The accepted view that inadequate naval force was the primary reason for Britain’s defeat in the War for American Independence leaves an open question. Disunited and ill-disciplined the Royal Navy certainly was. Its numbers were too few for its tasks, and as a result of profiteering at the dockyards and the carelessness of the Admiralty’s Commissioners, the ships were in such poor condition that one liner, royally named the Prince William for the King’s son, actually foundered and sank at anchor in the Thames. Its governors were men of limited intelligence, limited experience, no coherent strategy and unlimited assurance of winning. The open question is whether the persistence and will of the enemy in such men as George Washington and the Reverend Daggett of New Haven (whom we shall meet further on) and the geographical logistics of the American continent, where every one of the 50,000 British troops in North America and every bullet and every biscuit of his supply and every letter of instructions to his commanders had to be transmitted over the six-to-eight-week width of the Atlantic Ocean, would not have made the war unwinnable by the British anyway. A larger navy, it is supposed, could have made a major difference by allowing ships of the Channel fleet or the West Indies to be diverted for blockade of France’s Atlantic ports, preventing French maritime intervention in aid of the Colonies, but that could have happened only if the British had thought blockade sufficiently important. They did not, since at no time in the war did they take seriously the possibility of the Americans winning. Blockade of the French ports would have required immobilizing a large number of ships while their bottoms grew foul from marine growth, and would have depended on a concerted decision by the war Cabinet, which could never make up its mind whether concentration of naval forces in one place for blockade was worth weakening the forces available for convoy of trade and for defense of the Caribbean and East Indian colonies and of the home islands.
As in older and later empires, resouces were not equal to the over-extension of the imperial reach. Inadequacy of decision-making was a primary defect. Lord Sandwich begged the King to require that “meetings of the Cabinet” should reduce its decisions to writing, “and when a question is agitated it ought to be decided one way or another, and not be put off as now most frequently happens, without any determination.” Failure to focus available resources on a single objective and give that objective absolute priority was a major failure in strategy. Notwithstanding common opinion, human beings can and sometimes do learn. After Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American decision, previously agreed with Britain, to give priority of defense to Europe and defeat Hitler first was what made his defeat possible.
In 1778, Britain had no one capable of a decisive determination of that kind. Not the King. While George III had no trouble making up his mind, it contained only one idea—to conquer, but not how. Pitt was gone, felled by a stroke in April at the time of the French alliance, and dead a month later. The King’s two chief war ministers, Germain and Sandwich, were emphatic enough, but not usefully, having no clear plan of strategy and sloppy about implementing any plan they conceived. Saratoga, the most stunning British defeat before the end, was the result of simple carelessness to ensure that two armies, Howe’s and Burgoyne’s, which according to the plan of campaign were supposed to meet to form a pincer, were both informed of the design and timing of the movements planned for them. As it turned out, they were not; moreover, the plan approved by Lord Germain was based on the “wildly fallacious premise,” in the opinion of William Willcox, Clinton’s biographer, that Howe’s main field army could operate through Pennsylvania while a substantial part of it was immobilized in New York and that Burgoyne’s could move independently in the North without reference to Howe. Professor Willcox assigns the responsibility of the “worst” British planning of the war to “intellectual shortcomings” of the three architects, Howe, Germain, Burgoyne, and to the “almost complete lack of communication between them.” The basic fault was complacency rather than mental incapacity.
Complacency is an attribute of long-retained power like that of the Chinese. Throughout her history, China conceived of herself as the center of the universe, as the Middle Kingdom surrounded by barbarians. Outsiders whose misfortune it was “to live beyond her borders” were inferiors, required, if they wished to approach the Emperor, to assume the kowtow position, prone with face on the floor. If not quite so explicitly, Britain carried the same feeling in her soul, a sense of being the world’s moon that pulled the tides of international affairs.
The danger in complacency is that it causes the possessor to ignore as unimportant the local factors and conditions that govern other people with whom it deals. Britons faced with the American Revolution were not interested in Americans or in their magnificent continent reaching from ocean to ocean. No British monarch had ever seen his domain across the Atlantic, and no British minister in the fifteen years, 1760–75, when insurgency was brewing to a boil visited the Colonies to learn what was exercising the unruly subjects or what kind of people they were. The consequence was ignorance, which is a disadvantage in war.
“Know thy enemy,” the sine qua non of successful military operations, was entirely lacking in the war with America, and complacency allowed no room for effort to make good the lack. Lord Sandwich, for example, employed no proper means to obtain intelligence of French naval movements, according to a charge in Parliament by Lord Stormont, the British Ambassador in Paris. His “negligence” was “inconceivable” in that it allowed French warships to leave their ports to sail for the West Indies without an alert to the British at sea who were watching for them. “We have no intelligence,” the Ambassador told the House of Lords. Stormont said he had done his utmost repeatedly to arrange for cutters to lay off the French ports to get information, but could not prevail on Lord Sandwich to grant them.
More fundamental was the attitude of the chief war minister, Lord George Germain, who had won his position through the King’s favor by advocating the “utmost force of this kingdom” to finish the rebellion in one campaign, which should conclude with an offer to the Colonies of submission or ruin. That was the extent of his government’s understanding of the rebels.
Planlessness followed from the start of the war, when the British assumed that no plan was needed to suppress a rebellion—only hard blows. Carelessness followed from the assumption that the superiority of British force was so great that it made taking pains in performance unnecessary. A more basic deteriorating factor was dissension at home.
Politics as much as anything defeated the British in the American war. The British have always been obsessed with politics, not so much in terms of opposing systems of belief as in terms of who’s in and who’s out. Transmitted to the navy by the Keppel-Palliser quarrel, it cut like a carving knife through the solidity of the senior service. “So violent was the spirit of party and faction” in the fleet, as Wraxall has told us, “as almost to extinguish every patriotic sentiment.”
Mistrust of Sandwich after the Keppel affair was virtually total except for the King, who relied on him and who, knowing nothing of the nuts and bolts required to keep a fleet serviceable, accepted what he was told and dutifully believed in the navy as a British eagle which would pounce upon and destroy his enemies. Constitutionally unable to change ministers for fear that the unknown would be worse than the known, he held on to Sandwich as he had held on to Bute and now Lord North, as a sinking swimmer might hold on to a post when the waters are closing over his head.
The Opposition despised the First Lord. One of its leading figures, the Duke of Richmond, wrote to Keppel when he was first offered command of the Grand Fleet, before Ushant, that he did not think it a matter for congratulation. If Sandwich has a “bad fleet” to send out, he would “be glad to put it under the command of a man whom he does not love.” He advised Keppel to have each ship examined by himself and his officers and “not to trust Lord Sandwich for a piece of rope yarn.”
Britain’s greatest dread, the belligerency of France in alliance with the American rebelli
on, was now a fact. It put odds heavily in the balance against her and convinced many of the government party that the immediate necessity was to relieve Britain of a war both costly and profitless in order to free her to meet the French challenge, and the only way to do that was a settlement with the Colonies, as the Whigs had long been urging. Slowly the discouraging truth that the war was unwinnable was forcing itself on the notice of what Edward Gibbon called the “thinking friends of government,” meaning others like himself.* Chatham, formerly Pitt, the great Prime Minister, was the first to have pointed this out, in a speech on November 20, 1777. Before he knew of the American victory at Saratoga, he had told the House of Lords, “I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you cannot conquer America.…” The war was “unjust in its principles, impractible in its means, and ruinous in its consequences.” The employment of “mercenary sons of rapine and plunder” (meaning the Hessians and other German mercenaries) had aroused “incurable resentment.” “If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would 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.
The logistics, Charles James Fox added, pursuing the argument, made military success impossible. On land, generals were placed too far apart to aid each other, while America’s immensely long coast with its innumerable bays, estuaries and river mouths and her self-sufficiency in food, if not in arms, made her virtually impervious to sea power. Indeed, hostilities worked the other way around, by depriving Britain of the tall white pines from America for her masts, and of seasoned timber, tar and other naval stores for ship-building. Whereas in a European land war siege of a capital city usually led to surrender, the separateness of colonial regions meant that capture of New York or Boston or Philadelphia brought no finality. And there was a final problem that Chatham had also remarked. Even if you could conquer the Americans, you could not make them willing partners.
Failure to quell rebels by conventional military action was humiliating to Britain, and the failure to arouse active support by the Loyalists, who had been expected to rise up and overwhelm their misguided countrymen and had been counted upon as a primary component in the military suppression of the rebellion, was a major disappointment, which the British seemed not to realize was their own fault. In their persisting attitude of scorn for colonials, they made no effort to recruit Loyalists for an organized force of their own, or form Loyalist divisions or even brigades, or to offer them commissions as officers in the British Army. If the Loyalists had wished to fight as an organized force and do more than protect themselves from harassment and persecution by the patriots, what military command could they join? The British government, while paying German mercenaries at increasingly disagreeable cost and adding a few miserable results from Irish recruiting, did not use what they had at hand and complained unhappily when a Loyalist army did not arise out of the earth spontaneously. Loyalists, who mainly belonged to the propertied class, had in fact stronger feelings about the war than the ruling British. Their sentiments sprang less from devotion to the Crown than to their privileged position, which the Revolution threatened to overturn. Although the revolutionary leaders were landowners like Washington and Jefferson and men of wealth like the Morrises, they were felt to represent a spirit of subversion rising in the world. As against the Loyalists, the Revolution was essentially a class war which, like all conflicts that threaten the loss of property, arouses the fiercest feelings.
Britain had based her calculations on ending the rebellion by the spring of 1777; instead, in 1778 a successful conclusion in America was as far off as ever. The entry of France added force to the arguments that the war was unwinnable and brought about an astonishing reversal by Lord North’s government—an offer of peace terms and of conciliation to the Colonies, which it was hoped would bring them back to the house of the parent and break off their betrothal to France. The Conciliatory Propositions, as they were called, were submitted to a stunned and unbelieving Parliament in February, 1778. Their purpose was rather to placate the Opposition than to negotiate peace with the Americans. The Opposition, which enjoyed the Commons’ most eloquent and effective speakers, Fox and Burke, continually denounced the war as unjust, and as certain to be ruinous to Great Britain by the ever-increasing cost of maintaining enlarged armies and fleets at the price of increased taxes.
To stem the disaffection, the government made its peace proposal for the sake of its own hold on office, the primary concern of every government, regardless of policy. A Peace Commission was appointed in March, headed by Frederick, fifth Earl Carlisle, a young man of great wealth, scion of the Howards and owner of the regal Castle Howard. Known chiefly as a fashion plate, he was otherwise qualified mainly as the son-in-law of Lord Gower, a prominent member of the Bedford Gang, a political group faithful to the King and Lord North. Ample wealth and great estate are not attributes that as a rule accustom the possessor to walk softly and adjust to compromise. Life had not trained the Earl of Carlisle to be a negotiator, especially not vis-à-vis followers of Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin.
Except for one missing element, the peace terms proposed by Britain appeared to be a package of everything the Americans wanted: exemption from taxation by Parliament, membership in the House of Commons accepted as a principle (method and numbers were to be worked out in discussion), recognition of Congress as a constitutional body, repeal of the tea duty and other punitive acts—in short, everything except the grant of independence, on which the Americans insisted as a prior condition of, not a subject for, negotiation. Upon this rock of independence the mission foundered, nor was there any mention of withdrawal from the country of British troops and ships, another American condition; and without these conditions, members of Congress would neither meet nor talk with the peace commissioners. In any event, the peace overture had come too late. Having pledged to France to make no separate peace, the Americans could not have come to terms with the British even if they had wanted to. “The pride of men,” Edmund Burke noted, “will not often suffer reason to have any scope until it can be no longer of service.”
To end a war and restore peace in its place needs delicacy. The tactics of Carlisle and his colleague on the commission—Governor Johnstone, so called because he had formerly served as Governor of West Florida—were so heavy-handed as to suggest that they were intended to fail, as perhaps they were. The British government, hating and rejecting the thought of independence, had, as was suspected, planned the Peace Commission as a gesture to quiet the Opposition, without wanting a positive result. They were not likely to get one by Governor Johnstone’s methods, which were as counterproductive as possible, as we shall see. Before his service as Governor of West Florida, he had been a naval officer of the aggressive, dictatorial and quarrelsome kind. Given to dueling, he had been found guilty by court-martial of insubordination in a duel, but not sentenced except by reprimand because of personal bravery in action. In Florida his staff had officially protested his autocratic conduct. He was not the ideal selection for a peace mission. Carlisle, as noted, knew nothing of negotiation. William Eden, the third commissioner, had been confidential secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations, which governed relations with the Colonies, and, as a member of both the English and later Irish parliaments, had to deal with both Americans and Irish, two troublesome peoples. During the war with America, he served as the director of secret intelligence. In these positions he might be supposed to have learned the utility of tactful procedures, though if he had, he seems not to have been able to convey them to his colleagues.
The British government itself had nullified the mission before it could act, by ordering the evacuation of Philadelphia for transfer of command
to New York, giving an effect of British withdrawal just as the peace commissioners were due to arrive in America. The appearance of yielding was enhanced by the transfer of 5,000 troops, which had held Philadelphia, to the West Indies to counter expected French attack on the islands. Philadelphia was thus rendered indefensible and Carlisle deprived of his theorem that “gunpowder or guineas will fix the business.”
An offer of peace terms by one belligerent will always give an impression of a weakening of purpose and will to victory. The other party, sensing weakness, will be less disposed to accept terms. This is one reason why ending a war is always more difficult than starting one. The Peace Commission and the Conciliatory Propositions unavoidably gave an impression that British enthusiasm for the war was fading, which was indeed the case and which naturally gave the Americans reason to reject terms or even to discuss them.
Frustrated and affronted in America by the refusal of Congress to meet with him and his colleagues, Johnstone’s idea was to persuade individual members by worldly rewards to move the recalcitrant Congress to enter negotiations. He made his proposals in writing, offering to bribe Robert Morris of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in America and a devoted partisan of the Revolution, and also Joseph Reed, the Pennsylvania patriot, who was offered £10,000 if he could reconcile the Colonies with Britain. Johnstone suggested that peerages could be arranged for other members who might succeed in promoting a settlement. Among those he approached was Henry Laurens, President of the Congress. When Johnstone’s letters were given by their indignant recipients to the press, public outrage forced the overenterprising commissioner to resign from the Peace Commission and return to England. Eden, more circumspect, took no part, unless private and undocumented, in his colleague’s too zealous maneuvers, writing only to his brother at home that if “my wishes and cares could accomplish it, this noble country would soon belong once more to Great Britain.” His chief of mission, Lord Carlisle, was left to resort to a tactic of threats of terror and devastation. In a public manifesto of October, 1778, which he ordered distributed to all members of the Congress, to George Washington and all American generals, to all provincial governors and assemblies, to all ministers of the Gospel and commanders of the British forces and prison camps, he proclaimed in the name of the Peace Commission that the Colonies having made alliance with the enemy of Britain, it became Britain’s duty “by every means in her power to destroy or render useless a connexion contrived for her ruin”; in short, to replace the “humanity and benevolence with which she had hitherto pursued the war” by sterner practices. Carlisle’s notion of benevolence addressed to people who in every colony had already suffered pillage and destruction, the burning of villages and the laying waste of farms, fields and timberlands, did not lend him credibility. Taking advantage of his threats, Congress recommended to local authorities that the British text should be published in gazettes of their districts, “to convince the good people of these states of the insidious designs” of the Peace Commission.