The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (81 page)

Military operations also picked up in May as the British broke from their hibernation. British supplies were low and they sent out an increasing number of foraging parties. Advance units of Washington's army struck them and so did the irregulars in New Jersey. Howe disliked these savage little encounters. What he wanted was a general action which might destroy his enemy, and in mid-June he set about to lure Washington into fighting a major battle. On June 17, he moved a large force from Staten Island into New Jersey and marched them about nine miles along the road to Philadelphia. Washington was willing to have light units skirmish with the enemy but, though he feared that Howe meant to take the city, refused battle. A week later Howe again marched out, then pulled back, and when Washington followed, turned about and drove at him. Washington avoided the trap just in time, and Howe then pulled out of New Jersey completely, leaving the entire state in rebel control.
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If Howe had failed to trap Washington, he had succeeded in confusing him about British intentions. What the British were up to was a question that had been much discussed at the American headquarters in the early summer. The purpose of the forays out into the Jersey countryside in June seemed obvious enough, but what did the evacuation of New Jersey mean? In July, watchers duly reported the British going aboard ships in the New York harbor. As the fleet grew so did American uncertainty.

By this time Howe had at last decided what he was about. He was going to Philadelphia by sea. During his voyage he would change his mind about a landing place, a decision of great importance, but he would hold to his decision about his destination. He had decided on an attack on Philadelphia without consulting the ministry, although he had informed it of his plan -- or plans, rather, for he had changed his mind during the spring about how best to get to Philadelphia. For most of the winter of 1776-77, he seems to have thought of a march across New Jersey to the city. However, by April he had swung his thinking to an invasion by sea, presumably out from New York to the south and up the Delaware.
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In England the ministry, with the approval of the king, had also decided on a strategy for the campaign of 1777. The problem for these centers of strategic thought was in making their plans somehow meet, but neither the ministry nor Howe really knew what the other intended, and the plans they made remained uncoordinated. The ministry did learn early in the winter that Howe hoped to take Philadelphia. What it did not learn until much too late was that he had switched from an expedition by land to one by sea.

During the winter the ministry, or, more exactly, the American Secretary, Lord George Germain, whose responsibility it was to develop a strategy to crush the rebellion, listened to an ambitious scheme laid out by General John Burgoyne which called for an invasion from Canada. Burgoyne had returned to England from Canada after the failure of Sir Guy Carleton's attempt in summer 1776 to drive down Lake Champlain. Burgoyne had accompanied Carleton but had escaped the blame for the failure, and back in England he pleaded the wisdom of a second similar expedition -- this one under more aggressive leadership, which

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he himself would provide. The king liked the idea, especially when Burgoyne explained that the purpose of the move was to separate New England from the rest of the colonies. By slicing down Lake Champlain and then through the Hudson Valley to Albany, the Burgoyne expedition would neatly isolate the center of the rebellion. To give his drive even more strength, he proposed that a second force under Lt. Colonel Barry St. Leger push out from Oswego down the Mohawk, a tributary of the Hudson. The two rivers joined near Albany, and so presumably would the two prongs of the invading army.
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Burgoyne did not insist that an expedition come up the Hudson to meet him. Clearly, he was thinking of his own role as the leading one, and only as an afterthought did he suggest that at Albany he would place himself under Howe's command. He did not propose that Howe meet him or have an army in Albany prepared to give him aid or join his force to itself. Nor did he explain what he would do in Albany or how in fact marching there would effectively isolate New England.

Germain did not ask for explanations; nor did he suggest that grand though it was, the Burgoyne plan might be difficult to execute. He did, However, sense that perhaps Burgoyne's and Howe's planning ought to be coordinated. But he did not act on this perception, which was hardly more than a vague hunch, until it was too late.

Sir Henry Clinton was in England while Burgoyne was persuading Germain and the king that a fresh try from Canada was just what the war needed. Clinton saw the dangers of independent attacks by Burgoyne and Howe, but he no more than the others in England knew at that time that Howe would take to the sea in search of Philadelphia. So, though Clinton' detested Howe, he could not warn of the folly in the offing. Besides, he wanted the command of the expedition from Canada, and he knew that it was his for the asking if he could bring himself to ask, for he was Burgoyne's senior in rank. Asking for himself proved impossible to Clinton; then and later his "diffidence," his inability to exert himself to get what he really wanted, kept him silent. The command was given to Burgoyne in March; Clinton received the red ribbon of the Bath and orders to return to America as second in command to Howe. Both Clinton and Burgoyne had already sailed -- Burgoyne for Canada, Clinton for New York -- when Howe's final plan for the capture of Philadelphia reached England.
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Howe had written Germain on April 2 that since he would not be receiving the reinforcements he had requested, he would pull his forward posts out of New Jersey, give up all idea of a march overland, and embark his forces against Philadelphia. Earlier in the year Howe had conceived of an attack by both land and sea; then he had proposed to move only by land; but now in April, with the dismal news about reinforcements, he altered his strategy once more in favor of an invasion by sea.
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Why he made this decision is not clear. In the dispatch he wrote on April 2 informing Germain of his intention to transport his forces by sea from New York to the Delaware, he stated that he no longer expected to end the war that year. Deprived of reinforcements, he apparently had decided against risking the army (which numbered around 21,000) in a march across the Jerseys. A move by sea, of course, would eliminate his army as a factor in the northern campaign -- at least while the army was on ships, and in fact for a time afterwards -- for it would be far from the Hudson Valley.
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Howe seemed not to care, seemed oblivious even about what was being undertaken from Canada. He may not have been obsessed with Philadelphia, as some believed then and today, but he was thinking along lines that had appeared so clear to him in the New York campaign of the previous year. The thing to do at that time was to smash Washington's army, and, failing that, to seize a major American center, cut off sea-going trade and dominate the surrounding countryside, and encourage those colonials still loyal to the king to show themselves. Capture of Philadelphia and the Delaware offered a similar opportunity: the area had important business, its farms were productive suppliers, and eastern Pennsylvania was filled with loyalists awaiting the protection of his majesty's forces to make themselves known.
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If strategy of this sort was not an obsession, it was a preoccupation which carried Howe's mind far from Canadian problems. The responsibility to force him to consider the war and the current campaign together lay in England, most directly with Lord George Germain, the American secretary. Germain failed to do more than make Howe vaguely aware that something was brewing in the north. Between March 3, when the decision to give command of the northern expedition to Burgoyne

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was virtually certain, and April 19, Germain wrote Howe eight times, and neglected in each letter to tell him of Burgoyne's mission. Germain did write Carleton in Canada that Burgoyne would lead the invasion, and he sent a copy of this letter to Howe. But no explanation of strategy accompanied this letter -- and no orders to Howe to coordinate his efforts with Burgoyne's. Instead, Germain contented himself with letters to Howe of approval and reassurance to the effect that the Philadelphia campaign appeared sound and that contrary to Howe's gloomy expectations would lead to the conclusion of the war.

Germain may have believed everything he wrote Howe, or if he doubted the wisdom of what Howe was about, he may have hesitated to challenge him directly. At this point in the history of the war, character and the accidents of personal relations assumed for a moment at least a decisive importance. The character that proved so important was Germain's; the relations of persons were those entangled in English politics.

Among those ministers who advocated a stiff line in dealing with the Americans, none exceeded Germain in stiffness. One of the tough men in the ministry, he was in 1777 in his sixty-second year; he had replaced Dartmouth as American Secretary in November of the year of Concord and Lexington -- and Bunker Hill. North and the king found him refreshingly certain about American matters: the Americans, he argued, should give way, acknowledge Parliament's right to legislate in all cases whatsoever, and then, perhaps, grievances could be aired and complaints satisfied. These views resembled no one's as much as the king's. There is no real reason to suppose that they were not sincerely held, but it may well be that Germain hesitated to qualify them -- that is, to soften them while the king maintained that the Americans must surrender -- for Germain was a man always vulnerable to charges of weakness and even cowardice. His appointment to a major post in the government was a triumph of persistence and, more concretely, a strange consequence of the old feud between Leicester House, the center of the faction around the heir apparent, and the monarch, in this case George II, grandfather of George III. During the Seven Years War, Germain, then Lord George Sackville, had served on the continent with Prince Ferdinand. In the battle of Minden ( 1759) he had not brought the British cavalry forward fast enough to suit the prince, who brought charges against him of disobeying orders. Germain was tried before a court-martial, found guilty, and apparently relegated to disgrace and obscurity, with the stink of cowardice swirling around him. The case had attracted national attention, although only those who followed politi-