1775 (90 page)

However, the imperialist and navalist Britons who emphasized the economic importance of North America usually put strong emphasis on those colonies’ political subservience. Most advocated the sort of hard-line agenda that the colonists especially resented—tea policies to uphold East India Company interests, naval implementation that made customs enforcement the commercial equivalent of martial law, additions to the enumerated list of commodities that colonial growers could ship only to Britain, crippling regulation of American coastal shipping, prohibition of settlement beyond the Appalachians, restraint of colonial manufactures, and more. Imperialists of this harsher school often urged speedy discipline before population growth made America too strong. Politicians who put the greatest stock in mercantile theory were often especially fearful of a British global unraveling should the American colonies be lost. The king himself worried in 1779 that should America succeed, “the West Indies must follow them…Ireland would soon follow the same plan and be a separate state, then this island would be reduced to itself, and soon would be a poor island indeed, for reduced in her trade merchants would retire in their wealth to climates
more to their advantage, and shoals of manufacturers would leave this country for the New Empire.”
³³

When it came to foreign affairs, British proponents of keeping Americans on a tight rein were often the same navalists and insulars most eager to turn their backs on the old European balance-of-power strategies and German entanglements of the first two Hanoverian monarchs. By contrast, the pro-American old Whig element in Parliament generally deplored this abandonment of the old Continental alliance building so victorious for three decades under George II. Two pillars, they said, had girded the empire—benign treatment of the North American colonies and productive anti-French alliances pivoting on Protestant German states and the Dutch Republic. Brendan Simms and other British revisionists have detailed the policy pronouncements of such leading American sympathizers as Pitt, Burke, Conway, Lords Shelburne and Camden, and the Dukes of Richmond and Manchester. These men saw little but danger in mistreatment of old European allies and American colonials alike, arguing that it played into Bourbon hands. As Burke cautioned in 1772, “He who shall advise hostilities against the Bourbon Compact, till a compact shall take place between Great Britain and her colonies is a foe or a driveller.”
³⁴
For this chapter’s limited purposes, however, we must note one central failure: by 1775, Britain had alienated most of the continent, including her former friends.

The Duke of Newcastle, a former first minister, had anticipated the drift in 1766. He strove to improve relations with Prussia, he said, so “that His Majesty might have one ally in Europe.” But Frederick of Prussia wasn’t having it: England “is not interested in anything but naval dominance and her possessions in America.”
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A few years later Joseph II of Austria dismissed Britain as “isolated and almost without allies.”
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By 1772, Lord Rochford, secretary of state for southern Europe, saw France “forming such connections in the north which may make them as formidable there as they have for some time been by their alliance in the south, whilst we have not a single friendly power or ally to boast of.”
³⁷

For almost a decade prior to 1775, Britain had watched European developments that either assumed British inability to respond, confirmed French reassertion, or did both. In 1766, France reannexed the province of Lorraine. In 1768, Genoa ceded Corsica to France after the latter helped Genoa by suppressing a Corsican revolt. Seventeen seventy-two, in turn, saw the partition of Poland among Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and a coup d’état
in Sweden with the French on the winning side. Britain was conspicuous by her lack of influence. With respect to Poland, Horace Walpole acidly witticized that the British fleet, “being so formidable will, I suppose, be towed overland to Warsaw and restore the Polish constitution and their King to his full rights—how frightened the King of Prussia must be.”
³⁸

No more than a handful of Americans—Benjamin Franklin, for one—would have followed these events. Yet the changes clearly signaled both the decline of British influence and the rising prospect of Europe’s major powers either aiding an American rebellion or declining to provide mercenaries for its suppression. Even Admiral Graves in Boston, with his finger far from the pulse of European connivance, reported four times to the Admiralty during August and September 1774 that American ships were loading tea and gunpowder in northern European ports.
³⁹

Cockiness among London’s insular thinkers dissipated as the mere munitions suppliers of 1774–1776 threw off their neutral camouflage and declared war: France in 1778 and Spain in 1779. Then in February 1780, Russia issued her famous Proclamation of Armed Neutrality, aimed at Britain, which specified principles for the protection of neutral commerce in wartime. Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, and Austria all concurred. Later that year, Britain maneuvered the Netherlands into war out of belief that a neutral Holland, under the new rules, would have been a greater threat transporting munitions and naval stores to France and Spain.
⁴⁰
Now British concern over lack of allies became acute.

Henry Conway, a former secretary of state, told Parliament in 1780 that Britain was now “at war with America, with France and Spain, without a single power our friend…every one of the foreign powers, great as well as small, [is] acting either directly or indirectly in a manner inimical to our interests: even the little Lubeckers, the Danzigers, and the town of Hamburg [are] against us.” By 1781, Sandwich at the Admiralty, no longer singing the merits of insularity, admitted that “if Russia declares against us, we shall then literally speaking be in actual war with the whole world.”
⁴¹

The cracks in British confidence yawned ever wider, and three months after word was received in London of Cornwallis’s October surrender, Lord North resigned. However, despite widespread gloom, the economic disaster predicted by the mercantilists, based on their now-obsolescent doctrine, never came to pass. France and Spain had detached Britain’s prime colonies but won only a limited victory; America yielded them no economic benefits. Gibraltar and Jamaica were never captured, and the Royal Navy’s defeat of
the French Navy in April 1782 ensured that the damage to Britain in any new treaty would be much less than watchers had earlier predicted. The new United States was awarded a western border on the Mississippi, but the Bourbon powers won little—Spain only East and West Florida, along with Minorca, and France some piddling islands. In a few years, it would be clear that the war’s huge costs had helped lay economic foundations for a radical upheaval in France. The Bourbon Compact, in 1781 on the cusp of a great victory, would not survive into the new century.

The emergence of the United States, then, was owed to two Old World illusions: the French and Spanish reverie that revolt in America would usher in a new Bourbon era, and the hubristic belief of post-1763 Whitehall and Parliament that isolation, navalism, and fiscal prowess could suppress the thirteen colonies even in a global war that Britain might have to fight without allies. Taken together, the two mistakes enabled a new nation.

T
he southern expedition planned by King George, Lord North, and Lord Dartmouth in late summer and autumn 1775 ultimately expired in three stages of mishap and embarrassment. First came the defeat in late February 1776 of Loyalist Scottish Highlanders by North Carolina militia at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge. Following that was May’s month-long inability of seven regiments of British regulars and some 70 warships and transports to conduct meaningful amphibious operations along North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. The final failure occurred in late June, when those same ill-fated ships and regiments were bloodily repulsed seeking to force the entrance to Charleston Harbor in South Carolina.

It was all a great travesty. The Crown’s only success came in leaving such a muddled trail and confused chronology that the oneness of the operation has been lost, dissipating the attention of historians. The sole British chronicler to profile the expedition in its entirety, Eric Robson in the 1950s, reached a damning conclusion: “In its lack of coordination, its changes of character and objectives, its delays and its misapprehension of the position of the loyalists, it typifies many of the military expeditions of the American War of Independence, and reveals how ill-suited for the conduct of war was the eighteenth century system of government in Great Britain.”
¹

The final rebuff in Charleston Harbor is invariably described as a British defeat, but not on a major scale. For the most part, though, the battle has been examined on a stand-alone basis. This sidesteps the larger, longer context of British incapacity. June’s debacle did not stand alone. The strains on British logistics deepened, and winter’s abandoned schedules and deadlines echoed further into 1776 and 1777. Generals and commodores hoping to claim a late-hour vocational fig leaf only added mistakes. Intelligence, in the scouting sense of the term, went from bad to worse. After Charleston, the British government left the South more or less alone for two and a half years before returning for a second try.

Chapter 13
has already discussed the British Cabinet’s amateur assessments and the transport malcoordination that was set in motion in autumn 1775. Repetition seems unnecessary, beyond a reminder as to delay: the expedition’s main force, supposed to depart in December 1775, did not leave Ireland until February 13, more or less when it was originally to have arrived off Cape Fear. Obviously, this had serious consequences in the Carolinas. The prospect of Loyalist risings lost credibility. Worse, the transports and troops diverted to the South were among the elements that held up the all-important two-pronged invasion of New York, postponing it from spring 1776 to late summer. Then, because summer’s movement south from Canada was not completed by October, General Carleton returned to Quebec. The British had to begin again along Lake Champlain in the spring of 1777.

Extending the interpretations of Boston and Canada set forth several chapters back, these pages contend that the British war machine of the Revolutionary decade was not strong enough in 1775—nor would it be again five years later—to successfully suppress the northern colonies
and
the southern colonies at the same time. Although this became clear by 1781, the failure of the southern expedition of 1775–1776 indicates that simultaneous war in both regions was beyond British achievement in the early years as well. The caution initially voiced by senior officials like Lord Barrington, the secretary at war, and Edward Harvey, the army’s adjutant general, that the army was not strong enough to subdue all of America, was usually interwoven with an argument for reliance on the Royal Navy. However, the outcomes also supported a narrower conclusion: that Britain could not manage full-scale northern and southern invasions simultaneously.

Through 1775 and 1776, the British Cabinet was so preoccupied with the northern campaigns and the cul-de-sacs into which the rebels had drawn
them that little troop strength remained for the South. The diversion to the Carolinas of the seven regiments under General Clinton and accompanying warships and transports was large enough to strain overall British logistics, but it was too minimal to bludgeon either North or South Carolina. Where it tipped scales was in helping to deny General Howe the transports he needed to shift his soldiers from Boston to New York in October 1775 and again in March 1776. With too few transports and escorts available to sustain an opposed landing in rebel-held New York, Howe had to settle, in the first instance, for overwintering in Boston and, in the second, for being taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

February-through-July embarrassment in the Carolinas, coupled with Lord Dunmore’s ignominious mid-1776 expulsion from Virginia, doubtless influenced British leaders to concentrate their forces in the northern provinces. Only after Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in October 1777 punctured any hope of reconquering New York and New England by a powerful thrust from Canada did the British begin withdrawing from several northern areas of occupation. Philadelphia was vacated in June 1778, then Newport, Rhode Island, in 1779. To military historians, the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, fought by Washington in June 1778 against the British troops marching from Philadelphia back to New York, was “the last major engagement of war in [the] North.”
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Thereafter Britain’s war in the northern colonies, beyond its headquarters in and around New York City, was generally confined to raids, brief local occupations, and town burnings.
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The turn southward in 1779 was emphatic. One set of arguments had emphasized the pointlessness of keeping New England relative to the importance of the plantation colonies. Charles Jenkinson, the shrewd undersecretary at war, began making this case in 1775. Now it became more persuasive.
³
In late December 1778, Savannah became the first southern city to fall. In December 1779, General Clinton, with 8,700 men, moved against Charleston, which surrendered in May 1780. The second British “southern strategy” was under way, achieving considerable success through 1780 but starting to lose momentum in mid-1781. It imploded after Lord Cornwallis’s October 19 surrender at Yorktown, even though civil war persisted in the Carolinas.