Struggle for Sea Power : A Naval History of American Independence (9781782397403)

by Willis, Sam

  There was an established postal route north from Philadelphia to New York and Boston, but the route south was far more problematic and, if speed was a concern, involved sea travel. We know that the Dunlap broadside took just three days to get to Baltimore, four to New York, seven to Rhode Island, eleven to Massachusetts, and two weeks to Virginia, and twelve days after that, on 2 August, it reached South Carolina.76 We know that it was deliberately sent abroad. The Andrew Doria, a Continental Navy vessel, took a copy of the Declaration to the crucial Dutch island of St Eustatius, through which the rebels were importing vast quantities of military supplies, where it was presented to the island’s governor. The Committee of Secret Correspondence, meanwhile, sent a copy on board a fast brigantine to Bordeaux and then on to Silas Deane in France. News also went very quickly north by ship, up the Hudson and Lake George and then into Lake Champlain, reaching Ticonderoga on 16 July. The text first appeared in a London newspaper in the second week of August 1776, and from there news travelled to Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. By 24 August it reached Dublin, by the 27th Madrid, by the 30th Holland, by the 31st Vienna, by 2 September Denmark, and by the 4th Florence. Only two months after Congress had passed its resolution, word of independence reached Warsaw.77 This successful dissemination of the Declaration of Independence was one of the major success stories of American sea power in 1776.

  For all these successes, however, there were countless failures and frustrations, and when, in December 1775, the Royal Navy captured its first American naval ship, the Washington, the thin veneer of American sea power was exposed.78 She was surveyed and found to be so utterly awful that she was deemed unsuitable for British operations on the high seas, or in the words of the British carpenter who surveyed her, ‘totally unserviceable … unfit for war … not fit for sea’.79 This was a strong judgement indeed considering the British were then as desperate for shipping as they had ever been. Other American captains occasionally let the disguise slip. William Coit joked that his guns dated back to the Pilgrim era and that firing more than one at a time ‘would split her open from her gunwale to her keel’.80

  Nonetheless American ships achieved just enough to annoy the British and force them to deploy increasing numbers of naval craft in America, the Caribbean and home waters, thus stretching their already thin naval resources almost to breaking point.81 Sandwich realized the problem and urged full mobilization, but in vain. In fact British politicians had put so much faith in the success of the Coercive Acts of 1774 that they had actually reduced the numbers of both shipwrights and sailors in the navy.82 The British had thus scuppered their own ship, the result of an understandable failure to foresee the exact strategic problem that was posed by American sea power in 1776.* The British may have been surprised by the military competence displayed by the American rebels at Lexington and Concord, but they were entirely thrown off course by the Americans taking to the sea. One contemporary neatly summed it all up:

  Naval captures, being unexpected, were matter of triumph to the Americans, and of surprize to the British. The latter scarcely believed that the former would oppose them by land with a regular army, but never suspected that a people, so unfurnished as they were with many things necessary for arming vessels, would presume to attempt any thing on water.83

  Howe realized the dangers of this and wrote to Dartmouth in December, warning that a naval threat ‘will hurt us more effectually than anything they can do by land’.84 The moment the Americans took to the sea, even in their limited way, the traditional British strategy of putting down rebellions with a show of force led by an army was undermined. Naval officers were desperate for orders, but the entire naval hierarchy and, above them the politicians, were paralysed.85 The unchallenged birth of American sea power demonstrates so clearly that the British had misunderstood the nature of the beast they were trying to kill. Graves lamented that ‘whilst the Americans were preparing for, nay making war, we were only passing and making Acts of Parliament’.86

  The question posed now was: just how much damage could the Americans inflict on the British before they realized their mistake and rectified it?

  * The fighting so far, though by no means exclusive to New England, had focused on New England, and it was there that the British remained in force. It was politically important, therefore, that command of the Continental Army, and thus the man wielding the resources of all the colonies, should not be a New Englander. From the outset, the man chosen to lead the Continental Army was chosen for his origin as much as for his experience; he was to be both a leader and a unifier.

  * On a December night in 1753 Washington had attempted to cross the ice-choked Monongahela on a raft he and a companion had built. He fell in trying to fend off the ice floes. This river experience and knowledge is relevant to his subsequent escape from Brooklyn and the crossing of the Delaware in 1776.

  * These pro-navy men included John Adams, Stephen Hopkins, Silas Deane, John Langdon, John Glover, Christopher Gadsden, Richard Henry Lee and Joseph Hewes.

  * The only colony that rebelled but did not create a navy was Delaware, though for many years it was believed that New Jersey also did not create a navy. Scheina, ‘Matter of Definition’.

  * The additional men were John Adams of Massachusetts, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and Stephen Hopkins and Joseph Hewes of North Carolina.

  * In general these followed the Royal Navy pattern but were less severe. Fowler, ‘Esek Hopkins’, 8.

  * The most valuable ships carrying arms and army camp equipment were given escorts, though after 3,000 miles of trans-Atlantic voyage they often found themselves separated when they finally arrived in America. This is exactly what happened to the Nancy (see pp. 98–100).

  * The first of only two major seizures of British troops at sea in the war, the other being the convoy capture in 1780 by a combined Franco-Spanish squadron of six companies of the 91st Regiment en route to the West Indies.

  * Bingham died in Bath, England, in 1804. There is an impressive memorial to him in Bath Abbey.

  * For years the blame was attributed to a failure to keep the navy adequately maintained in the peace that followed the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), but the record of peacetime naval upkeep between 1763 and 1775 was only slightly worse than the norm. Baugh, ‘Why did Britain?’, 145. For a criticism, see Wilkinson, British Navy, 4n.

  6

  BRITISH EVACUATION

  In the summer of 1775 the British army was under siege in Boston and the situation there was mirrored, if in a diluted sense, elsewhere in the colonies. Up and down the eastern seaboard British troops and loyal Tories were forced into enclosures and, if there were none to hand, into British warships. Isolated and threatened, in several significant locations British authority in North America persisted through its warships alone.

  Governor Josiah Martin of North Carolina fled to the Peggy in the Cape Fear River, Governor James Wright of Georgia to the Scarborough in the Savannah River, and Governor Sir William Tryon of New York to the Duchess of Gordon in the North River. Significantly, he took with him the officials of the Parliamentary Post, another British institution that collapsed in this period.1 The situation in Virginia was particularly noteworthy. John Murray, Earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, had been chased out of the capitol, Norfolk, and had sought refuge with his family on HMS Fowey, which had also become the new home of the Williamsburg powder magazine. As soon as Dunmore left terra firma, royal government in Virginia collapsed. He was, in his own words, ‘reduced to the deplorable and disgraceful state of being a tame spectator of Rebellion’.2 Riled, he realized that his ships could be turned to some use – that they could become a focal point of British strength to attract local loyalists and, far more provocatively, the thousands of disaffected slaves in the south. Dunmore was sitting on a bomb in more ways than one.

  On 7 November 1775, aboard the William in Norfolk Harbour, Dunmore issued a proclamation, offering emancipation to any slaves willing and able to bear ar
ms who could get themselves to his fleet. There was a flood of escapes, all of them necessarily maritime-based. Two weeks after the proclamation a group of slaves came down the James River in a thirty-foot vessel but were captured. Soon after, seven broke out of a local jail and ‘went off in a pettinger’, a type of dugout. In an interesting example of British sailors affecting the revolution through the message that they carried rather than through their cannon or boarding axes, British tenders cruised up and down the river all summer, in the words of one Virginian, ‘using every art to seduce the negroes’.3

  Dunmore’s use of British sea power had a paradoxical effect on the revolution in the south. On the one hand it generated some support for the British and increased the number of men who could bear arms or sail their ships, but on the other it alienated many potential friends whose livelihoods were tied up in the local slave-run economy. Thomas Jefferson said that the proclamation raised the country ‘into a perfect phrensy’.4 The problem was simply one of numbers. In 1776 the population of America was 2.5 million and a fifth of those were slaves. The proportion varied from state to state, but in Virginia, Dunmore’s state, 40 per cent of the population were slaves. This was not just an issue of the British encouraging the slaves to escape; by arming them and turning them against their owners, Dunmore was exploiting one of the deepest fears of the south. The slave-owners’ reaction was vicious. A fifteen-year-old girl was caught on her way to Dunmore and received eighty lashes followed by hot embers poured on her bleeding back. Others who were caught were mutilated or sent to the lead-mines, ultimately a slow ticket to the grave. Few were actually executed.5

  Nonetheless, 800 or so slaves reached Dunmore’s fleet, around 200 within the first few weeks alone, and their success inspired many others – perhaps 4,000 in total – to run to the British throughout the war. Three slaves who reached Dunmore’s fleet via HMS Roebuck came from Washington’s own plantation. Some British captains also interpreted Dunmore’s decree to allow them to free any slave working as a mariner on a captured American vessel.6

  Some of the slaves were skilled watermen and pilots, and proved of great value to the British. This was no coincidence. Most of the slaves who escaped to the British fleet were the ones who could escape; they were maritime workers from Hampton, Norfolk and Portsmouth, and they were following a well-established pattern of slaves in northern America using the sea as an escape route.7 This was a key moment in the revolution. Hitherto the Royal Navy had been seen primarily as a tool of oppression, but for these Virginia slaves it symbolized the chance (though certainly not the guarantee) of freedom. It symbolized the hope of a new life.

  * * *

  Back in Boston the pot had been simmering since a titanic struggle for Bunker Hill, overlooking the harbour, had left the British in control but with Howe mourning the loss of 40 per cent of his attackers, dead or injured. The sides now peered at each other divided only by a barricade on Boston’ s neck, ‘almost near enough to converse’, said Washington.8

  Elsewhere the relationship between the British and Americans worsened, principally as a result of the actions of Samuel Graves. Seemingly liberated by the carnage suffered at the hands of the Americans on Bunker Hill, in the summer and autumn of 1775 Graves authorized several naval bombardment raids of American coastal towns as a means of subduing the insurrection. Only one was carried out, on Falmouth (later Portland, Maine), but it had the opposite effect to that which was, naively, intended: American maritime activity increased and resentment of the British grew. The ‘British Barbarians’ were condemned for their ‘malicious Purpose … to execute, their unrelenting Vengeance by every Means in their Power’.9

  Everything then changed dramatically in Boston on the morning of 4 March 1776 when the British were astounded to see the Americans hauling heavy artillery into position on Dorchester Heights, which overlooked the city. Henry Knox, sent to Ticonderoga by Washington to haul back the artillery seized by Arnold a year earlier, had succeeded in his herculean mission of hauling 120,000 pounds of guns 300 miles through snow and ice. Howe’s immediate response was to assault the heights in a re-run of Bunker Hill, but with the assistance of some timely bad weather, sense prevailed.10 The British would evacuate.

  In the subsequent fortnight every sailor, soldier and willing Tory was transferred onto a British ship. It was a massive logistical exercise. The ultimate destination was irrelevant, and we are certain that most of the evacuees and soldiers had no idea where they were headed. What mattered was simply this: the entire city of Boston was going to sea. It is possible, but by no means certain, that Howe agreed an unofficial truce with Washington to ease the embarkation process. Washington’s whaleboats remained tied up in muddy creeks, his armed schooners bided their time, hoping to track the convoy when it finally made it to sea, and Knox’s guns stayed silent. The biggest irony of all was that, when this crux finally arrived, the Americans never needed the powder they had been so desperate to attain.

  When news of the evacuation finally arrived in London, the behaviour of the British troops was applauded, not least by Lord North, who claimed that the British had embarked ‘with all possible coolness and regularity … perfectly at their ease’.11 Howe himself had been careful to describe how they had left ‘without the least molestation by the rebels’,12 and Molyneux Shuldham, the new naval commander who had taken over from Graves in March, celebrated the fact that the troops were embarked without the loss of a man.13

  The political challenge was to make this seem like an act of choice, but on the ground in Boston the reality had been quite clear. ‘Never [were] troops in so disgraceful a situation …’, wrote one American, ‘I pity General Howe from my soul.’14 Washington agreed: ‘By all accounts, there never existed a more miserable set of beings, than these wretched creatures now are.’15

  Central to the problem was Howe’s desire to provide passage for loyal Tories. The British, even in evacuation, had to be seen to protect those who favoured British rule. It was a valuable political point and it set an important precedent for several other large-scale evacuations as the war progressed. The result, however, was that the operation became a total mess. It was far from dignified, as one witness wrote: ‘It was not like the breaking up of a camp, where every man knows his duty. It was like departing your country, with your wives, your servants, your household furniture, all your encumbrances.’16 In the stampede to get men and baggage on board, the ladders to the wharves were repeatedly broken, ‘no care taken of them’.17 They were taunted: ‘The Tories with their brats and wives / Have fled to save their wretched lives.’18

  Everything that could not be loaded aboard was smashed and thrown into the harbour, which became thick with sodden timber and detritus, a tide of broken furniture like the aftermath of a tsunami. Piles of goods and belongings were abandoned, along with 220 horses.19 The Americans sat and watched as the pressure of civil war forced the British to destroy their own belongings and abandon their own homes. The Americans later claimed that some Britons with medical knowledge – the words they actually used were ‘Doctors of the diabolical Ministerial Butchers’ – deliberately mixed arsenic with medicines and left it behind.20

  Space at Boston’s wharves was limited, so whenever a ship was full, with white faces and shining eyes peering out of portholes, it drifted away from its jetty with the tide and made its way to Nantasket Roads, which, ironically – having been settled soon after the Plymouth Colony in 1620 – was one of the oldest areas of British control in America. There, ‘men, women, and children, parents, masters, mistresses, were obliged to pig together on the floor’, wrote the wealthy, disgusted Benjamin Hallowell.21 This was a grim time – the ships rolling sickeningly at anchor with no canvas to steady them, the cramped passengers with no idea of their destination. Those ships that had arrived first at Nantasket endured this for more than a fortnight. At least one man threw himself overboard and drowned.22 Washington thought this was only to be expected, if not a little overdue: ‘One or two have done wh
at a great many ought to have done long ago – committed suicide.’23

  When, on 25 March, the fleet was finally ready to sail, it carried 11,000 people including 8,906 troops, 1,100 loyalists and 553 children. One witness claimed the fleet was over 170 strong and appeared ‘like a forest’.24 It stretched nine miles out to sea and it took ten days before the final British sail dipped into the eastern horizon, even though it was still enormously short of the tonnage that they actually required. Forced onto reduced rations by the unplanned overcrowding, the British headed for their naval base at Halifax, Nova Scotia, which was entirely unprepared for such an enormous influx of humanity.25

  The Americans beamed as Howe left. ‘Surely it is the Lord’s doings and it is marvellous in our eyes’, wrote Abigail Adams.26 James Thatcher, a surgeon in Washington’s army, described ‘the unspeakable satisfaction’ of watching them leave ‘wafting from our shores the dreadful scourge of war’.27

  * * *

  What a moment. The British had been driven from their New England stronghold, and the only other significant body of British civilians, troops and ships in America was now to be found in Dunmore’s hideous floating town off Virginia.

  The pillars of hope raised by Dunmore’s recruitment of hundreds of slaves had now come crashing down. His naval surgeons had been faced with a serious problem. Most of the slaves were not inoculated against smallpox because the idea of inoculation had been fiercely resisted in Virginia. Dunmore’s surgeons tried to inoculate as many as possible, but hundreds – two-thirds in total – swiftly died; their bodies thrown overboard ‘tumbled into the deep, to regale the sharks’.28 Dunmore himself said that ‘there was not a ship in the fleet that did not throw one, two or three or more dead overboard every night’.29 Diseased, bloated bodies bobbed to the shore, a worrying advertisement to would-be escapees of the true cost of fleeing to the apparent safety of British ships.