Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  3. John Robert McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 26–45, 106–202.

  4. Albemarle’s appointment as general in charge of the expedition marked the completed rehabilitation of the duke of Cumberland, under way since the accession of George III. See Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), 349; J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst: A Soldier of the King (New York, 1933), 163; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 283.

  5. Allan J. Kuethe, Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986), 17; “An Account of the Taking of the Havannah,” Gentleman’s Magazine 32 (1762): 459–64.

  6. “Memoir of an Invalid,” quoted in Gipson, Culmination, 266 n. 39.

  7. Jeffery Amherst, The Journal of Jeffery Amherst, ed. J. Clarence Webster (Chicago, 1931), 283 (9 June 1762), 287 (5 July 1762); Gipson, Culmination, 264–8; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:265–82. The Spanish navy had forty-eight ships of the line, only twenty of which were sea-worthy; thus the naval toll at Havana was truly crippling for Spain. (See Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 [Cambridge, U.K., 1985], 210.)

  8. The most reliable figures available are only partial, ignoring the toll among provincials and evacuated regular soldiers. They are, nonetheless, horrifying: 5,366 dead in the land forces between 7 June and 18 Oct., 88 percent from disease; 1,300 seamen dead in the same period, 95 percent from disease, and another 3,300 still sick at the time of the report. Dr. Johnson’s response—“May my country be never cursed with such another conquest”—aptly sums up the effects of a siege which was, day for day, Britain’s costliest military operation of the Seven Years’ War. See McNeill, Atlantic Empires, 104, 248–9 nn. 147 and 148. The one provincial unit for which accurate figures are available suggests that the mortality was actually worse than among the regulars: of the 1,050 men in the Connecticut Regiment, 625 (59.5 percent) died before returning home. See [Albert C. Bates, ed.], The Two Putnams: Israel and Rufus in the Havana Expedition 1762 and in the Mississippi River Exploration 1772–73 with some account of The Company of Military Adventurers (Hartford, 1931), 5.

  9. Hides: McNeill, Atlantic Empires, 170–3. Tobacco and sugar backlogs and monopoly structure of Cuban-Spanish trade: Kuethe, Cuba, 53–4, 62–3. Demand for labor and transition to sugar: ibid., 66–7; McNeill, Atlantic Empires, 129–30, 166–70. Numbers of ships visiting Havana during the occupation, influx of cheap British goods and slaves: Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore, 1983), 78–9.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO: Peace

  1. Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–1763 (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 269–72; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 300–4; Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 3.

  2. Wiggin, Faction of Cousins, 272–6; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 297–8, 318, 342, 361–4; Thomas, British Politics,3–4.

  3. Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 307–9.

  4. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:377–90; Gipson, Culmination, 305–11; Walter F. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740–1763 (New York, 1940), 378–83.

  5. Ibid., 378, 384.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE:

  The Rise of Wilkes, the Fall of Bute, and the Unheeded Lesson of Manila

  1. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (New York, 1894), 1:184; and see Lewis B. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930), 469–70.

  2. Ibid., 469.

  3. J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (New York, 1957), 55, 83; Lewis B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (New York, 1957), 299–357; id., England in the Age of the American Revolution, 59–65.

  4. On the political ideology of Georgian Britain and the colonies, see esp. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967; rev. ed., 1992); and J. G. A. Pocock, The MachiavellianMoment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975). On popular politics and the press, see John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, U.K., 1976), 139–60. On the significance of the middle classes and professionals, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 55–145.

  5. On Wilkes generally, see George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962); and R. W. Postgate, That Devil Wilkes (New York, 1929). On his context in political culture (and esp. the Scottophobia of his supporters), see Colley, Britons, 105–17 et passim; Brewer, Party Ideology, 163–200; and Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill, and Reform (London, 1962), 1–24. On his ties with the earl Temple and the internal divisions in the Grenville-Pitt faction, see Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–1763 (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 204–5, 267–8, 294–5.

  6. On Grenville’s personality, see John Brooke, King George III (New York, 1972), 107–8; and, more charitably, Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984). The king had a horror of Grenville’s ability to bore: “When he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch to see if he may not tire me for an hour more” (quoted in Brooke, 108).

  7. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 22–7.

  8. Louis Kronenberger, The Extraordinary Mr. Wilkes: His Life and Times (New York, 1974),

  54. Cf. the more favorable estimate of Sandwich’s character and activities in N. A. M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich (New York, 1993), 80–4.

  9. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 28–36; quotation is from Thomas Ramsden to Charles Jenkinson, 11 Dec. 1763, quoted at 35. On Martin’s effort to kill Wilkes the best evidence is circumstantial; see Walpole, Memoirs of George III, 1:249–53.

  10. Except as noted, the following account of the Manila campaign is based on Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 275–83.

  11. Gregorio F. Zaide, The Pageant of Philippine History: Political, Economic, and Socio-Cultural, vol. 2, From the British Invasion to the Present (Manila, 1979), 10. The Manila galleon, taken as it arrived on 30 Oct., was worth about three million dollars in cargo and coin; Manila paid another half million in ransom; and soldiers, sailors, and irregulars seized at least a million dollars’ worth of plunder in the sack of the city.

  12. Zaide, Pageant, 2:17–24. On Anda’s resistance, see Capt. Thomas Backhouse to the secretary at war, 31 Jan. and 10 Feb. 1764, and Backhouse to Draper, 10 Feb. 1764, in Nicholas P. Cushner, ed., Documents Illustrating the British Conquest of Manila, 1762–1763 (London, 1971), 196–202. On the costs of administration (below), see “The East India Company’s case with respect to booty,” 2 Oct. 1764, and “Reimbursement requested by the East India Company for the Expedition to Manila,” 28 June 1775, ibid., 208–11.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR: Anglo-America at War’s End: The Fragility of Empire

  1. Quotation: Bernard’s speech to the General Court, 14 Apr. 1762, Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, vol. 38, part 2, 1762 (Boston, 1968), 302 (hereafter cited as JHRM). Bernard (1711–79), allied by marriage with the family of Vis
count Barrington, the secretary at war, had been governor of New Jersey from 1758; he moved to Massachusetts after Thomas Pownall was recalled, arriving on 2 Aug. 1760. (See Dictionary of American Biography and Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Bernard, Sir Francis.”)

  2. In 1759, the colonies as a whole fielded 81.4 percent of the men requested for the year (16,835 of 20,680); in 1760, 75.3 percent (15,942 of 21,180); in 1761, 9,296 of 11,607, or 80.1 percent; in 1762, 9,204 of 10,173, or 90.5 percent. Insofar as these were virtually all voluntary enlistments, it would seem that the northern colonies suffered little diminution in popular enthusiasm for the imperial enterprise once the French and Indian threat had been eliminated. The records of individual colonies bear this out in comparing the percentages of men raised to the number requested in each year from 1760 to 1762. Note the general consistency of Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and the New England provinces (with the exception of Rhode Island, where the availability of berths on privateersmen cut heavily into the willingness of men to enlist in provincial regiments).

  The qualitative assessments of contemporaries tend to bear out the quantitative implications of this chart. See, for example, Bernard’s comment to the Massachusetts General Court on the raising of provincials in 1762:

  Whatever shall be the Event of the War, it must be no small Satisfaction to us that this Province hath contributed its full Share to the Support of it. Every Thing that has been required of it hath been most readily complied with: And the Execution of the Powers committed to me for raising the Provincial Troops hath been as full and compleat as the Grant of them was. Never before were the Regiments so easily levied, so well composed, and so early in the Field as they have been this year. The common People seemed to be animated with the Spirit of the General Court, and to vie with them in their Readiness to serve their King (Bernard to the General Court, 27 May 1762, JHRM, vol. 39 1762–63 [Boston, 1969], 10 May 1762).

  Thomas Hutchinson observed that by the final years of the conflict the people of the Bay Colony had grown habituated to the demands of imperial warfare. (See History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, vol. 3 [Cambridge, Mass., 1936], 70.)

  Georgia did not appear in Amherst’s calculations of colonial participation because it was too poor to raise and pay for provincials on its own; yet it contributed men to the war effort in proportions that may have approximated those of Massachusetts and Connecticut in the last years of the war, by raising several companies of “Georgia Rangers.” These dragoons, or mounted infantry, patrolled the frontier against French (from Fort Toulouse), Spanish (from St. Augustine), and Indian enemies, and were American colonists. They were not provincials, however, because they received their pay and rations on the regular establishment, as did the rangers who served with the northern armies after 1756. On the Georgia Rangers, see Shy, Toward Lexington, 214–15; W. W. Abbot, The Royal Governors of Georgia, 1754–1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 103–25; and esp. James M. Johnson, Militiamen, Rangers, and Redcoats: The Military in Georgia, 1754–1776 (Macon, Ga., 1992).

  3. For Amherst’s views on the colonists, see id., Journal, 267 (8 June 1761), 279–80 (19 Feb. 1762), 286 (29 June 1762); Pitt to Amherst, 13 Aug. 1761, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:462–3; and (on fraudulent practices of various sorts) J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933), 151–2. Quotation: Egremont to Deputy Gov. James Hamilton, 27 Nov. 1762, in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 261 n. 23.

  4. Quotation: Pitt to Governors in North America and the West Indies, 23 Aug. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:320. On Hutchinson and the politics of Massachusetts during this crucial period, see Malcolm Freiberg, Prelude to Purgatory: Thomas Hutchinson in Provincial Politics, 1760–1770 (New York, 1990), 1–54; Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 1–69; Clifford K. Shipton’s sketch in id., ed., Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 6 (Boston, 1949), 149–217; John Waters, The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 76–161. The following account of the writs of assistance controversy is drawn principally from M. H. Smith, The Writs of Assistance Case (Berkeley, Calif., 1978); John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 25–63; and Gipson, The British Empire before the AmericanRevolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 111–31. For general political context, see William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981), 163–75. (Thomas Pownall appointed Hutchinson lieutenant governor in 1758, hoping to utilize his administrative and organizational talents in managing the Massachusetts war effort. Hutchinson served with distinction; but he fell out with Pownall, whose populist politics he abhorred. Bernard, recognizing Hutchinson’s experience, capacity, and alienation from Pownall’s political supporters, appointed him chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature on 13 Nov. 1760. Two previous governors, Shirley and Pownall, had promised this post to James Otis Sr. This so alienated James Otis Jr. that he “swore revenge” on his father’s behalf against both the governor and Hutchinson, and soon made himself a leading figure in the opposition, or country party, in the assembly [Waters, Otis Family, 119].)

  5. “Carnival”: Marcus Hansen, from The Mingling of Canadian and American Peoples, quoted in Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986), 364. On this phase in Nova Scotia history, see esp. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 129–42; George Rawlyk, Nova Scotia’s Massachusetts: A Study of Massachusetts–Nova Scotia Relations, 1630 to 1784 (Montréal, 1973), 218–22; John Bartlett Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years (New York, 1937), 3–121; R. S. Longley, “The Coming of the New England Planters to the Annapolis Valley,” in Margaret Conrad, ed., They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada (Fredericton, N.B., 1988), 14–28; and Elizabeth Mancke, “Corporate Structure and Private Interest: The Mid-Eighteenth Century Expansion of New England,” ibid., 161–77.

  6. On the progress of Skene’s settlement, see Doris Begor Morton, Philip Skene of Skenesborough (Glanville, N.Y., 1959), 31; on the rush to the Mohawk (presumably around Fort Stanwix), see Jack Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1961), 47–8.

  7. Michael Bellesiles, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 28–32, 41–6; see also Matt Bushnell Jones, Vermont in the Making, 1750–1777 (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 22–3, 42–5, 76–7, 430–2.

  8. Robert W. Ramsey, Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747–1762 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964), especially 95–105, 152–70; 193–9; Rachel N. Klein, Unificationof a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), 14, 54.

  9. “Over run”: Bouquet to Fauquier, n.d., quoted in Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1939), 141. On Bouquet’s attempts to expel squatters, see Gipson, New Responsibilities, 89–90.

  10. Buck and Buck, Planting of Civilization, 141.

  11. Alfred P. James, The Ohio Company: Its Inner History (Pittsburgh, 1959), 113–26; Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (1937; reprint, New York, 1959), 10–11; Sosin, Whitehall, 42–6.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE: Yankees Invade Wyoming—and Pay the Price

  1. On Susqu
ehannah Company operations and popularity in Connecticut, see Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Susquehannah Company Papers, vol. 2, 1756–1767 (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 1930), xvii–xix; Thomas Penn to Lord Halifax, 10 Dec. 1760, ibid., 35; “Minutes of a Meeting of the Susquehannah Company,” 9 Apr. 1761, ibid., 72–6; and Ezra Stiles to Pelatiah Webster, 21 May 1763, ibid., 221–33, 230–1. See also Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 387–8.

  2. Quotation from the Opinion of Charles Yorke, Solicitor General, 30 Mar. 1761, SusquehannahPapers, 2:68; cf. Opinion of Charles Pratt [attorney general], 7 Mar. 1761, ibid., 64–6. On progress of settlements at Cushitunk, see Deposition of James Hyndshaw Regarding the Settlers at Cushietunk, 29 Apr. 1761, ibid., 81–4.

  3. Narrative of Daniel Brodhead’s Journey to Wyoming, 27 Sept. 1762, ibid., 166–9; conference with Teedyuscung, 19 Nov. 1762, ibid., 180.

  4. Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 253–4.

  5. Quotation: Teedyuscung’s speech, 28 June 1762, in Wallace, Teedyuscung, 249. On the conference generally, see ibid., 245–50; Stephen F. Auth, The Ten Years’ War: Indian-White Relationsin Pennsylvania, 1755–1765 (New York, 1989), 163–72; and Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 434–6.

  6. Auth, Ten Years’ War, 183, 236–7 n. 59; Wallace, Teedyuscung, 252–4; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 179–80.

  7. Wallace, Teedyuscung, 255–6.

  8. Conference with Teedyuscung, 19 Nov. 1762, Susquehannah Papers, 2:180–1.

  9. On the alienation of the Ohio delegation at Lancaster, see McConnell, A Country Between, 179–81; and Auth, Ten Years’ War, 183–4. Croghan to Bouquet, 10 Dec. 1762: “Itt is Cartain that ye Dallaways [Delawares] have Received a Belt from ye Indians on Susquehanna and Sence that has ordered all thire Warrers to Stay Near there Towns to hunt this Winter and appears More Sulky than usual to the Treaders Residing Amungst them” (ibid., 237 n. 70).