The War for American Independence, 1775-1783 E-Book

Jeremy Black

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 582

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The bitter and often bloody fight which accompanied the emergence of the United States of America as an independent force on the world stage has always been a subject of much debate and controversy. Historian Jeremy Black challenges many traditional assumptions and conveys vividly the immediacy of events such as the battles of Bunker Hill and Saratoga and the sieges of Charleston and Yorktown, as well as less famous incidents, while also offering an original and thorough assessment of the campaign in its American, colonial and European contexts. Combining a chronological survey of the war with a thematic examination of the major issues, The War for American Independence, 1775–1783 is a comprehensive account of a remarkable campaign.

Leseprobe

For Thomas Otte,a good friend and a good historian

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First published in the United States of America in 1991 by St. Martin’s Press Inc.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1991 by Alan Sutton Publishing Limited under the title War for America: The Struggle for American Independence, 1775–1783

This edition published 2021 by

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Jeremy Black, 1991, 1994, 2021

The right of Jeremy Black to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 0 7509 9830 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

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Contents

List of illustrations

Preface

Abbreviations

1   Prologue

2   The Problems of Suppressing Rebellion

3   The Revolutionary War Effort

4   Conflict

5   1775: The First Year of the War

6   1776: The British Attack

7   1777: Philadelphia and Saratoga

8   1778: France Enters the War

9   1779: Georgia and the Highlands

10 1780: The Siege of Charleston; Impasse in the North

11 1781: Yorktown

12 Epilogue

Select Bibliography

Notes

List of illustrations

Endpapers:

Front: The battle of Lexington

Back: The surrender of Lord Cornwallis

1 Accounts listing sums spent on the upkeep of the Thirteen Colonies and the cost of maintaining an army there, 1776

2 A line-cut depicting America spewing tea back into George III’s face, 1775

3 Woodcut of the ‘wicked statesman’, 1774

4 A cartoon lampooning the repeal of the Stamp Act, 1766

5 Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer

6 A line-cut of ‘A Prospective View of the Town of Boston’, showing the landing of British troops in 1768

7Journal of the Proceedings of Congress held in Philadelphia, 5 September 1774

8 Frederick, Lord North, First Lord of the Treasury

9 A copy of a petition brought before George III by the General Congress listing their grievances against the Crown

10 Charles, 1st Marquis Cornwallis, 1783

11 Sir Henry Clinton

12 A comparison of British and Loyalist strength with that of the French and Americans, 1783

13 Contemporary American cartoon depicting British bounty payments to the Indians for taking American scalps

14 Medal given to Indian chiefs by the British in recognition of their aid during the War of Independence

15 The Declaration of Independence

16 Patrick Henry

17 A Delaware State one shilling note, printed 1777

18 A page from the North Carolina Revolutionary army accounts

19 An address by Nathanael Greene to the people of Salisbury District, North Carolina, 1781

20 An American rifleman and general

21 Wooden canteens used by the Continental army during the Revolution

22 ‘Kentucky’ or ‘Pennsylvania’ long rifle c. 1760

23 British Marine rifle with bayonet, dated 1762

24 Silver-gilt sword of the type used by many British officers

25 General Anthony Wayne

26 Battle at Lexington, 19 April 1775

27 Plan showing Boston and Bunker Hill, 1781

28 ‘A Correct View of the Late Battle at Charlestown’, 17 June 1775, engraved c. 1780

29 Pages from ‘An Impartial and Authentic Narrative’ of the battle of Bunker Hill, 17 June 1775

30 A cartoon entitled ‘Bunkers Hill or America’s Head Dress’, 1 March 1776

31 Early engraving of George Washington

32 Proclamation, ‘for suppressing Rebellion and Sedition’, 1775

33 A reply to an address ‘A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain and her Colonies’

34 Benedict Arnold, March 1776

35 ‘Old View of Quebec’, 1730

36 Plan of the attack on Quebec, 1775

37 Richard, Viscount Howe, 1799

38 ‘The entry of royal troops into New York’, 1776

39 Battle of Harlem Heights, 16 September 1776

40 The battle of Princeton

41 General Sir William Howe

42 General ‘Gentleman Johnny’ John Burgoyne

43 A chart of the Delaware Bay and River, 1776

44 ‘Provincial General Buttons marching to Saratoga with plunder’

45 The surrender of General Burgoyne to Horatio Gates at Saratoga, 17 November 1777

46 The battle of Brandywine

47 ‘An East Perspective View of the City of Philadelphia’, 1778

48 Plan of Philadelphia, 1777

49 The Delaware River, with inset of the attack on Fort Mifflin, 1778

50 A caricature entitled ‘A view in America in 1778’

51 Lord George Germain, 1760

52 A cartoon entitled ‘The Commissioners’, 1778

53 4th Earl of Sandwich, c. 1763

54 The capture of General Charles Lee

55 Battle of Monmouth Court House

56 A summary of the main events of the War of Independence

57 A line-cut of a ‘Prospect of the City of New-York’, 1771

58 General John Sullivan

59 Rt. Hon William Eden, 1786

60 General Benjamin Lincoln

61 Colonel Banastre Tarleton

62 General Horatio Gates

63 Plan of the battle of Camden, 16 August 1780

64 West Point, c, 1786

65 Facsimile of a miniature of Major André, drawn by himself on 1 October 1780

66 The taking of Pensacola, Florida, 9 May 1781

67 Thomas Jefferson c. 1800

68 General Daniel Morgan

69 Sketch map of the vicinity of Cowan’s ford, 1 February 1781

70 Battle of Eutaw Springs, North Carolina, 8 September 1781

71 Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

72 Plan of the siege of Yorktown

73 Letter from Cornwallis to Washington concerning the surrender of Yorktown and the Treaty of Capitulation, 18 October 1781

74 The surrender of Lord Cornwallis’ army at Yorktown, 19 October 1781

75 Revolutionary correspondance concerning a British landing at Beaufort, South Carolina, 5 April 1782

76 George III c. 1767

77 A French engraving produced to commemorate the peace treaty, signed at Versailles, 3 September 1783

78 A French map of the Thirteen Colonies, 1783

79 A perspective of the reign of George III

Maps:

1 The American Revolution

2 Bunker Hill

3 Siege of Boston

4 Invasion of Canada

5 New York operations

6 New Jersey and Pennsylvania

7 The war in 1777

8 Burgoyne’s advance to the Hudson

9 The Highlands forts

10 Brandywine

11 The South

12 Charleston

13 Camden

14 Guilford Court House

15 Yorktown

Photographs and illustrations were supplied by, or are reproduced by kind permission of the following: American Antiquarian Society (2, 3, 6, 58); Board of Trustees of the Royal Armouries (23, 24, 25); Bodleian Library, Oxford (Endpapers, 1, 8, 9, 13, 27, 30, 31, 32, 34, 46, 51, 53, 57, 67, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80); Delaware State Archives (18, 44); Historical Society of Pennsylvania (29, 35, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 60, 65, 66); Mansell Collection (4, 12, 16, 45, 73); National Army Museum, London (39, 42, 55); National Portrait Gallery, London (5, 10, 11, 38, 52, 54, 62, 77); North Carolina Division of Archives and History (17, 19, 20, 22, 33, 64, 68, 70, 76); Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures (14, 15, 21, 26, 28, 36, 37, 40, 43, 56, 59, 61, 63, 69, 71, 72).

Preface

It has been instructive to turn from the Jacobite cause discussed in my Culloden and the ’45 to resume an old interest in the American War of Independence. Both were struggles that have been contrasted with the bulk of pre-Revolutionary eighteenth-century European warfare, being more ‘political’, bitter and decisive. In each it is necessary to consider the question of inevitability: victory for the British regulars against the Jacobites, defeat for their successors, and in some cases the same men, against the American Revolutionaries. The fate of the ’45 confirmed the Anglo-centric nature of Britain and the solidity of the British empire in its native archipelago; that of ‘the glorious cause’ the rending asunder of the English speaking world. It is understandable that American scholars have devoted so much attention to this war and it is appropriate at the outset to pay tribute to their scholarly insights and industry which have ensured that the conflict is the most thoroughly studied of all eighteenth-century wars.

On a personal note I would like to thank numerous Americans for their many kindnesses on my recent visits to their invigorating country and to express the wish that British libraries would emulate their opening hours, without which this study could not have been possible. I owe a great debt to those who have commented on earlier drafts: Ian Christie, Harry Coles, Bill Deary, John Morgan Dederer, John Derry, Ira Gruber, Tony Hayter, Don Higginbotham, J. Michael Hill, Piers Mackesy and John Plowright. I would like to thank Alan Sutton for asking me to write the book and Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Wentworth Settlement Trustees and the Director of Libraries Sheffield for permission to quote from the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments. I am very grateful for assistance from the British Academy, the American Embassy, London and the University of Durham. This book is about brave men in unpredictable circumstances faced with difficult tasks without the resources they required: troops for the generals, food, shelter, clothes and footwear for so many of the soldiers. These men were Americans, both Revolutionaries and Loyalists, British and French. For each the war was different and far from predictable, and in offering an overall account it is necessary not to lose sight of this.

Abbreviations

Adams Family

L.H. Butterfield (ed.), Adams Family

Corresp.

Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

BL. Add.

London, British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Additional Manuscripts.

Cobbett

W. Cobbett (ed.), Parliamentary History of England from … 1066 to … 1803 (36 vols., London, 1806–20).

Cornwallis

C. Ross (ed.), Correspondence of Charles 1st Marquess Cornwallis (London, 1859).

Diplomatic

F. Wharton (ed.), The Revolutionary

Correspondence

Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, 1889).

Durham, Grey

Durham, England, University Department of Paleography, papers of 1st Earl Grey.

Fortescue

J.W. Fortescue (ed.), Correspondence of King George the Third 1760–83 (London, 1927–8).

Franklin

L.W. Labaree et al. (eds.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1959– ).

HMC

Historical Manuscripts Commission.

Halifax

Halifax, Calderdale District Archives.

Hamilton

H.C. Syrett and J.E. Cooke (eds.), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1961–79).

Jefferson

J.P. Boyd et al. (eds.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, 1950– ).

LC

Washington, Library of Congress.

Madison

W.T. Hutchinson et al. (eds.), The Papers of James Madison (Chicago, 1962-).

Me

Nottingham, University Library, Mellish papers.

NeC

Nottingham, University Library, Newcastle, Clumber papers.

NRO

Northumberland Record Office.

PCC

Washington, Papers of the Continental Congress.

PRO

London, Public Record Office.

SRO

Edinburgh, Scottish Record Office.

WMQ

William and Mary Quarterly.

WO

Public Record Office, War Office.

WW

Sheffield City Libraries, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments.

1

Prologue

… a state of anarchy and the dominion of a mob, who not only terrify the magistracy, but may put the match to the powder of discontent, that threatens to blow up all the provinces … they will suffer no man to execute any law to raise internal taxes unimposed by their own Assemblies … the newspapers … thunder out their weekly execrations against all the authors of the real or supposed grievances of the country, and the printers … inflame the whole continent.

Governor Thomas Boone, New York, 8 November 1765

I am more and more grieved at the accounts from America where this spirit will end is not to be said; it is undoubtedly the most serious matter that ever came before Parliament it requires more deliberation, candour and temper than I fear it will meet with.

George III, 6 December 1765

… although the violent effusions are and will be suppressed by the navy and army – yet I verily think a far more dangerous spirit is thereby rooting in the minds of the people – who begin to think Great Britain intends to enslave and destroy them, by mere force whence it is easy to see a settled gloom and inquietude take place everywhere; which will shortly alienate all the affection by which this country might for ever be rendered anything that Great Britain can wish them to be. I confess the present temper and increasing prejudices in America, appear much more important, than all the noise and reprehensible violences that have proceeded this time.

Sir John Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire, 2 November 17701

In the half century that started with the clashes at Concord and Lexington in 1775, Europe’s empires in the New World collapsed. The vast colonial territories which had been claimed and fought over since Columbus set foot in the Bahamas in 1492, that had helped fuel European political and economic activity for over three centuries, were no more. What had taken more than three hundred years to create, took less than fifty to dismantle. By 1825 Guiana, divided among the British, Dutch and French, was the only part of South America still ruled by a European power. In Central America, only British Honduras (modern Belize) was under European control, although the British still claimed suzerainty over the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. Far to the north, Britain still held Canada, and the Russians controlled Alaska until 1867. Only in the Caribbean had little changed; save for Haiti, all of the islands remained European possessions.

The swift collapse of the European empires does not look exceptional by the standards of post-1945 decolonization, but it was unprecedented in the late eighteenth century. In South America, most of the revolts were a consequence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, although Simon Bolivar and other leaders looked north to George Washington as a role model. After abortive republican risings in 1789, 1798 and 1817 the Portuguese colony of Brazil became an independent empire in 1822. This came about largely because of the willingness of the regent, the eldest son of the King of Portugal, to place himself at the head of the separatist movement. In the British and Spanish empires, movements for independence ran more violent courses. Argentina declared independence in 1810. A revolt against Spanish colonial rule was staged in Venezuela in 1811, but the Spaniards were not finally defeated until 1821 at Carabobo. The Peruvian war of independence did not begin until 1821, the Spaniards being defeated at Ayacucho in 1824.

Compared to the conflict in Spanish America, the American War of Independence was shorter, less diffuse and more affected by external intervention. However, once France entered the American war it became part of a global struggle between Britain and France, while the movements for independence in Spanish America benefited from official and unofficial British support, including the despatch as ‘volunteers’ of veterans from Wellington’s army in the Peninsular War. The value of comparing the two wars is naturally limited by their different contexts. The exercise can, however, be a useful reminder of the need not to treat the American war as unique, a need that is underlined by the notion of the American struggle as one of a number of revolutions in an age of revolution.2 This idea has been criticized, yet it serves as a reminder of the tensions within the Euro-centric world and suggests that the individual steps by which Anglo-American tension increased, though very important, should not be exaggerated.

The American Revolution may also be seen in more familiar terms as a struggle within the British Empire in which the clash of different ideological traditions played a major role. One of the most famous episodes in the pre-history of the Revolution, the Boston Tea Party of 16 December 1773, was properly symbolic in its setting, Boston harbour; and focus, customs duties and imperial finance; in its opposition of local sentiment to imperial interests; illegal, but limited, mass action to outnumbered authority; land power to maritime links. Tea was actually dumped in several ports, but events in Boston received the most attention. The British political establishment, faced by heavy government indebtedness after mid-century conflicts with the Bourbons in 1739–48 and 1756–63 (the latter, the Seven Years War, is usually dated in North America from the outbreak of hostilities in 1754 and called the French and Indian War) sought a contribution towards the burden of defence in future. This led to the highlighting of differences over colonial government and imperial links.

In the American colonies of the European powers many problems stemmed from the fact that the powerful section of the population and the internal colonial power structure were primarily European in origin, parts of a political community that was united as well as divided by the Atlantic, rather than from the original indigenous population. If American interests could lead colonists to clash with their home governments over the division of the profits and responsibilities of the Atlantic trading systems, European ideas could provide them with justification for resistance. The abortive plot of 1787 to expel the Portuguese and declare their Indian colony of Goa a republic was inspired by those Goan clergy who had returned from France with radical ideas. The republican conspiracy in Minas Gerias in Brazil in 1789 similarly failed. In Spanish America the clash between peninsulares (natives of Spain) and creoles (Spaniards born in America) was exacerbated by the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century, pragmatic devices by officials concerned to maximize governmental revenues rather than the expression of a new enlightened ideology on the part of government. Spanish reforms generally ignored creole aspirations and senior officials were mostly peninsulares. Though the Latin American wars of liberation were not to begin until the following century and owed much to the Napoleonic subjugation of Spain, nationalist feeling was already developing in eighteenth-century South America.3

The revolt of the thirteen British colonies owed as much to disagreements over the nature of the colonial bond as to specific colonial grievances. Disagreement revealed uncertainty as to the meaning of key terms, a crucial problem in an age when constitutional and legal issues played a major role in the definition of political identity and interest. In addition, the British and the colonists had grown apart. By 1775 the colonists were increasingly a new colonial hybrid, Americans. Furthermore, the Americans remained wedded to ideological traditions that were increasingly out of fashion in Britain. The role of imperial issues in the cause and conduct of the Seven Years War and its fiscal consequences helped to make America an important topic of British governmental concern, and thus of political debate thereafter. After a long period of benign neglect of their colonies, the British were increasingly coming to think in imperial terms. The observations made in 1755 by Lord Cathcart, a colonel and a confidant of George II’s son, the influential Duke of Cumberland, were symptomatic of new attitudes towards America:

I should imagine that the resources in that country have been hitherto so little examined, and turned so little to advantage that with proper powers, which the present emergency will enforce, a great deal might be done that has never been thought of … If we do make peace and are no longer afraid of our colonies falling into the enemy’s hands, I am persuaded our next care will be to rescue them from themselves at least it ought to be so: that will never be done by a set of governor merchants who give up the nation on many occasions in complaisance to the colony that pays them … the very great importance of our colonies in America, which appears stronger now than it ever did, [and] the difficulties which they have made on some late critical occasions will certainly make it necessary either to ascertain their privileges and subordination by an act of Parliament or to leave them independant.

Between 1763 and 1775 nearly 4 per cent of the entire British national budget was spent on maintaining the army in North America. Keen to make the colonists contribute more to the cost of their defence, the government sought both to increase taxation by the Stamp Act of 1765, and to improve the effectiveness of commercial regulations. These attempts clashed with a traditionally lax enforcement, associated smuggling to non-British territories and the sense that the levying of taxation for revenue purposes by a parliament that included no colonial representatives was a dangerous innovation. A feeling of shared community with Britain had for long been matched by one of particular interests shown, for example, by Maryland and Virginia which tried to encourage local shippers by giving them preferential treatment over the British. In December 1774 Viscount Stormont, the British envoy in Paris, reported the widely held view there that:

Accounts listing sums spent on the upkeep of the Thirteen Colonies and the cost of maintaining an army there. These costs were used as justification by the British government for the imposition of extra duties and taxes. Printed in 1776

… from the prodigious increase of the population, trade, and strength of North America, there must come a period when the spirit of independency will be generated throughout our colonies, and when actuated by that spirit, and conscious of their own superior strength, they will shake off all dependency on their Mother-Country, and form an immense Empire of their own. These men pretend that no human policy can prevent this, that all the greatest wisdom could do would be to palliate, what cannot be cured, and keep off, for a time, what must inevitably come at last, and whenever it does come must give Great Britain a fatal blow. They add that our conduct is directly opposite to what it should be, that by bringing on these discussions, we have raised in our colonies a spirit of opposition, and now by vainly attempting to subdue that unconquerable spirit, we shall of course increase it, make the flame general, and by our own fault accelerate that fatal period, which upon every principle of political wisdom, it should be our utmost endeavour to retard.4

American opposition to the new fiscal policy led to mob violence, which the colonial authorities failed to control, despite the deployment of naval and military forces. Force, however, was inappropriate. There was no equivalent of the regular regiments supported by substantial forces of militia that could be found in the Spanish empire after 1763, valuable supports when the colonial authorities wished to raise taxation and introduce administrative reforms. In America British troops were used for tasks for which they had no particular training and the navy was unable to police the entire coastline, lacked sufficient small vessels and was able to concentrate ships in Boston harbour and along the New England coast in 1774–5 only by abandoning the rest of the coast to virtually unregulated trade, although this was not surprising, as their purpose was to ‘overawe’, rather than defeat, their opponents.5

A line-cut by Nathan Daboll for Freebetter’s New England Almanack. It depicts America spewing back into George III’s face the tea he is pouring down her throat while she is held down. The British fleet cannonading Boston can be seen in the background. Printed and sold by T. Green, 1775

Woodcut of the ‘wicked statesman’, by Paul Revere in The Massachusetts Calendar, 1774

As the Emperor Joseph II, ruler of the Habsburg territories, was to discover in the late 1780s, when faced by rebellion in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and Hungary, force was no substitute for consensus, and the military effort required to suppress disaffection posed serious political, military and financial problems. Though only a minority of the colonists wished for independence when real hostilities began in 1775, the strength of separatist feeling within this minority was such that compromise on terms acceptable to the British government and British political opinion appeared increasingly unlikely. When, for example, Americans subscribed to resolutions rejecting tea drinking, in response to the Tea Act of 1773, designed to facilitate sales of East India Company tea, and enforced these resolutions by terror, tarring and feathering taxmen, they were publicly rejecting in a highly charged atmosphere the structure and rationale of empire. The issue could no longer be discussed in purely British mercantilist terms. The emptiness of the imperial ethos for many was revealed in the paranoia and symbolic and practical acts of defiance that led to a spiral of violence. In 1776 a congress of colonial representatives at Philadelphia declared the colonies independent. British action had led the colonists into doing something that had been hitherto very uncommon: cooperating and compromising. The European origin of the rebels aided them in obtaining support from other European powers, and indeed from British opposition circles, to an extent that non-whites would not have received. Their search for foreign, particularly French, support, typical of the European rebellious movements of the century, helped to internationalize the struggle, and to make compromise more difficult.

While stressing factors that led to rebellion it is also important to point out that numerous Americans did not rebel and many fought the rebels. About a fifth of the politically active section of the population has been described as Loyalist, but Loyalist sentiment and activity, like its Revolutionary counterpart, is difficult to assess and varied greatly, as local studies demonstrate.6 This is generally the case with civil wars, and helps to ensure that there are essentially two problems to explain, first why so many became critical of governmental measures and alleged intentions, as was the case in England by 1640 and America by 1774, and secondly why people took different sides. A number of issues can be probed, including increasing democratization in American society,7 which was related to the emergence of new political groups in the 1770s;8 a millenarian rejection of British authority;9 concern about British policy in Canada; the borrowing of British conspiracy theories about the supposed autocratic tendencies and intentions of Court Whiggery and George III; specific constitutional, ideological10 and commercial11 concerns about relations with Britain that arose from the disputes and economic difficulties of the 1760s and 1770s; and British policies whose firmness could be interpreted as tyranny and changes as sinister inconsistencies. The fact that Britain’s most important colonies in the western hemisphere, those in the West Indies, did not rebel, despite the sensitivity of their élites on questions of constitutional principle, suggests that it was the increasingly serious social, economic and political crises in the continental colonies that were crucial, rather than primarily their ideological and political traditions.12

As fighting resulted from the determination of the British government to employ force, and the refusal of sufficient Americans to be intimidated and their willingness to organize to use force themselves, then it is clear that both aspects have to be considered. Large numbers of Americans had become familiar between 1754 and 1763 with organized warfare involving European-style armies,13 as opposed to conflict with Indians and between colonists, both of which were also important. American society was also wealthy,14 sufficiently so to sustain and endure several years of expensive and destructive war. Institutions, habits and ideas of self-government provided a basis for organizing such activity. The potential for an organized armed struggle was present, although that, of course, did not make its outbreak inevitable. It was the anxieties engendered by the British attempt to strengthen imperial bonds when the common cement of fear of France was lacking that made the situation volatile. The authority of the Crown became increasingly involved in the internal political struggles within individual colonies. These struggles helped to determine not only the pace of events, but also the different responses within and between colonies.15 The unwillingness of British politicians to compromise parliamentary sovereignty, their refusal to make concessions on questions of principle, was demonstrated by the Stamp Act crisis of 1765–6; thereafter, this refusal helped to make a genuine reconciliation impossible. In the mid-1760s many American critics of the British government accepted the distinction between parliamentary taxation for the purposes of controlling trade, which they were prepared to accept, and parliamentary taxation for the raising of revenue, which they were not. Parliamentary sovereignty was fundamental to the British point of view, however, so when the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766 a Declaratory Act was passed stating parliament’s authority to legislate for the colonies in all matters.

A contemporary British cartoon by Benjamin Wilson lampooning the repeal of the Stamp Act, 1766. The coffin is carried by George Grenville, who is followed by Bute, the Duke of Bedford, Temple, Halifax, Sandwich and two bishops

Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1766–7, attributed to Isaac Gosset

A line-cut of ‘A Prospective View of the Town of Boston‘, showing the landing of British troops there in 1768. Cut by Paul Revere, it was published in Edes & Gill Almanac, 1770

The British were fortunate that, because Spain’s French ally did not support her, the Falkland Islands confrontation with Spain of 1770 did not lead to war with the Bourbons, as that would have raised the issue of colonial military and financial contributions to the imperial war effort anew; but it was to be the problems of another part of the empire, those of the British East India Company, that led to trouble in America. The Revenue Act of 1767, drawn up by Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had imposed American customs duties on a variety of goods including tea, which was brought from India by the East Indian Company, a monopolistic trading concern whose financial viability was seen as crucial to British government finances and the reduction of the national debt. This had led to a serious deterioration in relations between the British government and its American critics. The Americans responded with a trade boycott and action against customs officials, leading the British ministry to send troops to Boston. This was followed by the ‘Boston Massacre’ of 5 March 1770, a bloody incident that caused the death of five Bostonians and widespread hostility towards governmental methods. In some respects it was an overblown event, the consequence of drunken soldier-baiting that got out of hand and was exploited for propaganda purposes by Samuel Adams, but to many Americans it demonstrated the militarization of British authority and proved the harmful consequences of a standing army.

The British ministry had decided in 1769 to abandon all the duties save that on tea, whose retention was seen as a necessary demonstration that they would not yield to colonial views. Tension, however, remained high with serious constitutional disputes of varied cause in a number of colonies, particularly in Massachusetts, and a growing hostility towards parliamentary claims of authority over American affairs. The Boston Tea Party of December 1773 forced the British government to confront the growing problems of law and order and the maintenance of authority. They believed these arose from the actions of a small coterie of radicals, rather than from widespread disaffection in America. Thus, the ministry mistakenly hoped that tough action against Massachusetts, the so-called ‘Coercive’ or ‘Intolerable’ Acts of early 1774, would lead to the restoration of order. The Boston Port Act was designed to protect trade and customs officials from harassment, the Massachusetts Charter Act to strengthen the executive, the Administration of Justice and Quartering Acts to make it easier to enforce order. These measures were criticized by the parliamentary opposition in Britain as oppressive, but passed by overwhelming majorities. More troops were sent to Massachusetts and General Thomas Gage, the Commander-in-Chief in America, was appointed its Governor.

Far from leading to submission, these measures provoked outrage both in Massachusetts and, crucially, in the other colonies as well. A Continental Congress to organize opposition was established and met in Philadelphia in September 1774. Although British politicians feared the contrary, the delegates at that stage were interested not in independence, an idea which threatened the fragile unity of the colonies, but in the traditional constitutional process of redress of grievances, a process no longer adequately provided for by the imperial governmental system.16 By British standards, their view of the world was arcane, but prohibitions on trade with Britain and the creation of an institutionalized union of opposition to Britain were clearly both threats and challenges to imperial interests and pretensions. The Intolerable Acts were defied in Massachusetts and politicians and officials regarded as sympathetic to the royal administration were harried and forced to resign. The British government, led by Lord North, the First Lord of the Treasury, viewed the claims of Congress as an unacceptable challenge to parliamentary authority. Well supported in parliament, but keenly aware that a show of weakness towards the colonies might well alienate decisive elements of that support, they decided to use force, although at the same time they hoped to assuage grievances, as indicated by the conciliatory propositions North put before parliament in February 1775. However, the government was determined to retain control of the constitutional position and reimpose order in America. While there are hints that some compromise over the imposition of taxation might have been possible, there was little ministerial interest in negotiating over constitutional and political arrangements. The outbreak of fighting should have come as no surprise, though the ministry was to be startled by the scale and extent of resistance they encountered.

Journal of the Proceedings of Congress held in Philadelphia, 5 September 1774. Printed in London in 1775

Frederick, Lord North, First Lord of the Treasury 1770–82, by Nathaniel Dance, 1775

The first pages of a petition brought before George III by the General Congress listing their grievances against the Crown, 1774

2

The Problems of Suppressing Rebellion

Suppressing a rebellion within the dominions of the British Crown was not a novel problem for the British armed forces in the eighteenth century. Major risings on behalf of the Jacobite claimant to the throne had occurred in 1715 and 1745. Prior to that the succession crisis of 1685–91 had involved warfare in England, Ireland and Scotland. In 1798 there would be a major rising in Ireland, which was encouraged by the revolutionary government of France. A French invasion force landed to assist the rebels, but it quickly surrendered that September at Ballinamuck to the British Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief, Charles, 1st Marquis Cornwallis. He had himself commanded the British army whose surrender to the Americans and French at Yorktown in 1781 marked the effective end of British hopes of defeating the American Revolutionaries. Unlike Yorktown, however, French intervention in Ireland went for naught.

Nevertheless, the presence or likelihood of foreign intervention played a major role in rebellions within the British dominions. None received the sustained assistance provided by the French to the American Revolutionaries. They hoped to profit from Britain’s problems in order to reverse the Peace of Paris of 1763, the territorial settlement that had followed the overwhelming British victories in the Seven Years War (1756–63). If this factor is seen as crucial then the central military problem for the British can be presented as that of countering the fact of French intervention. There is no doubt that that intervention was of great consequence. It denied the British the clear naval superiority that had enabled them in the first years of the conflict to concentrate their military resources in North America, neglecting the defence of the West Indies, let alone Britain, in order to centre their efforts on the Thirteen Colonies and the defence of contiguous possessions: Canada and West and East Florida. Naval superiority enabled Britain to reinforce and supply her forces in North America untroubled save for a few American privateers, to move units along the American seaboard and to seek to blockade the Revolutionaries, although it was very difficult to sustain a blockade in eighteenth-century conditions.

Charles, 1st Marquis Cornwallis, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783

French naval power obviously played a central role in the Yorktown campaign, and it is easy therefore to see it as decisive in the defeat of British plans in America. A British officer wrote from New York in July 1781, that ‘this city and district are seriously menaced with a general attack, whenever a French fleet shall arrive on the coast, superior to ours, without which we have little to fear, notwithstanding the French and rebels are gathering round us’. Victory for the Americans, in the sense of a decisive defeat of the main British army in the field, can be presented as having been impossible without French intervention. It can, and has, been argued, however, that the British had failed well before Yorktown and that by then they were fighting on for no clear purpose.

This raises the question of British objectives in the conflict, their practicality and the consequent judgment of British military planning and operations. A confusion of purpose (or a strategy bereft of any solid attainable goals) in British intentions has been discerned, between the desire to end the revolution by conciliation, through negotiations in which they would yield many of the pretensions and prerogatives of royal government while denying independence, and the wish to achieve a military solution. It has been argued that this confusion, and especially the wish to negotiate while fighting, inhibited British operations, in particular by lessening the desire for a striking military victory. Attention has been directed to the ambiguous position of the Howe brothers, given military command of the navy and army in America in 1776 and at the same time entrusted with powers to negotiate a reconciliation. It has been suggested that this lessened their determination to crush the Americans. On the other hand, the clear purpose was to bring the war to an acceptable conclusion as rapidly as possible. As the scene of action was 3,000 miles from London it made sense to combine war-making and peacemaking powers.

The alleged confusion over objectives has been linked to another over means: specifically the British attitude towards the Loyalists. A large number of Americans did not support the cause of independence, generally due to local considerations, such as opposition to regional élites and leaders. The attitude that the British should take towards them was controversial. The extent to which military use could be made of these loyal Americans, the best means to obtain it and the relationship that this should have with British strategy, were unclear. In general, British hopes of Loyalist assistance increased during the war, especially after France’s entry in 1778, and this was linked to the growing concentration of British hopes and efforts on the southern colonies, Georgia and the Carolinas. The British hoped to use regulars to drive the Revolutionaries out of the south, leaving mopping up and the re-establishment of the civil government to Loyalists. As regulars were sent to the Caribbean, while few reinforcements arrived from Britain, British commanders became dependent on Loyalist units to make up their combat forces. The men left for mopping up were more marginal soldiers, men who were more interested, and justifiably considering the harsh way they had been treated in their country, in revenge, than pacification. Reliance on Loyalists posed a major problem, however, for the Loyalists were in turn greatly dependent on military help. In this there was a clear parallel with the ’45. Loyal forces in Scotland had played a considerable role, but they were most successful when the major Jacobite force under Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was in England engaged in operations against the royal army. In addition, loyal irregular units in England had little impact. Although the Jacobite retreat through Cumbria was harassed, their advance had encountered no resistance once the garrison at Carlisle had surrendered. Possibly the major role of the loyal units was in discouraging Jacobite sympathizers from acting, a role that was to prefigure that of the militia in limiting Loyalist action during the American War of Independence.1

In the American war it was clear to both loyal generals and Revolutionaries that organized and significant Loyalist activity would require the presence of British forces. The British advance into New Jersey in late 1776 was followed by an upsurge of Loyalist activity, with nearly 2,500 Loyalists volunteering for action. In January 1777 John Adams, a member of Congress, wrote of Sussex County in New Jersey, ‘If the British army should get into that county in sufficient numbers to protect the Tories, there is no doubt to be made they would be insolent enough and malicious and revengeful. But there is no danger at present and will be none until that event takes place’. He had described what was to happen in Georgia and South Carolina in 1779 and 1780. In June 1777 another prominent revolutionary, Robert Livingston, a landowner in New York State, wrote of:

… the spirit of disaffection being lower now than it has been in this state since the beginning of the controversy owing to the vigilance of the government, the punishment of some capital offenders, and above all to the weakness and languor of the enemies’ measures. Some very conscientious persons have declared [when they took the oath to the state] that they held themselves absolved from all allegiance to a power that was no longer able to protect them. Though I do not think such conversions greatly to be relied on, yet they are of use in stopping the progress of disaffection and giving an appearance of strength and unanimity to our government on which more depends than is generally imagined.

Tenants of the Livingstons in the Hudson valley had been dissatisfied with their landlords for a decade and, when the family supported the revolution, they took up arms for George III, rising in 1776 and 1777. Throughout the colonies local Revolutionary committees, supported by the militia, drove many Loyalists from their homes, confiscating property and making life hard for them. These committees and such action were the revolution across much of America.

In May 1776 Henry Clinton, then commander of a British expedition on its way to Charleston, suggested ‘we may possibly conquer by the assistance of our friends. Those friends will maintain afterwards with little support from the King’s troops’. The defeat of the North Carolina Loyalists at Moore’s Creek Bridge that February did not appear to invalidate this claim, as they had not received any support from British troops. In October 1778 Clinton, by now commander-in-chief, wrote, ‘We wished to have it clearly understood that military force is not to be employed in this country, but with an ultimate purpose of enabling His Majesty’s faithful subjects to resume their civil government’. This was a clearly stated objective, but it was unclear how best to gain and maintain Loyalist support. Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Campbell, who was sent in late 1778 at the head of nearly 3,000 troops to attack Savannah, was given such authority for Georgia and South Carolina with the hope that ‘the re-establishment of Georgia may if well supplied by the loyal inhabitants in the back settlements of South Carolina lead to the possession of this province likewise’.2

Sir Henry Clinton

Yet the Loyalist option posed major problems of strategic choice. The dispersal of troops to protect Loyalist areas would make operations difficult, for it was only through the maintenance of large concentrated forces able to manoeuvre that major attacks could be countered. Loyalist units could help in this, although they were likely to have only a secondary military role, as with the loyal Highlanders at the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746. Alexander Innes, the Inspector General of Provincial Forces, reported from New York on two of the leading units in September 1779, ‘Both the Queen’s Rangers and New York Volunteers want a good many men to be complete but the nature of the constant service they have been on … renders it almost impossible their losses have been so great and are so frequent’. Both were tough units fighting bravely for what they saw as their country. The Caledonian Volunteers, composed of Loyalist Scottish settlers, was another such unit. Furthermore, the Loyalist option offered little assistance if the war was to be taken into areas where there were relatively few Loyalists, especially New England and Virginia. Aside from the problem of protecting Loyalist areas, there was also the question of how far the war should be conducted in a manner calculated neither to offend Loyalist opinion nor to make the task of conciliation more difficult. This would entail the abandonment, not merely of any attempt to live off the country, but, more seriously, of ideas of terrorizing the Americans into submission by savage measures, such as devastating their property or laying them under contribution. When his generalship in America in 1776–8 was investigated in parliament in 1779, Sir William Howe asked a sympathetic witness, Lieutenant-General Charles, Earl Cornwallis, a series of leading questions:

If I had laid waste the country would not every degree of inconvenience have arisen from it to the King’s army, had it been necessary to return with the army into the same country, from the want of refreshments of all kinds, carriages and horses?

Would it not have had the effect of alienating the minds of the Americans from his Majesty’s government, rather than terrifying them into obedience?

Would not such a measure have distressed the inhabitants under the protection of the army, and the troops in winter quarters, by reducing the supply of provisions?

Such policies were suggested by some British officers and commentators. When, in September 1775, he realized that the Americans sought independence, Major Francis Sill of the 63rd Foot, hungry and exhausted in Boston, abandoned his earlier sympathy for his opponents and expressed his support for ‘harsh, absolute and severe methods’. Four months earlier it had been reported from Boston that ‘the whole army are dissatisfied with the conduct of the commander-in-chief [Gage] who all along has treated the seditious Bostonians with unequalled lenity and indulgence … The officers think with reason that he is too much of an American … Two months past had he only secured six of the most violent of the demagogues, this rebellion would have been crushed in the bud’, a familiar illusion. Major Robert Donkin wanted to shoot smallpox-tipped arrows at the Americans. John Hayes, the army physician in charge of medical services at Charleston, wrote in April 1781 to Charles Mellish, an MP who supported the ministry of Lord North until the end:

… this country is in a state of rebellion and destruction. Nine-tenths of the people who had taken protection and those paroled, have joined the enemy and in small bands, infest the province with a degree of rigour. Murders in cold blood are hourly committed; and they are become so numerous, that it is not safe to travel ten miles … they are nineteen out of twenty disaffected; and no ties except extreme rigour can influence them … where they used to live they are apt to resort, the more to see their wives and children, who they leave behind. If something of the same nature, as that exercised by Lord Chatham [Pitt the Elder], when he removed the Acadians from Nova Scotia is not adopted, this country will remain in enmity against us – It would be a wise and politic measure to remove the family of every absent, and the men most disaffected to you. New York can furnish refugees sufficient to people the province, and whose loyalty have been proved.3

Such tactics were not to be attempted, but they indicate a willingness to consider radical solutions. In part such suggestions can be seen as a bitter response to failure and to the apparently intractable nature of the revolution, but the willingness of European armies to resort to such tactics against recalcitrant populations should not be overlooked. It was certainly shared by the British army. Devastation was employed on a systematic basis in the Highlands of Scotland during and after the ’45. Lord George Germain, who was, as Secretary of State for the American colonies from November 1775 until February 1782, to direct British operations, played an active role as an army officer in the ’45; and later Irish prisoners were slaughtered in 1798, as they had been on earlier occasions. In this, however, the British army was following the traditional means of dealing with rebels. Parliamentary scrutiny and a generalized sense of the rule of law probably ensured that, on the whole, the British army behaved better than their continental counterparts. There was certainly no comparison between their conduct and that of the Russians, either during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, or in Poland, where, for example, over 10,000 Poles died on one day when the Warsaw suburb of Praga was stormed in 1794. Nevertheless, rebellion altered both the legal and the psychological context and, although Americans were not presented as contemptible aliens, in the fashion of the barbarian Scottish Highlanders or the ‘wild’ Catholic Irish, a strong antipathy was aroused by their being rebels. Since all Americans looked alike to British and German troops, many Loyalists were driven to the Revolutionary side by depredations. Major Carl Leopold Baurmeister, a Hessian, claimed that such actions by British troops exacerbated popular hostility. The attitude of many of the British troops counteracted attempts at conciliation and ensured that British administration of occupied areas was not such that it would inspire loyalty or retain the support of Loyalists. However, though Britain might have lost the battle for the hearts and minds in, for example, Queen’s County, New York, through the army’s abuse of private property and its demands on residents for supplies, and the arbitrary and abusive conduct of British officers, enthusiasm for the cause of independence proved difficult to sustain and opposition to the demands of the new government increased.

However different the cases might be, contrasting British conduct towards the Jacobites with that towards the American Revolutionaries highlights another aspect of an important element in the American war; the range of options facing the British. These were not only strategic, but also related to the means by which the conflict could be conducted. Given that much of the stress in accounts of the war has been on how Britain lost it, on mismanaged campaigns, poor generalship and strategic direction and missed oportunities, it is worth considering the question of the options facing the British and placing it in the contexts of the nature of eighteenth-century warfare and of the military problems the British faced.

Eighteenth-century European warfare has traditionally been described (and generally dismissed) as limited and inconsequential, a war of manoeuvre that lacked a determination to destroy the enemy. It is held to have emphasized manoeuvre over battle, a wish to preserve armies rather than a willingness to suffer substantial casualties in achieving objectives, in short an avoidance of risk. This caricature has been contrasted with the more dynamic, determined, vigorous and violent tactics, strategy, methods and objectives of the warfare of revolutionary France and, as in so much else, the American revolution is held to have anticipated that of France.

The novelty of the military methods of the American Revolutionaries is questionable. George Washington sought to create an ancien régime army. Given the constraints created by the nature of American society and the federal and anti-militarist political culture of a revolutionary new state, Washington, by necessity, created an American army suited for war in America. It has been argued that Washington was eminently successfully, especially due to the social, political and cultural restraints imposed by American society. The nature of the American achievement, as of the range of options available to the British, can be better appreciated if the over-simplified view of European warfare in the period is dismissed. War could be far from limited, campaigns could be decisive, casualties high, sometimes extraordinarily high. There was no common experience, no uniform model of operations.4 Generals were affected by a number of factors, among which those summarized by the term logistics (or lack thereof) were paramount, but they had a variety of tactical and strategic options to choose from. The British army had not campaigned since 1762, but the operations of that year indicated that they could look back on a wealth of varied experience. In 1762 British forces campaigned around the globe. They helped the Portuguese resist a Bourbon invasion – a campaign in which Burgoyne distinguished himself by bold action and Grey served – fought the French in Westphalia (part of Germany) and captured Martinique from the French and Havana and Manila from the Spaniards. 1762 was the last campaigning year in the Seven Years War (1756–63), a conflict that had also seen the British defeat French forces in India, crush the French navy in European waters, capture the French bases of Goree (West Africa) and Guadeloupe, and drive the French from Canada.

However, a major part of the problem facing the British is suggested by contrasting their conquests during the Seven Years War and the task facing them in the War of American Independence. During the Seven Years War they were essentially obliged in their colonial warfare to defeat small armies composed of regular European units supported by native irregulars. Campaigns centred on the capture of major fortresses and centres of government, such as Louisbourg and Quebec, all of which could be reached by water. Experience with sieges was obviously important. Operations in the hinterlands around fortresses were limited. The British captured Manila and Havana, not the Philippines or Cuba, but they gave effective political and military control of what Britain sought, bargaining counters for the inevitable peace treaty. The same was even more true of those French bases that lacked any real hinterland: Goree, Pondicherry, Louisbourg and the principal fortresses in the West Indies. The whole of French Canada fell into British hands with the surrender of Montreal in 1760. The military objective necessary to secure victory in colonial campaigns was therefore clear: assured naval superiority sufficient to permit the landing and supply of an amphibious force that would successfully besiege the major fortress whose capture would lead to the effective end of Bourbon strength.

Such a strategy was one option in dealing with the American Revolution, complementing the naval blockade of the American coast by seizing the major cities. Without occupying coastal bases no magazines (supply dumps) could be developed for operations in the interior. Capturing the leading ports was possible as British successes at New York (1776), Savannah (1779) and Charleston (1780) demonstrated, although the value of this strategy was only assured if the American forces in the region sought to defend the city and could be decisively defeated, as was the case at Charleston and, although not to a decisive extent, New York. Unless such a decisive defeat, accompanied by the surrender of the defeated unit, occurred, the principal effect of gaining a base was to oblige the army to devote much of its resources to defending a fixed target.

This was true of Boston in 1775, Newport in 1776–9 and Philadelphia in the winter of 1777–8. After the French entry into the war in 1778 this was especially dangerous, as the possibility of concerted operations by a French fleet and an American army made British bases vulnerable, as British fears on behalf of their principal base, New York, demonstrated. A British memorandum of March 1779 claimed that the major British posts were poorly fortified and that therefore they:

… would be in a critical situation, if four or five ships of force were to arrive, when we were without men of war, as at present, as such a naval force might cover a numerous descent of the New England and Continental troops … in one week might prove fatal to our detached cantonments and decide the war.

In November 1779 Sir George Yonge, a prominent opponent of the war, told the House of Commons that ‘the last campaign in America [the 1779 campaign] was not only a defensive, but a disgraceful campaign. Instead of gaining a single foot of ground, we had lost what we possessed in the beginning of it … Sir Henry Clinton, with the grand army, had called in all his distant posts, and was in a great measure besieged in New York, or so straitened in his quarters, as to be pretty much in a similar situation’. The American, James Duane, coming to the same conclusion, referred to the British in New York that September as a ‘grand army cooped up in a garrison’. In December Sir Charles Bunbury urged the cost and intractability of the American conflict as a reason for abandoning war. He told the Commons that Britain had no hope of conquering America, that she might as well seek to conquer Turkey, a clearly impossible goal, and that in the last campaign the army had ‘showed itself incapable of any one offensive operation, and even of maintaining and defending the small part of America which we had for some late years held, for the army had evacuated Rhode Island, on the news of d’Estaing’s approach’. Admiral Viscount Howe had already in April 1779 highlighted the vulnerability of the British defensive position in the face of French naval power when he told the Commons that the previous year:

The American Revolution

… the army could never have made their retreat good from Philadelphia, if d’Estaing had arrived a few days earlier; that the Delaware would have been blocked up; and that the supply of provisions being cut off, the army under Sir Henry Clinton must either have been starved or be compelled to force their way to New York under every possible disadvantage: or supposing that the army might have gained New York without any considerable loss, the force under his command in the Delaware, deprived of their co-operation must have fallen into the enemy’s hands.

Even without considering the impact of French naval power, however, the need to defend these ports was an obvious strategic encumbrance. To a certain extent it encapsulated the problems presented by the defence of Loyalist areas, although the task of defending ports allowed a more concentrated use of British forces. Charles, 1st Earl Grey, who served in America as a major general from 1776 to 1782, calculated that 14,700 men were required for the defence of New York and 6,000 or at least 4,000 for that of Rhode Island.