1775 (60 page)

On October 24, Lord Sandwich at the Admiralty wrote to Rear Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, who was about to replace Graves as commander in North America. Five regiments would sail from Ireland, and Commodore Sir Peter Parker would command at sea. However, as the Admiralty considered that 28-gun frigates were too large to get up the river, “we shall muster all the small 20-gun ships that can be got ready in time and appropriate them to this service.” The transports, being ready, “will probably sail the beginning of December.”
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By October 25, the list of regiments being sent had grown to seven. Not all were ready or in the right place; the schedule was clearly slipping. Two weeks later, on November 8, Dartmouth—himself now being replaced as American secretary by Lord George Germain—wrote to General Howe that the Cape Fear River was still to be the meeting place. However, because its bar would not admit ships of a large draught and the seven regiments would not have full protection in disembarkation, the army commander accompanying the expedition would have to decide between landing in North Carolina or going on to Charleston.
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A week later Germain, the new secretary, confirmed these orders.

December 1 came and went, but the expedition did not. In the words of one chronicler, the supposed departure date arrived with “no detailed instructions issued to the commanders, the naval convoy force not ready,
the transports not finally fitted, the Ordnance stores still to load, and the composition of the force not finally decided.”
²²

Explanations of many kinds were made. Some army units wound up in the wrong place; one frigate had to be dry-docked while others were late; the royal message requesting that Irish regiments be put in service was delayed in reaching the Irish House of Commons; one transport sank in a storm, and others were late; winds were adverse, and the winter weather was awful. Presumably the confusion resembled the circumstances that prompted American troops in World War II to coin the acronym SNAFU.

Germain, operationally in charge, repeatedly blamed “Providence.” On January 11, the king, increasingly angry, wrote to Sandwich that “I cannot too strongly inculcate the necessity of setting all forms aside that in the least delay the engaging [of] transports.”
²³
On March 3, after the main expedition had finally left Ireland in February, a sense of pointlessness was setting in. Germain sent modified instructions to General Clinton, on board the smaller force: If on reaching Cape Fear, the general felt that little or nothing could be achieved, he could proceed northward to join Howe. However, Clinton didn’t get that message until the end of May, by which time he had left Cape Fear en route to Charleston. In the meantime, Germain blithely notified Howe that those regiments would be reaching him in time to begin regional operations in New York in May or early June.
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If this seems silly, a spaghetti of logistical confusion, that is what it was. However, the larger story also establishes the lower Cape Fear as a scene of unheralded Patriot achievements—a waterway in need of recognition. Here, between late summer 1775 and late spring 1776, the British Cabinet opened a second American front, this time
outside
of New England, and botched it. As we will see, the Patriots of North Carolina’s tidewater fortified the lower Cape Fear and Wilmington during the winter, marched militia up the river to defeat the Loyalist Highlanders in February, and then for four weeks in May kept seven regiments of British regulars immobile in steamy riverside camps until General Clinton—unaware that he could have gone to New York—decided to move on to attack Charleston, a worse debacle. Surely there ought to be a monument or two.
²⁵

Eric Robson, the English historian, researched the relevant documents a half century ago in London’s Public Records Office. The materials relating to supply and transports have more recently been grist for other specialists. David Syrett, in his
Shipping and the American War,
devoted two pages to the foibles and failures of the North Carolina expedition. He explained the
difficulties the Navy Board, the Treasury, the Ordnance Board, and the Victualling Board had in their competitive management of what was a glaring insufficiency of transports. As for coordination of transport between England, Ireland, the Clyde, Germany, Boston, and the American South, that unprecedented and unmanageable set of demands aroused Sir Hugh Palliser, one of the Admiralty lords: “We are now required to provide (as it were instantly) more transports than the greatest number employed in the last war [1756–1763] which were years growing to the number.”
²⁶
It did not help that the several secretaries of state kept changing the plans and confusing the references.

The ships misallocated to Cape Fear could have changed things elsewhere. Had the Cabinet stopped the expedition just before it sailed from Ireland in February, 20 critical transports would have been freed up. And had the southern campaign been ruled out in September instead of being slowly bungled, that could have freed up enough transports by late October 1775 to let Howe evacuate his troops from Boston to New York.
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That, in turn, might—we can only speculate—have changed the course of the war.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. If the southern expedition took clumsy shape conceptually and administratively, it became equally as embarrassing to Britain on the battlefield and quarterdeck, as
Chapter 25
will detail.

The Southern Mis-strategy

Beginning the day-by-day, blow-by-blow history of the American Revolution in mid-1775 has not tempted British chroniclers, save for the old Whig historians of a century ago, who in any event had little good to say about the king, Lord North, or the Cabinet. In a 1775-centered analysis, King George does not come out too badly. He was correct in feeling that blows must decide, and that whatever New England and Virginia Patriots said, they were aiming at independence. Among the major generals and admirals he appointed in 1774, 1775, and early 1776—Gage, the Howe brothers, Clinton, Burgoyne, Cornwallis—most were moderates, and half had displayed pro-American sentiments in earlier debates as members of Parliament. Whatever Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, he did not send ogres.

In the few studies of the southern expedition, notably Robson’s, George III looks no worse with respect to decision making than North, Dartmouth, Sandwich, and the rest of the Cabinet. He did, of course, share in the
general mistake of asking for too many ships too early in the war. Where the king bears responsibility for a larger failure is in the version of government he indulged—a regime headed by a skilled and much-liked political manager, North, who was personally loyal to the king but had no military competence, and a Cabinet for the most part made up of mediocre men whose factional roots were in the generally anti-American Bedford and Grenville factions. In 1775 the Cabinet, besides North as First Lord of the Treasury or prime minister, included the three secretaries of state (Northern, Southern, and American), the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord President of the Council, and sometimes others.

The American secretary (until November 1775) was the Earl of Dartmouth, a moderate who, besides being North’s stepbrother, was generally ineffective. The other five were Lords Suffolk, Rochford, Sandwich, Bathurst, and Gower. Footnotes generally mention their Bedfordite or Grenvillite backgrounds and their support for “firmness” against the Americans but make no mention of acumen or competence.
²⁸
Nor was there much military expertise. During the summer of 1775, when war plans were gestating, one member of Parliament—artillery Colonel William Phillips, lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle—wrote to General Clinton that the ministry did “attempt to carry on a War of such magnitude without a serious consultation of any military man” and that the Cabinet members spent most of their time at their country seats.
²⁹
For this inexpert regime, George III was responsible, and he kept it as long as he could, refusing to let North resign until the government finally fell in early 1782 after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

The southern expedition was a product of these initial Cabinets, but so were many of the other miscalculations of 1774 and 1775. Ironically, the king and North would have had to plan better and more cautiously if they had not won such a large and initially unquestioning majority in the October 1774 general election.

However, it is appropriate to continue in a maritime vein to examine another British policy launched in September 1775: Admiral Samuel Graves’s orders to his captains to burn offensive seaports along the New England coast.

B
etween April 19, 1775, and New Year’s Day 1776, British warships bombarded, torched, or attempted to burn over a dozen American cities and towns from Falmouth (now Portland), in the Maine district of Massachusetts, to Norfolk, Virginia, 700 miles south. Another dozen were openly threatened. For some months, this represented a deliberate policy, spelled out by Admiral Graves and reiterated by Lord George Germain. To George Washington, the burning of Falmouth was “an outrage exceeding in Barbarity and cruelty every hostile Act practiced among Civilized nations.”
¹

Such burnings, however, were not all on one side. After British cannonades started the fires in Norfolk on January 1, 1776, American soldiers and political leaders opted to keep them burning to destroy what had been a nest of Tories.
²
Were Norfolk to survive, Patriots feared, it could have been rebuilt as a British strongpoint.

Questions also persist about New York. The major conflagration that broke out in British-controlled lower Manhattan on September 21, 1776, has never been fully explained, but many blamed “rebel arsonists.” George Washington, watching the blaze from a balcony miles to the north, revealingly commented that “providence, or some good, honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
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In Boston, General Gage stopped letting disaffected Americans leave the occupied city in early summer 1775. He feared that if no one remained save Tories and redcoats, Patriots might set the city ablaze.
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To eighteenth-century Americans, fires in major cities were both terrifying and commonplace. Boston led, with eight notable conflagrations. Charleston was plagued by fires and hurricanes alike. Manhattan had only a few, including a bad fire in 1741; Philadelphia, despite a bad one in 1742, was relatively untroubled.
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Residents relied on flames for both illumination and cooking, so that rows of wooden houses could go up like pine tree shavings. In many cases, the origins of fires were not clear.

Politically, the British suffered from Graves’s tactics. In New England, with its fishing and smuggling, and in Chesapeake Bay, with its tobacco dependence, local Revolutionary commitments were well advanced. However, in the middle colonies, where sentiment was more divided, two actions besmirched the British cause during the tense winter of 1775–1776. First came reports that King George was trying to hire Russian and then German mercenaries to suppress American rebels, who insisted that they sought only the rights of Englishmen.

Fence-sitting moderates were also offended by the bombardment and burning of towns, much publicized that winter in Patriot journals. Its menace was palpable. In town after town, even the mere threat of burning or naval bombardment caused a panicked exodus. The actual event, soaring flames or hurtling broadsides, could frighten away 20 to 40 percent of the population. The pathos of panicked refugees became a Patriotic symbol.

Worse for the king’s repute, during this period when American colonials were turning against him, was the perception that what was happening reflected his own sentiments and orders. Through burnings and treaties to
hire mercenaries, George III—not just Parliament or faceless ministers—was seen violating a monarch’s duty to protect his subjects. Both disenchantments encouraged the trend toward rejecting the king pressed that winter by Thomas Paine in
Common Sense.

Town Burning: Its 1775 Origins

Admiral Graves had first put forward the idea of burning seaports on April 20 in a rambling discourse on how Britain might reestablish control after Lexington and Concord. Before then, such talk had been flippant, like the cock crowing of British generals who promised to whip the colonials with only a few regiments. A month before Lexington, Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines had written Lord Sandwich that “one active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights.”
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When the first town was torched—Charlestown, Massachusetts, just across the Mystic River from Boston—Pitcairn was there to watch. It went up in flames on the morning of June 17, ignited by red-hot cannonballs from Royal Navy cannon and incendiary “carcasses” from British artillery on the Boston side. This was just hours before British troops were unloaded a half mile away on Moulton’s Point for their attack on what became known as Bunker Hill. Rebel sharpshooters had been sniping from some of the vacated Charlestown houses, by the rules of war enough to legitimate the burning.