Penguin History of the United States of America (34 page)

This altered the whole nature of the war. Hitherto the balance of battle in America had swung this way and that according to the local strength of the belligerents. Even Saratoga could not be said to prove that, left to themselves, the British lacked the strength to win some sort of victory in the long run, though it surely demonstrated the need for better generals. With France and Spain in the fight matters looked very different. In the first place British supply-lines across the Atlantic would now be threatened by French as well as American ships. Much worse was the general vulnerability of the British Empire. During the Seven Years War the French had
been beaten in India, Canada, the West Indies and at sea while Frederick II kept them busy in Germany; Spain entered the war only when France was already defeated, so that England could turn her undivided strength on the lesser Bourbon power. Furthermore, war seemed to finance itself: at any rate the conquest of various sugar islands greatly helped the military budget. In the War of American Independence none of these considerations applied. Frederick stayed at home; it was England’s turn to worry about the loss of sugar islands (so much was this the case that the Caribbean actually replaced North America as the principal theatre of the war); and she was thrown on the defensive in Europe, for not only was she threatened ineffectively with a French invasion but her high-handedness at sea drove the Dutch to war and provoked the formation of a League of Armed Neutrality, led by Catherine II of Russia. It seemed touch-and-go whether George III might find himself fighting the whole of Europe. Secondly, the very extent of the Empire gave the initiative to the French, who could choose when and where to attack and mounted offensives in the Caribbean, North America and the Indian Ocean at the same time as they threatened England herself. The Spanish took Minorca and besieged Gibraltar; Yankee privateers swarmed in the Atlantic, eventually doing Britain £18 million worth of damage; the
Bonhomme Richard
, a vessel of that puny infant, the US navy, commanded by John Paul Jones, captured HMS
Serapis
, a much stronger vessel, on 23 September 1779. It was no wonder that Lord North had the vapours again.

The King (‘If others will not be active I must drive’), Lord George Germain, the Admiralty and the generals held on. The prospect of French intervention had induced them to offer terms to the rebels. Everything would be conceded, except independence. The offer was rejected, the Bourbon powers declared war and the British resigned themselves to a continuing struggle. They attacked American commerce as effectively as the Yankees raided theirs and mounted devastating raids on coastal towns such as New Haven and coastal districts such as tidewater Virginia (in January 1781 Thomas Jefferson, now Governor of Virginia, was temporarily driven out of Richmond, the state’s new capital, by a force led by Benedict Arnold, who had previously changed sides in every circumstance of contemptible treachery). General Clinton, in command at New York, in the spring of 1780 launched a successful expedition against Charles Town (or Charleston, as it was coming to be called), the principal port of the Southern states; his energetic subordinate, General Cornwallis, overran Georgia, where some sort of royal government was re-established, and invaded the Carolinas. Doggedly, the British high command stuck to its original strategic doctrine: if enough force was mustered and if Washington’s army could be caught and made to fight (abigif, since it had become very adroit at dodging its pursuers), it must surely be crushed; and then the Americans would despair. The King was ready to go on fighting indefinitely. ‘This war like the last will prove one of credit,’ said he. He was sure that the French political and financial system
could not stand the strain nearly so well as the British,
¹⁸
and once France was beaten the rebels could be dealt with at leisure.

It is more than doubtful if, in the seventh year of the war, these calculations were sound any longer. True, in April 1781 Washington capped an endless gush of justified complaints about the state of affairs with the simple phrase, ‘We are at the end of our tether,’ but his position conditioned him to look on the gloomy side. It seems likeliest that, when the war broke out, there was a large patriot party, a substantially smaller Loyalist party and a majority of the population that was neutral. Subsequent events radically changed matters. The mere fact of war, the promulgation of independence and the survival of the Revolutionary governments tended to win recruits to the patriot party, which grew larger throughout the war, in spite of a dangerous war-weariness. Very foolishly, the British enlisted the Iroquois in the North-West. They did little for the imperial cause, but their depredations, carried out with their usual relentless cruelty, horrified and aroused every settler who had crossed, or was about to cross, the Appalachians in search of new land. (It was tales of Indian atrocities as much as anything else which brought out the New Englanders against Burgoyne.) Wherever the British won a temporary victory the Loyalists came out for them, only to find, at any rate in the North outside New York, that after a little while the British went away again,
¹⁹
leaving their collaborators with no choice but to flee. This of course put military and political power even more firmly in the hands of the patriots, while the Loyalists became a mere floating refugee population.
²⁰
The most effective Loyalist, Banastre Tarleton, who raised a substantial and efficient fighting force for Cornwallis, fought with such savagery (the American way of war is, perhaps, more cold-blooded than the British) that he not only added the fullest horrors of civil war to the Revolution, but inspired active hatred and patriotism in equal amounts throughout the South. The terror of his name drove the timid to seek the protection of General Washington and his subordinates, while the patriots vengefully hunted out Tories from their jobs, property and country. The American general, Nathanael Greene, commented sadly in South Carolina that

The animosity between the Whigs and Tories, renders their situation truly deplorable. The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Tories, and the Tories the Whigs. Some thousands have fallen in this way, in this quarter, and the evil rages with more violence than ever. If a stop cannot be soon put to these massacres, the country will be depopulated in a few months more.

After years of this sort of thing it grew less and less likely that any military victory would enable the British to reconstitute their rule. Their supreme war-aim had become unattainable long before they were forced to stop fighting for it.

A good example of what all this meant to ordinary people is provided in the continuing career of young Andrew Jackson. When he was thirteen (1780) the war came to his neighbourhood. He and all his relations were soon made fugitives by Tarleton’s terrible incursions, and then turned to fight. The boy saw service as a mounted orderly, was captured by the British and nearly died of smallpox in jail. His mother and his two brothers did die, his mother of ‘ship fever’ while nursing prisoners of the British at Charleston. None of this endeared the invaders to young Jackson. But the episode that was to become legendary when he became famous was that of the English subaltern who commanded his young prisoner to clean his boots. Jackson, standing on his rights as a prisoner of war, refused, and got a cut on his head from the officer’s sword for his insolence. It left a scar which, as his biographer says, he was to carry through a life ‘that profited little to England or any Englishman’;
²¹
more to the point, it was characteristic of the innumerable small strokes that were cutting the few remaining bonds between Britain and America. There must have been thousands of young sparks like Jackson. And George Washington was now a hero to all his countrymen; their admiration for him was uniting them as little else could. None of those who had learned to venerate him-least of all thosewhohad fought under him – would abandon the struggle before he did. However dark the outlook from time to time, it was always too early to talk of the Americans despairing.

However, the assumptions underlying British strategy were never to be thoroughly tested, for the rashness of a general made them irrelevant. Cornwallis proved to be another Burgoyne. He began well, but in his quest for the decisive victory over Nathanael Greene he allowed the Americans to lure him further and further north, losing men and supplies all the way. Finally he realized that he could neither retreat nor go forward in face of the resistance he was meeting, so he dug in where he was, at Yorktown in Virginia (a few miles from Jamestown and Williamsburg), and waited to be rescued by the Royal Navy.

Washington saw that this was the sort of opportunity that only comes once. His army had long been stationary in the North, pinning down the British in New York. Now was the time for it to move, if only because of the increasing war-weariness of the Americans and the desperate financial straits of the French, who had nevertheless sent him an army of some 6,700 regulars under the Comte de Rochambeau. A French naval squadron under Admiral de Grasse was at sea. Washington had been trying to concentrate all these forces for an attack on New York; but now he saw a chance, probably a last chance, for a decisive victory over the British. British carelessness
had given the allies temporary naval superiority in Virginian waters: De Grasse was able to seal off Chesapeake Bay, thus putting himself between Cornwallis and his relief. Washington and Rochambeau marched briskly south. Before Cornwallis quite knew what was happening to him he was trapped. The inexorable work of an eighteenth-century siege went forward; and at last Cornwallis gave in. On 17 October 1781 – four years exactly since Burgoyne’ s misadventure – he asked for terms. Two days later he surrendered unconditionally. Legend has it that as he and his soldiers marched out, prisoners, their regimental bands played ‘The World Turned Upside Down’.

Rightly, if so, for Yorktown was a decisive victory, though Washington could not at first believe it. It did the French little good (a few months later Admiral Rodney drubbed De Grasse in the Battle of the Saints); but it settled the question of American independence. The news provoked the House of Commons to mutiny at last. ‘Oh God! It is all over,’ said poor Lord North. His government fell, and a Whig ministry led by Rockingham, and after his death by Shelburne, lasted just long enough to negotiate a new Treaty of Paris (3 September 1783).

This treaty gave the United States excellent terms (far better than France and Spain were to get), for which the American negotiators (Franklin, John Adams, John Jay) deserved most of the credit. Not only did the British recognize American independence and make peace, and grant valuable concessions to American fishermen in Canadian waters; they conceded most generous boundaries to the new republic. Up to a point, this only confirmed what was already clear on the ground. In a series of desperate campaigns against the British and the Indians, the Americans had already made good their claim to the trans-Appalachian West. Still, the British controlled large areas there, in the Great Lakes region, and their Indian allies were still unbroken; but they had no stomach for continuing the struggle and formally recognized northern and western frontiers for the United States on the Lakes and the Mississippi. America thus became the legally undisputed mistress of an immense territory. Next to independence itself it was the most notable gain from the War of the Revolution.

At last General Washington was able to unbuckle his sword. He had had to repudiate a proposal that he make a bid for kingship, and to suppress a threatened mutiny over pay, which he did with a personal appeal to his officers. (‘Gentlemen, you must pardon me,’ he said, putting on his spectacles to read his manuscript. ‘I have grown grey in your service and now find myself going blind.’ That did the trick.) Sadly, he saw his cherished veterans going off to their homes like a ‘set of beggars’, still unpaid, though a body of mutinous soldiers had actually besieged the ungrateful Congress in State House at Philadelphia. Joyously, in November 1783, he entered New York as the British evacuated it; and in that city, on 4 December, he bade formal farewell to his officers, shaking each one by the hand, before he set off to the longed-for repose of Mount Vernon. Poor man: he was not to enjoy it for very long.

The Americans are the first people whom Heaven has favoured with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing, the forms of government under which they shall live. All other constitutions have derived their existence from violence or accidental circumstances, and are therefore probably more distant from their perfection, which, though beyond our reach, may nevertheless be approached under the guidance of reason and experience.

John Jay, 1777

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.

George Washington, 1787

Having got rid of the British, the Americans had to cope with the difficulties that had baffled George III and his ministers. The victorious rebels had one advantage: the American Empire (a favourite phrase of the time) was smaller, more compact and more homogeneous than the British, so there was much less inducement to break it up. In fact most Americans wanted to make a success of their new Republic, and maintain their Union. But the obstacles were, in practice, daunting.

The second Peace of Paris left many problems unsolved. It defined America’s place in the international system, but that place was an unsatisfactory one, at any rate to the Americans, and reflected the country’s weakness and unimportance in the scheme of things. Independence was qualified by the necessity of a French guarantee, of French protection. Until the United States could do without France, she would be no more than a satellite, unable to achieve or attempt much without permission. This might prove a disastrous position if, for example, she should clash with Spain. The Spanish alliance was a major component of French foreign policy; it would certainly not be sacrificed to the interests of an upstart little protégé. Yet
Spain was now a principal obstacle to the growth and, perhaps, to the continued existence of the United States. The first Peace of Paris, in 1763, had given her Louisiana, which included New Orleans and all the country between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. By the second, in 1783, she had regained Florida, which then stretched right along the Gulf Coast across what is now southern Alabama. She disliked the republicans, and had two effective weapons against them. By her control of the Mississippi navigation and the market of New Orleans she could dictate terms to the western Americans, who had begun to settle the valleys of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, for the only practicable outlet for their produce lay down the great rivers, since land carriage back across the Appalachians was so expensive; and she could stir up the powerful Indian tribes of the South-West-the Creeks and the Cherokees – against the weak new settlements of the Tennessee. By the winter of 1786–7 a full-scale frontier war was raging, and Spanish agents were at work plausibly suggesting to the Westerners that for protection in future they ought perhaps to look to the King of Spain rather than to the United States. Congress was as helpless as the individual state governments to do anything about these highly undesirable developments, which might end by robbing the United States of half her splendid Western heritage.