First Salute (52 page)

Walpole curiously records in a letter to Horace Mann that “Cornwallis’s disgrace does not make a vast impression, none in Parliament, but a drop will overset a vessel that is full to the brim.
Our affairs are certainly dismal and will get worse.” The war was nearing its end, he wrote to his friend, although its consequences were far from conclusion. “In some respects,” he foresaw with a sense of history that went beyond gossip, “they are
commencing a new date which will reach far beyond us.” Parliament was already full to the brim. Following Yorktown, and the loss of St. Eustatius and expectation of further French offensives in the West Indies, with potential further loss of sugar islands and their revenue, a sense of military depression took hold. The will to win, never an overwhelming emotion in the nation, subsided to minor key. The City of London, sensitive to the prospect of prolonged and costly expenditure, petitioned the King to end the war. Country meetings echoed the sentiment. Motions in Parliament urging an end were resisted by the government with smaller and smaller majorities. On December 12, a motion by a private member, Sir James Lowther, that “all further attempts to reduce the revolted colonies are contrary to the true interests of this kingdom,” was voted down by only forty-one, less than half the former majority. In February, Henry Seymour Conway, a former Secretary of State, moved that the war in America “be no longer pursued for the impracticable purpose of reducing the inhabitants by force,” and this was put down by a majority of only one. A week later, a second motion by Conway to the same effect was carried. Implacably, a third time, on March 4, Conway moved to inform the King that “this House will consider as enemies to his Majesty and this country, all those who shall [advise] the farther prosecution of offensive war on the continent of North America.” This rather startling proposition was carried without a vote. It put an end to the matter. To refuse Parliament’s advice was unconstitutional. No lawless monarch, George III knew only that he must stay within the rules. To carry on as before would mean overt conflict with Parliament; he must either comply or step down. He actually drafted a statement of abdication which said that as the Legislature has “totally incapacitated him from either conducting the war with any effect or from obtaining any peace that would not be destructive to the commerce and essential rights of the British nation His Majesty therefore with much sorrow finds he can be of no further Utility to his Native Country which drives him to the painful step of quitting it forever.” In consequence, “His Majesty resigns the Crown of Great Britain and the Dominions appertaining thereto.”

Rather than come to that point, he chose the lesser misery and agreed to drop North and treat for peace. On March 20, 1782, in “
one of the fullest and most tense Houses that had ever been seen,” with the streets outside equally crowded, the First Minister, who for twelve years had placidly presided over the most turbulent times since the Gunpowder Plot, was relieved at last. Given his long-desired and perhaps now ambivalent wish, Lord North resigned. A government of the Opposition took over, with Rockingham, Shelburne, Fox and the young Pitt. On April 25, the Cabinet agreed to negotiate peace terms with no allowance for a veto of independence.

In the interim, the Battle of the Saints had lifted British spirits even at the cost of disturbing Sir Horace Walpole’s sleep. He complained, expressing the Whig view of Rodney, that his windows had been broken by a noisy demonstration “for that vain fool Rodney when he came out of his way to extend his triumph.” The damage in the Battle of the Saints to French naval prestige ensured that the French would not return to America to lend further aid to Washington, which, together with restored British self-confidence won by Rodney, stiffened the British spine in the peace parleys. At the same time, the Americans were stiffened by formal Dutch recognition when the Dutch provinces cautiously, one at a time, voted to accept Adams’ credentials as minister-envoy of the United States and the States General of the United Provinces confirmed the vote in 1782, becoming the first nation after France to register formal recognition of the United States. A British negotiator proposed by Shelburne—a liberal Scots merchant named Richard Oswald, not a figure of political eminence—had been chosen and accredited to the Congress. Issues to be settled were as many and as hard to handle as a barrel of fish. Boundaries of Canada and the regions of the Northwest and of the Spanish territories in Florida and the South, and the perennial problem of treatment of the Loyalists, relations with the Indians, rights of trade and all the debris of military damage to lands and property required infinite discussion. After a preliminary treaty was reached on November 30, 1782, unfinished business was moved to Paris, where Franklin and John Jay negotiated for America. Differences and disputes between them, repeated by their respective partisans in Congress, prolonged the talks, which suffered further from interference of Vergennes in his effort to control the terms to French advantage. Difficulties stretched out the discussions for another ten months. The definitive peace treaty ending hostilities and acknowledging the independence of the United States was not signed until September 3, 1783.

Even then a new nation was not born from the labor pains. To create a national entity with agreed laws under a single sovereignty on a sound financial footing out of thirteen distinct colonies with interests and habits almost as separate as those of the Dutch was a path as rocky as the Revolution itself. Stumbling over the obstacles and amid the conflicts, the infant nation, at times nearly pulled apart by the strains, survived to become a federation that was to take its place among rulers of the world. While shortcomings and imperfections developed in the body as it grew, the body itself was so large and so rich in resources, and above all in the extra energies of newcomers who had had the grit to leave home for an untried land, that its future dominance as a great power was assured.

Long before the Treaty, in 1777, while hostilities were still alive and Britain was blockading ports of entry along the American coast, the
Andrew Doria
, bearer of the first greeting, was burned by her crew in the Delaware to prevent British seizure. Her former companions of the first squadron of the navy and of the first combat, the
Columbus
and the
Providence
, met the same fate, burned or blown up by their crews to prevent seizure by the enemy. The
Cabot
, and the
Alfred
, on which the flag of the Continental Congress was first raised in Philadelphia, were captured by the British. The
Providence
, last survivor of the originals, was destroyed in 1779 in the Penobscot in Maine. When commissioned in 1775, the squadron had been called “the maddest idea in the world.” Now scattered in ruined timbers along the banks of the Delaware and on the shores of Narragansett and Chesapeake bays, the charred relics expressed the note of sadness that lies beneath human affairs.

A private sadness that haunted Washington to the end was in having no child of his own to be his continuance. He had not grasped the fact that an autonomous America was his child. Yet he was as proud and confident of its future as any father could be of a promising son. In an enraptured, if now heartbreaking, vision of America, he said in his Last Circular to the States, issued in June, 1783, that America “seemed to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity. Heaven has crowned its other blessings by giving the fairest opportunity for political happiness than any other nation has ever been favored with and the result must be a nation which would have a meliorating influence on all mankind.”

Following his lead, historians of the 19th century, believers in progress, drew their nation’s history as a steady advance of liberty, starting from
the winning of the Revolution, which was considered the outstanding success in history of a popular military action, while the state it created was seen as having a mission assigned by God to build a model political nation of justice and equality and self-government. At the end of the 20th century we see in that proud design a more somber story, of injustice toward native Americans evicted from their lands, of inequality for those born of different colors and faiths, of government not by the best but by a collection of shoddy and peccant men, inept and corrupt yet always laced with workers and dreamers of a change for the better.

The two centuries of American history since the salute to the flag of the
Andrew Doria
can be celebrated for many things: for the opening of refuge for the wretched of other lands yearning to breathe free, for laws to establish the rules of decent working conditions, for measures to protect the poor and support the indigent, but the state of “human felicity” that Washington believed “must result from the sovereignty of America” has not been the outcome. Two thousand years of human aggression, greed and the madness of power reveal a record that blots the rejoicing of that happy night in Philadelphia, and reminds us how slow is the pace of “melioration” and how mediocre is the best we have made of what Washington and Greene and Morgan and their half-clad soldiers “without the shadow of a blanket” fought through bitter winters to achieve.

If Crévecoeur came again to ask his famous question “What is this new man, this American?” what would he find? The free and equal new man in a new world that he envisaged would be realized only in spots, although conditions for the new man would come nearer to being realized in America than they would ever come in the other overturns of society. The new man would not be endowed with liberty, equality and fraternity in France; he would not be freed from oppression when the Russians overturned the Czars. A new man formed “to serve the people” instead of himself would not be created by the Communist Revolution in China in 1949. Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway “between truth and endless error” the mold of the species is permanent. That is earth’s burden.

THE PERIOD
covered in this book, leaving aside the Dutch excursion, is approximately six years, from 1776 to 1781.

On the several subjects that make up the body of the story, that is to say, the salute to the
Andrew Doria
, the affairs of the Dutch Republic, naval warfare of the period focusing on Admiral Rodney, the American land battles in the South, and finally the long march leading to the siege of Yorktown, the published and unpublished material is far more extensive than I realized when I began, and too much for a standard bibliography. I have offered a limited bibliography of the sources that I used, together with a selection of works that were most useful for my purposes or for anyone interested in further reading.

Sources will be found in the notes located by page number and an identifying phrase from the text. The book title in each case will be found under the author’s name in the bibliography, with an indication of title in case he is responsible for more than one book.

The letter q. stands for material quoted from a secondary source.

Proceedings in the House of Parliament will be found under the given date of the statement in the relevant volume of
Great Britain, Parliament
.

On the
Andrew Doria
the most complete is J. Franklin Jameson’s “St. Eustatius in the American Revolution” and on the beginnings of the American navy, William Bell Clark’s
Naval Documents of the American Revolution
and Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s
John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography
.

On the Dutch Republic, apart from the inevitable John Lathrop Motley, more modern and excellent works on the revolt of the Netherlands and the growth of the nation are Petrus Johannes Blok’s
History of the People of the Netherlands
; C. M. Davies’
The History of Holland and the Dutch Nation
and Charles Boxer’s
The Dutch Seaborne Empire
.

For my period, the most useful by far was Nordholt Schulte’s
The Dutch Republic and American Independence
, which has something of everything.

For Admiral Rodney there are four biographies. The first and foundation work published in 1830, containing the most correspondence, is by Lieutenant-General George B. Mundy, Rodney’s son-in-law, who is said by his editor, George Bilias, to have “taken liberties with the wording” of the letters (preface to vol. I, p. ix of 1972 edition). Mundy was followed, while Rodney was still living, by the biography of a naval writer, David Hannay, published in 1891. Two modern biographies have followed since then, by Captain Donald MacIntyre in 1963 and David Spinney in 1969.

On naval warfare in general, one must begin with Alfred Thayer Mahan’s
The Influence of Sea Power upon History
; an essential study of shipboard life is Tobias Smollett’s novel
Roderick Random
, while the most informative work on management of sail and gunnery is Admiral Morison’s
John Paul Jones
. The most useful histories of naval events in my period are Captain W. M. James’s
The British Navy in Adversity
and Charles Lee Lewis’
Admiral de Grasse and American Independence
. A fine complement is A. B. C. Whipple’s
Age of Fighting Sail
. Limited in subject matter but very readable is Harold A. Larrabee’s
Decision at the Chesapeake
on the Battle of the Bay.