The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (10 page)

When he was sent to America to suppress the rebellion in 1776, he was promoted to lieutenant-general of Britain's North American Army, which still left him third in command, subordinate to generals Sir Henry Clinton and Sir William Howe. All three generals had supported the colonists before the war, and it showed. Howe was pessimistic about Britain's ability to suppress the rebellion, especially after the Battle of Bunker (or actually Breed's) Hill where the Americans proved a stubborn foe. Howe fought with a caution born of half-heartedness and even let Washington's army escape New York when he could possibly have crushed it. Cornwallis was cautious too, but the British succeeded in driving the Americans before them, even if the king's forces suffered stinging rebukes at Trenton and Princeton.

In October 1777, Howe resigned and Sir Henry Clinton was appointed his successor. Clinton preferred the safety of New York, its charming social life, and the comforting arms of his mistress to campaigning; and Cornwallis, though he remained a dutiful subordinate, tried to resign his commission. He yearned for home and believed the government was undercutting the army in North America in order to fight the French in the Caribbean. The king refused his resignation, but Cornwallis was finally granted leave and returned to England in December 1779 to find his wife, Lady Cornwallis,
desperately ill. He stayed with her through the winter until she died in February. It was her death that compelled Cornwallis to forgo thoughts of home and the company of his two young children and to return to the grim and unsatisfactory war in America; the reserved Englishman needed to bury his never-healing grief in duty.

He found that duty in the southern United States where he rejoined Clinton and besieged Charleston—this time, unlike a previous attempt in 1776, successfully. With Charleston secured, Clinton returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis in command, granting him broad powers and instructions to work his way to the Chesapeake after bringing the Carolinas to heel. This Cornwallis swiftly set out to do, reestablishing a loyalist government in South Carolina and then moving to the back country to fight the rebels. He met them at Camden. The rebel commander was General Horatio Gates, a former British army major of common birth and conniving personality. He had served in America in the past, but had only become an American resident in 1772. For all of Gates's experience—and the fact that he had nearly twice Cornwallis's number of guns and men—the nobleman routed the commoner, popping Gates's self-inflated reputation, and capturing all his guns. Gates disgraced himself by abandoning his army and fleeing the field.

Cornwallis believed in seeking out enemy armies and destroying them, but in the South he was confronted by partisan warfare, with loyalists brutalized into submission by patriot guerrillas. The patriots were full of passionate intensity, while the loyalists lacked all conviction—not surprising perhaps because all they wanted was a quiet life and a return to the status quo ante bellum.

The enormous weight the British government put on the presumed loyalist sentiment of Georgia (back in the British fold) and the Carolinas annoyed Cornwallis, usually the most temperate of men. He dismissed the loyalists as “dastardly and pusillanimous”
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and entirely reliant on his British regulars. The loyalists, however, were neither dastardly nor pusillanimous under the command of Scotch-born Major Patrick Ferguson, a brilliant and courageous British officer, at the Battle of King's Mountain, North Carolina (7 October 1780). They were nevertheless destroyed, their defeat reverberating throughout the South; the allegedly loyalist Carolinas did not seem so very safe for the British.

Cornwallis's chief failing in the Southern campaign was actually to his credit as a human being. He had, as his most prominent biographers have noted, “a soldier's conception of honor and straight dealing. He enjoyed fighting openly against a declared and courageous foe. By the same token he abhorred cruelty, deceit, and dishonesty. Here, however, he found himself in a situation where the last three qualities counted most in winning the war.”
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Luckily, he had the British Legion under the command of Banastre Tarleton, a cavalryman and politically incorrect poster boy who had fewer qualms about cruelty, deceit, and dishonesty. It is hard not to warm to a man like Tarleton—a man who boasted, according to Horace Walpole, “of having butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army”
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and who, as a member of Parliament defended the slave trade
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—but the Americans managed; indeed, his very name was used to frighten children; “Tarleton's quarter” was invoked by the patriots to mean
“no quarter”; he was the most feared and hated British cavalryman in the war. While Cornwallis insisted that his officers should behave like gentlemen, Tarleton, a gentleman by birth, was more than willing to mix it up with the partisans on their own terms of terror and slaughter. Cornwallis liked the ambitious young Tarleton, and though he discerned an occasional impetuosity and lack of scruple in his subordinate, he defended him when pressed. He did so even after Tarleton's rashly ordered cavalry charge, while on detached command, led to defeat at Cowpens (17 January 1781)
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—another serious blow to Cornwallis's campaign, one that he confessed “has almost broke my heart.”
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But when Cornwallis could bring his army against the colonials in a set-piece battle, even if badly outnumbered, he turned up trumps. He was so eager to catch an American army to fight that he burnt his supply train so that his troops could move faster. It also meant they had to endure more and live off what they could find, whether a turnip patch or a field of corn. As redcoat sergeant Roger Lamb noted, “In all this his lordship participated, nor did he indulge himself even in the distinction of a tent; but in all things partook our sufferings, and seemed much more to feel for us than for himself.”
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He raced to confront patriot Nathanael Greene at Guildford Courthouse (15 March 1781) in Greensboro, North Carolina, though Greene held an easily defended position on the high ground flanked by covering woods. The patriots outnumbered him more than two to one, but Cornwallis's intelligence reports told him he was outnumbered four to one. He decided to attack regardless, trusting to the steadiness of his British regulars. His confidence and determination were well placed, as his troops charged through rebel militiamen, shot down sharpshooters, and advanced straight through canister fire until their bayonets pricked the Americans into retreat.

The victory, of course, came at a high cost: at least a quarter of his force. Rubbing salt into the wound was that it did nothing to cement North Carolina's allegiance to the Crown or crush the rebels' ambitions. Cornwallis decided his only viable strategy was to plunge into Virginia, despite having only 1,400 men. He hoped to compel Washington and Greene to combine against him; then he could defeat them entire with reinforcements from some of the thousands of troops that sat idle with Clinton in New York. Events, however, betrayed Cornwallis's hopes.

Clinton had sent troops to Virginia, but they were intended to fortify a naval base at Portsmouth. Cornwallis had entirely other ideas. Forts were superfluous to winning the war; what was necessary was destroying the rebel army, and Virginia was the center of gravity of the war in the South;
force its submission and the Carolinas were secured. Clinton, however, remained convinced that New York was the center of the war. Combined French and American forces, he believed, would soon be striking against him; the Southern theatre was essentially a diversionary one. He ordered Cornwallis to locate his troops at either Williamsburg or Yorktown, where British ships could reach him; the plan was not to reinforce Cornwallis but for Cornwallis to reinforce Clinton.

The problem was that it was the French Navy that arrived in Chesapeake Bay—disembarking French troops and rebuffing the Royal Navy. With Cornwallis's men divided between Yorktown and Gloucester (necessary for the defense of Yorktown), he could either try to break out against the French regulars who outnumbered him or he could dig in for a siege. Cornwallis planned for a breakout—until, that is, he received a dispatch from Clinton promising troops. With that promise he decided to stick it out at Yorktown. But now racing down to Yorktown was Washington, who recognized that Cornwallis was trapped and could be destroyed. Cornwallis kept Tarleton sweeping his front and his men furiously building entrenchments; the rival armies traded bombardments; but as the siege tightened and the relief force didn't arrive, the end was inevitable. Cornwallis, pleading ill health, did not meet his conquerors at the surrender ceremony. Instead he sent Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, who tried to present Cornwallis's sword to the French commander the Comte de Rochambeau, who indicated that the honor belonged to General Washington. Washington returned O'Hara's snub by directing him to surrender to his own second-in-command, General Benjamin Lincoln.

Defeat at Yorktown did not end Cornwallis's career. Not only did he have the frisson of having his voyage home interrupted by a French privateer, but when he did return to Old Blighty he found himself cheered on all sides:
Lord North's government held him blameless, dumping its vitriol on General Clinton; King George found no fault in him; and even the opposition kept its fire on the government for failing to support Cornwallis properly. If his reputation needed a shield it was found in the near universal respect for his probity.

Cornwallis was under parole from the French privateer, but when the war with America ended, he felt free to accept, on 23 February 1786, the positions of governor-general and commander in chief of India. He demanded the positions be unified because he came to India as a broom, sweeping out corruption and choosing as his lieutenants Christian men of brilliance, dedication, and integrity. They were men like John Shore, an old Etonian, cricketer, classicist, and translator of Persian and Sanskrit, who came not to enrich himself in India but to serve the Indian people; William Jones, a lawyer, judge, and linguist who could speak thirteen languages fluently and get by in thirty more, and who appeared to know more about Hindu culture and history than the Hindus themselves; and Charles Grant, a friend of Shore's, sharing many of Shore's virtues and adding to them a masterful knowledge of the commercial workings of the East India Company. Together, they set the Hindu and Muslim legal codes into English, codified a general legal code for British India (the “Cornwallis Code”), and tried to ensure that the justice system lived up to its name (and abolished some of the harsher bits like mutilation as punishment). While they could not abolish slavery, which was still too popular in India, they did threaten to prosecute slave traders and prevent the selling of children. They established India's currency, reformed its system of taxation, founded a Sanskrit college for Hindus (still in existence), and, on the whole, followed Cornwallis's admonition that “whilst we call ourselves sovereign of the country we cannot leave the lives, liberty, & property of our subjects unprotected.”
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It is true, as his modern critics will be quick to point out, that Cornwallis established a color bar, requiring that officers and civil servants be not only gentlemen but white gentlemen. His reasons were simple. He thought European men were, in general, more likely to be disinterested and honest and that in the myriad of races, religions, and castes in India only a white man was capable of winning universal authority and respect.