Mackesy P. The War for America, 1775-1783
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for war by October. The balance of forces at the moment appeared thus: the French and Spaniards were believed to
have forty sail of the line in commission in Europe, with another four about to be commissioned in Toulon.
Against their forty-four, of which twenty-three were French, the Royal Navy had only thirty-six, and of these
twenty were dispersed on cruising stations or distant convoy duty, and one had just been ordered to Antigua. In
immediate reserve England had six ships ready to receive men, while the Bourbons were believed to have many
more in the same state which they could man much faster. Seven thousand five hundred seamen would be needed
to complete the ships in commission and man the six which were ready to receive men. The frigate situation was
catastrophic. There were only ten at home not under orders for America; and of these six were paying off or
docking, and the remainder cruising for privateers. There was not a single frigate to send to sea with the fleet.
Abroad the disbalance was worse. England had eight ships of the line overseas, six of them in America and two in
the West Indies. Against these there were thought to be twenty Spaniards and one French ship of the line.
Sandwich had already given warning that the opening of a war would find England on the defensive, and the
initiative in the hands of the enemy. If the Brest fleet went to New York, it 'might give such a blow to the English
fleet that it would be difficult ever to recover. The loss of America would in such an event be far the inferior
consideration.' On the first suspicion that the French were about to strike, America and the West Indies must be
reinforced. But how should we then stand at home? The country drained of troops, the coasts swarming with
privateers, and the French at liberty to invade the British Isles or take the offensive overseas as they might choose.
'In this situation', Sandwich demanded, 'are we safe at home, and can we in any emergency venture to detach,
without more ships being immediately commissioned?' It was a prescient forecast of the situation in March 1778.1
By now Sandwich was preaching to the half converted. North remained bewildered by the contrast between
protestations of friendship reported by the Paris embassy and the intelligence collected in William Eden's bureau.
The British Ambassador pointed out the difference between promise and performance; yet in September 1777
North was 'more sanguine than I have been for some time past in my expectations of the continuance of peace'.
Still he thought war was not inevitable, and that we must tread delicately; still he selected from Stormont's letters
to present French conduct to Parliament in its most favourable light.2 Nevertheless it was clear that amid these
1 G 2049; Sandwich, I, 2056, 231, 2358, 2415; Abergavenny, 17.
2 Add. MSS. 34414, ff. 1956, 3356.
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contrarities, the navy's strength must gradually be increased. By November forty-two sail of the line were in
commission at home, thirty-five of them completely manned for sea. In the space of a year Sandwich's importunity
had converted twenty guardships into twice that number of seagoing ships of the line.
4
Mobilisation
When Parliament reassembled late in November 1777, the debate on the address in the House of Lords opened
with a furious attack by Chatham on the defenceless state of the country. To this Lord Sandwich replied that the
navy had fifty-four ships of the line in service or fit for service at home; and of these thirty-five were completely
manned and seven more ready in all other respects. This force, he declared, was superior to anything which France
and Spain together could muster in Europe. 'Our navy is more than a match for that of the whole House of
Bourbon.'1
At that moment the statement may have been the strict and literal truth. But Sandwich added a flourish for which
he was not to be forgiven: 'I should, my lords, be extremely sorry, as presiding at the Admiralty-board, if I
permitted at any time the French and Spanish navy united, to be superior to the navy of this country; I should
indeed be wanting in the discharge of my duty.' There spoke the politician; but the views of the administrator
appeared a few days later in his Cabinet memorandum on the effects of Saratoga. France and Spain had at least as
many ships in commission in Europe as Britain's forty-two, and many more ready to receive men. Abroad, the
Spaniards could collect a formidable fleet in the West Indies without detaching a single ship from Europe; and the
French would certainly send a squadron overseas the moment they determined on war. Britain was vulnerable to
hostile fleets in the West Indies and America; and to amphibious attack in India and the Mediterranean. The
moment war began she must be ready to send large reinforcements to all these theatres: and the forty-two ships of
the line in commission could not supply these detachments. England must arm. 'What shall we have to answer for
if we are taken unprepared, and reduced to the necessity of either leaving our distant possessions undefended or
seeing France and Spain in the Channel with a superior fleet?'2
The worst danger was not realised in 1778: Spain did not enter the war with France. Yet in spite of Sandwich's
boast in the House of Lords the navy was found inadequate in the first weeks of crisis. A week before the breach
with France, the French and Spaniards together were believed to have sixty-five
1Parl. Hist., XIX, 3768.
2 Sandwich, I, 3355.
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ships of the line in commission in Europe, thirty-three of them French. Sandwich stated the British fleet at home as
fifty, of which only forty-one were ready. So much for his assertion that England could outmatch the combined
House of Bourbon. Against France the force seemed adequate; but the story is in every book of how Keppel went
down to Portsmouth to take command of a Channel fleet of twenty ships and found only six in a true state of
readiness. What had become of the powerful forces at home of which Sandwich had boasted in November? And
what had been done in the three intervening months to increase their strength?
The truth was that since December the navy had continued to expand rapidly; and the real state of the fleet was
very much better than Keppel's first report suggests. Of the forty-two which had been ready in November, two had
since dropped out; but a great number of ships were in course of being prepared for sea. By October 1778 sixty-
two ships were in full service throughout the world, and another eight lacked only men. Seventy ships in the first
months of a war was no mean achievement: it far outstripped what the French could do, and speaks well of the
ships and stores in reserve. If naval considerations had prevailed, these ships would have been ready in the first
weeks of the emergency. 'It is not your Lordship's fault', Palliser told Sandwich, 'that our fleet is not in more
forwardness: it was no reasoning of ours that we should not equip long ago for fear of alarming France, whilst they
were exerting themselves to the utmost in equipping theirs, and thus they have got the start of us.'1
The real trouble, then, was the late mobilisation. Many ships were still being rigged and stored; but the chief
difficulty was seamen. France, with her register of seamen, could man a fleet rapidly: England, with her clumsy
apparatus of pressing by an Order in Council, could scarcely find the men at all. Manning had always been a
bottleneck; but the American rebellion had made it all but insoluble. America's seamen had gone, and the vast
transport service which supplied the army had engulfed the British.
The method of raising seamen had been established for a century: first, a royal proclamation; then an embargo on
the sailing of merchant shipping while the fleet was being manned; and simultaneously the issue of press warrants
to the captains of ships being manned and to the impress service which recruited for the navy as a whole.
Throughout the war the manning difficulty continued. Landsmen had to be conscripted in a proportion variously
estimated at from a quarter to nearly half of the ships' complements. The wastage was colossal. In the course of the
war 171,000 seamen were raised. Only 1,240 were killed in action; but 18,500 died of disease and 42,000 deserted.
The impress service of 1780 was nearly three times as large as in 1760, but
1 Sandwich, II, 111, 183, 34952.
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its need far outran the reservoir of trained seamen. Of all the branches of naval administration, it was recruiting
which bore with deadliest effect on strategy.1
The manning shortage made the sickness rate calamitous. Every year thousands retired to the hospitals or were lost
to the service for ever by death. The navy's medical record from 1778 was a bad one; and the most sickly
command was the Channel fleet, which received a large proportion of the new entry. The effect on fleet operations
was crippling. Admiral Keppel reckoned that no large fleet should stay at sea for more than six or seven weeks; and
old Hawke, who had kept a fleet at sea for months in the Seven Years War, surprisingly supported him. 'Six weeks
is long enough in all conscience', he wrote in 1780 to Geary. 'I wish the Admiralty would see what was done in
former times.'2
How far must the Admiralty be blamed for the sickness? The figures make it clear that in this war, and in the
succeeding one against the French Revolution, the sick rate followed the navy's rate of expansion. The worst year,
1780, was the year of the greatest increase of seamen; and the sudden influxes of verminous recruits from 1778
onwards evidently swamped the machinery. Scurvy remained proportionately steady; but the fever-rate soared.
Towards the end of the war, however, the figures improved as the machine got into its stride; and the influence of
the great naval physician James Lind helped to reduce the spread of typhus and typhoid. It was Lind who observed
the dissemination of typhus from ship to ship, and from his hospital at Haslar to the surrounding countryside. Of
the agents of that transmission, the flea and the louse, he never had the smallest suspicion; but observation taught
him that infection could cling to clothing, tents and furniture. He ordered the scouring of cots and quarters, and the
airing of bedding on the decks of ships; and he recommended that doctors and nurses should change their clothes
on leaving the hospital. At his suggestion Receiving Ships were established in 1781, where recruits were examined,
issued with new clothes, and quarantined. His influence may have had much to do with the remarkable dropping
off of the hospital rate in the last two years of the war.3
Yet the greatest killer raged unchecked. Scurvy is a deficiency disease, and the therapeutic value of lemon juice
had been known since the reign of James I. Thirty years before the American War, Lind had proved the superiority
of lemon juice as an anti-scorbutic, and had described a method
1 Usher, 15574, 221 ff; Lloyd and Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, III, 137; Williams, 490501.
2 Lloyd and Coulter, 126.
3Ibid., 137, and tables on pp. 3712; Roddis, James Lind, 68, 134, 1525.
12
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of concentrating and preserving it. In 1775 Captain Cook had returned from his second navigation of the world
without losing a man from scurvy, proving how careful victualling could eliminate the disease. Yet throughout the
war the application of the lessons was left largely to private enterprise. A general sailing for India in 1781
complains that the East India Company had provided only a small quantity of lemons for his troops, and demands a
large supply of anti-scorbutics.1 Individual captains and ships' surgeons see that their crews are adequately
supplied with fresh fruit and vegetables. Yet the Admiralty continued to experiment with half-measures and useless
nostrums. Sauerkraut did some good, extract of malt little and elixir of vitriol none. Rodney's physician, Sir Gilbert
Blane, sent the Admiralty a memorial in 1781 in which he urged them to supply the seamen with lemons; but
fourteen years later when he became a Commissioner for the Sick and Wounded he found that nothing had been
done. In that year, 1795, he persuaded the First Lord to order a regular issue of lemon juice. The effect was
miraculous. Within five years scurvy was almost unknown. Fleets could stay at sea indefinitely, and the long
blockades which broke the naval power of Napoleon became possible. In 1807 one man in twenty was sent to the
hospitals: in 1779 it had been one in three.
It is a striking example of the gap between the scientific recognition of a technique and its administrative adoption.
The same administrative apathy which was killing off the garrison of Jamaica may have contributed to the delay2;
yet Blane himself has other explanations which do something to excuse the Admiralty, gripped as it was by
circumstance. Blane himself was an eminent physician; but ships' surgeons had a low social status and could not
easily make their opinions audible. Again, scurvy was rare on land, so eminent doctors did not have to give their
minds to it. And finally, the cure seemed too simple to be true.3
The forty-two ships in commission in November 1777 had been short of 3,000 seamen and nearly as many
marines; and many smaller vessels had been crying out for men. But the measures needed to complete the
complements bounties, embargo, and impressment were acts of state, controversial, portentous and risky. The
government had hesitated to injure the hopes of peace by taking these steps, and the wretched seamen already
raised were turned over from ship to ship without ever setting foot on shore. And thus it came about that when
Keppel went down to Portsmouth in March 1778 he found the Port Admiral's pool of seamen stripped to man
1 WO 34/138, f. 202.
2 See above, p. 6.
3 Lloyd and Coulter, III, 1306, 319 ff.
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the armed ships and cruisers at sea with convoys. If we could raise eight or nine thousand men, he said in April, the
whole situation would change. Every little batch was counted greedily. A lieutenant put in to Plymouth with 150:
'That 150 here would give us another 74-gun ship', wrote Palliser from Portsmouth. A Scots captain sent his tender
to Scotland, and it returned with 200 men for his ship. Lord Longford sent to his own countryside in Ireland. And
still the delayed mobilisation exercised its galling influence.1
1 G 2312; Sandwich, I, 7681.
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Chapter IX
War Plans and Preparations
1
Lord Amherst
Lord Barrington, faithful servant of the Crown, had for a long time past wanted to retire. When France entered the
war he went straight to Court and had a curious interview with his sovereign. He told him frankly that the Ministry
was inadequate, but if he would not change his Ministers he must change his military advisers. There was not one
general, he said, on whom the King, the nation or the army could rely if the British Isles were invaded. He then
made the extraordinary suggestion that Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, the victor of Minden, should be invited
from Germany to be Commander-in-Chief.1
This gross insult to Germain came more naturally from the lips of Chatham, who is said to have been on the point
of making it when he was struck down by his fatal fit in the House of Lords.2 But there were others who shared
Barrington's opinion of the generals. 'I do not know whether they will frighten the enemy', North is reported to
have said, 'but I am sure they frighten me whenever I think of them.' The flabby borrowed joke reflected on the
head of the government as much as on the generals. But it was clear at least that the peacetime system of direct
royal control of the army was no longer enough, and a Commander-in-Chief was needed. General Harvey,
Adjutant-General and the King's chief military adviser, had just died. The Duke of Gloucester came up from the
New Forest, where he had been convalescing from asthma, to offer his services. This was embarrassing, for the
Cabinet had already resolved that the King must release the command of the army from the hands of his family.
The obvious choice was Lord Amherst. To protect the pride of Gloucester the title of Commander-in-Chief was
withheld; but on 19 March Amherst was effectively appointed to the command of the army with a seat in the
Cabinet.
The choice was widely welcomed. In America he had shown administrative capacity and unusual care for his mens'
health and welfare, and had earned a reputation for temperance and honesty. 'A valuable man . . . a choice no one
disapproves of', an M.P. reported. In Minorca General Murray was delighted: 'I love and esteem the man, and I
think him the fittest person
1 Shute Barrington, Life of Barrington, 1867.
2 Walpole, Last Journals, II, 254.
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for the great task he has to perform of any of our Generals.' His actual performance in office did not sustain his
reputation. Walpole's opinion that his mind had gone to seed, and that he revealed himself as self-interested and
obstinate, is too harsh. But Lord Gower grumbled at his choice of men, and even the King was to own that he was
not perfect.1
Amherst's correspondence in the years which followed give an impression of good sense, integrity, and friendly
relations with the generals serving under him. His resistance to political pressure on the army has been
mentioned2; and he made determined efforts to compel officers whose regiments were in America to join them.
This meant resisting Lord North's suggestions for employing them at home3; but North could forgive a capable
and honest administrator, 'the most attentive to public economy', he told him,4 'of any military commander that I
ever knew'. His common sense and tact in dealing with the oddities of the militia show that he was neither
inflexible nor a martinet.5
Amherst's responsibilities as a strategic planner consorted oddly with his other duties. The chief administrator and
inspector of the army was not out of harmony with the Chief of Staff, which is what he, like Ligonier, really was,
in spite of his seat in the Cabinet. But he was also Commander-in-Chief of the home forces in England and Wales;
and we shall see that his interests as a theatre commander could conflict with his role as a maker of national
strategy. And as a Minister he was something of a disappointment to his colleagues. Unlike his predecessor and
patron Ligonier he was not at his ease among politicians, and became as monosyllabic as his successor in the First
World War, Sir William Robertson. He would give his opinion in his tactiturn way; but his reasons were hard to
extract.6
2
The Redeployment
Amherst had often been consulted about the strategy of the war; and before his new appointment was announced
he was already embroiled in the problems of redeployment against France. For France with its great military and
naval forces would open new theatres of war in the West Indies, the Indian Ocean and European waters. The
Cabinet was now squarely faced with the question which Sandwich had asked after Saratoga: ought the American
war still to be treated as the main effort?
1 Namier, . . . American Revolution, 3067; Malmesbury Letters, I, 384; Sackville, I, 372; Walpole, Last
Journals, II, 31516; G 2828, 3099.
2 Above, p. 10.
3 E.g. WO 34/231, pp. 2546.
4 WO 34/127 (31 Oct. 1780).
5 E.g. Long, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, 2489.
6 Wraxall Memoirs, II, 194.
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Lord North remained detached from the coming crisis. Ten days before the breach with France he left it to
Sandwich to arrange a Cabinet meeting to take the necessary naval measures. 'I am at present engaged from
morning till night with the House of Commons and the loan, but will attend any meeting where my presence is
required.'1 There could be no better illustration of North's preoccupation with finance and politics: a Newcastle
without a Chatham. In the great crisis of the war the initiative devolved among the American and Southern
Secretaries, the Admiralty, and the King.
The first and most frightened voice which had been raised against the effort in America had been Lord Chancellor
Bathurst's. On the news of Saratoga, he had foretold the loss not only of America but of the West Indies as well;
and in tones of deepest defeatism concluded that the only safe course was to stop reinforcing America, concentrate
our forces for the defence of the British Isles and the Mediterranean, and seek peace on any terms.2 With the
evasiveness of a legal careerist, he shied away from saying so in a forthright manner to the Cabinet; but when the
French war became inevitable others had similar thoughts.
The other declared pessimist in the Cabinet was Sandwich. He was not irrationally frightened like Bathurst. But in
his Cabinet memorandum after Saratoga he had pointed out how vulnerable we were in every overseas theatre with
France's capital fleet uncommitted in her home ports. To meet the threat we needed a powerful strategic reserve at
home. At the Cabinet meeting which followed the French Ambassador's declaration, he produced a new paper
which contemplated a suspension of operations in America. If this was resolved on, he suggested either recalling
Lord Howe with the army and most of his capital ships, leaving a force at Halifax; or ordering him to detach
Commodore Hotham with a squadron of fifty-gun ships and frigates to secure the West Indies.3
The West Indies: there lay a capital danger. The French were thought to have 9,000 troops in their islands. while
the British garrisons scattered throughout the Leeward Islands and Jamaica had only 1,800 effectives of all ranks,
and many of them were sick. But if a combined force from America could seize the island of St Lucia, in the
Windward Islands, we would gain a fine harbour dominating the main French base at Martinique. Sandwich had
before him a detailed proposal from another member of the Board, Lord Mulgrave, to do exactly this. Speed and
secrecy would be the essence of this opening blow. Mulgrave suggested that from St Lucia the expedition might go
on to St Nicolas Mole in Haiti, a new French establishment which they were developing into the Gibraltar of the
West Indies. With our port at
1 Sandwich, I, 347.
2 Bathurst, 16.
3 Sandwich, I, 333, 359.
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Pensacola in West Florida, Mulgrave said that St Lucia and St Nicolas Mole would make us masters of the
Caribbean from the Bahamas to the Spanish Main, and give us the control of both the outlets from the Caribbean.
He thought this might be accomplished in time for the ships to return to Europe or America before the hurricane
season in August.1
These proposals were after the King's heart. He had seen the approaching war, not as a matter for dread, but as an
opportunity to be grasped. England could compensate herself for the loss of America by completing Chatham's
work in the Caribbean, and driving the French from their remaining possessions in the West Indies.2 This view
would have caused no surprise in France, where it had been feared from the beginning of the rebellion that England
might seek compensation at the expense of the French Empire.
But why this obsession with the West Indies? Sandwich had predicted that the war aims of France would be to
overturn the peace of 1763 and regain her empire and her markets; and that for the sake of the American alliance
she would forget her claim to Canada, and look for her reward in the sub-tropics in India, West Africa and the
Caribbean. And he was right. The French navy was to neglect America for the West Indies. There most of the
naval fighting took place; and there in 1782 the greatest British victory of the war was won by Rodney. With the
fate of North America in the balance, the maritime Powers of Europe threw their strength and hopes into a chain of
small, fever-ridden islands in the Caribbean. 'The war', wrote one of Shelburne's correspondents in the year of
Rodney's victory,3 ' has and ever must be determined in the West Indies.'
A powerful and noisy pressure group represented the West India interest in London. In 1775 the Society of West
India Merchants and the Agents for the Planters had joined forces to represent the West India interest as a whole;
and they were to exercise some influence over the government's strategy. But their clamour was not the main
reason for the Ministry's interest in the islands.4 The real issue was concerned with national policy. In the long run
England might or might not recover America; but whatever the course of the war in the Caribbean, the Antilles
could not sustain an independent existence and would remain colonies of one Power or another. The wealth they
produced from sugar and its by-products was still vast. It is said that the West Indies accounted for a third of the
overseas trade of France. Much of the
1 Sandwich, I, 35760; CL, North's return-books of the army.
2 G 2182, 2251.
3 CL, Shelburne, Vol. 72, p. 377.
4 The West India interest in Parliament before the war is analysed in Namier's England in the Age of the
American Revolution, 2719. In the 'sixties they numbered some twenty votes in the House of Commons.
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