1775 (56 page)

S
enior British officials generally heeded the autumn 1774 alarm sounded over illicit arms and munitions reaching North America. King George’s own avid readership of secret service reports kept his secretaries of state and ambassadors responsive to matters like these. However, no comparable alertness extended to predictable wartime challenges
of transport and logistics. Yet the problems in supplying His Majesty’s ships and soldiers in a hostile rather than loyal America would be immense, worsening the British disarray so widespread in 1775 and early 1776.

The Crown’s undertaking was huge. To some chroniclers, the British ability to send 50,000 soldiers across an ocean would not be equaled again until the twentieth century.
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But shortages and poor planning were also much in evidence. The Royal Navy of 1775 had an inadequate number of the small frigates, sloops, and schooners needed for effective operations in American waters, especially along the rocky New England coasts, which became graveyards for several unsuitably large men-of-war. Nor were there enough to intercept the American vessels trading for powder and arms in Europe, the West Indies, or along Africa’s Slave Coast. A third insufficiency—too few and too poorly protected transports and supply ships—played havoc with the arrival and mobility of British forces in North America. Many provisions ships never reached British troops besieged in Boston, and not enough transports were available to shift those forces to New York in the autumn of 1775. The early war at sea soon became more embarrassment than cakewalk for the world’s leading navy.

As we will see, the force that the ministry had expected to converge in the spring of 1776—a New York–centered invasion by British forces and German mercenaries powerful enough to end the war in one campaign—fell far behind schedule and never fully prevailed. To David Syrett, the principal historian of shipping during the Revolution, “the Atlantic Ocean and the inability to think in terms of logistics were two of the most formidable obstacles confronting the British…There was during the American War a simple interrelation and interaction between strategy, logistics and shipping which geography imposed on the British effort, but this was not seen in Whitehall, and only dimly perceived at the Navy Office.”
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Logistics were not yet fashionable. At London’s political conference tables, senior commissaries, dockyard officials, paymasters, victuallers, Navy Board functionaries, and ordnance men sat below the salt, if they sat at all. Exceptions could be found—the great influence of a prominent politician like Henry Fox while he served as paymaster of the forces, a non-Cabinet post, or the recognition won by Sir Charles Middleton, comptroller of the navy during the later years of the American Revolution. But Cabinet meetings were an aristocratic milieu; commissaries and logisticians were support personnel.

At the Cabinet level, “most British military efforts during the American
War were planned on the assumption that there would always be enough transports, victuallers and storeships to put any scheme into effect, when in fact the required amount of tonnage was seldom readily available.”
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The staff, in short, would have to make do. John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty throughout the war, is best remembered for giving his name to a major logistical innovation: the sandwich—meat wrapped in bread for mannerly eating while at a gaming table. Professionally, though, Sandwich paid grains and provisions little attention, and his was a navy that tolerated practices like sound vessels being condemned, given new papers, and sold back to the Admiralty, or written off.
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Even late in the war, when British supply management had sharpened, the subordinate transport service heard of Cabinet plans to evacuate America only by reading them in the newspapers.

By mid-1775, many of the supply interruptions becoming apparent to London had already bedeviled Thomas Gage. Months before Patriot militia encircled Boston in April, the hapless general had been encircled by Patriot town meetings and committees of inspection able to take control of shipping, commerce, and labor in virtually every Massachusetts seaport. In mid-1774, after the Port Act, these communities had sent provisions, clothing, and fuel to aid needy Bostonians left without economic sustenance. By autumn, they declined to supply Gage. In October, for example, the Committee of Observation in Marblehead collaborated with neighboring towns in detailing the goods and services to be withheld from the occupiers. Included were bricks, lumber, spars, and labor. Carpenters in Salem echoed their Boston compatriots in refusing to build barracks for the soldiers.
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Workers in neighboring provinces were also prevailed upon. New York carpenters and mechanics agreed not to work in Boston, and New Hampshire governor John Wentworth was labeled an “enemy of the community” by Portsmouth committeemen for procuring carpenters and sending them to Gage.
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This was six months
before
Lexington and Concord.

By May 1775, Gage had advised Lord Dartmouth that “very great Pains have been taken to starve the Troops and the Friends of Government in Boston, for no Article Necessary for the support of Life is suffered to be sent from any of the Provinces from New Hampshire to South Carolina, and in most of the sea-Ports persons are appointed to examine everything that is embarked and where it is going.”
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No high policy maker in London thereafter had grounds for surprise.

Maritime New England Strikes Back

Gage must have understood, despite the anger shown by yeomen farmers in the summer of 1774, that the alienation of maritime Massachusetts was older and deeper. Setting aside the disillusionments of much earlier wars, latter-day hostility had been building, layer upon emotional layer, since the first fury over general warrants in 1761, the Customs Enforcement Act of 1763 that enlisted the Royal Navy as a coastal police force, the Sugar Act of 1764 with its procedural harassments, and the stationing of British troops in Boston beginning in 1768. Anger came to a head between May 1774, when news of the Coercive Acts arrived, and spring 1775, when word came of the imminent New England Restraining Act, and Admiral Graves resumed local naval impressment.

Venom was hardly confined to Boston. Twenty-five miles north, Essex County, Massachusetts, played home to the thirteen colonies’ leading fisheries. Centered on three adjacent towns—Salem (population 5,300), Marblehead (4,400) and Beverly (2,800)—this seafaring complex had come to rival nearby Boston in size and importance.
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Weeks before Lexington and Concord, codfish-dependent Essex fumed at word that Parliament was at work on a restraining act that would bar New England vessels from offshore fishing and trading anywhere but within the empire. Had a war fuse not already been lit, these measures would have done so.

Lord North and his allies described the Restraining Act in Parliament as payback for the Continental Association’s own belligerent trade demands. However, parliamentarians sympathetic to America analyzed it in far more negative terms. Lord Camden, a former British attorney general, charged during debate that other previous laws were “by no means so violent in their operations as this.” He described the bill as “at once declaring war [against the colonies] and beginning hostilities in Great Britain.” In 1776, Lord Rockingham explained the consequences set in motion by the Restraining Act: colonial “seamen and fishermen being indiscriminately prohibited from the peaceable exercise of their occupations, and declared open enemies, must be expected, with a certain assurance, to betake themselves to plunder, and to wreak their revenge on the commerce of Great Britain.” The protests of Camden and other Whigs during the February-March debate were published in several colonial newspapers in May 1775, further inciting maritime hostility.
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After April 19, Patriots quickly targeted the fuel and provisions required by British troops in Boston. If fuel might seem an exaggerated priority for late spring and summer, firewood was essential for cooking and heating water to wash clothing. Wood was needed to bake bread. Salt pork and beef, from casks often years old, had to be boiled to be made (barely) edible.
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Expeditions for firewood frequently went as far as Maine and Nova Scotia. Having to be provisioned by sea, Gage and Admiral Graves understood, was an Achilles’ heel. The Royal Navy could keep transatlantic sea lanes open, but the New Englanders had the small, fast ships and skilled seamen to harass communications and make occupation duty unpleasant and ill fed.

Maritime capabilities made New England a foe to be taken seriously. By some calculations, America accounted for close to half of the British Empire’s worldwide shipbuilding capacity. Between 1700 and 1775, the mainland colonies had expanded their annual output of vessels ninefold, from 4,000 tons a year to 35,000. Roughly one vessel in the British Empire out of three was American built. The North American colonies were also a great nursery of seamen, who numbered 30,000 to 50,000. Thousands in New England were being put ashore as the imminence of Restraining Act enforcement in July closed down the fisheries.

What better place to retaliate than in familiar waters? Maritime New Englanders had led pre-1775 political demonstrations, tarrings and featherings, and riots. In 1775, they would repeat with pistols, cutlasses, and fast twelve-gun schooners. True, North American shipyards had built few large vessels—ones big enough to fight, say, a 36-gun Royal Navy frigate. However, fast 75-ton or 100-ton sloops carrying eight to twelve cannon and 60 men, piloted by local mariners who knew Massachusetts Bay tides, shoals, and estuaries, could easily surprise and capture a virtually unarmed British transport. Dozens of these were en route to Boston, alone or in pairs. For salty Yankee Robin Hoods, Massachusetts Bay promised to be a blue-water Sherwood Forest.

Prior to April’s clash, the Treasury in London had been warned by the British Army’s principal contractor, the firm of Nesbitt, Drummond, and Franks, that American rebels would try to keep supplies from reaching Boston.
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Yet the Admiralty made no crisis plans, and Sandwich, generally preoccupied with France, scoffed at Americans. He called them “raw, undisciplined, cowardly men. I wish instead of 40 or 50,000 of these brave
fellows, they would produce in the field at least 200,000, the more the better, the easier would be the conquest; if they did not run away, they would starve themselves into compliance.”
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Of the 30 British warships on the North American station in April 1775, four were line-of-battle behemoths and seven were frigates. Just eighteen were 14-to-20-gun sloops and schooners, or smaller cutters. Of the small craft best suited to watchdog or escort roles, not nearly enough were available in either North American or European waters. Graves acknowledged that some American successes in capturing British supply ships and transports and in running gunpowder and arms from Europe and the Caribbean were to be expected.
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It seems extraordinary that the North ministry should proceed from one maritime slap at the thirteen colonies to another—from the Tea Act of 1773 to coercion of Boston in 1774 and then the Restraining Acts of 1775—without mulling potential naval responses: How would the colonies react, and with what stratagems could Britain pursue victory?

After Lexington and Concord, Gage and Graves, who disliked each other, were not good collaborators. They did agree on requesting shiploads of food and fuel from the royal governors of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and East Florida. By summer, these cargoes were helpful if expensive. And by May, the two commanders also concurred in ordering armed expeditions to seize the tens of thousands of sheep, hogs, and cattle that farmers kept or grazed on the hundreds of islands dotting the coast from Maine to Long Island, but here success was limited. The smoke from burning hay was visible for miles, and British raids drew quick and effective American response. As we will see in
Chapter 23
, one venture precipitated a fair-sized confrontation—the Battle of Noddle’s Island in Boston Harbor on May 27—and there were dozens of smaller encounters.

Several Royal Navy captains, most notably Rhode Island–based James Wallace, obtained provisions after April by threatening to bombard or burn towns that refused to furnish them. During May and June, vulnerable towns that cooperated included Newport, Portsmouth (N.H.), and Marblehead. New Yorkers also obliged HMS
Asia
after that 64-gun behemoth arrived in late May. By year’s end, however, few New England towns remained willing to make such arrangements.

Vulnerability at sea cut both ways. By late summer, provisions-carrying vessels of all kinds near Boston were falling into British hands. The Royal
Navy, under orders given by Graves, could seize a wide range of colonial vessels: any found carrying munitions; any approaching ports near Boston with provisions for the besieging rebels; and beginning in July, any violating the multiple provisions of the Restraining Acts. Public opinion in New England frowned on colonials willing to supply the British, but several dodges were used. A Tory merchant in Narragansett Bay, for example, could let his ship be “captured” by the British and minimize opprobrium. As we have seen, Quaker-dominated Nantucket became a problem for Massachusetts authorities in 1775 because some local vessels smuggled supplies to occupied Boston and British Newfoundland.

In need of small vessels, Admiral Graves had bought four local schooners in the summer of 1774 and several more in early 1775. By spring, he could no longer obtain them in a Massachusetts verging on open war. The belief held by many Britons that American ships were cheaply built and of inferior quality, while partly true, was also misleading. The two large warships constructed in New England for the Royal Navy during the previous half century had indeed failed to measure up. Yards in America, unused to building for great size or longevity in service, minimized or simply skipped the expensive process of seasoning wood. Unseasoned wood, of course, rotted more quickly. Slightly built framing, another Yankee practice, was equally unsuitable for major warships. These required sturdiness because of big crews (300 to 800 men) and the weight and recoil of four or five dozen large cannon.
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