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

by Willis, Sam

  By July 1775 the supply lines to the south were fully open, and there were more than 200 skilled shipwrights in Skenesborough and twenty-five blacksmiths.38 Valued so highly, they were paid more than any enlisted man or officer in the Continental Navy with the exception of the commander-in-chief, Esek Hopkins.39 The boats were quickly made, each gondola in no more than a few weeks, but they were also well made, and thanks to the wonders of maritime archaeology and the crystal-clear freshwater of Lake Champlain, which preserves timber as if it were a scientific sample pickled in formaldehyde, you can see one of them today: the gondola Philadelphia, on display in the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.

  The Philadelphia was discovered in 1935 upright, her mast still stepped, and was raised and excavated in a pioneering excavation. It is from a minute examination of the boat itself that we can say with confidence that she was well made. The joints are well crafted, the planks well cut, the fastenings secure. We now excavate ships in a very different way from how we did it in 1935, but even then the salvors were careful enough to save much of the material that survived in and around the boat, including buttons that had come from British uniforms, specifically from soldiers of the 26th Regiment of Foot, whose stores had been captured in Montreal during the American invasion of Canada in 1775.

  No doubt the Philadelphia’s crew was buoyed by such physical examples of their recent success, for these were cherished treasures that inspired confidence and kindled hope, but they must also have been anxious. At the other end of the lake the British were building a far larger fleet, spearheaded by a three-masted ship and supported by the largest radeau any of them would ever have seen or even believed possible – something out of a nightmare. In fact, if one ignores entirely the other twenty-three armed boats and ships in the British fleet, the firepower of the Inflexible and the Thunderer alone outgunned the entire American fleet.40 The Americans knew about this discrepancy. To make matters worse, they were badly undermanned, most of the men had no naval experience at all, and far fewer than they had hoped had an adequate grasp of maritime skills. As soon as the boats were on the water, it became clear that many of those who claimed maritime experience had done so for the extra money and had been creative with the truth.41

  If it ever came to battle, the Americans would stand no chance and they knew it. Arnold was given specific instructions to avoid an engagement if the British appeared in greater force. ‘It is a defensive War we are carrying on’, wrote Gates, ‘therefore no wanton risque, or unnecessary Display of the Power of the Fleet, is at any Time to influence your Conduct.’42 Stubborn and proud, Arnold ignored his orders.

  Schuyler had devised the idea of building a fleet as a means to delay the British by forcing them into building their own. A calculated challenge to British military and particularly naval ego as well as a problem posed to British military strategy, it had worked very well indeed. Here is another example of a ‘fleet in being’ affecting the war. Carleton could have saved significant time by building a naval force that was adequate to transport his far superior army down the lake to face any threat posed by the sickly and weak Americans. What he chose to do, however, when faced with an American shipbuilding programme, was to outbuild the Americans so that he could dominate them utterly with a display of force that would have a psychological as well as a military impact. He could have driven the Americans out with an efficient military strike designed around the intended result; he chose to drive them out with a naval regatta, flags flying, trumpets blaring, a demonstration of imperial might and reach rather than a demonstration of military efficiency. And that decision changed the war.

  On 24 September Arnold anchored his little fleet in the lee of Valcour Island, his position well recorded by eyewitnesses [see fig. 5]. The British came down the lake in all their pomp, rubbing their hands over the effect that the sight of their fleet would undoubtedly have on the Americans. And they were right. ‘The moment a three-masted ship made her appearance, being a phenomenon they never so much as dreamt of,’ wrote one witness, ‘[they] ran into immediate and utter confusion.’ This was a British victory ‘in working as much as fighting’, and they were rightly proud of it.43

  As expected, the subsequent battle was hopelessly one-sided. The mighty Thunderer was unable to force her massive, ugly, blunt hull into the wind and so could not take part in any of the fighting, but she wasn’t even needed. All but four of the American force were either captured or destroyed by just a fraction of the British fleet.44 The young midshipman Edward Pellew made a name for himself, taking command of the Carleton when the lieutenant in command of her was injured.* He was mentioned in dispatches and promised a promotion as soon as he reached New York.45

  In the aftermath of the battle, Carleton decided to halt the British advance because the season was already turning. The British showed their sails at Ticonderoga on 28 October but left just four days later with snow already on the ground.46 Carleton returned north like a boxer retreating to his corner, leaving Arnold, bloodied but swaying in his. Charles Douglas characteristically became overexcited by the victory and saw in it ‘the certain Re-establishment of our Nation’s Affairs, + the utter Ruin of the Rebel cause in Canada – I hope soon in all America’,47 but the reality was quite different. The American retention of Ticonderoga was a significant strategic development that could not be so easily overlooked, and, perhaps more importantly, American sailors and troops who had escaped death or capture at Valcour were now free to make an impact elsewhere in the war. Washington certainly needed the men. Chased by Cornwallis out of New Jersey to the far side of the Delaware, he was now ready to strike back, to try something that might shake up the British and perhaps rekindle the fire that warmed American dreams of independence. Washington sent messages north; Arnold sent men south. The focus of the war shifted from north to south. But would the momentum of the war change with it?

  * The accusation of slavery has echoes elsewhere in 1776. There were claims that Pennsylvania Tories were forced to man the oars of rebel galleys on the Delaware and that captured rebel soldiers were harnessed like oxen to British gun-carriages after the battle of Long Island. Bird, Navies in the Mountains, 189; Baxter, British Invasion, 120.

  * Quick and cheap to build they were flat-bottomed and ugly, designed for maximum capacity with minimum draft. Propelled by long sweeps with a single mast amidships.

  † The galleys were larger than the gondolas and carried more, lighter ordnance. Round-bottomed, they were rigged with two lateen masts.

  * After the death of Montgomery at the battle of Quebec, command passed in turn to Brigadier-General David Wooster, who was incompetent and was recalled, and thereafter to Major-General John Thomas, who died of smallpox.

  * Again, notice how low-ranking the British naval officers are in this fleet. See NMM: BGR/9 for a lieutenant doing a captain’s job at Valcour.

  9

  AMERICAN RIPOSTE

  On the west bank of the Delaware things were looking grim for Washington. His army had shrunk by 90 per cent, the soldiers’ annual enlistments having ended as November had arrived. The Continental Congress had abandoned Philadelphia for Baltimore and granted Washington the power to direct the war unilaterally. Between 1774 and 1776 the revolution had grown from an idea to a physical reality with military backbone, but unless something was done now, it would become a will-o’-the-wisp again. Washington admitted to his brother that ‘the game [was] pretty near up’,1 and he later recalled ‘trembling for the fate of America’.2 At the same time, however, he was a beacon of bristling energy and health in the midst of his shattered army, and he plotted his next move, something that would rouse the spirits of his men. He envisaged an ‘important stroke’, a ‘lucky blow’. He would seize the initiative; set the beat of a new campaign; demonstrate that the revolutionary cause, embodied by his army, was still alive.

  The potential to do so clearly existed. British troops on the New Jersey side of the river had been reduced in number for the wi
nter and divided to guard a lengthy frontier. They had no rivercraft. The key to the American chances therefore lay in the bateaux and armed galleys in the Delaware. Given favourable weather and water conditions, they could cross the snaking Delaware at numerous points and at any time they chose. The British had lost the initiative the moment that they forced the Americans back beyond a maritime border that they did not control.

  THE PENNSYLVANIA CAMPAIGN

  * * *

  The campaign that followed is one of the most widely known of all military campaigns. In brief, Washington took 2,400 men and their equipment across the Delaware and defeated a weaker Hessian force at Trenton. Eight days later the Americans fought off a vigorous British counter-attack, led by Cornwallis, who had marched 6,000 reinforcements from New York. In the aftermath of that battle, Washington disappeared into the night before attacking the British rearguard at Princeton. Those victories dramatically swung the New Jersey campaign back in favour of the Americans, who eventually drove the British out of New Jersey with the exception of a small bridgehead maintained around Perth Amboy, a little to the south-west of New York.3

  Washington’s crossing of the Delaware is widely recognized as the most decisive single day in the creation of the United States and was immortalized in Emanuel Leutze’s iconic 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware [see fig. 6], an image of maritime struggle which occupies a favoured place in the heart of the American nation. In many ways it is an American parallel to J. M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, which so intrigues the British.4

  Viewed in real life at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Leutze’s painting is vast, as full of clear and open sky as it is of men struggling to force their boats along their ice-bound path. Washington stands tall, one leg raised on an oarsman’s bench. His long, curved cavalry sabre – a ridiculous weapon to wear in the narrow confines of a boat – hangs prominently below the luxurious lining of his cloak. In his right hand, which rests on his knee, he grasps a telescope. He is surrounded by a motley collection of men. At the bow and wielding a boat hook is a frontiersman in a fur hat and buckskin jacket; behind him, fending away a floe with his oar, is a Scottish migrant in his bonnet; to his right, pulling hard on an oar, is a black crewman in a short sailor’s jacket; behind Washington is Lieutenant James Monroe, a future president of the United States, in his uniform struggling with the flag; below the flag is a feminine-looking sailor, perhaps a woman in a man’s clothing; behind her, cowering near the gunwale, is a man who might be a merchant; and towards the stern are two men who might be farmers, one severely wounded, both wrapped in cloaks with broad-brimmed hats.

  So many people on a such a small craft would have put the gunwales under, but by focusing on this single event, Leutze illustrates the revolution as a united struggle for freedom enacted by men and women from a variety of backgrounds, and he captures themes such as endurance, racial and sexual equality, leadership and faith.* For those seeking a deeper understanding of the American counter-attack, however, particularly its maritime dimensions, the painting is more than a little unhelpful.

  The first point to make is that the crossing was not a single event. In fact, after his initial retreat across the Delaware to escape Cornwallis, Washington subsequently crossed the Delaware not once but three times: once on the night of 25 December, then back across after the battle of Trenton on the 26th, and then back again into New Jersey on the 29th prior to the battle of Princeton. On each occasion the entire American army, complete with horses and artillery, was loaded onto boats and ferries, transported across a swollen river packed with ice, and then disembarked.

  Each operation was a feat of maritime skill in its own right and each was made possible by the presence of sailors in Washington’s army, the same men who had helped Washington’s army escape from the British army at Brooklyn. The action was led by the Marblehead sailor John Glover, who had personally advised Washington on the maritime logistics of a night crossing. It is nice to know that he did so with the deadpan, dry confidence of a working sailor dealing with a landlubber baulking at a maritime challenge. When the details were explained to Glover, he simply said ‘not to be troubled about that, as his boys could manage it’.5 It is understood that Glover’s assent led directly to Washington going ahead with the operation.6

  To assist the Marbleheaders, numerous skilled maritime hands from Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Navy had joined Washington’s force the moment they had reached the Delaware. These men, in the words of one witness, were ‘a hardy set of youths belonging to the water service and amply equal to any boating duty’.7 They carried Washington’s army across the Delaware ‘ferrying over the last reserved hopes and fortunes of our country, through the booming ice-crags of that stormy Christmas night’,8 and also fought alongside the soldiers at both Trenton and Princeton. ‘There, sirs, went fishermen of Marblehead’, recalled Henry Knox, ‘alike at home upon land or water.’9

  The first of those crossings – the one that Leutze purportedly depicted in his painting – was achieved in the dead of night and in a snowstorm. Witnesses complained of the snow and sleet driving into their faces from a fierce north-easterly gale. John Greenwood, a fifer in a Massachusetts regiment, simply said that ‘it blew a perfect hurricane’.10 Although the Americans used every boat that they could get their hands on, the majority of the boats were the local ‘Durham’ boats. High-sided, double-ended, large and roomy, these boats were designed to carry pig iron to and from the Durham ironworks upriver. It is likely that the American soldiers and sailors stood in them to cross the river.

  The other main source of local transport was the large ferries that regularly crossed the Delaware at the narrow points that Washington chose as the focus for his counter-attack. Indeed, he chose those points precisely because they were relatively narrow and relatively safe and were well-established ferry crossings. A ‘ferry’ in this instance was a large flat-bottomed barge, perhaps even secured to stout cables running across the river. Designed to transport large and heavy coaches, they were ideal transport for Washington’s horses and artillery. We know that Washington used at least thirteen ferries of this type in his various crossings.11

  Perhaps Washington himself travelled across in a smaller vessel such as that depicted by Leutze, but, even so, his safety would have been entrusted to a crack crew of experienced Pennsylvania or New England mariners. The American cause may have been precarious as they crossed, but Washington’s boat would have been expertly and safely navigated. He was too precious a commodity to be allowed to stand on one leg in a tiny boat during a storm at night.

  The waters in Leutze’s painting are also too calm for the wind-whipped swollen river that was scarred by sleet and heavy rainfall as if the Delaware itself had fallen to smallpox. The presence of large ice floes was very real, though they would not have appeared as the mini-icebergs of Leutze’s painting. Rather, they would have been flat, broken pieces of pancake ice. They were not a trifling nuisance but caused immense problems. At Dunk’s Ferry the ice formed into a solid mass jutting out from the east bank, strong enough to hold the weight of a man but not that of a horse or a field gun. There, the attempt to cross was abandoned. Still further downstream, where the tumbling rapids of the river at Trenton Falls met the tidal waters of the Delaware estuary, the floating ice backed up into an ice jam that made any crossing impossible.*

  Finally there is the flag in Leutze’s painting to consider. Certainly it is likely that flags were transported with the army, though the one in use at that time was not the 1777 ‘Betsy Ross’ version of the Stars and Stripes depicted in the painting, with its stars in a circle, but the Grand Union flag, with thirteen red and white stripes and a British Union flag in the top left quarter next to the flagstaff – the same ensign flown by the Continental Navy. If, as is certainly possible, Washington was taken across in a galley provided by the Pennsylvania Navy, their ensign, had they been bothered to fly it at night, would have been a green pine tree on a white backgrou
nd with ‘Appeal to Heaven’ embroidered above.12

  * * *

  The first crossing was a mighty struggle. Knox, who knew a thing or two about hard work having dragged the British guns captured at Ticonderoga in 1775 all the way back to Boston, declared the labour ‘almost incredible’ and only achieved ‘with almost infinite difficulty’.13 One witness claimed that Knox’s ‘stentorian lungs’, which projected his voice through the sleet and wind like cannon-fire, were essential to the entire operation’s success.14 Washington oversaw everything on the bank of the river, wrapped in his cloak. One officer was deeply impressed. ‘I have never seen Washington so determined as he is now’, he wrote,15 and one is immediately transported back to the shores of Brooklyn, where Washington oversaw that evacuation with such intense focus. The formidable maritime challenge immediately derailed Washington’s plans for a pre-dawn raid and the first contact did not occur until 8.00 a.m. So audacious was his move, however, that surprise was complete. The Hessians in Trenton were routed.

  Impressive enough; consider now the challenge of the second crossing. Glover’s mariners and the men from the Pennsylvania Navy, already exhausted, now had to ferry back across the river an army crippled by battle weariness and enemy bullets, and burdened with 896 prisoners and captured supplies. They achieved it by noon. The journey was made all the more treacherous by the fact that many of the American soldiers had plundered the Hessians’ rum supply; it is no coincidence that more men fell in on the way back across the Delaware than on the way over. One American soldier guarding the Hessians remembered how they stood knee-deep in icy water ‘so … that their underjaws quivered like an aspen leaf’. Another complained of the rain, sleet and ice, which made this return journey so tough.16

  On 29 December the third actual crossing of the river, but the second time that Washington crossed from west to east, was by far the largest logistical feat.* Eight separate crossing points were used and Knox, assisted by John Glover, shipped forty cannon and their associated carriages and ammunition boxes – that is well over 800 tons of artillery – across to the eastern shore, along with all their associated horses. This was a highly significant quantity of artillery because, in the context of eighteenth-century warfare, it represented an enormously high proportion of guns to men.† This in turn mattered because of the poor weather: muskets did not work if priming pans got wet, but cannon could be used in rain or snow.17