The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  In terms of results, Rodney’s lessons in discipline took time to bear fruit. He returned to the Caribbean in 1781 when his fleet attacked and took the Dutch island of St Eustatius, which yielded £3.5 million in prize money. Intrepid was not present, and so Lieutenant Home had to be satisfied with twenty-three guineas – ‘no small sum for a subaltern’ – his share from the attack on another Dutch island. Gratifying as such windfalls may have been, their obtainment did not do much material harm to the French fleet, which still sailed unchallenged in West Indian and North American waters.

  While matters hung in the balance in the Caribbean, the tide of war swung irreversibly against Britain in North America after the surrender of Major-General Sir Charles Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown in October 1781. France and Spain gained nothing from this victory and, after three years of fighting, both powers were feeling the pinch. In what turned out to be a final attempt to secure a substantial return for their outlay, the French and Spanish decided to launch a seaborne attack on Jamaica in the spring of 1782.

  Rodney was again ordered to the West Indies, warned by Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, that, ‘The fate of the empire is in your hands.’ His captains now responsive to his commands, Rodney, with thirty-six ships of the line, encountered Admiral de Grasse’s slightly smaller squadron off Les Saintes in the channel between Guadeloupe and Dominica in April. What followed was described by Rodney as ‘the most important victory I believe ever gained against our perfidious enemies, the French.’ The battle was long, bloody, and decisive, obstinately fought as if the fate of both nations depended upon the event. Success attended the British flag, and the French admiral with the Ville de Paris and four other ships remained as trophies of our victory.’22

  The battle of the Saintes not only saved the British West Indies, it demonstrated the awesome firepower of the carronade, a short-barrelled cannon nicknamed the ‘smasher’ from the ability of its 32- and 68-pound shot to tear into ships’ hulls. Introduced to the navy in 1779, the new guns were manufactured by the Carron ironworks at Falkirk in sufficiently large numbers to be widely distributed throughout the fleet by 1782. At the Saintes, the effect was devastating; for the first time in this war, French gunners flinched and ran from their pieces, terrified by British broadsides. Another recent innovation, copper sheafing for the lower hulls of ships, improved the speed and manoeuvrability of British men-o’-war. After his five-week, stormy crossing of the Atlantic before the battle, Rodney had remarked, ‘None but an English squadron and copper-bottomed could have forced their way to the West Indies.’ The new technology of the Industrial Revolution had rescued the empire.

  Checkmated in the Caribbean, the Franco-Spanish war effort wilted. Soon after the Saintes. a small Spanish squadron turned tail and withdrew from the West Indies rather than face Rodney. In October 1782, the combined fleet blockading Gibraltar failed to intercept a relief squadron under Admiral Sir Richard Howe, and the siege was ended.

  The exhaustion of France and Spain and their failure to exploit their early advantages at sea were reflected in the Peace of Versailles, which was signed in 1783. The North American colonies apart, Britain’s losses were confined to Minorca and Florida, which were delivered to Spain; Senegal, St Lucia and Tobago. which were returned to France, and Ceylon, which was handed over to the Netherlands. Considering what had been taken from her adversaries during the past hundred years, Britain had come out of the war remarkably well. She had survived largely thanks to her wealth; the government had borrowed £94.5 million during the war and some of this money had been spent on laying down thirty-two additional battleships. Maritime supremacy had been preserved, but only just.

  Even so, the British had suffered a psychological shock. A limit appeared to have been set on national greatness and the vulnerability of the empire exposed. Those who had cheered so loudly in 1759 were in a soberer mood in 1783, and one of them, Cowper, struck a pessimistic note when he surveyed Britain’s future in his poem ‘The Task’ (1785):

  England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!

  Time was when it was praise and boast enough

  In every clime, and travel where we might,

  That we were born her children. Praise enough

  To fill the ambition of a private man,

  That Chatham’s language was his mother-tongue,

  And Wolfe’s great name compatriot with his own.

  Farewell these honours, and farewell with them

  The hope of such hereafter!

  3

  The Empire of America: Settlement and War, 1689–1775

  Hail Pennsylvania! hail! thou happy land,

  Where Plenty scatters with a lavish Hand:

  Amidst the Woods we view the Friendly Vine,

  With Purple Pride, spontaneously entwine;

  Where various Cates arise without the Toil

  Of labouring Hind, to cleave the stubborn Soil.

  This picture of a fecund Eden, set down by an anonymous poet and published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in January 1729, owed more to the author’s acquaintance with Virgil and Milton than experience of everyday frontier life. Nevertheless, these lines reflected a commonplace, if unrealistic view of the fertility of a region which was gradually being penetrated by pioneers. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century they moved inland along the banks of the Hudson, Delaware and Potomac rivers and their tributaries. Woodlands were razed, land ploughed, and small settlements appeared in the wilderness. Between 1710 and 1730 the population of Pennsylvania alone grew from 24,500 to 85,700, an increase largely made up of incomers, mostly Scots-Irish from Northern Ireland.

  A new phase in the development of the North American colonies was underway, with expansion westwards across the Appalachians and northwards towards the St Lawrence basin. The new migration aroused misgivings among the Indian tribes, whose lands lay in its path, and alarm among the French, whose underpopulated colony of New France seemed in danger of being overwhelmed. Both reacted with defensive measures, but neither the Indians nor the French possessed resources adequate for the task. They could temporarily deflect, but never stem the advance of the colonists who, when the going got tough, could summon up assistance from Britain.

  The Indian tribes were sadly ill-equipped to understand, let alone take action to prevent what was happening to them. They could never wholly grasp the alien, European principle of land-ownership and all the legal paraphernalia of deeds of sale and titles that went with it. Nor could Europeans appreciate the Indian concept of the land, which was simply expressed many years later by a Sauk chieftain: ‘The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they cultivate it, they have a right to the soil.’1

  It was therefore possible for a tribe to sell large tracts of land in the belief that they retained the right to cultivate it or hunt its game. When they discovered that this was not so, and were excluded by settlers from what they still considered their property, Indians were puzzled and angry. Often tribes were unclear as to what they had relinquished since they knew nothing of European measurements, delineating boundaries by reference to natural features rather than lines drawn on maps.

  The agents of the land speculators, who were the forerunners of the colonists, commonly used every form of chicanery to dupe a people only dimly aware of what was being asked of them. One negotiator was identified by an Oneida sachem (supreme chief) during a meeting between representatives of the Iroquois Confederation and the colonies at Albany in 1754. He fingered the man and described his methods:

  That man is a Devil and has stole our lands, he takes Indians slyly by the Blanket one at a time, and when they are drunk, puts some money in their Bosoms, and persuades them to sign deeds for our lands upon the Susquehana which we will not suffer to be settled by other means.2

  Alcohol was the lubricant which eased many Indians off their lands. Ever since the arrival of the first settlers, Indians had b
een tempted and undermined by spirits, which were made freely available by unscrupulous traders. ‘Rum ruins us,’ an Oneida sachem complained to officials in Pennsylvania in 1753. He pleaded with them to ban the ‘Wicked Whiskey Traders’, who bartered alcohol for beaver pelts and furs, and took all the money which the Indians had saved to pay their debts for cloth and utensils bought from ‘Fair Traders’. This appeal ended on a bathetic note, which underlined how strongly the Indians had become addicted. Requesting a ritual exchange of presents, the chief concluded, ‘Our Women and Young People present you with this bundle of skins, desiring some Spirits to make them cheerful in their own Country; not to drink here.’3

  The harsh truth was that the frontier tribes had long ago abandoned a culture based upon stone, animal skins and bone and become dependent on the goods offered by the colonists. Warning the Creek Indians against making war in April 1774, Sir James Wright, the Governor of Georgia, brutally outlined their predicament. ‘And what can you do?’ he asked. ‘Can you make guns, gunpowder, bullets, glasses, paint and clothing, etc.? You know you cannot make these things, and where can you get them if you quarrel with the white people and how will your women and children get supplied with clothes, beads, glasses and scissors and all other things that they now use and cannot do without?’4

  In return, the Indians could offer beaver pelts and furs. The beaver pelt, carefully trimmed to leave a thin covering of fur, was a tough, waterproof material that had been used for hat-making in Europe since the mid-seventeenth century. The familiar tricorn hat, a mark of social respectability and universally worn throughout most of the eighteenth century (Governor Wright no doubt wore his when he addressed the Creek Indians), had its origins in the rivers and streams of North America. Europe’s millinery fashions provided the staple trade of the North American frontier; by the 1750s, the annual value of beaver pelts exported from New York and the Hudson’s Bay Company posts in northern Canada was £250,000.5 Further south, in Pennsylvania, the trade in beaver pelts and furs was worth £40,000 a year.

  From its start in the mid-seventeenth century, the commerce in furs and beaver skins had been intensely competitive. The French had tried, vainly, to evict the Hudson’s Bay Company traders from their bases and had taken systematic steps to secure a monopoly of fur and beaver-pelt trading with all the tribes along the St Lawrence basin and the shores of the Great Lakes. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, French governors in Quebec had negotiated treaties with the Indians that allowed them to build a chain of fortified posts which ran west from Montreal to the northern tip of Lake Michigan. Each was strategically sited to seal the narrow waterways between the lakes and so control the routes taken by fur-traders. Forts Frontenac, Niagara, Detroit and Mackinac were more than guard-posts, they marked the southern limits of New France and laid a tenuous claim to a wilderness that would shortly be entered by British settlers.

  French domination of this area was challenged in 1727, when New York established a fort at Oswego on the south-eastern shore of Lake Ontario. Four years later, the French countered by erecting a stronghold at Crown Point on the southern extremity of Lake Champlain. It served both to defend the approaches to Montreal and as a barrier against New York colonists advancing along the Hudson.

  Fort-building and efforts to win over the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, who occupied the region south of Lake Ontario, were part of a cold war between the British colonists and the French. The strengths and weaknesses of both sides were exposed in 1744 when Britain and France declared war. There was a series of minor actions at various points along the frontier, the most serious of which were a sequence of Franco-Indian raids which devastated isolated settlements on the upper Hudson and Mohawk rivers. In the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Indians, the French had the upper hand, largely because both parties were apprehensive about the scope of British expansion.

  The British colonists’ war effort was fragmented and therefore ineffectual. The colonies were disunited and without an apparatus to prepare and execute a common defensive strategy. Nevertheless, in 1745, the New Englanders had responded enthusiastically to a summons to send volunteers to the siege of Louisbourg. There were widespread festivities when the fort was taken and many who celebrated were already looking ahead to the collapse of New France and, with it, opportunities to move into and settle the empty lands of Lower Canada. The land-hungry were disappointed; the peace of 1748 restored the situation in North America to what it had been at the start of the war.

  There was no peace in the disputed territory between New France and British North America. After 1748, the focus for contention shifted to the upper Ohio, where the Ohio Company was in the process of buying 200,000 acres from the local Indians. The French reaction was swift and designed to stem the inevitable flow of pioneers into the region. The Marquis Duquesne, governor of Quebec, ordered an armed reconnaissance of the Ohio valley in 1749. This expedition was followed by further shows of force and, by the end of 1752, a string of outposts had been constructed which linked the southern shores of Lake Erie with Fort Duquesne, placed at the confluence of the Ohio, Monagahela and Allegheny rivers. British settlers and fur-traders who ventured too close to the new centres of French power were warned off.

  Duquesne’s bold move in the frontier chess game stunned the British colonists. Pennsylvania, the colony immediately threatened, was in a state of disarray since the Quaker minority, which dominated political life, had for years refused to contemplate any measures to defend the colony. Still without any machinery with which to plan and coordinate a common defence policy, the response of the other colonies was fumbling. An attempt by a detachment of the Virginia militia, commanded by a young landowner, George Washington, to keep a toehold in the Ohio region came unstuck in April 1754 when he was driven to abandon Fort Necessity.

  This setback panicked the colonies into action. Representatives from each assembled at Albany in the spring of 1755 in an effort to create a common front against the French and the Iroquois. Seen from the perspective of a small town in New York, the colonists’ position appeared extremely perilous. They were confronted by what seemed the overwhelming strength of New France, an offshoot of Europe’s greatest military power. Recent events indicated that France was now intent on pursuing an aggressive frontier policy which, if it succeeded, would confine the British to a coastal strip of North America. Moreover, France was a Catholic nation, which aroused deep fears among the colonists, a large proportion of whom were Presbyterians. Their anxiety was not solely based upon an ancestral loathing of Popery; Catholic priests and missionaries were abroad among the Iroquois and, with official approval, were warning them that the British intended to seize all Indian lands.6

  The outcome of the Albany assembly was an appeal to the British government for help. Alone, the colonists could not hope to beat regular French troops and their Indian auxiliaries. The desperation implicit in the request convinced Newcastle’s cabinet that recent French encroachments would, if unchecked, ‘endanger all the Northern colonies, and tend to the total Destruction thereof and their Trade’. Britain would not allow the colonies and their wealth to slip from her grasp, even if this meant a war with France, although, during the summer of 1754, the government hoped that the conflict would remain localised.

  The decision to send troops to North America had far-reaching consequences. It was a recognition of how vital the colonies were for Britain and, in a short time, it transformed North America into a war zone in which British forces were fighting for complete dominance of the region. Furthermore, and this was not fully appreciated by all those involved, the colonists had been placed under an obligation to the home government which would have to be redeemed. For their part, the colonists had for the first time found the will to shed their particularism and join together.

  The first priority in 1754 was the reassertion of British authority in the Ohio valley. In September, General Edward Braddock was sent to Virginia with two regiments of foot, an arti
llery battery and orders to expel the French from Fort Duquesne. He was a competent officer who had learned his trade on the battlefields of Europe where warfare had become an exact art. Firepower – that is concentrated, synchronised, close-range musketry – was the key to victory. Therefore soldiers, elegantly uniformed and drilled, manoeuvred in rigid lines to take positions from where they could most effectively fire the volleys which won battles. It would be very different in the backwoods of North America as Braddock soon discovered.

  In May 1755, Braddock set up his forward base at Fort Cumberland, a hundred or so miles from Fort Duquesne. His regulars had been augmented by some Virginian militiamen, who resembled Falstaff’s ragged regiment and were rated by Braddock ‘very indifferent men’.7 Equally unpromising, at least in the eyes of a professional soldier, were the droves of Indians who congregated around the fort and offered their services. All these men, and in many cases their wives, doxies and children, needed rations and these were carried by packhorses and horse-drawn wagons which were obtained, with much difficulty, from colonial governors. The horses came from local copers whose tendency to sell the army worn-out and sickly beasts provoked much irritable comment about dishonest colonials.

  Transport problems had to be put on one side after Braddock received intelligence that 3,000 French regulars, under the command of Johann Herman von Dieskau, were expected in Quebec by mid-summer. Von Dieskau was a specialist in what was then the novel art of partisan warfare in rough country, a subject about which Braddock knew next to nothing. Nevertheless, he had with him men like Washington who knew the rudiments of a type of fighting in which concealment, ambushes and rapid withdrawals were all important.

  If Braddock received any advice on this subject it was ill-heeded, since he took no precautions against sudden attack nor sent men ahead to spy out the land. His column, with its cumbersome tail of horses and wagons, trundled through the forests, watched at every turn by unseen Indian scouts in the French service. Soon after it forded the Monagahela River, the vanguard was ambushed by a Franco-Indian detachment who drove it in confusion back into the centre of the column. Panic followed; a third of Braddock’s army was lost and he was fatally wounded. Prisoners were tortured to death by the Indians, a practice which was tolerated by the French, and for which the British would later take condign revenge. The detritus of Braddock’s army retired to Fort Cumberland, leaving the French masters of the region.