Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Only in Pennsylvania did there seem to be any cause for hope in 1757, and the improvement in that quarter came not from military factors— Stanwix’s Royal Americans based at Carlisle and the provincial companies posted at forts along the frontier could do little to deter enemy raiders—but rather from the diplomatic negotiations between private intermediaries and the eastern Delaware leader, Teedyuscung, which had begun at Easton in 1756. These talks had continued, despite Sir William Johnson’s insistence that only he was authorized to conduct diplomacy with the northern Indians, because of two compelling, complementary needs. On one hand, Governor Denny realized that, given the failure of provincials and redcoats alike to defend the frontier, diplomacy offered his best (and perhaps only) hope for ending the devastation of his province. On the other, the flight of traders from Shamokin and the Susquehanna generally had left Teedyuscung’s people in desperate need of the manufactures—blankets, ironware, weapons, ammunition—that they needed to survive.

  Pennsylvania’s informal representatives were Quakers, now formally out of politics. They had begun by making individual efforts to negotiate an end to hostilities; then, in December 1756, several “weighty” Friends had founded an organization called the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures. This organization and the remarkable man who headed it, the merchant Israel Pemberton, had maintained contacts with Teedyuscung, raised large sums of money to support the negotiations, and purchased the diplomatic gifts necessary to keep the talks alive. Apart from the eastern Delawares’ precarious situation, the goodwill and impartiality of Pemberton and the Friendly Association were probably the biggest factors inducing Teedyuscung to negotiate. The presence of the Quakers at the renewed Easton negotiations of July and August 1757, as the financial supporters and informal monitors of the proceedings, added an element of integrity uncommon in Pennsylvania’s treaty-making after the passing of William Penn.6

  And, it must be said, the presence of Pemberton and the Quakers also added an element of complexity unusual even in the ordinarily complicated setting of intercultural diplomacy. As we have seen, Teedyuscung’s intentions in opening the talks at Easton in the previous year had included two goals: first, to nullify the Walking Purchase of 1737, by which Iroquois chiefs had connived with the representatives of the Penn family to deprive the Delawares of their lands in eastern Pennsylvania; second, to gain a perpetual grant of approximately 2,500,000 acres in the Wyoming Valley region as a territorial reserve within which the eastern Delawares could be forever safe from white encroachments. As a result, the Easton talks of 1757 had a distinctively multilateral character.

  Governor Denny was there to represent the province of Pennsylvania and of course the interests of the Penn family. But William Denny was also his own man and shrewdly capable of seeming “in the morning [to be] for the proprietaries, at noon of no party, and at night, plump for the Assembly.” At Easton, he was acting most of all as the direct subordinate of the earl of Loudoun and as a career officer in the British army. He aimed therefore at obtaining a strategic peace with the eastern Delawares. If in so doing it was necessary to expose and renounce a twenty-year-old land fraud, that was merely unfortunate for the proprietors. His oath was to the king, not the Penns, and the interest of the king in restoring peace with the Indians and gaining them as allies against the French far superseded any obligation he had to protect the pecuniary interests of the proprietors. Denny was not, however, the only delegate from Pennsylvania at the conference. Four commissioners representing the assembly attended, vigilant to protect their constituents’ interests against the power of the proprietors; agents of the Penn family were there too, intending to preserve the Walking Purchase, thwart the massive cession of Wyoming lands to the Delawares, and make sure that Denny did not respond too eagerly to the advice of the assembly’s commissioners. Observers from the Iroquois Confederacy were also on hand—chiefs who were as reluctant as the Penns to see the Walking Purchase renounced and by no means pleased to see Teedyuscung, who was supposed to be taking orders from them, negotiating his own people’s settlement with the government of Pennsylvania. To complicate matters further, George Croghan was at Easton as the deputy of Sir William Johnson, charged with preserving Johnson’s status as the sole Crown authority authorized to negotiate with the northern Indians; yet Croghan was also on the lookout—as always—for opportunities to promote his own interests as a private trader and land speculator. And of course, Pemberton and his colleagues from the Friendly Association were also in attendance, acting as ostensibly neutral observers but—insofar as they advised the Indians and kept an independent record of the proceedings— as de facto allies of Teedyuscung and the Delawares. Yet even the Quakers’ presence was complicated, and perhaps compromised, by the fact that Pemberton had been cultivating close relations with Colonel Stanwix, who supported a peace settlement in order to gain eastern Delaware allies for a campaign into the Ohio Valley, not to realize the Quakers’ hope of bringing a prompt, diplomatic end to the bloodshed.7

  Ultimately these complex affiliations among the participants and observers at Easton resolved themselves into the pragmatic alignment of interests that determined the conference’s outcome. Denny, the commissioners from the assembly, the Quakers, and Teedyuscung all wanted peace and had no objection to having the Walking Purchase reviewed by higher authorities in order to determine its legitimacy. The agents of the Penns, the representatives of the Iroquois, and George Croghan sought to defend the Walking Purchase but were willing to have it examined—if the higher authority who would examine it was Sir William Johnson. Denny and Croghan wanted peace to be accompanied by an alliance between the eastern Delawares and the British; Croghan and the Iroquois wanted the alliance to be understood as coming under the Confederacy’s sanction. Teedyuscung was willing to defer the grant of land to his people in return for immediate aid in the form of a permanent settlement, to be built at Pennsylvania’s expense in the Wyoming Valley—with houses, a trading post, and teachers to instruct his people in reading and writing. In return for this, he was prepared to offer a military alliance between his people and the British, under the formal aegis of the Iroquois. The commissioners from the Pennsylvania Assembly were willing (once the representatives of the Friendly Association had assured them of financial support) to subsidize the construction of Teedyuscung’s Wyoming town in return for an alliance.8

  Thus between July 21 and August 8 at Easton, the representatives of several cultural communities and a vast range of competing interests were able to negotiate something that even six weeks earlier would have seemed impossible: the beginnings of a peace. It was far from a comprehensive settlement, of course, and given its indeterminate character, it was at best a fragile one. Understood in strategic terms, the Treaty of Easton merely neutralized the eastern Delawares as a first step toward opening contacts with the western Delawares—a group still allied with the French. Nothing could dislodge the French from the Ohio Country, and nothing could make the raids along the frontier cease, unless the alliance between the French and the Delawares, as well as the other Ohio Indians, could be broken. In August 1757—as French and Indian raiders continued to pillage backcountry settlements from New York to North Carolina, and as Fort William Henry’s broken masonry and shattered timbers littered the headland above Lake George—any well-informed observer of the war would surely have found the likelihood remote that the Easton conference would prove a pivotal moment. Least of all would it have seemed a likely turning point to the best-informed observer of them all, the earl of Loudoun, who even then was sitting in Halifax watching his prospects for capturing Louisbourg fade into the blank face of a Nova Scotia fog.

  CHAPTER 21

  Pitt Changes Course

  DECEMBER 1757

  LOUDOUN AND HIS transports arrived at Halifax on June 30. Admiral Francis Holburne’s Royal Navy squadron dropped anchor there on July 9. By that time no fewer than three French squadrons, including eigh
teen heavily armed ships of the line and five frigates, had made it safely into Louisbourg harbor—a force that clearly overmatched Holburne’s. Loudoun had been unable to launch his expedition until Holburne had arrived, and Holburne would only proceed once he had determined the strength of the enemy fleet at Louisbourg; but weeks of fog and foul weather kept his reconnaissance vessels from returning with a report. When the fog lifted and the wind finally turned fair on August 4, the first reliable intelligence came in with the arrival of the frigate Gosport, which had taken a French prize carrying a complete list of the ships at Louisbourg.1

  Loudoun now asked Holburne the critical question. Could they “attempt the reduction of Louisbourg with any probability of success?” “Considering the strength of the enemy and other circumstances,” the admiral replied, “it is my opinion that there is no probability of succeeding in any attempt upon Louisbourg at this advanced season of the year.” On the same day that Monro watched Montcalm’s men open their siege entrenchments outside Fort William Henry, Loudoun ordered preparations to begin for the return to New York.2

  It was a prudent decision; indeed, in view of the recent firing-squad execution of Admiral Byng for failing to do his utmost against the enemy, even a courageous one. To hazard almost the entire regular army in North America by landing it on Cape Breton—late in the year, in uncertain weather, under threat of a superior naval force—would have daunted any but a foolhardy officer, and rashness was never one of Loudoun’s shortcomings. Admiral Holburne’s later experience, moreover, proved that he had decided wisely. After escorting Loudoun’s transports back to New York, Holburne returned to the Gulf of St. Lawrence where, reinforced by four new ships from home, he waited to waylay the enemy fleet when it emerged from Louisbourg. Instead of ambushing the French, however, Holburne found his squadron trapped against the shore of Cape Breton by a hurricane that blew in suddenly from the southeast on September 24. The fleet was within an hour or two of being dashed to pieces on the rocks when the wind finally came round the following day and began to blow from the southwest; but even so, six ships of the line were dismasted and one was completely destroyed. Only three vessels could be sailed back to England. The rest, stricken and unseaworthy, limped to Halifax for repairs. The French, having ridden out the storm in the shelter of Louisbourg harbor, sailed for Brest in October. 3

  By then Lord Loudoun was back in New York, trying with customary energy and application to restart a stalled war effort in the midst of newly heightened colonial discontents. His first concern was to regain the military initiative from the French, who had conducted the only successful offensive operations in America since 1755. Loudoun fell to the task immediately and on October 17 was able to inform the duke of Cumberland of his plans for a winter campaign against Ticonderoga. As he explained, there had been no time to rebuild Fort William Henry after his return, and to do that and build a fleet of boats would take most of the coming summer. He therefore intended only to wait for the first sustained frost before marching four thousand regulars and rangers from Fort Edward to Lake George, and then over the ice with light cannon and mortars to attack Fort Carillon’s small winter garrison. 4

  This plan, inspired by Rigaud’s attempt on Fort William Henry, might actually have succeeded if the frost had not come late (in February) and with so much snow (three feet) that the expedition could not proceed. In the meantime Loudoun had more than enough to keep him busy. He had to correspond with the governments of the northern colonies, ordering them to recruit rangers for the winter campaign (they were unenthusiastic); with the new governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Pownall, who had lately fallen out with him over the issue of quartering and who seemed bent on outdoing even William Shirley as a subverter of Loudoun’s authority; and with Governor Sharpe of Maryland, who had failed to discipline his assembly after its outrageous defiance of Loudoun’s orders to garrison Fort Cumberland. Moreover, problems with enlistment for the regular regiments required his constant attention, for colonists in every province from Maryland to New Hampshire were not only refusing to volunteer, but actually harassing recruiters. The military humiliations of Oswego and Fort William Henry may have focused popular resentment on the redcoats, or perhaps the forceful and abusive techniques of the recruiters themselves did the trick. At any rate, resistance appeared everywhere and antirecruitment riots erupted in Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire in the fall and early winter of 1757. (Indeed the violence grew so severe in New Hampshire, where a mob waving axes chased one officer and his party for four miles, that Loudoun put a permanent stop to recruiting in the province.)5

  On top of all this came the necessity of planning four new expeditions for the coming year, a grinding process that required hundreds of hours of information gathering, analysis, writing—virtually all of which Loudoun performed himself—and wrangling with the provincials. As the winter of 1758 wore on, Loudoun found it increasingly difficult to gain the acquiescence of the governors and assemblies of the various colonies. In February commissioners representing the New England colonial assemblies met at Boston, in Loudoun’s absence and without his permission, to determine the numbers of men they would supply for the coming year. He was compelled in response to summon all the New England governors to a meeting at Hartford and lay down the law: their assemblies would provide men according to quotas he would dictate, not numbers to be determined by the legislators’ whim. To his amazement, the governors proved recalcitrant and in the end cooperated only on a minimal level.6

  For all his energy, Loudoun now found his job more and more frustrating, more and more taxing. “My Sittuation,” he wrote to his kinsman the duke of Argyll, in February, In only one respect were these complaints exaggerated, for the tireless Scot did in fact manage to take an occasional hour for amusement: his personal accounts showed that during the Christmas week just past he and his guests had somehow found the time to consume “nineteen dozen bottles of claret, thirty-one dozen of Madeira, a dozen of Burgundy, four bottles of port and eight of Rhenish.”7 is that, I am more a Slave to Business than any man alive by having not only the affairs of the Army as a Soldier to manage and that being divided in three or four places and each to provide for without one man to assist me but M[ajor] G[eneral] Abercromby or to consult with but him and he very often at a Distance from me in the time when I want his Advice most.

  Besides which I have an Eternal Negotiation to carry on with Governments 1500 miles in length where every Day Produces not only New Plans, which effect the carrying on the Service but likewise meet with all sorts of opposition in it. So that my Business Begines every Day the moment I am out of Bed and lasts from that time to Dinner and from then till nine at night and this from day to day without Intermission or even allowing myself an hower for any Amusements and this for want of propper Assistance under me.

  What Loudoun did not know, as he drank health to the king and confusion to the French, would have encouraged him to drink even deeper than he did. Ten days before Christmas, William Pitt had decided to relieve Loudoun of his duties and indeed to change the policies by which he had done his best to fight the war. The content of Pitt’s new measures and the extent to which they departed from what had come before would remain unclear for months to come, since official notice of them would arrive in the colonies only in March. Pitt had in fact been contemplating a new approach to the war for more than a year. Only since the fall of 1757, however, when news of calamities in North America had come raining down on Whitehall along with accounts of even worse developments in Europe, had his position strengthened enough to put them into effect.8

  Pitt could change course in the last days of 1757 because recent events had altered the balance of power within the British government, strengthening his position by destroying the influence of his adversary, the duke of Cumberland. The critical development in what was by any measure the worst string of disasters in the war was Cumberland’s capitulation on September 8 to the French, who had trapped him and the Hanoverian army
he commanded between the Rivers Aller and Elbe. Nearly encircled and with no prospect of reaching the sea where the British navy would resupply him, Cumberland had tried to make the best of a hopeless position by negotiating a surrender on terms that saved his army. The French commander—Louis-François-Armand de Plessis, duc de Richelieu, victor of Minorca—agreed to hold a parley at the village of Kloster-Zeven.

  Richelieu named only two conditions: Cumberland must send home the troops in his army that came from Hesse, Brunswick, and Gotha; and he must withdraw half of his Hanoverian battalions beyond the Elbe, leaving the remainder in internment camps near the port of Stade. These seemed to Cumberland honorable—his troops did not even have to surrender their arms—but back in Britain the Convention of Kloster-Zeven seemed only to heap diplomatic humiliation upon military defeat. The French were left to occupy all of Hanover except for a neutralized zone along the Elbe. Richelieu would be free to turn his attention to his real target, Prussia, where England’s only significant ally, Frederick the Great, was in the direst of straits, facing a Russian invasion in East Prussia, a Swedish invasion in Pomerania, and an Austrian invasion of Silesia that threatened to break through to Brandenburg, and thus Berlin itself. 9

  In England the old king wept for shame. George had empowered his son to treat with the French and even if necessary to make a separate peace for Hanover; but this was “a convention shameful and pernicious.” To Newcastle he complained that “his honour and interest were sacrificed by it, that he had been by it given up, tied hand and foot, to the French. That he did not know how to look anybody in the face: that he had lost his honour and was absolutely undone.” He ordered his son back to England immediately. When Cumberland returned in October to defend his behavior, the king treated him with a cruelty notable even by the generous standards of the Hanoverian kings. “Here,” he remarked to his guests on the night that Cumberland reappeared at court, “is my son, who has ruined me and disgraced himself”; then he refused to speak to him at all. That same night the duke sent word that he intended to resign all his military offices. The king accepted his offer with no expression of regret on October 15.10