Wednesday, June 7, long known in London by the name of ‘Black Wednesday,’ witnessed a spectacle such as London had never before seen. The long tension, the succession of sleepless nights, the complete triumph of the mob during four days, the proved incapacity of the City authorities to keep the peace, the knowledge that the worst criminals from the gaols were at large, the threatening warnings sent out by the mob that they would destroy the Bank, the prisons, and the palaces, had utterly cowed the people. A camp was formed and cannon were drawn out in Hyde Park. The Berkshire Militia, and soon after the Northumberland Militia, arrived to reinforce the regular troops. Strong guards were stationed at the chief public buildings, at the houses of the ministers, at Devonshire House and Rockingham House, and every important dwelling was barricaded as in a siege, and guarded by armed men. But a great section of London was completely in the hands of the mob. The Lord Mayor and the City magistrates seemed paralysed with fear. Many magistrates had fled from London; the houses of the few who were really active had been plundered or burnt, and all spirit of self-reliance and resistance appeared for the moment to have been extinguished. Fanaticism had but little part in the proceedings of this day; it was outrage and plunder in their most naked forms. Richard Burke, in a letter dated from ‘What was London,’ gives us a vivid picture of the abject terror that was prevailing. ‘This is the fourth day,’ he writes, ‘that the metropolis of England (once of the world) is possessed by an enraged, furious, and numerous enemy. Their outrages are beyond description, and meet with no resistance. … What this night will produce is known only to the Great Disposer of things. … If one could in decency laugh, must one not laugh to see what I saw : a single boy, of fifteen years at most, in Queen Street, mounted on a pent-house demolishing a house with great zeal, but much at his ease, and throwing the pieces to two boys still younger, who burnt them for their amusement, no one daring to obstruct them? Children are plundering at noonday the City of London.’ 1 Three boys, armed with iron bars torn up from Lord Mansfield's house, went down Holborn in the middle of the day shouting ‘No Popery!’ and extorting money from every shop, and they met with no opposition. Small parties of the same kind levied contributions in almost every district, no one daring to resist them, lest the mob should be called down upon their houses. One man on horseback was especially noticed who refused to take anything but gold. Dr. Johnson walked on that day to visit the ruins of Newgate, and he passed a party plundering the sessions house of Old Bailey. They consisted, as he observed, of less than 100 men, and ‘they did their work at leisure, in full security, without sentinels, without trepidation, as men lawfully employed in full day.’ 2
In the afternoon the shops were shut. ‘No Popery!’ was chalked upon the shutters, and bits of blue silk were hung out from almost every house. Rumours of the most terrible kind were circulated through the town. It was reported that the mob had threatened to let loose the lunatics from Bedlam and the lions from the Tower; that the French had organised the whole movement in order that the destruction of London, and especially of the Bank, might produce a national bankruptcy; that the soldiers had been tampered with, and would refuse to fire on the people. The Duke of Grafton gives a curious illustration of the universality of the alarm, in the fact that even the servants of the Secretary of State wore blue cockades to conciliate the mob.
In the evening, scenes more terrible than any that had yet been witnessed took place. The King's Bench Prison, the Fleet Prison, the new Bridewell, the watch-houses in Kent Street near St. George's Church, the toll-gates on Blackfriars Bridge, and a great number of private houses, were simultaneously in flames. From a single point thirty-six distinct conflagrations were counted. The tall pinnacles of fire rising like volcanoes in the air, the shouts of the populace, the blaze reflected in the waters of the Thames, the shrieks of women, mingling with the crackling of the flames, with the crash of falling buildings, and, from time to time, with the sound of musketry as the troops fired in platoons into the crowd, all combined to form, in the words of an eye-witness, a perfect ‘picture of a city sacked and abandoned to a ferocious enemy.’ The rioters had seized large supplies of arms in the artillery grounds, and the great number of felons who were now in their ranks gave an additional desperation to the conflict. It was noticed that a brewer's boy, riding on a horse strangely decorated with chains from Newgate, led the most daring party. Under his guidance they attempted to capture and burn the Bank of England; but a strong body of soldiers, under the command of Colonel Holroyd, repelled them with the loss of many lives, and they were in like manner defeated in an attempt upon the Pay Office.
The riots were fortunately localised. The worst conflagrations were in Queen Street, Little Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and Holborn. Chains drawn across the Strand and Holborn, and protected by lines of soldiers, prevented the mob from passing westwards; but Charing Cross, the Haymarket, and Piccadilly were illuminated through fear. Strange to say, in the unmolested parts of the town the ordinary amusements still went on, and Horace Walpole notices that on this dreadful night Lady Ailesbury was at the play in the Haymarket, and that his four nieces were with the Duke of Gloucester at Ranelagh. 1 The night was fortunately very calm, and the sky was clear, and glowing with the reflected flames, save where dark volumes of ascending smoke from time to time overspread it. The streets in the quarters where the riot was at its height were thronged with idle spectators—many of them women with infants in their arms—gazing on the scene, and mixing with terror-stricken fugitives who were endeavouring to save some portion of their property. Spectators were, in most places, in little danger; for the rioters were busily engaged, and they might be distinctly seen by the glare of the flames pursuing their work of plunder and demolition, for the most part entirely undisturbed, in the midst of the burning houses. Wraxall went through a great part of the disturbed district on foot, without the smallest hindrance, and he noticed that as he stood with his companions by the wall of St. Andrew's churchyard, near the spot where the fiercest conflagration was raging, a watchman with a lantern in his hand passed by, calling the hour as in a time of profound tranquillity.
The resistance was confined to a few points. Some attempts were made to extinguish the flames, but they were baffled by the mob. A large engine was brought to play upon the Fleet Prison; but, in spite of the presence of soldiers, the rioters cut off its pipes and flung it into the flames. At Blackfriars Bridge, when the toll-gates were plundered, the soldiers fired with considerable effect. Many rioters were killed; one man was noticed to run thirty or forty yards, when pierced by a bullet, before he dropped dead; and several, when dead or dying, are said to have been thrown by their comrades into the Thames. Others were killed in the attack on the King's Bench Prison; but the greater number fell in the unsuccessful attacks on the Bank and on the Pay Office. The most terrible scene, however, took place near the decline of Holborn Hill, in front of St. Andrew's Church, where the buildings of a great Catholic distiller, named Langdale, were attacked and burnt. Immense casks of unrectified spirits, still wholly unfit for human consumption, were staved in, and the spirits flowed in great streams along the road, while men, women, and children gathered it up in pails or lapped it with their hands. Such a scene of drunken madness had perhaps never before been exhibited in England. Numbers, both of men and women, killed themselves by drinking the poisonous draught. Women with infants in their arms were seen lying insensible along the road. Soon the fire reached the spirits, and it leapt forth, with a tenfold fury, in the midst of the reeling and dizzy crowd who were plundering the house. Numbers fell into the burning ruins, or into the midst of the liquid fire. Eight or nine wretched creatures were dragged out when half-burnt, but most of those who fell perished by one of the most horrible of deaths.
The night of June 7 was the end of all that was serious in the Gordon riots. The defeat of the attacks upon the Bank and the Pay Office, and the terrible scene on Holborn Hill, had broken the spirits and power of the rioters, while the introduction into London of large bodies of regular troops and of militia had made further resistance impossible. In addition to the permanent debility and indeed impotence of the London police force, and to the incompetence of the Lord Mayor and of several of the City magistrates, other causes combined to paralyse the civil power. The military forces at the disposal of the Crown were diminished by the exigencies of the great war which was raging in America. The ministry of Lord North was already tottering to its fall, and its weakness enfeebled every branch of the Executive, while the recollection of the furious outbursts of popular indignation which had been aroused against those who employed soldiers in suppressing the Wilkes riots in 1769 made both magistrates and ministers extremely timid. 1 As Lord Mansfield once said with profound truth, ‘It is the highest humanity to check the infancy of tumults,’ and a well-directed volley on the first day of the riots, though it would have exposed the Government to much foolish declamation, would probably have prevented all the horrible scenes that ensued. It is a curious fact that Wilkes, who had been the instigator or the pretext of the last great riots in London, took, as alderman, a distinguished and courageous part in suppressing the Gordon riots, in defending the Bank, and in protecting the Catholics, and he received the special thanks of the Privy Council for his services.
No one, however, in this trying period appeared in a more honourable light than the King. The calm courage which he never failed to show, and his extreme tenacity of purpose, which in civil affairs often proved very mischievous, were in the moments of crisis peculiarly valuable. Many lives and a vast amount of property had been sacrificed because no officer dared to allow his soldiers to fire except by the direction of a magistrate, and after the Riot Act had been read, and a whole hour had elapsed. Such an interpretation of the law made the display of soldiers in the midst of burning houses and in the agonies of a great struggle little more than a mockery, and the King strongly contested it. On the 7th he called of his own accord a meeting of the Privy Council, and obtained from Wedderburn, the Attorney-General, an opinion that, if a mob were committing a felony, such as burning down a house, and could not be prevented by any other means, the military might and ought to fire on them at once, and that the reading of the Riot Act under such circumstances was wholly unnecessary. Much hesitation appears to have been shown in the Council, but the King, declaring that at least one magistrate would do his duty, announced his intention of acting on his own responsibility, on the opinion of Wedderburn, and his readiness, if any difficulty were shown, to lead his guards in person. The Council at length agreed with the opinion, and a discretionary power was given to the soldiers, which, though it was much complained of by some constitutional pedants, was manifestly necessary, and was the chief means of suppressing the riots. 1
In the course of the four days during which the riots were at their height no less than seventy-two private houses and four gaols were destroyed. 2 Of the number of the rioters who were killed it is impossible to speak with accuracy. No account was made of those who died of drink, who perished in the ruins or in the burning spirits, who were thrown into the Thames, or who were carried away when wounded and concealed in their own homes. Excluding these, it appears from a report issued by Amherst shortly after the suppression of the riots, that 285 had been killed or had died of their wounds, and that 173 wounded prisoners were still in his hands. In the opinion of the most competent judges the whole city had been in imminent danger of destruction, and owed its escape mainly to the fact that the mob at the time when it would have been impossible to have resisted them, wasted their strength upon chapels and private buildings, instead of at once attacking the Bank and the public offices, and also to the happy accident that on the night of the 7th there was scarcely a breath of wind to spread the flames. 135 prisoners were soon after brought to trial, and 59 were capitally convicted, of whom 21 were executed. Lord George Gordon was thrown into the Tower, and was tried before Lord Mansfield on the charge of high treason for levying war upon the Crown. The charge was what is termed by lawyers ‘constructive treason.’ It rested upon the assertion that the agitation which he had created and led was the originating cause of the outrages that had taken place. As there was no evidence that Lord George Gordon had anticipated these outrages, as he had taken no part in them, and had even offered his services to the Government to assist in their suppression, the accusation was one which, if it had been maintained, would have had consequences very dangerous to public liberty. After one of the greatest speeches of Erskine, Lord George Gordon was acquitted, and he still retained such a hold over large classes that thanksgivings were publicly offered up in several churches and chapels. He was many years after thrown into prison for a libel upon Marie Antoinette, and he died in Newgate in 1793. Before the close of his life he startled his theological admirers by his conversion to Judaism. 1
In the House of Commons a series of resolutions were introduced by Burke with the concurrence of the Government, vindicating the recent Relief Bill, and condemning the misrepresentations which had led to the tumults. An attempt was made to allay the fears of the more fanatical Protestants by a Bill introduced by Sir George Savile forbidding Catholics from taking any part in the education of Protestants; but though it passed the Commons, it miscarried in the Lords.
The riots of 1780 do not properly belong to the period of time with which the present chapter is occupied; but it is the plan of this book to prefer the order of subjects to the order of chronology, and these disturbances were the immediate consequence of the religious legislation under Lord North. Making every allowance for the amount of ordinary crime which entered into them, and considering how slight was the provocation that produced them, they display a depth and intensity of fanaticism we should scarcely have expected in the eighteenth century; and similar disturbances, though on a much smaller scale, took place at Hull, Bristol, and Bath. The disgrace was keenly felt both at home and abroad. 1 Secret negotiations for peace were at this time going on with Spain, and it was noticed that the reports of the riots in London greatly interfered with them, for the no-Popery fanaticism in London irritated the public opinion of Spain, while the success of the rioters was thought clearly to prove the weakness of the Government. 1 ‘Our danger,’ wrote Gibbon shortly after the suppression, ‘is at an end, but our disgrace will be lasting, and the month of June 1780 will ever be marked by a dark and diabolical fanaticism which I had supposed to be extinct.’ 2 To a writer of the nineteenth century, however, the lesson to be derived from the narrative is not altogether a gloomy one. Whatever judgment may be formed in other respects in the old controversy between those who regard the history of modern England as a history of unqualified progress, and those who regard it in its most essential features as a history of decay, there is at least one fact which no serious student of the eighteenth century will dispute. It is, that the immense changes which have taken place in the past century in the enlargement of personal and political liberty, and in the mitigation of the penal code, have been accompanied by an at least equal progress in the maintenance of public order and in the security of private property in England.
The Government of Lord North during the period preceding the great outbreak of the American war was almost wholly occupied with domestic, Indian, and colonial questions, and neither exercised nor aspired to exercise any considerable influence on the affairs of other nations. The Revolution, which in 1772 changed the Constitution of Sweden, breaking the power of the aristocracy and aggrandising that of the Crown, was effected, in a great measure, under French instigation, and England had no voice in the infamous treaty which in the same year sanctioned the first partition of Poland, or in the treaty of Kainardji in 1774, by which Russia made the Crimea a separate khanate, and greatly extended both her own frontier and her influence in Turkey.
In 1772 the Government had to contend with a keen commercial crisis and a period of acute and general distress. In many parts of England there were desperate food riots. Several banks broke, and a widespread panic prevailed. 1 But in Parliament the Government continued for some years invincibly strong, and its Indian policy and the earlier parts of its American policy appear to have been generally regarded either with approval or with indifference. In 1774 Parliament was dissolved shortly before the natural period of its existence had expired; and the American measures of the Government, if they had been seriously unpopular in the constituencies, would certainly have affected the elections. The election, however, fully confirmed the ministerial majority. 2 In the first important party division on an American question that followed the dissolution the ministers counted 264 votes to 73. 1 The Reform spirit appeared to have almost died away. Grenville's Act for the trial of disputed elections was, it is true, renewed and made perpetual in 1774, in spite of the opposition of Lord North; but different motions for shortening the duration of Parliament, and for making its constitution more popular, were rejected without difficulty, and appear to have excited no interest. The city of Westminster supported the ministers, and the democratic fervour of the City of London had greatly subsided. Wilkes found rivals and bitter enemies in Horne and Townshend; but at last, after two disappointments, he became Lord Mayor of London in 1774, and in the election of the same year he without opposition regained his seat as member for Middlesex. He made some good speeches against the policy of the Government in America, but his position in Parliament was never a distinguished one, and he soon abandoned the character and the practices of an agitator.
All the measures of American coercion that preceded the Declaration of Independence were carried by enormous majorities in Parliament. The Act for closing Boston harbour passed its chief stages without even a division. The Act for subverting the charter of Massachusetts was finally carried in the House of Commons by 239 to 64, in the House of Lords by 92 to 20. The Act for enabling the Governor of Massachusetts to send colonists accused on capital charges to be tried in England, was ultimately carried in the Commons by 127 to 24, in the Lords by 43 to 12. The motion for repealing the tea duty, which was supported by one of the greatest speeches of Burke, was rejected by 182 to 49. In February 1775 the address moved by Lord North, pledging Parliament to support the Government in crushing the resistance in America, was carried by 296 to 106, and an amendment of Fox, censuring the American policy of the ministers, was rejected by 304 to 105. In March the conciliatory propositions of Burke were defeated by the previous question, which was carried by 270 to 78. In May the very respectful remonstrance of the General Assembly of New York, which was one of the last efforts of conciliation by the moderate party in America, was censured by the House of Commons as ‘inconsistent with the legislative authority of Parliament,’ by 186 to 67. The Duke of Grafton had urged in the Cabinet the repeal of the tea duty, but had been outvoted. He still remained for some time in the ministry, trying in vain to modify its policy in the direction of conciliation. In August 1775 he wrote a strong remonstrance to Lord North on the subject. Seven weeks later he resigned the Privy Seal and went into opposition, declaring in Parliament that he had hitherto ‘concurred when he could not approve, from a hope that in proportion to the strength of the Government would be the probability of amicable adjustment,’ and recommending the repeal of all Acts relating to America which had been carried since 1763. But although Grafton had very lately been Prime Minister of England, he did not, according to Walpole, carry six votes with him in his secession. 1 The resignation of Conway, which immediately followed, proved even less important. Dartmouth, who had hitherto directed American affairs, obtained the Privy Seal, and he was replaced by Lord George Germaine, better known under the name of Lord George Sackville, who had never overcome the stigma which his conduct at Minden had left upon his reputation, but who was an able administrator, and a still more able debater. He speedily infused a new energy into the direction of American affairs, and the enlistment of the German troops appears to have been principally due to him. The Opposition in the beginning of 1776 was almost contemptible in numbers, and at the same time divided and discredited. The Duke of Richmond in one House, and Burke in the other, were the steadiest and most powerful opponents of the American policy of the Government, and they had been recently joined by Charles Fox, who had been dismissed from the ministry in February 1774, and had at once thrown himself with a passionate vehemence into opposition.
His secession, like most acts of his early life, was very discreditable in its circumstances. A libel on the Speaker, written by Horne, had been brought under the notice of the House of Commons. Lord North, with his usual moderation, would gladly have suffered the matter to drop; but one of the members insisted on Woodfall, the printer, appearing before the House, and it was moved, upon his apology, that he should be committed to the Sergeant-at-Arms. North, after some hesitation, agreed to this course; but Charles Fox, who was at this time a Commissioner of the Treasury, in opposition to the known wishes of his chief moved that Woodfall should be committed to Newgate, declared that he selected this gaol in defiance of the City and Sheriffs, in whose jurisdiction it lay, and insisted on carrying his motion to a division. Lord North, perplexed, irresolute, and embarrassed by a previous speech in which he had leaned towards severity, voted with his turbulent subordinate; but most of the ministerial party were on the other side, and the motion of Fox was rejected by 152 to 68. Such an act of glaring insubordination could not be passed over. The King wrote next day, with much indignation, ‘I am greatly incensed at the presumption of Charles Fox in obliging you to vote with him last night, but approve much of your making your friends vote in the majority; indeed, that young man has so thoroughly cast off every principle of common honour and honesty that he must become as contemptible as he is odious, and I hope you will let him know that you are not insensible of his conduct towards you.’ 1 About ten days later Lord North curtly dismissed Fox, who thus, at the age of twenty-five, was finally severed from the Tories.
He did not for some years formally attach himself to any section of the Whigs; 2 but he passed at once from an extreme Tory into virulent and unqualified opposition to his former chief, and he was conspicuous beyond all other speakers for his attacks upon the American policy of the Government. It must be acknowledged, however, that he never appears when in office to have taken any active part in defending the American policy of the Government, that this policy only attained its full distinctness and prominence after his dismissal, and that his father had from the first disapproved of the taxation of America. 3 From an early period of his life, Fox seems to have had some intimacy with Burke, 4 and the conversation of that extraordinary man profoundly influenced his opinions. The sincerity of his opposition to the American war never appears to have been seriously questioned, and it is confirmed by the great sacrifices of popularity he made in the cause, and by the strong internal evidence of his speeches and letters. The circumstances of his secession, his extreme youth, and the extravagant dissipation in which he at this time indulged, 1 deprived him of all the weight that attaches to character; but his extraordinary debating skill developed rapidly in opposition, and Grattan, who had heard him speak in many periods of his career, considered his speeches during the American war the most brilliant he ever delivered. 2
The division of opinion in the country upon the American question was probably much more equal than in Parliament, and it is also much more difficult to estimate with accuracy; but it appears to me evident that in 1775 and in 1776 the preponderating opinion, or at least the opinion of the most powerful and most intelligent classes in the community, on American questions was with the King and with his ministers. In February 1775, Lord Camden wrote, ‘I am grieved to observe that the landed interest is almost altogether anti-American, though the common people hold the war in abhorrence, and the merchants and tradesmen, for obvious reasons, are likewise against it.’ 3 The Established Church was strenuously anti-American, and the Bishops voted steadily for the measures of coercion. 4 The two Universities presented addresses on the same side, and the addresses from the great towns in favour of the Government were both more numerous and more largely signed than those which opposed it. Manchester, which was still, as in 1745, a great centre of English Toryism, led the way; 1 while on the other hand, ‘the majority of the inhabitants of the great trading cities of London and Bristol still wished and struggled to have matters restored to their ancient state.’ 2 It was said, however, with some truth, that the opposition of the merchants was mainly an opposition of interest, and the opposition of the City an opposition of faction, and it was acknowledged by the warmest advocates of the Americans that the trading classes on this question were greatly divided, and the bulk of them exceedingly languid in their opposition. The cessation of the Turkish war and of the troubles in Poland had revived trade, and the loss of American commerce was not yet sensibly felt, while the supply of the army in America and the equipment of new ships of war had given a sudden stimulus to the transport trade and to many branches of English industry. 3 The stress of legal opinion in every stage of the controversy appears to have been hostile to the Americans, and, in 1776, Horace Walpole emphatically declared that ‘the Court have now at their devotion the three great bodies of the clergy, army, and law.’ 4 The general English opinion, which at the time of the repeal of the Stamp Act had been very favourable to the colonists, appears to have turned. There was a strong feeling of indignation at the recent proceedings in America; a general belief that, as a matter of patriotism, Government ought now to be supported, even though some of its past acts had been culpable; a widespread anticipation that by a little decision all resistance might be overcome, that the civil war might still be averted, or that at least it might be terminated in a single campaign.
The great strength of the Opposition lay in the Nonconformist bodies, who were in general earnestly and steadily in favour of the Americans. The ‘Essay on Liberty,’ by Dr. Price, which was published in 1775, was a powerful defence of their cause, and it identified it very skilfully with the cause of constitutional liberty and of parliamentary reform at home. In two years it passed through eight editions, and in the judgment of Walpole it was ‘the first publication on that side that made any impression.’ 1 But though the majority of the old Dissenters were staunch supporters of the Americans, even in their ranks there was some languor and division, 2 while a large section of the Methodists, as we have already seen, took the other side. The tract of John Wesley against the American pretensions had an enormous circulation. Lord Dartmouth was one of the most conspicuous laymen in the Evangelical religious world; and Cowper, the great poet of the movement, believed that the King would be committing a sin if he acknowledged the independence of America. Literary opinion was, on the whole, anti-American. The views of Junius, of Adam Smith, and of Dean Tucker have been already given. Dr. Johnson was a leading pamphleteer in support of the Government. Gibbon in Parliament steadily supported Lord North, and Robertson, though somewhat timidly, leaned to the same side. Hume, however, though in most of his sympathies a decided Tory, was one of the very few men who as early as 1775 agreed cordially with Burke that the attempt to coerce America could lead to nothing but disaster and ruin. 1
The confidential letters of Burke throw much valuable light on the condition of English opinion on the American question, and they are full of bitter complaints of the languor or alienation even of the natural supporters of the Whig party. In January 1775, describing the failure of his friends to arrest the American measures of the ministry, he says: ‘The mercantile interest, which ought to have supported with efficacy and power the opposition to the fatal cause of all this mischief, was pleaded against us, and we were obliged to stoop under the accumulated weight of all the interests in this kingdom. I never remember the opposition so totally abandoned as on that occasion.’ 2 In the August of the same year, he writes with great bitterness to Rockingham: ‘As to the good people of England, they seem to partake every day more and more of the character of that Administration which they have been induced to tolerate. I am satisfied that within a few years there has been a great change in the national character. We seem no longer that eager, inquisitive, jealous, fiery people which we have been formerly. … No man commends the measures which have been pursued, or expects any good from those which are in preparation, but it is a cold, languid opinion, like what men discover in affairs that do not concern them. … The merchants are gone from us and from themselves. … The leading men among them are kept full fed with contracts and remittances and jobs of all descriptions, and are indefatigable in their endeavours to keep the others quiet. … They all, or the greatest number of them, begin to snuff the cadaverous haut goût of lucrative war. War is indeed become a sort of substitute for commerce. The freighting business never was so lively, on account of the prodigious taking up for transport service. Great orders for provisions and stores of all kinds … keep up the spirits of the mercantile world, and induce them to consider the American war not so much their calamity as their resource in an inevitable distress.’ 1 ‘The real fact,’ he wrote a month later, ‘is that the generality of the people of England are now led away by the misrepresentations and arts of the Ministry, the Court and their abettors, so that the violent measures towards America are fairly adopted and countenanced by a majority of individuals of all ranks, professions, or occupations in this country,’ and he complains that the Opposition were compelled ‘to face a torrent not merely of ministerial and Court power, but also of almost general opinion.’ 2
The party in England, however, that favoured the Americans, though it could not shatter the Government, was quite sufficiently strong to encourage the colonists, and many of its members threw themselves into their cause with the most passionate ardour. It is easy to imagine the effect that must have been produced on the excited minds beyond the Atlantic by the language of Chatham in his great speech in January 1775. The spirit which resists your taxation in America.’ he said, ‘is the same that formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money in England. … This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence, and who will die in defence of their rights as freemen. … For myself, I must declare that in all my reading and observation—and history has been my favourite study: I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world—that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. … All attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.’
In accordance with these sentiments Chatham withdrew his eldest son from the army rather than suffer him to be engaged in the war. 1 Lord Effingham for the same reason threw up his commission, and Amherst is said to have refused the command against the Americans. 2 In 1776 the question was openly debated in Parliament whether British officers ought to serve their sovereign against the Americans, and no less a person than General Conway leaned decidedly to the negative, and compared the case to that of French officers who were employed in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. 3 The Duke of Richmond, after the battle of Bunker's Hill, declared in Parliament that ‘he did not think that the Americans were in rebellion, but that they were resisting acts of the most unexampled cruelty and oppression.’ 1 The Corporation of London in 1775 drew up an address strongly approving of their resistance, 2 and the addresses of several other towns expressed similar views. A great meeting in London, and also the guild of merchants in Dublin, returned thanks to Lord Effingham for his recent conduct, and in 1776 the freedom of the City was conferred on Dr. Price, on account of his defence of the Americans. 3 An English subscription—though a very small one—was raised for the relief of the Americans who were wounded at Lexington, and for the relatives of those who had been killed, 4 and in 1777 Horne was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and to a fine of 200 l . for publishing an advertisement of the Constitutional Society, accusing the English troops in that battle of murder. 5 When Montgomery fell at the head of the American troops in the invasion of Canada, he was eulogised in the British Parliament as if he had been the most devoted servant of the Crown. 6
With scarcely an exception the whole political representation of Scotland in both Houses of Parliament supported Lord North, and was bitterly hostile to the Americans. Scotland, however, is one of the very few instances in history, of a nation whose political representation was so grossly defective as not merely to distort but absolutely to conceal its opinions. It was habitually looked upon as the most servile and corrupt portion of the British Empire; and the eminent liberalism and the very superior political qualities of its people seem to have been scarcely suspected to the very eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. That something of that liberalism existed at the outbreak of the American war, may, I think, be inferred from the very significant fact that the Government were unable to obtain addresses in their favour either from Edinburgh or Glasgow. 1 The country, however, was judged mainly by its representatives, and it was regarded as far more hostile to the American cause than either England or Ireland. A very able observer, when complaining of the apathy and lassitude with which the American policy of the Government was generally regarded, adds, ‘We must except from all these observations the people of North Britain, who almost to a man, so far as they could be described or distinguished under any particular denomination, not only applauded, but proffered life and fortune in support of the present measures.’ 2
‘In Ireland,’ says the same writer, ‘though those in office and the principal nobility and gentry declared against America, by far the majority of the Protestant inhabitants there, who are strenuous and declared Whigs, strongly leaned to the cause of the colonies.’ 3 ‘There are three million Whigs in America,’ said Chatham, in 1775, ‘and all Ireland is Whig, and many in England.’ 1 Protestant Ireland was indeed far more earnestly enlisted on the side of the Americans than any other portion of the Empire. Emigrants from Ulster formed a great part of the American army, and the constitutional question of the independence of the Irish Parliament was closely connected with the American question. The movement of opinion, however, was confined to the Protestants. The Catholic gentry, on this as on all other occasions of national danger, presented addresses to the King attesting in strong terms their loyalty, but the mass of the Catholic population were politically dead, and can hardly be said to have contributed anything to the public opinion of the country.
One remarkable fact, however, was noticed both in England and Ireland. There was a complete absence of alacrity and enthusiasm in enlisting for the army and navy. 2 This was one of the chief reasons why Germans were so largely enlisted, and it is the more remarkable because Irish Catholics were now freely admitted into the service. For a long time the system of enrolling soldiers, and still more the system of enrolling sailors, had excited much discontent, and the legality of press-gangs had very lately been brought into question. The impressing for the navy rested rather on immemorial custom than on positive law, and it was pronounced by lawyers to be a part of the common law. 3 The impressing for the army was more rarely resorted to, but a statute of Anne authorised magistrates within their specified limits to impress for the army such able-bodied men as did not follow any lawful calling and had not some other support, and several subsequent Acts continued the system for limited periods. A special clause exempted such as had votes for members of Parliament from liability to impressment. 1 In 1757, a gentleman of property having been pressed and confined in the Savoy, his friends applied for an immediate writ of Habeas Corpus, under the well-known Act of Charles II. The question was not determined, as the gentleman was released by order of the Secretary of War; but the judges who were consulted all pronounced that this Act only applied to those who had committed or were accused of committing a criminal offence, and that a man accused of no crime could not claim its protection. A Bill was introduced in the beginning of 1758 to remedy this strange anomaly, but it was thrown out by the instrumentality of Lord Hardwicke, 2 and this extension of the Habeas Corpus Act was only granted in 1816. 3
The enormous cruelty and injustice of the impressment for the navy, as it was actually carried on, can hardly be exaggerated, and it seemed doubly extraordinary in a country which was so proud of its freedom. ‘Impressment,’ as has been truly said, ‘is the arbitrary and capricious seizure of individuals from the general body of citizens. It differs from conscription as a particular confiscation differs from a general tax.’ 4 Voltaire was much struck with this feature of English life, and he drew a vivid picture of a boatman on the Thames boasting to him one day of the glories of English freedom and declaring that he would sooner be a sailor in England than an archbishop in France, the next day with irons on his feet, begging money through the gratings of the prison into which he had been thrown without the imputation of any crime, and where he must remain till the ship was ready which was to carry him to the Baltic. In a system so violent and so arbitrary, all kinds of abuses were practised. As we have already seen, the press-gang was often employed to drag Methodist preachers from a work which the magistrates disliked. It was sometimes employed to avenge private grudges. It was thus that Fielding represents Lord Fellamar endeavouring to get rid of his rival by employing a lieutenant to press him. On one occasion in 1770 a marriage ceremony in St. Olave's, Southwark, was interrupted by a press-gang, who burst into the church, struck the clergyman, and tried to carry away the bridegroom. 1 As merchant ships came in from America, and the sailors looked forward, after their long voyage, to see once more their wives and children, a danger more terrible than that of the sea awaited them, for it was a common thing for ships of war to lie in wait for the returning vessels, in order to board them and to press their sailors before they landed. 2 Often the press-gang went down to some great sea-port and boarded all the merchant ships lying at anchor, in order to collect sailors for the royal navy. 3
They were sometimes fiercely resisted. On one occasion in 1770, 110 impressed seamen who were being carried down the Thames in a tender, broke open the hatches, overpowered the officers and crew, ran the tender aground on the coast of Essex, and thus succeeded in escaping. 4 On another, when the sailors of a merchant vessel, which was lying off Gravesend, saw the boat of a ship-of-war approaching, they seized all the arms on board and drove off their assailants with a loss of one man killed and of several dangerously wounded. 1 In 1779 a man was hanged at Stafford for killing one of those who were endeavouring to press him, and a party of sailors were tried at Ipswich for the murder of a publican in whose house they were impressing sailors, but were acquitted on account of the impossibility of ascertaining who struck the blow. 2
Of the vast sum of private misery produced by the system it is difficult to form an adequate estimate. One case—which was probably but one of many—happened to attract considerable attention on account of its being mentioned in Parliament by Sir William Meredith, in 1777. A sailor had been taken in the press that followed the alarm about the Falkland Islands, and carried away, leaving a wife who was then not nineteen, with two infant children. The breadwinner being gone, his goods were seized for an old debt, and his wife was driven into the streets to beg. At last, in despair she stole a piece of coarse linen from a linendraper's shop. Her defence, which was fully corroborated, was that ‘she had lived in credit and wanted for nothing till a press-gang came and stole her husband from her, but since then she had no bed to lie on, nothing to give her children to eat, and they were almost naked. She might have done something wrong, for she hardly knew what she did.’ The lawyers declared that shop-lifting being a common offence, she must be executed, and she was driven to Tyburn with a child still suckling at her breast. 3
Even worse than the authorised system was the illicit pressing for the East India Company. Great numbers of young men were inveigled or kidnapped by crimps in its service, confined often for long periods, and with circumstances of the most aggravated cruelty, in secret depôts which existed in the heart of London, and at last, in the dead of night, shipped for Hindostan. Several cases of this kind were detected in the latter part of the eighteenth century by the escape of prisoners, and it was evident that the system was practised on a large scale. 1
The regular press-gang was not confined to England, and it formed one of the gravest and most justifiable grievances of the American colonists. As early as 1747, one of the most terrible riots ever known in New England was produced by the seizure of some Boston sailors by the press-gang of Admiral Knowles. An English vessel was burnt. English officers were seized and imprisoned by the crowd. The Governor was obliged to take refuge in the Castle. The sub-sheriff was impounded in the stocks, the militia refused to act against the people, and the Admiral was ultimately obliged to release his captives. 2 A similar resistance was shown to many subsequent attempts to impress in New England, 3 and one of the first and ablest writers against the system was Benjamin Franklin. In England a great opposition was raised in the City of London in 1770 and 1771, at the time of the great press for seamen which was made when a war with Spain about the Falkland Islands appeared imminent. Press warrants in the City were only legal when backed by an alderman, and Crosby the Lord Mayor, and most of the aldermen refused to back them. Wilkes and Sawbridge, in their capacity of aldermen, dismissed some men who had been pressed in the City. A press-gang, which was beating a drum through the City, was brought before the Lord Mayor and reprimanded; and at a great meeting in Westminster Hall, at which both Wilkes and Sawbridge spoke, impressment was denounced as a violation of the Constitution. 1 The agitation, however, did not spread. The attempts which had been made more than once since the Revolution to make impressing unnecessary, by a system of additional bounties and pensions, and by the formation of a reserve, 2 had not succeeded, and it is remarkable that the legality and absolute necessity of impressment were at this time strongly asserted by three such different authorities as Chatham, Mansfield, and Junius. 3
In the great difficulty of obtaining voluntary recruits for the American war, the press for sailors was very largely resorted to, and in 1776 it was especially fierce. In less than a month 800 men were seized in London alone, and several lives were lost in the scuffles that took place. 4
While these means were employed for recruiting the navy, others of an equally questionable kind were found necessary for filling the vacancies in the army. I have noticed in a former chapter that it had been a common thing for press-gangs for the navy to hang about the prison-gates and seize criminals whose sentences had just expired, and this was not the only way in which the gaols were made to furnish their contingent for the defence of the country. Two or three Acts in favour of insolvent debtors had been passed, granting them their liberty on condition of enlisting in the army or navy, and in 1702 a system had begun which continued up to the time of the Peninsular war, of permitting criminals, who were undergoing their sentence, to pass into the army. 1 In the beginning of the American war, this system appears to have been much extended. The usual manner of disposing of criminals under sentence of transportation had hitherto been to send them to America, where they were sold as slaves to the planters; but the war that had just broken out rendered this course impossible. For a time the Government was in great perplexity. The gaols were crowded with prisoners whose sentence it was impossible to execute. The governors of the African colonies protested against the introduction of a criminal element among them. An Act was, it is true, passed, authorising the punishment of hard labour in England as a substitute for transportation to ‘any of his Majesty's colonies and plantations,’ and galleys were set up in the Thames where criminals, under sentence of transportation, were employed in hard labour. 2 But it soon occurred to the Government that able-bodied criminals might be more usefully employed in the coercion of the revolted colonists, 3 and there is reason to believe that large numbers of criminals, of all but the worst category, passed at this time into the English army and navy. In estimating the light in which British soldiers were regarded in America, and in estimating the violence and misconduct of which British soldiers were sometimes guilty, this fact must not be forgotten. It is indeed a curious thing to notice how large a part of the reputation of England in the world rests upon the achievements of a force which was formed mainly out of the very dregs of her population, and to some considerable extent even out of her criminal classes. 1
The difficulty of procuring voluntary recruits for the army and navy seems to show that, if the bulk of the poorer population of the country did not actively sympathise with the Americans, a war with a people of their own race and language had at least no popularity among them. In concluding this review of the condition of English opinion in 1776, a few words must be added about the relations of the American contest to English party principles. Chatham, as we have seen, invariably maintained that the American cause was essentially the cause of the Whigs. In his great speech in the beginning of 1775 he asserted that ‘the great fundamental maxim’ of the British Constitution is, ‘that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent,’ and that ‘to maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other side of the Atlantic and on this.’ In December 1777, when the war had been long declared, he extolled the Americans as ‘Whigs in principle and heroes in conduct,’ and he openly expressed his wish for their success. Like the Whigs, the Americans made the full development of civil liberty, and especially the defence of the great Whig principle that taxation and representation are inseparably connected, the main object of their policy, and the highly democratic character of their political constitutions lay at the root of their resistance. Public meetings, instructions to members, all the forms of political agitation that had of late years grown up in England, were employed by the popular party in America. On the other hand, all who esteemed licentiousness rather than despotism the great danger of England, all who disliked the development of the popular element in the Constitution, all whose natural leaning was towards authority, repression, and prerogative, gravitated to the anti-American side. In America the supporters of the English Government were invariably called Tories. In England the King, the followers of Bute, and the whole body of Tories, were ultimately enlisted against the Americans, while the support of their cause became more and more the bond of union between the Whigs who followed Chatham and the Whigs who followed Rockingham. By a true political instinct the clergy of the Established Church and the country gentry, who were the natural supporters of Toryism, were generally ranged on one side, and the Dissenters and the commercial class on the other.
So far the party lines of the American question appear very clear; but on the other hand, Grenville, who began the policy of taxing America, always called himself a Whig, he defended his measure by Whig arguments, and he strenuously maintained that the bulk of the party, in supporting the Americans, had deserted the orthodox traditions of their policy. The Whigs were the hereditary champions of the rights of Parliament, and it was the power of Parliament that was in question. The Whigs had made it one of their first objects to make the Sovereign dependent on Parliament for his supplies, and they were therefore bound to look with peculiar jealousy on a theory according to which supplies might be raised by requisition from the Crown, and for other than local purposes, by Assemblies over which Parliament had no control. The Whigs were the natural opponents of all extensions of the royal prerogative, and they could not with any consistency admit that the King could withdraw by charter a portion of his dominions from the full authority of Parliament.
Much of the language and some of the arguments of the Americans were undoubtedly drawn from the Tory arsenal. As Lord North truly said, it was the colonists who appealed to the King's prerogative. It was the ministers who upheld the authority of Parliament. The Americans delighted in contrasting their devotion to the Sovereign with their repudiation of parliamentary control, and they dilated, in language which seemed an echo of that of the early Tories, upon the unconstitutional enlargement of the dominion of Parliament. With the deep-seated conservatism of the English character, the Whigs had always pretended that the Revolution had made no real change in the relative position of the great powers of the State; that it had only arrested encroachments by the Sovereign, and defined, asserted, and protected the ancient liberties of the people. The Americans, on the other hand, maintained with great reason that Parliament, since the Revolution, or at least since the Rebellion, had acquired a wholly new place in the British Empire, and that the arguments of English lawyers about the necessary subordination of all parts of the British Empire to the Supreme Legislature, and about the impossibility of the Sovereign withdrawing British subjects by charter from parliamentary control, were based upon a state of things which at the time when the colonies were founded existed neither in law nor in fact. ‘At present,’ Franklin wrote, ‘the colonies consent and submit to the supremacy of the Legislature for the regulations of general commerce, but a submission to Acts of Parliament was no part of their original Constitution. Our former kings governed their colonies as they had governed their dominions in France, without the participation of British Parliaments. The Parliament of England never presumed to interfere in that prerogative till the time of the great Rebellion, when they usurped the government of all the King's other dominions, Ireland, Scotland, &c.’ 1
But although the arguments by which the followers of Grenville and Bedford maintained that their policy was a legitimate outcome of the principles of the Whig party were by no means without plausibility, or even without real force, the main current of Whig sentiment flowed irresistibly in the opposite direction. As the conflict deepened, the line of division corresponded closely with the division of parties. The whole body of the Tories, headed by the King, steadily supported a policy of coercion, while the Whigs made the cause of the colonists their own, though they defended it, as we have seen, by different arguments and in different degrees. Chatham could never tolerate the idea of an independent America, though he foresaw the danger at a very early stage of the conflict. He treated the whole question as one of the right of every free people to be taxed only by their own representatives. He strongly asserted the right and policy of the parliamentary restrictions of American commerce, and with Shelburne he emphatically protested against the new American doctrine that the Sovereign could not place his troops in any part of his dominions that he chose. 1 The Rockingham Whigs, on the other hand, while they regarded the surrender of the parliamentary power of taxation as a matter not of right but of policy, were prepared to make wide concessions in other directions; and some members of the party, almost from the beginning of the struggle, were willing to consent to a final surrender of English dominion over the colonies. Of this section the Duke of Richmond was the most conspicuous. As early as 1776 he argued that America never could be subdued except at a ruinous expense; that by continuing the war, she would be forced into alliance with our natural enemy France; that if subdued, she would take the first opportunity of revolting, and that this opportunity would probably be when England was engaged in a deadly struggle, and when an American revolt might prove her ruin. If, then, he contended, America can no longer be kept amicably dependent, it is better to acknowledge her independence at once, to save further expenditure, to enter while it is still possible into close alliance with her, and thus to avert the great danger of her alliance with France. 1
One other consideration weighed greatly with the Whig statesmen. It was the firm conviction of many, if not of all of them, that the triumph of the English in America would give such an ascendency to the Tory party and to the power of the Crown, that it would be fatal to English, liberty. Such an opinion was more than once implied in the speeches of Chatham. It was the opinion of Fox 2 and of Horace Walpole, 3 and many years after the struggle had terminated it was deliberately reaffirmed by Burke. 4 We have a curious picture of the tone of thought prevailing among some of the Whig leaders in the beginning of the American contest, in a letter which was written by the Duke of Richmond to Burke from Paris in the August of 1776. Richmond had gone to France to prosecute his claim to an old French peerage, and he declares that the political condition of England was one reason why he was anxious to obtain it. England, he believed, was on the verge of despotism, and it would be a despotism more oppressive than that of France, for it would be less tempered by habit and manners. He himself was likely to be among the proscribed, and in that case, ‘if America be not open to receive us, France is some retreat, and a peerage here is something.’ 1
Under all these circumstances, England entered into the ill-omened conflict in which she was engaged, profoundly divided. A party, small indeed in numbers, but powerful from its traditions, its connections, and its abilities, had identified itself completely with the cause of the insurgents, opposed and embarrassed the Government in every effort to augment its forces and to subsidise allies, openly rejoiced in the victories of the Americans, and exerted all its eloquence to justify and to encourage them. We must now pass to the other side of the Atlantic, and examine the movements of public opinion in America and the measures of the American Congress to organise the war.
When General Howe sailed from Boston for Halifax on March 17, 1776, he was accompanied by rather more than 7,000 soldiers, besides 2,000 sailors and marines and about 1,500 loyalist refugees, while the army of Washington amounted to 21,800 men, of whom 2,700 were sick. The evacuation, though immediately due to the capture of Dorchester Heights, was not altogether involuntary, for the English ministers had some time before authorised and counselled him to leave Boston and repair to a Southern port, though they left the period to his discretion. In April, Washington left Boston, and on the 13th of the month he arrived at New York, which now became the great centre of the forces of the Revolution.
Several months passed with but little stirring action on either side. The Americans were busily employed in calling out and organising their forces, in arresting and imprisoning the loyalists, who were very numerous about New York, and in constructing powerful lines of entrenchment on Long Island for the defence of the city. Recruits came in slowly. Desertions, jealousies, and quarrels continued with little abatement, and the disastrous news of the result of the expedition against Canada and the appearance of small-pox among the troops had thrown a great damp upon American patriotism. 1 In the beginning of July, Colonel Reed, the adjutant-general of the forces, wrote to a member of Congress that the American army was now less than 8,000 men, all of whom, from the general to the private, were exceedingly discouraged. 1 Soon, however, several thousand volunteers or militiamen arrived from the country about New York, from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. On August 3, Washington's army was officially reckoned at 20,537 men, of whom, however, nearly 3,800 were sick or on furlough. By August 26 about 3,150 more men had come in. 2 They were, however, badly clothed, imperfectly armed, and for the most part almost without discipline or military experience.
General Howe in the meantime was drawing nearer to New York. He passed from Halifax to Sandy Hook, and from Sandy Hook to Staten Island, where he was joined by the fleet from England under his brother, Lord Howe. Troops withdrawn from Virginia and South Carolina, regiments from England and the West Indies, and a large body of newly enrolled Germans, soon filled his attenuated ranks, and he found himself at the head of little less than 30,000 well-appointed soldiers. On August 22 and 23 between 15,000 and 16,000 men were landed without opposition on Long Island, 3 and on the 27th they totally defeated the portion of the American army which was defending the entrenchments. If Howe had known how to improve his victory the whole force, consisting probably of about 10,000 men, must have been at his mercy. By the strange negligence of the English commander, by the great skill of Washington, and by the assistance of a dense fog, the Americans, who had been hemmed in on a corner of the island and who were separated from the mainland by an arm of the sea a mile wide, succeeded in effecting their retreat in the early hours of the morning, unimpeded and unobserved. They escaped, however, only by abandoning the lines they had constructed with much labour, and on September 15 Howe completed his campaign by the capture of New York.
The blow was a very formidable one to the American cause, and it had for some time been foreseen. On September 2 Washington wrote from New York a letter to the President of the Congress, in which he suggested no less a measure than the deliberate destruction of this great and wealthy commercial town. ‘Till of late,’ he said, ‘I had no doubt in my own mind of defending this place; nor should I have yet, if the men would do their duty, but this I despair of. … If we should be obliged to abandon the town, ought it to stand as winter quarters for the enemy? They would derive great conveniences from it on the one hand; and much property would be destroyed on the other. … At present I dare say the enemy mean to preserve it if they can. If Congress, therefore, should resolve upon the destruction of it, the resolution should be a profound secret, as the knowledge of it will make a capital change in their plans.’ 1
Such a suggestion, emanating from such a man, furnishes a remarkable comment upon the indignation so abundantly expressed by the revolutionary party at the burning of Falmouth and Norfolk at the time when these little towns were actually occupied by troops who were firing upon the English. If preparations for burning New York were not, as has been alleged, actually made before the Americans evacuated the city, it is at least certain that such a step was at this time openly and frequently discussed. 1 Jay, who was one of the most conspicuous of the New York patriots, was of opinion that not only the city, but the whole surrounding country, should be reduced to ruin, 2 and the former measure was strongly advocated by Greene, one of the most popular of the American generals. ‘The City and Island of New York,’ he wrote, ten days before the surrender, ‘are no objects to us. We are not to put them in competition with the general interest of America. Two-thirds of the property of the city and the suburbs belong to Tories. … I would burn the city and suburbs, and that for the following reasons.’ He then proceeds to enumerate the military advantages that would ensue, and adds, ‘all these advantages would result from the destruction of the city, and not one benefit can arise to us from its preservation, that I can conceive.’ 3 Joseph Reed, who was Adjutant-General of the American army, was also strongly in favour of burning New York—‘a city,’ he said, ‘the greater part of whose inhabitants are plotting our destruction.’ 4
Happily for its own reputation, happily perhaps for its influence in America, Congress rejected the counsel, and New York fell intact into the hands of the English. 1 But the knowledge of the design had spread abroad, and there were men who were quite ready to carry it into effect. Shortly after midnight, on the morning of September 21, fires burst out simultaneously in several parts of New York. The church bells had all been carried away by Washington to be turned into cannon, so there was great difficulty in spreading the alarm. The fire-engines were in bad repair, and before the fire could be extinguished about a fourth part of the town was reduced to ashes. Several women and children perished in the flames, and many hundreds of families were reduced in an hour from comfort to beggary. But for the admirable efforts of English soldiers under General Robertson, and of sailors who landed from the fleet, assisted by a sudden change of wind, it is probable that nothing would have remained of the future capital of America. Men with combustibles in their hands were seized and killed either by the soldiers or the populace. Tryon, the English Governor of New York, expressed his firm belief that the conflagration had been deliberately prepared with the full knowledge of Washington before the Americans had left the town, and had been executed by officers of his army, some of whom ‘were found concealed in the city.’ In this conjecture he was undoubtedly mistaken. The letters of Washington show that he had no knowledge of the conflagration, but few impartial judges will question the distinct assertion of General Howe that the fire was, beyond all question, an incendiary one, and it is almost equally certain that it owed its origin to the revolutionary party. 2
The superiority of the English over the Americans at Long Island, both in numbers, in arms, and in military experience, was so great that the defeat reflected no shadow of discredit upon the beaten army, who appear to have fought with great courage and resolution; but the extreme anarchy and insubordination that still reigned within the ranks, and the great want of real patriotism and self-sacrifice that was displayed, boded ill to the revolutionary cause. In the letter to which I have already referred, written by Colonel Reed before the battle, we have a vivid picture of the condition of the American army. ‘Almost every villainy and rascality,’ he wrote, ‘is daily practised with impunity. Unless some speedy and effectual means of reform are adopted by Congress our cause will be lost. As the war must be carried on systematically, you must establish your army upon a permanent footing, and give your officers good pay, that they may be, and support the character of, gentlemen, and not be driven by a scanty allowance to the low and dirty arts which many of them practise to filch the public of more money than all the amount of the difference of pay. It is not strange that there should be a number of bad officers in the continental service when you consider that many of them were chosen by their own men, who elected them, not for a regard to merit, but from the knowledge they had of their being ready to associate with them on the footing of equality. It was sometimes the case that when a company was forming, the men would choose those for officers who consented to throw their pay into a joint stock with the privates, from which captains, lieutenants, ensigns, sergeants, corporals, drummers, and privates drew equal shares. Can it be wondered at that a captain should be tried and broken for stealing his soldiers' blankets? or that another officer should be found shaving his men in the face of characters of distinction. … Had I known the true posture of affairs, no consideration would have tempted me to have taken an active part in this scene. And this sentiment is universal.’ 1
The letters of Washington at this time are full of complaints of the quarrels between the soldiers of the different provinces, of the numerous desertions in the most critical periods of the campaign, of the constant acts of insubordination, of the complete inefficiency of the militia. 2 The defeat at Long Island had totally demoralised them. ‘The militia, instead of calling forth their utmost efforts to a brave and manly opposition in order to repair our losses, are dismayed, intractable, and impatient to return. Great numbers of them have gone off, in some instances almost by whole regiments, by half ones, and by companies at a time.’ ‘Their want of discipline and refusal of almost every kind of restraint,’ ‘their humours and intolerable caprice,’ their ‘entire disregard of that order and subordination necessary to the well-being of an army,’ their ‘impatience to get home,’ and their ‘abominable desertions’ were rapidly infecting the regular continental troops. 1 On one occasion a body of New York militia under Colonel Hay simply refused to obey his commands or to do duty, saying that ‘General Howe had promised them peace, liberty, and safety, and that is all they want.’ 2 There was so little unity of action between the Congress and the local legislatures that, while the former offered a bounty of ten dollars to those who would enlist for a year in the continental service, the particular States sometimes offered a bounty of twenty dollars to the militia who were called out for a few months, and it was in consequence scarcely possible to obtain recruits for the more serious military service. 3 This competition, indeed, between the Congress and the separate States continued during a great part of the war; and as late as 1779, when Franklin was endeavouring to borrow money from Holland, he complained bitterly of the difficulties he encountered through the rivalry of particular States which were applying at the same time for loans for their own purposes, and not unfrequently offering higher interest. 4
To all these difficulties which beset the path of Washington must be added the widespread disaffection to the American cause which was manifest in the State of New York. The legal legislature of the province had indeed been superseded in 1775 by a Provincial Convention elected and governed by the revolutionists, and it passed a resolution that all persons residing in the State of New York who adhered to the King and Great Britain ‘should be deemed guilty of treason and should suffer death.’ 5 ‘A fierce mob was active in hunting down suspected Tories, and they had introduced the brutal New England punishment of carrying their victims astride upon rails; 1 but the bulk of the property of New York belonged to loyalists, and they were very numerous, both among the middle classes of the town and in the country population. Before the arrival of the English, New York gaol was crowded with suspected loyalists, and among them were many of the first characters in the town. English recruiting agents penetrated even into the camp of Washington, and a plot was discovered for seizing his person. 2 When Howe landed at Staten Island he was warmly welcomed by the inhabitants, who at once furnished him with all that he required, and came forward in numbers to take the oath of allegiance. 3 When Washington was driven from Long Island, almost the whole population came forward gladly to testify their loyalty to the Crown, 4 and a corps of several hundred loyalists recruited in the province was serving in the English army. 5 The Queen's County, which comprehended the north side of Long Island, was especially noted for its loyalty. It refused to send a delegate to the Continental Congress or the Provincial Convention, and at the end of the war nearly a third part of its inhabitants are said to have emigrated to Nova Scotia. 6
The conduct of the American troops, who were almost wholly unaccustomed to discipline, was, as might have been expected, far from faultless. ‘The abandoned and profligate part of our army,’ wrote Washington, ‘lost to every sense of honour and virtue, as well as their country's good, are by rapine and plunder spreading ruin and terror wherever they go, thereby making themselves infinitely more to be dreaded than the common enemy they are come to oppose.’ In a confidential letter to the President of the Congress he complained that except for one or two offences the utmost penalty he was empowered to inflict was thirty-nine lashes; that these, through the collusion of the officers whose duty it was to see them applied, were sometimes rather ‘a matter of sport than punishment,’ and that in consequence of the inadequacy of the penalty ‘a practice prevails of the most alarming nature, which will, if it cannot be checked, prove fatal both to the country and to the army.’ ‘Under the idea of Tory property, or property that may fall into the hands of the enemy, no man is secure in his effects and scarcely in his person.’ 1 American soldiers were constantly driving innocent persons out of their homes by an alarm of fire, or by actually setting their houses on fire, in order more easily to plunder the contents, and all attempts to check this atrocious practice had proved abortive. The burning of New York was generally attributed to New England incendiaries. The efforts of the British soldiers to save the city were remembered with gratitude, and, although some parts of the province of New York still obeyed the Provincial Congress, there is little doubt that in the city and in the country around it the British were looked upon not as conquerors but as deliverers. 2
Washington, in October 1776, expressed his grave fear that in case of any unfavourable turn in American affairs the enemy might recruit soldiers at least as fast as the revolutionists. 1 It was one of the great miscalculations of the English Government that they entertained a similar expectation, and hoped to suppress the rebellion mainly by American troops. Attempts were made to produce a rising among the Scotch emigrants in Virginia. Officers were authorised to raise provincial corps for the service of the King, and on a single occasion equipments were sent out from England for no less than 8,000 provincial troops. In the course of the struggle it is, no doubt, true that many thousands took arms for the King either in isolated risings or in the regular army, 1 but the enlistments were much fewer than was expected, and the hope that America would supply the main materials for the suppression of the revolt proved wholly chimerical. One of the first acts of the Whig party in every colony was to disarm Tories, and the promptitude and energy with which this measure was accomplished, combined with the unfortunate issue of several small risings in the Southern colonies, paralysed the loyalists.
Nor was it surprising that they showed great reluctance and hesitation. That strong dislike to military life which pervaded the colonial population was nowhere more conspicuous than in the class of society in which loyal sentiments chiefly prevailed, and the American loyalists risked much more than the American insurgents. In addition to the Acts punishing with death, banishment, forfeiture of goods, or imprisonment, those who assisted the English, every State passed Acts of Attainder, by which the properties of long lists of citizens who were mentioned by name were confiscated. Pennsylvania and Delaware, following the example of the Irish Jacobite Parliament of 1689, gave the attainted person the option of appearing to take his trial for treason by a specified date, but usually the confiscations were absolute and unconditional. In Connecticut the simple offence of seeking royal protection or absenting himself from his home and country made the loyalist liable to the confiscation of all his property. In New York, in addition to an Act confiscating all the goods of fifty-nine persons, three of whom were women, and making them liable to the penalty of death if they were found in the State, a heavy tax was imposed on every parent who had a loyalist son. 1 One of the first acts of the revolutionary party when they occupied Boston was to confiscate and sell all property belonging to loyalists, and in a country of farmers and yeomen most property was immovable. The loyalist exposed himself to the undying animosity of a large proportion of his neighbours; he exposed his family to those savage mobs who by plunder and torture were everywhere supporting the Revolution, and he was certain to incur absolute ruin not only in case of the defeat of the English cause, but even in case of the temporary evacuation of the district in which his property was situated. If the rebellion collapsed, it would probably do so speedily through the want of men and money and through the burden of the sufferings it produced, and it was not necessary for him to intervene and to excite against himself the hatred of those who would continue to be his neighbours. If the rebellion was prolonged, an American resident could estimate more truly than Englishmen how difficult it was to subdue an enormous, half-opened country, how absolutely impossible it was that the English power could be, for purposes of protection, a living reality over more than a very small section of it. Nor were the moral inducements to enter into the struggle very strong. Thousands who detested the policy of the New Englanders, and who longed to see the colonies reconciled to England, reprobated the Stamp Act and many other parts of the English policy, and felt in no way bound to draw the sword against their countrymen, or to add new fuel to a civil war which they had done their utmost to avert.
The remaining military operations of 1776 may be told in a few words. Washington, after his defeat, avoided any general action, though several slight skirmishes took place. The whole of New York Island was evacuated with the exception of Fort Washington, which, by the advice of General Greene, and contrary to the opinion of Washington, it was determined to defend. The British, however, took it by storm in a single day, and they captured in it 2,700 American soldiers and a large quantity of artillery and military stores, which the Americans could ill spare. Immediately after this brilliant success, a powerful detachment under Lord Cornwallis crossed the Hudson, entered New Jersey, to which Washington had fled, and prepared to besiege Fort Lee; but the garrison hastily evacuated it, leaving their artillery and stores in the hands of the British, and the whole province open to invasion. The Provincial Convention still held its meetings in distant towns of the Province of New York, and a few American soldiers under Lee continued in the province; but the main operations were now transferred to the Jerseys.
But before following the fortunes of the war in that province, it is necessary to enumerate the chief operations in other parts of the colonies. Schuyler, who commanded the Northern army, which had just evacuated Canada, though he appears to have been a capable officer, was disliked by the New England troops, and in the summer of 1776 the Congress, without as yet absolutely superseding him, gave a joint command to Gates, who was more popular in New England. The defeated army had fallen back on the strong fort of Ticonderoga; but the Americans also held the fort of Crown Point, which was fifteen miles distant, and they had constructed with great energy a small fleet, which for a time gave them the command of Lake Champlain. Gates appointed Benedict Arnold to command it; and this general, who had already shown himself a soldier of great daring and capacity, exhibited the same qualities in the novel functions of naval commander. The English at length constructed a fleet far more powerful than that of the Americans, and in October they compelled the Americans to evacuate Crown Point, and they totally defeated the American fleet. Only one or two vessels were, however, captured, for Arnold succeeded in running the others on shore, in burning them before they could fall into the hands of the English, and in conducting the soldiers who manned them safely to Ticonderoga. The winter was now drawing in, and General Carleton, who commanded the English, made no attempt to besiege Ticonderoga, but fell back into winter quarters on the Canadian frontier.
In June 1776 General Clinton, at the head of some troops which had lately arrived from Ireland, and supported by a fleet under Sir Peter Parker, attempted to capture Charleston, which was the wealthiest and most important town in the southern colonies. Had he succeeded, he would have stopped one of the chief sources of military preparation in the South, and would have probably called into activity the strong loyalist party which had already shown itself in South Carolina. Charleston had, however, recently been protected by a very strong fortification on Sullivan's Island, and it was skilfully defended by General Lee, the most experienced of all the soldiers in the service of the revolution. In attacking the fort, three frigates ran aground, and although two were saved, it was found necessary to burn the third; and after several attempts the difficulties of the enterprise were found to be so great that it was abandoned. In July, Parker and Clinton sailed for New York.
The successful defence of Charleston was a great encouragement to the revolution in the Southern colonies, and for two and a half years no new attempt was made to re-establish in those quarters the dominion of England. In December, however, the same commanders who had made the abortive attempt upon Charleston descended upon Rhode Island, and occupied it without resistance. One of the provinces most hostile to British rule was thus effectually curbed, considerable impediments were thrown in the way of the naval preparations of the enemy, and a good harbour was secured for the British; but military critics have doubted, or more than doubted, whether these advantages justified the British commander in detaining at least 6,000 soldiers for nearly three years inactive in the island.
The employment of Indians in the war was now on both sides undisguised. I have related in a former chapter what appears to me to be the true history of its first stages, and in the Canadian campaign the Indians gave great assistance to the English. Actuated, according to the English view, by a strong personal attachment to Sir William Johnson and Colonel Guy Johnson, and by an earnest loyalty to the Crown, which had so often protected them against the encroachments of the colonists—according to the American view by a mere selfish desire to support the side on which there was most to gain and least to lose, 1 the Indians along the Canadian frontier remained steadily loyal; and it is but justice to add that their fidelity was never more conspicuous than in the first period of the campaign, when it appeared as if the forces of Montgomery and Arnold would have carried everything before them. In May 1776 the Congress resolved that ‘it is highly expedient to engage the Indians in the service of the United Colonies;’ in the following month they authorised General Schuyler to raise 2,000 Indians for his service in Canada, and Washington to employ Indians to any extent he thought useful; and they at the same time promised a reward to all Indians who took English officers or soldiers prisoners. 1 Schuyler found it impossible to shake the allegiance of the Canadian Indians; but in July 1776 Washington wrote an urgent letter to the General Court of Massachusetts begging them to enlist 500 or 600 Indians for his own army. 2 It is a remarkable fact, however, that in nearly every period of the struggle, and in every part of the States, the great majority of the Indians, if they took part in the war, ranged themselves on the side of the Crown, and England obtained in consequence much the larger share both of the benefit and of the discredit of their assistance. 3
The English Government had certainly no desire to instigate or encourage acts of atrocity, and they Strongly exhorted the Indians to abstain from such acts; but at the same time they knew that it was often wholly impossible to restrain them; they deliberately calculated upon the terrors of Indian warfare as a method of coercion; they were not content with employing Indians in their own armies, and under the supervision of their own officers, but urged them to independent attacks against the colonists, and there were men in the English service who would have readily given them uncontrolled licence against the enemy. 1 Shortly before the attack upon Charleston, a very formidable conspiracy of loyalists and Indians to invade Virginia and the Carolinas was discovered. Mr. Stuart, who had for a long time directed the Indian affairs of the Southern colonies, was the leading agent in organising it; and it was intended to bring the Creeks and Cherokees, who inhabited lands to the west of the Carolinas and of Georgia, into the field, and to assist them by an expedition of English soldiers and by a great loyalist rising. The project was paralysed by its premature disclosure, and the great body of Indians in these parts remained passive; but the Cherokees took up arms, and waged a very savage war in the back settlements of Virginia and the Carolinas. The Southern colonists, however, soon collected an army for their defence, and not only cleared their own territory, but crossed the Alleghanies, traversed the Indian settlements, burnt the villages, destroyed the crops, and soon compelled the savages to sue for peace, and to cede a great part of their land to South Carolina. It was noticed that the barbarities practised by the Indians in this campaign had a great effect in repressing the loyalist sentiment in the Southern colonies. 1
Another subject which greatly occupied the attention of the Americans was the indispensable necessity of creating a navy for the purpose of protecting their commerce and injuring that of the enemy. The Americans have at all times shown a remarkable aptitude for the seafaring life, and they did not wait for the Declaration of Independence to take measures for the construction of an independent navy. In the last three months of 1775 Congress ordered seventeen cruisers, varying from ten to thirty-six guns, to be built. In February 1776 the first American squadron, consisting of eight small ships—the largest carrying twenty-four guns—sailed under Commander Hopkins from Delaware Bay, and in October 1776 twenty-six American vessels were either built or building. 2 A few larger vessels were afterwards constructed in France, but the American navy appears to have been almost wholly manned by natives, and in this respect it furnished a great contrast to the army, in which the foreign element was very prominent. The populaity, however, of the regular naval force could never compete with that of privateering, which was soon practised from the New England and Pennsylvanian coasts on a scale and with a daring and success very rarely equalled. The zest with which the Americans threw themselves into this lucrative form of enterprise is a curious contrast to their extreme reluctance to take up arms in the field. ‘Thousands of schemes of privateering,’ wrote John Adams in August 1776, ‘are afloat in American imaginations.’ 1 In the beginning of the war this kind of enterprise was especially successful, for a swarm of privateers were afloat before the English appear to have had the smallest suspicion of their danger. The names are preserved of no less than sixteen privateers belonging to Rhode Island alone, which were on the sea in 1776; 2 and it is probable that these form but a small fraction of the total number. At the end of 1776 250 West Indiamen had been captured, 3 the injury already done to the West India trade was estimated in England at 1,800,000 l ., and the rate of insurance had risen to 28 per cent., which was higher than at any period in the last war with France and Spain. 4
The leading merchants speculated largely in privateers, and it was noticed that ‘the great profit of privateering was an irresistible temptation to seamen,’ 5 and a formidable obstacle to enlistment in the army. At the end of 1776, Robert Morris, in describing the gloomy prospects of the revolution, complained that ‘in the Eastern States they are so intent upon privateering that they mind little else; 1 but when Chastellux visited Philadelphia a few years later, he found this distinguished patriot and merchant himself so occupied with the trade that he regarded a week as a calamitous one in which no prize was brought in by his cruisers, and his fortune had risen in the most disastrous period of the American war to between 300,000 l . and 400,000 l . 2 It was found impossible to man the navy without laying an embargo on the privateers, and in 1776 the Assembly of Rhode Island proposed to the other States a general embargo until the quotas of enlistments required by the Congress for the army had in each State been filled. 3 It may be questioned, however, whether American enterprise could have been on the whole more profitably employed, for successful privateering brought great wealth into the country, impoverished the enemy, and added very largely to the popularity of the war.
It needed, indeed, all the popularity that could be derived from this source, for the latter months of 1776 form one of the darkest periods in the whole struggle. The army of Washington had dwindled to 3,000 and even to 2,700 effective men. Except two companies of artillery belonging to the State of New York that were engaged for the war, the whole of the continental troops had only been enlisted for a year, and when their time of service expired in November and December, it appeared as if none of them would consent to re-enlist or to postpone their departure. In the face of an enemy of overwhelming numbers, in the very agonies of a struggle upon which the whole future of the contest depended, company after company came forward claiming instant dismissal. Fourteen days after the capture of Fort Washington had deprived the Americans of nearly 3,000 soldiers, a large division of the army took this course. Every hope of success seemed fading away. An urgent despatch was sent to Gates, who commanded the remains of the army which had invaded Canada, to send assistance from Ticonderoga. Unfortunately two of the regiments which he sent were from New Jersey, their time of service had expired, and as soon as they found themselves in their native State they disbanded to a man. 1
General Lee had been left with some troops at the east side of Hudson River, and Washington now urgently summoned him to his assistance. Lee had served with much distinction in the English army in America during the last war, and his fierce energy had gained for him among the Indians the title of ‘the spirit that never sleeps.’ He returned to England after the capture of Canada, served in 1762 in Portugal with the auxiliary forces against the Spaniards, and performed at least one brilliant exploit in the capture of a Spanish camp near Villa Velha, on the Tagus. Having, however, quarrelled with his superiors, and being disappointed in his hopes of promotion, he passed into the Polish service, where he became a major-general. He afterwards spent some years in travelling, fought several desperate duels, and was everywhere noted for his violent and turbulent character; but he was also an accomplished linguist and a man of some literary talent, and he was one of the many persons to whom the letters of Junius were ascribed. He travelled in America in an early stage of the colonial dispute, and appears to have conceived a genuine enthusiasm for the American cause; but he was even more of an adventurer than an enthusiast, and was much disappointed at being placed in the American army not only below Washington, but also below Ward,—‘a fat old gentleman,’ as he complained, ‘who had been a popular churchwarden, but had no acquaintance whatever with military affairs.’ General Ward retired shortly after the recovery of Boston, and the star of Lee seemed for a time rising very high. His military experience was eminently useful in organising the American army. His defence of Charleston against the fleet of Sir Peter Parker in the summer of 1776 had been skilful and successful; and having afterwards been summoned to the north, his advice is said to have decided the evacuation of New York Island, which probably saved the American army from capture.
His self-willed, impracticable, and insubordinate temper, however, soon became apparent; he was extremely jealous of Washington, whose ability he appears to have greatly underrated, and after the capture of Fort Washington he thought the situation nearly hopeless. ‘Between ourselves,’ he wrote to his friend Gates,’ a certain great man is most damnably deficient. He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties. If I stay in this province I risk myself and army, and if I do not stay, the province is lost for ever. I have neither guides, cavalry, medicines, money, shoes, nor stockings. I must act with the greatest circumspection. Tories are in my front, rear, and on my flanks. The mass of the people is strangely contaminated. In short, unless something which I do not expect turns up, we are lost. Our councils have been weak to the last degree.’ For some time he positively disobeyed the summons of his chief, hoping to strike some independent blow near New York. At length, slowly and reluctantly, he entered New Jersey; but having on December 13 gone some way from his army to reconnoitre, he fell into the hands of a British party and was captured. To the officers who took him he expressed his disgust at ‘the rascality of his troops,’ his disappointment at the deep division of opinion in America, and his conviction that ‘the game was nearly at an end.’ 1
The incident struck terror into the American army at a time when no additional discouragement was needed. Washington, closely pursued by a greatly superior force under Lord Cornwallis, retreated successively to Newark, to Brunswick, to Princeton, to Trenton, and to the Penn-sylvanian side of the Delaware. Seldom has a commander found himself in a more deplorable position, for in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania, as well as in New York, the bulk of the people were either utterly indifferent or positively hostile to his cause. ‘The want of exertion,’ he wrote ou December 5, ‘in the principal gentlemen of the country, or a fatal supineness and insensibility of danger … have been the causes of our late disgraces.’ The militia he described as ‘a destructive, expensive, and disorderly mob.’ 2 On the 12th he wrote that, a great part of the continental troops having insisted on abandoning him, he had ‘hoped to receive a reinforcement from the militia of the State of New Jersey sufficient to check the further progress of the enemy,’ but had been ‘cruelly disappointed.’ ‘The inhabitants of this State, either from fear or disaflection, almost to a man refused to turn out.’ 1 In Pennsylvania, things were a little, but only a little, better. About 1,500 men of the militia of Philadelphia marched to Trenton, ‘but the remainder of the province continues in a state of supineness, nor do I see any likelihood of their stirring to save their own capital, which is undoubtedly General Howe's great object.’ 2
‘With a handful of men,’ he wrote a few days later, ‘compared to the enemy's force, we have been pushed through the Jerseys without being able to make the smallest opposition and compelled to pass the Delaware.’ 3 ‘Instead of giving any assistance in repelling the enemy, the militia have not only refused to obey your general summons and that of their commanding officers, but, I am told, exult at the approach of the enemy and on our late misfortunes.’ 4 ‘I found … no disposition in the inhabitants to afford the least aid.’ ‘We are in a very disaffected part of the province, and between you and me I think our affairs are in a very bad condition; not so much from the apprehension of General Howe's army as from the defection of New York, the Jerseys, and Pennsylvania. In short, the conduct of the Jerseys has been most infamous. Instead of turning out to defend their country and affording aid to our army, they are making their submission as fast as they can. If the Jerseys had given us any support we might have made a stand at Hackinsac, and, after that, at Brunswick; but the few militia that were in arms disbanded themselves and left the poor remains of our army to make the best we could of it.’ ‘If every nerve is not strained to recruit the new army with all possible expedition I think the game is pretty nearly up. ‘The enemy are daily gathering strength from the disaffected.’ ‘I have no doubt but General Howe will still make an attempt upon Philadelphia this winter. I see nothing to oppose him a fortnight hence.’ 1
Clothes, shoes, cannon, entrenching tools were imperatively needed. A great part of the military stores of the Revolution had been captured at Fort Washington. Even small arms were beginning to fail. ‘The consumption and waste of these,’ wrote Washington, ‘this year have been great. Militia and flying-camp men coming in without them were obliged to be furnished or become useless. Many of these threw their arms away; some lost them; whilst others deserted and took them away.’ 2 And in the midst of all this distress there was incessant jealousy and recrimination, dishonesty and corruption; ‘the different States, without regard to the qualifications of an officer, quarrelling about the appointments and nominating such as are not fit to be shoeblacks, from the local attachments of this or that member of the Assembly;’ 3 ‘the regimental surgeons, many of whom are very great rascals, countenancing the men in sham complaints to exempt them from duty, often receiving bribes to certify indispositions with a view to procure discharges or furloughs.’ quarrelling incessantly around the beds of the sick, and ‘in numberless instances’ drawing ‘for medicines and stores in the most profuse and extravagant manner for private purposes;’ 4 the troops, in fine, so full ‘of local attachments and distinctions of country,’ that after vainly trying to unite them by ‘denominating the whole by the greater name of American,’ Washington acknowledged that the task was an impossible one, and that the best way of governing his army was by stirring the emulation of the contingents of the different States. 1
It seemed at this time not only probable but almost certain that the American Revolution would have collapsed; and if it had done so, it is strange to think how completely the commonplaces of history would have been changed, and how widely different would now have been the popular estimate of the rival actors both in England and in America. In the course of a few months the English had driven the Americans from Canada and from New York. They had taken possession of Rhode Island without opposition. They had overrun the whole of the Jerseys, and nothing but the Delaware saved Philadelphia from capture. It is almost certain that with the most ordinary vigilance and enterprise Howe could have compelled the chief American army to surrender in Long Island, and that if he had at once pursued Washington across the Delaware, Philadelphia would have immediately fallen into his hands. In either of these cases the American Revolution would probably have ended in 1776. In all the provinces which had been conquered, except Rhode Island, the feelings of the people had been at least as favourable to the British as to the revolutionists, and the more closely the correspondence of the time is examined the more evident it will appear that, in the middle colonies at least, those who really desired to throw off the English rule were a small and not very respectable minority. The great mass were indifferent, half-hearted, engrossed with their private interests or occupations, prepared to risk nothing till they could clearly foresee the issue of the contest.
In almost every part of the States—even in New England itself—there were large bodies of devoted loyalists. 1 The different States still regarded themelves as different countries, and one of the sentiments that most strongly pervaded the majority of them was dislike of the New Englanders. 2 Washington, in New Jersey, issued a stringent proclamation ordering the inhabitants along the march of the English to destroy all hay and corn which they could not remove, but the order was nearly universally disobeyed, and Howe never at this time found the smallest difficulty in obtaining all necessary supplies. 3 Had the Americans as a whole ever looked upon the English as the Dutch looked upon the Spaniards, and as the Poles look upon the Russians, had they manifested in the struggle of the revolution but a tenth part of the earnestness, the self-sacrifice, the enthusiasm which they displayed on both sides in the war of Secession, Howe would at least have been enormously outnumbered. But during the whole of the campaign in New Jersey the army of Washington was far inferior in numbers to that which was opposed to him, and it was so ragged, inexperienced, and badly armed that it had rather the appearance of a mob than of an army. Howe issued a proclamation offering full pardon to all rebels who appeared before the proper authorities within sixty days and subscribed a declaration of allegiance, and great multitudes, including most of the chief persons in the State, gladly availed themselves of it. At Philadelphia itself there was so much disaffection that Washington was obliged to detach a portion of his shrunken army for the purpose of intimidating those who were opposing all defensive works against the British, and he was in almost daily expectation that the British would make an attempt to pass the Delaware, and only too certain that if they succeeded in doing so, Philadelphia would be at their mercy.
The Congress regarded the capture of the town as so imminent that it fled precipitately to Baltimore. Probably the last member who remained in Philadelphia was Robert Morris, afterwards well known for the great ability he displayed in organising the finances of the Union, and he wrote on December 21, 1776, a report of the condition of affairs to the American Commissioners at Paris, which gives a most vivid and instructive picture of the light in which the struggle now appeared to the ablest of its partisans. He describes the ruinous consequences of the capture of Fort Washington, the interception of the despatches of Washington, the sickness that was raging in the army, the want of warm clothing in the coldest period of the winter, the headlong flight through New Jersey before an overwhelming force of the enemy, the disappointment of all hopes of assistance from the people. ‘Alas, our internal enemies had by various arts and means frightened many, disaffected others, and caused a general languor to prevail over the minds of almost all men not before actually engaged in the war. Many are also exceedingly disaffected with the constitutions formed for their respective States, so that, from one cause or other, no Jersey militia turned out to oppose the march of an enemy through the heart of their country; and it was with the utmost difficulty that the Associators of this city could be prevailed on to march against them.’ The capture of Lee had been a new and terrible blow, but the party he commanded, and also 500 men returning from the Lakes under General Gates, had just joined Washington; and as the army of Howe had been scattered, the one hope of the Americans was that they might be able to cut off the detached parties of the British, and thus compel them to abandon New Jersey. ‘Unless that task is performed, Philadelphia—nay, I may say Pennsylvania—must fall.’
But the difficulties were almost insuperable. The dispositions of the people were such that the English had excellent intelligence, while the revolutionists could scarcely obtain any. The proclamation of Howe ‘had a wonderful effect, and all Jersey, or far the greater part of it, is supposed to have made their submission. … Those who do so of course become our most inveterate enemies; they have the means of conveying intelligence, and they avail themselves of it.’ Philadelphia was in a state of complete panic, and numbers of its citizens were taking flight. ‘We are told the British troops are kept from plunder, 1 but the Hessians and other foreigners, looking upon that as the right of war, plunder wherever they go, from both Whigs and Tories without distinction, and horrid devastations they have made.’ The rapid depreciation of the continental currency in itself threatened ‘instant and total ruin to the American cause.’ ‘The enormous pay of our army, the immense expenses at which they are supplied, … and, in short, the extravagance that has prevailed in most departments of the public service, have called forth prodigious emissions of paper money.’ Unless some brilliant success immediately changed the prospects of the war, nothing, in the opinion of this most competent observer, but the speedy assistance of France could possibly save the American cause. ‘Our people,’ he continues, ‘knew not the hardships and calamities of war when they so boldly dared Britain to arms; every man was then a bold patriot, felt himself equal to the contest, and seemed to wish for an opportunity of evincing his prowess; but now, when we are fairly engaged, when death and ruin stare us in the face, and when nothing but the most intrepid courage can rescue us from contempt and disgrace, sorry I am to say it, many of those who were foremost in noise shrink coward-like from the danger, and are begging pardon without striking a blow.’ 1
Nothing, indeed, could now have saved the American cause but the extraordinary skill and determination of its great leader, combined with the amazing incapacity of his opponents. There is no reason to doubt that Sir William Howe possessed in a fair measure the knowledge of the military profession which books could furnish, but not one gleam of energy or originality at this time broke the monotony of his career, and to the blunders of the Jersey campaign the loyalists mainly ascribed the ultimate success of the revolution. The same want of vigilance and enterprise that had suffered the Americans to seize Dorchester heights, and thus to compel the evacuation of Boston, the same want of vigilance and enterprise that had allowed them when totally defeated to escape from Long Island, still continued. When Washington was flying rapidly from an overwhelming force under Lord Cornwallis, Howe ordered the troops to stop at Brunswick, where they remained inactive for nearly a week. In the opinion of the best military authorities, but for that delay the destruction of the army of Washington was inevitable. The Americans were enabled to cross the Delaware safely because, owing to a long delay of the British general, the van of the British army only arrived at its bank just as the very last American boat was launched. 1 Even then, had the British accelerated their passage, Philadelphia, the seat and centre of the Revolutionary Government, would have certainly fallen. The army of Washington was utterly inadequate to defend it. A great portion of its citizens were thoroughly loyal. The Congress itself, when flying from Philadelphia, declared the impossibility of protecting it, and although Washington had burnt or removed all the boats for many miles along the Delaware, there were fords higher up which might easily have been forced, and in Trenton itself, which was occupied by the English, there were ample supplies of timber to have constructed rafts for the army. 2
But Howe preferred to wait till the river was frozen, and in the meantime, though his army was incomparably superior to that of Washington in numbers, arms, discipline, and experience, he allowed himself to undergo a humiliating defeat. His army was scattered over several widely separated posts, and Trenton, which was one of the most important on the Delaware, was left in the care of a large force of Hessians, whose discipline had been greatly relaxed. Washington perceived that unless he struck some brilliant blow before the close of the year, his cause was hopeless. The whole province was going over to the English. As soon as the river was frozen he expected them to cross in overwhelming numbers, and in a few days he was likely to be almost without an army. At the end of the year the engagement of the greater part of his troops would expire, and on December 24 he wrote to the President of the Congress, ‘I have not the most distant prospect of retaining them a moment longer than the last of this month, notwithstanding the most pressing solicitations and the obvious necessity for it.’ 1 Under these desperate circumstances he planned the surprise of Trenton. ‘Necessity,’ he wrote, ‘dire necessity, will, nay, must justify an attack.’ It was designed with admirable skill and executed with admirable courage. On the night of Christmas 1776, Washington crossed the Delaware, surprised the German troops in the midst of their Christmas revelries, and with a loss of only two officers and two privates wounded, he succeeded in capturing 1,000 prisoners and in recrossing the river in safety. 2
The effect of this brilliant enterprise upon the spirits of the American army and upon the desponding, wavering, and hostile sentiments of the population was immediate. Philadelphia for the present was saved, and the Congress speedily returned to it. Immediately after the victory a large force of militia from Pennsylvania joined the camp of Washington, 3 and at the end of December the disbandment of the continental troops, which a week before he had thought inevitable, had been in a great measure averted. ‘After much persuasion,’ he wrote, ‘and the exertions of their officers, half, or a greater proportion of those [the troops] from the eastward have consented to stay six weeks on a bounty of ten dollars. I feel the inconvenience of this advance, and I know the consequences which will result from it, but what could be done? Pennsylvania had allowed the same to her militia; the troops felt their importance and would have their price. Indeed, as their aid is so essential and not to be dispensed with, it is to be wondered at, that they had not estimated it at a higher rate.’ 1 ‘This I know is a most extravagant price when compared with the time of service, but … I thought it no time to stand upon trifles when a body of firm troops inured to danger was absolutely necessary to lead on the more raw and undisciplined.’ 2
No money was ever better employed. Recrossing the Delaware, Washington again occupied Trenton, and then, evading an overwhelming British force which was sent against him, he fell unexpectedly on Princeton and totally defeated three regiments that were posted there to defend it. The English fell back upon Brunswick, and the greater part of New Jersey was thus recovered by the Americans. A sudden revulsion of sentiments took place in New Jersey. The militia of the province were at last encouraged to take arms for Washington. Recruits began to come in. The manifest superiority of the American generalship and the disgraceful spectacle of a powerful army of European veterans abandoning a large tract of country before a ragged band of raw recruits much less numerous than itself, changed the calculations of the doubters, while a deep and legitimate indignation was created by the shameful outrages that were perpetrated by the British and German troops.
Unfortunately these outrages were no new thing. An ardent American loyalist of New York complains that one of the first acts of the soldiers of General Howe when they entered that city was to break open and plunder the College library, the Subscription library, and the Corporation library, and to sell or destroy the books and philosophical apparatus; and he adds, with much bitterness, that during all the months that the rebels were in possession of New York no such outrage was perpetrated, that during a great part of that time the regular law courts had been open, and that they had frequently convicted American soldiers of petty larcenies, and punished them with the full approbation of their officers. 1 In New Jersey the conduct of the English was at least as bad as at New York. A public library was burnt at Trenton. A college and a library were destroyed at Princeton, together with an orrery made by the illustrious Rittenhouse, and believed to be the finest in the world. 2 Whigs and Tories were indiscriminately plundered. Written protections attesting the loyalty of the bearer were utterly disregarded, and men who had exposed themselves for the sake of England to complete ruin at the hands of their own countrymen, found themselves plundered by the troops of the very Power for which they had risked and sacrificed so much. Nor was this all. A British army had fallen back before an army which was manifestly incomparably inferior to it, and had left the loyalists over a vast district at the mercy of their most implacable enemies. Numbers who had actively assisted the British were obliged to fly to New York, leaving their families and property behind them. Already loyalist risings had been suppressed in Maryland, in Delaware, and in Carolina, and had been left unsupported by the British army. The abandonment of New Jersey completed the lesson. A fatal damp was thrown upon the cause of the loyalists in America from which it never wholly recovered. 1
In the meantime the Congress was busily engaged in raising a new continental army to replace the troops that were disbanded. The language of Washington on this subject was very decided. He again and again urged in the strongest terms the absolute impossibility of carrying on the war successfully mainly by militia, and he declared his firm conviction that, on the whole, this branch of the service had done more harm than good to the cause. He was equally positive that no system of short enlistments would be sufficient, and that the continental troops should be raised for the whole duration of the war. To do this it was necessary to offer high pay and a large bounty, but it was a measure of capital importance, and no sacrifice must be grudged. The class of officers appointed must be wholly changed. The pay of the officers must be greatly raised both absolutely and in its proportion to the pay of the privates. The system of allowing soldiers to appoint their own officers must be abandoned, and no persons who were not gentlemen should be chosen. It is curious, in tracing the foundation of the great democracy of the West, to notice the emphasis with which Washington dwelt on the danger to discipline of ‘the soldiers and officers being too nearly on a level,’ and on the facility with which degrees of rank were transferred from civil to military life. ‘In your choice of officers,’ he wrote to one of his colonels, ‘take none but gentlemen. Let no local attachments influence you,’ 2
It was only with great hesitation and reluctance that the Congress could be induced to adopt these views. They hated the notion of a standing army. They dreaded the expense of additional bounties, and, the unpopularity of a great difference between officers and privates, and a strong jealousy of Washington prevailed with many members. John Adams expressed his firm conviction that if the system of enlistments for the war were adopted, few men, except mercenaries of the lowest type, would serve in the American army. 1 At length, however, in September 1776 the Congress agreed to vote that eighty-eight battalions, each consisting of 750 men, should be enlisted for the war. It entrusted the enlistment of these battalions to the different States, but assigned to each its quota and gave to the States the right of appointing colonels and all inferior officers, and it at the same time revised the articles of war and made them somewhat more stringent. A bounty of twenty dollars was offered to each recruit, and future advantages were very lavishly promised. Every private was to be entitled at the end of his service to 100 acres of land, while larger quantities, proportioned to their rank, were promised to the officers. Congress also offered eight dollars to every person who should obtain a recruit; and in spite of the strong protest of Washington, several of the States offered additional and separate bounties for enlistment. It was found, however, impossible, even on these terms, to obtain any considerable number of recruits for the whole duration of the war; so it was determined to admit recruits for three years, who were to have no land, but were entitled to all the other advantages. Congress also, after some hesitation, gave Washington an extraordinary power of raising and organising sixteen additional battalions of infantry, three regiments of cavalry, three regiments of artillery, and a corps of engineers; and as the State appointment of officers proved very prejudicial, they gave Washington a dictatorial power over officers under the rank of Brigadier-General. 1 But in spite of all efforts to encourage enlistment, a large proportion of the continental soldiers were raised by compulsion. The States passed laws drafting the militia, and compelling every person drafted to enter the military service or to find a substitute under pain of imprisonment. In Virginia a law exempted every two persons who could find a recruit from all military service, and servants were manumitted who consented to enter the army. 2
The difficulty of obtaining soldiers was by no means the only one that weighed upon the Congress. The powers of this body were so little defined and so imperfectly acknowledged that it had scarcely any coercive authority over the separate States. Prior to the Declaration of Independence, Congress was merely regarded as an organisation for enabling them to cooperate in resisting the encroachments or coercive measures of Great Britain, and the delegates had been severely limited by the instructions of their constituents. Since the Declaration of Independence, Congress had become the Government of the country, but its authority rested only upon manifest necessity and general acquiescence, and had no real legal basis. It was not even a representation of the different State Assemblies. The great majority of its members were elected by Provincial Conventions, summoned with every sort of irregularity, and often representing very small sections of the people. 1 It was obvious that such a body could not strain allegiance or impose sacrifices. It was only in November 1777 that the Articles of Confederation were voted by Congress, which settled its constitution and powers, and defined the respective limits of the central and State governments. But these Articles of Confederation were not ratified by any of the States till July 1778, and they were not ratified so as to become obligatory on all the States till March 1781. 2 In the meantime Congress exercised the authority of a sovereign power, but it was obliged to be more than commonly careful not to arouse the jealousy of the States. Several questions of great difficulty had indeed already arisen. It was necessary to determine the proportion of men and money to be contributed by each State, and there were dangerous controversies about the exact boundaries of the different States, and upon the question whether the Crown lands should be regarded as common property at the disposition of Congress for the public good, or as State property subject only to the local legislatures. 3 It was only by great skill, management, and forbearance that these questions were solved or evaded, and a unity and consistency of action imparted to the whole machine.
The first necessity of the war was to raise money to carry it on. A great portion of the military stores had to be manufactured or imported, and it was very evident that in no part of the world was it less possible than in America to count upon gratuitous service. But the first step in the quarrel with Great Britain had been due to the attempt of the British Parliament to tax America, and a great impatience of taxation had been one of the chief supports of the revolutionary party. Under these circumstances, Congress did not venture to claim the power of directly imposing any tax, and at the beginning of the contest the separate States, which had an indisputable right of self-taxation, did not venture to exercise it for military purposes, knowing how large a part of the population were lukewarm or hostile to the revolution. During the first two years of the war no additional taxes of any importance appear to have been imposed, in spite of the earnest entreaties of Congress. 1 But money was imperatively needed, and the plunder of loyal subjects went but a small way in providing it. A foreign loan was obviously impossible until the revolutionary government had acquired some aspect of permanence and security. The only course that remained was the issue of paper money, and this Congress authorised with the general implied assent of the States. Five issues, amounting in the whole to fifteen million dollars, had been made by the end of July 1776. Congress apportioned the debt thus incurred to the several States upon the basis of population, and each State was primarily bound to raise taxes for the gradual redemption of its portion of the debt, and if it failed, the other States were liable to the creditor. At first this expedient was very popular, and the struggle was undertaken under the belief that it would be only a short one. But already, in July 1776, there were alarming symptoms of that depreciation of the continental paper which was perhaps the most serious danger to the cause of the Revolution, and it was aggravated by the failure of an attempt which was made to raise a loan of 5 millions of dollars at 4 per cent.
The financial question, indeed, was, perhaps, the most formidable which the party of the Revolution had to encounter. America started with the great advantage of a prosperous and economical people, and of a government entirely free from the profuse extravagance and corruption of the English political system. In a remarkable memorial drawn up by Franklin, the continental nations were reminded that the colonies of America, having borrowed 10,000,000 dollars in the last French war, had paid off the whole of this debt in 1772, and that the entire amount expended by the civil governments of three millions of people was only 70,000 l. 1 But the very payment of the debt, though it greatly raised the credit of the country, had left it with but little money, and it was estimated that the whole amount of specie in the colonies amounted to less, probably to much less, than twelve millions of dollars. 2 The Congress judiciously threw open the ports, as far as the British cruisers would allow it, to commerce, and the American privateers brought in much wealth to the nation, but the revenues derived from these sources could not balance the expense of the war. At the end of 1777, Congress advised the different States to confiscate and sell for public purposes the property of all who had abandoned their allegiance to the State and passed over to the enemy, and this measure was energetically pursued. In some States, the estates and rights of married women, of widows and minors, and of persons who had died within the territory possessed by the British, were forfeited, and great masses of property were thus brought into the public treasury. 1 But in spite of all such palliatives, the financial stress was rapidly increasing, and measures of the most violent character were taken to arrest it. Already, at the end of 1776, Robert Morris described the proportionate rate of paper money to specie as from 2 or 2 1/2 to 1, and the depreciation naturally advanced with accelerated speed. 2 It was not uniform in all the States, but in 1778 the rate was 5 or 6 to 1. In 1779 it was 27 or 28 to 1, and in the beginning of 1780, when new measures were taken on the subject, it was 50 or 60 to 1. 3 Its necessary consequence was a corresponding elevation of all nominal prices, and an utter confusion of all pecuniary arrangements which had been made before the war. Multitudes of quiet and industrious men, who had been perfectly indifferent to the Stamp Act and the tea duty, found themselves brought face to face with ruin, and a cry of indignation and distress rose up over the land. ‘The country people,’ wrote a French officer from Philadelphia, ‘are so exasperated at the high price everything bears, that unless some change soon takes place they threaten not only to withhold provisions from the town, but to come down in a body and punish the leaders.’ 4
In the beginning of 1777, Congress, with the warm approval of the great body of the people, determined to enter upon a course which the more sagacious men in America knew to be little better than insane. It imagined that it could regulate all prices by law, and maintain them at a level greatly below that which the normal operation of the law of supply and demand had determined. Laws with this object were speedily made in all the States. The prices of labour, of food, of every kind of manufacture, of all domestic articles, were strictly regulated, and committees employed to see that these prices were not exceeded. The measure, of course, aggravated the very evil it was intended to diminish. Goods that were already very rare and greatly needed were carefully concealed and withdrawn from sale lest they should be purchased at prices below their real value. In most cases the law was disregarded, and sellers continued to sell, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, at prices higher than the law permitted, charging an additional sum to compensate them for the risk they incurred. Mob violence directed against the ‘engrossers, monopolisers, and forestallers,’ combinations of the more patriotic merchants binding themselves to sell only at the authorised prices, newspaper denunciations and occasional legal punishments, were all insufficient and impotent; and in September 1777, John Adams wrote that in his sincere opinion the Act for limiting prices, if not repealed, would ‘ruin the State, and introduce a civil war.’ At last, in October 1778, Congress voted that ‘all limitations of prices of gold and silver be taken off;’ but the States continued for some time longer to endeavour to regulate prices by legislation. 1
Still more terrible in their consequences than the attempted limitation of prices were the laws which were passed by the different States at the invitation of Congress, making paper money legal tender, compelling all persons to receive it in full payment of debts or obligations contracted before the Revolution, and pronouncing those who refused to do so enemies of the liberty of America. Few laws have spread a larger amount of distress, dishonesty, and injustice through a great community. All those who subsisted on life-incomes or fixed rents or interest of money found their incomes rapidly reduced to a small fraction of their previous value; while, on the other hand, vast wealth was suddenly created, as the whole debtor class were enabled to free themselves from their obligations. Debts incurred in gold were paid off in depreciated paper which was only worth a twentieth, a thirtieth, a fortieth, a fiftieth part of its real value. They were legally extinguished by a payment which was in reality not 1 s. or 6 d. or even 3 d. in the £.
In a country where debtors were extremely numerous, and where the whole social and economical system rested on the relation of debtor and creditor, this law opened the door to the most enormous and far-reaching fraud, but it acted differently on different classes, and this difference had an important influence upon the fortunes of the Revolution. To the labourer who lived upon his daily wages, the depreciation was of little moment, especially if he had been too improvident to lay by any store for the future. Earning and spending in the same currency, the change was no disadvantage to him, and he was even benefited by the unnatural stimulus which the immense quantities of paper money thrown suddenly upon the market had given to all kinds of labour. On the other hand, the wealthy and the saving and the helpless classes were in general utterly ruined. Debts of merchants which had been contracted when goods were cheapest and had often been for years on the books, were now discharged in paper not a twentieth part of the real value. Widows and orphans in great numbers, who had been left fortunes in money, were paid off by guardians, trustees, or executors in depreciated paper. Old men who had lent out the savings of industrious lives, and had been living comfortably upon the interest, were fortunate if they did not receive back their principal shrunk to perhaps a fiftieth part of its original value. Everyone who had been sufficiently saving to lend was impoverished. Everyone who had been reckless and improvident in borrowing was enriched, and ‘truth, honour, and justice,’ in the emphatic words of a contemporary American historian, ‘were swept away by the overflowing deluge of legal iniquity.’ 1 Among the enterprising men who had thrown themselves into the first movement of the revolution were many of broken fortunes and doubtful antecedents, many ardent speculators, many clever and unscrupulous adventurers. Such men found in the violent depreciation, the local variations, and the sudden fluctuations of the currency a ready path to fortune, and they soon acquired a new and sinister interest in the continuance of the struggle. Among others, the gentleman who called himself Earl of Stirling, and who had attained the position of brigadier-general in the American service, had entered it overwhelmed with debt, but by availing himself of the condition of the currency, he is stated to have paid off debts amounting to nearly 80,000 l. with 1,000 l. of gold and silver. 2
Very seldom in the history of the world had the race for wealth been so keen, or the passion for speculation so universal, or the standard of public honesty so low. ‘The first visible effect,’ wrote a contemporary American economist, ‘of an augmentation of the medium and the consequent fluctuation of value was a host of jockeys, who followed a species of itinerant commerce, and subsisted upon the ignorance and honesty of the country people; or, in other words, upon the difference in the value of the currency in different places. Perhaps we may safely estimate that not less than 20,000 men in America left honest callings and applied themselves to this knavish traffic.’ 1 ‘The manners of the continent,’ wrote the Committee of Foreign Affairs in March 1778, ‘are too much affected by the depreciation of our currency. Scarce an officer but feels something of a desire to be concerned in mercantile speculation, from finding that his salary is inadequate to the harpy demands which are made upon him for the necessaries of life, and from observing that but little skill is necessary to constitute one of the merchants of these days. We are almost a continental tribe of Jews.’ 2 ‘Speculation,’ wrote Washington, ‘peculation, engrossing, forestalling, with all their concomitants, afford too many melancholy proofs of the decay of public virtue.’ 3 The vast gains rapidly acquired by privateering, the enormous rate of insurance, the enormous prices given for such European goods as arrived safely in America, had already produced a spirit of fierce and general gambling which the depreciation and fluctuation of the currency immeasurably increased. Immense fortunes were suddenly accumulated; and, in the gloomiest period of the struggle, Philadelphia was a scene of the wildest and maddest luxury. Many years after the peace with England had been signed, the older Americans could clearly trace in the prevailing spirit of reckless and dishonest speculation the demoralising effects on the national character of the years of the depreciated currency. 1
It was gradually becoming evident to intelligent observers that the war was not likely to be determined by mere hard fighting. In its first stages a decisive English victory might more than once have concluded it; but it was plain that, if the American people, or any very large proportion of them, persevered, no military expeditions could subdue them. In no country in the world was it more easy to avoid a decisive action, and the whole texture and organisation of colonial life hung so loosely together, that the capture of no single point was likely to be of vital importance. In the course of the war every important town—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Savannah, Charleston—fell into the hands of the British, but the struggle still continued. A Rebel Convention governed a part of the State of New York at the very time when the capital and the surrounding country were in the undisputed possession of the King's army; and whole districts submitted without a struggle whenever the troops appeared, and cast off their allegiance the moment they had gone. To occupy and maintain in permanent subjection a country so vast, so difficult, and so sparsely populated; to support a great army in the midst of such a country, and 3,000 miles from England, if the people were really hostile, was absolutely and evidently impossible, and the attempt could not long be made without a ruinous expense.
The real hope of success lay in the languor, divisions, and exhaustion of the Americans themselves. A large minority detested the revolution. A large majority were perfectly indifferent to it, or were at least unwilling to make any sacrifice for it. Jealousies and quarrels, insubordination and corruption, inordinate pretensions and ungovernable rapacity divided and weakened its supporters. The extreme difficulty of inducing a sufficient number of soldiers to enrol themselves in the army of Washington, the difficulty of procuring cannon and gunpowder and every kind of military stores, the want of woollen clothes, and of other important articles of European commerce, the ruin, the impoverishment, and the confusion that resulted from the enormous depreciation of the currency, and finally the impossibility of paying for the essential services of the war, made it probable that a peace party would soon gain the ascendent, and that the colonies would soon be reunited to the mother country.
If America had been left unaided by Europe this would probably have happened. A large proportion of the States would almost certainly have dropped off, and although the war might have been continued for some time in New England and Virginia, it was tolerably evident that even there no large amount of gratuitous service or real self-sacrifice could be expected. Washington himself at one time gravely contemplated the possibility of being reduced to carry on a guerilla warfare in the back settlements. But at this most critical period foreign assistance came in to help, and it is not too much to say that it was the intervention of France that saved the cause.
I have already noticed the circumstances under which Congress in 1775 determined to seek this assistance, and the strong motives of resentment, rivalry, and interest that disposed France to accede to the request. It was in November 1775 that a committee was appointed to correspond with ‘friends of America in other countries;’ and early next year Silas Deane was sent to Paris as secret agent, with instructions to ascertain the dispositions of the French Court, and to endeavour to obtain arms and supplies. He arrived in Paris in July 1776, but before that date the French ministers had resolved upon their policy. Choiseul, who had watched with especial eagerness the rise of the troubles in the colonies, and who had steadily laboured to reconstruct the shattered navy of France, to maintain a close alliance between the different branches of the House of Bourbon, and to oppose on all occasions the interests of England, had fallen from power in 1770, but he was still said to have some influence, and to have exerted it in favour of the colonies. The existing ministry was presided over by Count Maurepas, and its most powerful members were Vergennes, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the illustrious Turgot, the Comptroller-General.
In the beginning of 1776 Vergennes drew up a memorial on American affairs, which was laid before the King. It was written in a tone of extreme hostility to England, and although it affected to deprecate a war, its whole tendency was to urge the Government to a more directly aggressive policy. The civil war that had arisen was, in the opinion of Vergennes, infinitely advantageous both to France and to Spain, in so far as it was likely to exhaust both the victors and the vanquished, but there were some grave dangers to be feared. It was possible that the English would acknowledge the impracticability of coercing America, and would enter into a policy of conciliation; and it was only too probable that in that case they would employ the great army they had collected in America to seize the possessions of France and Spain in the West Indies. Such an enterprise would be extremely popular. It would speedily efface the recollection of the domestic quarrel; it would be almost certainly successful, for the French and Spanish West Indies were practically indefensible; and it was especially likely if Chatham again became minister, as it would enable him to overthrow the arrangements of the Treaty of Paris, against which he had so bitterly protested. It was possible again, that the King of England, having conquered the liberties of America, would endeavour to subvert those of England, but he could only do so by flattering the national hatred and jealousy, and by surrounding himself with the popularity that springs from a successful foreign war. If, on the other hand, the American States became independent, it might be feared that England would seek to indemnify herself for her loss and humiliation by seizing the French and Spanish West Indies; and it was not impossible that America herself, being shut out from the English markets, might be compelled by necessity to seek in new conquests an outlet for her productions.
The Kings of France and Spain were animated by a strong love of peace, and peace must in consequence, if possible, be preserved. If, however, they had thought fit ‘to follow the impulse of their interests, and perhaps of the justice of their cause … if their military and financial means were in a state of development proportionate to their substantial power, it would, no doubt, be necessary to say to them that Providence had marked out this moment for the humiliation of England … that it is time to avenge upon her the evils which, since the commencement of the century, she has inflicted upon her neighbours and rivals; that for this purpose all means should be employed to render the next campaign as animated as possible, and to procure advantages to the Americans. The degree of passion and exhaustion should determine the moment to strike the decisive blows which would reduce England to a secondary Power … and deliver the universe from a greedy tyrant that was absorbing all power and all wealth.’ This bold policy, however, of undisguised assistance the two Kings did not wish to adopt, and so another policy was submitted to the King and to his council.
‘The continuance of the war for at least one year is desirable to the two Crowns. To that end the British ministry must be maintained in the persuasion that France and Spain are pacific, so that it may not fear to embark in an active and costly campaign; while on the other hand the courage of the Americans should be kept up by secret favours and vague hopes which will prevent accommodation. … The evils the British will make them suffer will embitter their minds; their passions will be more and more inflamed by the war; and should the mother country be victorious, she will for a long time need all her strength to keep down their spirit.’ To carry out this policy the ministers must ‘dexterously tranquillise the English ministry as to the intentions of France and Spain,’ while secretly assisting the insurgents with military stores and money, and they must at the same time strengthen their own forces with a view to a war. 1
In order to judge the real character of the advice so frankly given, we must remember that England was at this time at perfect peace with France; that she had given no provocation or reasonable pretext for hostility; that as the American colonies had not yet declared their independence, their quarrel with the mother country was as yet a purely domestic one, and also that no consideration of their welfare or of the principles they were advocating entered in the smallest degree into the motives of action of Vergennes.
By the command of the King the memorial of Vergennes was submitted to Turgot, who, in April 1776, presented a paper containing his own views of the question. Sooner or later, in the opinion of Turgot, the independence of America was a certainty, and it would totally change, not only the relations of Europe with America, but also all the prevailing maxims of commerce and politics. America must necessarily be a nation of free-traders. She need not seek new conquests in order to find a market for her produce. By throwing open her own ports she would soon oblige other nations to do the same; and they would not be long in discovering that the whole system of monopoly, restriction, and dependence on which the colonial system of all European nations during the last two centuries was founded was an absolute delusion.
It is a remarkable illustration of the manner in which economical ideas were growing in Europe, that this opinion, which a few years before would have been regarded as the most extravagant of paradoxes, was in 1776 independently promulgated by the greatest French statesman of his age, and by the founder of political economy in England. Turning, however, to the immediate interests of France, Turgot considered her most pressing and immediate necessity to be peace. Her finances were so deranged that nothing but extreme and long-continued frugality could avert a catastrophe, and the foreign dangers that threatened her were much exaggerated. There was no sufficient reason to believe that the English ministers contemplated attacking her, and it was extremely unlikely that in the very probable event of England losing her colonies she would launch into a new and costly war, especially as in that case she would have lost the basis of her operations against the French West Indies. The severance of the colonies from England would not injure England, and it would be a great benefit to the world, on account of its inevitable influence on colonial and commercial policy. ‘Wise and happy will be that nation which shall first know how to bend to the new circumstances, and consent to see in its colonies allies and not subjects. … When the total separation of America shall have extinguished among the European nations the jealousy of commerce, there will exist among men one great cause of war the less, and it is very difficult not to desire an event which is to accomplish this good for the human race.’
The immediate interests, however, of France and Spain must be judged upon narrower grounds. England was their great rival, and the policy of the English ministers was so infatuated that their success in America would be the result most favourable to French and Spanish interests. If England subdued her colonies by ruining them, she would lose all the benefits she had hitherto derived from them. If she conquered them without materially diminishing their strength, she would find them a source of perpetual weakness, for they would always be awaiting their opportunity to rebel. The true interest of France was to remain perfectly passive. She must avoid any course that would lead to war. She must give no money and no special assistance to the revolted colonists, but the ministers might shut their eyes if either of the contending parties made purchases in French harbours. 1
Maurepas and Malesherbes supported the pacific views of Turgot, but Vergennes found the other ministers on his side, and his policy speedily prevailed. Malesherbes, discouraged at the resistance to his internal reforms, retired from the ministry in the beginning of 1776, and Turgot, who was detested by the aristocracy and disliked by the Queen, was dismissed a few months later. The French Government, while duping the English ministry by repeated and categorical assertions of their strict neutrality, subsidised the revolt; and in May 1776, nearly two months before the arrival of Silas Deane in Europe, Vergennes wrote a letter to the King, of which it is no exaggeration to say that it is more like the letter of a conspirator than of the minister of a great nation. He was about to authorise Beaumarchais to furnish the Americans with a million of livres for the service of the English colonies. He was so anxious to preserve the secrecy of the transaction that he had taken care that his letter to Beaumarchais should not be in his own handwriting or in the handwriting of any of his secretaries or clerks, and he had accordingly employed his son, a boy of fifteen, on whose discretion he could rely. He would now write to Grimaldi, the minister of Spain, proposing to him to contribute a similar amount. 2
The reputation which literary achievement gives, so far eclipses after a few years minor political services that it is probable that only a small fraction of those who delight in the ‘Marriage of Figaro’ or in the ‘Barber of Seville’ are aware that Beaumarchais was for a time one of the most active of the confidential agents of Vergennes, and that he bore a very considerable part in the transactions that led to the independence of America. Under an assumed name, he brought a first loan of a million livres from Vergennes to the Americans. A similar sum was sent by Spain, and the money was employed in purchasing from the royal arsenals of France such munitions of war as were necessary for the army. In the course of 1776, Deane was able in this way to procure for his countrymen 30,000 stand of arms, 30,000 suits of clothes, more than 250 pieces of cannon, and great quantities of other military stores. 1
The assistance at this critical moment was of vital importance, and from this time France continued steadily, by successive loans and supplies of military munitions, to maintain the army of Washington. In September 1776, Franklin and Arthur Lee, together with Deane, were appointed commissioners at Paris for the purpose of negotiating treaties with foreign Powers, and especially with France, and rather more than a year later a furious quarrel broke out between Lee and Deane, which ended in the recall of the latter, with serious imputations upon his integrity. He was replaced by John Adams, but before that time the alliance with America had been signed. The assistance of France, however, was never more valuable than in the first period of the war, while she was still at peace with England. American vessels were admitted, by the connivance of the ministers, into French ports with articles of commerce of which by law French merchants had a strict monopoly, and the American agents were soon able to inform the Congress that France gave the commerce of the insurgent colonies greater indulgences in her ports than the commerce of any other nation whatever. 2 Privateers were sheltered and equipped; prizes were secretly sold in the French harbours. Experienced officers, trained in the French army, were sent to America with the permission, or even at the instigation, of the French ministers, to organise or command the American forces. In the beginning of 1777 one of the ablest sea officers in France was engaged, by the permission of the minister, in superintending the construction in French harbours of ships of war for America, 1 and finally a new grant of two millions of livres from the Crown was made, the King exacting no conditions or promise of repayment, and only requiring absolute secrecy. 2
It was not possible that these things could be wholly concealed from the English Ambassador, but the comedy was boldly if not skilfully played. Vergennes professed his absolute ignorance of the despatch of military stores to America, at the very time when by his authorisation they were freely exported from the King's own arsenal. He gave orders that vessels which were pointed out as laden with such stores should be stopped, and then allowed them secretly to escape. He formally recalled the leave of absence of officers who were said to be going to America, but did not oblige them to return to their regiments. He gave orders that no prizes should be sold in the French ports, and then instructed persons about the Court to inform the American agents that this measure was necessary, as France was not yet fully prepared for war, but that they must not for a moment doubt the good-will of the Court. He even imprisoned for a time some who were too openly breaking the law, and restored some prizes which were brought too ostentatiously into French harbours, but he secretly granted 400,000 livres as a compensation to their captors, and the prisoners found no difficulty in escaping from the prison at Dunkirk. He again and again, in every term that could be binding upon men of honour, assured the English Ambassador of the perfect neutrality and pacific intentions of France, and of the determination of the French King to observe religiously the treaties he had signed; and he at the same time steadily pressed on his naval preparations for the war. 1 If the French were somewhat slower in throwing away the mask and the scabbard than the Americans could have wished, they at least gave the colonies the assistance most needed, and, as the commissioners acutely said, the very delay was not without its compensation. ‘Enjoying the whole harvest of plunder upon the British commerce, which otherwise France and Spain would divide with us, our infant naval power finds such plentiful nourishment as has increased and must increase its growth and strength most marvellously.’ 2
‘All Europe,’ they wrote, about this time, ‘is for us.’ ‘Every nation in Europe wishes to see Britain humbled, having all in their turn been offended by her insolence, which in prosperity she is apt to discover on all occasions.’ 3 England under the great ministry of Pitt had acquired an empire and a preponderance on the sea not less overwhelming and not less menacing than that which Charles V. and Lewis XIV. had acquired on land, and it had become a main object of the governing classes on the Continent to reduce it, while the merchants in every nation were looking forward with eagerness to the opening of the great field of American commerce, which had hitherto been a monopoly of England. Spain, which was greatly under the influence of France, and very hostile to England, supplied the colonies with money and with gunpowder, and gave their vessels greater trade privileges than those of any other country, 1 though without any real wish for American independence. The Grand Duke of Tuscany secretly removed all duties from American commerce, and expressed himself so favourable to the American cause that Deane assured his employers that they might safely purchase or construct frigates at Leghorn. 2 Frederick of Prussia, who had never forgiven his desertion by England, without committing himself openly to the Americans, or even consenting to receive their envoy, watched with undisguised delight the growing embarrassments of his old ally, threw every obstacle in his power in the way of German enlistments, and took great pains to assure France that he would remain perfectly passive if she entered into war with England. The Emperor, hostile on all other points to Frederick, agreed with him in discouraging the German enlistments for England. Holland was delighted to find in America a new market for her goods, and the little Dutch island of St. Eustatius became a great mart for supplying the wants of the insurgents.
In France public opinion began to flow with irresistible force in favour of war. The old enmity towards England, the martial spirit which had been repressed and profoundly humiliated, the recollection of the long series of defeats and disasters which had terminated in the shameful peace of 1763, and also the prevailing fear that, unless the power of England were diminished, all the French dominions in the West Indies and South Africa must speedily be captured, had deeply stirred the French people; while all that was best in French thought and most generous in French character welcomed the rise of the great republic of the West. The small but growing school of economists saw in it the future champion of free trade. The followers of Voltaire, who aspired beyond all things to religious liberty, pointed with enthusiasm to the complete separation of Church and State and the total absence of religious restrictions in the American constitutions, and they began to extol America even more than they had hitherto extolled China, as the ideal land of philosophers and freethinkers. The followers of Rousseau, who valued beyond all things political equality and liberty, and who were at this time in the zenith of their influence, saw in the New World the realisation of their principles and of their dreams, the final refuge of liberties that were almost driven from Europe. The influence of French speculation on the American contest had in truth been extremely slight. The struggle in New England was of an essentially English kind, directed to very practical ends, and turning mainly on the right of taxation and on disputed principles or interpretations of the British Constitution; but there were a few men in America who had been in some degree touched by French thought, and among them was Jefferson, the chief author of the Declaration of Independence. The passage in that document—curiously unlike the cautious spirit of New England lawyers and of Pennsylvanian Quakers, and curiously audacious in a document that emanated from an assembly consisting largely of slave-owners—in which the American legislators asserted as a self-evident truth that all men were created equal, and were endowed by the Creator with an inalienable right to liberty, might have been written by Rousseau himself; and the much nobler passage in which they maintained that all governments exist only for the benefit, and derive their just powers from the consent, of the governed; and that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to the ends for which government was instituted, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, awoke a mighty echo on the Continent.
It was a strange thing to see the public opinion of a purely despotic country thrilling with indignation because England had violated the constitutional liberties of her colonies; especially strange when it is remembered that one of the great American grievances was that England had perpetuated in Canada something of the French system of colonial government. Of the sincerity of the enthusiasm, however, there can be little question. The very judicious selection of Franklin as the chief representative of the colonies greatly added to it. His works were well known in France through several translations; his great discovery of the lightning conductor had been made when the Parisian enthusiasm for physical science was at its height, and it was soon found that the man was at least as remarkable as his works. Dressed with an almost Quaker simplicity, his thin grey hair not powdered according to the general fashion, but covered with a fur cap, he formed a singular and striking figure in the brilliant and artificial society of the French capital. His eminently venerable appearance, the quaint quiet dignity of his manner, the mingled wit and wisdom of his conversation, the unfailing tact, shrewdness, and self-possession which he showed, whether he was negotiating with French statesmen or moving in a social sphere so unlike that from which he had arisen, impressed all who came in contact with him. Vergennes declared him to be the only American in whom he put full confidence. Turgot, in an immortal line, described him as having torn the lightning from heaven and the sceptre from the tyrant's hand. 1 Voltaire complimented him in his most graceful phrases, and expressed his pride that he was himself able to address him ‘in the language of Franklin.’ Poets, philosophers, men and women of fashion, were alike at his feet, and all the enthusiasms and Utopias of France seemed to gather round that calm American, who, under the appearance of extreme simplicity, concealed the astuteness of the most accomplished diplomatist, and who never for a moment lost sight of the object at which he aimed. His correspondence and his journal show clearly the half-amused, half-contemptuous satisfaction with which he received the homage that was bestowed on him. It became the fashion to represent him as the ideal philosopher of Rousseau. He was compared by his admirers to Phocion, to Socrates, to William Tell, and even to Jesus Christ. His head, accompanied by the line of Turgot, appeared everywhere on snuffboxes and medallions and rings. He was the idol alike of the populace and of society, and he used all his influence to hurry France into war. 2
A few warning voices were heard, but they were little heeded. Necker, who now managed the finances, saw as clearly as Turgot had seen before him that continued peace was a vital interest to France and to her dynasty, for it alone could avert the impending bankruptcy. Even Vergennes hesitated to strike the fatal blow till it had been somewhat more clearly demonstrated that a reconciliation of England with her colonies was no longer to be feared. When at the request of Franklin the Declaration of Independence was translated, and scattered, with the permission of the ministers, broadcast over France, Mirabeau, who was then a prisoner at Vincennes, asked whether those who were so anxious to ally themselves with the revolted colonies had really read or understood this Declaration, and had considered whether on its principles any European governments, except those of England, Holland, and Switzerland, could be deemed legitimate. When a few months later the French ministers informed England that the Americans had become independent by virtue of their Declaration, Lafayette remarked with a smile that they had announced a principle of national sovereignty which they would soon hear of at home. 1 The King hesitated much, but Marie Antoinette, who caught up every fashion and enthusiasm with the careless levity of youth, assisted the American cause with all her influence, little dreaming that she was giving the last great impulse to that revolutionary spirit which was so soon to lead her to misery and to death. ‘Give me good news,’ she said to Lafayette, when he visited her in 1779, ‘of our good Americans, of our dear republicans.’ 2 Paine's ‘Common Sense,’ with all its denunciations of monarchy, was translated into French, and was, if possible, even more popular in France than in America. 1 Few things in history are more tragical than the mingled gaiety and enthusiasm with which the brilliant society of Versailles plunged into the stream that was to sweep them so speedily to the abyss. As yet, however, there were few misgivings, and American observers believed and hoped that if a revolution broke out it would not be in Paris but in London. ‘The King and Queen,’ wrote John Adams from Paris in 1778, ‘are greatly beloved here. Every day shows fresh proof of it. On the other side of the Channel there is a king who is in a fair way to be the object of opposite sentiments to a nation if he is not at present.’ 2
One of the chief signs of the prevailing enthusiasm was the multitude of soldiers who went to America to enlist in the army of the insurgents. ‘I am well-nigh harassed to death,’ wrote Deane in 1776, ‘with applications of officers to go out to America.’ ‘Had I ten ships here I could fill them all with passengers for America.’ ‘The desire that military officers here of all ranks have,’ wrote the commissioners a few months later, ‘of going into the service of the United States is so general and so strong as to be quite amazing. We are hourly fatigued with their applications and offers which we are obliged to refuse.’ 3 Most of them, no doubt, were mere soldiers of fortune, animated only by love of adventure, hatred of England, or hope of higher rank or pay than they could gain at home; but a few were of the purest type of enthusiasts for liberty. Among these the most conspicuous was Lafayette, who abandoned a great fortune and position and a young wife to serve gratuitously in the army of Washington, and who was appointed a major-general at the age of nineteen.
The great majority of these foreigners were French, but there were a few of other nationalities. Among the latter were Pulaski, who had distinguished himself beyond all other men in resisting the first partition of Poland, and Kosciusko, the hero of her later struggle. Steuben, a veteran German soldier, who had served under Frederick through the Seven Years' War, did more than perhaps any other single person to discipline and organise the army of Washington. Baron Kalb, who, like many other Germans, had fought with much distinction under the banner of Marshal Saxe, had visited America in 1768 as the secret agent of Choiseul, and when the war broke out he hastened to place his sword at the disposal of the Americans. Another officer of whom great hopes were entertained was Conway, an Irishman in the French service, who was esteemed ‘one of the most skilful disciplinarians in France,’ but whose intriguing and ambitious character produced one of the most serious of the many divisions in the American army. 1
This incursion of foreign soldiers into America was by no means without embarrassments. It was not at all in the character of the American troops to place themselves under the command of strangers, or to give up to strangers the most lucrative posts in their army, and the swarms of French soldiers who came over with promises of high rank given them by Deane excited endless jealousy and difficulty. Great numbers of American officers at once resigned. General Du Coudray, who came out with a large party of French officers, was drowned in the Schuylkill, and his followers, after much angry contention about the rate of pay, declared that the terms of their engagement were broken, and returned to France. An attempt was made to enlist a brigade of French Canadians, and to employ the French officers in organising it, but it utterly failed, and no class of Canadians showed the smallest disposition to throw off the English rule. 1 In the eighteenth century the type of mercenary soldier who sought pay and adventure in foreign armies was a very common one, and men of this stamp were often more than commonly capacious and unprincipled. Numbers of officers, through their ignorance of English, were wholly unable to communicate with the troops they aspired to command, while the leading authorities in America who were obliged to organise the public service were often, if not usually, absolutely ignorant of French. Washington himself was completely so, though he found time, in the midst of the occupations of the campaign, to learn enough to understand, though not to speak it, 2 and in the busiest and most anxious period of the struggle John Adams wrote to his wife lamenting bitterly that he had not her knowledge of that language, and imploring her to send him the name of the author of her ‘thin French grammar which gives the pronunciation of the French words in English letters.’ 3
It needed all the tact and skill of management which Washington eminently possessed to surmount these difficulties, but in spite of every drawback the presence of this large foreign element was of great assistance to the Americans. In addition to several excellent officers who had fought in the British army during the conquest of Canada, they had now among them many veteran soldiers trained in the very best armies of the Continent, and it is a significant fact that out of 29 major-generals in the American army, no less than 11 were Europeans. 1
The remainder of the winter of 1776–7, after the combat of Trenton, passed without any memorable incident in America. The English remained for several months absolutely inactive in their entrenchments, and, to the unfeigned astonishment of Washington, 2 they made no attempt to regain the territory they had lost, or to force the passage of the Delaware and capture Philadelphia. Washington, on the other hand, was endeavouring to form an army, and his letters are full of bitter complaints of the want of patriotism he on all sides discovered. In New Jersey, it is true, the tide of feeling had been turned by the outrages of the British and Hessian troops. The New Jersey militia were in arms against the British, who now found the difficulties of obtaining provisions, forage, and intelligence greatly enhanced; but the laws of Congress directing the States to provide specified contingents for the American army were almost inoperative. The reluctance to enlist was extreme, and the delays of the State authorities threatened the utter ruin of the cause. The attempt to enlist troops for the whole duration of the war almost entirely failed. For some time Washington had not more than 1,500 men in his camp, while the English army was nearly ten times as numerous. 3 The theft of arms by the soldiers who deserted or disbanded themselves had been carried to such an extent that it had become difficult even to provide the soldiers with common guns, when fortunately in March the first great supplies of guns and military stores arrived from France, and in this respect restored the condition of the army. 1 In the beginning of this month Washington reckoned the army of Howe in the Jerseys at not less than 10,000 men, while his own army was 4,000, nearly all ‘raw militia, badly officered, and under no government.’ 2 In the beginning of April he complained that the extravagant bounties given by different States for raising bodies of men upon colonial establishments had made it almost impossible to procure them for the continental service, as ‘the men are taught to set a price upon themselves, and refuse to turn out except that price be paid.’ ‘How I am to oppose them’ [the British], he adds, ‘God knows; for excepting a few hundreds from Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, I have not yet received a man of the new continental levies.’ 3 Ten days later, in a confidential letter to his brother, he once more expressed his utter astonishment at the continued inactivity of General Howe, and declared that if the English general abstained much longer from taking advantage of the extreme weakness of his opponents it would show that he was totally unfit for the trust that was reposed in him. 4 In the beginning of June he again acknowledged that it was still ‘impossible, at least very unlikely, that any effectual opposition can be given to the British army with the troops we have, whose numbers diminish more by desertion than they increase by enlistments.’ 1 If, indeed, as most historians are accustomed to assume, the bulk of the American people were really on the side of Washington, their apathy at this time is almost inexplicable, and it could only be surpassed by the stupendous imbecility of the English, who appear to have been almost wholly ignorant of the state of the American army, who remained waiting for reinforcements from England long after the season for active operations had begun and at a time when there was scarcely any enemy to oppose them, and who, by burning and plundering houses, destroying crops, insulting and outraging peaceful inhabitants, were rapidly turning their friends into foes.
One great cause of the slow organisation of the Americans was the difficulty of appointing the principal officers. In addition to the numerous foreigners who were to be provided for, great perplexity arose from the claim of every State to have a proportion of general officers corresponding to the number of troops it furnished. 2 In the absence of any universally recognised superior, conflicting claims and pretensions had free course; and several admirable letters remain in which Washington endeavoured to soothe the resentment or the vanity of neglected officers. John Adams, who visited the army in the summer of 1777, was much shocked at the disunion he found prevailing, and in a letter to his wife he expressed himself on the subject with great bitterness. ‘I am wearied to death,’ he wrote, ‘with the wrangles between military officers high and low. They quarrel like cats and dogs. They worry one another like mastiffs, scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts.’ 1
In the spring and early summer a few inconsiderable expeditions took place in different quarters. The English destroyed large quantities of American stores at a place called Peeks-Kill, about fifty miles from New York, and at Danbury in Connecticut. The Americans destroyed a quantity of English stores in Long Island, and a small party of volunteers passing into Rhode Island succeeded in surprising and taking prisoner General Prescott, who was ultimately exchanged for General Lee. In June, Howe, having received some reinforcements from England, abandoned his quarters at Brunswick, but he made no effort to march upon the Delaware. After much complex manœuvring and several skirmishes which it is not here necessary to recount, he returned to his old quarters at Staten Island, despatched a portion of his troops to New York, and then sailed by a circuitous route to Chesapeake Bay, where he landed with about 16,000 men at a point some sixty miles from Philadelphia.
If the States had done what was expected from them, he would have been at least greatly outnumbered, but it was estimated by Galloway, and probably not untruly, that, of the 66,000 men voted by Congress for the continental service of 1777, they did not bring into the field 16,000, and that not half of these had enlisted voluntarily. 2 Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire—the States where the anti-English spirit might have been expected to be strongest—were obliged to pass laws drafting militiamen to serve by compulsion as substitutes in the continental army for twelve months. 3 There were also great numbers of ‘redemptioners,’ or men who had bound themselves to serve their masters for a specified number of years, and who were freed from their obligations if they would enlist in the American army. 1 Even Boston had lost much of her old enthusiasm, 2 and every State fell far short of its quota. Washington endeavoured to arrest the march of Howe, but on September 11, 1777, he was totally defeated in the battle of Brandywine. His army fled in utter confusion to Chester, and Du Portail, a French officer who was then in the American service, in reporting the circumstances to the French War Office, expressed his firm conviction that ‘if the English had followed their advantage that day, Washington's army would have been spoken of no more.’ 3
As usual, however, Howe did nothing to complete his victory, and the American army was able to re-form itself. The revolutionists took great pains to intimidate the loyal inhabitants of Pennsylvania, and they sent several of the principal inhabitants of Philadelphia prisoners to Virginia. 4 On September 26, Howe entered Philadelphia, and appears to have been warmly received both in the town and in its neighbouring country. He left four regiments to occupy the city, but posted the bulk of his army at German-town, about ten miles distant. On October 4, Washington, having received large reinforcements of militia from Maryland and New Jersey, surprised this post, but after an obstinate battle he was again utterly defeated. The British, with the assistance of some men-of-war, then proceeded to open the navigation of the Delaware, attacking the powerful forts which the Americans had constructed to command it, and though they were once very gallantly repulsed, they were in the end completely successful. Washington still continued, at the head of a regular army, to maintain himself in Pennsylvania, but the capital was in the undisputed possession of the English, the Congress was obliged to fly to Lancaster and Yorktown, the army of the Americans was demoralised by two great defeats, and the communications between the English fleet and army were fully established.
The position of Washington at this time was in all respects deplorable. As early as March he had written to General Schuyler: ‘The disaffection of Pennsylvania, I fear, is beyond anything you have conceived,’ 1 and the experience of the campaign fully justified his apprehensions. General Howe, during the many months his army was stationed at Philadelphia, never found the smallest difficulty in obtaining from the people abundance of fresh provisions. Profiting by his experience in New Jersey, he had given stringent orders, which appear to have been on the whole complied with, that no peaceful inhabitants should be molested; he even despatched a severe remonstrance to Washington, who had destroyed some mills in the neighbourhood; and he succeeded without difficulty in establishing perfectly amicable relations with the inhabitants. It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that the active loyalists were the true representatives of Pennsylvanian feeling; but it is, in my opinion, not doubtful that the sympathies of this great and wealthy province were much more on the side of the Crown than on the side of the Revolution. Had the Pennsylvanians really regarded the English as invaders or oppressors, the presence of an English army in their capital would most certainly have roused them to passionate resistance. But, in truth, it was never found possible to bring into the field more than a tenth part of the nominal number of the Pennsylvanian militia, and the Pennsylvanian quota in the continental regiments was never above one-third full, and soon sank to a much lower point. 1 Washington complained bitterly that he could obtain no military intelligence, the population of whole districts being ‘to a man disaffected’—disaffected ‘past all belief.’ 2 Millers refused to grind corn for his army. Provisions of every kind were systematically withheld, and often only obtained by forced requisitions or from other provinces. Carriages could rarely be obtained except by force, and Washington candidly described himself as in an enemy's country. 3 No American of any military or political eminence could separate himself from the army in Pennsylvania without great danger of being seized by the inhabitants and delivered up to the English. 4 As Lafayette bitterly complained, there were whole regiments of Americans in the British army, and in every colony there was a far greater number who, without actually taking up arms, made it their main object ‘to injure the friends of liberty and to give useful intelligence to those of despotism.’ 5