1775 (72 page)

Beyond poor whites, some other groups looked to the British: indentured servants; black slaves; and several religious minorities and evangelical movements of local importance. Of the latter, the Chesapeake had more than its share.

As
Chapter 15
has discussed, the thirteen colonies’ greatest numbers of indentured servants and runaways were in the Chesapeake—in the Baltimore-Annapolis section, the Northern Neck of Virginia, and some Pennsylvania locales along the Maryland border reputed to house many runaways. In November 1775, Jonathan Boucher, a Maryland Anglican clergyman, citing servants’ “ill-humor,” offered advice in a letter to Undersecretary of State William Knox in London. Five hundred recruits might well be enrolled in Baltimore; “it is certain the richest Harvest of Them may be gleaned there, at Elk Ridge, the Iron-works and Annapolis.” He also recommended sending parties in armed vessels to the heads of rivers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to spread word “to the back Settlements where most of these people have been carried.”
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The Northern Neck of Virginia, home to the Washington, Carter, Ball, and Lee families, had a comparable indentured servant population. According to one historian, “In the convict- and indentured-servant-rich Northern Neck counties, for example, many whites tried to escape to Dunmore, and more plotted their escape and waited for the right moment. Indeed, in some quarters, like George Washington’s own estate, Mount Vernon, discontented and rebellious white servants caused almost as much anxiety as enslaved blacks.”
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In the autumn of 1775, the general and his cousin Lund, the
estate manager, were especially uneasy about the white servants and black slaves collaborating. “I think if there was no white Servts in this family I shoud [
sic
] be under no apprehensition [
sic
] about the Slaves,” Lund advised.
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Washington, as we will see, feared that Dunmore might raid Mount Vernon.

As for black slaves, planters in both Virginia and Maryland worried about uprisings. By December 1775, Dunmore’s defeats at Great Bridge and then in Norfolk eased the immediate threat. However, in 1780 and 1781, when the British returned to Virginia in larger numbers, employing the rivers as invasion routes, one chronicler noted that slaves “flocked to the Enemy from all quarters even from very remote parts.”
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It was an ongoing vulnerability.

From the British standpoint, a further Chesapeake opportunity in 1775 and 1776 came from religious preferences. To begin with, poor-white Anglican Loyalism was strong in the lower counties of Delmarva. In contrast to mainland Virginia’s largely Patriot-minded Anglican clergy, those in Delmarva took the British side by two to one. Anglican Loyalism also thrived on the peninsular rivalry between Anglicans and the Patriot-leaning Presbyterians.
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Irish and German Catholics, many of them indentured servants, were a potential British recruitment pool. Philadelphia’s prosperous Irish Catholic merchants—the Moylans, Fitzsimons, Meases, and Meades—were prominent Patriots, as were most of the long-established Catholic tobacco gentry in southern Maryland. By contrast, indentured workers from the Philadelphia construction trades and the Pennsylvania and Maryland ironworks, as well as runaway servants, were ripe for picking. Britain’s short-lived Roman Catholic Volunteers Regiment had 180 men at its peak, most of them from Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Potential Catholic Loyalism was also apparent in Pennsylvania’s iron-producing regions. One British officer, housed locally as a prisoner, reported “something very extraordinary but most of the Roman Catholics are friends to the [British] government.”
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The threat was underscored by periodic talk in 1777 and thereafter about potential risings. If the British landed an army near Baltimore and moved north, they would be joined by thousands of Pennsylvania Loyalists on reaching the areas around York and Lancaster; alternatively, if the Pennsylvanians rose, a British army could march to join them.
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Evangelical missionaries had already launched efforts that would turn the Delmarva Peninsula into “the Garden of American Methodism.” And
in 1775, Methodist leader John Wesley unexpectedly took a strong pro-Tory position in his
Calm Address to the American Colonies.
His Loyalism complicated the Methodists’ colonial missionary efforts, concentrated in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland. But Patriots fumed over the message and behavior of the region’s principal Methodist missionaries: Thomas Rankin, Martin Rodda, and Thomas Webb, all British by birth and loyalty. Over several years, Rodda was arrested for helping to lead a rebellion on the Eastern Shore, and Webb, a former British Army captain, was jailed for spying and furnishing information to the British.
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What further angered Patriot leaders was the repeated interference by Methodist missionaries and itinerants with recruitment and militia musters. In 1777, Colonel Nathaniel Potter, an Eastern Shore militia leader, wrote to the governor that “the spirit of Methodism reigns so much among us that few or no men will be raised for the war. It is a general practice…when there is any call for raising men for their preachers to be continually attending their different posts day and night which I am fully persuaded is the greatest stroke the British Ministry ever struck amongst us.” In Delaware that year, Patriot leader Caesar Rodney believed that Methodist preachers were recruiting a Loyalist unit in the area along the Maryland border.
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Taken together, Delmarva Anglicans, Irish and German Catholics, and Methodists represented a significant population of British sympathizers and potential recruits. Although this chapter has skimmed over the religious factor, we have seen it appear again and again as a major factor in choosing sides for the Revolution. In the Chesapeake, Loyalist numbers augmented the topographic, naval, and economic factors that invited British attentions to the region.

Between 1777 and 1781, when the British—wiser every year—had renewed attention to the Chesapeake, they did tap more of these possibilities, and the wide array of proposals and strategic memoranda, submitted to generals Clinton and Cornwallis in particular, elaborate the opportunity never realized.

An Overview of Lost Chesapeake Opportunities

Six years after the sloop HMS
Otter
failed in its attack on the small Virginia town of Hampton, two great British defeats in the Chesapeake region finally cost them the American war. On September 5, 1781, a French fleet
under the Comte de Grasse defeated the Royal Navy at the Battle of the (Virginia) Capes; and on October 19, Lord Cornwallis, no longer able to expect relief, was obliged to surrender his 10,000-man army at Yorktown. Over those six years, British and Loyalist thinkers had left few strategic stones unturned in making the case for greater attention to the region.

In terms of the naval opportunities neglected, what Dunmore pointed out in 1775, and Captain Hamond restated in February 1776, was voiced again by Commodore Sir George Collier, who commanded British naval forces during the brief but effective reinvasion of 1779. The commodore opposed withdrawal because southeastern Virginia was too critical as a base.

The great bay, he said, was a key to victory. “The most feasible way of ending the rebellion was by cutting off the resources by which the enemy could continue war, these being principally drawn from Virginia, and principally tobacco.” Toward this end, “an attack and the putting up and shutting up of the navigation of the Chesapeake would probably answer very considerable purposes…especially as [their] army was constantly supplied by provisions sent by water through the Chesapeake.”
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Others advised that Britain should either occupy the entire Delmarva Peninsula or neutralize it more cheaply by garrisoning and fortifying a line between Port Penn on Delaware Bay and the port of Oxford, Maryland, 60 miles away on the Chesapeake side.
Map 11
illustrates the geography. Furthermore, had the British seized Delmarva, they would have controlled most of the American coast from Long Island south to North Carolina.

There is no need to repeat the groups that might have been supportive or sympathetic, from slaves and indentured servants to poor-white Anglicans and German and Irish Catholics.

Last but not least, the memo writers and other frustrated Loyalists dwelled on what could be called economic warfare: the importance of seizing or destroying the tobacco so important as a Revolutionary currency and of cutting off the grain, flour, and bread so vital to the American armies. Capturing or destroying tobacco became a major British objective during Collier’s brief invasion. As for the importance and opportunity of cutting off Patriot supplies of wheat, flour, and bread, that was drummed repeatedly by Maryland Loyalists like James Chambers and Robert Alexander.

In 1780 and 1781, as British strategy moved toward a showdown on the Chesapeake, even senior generals like Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis began to grasp the region’s centrality. In April 1781, Clinton advised
a fellow general of a new option that could be “solidly decisive” in the war: “Virginia has been in general looked upon as universally hostile; Maryland has not been as yet tried, but it is supposed to be not quite so much so: but the inhabitants of Pennsylvania on both sides of the Susquehannah, York, Lancaster, Chester and the Peninsula between Chesapeak [
sic
] and Delaware, are represented to me to be friendly. There or thereabouts, I think this experiment should now be tried, but it cannot be done fairly until we have a force sufficient not only to go there, but to retain a respectable hold of the country afterwards.”
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Even in Clinton’s musing, one finds neither coherent overall strategy nor firm plan. And Cornwallis’s decisive surrender at Yorktown was only six months away.

The hour for a Chesapeake blueprint had passed.

F
rom the London City Council to the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, from John Adams to Edmund Burke, and from Quaker meetinghouses to the Philadelphia Synod of the Presbyterian Church, the conflict boiling up in 1775 brought a stir of related apprehensions. The English-speaking peoples, some observers feared, were on the brink of another civil war, potentially as bitter as the one that had rent the British Isles during the 1640s.

Of the thirteen colonies, those with proud seventeenth-century roots, especially the four vanguards, were home to the elites most conscious of some historical continuity. Massachusetts and Connecticut, with their Puritan antecedents, were proud of how Parliament had stood up to King
Charles in support of English political, religious, and economic liberty. Many of their leaders and preachers circa 1775 considered New Englanders a chosen people who would continue that fight in North America.

Virginia’s ties to the English Civil War were mixed. There was both a royalist or Cavalier heritage from English emigration in the 1640s and a Puritan and parliamentarian legacy left by Bacon’s Rebellion in the 1670s. Thomas Jefferson was especially mindful of the latter side, avidly researching precedents from the 1640s to support a Fast Day in 1774. But in no sense was Virginia circa 1775 wracked by seventeenth-century memory.

Although the Carolinas had grown out of a charter granted to prominent royalists in the 1660s, that counted little by 1775. What did matter was that both Carolinas, south and north, looked to be badly divided, culturally and regionally. War in the Carolinas would be more fratricidal than in New England or Virginia. In January 1775, the South Carolina Provincial Congress called for prayer “to avert from them [the people] the impending calamities of civil war.” Five months later, that body regretted that the king had been misled into measures, which if persisted in “must inevitably involve America in all the calamities of Civil War.” By August, the Charleston Council of Safety “viewed with horror the spectacle of a civil war” already in the making.
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Ardent war supporters on both sides, frequently cocksure, generally predicted neat and favorable outcomes. Bellicose Tories in England pictured a simple rebellion that would be easily suppressed. Militant American colonials believed that their resort to war would force Britain to compromise. But if not, virtue would triumph in a patriotic war for liberty.

The predictions of deeper pain and civil war trauma proved more accurate, especially in the Carolinas. Local feuds wove themselves into the larger hostilities. Families often divided. Fratricide led into what Winston Churchill later described for South Carolina circa 1780: “Here the fierce civil war in progress between Patriots and Loyalists—or Whigs and Tories as they were locally called—was darkened by midnight raids, seizure of cattle, murderous ambushes, and atrocities such as we have known in our own day in Ireland. [General Nathanael] Greene himself wrote: ‘The animosities between the Whigs and Tories of this state renders their situation truly deplorable. There is not a day passes but there are more or less who fall a sacrifice to their savage disposition. The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Tories and the Tories the Whigs. Some thousands have fallen in this way in this quarter, and the evil rages with more violence than ever. If a stop cannot be put to these massacres, the country will be depopulated in a few months more, and neither Whig nor Tory can live.’”
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