1775 (93 page)

Simply put, the British defeat on June 28 was a rout. Besides the casualties at Breach Inlet, the navy took a drubbing. Of the three frigates that went aground, one, the
Acteon,
could not be rescued and had to be blown up. Sullivan’s fort concentrated its fire on the two major warships, the
Bristol,
50 guns, and the
Experiment,
50 guns. Both were shot almost to pieces and would have been sunk had the Americans enough powder for continual firing. Instead, the American gunners had to pause for long intervals, sometimes awaiting more deliveries. In the end, the fort fired only 4,766 pounds of gunpowder to the ships’ 34,000 pounds.
³⁸
Even so, the ratio of officers and men killed on
Bristol
and
Experiment
was high, almost Bunker Hill–like. Both captains died, and Commodore Parker literally had the seat of his pants shot off. Only twelve Americans were killed, most having remained safe behind the palmetto walls.

As we have seen, King George stiffened his upper lip and acknowledged that he “should have been as well pleased if it had not been attempted.” Indeed, he was less to blame than some of his Cabinet members, colonial governors, and generals.

The American Revolution and the Limits of British Power

It would be hard to find a less impressive trio of British military achievements than the February-June cavalcade of pipes and broadswords at Moore’s Creek Bridge, the evening pine fires of seven regular regiments immobilized by Carolina sharpshooters, and the shared failure of the army and navy in the attack on what became Fort Moultrie. It is a cliché of military historians that British wars often get off to a poor start but finish strongly. Not in this war. When Lord North heard in December about Cornwallis’s October 1781 surrender, his first words—“My God, it is all over”—were a succinct political as well as military summary. He resigned in April 1782.

The long-term implications of the American Revolution for Britain’s future world role did not suffer the damage that many Britons had feared in late 1781 and early 1782. However, the strategic predicament that British strategists never fully confronted was that with the rebellion in America spread over so large a territory, only one major region could be managed at a time.

By 1778, for example, it is fair to say that Britain was losing interest in expending blood and resources to keep control of the old Puritan, smuggling-driven, and innately hostile southern core of New England—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. British strategists remained interested in peripheries like semi-independent Vermont and the Penobscot district of Maine, but principally as buffer zones for a future Canada. British undersecretaries like William Knox and Charles Jenkinson had already popularized the economic and political argument against Britain trying to keep New England. The region would remain a lucrative market for British goods simply because of their price. Virginia was well worth keeping because of its tobacco, but the best approach to reconquering plantation country, Knox argued, would be to first invade Georgia and South Carolina, the states farthest from northern military reinforcements.
³⁹

Britain’s new logic did indeed point south. However, much of Whitehall was insufficiently mindful of another vital nuance. When Spain declared war in 1779, General Bernardo de Gálvez, the highly capable governor of Louisiana, put his own “southern strategy” to work. As we have seen, between 1779 and 1781, Gálvez captured one British fort or Gulf Coast strongpoint after another: Manchac, Natchez, Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola; and in 1782, a joint Spanish and American expedition, with the frigate
South Carolina
as its flagship, captured the Bahamas. That loss suggested
that Britain would have to recover the latter by giving East and West Florida back to Spain at the peace tables. In such a case, Georgia and South Carolina would no longer be important chess pieces.

Besides which, Clinton and Cornwallis, the two British generals with the longest experience in the South—not least, with unhappy memories of Carolina snipers and palmetto log forts—had their doubts about Britain’s second southern strategy even before Cornwallis’s eventual surrender. Clinton, as we have seen, doubted the ultimate success of a British strategy in the South that consolidated in South Carolina and Georgia and then built northward. For a while, at least, as noted in
Chapter 17
, the mercurial general favored a Chesapeake-focused approach.

As the second southern strategy took hold in 1780–1781, British soldiers had been withdrawn from most of the North save for the large headquarters concentration New York City and its environs. Even so, Cornwallis doubted that the force in the South was adequate. In April 1781, he wrote to a fellow general that “if we mean an offensive war in America, we must abandon New York and put our whole force into Virginia…If our plan is defensive, mixed with desultory expeditions, let us quit the Carolinas (which cannot be held defensively while Virginia can be so easily armed against us) and stick to our salt pork in New York, sending now and then a detachment to steal tobacco.”
⁴⁰
His capitulation in October, of course, left no real options.

Obviously, Britain did not
conclusively
lose America in 1775. However, it may be fair to say that Britain lost in the end because of circumstances that started to be apparent in 1775. These ranged from too few British troops to subdue North and South at the same time to the Patriots’ fierce suppression of Loyalists, the obvious intentions of France and Spain, the dislike of Britain across Europe, the considerable support for America within Britain, and in a more personal vein, the 1775–1778 reluctance of the Howe brothers to crush the Patriots and the Howe family’s preference for trying to win in a way that kept the thirteen colonies’ attachment.

And so we turn to our final chapter: the opportunity of 1775 and the long-term implications of the Revolution’s powerful beginnings.

A
s 1775 drew to a close, both the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the self-styled United Colonies of North America were trying something altogether new. Never before had a large mass of European colonists of a major European empire tried to break away and become semi-independent or independent. There were no meaningful guidelines, which explains some of the missteps on both sides. Neither British law nor what passed for international law had clear, easy answers.

The great gamble undertaken by colonial Americans in 1775 succeeded because its timing was plausible and its political, military, and international assumptions were generally valid. Britain never did regain most of the territory vacated in 1775; nor did British power ever overthrow the great bulk of the new local committees, associations, congresses, and de facto governments set up across the land during that year. Europe kept shipping munitions, and France, Spain, and Holland eventually became American allies. The gamble succeeded.

If the timing was not perfect, conflict had become unavoidable. Mid-October 1774 was a critical month when the king’s Privy Council prohibited arms shipments from Britain to North America and the Continental Congress delivered its belligerent ultimatum on trade. Absent huge concessions, the colonies intended to withhold tobacco and other exports. For a colony to suspend its role as a supplier of commodities and materials was a rejection of imperial authority. The king’s lawyers thought it added up to treason. That made 1774 the Revolution’s threshold year. Neither side backed down, and the colonists would have been fools to delay and give Britain more time to bring its economic and military power to bear. Seventeen seventy-five was when opportunity beckoned and confrontation escalated.

The faulty element of what had been put in motion—it became obvious enough in two or three years—was principally
economic.
The king, his ministers, and Parliament refused to bow to the colonial boycotts so grandly announced in late 1774. The British government instead replied with restraints, prohibitions, naval blockades, and the commercial equivalent of outlawry. This had not been expected by the delegates in Philadelphia, most of whom assumed that Britain would back down or compromise as in 1766 and 1770. It was not a fatal miscalculation. But it came close.

Of the four states that had been the vanguard colonies of 1774 and 1775, Virginia and Massachusetts retained national leadership after peace came in 1783. Of the first six American presidents, four hailed from Virginia and two from Massachusetts. However, the sectional emphasis that so influenced British war strategy had its effect, leaving the despoiled lower South the poorest part of the new confederation. Sectionalism was baked into the cake of American independence. By the late 1820s, when the six Virginia and Massachusetts presidents had ended their tenures in office, South Carolina, ever combative, had moved to the forefront of a new cause: nullification and eventually secession. Connecticut retained respect but never regained its centrality in those early years when Jonathan Trumbull was the United Colonies’ most dedicated and experienced governor. Because of Trumbull’s political influence, the colony’s many regiments of militia, its cannon, and its strategic location between Boston, Lake Champlain, and New York City, Connecticut played a disproportionate role. Without the temporary coalescence of the vanguard colonies, there might not have been a Revolution.

The 1775 Framework: Politics, Military Success, and Foreign Support

The implication that the United States sprang miraculously into nationhood in 1776—trumpeted, for example, by the phrase
Annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum
(“announcing the birth of the new world order”) on the one-dollar bill—has discouraged attention to our unusual national foundations built in 1774 and 1775. The vital importance and consequences of the victories and achievements during those years have been left untended. My contention is that between the summer of 1774 and the spring of 1776, the Americans won a number of battles and campaigns and achieved a de facto independence that put slow-moving British counterrevolutionary intentions
at a distinct disadvantage from which they never recovered. The Declaration of Independence was a milestone, but only one among several.

The first great battle won by the United Colonies of 1775 might be called the expulsion of British authority. Of the ten appointed royal governors, Gage had been besieged in Boston in 1774, and four others, as we have seen, fled to British warships during the summer of 1775. In October 1775, New York governor William Tryon removed himself to the comfortable merchant ship
Dutchess of Gordon
in New York off Manhattan. In Georgia, Governor James Wright fled to HMS
Scarborough
in February 1776. Patriots delayed taking William Franklin of New Jersey into custody until spring 1776 largely because he was Benjamin Franklin’s son. Governor John Penn of the proprietary family retired to his country home after Pennsylvania abolished his office in mid-1776, but he had been a figurehead. During the spring, the Maryland Convention voted to expel Governor Robert Eden, although he had been liked personally. Scores of lesser officials also left or fled.

British redcoats, too, were nowhere to be seen. Those in upper New York had surrendered in May. The last few companies of redcoats in New York City were marched onto HMS
Asia
during the summer, partly to keep them from deserting. Naval historian David Syrett summed up that “by midsummer of 1775, the ships of the Royal Navy and the enclave at Boston were all that remained of the British empire in America,” by which he meant the thirteen colonies.
¹
The same collapse elicited parliamentary notice in October 1775, when opposition spokesmen noted somewhat flamboyantly that neither Caesar nor Alexander the Great had conquered so much territory in their wars as Lord North had lost in six months.
²

The Patriot faction in 1775 also won the battle to impose new institutions at the grass roots to implement most of what the founders in Philadelphia recommended. The local committees called for in 1774 by the First Continental Congress were elected or appointed rapidly in provinces, save for New York and Georgia. New Englanders elected several hundred town committees, and together with the organizations in more than 100 counties across the middle and southern provinces, these bodies imposed new hands-on political regimes that quickly assumed authority beyond imports, exports, and maritime regulation. By mid-1775, credible local governments were administering no-nonsense loyalty oaths and exercising control of the local militia.

On the provincial level, self-governing Connecticut and Rhode Island did not require structural changes. Elsewhere, local assemblies put themselves into limbo, taking new form as provincial congresses or conventions. In Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the new provincial congresses and conventions of 1775 had many of the same members as the old assemblies. However, even before royal governors were obliged to flee, these new bodies had sidestepped their veto and dissolution powers.

One British military historian, Piers Mackesy, offered a broader, if reluctant, salute. The Revolution’s successful endurance, he argued, lay in how “before the conflict had become an armed rebellion, the dissidents had seized control of the organs of government.” Among other things, they used this control to politicize and wield the militia. The latter, in turn, “secured control of the machinery of authority for the rebels; who stifled early threats of counter-revolution; who defended the civil institutions of the revolution throughout the war; and who restored revolutionary control wherever the British had temporarily overthrown it.”
³

A third early campaign absolutely vital to Patriot success involved bringing sufficient gunpowder and arms to America to support a revolution. Here battle lines had been drawn by late 1774; indeed, most of the early confrontations of 1775 pitted Patriots who were trying to import gunpowder and arms, or to capture them from provincial forts and magazines, against British governors and military commanders who were trying to stop them or working to seize Patriot supplies. The Royal Navy went far afield—virtually blockading the Dutch coast and patrolling West Africa’s slave ports—to stop shipments. But Britain failed. By late 1775, Admiral Samuel Graves admitted that he had been able to stop only a small portion of what was being shipped, and naval historians generally concur.