1775 (80 page)

The Effects of British Confinement and Delay in Boston

Belief that Massachusetts radicals were responsible for leading otherwise loyal colonies astray, and that cutting off the vipers’ heads in Boston would end the Revolution, was one of British officialdom’s most costly self-deceptions. During 1774 and 1775, as so much emphasis was placed on sending regiments to Boston, Canada was left open to invasion, and at the end of 1775, twelve of the thirteen colonies had no British regulars stationed within their boundaries to command fear or even respect.

Obviously, the king and his Cabinet hardly planned anything like this. If critics are to be believed, relatively little was seriously planned. However, if we date the Revolution from 1774 and 1775, that period’s overconcentration of British forces in Boston and its damage to alternative military options—in the middle colonies, along the Hudson-Champlain corridor, or in a more sophisticated southern expedition—jumps right out. Not only did the rebels build a new political infrastructure in much of the abandoned territory—thousands of associations, committees, conventions, and new militia structures—but it was Patriot leaders who effectively determined where the Revolution’s major early battles were fought: in the Boston area and along several of the war routes into Quebec.

But British commanders regarded Boston as strategically useless and an
awful place to spend the winter of 1775–1776. Had Britain operated the eighteenth-century equivalent of naval and army war colleges, nobody could conceivably have drawn up the strategy Lord North and the Cabinet stumbled into. In fact, North knew he was militarily unqualified and several times asked the king for permission to resign.

The Patriots who knew best what they were about during the period that this chapter has styled the Battle of Boston were a handful of bold political strategists—most notably, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren—and one commanding general, George Washington. Still, the credit Washington deserves for generalship between July 1775 and March 1776, and also for naval acumen and for his handling of munitions, certainly did not include the original politics of entrapment that lured British ministers and parliamentarians into the Yankee spider’s web.

Not a few historians have said of Sam Adams, and to a lesser extent of Joseph Warren and Paul Revere, that during the period from 1773 to 1775, they always seemed to be around when something was happening. However, it has long been unfashionable to renew the popular accolades that Adams and Warren enjoyed in the 1770s and 1780s, when they were two of the Revolution’s best-known heroes—
le fameux Adams
and the greatly admired Warren, who died at Bunker Hill fighting as a private soldier because his commission as a major general had not yet arrived. It is unfortunate that this praise has ebbed.

Central importance to the Revolution should no longer be confined to the handful of men who made their names in 1776 through involvement with the Declaration of Independence. Greater attention is in order to the leading politicians, agitators, and propagandists—Adams and Warren fit all three descriptions—who turned Boston and the Bay Colony into the ill-mannered backwoods bobcat that the haughty British Lion had to corner and destroy before anything else, but never could.

Nor was Boston the only strategic miscalculation that preoccupied, misled, and delayed the British in 1775. The American attack on Canada, besides almost succeeding, forced Britain into a northern military emphasis and buildup. This in turn dictated much of the route followed by the grand invasion that the king and Parliament counted on to finish the war in one campaign. We now turn to that flawed strategy.

A
mong the decisions made by the Second Continental Congress between early May and late July 1775—ten weeks that matched or exceeded the gravity of that same period in 1776—the invasion of Canada was among the most influential, with repercussions felt throughout the war. Yet it probably wouldn’t have taken place without mid-May’s provocative Yankee expeditions that seized Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point and raided St. John across the Quebec border. These, in turn, might not have taken place without the machinations of Samuel Adams or the
north country knowledge of Benedict Arnold, then a captain of Connecticut Foot Guards.

The general verdict of historians, at least until recently, has been to label the invasion a failure and to concede American overambition in trying to make Canada into a future state. However, not only did the northward incursions almost prevail, but they furthered less obvious goals: thwarting and delaying the British use of Canada as a base for an invasion of New York; stalling support for the Crown among the Canadian Indian tribes; minimizing the prospect of British raids on western New England to pull Yankee militia away from the siege of Boston; and seizing some of British North America’s remaining supplies of gunpowder, cannon, and mortars.

Ultimate American success, achieved at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, although hardly a conscious strategy two years earlier, flowed from British officialdom’s forced reliance on a substantially Canadian-based grand invasion to put down rebellion in a string of provinces that had their population center near Philadelphia. We have seen how London had overcommitted to a political and military focus on Boston to cut off that Medusa’s head of sedition. Then the American invasion obliged an overconcentration in Canada. The ensuing British master plan to split New England from more reconciliation-minded New York consequently required two of its three expeditions to be launched from Canada—the larger taking the familiar Champlain-Hudson warpath southward, the second coming from the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario and sweeping eastward down the Mohawk Valley toward Albany. This was backward looking because the old French invasion routes, while imprinted on British minds, had never enabled the French to prevail as far as Albany, and this shortfall occurred in decades when the English-speaking districts en route had been only sparsely settled.

By 1775, the population of northern New England had ballooned, and its hostility would prove crippling, as General John Burgoyne reported home with such frustration in 1777. With Whitehall trapped in a geographic time warp, the stakes rose with each year of strategic persistence. The fatal postponement of the Champlain-Hudson and Mohawk Valley expeditions into the summer and autumn of 1777, instead of the autumn of 1776, was an indirect consequence of British forces in Boston coming late to New York and Benedict Arnold’s timely October 1776 delaying action on Lake Champlain in the Battle of Valcour Bay. The latter’s unusual military capacities included land and sea alike. In June 1775, General Carleton
in Quebec had prophetically said of Arnold that he “is well acquainted with every avenue to it [Quebec].”
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The muses have ignored how close the American invasion of Canada in 1775 came to success. The vaunted Quebec Act was disliked rather than appreciated by the French-Canadian peasantry—and without their support, Carleton and his advisers were dubious, through much of October and November, about Quebec holding out against the rebels.

For some weeks, the doubt verged on panic. Ships and cargoes were sent back to Britain lest they be captured when Montreal and Quebec fell. Had the incomplete British fortifications just south of Montreal at St. John—present-day St. Jean-sur-Richelieu—fallen in two or three weeks instead of withstanding a siege for 45 days, the American gamble would have succeeded. The main invasion force from Lake Champlain would have secured Montreal in October and then taken Quebec in late October or early November, when its garrison was minimal and its gates wide open.

New York: Insufficient Mid-1775 Invasion Commitment

June and July’s gradual hardening of congressional willingness to invade Canada was not matched by a parallel buildup of men, munitions, and martial enthusiasm in the staging grounds near Lake George and Lake Champlain. This was New York territory. Philip Schuyler of New York, appointed in June as one of Congress’s four new major generals, was shortly thereafter named to command the invading army. However, New York was not prepared—not militarily and perhaps not psychologically. As its Provincial Congress conceded in a mid-July letter to Schuyler, “Our troops can be of no service to you; they have no arms, clothes, blankets or ammunition; the officers no commissions; our treasury no money; ourselves in debt. It is in vain to complain; we will remove difficulties as fast as we can, and send you soldiers, whenever the men we have raised are entitled to the name.”
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These were dire constraints, because the invasion clock was ticking ominously. July would have been the optimal month; August was critical. New Englanders knew; so did George Washington. But Congress was in charge and had put Schuyler in command. As of July, the regiments garrisoning Ticonderoga and Crown Point were New England units, and they could have invaded with a few weeks’ notice.

To complicate matters, Yorkers and New Englanders were mutually suspicious. As
Chapter 2
has noted, some New Yorkers—Alexander Hamilton was one—worried that New England radicals had ambitions to annex border regions of New York, especially if the province continued to equivocate or became caught up in civil war. According to one Connecticut historian, in late spring “New York’s inability to man her own posts in this crisis raised the suspicion that she pursued a policy not of involvement but of neutrality, a suspicion fed by subsequent events.”
³
That summer, Connecticut units were sent to the city of New York and Fort Ticonderoga at New York’s request, and the Yankee province’s soldiers also crossed the border to suppress Toryism on Long Island and the mid-Hudson Valley.

However, not wanting to provoke New York into further Loyalism, Massachusetts and Connecticut accepted the northern command going to Schuyler, with Richard Montgomery as his second in command. In politics, though, both generals represented the same conservative, landholding wing of the Patriotic movement in New York. Schuyler’s mother was a Van Cortlandt, his wife a Van Rensselaer. Montgomery, the son of a British baronet, was married to a Livingston. Indeed, Schuyler’s wife and Montgomery’s were cousins. Not surprisingly, both men disliked the egalitarian views, behavior, and discipline of the New Englanders and thought little better of New York’s initial Patriot formation, the First Regiment. Commanded at first by Colonel Alexander McDougall, a prominent city radical, it was heavy with members of the Sons of Liberty. Montgomery would later describe that unit as “the sweepings of the New York streets.”
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Like many officers from the southern and middle colonies, Schuyler and Montgomery looked askance at Yankee majors who were tavern keepers and at captains who were shoemakers. Such criticism was often valid from a disciplinary perspective; Yankee troops were known for insubordination. The Yankees had their own Yorker jokes, not least about the scarcity of New York rank and file. Connecticut Colonel Benjamin Hinman, commanding at Ticonderoga, remarked that although New York abounded with officers, his curiosity had not yet been gratified by the sight of one private.
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Also to the point, the Yankees did not care for the pretensions of New York officers. The chaplain of Hinman’s regiment wrote bemusedly to his wife back in Connecticut that Schuyler, “somewhat haughty and overbearing,” would not heed advice from persons without “some wealth and rank.”
The general, he recounted, had only listened to a blacksmith “after I had explained to him that the man was well-descended and only a blacksmith by reason that his grandfather’s English estates had been forfeited to the Crown.”
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Schuyler, though, was hardly the colonial equivalent of a third marquess or fifth viscount. He was principally a businessman, operating both timber mills and shipbuilding enterprises while managing his large landholdings. His earlier military role during the French and Indian War involved not combat but supply, logistics, and shipbuilding. Here his skills were acknowledged. With soldiers having such varied muskets, he was shrewd enough to keep insisting on bullet molds of different sizes. He knew how to build ships. In 1777, Schuyler’s program of felling trees, diverting streams, and moving boulders onto roadways seriously delayed General John Burgoyne’s southward advance from Ticonderoga to Saratoga.

But in invasion-minded 1775, he was doubly miscast. To begin with, he was not a battlefield commander, for which he had neither qualification nor experience. On top of which, he was no warrior but a reconciliation-minded conservative reluctant to wage all-out war against the Crown. Even Montgomery wondered “but has he strong nerves?”
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John Adams later blamed the congressional reconciliationists for the loss in Canada because they “impeded and paralyzed all our enterprises…If every measure for the service in Canada, from the first projection of it to the final loss of the province, had not been opposed and obstinately disputed by the same party…”
⁸
Although Adams singled out John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and James Duane of New York, that delegation included others so inclined. Among the conservative wing of the New York Patriotic movement, symbolized by men like Duane, John Alsop, Lewis and Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, and several of the Livingstons, as of mid-1775 probably half had reconciliationist hopes or tendencies. Such sentiments could have conflicted with an aggressive military posture.