The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  The American political response to the Quebec Act and the measures taken against Boston was rapid, and followed a pattern which had proved efficacious during previous crises. A Continental Congress was convened at Philadelphia at the beginning of September 1774 to devise a programme of retaliatory measures which, it was hoped, would make the British government think again. The delegates proceeded cautiously for, while they were united in their rejection of parliamentary sovereignty, they did not want to precipitate a complete break with Britain. First, they repeated their legal position as subjects of a government which denied the existence of what they knew to be their inalienable rights. Then, they brandished the sword of American economic power with a call for a boycott of all trade with Britain and its other colonies. The Congressional apologist, Alexander Hamilton, claimed that this would soon ‘introduce beggary and wretchedness in an eminent degree both in England and Ireland; and as to the West-India plantations, they could not subsist without us.’14

  Representatives at the Congress were careful not to discuss military preparations publicly even though, while they debated, the British government banned the import of arms and gunpowder into North America. In what was a spontaneous reaction, many Congress supporters began to stockpile weapons and make arrangements for the swift mobilisation of militiamen in case the government used force to disarm them. The headstrong went further and seized colonial arsenals and forts; in December a body of men, in which the ‘Sons of Liberty’ were prominent, occupied Fort William and Mary at Portsmouth and carried off cannon, muskets and gunpowder.

  5

  The World Turned Upside Down: The American War of Independence, 1775–83

  At the close of 1774 the British empire faced a crisis of unprecedented seriousness. During the past six months British power in North America had evaporated. Colonial governors had become stranded symbols of an authority they lacked the means to assert, and were reduced to writing dismal accounts of their impotence to Lord Dartmouth, the Colonial Secretary. Cadwallader Colden of New York was marginally luckier than his colleagues since the sloop HMS Kingfisher had cast anchor in the harbour in December, and he had a garrison of a hundred men from the Royal Irish Regiment. Nonetheless, he was anxious, since the ‘moderate inhabitants’ needed the reassurance of ‘a formidable power in the place to awe the licentious and encourage the friends of the government’.1

  Real power was passing into the hands of hard-line supporters of Congress. By April 1775, local committees of these men had superseded the governors of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina. There was nothing which the government could have done to halt this process, beyond issuing minatory proclamations which were largely ignored. What troops and warships were available were concentrated at Boston, the colonial militia could not be relied upon, and the customary instruments of coercion, the sheriffs and magistrates, either sided with Congress or were scared into neutrality. Even without partial or disinterested law officers, Americans in 1774 enjoyed considerable political freedom. Their press was unfettered so ideas could be freely expressed and circulated; Americans could travel where they wished, and hold public meetings whenever and wherever they chose. It was therefore easy for the agents of Congress to consolidate and organise the committed, convert the lukewarm, and bully the Loyalists.

  It took time for the reality of the situation in America to be fully understood in London. Here, George III and his ministers vacillated between policies of concession and coercion. By the new year, the King was convinced that parliamentary sovereignty could only be restored in America by condign measures. North and Dartmouth concurred, but clung to the hope that the Americans would ultimately back down rather than risk war, and that a negotiated settlement could be arranged.

  The policy which evolved during the early months of 1775 was therefore both placatory and threatening. On the one hand, North offered conciliation with promises of fiscal concessions in return for American acknowledgement of parliament’s supremacy, and on the other, he prepared for war. Four additional regiments of infantry were drafted to Boston, where the local commander, Lieutenant-General Thomas Gage, was ordered to take whatever measures he thought necessary to forestall armed resistance. A large-scale campaign was already being contemplated, and in February three major-generals, Sir William Howe, Sir Henry Clinton and John Burgoyne were appointed to command the armies which would undertake it. All were second choices since Jeffrey Amherst, who had extensive American experience and was a better general, had refused the supreme command because his sympathies lay with the colonists.

  The prospect of a war with the Americans was greeted with dismay and disbelief inside Britain. Many agreed with the poet Cowper, who thought that Britain and America were ‘one country’, which made the imminent conflict a civil war.2 Chatham vainly tried to avert catastrophe in January by laying a plan for compromise before the Lords, but the debate which followed did little more than expose the gulf between the two sides. Chatham praised the Americans as ‘men prizing and setting the just value on the inestimable blessing liberty’, a judgement which was contested by Dartmouth, who cynically dismissed the colonists’ appeals to conscience as a device to obscure their real motive, which was a selfish desire to be rid of restraints on their trade. Lord Gower, a dim Tory speaking ‘in a great heat’, condemned all Americans as traitors.

  There was a strong feeling among military men that the Americans were bluffing and that, when put to the test of arms, they and their cause would quickly fall apart. In a report prepared for Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, early in March 1775, Major John Pitcairn was confident that ‘one active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights.’3 His commanding officer, Gage, was less sanguine and feared that precipitate action would provoke ‘irregular and incessant’ resistance, which might prove too much for the troops at his disposal.’4

  His misgivings were confirmed on 19 April when, acting on Dartmouth’s instructions, he sent a column of his best men to secure the arsenals at Worcester and Concord. Alerted by spies inside Boston, the Massachusetts militia mobilised. A small section was scattered after a brief exchange of fire at Lexington, but a larger body forced the British column to abandon Concord. As it retreated to Boston, it endured a sequence of guerrilla attacks in which it suffered 300 casualties, nearly three times as many as its adversaries. Within a few days, an American force, commanded by the impetuous and highly talented Benedict Arnold, occupied Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point, opening the way for an invasion of Canada.

  The slide to war was now irreversible. News of the skirmishes in Massachusetts left the cabinet with no choice but to apply force majeure to all the colonies. This move was welcomed by George III, who had always been impatient with appeasement, and by those amateur and professional strategists who imagined that well-trained soldiers would easily disperse what was commonly seen as a rabble in arms.

  Foremost among the advocates of a short, sharp war was Lord George Germain, who, in August, replaced the more flexible Dartmouth as Secretary for the Colonies with a mandate to mastermind operations throughout North America. It was a task he relished and, if resilience and singlemindedness counted for something in the exercise of high command, Germain was well qualified. Despite having been cashiered from the army in 1760 for cowardice during the Battle of Minden, he inspired considerable confidence among the troops in North America who were looking to him for rigorous measures.5

  Germain’s formula for victory was based upon a variety of American intelligence sources which agreed that the colonists’ will to fight was fragile and would never survive a major defeat. He therefore proposed to deploy a large force in America which would seek out, engage and overcome the rebel army in a single, decisive action. It was confidently imagined that a victory of this nature would not only destroy the rebels, but would give encouragement to Loyalists and those who had remained aloof from the contest. Again, intelligence reports from Amer
ica had described the existence of a substantial Loyalist element, temporarily driven underground by the intimidation of Congress supporters, which would reveal its sympathies when it was safe to do so. The forthcoming war would be a struggle for hearts and minds, and the British generals knew that one of their most important tasks was to assure the Loyalists that they would be protected for, as Clinton later observed, they would never declare themselves ‘before there is the strongest certainty of his army being in a condition to support them’.6

  Manpower was the key ingredient in Germain’s battleplan. From the start of the war there were difficulties in procuring sufficient troops for operations of the scale he had in mind. During 1775–6 garrisons in Ireland, Gibraltar and Minorca were pared to the bone and, as the war progressed, an intense recruiting campaign was undertaken in Britain.

  It was never an easy job to tempt men to enter a world where they could expect a flogging for a trifling misdemeanour, low pay, thin rations, capricious officers, exposure to danger and the contempt of so-called respectable society. Patriotism, that is soldiering, was regarded by Samuel Johnson as the last resort of the scoundrel; in other words, a man without the ability or inclination to live honestly. It was a harsh judgement, but supported by current practice; many desperate recruiting officers scoured prisons to fill out the ranks. In 1776, Lieutenant Ridout of the 46th Regiment discovered some ‘very fine lads’ in Shrewsbury gaol for ‘petty offences’ and obtained their pardon and enlistment into his regiment. One, grateful for this chance of redemption, rose to the rank of sergeant during the American War.7

  There were recidivists and others for whom the war was an opportunity for rape and plunder, and their conduct gave American propagandists a stock of stories about British brutality. Even experienced men of good character joined in the looting, which some believed was the reward for victory, or just vengeance against civilians who insulted them and secretly favoured their adversaries. This may have been why officers encouraged their men to steal during the campaign around Boston in April 1775.8 The more audacious even robbed their own officers. Captain Peebles of the Black Watch found some linen and six or seven bottles of rum and wine taken from his tent, and observed that ‘there are some sad rascals in this Batallion who are wicked enough to do anything, and have cunning enough to escape.’9 No doubt these spoils were consumed, but there were plenty of enterprising American fences willing to buy stolen goods from soldiers and resell them.10

  The supply of rogues was not enough to meet the demands of Germain’s strategy and so a stopgap measure of the Seven Years War was revived and mercenaries were purchased. An approach made to Tsaritsa Catherine for 20,000 Russians failed and so the government turned to the Landgraf of Hessen-Kassel who proved more obliging. In all, 19,000 Germans, two-thirds of the Hessians, served with the British army in North America, of whom approximately 3,000 deserted, 500 were killed as a result of enemy action and 4,500 died from diseases.11

  On the whole, the Hessians proved good value for money and well-motivated, brave soldiers. Schooled in the habits of submission as the subjects of German autocrats, they were willing to fight for the rights of monarchy against an enemy whom British propaganda depicted as inhuman fiends. Two Hessians, captured in November 1776, revealed to an American army surgeon that they had been told that their opponents were ‘savages and barbarians’ who tortured their prisoners in the Indian manner.

  For the greater part, British soldiers fought out of a sense of duty and loyalty, first to their comrades and then to their country. Officers of aristocratic background, and most were, had little but contempt for adversaries who were their social inferiors. ‘I hope that we shall soon have done with these scoundrels for one dirties one’s fingers by meddling with them,’ wrote Major Lord Rawdon, Clinton’s adjutant. An Anglican, brought up to associate religious dissent with political radicalism, Rawdon was also disgusted by the ‘godly twang’ of the rebel ‘psalm singers’.12 Captain Peebles was enraged by being overcharged by his landlady who was ‘greedy and cunning like the rest of the Yankees’, but he also felt pity for those unwillingly drawn into the war. After the court martial of a rapist, saved from the gallows by the intercession of his victim, he wrote in his journal, ‘hard is the fate of many who suffer indiscriminately in a civil war’.13 A humane man, Peebles like many others, was distressed by the sight of abandoned or burned farmsteads and the fate of families driven from their homes.

  Derision of the Americans’ fighting stamina quickly gave way to grudging respect. A year’s campaigning taught Clinton that ‘the Americans were trained to stratagem and enterprise’ and ‘they knew every trick of chicane’.14 They were also capable of fighting in the conventional manner, which was proved in June 1775 during the struggles for Breed’s and Bunker’s Hills overlooking Boston. Further north, Benedict Arnold and General Richard Montgomery had taken the initiative and launched an invasion of Canada which they advertised as a war of liberation.

  As the Americans advanced towards Quebec, they called on the French-Canadians to free themselves from tyranny, and for a time it was expected they might. ‘The Canadians talk of that damned absurd word liberty,’ complained one British officer, and General Guy Carleton, the governor of Quebec and veteran of Wolfe’s campaigns, feared defections from his militia.15 In fact, most Canadians remained prudently neutral and waited to see what, if any, success the Americans would achieve. The arrival of winter, Montgomery’s foolish decision to besiege Quebec with an outnumbered force, and Carleton’s brilliantly improvised defence combined to frustrate the Americans. The city was relieved in May 1776 by a British flotilla, by which time Arnold had withdrawn with the remnants of his army.

  It was impossible to hold Boston. Relations between townsfolk and soldiers were sulphurous and the Americans controlled the immediate hinterland. In March 1776, the commander-in-chief, Howe, ordered the city’s evacuation. ‘It is not possible to describe to you the confusion everything is in here,’ Lieutenant Charles Cochrane of the King’s Regiment told his uncle. ‘To embark (under the guns of those Rascals) the above remaining stores with the heavy baggage of Women and Children, friends of the Government, which last, I believe, might be put in a canoe, is such an operation as probably never happened before.’ It was the climax to a year of humiliation, and Cochrane added ruefully that ‘an uncommon bad fate has attended our Affairs here from first to last; after scrambling through this disagreeable winter with so little assistance from any quarter that we must make a moon light flit is most irksome.’16 Nevertheless, Cochrane found grounds for optimism and believed that the army’s fortunes would soon revive once Germain’s grand strategy was implemented.

  Cochrane’s confidence was misplaced. The North American battlefield encompassed a million square miles, most of them covered with mountains, woodland and scrub. Armies were easily swallowed up in this wilderness, through which they often marched blindly; Clinton, traversing New Jersey in 1778, had only the vaguest idea of Washington’s whereabouts until he was attacked at Monmouth.17 The possession of major towns counted for less than it did in Europe because economic resources, such as iron foundries, were scattered. Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston were all under British control at various times, but their occupation did little to hamper the American war effort.

  Bold and imaginative generals might have overcome these difficulties, but the thinking of the British high command was uninventive and often timid. Moreover, and this became painfully apparent as the war proceeded, the British command structure was shaky. Germain in London retained overall direction of strategy, but his instructions to the commanders in America were often delayed by as much as eight to ten weeks because the ships carrying them faced contrary winds. Misunderstandings between him and his subordinates remained uncorrected, and in some instances the generals in the field had no choice but to follow their own judgement. There was also, at least in 1775–6, confusion over objectives. Germain favoured an all-out effort while North still held out hope for a
negotiated settlement.

  It took time for these flaws to reveal themselves. Howe’s operations in the summer of 1776 had started slowly, thanks to delayed reinforcements, but they showed every sign of prospering. He had decided to concentrate his forces on New York in the centre of an area where Loyalism was believed to be strong. The landing on Staten Island went off smoothly and, in mid-August, Howe launched his 23,000-strong army against the outer defences of New York City. A solid, painstaking commander, Howe proceeded cautiously and in doing so missed the opportunity to fight a decisive engagement. For a time, Washington had been prepared to risk the bulk of the rebel army to save the city, but Howe did not offer battle. Instead he attacked the enemy’s earthworks piecemeal and, when it was clear that New York would fall, shrank from a pursuit of the badly mauled and demoralised American army.

  There now seemed no need for the hammer-blow which Germain had imagined would end the war. Howe’s successes around New York during the autumn of 1776 indicated that the British army was unbeatable, and at the end of November he felt strong enough to issue a proclamation which offered an unconditional pardon to all rebels who surrendered and reaffirmed their allegiance to George III. Many Americans, well aware of the pitiful state of Washington’s army, were glad to accept Howe’s clemency. The temper of the colonists seemed to be changing and Howe, several victories to his credit and with a base at New York, felt he could safely alter his strategy. Henceforward he would aim to occupy territory rather than coaxing Washington into a full-scale engagement. This shift offered tempting political dividends; wavering rebels would be further disheartened and the presence of British troops in an area would rally the local Loyalists.