1775 (58 page)

Earlier that month, Washington had asked Cooke whether the Rhode Island provincial sloop
Katy
could voyage to Bermuda to pick up some gunpowder identified by local sympathizers. Cooke took until September arranging for the
Katy
to sail, but by then other Patriot vessels had taken away the promised barrels. Washington had been eager enough to tell Cooke that the expedition would be “at the Continental Expense.”
³⁰
During August, the general had also been talking with John Glover, the “webfoot” colonel, about a related project: the hiring by the Continental Army, in Congress’s name, of a good schooner, to be manned by the army’s Marblehead and Beverly recruits. This would test the plausibility of arming local schooners to go after British supply ships. An agreement was signed on August 25.

The captain Glover recommended, Nicholson Broughton, turned out to be headstrong and a poor choice. However, it is revealing that the instructions Washington gave on September 2 went beyond Congress’s July preoccupation with protection. Broughton was ordered to cruise outward from Boston in the schooner
Hannah
and “to take and seize all such Vessels, laden with Soldiers, Arms, Ammunition or provisions for or from said [ministerial army].” He was further ordered to “avoid any Engagement with any armed Vessel of the Enemy…the Design of this Enterprise being to intercept the Supplies.”
³¹

The commanding general, as many have elaborated, may already have visualized the larger force that emerged during September and October—what future writers would nickname “Washington’s Navy.” It included six to eight schooners varying in size from 40 to 80 tons, each armed with four
to ten cannon, mostly four-pounders, and manned by oversize crews of 35 to 60 men. After the slow and disappointing
Hannah
was damaged, another half dozen schooners were obtained and named to woo or flatter a geographic cross-section of congressional and provincial sympathizers: Messrs. Hancock and Warren of Massachusetts, Harrison and Lee of Virginia, Franklin of Pennsylvania, and Lynch of South Carolina. The enlarged franchise for these vessels was set out on October 16, when Broughton was instructed by Congress to take two schooners to the Gulf of St. Lawrence to intercept and capture a pair of British ordnance brigs bound for Quebec with 6,000 stands of arms and a large quantity of gunpowder. He was also to “seize and take (any other transports laden with men, ammunition, clothing, or other stores for use of the Ministerial Army or Navy in America.”
³²

Instead, after deciding in November that he had missed the ordnance brigs, Broughton embarrassed himself by raiding inoffensive Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and carrying off two provincial officials—both quickly freed and sent home by an irate Washington. The great success was achieved on November 28 by Captain John Manley in the
Lee,
who bagged the
Nancy,
a British supply ship carrying 2,000 muskets and bayonets, 7,000 cannonballs, 53 kegs of flints, a thirteen-inch mortar, seven ammunition wagons, and all kinds of essential hardware.
³³
Delighted American generals agreed they could not have drawn up a better cargo list.

October and November brought a seasonal escalation of the increasingly important war at sea. Seventeen seventy-five’s final wave of British transports were sailing west to make port, usually Boston, before the fierce North Atlantic winter set in. Colonel Joseph Reed, Washington’s military secretary, passed along to Glover the general’s urgent request that additional schooners put to sea. Glover was told to lose no time because “a great Number of Transports are hourly expected at Boston from England and elsewhere.”
³⁴
The
Nancy
was one, separated from her escorting frigate in bad weather and taken just 20 or 30 miles from Boston and safety.

Lord North and the Cabinet responded to growing American combativeness—the invasion of Canada, escalating arms traffic, naval debates in Congress—by intensifying British replies. On November 20, North initiated parliamentary consideration of the Prohibitory Act, sometimes called the Capture Act, which “banned all trade and intercourse with the…colonies…during the continuance of the present rebellion.” He
told Parliament that Britain was now “at war.”
³⁵
The measure became law before 1775 ended.

In naval history, these are much-commemorated months. The organization of the U.S. Navy is generally dated from October 13, after a convergence of supportive events. On October 3, Rhode Island’s delegates had moved in Congress to establish a navy on behalf of the United Colonies, but consideration was put off. Next, on October 5, Congress had received its confidential intelligence that two British brigs laden with munitions would soon reach the St. Lawrence. Then, in a letter dated the sixth, Washington advised Congress that he had begun fitting out and arming vessels at Continental expense. What took place on the thirteenth specifically was that Washington’s letter was read to Congress, which shortly thereafter resolved to fit out an armed vessel “to cruise eastward, for intercepting such transports as may be laden with warlike stores for our enemies, and for other such purposes as the Congress shall direct.” For good measure, the resolution added that “another vessel be fitted out for the same purpose.”
³⁶
Thus did Congress, in the first instance as a matter of policy, send ships to sea to attack enemy shipping—and as a result, the United States Navy considers itself born on that day.

Subsequent enactments put flesh on the youthful skeleton. On October 30, Congress authorized a navy of four ships, quickly appropriating the funds on November 2. On November 28, approval was extended to
Rules for the Regulation of the Navy of the United Colonies
drafted by John Adams.
³⁷
However, the essential logjam with respect to a navy had been broken on October 13.

Individual colonies, meanwhile, were piercing the sides of schooners and sloops for gun ports and hearing from would-be privateer operators. As we have seen, seven colonies launched provincial navies of various sorts before October 13. Virginia and North Carolina joined them in December.
³⁸
Similarly, several colonies—Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut—took a forward role in arranging to trade tobacco, rice, lumber, fish, and other provisions for gunpowder and arms in the West Indies and Europe, sending agents to such ports as Nantes and St. Eustatius. The vessels that plied these routes had many varieties of official papers and a wide variety of prewar commercial origins. A few were also commerce raiders, but most were not.

New England was especially impatient for privateering. On November 2, the two houses of the Massachusetts General Court passed legislation
randly entitled “Act for Encouraging the Fixing Out of Armed Vessells, to defend the Sea Coast of America, and for Erecting a Court to Try and Condemn all Vessells that shall be found infesting the same.” Other jurisdictions were not so fast to act, but once Congress in March 1776 passed its own resolution authorizing privateering, many colonies simply used the Continental commissions signed by John Hancock that were sent around in blank.
³⁹

Here it is important to clarify terms. Properly used, the word
privateer
referred to private armed vessels sailing cargoless and exclusively making war, mostly by taking prizes. However, it was “used at the time, and later, too, with the utmost disregard of its true meaning. Persons with an understanding of maritime affairs constantly spoke of Continental and state cruisers, especially the smaller ones, as privateers. The term was often wrongly used even in official correspondence.”
⁴⁰
Over the full course of the American Revolution, one can speak with confidence of the huge role played by privateers, but references to 1775 and early 1776 must be more guarded.

John Adams, looking back, said of the boats privately fitted out by merchants that “these were my constant and daily topics from the meeting of Congress in the autumn of 1775 through the whole winter and spring of 1776.”
⁴¹
But this puts him among those who misspoke. One way or another, almost every vessel—from George Washington’s navy to Rhode Island’s—was fitted out by merchants, either in their own right or in partnership with Congress or with the individual United Colonies.

British Logistical Overreach

Blurred terminology was obviously less important than these vessels’ overall effectiveness against British shipping, which was considerable. However, the story of the supply war at sea in 1775—British vulnerability and appreciable American success, at least on a small scale—is clogged with confusions and complications. These ranged from the multiple bureaucracies of the British transport services to the many instructions from the far-off Admiralty or from Graves in North American waters setting out what Americans vessels could be seized under what concern or statute and beginning on what date. Naval officers themselves were confused. The Royal Navy initially had so few ships in American waters that which ports or bays were effectively watched—
blockaded
is descriptive only in New England—varied
from month to month. Late in the winter of 1775–1776, the dearth of food in occupied Boston was severe enough that the Royal Navy sailed to Savannah in order to buy or seize rice. The loss of unprotected transports and ordnance brigs, in turn, began a debate about whether to use convoys, station soldiers aboard for protection, or employ large men-of-war with half their guns removed to make room for cargo. No small chapter like this one can attend to these details and differences or fret overly about inevitable imprecision.

In broad terms, the supply war went badly enough for Britain in 1775 and early 1776 that the king and his ministers should have worried about spillover into their larger war-making capacity. How events from the Boston Tea Party to Bunker Hill ultimately trapped both the British Army and Royal Navy in what became a regional debacle is pursued in
Chapter 20
. First, though, it is useful to look at a second strategic miscalculation of late 1775, this one a southern expedition, that further overextended British transport capacity and logistics.

T
o dismiss the first of the southern regional strategies the British government pursued during the American Revolution as achieving “nothing” was appropriate for Robson, an Englishman. The king himself, in the end, regretted that the ill-fated expedition had ever been attempted.

However, from the Patriot standpoint, this year of wasted British might—kin to the one passed impotently and uncomfortably by His Majesty’s army in occupied Boston and the many months frittered away in New England waters by Admiral Graves—was pure gift. It bricked in another vital regional support in the early architecture of American independence.

Early hints of the southern expedition, which over eight months probed and pricked at three colonies—Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—had come in the perceptions of relative colonial Loyalism formed by Lord Dartmouth and his advisers in the American Department during the winter of 1774–1775. Dartmouth was taken with how some colonies hung back from participating in or even accepting the Continental
Association, which by March had infuriated him with its “criminal” behavior. Georgia was apathetic enough to elicit spring criticism from Congress, and several counties in North Carolina had petitioned in support of the Crown. Both colonies, therefore, were left out of the initial Restraining Acts, although by August both were brought within the king’s Proclamation of Rebellion.

As we have seen, all four royal governors—Lord Dunmore in Virginia, Josiah Martin in North Carolina, Lord William Campbell in South Carolina, and Sir James Wright in Georgia—had by summer lost control of their provinces, so much so that three took cramped but safe refuge in nearby British naval vessels. From these questionable vantage points, they—Martin most of all—kept up a correspondence with Dartmouth, reiterating prior contentions that most people in each colony were still loyal subjects. If troops were sent, they would rise in the king’s support.

By late summer, all four had cited evidence to Dartmouth. Virginia was the most important colony, but Dartmouth had referred to the local population’s revolutionary “madness,” and the American secretary was also well aware of Lord Dunmore’s especially controversial proposals. In May, Dunmore had repeated them in a letter to Dartmouth saying “that if His Majesty should think it proper to add a small Body of Troops to be sent here, a quantity of Arms[,] Ammunition and other requisites for the Service, I would raise such a force from among the Indians[,] Negroes and other persons as would soon reduce the refractory People of this Colony to obedience.”
¹
These were measures the British government was wary of embracing.

In fact, by October and November, the volatile governor’s other aggressive tactics—sending raiding parties up local rivers to pillage opponents’ plantations, seizing cannon and munitions, and organizing Loyalist regiments—worried Patriot leaders through their greater than expected success. Parts of southeastern Virginia—the Norfolk region and the lower Eastern Shore—seemed to be coming under Dunmore’s control. In early December, he boasted of his success to Dartmouth: “About three thousand have taken that Oath [to the king]” and “I am now endeavoring to raise two regiments, one of white people (called the Queen’s Own Loyal Virginia Regiment) the other of Negroes called Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment.”
²