The turning point of the Revolution : or, Burgoyne in America

Front matter

Poin urnin

The |

Cx vhetetetete

Contents

I. AMERICA, ENGLAND, AND FRANCE I

II. THE HuDSON AND THE BRITISH PLAN 31

III. THe DectstvE BLow PREPARED AND SPOILED 65

Chapter I _ America, England, And France

FAcE to face with the riddle of history, man takes refuge in metaphors. Unable to grasp the laws which govern the rise and fall of societies, he finds himself tempted to simplify these complex events by means of parallels drawn from the shorter and more obvious sequences of nature or even of his own handiwork. So he will sometimes compare the activity or the decline of a human group to the speeding-up or slowing-down of a machine. Such a simile may serve for an administrative department or other narrow cross-section of social life; to apply it to any complete and rounded community is to make one’s self ridiculous. Again you will often see attempts to illustrate history by means of the lives of individuals or even of plants. So men will say that such and such a nation is young and growing, whereas another is old and therefore in decay. Here the absurdity is less, for in dealing with living things we begin to meet with intricate and subtle forces whose true nature escapes us. Nevertheless the comparison is still absurd. As a great man of our own generation has said, to say that Spain is growing old is like saying that Spain is losing all her teeth. The fact is that while some Spaniards are losing their teeth other little Spaniards are getting new ones! For great sweeps of history the least ambitious, and therefore perhaps the least unsatisfactory, metaphor is that of waves or tides.

The eighteenth century was a period of slack water and of calm. After the prolonged convulsions attendant upon the loss of religious unity in the West, men naturally desired order and repose. The constructive forces of our society rallied to build up again the shaken structure of Christendom. Since the indecisive result of the Reformation forbade them the foundation of a common faith, they attempted to refound civilization upon a philosophy of measure and decorum, itself based upon the classic culture then common to all educated men. For a time they seemed to succeed. The men of the century, justly known to the French as the ‘Grand Siécle,’ may well be pardoned for their belief that the huge scar left by the Reform in the living body of Europe was in the way of healing. And in the great galleries of Versailles they have left us a memorial worthy of their achievement.

Nevertheless that achievement was not destined to endure. Putting aside the question as to whether any philosophy could have long replaced the old religious bond of union, it is certain that the neo-classical decorum was too regular, too artificial. It left too little scope to the imagination, and therefore attracted an insufficient loyalty. Before the century was old, new forces pregnant with change were already at work. The great wound of Christendom had healed only in part and on the surface.

Chief among the new forces was an increased (and at bottom an unreasonable) confidence in human nature. Here and there men talked of natural law and the rights of man. In that high-bred time which had forgotten the populace, great gentlemen were found who hopefully desired an increased measure of popular initiative in government. The first blow for these new lay creeds was struck not in Europe but in colonial America.

This is not the place to estimate the democratic movement. In this study of the decisive campaign of the American Revolution I am concerned only with the background necessary to my narrative. As to the Reformation, which has determined all subsequent history, I would ask the reader to remember only two points. First, the loss of religious unity intensified local loyalties so that Protestantism sometimes seems only an incident in the rise of nationalism. Second, between the populations which had, in varying degrees, broken with tradition, the partial success of the reforming movement created a certain sympathy. Both of these factors underlay the story which I am to tell.

America was discovered a generation before the outbreak of the religious quarrel. During the sixteenth century, while that quarrel raged, the Atlantic coast of the new continent was explored. The following century which, after seeing Protestantism nearly crushed, saw its final triumph in England, the northern Germanies, and Scandinavia, and the end of the religious wars, saw also the establishment by various European powers of permanent settlements beside the North American harbors.

During the first two generations of the eighteenth century, the population of the colonies increased rapidly in numbers. The rivalry of the European powers, less and less restrained by moral considerations, began to find America a pawn of increasing importance on the diplomatic and military chessboard. At bottom this rivalry was economic, and if you could grab a colony and monopolize its trade the advantage was worth having. Before 1700 the English had definitely possessed themselves of New York and the other Dutch posts along the Hudson. In 1760, after a far more considerable naval and military effort, they took Canada from the French and held it. It was true that national and religious differences kept the Canadians apart from their new masters. Nevertheless, from Florida northward the British colonists now stood alone face to face with the mother country. The Peace of Paris, in which the French monarchy reconciled itself to the loss of Canada, had been signed in 1763. Within a few years anger between the colonists and the British Government was already dangerously high over the question of how the costs of the French war should be paid.

The particular points in dispute have been so often rehearsed that they may here be rapidly passed over. At first sight the power to tax for which the British Government contended seems to us to-day a necessary accompaniment of sovereignty. The good medieval notion of a tax had been that of an exceptional free grant on the part of the subjects of a prince whose ordinary expenses were supposed to be met from his private fortune. But this wholesome idea, although it had not altogether vanished as it has to-day, was already a shadow. It was no more than right that the colonies should help to pay for their own defense. While it was true that they had no representation in Parliament, nevertheless their slogan of ‘No taxation without representation’ rings hollow enough in our own post-war years burdened with the crushing taxation imposed by representative assemblies. Furthermore, the colonists had representative assemblies of their own, and those assemblies had persistently refused to vote a penny for the support of the British army and fleet.

On the other hand, it could not be denied that the colonial assemblies had willingly ‘. . . raised, paid, and clothed nearly twenty-five thousand men during the last war — a number equal to those sent from Great Britain, and far beyond their proportion,’ as their spokesman Benjamin Franklin maintained. It was equally undeniable that in so doing they had gone deeply into debt and mortgaged their taxes for years to come. Indeed, throughout the seven years of the war Parliament had several times acknowledged that the colonies had done so much more than their share as dangerously to strain their resources, and had followed up the acknowledgment by voting large sums to the colonies in partial compensation. The royal Treaty of Fort Stanwix with the Indian Tribes, signed in 1768, was bitterly resented by the colonists as cutting them off from what they considered their legitimate westward expansion. They felt—and with much reason — that their old charters bounding them only by the ‘southern sea’ or “western sea’ had been lawlessly violated by the crown. Finally America, like most colonies of the time, was all the while being systematically milked by the mother country’s monopoly of her foreign trade.

The true bearing of the quarrel is to be found in the temper in which it was waged. It has been obvious to historians that the colonies had become conscious of their strength. Their population of three millions was a third that of Britain. The men of Massachusetts alone had taken the great French fortress of Louisburg. Alone a handful of Virginia militiamen, under a young colonel by the name of Washington, had held together and covered the rout of brave but pig-headed Braddock’s command. What has not been obvious, especially in England and least of all in the England of to-day, with its keen hope of an American alliance, is that the colonists were no longer Englishmen.

They had undergone a subtle change. These former Europeans had been moulded by the life of the frontier. They had breathed the electric air of the American nor’wester. In them there sparkled a popular initiative that set them worlds apart from aristocratic England.

For England was an aristocracy. She was of those rare states which desire to be governed by the rich. Egalitarian societies, whether ruled by a democracy or by a true monarch, can hardly understand such a mood. To them it is detestable. The elaborate structure of subtle convention by which an aristocracy necessarily fortifies itself against its own want of logic moves the egalitarian only to laughter or even to fury. Conversely, in the citizen of an aristocratic state the sight of egalitarianism in action causes bewilderment and disdain. The Carthaginian and the Venetian gentlemen must have felt so.

Besides being an aristocracy, England was an island. Besides being an island, she was the metropolis whence most of the colonists had come. All these things furnished an infinite series of points for personal friction. Of all the colonies Virginia was probably least alien to the mother country, and yet in the light of the future one takes an ironic amusement in imagining the talk about Braddock’s camp-fires between the redcoat officers who carried the King’s commission and the young Virginian colonel of militia who was to beget a nation.

The inevitable conflict might have smouldered on had it not been blown into flame by the economic opposition of the two parties. I have already said that colonies were valued because they could be so managed as to increase the wealth of the mother country. Now the English aristocracy, while its members made a point of despising ‘trade,’ was closely connected with the business world. The thing that sharpened the controversy on both sides was that England thought of America chiefly as a possible source of profit, and America knew it.

It so happened that a moot point of English internal politics blurred the fundamental opposition between two such different societies. The colonial slogan of ‘ No taxation without representation’ was not original with the Americans. It was a British party cry. Indeed, it touched the heart of the repeated struggles in which the aristocracy had affirmed itself against the principle of true monarchy. Especially it recalled the Stuarts and thus raised the spectre of the great religious quarrel which had finally ruined that unhappy dynasty. To shout ‘No taxation without representation’ could hardly fail to rouse some sort of echo in the great Whig Party which had governed England almost without a break since 1688.

Finally, true monarchy, although already mortally stricken, was not yet dead and buried as it is in the England of to-day. Bolingbroke’s book ‘The Patriot King’ was still read. His genius still helped to keep the principle of true kingship flickering here and there in the minds of Englishmen. Thanks to him the thought of a chief, set above parties and the rich, could even touch the great-grandson of the Hanoverian boor whom the great families had made their puppet king.

George III was the first of his house born on English soil and the fact encouraged him to react against the impotence his grandfather and great-grandfather had endured. In the nature of things his objective was strictly limited. He did not try to put himself in the place of the House of Commons as the chief organ of government. He never even carried the thing so far as to veto a single act of Parliament, but aimed merely to control (or at least to affect) the actions of the House. For this purpose he could use the considerable power of patronage which the titular monarch still possessed. He could still personally give out peerages, choose men for particular military commands, and dismiss them from these commands at his good pleasure.

His effort failed. Although he seemed for a moment to be succeeding, to work for long against the grain of aristocratic England would have required a man of genius. For such a man it might have been barely possible to have reénforced the loyalty of the country squires, of powerful elements in the national Church, and of the Tory Party generally, by making the people see in him their natural protector. Certainly in 1688 the great houses had felt it necessary to set up William of Orange and again in 1714 to set up George IIl’s great-grandfather precisely because the name of king pleased the populace. George III, however, was anything but a genius. Such were his own limitations and those of his advisers that he let the trump card of popular support slip through his fingers. Ironically enough, this prince, who so earnestly desired to rise above parties, is himself remembered as an active party organizer, who lost his American subjects not in defending his own kingly rights — which at the beginning of the quarrel they were eager not only to acknowledge but even to increase — but in maintaining over them the authority of Parliament, that organ of the new aristocratic England which had twice broken his predecessors and was to defeat himself. His blunders made it possible for his opponents to represent themselves as defenders of popular liberties against ‘arbitrary power.’ He died mad. Most ironical of all, the chief permanent result of his moment of partial success is the American distaste for the name of king. This active and logical people, who in an unmonarchical age have wisely and spontaneously set up powerful elective monarchies, not only in the presidency, but also in the governors of states and even in the mayors of cities, this people, I say, still seriously believes that ‘Liberty’ consists in the absence of an hereditary titular monarch. And this astonishing fact is the permanent legacy of George III.

Meanwhile the American patriots took the name of Whigs, and professed (sincerely enough, no doubt) to base themselves on English constitutional principles. When British troops were sent to America, it became the fashion in the party of resistance to speak of them not as the ‘royal’ but as the ‘ministerial’ troops. Washington himself spoke so. The buff and blue of the uniforms of the new American army had long been the electioneering colors of the English Whig Party, now the anti-ministerialists. The Declaration of Independence did not come for over a year after Lexington. So it was that, given the resistance of the English Whigs to George III, the embryo national resistance of the Americans became a British party question. If this surprises us to-day, we should remember that there are still many Englishmen (and even a few Americans) who can shut their eyes to the chasm that separates us from all Europeans and especially from Englishmen.

The first military move of the British Government, the occupation of Boston in 1768, was not an act of war but a large-scale police operation. Boston was selected merely because in that city, then second only to Philadelphia in population, the feeling against the taxation of America had run highest and there the execution of the laws had broken down. The occupation formed a part of no strategic plan, for no state of war existed. It had gone on seven years when the news of Lexington and Concord provoked the sudden and everywhere successful uprising of the entire thirteen colonies, which wiped out in a moment all British authority within their borders outside of Boston itself and brought out an army which besieged the British garrison there. Not until then did the astonished home Government begin to realize that it might have a war on its hands. The stubborn American resistance at Bunker Hill made it clear that the war would be no promenade. The police operation, as such, had failed and it remained only to liquidate it either by sweeping concessions to the insurgents or by a reconquest of the continent. George III and his advisers chose war.

The military problem now began to outline itself. To the soldiers and statesmen of the time its dominant factor was that England possessed a standing army, whereas the forces the colonists must oppose to the British regulars would have to be improvised. Moreover, the British navy was the best in the world, and as long as the colonies lacked European allies, the control exercised by that navy over American waters would be limited only by the limitations of sailing ships and by the difficulty of supplying their crews when long stationed at great distances from any considerable source of foodstuffs.

It is true that those limitations were considerable. Given the westerly winds prevalent in the North Atlantic, the eighteenth-century sailing ship was making good time if she crossed from west to east ina month. The passage from east to west would probably take nearer two months. Allowing for calms and for storm which might drive her far from her course, a round trip of less than three months would be exceptional. Moreover, transports and supply ships had to keep together in fleets convoyed by men-of-war, for the Americans were a seafaring folk and their enterprising privateers soon swarmed everywhere. The speed of such a fleet must necessarily be reduced to that of the slowest sailers.

Finally, since the length of voyages was entirely dependent upon weather conditions, it was utterly impossible to calculate the time of arrival.

Besides the slowness, and still more the uncertainty, of sail navigation, the problem of supply was further complicated by the limited means then known for the preservation of food. There was as yet no foreshadowing of Liebig and the transformation in this regard which the increased chemical knowledge of the nineteenth century was to achieve. Canned food was undreamed of. Flour, or at most hardtack, and salt beef and pork were the least perishable sorts of foodstuffs known.

Naturally, when the sailing ship did manage to land her provisions in America, a large proportion of them might be hopelessly spoiled. Several cases are recorded in which shipload after shipload was wholly condemned. Even throughout the British men-of-war on the American station there was hardly a moment during the whole struggle when the generals had enough rations on hand to undertake a lengthy movement in any direction, while frequently, as with Howe at Halifax in the spring of ’76, weeks would go by during which it was a daily struggle to find food for the men.

Nor was it possible to overcome the difficulties of overseas transportation by means of supplies obtained locally in America. The British generals did their best, but in the first place American supplies were seldom abundant. There were few large centres of population; the farms were widely scattered, and the farmer, with labor scarce and expensive, did little more than provide for his own needs. Furthermore, as we shall see in a moment, the eighteenth-century armies and their traditions of war were of such a nature as to discourage living off the country. Accordingly the greater part of the supplies for the British forces had to be transported overseas.

While thus impotent to assure to the King’s armies in America more than a scanty and uncertain supply of provisions, British sea power was equally unable to shut off American trade by means of a blockade. To the modern scholar sitting with his map before him, especially if he be a landlubber, the operation may look easy enough. And in fact it would have been entirely possible to stop up a few of the

Io THE TURNING POINT OF THE REVOLUTION principal ports. But even under Civil-War conditions, with the enormous advantage of steam and the nearness of the home bases, to blockade the South cost the North an enormous effort. With sailing ships to blockade effectively two or three thousand miles of stormy coast, thickly studded with inlets, shoals, and islands, was out of the question. Moreover, a blockade was a two-edged sword. Whatever the issue of the quarrel, the English merchants looked forward hopefully to American trade at its close. An effective blockade would have wiped out this hope by stimulating home manufactures. For George III’s Government.so to provoke the hostility of the commercial interests might weigh heavily in the balance when it came to raising money for carrying on the war.

Nevertheless, when all the limitations of British sea power had been taken into account, the enormous fact remained that the colonists, lacking a navy, could not prevent the royal troops from striking secretly and at will against any point in the line of coast whose ports were the vertebre of their whole social structure.

In order to understand the nature of the weapon to which naval superiority gave such wide scope, at this point it is necessary to give the reader some account of the armies of eighteenth-century Europe. For although here and there very old men who talked with their survivors may still be alive, and although their general tactical method survives in the close order drill familiar to all contemporary soldiers, nevertheless that method, together with their whole organization and conduct of war, are to-day not easy to understand. |

In the first place, the typical instrument of eighteenth-century warfare was the professional standing army, its members enlisted for long terms. To us of the democratic and industrial era, in which the typical army is a huge horde of militarily low-grade conscripts, it 1s hard to grasp the characteristics of long-term professional troops. Without considering the causes which had strengthened the movement toward professional armies even during the religious wars, it is enough to note that they were the natural military development of the period of calm after that hurricane had blown itself out. Everywhere the strong national executives

AMERICA, ENGLAND, AND FRANCE II into whose hands the government of Europe had fallen naturally accepted the principle of a standing army. No other system can satisfy a society determined upon repose. These armies were shaped by the necessary permanent conditions attaching to such troops. The minimum of social and political friction was achieved by recruiting their rank and file from the cheapest human material available. In a spirit not altogether alien to that of the ancient Roman enlisting barbarians, eighteenth-century English judges used to offer convicted criminals the alternative of enlistment or jail.

That the rank and file of the eighteenth-century armies were made up of such poor elements explains the fact already mentioned, that is, that the practice of the time discouraged living off the country. Quite apart from securing tactical efficiency, it was necessary to employ a drastic code of discipline to ensure order. In the Prussian army, which set the standard of the age, flogging was carried to the limit of brutality and torture. Nor was the British army far behind. General Gage, the British commander in Boston, did not hesitate to hang some of his men caught breaking and entering a colonist’s shop. It would have subverted this system completely and, oddly enough, it would have offended the humanitarianism characteristic of the civilian life of the time, if troops had been allowed to live on the country. Under lax disciplinarians, or when in great straits, this might occur, but the scattering which it involved was always deplored and the practice was considered the most desperate of expedients.

- On the other hand, no matter what the quality of its recruitment, any professional standing army worth its salt can achieve a discipline and especially a tactical training impossible to short-term or hastily raised troops. For infantry a hundred and fifty years ago this admirable discipline and high tactical training were concentrated upon a single point; the delivery of the so-called ‘perfect volley.’ Upon this all tactical theory and all the elaborate and endless training of the infantry soldier converged. The reasons for this would have been as obscure to the great-grandfathers of the men of 1775 as they are to us their great-grandchildren to-day. They were briefly these: During the seventeenth century, the increasing power and handiness of the musket, together with the desire for greater tactical and strategical mobility, had gradually caused the disuse of armor. It could protect its wearer only at the cost of weighing him down too heavily. This increased power of musketry, together with the disuse of armor, combined to decrease the importance of the pike. About 1700 the invention of a type of bayonet, which when fixed would not prevent the musket from being fired, caused the pike to be abandoned altogether. The tactical problem then became that of developing the greatest possible concentration and effectiveness of infantry fire.

All tactics are conditioned by the weapon used. While there may be many ways of using the same material, nevertheless the power and limitations of that material must always condition that which can be done. The reader should therefore clearly understand the powers and limitations of the eighteenth-century musket. Without its bayonet it weighed about ten and a half pounds and was about four feet nine inches long. Accordingly, although longer and heavier than the modern service rifle, it was nevertheless a perfectly practicable infantry weapon. With its flintlock ignition a rainy day was apt to result in misfires, and indeed these would sometimes occur even in fine weather, but as long as the powder in the priming-pan was kept dry the percentage of misfires was not enough to destroy its effectiveness. With a calibre of about three fourths of an inch, it shot a big lead bullet weighing about an ounce, which ploughed through a man’s body, smashed his bones, and usually knocked him out from the mere shock of its impact even when no vital part was touched. As to the rate of fire we are probably safe in rejecting the stories that Frederick the Great’s infantry were able to fire six shots a minute; the thing seems impossible. Nevertheless it does seem that in good hands the eighteenth-century musket would fire three shots a minute.

To us the chief limitations of the arm were in accuracy and range. In the first place, many service muskets were hopelessly ill-bored. Assuming a reasonably well-bored weapon, at eighty yards a single man standing and fully exposed could be hit. At a hundred yards under favorable conditions such a target might be hit with forty per cent of the shots fired; thus a commander exposing himself was almost certain to be picked off by persistent firing. At a hundred and fifty yards to hit a single man was practically impossible; a target twice as high and twice as broad as a man, with most careful shooting under peace-time conditions, could be hit only three times out of four. In battle it was therefore out of the question to fire even at a formed body of troops a hundred and fifty yards off. At two hundred yards one might as well shoot at the moon.

With such a weapon — possessed of high shocking power and fair rapidity of fire but drastically limited as to accuracy and range — and with that weapon in the hands of men of low average intelligence, the long-term professional armies of the eighteenth century worked out the system known as ‘linear tactics.’ The name sprang from the new formation in line and the importance of regularity in that formation. Given the increased rapidity of musket fire and the short reach of the bayonet as compared with the now discarded pike, the old deep formations lost their meaning. Instead you formed your infantry in line no more than three deep, and marched them toward the enemy with the measured cadenced step still seen on the modern parade ground. The pace of this slow approach was often reduced still more by halts to rectify the alignment, for if this was not done the men in any sharp little bulge forward, when the command to fire finally came, would have their ears blown in by the detonation of the muskets of their comrades close beside and a little behind them. All the time, and here comes in the essential point, the men were forbidden to fire before the command. The original calculation undoubtedly was that the strain of seeing one’s enemy gradually coming nearer and nearer would break the nerve of insufficiently disciplined men. Either they would disobey orders and deliver a scattering, and therefore ineffective, fire, or else their officers, fearing such a fiasco, would give the command for a volley too soon. In either case, while those who had fired too soon were reloading, the better troops would continue to advance and would deliver their volley at a murderously close range. Even if both sides stood the fearful strain and held their fire until well inside effective range, say fifty yards, it became the ne plus ulira of the art to take, not to give, the first fire; to stand the losses and to put in your own volley so close that every shot went home. Thus at Fontenoy the English officer who tauntingly invited the French to fire first was by no means playing the fool. Behind his bravado was the soundest of tactical principles. Of course, once committed to the action, it was impossible to get men to go on firing by command and not individually and at will. Nevertheless, every effort, and apparently with a good deal of success, was made to keep the men in alignment and under control, so that any pause might be followed by renewed volleying. Moreover, a first ‘perfect volley’ like Wolfe’s at Quebec might decide a general action.