The March of Folly (39 page)

7. (
LEFT
) Secretary of State John Foster Dulles leaving a session of the Geneva Conference, April 1954
.

8. Fact-finding mission. General Maxwell D. Taylor and Walt Rostow with General Duong (“Big”) Mirth, commander of South Vietnamese field forces, at officers’ club in Saigon, October 1961
.

9. Operation Rolling Thunder. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and General Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, watch planes taking off from U.S. aircraft carrier Independence, 18 July 1965, to attack targets in North Vietnam
.

10. A certain skepticism. Senators J. William Fulbright, John Sparkman, and Wayne L. Morse listening to the testimony of General Taylor at the Fulbright Hearings, February 1966
.

11. Antiwar demonstration on the steps of the Pentagon, 21 October 1967. Military police are reinforced by Army troops to prevent the public from storming the entrance
.

12. The Tuesday lunch at the White House, October 1967, with Battle of Saratoga in the background. Those present, clockwise from President Johnson’s left, are Secretary of Defense McNamara, General Wheeler, Press Secretary George Christian, Walt Rostow (at the foot of the table with only a fraction of his head showing behind Christian), Assistant Press Secretary Tom Johnson, CIA Director Richard M. Helms, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk
.

Against the pressure of the Bedford Cabinet and the King, he had to give way. His Majesty’s Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition was issued on 23 August. In announcing the Americans’ “traitorous” levying of war upon the Crown, it clung to the view that the uprising was the work of a conspiracy of “dangerous and ill-designing men,” in spite of the stream of reports from General Gage and governors on the spot that it was inclusive of all kinds and classes. Insistence on a rooted notion regardless of contrary evidence is the source of the self-deception that characterizes folly. By hiding the reality, it underestimates the needed degree of effort.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia moderates of the Continental Congress succeeded in obtaining the Olive Branch Petition, which professed loyalty and allegiance to the Crown, appealed to the King to halt hostilities and repeal the oppressive measures enacted since 1763, and expressed the hope that a reconciliation might be worked out. George III’s refusal to receive the petition when it reached London in August and his Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion, which followed within a few days, effectively terminated the American overture, for what it was worth. In Parliament, a motion by the opposition to consider the Olive Branch a basis for negotiation met with the usual rejection by the majority.

Following the Proclamation, the definitive act was the removal of Dartmouth to the office of Lord Privy Seal and his replacement as Secretary for the Colonies by a vigorous advocate of “bringing the
rebels to their knees” by armed force, Lord George Germain. A Sackville of Knole by birth
^*
and younger son of the 7th Earl and 1st Duke of Dorset, he had overcome a strange history of court-martial and ostracism to maneuver himself into favor with the King and, by plying him with the advice he wanted to hear, to gain the critical American post in the Cabinet.

As a Lieutenant-General and commander of the British cavalry at the battle of Minden in 1759, Lord George had inexplicably refused to obey the order of his superior, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, to lead a cavalry charge to finish off a victory over the French. Dismissed from the service, called a coward by society, tried for disobedience to orders, he was declared by verdict of the court-martial “unfit to serve His Majesty in any military capacity whatever,” the sentence being recorded in the order book of every British regiment. “I always told you,” wrote his poor half-mad brother Lord John, “that my brother George was no better than myself.”

Although the tag of cowardice fitted queerly with a strenuous military career of more than twenty years, Lord George never explained his conduct at Minden. Hard and arrogant, he stemmed from one ancestor who “lived in the greatest splendour of any nobleman in England,” from a grandfather who avoided a charge of murder only by the friendly intercession of Charles II, from a father created a Duke when George was four years old, whose house was so crowded with suitors and visitors on a Sunday as to give it the appearance of a royal levee. Not a likable man, Lord George had already made enemies by his criticisms of fellow-officers, yet he was able after some years, with Sackville support and an aggressive will, to rise above disgrace and retrieve the status owed to his rank and family. Made harder if not wiser by his experience, he was now to become the minister in active charge of the war.

Opposed like the rest of the Cabinet and the King’s friends to any effort at conciliation, Lord George resisted rigorously the plan of a peace commission to treat with the colonies. When Lord North carried this point, to which he was previously committed, Germain insisted on drafting the instructions. His terms required the colonies to acknowledge, prior to a parley, the “supreme authority of the legislature to make laws binding on the Colonies in all cases whatsoever.” Since their consistent rejection of this principle for ten years was what had
led them to rebellion, it was fairly obvious, as Lord North pointed out, that this formula would condemn the peace commission to failure. Dartmouth said flatly he would resign as Privy Seal if the instructions stood; North hinted that he would go if his stepbrother did.

Interminable discussions of the terms followed: whether the phrase “in all cases whatsoever” should be in or out; whether colonial acceptance of the supremacy principle must precede or be part of negotiations; whether the commissioners should have discretionary powers; whether Admiral Howe should hold both the naval command and membership on the peace commission. Mingled with these disputes were intrigues about who should fill several court and sub-Cabinet posts from which opponents of the war had resigned, while Parliament, upon reconvening in January 1776, spent its time arguing over contested elections and the high prices charged by German princes for the hire of their troops. The peace proposals as finally settled went no further than North’s conciliation plan of the year before, already spurned by the Continental Congress. Neither King nor Cabinet had any thought of considering American terms for a form of autonomy under the Crown; the peace commission was intended mainly for public effect and the still persisting illusion of dividing the colonies. Under Germain’s domineering direction, wrote Franklin’s friend the scientist Dr. Joseph Priestley, “anything like reason and moderation” could not be expected. “Everything breathes rancor and desperation.”

By the time terms and appointments were settled in May 1776, events had made them obsolete. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet
Common Sense
, calling boldly for independence, had electrified the colonists, convinced thousands of the necessity of rebellion and brought them with their muskets to the recruiting centers. George Washington had been named Commander-in-Chief; Fort Ticonderoga had yielded to Ethan Allen’s company of 83 men; General William Howe, prompted by the Americans’ remarkable hauling of cannon from Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights, had been forced to evacuate Boston; British forces in full combat were gaining in the south and in Canada. In June the Continental Congress heard a resolution offered by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” On 2 July the formal Declaration of Independence was voted without dissent, with revisions added in a second vote on 4 July.

In September, after Howe’s victory in the battle of Long Island, his brother the Admiral arranged in his alternate capacity as peace commissioner a conference with Franklin and John Adams representing the
Continental Congress, but as he had no authority to negotiate unless the colonies resumed allegiance and revoked the Declaration of Independence, the meeting was fruitless. So passed on both sides the attempt to forestall and then reverse the rupture.

Opponents of the war were vocal from the beginning although outnumbered by the war’s supporters. Following Amherst’s example, others in the Army and Navy refused to serve against the Americans. Admiral Augustus Keppel, who had fought throughout the Seven Years’ War, declared himself out of this one. The Earl of Effingham resigned his Army commission, unwilling to bear arms in what “is not so clear a cause.” Chatham’s oldest son, John, serving with a regiment in Canada, resigned and came home, while another officer who remained with the Army in America expressed the opinion that because “This is an unpopular war, men of ability do not choose to risk their reputations by taking an active part in it.” This freedom of action found its justifier in General Conway, who declared in Parliament that although a soldier owed unquestioning obedience in foreign war, in case of domestic conflict he must satisfy himself that the cause is just, and he personally “could never draw his sword” in the present conflict.

Animating these sentiments was the belief that the Americans were fighting for the liberties of England. Interdependent, both would either be “buried in one grave,” said the opposition speaker, Lord John Cavendish, or endure forever. London’s four members in Parliament and all its sheriffs and aldermen remained steadfast partisans of the colonies. Motions were made in both the Commons and the Lords opposing the hiring of foreign mercenaries without prior approval by Parliament. The Duke of Richmond moved in December 1776 for a settlement based on concessions to America, whose resistance he termed “perfectly justifiable in every political and moral sense.” A public subscription was raised for the widows and orphans and parents of Americans “inhumanly murdered by the King’s troops at or near Lexington and Concord.”