Military ill success and the personal humiliation of the Peace Commission had prompted the commissioners to issue the manifesto known as the Carlisle Proclamation. Its expressed threats were modest compared to the intentions of its first unpublished draft, proposing “a scheme of universal devastation,” to be applied by the army and fleet, which its author fondly believed “will have effect.” A test came in Connecticut. Whether or not taking its cue from the Carlisle Proclamation, a short campaign of terror was carried out by Governor Tryon of New York in July, 1779. Compared by Henry Laurens to the operations of the Duke of Alva, in dreadful memory of the Spanish Terror, the Connecticut raid was no massacre, but vicious enough to stimulate rather than subdue resistance, a well-known effect of such measures, and to induce residents to record the events in many journals.
Apart from geographical convenience, Connecticut was chosen because it had made itself obnoxious to the British in and around New York by manufacturing munitions for the colonials and furnishing more troops for the rebel cause than any other colony except Massachusetts, and by launching frequent raids on land and water that interfered with the military plans of Sir Henry Clinton, the British Commander-in-Chief. Moreover, its population was counted as three-quarters disloyal. Clinton had decided upon “severe punishment” to be inflicted by a force of 3,000 troops coming from New York under the command of Major General Tryon, Governor of New York, and to be joined by 2,000 sailors and marines crossing from Long Island in 48 transports with tenders escorted by two warships. The largest collection of ships that had ever entered Long Island Sound, the armada made an impressive sight as it came up to New Haven and anchored in the early light of dawn July 5, 1779.
On the previous day, July 4, Tryon had issued an eloquent proclamation distributed in printed copies evidently thought to be truly persuasive, for although their effect, he reported, “cannot be discovered until further operations and descent upon their coast,” he expected his words to awaken “terror and despondency” among the people of the coast, whom he believed to be “already divided and easily impressible.” He told them that their lives and “the existence of their habitations on your defenceless coast showed Britain’s forbearance and lenity in its mild and noble efforts.” He urged the population to give up their “ungenerous and wanton insurrection into which they had been deluded by designing men for private purposes.” In this plea, General Tryon reflected the enduring British belief, which held Britain to the expectation of an early victory around the corner, that the mass of Americans were basically loyal and only waiting to overturn demagogues and agitators to come back to their old allegiance. “Can the strength of your whole province,” continued the proclamation, “cope with the force of Great Britain? You are conscious it cannot. Why then, will you persist in a ruinous and ill-judged resistance? We hoped you would recover from the frenzy which had distracted this unhappy country and we believe the day will come when the greater part of this continent will blush at their delusion.”
How was it possible for Tryon, Governor of a colony, to know so little of the people he was fighting? Only the year before, giving firm notice of their intent, Connecticut and six other colonies—two from New England, two from the mid-Atlantic and two from the South—signed the Articles of Confederation that were to be the foundation of the United States of America.
At sunrise on July 5, a gunshot from the ships of Tryon’s raid sounded the signal for landing. Instantly, a string of boats filled with redcoats was seen dropping astern from every transport and pulling directly for shore. They were met by a biting blaze of musket fire from a people who proved less “impressible” than supposed. Warned in advance by compatriots in New York of Tryon’s coming, defenders armed with ancient long-range Queen Anne muskets poured into New Haven from nearby towns to a total of several thousand. Knowing every tree and fence, and fighting for their homes and rights, they fired upon the invaders from the protection of the tall Indian corn now at its full July height. As excellent marksmen, they severely damaged General Tryon’s assumptions, but they could not repel his numbers nor save their homes and neighbors from pillage, fire and murder. The sharp crack of musketry and the smoke of burning buildings marked the invaders’ line of march. Smashing their way into every house, they tore and trampled on furnishings, piled up furniture to set it in flame, beat, raped and savaged the residents, and in one case murdered an aged and defenseless victim. He was Mr. Benjamin English, who, according to an account in the Connecticut Journal two days later, reproved a group of drunken redcoats for rough and insulting behavior to his daughter when they broke into his house demanding refreshments. They ran him through the body several times with bayonets. His daughter, on entering the room where he lay on the floor bleeding as he died, cried out, “Oh! How could you murder my poor old father so cruelly?” One of the soldiers asked “Is he your father?” and at her reply of “Yes,” he stamped upon the old man’s chest and upturned face, crushing his nose.
In the midst of the skirmish in New Haven, a body of students from Yale College, marching to meet the enemy, raised a cheer as they saw their former president, the Reverend Dr. Naphtali Daggett, astride his old black mare and carrying his fowling piece ready for action, riding furiously to the attack. Professor of divinity and president of Yale for nine years, he galloped past and soon was seen standing alone on a nearby hillside, firing upon the advancing British column. Coming up, the officer of the column shouted, “What are you doing there, you old fool, firing on His Majesty’s troops?” Firmly, Daggett replied, “Exercising the rights of war.” Asked whether, if his life were spared, he would do such a thing again, he answered, “Nothing more likely. I rather think I should.” Cool defiance can invite respect, if only temporary. Instead of shooting him, the soldiers permitted Daggett to surrender and marched him back to town at the point of their bayonets, wounding him with small stabs as they pricked him forward under the burning midday sun of the hottest day, one observer said, he had ever known. “The stoutest man almost melted in the heat.” When the Reverend’s strength failed and he was ready to sink to the ground in exhaustion, the soldiers drove him on with blows and bruises from the barrels of their guns and stripped his shoes from him to take their silver buckles, while they called him a “damned old rebel” and a thousand insults. Bleeding from his wounds, he was finally left where neighbors took him in and cared for him, but the battering had been too much. He died within the year—as everyone firmly believed, from the treatment he had received.
Two churches and a meetinghouse were burned at New Haven, which Tryon excused on the ground that they had caught fire accidentally from houses burning nearby. Papers and manuscripts taken from Yale College were not recovered, despite the indignant protest of President Ezra Stiles to Tryon, telling him that a war “against science” had been “reprobated for ages by the wisest and most powerful generals.” As the Duke of Alva would not have done, Tryon actually replied, saying that an inquiry had turned up no information about the papers. It was an insignificant item amid tragedy that did not end at New Haven. Governor Tryon’s forces moved on to pillage and burn Fairfield and Norwalk and destroy the salt pans at Horse Neck before they re-embarked for New York.
What could they have thought to gain by this persecution of civilians—to persuade Americans to give up their cause and return obediently to the sovereignty of Britain? To be worth the effort, war requires a rational objective, political and, in the short run, military, not just foolish aggression. Ultimately, the end sought is surrender of the enemy and the giving up of his purpose, whatever it may be, by the military destruction of his armed forces and his supporting resources, by penetration and occupation of his territory, by fear and despair induced in the population by terror. From the days of the Tarquins on the banks of the Tiber to the Germans in Belgium in 1914 and again at Lidice in Czechoslovakia in 1942, when every adult of the town was collected in a group and shot dead in retaliation for some act of resistance, this method has rarely brought the desire
d results, unless it is total and undeviating. Did Clinton and Tryon expect otherwise? More likely they and their soldiers were simply moved to vent violence by the angry frustration of unsuccessful war, which is what usually generates atrocity—as in the case of the Americans at My Lai—except when it is authorized and organized from above, as in the case of the Spanish in the Netherlands, the Japanese in China and the Germans in both World Wars. It is always possible to say, and is always said afterward, that the agents were merely acting on orders of higher authority, but when does normal inhibition in the common soldier or other agent cry stop? If inhibition has been systematically weakened by prevailing policy, it does not operate.
Given the firm intent of the British to hold their empire of the American Colonies and the equally strong intent of the Colonies to achieve independence, there was in fact no solution to the conflict. From King George down, every Englishman, including most of the Opposition, was convinced that Great Britain’s greatness depended on the possession of colonies and that to give up America would mean the fall of Britain as a world power and her reduction, as Walpole wrote, “to a miserable little island as insignificant as Denmark or Sardinia.” “If American independence were recognized,” declared Shelburne, a leader of the Opposition, “on that day, the sun of Great Britain is set.” Even if she won, trade and useful connection with an angry defeated people would dry up, unless measures were taken to recover their friendship. The Tryon raid did not seem the surest way to recover friendship.
Without trade or colonies, Britain’s ruin seemed foretold. “Like Carthage she will fall when the commerce on which she is founded is no more,” an official said, a prophecy that found an echo in the sage of Strawberry Hill. “She will lose her East Indian Colonies next,” Horace Walpole predicted, “and then France will dictate to us more imperiously than ever we did to Ireland.” France had every such intention, but history had laid out a different path. The challenge of Napoleon, thirty-odd years later, stimulated Britain to a revival of her energies and her will, and when her recovered navy under Nelson turned the challenger back at the Nile and at Trafalgar, Britain, instead of sliding as predicted to the level of Denmark or Sardinia, regained her dominant place as a world power and retained it for another hundred years until the crash of 1914.
In America, the Carlisle peace overture had brought only failure to finish a humiliating and interminable war. Faced with the absolute refusal of members of Congress to meet for talks, Carlisle and his fellow-commissioners went home in November, 1778, empty-handed. Their visit, like the Tryon Raid, had been an exercise in futility.
At the same time, American fortunes suffered a graver exercise in futility in the fiasco of the first military assistance produced by the French alliance—the more disappointing because it was naval assistance, the kind wanted most. Early in July, 1778, when the French first entered the war, a French fleet of 12 ships of the line and 3 frigates, under Admiral Count d’Estaing, had arrived on the coast of Virginia and moved up to New York. The plan of action contemplated a joint offensive on New York by the French fleet together with American land forces, but the large French warships found themselves unable to cross the bar at Sandy Hook in New York Bay. At Washington’s suggestion for a combined attack on Newport, Rhode Island, d’Estaing then sailed north. A British fleet under Admiral Howe from New York moved after him, but a series of frustrations intervened, culminating in a furious storm that dispersed both fleets. Battle was averted when, in the gale, d’Estaing’s flagship suffered the loss of masts and rudder, forcing him to retreat into Boston under a makeshift jury rig for repairs. From Boston he sailed away without action, leaving soured hopes and no love. Americans in their disappointment claimed they had been “deserted in a most rascally manner as if the Devil himself were in the French fleet.” To smooth over a riot of bad feeling took earnest effort by Washington and others, but to no great purpose, since d’Estaing was not fortune’s favorite. From Boston he sailed to the West Indies and returned the following year for another joint venture with the Americans: to recapture Savannah, which had been taken by the British the year before. In the fighting, Count d’Estaing was wounded and this assault, too, failed in its purpose. The cherished hope of naval superiority, which should have shut the British off from their supply line, vanished with the last sight of d’Estaing’s masts as they disappeared over the horizon, taking the frustrated Admiral back to France.
*Gibbon had been elected to Parliament as a supporter of the government in 1774.
IX
Low Point of the Revolution
INTERNED in Paris, Admiral Rodney, Britain’s ablest naval officer, was moored far from mast or sail, an admiral without a sea. Frantic in disuse, he tried through friends to be recalled for a private audience with the King, in vain. He wrote to his wife urging her to plead his cause with Sandwich in person and to send his son to speak to Lord North. Sandwich refused to receive Lady Rodney, replying to her letter that it would be politically impossible to give her husband active employment until he had discharged his debts to private creditors and to the Exchequer, referring, it may be supposed, to expenses like the greatcoats for the Greenwich Hospital pensioners, charged to the navy. In an unnecessarily mean letter to the King, Sandwich wrote, “If Sir George Rodney should from his indigence have any temptation to make advantage of purchasing stores or anything else of that sort, he will have no means of doing it at present, as there will be a Commissioner on the spot through whose hands all that business must be transacted.” It was this kind of action that formed his contemporaries’ dislike and generally low opinion of Sandwich as a man. When Rodney was later recalled to active duty, an Admiralty Commissioner was indeed assigned to him to make sure he did not use his post for personal enrichment. No one knew more about taking advantage of purchasing than Sandwich himself, up to his elbows in jobbery throughout his career. Since graft was a way of life to English officials, it is hard to understand why, if the Navy Board found indebtedness so shocking, they made it virtually incumbent on Rodney by paying only half the salary due his rank, possibly on the pretext of his residence abroad. If the Navy Board would “deliver but half of what is due to me as Rear-Admiral of England,” he wrote to his wife in April, 1778, “it would be sufficient to satisfy every body and there would be money to spare besides.” In his letters, he pointed out rather logically that employment was the only method by which he could both serve his country and honorably discharge his debts. Certainly Sandwich seems to have borne some kind of grudge. To leave in disuse at this juncture of renewed war the most dynamic sailor in the Royal Navy, as Rodney was soon dramatically to prove himself, and one moreover willing to serve under Sandwich as First Lord, when most officers at this time, owing to the Keppel affair, were not, was hardly in the national interest. The given reason was that Rodney was too bellicose and likely to allow himself some action that would add Spain to the war, but this seems not to have been a very real fear, for the British were always making slighting remarks about Spain’s lack of enterprise and avoidance of any offensive action in the Channel when, having numerical superiority in combination with France, she had the opportunity for it.
In Paris, Rodney—receiving no messages or remittances—wrote in agony of mind to his wife, “Delays are worse than death, especially at this critical time when every hour teems with momentary expectation of war.” A French squadron, he reports, has sailed at the end of January for America along with a convoy of 13 sail and 2 ships of war “belonging to the Congress of twenty-eight guns each who saluted the French Admiral under Congress colours and had their salute openly and publicly returned, by which France seems to own them as a Republic—the greatest insult they could offer us.”
Besides the agony of inaction, Rodney was now in acute embarrassment for living expenses. At this moment an unexpected hand of friendship was extended to him, so unexpected and from so unlikely a source as to seem unreal. A French nobleman, the Maréchal Duc de Biron, Marshal of France, Colonel of the Gardes Fra
nçaises and commander of the troops of Paris, having heard of his enforced detention, proposed, Rodney wrote, “that his purse was at my service,” saying that “whatever sum I might want, even to £2,000 he would immediately let me have,” and the English friends in whose home the proposal was made would be asked to inform certain bankers to advance the sum which the Maréchal would pay. After Rodney’s initial reluctance to accept such astonishing generosity, the Duc de Biron assured him in the hearing of the English guests present “that it was not a French gasconnade but an offer of pure friendship and regard,” that “all France was sensible of the services I had rendered my country and that the treatment they all knew I had received was a disgrace to the nation and to its ministers” and that the Maréchal would be extremely happy if he were allowed to make this proof of his “esteem and good will” in order that “I may leave Paris without being reproached.” The Frenchman’s offer was made in May, after the French alliance was concluded with the American rebels but before France’s actual declaration of war on Britain. Biron certainly knew that he was releasing a formidable opponent, for he was reproached by many of his countrymen for doing so when his intervention became known. It was on this occasion that he consulted the French Chef de Cabinet Maurepas, who thought the matter of no great consequence because naval combat in his opinion was “piff poff.” Biron also went to Versailles to ask the King’s permission to give Rodney his freedom. “Je vous envie d’avoir eu cette idée,” the King replied, according to Biron family records. “Elle est Française et digne de vous.” (I wish I had had your idea. It is French and worthy of you.) If it was French, it was perhaps a reflection of medieval chivalry in which fellow-knights felt joined by brotherhood in the transnational chivalric order and more obligated to each other than to any other loyalty.