1775 (69 page)

Bloody-mindedness aside, Britain circa 1775 had no choice but to hire mercenaries. After the Glorious Revolution, William and Mary and then Queen Anne took part in the major European wars of 1689–1713, which required London’s increasing resort to German auxiliaries. Prior to this involvement, large-scale English military activity on the Continent had ended in the fifteenth century with the Anglo-French Hundred Years War.

The Prince of Orange led the reversal, and the House of Hanover followed. Dutch Prince William, on becoming King William III of England,
indulged and enlarged his personal war with Louis XIV of France. Then, beginning in 1715, the first two monarchs from the House of Hanover, George I and George II, both German born, escalated Britain’s involvement in central European politics, alliances, and German subsidies. During the wars of the 1740s and 1750s, the employment of Hessians and Brunswickers ballooned. Although many English members of Parliament deplored these commitments and costs, presumably they would have been angrier still to see Englishmen forced to fill a large standing army to pursue Hanoverian interests on Palatine or Pomeranian battlefields.

Whatever its merits, the heavy reliance on mercenaries was expensive. A considerable portion of the huge 1756–1763 expenses that drove postwar British Cabinets to demand more revenue from America involved outlays for
Soldatenhandel.
The 90,000-man “British Army in Germany” of 1760, for example, included 37,800 Hanoverians, 24,400 Hessians, 9,500 Brunswickers, and only 22,000 British.
⁵⁹

Throughout much of 1775, the secretary at war, Lord Barrington, had been admitting to members of Parliament and foreign diplomats alike that Britain would require 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers for its planned grand campaign in America, but had only 18,000 rank and file without mercenaries.
⁶⁰
Barrington didn’t expect the army to succeed, and he favored relying on the navy. He also kept sending in his resignation, but George III would not accept it. Nor did Lord North want Barrington to leave. In September 1775, North told an adviser who complained of the secretary at war that he “may perhaps not be so active in promoting measures which he does not approve as we could wish. I do not know that we have any particular neglect to lay to his charge, and without that I am sure that no application for removing him will succeed. The reasons must be very cogent which can carry that point: I speak from knowledge.”
⁶¹
North, too, freely admitting his lack of military expertise, also periodically approached the king about resigning. Presumably that was part of the knowledge from which he spoke.

Did having to turn to mercenaries and auxiliaries in 1775 cost Britain victory? It is hard to make that specific case with any assuredness. Still, hiring them cost too much—the treaties and pay scales were exorbitant, as opposing members of Parliament detailed at length. Furthermore, moving the Germans from their individual principalities to embarkation points and thence to North America became part of the logistical nightmare profiled in
Chapter 12
. Ordering up 6,000 Hessians to be marched 80 miles to Ulm or Hanover in 1756 was a cakewalk next to arranging enough transports,
escorts, victualling orders, and suchlike to move 20,000 of them, as well as 10,000 British troops 3,000 or 4,000 miles.

Drawn-out German negotiations added to the delay. Too few ships were available, half a dozen seaports and fleet rendezvous locations were involved, and schedules kept slipping. Instead of reaching New York by spring, as early plans had assumed, the main body of Germans—Hessians—were delivered in the summer. The Brunswickers, first to sail, left Europe in February and arrived in Quebec City on June 1.

In addition, some of the Hessian and Brunswicker units were of poor quality or commanded by officers who did not speak or understand English. Some did not comprehend North American warfare, as key 1776 and 1777 battles like Trenton, Bennington, and Saratoga generally confirmed. The British need to rely on mercenaries and auxiliaries had been disdained by France and Spain as early as December 1775, presumably encouraging their support of the Americans.
⁶²
As we will see in
Chapter 24
, by 1780 and 1781, the British government had barely an ally left in Europe.

Would a less-smug Britain have been able to suppress the American Revolution? Perhaps, if that difference had reflected the sort of political change and somewhat more democratic directions finally achieved by the Reform Act of 1832. Such a Britain would not have had to mobilize Englishmen to fight Englishmen; it would have been able to work out self-government for the United Colonies somewhat akin to that laid out for Canada by the Durham Report in 1839. In the unreformed Britain of 1775, such thinking was not possible.

What may be fair to suggest, though, is that the early-eighteenth-century British “fiscal-military state” with its dependence on foreign “subsidy” troops to fight
ancien régime
conflicts in a still–
ancien régime
Europe was already outdated as the crisis of the 1770s widened. Yesteryear’s reliance was not enough to win a new kind of major war (1) arising thousands of miles from Hesse, Brunswick, and the
Soldatenhandel;
(2) putting a global strain on eighteenth-century logistics; and (3) combining an unprecedented English colonial popular upheaval with considerable empathy for their cause even within England. When these new circumstances could not be understood and acted on in 1775, flawed decisions were inevitable. The fact that some of the new methods pursued so desperately (like rights for Catholics and large-scale Irish and Scottish recruitment) would later underpin a nineteenth-century imperial success is another story. However appropriate to the Second British Empire, they were not well suited to the First British Empire, which succumbed in North America.

W
ith the exception of New York’s Hudson-Champlain corridor, no other body of water in the thirteen colonies matched Chesapeake Bay and its over 100 riverine extensions as a potential conduit of invasion—a giant passageway through which an aggressive British deployment might have divided the northern provinces from those to the south. Two hundred miles in length, the bay is an estuary, where salt water and fresh water meet. It remains the largest of 130 estuaries within the boundaries of the United States. Including its tidal tributaries, the bay covers 4,500 square miles as the centerpiece of a watershed that sprawls over 64,000 square miles.

In terms of reach, the bay’s arms point in every direction. Wide and lengthy navigable stretches of rivers like the James, York, Rappahannock, Patuxent, Potomac, Elk, Chester, Choptank, Nanticoke, and Pocomoke greatly expanded the potential range of warships and substantial landing parties. Dunmore in Virginia conceived of the Potomac as a water descent, by which an invading force of Great Lakes Indians could meet near Alexandria
with a British flotilla sailing upriver from Chesapeake Bay. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the wide Nanticoke River was navigable to Seaford, Delaware.
Map 11
shows the great bay’s sprawling contours and major ports, together with its 1775 battlefields, river defenses, and burned or bombarded towns.

Employed instead as a loose geopolitical noun, the
Chesapeake
of 1775 included most of two colonies, Maryland and Virginia, as well as adjacent portions of two more, lower Delaware and a bit of northeastern North Carolina. South-central Pennsylvania had close ties to the Chesapeake through its rich wheatlands. These sent enough grain and flour south for export to make Baltimore the bay’s leading port early in the Revolution. Despite this centrality, the region was a relatively neglected venue in early British thinking. This was doubly a boon for the Patriots, because the Chesapeake lent itself to a number of British actions, especially innovative use of naval power. But as we have seen in several chapters, innovation was not a feature of naval thinking in 1775, either at the Admiralty under Lord Sandwich or on the part of Admiral Graves, who commanded the Royal Navy in North America from an embattled flagship in Boston Harbor. Even when Lord Howe, a much more competent commander, took over in mid-1776, he was so preoccupied with the invasion of New York that “the Delaware and Chesapeake were left unguarded…and there was not a single cruiser between the Delaware and the St. Marys [Georgia].”
¹
Fortunately for the United Colonies, senior British officers familiar with North America from the previous war had mostly fought French and Indians based in Canada and the Great Lakes. The impressive bodies of water they kept in salutary memory alongside the great victories of 1758–1760 ranged from the St. Lawrence and Hudson rivers to the Forks of the Ohio, a distinct detriment by 1775. The deeper comprehension of Chesapeake opportunities gained by British commanders between 1777 and 1781 came several years too late for timely action. On a smaller scale, seizing control of Delmarva—latter-day shorthand for the peninsula shared by portions of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—was usually feasible, potentially rewarding, and never ventured.

Nor was the Chesapeake important only as a venue for battles and invasions. Trade was frequently pivotal. Chesapeake tobacco, and to a lesser extent local grain, served the Patriot side as an essential wartime currency. Three times in 1775 Congress urged the individual colonies, emphasizing those along the Chesapeake, to ship their most salable produce only to buyers committed to paying with utter necessities: munitions, weaponry, medicine, and salt. Paper money was distinctly less welcome in payment. The foreign sellers having the most gunpowder and arms available—France and Holland—were precisely those anxious for tobacco in return.

Tobacco: The 1775 Currency of Revolution

The considerable price increases in 1774 and much of 1775 reflected British and European anticipation that Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina growers would hold back shipments once nonexportation began in September 1775. Smuggling, of course, was another avenue. Even in 1770, over 20 percent of merchantable Chesapeake leaf never cleared customs, presumably reaching buyers by unlawful means.
²

That variety of trade doubtless grew in 1775, although many hogsheads still went to English and Scottish firms. However, American shippers requiring payment in Dutch gunpowder or French muskets conveniently declared surplus by King Louis’s arsenals began sending their tobacco to Amsterdam, Dunkerque, and Nantes or, nearer home, to West Indian entrepôts like Martinique and St. Eustatius. Patriots in Maryland and Virginia handled part of this commerce through vessels of their own, but many ships also sailed from Philadelphia under the aegis of politically active and tobacco-wise firms like Willing and Morris and Cunningham and Nesbitt. The former also partnered with Virginia firms like Norton and Beall of Williamsburg in obtaining powder for that market.
³
By 1776, in one calculation, Willing and Morris had 20 ships trading in war supplies for Congress’s Secret Committee.
⁴
Robert Morris, although British born, had grown up in Oxford, Maryland, where his father had been a pioneering tobacco merchant in the 1740s.

During the spring of 1775, as control over provincial gunpowder supplies preoccupied Patriots from Boston to Savannah, Chesapeake rebels did their share. In March, irate Marylanders had tarred and feathered a customs officer who had confiscated smuggled powder. On April 27, local Patriots pressured Royal Governor Robert Eden into delivering up some arms and ammunition that Marylanders demanded, ostensibly “to keep the servants and negroes in order.”
⁵

Merchants and shippers in Maryland chose the Patriotic side in higher ratios than did those in Virginia, so many of whom were Scottish Loyalists. In both Baltimore and Annapolis, Scotch-Irish merchants with ties to
colleagues in Philadelphia matched tobacco growers in their influence over Maryland’s Revolutionary movement.
⁶

In early December 1775, as Congress again encouraged trade for war necessities, the Maryland Convention named Richard Harrison, a young Virginia merchant, as its agent in Martinique. Tobacco and wheat would be shipped to neutral Caribbean warehouses, then sold by Harrison for arms and ammunition.
⁷
He teamed with Baltimorean Abraham Van Bibber, and the two jointly represented Maryland and Virginia in both Dutch St. Eustatius and French Martinique. Van Bibber, a Dutch speaker, was an old hand. Traffic had so expanded by January 1775, “there were already
daily
[italics added] consignments from the ports of the Netherlands by way of St. Eustatius—cargoes of gunpowder and other munitions, tea and liquor.” After the arrival of a new Dutch governor in 1775, Van Bibber assured associates that “we are as well fixed with him as we were with the former.”
⁸