Despite the specter of famine that drove him to negotiate, the price Teedyuscung intended to ask was a steep one: a formal admission from the Penns that the Walking Purchase of 1737 had been a fraud, and compensation to his people in the form of a grant, of 2,500,000 acres of the Wyoming Valley and adjoining lands, as a perpetual reservation for the eastern Delawares. These were audacious demands, for Teedyuscung was not only asking that the Penns surrender a vast proportion of the best land in the province, but risking the wrath of the Iroquois, who would be officially recognized as having been complicit in the Walking Purchase fraud. Yet while the first substantive meeting between Teedyuscung and Governor Denny, in November 1756, must have been a tense one—four Iroquois chiefs had come from Onondaga to observe Teedyuscung’s actions and report back to the Grand Council—it was also remarkably promising. Supported in the negotiations by Quaker advisors who had promoted and financed the negotiations from the beginning, Teedyuscung managed to wring three important concessions from Pennsylvania. Denny distributed a gift of trade goods worth four hundred pounds, promised to open a trade at Fort Augusta and to provide “a large uninhabited country to Hunt in,” and agreed to consider the charges of fraud impartially at a meeting to be held in the coming year. In return Teedyuscung promised only to bring whatever white captives he could obtain to the next conference.13
Although the results of the Easton conference were inconclusive, the mutual desperation of the Delawares and the government of Pennsylvania had led to the opening of real dialogue. The Quakers, having withdrawn from politics, had become able to act as honest brokers and could begin to hope that a peaceful solution to the conflict might be reached if both the governor and Teedyuscung behaved in good faith. For the first time since the beginning of the war in Pennsylvania, hope flickered in the gloom. Yet it was only a glimmer, and the raids and the killings along the frontier meanwhile continued unabated.
CHAPTER 15
The Strains of Empire CAUSES OF ANGLO-AMERICAN FRICTION
1756
LORD LOUDOUN, taking stock of the year’s developments, put little hope in the Easton negotiations, which after all depended on the good faith of a savage. Convinced that the Pennsylvanians were incapable of protecting themselves, he saw the killings on the frontier more clearly than the hope of peace and merely dispatched a battalion of the Royal American Regiment to stiffen Pennsylvania’s defenses. The troops arrived at Philadelphia in December, however, to face something like a reprise of the quartering crisis that Loudoun had experienced at Albany in August: there were too few rooms in taverns and other public houses to accommodate five hundred men, and the assembly refused to billet them in private homes. The legislators had prudential as well as constitutional concerns, for smallpox had just broken out in the regiment. Loudoun, however, found any resistance to housing the troops he had sent to defend the province deeply offensive. As in the case of Albany, he threatened to use force to obtain quarters, this time with the concurrence of Governor Denny, who as a regular field officer could hardly have agreed more with Loudoun’s judgments.
Faced with the prospect of having not only soldiers but an epidemic imposed on Philadelphians at bayonet-point, the assembly followed the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin and handed over the new province hospital as a temporary barracks for the troops. As in Albany, only force or the threat of force had moved the assembly to comply with Loudoun’s directives; also as in Albany, it would be nearly another year before the province would finally build adequate barracks for the regulars. Lord Loudoun might well have wondered what madness afflicted Americans, who seemed to regard the king’s troops as if they, not the French and Indians, were the enemy. Denny simply concluded that such “open neglect of Humanity was the highest Instance I have ever met with of the Depravity of human nature.”1
The collapse of Britain’s war effort in the colonies during 1756 had resulted from a variety of factors, including the confusion that resulted from the change in command from Shirley to Loudoun, the general weakness of the position in which Shirley had left the campaigns, the stunning loss of Oswego, and the deftness of the French in using Indian allies against the British settlements. These were all the reasons Loudoun and his masters at Whitehall recognized, and each was in its way valid as an explanation. Yet there were two other factors, neither of which they could fully have grasped, that contributed even more dramatically to the failures of British arms in America.
The first of these was Lord Loudoun himself. As his repeated wrangles with colonial legislatures over quartering showed—and before his tenure as commander in chief ended, such disputes would have occurred in five colonies, or practically everywhere he had stationed large elements of the army—both his personality and his understanding of Americans inhibited cooperation between the provinces and the Crown.2 As a professional officer who had been granted extraordinary powers and as an aristocrat with scant sympathy for the cultural norms of the provinces, Loudoun interpreted any resistance to his authority as evidence of colonial inferiority, corruption, and rebelliousness. His virtually automatic response to opposition was to threaten to use force to compel submission. That tactic, while effective in the short term, tended over time to convince the colonists that Loudoun himself posed at least as grave a threat to their liberties as the French and Indians—and one much closer at hand. In this way the actions of His Majesty’s own commander in chief, because he enjoyed the support of the most influential men in English government as well as the obedience of thousands of regular troops, became the most convincing arguments many Americans had yet seen for the lack of identity between their own and the empire’s interests. Resistance to Loudoun’s edicts, haphazard and sporadic at first, grew more general and more consistently sullen as his tenure lengthened.
The second factor contributing to the failure of the war effort was the lack of willingness, either on the part of the Crown or the colonies, to expend the vast sums of money necessary to make the war a success. Although Loudoun’s powers were virtually viceregal in character, his purse was notably short, for the ministry had sent him to America on the assumption that the provinces could be made to create a common fund to pay for the war. When the various provincial assemblies refused to comply with his requisitions without exercising the kind of oversight that their previous experience had led them to believe was their prerogative, Loudoun saw more evidence of colonial recalcitrance and degeneracy. But particularly in the colonies from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, which had known no serious external threat for years, assemblies regarded military expenditures as undesirable at best, and as an absolute threat to their rights if dictated by Lord Loudoun. The parsimony of the House of Burgesses in funding its own provincial regiment offers the best case in point. By refusing to offer wages and bounties to compete with what civilian laborers and artisans could earn, and relying instead on the conscription of socially marginal men, Virginia’s government virtually insured that its provincial forces would be both chronically undermanned and next to impossible to discipline. In the end, Virginia got exactly as much defense for its frontiers as the Burgesses were willing to pay for, and despite Washington’s best efforts by the close of 1756 the bloody results were only too clear.
Friction between the colonists and their commander in chief over issues of finance and local control incapacitated British arms in North America during 1756. Although the next year would see substantial gains in organizational stability and a new efficiency in supply and transport services among the British and colonial forces, these underlying problems would go unresolved for a very long time. Before the remedy could be found would fall the darkest hours of the war for Great Britain and its colonies.
CHAPTER 16
Britain Drifts into a European War
1756
THE NEWS OF OSWEGO’S loss arrived in London on September 30, in time to contribute to a governmental crisis that had been brewing since May. With the reorientation of European alliances, Hanover had ceased to be a target that France
could threaten as a means of influencing British policy. The first unanticipated result of the Diplomatic Revolution was thus to convince the French foreign ministry that it might most effectively encourage Britain to suspend hostilities at sea and in the New World by threatening to invade England itself. France accordingly built up its army strength in the Channel ports to a hundred thousand men, forcing the British ministry to take stock of its ability to defend the home isles. Newcastle, concluding that the army and navy were stretched too thin to prevent the French from devastating the coast with raids or even launching an invasion, decided that he had no choice but to summon Hessian and Hanoverian troops to bolster England’s defenses—and thereby handed Pitt the occasion to question both his competency and his patriotism. Although Fox continued to manage the ministry’s business in the House of Commons deftly enough, he was growing more and more alienated from Newcastle, whom he regarded as a man of little real capacity; at the same time Newcastle was making no secret of his distaste for the ambitious, grasping Fox. As the rift between the two men widened and became common knowledge, the cabinet began to split apart internally. Meanwhile Pitt could not be silenced, and the more he railed, the more the ministers blamed one another for the disarray in Britain’s defenses. How could this travesty, Pitt cried, be called “an Administration? They shift and shuffle the charge from one to another: says one, I am not General; the Treasury says, I am not Admiral; the Admiralty says, I am not Minister. From such an unaccording assemblage of separate and distinct powers with no system, a nullity results.”1
Pitt’s jabs told all the more heavily for their accuracy, for the military situation grew more critical by the day. In addition to the forces gathering across the Channel, the French were assembling a fleet at Toulon, from which they could threaten Britain’s strategic naval base on the Mediterranean island of Minorca. No one knew whether the French were trying to distract British attention from Minorca by building up their forces in the Channel ports, or preparing to send a massive reinforcement to their army in Canada. Newcastle, whose temperament virtually prohibited decisive action, could bring himself to detach only a small squadron from the defense of the home waters. At the end of March, he ordered ten warships to proceed to Gibraltar, where their commander, Admiral John Byng, was to respond to whatever the French might attempt. If French ships had already passed the Straits, he was to pursue them to America; otherwise, he was to proceed to Minorca and help the garrison resist attack.
Byng, alas, was no fighting admiral, but rather a senior officer notable for administrative skills and strong family political influence. Moreover, the ships in his task force had only recently returned from raiding French commerce on the Atlantic. It was, therefore, with depleted crews, unmade repairs (two vessels were taking on water fast enough to need frequent pumping), and fouled hulls that Byng’s ships sailed from Portsmouth on April 7. When he reached Gibraltar nearly a month later, news was waiting that the French had landed on Minorca and besieged the island’s fortress, St. Philip’s Castle. Without waiting to refit, Byng sailed off to meet his enemy. 2
By the time Byng found the French fleet off Minorca on May 20, the British government had been at war with France for two days. Newcastle had long hesitated to issue a formal declaration of war, for domestic no less than diplomatic reasons. Given the gravity of the news from Minorca, however, where a small garrison under the command of an octogenarian colonel was being attacked by a much stronger force, the ministry had had little choice. Byng’s mission thus assumed enormous significance for the government, for as Newcastle knew only too well, a failure to relieve St. Philip’s Castle would bring down the ministry. The duke was frantic to avoid taking the blame himself, and long before the first news had arrived from the Mediterranean, at least one old political hand was advising Henry Fox to consider if there was “anybody to make a scape-goat” in the event Minorca should be lost.3
When the news finally arrived from the Mediterranean, all of it was bad. Byng’s leaky, barnacle-fouled, undermanned squadron had engaged a better-equipped force under the marquis de La Galissonière—the same man who as governor of Canada in 1749 had ordered Céloron de Blainville to make his celebrated reconnaissance of the Ohio Valley. In a four-hour action, half of Byng’s ships had been heavily damaged without inflicting any appreciable loss on La Galissonière’s force. That was humiliating enough, but not in itself disastrous, for following the exchange of fire La Galissonière had declined to press his advantage and sailed off to support the troops on Minorca. What turned this indecisive battle into a catastrophe was Byng’s decision, four days after it was over, to return to Gibraltar for repairs rather than to stand off Minorca and await the reinforcements that were on their way from the Rock. Byng’s retreat to Gibraltar doomed the Minorca garrison. Even so, the defenders held out until June 28 before capitulating, with full honors of war, to the French.
As the reports of these disasters filtered back to England, Newcastle’s divided ministry began to fall apart. Fox, fearing that the “scape-goat” would be him, blamed Newcastle for giving Byng too few ships, having concluded that “those who had direction of [the country] could no more carry on this war, than his three children,” and decided to resign when the right moment came. Newcastle, desperate to escape responsibility for the disaster, determined to blame Byng and set in motion the court-martial proceedings that would end with Byng’s execution by firing squad on March 14, 1757. 4
Voltaire would later explain that in England it was thought a good thing to shoot an admiral, from time to time, in order to encourage the others, but in the aftermath of the Minorca debacle many English politicians thought that Newcastle’s obsessive pursuit of Byng signaled only his lack of fitness to lead the government. Thus opposition M.P.s were already in full cry against a disintegrating ministry when news arrived that the king of Prussia had precipitated a crisis certain to result in a continental war. On August 30, 1756, Frederick, without consulting and indeed almost without bothering to inform the British, invaded Saxony and launched military operations against the Austrian empire. The Convention of Versailles now operated inexorably to bring France to the defense of Maria Theresa, Austria’s empress-queen. The Russians, unprepared for war and knowing that they could expect no support from the English, abrogated the subsidy treaty and sought an accommodation with France and Austria. Once again Hanover stood exposed to invasion, and—Newcastle’s hopes and diplomatic efforts to the contrary notwithstanding—Great Britain found itself slipping over the brink into a general European war.5
Stories of Oswego’s fall, spreading from newspaper to newspaper across England in early October, therefore seemed to be the final calamity in a string of misfortunes that made it hard to imagine how Newcastle could face a new session of Parliament. Choosing his moment to wound the duke most gravely, Fox resigned on October 13. With no one to manage the Commons, and with Pitt, the only M.P. with sufficient stature to lead, trumpeting his refusal to serve in any administration that included Newcastle, the duke had no choice but to resign. By October 20 he knew the end had come and prepared for it by paying off his supporters with honors and pensions. On November 11, Newcastle formally surrendered the seals of office as first lord of the Treasury, and, for the first time in nearly four decades, retired from public life. 6
Yet while Newcastle was formally out of power at the end of 1756, he was not yet shorn of political influence. Formed under the leadership of William Pitt as Southern secretary (Pitt disdained the Treasury along with all issues of public finance, so the new first lord was a figurehead, the duke of Devonshire), the new ministry was destined to be a weak one for reasons that contemporary observers found self-evident. In the first place, Pitt’s base of support in the House of Commons was anything but secure. After years in opposition, his greatest constituency was external— the merchants and financiers of London and that vaguer body he called “the People” or “the Nation,” by which he meant the urban middle class and lesser gentry. Among active politicians i
n Parliament, Pitt could count on the votes of three groups only: “the faction of cousins,” as his in-laws the Grenvilles and their supporters were known; the Leicester House faction, or those politicians attached to the interest of the teenaged prince of Wales, his tutor the earl of Bute, and his mother the dowager princess; and the so-called independents, mostly Tory backbenchers who could be swayed by Pitt’s oratory and reputation as an incorruptible statesman.
What weakened Pitt even more, however, was the fact that George II detested him and his Grenville kin for the warmth of their connections with the heir apparent and the Leicester House faction generally. Nothing could budge the old king from keeping faith with his favorite son, the duke of Cumberland, and Cumberland’s protégé, Henry Fox. The enmity of the king was no mere inconvenience, for British monarchs remained powerful enough in the mid-eighteenth century that no ministry could long endure without royal cooperation. Finally, Pitt’s prospects were sharply limited by the fact that many members of the House of Commons remained under the influence of the duke of Newcastle, whose decades of assiduous attention to patronage had made him a man, in or out of power, whose opinion few M.P.s could afford to ignore. From the start Pitt was, therefore, a minister on a very short leash, capable of governing only at the sufferance of the king and Newcastle— and he knew it.7
Thus Pitt’s policies marked no great departure from the substance of those that Newcastle and Fox had pursued, although the Great Commoner did succeed in placing his distinctive rhetorical stamp on them by declaring the American war to be his first priority. Both the army and the navy were to be built up to new levels of strength and proficiency, he promised, and principally committed to American and West Indian operations. Lord Loudoun was to have no fewer than 17,000 regulars at his disposal by the beginning of the campaigning season, and use them first to seize Louisbourg, then Québec. Because the Hessians and Hanoverians who had been summoned to defend against French invasion had returned home at the outbreak of hostilities in the Germanies, Pitt also proposed to supplement the regular army by creating a militia for home defense—a 32,000-man territorial force raised in the counties under the leadership of local squires (eventually including the pudgy, bookish Edward Gibbon, whose service as a captain in the south battalion of the Hampshire militia would prove invaluable to history, if not necessarily indispensable to the defense of the realm).8 As for the Continent, Pitt had no intention of committing British soldiers there at all, preferring to let Germans spill German blood. The man who had so roundly reviled Newcastle for his policy of foreign subsidies accordingly advocated pouring vast sums into the coffers of Hanover, Hesse, and Prussia. These three together, he maintained, could raise 50,000 or 60,000 men to defend Hanover, and Britain should pay them to do it. Since Prussia was strong enough to carry the main burden of the land war against France and Austria, it deserved a subsidy of £200,000 annually.
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