The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (75 page)

Washington probably never understood the anomaly of his wishing to make a revolution with a conventional eighteenth-century army -- to establish once and for all American independence with an organization which systematically broke the personal independence of its members. But he never gave up this desire. Yet he believed passionately in the American cause as its most enlightened advocates defined it: as a struggle for the rights of man. When those rights were translated into personal codes and into behavior, they did not necessarily subvert the will and discipline of an army -- once a genuine army was created, an army in which orders were followed and men did their duty. But why should anyone expect the unbridled creatures who appeared in the militia to fight and to hold fast when their lives were endangered? They should fight -- Washington insisted -- for their honor, for fame, and glory, those aristocratic virtues which free men might value were they properly instructed and trained. Free men might fight for their honor and for a great cause. But they would not fight in their present organization -the militia, for example, with its local orientation, its incompetent and democratically chosen officers, its disdain of discipline, and its short enlistments.
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Washington's distrust of civilians-in-arms ran so deep as to blind him to the possibility -- realized twenty years later in the French Revolution -of drawing an entire population into the war. Washington did not dread social revolution and the overturning of classes which might have occurred in a war fought by a people under arms for he did not really conceive of it as possible. The people were disabled by their lack of restraint and their inability to suffer themselves to be organized and disciplined. The best that could be done in the Revolution was to create a standing army composed of free men broken of some of the worst habits freedom engendered. They were -- he believed -- superior to mere mercenaries; they had a cause, and if their sense of honor could be aroused, they could be made into a reasonable facsimile of a conventional army. But until he had such an army all he could do was to substitute fortifications, the protection of breastworks, parapets, and trenches, for pride and honor so sadly deficient in the citizen-soldiers who flowed in and out of camp. Therefore he would fight a war of posts.

The British strategy lacked the simplicity of the American. Until Howe evacuated Boston in March 1776 the ministry had no strategy at all,

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no overall conception of the war. And it might be argued that the ministry never arrived at one. The ministry's difficulty in 1775 after Lexington was that it had no clear policy, and until it decided on policy no clear strategy could be maintained. Howe sat locked up in Boston for almost a year; at home the king at least knew what he wanted -colonial submission to royal and Parliamentary power. Once that was given things might resume -- he thought -- where they left off, before all the trouble started in 1764. North did not seem able to muster up resolution to match the king's, but as a good and loyal servant he went along. Lord George Germain, who had replaced Dartmouth as American Secretary, shared the king's ardor for first defeating the colonies and then taking them back into the empire, but like the government as a whole, he had trouble translating a desire for military victory into victory in America.
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Part of the ministry's problem lay with the instruments they chose to fight the war. Admiral Richard Howe, in overall command in America, possessed outstanding abilities and considerable influence. Lord Howe had headed the well-connected Howe family since 1758, when he succeeded his older brother as fourth viscount. The family had held important offices and several of its members had sat in Parliament for years. They also enjoyed friendly relations at court; Howe's mother, for example, had received a pension from George I when she married and later became a member of George III's household. Admiral Richard Lord Howe took his turn at court too. He had sailed with the brother of George III in the Seven Years War; Queen Charlotte sponsored his first child; and the king himself came to rely on his advice concerning the navy.
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Despite these advantages, despite the king's friendship, Howe held himself aloof in politics -- he was independent -- and he failed to back a policy of coercion against the colonies. In fact, he favored conciliation and had held to this line from the time troubles began until he himself was relieved of command in America. He was fond of America and Americans, and apparently had been since Massachusetts put up a monument in Westminster Abbey to the memory of his brother, George Augustus, Third Viscount Howe, killed at Ticonderoga in 1758.

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In February 1776 the Crown made Lord Richard Howe commander in chief in America in ignorance of his views on policy. The ministry wanted to subdue the colonies first, and in the spring it gave him unambiguous instructions to that effect. He was not to negotiate until the colonies accepted Parliament's supremacy, presumably in all cases whatsoever. Howe's instructions also provided the details of operations: he was to suppress all colonial commerce, shut up the Americans' ports, and destroy their armed ships, supplies, and fortifications.

At about the same time, Germain reached an understanding with the commander of the army in America, William Howe. Germain had believed for at least a year that New York City should be the focus of the land war. Howe agreed; and agreed too that the army in Halifax should be sent there, to be joined by Clinton's small force in the Carolinas and by a much larger number of troops from Britain. By sometime in the summer Howe would have around 30,000 soldiers in New York City. This army would push up the Hudson, to be met by a smaller force under Carleton coming south from Canada. If Washington opposed, the two would trap him and destroy him piecemeal. If he retreated, they would reduce New England, the center of the rebellion, to submission. Cutting the colonies in two was the large strategic objective; after that, submission of the colonies to the south would follow inevitably.

Whether any strategy could have accomplished the purposes of the ministry's policy is an open and unresolvable question. Had the British succeeded in smashing Washington's army, had they cut New England off and reduced it to "submission" and then subdued the other colonies, would they in fact have restored their American empire? They may well have created a persistent opposition underground which eventually might have broken into the open and brought a more savage and chaotic war. But even had peace been established, the dost in loyalty and in morale may have rendered the colonies largely useless -- a collection of people with smoldering resentments whose creative energies were permanently dampened.

As formulated, the strategy of summer 1776 had a more immediate flaw: it neglected the fact that William Howe dreaded to risk his army in battle. After he landed his troops on Staten Island early in July, he let them sit there for seven weeks. He did not lack courage, but he did fear that the loss of his force might end British efforts in America. Thus Washington's fear was also Howe's, a long-standing disposition based on the scarcity of troops. Howe strained to find reasons to delay committing his men to battle: camp kettles were lacking and without

them the health of his troops might suffer; and these troops were irreplaceable, "the stock on which the national force in America must in future be grafted."
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Howe was not alone in this conviction; for example, Lord Percy, who had saved the British expedition to Concord the previous year, wrote in the summer of 1776 that "our army is so small that we cannot even afford a victory." The adjutant general in England sounded a note beard throughout the army after fighting began -- that British forces might be "destroyed by damned driblets," -- and General William Murray, another observer from afar -- in Minorca -- wrote after Bunker Hill that the "Americans' plan ought to be to lose a battle every week, till the British army was reduced to nothing: 'it May be that our troops are not invincible, they certainly are not immortal.'" As Murray summed up Howe's problem in a classic eighteenth-century military sentiment, "The fate of battles at the best are precarious."
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Washington had known little of the British reluctance to join battle when he marched his army from Boston to New York in April. His mind was not entirely on New York or on battle, though he expected the British to move against the middle Atlantic colonies at some time. But for the time being he was more concerned about Canada, where he hoped that American troops might recapture the initiative and, if unable to seize Quebec, at least might prevent the British from cutting New England off from the rest of the colonies. He feared that Howe would sail into the St. Lawrence and drive out the remnants of Arnold's tired expedition and the reinforcements sent to him on orders from Congress. He found reassurance in the knowledge that the American commander at the siege of Quebec, Major General John Thomas, was an able officer. Thomas arrived at the American camp on May 1, 1776; a month later, on June 2, smallpox killed him. In one way or another Canada had taken a frightful toll of American leaders. Brigadier General David Wooster, Thomas's second in command, now took over. Unfortunately, Wooster was incompetent -- and did not recognize his own incapacity. June proved to be a deadly month for troops as well as generals. As the St. Lawrence rose with the spring runoff, and green buds made their appearance on the alder along its banks, a force of 2000 Americans under Brig. General William Thompson attacked at Trois Rivières.
The

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British threw them back easily and then cut them apart, taking prisoners with contemptuous ease. A week later Arnold pulled his pathetic little command of three hundred out of Montreal and withdrew to Ile aux Noix. There he found some 7000 American troops, at least half of whom were sick and wounded. Washington heard of these disasters by the end of the month.
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June also brought William Howe back to New York. The British warships and transports were sighted off Sandy Hook on the 29th, and on July 3 a heavy force put ashore on Staten Island. Two days later the British army demonstrated that it too valued the pick and shovel, as the troops on Staten Island began digging in. Over the next six weeks more ships arrived, including one on July 12 carrying Richard Howe and troops from Halifax, England, and South Carolina. By the middle of August they numbered 32,000, including 8000 Hessians.

Washington calmly observed these arrivals for himself and received rather excited reports from others. His soldiers on Manhattan dug fortifications at the island's southern tip in expectation of a landing. Brooklyn Heights on Long Island was the key to New York's defenses, and there the Americans also constructed entrenchments. The army needed troops even more than fortifications, and Washington appealed to Congress to provide them. But since he did not expect the British to delay the attack while the Americans gathered themselves, he strove to bring the soldiers he had to readiness. Washington's mastery of detail, his ability to think of the small things as well as the large, was much in evidence over the summer. Many of the soldiers needed practice with their weapons, so early in July he ordered that each man was to fire two rounds -hardly extensive exercise but all that supplies permitted. He also ordered that officers and troops should practice moving from their camps into the trenches in order to become familiar with the ground they would have to travel when the attack came. The soldiers were to fill their canteens every evening because the battle might begin early some morning before they had an opportunity to do so. Washington ordered houses stripped of lead for bullets; powder and flints remained in short supply despite efforts to increase stores.
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