1775 (62 page)

Here again a brief chronological reminder is in order. Political and commercial relations between Britain and the thirteen insurgent colonies were deteriorating rapidly in midsummer. In July, the British begin implementation
of the Restraining Acts, which included a specific prohibition of (coastal) trade between colonies, even adjacent ones. A Rhode Island schooner could be seized for bringing goods to Connecticut. Meanwhile, effective July 18, the Continental Congress had urged the individual colonies to send vessels to the West Indies to trade for gunpowder. Few lawyers could keep up with the flow of deadlines, authorizations, and variable interpretations, and presumably the same was true of Royal Navy officers and Yankee ship captains. But clearly the matériel war was getting more serious every day.

September brought word that King George had gone before Parliament in August and declared all thirteen colonies in rebellion. September 10, in turn, marked the official date—now losing its practical meaning—that the United Colonies would cut off exports to the mother country. On September 18, as we have seen, Congress established a Committee of Secret Correspondence with authority and funds to commission American ships to trade wherever necessary to bring back powder, muskets, and field pieces. Dozens sailed within a few months. As for the invasion of Canada by Yankee and New York rebels aiming for Montreal and Quebec, it, too, had begun in September.

Admiral Graves, in short, was hardly precipitous in taking a strong line in September. Even so, his orders still had not listed specific towns to be burned. That came in early October. On the sixth, he ordered Lieutenant Henry Mowat, in command of the six-gun armed vessel
Canceaux,
in company with the schooner
Halifax
and the newly refitted and better-armed transports
Symmetry
and
Spitfire,
to go to Cape Ann Harbor (Gloucester). There they were to “burn, destroy and lay waste the said Town together with all Vessells and Craft in the Harbour.”
³⁴
Here was payback for Gloucester’s rough handling of Captain Linzee and the
Falcon
in August.

Once Cape Ann had been bloodied, Mowat was to head north to bombard other rebellious seaports. “My design,” said Graves, “is to chastize Marblehead, Salem, Newbury Port, Cape Ann Harbour, Portsmouth, Ipswich, Saco, Falmouth in Casco Bay, and particularly Mechias, where the
Margueritta
was taken, the Officer commanding her killed, and the People made Prisoners, and where the Diligent Schooner was seized.”
³⁵

Unfortunately for Mowat, when he reached Cape Ann, the artillery officer assigned to the expedition saw limited prospects. For a bombardment from the sea to be successful, he said, houses had to be densely clustered. Those in Cape Ann Harbor were too scattered.
³⁶

The expedition continued north, but instead of heading for Machias, the
admiral’s second priority, Mowat turned for Falmouth, where he felt he had been personally insulted in May. Back then, after being ordered to Falmouth in the
Canceaux
to safeguard a cargo, he had been captured while ashore by local radicals. Town leaders, however, returned Mowat to his ship under parole—for which he had expressed his gratitude—and he sailed back to Boston.
³⁷
For this, Falmouth would be pounded five months later by the
Symmetry
and the
Spitfire.

In Newport, the belligerent Captain Wallace only grew bolder. On August 7, six weeks after bombardment of Stonington, he brought his growing squadron—the
Rose, Swan,
and
Glasgow,
a bomb ketch, and twelve other smaller craft—to bombard the port of Bristol, on the Rhode Island mainland 20 miles north of Newport, until its residents complied with his demand for livestock.
³⁸
In the words of one Patriot who was on hand, “The night was dark and rainy and people ran in terror and confusion. For an hour 120 cannon and cascades [mortars firing incendiary rounds] were discharged on us [and] kept up constant fire on the people.”
³⁹
Forty sheep were provided, and Wallace sailed away.

On October 11, residents of Beverly, Massachusetts, were surprised when a locally based schooner, the
Hannah,
under lease to Washington and the Continental Army, ran for safety into their harbor with the sixteen-gun British sloop of war
Nautilus
two miles behind. Normally, Beverly’s twisted harbor channel discouraged British warships, but the
Nautilus
under Captain John Collins did not flinch. When the
Hannah
went aground near the shore, Collins seemed to have won his bet. The
Hannah
’s crew had to abandon her. But Beverly townspeople and militiamen, hurriedly assembling, had enough time to carry the
Hannah
’s four-pound guns ashore and set them up. The British sloop continued to attack but came under return fire from muskets, swivel guns, and finally four-pound cannon from both Beverly and Salem across a narrow channel. The
Nautilus
fired back, and buildings were damaged in the center of town. Women and children began evacuating. However, when a cable snapped, the
Nautilus
ran aground, with many of its guns no longer able to bear. The sloop remained under fire for four long hours until freed by a changing tide. Collins escaped, partly because of inexpert Yankee marksmanship. There was no mistaking the almost reckless hostility of local populations that British warships faced in New England seaports.
⁴⁰

On October 17, having given up on Gloucester, Lieutenant Mowat appeared in Casco Bay with his new, augmented force and cited orders “to
execute a just Punishment on the Town of Falmouth.” He gave the population there two hours to evacuate the town, at which time “a Red Pendant will be hoisted at the Maintopgallant Masthead.”
⁴¹
In fact, the negotiations were more drawn out. However, by the morning of October 18—after a night of panic—the townspeople had not acceded to Mowat’s demand to surrender all weapons and take oaths of allegiance. Most local residents then evacuated, and Mowat’s five vessels, including a bomb ketch, began a bombardment at 9:30
A.M.
that lasted until six o’clock in the evening, when a British landing party went ashore to torch several specific buildings and complete the conflagration. All told, 130 houses were destroyed, along with the new courthouse, the fire station, and the public library. Of thirteen American vessels in the harbor, Mowat took two and sank the others.
⁴²

The destruction of Falmouth sparked a furor on the Patriot side. That anger, in turn, encouraged Washington to publicly announce his own efforts to arm schooners and also influenced Congress to take its late-October and early-November actions respecting naval construction. On November 1, partly in response to the burning of Falmouth, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress passed its own legislation to commission privateers, although a number were already sailing unofficially.
⁴³

After Gloucester, Beverly, and Falmouth, the fourth town targeted or attacked in October was Hampton, Virginia. On October 25, under Lord Dunmore’s orders, five vessels, led by Royal Navy Captain Matthew Squire in the
Otter,
brought up before the town expecting to burn it, but they were blocked by sunken vessels in the channel. The next day, in a confrontation some enthusiastic Virginians have called the Lexington of the South, the British hacked through the sunken barricade and burned a farmhouse, but were routed when Patriot Colonel William Woodford arrived with a company of riflemen. These poured such heavy and accurate fire on the British vessels—sailors couldn’t remain on deck long enough to fire their cannon—that Squire had to retreat, losing one of his tenders and ten men captured.
⁴⁴

November now became the month during which the Congress moved decisively toward building an American navy, and during it, perhaps ironically, no towns were bombarded or burned. However, on December 10, Wallace and the
Rose
struck again. Royal Marines under his command burned parts of Jamestown, Rhode Island, torching houses along the road from the Jamestown-Newport ferry.
⁴⁵

The other great bombardment-cum-burning came on New Year’s Day. The city of Norfolk, Virginia’s leading port, was also, as we have seen, a stronghold of Scottish merchants and the principal concentration of Tories in a strongly Whig province. During late December, British forces consolidating after their defeat at Great Bridge, 20 miles to the south, decided to vacate Norfolk and instead go aboard the considerable fleet that also served Dunmore as a floating headquarters. As the British took ship, American forces entered the city on December 29, and riflemen periodically sniped at British soldiers and sailors on the closest vessels. In the middle of the afternoon of January 1, as American forces paraded, somewhat tauntingly, Dunmore’s half dozen warships, led by the 28-gun frigate
Liverpool,
commenced firing and continued until ten o’clock at night. Some landing parties came ashore, and fighting persisted in the dock area until the British withdrew, by which time fires were widespread.

Some annals tell that tale and little more. However, as investigators ascertained several years later, although British gunfire had started the fires, Americans fanned them and let them continue. The truth is more than a little embarrassing. As the center of Loyalist strength in the colony, Norfolk had become an anathema. Colonel Robert Howe of North Carolina, the ranking Patriot officer, did not believe that Norfolk could be held without naval control. Thomas Jefferson, in turn, saw it as the entryway to Virginia and urged that the seaport be leveled to keep it from becoming a British rallying point. Updating the Roman statesman Cato’s comment that Carthage must be destroyed (
delenda
) to save the empire, Jefferson had written in October to a fellow Patriot that
Delenda est Norfolk.
⁴⁶
The American-led destruction of Norfolk took place over a considerable period of days, although on January 21, the British warships
Liverpool
and
Otter
also delivered a further cannonading.
⁴⁷

Somewhat later, a commission established by the Virginia Convention concluded that most of the burning had been done by American soldiers. To be specific, the British had destroyed 32 houses on November 30, 19 on January 1, and 3 others on January 21. By contrast, Virginia soldiers had destroyed 863 houses before January 15, and another 416 were leveled in February on the orders of the Convention. In the words of one chronicler, “the report was so potentially politically damaging that it was immediately suppressed. If word leaked out that the Americans themselves were responsible for so much of the burning of Norfolk, it might undermine the cause of revolution.” Indeed, it was not made public until 1836.
⁴⁸

The other burner, the hapless Samuel Graves, had been recalled months earlier, and he sailed for home in January. His replacement was a colorless rear admiral, Molyneux Shuldham, on station for only a few months. Shuldham is scarcely remembered, but then maritime Massachusetts was all but frozen in place that winter. There is no evidence that Graves was replaced for excessive zeal in burning rebel seaports. Wallace, just as zealous, won a knighthood. Besides, Gage, as military governor, approved Graves’s September 1 letter, even to the point of saying that it might have been done earlier.
⁴⁹

Lord George Germain, who in November had replaced Dartmouth as American secretary, himself had a distinctly Gravesian view of how to treat troublesome seaports. He later advised the Royal Navy’s senior officers in North America to keep “the coasts of the enemy constantly alarmed” through raids and bombardment.
⁵⁰
He repeatedly asked Admiral Richard Howe to harass the coasts, but the admiral was disinclined—and had the stature to prevail.

As 1776 began, both Gage and Graves had handed their North American batons to two more conciliatory officers, Lieutenant General William Howe and his older brother, Vice Admiral Richard Lord Howe, fourth viscount of that title, who did not actually arrive until July. Their mother, the dowager viscountess, was an illegitimate daughter of George I. Their older brother, Brigadier George Augustus Howe, the third viscount, had been killed by the French near Lake George in 1758. The leading light of his family, apparently hero worshipped by his brothers, he had also been the pride of the British Army assembled before Ticonderoga and also, quite uniquely for a British general, the hero of the army’s New England militia regiments. Indeed, the General Court of Massachusetts so regarded George Augustus Howe—who several times had campaigned with New England troops—that a decade earlier it had placed a memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey. Neither Richard nor William Howe was happy to be fighting Americans, and both assumed a tricky dual role: peace commissioners as well as military commanders.

After General Howe vacated Boston for Halifax in March 1776, the Bay Colony was no longer a major battleground. For several months, a half dozen British warships kept watch on the coast, but sweeping orders to burn the province’s seaports were no longer issued. Neither of the Howes would want to take such measures against the province that had honored their brother.

Of course, the various peace missions between 1776 and 1778 did not succeed. The Howes returned home to England with more than a little explaining to do. Germain remained in office as American secretary. In 1777 and more conspicuously in 1778, the burning and bombardment of New England towns resumed. By 1781, Fairfield, Norwalk, New Haven, and New London in Connecticut had been added to the list, as well as New Bedford in Massachusetts.

In those later years, Lord North and the king’s Cabinet had given up on conquering or holding New England. The locus of battle shifted to the South, where the British government’s second “southern strategy” achieved somewhat more success than the first. The bombardments and burnings between 1777 and 1781 were more diversion than pursuit of serious geopolitical designs. By comparison, the burnings back in 1775 were retaliatory and malice driven, a tribute of sorts to the towns that had worked hardest and longest for revolution.