Independence (35 page)

CHAPTER 7

“T
HE
K
ING
W
ILL
P
RODUCE THE
G
RANDEST
R
EVOLUTION
”

G
EORGE
III
AND THE
A
MERICAN
R
EBELLION

WHEN THE PACKETS BROUGHT
to London by the
Quero
were opened on May 28 and news of the losses suffered by the British force sent to Lexington and Concord spread across the city, members of the government reacted with skepticism. Most thought the reports must be American propaganda. Given a couple of days for reflection, the king privately allowed that General Gage might have dispatched an inadequate force to Concord. Possibly, there had been some trouble, but George III would not budge from his belief that the accounts in the Salem newspapers on display at the lord mayor’s office were exaggerated. Even so, while it awaited Gage’s official report, the government used friendly newspapers to counter the rebel allegations that the king’s soldiers had committed atrocities. The
General Evening Post
cautioned readers, “Impartiality cannot be expected from Men when they are giving an Account of their own rebellious Proceedings.” It added that the version spread by the “rebel Vermin” was “stuffed with many Falsities.”
¹
The
London Gazette
and
London Magazine
also ran unfounded stories claiming that the Americans had not only committed atrocities—they had both scalped wounded redcoats and cut off their ears, it was alleged—but also fired the first shot on April 19.
²

Two weeks later Gage’s own report on the bloody first day of war arrived in London. Lord North learned that the accounts carried across the sea by Captain Derby had not been overstated. Although Gage emphasized that the force sent to Concord had accomplished its mission of destroying the arsenal—after the colonists fired the first shot, he said—the general revealed that on the return to Boston his soldiers had been “a good deal pressed” as they took “Fire from … every Hill, Fence, House, Barn, &c.” The “whole country was Assembled in Arms” against the British army, he confided. Disconcertingly, Gage did not divulge his losses, but aside from the matter of the source of the first shot, his report more or less confirmed the colonists’ accounts of the action. North summoned his cabinet, which had not met in weeks, to his office on Downing Street.
³
Having expected that a show of force would resolve the crisis, North instead had a war on his hands. He and his ministers now had to prepare for hostilities they had not foreseen.

The mood was glum when the cabinet gathered on June 15—the very day that the American Congress, three thousand miles away, appointed General Washington to command the Continental army. Some were upset at learning just how erroneous had been the repeated bluster that the Americans would back down when confronted. Others were disturbed at discovering on the very eve of their meeting that New York, which they had been led to believe was safe from rebel control, was acting in “association with other colonies to resist Acts of Parliament.”
⁴

The ministers may have been in low spirits, but as far back as January 1774, when the cabinet considered the Coercive Acts as a response to the Boston Tea Party, they had known that a heavy-handed approach could lead to war. They had never wavered from the belief that if war came, Great Britain would be victorious. That attitude yet prevailed, and according to one account, Dartmouth alone, at that initial cabinet meeting after Lexington-Concord, urged an alternative to a military response.

The American secretary got nowhere with his pleas for peace. His colleagues were certain that it would be disastrous for Great Britain to show a hint of weakness. Besides, they were convinced that American firebrands were to blame for the bloodshed. That view was confirmed by General Gage, who told them that this was “a preconcerted Scheme of Rebellion, hatched years ago in Massachusetts Bay.” The ministers knew, too, that going to war was popular in the British home islands. Driven by outrage that the colonists had killed British soldiers, the “nation … is in a manner unanimous against America,” Sandwich told friends. Edward Gibbon, the MP, described the mood as a “national clamour” to employ “the most vigorous and coercive measures.”
⁵
At that June 15 meeting, and three others later in the summer, North’s government took steps to escalate the conflict.

During the first meeting, the ministers agreed to reinforce Gage’s army by shifting troops from England and Ireland, recruiting one thousand Highlanders in Scotland, and directing Guy Carleton, a general and the governor of Quebec, to raise a force of two thousand citizen-soldiers—if the solicitor general deemed it legal to recruit Catholics—and to persuade his Indian allies to attack along the northern frontier of New York. The cabinet also discussed hiring upwards of three thousand foreign mercenaries, though it came to no decision. Finally, the ministry agreed to send four frigates to America.

By the ministry’s second meeting, a week later, Wedderburn had ruled that Catholics could be recruited. North’s government then directed Carleton to raise six thousand Canadians—triple the number first contemplated—and assigned them the objective of retaking Fort Ticonderoga, the loss of which London had just learned. The ministers additionally voted to transfer three regiments from Gibraltar and Minorca to America, replacing them with soldiers hired in the German province of Hanover. The cabinet also contemplated how to utilize the Royal Navy in suppressing the American rebellion. The navy was directed to blockade not only the New England coast but also the ports of New York and Charleston and the entrances to Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay. At this stage, Britain’s blockade was designed to obstruct commerce between the thirteen colonies. The colonies were allowed to trade with both the mother country and the British West Indies, though naval commanders were instructed to stop American vessels and search for arms and munitions, and for illegal foreign goods. The cabinet took two more steps at this busy meeting. It agreed to ship arms to the royal governors in the southern colonies. It also commanded Dartmouth to ask the northern Indian superintendent in New York to “lose no time in taking such steps as may induce” the Six Nations Confederation of Iroquois “to take up the hatchet against His Majesty’s rebellious subjects.”
⁶

The decision to raise Native American warriors was taken after Gage reported that Indians were part of the siege army at Boston. “You may be tender of using Indians,” the general had advised, “but the Rebels have shewn us the Example, and brought all [the Indians] they could down upon us.” Gage’s communiqué was accurate. The Stockbridge Indians, a tribe that had allied with the New England settlers during their eighteenth-century wars with the French, had cast their lot with the Yankees once again. As the Grand American Army took shape in May, some fifty Stockbridge braves formed a light infantry company within the siege army. Prior to Washington’s arrival, the Indians were active in ambushing British outposts and surprising sentries. During April and May at least six redcoats died at the hands of the Indians and several others had been wounded (and plundered, according to British reports). Washington continued to utilize his Indian allies—his secretary, Joseph Reed, referred to them as “our Stockbridge Indians”—even though congressional policy after late June was to secure the “strict neutrality” of the Indians.
⁷

In the course of its two meetings the ministry had agreed to send some five thousand more regulars to Gage. North’s government had deployed two thousand troops to New England at the beginning of the year, when it directed Gage to use force. With the reinforcement agreed to in June, there would be an army of some thirteen thousand men in Boston by late autumn, nearly a 150 percent increase over the number posted in the city only a year earlier.
⁸
The huge force raised in Canada was expected to bring the number of British under arms in America to nearly twenty thousand, more than double the number in service on the continent when the war broke out.

When the weeklong second cabinet meeting concluded, North was confident that his ministry had done all that was necessary to cope with the American problem. He hurriedly departed London for Wroxton, his 150-year-old country house in Oxfordshire. As Parliament was not in session between May and October, North had spent the spring at his country estate and expected to remain there until autumn. His hopes were quickly frustrated. Late in July, London was jolted by tidings of the Battle of Bunker Hill. The prime minister once again called the cabinet to an emergency meeting and sped to Downing Street.

When the ministers gathered on July 26 for their third meeting on the American war, the atmosphere was even more somber. Their frame of mind was captured perfectly by William Eden, an undersecretary of state: “We certainly are victorious … but if we have eight more such victories there will be nobody left to bring news of them.”
⁹
North, at last, grasped that his government faced a more formidable challenge than he had realized. The “war is now grown to such a height, that it must be treated as a foreign war,” he told the monarch, adding that “every expedient which would be used” in a contest with a major European adversary “should be applied” to hostilities in America. Privately, North confided to a neighbor and friend that he doubted victory could be won. Not only had the stout performances of the American soldiers awakened him to the realities of this war, but also North was not confident that the nation possessed the financial means of carrying on a widespread, protracted war. But he did not take his reservations to the king.
¹⁰

While North remained silent, others expressed their misgivings. Viscount Barrington, the secretary at war, told the prime minister that the Americans might be brought to their knees through a naval blockade, but they could not be defeated in a land war. Dartmouth pushed harder than ever for a negotiated settlement. London, he argued, must make sufficient concessions so that the leaders in the mother country and the colonies could “shake hands at last.” The Duke of Grafton, Lord Privy Seal and a veteran of many past ministries, urged North to “go to great lengths to bring about … a reconciliation.”
¹¹

But most ministers remained intransigent, sure of victory, though they implicitly acknowledged that this would be a tougher war than they had formerly imagined. No one any longer presumed the war could be won in 1775. Every minister understood that victory required more troops than had been thought necessary only thirty days before, and all presumably understood that, at the moment, the British army did not have sufficient men to do what it was to be asked to do. On paper, the British army in 1775 consisted of 48,647 men, but the ministry knew that no more than 36,000 regulars were under arms.
¹²
Somehow, somewhere, men had to be found. In the wake of Bunker Hill, five regiments in Ireland, six more battalions in Gibraltar and Minorca, and four artillery companies in the home islands were ordered to sail for America at once. In addition, 6,000 men were to be recruited to bring the regiments already in America up to strength—that is, up to 811 men per regiment, not counting officers and noncommissioned officers. North’s government had gone to war thinking the job could be done with as few as 7,000 regulars. Word of Lexington-Concord and Bunker Hill caused the ministry to increase its estimates of how many men were needed to suppress the colonial rebellion. By the time the late-July cabinet meeting adjourned, North was committed to deploying more than 30,000 redcoats in North America. Between January and July, the ministry had taken steps to nearly quintuple its army in America. Some of the reinforcements were expected to reach the colonies by early autumn, but it would be the spring or summer of 1776 before the last British soldier crossed the sea.
¹³

Three days after the third emergency cabinet meeting, North learned from Carleton that none of the 6,000 Canadians, and none of the Indians, that the ministry had anticipated would be available to augment the British army. When asked to take up arms, both had “showed … backwardness,” the governor exclaimed. An incursion into New York to reclaim the lost forts was out of the question, at least in 1775. In fact, Carleton was not even sanguine about securing Canada. He needed money and reinforcements, he said, to defend his province against a possible rebel invasion.
¹⁴