Читать книгу The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson - Страница 11

For more than three centuries, the Tower of London had issued departing armies the ordnance needed to fight Britain’s expeditionary battles, from field guns and shoulder arms to bullet molds, powder flasks, and musket flints. In the early spring of 1775, the place grew busy again. “Many thousand firearms sent out of the Tower and shipped on board the transports,” a visiting American artist wrote. “Kegs of flints marked ‘Boston’ on each keg, with all the implements of war.” A Tower armory reportedly held eighty thousand stand of arms, “bright and shining.” Visitors could pay four pence to view the “Royal Train of Artillery,” from 6-pounders to 24-pounders, some with new leveling screws for quicker aim and greater accuracy. The train also included 13-inch mortars and “carcass” shells packed with combustibles designed to incinerate enemy towns. New brass cannons filled an adjacent storehouse more than a hundred yards long, with sponges, rammers, handspikes, drag ropes, and other gunnery tools, plus four thousand harnesses for pull teams. Obsolete weapons decorated Tower walls in fantastic sculptures, like the seven-headed hydra constructed from old pistols. Stacked bayonets and ancient firelocks formed a corkscrew pillar twenty-two feet high. The place was a tabernacle of firepower.

Gun shops clustered along the Thames below the Tower walls assembled the flintlock musket known as the Brown Bess. Smiths fitted the barrels and locks, mostly forged in the Midlands from imported Swedish iron, to walnut stocks; they then attached the “furniture”—brass and iron mounts, including triggers and butt plates. Each musket cost one pound, thirteen shillings, plus four pence to prove the barrel and fit a bayonet. Tower officials also tested the potency of gunpowder made in government and private mills. The British appetite for powder was voracious: each foot regiment typically received 42,000 powder charges a year, enough for every soldier to fire 60 to 120 lead balls. That allotment would increase in heavy combat. A single warship of 100 guns might carry 535 barrels, nearly 27 tons; even a small naval sloop could carry 6 tons, more powder than would be found in all the rebel magazines around Boston a few months hence. “Incredible quantities of ammunition and stores shipped and shipping from Tower Wharf for America,” another correspondent reported.

Precisely how this formidable strength should be wielded against America remained in dispute among the king’s men. “A conquest by land is unnecessary,” the secretary at war, Lord William Barrington, had advised in December, “when the country can be reduced first to distress, and then to obedience, by our marine.” That marine—the Royal Navy—might have its own woes, but General Edward Harvey, the adjutant general and the highest army official in Britain, agreed that “attempting to conquer America internally with our land force is as evil an idea as ever controverted common sense.” He added bluntly: “It is impossible.”

The army’s small size fueled this consternation. In 1760, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, Britain had mustered more than 200,000 men, including mercenaries. Now the army’s paper strength had dipped below 50,000—less than a third the size of France’s army—and no more than 36,000 soldiers actually filled the ranks, of whom thousands kept the restive Irish in check. Recruiting was difficult, and although many of the army’s 3,500 officers had combat experience, the force had fought few major battles since Quebec and Minden, sixteen years earlier. A few prominent commanders refused to fight the Americans, among them Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who had led North American forces against the French from 1758 to 1763. While some junior officers were keen to earn their spurs in New England, enough were leaving the service that in February the king declared he would “not listen to any further requests” from those hoping to sell their commissions rather than embark for America; he deemed such behavior a “great impropriety.” Lord North, as early as September 1774, had suggested that “Hessians and Hanoverians could be employed if necessary.” During the winter, secret negotiations had begun in Kassel to retain German hirelings, should war erupt in America.

A fateful momentum swept the government along. Something must be done; even those wary of war agreed that American rebellion could not be condoned. Much of the particular planning fell to slender, rigorous William Legge, the Earl of Dartmouth and the colonial secretary, who was so pious a Christian that he was known as the “Psalm Singer”; his country home near Birmingham had provided a refuge for evangelical preachers and for revival meetings of sobbing, hysterical worshippers. Raised in the same household as North, his stepbrother, Lord Dartmouth was hardly a warmonger. But he believed that prideful rebels disobeyed both their British masters and their God. Obedience and Christ’s redemption were needed to set things right, along with a few regiments. After a decade of fitful, indecisive political skirmishing, a short, sharp contest of arms offered an appealing clarity.

And so war stuffs spilled from the Tower and other depots to be loaded onto westbound ships: canteens, leather cartridge boxes, watch coats, tents, five-ton wagons by the dozen, muskets by the hundreds, powder by the ton. There was a run on New World maps, although one London skeptic later wrote, “The small scale of our maps deceived us, and as the word ‘America’ takes up no more room than the word ‘Yorkshire,’ we seemed to think the territories they represent are much the same bigness, though Charleston is as far from Boston as London from Venice.”

Troops tramped toward the ports. A London newspaper reported that a light cavalry regiment preparing to deploy had inscribed “DEATH OR GLORY” on its caps, with an embroidered skull. Seven regiments of foot bound for America were brought to strength by drafting soldiers from units left behind. Each regiment was also permitted to take sixty women, twelve servants, and eighty-six tons of baggage. On the southern coast of Ireland, Cork grew so crowded that officers waiting to embark on transport ships complained of difficulty in finding lodging. Soldiers living in hovels on Blarney Lane or Brogue Market Street practiced the manual of arms, though some lacked muskets. Each would be issued a bunk, a bolster, a blanket, and a spoon for the voyage. The usual drunken sprees and fistfights between soldiers and sailors kept officers alert; dragoons preparing to sail from Cork found the ships’ holds stacked with so many casks of porter being smuggled for sale in Boston that they could not reach the stalls to feed their horses.

As the squadrons awaited a fair wind, a vague unease drifted through the kingdom. “Our stake is deep,” wrote Horace Walpole. “It is that kind of war in which even victory may ruin us.” But the man who reigned over that kingdom remained constant, as ever. “When once these rebels have felt a smart blow,” George told his Admiralty, “they will submit.”

Blows would decide, as the king had predicted. Yet no one could foresee that the American War of Independence would last 3,059 days. Or that the struggle would be marked by more than 1,300 actions, mostly small and bloody, with a few large and bloody, plus 241 naval engagements in a theater initially bounded by the Atlantic seaboard, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico, before expanding to other lands and other waters.

Roughly a quarter million Americans would serve the cause in some military capacity. At least one in ten of them would die for that cause—25,674 deaths by one tally, as many as 35,800 by another. Those deaths were divided with rough parity among battle, disease, and British prisons, a larger proportion of the American population to perish in any conflict other than the Civil War. If many considered the war providential—ordained by God’s will and shaped by divine grace—certainly the outcome would also be determined by gutful soldiering, endurance, hard decisions (good and bad), and luck (good and bad). The odds were heavily stacked against the Americans: no colonial rebellion had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. But, as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought for territory or the usual commercial advantages. Instead, what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come. Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.

Those 3,059 hard days would yield two tectonic results. The first was in the United Kingdom, where the reduction of the empire by about one-third, including the demolition of the new dominions in North America, proved to be as divisive as any misfortune to befall the nation in the eighteenth century, at a cost of £128 million and thousands of British lives. The broader conflict that began in 1778, with the intervention of European powers on America’s behalf, led to the only British defeat in the seven Anglo-French wars fought between 1689 and 1815. Of course, what was lost by force of arms could be regained, and a second British Empire, in different garb, would flourish in the next century.

The second consequence was epochal and enduring: the creation of the American republic. Surely among mankind’s most remarkable achievements, this majestic construct also inspired a creation myth that sometimes resembled a garish cartoon, a melodramatic tale of doughty yeomen resisting moronic, brutal lobsterbacks. The civil war that unspooled over those eight years would be both grander and more nuanced, a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Beyond the battlefield, then and forever, stood a shining city on a hill.

An unusual bustle disturbed placid Craven Street on Monday morning, March 20, 1775. At No. 27, a looming town house with fourteen fireplaces, crates and trunks had been packed and prepared for shipment. Visitors in fine carriages had recently been seen wheeling up and wheeling off, bidding good-bye, adieu, bon voyage. Among the neighbors it was rumored that after almost two decades in London, Dr. Franklin was going home.

He was famous in Craven Street, as he was famous everywhere, though he still referred to himself as “B. Franklin, printer.” Except for a brief return visit to Philadelphia in 1763–64, and a temporary move a few years later to a different house on the street, he had lived at No. 27 since arriving in England as a colonial agent in 1757. Because he was widely deemed a “universal genius”—the accolade did not displease him—his eccentricities were forgiven: chuffing up and down the nineteen oak stairs, dumbbells in hand, for exercise; sitting nude in the open window above the street, regardless of the season, for his morning “air bath”; playing his “harmonica,” an improbable contraption constructed of thirty-seven glass hemispheres mounted on an iron spindle and rotated with a foot treadle so that he could elicit three ghostly octaves by touching the moving edges with his moistened fingers. (Mozart and Beethoven, among others, would compose for the instrument.) And Craven Street had also been his laboratory, the site where he had launched inquiries into sunspots, magnetism, lead poisoning, the organic origins of coal, carriage wheel construction, and ocean salinity. At the foot of the street, on the Thames, he had repeated his celebrated kite-and-key demonstration; St. Paul’s Cathedral, nearby, was Britain’s first structure to install his lightning rod.

The tall man who emerged onto the front stoop that morning was now sixty-nine, with thin, graying hair and sensual lips that made him look younger. He retained the broad shoulders of the leather-apron tradesman who’d once carried lead type for a living, though he had grown plump enough to call himself “a fat old fellow.” Furrows creased the prominent dome of his forehead, and the hooded blue eyes sagged. “Anxiety begins to disturb my rest,” he had written a friend in America a few weeks earlier, “and whatever robs an old man of his sleep soon demolishes him.”

He had chosen to spend this final day in London in semi-seclusion with Joseph Priestley, a fellow natural philosopher who lived a mile distant. As Franklin made his way across the city he had once loved, those anxieties weighed on him. How far he had traveled, this fifteenth child of an impoverished Boston candlemaker! With only two years of formal schooling, he had become not only a prosperous printer but the largest bookseller in Philadelphia and the most prominent paper merchant in America. At forty-two, self-made, he retired from the trades to devote himself to good causes—smallpox inoculations, paper money, and streets made safer by night watchmen paid through public taxes. He also threw himself into practical science, with inventions ranging from bifocals to efficient stoves. He had once told his mother that for his epitaph, “I would rather have it said, ‘He died usefully,’ than, ‘He died rich.’” His 1751 treatise Experiments and Observations on Electricity brought international fame for discoveries lauded by a contemporary as “the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton.” He not only invented the first device for storing electrical charges, he also named it—the battery—as he named other things in this new field: conductor, charge, discharge, armature. Electrical experimenters in France were known as franklinistes. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him “the new Prometheus,” a man who had captured heaven’s fire.

He was proud, perhaps prideful. The ink-stained printer became Dr. Franklin, thanks to the honorary degrees from Oxford and St. Andrews, and he was not above snickering at American provincialism. “Learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England almost all make a point of visiting me,” he had written in 1772 to his son William, who, thanks to Franklin’s influence, was the royal governor of New Jersey. “The K[ing] too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.” If esteemed and clubbable, he still at times seemed opaque. A man of masks and personas, he was Poor Richard, after the pseudonym adopted for the almanac he’d first published in 1732; he was also, thanks to his many whimsical pen names, Silence Dogood, Cecilia Shortface, and Obadiah Plainman. Since moving to London at age fifty-one to represent Pennsylvania, and then other colonies, he had used forty-two different signatures on his published articles.

So, too, was he a creature of contradiction. An advocate for the rights of man, he had owned slaves for thirty years, complaining that most of them were thieves. A man of temperance and discretion, he enjoyed “intrigues with low women that fell in my way” and took a common-law wife in 1730. Perhaps most confounding, he had been a zealous citizen of the empire, so exuberant in his Anglophilia that in September 1761 he curtailed a trip to the Continent to attend George III’s coronation. He had long favored excluding Germans and other non-English émigrés from the colonies. Americans “love and honor the name of Englishman,” Franklin had written in the London Chronicle in 1770; aping “English manners, fashions, and manufacturers, they have no desire of breaking the connections between the two countries.” Yet in the past year he had become so hostile to Britain that now he could fulminate like a Boston radical, his face white with rage. Franklin, these days, was a few steps ahead of an arrest warrant.

His good friend Priestley, beak-nosed and thin-lipped, offered a sympathetic ear. As librarian and companion to the Earl of Shelburne, Priestley lived in the earl’s sprawling mansion just off Berkeley Square. The son of a Calvinist cloth dresser, he, too, was a universal genius, one who, it was said, wrote books faster than people could read them. The previous August he had discovered the gas called oxygen, and he would be credited with identifying nitrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other gases, as well as photosynthesis, the principles of combustion, and the recipe for soda water. On this Monday he and Franklin pondered electricity and sundry scientific mysteries, as they had for years. Then the conversation turned to politics and what Franklin called “the impending calamities.” “Much of the time was employed in reading American newspapers,” Priestley later wrote of that day with Franklin, “especially accounts of the reception which the Boston Port Bill met with in America. And as he read … the tears trickled down his cheeks.” The coming war would likely last ten years, Franklin predicted, and he would “not live to see the end of it.”

He wept, not least, for his own shortcomings. For decades he had championed a greater Great Britain, an Anglo-American union of “mutual strength and mutual advantage.” As political upheaval strained those blood ties, he sought “to palliate matters” with various compromises, including an offer to pay for Boston’s drowned tea from his own pocket. Even now he considered the schism to be “a matter of punctilio, which two or three reasonable people might settle in half an hour.” But by degree he had grown vexed, then angry at what he called the “insolence, contempt, and abuse” of arrogant British officials toward his countrymen; the condescending reference to Americans as “foreigners” infuriated him. His writings turned acerbic: he proposed to answer the British practice of shipping convicts to America by exporting rattlesnakes to England, and his Swiftian essay, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” postulated that “a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edge.”

Then, two years ago, disaster had struck when a wise man did a foolish thing. Someone whose identity remained obscure gave Franklin a sheaf of private letters written by a Crown official in Massachusetts to a British undersecretary, urging stern measures by the government against New England troublemakers. One passage even advocated “an abridgement of what are called English liberties.” In December 1772, Franklin sent the letters to Boston as confidential intelligence for patriot leaders, but six months later they were published, causing an uproar in New England, and then in Britain. Franklin eventually placed a notice in the London Chronicle, disclosing his responsibility. British newspapers vilified him as “this old snake,” “old Doubleface,” and a “base, ungrateful, cunning, upstart thing.”

On January 29, 1774, he appeared before the king’s council in the Cockpit, a Whitehall amphitheater once used for cockfights. For more than an hour, Franklin was pelted with invective, denounced as a “man without honor” and a “hoary-headed traitor” who had “forfeited all the respect of societies and men.” The packed gallery jeered while he stood as still as statuary, wearing a fine blue suit of spotted Manchester velvet. It was the greatest humiliation of his life, and a day later he was sacked as deputy postmaster general for North America. He had made a serious error of judgment, but so had Britain, by demeaning the Crown’s best American ally in promoting imperial harmony.

In the months since that wretched day, he had shrugged off the ordeal to continue mediating between Crown and colonies. He took meetings, public and private, enduring endless palaver with men of influence and no influence, men of goodwill and ill will, men with potential remedies and men spouting nonsense. Franklin admitted to growing “irritated and heated”; he insisted on repealing the Coercive Acts, withdrawing the fleet from Boston, and removing British soldiers to Quebec or Florida. “The true art of governing the colonies,” he believed, “lies in … only letting them alone.” The government secretly intercepted and read his mail, carefully repairing the seals and making copies with a cover note that labeled him “this arch traitor.” Public hopes for reconciliation ascended, then subsided, only to rise again. The stock market jumped in late December on false news that he and Lord North had reached a peace deal.

But there would be no peace. These febrile efforts, he wrote, “availed no more than the whistling of the winds.” While government officials considered him the “great director” of New England radicals, the radicals themselves wondered if he was “too much of an Englishman.” He felt “like a thing out of its place, and useless because it is out of its place.” Like many Americans, he found that the middle ground was narrow and perilous; he, too, gradually chose insurrection. Britain, he concluded, had become “this old rotten state.” He was reduced to quoting from Horace’s Odes: “What is bad now may not always be.”

Franklin spent his final night on Craven Street. The last of his books, papers, and scientific instruments packed, he caught the post coach for Portsmouth on March 21. Beyond the political turmoil, two personal matters gnawed at him as he rolled through Surrey on a route similar to that taken by the king to the dockyards twenty-one months earlier. In New Jersey, Governor William Franklin, the great man’s son, seemed intent on remaining loyal to the Crown. “You, who are a thorough courtier,” Franklin wrote in a letter, “see everything with government eyes.” And in Philadelphia, his common-law wife of forty-four years, Deborah, had died in December after a long decline. Although a faithful correspondent, Franklin had not seen her in a decade. Regret and perhaps guilt dogged him up the gangplank onto the Pennsylvania Packet, moored along the Portsmouth waterfront.

Franklin never went to sea without vowing never to go again. Yet here he was in his seventieth year, a large man in a small cabin on a small ship. He had resolved to stay busy during the passage, scrutinizing the heavens with his telescope and frequently measuring ocean temperatures with a thermometer suspended on a long rope, as part of his perpetual study of the Gulf Stream. He promptly started a letter to William, which began, “Dear Son” and grew to twenty thousand words on 250 foolscap pages, as it became a detailed account of his failed diplomacy in Britain. That failure had taught him lessons in patience, tact, intrigue, and power—lessons that would prove useful, since his best days as a diplomat, perhaps the greatest America ever produced, still lay ahead of him.

The bells of Philadelphia would ring for joy upon his arrival six weeks hence. The man who had felt “like a thing out of place” would find his rightful place. Among the slurs hurled at him in the Cockpit was the accusation of being a “true incendiary.” That much was certain, as befitted the American Prometheus. He was the best of his breed, this kite flier, this almanac maker, this lightning tamer. The Pennsylvania Packet shrugged off her moorings and crowded on sail, bearing him home, where he belonged.