Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Meanwhile, the supreme commander scarcely had a friend, let alone a patron, left in the British government. Pitt was in opposition, Ligonier had been deprived of his most lucrative offices and all effective control over the army in March, and the duke of Cumberland had been incapacitated by a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and half-blind. When in August the earl of Egremont gave Amherst his long-sought permission to return home, however, he spared him the embarrassment of a formal dismissal by indicating only that His Majesty required advice on military affairs in America. Overjoyed, Amherst summoned Major General Thomas Gage down from Montréal, where he had marooned him as military governor in October 1760. Gage, equally happy to be spared a fourth Canadian winter, arrived at New York on the evening of Wednesday, November 16. Without ceremony Amherst handed over his papers, sketched the plans he had set in motion for the coming year’s campaigns, and formally invested Gage with the supreme command of His Majesty’s forces in North America. The next day, aboard the packet Weasel bound for Plymouth, we may suppose that Amherst heaved a sigh of relief as the coastline sank below the horizon. A man not prone to reflection, he probably wasted little time musing on his successor’s prospects. Leaving a set of colonies he despised in the care of an officer he distrusted, in the midst of an rebellion he had not foreseen, Amherst was undoubtedly preoccupied with his own immediate future. He would have to minister to a mad wife and salvage a languishing estate; but at last he would receive his hero’s reward. Only after he arrived in London would Sir Jeffery Amherst realize that he had been summoned, not to be feted as the conqueror of Canada, but to be blamed for a rebellion that—in his own mind, at least—had come out of thin air.8

  PART VIII

  CRISIS AND REFORM

  1764

  Pontiac’s War brings a new sense of urgency to George Grenville’s efforts to deal with American affairs. The future of the army and the demand for revenue. The need for a coherent Indian policy and the Proclamation of 1763. The American Duties Act of 1764 and the dual necessity of taxation and control. The significance of the Currency Act. The colonists, confronting depression and political unrest, react ambiguously to Britain’s reforms, while Gage prolongs Pontiac’s War into 1765. The lessons of a pan-Indian rebellion.

  CHAPTER 58

  Death Reshuffles a Ministry

  1763

  THE LONDON PRESS broadcast the first news of Indian rebellion in July 1763, further clouding a political atmosphere heavy with the smoke of Wilkes’s fires. The Triumvirate of Grenville, Halifax, and Egremont groped through the murk, recalling Amherst in the hope of averting more military calamities and accelerating plans for imperial reform in order to preserve order once the Indians had been pacified. As the news from the colonies worsened during the first three weeks of August and the London mob grew steadily more obstreperous, the ministry weakened and wavered. The king made no secret of his readiness to hand the government over to another leader, should a suitable candidate present himself. It was not until the morning of Sunday the twenty-first that George’s fears of aggravating the crisis overrode his desire to give Grenville the sack. Summoning the prime minister to the palace at nine, the king announced that he had chosen not to alter existing arrangements. Whatever relief Grenville felt, however, lasted only until he reached Egremont’s door and discovered that the earl had just suffered a heart attack. By nine that night he was dead.1

  The secretary of state for the Southern Department could hardly have found a less opportune time to die, and not only because he was responsible for formulating colonial policy. The necessity of replacing him raised questions of patronage requiring royal assent, and that gave George III a fresh chance to eject Grenville from office in favor of a patriot minister capable of rising above party. The king’s unsteady compass now swung toward Pitt, and he spent another week making overtures to the Great Commoner while consulting Bute for advice. He had every right to do these things, of course, and given the ordinary pace of eighteenth-century British politics, a week was not a long time to take. But a week was long enough to destroy the last vestiges of confidence between monarch and prime minister. When George at last understood that Pitt’s terms for accepting office included giving the Treasury to Grenville’s odious brother, the earl Temple—the man who had paid for John Wilkes’s press—he decided once more that he would have to trust the incumbent. Grenville, for his part, decided that he could never trust the king again.

  Two more weeks passed before the shuffling of offices finally ended. The earl of Halifax moved into the position for which his experience and preferences suited him, secretary of state for the South. John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich, took over as secretary for the North. The earl of Shelburne, president of the Board of Trade, had been so embarrassingly implicated in a plot to supplant Grenville with the duke of Bedford that he was forced to resign. This allowed Halifax to hand the presidency over to a protégé with an interest in American affairs, Wills Hill, earl of Hillsborough. Shelburne, with nowhere to go but the opposition, gravitated into an alliance with Pitt; Bedford, too powerful to be ignored, became lord president of the Privy Council. By mid-September sufficient equilibrium returned to the high politics of place and honor that the ministers could turn again to questions of imperial policy and order. That was none too soon. While the ministry sorted itself out, America had been turning into an issue no one could ignore.2

  The previous ministry neglected the colonies until an Indian uprising had practically destroyed Britain’s hold on the interior of North America, but from the fall of 1763 through the following spring Grenville and Halifax attended to reforming imperial relations with an intensity rarely seen before. They set out to create a secure and financially stable empire: to institute political order within the conquests, restore peace in the west, and use the prosperity of the older colonies to strengthen the empire as a whole. These were innovations, but Grenville and company were not making up a program out of whole cloth. The king himself had set the priorities according to which they acted. The pivot on which the new imperial relationship would turn, the army, was already in place. Since the beginning of the year the Board of Trade had been drafting plans for colonial reorganization. Every measure that Grenville and Halifax would propose reflected a consensus, broadly shared in Whitehall and Westminster, on the nature of the empire and Britain’s power to control it. Halifax, who had been thinking about the colonies for fifteen years, was arguably the best man in Britain to direct reforms in the imperial relationship, and nobody knew more about taxation than Grenville.

  And yet, for all that, the program that Halifax and Grenville proposed, which Parliament would pass into law and which the king would approve, would prove more energetic than coherent, setting the stage for disasters beside which the Indian insurrection would seem trivial. The reason why was simple. Down to virtually their last detail, the reforms reflected the legacies and the lessons of the Seven Years’ War as construed at the highest levels of metropolitan power. Grenville and Halifax, in that regard, responded to current problems not on an ad hoc basis, but with a firm sense of historical context. Unfortunately for the empire’s future, they had no equally well considered sense of how their reforms would interact with postwar conditions, nor—given those—any clear idea of how their initiative might appear to colonists whose understandings of the war and its lessons differed significantly from their own.

  CHAPTER 59

  An Urgent Search for Order GRENVILLE AND HALIFAX CONFRONT THE NEED FOR REVENUE AND CONTROL

  SUMMER-AUTUMN 1763

  LIKE AN ELEVATION benchmark from which a surveyor begins his loop and to which he must return at its end, the ministers’ planning for America started, and in time would conclude, with the British army. By the end of the summer few Americans and no Englishmen doubted that the redcoats were the colonies’ best bulwark against Indian attacks. This in turn seemed to validate a decision taken at Whitehall near the end of 1762, seven months before anyone in Britain had heard of Pont
iac, to maintain a large peacetime garrison in America. But Bute’s ministry had decided to keep troops in the colonies for reasons that had less to do with the empire than with other—and at the time, seemingly more pressing— concerns. In late 1762 the prospect of demobilization posed devastating problems in parliamentary politics, and a permanent American army seemed to offer the only reasonable solution.

  The army had expanded enormously during the war, ending with approximately 100,000 men under arms in 115 regiments.1 To maintain such a force permanently was inconceivable financially, ideologically, and politically. With peace in the offing, virtually everyone from the duke of Newcastle to otherwise mute Tory squires on the Commons backbenches demanded severe reductions in the army and navy and rigid economy in government spending. A government that chose not to reduce the armed forces would be handing the opposition a club with which to beat it senseless. Yet to return the army to its prewar level of 49 regiments and 35,000 men was impossible, for two reasons.

  First came the strategic necessity of securing the new empire. Peace was clearly going to leave Britain in possession of overseas territories, and alien populations, that would need to be policed internally and defended against foreign aggression. No one thought that seventy or eighty thousand former French subjects in Canada would long remain docile unless a substantial armed force remained to remind them of Britain’s power. Nor did any minister seriously propose leaving the west to the Indians. In December 1762, no one knew what hell French traders and former officers might try to raise among their old clients and friends. The sensibleness of those fears seemed only to be confirmed in the following fall when it became clear how nearly simultaneous the attacks on the western posts had been, suggesting the obvious conclusion that French agents coordinated them all, in a great conspiracy to retain Louisiana and Illinois and regain control of the pays d’en haut. Immediate withdrawal from either Canada or the west was so unthinkable that, in formulating policy, no one even asked whether British forces should remain in America. The only real questions concerned how many battalions should be left, where they should be stationed, and how long they should stay. Factors other than imperial policy, however, would decree that the American garrison should be a permanent one.

  The second, more significant, reason that the ministers decided in favor of a large peacetime force for the colonies was a matter of practicality and parliamentary management—which made it, of course, the most pressing concern of all. To demobilize the army to prewar levels would force hundreds of colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors (not to mention hordes of captains and subalterns) into retirement on half pay. If the welfare of fifty thousand suddenly unemployed enlisted men caused the government little concern, the fate of fifteen hundred officers had the opposite effect, for the excellent reason that many of them either sat in Parliament or were the sons and brothers and nephews and cousins of men who did. No prudent minister, and certainly no patriot king, could let so many deserving gentlemen go unrewarded. But how could they be provided for in a financially responsible way? America held the answer, and the king himself found it.2

  Like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, George III took a keen interest in the army. He was determined to preserve it at levels of strength and readiness higher than those at which it had entered the Seven Years’ War, and he dedicated considerable ingenuity to finding a way to do so while holding costs down to a politically manageable level. After careful thought and much labored calculation (sums never having been his strong suit), the king concluded that it would in fact be possible to maintain more than eighty regiments on active duty and still make “the expence . . . some hundred pounds cheaper than the establishment [had been] ... in 1749.”3

  Two conditions had to be met in order to perform this improbable feat. First, every regiment would have to be reduced to a single battalion of five hundred men. The political advantages of more than halving the number of enlisted men on active service while maintaining nearly three-quarters of the army’s current regiments—and therefore almost three-quarters of its officers—could hardly be missed. The king of course understood that perfectly, but his real interest in keeping so many understrength battalions on active service was to render Britain more secure in the event of war. British patriotism could be relied upon to fill the ranks with recruits, as it had since 1756; but only his new-modeled army would insure enough trained officers and sergeants to lead them.

  Second, a double obstacle had to be surmounted: finance, since keeping up eighty permanent regiments would necessarily cost more than the forty-nine regiments of 1749; and ideology, for Tories and opposition Whigs alike were sure to raise the traditional objections against enlarging the peacetime establishment. George’s solution showed his genius in full flower, for it leveled both barriers with one deft stroke. It was simply this: there would be no expansion of the number of troops stationed in Britain. Twenty of the new battalions would be stationed in the American colonies (including the West Indies) and twelve would be added to the Irish establishment. Parliament would pay for these new garrisons only in 1763. Thereafter taxes on the colonies would support the troops stationed there, and the Irish Parliament would bear the expense of that island’s new defenders.4

  It was imperative that the colonies, not Parliament, pay for the American regiments. The furor over the cider excise, which contributed to Bute’s departure from political life in April 1763, left no doubt about British ratepayers’ enthusiasm for tax increases. Grenville knew that one of the biggest fights that awaited his government when the Commons reconvened in mid-November would come when the opposition moved to revise or repeal the cider tax. Faced with the responsibility for servicing a national debt that had practically doubled during the war and now approximated £146,000,000 sterling, the government literally could not afford to surrender any source of revenue. Grenville thought he might be able to modify the operation of the cider tax, but if the opposition wanted more than symbolic concessions and could assemble a majority in favor of repeal, the government would be overthrown on what amounted to a noconfidence vote. Given the drained state of the Treasury and the government’s tenuous hold on its majority in the Commons, the minimum of £225,000 a year it would cost to keep twenty battalions in the colonies could not be added to the budget. But virtually everyone agreed that the Americans could comfortably bear such an expense, which worked out to substantially less than two shillings per capita, per annum.5

  No British politician who had been awake for the past six years would have denied that the colonies benefited handsomely from the war. Army and navy expenditures in the colonies from 1756 through 1762 amounted to over six million pounds sterling, in addition to parliamentary reimbursements in excess of a million pounds paid directly to the colonial governments. This influx of credit and specie had enabled the Americans to double the volume of their imports from Britain during the conflict. Everybody knew, of course, that the colonists paid for their own governments and militia establishments. Yet they also knew that the colonists contributed to the support of the empire only by paying customs revenues on their trade, and the customs receipts barely covered the costs of collection. Moreover, the regiments were being stationed in America to protect Americans. Justice, no less than economic realism, decreed that the colonies should contribute modestly from their prosperity to relieve the burdens under which the metropolis now groaned.6

  In fact Parliament had already taken a step toward enhancing collections from the colonial customs in the Revenue Act of 1762. This measure aimed at reducing the volume of smuggling by authorizing naval officers to assist customs officials, and by offering them incentives to do so energetically. In a way more or less typical of Bute’s ministry, this measure had been passed only to be forgotten. In May 1763, however, Grenville revived it when he committed the Treasury to improving customs collections in the colonies and asked that the Privy Council direct the implementation of the act. The resulting Order in Council of June 1 foretold Grenville’s
determination to implant teeth in a system that colonial smugglers and corrupt, absentee customs officers had effectively defanged. In early July the Southern secretary put the colonial governors on notice that His Majesty expected the customs to be collected according to law and assigned forty-four Royal Navy vessels to aid in enforcement. Late that month, Grenville ordered all absentee customsmen to resume their posts in the colonies. Anyone who had not left Britain by August 31 would be dismissed from the service.7

  Thus the push to collect revenues from colonial sources began, in a general way, during the summer of 1763. In September, however, when the ministers turned their full attention to reform, raising revenues in the colonies became a matter of first priority. If they understood nothing else about America, the ministers knew that an army engaged in suppressing an Indian rebellion would cost the Treasury more than an army tucked up in forts and barracks. They also knew that there were two ways to raise a colonial revenue. George Grenville decided to try both.

  The most obvious, least troublesome means was merely to make the colonists pay what they already owed. That this would be Grenville’s first priority was evident in his disposition to end the lackadaisical, corrupt collection of customs duties. It became unmistakable in an order he signed on October 4, directing that enforcement measures in American ports be carried out as strictly as in Britain, and recommending that the Admiralty establish a uniform system of vice-admiralty courts in the colonies, in order to make the seizure and sale of smuggled cargoes as efficient there as at home. 8