Fusiliers (49 page)
Captain Saumarez was to receive the honour of leading the first detachment of British prisoners back to New York. The column would be headed by several dozen men of the Royal Artillery, the Light Infantry, then the remnants of the 17th, followed by the 23rd. Some 500 marched behind the young captain, travelling initially to Philadelphia, 125 of them from the 23rd Fusiliers.
There were not many other captains left to dispute the honour of leading this division back, indeed only four others remained in the whole of the Yorktown army. None would have wanted to elbow Saumarez out of the way in any case, since he had emerged as an articulate and forceful spokesman for the prisoners, taking up the cudgels both with their captors as well as British headquarters in New York, ensuring that the men were properly provided for.
During their nineteen months of captivity, a great many officers had looked after themselves rather than their men, using their connections to escape the tedium of Lancaster and the other posts where prisoners had been confined. When the turn of the Guards came to march, around 260 soldiers and non-commissioned officers formed up without a single officer to command them.
News of the peace treaty negotiated by emissaries in Paris had brought all manner of celebrations: bonfires were lit, feux
de joie
echoed across the landscape, festive dances were held, and many a dram drunk. In some places alcohol had worked its malign way on the soldiers, with American cheers of ‘Hurrah for Washington!’ or ‘Hurrah for Congress!’, soon answered by cries of ‘Hurrah for King George!’ Ill-will between prisoners and captors had then shown itself with some brawls, attacks on British or Hessian prisoners as well as absurd orders to the detainees not to sing their national anthem. On the whole though, a spirit of bonhomie was preserved; many local people who came to see the columns tramping off did so with wishes of ‘God’s speed’, cries of farewell and tears in their eyes. The soldiers had consorted with locals around Lancaster just as they had everywhere else when the army stopped for long enough. Transactions – commercial, convivial and carnal – had flourished. Each regiment under orders to march to New York, and via there to return to Europe, faced a reckoning that May, since there were many who did not want to go back.
The German regiments, held near Fredericktown in Virginia, were hard hit by desertion, many men choosing to settle with countrymen or local girls in the New World. As for the 23rd, it had marched around 200 men into captivity at Yorktown, taking 125 back to New York. Of the missing, thirty-three deserted, twenty-four died of natural causes while prisoners, and perhaps fifteen had escaped back to British lines, like Roger Lamb.
By late May, around 4,900 former prisoners of the Americans had come in to New York, the commander-in-chief reporting to his masters in London, ‘Much civility has been shewn them on their march through the country.’ The returnees included even a few hundred remnants of Burgoyne’s Convention Army who had been prisoners for nearly six years. Once back within the British lines, the Fusiliers and other regiments were issued with new muskets, an important moment in their rehabilitation as soldiers.
Britain’s disengagement from the thirteen provinces was being conducted by a different set of leaders to those that had prosecuted the war. After Yorktown, the ministry of Lord North had collapsed and Lord Germain had been removed from the American department. General Clinton, after years of attempted resignation, finally shuffled off the duties of commander-in-chief in America. In their place had
come a Whiggish bunch that the King could hardly bear to be civil to, including that fiery orator Charles Fox as Foreign Secretary. General Sir Guy Carleton took the reins in New York.
It was to Carleton, during the summer months of 1783, that the huge labour of uprooting the British army from America would fall. In this he was seconded by Major Frederick Mackenzie of the Fusiliers, and many other staff officers. Carleton, like his predecessor, was not an inspiring leader of men. He had a prickly manner and, such were the dynamics of army politics, his actions aroused the scorn of the customary pack of critics. Carleton was, though, the right commander for the moment because he had finely tuned political instincts, a sense of fairness, and was a stickler for keeping track of every farthing of the public money he disbursed. These qualities were required because Britain’s war for America had been fought on promises: to loyalist Americans raising troops; to merchants owed thousands of pounds; or to men who had joined the army ‘for the duration’ of the war only. Now that it was clear that the war was lost, New York was crammed with those who feared that every pledge made by the previous government in London would be liquidated as British power in America ebbed away.
Every sultry morning during the summer of 1783 brought a different procession of petitioners to headquarters. The common sort were sometimes treated with cold indifference, sometimes propelled towards the lower grade of staff officer, men empowered to dispense a few pounds for a home lost or years spent soldiering in some southern swamp. Many of the blacks, former slaves desperate to evade the vengeance of masters they had escaped, found a sympathetic ear at the house of New York’s commandant, Colonel Birch, where Serjeant Lamb worked as a secretary. Others, given the runaround by some assistant to the quartermaster general or minor barrack master, crisscrossed the city clutching their memorials, records of service, or title deeds, well-worn papers, unfolded before the weary eyes of each new official that would receive them.
A higher class of desperation could be found in the anteroom to General Carleton’s office. It was there that the once-powerful merchants, men of property, or provincial colonels might have their grievances heard by the commander-in-chief in person. In the case of Frederick Phillips, father-in-law of Captain Smythe of the 23rd, these
supplications produced a letter from Carleton to a minister in London. The claimant, wrote the general, was ‘a gentleman of character and the head of a respectable family, lately possessed of one of the greatest estates in America … the circumstances of his being compelled to take refuge in England for personal safety, at an advanced time of life and in a very bad state of health, gives him additional claim to consideration.’
The compensation in store for Frederick Phillips would be a small proportion of what he claimed to have lost. The same principle was applied to the more lowly petitioners, too. Often they got one tenth of the value of their property. Nevertheless, hundreds if not thousands of claims were paid out that summer, many of them coming across Major Frederick Mackenzie’s desk. There were ‘pilots’, farmers who had guided British escapees across the Jerseys, people claiming large unpaid bills for supplies, or widows of men who had died fighting for their king. Those incapable of writing employed scribes to add some copperplate dignity to their pathetic narratives.
Once the question of compensation was settled, many wasted little time escaping the city. The peace treaty between Britain and her enemies (France, Spain and the Netherlands had joined in the global free-for-all against the King’s interests) had produced a state of non-belligerence, but the business of extracting garrisons from America would require months. During this ill-defined time, people who had taken different sides began to mix together once again, something that caused particular angst to the Tories. ‘Those who would dare to remain in New York look desperate with fear of dark prospects,’ wrote one Hessian. ‘Rebel sympathisers arrive in the city from all directions by land and water. With a triumphant air they take possession of their dwellings, on which they had turned their backs eight year ago.’ With victory in sight, many Patriots began to walk the streets of New York again, sometimes muttering insults at the redcoats or loyalists they passed, producing brawls or even duels in the streets.
Although the city’s commerce had largely dried up, the quayside was a place of constant activity during these days. Hundreds of ships were sailing every month. Early in the year, evacuees from Georgia and Charleston, including the one-time commandant Lieutenant Colonel Nisbet Balfour, had arrived in New York. These southern provinces had been given up now the end was in sight. From the harbour thousands of loyalists set sail for the West Indies, Canada or Europe. They wanted a new life, away from their self-righteous former
neighbours, smug with triumph. Between 26 May and 17 June, for example, a little over three weeks, 7,556 people applied for passage out of New York. Most were heading north, taking advantage of new land grants in Canada: 3,656 wanted to go to the colonies on River St Johns, 681 to Halifax and 1,218 to the Canadian mainland.
Many soldiers enlisted during the war had been wooed with offers of land, an incentive copied from the rebels. Although they knew that Newfoundland or Nova Scotia were barren forested wastes in which it would be hard to scrape a living, more of the discharged men chose to go to these provinces rather than to the slave economies of the West Indies, or back to Britain or Ireland with a few pounds in their pockets. General Carleton understood the danger that these shiploads of settlers would starve or fall into a desperate situation, arriving too late to clear their land and grow crops before winter. He wrote to the governor in Halifax outlining plans to help the demobilised soldiers: ‘Each man has received two pair of stockings, two pair of mitts, and one pair of shoes, extra clothing, also an axe and a spade.’ They would also be eligible to draw rations for a full year after they arrived.
Dozens of the Welch Fusiliers took advantage of the offer of free land in Nova Scotia, turning their backs on former lives across the Atlantic. Carleton’s staff, meanwhile, planned the evacuation of those that remained with the colours, an enormous undertaking requiring the transport of 3,436 people to Nova Scotia (including six regiments to garrison the place, families and some dischargees), and 11,276 back to Europe.
With the return of the main body of the 23rd from captivity, the regiment had found itself more or less together again, and there were many reunions at Herricks on Long Island, where they were camped the summer of 1783. Lieutenant Colonel Balfour had in March heard that years of assiduous cultivation of his patrons, Sir William Howe and Earl Cornwallis, had paid off, with his appointment as an aide-decamp to the King. This honorary post promised elevation to the rank of full colonel, ascension beyond regimental service to the general staff; future promotions would then come by seniority alone (so Balfour would not have to purchase). Plums such as regimental colonelcies might be expected and, if he lived long enough, a general’s rank. Frederick Mackenzie, meanwhile, enjoyed the fruits of long service and patronage at a proportionately lower scale, banking his ten shillings per diem staff pay and getting his son James, who had been
commissioned into the 23rd two years earlier, elevated to the rank of lieutenant while he studied in England.
Serjeant Lamb was sent to take command of the regiment’s latest batch of recruits. Robert Mason, the one-time light company bugler, had restored himself to favour following the unpleasant business of his attempted desertion and court martial of four years earlier. A lengthy period in jail, more than one year while he awaited reprieve from his death sentence, had saved Mason from the hardships of the southern campaigns. Since the regiment always needed talented musicians and Mason was a charmer, he had managed not only to rehabilitate himself but to gain promotion to corporal.
During the daily parades and drills, the officers and serjeants tried to get the regiment back into some sort of order. The grenadier company was a pool of veteran soldiers, including several escaped Convention Army men, and it was the one part of the regiment not to have suffered the indignity of capture. The other companies combined soldiers who had shared in Cornwallis’s heroic epic in the Carolinas with complete novices or skulkers who had sidestepped service. Major Dansey, drilling the 33rd – brother regiment to the Fusiliers in Webster’s brigade at Camden and Guilford – noted in July of 1783, ‘I am pleased to find that our groundwork is not quite gone and that Lord Cornwallis and Webster are not wore out of the 33rd.’
The Fusiliers passed the summer months with sea-bathing trips, occasional turns on guard, and preparations for their return to Europe. In contrast to the anguished loyalists, it was a happy time for the regiment, one in which the veterans of many years’ hard fighting began to disregard rumours of a posting to Nova Scotia or the Caribbean and imagine a homecoming with families whose faces they struggled to remember. Those who had joined for ‘the duration’ could prepare for their discharge too. There were few discipline problems, so the Welch Fusiliers lived in near complete harmony with the Long Island farmers around their encampment. So pleasant were these relations that the people of Herricks petitioned General Carleton in July, following a rumour that the regiment was to be re-deployed, noting:
… having for sometime past had the 23rd Regiment of troops quartered amongst us, and finding the behaviour of both officers and men to be such as affords the greatest satisfaction from their civil deportment, and carriage, the good order of the troops, and their peaceable behaviour towards the inhabitants in general, [we] cannot but regret their departure from this place’.
So much for the rapacious redcoat of the Whig pamphleteers. Some of the Long Islanders were undoubtedly loyalists fearful of encroachments by rebel patrols from Connecticut, for as the British garrison around New York was wound down and the first regiments shipped home, such incursions increased, but the Fusiliers had found peace during their final months in America.
The mood of the Fusiliers’ encampment was most probably lightened by the fact that the majority of soldiers at Long Island were eligible for discharge. Many of them would choose to take it back in Britain, leaving the King the expense of shipping them, their wives and children back across the Atlantic. In early October, however, those wishing to settle in Nova Scotia boarded the suitably named transport Hopewell for the journey to that frigid colony. They were formally discharged a couple of weeks later on 24 October, four corporals and fifty privates. These men were paid off-pay and would remain in the Americas, having achieved honourably what dozens had deserted the 23rd to find: a new life, often with an American wife.
