The March of Folly (40 page)

Recognizing the contradiction of self-interest in the American war, a political cartoon of 1776 pictured the British lion asleep while ministers were busily engaged in slaughtering the goose that lays the golden egg. Observers like Walpole saw the contradiction too. Whether America was conquered or lost, Britain could expect “no good issue,” for if governed by an army, the country, instead of inviting settlers and trade, “will be deserted and a burden to us as Peru or Mexico with all their mines have been to Spain.… Oh the folly, the madness, the guilt of having plunged us into this abyss!” Even Boswell in private thought
the measures of the Government were “ill-digested and violent” and the ministry “mad in undertaking this desperate war.”

Governing opinion in support of the war was no less forward and more general. Not all would have joined in Dr. Johnson’s intemperate outburst, “I am willing to love all mankind
except an American
,” or gone to the extreme of absurdity of the Marquess of Carmarthen, one of the King’s friends, who demanded in a debate, “For what purpose were [the colonists] suffered to go to that country, unless the profit of their labor should return to their masters here?” But gradations of such sentiments were widely shared. (A notable factor in the British attitude was a bland ignorance of how and why the colonies had been settled.)

Business sentiment was expressed by Bristol, Burke’s constituency, which he addressed in his
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
with implacable logic and small effect, for the merchants, tradesmen and clergy of the busy port sent a loyal address to the King urging firm coercion. Landed gentry and fashionable society agreed. All motions of the opposition were routinely defeated in Parliament, where the majority sustained the Government faithfully, not merely from purchased loyalty but from the gruff conviction of the country party that supremacy must be made good and the colonies brought to submit.

The impotence of the opposition, which numbered about a hundred, was owed not only to the power of the incumbents but to their own lack of cohesion. Chatham, sunk in another period of debility, was out of combat from the spring of 1775 to the spring of 1777 but, like Hamlet, not so mad that when the wind was in the right quarter, he failed to know a hawk from a handsaw. After the American Declaration of Independence, he predicted to his physician, Dr. Addington, that unless England changed her policy, France would espouse the cause of the Americans. She was only waiting until England was more deeply engaged in this “ruinous war against herself” before taking an overt part.

Yet when active, Chatham always played his own hand, scorning association. His arrogance and his refusal to act as a functioning leader left the opposition subject to separation and to the vagaries of its chief figures. Richmond, who had emerged as the most aggressive and outspoken voice in the Lords, hated Chatham and was not temperamentally either a leader or a follower. Charles James Fox, rising young star of the opposition, glittered in the Commons with wit and invective, as Townshend once had, but he too played a solo role. Others were ambivalent. Though believing in the justice of the American cause, they could not help fearing that a victory for American
democracy represented a threat to parliamentary supremacy and a dangerous stimulus to the Reform movement.

To feel dismayed by their own government and always to be outvoted were dispiriting. Richmond confessed it in replying to Rockingham, who was trying to maintain the opposition front and had summoned him to come to vote on a bill prohibiting trade with the thirteen colonies during the rebellion. “I confess I feel very languid about this American business,” he wrote. There was no use going on opposing this bill and that; “the whole system must be opposed.” He did not come down to London and later took himself off to France to deal with legalities regarding a French peerage he possessed. It might be “a happy thing to have,” he wrote to Burke, for the day might not be distant “when England will be reduced to a state of slavery,” and if he were “among the proscribed … and America not be open to us, France is some retreat, and a peerage here is something.” With the French Revolution coming in the next decade, probably no historical prophecy has ever been so upside down. “About English politics,” Richmond concluded, “I must freely confess to you that I am quite sick and wore out with the too melancholy state of them.”

Rockingham, as leader, grew so frustrated that in 1776 he proposed a “secession” by opponents of the war, that is, a deliberate absenting of themselves from Parliament as their most visible protest against ministerial policy. Solidarity on this issue too was unobtainable; only his own followers agreed. Dignified and stately, the Rockingham Whigs retired to their estates, but after a year of ineffectiveness drifted back. They were “amiable people,” wrote Charles Fox to Burke, but “unfit to storm a citadel.” Burke, making an essential point about these men as ministers, replied that their virtues were the result of “plentiful fortunes, assured rank and quiet homes.”

Submission of the rebels was no nearer. For all their disadvantage in shortage of arms and supplies and of trained and disciplined troops and in the short-term enlistments that were their most disabling factor, they had a cause to fight for, a commander of heroic stature and unflinching will and occasional stunning limited victories as at Trenton and Princeton to reinvigorate morale. Britain’s enemies abroad were supplying arms and British resort to deliberate wrecking and pillage of property and to recruitment of Indians for terrorist tactics stimulated American fighting spirit when it faded under hardship. British overestimation of the internal support to be expected from Loyalists and the failure—which owed something still to scorn of colonials even on their own side—to mobilize and organize a Loyalist fighting force left them dependent
on the long trans-Atlantic haul of Europeans. Fear that France and Spain would take advantage of their trouble by a naval offensive or even invasion required maintenance of troops for home defense and hard-to-spare ships in home waters. The drain of the whole enterprise alarmed many. “The
thinking
friends of the Government are by no means sanguine,” wrote Edward Gibbon, who had been elected to Parliament in 1774 as a supporter of North.

In February 1777 General Burgoyne came home to plan with Germain a knockout campaign that by effecting a juncture on the Hudson of British forces coming down from Canada and others coming up from New York would cut off New England from the rest of the colonies and end the war before the next Christmas. Burgoyne returned to lead the northern force in a march pointed at Albany, but the pincer movement suffered from a fatal deficiency in having only one arm. The bulk of the southern arm under the Commander-in-Chief, Sir William Howe, who had designed his own campaign without reference to his colleague, was moving in the other direction, against Philadelphia. Sir Henry Clinton, in command of the remaining forces in New York, could not move up the Hudson without the main Army. Burgoyne had started in June. As the summer progressed, reports were disquieting: Burgoyne’s supplies were dwindling dangerously; a foray to capture stores at Bennington was sharply defeated; an American Army was gathering in strength. Howe was still occupying himself in Pennsylvania; Clinton, though given to fits of paralysis of will, made a lastminute move northward in desperation; no juncture had yet been made. Washington, engaged against Howe outside Philadelphia and discovering from his movements that there was no danger of Howe’s turning north, wrote to General Putnam on learning of the victory at Bennington that he hoped now “the whole force of New England will turn out and … intirely crush General Burgoyne.”

Less concerned with these events than with the threat of France, Lord Chatham rose to his feet on 20 November 1777 to demand an “immediate cessation of hostilities.” Speaking before news was known of the event that was to mark the watershed of the war and justify his argument, he said, “I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you
CANNOT
conquer America.…” Defense of unalienable rights was not rebellion. The war was “unjust in its principles, impracticable in its means, and ruinous in its consequences.” The employment of “mercenary sons of rapine and plunder” had aroused incurable resentment. “If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country,
I would never lay down my arms, never—never—never!” By insisting on submission, Britain would lose all benefit from the colonies through their trade and their support against the French and gain for herself only renewed war against France and Spain. The only remedy was to terminate hostilities and negotiate a treaty of settlement. Chatham did not call for recognition of American independence as a condition of settlement, for he believed to his dying day in the unalterable relationship of colony and Crown, and, in paraphrase of a successor, would have gladly declared that he had not served as First Minister to acquiesce in the liquidation of the British empire. His proposal of an end to hostilities made no appeal to the Lords, who rejected his motion by four to one.

In the Commons, Charles Fox pursued the same vein in a military analysis that was to be uncannily verified. Conquest of America, he said, was “in the nature of things absolutely impossible” because there was “a fundamental error in the proceedings which would forever prevent our generals from acting with success”—that they were placed too far apart to aid each other. Twelve days later a courier arrived with the awful report that General Burgoyne with all that was left of his battered, starving and outnumbered force had surrendered to the Continental Army at Saratoga near Albany on 17 October. General Clinton, who had advanced no farther than Kingston, fifty miles below Albany, had on the previous day turned back to New York for reinforcements.

The result of Saratoga was a matchless encouragement to American morale that warmed the thin blood of survival through the snows and miseries of that winter at Valley Forge. Saratoga lost the British, through casualties and the terms of surrender, which required Burgoyne’s men to lay down their arms and be shipped back to Britain under pledge not to serve again in the war against America, an entire army of almost 8000. Above all, it realized Britain’s greatest dread, the entry of the French into the war in alliance with America. Within two weeks of the news of the surrender, the French, in fear that the British might now offer acceptable peace terms to their former colonies, hastened to inform the American envoys of their decision to recognize the newborn United States, and three weeks later of their readiness to enter into alliance. The treaty, which for its share in bringing into existence a new nation was one of the most momentous in history, was negotiated in less than a month. Besides recognizing American independence and including the usual articles of amity and commerce, it provided that in the event of war between Britain and France, neither of the treaty partners would make a separate peace.

Chatham’s prediction of French entry was now confirmed, but even before this was known he rose in the House of Lords on 11 December 1777 to declare again his view that England had engaged herself in a “ruinous” war. The nation had been betrayed into it, he said in a devastating summary that could apply to wars and follies of many ages before and since, “by the arts of imposition, by its own credulity, through the means of false hope, false pride and promised advantages of the most romantic and improbable nature.”

In England, the incredible fact of a British Army surrendering to colonials stunned government and public and awoke many who had hardly concerned themselves about the war until then. “You have no idea what effect this news has had on the minds of people in town,” wrote a friend to George Selwyn. “Those who never felt before, feel now. Those who were almost indifferent to American affairs are now awakened out of their lethargy and see to what a dreadful situation we are reduced.” Stocks fell, “universal dejection” ruled the City, people murmured of a “disgraced nation” and talked of a change of government. Gibbon wrote that although the majority held in Parliament, “if it had not been for shame there were not 20 men in the House but were ready to vote for peace,” even “on the humblest conditions.”

The opposition bounded into virulent attack, castigating every minister individually and the Government collectively for mismanagement of the war and the measures that had led to it. Burke accused Germain of having lost America through “wilful blindness”; Fox called for Germain’s dismissal; Wedderburn, who came to Germain’s defense, challenged Burke to a duel; Barré said the plan of campaign was “unworthy of a British minister and rather too absurd for an Indian chief.” Even Germain himself was flustered but survived the onslaught with the King’s and North’s support. They could see that if they let responsibility be brought home to Germain, it would be carried next to his superiors—themselves.

The Government too survived on its carefully carpentered structure of votes. Although uneasy about the war, the country party were uneasier about change, and though burdened with a war that was costing them money instead of bringing in revenue, they sat tight. Only the King, encased in his armor of righteousness, was impervious to the general anxiety. “I know that I am doing my duty and therefore can never wish to retreat,” he had told North at the beginning of the war, and that was all he needed to know. No actualities could dent the armor. The King was convinced of the rectitude and therefore the necessary triumph of his actions. Later, as fortunes faded, he believed
that a victory for American independence would mean the dissolution of the empire under his sovereignty and he prayed Heaven “to guide me so to act that posterity may not lay the downfall of this once respectable empire at my door.” The prospect of defeat under “my” command pleases no ruler, and rather than face it, George tried obstinately to prolong the war long after it held any hope of success.

Howe’s resignation, Burgoyne’s return, Clinton’s mistrust and disillusion, recriminations and official inquiries followed in the wake of Saratoga. The generals, who blamed their failures on the ineptitude of the ministry, were treated with forbearance not only because of the general feeling that the fault indeed lay with Germain, but also because they held seats in Parliament and the Government had no wish to drive them into opposition. Germain’s failure to coordinate Howe’s campaign at Philadelphia with Burgoyne’s on the Hudson was clearly the hinge of the disaster and like his strange conduct at Minden seemed to have no explanation—other than a languid attitude.