Authors: Kevin Phillips
Fears were certainly in order. In late 1774, the future United States had to begin the equivalent of a munitions and armaments race
in utero,
so to speak, in order to survive and emerge politically and legally. Much of the extended year 1775 involves the story of that quest, abetted by French, Spanish, and Dutch officials, diplomats, and merchants.
From the start, the would-be rebels principally depended on shipments from Britain’s major political and maritime rivals—nations convinced that a too-arrogant United Kingdom could best be humbled by encouraging the revolt of her North American colonies. Just as mercantilist thinking influenced the British government in squeezing the thirteen colonies, similar tenets encouraged France, Spain, Holland, and others to overestimate the importance of the thirteen. They exaggerated their own chances to profit should the colonies be detached from Britain’s commercial and political orbit.
No map or illustration can convey the gunpowder shortage or its importance. However, General Washington’s storied speechlessness can help. In early August 1775, when given a drastically reduced figure of powder on hand for the army besieging Boston, he was literally shocked into silence.
Brigadier General John Sullivan of New Hampshire, penning a plea to his province’s Committee of Safety to speed 20 barrels, confided that “the General was so struck that he did not utter a word for half an hour.”
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In July, Washington’s first report to Congress had complained, with respect to powder, that “we are so exceedingly destitute that our artillery will be of little use without a supply both large and seasonable. What we have must be reserved for the small arms, and that managed with the utmost frugality.” His speechless half hour came after being told that the main magazine in Cambridge held 38 barrels, not 300. Two days later he wrote to John Hancock that the powder in Massachusetts, together with the stocks of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, totaled only five tons, or roughly nine cartridges per man. By the end of August, although supplies had grown, all of Washington’s cannon had gone quiet, except for a small nine-pounder on Prospect Hill, near the new British emplacements west of Bunker Hill.
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Despite shipments from Philadelphia, the Chesapeake, and South Carolina, the dearth continued. In December, Washington advised Congress that “our Want of Powder is inconceivable,” and in January the army’s magazine in Cambridge was all but empty. These months were doubly tense because of a simultaneous crisis of expiring short-term enlistments and the imperative of replacing them with new recruits. In February 1776, he confided to Connecticut governor Trumbull that “I am so restrained in all my Military movements that it is impossible to undertake anything effectual.”
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Lack of powder, for example, kept the general from taking advantage of temperatures bitter enough to offer a firm pathway of thick ice over which the British could be attacked in Boston. In late February, Trumbull sent two tons more, which almost doubled 100 barrels on hand.
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Hard as it is to credit that British agents were uniformly gulled, the new commander in Boston, General Howe, never saw—or never took advantage of—any opportunity to attack. Looking back months later, Washington marveled “whether a case similar to ours is to be found: to wit, to maintain a post against the flower of the British troops for six months altogether, without powder, and at the end to have one army disbanded and another raised within the same distance of the reinforced enemy.”
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A fair boast, all in all.
The commanding general masterminded much of the propaganda and disinformation. During that perilous summer of 1775, he leaked word of having 1,800 barrels of powder, insinuating that overabundance explained
his order that soldiers stop their random firing because it “elicited the ridicule of the enemy” and disrupted the camp with false alarms.
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In fact, wasteful firing by citizen soldiers remained a major frustration.
A visitor from Rhode Island who delivered powder to Cambridge in November later recalled another deception. The magazine’s supervising officer confided that the barrels were filled with sand to “deceive the enemy should any spy by chance look in.”
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That winter the British intercepted a deceptive “letter” alleging that powder, saltpeter, and small arms were flowing into Washington’s camp. Women were finding it “as easy to make Salt Petre as to make soft soap.”
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Somehow, it all succeeded.
Through mid-1775, though, it must be underscored that Congress—convening on May 10 and adjourning on August 2—enjoyed relatively little control over Patriot supplies of powder and arms. The bulk was being captured or imported by individual merchants and by provincial committees of safety. It was not Congress’s to allocate. Washington was inhibited by the same slow cobbling together of authority. As one chronicler mused, “There was a tremendous shuttling back and forth of what supplies were available. One colony would lend another a few wagonloads of ammunition to meet an expected danger. Congress would now exact a tribute from a colony in order to supply Washington, and the next day rob Washington to help out a seaport town in great peril.”
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Fortunately for the future United States, the contest was assuming global dimensions. Patriot regimes or committees in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and South Carolina were among the first to commission private merchant vessels to buy powder in the West Indies or to capture British supply ships. On a grander scale, French, Dutch, and Spanish merchants had begun shipping large quantities of munitions from their own seaports to their Caribbean colonies—French Martinique and Saint-Domingue, Dutch St. Eustatius, and Spanish Santo Domingo—for sale to resident or visiting North American traders and ship captains. In other cases, devious American owners put their vessels under French or Dutch captains with crews and false papers to match in order to thwart the Royal Navy. In mid-1775, Lord Suffolk, one of Britain’s principal secretaries of state, commented that “an extensive, illicit and dangerous commerce is carrying on by vessels belong to His Majesty’s Colonies under Foreign Colors.”
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These enterprising Patriots, some with smuggling and privateering skills honed in the French wars, typically retained a sizable amount of powder to arm their own schooners, brigs, and sloops. Local committees of safety, in
turn, often insisted that purchased powder and small cannon be brought back to defend threatened home ports and harbors. Of course, where the voyage was entirely private, not a few of the powder barrels were trundled into Yankee, Philadelphia, or Charleston warehouses in anticipation of nothing more patriotic than rising prices. With General Washington obliged to support a large army, this was not an ideal distribution system. Not until September 1775, when the Second Continental Congress set up its Secret Committee and gave it authority and funds to make procurement contracts with reliable merchants, did a better percentage of arms and munitions start flowing directly to Washington’s forces.
Want of powder frequently curtailed or denied success on the battlefield. Facing the third British wave on Bunker Hill, running out of ammunition obliged the New England defenders to retreat from their central redoubt. Less obviously, insufficient ammunition forced George Washington to reject most of the propositions made that summer and autumn for tightening the Patriots’ tenuous noose around Boston. Inactivity and boredom, in turn, contributed to the encircling army’s considerable rate of desertion and soldiers’ tendencies to “go home.” In August, as New England troops and some New York units collected at the northern end of the Hudson Valley to invade Canada, New York authorities had little ammunition. Only a month earlier their provincial congress had pleaded to Congress: “We have no arms, we have no powder, we have no blankets. For God’s sake, send us money, send us arms, send us ammunition.”
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After the main American army under Montgomery crossed into Canada in early September, the principal British strongpoint blocking its way—Fort St. John on the Richelieu River—held out for eight weeks, causing a near-fatal delay. Cannon and mortars from Ticonderoga and Crown Point, powerful enough to compel its surrender, did not arrive until October 15. Ammunition remained in short supply. Richard Smith, a Massachusetts delegate, described the dispatches Congress received in November: “Arnold is near Quebec, but has not enough men to surround it and his powder so damaged that he has only 5 Rounds apiece.”
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When Arnold arrived before Quebec in November, lack of enough ammunition to confront a rumored sally by British defenders obliged him to retreat toward Montreal and await help and supplies.
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By the spring of 1776, as we will see, the arrival of artillery, muskets, and ammunition from France was accelerating, as were sub rosa political commitments from the French foreign ministry. However, insufficient ammunition
would undercut Patriot forces, although not critically, in one more major battle: Britain’s ill-starred attempt to capture Charleston, South Carolina. On June 28, during the Royal Navy’s bombardment of Fort Sullivan, the uncompleted palmetto-wood bastion controlling the entrance to Charleston’s harbor, American defenders again almost ran out of powder. At two
P.M.
the fort’s fire slackened, and at three its guns went silent for an hour. All in all, the Americans had used 4,766 pounds of powder, while the attacking Royal Navy had drawn 34,000 pounds from its abundant supply. Colonel Moultrie, commanding the fort, opined that if rebel powder had been adequate, the damaged British ships would have had to strike their colors.
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Although both sides made many mistakes during 1774 and 1775, neither underestimated the central role of ammunition. Adapting a term from Christian theology, Samuel Adams candidly proclaimed gunpowder as the
unum necessarium
—the one thing needful. His cousin John may have introduced the cachet in a September 1775 letter that discussed the saltpeter production getting under way in Connecticut, Philadelphia, and Virginia.
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Irreverent or not, the term was certainly apt.
By the second half of 1775, the stark need for powder had forced decision makers to abandon the previous autumn’s abstractions about nonimportation and nonexportation. Exceptions had to be made on both counts. To pay for vital imported munitions, armaments, and medicines (but virtually nothing else), Congress decided to export the commodities and products in the greatest demand—tobacco, indigo, rice, food, barrels, and staves. These arrangements will be amplified shortly.
Harking back in 1776, John Hancock cited the unpreparedness in gunpowder to prove that Americans back in 1775 had not contemplated independence. That was not quite true. Only days before the official British closure of the port of Boston on June 1, 1774, merchant Hancock ordered his own vessels to clear for London. His most trusted captain, James Scott, was sent word to return with a cargo of gunpowder. This Scott did, dropping anchor in Salem on September 30.
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By September 1774, Hancock and Captain Scott, as both doubtless knew, were only two players in a game involving hundreds, perhaps thousands.
Europe: The Gunpowder Plots Thicken
That hectic summer of 1774 proved to be the turning point. Upon hearing in May that Parliament was closing down their port, Bostonians urged the
other colonies to join a protest by suspending their own trade with Britain. Although such precipitous action was rejected, both maritime New England and the tobacco provinces conducted a broad public debate, filling June, July, and August with generally supportive letters, meetings, and extralegal conventions. Cabals of merchants, smugglers, ship captains, maritime lawyers, rum distillers, and traders to the West Indies and southern Europe—veterans of earlier boycotts prominent among them—doubtless began to plot in taverns, meeting rooms, and exchanges up and down the Atlantic coast. A dozen major New England, New York, and Philadelphia merchant firms already had commercial agents in England, Ireland, Holland, and France and in Iberian ports like Bilbao, San Sebastián, Lisbon, and Cádiz. Gunpowder would have been a frequent topic of discussion.
Benjamin Franklin, in London before heading home in March 1775, was among his several employments the designated London agent of Massachusetts, hardly a low-profile post. He may have made clandestine arrangements with visiting American ship captains, as well as friendly merchants in Amsterdam, Nantes, and Bilbao. Researchers concur that there is no record, either in Franklin’s writings or in the documents of various governments. But should we expect documents? During these months, when British officials talked openly of transporting to London for trial such Patriot leaders as Hancock and Samuel Adams, the author of
Poor Richard’s Almanac
was already resident in the imperial capital. His home at 36 Craven Street was only a few hundred yards from Whitehall.
Certainly Franklin was both active and careful once back in Philadelphia. Named to the Secret Committee launched by Congress in the autumn of 1775, he left few tracks there. The Continental Congress itself deliberated behind closed doors, and the Secret Committee was even more inscrutable. It routinely withheld information from the parent body and later burned its own records. Indeed, when Franklin sailed back to France in December 1776, there is little record of what he did or said during his visit to Nantes, a seaport front and center in early Patriot gunpowder machinations.
Many years later, as World War I reinvolved Americans with European alliances and the lucre of international trading in armaments and munitions, some historians revisited the events of 1773–1783. These eighteenth-century relationships—and the mixture of motivations guiding both France and America—had become eerily relevant again. Between 1915 and 1935, historians like Edward Corwin, Samuel Flagg Bemis, and Elizabeth S. Kite all
penned realpolitik-flavored evaluations, which deserve an explanatory note.
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