FRENCH INTERVENTION AND BRITISH FAILURE, 1778-1781
During the two years of fighting, the party situation in England had
grown increasingly bitter. The Whigs, joined now by young Charles Fox,
unremittingly denounced the war as a crime, sympathized with the
rebels, and execrated the cruelty of the Ministers while deriding their
abilities. Parliament rang with vituperation; personal insults flew
back and forth. From time to time Chatham took part in the attack,
joining Burke and Fox in an opposition never surpassed for oratorical
power. But the Ministerial party, secure in its strength, pushed on
its way. The King now regarded the war as the issue {97} upon which he
had staked his personal honour, and would tolerate no faltering. Yet
in the winter of 1778 the rumours of a French alliance thickened; and,
when the probability seemed to be a certainty, North made a desperate
effort to end the war through a policy of granting everything except
independence. In a speech of incredible assurance, he observed that he
had never favoured trying to tax America, and brought in a Bill by
which every parliamentary measure complained of by the Americans was
repealed, and the right of internal taxation was expressly renounced.
Amid the dejection of the Tories and the sneers of the Whigs, this
measure became law, March 2, 1778; and commissioners, empowered to
grant general amnesty, were sent with it to the United States.
At no other time in English history would it have been possible for a
Ministry thus utterly to reverse its policy and remain in office; but
North's tenure depended on influences outside the House of Commons, and
he continued in his place. So severe was the crisis that an effort was
made to arrange a coalition Ministry, with the aged Chatham at its
head; George III, however, positively refused to permit North to
surrender the first place. He would consent to Whigs entering the
Cabinet only in subordinate positions. This {98} obstinacy and the
sudden death of Chatham blocked all coalition proposals, and left the
war to continue as a party measure, not national in its character--the
"King's war."
In America, the task of the commissioners proved hopeless. The men now
in control of the Continental Congress and the State governments were
pledged to independence from the bottom of their souls; and in the
course of months of appeals, and attempts at negotiations, the
commissioners failed to secure even a hearing. Congress ratified the
French treaties with enthusiasm. That their proposal if made before
the Declaration would have been successful can scarcely be doubted. It
might even have produced an effect after 1776 had it been made by a
Whig Ministry, headed by Chatham. But coming in 1778, after three
years of war, when every vestige of the former sentiment of loyalty was
dead, and offered by the same North Ministry which had brought on the
revolution, it was foredoomed to defeat.
The war now entered upon a second phase, in which England found itself
harder pressed than at any time in its history. It had not an ally in
the world, and could count on no Rhine campaigns to exhaust French
resources. For the first time England engaged France in a purely naval
war; and for the only time France was sufficiently strong in
sail-of-the-line {99} to meet England on equal terms. The French
fleet, rebuilt since 1763, was in excellent condition; the British
navy, on the contrary, under the slack administration of Lord Sandwich,
was worse off in equipment, repairs, number of sailors, and _esprit de
corps_ than at any time in the century. The French were able to send
fleets unhindered wherever they wished; and when Spain entered as an
ally, in 1779, their combined navies swept the Channel, driving the
humiliated British fleet into port. England was called upon to make
defensive war at home, at Gibraltar, in the West Indies, and finally in
India, at a time when the full strength of the country was already
occupied with the rebellion.
This led to an alteration of military methods in America. The policy
of moving heavy armies was abandoned; and the British, forced to
withdraw troops to garrison the West Indies and Florida, began the
practice of wearing down the revolted colonies by raids and destruction
of property. George III especially approved this punitive policy. As
a first step, the army in Philadelphia marched back to New York,
attacked on its retreat by Washington at Monmouth on June 27, 1778.
The American advance was badly handled by General Lee, and fell back
before the British; but Washington in person rallied his men, resumed
the attack, and held his position. {100} Clinton, who succeeded Howe,
continued his march, and the British army now settled down in New York,
not to depart from its safe protection except on raids.
Washington accordingly posted his forces, as in 1777, outside the city,
and awaited events. He could assume the offensive only in case a
French fleet should assist him, and this happened but twice, in 1778,
and not again for three years. The first time, Admiral D'Estaing with
a strong fleet menaced New York and then Newport, the latter in
conjunction with an American land force. But before each port he was
foiled by the superior skill of Admiral Howe; and he finally withdrew
without risking a battle, to the intense disgust of the Americans. For
the rest, the war in the northern States dwindled to raids by the
British along the Connecticut coast and into New Jersey, and outpost
affairs on the Hudson, in some of which Washington's Continental troops
showed real brilliancy in attack. But with the British in command of
the sea little could be done to meet the raids, and southern
Connecticut was ravaged with fire and sword.
At the same time, the States suffered the horrors of Indian war, since
the Tories and British from Canada utilized the Iroquois and the Ohio
Valley Indians as allies. The New York frontier was in continual
distress; {101} and the Pennsylvania and Maryland and Virginia
settlements felt the scalping knife and torch. Hamilton, the British
commander at the post of Detroit, paid a fixed price for scalps, and
was known as "the hair buyer." Against the Iroquois, Sullivan led an
expedition in 1779 which could not bring the savages to a decisive
battle, although he ravaged their lands and crippled their resources.
Against the north-western Indians, a daring Virginian, George Rogers
Clark, led a counter-raid which captured several posts in the territory
north of the Ohio River, and finally took Hamilton himself prisoner at
Vincennes. In every such war the sufferings of the settlers
outnumbered a hundred-fold all that they could inflict in return, and
this consciousness burned into their souls a lasting hatred of England,
the ally of the murdering, torturing devils from the forests.
While the British fleets fought indecisive actions in European waters,
or near the West Indies, the British raiding policy was transferred to
a new region, namely, the southern States, which thus far had known
little of the severities of war. In December, 1778, an expedition
under Prevost easily occupied Savannah, driving the Georgia militia
away. The next year an effort was made by an American force, in
combination with the French fleet under D'Estaing, who returned from
{102} the West Indies, to recapture the place. The siege was formed,
and there appeared some prospects of a successful outcome, but the
French admiral, too restless to wait until the completion of siege
operations, insisted on trying to take the city by storm on October 9.
The result was a complete repulse, after which D'Estaing sailed away,
and the American besiegers were obliged to withdraw. The real
interests of the French were, in fact, in the West Indies, where they
were gradually capturing English islands; their contributions so far to
the American cause consisted in gifts of munitions and loans of money,
together with numerous adventurous officers who aspired to lead the
American armies. The most amiable and attractive of these was the
young Marquis de Lafayette, owing largely to whose influence a force of
French soldiers under de Rochambeau was sent in 1780 to America. But
for months this force was able to do no more than remain in camp at
Newport, Rhode Island, blockaded by the English fleet.
In 1780, the British raiding policy was resumed in the southern States
and achieved a startling success. In January, Clinton sailed from New
York with a force of 8,000 men, and after driving the American levies
into the city of Charleston, South Carolina, besieged and took it on
May 12, with all its {103} defenders. He then returned to New York,
leaving Lord Cornwallis with a few troops to complete the conquest of
the State. Congress now sent General Gates southward to repeat the
triumph of Saratoga. At Camden, on August 16, 1780, the issue was
decided. The American commander, with only 3,000 men, encountered
Cornwallis, who had about 2,200, and, as usual, the militia, when
attacked by British in the open field, fled for their lives at the
first charge of the redcoats, leaving the few continentals to be
outnumbered and crushed.
For a period of several weeks all organized American resistance
disappeared. Only bands of guerillas, or "partisans," as they were
called, kept the field. Clinton had issued a proclamation calling all
loyalists to join the ranks; and Cornwallis made a systematic effort to
compel the enrolment of Tory militia. The plan bore fruit in an
apparent large increase of British numbers, but also in the outbreak of
a murderous civil war. Raiding parties on both sides took to
ambuscades, nocturnal house-burning, hanging of prisoners, and
downright massacres. Pre-eminent for his success was the British
Colonel Tarleton, who with a body of light troops swept tirelessly
around, breaking up rebel bands, riding down militia, and rendering his
command a terror to the {104} State. Marion, Sumter, and other
Americans struggled vainly to equal his exploits.
Occasional American successes could not turn back the tide. On October
18, 1780, a band of Tories under General Ferguson ventured too far to
the westward, and at King's Mountain were surrounded and shot or taken
prisoners by a general uprising of the frontiersmen. General Greene,
who replaced Gates in December, managed to rally a few men, but dared
not meet Cornwallis in the field. His lieutenant, Morgan, when pursued
by Tarleton, turned on him at the Cowpens, and on January 17 managed to
inflict a severe defeat. The forces were diminutive--less than a
thousand on each side--but the battle was skilfully fought. After it,
however, both Morgan and Greene were forced to fly northward, and did
not escape Cornwallis's pursuit until they were driven out of North
Carolina. The State seemed lost, and on February 23, Cornwallis issued
a proclamation calling upon all loyalists to join the royal forces.
Meanwhile, encouraged by the striking successes in the Carolinas,
Clinton sent a force under Arnold to Virginia, which marched unopposed
through the seaboard counties of that State in the winter of 1781. It
seemed as though the new British policy were on the verge of a great
triumph.
{105}
By this time it was becoming a grave question whether the American
revolution was not going to collapse from sheer weakness. The
confederation, as a general government, seemed to be on the verge of
breaking down. The State governments, although badly hampered wherever
British raids took place, were operating regularly and steadily, but
the only common government continued to be the voluntary Continental
Congress, whose powers were entirely undefined, and rested, in fact, on
sufferance. In 1776 a committee, headed by John Dickinson, drafted
Articles of Confederation which, if adopted promptly, would have
provided a regular form of government; but, although these were
submitted in 1777 for ratification, inter-state jealousy sufficed to
block their acceptance. It was discovered that all those States which,
by their original charters, were given no definite western boundaries,
were disposed to claim an extension of their territory to the
Mississippi River. Virginia, through her general, Clark, actually
occupied part of the region claimed by her, and assumed to grant lands
there. The representatives of Maryland in Congress declared such
inequality a danger to the union, and refused to sign the Articles
unless the land claims west of the mountains were surrendered to the
general government. {106} This determination was formally approved by
the Maryland legislature in February, 1779, and matters remained at a
standstill. At last, in 1780, Congress offered to hold any lands which
might be granted to it, with the pledge to form them into States, and,
following this, New York, and Virginia intimated a willingness to make
the required cessions. Then Maryland yielded and ratified the
Articles, so that they came into operation on March 2, 1781.
The self-styled "United States" had now travelled so far on the road to
bankruptcy that the adoption of the "Articles of Perpetual Union"
seemed scarcely more than an empty form. In the first place, the
federal finances were prostrate. The device of issuing paper money had
proved fatal, for, after a brief period, in 1775, the excessive issues
depreciated in spite of every effort to hinder their decline by
proclamations, price conventions, and political pressure. The only way
of sustaining such notes, namely, the furnishing by the States of a
full and sufficient revenue, was never attempted; for the States
themselves preferred to issue notes, rather than to tax, and when
called upon by the Continental Congress for requisitions they turned
over such amounts of paper as they saw fit. By 1780, the "continental
currency" was {107} practically worthless. Congress could rely only
upon such small sums of money as it could raise by foreign loans
through Franklin and by the contributions of a few patriotic people,
notably Robert Morris.
The maintenance of the army exhausted the resources of Congress, and
every winter saw the story of Valley Forge repeated. To secure
supplies, Congress was driven to authorize seizure and impressment of
food and payment in certificates of indebtedness. It was for this
reason, as well as from the unwillingness of the Americans to enlist
for the war, that the Continental forces dwindled to diminutive numbers
in 1781. Nothing but Washington's tireless tenacity and loyalty held
the army together, and kept the officers from resigning in disgust.
Yet it seemed impossible that Washington himself could carry the burden
much longer. The general government appeared to be on the point of
disintegrating, leaving to the separate States the task of defending
themselves. Everywhere lassitude, preoccupation with local matters, a
disposition to leave the war to the French, a willingness to let other
States bear the burdens, replaced the fervour of 1776. In other words,
the old colonial habits were reasserting themselves, and the separate
States, reverting to their former accustomed negative politics, were
{108} behaving toward the Continental Congress precisely as they had
done toward England itself during the French wars. With hundreds of
thousands of men of fighting age in America it was impossible, in 1781,
to collect more than a handful for service away from their homes. The
essentially unmilitary nature of the Americans was not to be changed.
Fortunately for the rebels, the policy of Great Britain was such as to
give them a lease of hope. In spite of the great British naval power
during the first two years of the war, no blockade had been attempted;
and after 1778 the British fleets were thoroughly occupied in following
and foiling the French. The result was that commerce of a sort
continued throughout the war, armed privateers and merchantmen
venturing from the New England and other ports, and trading with
France, Spain and the West Indies. Hundreds were taken by British
cruisers, but hundreds more continued their dangerous trade, and so
America continued to receive imports. The Dutch, especially, supplied
the revolted colonies with some of the commodities which their
exclusion from British ports rendered scarce. So, except for paper
money, there was no economic distress.
In 1781, when if ever the British might hope to reduce the colonies,
the Empire was itself in sore straits for men to fill its ships and
{109} garrison its forts. This made it difficult for England to send
any reinforcements to America, and left Clinton and Cornwallis with
about 27,000 men to complete their raiding campaign. The task proved
excessive. In March, 1781, Greene, having assembled a small force,
gave battle to Cornwallis at Guilford Court House. The little army of
British veterans, only 2,219 in all, drove Greene from the field after
a stiff fight, but were so reduced in numbers that Cornwallis felt
obliged to retreat to Wilmington on the coast, where he was entirely
out of the field of campaign. On April 25 he marched northward into
Virginia to join the force which had been there for several months,
took command, and continued the policy of marching and destroying.
Before his arrival, Washington had tried to use the French force at
Newport against the Virginia raiders; but the French squadron, although
it ventured from port in March, 1781, and had a successful encounter
with a British fleet, declined to push on into the Chesapeake, and the
plan was abandoned. Cornwallis was able to march unhindered by any
French danger during the summer of 1781.
But while the British were terrifying Virginia and chasing militia, the
forces left in the Carolinas were being worn down by {110} Greene and
his "partisan" allies. On April 25, at Hobkirk's Hill, Rawdon, the
British commander defeated Greene, and then, with reduced ranks,
retreated. During the summer, further sieges and raids recaptured
British posts, and on September 8 another battle took place at Eutaw
Springs. This resulted, as usual, in a British success on the
battlefield and a retreat afterwards. By October, the slender British
forces in the southernmost States were cooped up in Charleston and
Savannah, and a war of extermination was stamping out all organized
Tory resistance. The raiding policy had failed through weakness of
numbers. The superior fighting ability and tactical skill of
Cornwallis, Rawdon, Stuart, and Tarleton were as obvious as the courage
and steadiness of their troops; but their means were pitifully
inadequate to the task assigned them.
Further north, a still greater failure took place. Washington was not
deterred by the futile outcome of his previous attempts to use French
co-operation from making a patient and urgent effort to induce De
Grasse, the French admiral in the West Indies, to come north and join
with him and Rochambeau in an attack on Cornwallis in Virginia. He was
at last successful; and on August 28 the wished-for fleet, {111} a
powerful collection of twenty-eight sail-of-the-line, with frigates,
reached Chesapeake Bay. Already the French troops from Newport, and
part of the American army from outside New York, had begun their
southward march, carefully concealing their purposes from Clinton, and
were moving through Pennsylvania. As a third part of the combination,
the French squadron from Newport put to sea, bringing eight more
sail-of-the-line, which, added to De Grasse's, would overmatch any
British fleet on the western side of the Atlantic.
The one disturbing possibility was that the British West India fleet,
which very properly had sailed in pursuit, might defeat the two French
fleets singly. This chance was put to the test on September 5. On
that day Admiral Graves, with nineteen men-of-war, attacked De Grasse,
who brought twenty-four into line outside Chesapeake Bay; and the
decisive action of the Revolution took place. Seldom has a greater
stake been played for by a British fleet, and seldom has a naval battle
been less successfully managed. Graves may have intended to
concentrate upon part of the French line, but his subordinates
certainly failed to understand any such purpose; and the outcome was
that the head of the British column, approaching the French line at
{112} an angle, was severely handled, while the rear took no part in
the battle. The fleets separated without decisive result, and the
British, after cruising a few days irresolutely, gave up and returned
to New York. The other French squadron had meanwhile arrived, and the
allied troops had come down the Chesapeake. Cornwallis, shut up in
Yorktown by overwhelming forces, defended himself until October 17, and
then surrendered with 8,000 men to the man who had beaten him years
before at Trenton and Princeton. Clinton, aware at last of his danger,
sailed with every vessel he could scrape together, and approached the
bay on October 24 with twenty-five sail-of-the-line and 7,000 men; but
it was too late. He could only retreat to New York, where he remained
in the sole British foothold north of Charleston and Savannah.
Washington would have been glad to retain De Grasse and undertake
further combined manoeuvres; but the French admiral was anxious to
return to the West Indies, and so the military operations of the year
ended. More was in reality unnecessary, for the collapse of the
British military policy was manifest, and the surrender of Cornwallis
was a sufficiently striking event to bring the war to a close.
Washington had not won the last fight with his own {113} Continentals.
The co-operation not only of the French fleet but of the French troops
under Rochambeau had played the decisive part. Yet it was his
planning, his tenacity, his personal authority with French and
Americans that determined the combined operation and made it
successful. In the midst of a half-starved, ill-equipped army, a
disintegrating, bankrupt government, and a people whose fighting spirit
was rapidly dwindling, it was he with his officers who had saved the
Revolution at the last gasp.
It was no less the British mismanagement which made this possible, for
had not Howe, by delays, thrown away his chances; had not Howe and
Burgoyne and Clinton and Cornwallis, by their failures to co-operate,
made it possible for their armies to be taken separately; had not the
navy omitted to apply a blockade; had not the Ministry, in prescribing
a raiding policy, failed to strain every nerve to furnish an adequate
supply of men, the outcome would have been different. As it was, the
British defeat could no longer be concealed by the end of 1781. The
attempt to conquer America had failed.
{114}