Crucible of War
Page 18
Bradstreet, an unorthodox regular officer with rare talent for dealing with provincials, quickly enlisted hundreds of rivermen, then armed and trained them to fight in the woods. In May, despite Indian attacks along the route, Bradstreet’s men pushed large quantities of supplies through to Oswego. By June the garrison was sufficiently recovered from its winter ordeal to begin improving the post’s fortifications. The persistent lack of skilled workers and money sharply limited attempts to strengthen Oswego’s defenses, and soldiers and carpenters remained subject to harassing Indian raids from the surrounding woods, but Bradstreet’s bateaumen had saved the fort.9
By early summer, notwithstanding the concerns of Lieutenant Colonel Mercer and his fellow officers about the security of their position, things seemed at last to be looking up. While it was clear that the depleted regiments (the effective strength of which had dwindled by May to half what it had been eight months earlier) would not be strong enough to attack Fort Frontenac without reinforcements, the supply crisis was over, and three newly raised companies of rangers were patrolling the supply route to keep off Indian raiders. With new recruits arriving to fill the ranks of the 50th and 51st, and with the addition of a battalion of New Jersey provincials, the garrison seemed at least strong enough to hold the fort and thus able to sustain Britain’s strategic foothold on the Great Lakes. The most pressing task was to strengthen the fortifications, which remained in poor condition but were at last coming under repair.10
On June 25, Major General James Abercromby, Lord Loudoun’s second-in-command, arrived in Albany and relieved Shirley of all further responsibility for His Majesty’s forces in North America. Shirley, who had heard through informal channels more than two months earlier that he would be superseded, accepted it calmly and proceeded to New York to await the new commander in chief. For his part, Abercromby was determined to do as little as possible. A corpulent man and an indifferent officer, he wanted to undertake nothing for which he might later be blamed; thus he contented himself with taking stock of the situation. What he saw gave him pause.11
At this point, the campaigns were well under way. A provincial force made up of nearly seven thousand men from New England and New York was assembling at Forts Edward and William Henry, preparing to move against Fort Carillon (at Ticonderoga) and Fort St. Frédéric (at Crown Point). Like virtually all other regular officers, Abercromby did not approve of using badly trained and imperfectly disciplined provincials as combat troops, but theirs seemed likely to be the only campaign that would actually proceed before the campaigning season ended—unless, of course, Loudoun should decide to send the new troops he was bringing from England to strengthen Oswego’s depleted regiments and attack Fort Frontenac. Not knowing his lordship’s preferences, Abercromby could not decide what to do with the regulars he now commanded in the Albany region. In all there were about three thousand of them, including four understrength regiments, several independent infantry companies, assorted artillerists, and a few engineers. Lacking any better idea, he deployed them as guards along the supply line between Albany and Fort Edward and waited for Loudoun to arrive and solve his problems for him. But Loudoun was slow in coming.12
At length, dogged by doubts about letting a pack of half-disciplined provincials undertake what seemed likely to be the sole expedition of the year while His Majesty’s troops stood guard over the pork barrels and bateaux of Albany, Abercromby asked Major General Winslow for advice. What would happen if Abercromby ordered regulars up to Lake George, to join the campaign against Crown Point? Because Winslow had served in a regular regiment during King George’s War and still ranked as a captain in the British army, his personal alternatives were limited to two: he could obey Abercromby’s commands or he could expose himself to arrest and court-martial for insubordination. He therefore assured Abercromby that he personally would gladly follow any orders he received but warned him that most provincial field officers would resign their commissions rather than take orders from regular officers far junior to them in rank. Even more ominously, Winslow predicted that the common soldiers of the expedition would desert en masse before submitting themselves to the lash and noose of regular discipline.13
Abercromby found this a most worrisome response and so convened his senior officers as a council of war to advise him on what to do—they urged him not to press the issue—while Winslow promised to take up the question with his own officers at Lake George. There the matter hung, with the provincials entering upon a “grand debate” in a three-day council of war and Abercromby squirming in indecision, when H.M.S. Nightingale dropped anchor off Sandy Hook on July 22. Early the next morning Lieutenant General John Campbell, earl of Loudoun—fiftyish, “short, strong made & . . . fit for Action”—stepped off a pilot boat onto the quay at New York City. Abercromby’s problems were solved, those of Winslow and his officers about to begin; but the first to feel the force of Lord Loudoun’s will would be William Shirley.14
Loudoun brought with him all the accoutrements of his rank and office. Six thousand more troops had been authorized to support him, including two regiments (the 35th Foot and the 42nd Foot, the Black Watch) sent from Britain. A new, unique regiment of four battalions, the 62nd Foot (or Royal Americans, soon to be redesignated the 60th), was to be raised in the colonies, largely among the Germans of Pennsylvania. Loudoun’s commissions and instructions granted him the most extensive civil and military powers in the history of British imperial governance— powers as nearly viceregal as it was constitutionally possible to make them—and he carried a commission as governor of Virginia as well. His entourage numbered no fewer than twenty-four, including his mistress and her maid, seventeen personal servants, and one “secretary extraordinary”—Thomas Pownall.15
Loudoun and Pownall had conferred throughout the two-month crossing about how best to handle American affairs, and Loudoun arrived convinced that the first order of business would have to be settling with his predecessor. That he did straightaway, calling Shirley in on July 24 for consultations on the state of the campaigns. Their first meeting was restrained and correct, but relations between the two men deteriorated sharply thereafter. Almost from the moment of his arrival, Loudoun heard accusations of impropriety from the concourse of Shirley’s enemies who had been on hand to welcome him to New York. As Loudoun’s first days in America passed, he heard, among other allegations, that Oswego was in a dangerously exposed state; that Shirley had violated every conceivable point of army procedure in recruitment, promotions, and the allocation of supply contracts; that he had drained the military chest by unauthorized and unaccounted expenditures; that his contractors had been behindhand in procuring supplies and profligate in spending money for them; that he had allowed the provincial officers of the Crown Point expedition to operate as if they were an autonomous force, permitting them to recruit their troops on conditions that in effect insulated them from the control of the commander in chief.16
As Loudoun confronted Shirley with these accusations, Shirley came for the first time to understand that prosecution might well lie in his future, and began peppering the commander in chief with self-justifying letters (nine within the first week alone). His lordship received each with more displeasure than the last, annotated them with critical comments, and dispatched them to England, where they became part of the dossier that Cumberland and Fox were compiling for use against the unfortunate governor. Soon Loudoun and Shirley were no longer on speaking terms.
John Campbell, fourth earl of Loudoun (1705–82). Shown here as painted by Allan Ramsay perhaps fifteen years before he was appointed commander in chief, Lord Loudoun was an energetic man, a thoroughly professional military administrator, and a keen critic of American foibles. Notwithstanding formal powers that made him little less than a viceroy for America, his inability to work with provincial troops and colonial legislative leaders alike kept him from realizing the advantages of manpower and matériel he built up while supreme commander. Courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland.
What troubled Loudoun most about Shirley’s misrule was the position in which he had left the provincials on the Crown Point expedition. Loudoun, a supremely orderly man who amused himself on his Ayrshire estate by planting a wood along the avenue to the house “in the form of [an infantry] regiment drawn up in review, a tree to a man,” could not tolerate so carnivalesque a campaign. For such a general as he, a dedicated administrator and a stickler for discipline, it was almost intolerable that the un-uniformed, untrained, mobbish provincials of Winslow’s army should be bumbling about on the most direct route to Canada, separating the king’s regulars from the enemy. What made it worst of all was the result of the provincial officers’ council of war at Lake George, which had been meeting to discuss the consequences of joint operations with the regulars when Loudoun arrived in New York. As Winslow reported the proceedings of the council, the majority of his colonels had agreed that any effort to put them and their men under joint command with the redcoats would end in “a dissolution of the army.” The reason they gave for this remarkable conclusion was that the conditions under which they had accepted their commissions and the understandings of the troops at the time of their enlistment had been contractual in character, and those contracts would be violated if the provincials were placed under direct regular command. Once the agreement that created it was broken, the army would cease to exist.17
Such reasoning was nonsense to Loudoun, who immediately identified Shirley as “the first contriver and fomenter of all the Opposition, the New England Men make, to being Join’d to the Kings Troops.” In fact Loudoun, to a degree unappreciated among Winslow’s subordinates, had done his best to improve the status of provincial officers serving jointly with regulars; before he left Britain he had seen to it that the regulation on precedence was modified so that provincial field officers and generals would rank as “eldest captains” when in joint service with regulars. This so-called Rule of 1755 meant that twenty-year-old subalterns could no longer issue orders to senior colonial officers, although the most junior redcoat majors were still free to do so.18
In Loudoun’s mind, this was a great concession. The provincials thought otherwise. Their intransigence so irked the commander in chief that when he went to Albany at the end of July he made it his first priority to set Winslow straight. When the New Englander (mistaking an order for an invitation) proved slow to respond to Loudoun’s summons, Loudoun ordered him to Albany in peremptory terms, on August 5. Winslow did not make the same mistake a second time. Within two days of receiving Loudoun’s letter, he and all his principal subordinates were waiting on his lordship at Albany.
And yet—concerned as they were at the sight and sound of the squat, irate Scot who was demanding that they explain, in writing, why they did not wish to place themselves under his command—Winslow and his officers stood fast. As for himself, Winslow replied, “your lordship may be assured I shall ever be ready to obey your commands.” His fellow officers, he continued, were “ready and willing to act in conjunction with his majesty’s troops and put themselves under the command of your lordship, who is commander in chief; so that the terms and conditions, agreed upon and established by the several governments to whom they belong and upon which they were raised, be not altered. . . .” So there would be no mistake, the next day one of Winslow’s subordinates provided Loudoun with a list of the “terms and conditions on which the provincial troops, now on their march towards Crown Point, were raised.” 19
Since the provincials had made it clear that they would resign before they would submit, and since Loudoun had no means to defend the Lake George frontier without them, all that the commander in chief could do was look for some face-saving compromise. It did not make him happy to have to do so. In the end, he settled for having each of the officers sign a formal written submission to the king’s authority, in return for which he promised that he would allow their expedition to proceed without the injection of regular troops or direct regular command. By August 19, the provincials were back at Fort William Henry, preparing once more to embark for Ticonderoga and Crown Point.20
Loudoun now wrote furious reports to Whitehall and to the duke of Cumberland, detailing the outrages that Shirley and his henchmen, the Massachusetts officers, had perpetrated. Yet even as he wrote the commander in chief was beginning to see that it was not just Shirley who was causing these problems. On the basis of his monthlong acquaintanceship with Americans, it was already clear to Loudoun that they lacked a proper sense of subordination to constituted authority. The New Englanders, prattling about contracts, were the worst; even their legislatures so distrusted his authority when he attempted to rationalize the provincial supply system that they refused to cooperate until they could be sure he was not trying to use provisioning as a pretext for claiming direct control over the provincial forces. Something larger was indeed afoot in America, but he did not know what to call it.21
Loudoun did not—because a man of his background, class, and position could not—understand that the New Englanders clung so obstinately to contractual principles and seemed to care so little for efficiency and professionalism because they understood military obligations and ideals differently from him. If they saw their undertaking of a campaign against the French and Indians as a function of agreements openly entered into between soldiers and the province that employed them, it was because much in the culture of New Englanders, the descendants of seventeenth-century Puritans, was premised upon covenantal relationships, and therefore upon the strict observation of contractual obligations. Moreover, if New Englanders were loath to allow their soldiers to be subjected to the strict discipline of His Majesty’s forces, it was because New England’s comparatively unstratified society, when required to create armies as large as those of 1755 and 1756, could not produce the kind of armies that contemporary European states did.
Given the social configuration of their provinces, New England governments simply could not field forces made up of economically marginal men led by their social superiors, on the model of the British army. Instead, the provinces had to commission as officers those ordinary farmers and tradesmen who could most effectively convince the young men of their towns to follow them for a year of campaigning. As often as not, this meant that recruits served in companies commanded by older neighbors or relatives; in most cases there was some personal bond, or at least prior acquaintanceship, between officers and the men they enlisted. Among the provincials the relationships of civil society thus carried over directly as the basis for military life, narrowing what was in professional European forces a vast social gulf between officers and enlisted men to a barely perceptible gap. To expect the officers of such an army to subject their men to the strict discipline required by His Majesty’s regulations was to expect the impossible. Neither the contractual understanding of military service nor the close social connections between officers and men would allow it.
Because such circumstances as these were so utterly outside Loudoun’s experience as an aristocrat and professional officer, and because the army they produced was so anomalous when judged by the standard of professionalism the British army set, it is scarcely surprising that the commander in chief should have railed against the New Englanders. It was not much longer, however, before Loudoun came to realize that the New Englanders were only the worst of a bad lot. All over the colonies during the summer of 1756, local officials and provincial assemblies were refusing to provide adequate housing for His Majesty’s troops. Shirley had avoided the problem of quartering by paying what amounted to the market rent for room and board: his warrants for “slap-gelt” (as the victualing and billeting allowance was called) helped drain the military chest to the bone-dry state in which it stood at the end of his tenure as supreme commander. Loudoun would have none of such outrageous expedients, and he insisted that the colonists contribute quarters on his terms or face the consequences. To his astonishment and vexation, such resistance arose that even in Albany, his very headquarters, he had to u
se armed force to secure quarters for his men and officers.22
Loudoun could not comprehend the unwillingness of colonial civilians to provide accommodations for the soldiers who had been sent so far, at enormous expense, to protect them. All he heard from the people who opposed him, like the mayor of Albany and the sheriff of Albany County, were sermons on how the English Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom from the arbitrary quartering of troops as one of the most cherished of all the rights of Englishmen. No American he met seemed to understand the concept of self-sacrifice, of service to the common cause; there was, by contrast, no shortage of Americans willing to plunder the royal purse. The result for Lord Loudoun was continual frustration and rising anger. “The delays we meet with,” he wrote in exasperation to Cumberland, “in carrying on the Service, from every parts of this Country, are immense; they have assumed to themselves, what they call Rights and Priviledges, totaly unknown in the Mother Country, and [these] are made use of, for no purpose, but to screen them, from giving any Aid, of any sort, for carrying on, the Service, and refusing us Quarters.”23