Winter 2009
Courtesy Of Dissent Magazine
How does one recognize the looming inevitable? In the 1760s, the British, having defeated the French in America and expanded George III’s overseas empire, saw only profit and prestige ahead. A New England cleric, the Reverend Samuel Cooper, told his congregation that the colonists were indebted “not only for their present Security and Happiness, but, perhaps for their very Being, to the paternal Care of the Monarch.” The legitimacy of royal rule was little questioned. In that future seedbed of sedition, Boston, Thomas Foxcroft declared, “Above all, we owe our humble Thanks to his Majesty and with loyal Hearts full of joyous Gratitude, we bless the King, for his Paternal Goodness in sending such effectual Aids to his American Subjects. . . when we needed the Royal Protection.”
Fighting a seven-year war three thousand miles from home, when travel time was measured in months, had pinched the British economy. Why not, then, have the colonists, who had been rescued from the wicked French, pay something for their own protection? It was a petty stamp tax on printed paper, a bargain fee (a quarter of what Britons at home paid) on imported tea. It would go to quartering Redcoats to keep away marauding Indians, or to inhibit revengeful “Frogs.”
This imperial logic escaped its beneficiaries. Outspoken colonists resented paying anything on their own behalf, claiming lack of representation in Parliament, the tax-raising body in remote London. But that complaint was only the tip of the trade iceberg. Colonists by law could not manufacture weapons or ammunition (or much else) for their own defense. British industry at home was sustained by commercial barriers. Americans were to supply the raw materials for the making of goods they would have to buy as finished products.
Within a decade, objections about taxes, trade, and troops had plucked the gilded genie from the transatlantic bottle. Colonial farmers, craftsmen, and merchants began proposing a new concept, liberty, as a solution to their discontent. In Britain, complacent merchants, manufacturers, and landowners saw only ignorance, ingratitude, and greed motivating the radicalized handful of New England Yankees, who—despite a way with words—lacked arms and fighting zeal. In the seemingly tractable South, Tory planters—self-styled aristocrats—prospered alongside a noisy rabble and illiterate backwoodsmen. Samuel Johnson grumbled that deprivation of the “rights of Englishmen” was an unrealistic grievance. Americans were no less represented in Parliament than most inhabitants on his own side of the water, who lived in increasingly teeming districts excluded from seats in Parliament. Americans were “a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.”
Did the Establishment foresee unwelcome change? Could it maintain the imperial equilibrium by granting token seats—unlikely ever to be occupied—in the House of Commons, as London was an ocean away and members unsalaried, or by prudently tucking Redcoats away in obscure barracks; or by relaxing commercial restrictions, to forestall such outrages as a Boston Tea Party; or by proposing that prosperity be shared? Could a royal symbolic presence suffice? We will never know. Instead, what were called the Coercive Acts annulled most local rights granted under colonial charters, turning over elections, appointments, and the administration of justice to Crown officials.
Henry Laurens, a political moderate from South Carolina, later to become presiding officer of the Continental Congress, warned that the colonists, who until then saw little in common, “would be animated to form . . . a Union and phalanx of resistance.” In lonely opposition, a few Members of Parliament rose to urge that negotiation would have a better chance of resolving differences than coercion, although as mutual hostility grew, it became clear that any compromise short of some form of independence would not be accepted. The outgoing secretary of war, Viscount Barrington, predicted that pursuing a hard line, however popular at home, “will cost us more than we can ever gain by success.” Advising conciliation, the ailing William Pitt, the Elder, now Lord Chatham, warned, “We shall be forced ultimately to retreat: let us retreat when we can, not when we must.”
Royal supremacists failed the geopolitical test of maps. In the early 1770s, few recognized, as did Pitt, that the sprawling overseas colonies, more than 1,800 miles north to south, would become more populous than the mother country and would be impossible to subdue, oversee, and manage. At the start of the small-scale and unexpected rebellion, George III impatiently condemned the first risings as parricide—a conspiracy against the “parent state.” He was “unalterably determined,” he told a supine Parliament, many of its members bought off by the Palace, “to compel absolute submission.” Yet, as Ben Franklin observed, once hostilities began in 1775, “Britain, at the expence of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is [£]20,000 a head; and at Bunker’s Hill . . . gained a mile of ground. . . . During the same time 60,000 children have been born in America.” Anyone versed in mathematics, he posited, “will easily calculate the time and expence necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.”
From the vantage point of a Cabinet office under Lord North, the Earl of Suffolk saw no reason for alarm at early reverses in Massachusetts. “The stocks are unaffected, and the respectable part of the City is in very proper sentiments.” He deplored any “disinclination to persevere.” Nevertheless, Edmund Burke, MP for Bristol and an outspoken, if outnumbered, critic of colonial policy, warned of “iron tears” being shed—musket shot and cannon balls fired in helpless anger. The king reminded his subjects, rather, of national honor, by which he implied international embarrassment. But behind his rhetoric lay the feared economic repercussions of losing America. “No man in my dominions desires solid peace more than I do,” he claimed, “but no inclination to get out of the present difficulties can incline me to enter into the destruction of the empire.” Besides, his hawkish military advisers in Whitehall, preeminent among them Lord George Germain, the micromanaging secretary for America, saw “no common sense in protracting a war of this sort. I should be for exerting the utmost force of this Kingdom to finish the rebellion in one campaign.”
As Count Helmuth von Moltke would write in the next century, no strategy survives the first contact with the enemy. British generals recommended forcing the war to a conclusion, although one commander would replace another as each, in turn, failed. All were ambitious careerists, with promotions, titles, and parliamentary gratuities dancing in their heads. General John Burgoyne, who, before a shot was fired, advocated “persuasion rather than the sword,” now decried diverting “British thunder” by “pitiful attentions and Quaker-like scruples.” They possessed overwhelming military superiority. They were better equipped, better trained, more numerous, and more professional than the poorly equipped, ragged, undisciplined patchwork amateurs serving short enlistments and unlikely to stay on for further service. The London Morning Post published a list of rebel generals ostensibly ridiculed for their prewar occupations—a boat builder, a bookseller, a servant, a milkman, a jockey, a clerk. It was a covert satire on British snobbery, implying that commanders of noble birth were overmatched by officers reaching the top by merit in classless America. Misguided generalship was compounded by civilian arrogance at Whitehall. “Rarely has British strategy,” Winston Churchill would write, “fallen into such a multitude of errors. Every principle of war was either violated or disregarded.”
Although the British had a surplus of brass, as the war dragged on it became frustrating to fill the ranks. When it became difficult to raise more Redcoats, Parliament obstinately authorized hiring thousands of mercenaries from German statelets (“Hessians,” although not all were from Hesse) and constructing warships by the dozen. The amphibious assault on Long Island and Manhattan employed an armada not surpassed in numbers until D-Day in 1944, yet in remote upstate New York in 1777, Burgoyne and his army, bereft of reinforcements, surrendered at Saratoga.
General William Howe took the rebel capital, Philadelphia, chasing George Washington into woeful winter quarters at Valley Forge. Still, Washington was winning merely by keeping his army alive while imperial overstretch took its toll. The insurgency thrived on British attrition. With more land to occupy and control than he had troops to accomplish the job, Howe scuttled back to New York the next spring, explaining later from London, once he had been replaced (and promoted), that professional soldiers lost to shot and disease would be difficult to replace from across an ocean, while the upstart Americans could recruit marginally trained militiamen close at hand. He would “never expose the troops . . . where the object is inadequate.”
IF THE object was not worth the effort, why not abandon it? Undeterred, other generals succeeded Howe. Never numerous, local loyalist volunteers were decreasing, while further foreign hirelings were largely unaffordable under dwindling budgets, captive now to the contagion of pessimism and new parliamentary parsimony. Even the country landowners, the conservative backbone of the regime, were becoming disillusioned, as a wry “Dialogue between a Country Squire and his Tenant” suggested in the London Gazeteer in 1778:
Tenant: Pray, Squire, when do you think the war will end? |
As an unbridled press revealed, returning casualties and the declining standards for enlistment made soldiering a grim option, largely for the jobless and the poor. “An Exact Representation of Manchester Recruits,” captioning a cartoon of weird, dehumanized volunteers, illustrated the increasing national pain. “The Master of the Arses, or the Westminster Volunteers” showed six motley recruits spurred on, front and rear, by bayonet-bearing Redcoats, one inductee stumbling with a crutch and stick, another on gouty, swathed legs. “The Church Militant” satirized an equally useless dimension of belligerence. In that broadside, a group of clergy, some lean and ascetic, others stout and gross, all led by obtuse bishops, sing “O Lord Our God, Arise and Scatter Our Enemies.” Desperation about the war was out in the open.
Decades later, Charles Dickens imagined a scene in Barnaby Rudge, in the aptly named Black Lion tavern in the late 1770s, in which the barkeep observes scornfully as a recruiting sergeant offers his spiel, “I’m told there ain’t a deal of difference between a fine man and another one, when they’re shot through and through.”
The sergeant suggests to potential enlistees a life of wine, women, and glory, and a timid voice pipes, “Supposing you should be killed, sir?” Confidently, the Redcoat responds, “What then? Your country loves you, sir; his Majesty King George the Third loves you; your memory is honoured, revered, respected; . . . your name’s wrote down at full length in a book in the War Office. Damme, gentlemen, we must all die some time or other, eh!” Pages later, the publican’s son, who fell for the sales pitch and has returned from Savannah, sits quietly in the tavern with one sleeve empty. “It’s been took off,” his father explains, “at the defence of the Salwanners. . . . In America, where the war is.” To his listeners, it is all meaningless.
While losses, prices, and taxes fueled anxiety, no effective tactics surfaced to put down the rebellion. End-the-war adherents were an increasing yet still powerless minority. Since the “experiment” of putting the Americans down was failing, the St. James’s Chronicle editorialized, Britain should “withdraw in time with a good grace, and declare them INDEPENDENT.” Although the House of Lords remained firmly behind the king, in the Commons a former general and Cabinet minister, Henry Seymour Conway, moved that “this mad war” should “no longer be pursued.” The motion failed by one vote. “We are not only patriots out of place,” Sir George Savile, a Yorkshire MP, remarked gloomily to the Marquis of Rockingham, “but patriots out of the opinion of the public.” Rockingham advised waiting “till the Publick are actually convinced of the calamitous State we are in.” That would come only after the futile campaigns of Earl Cornwallis in the presumably safe American South. Not many months after, Rockingham would be the first peace prime minister.
Cornwallis busied himself evading defeat, but he ran out of alternatives late in 1781, once the French intervened by land and sea. Third forces are often crucial. Uninterested in American ideals about liberty and equality, the French were determined to give the British a black eye and arrived in Yorktown before a rescue fleet from New York. Abroad, few had been listening to radicals like Josiah Tucker, an Anglican divine and amateur economist, who in a pamphlet, Cui Bono, called for getting out. America, he charged, had become a “millstone” round the neck of Britain. “If we ourselves have not the wisdom to cut the Rope, and let the Burthen fall off, the Americans have kindly done it for us.”
As Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, a British band played “The World turn’d Upside Down.” After further weeks of national dismay, George Germain, pushed to resign, was rewarded for his sacrifice with a viscountcy. A broadside cartoon, “Three Thousand Leagues beyond the Cannon’s Reach,” portrayed him satirically yet realistically as unable to direct military affairs from distant London. His office as secretary for America was soon abolished by Rockingham’s reform government.
THE BRITISH had no exit strategy other than victory. Capitulation and a draft treaty negotiated in Paris the next year with the grudgingly recognized United States required evacuating troops from the few Atlantic seaports they still held and keeping faith somehow with loyalists still within British boundaries. There were also thousands of prisoners of war to be paroled, held hostage in vain by Congress for payment of their upkeep. The hard and possibly thankless decisions were left to the pragmatic last Redcoat commander, Sir Guy Carleton, who, with a mere knighthood, eyed a peerage for his services. (He would get it.) Fleets of transports would evacuate Charleston, Wilmington in North Carolina, and tightly held Savannah, taking with them prominent but angry loyalists who had to abandon their properties. Most were promised only a sailing to Halifax and resettlement in the sparsely populated Maritime Provinces. Diehards were granted six hundred very likely untillable acres; officers choosing Canada were offered fifteen hundred acres; and men in the ranks could look forward to a meager fifty. Some troops opting for further duty were sent to the West Indies to garrison sugar islands against the French.
Under occupation beyond New York and Long Island were isolated frontier posts on the Canadian border held for payment of colonial debts acknowledged in the treaty. As the financial settlements were made unwillingly and late, Forts Niagara, Oswego, Presque Isle, Mackinaw, and Detroit would not be relinquished until the mid-1790s. The Treaty of Paris called for the British departure to be accomplished “with all convenient speed,” but the major remaining enclave of New York was held by Carleton until he had confirmation of acceptable guarantees for withdrawal of his troops and local loyalists. About three thousand slaves within British lines were permitted to leave with owners who certified them. Others were reclaimed by Washington’s “commissioners” (for lack of documentation) as “American property,” while most aged, sick, and otherwise helpless slaves were cynically abandoned to freedom as worthless for labor. Ironically, the chattels left behind were liberated for less than idealistic reasons, but Washington, after all, was a slaveholder.
For Carleton, getting out was a logistic nightmare. It had taken 479 vessels to bring the first 39,000 troops to New York in July 1776. Re-embarking the occupiers and their equipage required much more—several months and hundreds of sailings and return sailings through early December 1783, as frantic sympathizers by the thousands (29,244 evacuees from New York to gloomy Nova Scotia alone), along with their most prized goods, were assured accommodation. Few—only the wealthy elite and those closely associated with the royal government—were eligible for immigration to England, where Benedict Arnold had already arrived, to no acclaim, with his family. The British had no interest in housing, employing, or feeding their miserable and burdensome transatlantic cousins.
HUMILIATED, GEORGE III threatened to abdicate in favor of the playboy Prince of Wales, but prudently dropped the idea. Rather, in a rare attack of realism, the king belatedly recognized the first rule of holes: when you realize you’re in one, stop digging. His second thoughts went into a draft memorandum now in the Royal Archives at Windsor. Getting out, he realized, had been the right course all along, although accomplished now for the wrong reason—defeat. “America is lost!” the king wrote. “Must we fall beneath the blow? Or have we resources to repair the mischief?”
Alternatives to the “Colonial Scheme,” he contended, would sustain British power and prosperity while involving an independent American nation. “A people spread over an immense tract of fertile land, industrious because free, and rich because industrious, presently [will] become a market for the Manufactures and Commerce of the Mother Country.” He conceded that the war had been “mischievous to Britain, because it created an expence of blood and treasure worth more . . . than we received from America.” The more potent Americans became, the less they would be “fit instruments to preserve British power and consequence.” Investing any effort to regain hegemony over the colonies would only contribute to “the insecurity of our power.” Was an empire destined to be lost worth the price to preserve it? Through the global marketplace the lost lands could still promote British prosperity. Getting out, even accepting humiliation, he argued, could be an unforeseen boon if exploited wisely.
The king’s document, based on the thwarted American experience, was a remarkable prophecy. Yet George conceded that the catastrophe had so weakened him at home that he had no clout with his ministers, reactionary or radical. He put the draft aside. Future governments would pour vast resources into subjugating, yet failing to assimilate, the successor jewel in the Crown—the subcontinent of India—and millions of square miles of indigestible Africa, eventually to relinquish them all at staggering cost to the home islands. It was always foolhardy to be tempted to stay, and always too late to get out. “Mutual interest,” the Reverend Tucker had opined, was “the only Tie . . . in all Times and Seasons, and this Principle will hold good, I will be bold to say, till the end of Time.”
Stanley Weintraub is author of Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire (Free Press, 2005) and General Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (Plume, 2004).
No comments:
Post a Comment