Читать книгу Flight of the Eagle - Conrad Black - Страница 13
ОглавлениеBenjamin Franklin
The British and Americans Defeat the French in America, 1754–1774
1. THE GREAT POWERS AND THE AMERICAS
The long, swift rise of America to absolute preeminence in the world began in the obscure skirmishing of settlers, traders, natives, adventurers, and French and British (and some Spanish) soldiers and militiamen, more or less uniformed, in what is today the western parts of eastern seaboard states of the United States. Surges of idealism and desperation had propelled Quakers, Puritans, organized groups of Roman Catholics, more exotic non-conformists, and the routinely disaffected and abnormally adventurous to strike out for the New World. There was, with most, some notion of ultimately building a better society than those from which they had decamped. There was little thought, until well into the eighteenth century, of constructing there a political society that would influence the world. And there was almost no thought, until near the end of that century, that there would arise in America a country that would in physical and demographic strength, as well as moral example, lead the whole world.
Political conditions at the approach of what became the Seven Years’ War (in America, the French and Indian Wars, in Russia and Sweden the Pomeranian War, in Austria and Prussia the Third Silesian War, and in India the Third Carnatic War) consisted of endless scrapping among the great continental powers along their borders. These were France; Austria, the polyglot Central European heir of the Holy Roman Empire; Russia; and, thrusting up to challenge Austria for leadership of the German center of Europe, Prussia. The other Great Power, Great Britain, when its Stuart Dynasty, half Protestant and half Roman Catholic, came to an end in 1714, recruited the Stuarts’ distant but reliably Protestant cousins, starting with George I to IV, 1714–1830, to succeed them. George I and George II scarcely spoke English and spent much time in their native Hanover, a placid little principality of 750,000 which they continued to rule and where they didn’t have to be bothered with an unruly parliament like that in London.
The lengthy British rule of the great Whigs, Sir Robert Walpole, Henry Pelham, and Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, 1721–1762, appeased the kings by using British money and power to secure Hanover. Apart from that, Britain cohered, before the king set up his own Church, to the policy of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1511–1529), Henry VIII’s chancellor, who devised the practice, followed to recent times, of putting England’s weight against whichever was the strongest of the continental powers (successively, roughly, Spain until the rise of Louis XIII’s great minister, Cardinal Richelieu in 1624; France until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815; Germany until the defeat of Hitler in 1945; and Russia until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991). An unprecedentedly benign Germany then resumed that position to no great consternation in Britain or elsewhere (Chapter 16).
Russia, under Peter the Great, Czar from 1689 to 1725, joined the ranks of the Great Powers at the start of the eighteenth century. For the purposes of this book, the first important Russian leader was the Empress Catherine the Great,1 who reigned from 1762 to 1796, and we are also concerned with the Prussian king Frederick II, the Great (1740–1786), and the Austrian empress Maria Theresa (reigned from 1740 to 1780). These three rulers provided strong military and diplomatic government in Central and Eastern Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
2. THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND EARLY SKIRMISHING IN AMERICA
William Pitt was the first leading British public figure to limn out a vision of a growing and flourishing British civilization on both sides of the Atlantic and in the East and West Indies, arising to give the British the status and strength of an incomparable giant straddling the great ocean. Even he pitched his vision, naturally, mainly in terms of ending, in Britain’s favor, the great contest with France because of the scale and size and wealth the British nationality would grow into, vast and rich, and relatively secure as not having to fend off the invasions of adjoining landward neighbors. In Britain, his philippics against the French went down better than his visions of the New World. But as Pitt gained force and support in Britain, the leading Americans considered that the Thirteen Colonies were coming close to self-sufficiency, if the French threat in Canada could be disposed of, and could indeed then have a splendid autonomous political future, if they could coordinate better between themselves, and agree on their collective purpose. As the formal beginning of the new Anglo-French war approached, the most astute leaders of both Britain and America were groping for a raison d’être of the American project. In London and Westminster, going it alone was unthinkable for the colonies, and so was not given any thought. In America, if France could be driven from Canada, it was an idea whose attractions were bound to grow, and, if it were not headed off by a competing imperial vision, its time would come.
From the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, European diplomacy was a minuet, with the partners constantly changing, but disputing the same adjoining areas, a horribly expensive struggle between hired and often mercenary armies. The only country that had a vision that transcended this pattern of self-inflicted destruction, through the attrition of endless conflict on the frontiers, was Britain, with its concept of manipulating the balance of power while steadily expanding its empire overseas and asserting mastery of the world’s oceans. This was the long-standing British strategy. France oscillated between trying to dominate Germany and trying to contest overseas theaters with Britain, and couldn’t do both simultaneously. Prussia and Russia were trying to expand at the expense of their neighbors, which in Russia’s case meant much of Eurasia. Austria, Turkey, and Spain were trying to hold on to what they had. Sweden and the Netherlands were second-tier opportunists and Portugal was outward-facing from Europe to an empire that was large for the size of the home country (in South America, Africa, India, and the Far East). By opposing larger Spain, Portugal gained the protection of the Royal Navy to maintain its empire, which it would not otherwise have been able to defend from larger predators.
The French, when they finally developed a plan, wanted to distract the British to the nether regions of empire and strike a mortal blow at the home island of Britain. Of these long-standing British and French strategic designs, the British generally succeeded in imposing theirs, and the French, perpetually unsure whether they wanted to make a crossing in force of the Rhine or the English Channel, never really came close to a serious invasion of the British Isles. (The Pyrenees and the Alps were less promising and tempting places of trespass, though they were occasionally traversed.)
By the 1750s there were just the first glimmerings of an American strategy, spontaneously derived but starting to receive direction to work with the British to remove the French from Canada and then favorably alter the relationship with Britain.
There was a loyalty in the colonies to the abstract entity of the Crown, and the impersonal wearer of the crown, but affections between the English and the Americans became frayed (as did relations between the Canadians and the French), and if the Crown (in the one case and the other) was seen as exclusively favoring the mother country, colonial fealty to the overseas king-protector would prove very fungible.
Combat was so routine in North America that even full-scale battles and reductions of opposing forts, involving the deaths of hundreds of men on both sides, did not provoke declarations of war. Until 1756, wars could be generated only by European matters. By the early 1750s, the race was on between the French, pushing down from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River and then to and down the Mississippi, and the English (Americans in practice but constantly seeking British military reinforcement when challenged), settling and exploring ever westward, for control of the Ohio country and the vast hinterland of North America. Alert American landowners, including young George Washington, 21 in 1753, were large land acquirers west of the Alleghenies. The French, who had an entirely developed rival claim, constructed a series of forts connecting Quebec to their traders in Illinois. These forts were at Presque Isle on the south shore of Lake Erie, another on a tributary of the Allegheny River, a third on the Allegheny itself, and the fourth at the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers to form the Ohio, the site of the modern city of Pittsburgh (whose name gives a hint of the outcome of the Anglo-French rivalry).
The French fort at the forks of the Ohio was called Fort Duquesne, after the builder, a French naval officer who was entrusted with the Canadian military command, and mobilized 11,000 Canadians, trained them thoroughly by colonial standards, and pressed south with them organized into 165 companies, supported by thousands of Indians whom the French had enticed with generous offers of trading rights. The Indians tended to take the promises of the French more seriously than those of the English, because the French seemed much less inclined to people the New World themselves with immigration, rather than just taking what the fur trade and other commerce would yield. The British had planned a fort on the same site and the rivalry, in the names of Duquesne and Pitt, and over the same geography, presaged future conflicts over many colonial places claimed as a matter of right by different nationalities. Duquesne expended the lives of over 400 of his men and spent over four million livres, erecting his forts and developing trails between them, but the effort did wonders to galvanize American colonial opinion, especially in the unison of the chorus it raised up to London to repel the French interloper.
In the autumn of 1753 an enterprising 21-year-old Adjutant George Washington volunteered to carry a letter to the French at the forks of the Ohio, asking them to “desist” and withdraw. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, sent 200 men with Washington for this mission. Before Washington got clear of the Allegheny Mountains, one of Duquesne’s officers had repulsed the British contingent that tried to occupy the coveted site, majestic to this day, where the Ohio River begins. Undaunted and showing a boldness, indeed impetuosity, a trait for which he would not be well-known at the height of his career, Washington chose to advance against the French, who greatly outnumbered him. Washington fell upon a 35-man French and Indian scouting party and killed the commander of the French unit, a M. Jumonville, and nine others. Accounts differ and Washington’s own is a truncated and rather self-serving description of a provoked and measured response, rather than, as is claimed by the French and some of the colonial militiamen, a massacre begun by an Indian ally of the Americans who sank his hatchet into Jumonville’s skull, preparatory to relieving him of his scalp. The young Adjutant Washington, after the astonishing precocity of carrying out an act of war of one Great Power on another, on the instructions of Dinwiddie, who had no authority to order anything of the kind, then sagely retreated to a hastily constructed stockade, christened—in a divine service where Washington, not a demonstrably religious man, presided—Fort Necessity.
It was a modest affair and was soon invested by 700 French and Canadians and 100 of their Indian allies. The French rained down musket-fire on the garrison, which Dinwiddie had bulked up to 400, and at sunset of the first day of the siege, Washington’s force panicked and broke into the rum issue. The French mercifully offered the Americans, retirement from Fort Necessity provided they returned French prisoners, promised not to return to the Ohio Valley within a year, left two hostages behind as an earnest, and admitted the “assassination” of Jumonville. Washington accepted all this, having taken 30 dead and 70 wounded, compared with three French dead and a handful of wounded. He retired, with most of his men carrying the wounded and the corpses of their fallen comrades. Most of his force deserted and scattered at the first opportunity. He rightly counted himself lucky, but had effectively accepted responsibility for starting one of the most important wars of modern times, and with an uncivilized act at that. Washington has presented posterity a rather bowdlerized version of this fiasco and his subsequent renown has somewhat obscured the facts, though it must be said that he was personally brave and collected, and swiftly seized the prospect of honorable deliverance when it appeared.
Even the placatory British prime minister, Newcastle, was outraged and worried when he learned of this debacle. He relied on what he portentously described as his continental “system” of alliances with the Spanish, Austrian Empire, Danes, Hanover, and some other German states to contain France, while he launched a counter-blow in America. With George II’s favored son, the Duke of Cumberland, Newcastle concerted a plan for sending two Irish regiments out to America under the command of Major General Edward Braddock, a spit-and-polish professional with no experience or knowledge at all of American warfare, to uproot the French fort system that Duquesne had built. Cumberland blew any security with public announcements about the new armed mission, which came to the attention of the French ambassador in London as to any informed person in the British capital. The French rushed to send reinforcements to Canada, though they suffered from the ice-shortened season for dispatching forces up the St. Lawrence.
3. THE OUTBREAK OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR
The English position in those colonies was not much strengthened by the arrival of Braddock and his Irishmen in February 1755. The colonists resented Braddock’s high-handed manner and the British army’s rules, which were that any British officer, even a lieutenant, could order about like pirates any colonial officer, even Washington and his few peers, and that the colonial militias were subject to British military discipline. This was heavy going for these rough and ready frontiersmen, who were unaccustomed to taking orders, other than at the approach of and during outright exchanges of live fire. Nor were they much enamored of submitting themselves to a regimen that was unsparing in meting out floggings and even drum-head executions.
From May to July 1754 in Albany, New York, there was what was called the Albany Congress, to pursue unity of the colonies. The leading figure at the Congress was the ambitious Philadelphia inventor, scientist, printer, postmaster, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Behind his jaunty humor there lurked a sophisticated political operator who would prove himself more than able to master the sternest and most tortuous challenges that could be posed in the chancelleries of Europe. He was already the principal public figure among the colonists, and Washington was a rising young officer and landowner, the one an amiable intellectual and sly maneuverer, the other a physically imposing and capable officer, though personally stiff and somewhat limited by being a plantation inheritor and, beyond elemental education, an autodidact. But both were investors in and advocates of trans-Allegheny development, and both had a vision of a rapidly expanding America that would brook no interference from the French, and whose attachment to the British was essentially much less a reflexive submission to the Crown than a tactical association with the presumed facilitator of their local ambitions.
Franklin had already done a stint as Pennsylvania’s representative in London. However flickering might be their imperial enthusiasm, the colonists had no ability at this point to replace the British with any locally generated or spontaneous cohesion. The Albany Congress broke up in disharmony, and the Quaker majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly, dominated by and servile to the Penn family, roundly deserted Franklin and repudiated any notion of colonial union for the unholy purpose of armed combat, especially for the purpose of enriching the less pious of their number in extra-territorial speculation.
Braddock started off with a fantastically ambitious plan for blotting the French out of the continent, which Cumberland and his entourage had devised in complete ignorance of North American conditions or of the likely correlation of forces, and in defiance of Newcastle’s chimerical hopes of avoiding war with France. Admiral Edward Boscawen was to blockade the Gulf of St. Lawrence, strangling New France of reinforcements. Braddock and his Irish regiments were to take Fort Duquesne, which was now a formidable fortress. Braddock named the governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, a major general and told him to reactivate disbanded regiments and march to Niagara at the western end of Lake Ontario and seize the large French fort there, following which Braddock, who would clear the French out of the several hundred miles of French forts and garrisons between what are today Pittsburgh and Buffalo, would join forces for the final mopping-up of New France. It was an insane plan, made even more absurd by Braddock’s impossible personality and incandescent contempt for the colonials.
Braddock rejected suggestions from a couple of the colonial governors that instead of attacking the southern French forts, including Duquesne, he attack with all his forces at Niagara, the northern terminus of the French supply route into the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi country. This would have been the correct strategy for concentrating all available force on the point of maximum vulnerability. Cumberland and the other London creators of the Braddock attack plan had no idea that the supposedly navigable rivers often had rapids and that the trails that were supposed to be avenues for British supply wagons were narrow and often soft underfoot and could only be used at a snail’s pace, and a not very motivated snail at that. Nor were they aware that almost no Indians could now be induced to assist the British as guides or scouts and that only they knew their way to the designated targets. Washington prudently declined the command of a Virginia regiment and instead accepted to be an unpaid aide to Braddock, presumably, after his harrowing combat command debut at Fort Necessity, to avoid blame for another shambles, and to increase his chances for a British commission that would give him some status in the parent-country forces, which would clearly be needed in ever larger numbers if the French were to be successfully resisted.
Braddock also made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin. His severe demands for horses and supplies frightened the Pennsylvania legislature out of its Quaker aversion to the somewhat louche and worldly Franklin, who was sent as a placatory envoy to Braddock. Franklin, now America’s most accomplished diplomat, as Washington was its foremost soldier, though nothing in the past of either indicated the heights they would achieve in the balance of their careers, exploited Braddock’s unsuccessful foraging in Maryland and Virginia. Franklin sent boxes of fine food and good wine to the junior officers of Braddock’s units, and Pennsylvania was thereafter excused from the general’s rages against the colonials.
Braddock, with Washington at his side suffering from dysentery and acute hemorrhoids, plunged through the wilderness toward Fort Duquesne, his force’s movements faithfully reported by Indians to the French commander, Contrecoeur, the victor of the Fort Necessity encounter and brother-in-law of the “assassinated” Jumonville. On July 10, Braddock’s so-called “flying column” of about 1,500 men, including several hundred civilian workers and a number of the officers’ whores, which had managed about five miles a day, was attacked by about 800 French, Canadians, and (in the majority) Indians. The attackers infiltrated the dense forests on each side of the road and without warning, disconcerting the English with the nerve-rattling screaming of the Indians, poured down precise, rapid sniper-fire. The well-trained British formed into rectangles in the road, consolidating themselves as better targets for the enemies they could not see, and were steadily mowed down. Braddock remained mounted, and acted with great bravery, as did Washington, who had two horses shot from under him. After several hours, Braddock was mortally wounded, and died on the retreat two days later. A rout began, with Washington trying manfully to prevent a complete shambles, organizing the transport of the wounded, and trying to keep the retreat in some sequence. The French took 23 dead Indians, and about 16 wounded, compared with about 1,000 British dead and wounded, scores of whom were scalped by the Indians. Fortunately for the British, and as was their custom, the Indians had no interest in following up on their victory beyond taking the heads and picking the pockets of the enemy and whatever could be had from their wagons. The wreckage of Braddock’s flying column and the balance of his force arrived like a grim tornado in Philadelphia and, although they were in the searing heat of late July, demanded winter quarters.
The British did better in Acadia, and seized the French fort at the narrow isthmus connecting Cape Breton to Nova Scotia. There followed the expulsion ultimately of about 14,000 French and Franco-Indian civilians from Acadia (mainly Nova Scotia, and what are now New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), an eerie foretaste of some greater deportations of helpless civilian populations in the centuries to come, an ethnic cleansing. The Acadians had generally refused an oath of allegiance to the British Crown, because of conflicting loyalties, a refusal to draw a hostile line with French and Indian relatives, and fear of being deprived of their right to practice as Roman Catholics and to retain their language. In about equal numbers, they were assimilated into New England, went to Louisiana and laid the base of the “Cajuns,” returned to France, or returned to the area of their expulsion when conditions had improved. It was a shabby affair, and there was no excuse for it, though it was conducted less brutally than more modern deportations, including by the United States of its southeastern Indians.2
The British also had a modest success on Lake George, south of Montreal, where both sides took several hundred casualties and continued into the winter more or less as they had entered the spring, though with the French toiling to build a larger fort. Admiral Boscawen had seized two ships and several hundred soldiers, but the main French reinforcements for Canada, under General Montcalm, had arrived successfully in Quebec. The attack on Niagara, which was the only one of the projected operations that made much sense, was not launched in 1755, as planned. Despite repeated acts of war and probably 2,000 casualties or prisoners taken, while Britain stood clearly in the eyes of the world and such international law as there was as an aggressor, France and Britain were still officially at peace. The rout and death of Braddock and the failure of the rest of the British plan had heavy repercussions in London, where Newcastle’s legendary talents at political survivorship would be put to a serious challenge. William Pitt’s hour had almost arrived.
Implausibly, Newcastle still thought he might be able to avoid war with France in Europe. He was trying to maintain his continental “system” of alliances with Austria, the Netherlands, and Georgian Hanover and some neighboring German states, against France and Prussia, steadily emerging as the chief acquirer of German states and a potential rival in central Europe to Austria, whose empire was largely in the polyglot and irredentist Slavic and Italian wards of eastern and southern Europe. Newcastle proposed to try to add Russia to this alliance, to put a rod on Prussia’s back, concerned always, Pitt and his faction claimed, more with the welfare of Hanover than of Britain.
The rise of Prussia under George II’s brother-in-law, Frederick the Great, caused George II to fear Prussian designs on Hanover, as Frederick had already seized Silesia from Maria Theresa. Acting on this concern, Britain proposed and negotiated renewal of its defensive treaty with Russia in 1755. Frederick feared Russia even more than George feared Prussia, and after first rejecting an overture from Britain on news of the renewal of the Anglo-Russian treaty, Frederick proposed, and in January 1756, concluded with Britain, a non-aggression pact, which became one of mutual assistance should any aggressor disturb “the tranquility of Germany”—i.e., attack either Hanover or Prussia.
This appeared to be a brilliant consolidation of Hanoverian security, but Newcastle had outsmarted himself. Maria Theresa was so outraged at Britain’s treaty with Prussia, from which she proposed to recover Silesia, that she terminated her alliance with Britain. Russia declined to ratify its treaty renewal with Britain; France renounced her treaty with Prussia and formed a new alliance with its rival of 250 years, Austria. This was the real beginning of the 200-year Franco-German conflict. Far from being secure, Hanover was now threatened by France and Austria.
In an attack that replicated his sudden seizure of Silesia, Frederick invaded the Austrian protectorate of Saxony in August 1756. Austria, France, and Russia declared war on Prussia. While it was reminiscent of the seizure of Silesia, the attack on Saxony, coming on the heels of the arrangements with Britain, also presaged the German attack on Poland immediately after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. And the cascade of treaty-triggered declarations of war would be somewhat replicated 158 years later at the outbreak of World War I (Chapters 8 and 10).
France would protect Austria, but Austria was not bound to assist France—it was sufficient incentive for the French to detach Austria from the British. These tergiversations became known as the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756.
In 1755, the Thirteen Colonies had about 1.5 million people, compared with a little more than four times that in Great Britain (excluding Ireland), around 15 million in France, 3.5 million in Prussia, and just under two million in the Netherlands. The American colonies had a faster rate of growth and higher standard of living than any of the major powers. They were politically primitive but, as events were to prove, had political leadership more talented than the governors the British haphazardly sent to rule over them, and even than the mature European powers themselves. The instances of statehood were already close to hand, though few thought in these terms, especially as the French menace loomed larger and more imminently than ever. The myth of the paltry obscurity of a handful of disparate and insignificant settlements, however, is much exaggerated, both by British snobbery and by the requirements of the mythos of America’s birth.
As Newcastle scattered subsidies across Europe from the Rhine to Russia, to try to raise an alliance that would deter France from going to war in reprisal against Britain’s acts of war in America, Pitt denounced the system of paying subsidies as cowardly and ineffectual with greater force and causticity than ever. His parliamentary remarks were especially vituperative given that he was a member of the government as paymaster of the armed forces, from which post he was finally dismissed in 1755. In 1756, Pitt claimed that Newcastle was deliberately leaving the British base in Minorca, in the Balearic Islands, under-defended, in order to represent the fall of it as evidence of the inadvisability of going to war with France. France had assembled a large naval force in Toulon, its main Mediterranean naval base, and attacked Minorca, which fell in the summer of 1756, despite an effort to protect the island by Admiral John Byng. Newcastle finally declared war on May 18, 1756, after hostilities had been in full swing in the Americas for two years. Partly in order to relieve himself of Pitt’s charges, Newcastle had Byng court-martialed and persecuted him relentlessly, until he was, very unjustly, executed by firing squad in March 1757.
It was of no interest to the other powers what happened between the British and French in North America, and the British and French had no interest in Central and Eastern Europe, except the nostalgic British defense of Hanover. This took the form, in practice, of the British arming and paying extensive Hanoverian and Hessian armies, which they could deploy to North America when conditions in Germany allowed their release. The Netherlands, traditionally one of Newcastle’s allies, was exhausted and had no interest in any of the contested areas and refused to be subsidized back into line as an ally. Sweden, however, was induced to join against Prussia. In its preliminaries this was the most American of all wars to date between the European powers.
Though their fleet was at Toulon, the French were preparing an army of up to 100,000 men in the Channel ports, for an invasion of Britain. Pitt, when he gained control of policy, wanted to mire France in Europe and deploy superior forces to America, India, and the Caribbean.
4. THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, AMERICA
The French commander in Quebec as of May 1756, Montcalm, was an accomplished soldier, though he, too, despised the Indians, and had little use for the Canadians either, but he was a military genius in comparison with Cumberland’s successor to Braddock, the Earl of Loudoun, a pompous military administrator who not only detested colonials and natives but had no idea of how to conduct a war or even a battle. He abruptly fired Massachusetts governor William Shirley in June 1756, and sent him off in disgrace, carrying the responsibility for some of Braddock’s blunders. (It was the season of the scapegoat, as the official murder of the only slightly cautious Admiral Byng after the fall of Minorca had demonstrated.) Loudoun’s lack of rapport with the colonial authorities surpassed even Braddock’s.
Montcalm invested Fort Oswego, at the southeastern edge of Lake Ontario, with 3,000 men, in August 1756, and it quickly fell, with about 1,600 British taken prisoner. Montcalm was not sufficiently impressed with the duration or vigor of their resistance to allow the British to retreat under their own colors. This was the inauspicious start of the Loudoun incumbency, and even after this setback, the colonial governments were little disposed to assist the British military, despite all Loudoun’s huffing and puffing. Once again, the worldly Franklin came to the rescue in Pennsylvania, and in exchange for a modest gift by the owners of most of the colony, the Penn family, the Assembly voted 55,000 pounds for “the King’s use,” a Franklinian euphemism that allowed the pacifist Quaker majority to pretend that it was not for military uses, a balm of conscience presumably made more emollient by the fact that the payment was destined to help prevent their occupation and capture by Montcalm’s swashbuckling Catholic, French legionnaires. The Quaker caucus of legislators soon splintered on the issue of whether to offer bounties for Indian prisoners and scalps, and the Quaker domination of the Pennsylvania Assembly ended abruptly, at the hands of fellow colonials less troubled by the exigencies of war. Loudoun had had explicitly to threaten the use of force to gain quarters for his troops in Philadelphia, where an epidemic of dysentery and related ailments was feared. This was not a gesture best designed to build Anglo-American solidarity at the approach of the enemy. Again, Franklin produced the desired compromise, by assigning the soldiers a principal hospital, addressing under the same roof both the wrath of the commander and the threat to public health.
Loudoun had been promised the formidable total, for the American theater, of 17,000 troops, to seize Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, and ultimately Quebec; he left New York in a 100-ship force carrying 6,000 troops, the largest amphibious force ever launched in North America up to that time, bound for Louisbourg, on June 20, 1757. His force arrived at Halifax on June 30 and had to wait 10 days for the accompanying Royal Navy squadron that was to blast its way into Louisbourg harbor. There was a further wait for the abatement of fog. By that time, the French had concentrated a fleet of 18 warships at Louisbourg, and the Royal Navy commander, Admiral Francis Holborne, declared the mission impossible beginning so late in the season, and the whole force returned dismally to New York. While this was happening in late July 1757, Montcalm, at the head of 3,000 French, 3,000 Canadians, and a blood-curdling 2,000 Indians, who volunteered in large numbers, encouraged by French successes, had invested Fort William Henry at the south end of Lake George, the entrance to the Hudson Valley from Quebec. Montcalm’s force included representatives from 33 different Indian tribes, or nations. Nearly half were Catholics who could be influenced, if not commanded, by the missionary priests that Montcalm brought for that purpose. The rest could be motivated to some degree by French officers and traders they had served with, but 2,000 Indians coming from up to 1,500 miles to enlist for an attack on the British were going to be a terribly unruly group once the issue was joined.
Colonel George Monro was defending the fort with 1,500 men. In late July Monro sent a reconnaissance in force up the lake. Most of it was seized by Indians and frightful barbarities ensued, including three Englishmen boiled in a pot for dinner, washed down with large quantities of rum the British had brought with them. Returning survivors warned Monro of the imminent dangers, though they did not know the extent of Montcalm’s force. The French arrived in strength on August 3, including artillery, spearheaded by 1,500 naked Indians gliding swiftly up the lake in their canoes. Monro was advised to consider capitulation in a letter expressing the view of the governor of New York, which was taken by an Indian from the body of the courier, whom he had intercepted, and sent into Fort William Henry under a white flag, with an accompanying note from Montcalm that it was good advice. When Monro declined, Montcalm maintained continuous artillery fire for five days, and by August 9 the British garrison was very haggard and the walls of the fort had been smashed in several places.
Monro belatedly took the governor’s advice and Montcalm chivalrously replicated the surrender terms of Minorca earlier in the summer: the British would promise to refrain from combat for 18 months and would leave an officer behind as hostage and return French prisoners, and would be allowed to leave with their belongings, under their colors, with a French escort to the next fort to the east. Montcalm would take all the stores and artillery left in the fort, and would care for the seriously wounded British and return them as their convalescent condition permitted. It was European war by officers and gentlemen to the highest standard.
Unfortunately, these terms did not conform in the slightest to Indian notions of the fruits of victory. The Indians were not consulted by Montcalm, and when they learned of these generous conditions, and of the resulting paucity of rewards for them, they first seized and scalped some of the wounded, and the following day, on the march to the nearest British fort, Fort Edward, they attacked the column from all sides and in the most terrifying manner, killing nearly 200 and capturing perhaps 500. Montcalm himself led his officers and men, accompanied by the placatory missionaries, to restore order and take back the prisoners seized by the Indians. Eventually Montcalm, the French governor, Vaudreuil, and others managed, sometimes by paying up to 30 bottles of brandy per ransomed prisoner, to liberate and return to Fort Edward all but about 200 prisoners, who, except for about 40 who joined Indian communities and remained there, were deemed to have been massacred. The incident was apparently concluded by a public, ritualistic, and instantly infamous boiling and eating of a British prisoner by his Indian captors outside Montreal on August 15, 1757.
It was a great victory for Montcalm and left all New York almost open to Montcalm’s forces, which with further reinforcements now stood at about 11,000 seasoned fighters under a skilled commander. But as Montcalm and Vaudreuil immediately foresaw, the strategic implications of the terrible aftermath of the fall of Fort William Henry were potentially very bad for France. The Indians would henceforth be very difficult to persuade to join the French, as they didn’t really care what side they were on and were only interested in the slave labor of prisoners and, along with scalps, the prestige they brought to returning individual warriors, and booty—especially liquor, firearms, ammunition, and gaudy trinkets. Montcalm could attempt to provide them with all of this except the prisoners and scalps, but the French had become heavy-handed in retrieving the captured British, from civilized and Christian disgust at the barbarities of their allies. It was difficult to imagine that of the three parties in the engagement, the British and French, with their colonial fellow-soldiers, were the enemies. The Indians would not assist if they had to fight the designated enemy and then the ostensible ally to get anything useful, and the French would not recruit allies who would sully the flag and faith of France with disgusting acts and have to be subdued, at great risk and cost of lives. Thus would vanish much of the French superior expertise at guerrilla war, and reconnaissance and path-finding in the trackless wilderness of much of the contested territory.
Even more worrisome, the French commanders knew, and were even in some sympathy with, what they correctly anticipated would be the British reaction. It would be represented to Britain and the colonies that what had occurred was completely normal behavior for the Catholic French and the Indians whom they had coached and encouraged, and that the aftermath of the capitulation agreement was indicative of the French regard for a pact between officers, and of French treachery generally.
The notorious failure of the colonial assemblies to assign the funds necessary to build and equip proper militias, and to coordinate with each other, was now over. Instead of the British having to send forces from across the Atlantic to enter into cat-and-mouse games with inhospitable locals, there was finally a sense that it was time for a showdown with the French and Indians in North America, and that it was a struggle of life and death and for the honor of British America, to avenge the massacred and punish the savages and their satanic French puppeteers. As always in mortal combat, these caricatures were travesties, and there was a general recognition that Montcalm personally had behaved with the exemplary courtesy and the moderation of a noble officer of the Old World (which was true, but he could have prearranged a buy-off of most of the Indians, if necessary, where appropriate, with the moral reinforcement of the missionaries). But the intensity of the war, and the fervor and determination with which it would be conducted by the British of both the New and Old Worlds, had changed radically.
Between August 7 and August 12, Connecticut and Massachusetts alone mobilized 12,000 militiamen and sent them to Fort Edward to deal a counterblow to Montcalm and, as it was fancied, his blood-stained Indian allies. In fact, Montcalm was exhausted of provisions and his Indian intelligence and logistical and reconnaissance expertise had defected, and he felt he had no alternative but to withdraw toward Montreal. Loudoun, returned from the fiasco in Nova Scotia, at least was heartened by the stiffening of colonial resolve to self-defense and cooperation with the British. There was not, however, such a spirit of solidarity that Loudoun was prepared to accede to Washington’s request to take the Virginia regiment Washington had led and trained to a high standard directly into the British army, nor to give Washington the commission he had certainly earned.
Instead, he placed Washington directly under a British regimental colonel who immediately ordered him to supply immense requisitions for what was clearly outright embezzlement.3 Greater coordination between the colonial assemblies was a great step forward, but Loudoun’s continued oppressive condescensions, faithfully replicated by his subalterns, could only contribute to increased American contemplation of the long-term need for this chronically subordinate relationship. This was especially true when inflicted on a man of Washington’s high character, loyalty, and impending influence on colonial opinion.
5. THE FIRST PHASE OF THE WAR IN EUROPE
The Russians, Austrians, Swedish, and French were all determined to slam the door on Frederick’s effort to force his way onto the European scene as a Great Power, whereas the British were for as many land powers as possible in Europe, to facilitate their manipulation of the balance of power. A war in Europe having been unlikely a few months before, it was now a roaring conflict involving all the major powers. France, Austria, Sweden, and Russia should have been able to subdue Prussia, but the shared Pitt-Newcastle objective of so distracting France in Europe that it would be unable to commit equivalent forces to resist Britain’s overseas ambitions might be attainable.
No American had any experience with European diplomatic affairs, and few were interested. Franklin, as the former and returning representative to London of Pennsylvania and a couple of other of the colonies, must have had some curiosity about these events, but his only recorded interest was in the distraction of France in Europe to facilitate its expulsion from North America. Pitt finally forced Newcastle from office in November 1756, and returned to government the following month as secretary of state for all external matters except the main powers of Europe, under the Duke of Devonshire as prime minister, who had no real support and was just a compromise caretaker acceptable to Newcastle, Pitt, and George II. Newcastle remained the principal influence on the government. Pitt was again dismissed in April 1757, because of his opposition to the continental policy, as he wanted a fight to the finish with France and not the temporizing he imputed to Newcastle, and he continued to accuse Newcastle of murdering Byng to cover his own pusillanimity (with some reason).
By this time, Frederick had prorupted into Bohemia (the Czechs), aiming to knock the Austrians out of the war. In May 1757, he laid siege to Prague, next to Vienna and Budapest and Venice the greatest city in Maria Theresa’s empire, but was defeated in June. Frederick was soon flung out of Bohemia and Silesia was largely recaptured by the Austrians.
With bad news pouring in, Pitt and Newcastle somewhat composed their differences, and formed a new ministry in June 1757. Newcastle was in charge of finances and Pitt of war policy. Cumberland was defeated in Hanover and forced to acquiesce in the withdrawal of Hanover from the war in October. Pitt managed to have this decision revisited at the end of the year (with a huge bribe to the native land of his monarchy, a practice he had always criticized), and Frederick scored two of the greatest victories of his career, at Rossbach against the French on November 5, 1757, and at Leuthen against the Austrians one month later. (This pushed the Austrians out of Silesia permanently, a bitter pill for Maria Theresa.)
In a long and almost unwaveringly unsuccessful military tradition, Pitt organized a series of amphibious “descents” on the French coast. The first of these was at Rochefort in September, and it failed, as did almost all such initiatives up to and including the Canadian landing at Dieppe in 1942 (Chapter 11). The brightest note, early in the war, was in India. Colonel Robert Clive, the deputy commander at Madras, had seized Calcutta, the principal city of Bengal, in early 1757, and made substantial advances from there. And Pitt created a militia, forerunner of the Home Guard, of 32,000, as a back-up force in case England were herself to see for the first time in 700 years the campfires of a real invader. One of the celebrated (but none too bellicose) recruits to this force would be the illustrious historian Edward Gibbon.4 By the end of 1757, Pitt had already energized the war effort.
As 1758 dawned, William Pitt was firmly in control of the British war strategy and was canvassing the ranks of British officers to get aggressive, intelligent commanders for the overseas operations, like the brilliant Clive in India. Frederick’s victories over the French and Austrians, and the return to war of Hanover, had pushed those powers back onto the defensive. In America, the colonies were stepping forward to their own defense more determined than ever to remove the threat to their existence posed by the French. If that goal could be attained, the future of the English-speaking world would depend on whether the war in America forged an unshakable solidarity of national victory between its two great components, or an American recognition that in the new circumstances, colonial subordinacy to Britain was a retardant, and not a spur, to the stirring and increasingly plausible ambitions of the New World. Without the French threat, America’s need for the overlordship of the British would be much less obvious.
William Pitt’s strategy was to tie down as many French as possible in Germany or as they waited for a chance to cross the Channel, which he was confident would not come, while pouring British resources into the Empire he was building. He grasped the importance of sea power and the huge advantage that accrued to Britain with a blue-water policy that put the British flag all around the world while the European powers squabbled and skirmished on their frontiers, as long as none of them became too over-powerful opposite the others. Partly to divert the French and partly, belatedly, to appease King George II, he dispatched the first British troops to the continent in many years, 9,000 regulars under the scion of Britain’s greatest general up to that time (with the possible exception of Cromwell), the Duke of Marlborough, to Hanover.
The Hanoverian commander, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, pushed the French out of Hanover, recaptured the port of Emden in March, and stirred considerable anxiety in France by crossing the Rhine, a bold move for a small state. The French eventually drove him out, but he fulfilled Pitt’s plan of distracting the French on their German frontier while he attacked them around the world. At the behest of an American slave-trader, Thomas Cumming, Pitt sent a force to clear the French out of Goree and Fort St. Louis, near the modern Dakar, and from the nearby mouth of the Gambia, in West Africa, and quickly took over a lucrative slave trade, shipping unfortunate natives to the mercies of the American plantation owners. Following a very modestly successful “descent” at Cherbourg, and the disastrous failure of his third “descent,” at St. Cast, a worse fiasco than Rochefort in 1757, Pitt concluded that the Caribbean would be a more rewarding disposition of these amphibious forces.
Pitt solidified relations with Frederick of Prussia with the Anglo-Prussian Convention of April 1758, and a 670,000-pound annual subsidy to Prussia, at least several thousand times as much in today’s dollars. Frederick demonstrated an astonishing bellicosity as he rushed around the borders of his kingdom battling the Austrians, French, Swedes, and Russians. He showed the advantages of interior lines and demonstrated the weakness of these primitive alliances, as for years there was no coordination at all between the enemies of Prussia. Had they determined to attack from four directions at the same time, Frederick, talented commander though he was, would have been overwhelmed.
Frederick began 1758 with an invasion of Moravia (now the eastern Czech Republic), but the Austrians repulsed him after several months, ending his last attempt to seize territory directly from Maria Theresa. While France fenced with the Hanoverians, Frederick turned against Russia, which had occupied East Prussia, around Königsberg. Frederick drew a bloody battle with the Russians at Zorndorf in August 1758, but the Russians withdrew. In September the Prussians failed to expel the Swedes from Prussia, though Frederick did deflect them from Berlin, which was their target. In October, Frederick was again bested by Maria Theresa’s army, though narrowly, in Saxony, but compelled her withdrawal from Saxony at the end of the year. Pitt’s European strategy worked well in 1758, as Prussia and Hanover were magnets to the powers of the French-led coalition, and absorbed the blows of all, leaving Pitt almost free to bulk up his overseas strategy.
6. THE WAR IN AMERICA, 1758
In America, Loudoun had a dismal start to the year, and was horrified at the uncooperativeness of the colonial assemblies, who, while resisting his heavy-handed tyranny, recognized the French threat sufficiently to group ever more closely together, naming commissioners to meet and agree on force levels. Loudoun wrote Pitt on February 14, 1758, announcing what he represented as virtually a usurpation in America of the powers of the Crown by the collaboration of the New England governors. He summoned the governors to meet with him at Hartford a few days after writing Pitt, and revealed his campaign plans for the year: the now customary menu for new attacks on Louisbourg and Fort Duquesne, on Fort Carillon on Lake Champlain (Ticonderoga), and on Fort Frontenac at the mouth of Lake Ontario, near the modern Kingston. These plans were then lengthily debated in the Massachusetts Assembly, to the assured knowledge of the French.
This was the state of disorder Loudoun’s bungling had created when the genius of Pitt revealed itself in letters delivered March 10 and obviously written before Loudoun’s complaints to him of near-insurrection in his letter of February 14. Pitt sacked Loudoun and replaced him with Major General James Abercromby, “to repair the Losses and Disappointments of the last inactive and unhappy Campaign,” and ordered that colonial officers would henceforth enjoy the same rank in the British forces, and the British government would undertake the cost of equipping the colonial forces to a serious standard, in furtherance of an “Irruption into Canada.”5 This was a series of giant leaps forward. The Massachusetts legislature, which had been balkily debating Loudoun’s request for 2,128 men for weeks (and had, in effect refused him), agreed by voice vote on March 11, 1758, to raise 7,000 men. Within a month, the colonies had voted to raise 23,000 men for Abercromby. Only Maryland, divided by other issues, temporarily failed to increase its militia. As the colonies had over 1.5 million people (counting about 150,000 slaves), these levies of forces could be considerably extended, and given the preeminence of the Royal Navy in the North Atlantic, France was not going to be able to maintain a military balance in America. The combination of Pitt’s enlightened policies and the French-Indian outrage at Fort William Henry the previous summer had stirred what amounted to national sentiment in the Thirteen Colonies. This would not subside, and was to endure and grow into a world-shaking historic force.
So also had American affection for Britain been stimulated. The problem with the colonists, which Braddock and Loudoun had not understood, was not that they were such slackers but that there was little unemployment or surplus labor in the colonies, because of the prosperity of agriculture and the requirements for growing trades in the towns to service a growing population settled ever more extensively. As a result, military service for minimal pay, as was the European norm, was not only an uncompetitive living financially but had been a long-term commitment to thankless servitude to overbearing and often corrupt British officers. At a stroke, Pitt had promised pay-levels equivalent to civilian work and the promotion of American officers, for a limited enlistment, in a holy crusade to crush the French and the Indians once and for all. It was an irresistible package to take advantage of the colonies’ demographic advantage over French Canada of more than 15 to one. It was inspired policy, but it also reflected Pitt’s complete lack of interest in administration. It was going to be expensive and was going to whet the autonomist appetites of the locals, but these were delayed reactions that would be dealt with after the immediate French threat had been excised.
The new British commander, Abercromby, was just an undistinguished conduit. Pitt brought in with him as army and navy chiefs of staff Field Marshal Lord Ligonier, and Admiral Lord Anson. Ligonier was 77 in 1757, and had served with distinction in heavy combat in every British war of the eighteenth century, starting with his close proximity to Marlborough in the last great battles against the armies of Louis XIV. He is generally reckoned the greatest British field commander between Marlborough and Wellington. Anson was one of the Royal Navy’s great reformers, after a distinguished career as a combat serving officer, and he and Ligonier worked very smoothly together. Pitt told Ligonier he wanted young, aggressive officers without political influence. He wanted men who would fight to make their careers and achieve position and renown, and who would be dependent on him, Pitt, and not constantly scheming and trading with prominent members of Parliament or the entourage of the royal family.
Ligonier selected accordingly for the four missions that had been the ambitions of succeeding British commanders since before the war officially began. Jeffery Amherst, a 40-year-old colonel and regimental commander, was promoted to “Major General in America” to command the expedition against Louisbourg, assisted by the 31-year-old Lieutenant Colonel James Wolfe. The attack on Fort Duquesne was to be conducted by a 50-year-old Scottish doctor, Brigadier John Forbes; Ticonderoga (Fort Carillon) and Fort Frontenac were to be taken by the 33-year-old acting brigadier, Viscount Howe (though Abercromby himself was the nominal commander). Pitt had strengthened the forces in accord with his plan: 14,000 men under Amherst in the attack on Louisbourg; 25,000 men for the attacks on Ticonderoga and Frontenac and the “Irruption into Canada”; and Forbes had 7,000 men for the attack on Fort Duquesne.
Counting the militia of every able-bodied male between the ages of 16 and 60 (except for the numerous priesthood), Montcalm had 25,000 men in total, though the real total at any time was less than that, or all secular civilian occupations would have been denuded. The Indians, traditionally a powerful French ally, had vanished, either from smallpox, detection of the shifting balance of power, or anger at the debacle following the fall of Fort William Henry. Montcalm thus reaped the worst of two harvests: the spirit of vengeance of both the outraged English and the, as they considered themselves, betrayed Indians. He was also suffering from acute shortages of food, due to a poor harvest, and a shortage of some munitions. Montcalm’s problems were further aggravated by the divisions of the civil administration, led by the governor, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, and the financial director, or Intendant, François Bigot, and particularly the corrupt practices of Bigot, who held that office from 1744 on and had embezzled an immense fortune.
Gravely compounding French disadvantages, Louis XV had lost interest in colonial matters and was particularly tired of the military costs of Canada, which did not return him much. The fur trade was no possible justification for such a vast effort, and the French had much less natural disposition for overseas adventure than Britain, a relatively poor island nation with seafaring conducted along its entire perimeter. Pitt was able to blockade the French Mediterranean fleet at Gibraltar, and many of the Atlantic ports, and Boscawen had raised appreciably his interdiction of arriving French ships in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There were only two avenues for breaking into Canada and strangling the French presence up the St. Lawrence to Quebec, which required disposing of Louisbourg first, or from New York past Ticonderoga-Carillon and Lake Champlain toward Montreal. Pitt and Ligonier had prepared a heavy blow at each door.
The first test was Abercromby and Howe’s move on Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga). They set up their headquarters on the recently smoldering ruins of Fort William Henry and amassed 16,000 men for the assault. They arrived by water, in a thousand small craft, and landed four miles from the French fort on July 5. Unfortunately, Howe was killed by a retreating French reconnaissance sniper, and Abercromby lacked the energy for what followed. Montcalm had arrived at Carillon and found it desperately under-prepared, in men and supplies and the state of the fortifications, to cope with an attack. He built concealed trenches and elevated gun emplacements, and moved some of his 3,600 men forward. Abercromby did not trouble to train his artillery on the fort, and ordered a charge uphill at the French on July 8, a thousand light troops followed by 7,000 Redcoats in parade precision, to the roll of drums and the skirl of bagpipes. The French held their fire until the British became disorganized in the forward trenches and impediments Montcalm had just had crafted from felled trees, and then cut the British down in droves. About 2,000 were killed or seriously wounded, as Abercromby, from behind the lines, ordered renewed attacks over the corpses and wounded of the previous failed charges all day. Then, as night fell, he ordered a retreat that became a panic and a rout, and many wounded and much supplies were abandoned. Montcalm thought at first it was a stratagem to lure him out, as Abercromby still had a great superiority of manpower and artillery and supplies. Abercromby stabilized his forces at the old Fort William Henry; Montcalm remained at Carillon until late August, and then had to release most of his men to return and bring in the harvest. He had, by his skill and decisive leadership, and Abercromby’s incompetence, saved New France for another winter. But the British, under so determined a leader as Pitt, were not to be put off so easily.
The other access to Canada, via the St. Lawrence, was not approached with such hesitancy. Amherst had arrived in strength near Louisbourg on June 8 and began investing the town and fort. Louisbourg was a formidable installation, but the techniques for reducing a fortress in a siege were well-known and could not be countered if the attacking forces were adequately numerous and supplied and the besieged object could not be resupplied. Trenches were dug to bring siege guns forward and holes were blasted in the walls and other trenches were dug to enable columns of attackers to come forward and surge through the ruptured walls. Other artillery would fire over the walls and create as much havoc as possible for as long as was necessary. The British boxed in and gradually outgunned the French men o’ war in the harbor, and invested the fort on all landward sides and were eventually able to pour fire from the naval squadron straight into the town. The French defended valiantly but had no chance of being relieved, and by July 26, the French commander, Drucour, asked for terms, as the British had at Fort William Henry.
The legacy of that frightful episode intruded. Instead of recognizing that the French had fought honorably and tenaciously, as they had (and had taken 400 dead and 1,300 wounded in a garrison of 5,000), and allowing them to retire under their colors and with their possessions, Amherst required that the entire garrison be taken as prisoners of war and the entire civilian population of 8,000 from the surrounding area be deported to France. This was the larger, second half of the removal of the Acadians from 1755, and was another outrage. But the British felt that the earlier, prewar precedent and the antics of the French and Indians at Fort William Henry would have justified even sterner measures. The fall of Louisbourg left the St. Lawrence wide open to the Royal Navy, though there was not time to organize an attack up-river in 1758.
The third British target, Fort Frontenac, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario where it empties into the St. Lawrence, fell easily on August 26, to a deft and stealthy approach by Colonel John Bradstreet at the head of 3,100 men against a garrison of only 110 soldiers, the rest having been taken forward by the troops-starved Montcalm. Bradstreet captured stores and bread for more than 4,000, plus all the lake-craft the French had on Lake Ontario. The supply route between Montreal and the Ohio and western Pennsylvania forts was now heavily interdicted.
Abercromby, who despite his lethargy and lack of imagination as a commander had moments of strategic boldness, ordered Forbes to take Fort Duquesne, which involved some sort of rapprochement with some of the Indian tribes (or nations, as they preferred to be called). Abercromby was then sacked by Pitt, in favor of Amherst. The Indians remembered Fort William Henry, and despite Montcalm’s repulse of Abercromby at Carillon, they knew of the fall of Fort Frontenac and the approach of Forbes at the head of a large force. They spurned the request for alliance of the French commander at Duquesne, François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, and the Frenchman evacuated Fort Duquesne, blew it up on November 23, and withdrew his diminished garrison up the Allegheny for the winter. Pittsburgh would arise on the ashes of Fort Duquesne, Ligonier would be its most prosperous suburb, Duquesne a distinguished university, and for many years Forbes Field would be Duquesne’s baseball stadium. The route was clear from Philadelphia into the Ohio country, and the French presence in North America had been eradicated except for Montreal, Quebec, a few lesser towns along the St. Lawrence and St. Maurice Rivers, and partially, New Orleans.
7. THE WAR IN THE WEST INDIES AND AFRICA, 1759
On the heels of his successful seizure of the Senegalese slave trade, Pitt followed the advice of a Jamaican sugar plantation owner, William Beckford (who was also a London alderman), and seized the French island of Guadeloupe, which had a sugar production equivalent to Jamaica’s (20,000 tons a year), and was a staging port for attacks by French privateers against British sea commerce in the Caribbean. Possession of it would give Britain control of the sugar market and pricing procedure opposite most of Europe, and a bargaining chip to trade for Minorca, a valued base for the British fleet in the Mediterranean. (The British would take Martinique, too, in 1761.) A financial bonanza followed, as Martinique and Guadeloupe provided Britain with great quantities not only of sugar but of coffee, rum, molasses, and tropical fruit, and the wealth generated by these activities transformed the City doubters about Britain’s rising debt to purring tabbies, financing these exotic industries. The cautious and envious Newcastle periodically advised Pitt that the London City financial community, which bought British bonds, had to believe in the war for it to be paid for; in fact, Pitt, as long as his military operations were successful, could have forced the country’s bonds on the City, though it would have been a huge inconvenience. Pitt had sold his ability to deliver much of the world to British rule and profit, and to push France back into her own country, and he was delivering on his promise. There were 71,000 men in the Royal Navy and 91,000 in the army and it was proposed to add 10,000 to the army. Britain’s capacity to build ships was at its outer limits. With the activities of Britain in America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India, as well as Hanover, there were only about 10,000 troops, strengthened by the flabby and almost untrained home guard of 32,000, to protect the home islands in case of need.
For once, Montcalm would not be looking forward to the end of the Quebec winter. In Paris, it had been a dismal military year, and all Louis XV had to show for his exertions was to have thrown the paltry Hanoverians back across the Rhine. The Duke de Choiseul was named chief minister to go head-to-head with Pitt. His strategy would be the familiar one to mass the French navy to facilitate an invasion of England by the main French army, and leave it to Austria and Russia and the Swedes to give Frederick of Prussia a well-deserved thrashing, and give up the overseas campaigns as an improvident beau geste where France had little interest and less chance of success against the maritime-focused British. Of course, the problems with this were that Choiseul had no short-term ability to devote the forces necessary to build a fleet that could seriously threaten the British Isles; Pitt could always bribe Europeans into tearing scraps out of the frontiers of France; and the long-term strategic future was in vast continents and subcontinents, such as North America and India, and not in the cordons sanglants, slivers of territory between the Great Powers of Europe such as Flanders, Alsace-Lorraine, Silesia, and the trackless political wasteland of the Balkans, which changed hands back and forth at intervals for centuries.
Choiseul’s impatience with the overseas operations was understandable, and coincided with the king’s irritation at their cost and difficulty. But in building up an army of 100,000 in the Channel ports and waiting for an opportunity to attack across the Channel with naval superiority, he was seeking an instant gratification of a long-held wish that the British had never permitted to be filled. The only way to defeat Britain was successfully to occupy the home islands. This would require a substantially stronger navy than Britain’s, as well as an army large enough to defeat and occupy England, while maintaining sufficient strength to repel an invasion by a land neighbor, while busy trying to subdue the British Isles. Thus the secret of crushing Britain, as was never realized by its greatest continental adversaries, was to be at peace with all continental powers, which would require a greater army than all continental rivals, and then to have a greater navy than Britain’s. This would effectively require the combined naval and military force of the three other greatest powers in Europe. The geography and history of Europe never yielded any country such an advantage, and the British talent for dividing Europe with well-purchased and supported coalitions prevented that, even against leaders who dominated most of Europe for a time. This is why Britain has not been seriously invaded since the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066. Choiseul’s plan appealed to Gallic logic and King Louis XV’s acute military frustration, but it had no basis in reality. Though there is no evidence that anyone was thinking in these terms in the eighteenth century, this is precisely the advantage, much magnified from Britain’s modest means, that would eventually accrue to the Great Power of the Americas: no one could threaten it at home, and it would be able to intervene and promote coalitions in Europe and East Asia and the Middle East.
Pitt had successfully placated the king, and was loved by the masses, and the cautious Newcastle was little disposed to oppose him. As the normally waspy and envious Horace Walpole (the long-serving prime minister’s belletrist son) remarked, “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.”6 Pitt presented a budget for 1759 that, at 13 million pounds, was the greatest by far in British history and was more than half debt, with more than half the anticipated revenues committed to paying interest. To anyone who cared to notice, it was obvious that the quantum of this debt, especially if the war dragged on at all (and Pitt might take France’s castaway colonies but neither Britain nor any other country had any power to threaten France herself), would grow and would have to be shared by all the British, including the more than 20 percent of Britons in the flourishing colonies of America. This was a time bomb.
Seven Years War in America. Wisconsin Cartographers’ Guild. WISCONSIN’S PAST AND PRESENT. © 1998 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.
8. THE FALL OF QUEBEC
Pitt sent out his military orders for 1759 on December 9, 1758. These were to include Amherst overwhelming French opposition along Lake Champlain and seizing Montreal, while James Wolfe, who had returned to London and settled in his club to recover his health and reported to Pitt that he was ready to go up the St. Lawrence, was so charged, and he left England for Canada on February 24. On July 25, 1759, Amherst’s forces captured Fort Niagara, about 60 miles from what is now Toronto, and at the opposite end of Lake Ontario from Fort Frontenac, which Bradstreet had taken 11 months before. By this time, Wolfe’s assault on Quebec was well underway. He landed 8,500 troops on Ile d’Orleans, a few miles down-river from Quebec, on June 28. Despite the immense importance of the battle for Quebec to the whole Western world, and the huge mythology that has been built about it, from both sides, it was an almost accidental and very close-run engagement. Heavily outnumbered and isolated, Montcalm defended Quebec with great skill and agility, inflicting heavy losses on Wolfe, whose problems were compounded by acute fevers, indigestion, and depressive attacks. He was reduced to asking the opinion of his brigade commanders (Robert Monckton, George Townshend, and James Murray), whom he despised, a sentiment that was fully requited. They recommended that he desist from further attacks on Quebec from down-river and that Wolfe move the British forces up, to the west of Quebec, and attack there, to separate Montcalm from landward reinforcements, and try to enfilade Quebec from what was presumed to be its more vulnerable aspect.
Precise advice on how to take Quebec came from Captain Robert Stobo, one of the prisoners handed over by Washington as an earnest when he evacuated Fort Necessity in 1755. Stobo had lived as a prisoner since, in Fort Duquesne and then Quebec, though he circulated easily in Quebec society, until apprehended as a spy for having smuggled out of Fort Duquesne, via an Indian, plans he had drawn of Duquesne that were found in the belongings of the deceased Braddock after the disaster on the Monongahela. Stobo escaped Quebec, spoke only to Wolfe, and advised him of a footpath up the cliffs at what has become known as Wolfe’s Cove. Thus arose the plan for one of history’s decisive military battles.7
Wolfe moved about 4,500 men on the tides up-river from Quebec, then down on the current in the early hours of September 12, mounted Stobo’s path to a site above known as the Plains of Abraham, and overwhelmed a small French tent encampment. Wolfe was apparently beset by morose thoughts, as well as indecision, finding himself alone on the Plains. He ordered that disembarkations stop, but the landing officer assumed the order was mistaken and ignored it. Montcalm had been distracted by a carefully played ruse to the east of Quebec, and only arrived on the Plains after Wolfe’s men had been drawn up across the Plains. By 9:30 in the morning Montcalm was concerned that the British were bringing up artillery from the ships and entrenching themselves in a manner that would become irreversible if didn’t act, and ordered his men forward. In fact, Wolfe had had one of his attacks of inertia and the British were bringing up artillery but not entrenching; Montcalm had summoned a detachment of 2,000 of his best troops from the west, who he hoped would land in Wolfe’s rear once battle was engaged.
There were about 4,500 men on each side, though the British had the advantage of better trained and disciplined forces. There is a good deal of anecdotal evidence that neither commander expected to survive the engagement about to begin. In this at least, their provisions were exact. The French attacked in rather ragged order, supported by Indians and irregular skirmishers who sniped from the sides. The British coolly held their fire, and the professionalism of the Redcoats paid handsome rewards—they drenched the French with artillery and pushed them into what became a rather uncoordinated but not panicky retreat to Quebec. Wolfe had been wounded early on the wrist, but was mortally hit by snipers in the chest and stomach as he joined the advance. Just before he died, he received the information that the French were vacating the field and that it was certainly a victory. Only a few minutes later, the column Montcalm had been hoping for arrived in the British rear, but the British, now commanded by Brigadier George Townshend, were able to deflect them. Montcalm had been severely wounded on his retreat from the Plains, in his stomach and leg. He fell into a delirium and died at 4 a.m. the following morning.
The governor general of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, took over. He ordered the forces Montcalm had been whipping into shape to the east of Quebec when Wolfe attacked from the west to retreat inland and westward; the remains of the army at the Plains to join them; both groups to join with the column that had arrived from the west just after they could have been decisive; Quebec to hang on as best it could; and the forces that managed to execute the maneuver to retreat toward Montreal, the final significant outpost of French rule in North America. (New Orleans was an unfortified, international crossroads of adventurers.) The French irregulars had no enthusiasm for prolonging the suspense at Quebec and accepted Townshend’s generous surrender terms on September 18. Montcalm’s deputy commander, François de Lévis, had taken over the fragmented units from Vaudreuil, had shaped them up, and was leading them crisply back to Quebec and was only a day’s march away when Quebec surrendered.
The historic importance of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, as determining the fate of Canada, and the expulsion of the French from North America, amplified by the drama of the two brave and capable commanders dying on the field, mythologically immortalized by the paintings of the death scenes by Benjamin West of Wolfe and by Louis Watteau of Montcalm, have obscured what a close and often farcical encounter it was. If Wolfe had approached Quebec more closely and quickly and put in hand the measures to start a siege, preventing westward sorties from the city, Montcalm would have been bottled up. If Montcalm had waited an hour before attacking, his relief force would have arrived in the British rear almost simultaneously. If Quebec had held out another two days, Lévis would have mauled Townshend very badly.
Because the British would now have to spend the winter in Quebec, 7,000 troops with 7,000 civilians, in a heavily damaged town with accommodation and food for the winter for just 7,000 and winter closing off the possibility of resupply, Brigadier Murray, to whom Townshend bequeathed command when he took the last ship out on October 18, formalized what would be a genuinely historic policy that would ramify constructively through centuries to come, of close and equal cooperation between the British and the French in Canada.
There would not be such rejoicing at the military capture of a town in North America until the fall of Atlanta to General Sherman 105 years later (Chapter 6), and in Britain, a thousand bonfires of celebration blazed. It was a particular relief to Pitt, as Wolfe’s last dispatches had been quite gloomy. Pitt’s eulogy of the fallen commander remains one of the classics of British parliamentary oratory: “The horror of the night, the precipice scaled by Wolfe, the empire he with a handful of men added to England, and the glorious catastrophe of contentedly terminating life where his fame began—ancient story may be ransacked and ostentatious philosophy thrown into the account before an episode can be found to rank with Wolfe’s.” A monument was raised to Wolfe in the slightly out-of-the-way place of Greenwich, only a few hundred yards from where the Meridian would be set (Chapter 7). The French were not so preoccupied with Quebec, though they found the succession of British victories very tiresome, but Choiseul’s policy of an invasion of England had gained no traction. The French fleet at Toulon, which had taken Minorca, tried to skip the Mediterranean and gather in the Channel. The ever-vigilant Boscawen saw it sneak past Gibraltar, gave chase, destroyed five of the French ships at the Battle of Lagos (Portugal, not Nigeria), and blockaded the rest into Cádiz.
9. THE WAR IN EUROPE, 1759
But the main French naval forces, at Brest in Britanny, joined with returning forces from the Caribbean and sought to take advantage of traditionally stormy weather in the autumn to slip the blockade of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, who had developed the technique of rotating several of his ships at a time home for refit, provisioning and home leave, and maintaining the watch constantly. Hawke and the French naval commander, the Count de Conflans, came to grips on November 20 in tempestuous weather in Quiberon Bay. A wild action ensued, in which there was no effort to coordinate between different ships in each command, and in the melee and the succeeding grounding of French ships in the Vilaine River, the British lost two ships and 300 men and the French ultimately 17 ships and 2,500 men. The French navy was in no position to conduct invasion barges across the Channel, even had the weather allowed, and Quiberon Bay was a victory on the scale of Drake’s, and of Howe’s and Nelson’s to come. Pitt’s strategy was triumphant, and Choiseul’s, as designs based on the invasion of Britain inevitably are, was a complete failure.
The continental campaign had not gone well for the Anglo-Prussian alliance, however. Hanover was safe enough, but Frederick’s bellicosity had caught up with him. The Russians won some victories on the Eastern Front, the Austrians forced the surrender of a Prussian corps at Maxen (13,000 men), and at Kunersdorf on August 12, in the greatest defeat of his career, Frederick lost half his army (21,000 men) to the Russians, who, not for the last time in the history of these countries, had been completely underestimated. The Austrians occupied Dresden, and Saxony, Frederick’s initial prize in the war, was largely lost. Frederick contemplated abdication and even suicide and began frenzied importuning of Pitt to convene a peace conference. Prince Louis of Brunswick, the Dutch regent and a presentable neutral, but the brother of the British ally Prince Ferdinand, duly invited the combatants to parlay, but the Austrians and Russians were not interested. Nor, really, were the French. No one, including the British banker of Frederick’s military impetuosities (and his brother-in-law George II), much cared what happened to the Prussians.
The odd Anglo-Prussian alliance, with Pitt everywhere victorious and Frederick on the ropes, surged and staggered into 1760. Pitt was running out of French colonies to attack, but France had the largest army in Europe, and in the same measure that the British were determined to keep continental and especially French armies out of England, they had no land war capacity to do more in France than amphibious pin-pricks along the coast, which were almost always costly failures anyway. It was a stand-off, a shark and a lion. But a general peace could not be had until the Austrians and Russians wearied of the war with Prussia, which had Frederick, in a frenetic war of maneuver, endlessly showing the prowess of his well-trained troops, marching all about his frontiers repelling intruders at every hand. His opponents finally had a coordinated plan: The Austrians would again try to take Silesia and advance from Saxony, the Russians would attack from East Prussia, and whichever column encountered Frederick was to try to tie him up while the others made for Berlin.
The endless scrambling around the edges of a gradually imploding Prussia continued all year. Frederick, though outnumbered, ejected the Austrians from Silesia yet again. The Russians, with an Austrian contingent, briefly occupied Berlin in October, but withdrew as Frederick hastily returned. The Russian empress, Elizabeth, would be the only Russian leader to occupy Berlin until Joseph Stalin arrived at the Potsdam Conference in Frederick’s palace in 1945, at the head of the 360 divisions of the Red Army (Chapter 11). The year of relentless warfare in Germany ended with the Battle of Torgau on November 2, west of Dresden, which was effectively a draw between the Austrians and Frederick’s smaller army. Frederick’s resourcefulness was starting to wear down his enemies, but even now, no serious peace discussions took place. The war in India also continued well for the British, and France had no capacity at all to resupply its forces there.
10. THE END OF THE WAR IN AMERICA, 1760
In America, Montreal was effectively the last prize. Lévis made a spirited effort to retake Quebec in April but was repulsed, and Amherst encroached on Montreal over the summer and it was surrendered, at least honorably and with generous terms for the civil population, by Governor Vaudreuil, on September 8, 1760. With the fall of Quebec and Montreal to the English, the war for North America was effectively over. In London, America’s greatest intellectual, Benjamin Franklin, was back as the envoy of Pennsylvania, as of 1757, and he shared in the widespread concern in some American circles that Britain might bargain Canada back to France for Martinique and trade Guadeloupe for Minorca. All his conscient life up to this time, Franklin had cherished a view of the endless growth of America, and noted early regarding the growth of the American population, doubling every 20 years or so, that “it will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the water.”8 He strongly objected to the British custom of prescribing the death penalty for far too many offenses, and of substituting for the gallows the transportation of such convicts to America. He approved the imposition of tariffs on the convicts’ admission (invalidated by the British Parliament), and even sponsored the return to Britain of a shipload of rattlesnakes as a gesture of thanks for the receipt in America of so many hardened criminals.9
Franklin chafed at unreasonable laws imposed from overseas, but continued to regard himself as an Englishman living in America. Franklin disapproved the emigration of Germans in such numbers that they might not assimilate to the English language,10 but reasoned that the prosperity, relative absence of war, more abundant agriculture, standard of living, and general levels of nutrition and energy in America were so superior to those in Britain that America would surpass the British population without one more person embarking in Britain for America. Franklin was correct, and would have been even without the huge waves of assimilated immigration from central and southern Europe, or the famine-driven half of the entire Irish population that made ship for America and Canada in the middle of the next century. Franklin included such thoughts in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. He wrote nothing of his long-term notions of political organization of relations with the home country, but when the North American victory became clear, he agitated and lobbied strenuously for the British retention of Canada. As agent for Pennsylvania, Franklin rarely met Pitt (until later, less intense times for Pitt, when they became quite friendly), but he had a close relationship with Pitt’s secretaries, Potter and Wood, and was continually pipelining in his urgings for the conquest and retention of Canada.
When this appeared to be in hand, in 1760, it was assumed in Britain that peace was near, as the British sea superiority and French land superiority made it hard to discern where the war would continue. The Earl of Bath wrote a pamphlet promoting retention of Canada, and it was widely thought, but never confirmed and now seems unlikely, that Franklin effectively ghost-wrote much of it. Edmund Burke wrote a trenchant championship of retention of Guadeloupe and the return of Canada, as Louisbourg had been returned by the Peace of Aix-la-Chappelle in 1748. Franklin openly entered this controversy, writing “I have long been of opinion that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though, like other foundations, they are low and little now, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure that human wisdom ever erected. . . . If we keep it, all the country from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people . . . the Atlantic sea will be covered with your trading ships; and your naval power, thence continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole world, and awe the world. If the French remain in Canada, they will continually harass our colonies by the Indians, and impede, if not prevent their growth; your progress will at best be slow.”11 This was from a letter to Lord Kames but was reprinted in what became known as Franklin’s The Canada Pamphlet.
Franklin was certainly prescient, but he was essentially sketching out the future of America, not Britain. There is no doubt that he thought America would surpass Britain, and given his frequent bouts of irritation with the British regime in America, it is hard to doubt that he at least had a two-track option: Britain and America together become unquestionably the greatest power in the world and sort out governance between them; or America, the mortal threat of France to strangle English-speaking America in its cradle having been graciously removed, would achieve the same prodigies without the British. What he did not know, and was not generally known, was that Pitt would have fought to the last musket ball himself to keep Canada, and Louis XV and Choiseul felt themselves well shot of the unprofitable, inaccessible, unremitting New France that Jacques Cartier had allegedly called, on discovering it, “The land God gave to Cain,” and that Frederick the Great’s (and Catherine the Great’s) friend Voltaire dismissed as “a few acres of snow” (a description that rankles yet in Quebec, 250 years later). Even more improbably, the bountiful fisheries of Newfoundland caused Pitt to say that he would rather give up his right arm than a share of the fishing off the Grand Banks to France, and that he would surrender the Tower of London before he would give up Newfoundland. Pitt was not just concerned with fish, because access to fisheries was what bred sailors and created the personnel for a navy, and cutting France off from such fisheries would have severely crimped its ability to rebuild its shattered navy.12
11. THE END OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR
Military fatigue and diplomatic confusion settled and thickened until the war finally ended. King George II died on October 25, 1760, and was succeeded by his young grandson, the preternaturally headstrong George III, who had no interest at all in Hanover and was opposed, partly from sharing his father’s dislike of his grandfather, to any British assistance there. It was to appease George II that Walpole and Pelham had propped up Hanover. George III achieved the appointment of his former tutor, the Earl of Bute, as northern secretary in charge of European continental relations (for which post he was completely unqualified), assuring friction with Pitt, who retained the Southern Department (all foreign affairs except Europe). Bute wanted to wind the war down and shared his master’s opposition to any involvement in continental wars.
In Europe in 1761, essentially the same familiar armies continued to mill about on the edges of Prussia in an increasing state of depletion and exhaustion. Choiseul managed in 1762 to bring Spain into the war against Britain, convincing the Spanish that now that Britain held the scepter of the seas, she would be poaching on the Spanish interests in Latin America next. (If true, that was all the more reason for Spain to have entered the war earlier, when she could have joined forces with a still navally viable France.) Faithful to a centuries-old alliance, Portugal rallied to England and declared war on Spain, which invaded its smaller neighbor. Again, the British sent an expeditionary force to help their protégé. Pitt had learned of the French-Spanish arrangement, and advocated a preemptive strike against the Spanish. The advice was rejected as improper under international law (which scarcely existed and when invoked was almost always pretextual), and from war-weariness. Pitt resigned from the government, leaving Bute preeminent under the mighty survivor, Prime Minister the Duke of Newcastle, now 36 years in cabinet. He was now having severe problems paying for the war, as the government was charged, in effect, 25 percent interest and was still two million pounds short on the last year, facing the possible requirement simply to print banknotes and endure inflation, a horrible political and social nightmare. Newcastle, too, was abruptly turned out by George III and Bute on May 26, 1762, ending the very long (41 years) dominance of the Walpole-Pelham Whigs, years of vast success for Britain, in war and peace, and all over the world.
The French army, in one of the longest droughts of victory in its history, was unable to get by or through the Hanoverians; Czarina Elizabeth died, and was replaced by her dull-witted German nephew, Peter III, who worshipped Frederick the Great and abruptly withdrew from the war, mediated peace between Prussia and Sweden, and threatened Austria, before being overthrown, imprisoned, and murdered, in 1762, with the presumed complicity of his formidable wife, Catherine the Great, in one of history’s most lop-sided marriages. She quickly restored the anti-Prussian slant of Russian policy.13 Frederick, who was a man of considerable culture, wrote a couplet about Catherine: “The Russian Messalina, the Cossacks’ whore, Gone to service lovers on the Stygian shore.”14
As negotiations dragged desultorily on, the well-traveled Monckton seized Havana on August 14, 1762. Once again, there were celebrations in the streets in England. Peace was finally secured by the craftiness of Choiseul, a clever negotiator and diplomat, if an unsuccessful war strategist. Spain would fight to the death rather than acquiesce in the permanent loss of Havana. Britain would have to be bought off with something comparable. An insufficiently generous peace could produce a parliamentary revolt, and bring back Pitt, who would trim France back to the Ile-de-France, if he could bribe enough European armies to do it. The national debt of Great Britain had increased from 74.5 million pounds in 1755 to 133.25 million in 1763; 10 times the year’s budget which was half deficit. This was almost more debt than Britain could bear without provoking taxpayers’ revolts in both the home islands and America, and a default and rampant inflation were both completely out of the question.
It had been a brilliant but almost Pyrrhic victory for Pitt. France was a larger and richer country than Britain, but it too had a financial problem, so the pressure was on Choiseul to produce a peace that would be accepted by Spain, which he had induced late into the war and was not gasping for money and was prepared to delay peace to get Havana back. Choiseul gave Louisiana to Spain, in exchange for Spain ceding to Britain the territory from Mississippi to Georgia in return for Havana. Since Louis and Choiseul had no interest in North America, that worked for everyone, and France took back her sugar islands, as well as the little Gulf of St. Lawrence islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, from which to service her fishing fleet, which was guaranteed access to Newfoundland fishing. France gave back Minorca but kept Pondicherry in India and the West African slave trading stations. Britain ruled North America and India. Everyone had what he wanted most and the Peace of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763. Britain had the winning strategy, but in a perverse pattern that would be followed with other leaders who rescued it from wars that were going badly with Great Powers, it dispensed with the father of victory Pitt, as it would with his son for a brief peace with Napoleon, Lloyd George in 1922, and Churchill in 1945 (though not Palmerston after Crimea).
Five days later came the Treaty of Hubertusburg. Frederick the Great kept Silesia and Maria Theresa took back Saxony. Not for the last time, Germany had unleashed aggressive war, and not for the last time gained nothing tangible from it. Frederick promised to support Maria Theresa’s son as next head of the Holy Roman Empire. But he had established Prussia as a Great Power, and had given the world an astonishing and minatory demonstration of Germany’s military aptitudes and national tenacity. Furor Teutonicus was foreseeable (if not much foreseen). In Eastern Europe, Prussia was a doughty contender, but hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost in a war that, though it made Prussia a Great Power and enabled America to start thinking of independence, effected no significant changes to anything else in Europe. The 22-year-old George Washington had ignited a fateful conflict.
The Seven Years’ War had been an utterly stupid war for everyone except the British and the Americans. They had gained a world, with a debt time bomb attached to it, and had perfected the technique, soon to be absolutely vital for compensating for France’s much larger population and greater national wealth. France had surrendered much of the prestige she had enjoyed from Richelieu to Louis XIV. The zigzag of French decline had begun, with the most dismal war in its history, prior to the severe beatings it would suffer (110 and 180 years later) in two out of three contests with a united Germany. William Pitt had been the great war statesman, Frederick the Great the great commander, and the whimsical Philadelphian printer and scientist, Benjamin Franklin, the great strategic prophet.
12. ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS AFTER 1763
The removal of France from North America made Britain dispensable to the American colonists, and the heavy costs of the British victory in the Seven Years’ War and the increased cohesion the colonies achieved in the war altered the correlation of forces between Britain and America. The British did not notice this, but the more astute Americans did.
At first, all was well in Anglo-American relations, as the dispatch of the French was celebrated by both. As early as 1754, Franklin, renowned throughout the world as a scientist, and a prodigious talent in other areas as well, had exposed to his learned British friend Peter Collinson, a successful merchant but also a distinguished naturalist, his opinion that “Britain and her Colonies should be considered as one Whole, and not different states with separate Interests.” He had abandoned his previous hope, broached but frustrated at the Albany Congress earlier in 1754 (which had been convened at the request of the British Board of Trade, a government ministry), for colonial unity of purpose and action. He still favored a Grand Council of all the colonies, chosen by the individual colonial assemblies and presided over by a President General, who would represent the monarch of Britain and America. This was the heart of his plan at Albany. The Grand Council would operate independently of the British Parliament. This largely prefigured constitutional dispositions in America and the British Commonwealth, but Franklin made little progress with it at this stage. The prime minister, Newcastle, completely ignored the proposal when it was presented to him by the Board of Trade in 1754.15
When Franklin had persuaded the Pennsylvania Assembly to set up a colonial militia after the catastrophe on the Monongahela, and accepted a colonelcy in it, so great was the concern about Pennsylvania’s open western border that the British government vetoed the creation of the militia. British reaction to autonomous gestures in the colonies was reflexive and hostile. Franklin, an optimist, chose not to set too much store by that, and the ensuing war buried the hatchet between the British and their colonies (in the heads and torsos of their shared enemies). Even Franklin’s astounding and relentless powers of persuasion made few converts to his idea of trans-Atlantic organization or any devolution like it when he returned as representative (lobbyist, in fact) for Pennsylvania in London in 1764 after a brief absence. He had already been elected a member of the Royal Society and soon was awarded honorary doctorates from St. Andrews and Oxford (and had as much right to be called Doctor as Samuel Johnson). The British greatly respected Franklin and much liked him, but they did not connect their regard for him with any notion that the American colonies possessed any aptitude or representative desire for self-government. Franklin gleaned a notion of what he was facing in 1760, when Collinson arranged a meeting with the president of the King’s Privy Council, Lord Granville, one of the most influential members of the government. Granville wished to discuss the military scene in America, but added, in an unpromising aside, that “The king is the Legislator of the Colonies,” and his will was “the law of the land.” Franklin’s polite remonstrations made no headway.16
When Franklin returned to London in 1764, his chief preoccupation, bizarrely, was to bring Pennsylvania more directly under British rule, in order to emancipate it from what he rightly considered the bigoted autocracy of the Penn family. He had fought against this in various capacities in Philadelphia and construed it as his duty to seek the most likely possible easement of the arbitrariness of the Penns, and so called for the prerogatives of the existing legislature to be gutted, prior to the establishment of a federal colonial authority. His wishes would come to pass, but not as he had initially foreseen. One of Franklin’s closest British friends and one of the country’s leading solicitors, Richard Jackson, told Franklin shortly after the Treaty of Paris was signed that Britain intended to keep 10,000 troops in America, at the expense of the colonies. Franklin replied that the more costs Britain inflicted on the colonies, the less revenue it could expect to have remitted to Britain, recognizing at once the problem the victorious Empire faced. “It is not worth your while. The more you oblige us to pay here, the less you can receive there.” Six months later, Jackson, by then a member of Parliament, wrote to him that “200,000 pounds will infallibly be raised by Parliament on the plantations.” Franklin replied that he was “not much alarm’d. . . . You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater Burthens upon us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting yourselves.”17 He wrote to Collinson in the same line: “I think there is scarce anything you can do that may be hurtful to us, but what will be as much or more so to you. This must be our chief security.”18
13. THE STAMP ACT
Shortly after Franklin’s return to London in 1764, debate began on the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on printed and paper goods in the colonies, including even newspapers and decks of cards, and was so called because payment of the tax was certified by a stamp on the article taxed. Britain already had such a tax domestically. Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville (not to be confused with Lord Granville), was leader of the government in the House of Commons. In presenting the measure, Grenville claimed the right of Parliament to levy taxes anywhere in the Empire, which was not contested by his fellow legislators, but he gave the colonies a year to propose alternatives. None did so, although Franklin himself did. Franklin achieved prodigies of diplomatic access and advocacy, but he had no legitimate status at all, and was merely an information service from Pennsylvania and other colonies that engaged him, to the British government, establishment, and public. Franklin’s proposal was to have Parliament establish a colonial credit office that would issue bills of credit in the colonies, and collect 6 percent for renewal of the bills each year, and these could be used as currency. Gold and silver currency were scarce in the colonies, as all transactions with Britain had to be paid in cash, and Parliament had forbidden the issuance of paper money in America. Franklin’s theory was that this would be an adequately disguised tax, and would not be unpopular in America because of the desire there for paper money to replace an inordinate mass of informal IOUs. It isn’t clear how the interest would have been collected, or how inflation would have been avoided, but at least it was creative thinking, and a start.
Franklin subscribed to the theory of his friendly acquaintance Edmund Burke that popular discussion of rights was a sure sign of misgovernment, and he watched with concern as the revenue-raising tax became a noisy trans-Atlantic debate about the right to tax. Franklin was shocked at the proportions of the outrage in the colonies when the stamp tax was imposed, in November 1765. There was in the stamp tax a move to tax harmonization in the Empire, but also to strike a preemptive blow for the untrammeled rights of the Imperial Parliament. The English suspected some of the colonial leaders of aspiring to independence, and that must have been correct.19 But they acted in a way that could have been reasonably assumed to fan and inflame that sentiment, not defuse or douse it. The British political class assumed that while there were agitators for independence in America, they were opportunists, rabble-rousers, and scoundrels, and that the great majority were committed Englishmen, loyal to the Crown, come what may. That sentiment was strong, but what the British, from the king down, failed to grasp was that loyalty to the Crown in America depended on the wearer of the Crown appearing to be the impartial arbiter, when necessary, of the interests of all his subjects. If the king were to seem solely interested in upholding the British side of an argument with the Americans, that loyalty, in the face of the higher and more imminent patriotic interest of the colonists, supplemented by their material interests, would quickly evaporate. The British had not sent talented governors to America, with rare exceptions, and as has been mentioned, the conduct of the military expedition leaders had been heavy-handed with the colonists, and completely ineffectual with the French and Indians, prior to Pitt’s taking control of the Seven Years’ War in 1758.
The theory of parliamentary representation of all interests was strained, in part because Parliament was riddled with constituencies that had very few people in them, were controlled by influential individuals, and in any case did not represent the colonies at all, other than in the sense that the national interest of the home islands required some consideration of the Americans. (There were about 9.5 million people in the British Isles, including over two million Irish Roman Catholics who were a good deal more dissentient in spirit as subjects of the British Parliament than the Americans at their most unenthusiastic; there was an electorate of about 300,000, scattered extremely unevenly through about 540 constituencies, and the appointive and hereditary House of Lords had greater powers than the House of Commons.) Even had it been a broad suffrage with equal representation for all districts, it would still have been scandalous non-representation of the Americans, the wealthiest part of the British-governed world with, by the mid-1770s, about 30 percent of the population of Britain, about 70 percent of the population of Prussia, which had just held the great Austrian and Russian Empires at bay for almost seven years, and a greater population than the Netherlands or Sweden, noteworthy powers that had swayed the destinies of Europe at times in the previous 150 years. (Admittedly, about 8 percent of the Americans were unenfranchised slaves, who had only the rights their owners allowed from one moment to the next.)
On the other side, the Americans knew that Britain had saved them from a most unappetizing fate at the hands of the French, a prospect made more gruesome and horrifying by any contemplation of what the Indians might have done to make the lives of the colonists shorter and more uncongenial. All informed Americans knew that Britain had gone a long way into debt doing so, and as America was the most prosperous part of the Empire, it had some obligation to shoulder a proportionate share of the cost. It is impossible, at this remove, and buried as these matters now are in the folkloric mythology of the creation of the United States, to guess what degree of unvarnished cynicism might have hastened and made louder the American caterwauling about rights, and the corresponding failure to make any suggestion, apart from Franklin’s worthy improvisation, of an alternative to the stamp tax to retire the debt incurred in the military salvation of America.
The Pennsylvania Assembly adopted a resolution strenuously condemning the Stamp Act, as did the Virginia Assembly, under the influence of the fiery orator Patrick Henry, who advised George III to contemplate the fate of Julius Caesar and Charles I (as if either the men or their fates were in the slightest similar, and seeming to condone their ends, an assassination and a pseudo-judicial murder, shortly leading in each case to the elevation of their heirs). The Virginians asserted that the tax was “illegal, unconstitutional, and unjust. . . . The inhabitants of this Colony are not bound to yield Obedience to any law or Ordinance whatever, designed to impose any Taxation whatever upon them,” apart from those legislated in Virginia. This response was known as the Virginia Resolves and was emulated by most of the colonies. The British had designated collectors of the tax, who were pressured into refusing to collect it. With the tax in effect but not being collected, and demonstrations verging on violence around the colonies, nine of the colonies met in New York and declared that taxes could be imposed on the colonists only with their personal consent or that of their elected representatives. This was represented as part of the birthright of Englishmen. It was a stirring stand for individual liberty and rugged individualism, but was nonsense in fact. No sane person will volunteer to be taxed, other than in a severe community or national emergency, and Englishmen were taxed all the time with only a vote of an undemocratically elected House of Commons and a House of Lords that would recoil in horror at the thought that it was answerable to the taxpayers. (It should not be imagined that the colonial houses of assembly had a greatly larger percentage of representation on their voters’ lists, although the procedure of what became known as gerrymandering [after the redistricting artistry of the fifth vice president, Elbridge Gerry] had not had the time to plumb the depths of electoral vote-rigging that existed in England.) The rights Englishmen possessed, which distinguished them from most nationalities, except for some Swiss, Dutch, and Scandinavians, were freedom of speech and assembly, and access to generally fairly independent courts, as well as some participatory legislative processes, and the Americans received them from and shared them with the British.
14. FRANKLIN’S DIPLOMACY IN LONDON, 1764–1767
The Americans, Franklin was convinced, didn’t want independence, but they wanted an end to inferiority. They recognized the British right to regulate trade between parts of the Empire, but not to do anything that really touched the lives of the colonists. The problem with this outlook was that it amounted to Britain’s having the high privilege of assuring the security of the colonists, at British expense, and no authority to require anything of the colonists in return. Even if such a thing could be negotiated for the future, it left Britain with the heavy cost of having thrown the French out of North America, to protect the colonists, with the beneficiaries loudly claiming that it was their birthright as Englishmen, and the most well-to-do group of Englishmen at that, to refuse to pay anything toward their own salvation. That would not work as the modus operandi of a functioning empire.
On the other side, the British imagined that they could do what they wished legislating over and for the colonists, that there was any truth to the fiction that the British Parliament represented the Americans, that the colonists, like those in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands, had no capacity whatever for self-government, and that no American could possibly wish it except a few political demagogues and self-seekers. The Empire was not going to last long on such a flimsy foundation as that, either. It was in this deepening vortex that Franklin worked in London.
Franklin had thought of American representation in the British Parliament, but it was soon clear that matters had deteriorated too far for that. The Americans would not seek it, in the same measure that the British would not offer it. There was already an obvious danger of armed conflict, as there was much talk in London of sending the British army to collect the stamp tax. Fortunately the ministry changed, and Pitt’s friend the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister. Franklin met the new president of the Board of Trade, Lord Dartmouth, and proposed the suspension of the Stamp Act, until the colonies’ debt levels, which he attributed to the fiscal rigors of the late war, had subsided. (They were modest compared with Britain’s.) And then the Stamp Act could quietly expire. He also warned that the use of armed force to collect taxes in America would fail, as the soldiers would be induced to desert in large numbers by the higher pay scales of the American private sector, and by the impossibility of rounding up deserters in a country so vast and absorbent of dissenters.
On February 13, 1766, Franklin appeared before Parliament in effect to answer for America. He did so brilliantly. He protested American loyalty, which had been affected by the British imposition of “an internal tax.” There had never been any objection to taxes on exports. Partly because of Franklin’s efforts, the British repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but accompanied that move with the Declaratory Act, which averred that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Franklin wasn’t much bothered by that declaration, as long as nothing was done about it. He cherished a reform of the Empire that would cause Britain to shed even its right to excise taxes on exports. He was more convinced than ever that eventually America would surpass Britain and foresaw a gradual inversion of the relationship, that the American country would be the senior partner. A man of immense subtlety, congeniality, and diplomacy, Franklin exaggerated the ability of others to reason as thoughtfully as he did.
He wrote home very happily of “the august body” of the British Parliament having done the right and sensible thing in repealing the Stamp Act, and predicted imperial reform. By this Franklin meant a single monarch of the Empire, but the main constituent parts entirely self-governing, or coordinating through a grand assembly of representatives meeting in equality and dealing with matters of common interest, as he had proposed for the colonies themselves. The first option was close to what the British Commonwealth became 150 years later, between Britain and what were called the “white Dominions”—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, more or less, South Africa. Of course, all of those countries combined, and adding the United Kingdom, even today, have a population, as Franklin foresaw, that is not much more than half that of the U.S. The second option, with the grand assembly, was emulated to a substantial degree by the advocates of federalism at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where Franklin presided, in 1787 and 1788.
Franklin’s optimism, as frequently happened in his long life, was unjustified. “Every man in England,” he wrote, “. . . seems to jostle himself into the Throne with the King, and talks of ‘our subjects in the colonies.’”20 As usually happens in long-running disagreements, tempers escalated and a natural desire to settle the dispute violently steadily gained ground as a prospect. A similar process would be replicated between the slave-holding and free American states 90 years later (Chapters 6 and 7). The British could speak only of repression by force, tipsy with their Seven Years’ War victories, especially as the Rockingham-Pitt regimes gave way to the king’s friends, the reactionary governments of the Duke of Grafton and Frederick, Lord North. Franklin did not think the British possessed the least idea of how difficult it would be to suppress the colonists, and did not think they would succeed if they tried. It was painful for Benjamin Franklin, as for many. He wrote Lord Kames (Pitt’s friend) that “I love Britain” and many British, and “I wish it prosperity.” His sought-for union could disadvantage America briefly, but “America, an immense Territory favour’d by Nature with all advantages of Climate, Soil, great navigable Rivers and Lakes etc., must become a great Country, populous and mighty; and will in a less time than is generally conceived, be able to shake off any Shackles that may be imposed on her and perhaps place them on the Imposers.”21 This was Franklin’s wistful hope, and prophetic view; while the British grumbled belligerently and garrulously about putting America in its place, the sun was already rising on the mighty and uncontainable power of the New World. Nothing could stifle, or, ultimately, equal it. America was the predestined nation.
15. THE TOWNSHEND TAXES
Franklin was already being overtaken by events. In 1767 the chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, imposed a series of excise taxes on a range of English manufactures, including paper, glass, paint, and, eventually, tea, and provided for a board of customs commissioners to sit in America and collect the tax as the goods arrived. This must have been a gratuitous gesture to annoy the Americans, as the duty could have been levied in British ports as the goods left the country of origin. Franklin did not foresee that this would arouse his countrymen, but a new uproar occurred. The most important American of all, if a confrontation came, would be George Washington, the senior military officer in the colonies. He had not been overly successful as a senior officer, but was a capable and brave leader, a tall, impressive presence, and an astute businessman, though only a mid-level plantation owner. He had continued assiduously to invest in the western part of Virginia and in the Ohio country, and had steadily built his plantation at Mount Vernon, where he was sometimes a harsh slavemaster. Though largely self-educated, he was knowledgeable and worldly, despite the fact that he never left America. Unlike Franklin, he was not gregarious but rather slightly shy. But he was formidable and respected. He was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and steered clear of the debate on the Stamp Act, ignoring the pyrotechnics of Patrick Henry and others, as did also the young plantation owner from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who entered the House at the age of 21 in 1764. Jefferson disliked public speaking, and was never good at it, but he was an elegant writer, a talented lawyer, a fine architect, and a learned polymath.
Washington reasoned that the Stamp Act raised the ire especially of “the speculators,” by which he meant lawyers, publishers, and ship owners, whom he tended to disparage (not land and crop speculators like himself). Washington proposed that the Stamp Act be responded to with a general campaign to buy less from Britain, arguing that British merchants could be relied upon to agitate in ways that the Mother of Parliaments could not resist, whereas it could resist disaffected colonials. He believed such a partial boycott would provide “a necessary stimulus to industry” in America. He was as cool-headed as Franklin, but less intellectual, and tended to think as a businessman or military commander. He soon discontinued tobacco production at Mount Vernon, and went over to arts and crafts manufacturing to fill the void that he anticipated from strained relations with the British.22
By 1769 Townshend’s laws had caused Washington to toughen his stance and call for an outright general American boycott of British goods. More ominously, and getting well ahead of Franklin, who toiled to the end to avoid a complete rupture, Washington wrote that if “selfish, designing men . . . and clashing interests” made a boycott impractical, no one should “hesitate a moment” to take up arms, though this “should be the last resource.”23
In May 1769, the Virginia burgesses adopted “An humble, dutiful, and loyal address” to George III to protect “the violated rights of America.” The angry governor, a typical British Colonel Blimp (an inflexible and traditionalist stuffed shirt) figure, Lord Dunmore, dissolved the House of Burgesses, and its members repaired to the Raleigh Tavern for a venting of fierce oratory. After a fair bit of steam had been blown off, Washington spoke, and unveiled a plan he had worked out with his closest collaborator, George Mason, for total non-importation from Britain. Washington sold it, apart from other factors, as a way for Virginia merchants to simply renege on their often heavy debts to British suppliers. This plan was adopted, and gave Washington a rounded parliamentary status to add to his high standing as an officer and astute plantation owner and land buyer. Washington faithfully adhered to it at first, but it quickly became clear that, though the general boycott did hold in many other areas, Virginians and other Americans did not wish to give up their addiction to British luxury goods, and Washington abandoned his own boycott on British clothes and furniture after a few months. (Yet when he had his portrait painted by Charles Wilson Peale in 1772, he wore an old Virginia Regiment uniform he had not been in for 13 years. The colonel, as he now was, had a natural political flair.)
Franklin, in the front lines in London, equable though he was, was also hardening in his attitude. By the end of 1769, Parliament was considering the repeal of all the Townshend taxes except that on tea. Franklin told his British friends that no such repeal would be adequate to lift the non-importation campaign in America, unless it also applied to everything exported to America.24 Parliament and the party leaders had determined that tea was the point where the line had to be drawn. There must be no more concessions to the colonists. By the early 1770s Franklin still loved England and watched the descent toward armed conflict with foreboding, relieved only by the esteem in which the English held him, even King George III.25 In 1770, when a letter of his to a Massachusetts friend was read in the legislative assembly of that colony, Franklin was chosen to become representative for Massachusetts also, as he already had been for Georgia and for New Jersey, where Franklin’s son William was the governor, as well as Pennsylvania.
A running battle went on with partial boycotts, a good deal of smuggling, and outbursts of civil disobedience. In the spring of 1773, the still young Jefferson (30, compared with Washington’s 40 and Franklin’s 67) had earned himself a reputation as a diligent and capable legislator and agreeable and thoughtful and intelligent companion, and he led a “committee of correspondence” to strengthen ties with other colonial legislators and coordinate responses to continuing British impositions. Townshend’s tax on tea was continuously in place through the early 1770s. Once again, the British had no idea that the Americans would find this particularly objectionable. On December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty, a Boston autonomist organization led by vehement opponents of any subordination to Britain, such as John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, disguised themselves as American Indians, stormed the tea ships, and threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor. This passed into history as the Boston Tea Party. The Sons of Liberty went to great lengths to show they were not an unruly mob, repairing locks on the ships’ holds and punishing one of their members who had pocketed some tea leaves for his own use.
The Tea Party, as all the world knows, set the tinder and kindling alight. Parliament revoked the Charter of Massachusetts in early 1774, substituted a military government, and purported to shut down Boston Harbor until the value of the tea destroyed had been paid. The reaction among the colonies was uniform and very supportive of the Boston tea partiers. Thomas Jefferson drafted a resolution denouncing the “Intolerable Acts,” as the parliamentary response was known. The resolution passed and Dunmore vetoed the measure. Jefferson then drafted a pious resolution calling for “a day of fasting and prayer” for the Boston protesters, which passed easily, and Dunmore again dissolved the House of Burgesses. (Jefferson too, like Washington and Franklin, was not a formally religious man—he was pitching this to others.) This time the legislators dispersed to the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, and adopted a resolution calling for a “continental congress” from all the colonies to meet in Philadelphia to organize resistance to British rule. The strategy of a nation or people may be crafted deliberately by leaders, or may, in more primitive circumstances, evolve spontaneously from collective responses to events. The Americans were just moving from the second to the first. (Mainly) British people seeking a better life had come to America to find it. British grand strategy, devised by one of its greatest statesmen, William Pitt the Elder, had provided for the successful prosecution of a worldwide war against France, conspicuously in North America, empowering the Americans to reconfigure the nature of their relations with Britain. Pitt’s successors did not grasp the complexities of the post-French era in North America, though Pitt and his most talented contemporaries did. And so had an emerging cadre of unusually capable Americans.
16. THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS
Jefferson wrote some guidelines for the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress that were judged too radical to be adopted, but one was published in London, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, with the author identified as “A Virginian.” It is a learned but rabidly partisan constitutional-law treatise. Jefferson claimed that the colonists carried to the New World all the rights of free-born Englishmen, and that the unwritten constitution of England assured these rights as, according to the Virginian in question, the colonists had built the colonies “unaided” by the mother country, which was nonsense, of course, and ignored the chief subject of the dispute: the demand of the British to be assisted in recovering their huge investment to protect the colonies from the French. Jefferson claimed that the British were taking the view that the only rights the colonists had were those of conquered people, because the colonies were conquered. This was doubly nonsense, both substantively and because that was not the British position, which was that the Parliament of Great Britain represented all British subjects whether they participated in elections to it or not (another tenuous argument, but they abounded on both sides). Jefferson also improvised the sheer fiction that the pre–Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxons had a fundamental attachment to individual liberties, to which the colonists were legitimate heirs. They had no claim to be continuators of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain before 1066, and those Anglo-Saxons had no such system. The whole argument was moonshine, but it indicated the polemical and casuistic legal skill of Jefferson.
The Continental Congress met in the autumn of 1774 and called for a complete boycott of British goods, and adjourned to May 1775. Before that meeting occurred, the American Revolutionary War had begun. These three men, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, would be the most important of the prominent figures that conducted the American side, a surprisingly talented leadership group, given the colonies’ population of now just under three million, though their distinction has been somewhat exaggerated by the American genius for hyperbole, for the recreated spectacle, and by the star system, which Jefferson largely originated with his fantastic polemical assertions at the new nation’s birth.
The rebels would look to Washington to put together a fighting force from the previously rather unreliable militia (which Washington himself had despised), and successfully resist the battle-hardened British regulars, the Redcoats. Benjamin Franklin, the great diplomat and world-renowned intellectual, would be relied upon to recruit allies by exploiting the fissiparous European interplay of ever-changing balances of power, which always included a deep reservoir of resentment of whichever power had won the last European war, never mind that the suitor was the beneficiary of Britain’s great victory. And Thomas Jefferson would be the chief expositor, not to say propagandist, to make the case that this was not a grubby contest about taxes, colonial ingratitude, and the rights of the martial victor and mother country (all of which it largely was), and to repackage it as an epochal struggle for the rights of man, vital to the hopes and dreams of everyone in the world. Instead of, as Austria would do in the following century, “astound the world with our ingratitude,” America would raise a light unto the nations and uplift the masses of the world with a creative interpretation of its motives.
All three men were suffused with the vision of the rising America, predestined to mighty nationhood. They had the starting strategy for the vertiginous rise of America: Washington the military and commercial might, Franklin the intellectual leadership and diplomatic felicity, Jefferson the clarion of a new order of freedom (unencumbered by a number of incongruities, not least among them the institution of slavery, which all three enjoyed, although Franklin became an abolitionist). The combination of people and events was combustible and would produce both heat and light. Inconveniently prematurely perhaps, but inevitably, the American project would show the world what free men in a new world could do. From the start, the world was watching, and its astonishment at what has followed has not ceased, these 238 years.
1. During the Pugachev Revolt of 1774, which inflamed much of southern Russia, Catherine wrote to her friend the French philosopher and agitator Voltaire that that region had become infected because it was “inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past 40 years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies were populated.” The British made Homeric efforts to persuade Catherine to assist them against France, Spain, and the American colonists in coming years, but Catherine, though an Anglophile and well-disposed, sagely declined, even when offered Minorca as an inducement. (RKM402)
2. In contravention of binding treaties and the judgment of the U.S. Supreme Court.
3. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of the Empire in British North America, 1754–1766, London, Faber and Faber, 2000, p. 203.
4. Anderson, op. cit., p. 173.
5. Anderson, op. cit., p. 226.
6. Anderson, op. cit., p. 298.
7. This version of events, long conventionally accepted, is not undisputed, and it is impossible to be certain of it because of Wolfe’s premature death and the lack of corroboration of his alleged comments, but it still seems likely.
8. Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 76.
9. Ibid. p. 74.
10. Ibid. p. 72.
11. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, Childs and Peterson, 1840, vol. 1, p. 255–256.
12. Shortly after, Newfoundland settled into a long notoriety as a poor province. It went bankrupt as an autonomous dominion in the 1930s and more or less fell into the arms of Canada in 1949, but finally became wealthy with the development of off-shore oil in the early twenty-first century.
13. The death of the Czarina Elizabeth is celebrated as the miracle of the House of Brandenburg, and it was invoked by Goebbels and Hitler, inaccurately, in the desperation of their bunker, following the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 (Chapter 11).
14. Anderson, op. cit., p. 493.
15. Morgan, op. cit., pp. 86, 90.
16. Morgan, op. cit., p. 114.
17. Ibid. p. 141.
18. Ibid. p. 142.
19. Morgan, op. cit., p. 152.
20. Morgan, op. cit., p. 161.
21. Ibid. p. 163.
22. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America, New York, Grove Press, 2001, p. 16.
23. Burns and Dunn, op. cit., p. 17.
24. Morgan, op. cit., p. 171.
25. Ibid. p. 175.
