Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Amherst wanted these measures to reduce the disorders of a trade in alcohol that he rightly believed had gotten out of hand, to economize on presents that he knew had become too expensive, and to minimize Indian military capabilities that he feared had become too great. What he did, however, was disable Indian men from carrying on their fall and winter hunts, inhibit their ability to provide for their families and villages, and deprive them of a drug that had become an important part of their social life. Rather than improving their character by forcing them to become soberly attentive to the business of hunting, Amherst had begun to turn the Indians of the interior into sober (and vastly more dangerous) enemies.22 Far from keeping the Indians so busy that they had no time to hatch mischief among themselves, he had given them what they had never had before: a common grievance, and tangible evidence that the English would not hesitate to threaten their way of life.

  CHAPTER 48

  Amherst’s Dilemma

  1761

  INDIAN POLICY WAS only one of many matters on Jeffery Amherst’s mind in 1761, and it was by no means the most pressing. For a variety of reasons—notably the willingness of post commanders and traders on the frontier to disregard the new regulations—rebellions did not immediately erupt in response to the changes he had decreed. Thus Amherst paid comparatively little attention to reports from Detroit of a rumored Indian conspiracy and news of unrest among the Indians around Fort Pitt; he merely assumed, notwithstanding the dire warnings of Sir William Johnson, that his reforms in the Indian trade were having the beneficial, economizing effect he intended. In the meantime Amherst addressed himself to the many problems of winding up the war in North America while fighting dragged on in Europe and elsewhere, with no clear end in sight. These difficulties all derived in one way or another from the need to control a conquered population and secure vast, newly won territories; and to do so with less money and fewer men than ever before.1

  Amherst had established a military government for Canada in September 1760, immediately after Vaudreuil’s capitulation. This improvised system of administration, which divided what had been New France into the three districts of Québec, Trois-Rivières, and Montréal, would last until civil government could be instituted in August 1764. Until then, despite the fact that the governors of the three districts—Brigadier James Murray, Colonel Ralph Burton, and Brigadier Thomas Gage, respectively—ruled with comparative lenity, the government of Canada rested on essentially coercive foundations. At the beginning of 1761, seventeen battalions were stationed in the three districts, and another four battalions controlled the communications corridors that linked Canada to the British colonies and to the interior. Smaller units, of from one to eight companies, garrisoned the remote posts of the west, from Fort Pitt in the Ohio Valley, to Detroit at the head of Lake Erie, to Fort Michilimackinac at the confluence of Lakes Michigan and Huron. Eventually the absence of rebelliousness among the French allowed the garrisons of the Canadian heartland to be reduced, but there would always be at least five and a half battalions in the St. Lawrence Valley, and many more small units would be dispatched to take over French posts as they surrendered on the remote shores of the Great Lakes, in the Illinois Country, on the lower Mississippi, along the Gulf Coast, and in the southern interior. Finally, the British still had to man posts along the Atlantic coast, at St. John’s, Newfoundland, at Halifax and other Nova Scotia sites, and at army headquarters in New York. These together required a steady commitment of approximately four battalions.

  Amherst at the beginning of 1761 had about sixteen thousand regular troops under his command, barely enough to perform the tasks of administration and control that confronted him—particularly since, as he well knew, desertion, death, and discharge would inexorably erode that number. In the best of times, Amherst’s battalions had been about 30 percent understrength; now, owing to the chronic difficulty of replenishing their ranks by enlistment in the colonies and the heavy demand for troops in Europe, which kept large numbers of replacements from being shipped across the Atlantic, he faced a situation that he knew would deteriorate, even as his responsibilities grew. To make matters worse, Pitt had recently ordered him to detach two thousand men for immediate service in the West Indies, and to prepare another six or seven thousand to depart in the fall for the invasion of the French island of Martinique. As much as he had come to despise American provincials—whom he thought barely worth their rations, much less their princely pay—Amherst had no choice but to request more than ten thousand troops from New England, New York, and New Jersey to help garrison his far-flung forts. This in turn meant more expense, and Amherst’s superiors were pressing him to economize with an urgency that would only intensify as the costs of the European war continued to mount. Always eager to please, Amherst constantly searched for ingenious ways to cut expenses while fulfilling his administrative responsibilities and securing the conquests. In the end, his solutions mainly succeeded in rendering his job more difficult.2

  One of Amherst’s initiatives involved the early promotion of settlement. As early as 1759 he had agreed to requests from enterprising officers, provincial and regular alike, for grants of land in the vicinity of various posts. On November 10 that year, the colonels of the Massachusetts and Connecticut regiments had asked for permission to promote settlement along the road that had recently been completed from Fort Number 4 on the Connecticut River to Crown Point. That same day Major Philip Skene of the 27th Regiment had approached him with a request to ratify a venture he had already begun by settling a “number of poor families and some servants” at the head of Lake Champlain. Amherst tentatively agreed to both ventures and asked Pitt to have the Privy Council confirm his grants. Later he encouraged regular officers to begin settling civilians on a ten thousand–acre grant near Fort Niagara, and on a similar tract in the neighborhood of Fort Stanwix, at the Great Carrying Place between the Mohawk and Wood Creek. He also sanctioned settlements along the Forbes Road around Forts Bedford, Ligonier, and Pitt and was at least aware of settlements near other backwoods posts. The promoters of these schemes intended to make a speculative profit on the sale of lands to farmers, to promote trade, or even (in the case of Skene) to create manors on which they could settle tenants whom they would import from Europe. To Amherst, however, the new settlements offered a practical, economical solution to two problems. Most important, these settlements would insure the local availability of food, at a reasonable price, to garrisons that would otherwise have to continue hauling in provisions over vast distances. Second, they seemed to provide the only possible way to contain and control the migration of farm families to the now presumably safe frontier.3

  By the fall of 1761 the valleys of the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, Loyalhanna, and Allegheny Rivers upstream from Pittsburgh were attracting backwoods settlers and hunters in such numbers that the commandant of Fort Pitt found it necessary to issue a proclamation forbidding settlement except where specifically authorized. Eventually he ordered the houses of squatters burned. Under such pressure, the officially sanctioned community at the Forks of the Ohio grew rapidly, as its inhabitants felled tracts of forest for fuel and building materials; planted fields of corn and beans; began a school for their children; constructed houses and barns, stores and warehouses, mills, brick kilns, and tanyards; excavated quarries for stone and lime, and opened a coal mine on a hill overlooking the Monongahela.4

  Pittsburgh, and even the smaller settlements that grew up at Niagara, Fort Stanwix, on Lake Champlain, and elsewhere near frontier forts, were larger and more intrusive than any French trading post had ever been. Indian leaders understood only too well that the settlers had not necessarily come to trade with and live peaceably among them. While many had indeed come as traders whose presence was at least in general desirable, many more were coming to farm and to hunt, activities that competed directly with Indian subsistence. Those farmers and hunters, moreover, harbored attitudes shaped by seven years of bloody backwoods war, by no means favorable to Indians. Ye
t disruptive—and menacing— as their presence might be, no nativist leader could hope to expel them by force without first reckoning with the soldiers of the forts themselves: troops who were at once more alien, more numerous, and more heavily armed than the French had ever been.

  Thus what seemed to Amherst to be sensible, economical solutions to the problems of supplying his garrisons and controlling the immigration of frontier families onto Indian lands looked to the Indians who traded at the forts like something else: colonization in the wake of conquest. In persuading them to abandon the French alliance, the British had pledged themselves to open a plentiful trade on favorable terms, and when the war was done to withdraw their soldiers. But more and more, in 1761 and after, the Indians came to understand these promises as lies. How else could they reasonably interpret the failure of the British to pull troops out of the west? How else could they explain the growth of civilian communities around the forts, or Amherst’s abrupt refusal to bestow presents, or new trade regulations that would render them both defenseless and dependent? At the end of 1761, however, Sir Jeffery Amherst saw none of the Indians’ concerns, for he had problems enough of his own.

  CHAPTER 49

  Pitt’s Problems

  1761

  BACK IN LONDON, William Pitt had problems too—political ones that dwarfed anything that Amherst faced in America. These would shape the remainder of the war and its conclusion and deeply influence the politics of a critical decade in British and American history. To understand them, we need first to realize that while in late 1760 William Pitt was the most powerful figure in British politics, his power depended on two factors beyond his control. More than even Pitt knew, his fortunes were hostage to the character of the new king and to the course of a stalemated European war.

  George III was twenty-two years old when he ascended the throne, a limited, immature man, and all too easy to underestimate. His father, Frederick Lewis, prince of Wales, had died when George was only thirteen. Frederick had rejected his father’s and grandfather’s devotion to Hanover along with their embrace of the Whig party. Had he lived, he would doubtless have striven to make the monarchy symbolically central to the British national identity that was still taking form. George was old enough at Frederick’s death to have absorbed his ambitions, but he was fated to pass his teenage years at Leicester House, the focus of the “reversionary interest” and the very heart of opposition to the court and its policies. Because of his youth, George as heir apparent was more observer than actor in the schemes of his mother, the dowager princess Augusta, and his tutor, Lord Bute. Because of this, he imbibed their views on politics and politicians wholeheartedly, leavening them with his own powerful conviction that people and issues must be divided into morally absolute categories of right and wrong. George had been a reluctant student—he evidently did not read until he was eight years old and wrote like a child through his teens—but like many late bloomers he made great strides at the end of adolescence. At the time of his accession no informed observer could have missed his marked intelligence, nor failed to see the odd skew his emotions had given it. 1

  It was not limitations of mind but certain characteristics of personality that made the new king a problematic figure for Pitt and the rest of Britain’s ruling oligarchy. George was unswervingly loyal to people he trusted and ideas he believed to be true; and he behaved in ways that a modern psychologist might interpret as obsessive. As a young man he developed remarkably regular habits. As he aged these would grow rigid: he would, for example, eat virtually the same dinner every day of his adult life (bread, soup, beets or turnips, and mutton—varying only on Sundays, when he allowed himself roast beef). The regularity of his tastes bespoke a deeper hunger for order. It was no accident that he would become a great collector of Canaletto paintings and of ingenious orreries and chronometers, for both Canaletto and clockwork offered the reassuring precision he looked for in the universe and longed for in human relationships.2

  Mercurial, brilliant, and charismatic, William Pitt at the zenith of his power seemed to George to be precisely the kind of man who was most dangerous in politics. Once Pitt had been Leicester House’s darling and had seemed to the prince to exemplify the principles that would be Britain’s salvation: incorruptibility in politics, aversion to factionalism and self-interest, and a refusal to compromise British interests by allowing foreign policy to be driven by concern for Hanover. Everything George had loathed in his grandfather, especially his partisanship and his fixation on “that horrid Electorate,” Pitt had opposed before he had become chief minister. But Pitt’s alliance with Newcastle, his volte-face on engagement in the continental war, his willingness to ingratiate himself with the old king without regard to prior expressions of principle: these had helped convince George that Pitt was a man of no moral character, no trustworthiness, at all. Pitt’s refusal to intervene with the king and preserve the reputation of General Bligh after the disaster of St.-Cas, his rejection of the advice that George’s beloved Bute offered, and his readiness to jettison his Leicester House connections once they became inconvenient: these had proven to the prince that Pitt was “the most dishonorable of men . . . the blackest of hearts.”3

  George wanted most of all to be a king who stood as truly above party as Pitt had once seemed to stand: a king of all the people of Great Britain, as his father had intended to be, and not just the servant—as his grandfather had been—of the Whig oligarchs who controlled the House of Commons. In his first address to Parliament, he took pains to announce that he gloried “in the name Briton,” and he meant it with all his callow soul. He intended to serve the interest of all Britons, Scots and Welsh and English alike, and above all he understood that to do so would require ending what in his inaugural statement to the Privy Council he attempted to call “a bloody war.” Attempted, because Pitt had caught his tone beforehand and insisted that he change the words to “an expensive but just and necessary war,” which he would would pursue “in concert with our allies” until it was possible to obtain “an honourable and lasting peace.”4 The new king acquiesced. But he had not been persuaded that the war was either just or necessary, and from the beginning of his reign he made it his goal not only to end it, but to terminate the political ascendancy of the man he identified with its continuance. The interests of the whole people, George III believed, were no longer being served by William Pitt; they would be better protected by a Briton as truehearted and impartial as he was himself, the earl of Bute.

  The young king: George III (1738–1820). This Woollett engraving of a portrait by Allan Ramsay shows the king as he would have appeared at court in his early thirties. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  But while Lord Bute coveted the office of first lord of the Treasury, he also feared Pitt, who had declared on the first day of the new reign that “he must act as an independent minister or not at all, that his politics were like his religion, which would admit of no accommodation,” and that “if the system of the war was to undergo the least change or shadow of a change,” he would resign. That statement required no decoding: Newcastle and all the rest of the ministers would stay on, or Pitt would go. And thus although the former prince’s tutor was beyond doubt the man whom the king trusted most in all the world, his ambitions were for the moment blocked by Pitt’s popularity as the most successful war leader in British history. Sophisticated and handsome, and yet also an outsider, and temperamentally aloof—as Walpole put it, “unknown, ungracious, and a Scot”—Bute would for the time being hold only the ceremonial office of Groom of the Stole. George stipulated that Bute be admitted to meetings of the cabinet, but he would have to wait more than five months before he assumed an official role in government. In the meantime, Pitt would continue to operate as before and assume that his control was as complete as it had ever been. In the realm of strategy, this meant the execution of his plan to seize Belle-Île-en-Mer, the fortified island just outside Quiberon Bay, and the continuation of
plans to conquer Martinique. Both expeditions went forward in 1761, and both succeeded in obtaining yet more territory for Britain, more leverage to be exerted in the peace negotiations. As a matter of practical fact, however, the entry of Bute into active politics changed more than Pitt realized, for it put a direct contender for power into the cabinet and gave Newcastle—ironically Newcastle, for his was the job Bute wanted—an ally in his search for a way to end the war.5

  Because Newcastle acted as the government’s chief fund-raiser among the “money’d men” of the City, the war’s expense never ceased to torment him. Better than most politicians—and much more acutely than Pitt, who naively believed that the government’s credit was bottomless— Newcastle understood that the financial resources of the nation had been stretched taut by taxation and borrowing. Yet the war on the Continent dragged on, seemingly without any prospect of ending, while its costs mounted to ever more terrifying heights. Decisive victories were nowhere to be seen. Frederick had finished the campaign of 1760 with a victory over Daun at Torgau, a strategic crossing on the River Elbe. This victory, however, cost the Prussian army seventeen thousand men against sixteen thousand Austrians, and it settled nothing. Daun merely withdrew across the river, while Frederick’s forces were so depleted that he could only send them into winter quarters. He had staved off the Austrian threat to Berlin but remained powerless to remove the enemy from Silesia, or even from Saxony.6

  The “Dearest Friend”: John Stuart, third earl of Bute (1713–92). Allan Ramsay’s 1760 portrait, engraved by William Wynne Ryland in 1763, shows the “unknown, ungracious” Scot at the height of his influence, wearing the ceremonial robes of a member of the House of Lords, as well as the chain that symbolized his recent appointment as first lord of the Treasury. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.