Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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attempt to displace the British at Newport, Rhode Island. There were British spoiling raids along the New England shore, and the other main actions in the balance of 1778 were in Georgia. The British had no strategy at all to win the war except attrition, which was operating more effectively against them than against the Americans. The war dragged on and the Americans became stronger and the British more exasperated.
In 1778 there was again the danger of invasion of England from France. With much of the British fleet tied up in the Americas, the French army was always large enough to threaten the home islands if it could be got across the Channel. The British and French fleets skirmished indecisively in the Channel in mid-July, but the damage to French rigging and supplies made an invasion effort unlikely in that year. The lack of success of d’Estaing’s hovering around the American coast aroused sentiments that were to prove durable: “Americans who recalled the French and Indian Wars and looked upon the French as foreigners and papists, now also regarded them as foppish and cowardly. The aristocratic French looked upon the Americans as vulgar rabble.” Lafayette almost fought a duel with an American after hearing “the name of France . . . the leading nation of the world, spoken . . . with disdain, by a herd of Yankees.”15 D’Estaing, as the French too were preoccupied with the West Indies, took St. Vincent and Grenada after the British had seized St. Lucia. In India, the capable governor Warren Hastings (about to be unjustly persecuted by Edmund Burke) seized almost all the remaining French enclaves in the subcontinent.
This was to some degree the return of world war, because of the French element, but there was no plan to suppress the revolt that started it and the British planners henceforth really aimed only at breaking off and keeping some of the southern states and Florida, to make the core of a tropical and Caribbean empire. In a classic case of strategists believing what they wanted to believe rather than what was indicated by the objective facts, the British, to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam War, Americanized the war by trying to arm and encourage loyalists along the sea coast. It was nonsense, of course. The loyalists were never more than a third of the country at their most numerous and were less now, and the gap in the mismatch between the leadership talents and quality of command decisions between George III and Lord North on the one hand, and Washington and Franklin on the other, widened steadily. The British blundered into war with the Netherlands after seizing diplomatic correspondence bound for that country, on the high seas, and the blandishments of the French and two centuries of stunted envy brought the Spanish into the war against Britain in the summer of 1779, as it had in the Seven Years’ War. The British remained convinced, on no evidence, that most Americans were opposed to the Revolution, and they now intended to assist loyalist groups within the colonies and not try to insert overwhelming force to suppress and occupy the country.
The whole concept was a fantasy, and Washington established himself at West Point, a fort north of New York, where he could move the Continental Army to New England or New Jersey and Philadelphia, as need arose. The British continued to occupy New York City, but apart from that, very few Americans saw much of them from then on, apart from the to-ing and fro-ing with small forces in the South. In the debate on America in Parliament in May 1779, General James Robertson gave the new rationale: “The object of the war was to enable the loyal subjects of America to get free from the tyranny of the rebels, and to let the colony follow its inclination, by returning to the king’s government.” This was building a revisionist airplane in the air.
On the American side, much has been made of Washington’s failure to destroy the British though he had many chances, but he had pursued successfully his political/military strategy, of harassing and containing the British wherever they tried to advance, strengthening the quality of his fighting units, and facilitating the rise of rebel confidence and determination.
As had been the case in the years before the Revolution, the colonies tended to think of themselves and of military deliverance as an entitlement of miraculous origin. Just as they balked at paying their share of the cost of ejecting the French from North America, the colonies, as long as the Redcoats weren’t coming across their own fields and through the kitchen door, tended to ignore the Continental Congress’s calls for funds. The Congress, which had no authority over the individual states/colonies, droned self-interestedly and loquaciously on, taking pot shots at Washington and others who were risking all for the birth and life of a new nation. The British convinced themselves that the South was a loyalist heartland, and Clinton dispatched 3,500 by sea to Georgia and seized Savannah with a brilliant amphibious operation. Heady with this success, the normally rather diffident Clinton laid claim to Georgia and then marched for Charleston, the largest city in the South, but was stopped and sent swiftly back to Savannah, being as hotly pursued by the American general Benjamin Lincoln as Lincoln’s lameness, obesity, and narcolepsy would allow. D’Estaing was persuaded to assist in a recapture of Savannah, but became impatient lest he be taken by surprise by the Royal Navy during the siege and ordered a disastrous attack across a swamp in which more than a quarter of the investing forces were killed. D’Estaing, unashamed at being the author of this fiasco, then withdrew to the West Indies, and Lincoln withdrew to Charleston.
6. THE SOUTHERN CAMPAIGN, 1779–1781
The Spanish posed something of a distraction for the British in western Georgia and Florida, and Clinton was enticed by the southern climes to try his hand at winter war with an amphibious expedition from New York to Charleston at the end of 1779. Like so much of most wars, and certainly this one, macabre farce ensued, as the fleet of over a hundred vessels was severely buffeted by storms, and broken up, and Clinton and the naval commander, Admiral Arbuthnot, hated each other. There was no such concentration of loyal support as the British imagined, and the coastal area of South Carolina had only 19,000 whites and 69,000 slaves, not a rich reservoir of political support even if most of the citizens had been monarchists. The British did finally reach Charleston and Clinton commanded the attack well, took the city, and treated the inhabitants generously. It was the greatest British victory of the war. Unfortunately, one of his cavalry commanders, Banastre Tarleton, soon overran some retreating Virginians near the North Carolina border at Waxhaw in June 1780, ignored a white flag, and massacred the American force, 350 men. This was a shocking breach of discipline and civilized standards of war-making, and resonated ominously. (His excuse was that his horse had been shot out from under him after he had ordered the charge and before he saw the flag of surrender, but this is not believable, as the killing continued for 25 minutes among the idle and prostrate Americans.)
The condition of the Revolution lapsed back to the implacable gloom of Valley Forge, as Washington wintered in Morristown under another heavy winter, with the Congress providing neither funds nor recruits. Washington’s army of 15,000, with desertions and some deaths from exposure and malnutrition, dwindled to 5,000 in early 1780. This, coupled with the debacle at Charleston, seemed to bring American fortunes back to their lowest point in a war that had now sputtered on for five years. But it would be clear in time that the greatest impact of this trying time was on Washington’s views of post-independence government. He railed at the venality and cowardice of the Congress and assemblies. He lamented that war profiteers had not been “hunted . . . down as the pests of society. I would to God that one of the most atrocious in each state was hung in gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Hamen.”16 This galvanized Washington into a belief that only a strong, but non-monarchical, executive of a federal state in which the central government had authority in all non-local matters would govern successfully. Washington was as much a politician and administrator, and almost as much a financier, as a specialist in military strategy and tactics, and his conclusions in these trying times, which he navigated with great strength of character and astuteness, would ramify profoundly in the establishment of the state that would eventually emerge from these convulsions.
General Benedict Arnold, who had conducted the arduous march to Quebec, to be sent packing by the French Canadians in 1775, a very capable general who had been unfairly under-recognized because of his relative sympathies for the British (Washington had complained that he had not been promoted), deserted a command position, and missed arrest by a few minutes when he fled West Point in September 1780 and went over to the British, abandoning even his wife. He asked for 20,000 pounds, and received most of it, to lead American forces into a trap, squandering the lives of his men and forfeiting the respect of everyone, permanently, one of the most catastrophic career