by Willis, Sam
The Caribbean had been a major weakness for the British since the start of the war. The key difference in this period was that the tempo and reach of American privateer attacks elsewhere increased dramatically with their own, unique, impact on the war. In June three American privateers working together captured no fewer than fourteen British merchantmen in the Firth of Clyde, eleven of them taken in five days. In England and Scotland, Lambert Wickes, a merchant from Maryland now holding a commission in the Continental Navy, and the Irish-born Philadelphian Gustavus Conyngham, another ex-merchant, became bogey figures for this American success. On one cruise alone Wickes captured eighteen British merchant ships in the Irish Sea, almost within sight of English shores, and Conyngham captured sixty ships in less than eighteen months. The British losses led to Germain writing a sarcastic letter to Admiral Howe in which he congratulated him for allowing swarms of enemy privateers to get into European waters.14
The Americans did their best to take advantage of European ports through deception, ruses and collusion, and the French and Spanish trod a fine line between assisting American privateers by offering them shelter and supplies and heading off British diplomatic outrage.15 The comte de Vergennes insisted on enforcing the neutrality of France only when Lord Stormont, the British ambassador, presented him with evidence so conclusive that no other option was possible.16 By no means were the French happy with this, however: the Americans were trampling all over their carefully laid plans, and they were not to be forced into war with Britain before they were ready. The Americans were also pushing the boundaries of Spanish assistance. Conyngham openly used Spanish ports as a base from where he could prowl Biscay and as far south as the Canaries, an excellent route for the interception of Caribbean-bound trade.17
By taking more effective measures to protect their trade, the British had stopped the very easy pickings that had characterized 1775–6.18 Nonetheless, as many as 300 British merchantmen were taken in 1777.19 Such figures, however, can divert one’s attention from the real issue. The vast British maritime economy was particularly sensitive in the Caribbean, but even there – and certainly everywhere else – it was able to absorb these losses, and there is no evidence that the American privateering effort did anything to shorten the conflict.20 It is far more useful to see the American successes of 1777 in terms of their political and diplomatic impact on the war rather than in material terms measured against the British economy. These privateering successes were part of the broader narrative of American successes in 1776 and 1777. Together, they demonstrated on an international stage that the Americans were committed to their revolution and that the British were vulnerable, and they heightened tension between Britain and her traditional European enemies. In short, they created the opportunity for foreign intervention.
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At the same time, however, American sea power had also demonstrated, and with stunning clarity, that an intervention was absolutely essential if the revolution was going to succeed, for overshadowing these successes was a mountain of failures that signalled just how badly the Americans were struggling.
Those failures were encapsulated by the fate of the thirteen American frigates that had been commissioned amid such excitement and expectation in 1775. Ever since then the Marine Committee had been struggling desperately with the unprecedented challenge of building, arming, rigging, manning and then using men-of-war in an appropriate fashion. A key problem was that the same body of men responsible for the administration – the Marine Committee – was also responsible for the young navy’s operations. An attempt was made in April 1776 to ease the burden by setting up two separate regional Navy Boards to concentrate on building, manning, outfitting and supervising expenditure. For the first time this extended the management of American naval affairs to include men who were not members of Congress. The Americans thus took their first step in the creation of a separate bureaucracy for naval affairs, a key development in any national navy.21
Perhaps the most daunting challenge of all for this young navy was to live up to the dreams of the public it represented. ‘Expectations run high’, wrote James Warren, now an elected member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, to John Adams with gritted teeth, having acknowledged a bewildering array of problems, not least that the authority of the Navy Board was ‘contemptible’ and that ‘all ideas of Oeconomy seem to be lost’.22 A key weakness, now acutely felt, was that no American leader had any experience of the British Admiralty or Navy Board or, indeed, the respective institutions of any other navy. The man with the closest experience was Christopher Gadsden, who had served in the Royal Navy as a purser. Allied to this problem was the sheer burden of work that now fell on Congress, which was serving as both legislature and executive, its work executed via a variety of inefficient committees. There was, in fact, no settled American government until the Articles of Confederation were finally ratified in March 1781; everything until then was ad hoc, unreliable, cumbersome. The Continental Congress had been designed as a forum where representatives of the colonies could air their views on matters of mutual concern, not for supervising the conduct of a war. Congress was plagued by inter-state feuds, duplication of responsibilities and irregular attendance. It was occasionally impossible to find sufficient members for the Marine Committee even to meet.23
The first American frigate to be launched, on 10 July 1776, was the 26-gun Randolph. Her maiden voyage was a total disaster. Her fore and main masts were rotten and crashed overboard. Sickness then struck and many of her crew died. Nineteen British prisoners of war who had been signed on to her crew to boost numbers mutinied and were narrowly defeated. She staggered into Charleston on 11 March. Her captain, Nicholas Biddle, was an experienced mariner, one of the few American naval officers who had served in the Royal Navy. Biddle simply said that it was ‘one of the most disagreeable passages that I have experienced’.24 Since then, the Delaware had been captured at Philadelphia; the Washington and Effingham had been hidden twenty-five miles upstream on the Delaware at Bordentown before being scuttled to deny them to the British; the Congress and Montgomery had been destroyed on the Hudson to prevent them from falling into Clinton’s hands; the Trumbull drew too much water to get out of the Connecticut River where she had been built; the Virginia, built at Fells Point in Maryland, was trapped in the Chesapeake by a British blockade; and the Warren and Providence were blockaded in Narragansett Bay by the British in Newport and, in their inactivity, the crews of Esek Hopkins’s squadron had been torn apart by squabbling.25 Only three of the frigates – the Raleigh, built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the Hancock and Boston, built in Newburyport, Massachusetts – made it to sea with any chance of success, and those of the 32-gun Raleigh were particularly slim: when she was launched, her builder confessed, ‘am Sorry to say, [I] can form no Idea where the Guns are to com[e] from.’26 Richard Hart, a Portsmouth merchant, subsequently wrote to Abraham Whipple, now a captain in the Continental Navy, and signed off with a wry comment: ‘We have a fine ship, at her moorings. Wish we had the Cannon &c.’27 She eventually sailed with only a handful of guns for Brest, where it was hoped she would find some more. She enjoyed some limited success on the way, including a scrap with a small British sloop, HMS Druid.28
The Hancock and Boston, based in Boston, had the best opportunity of any of the American frigates. The British had taken nearly every available naval ship with them on their Philadelphia campaign, leaving the New England coast almost unprotected.29 In May the Hancock and Boston set sail with a fleet of privateers and briefly seized control of New England waters. One British officer writing from Newport commented on how it had become ‘absolutely necessary to avoid a separation, as he [Captain John Manley of the Hancock] had a force infinitely superior to us; which was the cause of our losing a vast number of valuable prizes’.30
The Americans, however, were never able to realize the full potential of their force. Soon after they reached the Grand Banks, the privateers immediately abandoned the frigates, reaso
ning that such a concentration of American ships was likely to attract the attention of any nearby British warship. And they were right. It was not long before rumours reached Boston that the British, horrified at the loss of naval control, had sent eight frigates after them.31 The privateer captains had no interest at all in risking their vessels in battle with the British. Thus the opportunity to work together, by forcing the British merchantmen to scatter and then catching them in a well-coordinated net of American armed ships, vanished.
The second problem was that Manley and Hector McNeill, captain of the Boston, loathed each other. ‘McNeill and Manly it is said like the Jews and Samaritans will have no Connections of Intercourse’, wrote Warren before they left. He was understandably anxious about what might happen.32
The American frigates plodded on alone, and after a narrow escape from a far more powerful British warship, the 64-gun Somerset, they fell in with some prey that they could handle themselves: the 28-gun British frigate Fox. The Fox fled but was chased, and was chased well in a display of competent seamanship and tactical nous by Manley in the Hancock. The Boston soon joined the fight, and when she could no longer steer, the Fox surrendered.33 McNeill made some atmospheric sketches of the battle from the decks of the Boston [see fig. 8].34
The victory papered over some serious cracks in American sea power. It had been far from easy. Some of the Hancock’s crew had shown ‘strong signs of fear and dismay’, and Manley had been forced to urge them on like a dervish:
[Manley] ran continually from one end of the ship to the other, in his waistcoat, his shirt sleeves tucked up to his shoulders, flourishing and swinging a great cutlass around his head, and with the most horrid imprecations, swearing he would cut down the first man who should attempt to leave his quarters.35
If the Boston had not been there as well, it is more than likely that the Hancock, rather than the Fox, would have struck.
The American victory was also short-lived. They captured a merchantman on the way back to Boston but were then caught by a British squadron under the command of the excellent George Collier. The Fox was recaptured along with the Hancock.36 McNeill in the Boston escaped back to the Maine coast, but it became clear that he had abandoned Manley. ‘Capt. McNeill’s reputation on his first Appointment was Extreemly good’, wrote Warren. ‘It seems to be now reversed.’37 McNeill was later court-martialled for abandoning Manley, found guilty and dismissed from the service, and the whole sorry tale was laid to rest in July when the Hancock was defeated in battle and captured by the British. By the summer of 1777 it had become painfully clear that, in the words of the Reverend William Gordon in a letter to Adams, ‘Maritime affairs have been most horribly managed.’38
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The successes and failures of American sea power in 1777 are therefore important if we are to understand the extraordinary diplomatic changes that happened next. The Americans’ operations had advertised commitment and ambition, but at the same time had betrayed weakness and incompetence.* The French had begun by offering them arms and powder, but they now clearly needed money, men, engineering knowledge, shipbuilding supplies, large cannon, and access to European and Caribbean ports. Without this they would be unable to conduct their own war at sea, to protect their own shipping or to give their failing economy a crucial boost.39
American ships had also facilitated any possible French intervention by transporting key diplomats – Silas Deane, Ben Franklin, John Adams – as well as intelligence to and from France.40 Franklin’s arrival in the Reprisal was by far the most significant: this was the first Continental warship to be seen in European waters. She made quite an impression, arriving in Nantes in November 1776 with two prizes in tow.41
During this period the French had grown ever closer to their final, decisive commitment to intervene and had travelled far down that road long before the British surrender at Saratoga in October. Then the French foreign minister Vergennes had commented on the possibility of gaining revenge over Britain for the humiliation suffered by France in the previous war: ‘the opportunity would be seductive and it would be a sublime effort of virtue to refuse it’, he had written.42 Their motivation, however, was far more mixed than this suggests and far more important for the future of France.
Their aim, rather, was a readjustment of the balance of power that would recover for France the diplomatic prestige lost in the Seven Years’ War (1754–63). Before that war, France had been a powerhouse of European style, political and military power. The French now wanted to hold once again the dominant hand in European politics, to place herself ‘en position d’arbitre’.43 In the 1770s Vergennes was particularly concerned about the growing influence of Russia in the balance of European power,* and Britain was an ally of Russia. A weakened Britain therefore meant a weakened Russia, and there was an explicit assumption in France that Britain would be gravely damaged if it no longer had a monopoly on American trade. At the same time it was envisaged that France, rather than Britain, would become the dominant trading partner with the United States and that Britain might even then be encouraged to work with France against expansion by the eastern powers.44
Any premature pressure on the French naval infrastructure would threaten this grand vision of the future. The ships had to be ready, the crews mustered and trained, and the dockyards prepared for a lengthy campaign with stockpiles of timber, rigging supplies, munitions and food. If they were not adequately prepared, the Royal Navy would crush them utterly, and once war was declared this would not just be a question of American independence but of the survival of the French maritime empire: it should not be underestimated just how much the French risked by allying themselves with the Americans and how correspondingly cautious they were about the exact moment of commitment. The fate of a relatively small British army blundering around in the Hudson Highlands was hardly a priority concern.
Even as Burgoyne and Gates clashed in battle at Saratoga, the French dockyards were a hive of activity. In May 1776 the French could boast twenty-five ships of the line; by 1 January 1777 it was thirty-seven; a year later they had fifty.45 All the while the relative naval strength of Britain and France converged because the British had failed to mobilize their navy in 1776 and the Royal Navy was suffering from a natural cycle of decay which meant that ships built at the height of the previous war, the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), were now being broken up faster than new ships were being built to replace them. Finally, and far too late, the British ordered a full-scale naval mobilization in January 1778, but they were now at least fifteen months behind the French. The British also began to build ships at an unprecedented rate in this period, far faster than the French; fifty-five frigates were built in 1778 and 1779 alone, and in those years eighteen ships of the line were also ordered – ships that would take at least three years to build, and ships that would, once launched, tip the balance of naval power significantly back towards the British. In 1777, therefore, the French knew that, for the first time since 1690, they could achieve near-parity with the British. That parity would come in 1778, but they were then likely to lose it again in 1779 when the enlarged British fleet could be fully manned by impressing sailors returning from overseas trade. The window of opportunity to strike a blow on their own, therefore, was just a year.46
Under the careful guidance of Vergennes the French would not rush their commitment. They knew they had an advantage and they were not prepared to jump the gun; in fact they used every possible delaying tactic available to them, just to perfect the state of their naval forces and to give them more time to try to woo the Spanish into joining the fight.47 The result was that this was the one and only time between 1688 and 1815 that the French embarked on a naval war with two full years to build and repair ships and stock up the yards.48 Even when the chance to take an open stance by officially assisting a squadron of American privateers appeared in 1777, the French refused to help and expelled the American squadron, all because their naval preparations had yet to be finished.49
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p; While Vergennes waited to launch his naval Armageddon, the help offered to America subtly increased. As 1777 slipped into 1778, more French ships arrived in America with significant and now varied cargoes, not least the Flamand, which carried 500 barrels of sulphur for making gunpowder and none other than Baron von Steuben, the former staff officer of Frederick the Great. Arrivals like these were joyously broadcast in the local newspapers and the Americans could sense a change in the wind.50 It was clear that the rebellion, which had grown into a full-scale civil war, would soon change again, this time into an international conflict. It was about to change from a naval war dominated by cruisers, whaleboats and bateaux to one that was dominated by ships of the line. The timing of that intervention had less to do with Burgoyne surrendering at Saratoga than with the readiness of the French navy.
By the time Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga the French were waiting only for the king’s approval to enter the war.51 But was that good news or bad for America? The answer was not as clear as you may suspect.
* So too had the poor performance of Washington’s army at New York in 1776 and then Brandywine and Germantown in 1777.