Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick (1721–92). Brother-in-law of Frederick the Great and the duke of Cumberland’s successor in command of the army of observation, Ferdinand was a master of the art of maneuver and an exemplar of eighteenth-century military professionalism. His success in reanimating the army in early 1758 made him a hero in England, and the most ambitious officers in the British army clamored to serve under him on the Continent. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  With such dramatic developments afoot in Westphalia and the Austrian Netherlands, and with his coastal raids showing so few tangible results, Pitt reversed his policy against direct engagement on the Continent and agreed to send six regiments of cavalry and five of infantry (in all, about seven thousand men) to Ferdinand’s aid. As it happened, this reinforcement came too late to make a difference. After a year of maneuvering, many minor engagements, and one major battle, Ferdinand had taken his army as far as it could go. In November he went into winter quarters, making his Hanoverian, Hessian, Prussian—and now British— force once more into an army of observation. Spring would come before he would again take them into action against the French.7

  Thus the principal result of Pitt’s decision to send troops to the Continent was to increase the expense of the war—between three and four million pounds sterling a year would now be required to maintain British commitments in Europe—while diminishing the number of men available to defend the home islands. Sending British troops to serve with Ferdinand’s army undeniably rendered Hanover more secure and lessened the ability of the French to launch an invasion of England from the Low Countries. It did nothing, however, to alter the strategic balance in Europe—an equation that depended on the relative strength of Prussia. And, to Pitt’s consternation no less than Frederick’s, Prussia seemed to be growing steadily weaker. 8

  Frederick had followed up his spectacular victories at Rossbach and Leuthen by reconquering those parts of Silesia that had fallen to Austria and then by pressing south into Austrian Moravia. As he was pursuing this enterprise, however, a great Russian army struck into the Prussian heartland, threatening Frankfurt an der Oder and Berlin. Dashing back from Moravia, Frederick met his adversaries on August 25, about twenty miles east of Frankfurt near the village of Zorndorf. In what was technically a Prussian victory, he forced the Russians to withdraw, but only at a horrendous price: his army of 36,000 men had suffered losses of 13,500 killed, wounded, and missing—a casualty rate of nearly 40 percent. Worse followed. No sooner had the Russians assumed the defensive than Frederick learned that a huge Austrian army was threatening Dresden. Dividing his battered troops in two, he left half to watch the Russians and took the remainder south into Saxony, by a series of rapid marches, to seek battle with the Austrians. On October 14, Field Marshal von Daun gave him one near Hochkirch, where Frederick saw a quarter of his army destroyed before he broke off contact and withdrew to Dresden—which the Austrians promptly besieged.9

  Winter now gave the grim little monarch breathing space enough to concentrate on rebuilding his forces. Even though he had won three major victories and suffered only one defeat in 1758, even though he had retained his hold on Saxony and Silesia and forced the invaders to back out of East Prussia, Frederick was anything but the master of the European war. His position was in fact becoming critical, for his victories had cost him as dearly as any defeat. The matchless discipline of the Prussian army had given Frederick an edge early in the war, but that discipline was an asset less easy to replace than the dead and broken bodies of the men who had once possessed it. Whereas Prussia had boasted the best-trained troops in Europe at the outset of the war—so much so that virtually any company could fire four or even five volleys a minute, a phenomenal rate for the day—by the time of Hochkirch, Frederick had lost more than a hundred thousand soldiers to death, wounds, capture, disease, and desertion. These he could only replace with untrained men, many of whom were foreigners, and prisoners of war. By the autumn of 1758 many of his regiments were barely half-disciplined, and Frederick’s early advantage had all but vanished. Without British money to recruit, pay, and supply his troops, he knew, the army itself would vanish in short order.

  Pitt understood Frederick’s position and thus had continued throughout the summer to harass the coast of France in the hope of tying down French forces there. Unfortunately for his hopes, the one unqualified success in the history of these operations—a raid on Cherbourg in August— was followed, in early September, by the disaster that would bring them to a halt. Part of the reason for this stemmed from the fact that as soon as Pitt had decided to send troops to the aid of Prince Ferdinand, the most capable officers in the army had rushed to claim commands on the Continent, and the leadership of the coastal raiding force had fallen, as if by default, to a seventy-three-year-old lieutenant general named Thomas Bligh.

  General Bligh’s qualifications for command included enviably strong connections to the prince of Wales’s political establishment, Leicester House, but not, unfortunately, military competence. His descent on Cherbourg in August had succeeded by virtue of good fortune, lack of French preparedness, and the sensible advice he received from the descent’s naval commander, Captain Richard Howe (younger brother of Viscount Howe, recently killed near Ticonderoga). Bligh’s September descent on St.-Malo possessed none of those fortunate qualities. The French had so strengthened defenses in the months following the June raid that the town could no longer be taken without a prolonged siege. Moreover, foul weather so interfered with the landing that only about 7,000 men and very few supplies came ashore before the attempt had to be abandoned. This put the whole expedition in jeopardy, for in order to reembark his men safely, Bligh had to march them overland about nine miles to the Bay of St.-Cas, a sheltered anchorage where Howe could meet him. Bligh managed the march badly, moving so slowly that the French had time to gather at least 10,000 men and attack as the British tried to embark. Notwithstanding the courageous efforts of Howe and his sailors to cover the infantry’s retreat, Bligh lost between 750 and 1,000 men killed, wounded, and captured. It was an episode more humiliating than militarily significant, but the fiasco of St.-Cas helped convince Pitt to send troops to the direct aid of Frederick and Ferdinand, a policy he had ridiculed not six months before.10

  Historians have taken Pitt’s ability to reverse himself in questions of policy as evidence of intellectual flexibility, and indeed it was. But it was also much more, for Pitt’s abrupt abandonment of his previous course reveals three distinctive features of his situation in the aftermath of Louisbourg: elements that together enabled him to exercise almost sole control over British strategy and policy from 1758 through 1760. The first derived from the temporarily abnormal configuration of British politics, in which no effective opposition existed to constrain his actions. The duke of Newcastle was nervous—justifiably so—about Pitt’s indifference to the costs of the war, worrying that the financiers in the City of London would become unwilling to satisfy the government’s bottomless appetite for credit. But while his money-anxiety would make the duke yearn for the peace that Pitt spurned, that alone would not make him withdraw from what by 1758 had become a solid partnership. Newcastle, admiring Pitt’s willingness to accept responsibility, conceived a dogged loyalty to him, while Pitt came to trust Newcastle’s judgment in matters of patronage and finance. Since Newcastle was the only politician in England capable of bringing the secretary down, his support in effect guaranteed Pitt’s political survival. Newcastle’s refusal to grant offices to Pitt’s would-be critics shielded him from effective opposition in the House of Commons. Pitt so much appreciated this that his tilt toward engagement in Germany in part reflected his growing regard for Newcastle, who continually pressed him to concentrate on the European war instead of the expensive empire-building that Pitt preferred.11

  Of course Newcastle’s support could not prevent a disorderly opposition from arising among the independent backbenchers in Parliament, men who habitual
ly opposed any measure likely to raise their taxes, diminish their local authority, or expand the power of the state. Pitt, however, was fully capable of protecting himself on that front. In part his reputation as a politician above party and his previous eminence as an opposition figure preserved his standing with the country M.P.s, but he also preserved their affections by refusing to increase taxes on land and corn and by proposing to rely upon militia instead of regulars to defend against invasion. The establishment of a national militia in 1757 had indeed proven especially useful in maintaining good relations with the backbenchers for, as Walpole observed, “by the silent douceurs of commissions in the Militia” the conservative squires “were weaned from their opposition, without a sudden transition to ministerial employment.”12

  Pitt’s power over policy, like Newcastle’s command of patronage, ultimately derived from the king’s confidence, without which—as the duke of Cumberland himself had learned the hard way—no one could survive in office. Royal support, then, was the critical second element in Pitt’s algorithm of power, and that was growing ever more secure. Pitt quite deliberately cultivated the king by committing substantial subsidies, and eventually troops, to the defense of Hanover; meanwhile, the conquest of Louisbourg fired George’s imagination to such a degree that he endorsed Pitt’s plan to expel France from North America for good and all. From the fall of Louisbourg onward, in the frail old king’s one good eye Pitt could do no wrong, while he reserved the deafest of the royal ears for any complaints—even Newcastle’s—about the expense of the war.13

  So firm indeed was the king’s support that Pitt remained unconcerned when his relations with Leicester House, once so ardent, cooled in the fall of 1758. The dowager princess, the prince of Wales, and the prince’s tutor, Lord Bute, still opposed the Crown’s heavy commitment to defending Hanover, and Pitt’s newfound willingness to send troops to reinforce Prince Ferdinand had put a great strain on his relations with them. The final break came when the king refused to receive the Leicester House favorite General Bligh after the disaster of St.-Cas. The prince and Bute complained to Pitt of the king’s callousness, but Pitt refused to curry favor on Bligh’s behalf and, irritated by Lord Bute’s insistent letters, finally broke off correspondence with him. The prince fumed at Pitt’s refusal “to communicate what is intended to be done.” “Indeed my Dearest Friend,” the prince wrote to Bute, “he treats both you and me with no more regard than he would do a parcel of children[. H]e seems to forget that the day will come, when he must expect to be treated according to his deserts.”14 And indeed, Pitt did forget. The staunchness of the king’s support had given him more freedom of action than any first minister since Robert Walpole and enabled him to indulge the megalomaniacal streak that he had never fully repressed. From Louisbourg onward, George II’s approbation meant that Pitt would feel little personal constraint in making his decisions, even as Newcastle’s loyalty freed him from those limits that were merely political.

  The third factor that allowed Pitt to control policy was the institutional character of the British war effort—or, more properly, the lack of strong institutions to stabilize and give continuity to it. Although the army and navy had both produced substantial bureaucracies to deal with supply, finance, and other technical functions, neither had developed anything approaching a general staff. The armed forces and the government lacked organizations to gather intelligence or to present Pitt with reasoned estimates of enemy—or allied—strengths and capabilities. No minister, no agency, had the authority to supervise defense policy; the Crown’s nominal chief military officer, the secretary at war, was not ordinarily even a member of the cabinet, and his duties consisted almost exclusively of presenting financial estimates to Parliament and dealing with legal issues affecting the services.15

  The absence of bureaucratic machinery gave Pitt the ability to control strategy and policy personally, but it also imposed upon him a workload that not even he, at his most manic, could sustain. He had turned for help not to the secretary at war, Viscount Barrington—a man he despised as a hack—but to the first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Anson, and to the commander in chief of the army, Lord Ligonier. By late summer 1758, Anson and Ligonier had learned to cooperate better than any two service chiefs in British history and in effect were functioning as Pitt’s rudimentary general staff. Ingenious, vigorous, experienced, and loyal, they offered the advice he needed to make sound policy and the administrative expertise necessary to keep the armed forces capable of performing the missions he might assign. Capable as they were, however, Anson and Ligonier could not provide sound intelligence estimates on which Pitt might base his decisions.16

  In fact no one could, and throughout the war Pitt relied largely on instinct and private advice to decide where he should concentrate his forces to take maximum advantage of the weaknesses of the enemy. This meant that he made decisions about where to send military expeditions with a casualness that would have been unthinkable had any trustworthy intelligence service existed to offer him advice. In the absence of accurate information about enemy and allied forces alike, success did not always crown his decisions: had he known more about Prince Ferdinand’s army, for example, he might well have declined to send thousands of men to reinforce a general who had already decided to assume the defensive.17 Yet Pitt’s willingness to respond to suggestions, together with his generally reliable ability to distinguish sensible from crackpot schemes, led to some of the most important breakthroughs of the war. Finally, when something happened to work, Pitt was opportunistic enough to capitalize on his success. Thus in 1757 he had taken the advice of Thomas Pownall in replacing Lord Loudoun and encouraging the colonies to cooperate voluntarily in return for reimbursements, and once the fruits of those changes were clear to see, he was prepared to pursue them to the end, regardless of expense. In the same way, in 1758 Pitt had listened to an even less likely figure than Pownall and parlayed a visionary scheme into one of the war’s more spectacular coups.

  In this case, the man with a plan had been Thomas Cumming, a Quaker merchant from New York who had approached Pitt with information about France’s trading stations on the west coast of Africa— weakly defended posts rich with slaves, gold dust, ivory, and gum senega (the sap of the acacia tree, also known as gum arabic—a product critical to the sizing and dyeing of silk, and always in short supply in Britain). In return for a trade monopoly in Senegal, Cumming offered to guide an expedition to the region and to negotiate with the native rulers for aid. At the beginning of 1758, Pitt had appointed the enterprising Quaker as his political agent and had sent him to West Africa with a small naval squadron (two ships of the line and four auxiliary vessels carrying a couple hundred marines). When this minute force appeared before the unformidable walls of Fort Louis on the Senegal River at the end of April, the French commandant promptly surrendered, the resident factors swore allegiance to George II, and the British took control without losing a man.

  The return to England of Cumming’s ships, deep-laden with slaves, gold, silver, and four hundred tons of valuable gum, prompted Pitt to dispatch a second expedition to seize France’s remaining African posts, Fort St. Michaels on the island of Goree and a slave-trading factory on the River Gambia. By the end of the year, all of it was in British hands. French silk manufacturers had been deprived of the gum senega they needed; sugar planters in the French West Indies had been deprived of the supply of slaves without whom they could not survive; the French privateers who had previously preyed on the Anglo-American slave trade had lost their only secure base of operations on the African coast. By the same token, British textile makers no longer had to buy their gum from the neutral Dutch at high prices, and British sugar planters found their profits growing as a new supply of slaves lowered labor costs. Uncharacteristically for wartime, the pace and the profitability of trade between the mother country and the sugar islands were on the upswing. And all of this had been possible because William Pitt, who would once have had trouble finding Senegal on a map
, had been willing to listen to a buccaneering Quaker who had had the persistence to seek him out.18

  Pitt’s virtually unassailable political position, his robust combination of flexibility and opportunism, his suggestibility, and his ability to exploit whatever measures seemed to work all furnish the backdrop to the important moves he made in September 1758. The news from Louisbourg and Senegal, together with his fading hopes that a decision would soon be gained on the battlefields of Europe, only increased his determination to strip France of her empire while Frederick and Ferdinand held the line in Europe. Thus even before Pitt had finished formulating plans for 1759 he took two steps that would be of great consequence for the coming year’s campaigns. The first came on September 18 when he issued orders relieving Abercromby from command and appointing Jeffery Amherst as his successor. Although Amherst was only forty, he had shown himself to be both competent and successful, qualities combined in no previous American commander in chief. In him Pitt recognized an able administrator who knew how to follow orders as well as give them: a man whom the colonials could trust, and to whom Pitt could entrust the conquest of Canada.

  Negroland. Emmanuel Bowen’s New and Accurate Map of Negroland and the Adjacent Countries(1760) shows the location of Fort Louis, at the mouth of the “Sanaga” (Senegal), the longest river depicted. Goree lies to the south, just below Cape Verde and fifteen degrees north latitude; the next river to the south is the Gambia, site of the slave factory seized in early 1759. Bowen responded to English interest in the commercial potential of the region by carefully portraying the location of the gum forests on either side of the Senegal River, as well as the region’s other resources: gold, ivory, “good Tin,” and slaves. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.