Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  10. Size of migrating population: Stiles to Webster, 21 May 1763, Susquehannah Papers, 2:230. Quotation: extract of a letter from Paxton, in Lancaster County, 23 Oct. 1763, ibid., 277. Battle and aftermath: Wallace, Teedyuscung, 264 et passim.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX: Amherst’s Reforms and Pontiac’s War

  1. On Neolin and the other Delaware prophets, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, 1992), 27–34; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 279–83; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 179, 220–1; and Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 116–17. For the best contemporary description of Neolin’s ritual program, see John W. Jordan, ed., “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913): 188 (entry of 1 Mar. 1763).

  2. On the epidemics, crop failure, and famine, all of which were prevalent in the Ohio Valley, see McConnell, A Country Between, 177–8, 181; and White, Middle Ground, 275.

  3. War belts: ibid., 276–7. New leadership: McConnell, A Country Between, 183.

  4. Apprehensiveness: Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 194–5. “Pretended conspiracy”: Bouquet [to Amherst?], Nov. 1762, quoted in McConnell, A Country Between, 181. “Meer Bugbears”: Amherst to Sir William Johnson, 3 Apr. 1763, quoted in White, Middle Ground, 286. “This alarm”: Amherst to Bouquet, 6 June 1763, quoted in Howard H. Peckham, Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (Princeton, N.J., 1947), 172.

  5. Pontiac’s council at the Ecorse River encampment and Indian strength: [Robert Navarre,] “Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” in Milton Milo Quaife, ed., The Siege of Detroit in 1763 (Chicago, 1958), 5–18; strength of the Detroit garrison and early Indian successes: Peckham, Pontiac, 127–8 n. 12, 144, 156–8, 190, 200, 182–4.

  6. 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), 99–101; Peckham, Pontiac, 159–65; McConnell, A Country Between, 182.

  7. Ecuyer to Bouquet, 31 May 1763, quoted in Gipson, New Responsibilities, 107.

  8. On the Seneca, Delaware, and Shawnee operations between Lake Erie and the Ohio, see Peckham, Pontiac, 167–70; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 105–9; McConnell, A Country Between, 181–90 passim; and Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1939), 104–5.

  9. McConnell, A Country Between, 190.

  10. Lack of troops: J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933), 182, 188–9; 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), 261–2, 275. Response and quotations: Amherst to Egremont, 27 June 1763, quoted in Peckham, Pontiac, 177. Amherst responded to the reports about as quickly as anyone could have, given the limited information he had at hand; see the discussion in John W. Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 113–16.

  11. “To extirpate that Vermine”: Bouquet to Amherst, 25 June 1763; “We must Use Every Stratagem”: Amherst to Bouquet, n.d. [probably 29 June 1763]; both quoted in Gipson, New Responsibilities, 108. “Immediately be put to death”: Amherst to Gladwin, n.d., quoted in Peckham, Pontiac, 226. Amherst to Bouquet, 16 July 1763: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race” (ibid., 227). In reply Bouquet wrote that he would “try to inoculate the bastards with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself. As it is a pity to expose good men against them [the Indians], I wish we could make use of the Spanish methods, to hunt them with English dogs” (Bouquet to Amherst, 13 July 1763, quoted in Long, Amherst, 187).

  12. Ibid., 188–9.

  13. Amherst to Johnson, 30 Sept. 1763, in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, vol. 7 (Albany, 1856), 568–9.

  14. Shy, Toward Lexington, 116–17; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 115–17.

  15. Gregory Evans Dowd, “The French King Wakes Up in Detroit: ‘Pontiac’s War’ in Rumor and History,” Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 254–78; White, Middle Ground, 277–88.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN: Amherst’s Recall

  1. Casualties: see Milton Milo Quaife, ed., The Siege of Detroit in 1763 (Chicago, 1958), 211. Prisoners: Amherst to Maj. John Wilkins, 29 Oct. 1763, quoted in Howard H. Peckham, Pontiacand the Indian Uprising (Princeton, N.J., 1947), 239 n. 5.

  2. Ibid., 201–10; 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), 102–3. The Michigan ran aground and was wrecked near Niagara in August. The Huron, the only remaining link between Niagara and Detroit, was very nearly lost to Indian attack on 1 Sept. When the little ship arrived the following day at Detroit, its barrels of flour and pork intact, only six men of its crew had escaped being killed or wounded. The weapons they had used to repel boarders reminded one witness of “axes in a slaughter house.” “In short,” wrote the trader James Sterling, “the attack was the bravest ever known to be made by Inds., and the Defense such as British subjects alone are capable of” (quoted in Quaife, Siege of Detroit, xx). Even after the Huron made a less eventful voyage in early October, the supply situation remained critical; on 3 Oct. Gladwin had only three weeks’ supply of flour left. Four days later, nearly in despair, he wrote to Sir William Johnson, “I am brought into a scrape, and left in it; things are expected of me that cant be performed; I could wish I had quitted the service seven years ago, and that somebody else commanded here” (quoted in Peckham, Pontiac, 233). Even after Pontiac declared a truce, it was not the arrival of supplies from Niagara that enabled the fort’s garrison to survive, but rather the belated willingness of the French community—hitherto neutral—to sell its surplus food to the British; within four days of the truce, they had sold Gladwin four tons of desperately needed flour (ibid., 237). It was well for Detroit that they did, for Seneca attacks at Niagara kept the Huron from adequately resupplying the fort before winter (ibid., 240–2). On the general state of Detroit and Gladwin’s “want of flour, [so great] that he must either have abandoned his post, or listened to” Pontiac’s proposals, see Gage to Halifax, 23 Dec. 1763, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 5.

  3. “I feel myself uterly abandoned”: Bouquet to James Robertson, 26 July 1763, quoted in Gipson, New Responsibilities, 110.

  4. On Bouquet’s expedition to relieve Fort Pitt, the Battle of Edge Hill (or Bushy Run), and the end of the siege, see Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 191–4; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 109–13 and “Plan of the Battle near Bushy-Run,” facing 124; Peckham, Pontiac, 211–13; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 288–9; and John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 119. Unlike the principally Scottish 42nd and 77th Regiments, the 60th Regiment included large numbers of colonists, especially Germans from Pennsylvania, who (after 1759) had been permitted to enlist for three years or the duration of the war. It was presumably these who demanded their discharges from Bouquet, and who threatened to mutiny when he refused.

  5. Peckham, Pontiac, 224–5, 241–2.

  6. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1
988), 438, 451–2; James Thomas Flexner, Lord of the Mohawks: A Biography of Sir William Johnson (Boston, 1979), 258–60; Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 201–2.

  7. Reactions of ministers: Shy, Toward Lexington, 121–5. Mutinies in regular units: ibid., 118–20; Paul E. Kopperman, “The Stoppages Mutiny of 1763,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 69 (1986): 241–54. Reluctance of provincial legislatures to cooperate, Gipson, New Responsibilities, 115–17.

  8. On Ligonier’s demotion, see Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), 376–8; on Cumberland’s physical decline, Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland”; on Gage’s assumption of command, J. R. Alden, General Gage in America: Being Principally a History of His Role in the American Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1948), 61; on Amherst’s belated understanding of the character of his recall, J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933), 189–92.

  PART VIII: CRISIS AND REFORM, 1764 CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT: Death Reshuffles a Ministry

  1. William James Smith, ed., The Grenville Papers, vol. 2 (1852; reprint, New York, 1970), 193–4.

  2. On the arrival of news from America and the ministry’s initial reactions, see John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 121–4; on the death of Egremont and its impact on politics, see Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 160–3; and Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 12–13; on Pitt, see Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London, 1976), 315; on the king, see John Brooke, King George III (New York, 1972), 104–5.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE: An Urgent Search for Order: Grenville and Halifax Confront the Need for Revenue and Control

  1. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989), 30; Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire (London, 1981), 586–7.

  2. John L. Bullion, “ ‘The Ten Thousand in America’: More Light on the Decision on the American Army, 1762–1763,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43 (1986): 646–57; id., “Security and Economy: The Bute Administration’s Plans for the American Army and Revenue, 1762–1763,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (1988): 499–509; John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 69–83.

  3. George III to Bute, 13 Sept. 1762, in Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London, 1939), 135. The king meant that the expense to the British taxpayer for maintaining the army would be “some hundred pounds cheaper,” not that the total expenditure on the army would be less than in 1749. See below.

  4. Bullion, “Security and Economy,” 502–4; Shy, Toward Lexington, 73–4.

  5. The national debt: Brewer, Sinews, 32. (Brewer’s figure of £132,000,000 represents the most conservative estimate of the funded portion of the debt at war’s end. Grenville himself believed that the funded portion of the debt amounted to £137,000,000, and the debt as a whole to £146,000,000; see Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 [New York, 1967], 182.) For the winter session and its politics, see Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 17–20; and Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 171–80. Annual expenses of twenty battalions: Peter D. G. Thomas, “The Cost of the British Army in North America, 1763–1775,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (1988): 510–16. (The sum with which Parliament was working, £224,906, excluded “extraordinaries”—operating expenses. The actual annual expense averaged £384,174 in 1763–73.) Budget inflexibility: John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765 (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 18; Brewer, Sinews, 117. (Grenville anticipated revenues of about £9,800,000 sterling annually, of which about 48 percent would be needed to pay interest on the funded debt. Virtually every farthing of its £5,000,000 in discretionary revenue was already committed to pay the costs of government administration and defense.)

  6. Expenditures in the colonies: Julian Gwyn, “British Government Spending and the North American Colonies, 1740–1775,” in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams, ed., The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (London, 1980), 77. Reimbursements: Jack P. Greene, “The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered,” ibid., 98. Contemporary understandings of British government spending and colonial prosperity: Bullion, Measure, 23–5. Rising colonial consumption: T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 467–99; id., “ ‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (1988): 73–87; and id., “Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 50 (1993): 471–501. Impact of war on political economy: Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994).

  7. Bullion, Measure, 62–4; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 203, 206–7.

  8. Bullion, Measure, 73.

  9. Ibid., 80–2; 106–8; Lawson, Grenville, 166–80, 187–94; Thomas, Politics, 45–7; Koehn, Power, 125–7.

  10. Thomas, Politics, 41–3; 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), 41–6; Jack Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1961), 52–65.

  11. The proclamation also erected a fourth government, from the West Indian islands ceded to Britain in the Peace of Paris, in the colony of Grenada, or the British Windward Islands. See Gipson, New Responsibilities, 232–47. For the quotations in the following paragraphs, see David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1955), 640–3.

  12. The same provisions for grants also extended to “such reduced officers of our navy . . . as served on board our ships of war in North America at the times of the reduction of Louisbourg and Quebec” (ibid., 641; sailors and petty officers were excluded, perhaps by oversight).

  13. Indian plan draft: Halifax to Amherst, 19 Oct. 1763, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, and with the War Office and the Treasury, 1763–1775, vol. 2 (New Haven, Conn., 1933), 4–5. (Cf. the complete proposal, reprinted as “Plan for the Future Management of Indian Affairs,” 10 July 1764, in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, vol. 7 [Albany, 1856], 637–41.) Also see John Richard Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier (1944; reprint, New York, 1966), 242–4; J. Russell Snapp, John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge, 1996), 58–64; Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 207–8; and Gipson, New Responsibilities, 431–2. Parliament never implemented the plan formally (it was too expensive), but the superintendents organized the Indian trade after 1764 along the lines it laid down.

  14. Sosin, Whitehall, 52–78.

  CHAPTER SIXTY: The American Duties Act (The Sugar Act)

  1. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 180–1; Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 171.

  2. This account of the session follows Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the St
amp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 17–20; and Lawson, Grenville, 171–80. “Beyond all example”: Grenville to Northumberland, 26 Feb. 1764, quoted in John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765 (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 90. King’s support: William James Smith, ed., The Grenville Papers, vol. 2 (1852; reprint, New York, 1970), 491.

  3. “Brevity”: Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (New York, 1894), 1:309. “This hour”: Grenville’s speech to the Commons, 9 Mar. 1764, in Lawson, Grenville, 195.

  4. Pitt and Townshend: Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 321; Cornelius P. Forster, The Uncontrolled Chancellor: Charles Townshend and His American Policy (Providence, 1978), 49–54. “There did not seem”: Mauduit to the secretary of Massachusetts Bay, 7 Apr. 1764, in Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 231.

  5. For the American Duties Act, see David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1955), 644–8. On the provisions relating to customs enforcement, see Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (1953; rev. ed., New York, 1963), 40; Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 4–8; Thomas, Politics, 45–8; and Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 227–31. On the operation of the more complex British system, see Elizabeth E. Hoon, The Organization of the English Customs System, 1696–1786 (New York, 1938), esp. 143–8, 256–64; on the American customs, Thomas Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial North America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 182–4 (on the provisions of the American Duties Act) and passim. For a discussion of the act that differs in emphasis from my own, by stressing the antismuggling intent of the Grenville administration as evidence of orthodox mercantilism, see John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 75–83.