenada, the 1,200 men of the militia were prominent during the insurrections and in Saint Domingue there were 5,000 militiamen in 1795.

  These were not proper troops and they were mostly of limited utility in action. There are many complaints of their uselessness in the contemporary records of the wars. They were inhibited by their purely defensive role and undermined by inadequate training, easy exemption from service and poor discipline. In Saint Domingue the militia was depicted as being ‘bred up in ease and luxury and since worn down by anxiety and dismay’. Similarly, on Jamaica, the British commander, Lord Balcarres, complains in 1795 that his militia ‘always go to the point of danger but never encounter it’. There was often reluctance to raise militia, there being concern that this might threaten security rather than ensure it.

  Despite all this, there is patchy evidence that militia units could respond to good officers. Balcarres later contradicted himself, conceding that at least some militia had fought well with regular troops; ‘They have encountered the extremity of danger and fatigue without a murmur’. In Saint Domingue, the militia were inept when acting in isolation but, according to a senior British officer, they did ‘tolerably well’ if joined to regular forces. When George Nugent gave up his governorship of Jamaica in 1808, he was thanked by the island’s assembly for taking a personal interest in the militia. He had improved the esprit de corps and instituted good habits. That his successor, Sir Eyre Coote, immediately censured the militia perhaps tells us that even the best officers and administrators struggled to forge these men into a reliable weapon.10

  When fighting erupted in Saint Domingue in 1793, there was a rush to create auxiliary colonial corps to support the British cause. The British commander, Sir Adam Williamson, supported this policy and many of the units were raised by French colonists with royalist sympathies. By the end of 1795, there were around forty different corps totalling some 7,000 men. Most of these units had both infantry and cavalry and some also had artillery companies attached.

  We will mention a few which will make an appearance in the campaign chapters. Dillon’s Regiment was derived from the disillusioned remnants of the 2nd Battalion of the 87th French line infantry regiment (formerly Dillon’s Irish), which was in garrison at the Môle when the British arrived in September 1793. Antagonistic to French revolutionary politics, the rump of the unit remained loyal to the British until it disappeared in 1796. Jean Kina’s Corps was raised in 1792 by the white planters of Tiburon and was made up of their best slaves. Captain Charles Colville reported its appearance in 1793 to be ‘very grotesque’, the men carrying the musical instruments of their homeland and a strange variety of arms including billhooks and plantation tools. The Légion de la Grand Anse was led by the Canadian-born Baron Jean Charles de Montalembert and numbered about a thousand men, inclu
ding white colonists and free mulattoes. Dessource’s Volunteers or Légion was raised by Claude Bruno Dessource, a former French colonial officer, and consisted of black slaves and white officers. The Légion d’York was commanded by a local mayor and commander of the National Guard, Jean-Baptiste Lapointe; it recruited from free blacks and mulattoes. Finally, the Légion Britannique de Saint Domingue well illustrates the complex nature of many of these units. Evolving from Montalembert’s Légion de la Grande Anse, it incorporated a number of other subsidiary forces and eventually absorbed Bouillé’s Uhlans Britanniques, meaning that the corps was a mixture of colonial and European troops.

  A number of these corps performed well in the desperate fighting for control of Saint Domingue. Kina’s corps was renowned for its expertise in ‘bush fighting’ and Dessource’s, Montalembert’s and Lapointe’s forces all had military success against the army of Toussaint Louverture. Their conduct was uneven and not all British officers were convinced of their value; Lieutenant Colonel John Whitelocke complained to a fellow French officer in 1794 that he had been ‘tricked’ by colonial troops and he vowed that he would never again expose British soldiers next to them. It was, of course, all too easy to highlight the frailties of colonial allies in explaining British failure. Ultimately, the colonial forces proved to be unwieldy and prohibitively expensive. Williamson had failed to control their proliferation and there was ample opportunity for corruption, some units listing fictitious men. They were often top-heavy with officers. When the British evacuated Saint Domingue in 1798, there were 6,000 colonial troops in British service, of which at least 3,000 were non-whites. A few got off the colony to reach Jamaica, the great majority being left to fend for themselves.

  In 1796, on Grenada, William Dyott led a column of troops made up of the 8th, 9th and 25th ‘British’ regular line regiments, La Tour’s Royal Étranger, Lowenstein’s Chasseurs and local black militia. A year later in Saint Domingue, General John Graves Simcoe commanded an army composed of around 5,000 white troops, of which 40% were foreign, supported by 5,800 black chasseurs and 3−4,000 local militia. The war in the region was, with only a short interim, to last another 18 years. As British soldiers died in the heat, the need to close the ranks with local and foreign troops became ever more pressing. Britain’s West Indian army was a remarkably diverse body of men.11

  Chapter 2

  Citizens and Warriors: The French and Other Enemies

  In his admirable study of Napoleon’s overseas forces, René Chartrand observes that there is surprisingly little written on the Caribbean forces of Republican and Napoleonic France. There is, however, just enough information in the English and French literature to allow an overview of the soldiers of Britain’s greatest enemy in the region. The army of Republican France between 1791 and 1794 was an army of ‘citizen soldiers’, men who fought out of a sense of duty and to retain their rights. They were, as John Lynn points out, quite different to the soldiers of the earlier eighteenth century who embraced military service only because society offered them little alternative. The army was now more socially representative of France, the number of peasants increasing and the average recruit becoming younger and shorter in stature. Two-thirds of the army’s soldiers had served less than four years and more than a third less than one year.

  As war approached, the army was effectively rebuilt. In early 1793, the line numbered 180,000, its regiments considered the central part of the nation’s war effort. The organisation of this force was subject to ceaseless administrative change and political interference and cannot be detailed here. In addition to the regular units, young men willing to enlist could enter the ‘Volunteers’ where discipline was more lax, promotion quicker and pay higher. The National Assembly had decreed the levy of 100,000 ‘National Volunteers’, the bulk of which were formed into line battalions which elected their own officers, noncommissioned officers and grenadiers. The army was a ‘jumble of regular, volunteer, federal, legionary and free corps units’. Efforts were made to amalgamate regular and volunteer battalions to form a three-battalion demi-brigade which was classed as being either ligne (line infantry) or légère (light infantry). The volunteers were in excess − there were twice as many volunteer as regular battalions – and some brigades were volunteer only. The reorganisation was chaotic but it did give the army an improved basic structure that would be retained in the Grande Armée of 1805.

  When war erupted in the West Indies, the garrison of the French islands was mostly made up of these line regiments and National Volunteers sent from France. For instance, in Saint Domingue in 1792, the Republican governor, Léger-Felicité Sonthonax, received a reinforcement of 6,000 men from an anxious government, 2,000 being regulars of the line and 4,000 National Volunteers. There was disaffection in these units, royalist officers rejected and men divided by the extreme political views of the period. Regular line regiments were despatched to the Caribbean throughout the wars, notably to fight Toussaint Louverture in Saint Domingue and to contest Martinique, Guadeloupe and other key islands with the British.

  We will briefly review the nature and fate of four of these regular line battalions which saw action against British forces. We have only limited information from French sources. All the regiments experienced the devastating losses from disease which were the common lot of all European armies in the West Indies. The 37th ligne had a hundred men in the garrison of Fort Royal in Martinique in 1794. According to the French commander, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, the regiment deserved the highest praise for its conduct. By 1805, it had presumably been diminished by fighting and fever and the third battalion was absorbed into the reformed 82nd ligne. Battalions of the 26th ligne served both on Guadeloupe and Martinique forming part of the garrison of Fort Desaix in 1809. Its ranks included veterans of the Armies of Egypt and Italy and it was regarded as an excellent unit. The second and third battalions of the 66th ligne were in Guadeloupe in 1802. By 1807, the regiment had 1,300 men in the colony, but within the next two years it had been reduced to half strength by disease and at least a third of the ‘fit’ men could perform no useful duties. To salvage the unit, the French imported 1,500 black troops into the 15 centre companies, these new recruits armed with muskets which had been held in reserve. In late 1809 the regiment, ‘hassled’ by numerous changes in command, received another 320 recruits from France and, by now 2,500 strong including the black contingent, it performed well against the British on Guadeloupe in 1810.

  Thanks to Paul Arvers’s fine regimental history, we have a little more information pertaining to the experience of the 82nd ligne in the West Indies. Recruitment to regiments bound for the region was problematic. In 1802, General Henri-François Delaborde wrote to the Minister of War in Paris:

  It will be difficult to extract 600 men of the 82e and organise them for embarkation [to Martinique]. My fears are based on the pronounced repugnance of several officers and soldiers of the former 141e demi-brigade, incorporated into the 82e, the officers and soldiers of which have been almost four years in Saint Domingue. This repugnance has spread itself for some time in the 82e and it is manifested by a considerable desertion every time it receives the order to march to Brest, perhaps only half the men destined to be embarked arriving in the town. Be this as it may, I have given the order that the senior officer of the 82e demi-brigade form a battalion of 600 men.

  The reluctant regiment was to see prolonged service in the Caribbean. It showed ‘great bravery’ at Castries on St Lucia in 1803. In May 1805, the 82nd was essentially reformed with the incorporation of a number of smaller units. Its greatest feat of valour was the capture of the British-held Diamond Rock off Martinique in the same year, the young officers praised for their military knowledge and intrepidity.

  At the outset of 1809, the regiment’s three battalions on Martinique were each formed of six companies, of which one was of grenadiers and one of voltigeurs. The grenadier company was weak due to recruitment problems. The 1,500 strong regiment apparently fought well in the subseque
nt campaign against the British although the 82nd was not regarded as an elite force, French historian and soldier Henry de Poyen comparing it adversely with the 26th ligne and describing it as containing ‘beaucoup d’élements étrangers’. After the capitulation of the island, the French commander Villaret de Joyeuse complained of large-scale desertions, mostly from the 82nd. ‘These corps are unfortunately composed in large part of refractory conscripts, of prisoners and of poor quality individuals from the colonial depots.’ The bulk of the men were captured and sent to the prison hulks in England.1

  The French, just as the British, backed up their regular troops by the raising of a large number of local West Indian corps. The National Guards, sometimes referred to as ‘Citizens Guards’, were formed at the time of the Revolution. Despite the opposition of at least some whites, free blacks and mulattoes were commissioned as officers in a number of these units. Their uniform, consisting essentially of a dark blue coat, was virtually the same as that of the National Guard in France. Initially formed in a climate of revolutionary zeal, the tricolour cockade was widely displayed. In later years, National Guard units were created on Martinique and Guadeloupe. A decree of 1802 issued on Martinique instructed that all whites between the ages of 16 and 55 years were to report for service. The six battalions each had a company of grenadiers and one of chasseurs, the remaining companies being fusiliers. There were also six battalions on Guadeloupe, each battalion having black or mulatto chasseur companies, white fusilier companies and a company of dragoons. Similar arrangements were made on the neighbouring smaller islands.

 

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