Mackesy P. The War for America, 1775-1783

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never grasped by most Americans, Suez marked an end to the widely shared British belief that the nation had

imperial power and responsibilities. And with the memories of Suez, Narvik, and Operation Market Garden went

the personal, professional consciousness of how his own work since 1945 had centered on Britain's great struggle

against Napoleonic France, when once before British resources were stretched to the ultimate in a fight that by

turns had seemed hopeless and mistaken.

Whatever memories were working in the author's mind, affecting to some degree his viewpoint and judgment as he

strove to reconstruct how George III and his government had tried to put down rebellion in the American colonies,

and doing so against the effort of France to break up the empire, American readers of The War for America

brought their own memories and anxieties to the book. Here, it seemed to many of them in the mid-1960s, was a

brilliantly developed historical case of how a great imperial power had stumbled from military victory into a

disastrous military and political quagmire. Especially for American academics who disliked and opposed the war in

Vietnam, Britain's resort to force in America following the spectacular but unsettling British victory of 1763, and

the course of the United States in Southeast Asia since 1945, offered parallels that leapt off the pages of this new

book.

Throughout The War for America, Piers Mackesy recounts the persistence with which British leaders misperceived

the nature of their American antagonists, and describes the price those leaders paid for misperception. Hazy about

the ultimate goals of their strategy, they could never settle on the best military means to attain the desired end.

Unwarranted optimism, encouraged by the early popularity of the war in Britain, often displaced strategic

calculation, with disastrous results on more than one occasion. That the American colonies lacked the clear social

hierarchy deemed essential for a disciplined army, and that individual Americans often behaved badly in battle,

were a source of endless confusion to British strategists. Equally confusing was the question of how best to exploit

the large minority of the American population that did not support the rebellion. Mackesy, bringing an unusually

broad conception of "strategy" to The War for America, never let his readers lose sight of how these essentially

political issues incessantly plagued the British effort to combat revolution. That the author so evidently had no

political agenda of his own, revealing if anything a slight pro-British bias, gave the contemporary message of the

work all the greater force.

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It hardly needs to be said that the War of the American Revolution differed in many ways from the war in Vietnam

two centuries later. What remains, however, of an overwrought, overdrawn discovery of historical parallelsnot by

the author, but by some of his American readersis a tribute to the accomplishment of Piers Mackesy. Changes in

technology have not changed everything about the waging of war, and one of the constant elements remains the

struggle by leaders responsible for its direction to understand the nature of their task, and then to deploy the

available military resources in space and time in accord with their understanding; in other words, to make strategy.

On paper, strategy looks deceptively simple and straightforward, but in practice it has often been maddeningly

difficult and frustrating. The War for America offered in 1964, and continues to offer, an exceptionally realistic

study for a major, protracted war of strategy in action. Its relevance for the Vietnam War or any other particular

strategic situation of our own time lies less in finding specific parallelisms, with their presumed lessons, than in the

quality of Mackesy's scholarship and in the fidelity and skill with which he has recaptured the historical moment.

As a historical study of strategy, The War for America is truly a classic.

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PREFACE:

THE SERVANTS OF KRONOS

The Muses attend the births of gods and nations: Clio to record and Calliope to adorn the great event. They tell

how the infant Zeus was snatched from the jaws of his father Kronos; and inevitably it is the infant who is sung,

while old Kronos fades back into the mists of antiquity, the half-forgotten symbol of an outdated and regrettable

past.

So it happened with the American Revolution. The triumph of the rebels was of overwhelming importance for the

future of the world, and the struggle was recorded in terms of American battles on American soil. The red coats of

old Kronos's hirelings are visible; but the mind that moved them, the Kronos of Whitehall and St James's, was

thrust aside to be forgotten or turned into a background buffoon.

This treatment accentuated a characteristic feature of British historiography: the distortion of diplomacy and

warfare by the elimination of strategy. Strategy falls between two kinds of history. For the political historian it is a

marginal activity of government which occasionally erupts to disturb the course of diplomacy, debate and

electioneering. For the military historian it is a background to operations in the field and on the seas; and the

decisions of governments are too often seen through the eyes of distant and half-informed commanders. Sir John

Fortescue, the historian of the British army, was a devoted operational historian; and the thirteen volumes of his

history, magnificent in their energy, style and range of narrative, form a splendid monument to the vanishing

regiments which made the British empire. Yet his devotion to the army narrowed and warped his judgment. In the

sphere where strategy merged with policy, he was incapable of justice. For him the appalling problems of the

government which waged the war for America were reduced to 'the folly and ignorance of Germain'.

Though strategy has emerged to take its rightful place in the history of the twentieth century, the direction of war

before 1914 is a little known area of British history. In no war has less attempt been made to strike the balance

between strategy and operations than in the War of American Independence. There is now much interest in Lord

North's administration; yet though the war covered seven of its twelve years of life, the task of assessing its efforts

to direct the war in the context of eighteenth-century warfare remains to be done. The neglect is largely due to the

consequences of the war, which concentrated the interest and emotions of historians on the struggles of the new

state and its embryo armies beyond the Atlantic. Yet the injustice which has been done in the past to Lord North

and his colleagues has two other causes: that the war was lost, and that George III and his Ministers were

blackguarded by domestic enemies.

The men who conduct a war are more intemperately and uncharitably criticised than those who run an

administrative machine in peacetime. Statesmen and commanders are equally victims; for in war the results are

swift, harsh and measurable,

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and censure readily precedes understanding. The vilification of the Ministry was perpetuated because the most

accessible and digested source of information was the Parliamentary Debates. There one may read the half-

informed and largely disingenuous criticisms of the Opposition, and the misleading and partial replies of the

Ministers. The failure to blockade Brest will demonstrate the effect. The Ministry's enemies maintained that if it

had been done the enemy would have been unable to seize the initiative: his overseas expeditions and his

concentrations in home waters would have been prevented, and England would have maintained her maritime

ascendancy. Yet Lord Howe, whose slow mind required time to choose its political stance, flatly declared in the

House of Commons that Ushant was no station for a fleet. Though naval historians are aware how great a margin

of superiority was necessary to maintain a close blockade, it is rarely asked whether the country had the necessary

means, and whether the policy which had succeeded in the Seven Years War and was to succeed again in the

struggles with revolutionary France could have been applied in the different circumstances of the American War.

The Parliamentary History, supplemented by the Annual Register and memoirs like Horace Walpole's, dominated

the entire history of the reign for generations: they are riddled with lies, special pleading and gossip. Though the

political history is being re-written from better sources, the major decisions of the war have not been re-assessed.

Yet better sources are freely available, and some of the most important have been in print for many years. It is not

necessary to accept opinions as facts, or to mistake uninformed hindsight for wisdom.

The American War was Britain's only clear defeat in the long contest with France which began with the

Revolution of 1688 and ended at Waterloo. Unique characteristics explain the uniqueness of the failure. England

was maintaining nearly 60,000 soldiers beyond the Atlantic, most of them in a hostile country: a feat never

paralleled in the past, and in relative terms never attempted again by any power until the twentieth century. The

territory was vast, and the people were in arms. Even so the resistance of the Americans might have been worn

down and a settlement (though probably a temporary one) achieved. But for the first time England faced what she

had always dreaded and averted: a coalition of maritime enemies undistracted by war in Europe.

In simple terms of power the consequences are clear, and after a struggle of several years a momentary tilt of the

naval balance brought the disaster at Yorktown which broke the country's will to fight on. The same factor made

the strategic choices which faced the North Ministry infinitely more complicated than those which faced the two

Pitts. With a general command of the sea it was possible to take as much or as little of the war as one desired: to

feed the war fronts in Europe as much as one judged necessary, and to take the initiative in colonial warfare. In

other words it was possible to a considerable degree to treat the theatres of war in isolation, and to neutralise one

theatre in order to act in another. But for Lord North's government, whose enemies had free access to ocean

communications, all problems of war were interrelated. An additional effort in North America might expose in the

West Indies, a strong fleet in the Channel endanger India.

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The Ministry which faced these problems was not a strong one. Its parliamentary majority was insecure, it was

troubled by internal stresses, it lacked leadership, and it waged war without gusto. But weak leadership was not

unique in English warfare. The Elder Pitt had been a brilliant exception perhaps the only exception in two

centuries. And he had everything in his favour: a European war which engaged the resources of the enemy,

friendly colonies in America, Spanish intervention delayed till the French navy and empire had been broken. The

country and Parliament were united behind the war, and Pitt's junction with the Newcastle system gave the

government an unbreakable majority. One often hears how the North government alienated its generals and

admirals; yet only one, Keppel, was court-martialled, and he through unhappy circumstances. The reason for the

government's forbearance was timidity and fear of outcries. In the Seven Years War two successive commanders

were recalled from America with no outcry; the general at Gibraltar was court-martialled, and a 'revision' of his

sentence was discussed when he was acquitted; Sackville was broken, and Byng was shot. What would have been

the fate of Burgoyne under the régime of Pitt and Newcastle? How long would Clinton have held his command?

There was much administrative inefficiency in the American War. But North was using the machinery he had

inherited; and the more one lifts the curtain of adulation from the Ministry of the Elder Pitt, the less does the scene

appear to match the script, and the more one uncovers the characteristic inefficiences of the age. One finds the

same delays in despatching expeditions; vital reinforcements held up by contrary winds; time lost by naval

commanders in securing prizes. There are the same shortages of shipping, the same departmental friction over

transports, the same slow and piecemeal embarcations. Pitt and his friends planned distant offensives in the same

manner as Germain, with no allowance for wastage from sickness and the same optimistic reliance on precise

timing.

If one looks forward the same scene is revealed. In the American War much was made of the Ministers' summer

habit of haymaking in the country; yet as the Helder expedition prepared to embark in the summer of 1799 the

Younger Pitt was to write that in a few days he and many of his Cabinet would be out of London. His faults as a

war minister were shrouded by the necessity of his leadership, to which almost all subscribed. The Ministry of All

the Talents of 18067 were less fortunate: their failures were scrutinised under the microscope; and even their

successes were harvested by their opponents, for the swift and secret Copenhagen expedition of 1807 sailed in

transports which they had assembled. If one contemplates the arrangements for the Mediterranean in the autumn of

the same year, one may wonder how far Castlereagh and Canning excelled Germain and Sandwich in overcoming

the difficulties of slow communication and uncertain weather.

The first purpose of this book is to examine the making and execution of strategy in one of England's great

eighteenth-century wars, and to create a detailed model of the machine at work; the second, to judge a war

Ministry in the light of circumstances rather than results. This is how one at least of the Ministers wished to be

judged. Defending the Admiralty after Yorktown against charges of operational mismanagement, Lord Sandwich

wrote: 'These charges are not so easily answered, because there

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is no demonstrative evidence that the orders given have been right; the event certainly does not decide that

question; but those who mean to find fault, wait the event, and then adopt whichever side of the question best suits

their purpose.'1 To understand the war, one must view it with sympathy for the Ministers in their difficulties, and

not with the arrogant assumption that because they were defeated they were incompetent, and that all their actions

proceeded from folly.

This, then, is not a history of the War of Independence, but a study of British strategy and leadership in a world

war, the last in which the enemy were the Bourbons. I hope that American readers will not be disconcerted by the

Whitehall perspective: that they will forgive my disregard of the great moral truths of the struggle, and bear with

the habitual designation of the Patriots as rebels. The term is used with deliberation. It was the contemporary

British usage, and any other would alter the perspective. 'Patriots' is the language of opposition, not of those who

fought the rebellion. 'American' in many contexts is misleading. And rebels are conceded to be Revolutionaries

only when they have succeeded, whereas the struggle was waged by men who believed that the rebellion could still

be defeated.

A work which covers such well explored campaigns owes debts to many predecessors; particularly, among recent

writings, to the scholarship of Professors J.R. Alden, G.S. Graham and W.B. Willcox; and to Douglas Southall

Freeman's monumental life of Washington. Dr Howard C. Rice of Princeton University cleared up a number of

topographical problems. Mr J.D. Spinney gave me valuable information about Lord Rodney, though he will dispute

some of my views on the Admiral; and Father J.S. Benedict Cullen about Father Hussey. Mr M. W. Williams

generously lent me his manuscript on the naval administration of Lord Sandwich and transcripts of unpublished

letters in the Sandwich papers. The Marquess of Bath allowed me to see the papers of Lord Weymouth, later first

Marquess; and the Earl of Mansfield had the great kindness to send me copies of some papers left by Lord

Stormont, though there are hopes that more may one day come to light. Through the kindness of the Hon. R.P. de

Grey I was able to see some papers of the 2nd Lord Walsingham, in the possession of Lord Walsingham at Merton.

I have the Librarian of Duke University to thank for permission to quote from three manuscript letters in the

Library; and Dr Howard H. Peckham and William S. Ewing of the William Clements Library for their help and

courtesy. The research was begun, and a study made of the collections at the William Clements Library, when I

held a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship of the Harkness Foundation; and the manuscript was completed during a

visit to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

PEMBROKE COLLEGE, OXFORD.

SEPTEMBER 1962.

1 G 3510.

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The Cabinet 177583

LORD NORTH'S

(to March 1782)

LORD ROCKINGHAM'S

(to July 1782)

LORD SHELBURNE'S

(to Feb. 1783)

First Lord of the Treasury Lord North Marquess of Rockingham Earl of Shelburne

Secretaries of State 1. Northern Department: 1. Foreign Affairs: Foreign Affairs:

(a) Earl of Suffolk

(b) Viscount Stormont (from Oct. 1779)

Charles James Fox Earl of Grantham

2. Southern Department: 2. Home and Colonial Affairs: Home and Colonial Affairs:

(a) Earl of Rochford

(b) Viscount Weymouth (from Nov. 1775)

Earl of Shelburne Thomas Townshend

3. For the American Colonies:

(a) Earl of Dartmouth

(b) Lord George Germain (from Nov. 1775)

First Lord of the Admiralty Earl of Sandwich Viscount Keppel (a) Viscount Keppel

(b) Viscount Howe

(from Feb. 1783)

(continued on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

LORD NORTH'S

(to March 1782)

LORD ROCKINGHAM'S

(to July 1782)

LORD SHELBURNE'S

(to Feb. 1783)

Commander-in-Chief Lord Amherst (from March 1778) General Conway General Conway

Lord President of the Council (a) Earl Gower

(b) Earl Bathurst (from Nov. 1779)

Lord Camden Lord Camden

Lord Privy Seal (a) Duke of Grafton

(b) Earl of Dartmouth (from Nov. 1775)

Duke of Grafton Duke of Grafton

Lord Chancellor (a) Earl Bathurst

(b) Lord Thurlow (from June 1778)

Lord Thurlow Lord Thurlow

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster

Chancellor of the Exchequer

Master-General of the Ordnance

Lord Steward of the Household

Lord Ashburton Lord Ashburton

Lord John Cavendish William Pitt

Duke of Richmond Duke of Richmond

Duke of Rutland

(from Feb. 1783)

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Abbreviations Used in Footnotes

Add.

MSS.

Additional Manuscripts in the British Museum.

Adm. Admiralty Papers in the Public Record Office in London.

CL William Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan (followed by name of

collection).

CO Colonial Office Papers in the Public Record Office.

Eg Egerton MSS in the British Museum.

G Correspondence of George III (ed. Fortescue).

Knox MSS. of Captain H.V. Knox (Historical MSS. Commission).

Sackville Stopford-Sackville Papers (Historical MSS. Commission).

SP State Papers in the Public Record Office.

WO War Office Papers in the Public Record Office.

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Introduction:

A Government at War

And Great Bellona Smiles

The Peace of Paris in 1763 had left England alone in splendid but perilous eminence. She had crushed her enemies,

but lost her friends. Her former ally Austria, turning from Flemish interests and obsessed by the rise of Prussia,

had looked to France since the renversement des alliances of 1756. Prussia, the ally of the Seven Years War, was

alienated, for Frederick the Great chose to regard the peace as a desertion. Holland had gradually retreated from the

role of a Great Power. Spain was a defeated enemy. France, once the arbiter of Europe, stood humiliated before the

nations. She had been stripped of her colonies. Her resources were exhausted, her prestige was demolished. While

her former client states, Poland and Turkey, were plundered, she stood a helpless spectator. At foreign courts

English ambassadors claimed the precedence of victors.

But within a few years a shadow was dimming the glory of England's triumph, and giving hope to the defeated. It

had been foretold that the ejection of the French from Canada would bring to a head the discords of England and

her American colonies. In 1765 the Duc de Choiseul traced out the course by which France would rise from her

defeats. The colonies would cast themselves loose from British tutelage; and if France was to find her revenge she

must seize that moment. She must turn her back on the battle-fields of Europe, and fight in alliance with Spain for

the supremacy of the seas. A year later he thought the time was approaching. But rebellion had not yet ripened in

America, and France was weak. The years still slipped away.

Yet the stage was being prepared. Stamp Act, Customs disputes, mob violence and military retaliation were

building up a pressure of animosity which was soon to burst the shell of the old British Empire. By 1774 civil

government was near its end. The courts could no longer administer justice, and the people of New England were

arming and training for war. Parliament closed the port of Boston, and General Gage returned to America to

combine the offices of Governor of Massachusetts and Commander-in-Chief of the troops in North America.

Before the end of the year he was warning the government at home that only a great army could end the troubles,

and that a bloody crisis was at hand.

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