After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  But on an overcast Sunday, June 29, at 1:30 P.M., with a fresh wind coming from the southwest, Suffren wrote in his journal that one of his ships “reported a sail to the North-Northeast.” Because of the wind, it took ten hours for the Medea, a British frigate flying a white flag, to position itself next to Suffren’s ship. Medea’s Captain Erasmus Gower had a message from Hughes and Macartney for Suffren and Bussy.34

  Twelve days before, on June 17, someone gave Madras officials a newspaper that reported details of the preliminary Anglo-French peace treaty. The treaty had been signed in Paris five months to the day that the Battle of Cuddalore was fought. As soon as Hughes returned to Madras from the battle, he and Macartney dispatched the Medea with a ceasefire proposal. “It is somewhat strange that the saving of many thousands of lives of ours was literally owing to one private gentleman sending a newspaper to another,” Gower said.35

  The truce held, although the French and British didn’t receive official word of the treaty until late August. The Mysoreans, however, weren’t a party to the treaty, and Tipu and the British continued to skirmish until March 1784, when they signed the Treaty of Mangalore. It provided for a prisoner exchange and mutual restoration of territory, but some British considered it a diplomatic victory for Tipu since it positioned him better to fight neighboring kingdoms.36

  For the French, the ceasefire was “most unfortunate,” because if they had defeated Stuart’s army, all southern India would have been theirs. Suffren complained to Paris, “If everything sent from France had arrived in time, we should now be masters of India.” To his close friend, he was modest: “The consideration in which I am held in India is almost incredible: verses, songs, letters, the lot. But it could have been otherwise. The smallest thing can turn handclaps into hisses.”37

  Hughes also was reflective. He acknowledged to Parliament his inability to destroy Suffren’s squadron. Nonetheless, “I have, however, with the assistance of the brave men who served with me, been able effectually to disappoint and defeat all their designs of conquest in this part of the world.”38

  The careers of Hughes and Suffren were effectively over. Promoted to admiral in 1793, Hughes never held another command. Suffren arrived home in 1784, was celebrated as a hero, given a large pension, and ignored for any active command. “Here I am,” he wrote, “once a man of importance, now fallen to the humble state of a bourgeois of Paris.” In 1788, while eating dinner, he collapsed, probably from a heart attack. Suffren lay in a Paris cemetery for four years until the French Revolution, when his bones were dug up and scattered. Seven navy ships have been named after Suffren, as well as a Parisian avenue, at least one bar, restaurant, and hotel.39

  Tipu fought two more wars with the British, but never achieved his father’s success. Cornwallis, then in India, defeated Tipu in 1792, and forced him to cede half his kingdom to the East India Company and its allies. In 1799, the British invaded Mysore. Tipu was killed on May 4, when his enemies stormed the capital. The British exiled his family to Calcutta, and their descendants became impoverished. In 2009, a state government, acknowledging Tipu’s contributions to nationalism, agreed to give one descendant a house and pay for his children’s education. Tipu and Hyder are buried in their capital city in a mausoleum.40

  The mutual hatred between Madras governor Macartney and Stuart intensified when Macartney suspended Stuart after Cuddalore and ordered him to England. Four years later, Stuart challenged him to a duel. Macartney accepted, and Stuart wounded Macartney in the shoulder. Stuart is sometimes confused with Lieutenant Colonel James Stuart (1741–1815), who was under General Stuart’s command at Cuddalore. The lieutenant colonel also became a general.41

  Cuddalore was the last battle of the American Revolution. But it wasn’t yet the end.

  PART EIGHT

  Washington and Carleton

  41. New Leader, Old Leader

  AFTER YORKTOWN, HENRY CLINTON, BRITAIN’S COMMANDER IN North America, lost the war of finger-pointing. London allowed him to resign, and he left New York for England shortly after his replacement arrived on May 5, 1782.

  “The country will have more confidence in a new man,” George III said. “I believe, without partiality, that the man who would, in general, by the army be looked on as the best officer is Sir Guy Carleton.”1

  Lieutenant General Carleton, 58, came from a family of modest landowners in Ireland. He worked his way up the ranks by demonstrating competence to powerful patrons. He befriended the future general and military wunderkind, James Wolfe, as well as the Duke of Richmond, a future field marshal. While George II wasn’t fond of Carleton, George III appointed Carleton an aide-de-camp. That led to the resignation of cabinet eminence George Germain, with whom Carleton had an ancient, bitter feud. And even Germain acknowledged Carleton’s “reputation of a resolute and persevering officer.”2

  Carleton’s personality didn’t match his competence. “He is one of the most distant, reserved men in the world,” said a lieutenant who served with him in Canada. “He has a rigid strictness in his manner, very unpleasing, and which he observes even to his most particular friends and acquaintances. At the same time, he is a very able general and brave officer; has seen a great deal of service; and rose from a private life . . . by mere merit to the rank he at present bears. In time of danger, he possesses a coolness and steadiness . . . which few can attain, yet he was far from being the favorite of the army.”3

  An MP described Carleton as “a grave man . . . too reserved to betray himself if he was not what he was reckoned.” The prime minister, Lord North, said Carleton didn’t play games: “so much of a soldier, and so little of a politician; such a resolute, honest man, and such a faithful and dutiful subject.”4

  Unlike other military leaders of his time, Carleton refused to tolerate corruption as General William Howe did or get rich in the questionable ways that Admiral Rodney did. George III complained about Carleton being “too cold and not as active as might be wished,” but his “uncorruptness is universally acknowledged.”5

  He came to North America during the Seven Years’ War as quartermaster general and de facto chief engineer for Wolfe. At the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside Québec, he commanded a battalion. Wolfe was killed; Carleton, wounded in the head. Two years later, Carleton was seriously wounded again during an attack against an enemy position off the French coast. Star-crossed, he was wounded a third time during a 1762 assault on Havana.

  After the war, he was promoted to lieutenant governor of Québec. In fact, he served as de facto governor general, because the existing governor general, James Murray (the future hero of Minorca), was recalled. Five years later, in 1768, Carleton became governor and commander in name. Canada then (as now) was split by language and ethnic divisions. Carleton was an autocratic reformer who, like Murray, championed the majority French-Canadian population over British merchants and traders. One of his early actions was to suppress government and military officials from enriching themselves by taking a cut of fees imposed on the population. “There is a certain appearance of dirt, a sort of meanness, in exacting fees on every occasion,” he said.6

  His reforms ran the gamut: promoting agriculture and mining; opposing a manufacturing ban; lifting bans on fur traders traveling in Indian country; indemnifying residents who owned old French paper money; repairing roads; regulating bakers and river pilots. Carleton spent four years in London helping to shape what became the Québec Act of 1774; it extended Canada’s boundary to the Ohio River, guaranteed French-Canadian civil rights, and allowed Catholics to hold office. British merchants and American rebels denounced it.

  Those rebels invaded Canada in fall 1775 and captured Montréal. Carleton escaped the city disguised as a peasant and narrowly avoided capture. Soon, however, he organized and led the defense of a besieged Québec, repulsed a new year’s attack, and kept it in British hands until it was relieved in May 1776. Although he defeated a weak rebel armada on Lake Champlain in October, he failed to pursue the remnan
ts of the rebel army—citing the late time of year—and refused to allow allied Indians to attack the enemy. That month, as a conciliatory gesture, he released all his prisoners.

  London praised him for Québec’s defense, but it ordered another general, John Burgoyne, to assume command of an invasion force for 1777. Carleton resigned in protest, although he made a good-faith effort to support Burgoyne while waiting for a new governor. Burgoyne’s expedition ended in defeat at Saratoga. From 1778 to 1782, Carleton lived in England, working on a commission that audited military expenditures. Then, the king named him Clinton’s replacement.

  As Carleton prepared to leave London for New York, Lord North’s ministry fell, and Parliament voted to end offensive military actions against the American rebels and to treat captured rebels as prisoners of war, not practitioners of treason. The new prime minister, Shelburne, confirmed Carleton’s appointment, and agreed that he should follow up on the demonstrations of Britain’s good faith with a goal of achieving reconciliation with the rebels short of independence. This would allow Britain to focus its military efforts against the more dangerous enemies, France, Spain, and Holland.

  Carleton’s first priority, Shelburne said, was to “provide for withdrawing the garrison, artillery, provisions, stores of all kinds, every species of public property” from Savannah, Charlestown, and New York. If he was attacked while evacuating, he was authorized to make “an early capitulation” if he could do so on favorable terms. Avoid “an obstinate defense of the place without hope of answering any rational purpose by it.” In addition, by “reconciling the minds and affections of His Majesty’s subjects by such open and generous conduct as may serve to captivate their hearts and remove every suspicion of insincerity” would help sever their alliance and dependence on the French.7

  On May 7, two days after arriving in New York, Carleton wrote Washington an introductory letter, talked about Britain’s new “pacific disposition,” and said he would match conciliatory acts in kind. He especially hoped the two generals could reduce atrocities and “acts of retaliation” by Whig and Loyalist militias.8

  Beyond relations with Washington, Carleton assessed the situation he inherited from Clinton. It wasn’t good. For lack of transports, he would be unable to carry out his orders to evacuate the city in 1782. Worse, Clinton had neglected New York’s defenses; a combined French-rebel attack could well succeed. Carleton immediately ordered fortifications strengthened and to emphasize it, he rode out every morning to inspect a different part of British-controlled territory.9

  Loyalists chafed under British military rule—and corruption. Within a month, Carleton began to correct what one MP called “enormous abuses.” A German-born minister, the Reverend Ewald Gustav Schaukirk, described Carleton’s impact after just two weeks: “The new commander-in-chief makes many wholesome changes to the great saving of public expenses. . . . A couple of hundred of deputy commissioners in different departments have been or will be dismissed, hundreds of carpenters and other workmen have been turned off. . . . No officer will be allowed to have vessels, wagons, etc. to carry on any [personal or contraband] trade. We rejoice that the chain of enormous, iniquitous practices will be at last broken! . . . The inhabitants have also been relieved from working on the fortifications every fifth day.” Nine months later, Schaukirk recorded that the prices of flour, rum, molasses, and coffee “have fallen surprisingly.” This showed that before Carleton arrived, merchants practiced “avarice and extortion.”10

  But Carleton couldn’t be everywhere. British colonel Benjamin Thompson, who had fought successfully against Francis Marion in South Carolina, showed how British troops—actually, Loyalist troops—turned neutral or even loyal civilians into rebels. He stationed his 400-man King’s American Dragoons in Huntington, Long Island. There, he demolished a Presbyterian church for its timber; forced civilians to build a fort; used gravestones for fireplaces, tables, and ovens; pitched his tent in a graveyard; and as his troops left, burned all the fence rails in the area. He did all this, a Whig resident said, “without any assignable purpose except that of filling his own pockets,” and to “gratify a malignant disposition by vexing the people.”11

  (Thompson had an illustrious postwar career. With British government permission, he moved to Munich, where he served as Bavarian war minister and modernized its army. Munich built a monument to him and named him Count von Rumford, after his New Hampshire hometown [now Concord]. President John Adams offered him a military position. Rumford declined with thanks. In Dublin, Rumford improved hospital and workhouse conditions. Back in London, he invented ways to reduce smoky chimneys, and contributed ideas in physics. He moved to Paris in 1805 and married the widow of the French scientist, Lavoisier. There, he died. Part of his estate went to Harvard University to create a still-active endowed chair.)

  Thompson wasn’t alone in alienating civilians. As with many modern-day insurgencies, the British army, even after six years of occupation, couldn’t distinguish between friends and enemies; experienced breakdowns in discipline that resulted in civilians being robbed, their property confiscated, their persons abused; and failed to compensate adequately, if at all, for goods. The military government often failed to convict soldiers guilty of crimes, or commuted their sentences. The army caused food and fuel shortages, and inflation. Admiral Rodney, visiting New York in 1780, called it “a long train of leeches.”12

  Prisoners of war were another of Carleton’s problems. Clinton had paroled 130 rebels in January 1782 from one of the brutal New York prison ships that had mortality rates estimated from thirty-five to seventy percent. When the ex-POWs arrived in Connecticut, a Whig paper reported, “It is enough to melt the most obdurate heart of anyone (except a Briton) to see these miserable objects continually landing here . . . sick and dying, and the few rags they have on covered with vermin and their own excrements.” Carleton paroled another eight hundred prisoners in May. By the end of the year, a prison ship officer said he was “left here with about 700 miserable objects, eaten up with lice, and daily taking fevers, which carry them off fast.”13

  Carleton, however, wanted reciprocity. He and Washington named commissioners in September to negotiate a general exchange. The talks failed because the Whigs felt the British commissioners didn’t have enough authorization to do the kind of deal they wanted. Then, the Whigs demanded compensation for the upkeep of the British POWs. Carleton told Washington that the easiest way to ease that burden would be for Congress to release all the prisoners on parole. The British ended up sending clothing and blankets. Despite the commission’s failure, by year’s end, Carleton had paroled hundreds of enemy prisoners.14

  The rebels frustrated Carleton. “I have not found the least disposition in the rulers of the provinces to come into pacific measures,” he told Shelburne. Some said the country is controlled by the French minister, Washington, and Robert Morris (the superintendent of finance), and that Congress is their puppet. If so, Carleton said, “‘tis not surprising America should be sacrificed to the interests of France.”15

  The rebels’ chain of command—Washington’s insistence that he could make no decisions about what he defined as civil matters—confused Carleton. In one letter about prisoner exchanges, Carleton asked Washington for clarification. “Am I, sir, to apply to Congress, that persons appointed by me, may be admitted to conferences at Philadelphia? Or can any deputation be sent by Congress to your camp for this purpose, to be there met by persons empowered by me? Or will you, sir, undertake to manage our common interest? All I wish for is: that an end in which our common honor and humanity is engaged may be substantially obtained.”16

  Washington had his own problems. The Continental army returned in November 1781 from Yorktown to its main encampments along the lower Hudson River north of New York City. Thanks to French money, its twelve thousand men were now the best equipped in its history.17

  However, the soldiers worked for a bankrupt government with no taxing authority and no ability to pay them. The situ
ation gnawed at Washington, who confided to a former aide: “The predicament in which I stand as citizen and soldier is as critical and delicate as can well be conceived. It has been the subject of many contemplative hours. The sufferings of a complaining army on one hand, and the inability of Congress and tardiness of the states on the other, are the forebodings of evil.”18

  The evil was an army mutiny or even a coup. In the war’s eight years, there would be fifty-six documented mutinies or attempted mutinies in the Continental army. New England troops suppressed a mutiny by New Jersey troops in January 1782. A march by Connecticut troops on the state capital in May ended when their leader was shot. The Pennsylvania line threatened Congress in June 1783; Washington ended the mutiny by sending 1,500 troops against them. Congress pardoned the ringleaders.19

  Two months earlier, in Newburgh, New York, Washington personally quashed a potential rebellion among his officers at an emotional meeting. By deferring to civil authorities, he said, “you will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, ‘Had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’” At one point, Washington pulled out his reading glasses—most officers had never seen him use them—and, said an eyewitness, excused himself because “he had grown gray in their service, and now found himself growing blind.”20

  Washington also had problems maintaining the size of his army due to desertion and expiring enlistments. Recruiting standards fell, but even so, in spring 1782, Washington court-martialed an officer for recruiting French deserters, small boys, a lame Negro, and an “idiot.”21

  Another concern was contraband. Since the British could pay gold for goods and food, a continuous flow of supplies streamed across the lines. It made Washington’s own efforts to supply his men that much more difficult.22