Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

lobsterbacks 49

of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. In fact, this German connection would be

carried right through into the modern British monarchy. (Under pressure

from anti-German sentiment during World War I, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

changed its name to Windsor.) It is not surprising, therefore, that Britain

should turn to a tried and trusted source of mercenary auxiliaries. The

greatest of the German states, Frederick the Great’s Prussia, refused to

supply troops (nor would Catherine of Russia), but there were still those

German princelings, ever needy, ever greedy.

The first deal was struck with Charles I, duke of Brunswick, in

January 1776. He agreed to supply 3,964 fully equipped infantry and 336

mounted dragoons (minus their mounts) at the rate of £17 four shillings

four and a half pence a head per year. In addition, the British government

would pay an annual “fee” of £11,517 seventeen shillings one and a half

pence starting from the day of signature of the treaty. For each of the

two years following the return of the Brunswickers to Germany, the fee

would be doubled. As a bonus to be paid directly to Charles, Britain also

agreed to cover the costs of replacing any Brunswicker killed in British

service (at £17 four shillings four and a half pence a head), with a macabre

footnote that three wounded men were to count as one dead man. (The

War Office paid the sum “off the books” to avoid public censure—an

eighteenth-century Iran-contra arrangement.) For his part, Charles

would have to replace any deserters or any soldier who fell sick with

anything other than an “uncommon contagious malady.”

By war’s end

Brunswick would send a total of 5,723 troops.

The end of January 1776 saw a treaty with the largest supplier of

men: Hesse-Cassel (hence the umbrella word Hessian to describe all

Germans fighting in America). The per-head rate was the same (as it

would be with the smaller states who participated), but the landgrave,

Frederick II, cannily managed to wring a substantially better deal

than Charles: £108,281 five shillings per year (paid up to a year after

the troops’ return) together with a British defense commitment should

Hesse-Cassel be attacked. Frederick was to supply 12,000 men, a figure

that grew to almost 17,000 by war’s end. Treaties with the smaller states

of Hesse-Hanau, Anspach-Bayreuth, Waldeck, and Anhalt-Zerbst

completed the haul. In all, the total throughout the war was just short of

patriot battles 50

30,000, about 30 percent of the British military presence in America, and

General Wilhelm von Knyphausen would rise to be deputy commander

in chief of the allied army in America.

The Hessians—“of a moderate stature, rather broad shoulders,

their limbs not of equal proportion, light complexion with a b[l]ueish

tinge, hair cued as tight to the head as possible, sticking straight back

like the handle of a skillet,”

with their extravagant mustachios (the

British and American armies of the time were clean-shaven)—were

considered exotic and a little savage by British and Americans alike.

But in fact, the common Hessian soldier was not unlike the common

British or American soldier. They had been agricultural laborers,

textile workers, shoemakers, all of whom had fallen on hard times, or

fallen for the sucker punch of an unscrupulous recruiting agent. They

were, to use the wonderful phrase of the poet Johann Gottfried Seume,

himself an unwilling recruit, a “true pell-mell of human souls.” Seume

listed among the occupations of men in his group: “a runaway student

from Jena, a bankrupt merchant from Vienna, a haberdasher from

Hannover . . . a Prussian Hussar guard, a cashiered major from the

fortress,” and even a monk from Würzburg.

Not even their allies always appreciated them. Ambrose Serle,

Admiral Lord Howe’s secretary, thought they would “tend to irritate

and inflame the Americans infinitely more than two or three British

armies.”

Captain John Bowater, writing from New York in May 1777,

called them “the worst troops [he] ever saw . . . They are exceedingly

Slow, their mode of discipline is not in the least Calculated for this

Country and they are strictly enjoined by the Landgrave, not to alter

it. They are so very dirty that they always have one half of their People

in the Hospitals . . . [The Americans] have now got a very Considerable

Army together, and you may depend upon it, they will beat the Hessians

every time they meet (the Granadiers & Chassures only excepted.)”

Serle and Bowater’s attitude is explained to some extent by good old

British chauvinism, for given the circumstances that had led many of

the German troops into the ranks, and given that they had no interest

in the ideological basis of the war, they fought with surprising tenacity.

At Long Island, at the attack on Fort Washington in Manhattan, at

lobsterbacks 51

White Plains, at Brandywine, even during the Saratoga battles in which

they took tremendous punishment, and later in the South, particularly

at Guilford Courthouse, they gave good accounts of themselves, as

evidenced by a short list of the senior German officers killed in battle:

Johann Rall at Trenton, Friedrich Baum at Bennington, Heinrich

Breymann at Bemis Heights, and Carl von Donop at Fort Mercer.

“The Idea which we at first conceived of the Hessian riflemen was

truly ridiculous,” wrote an American officer of the battle of Brooklyn,

“but sad experience convinces our people that they are an Enemy not

to be despised.”

A Hessian officer explained why: “[The rebels] have

some very good marksmen [and] they are clever at hunter’s wiles. They

climb trees, they crawl forward on their bellies . . . But today they are

much put out by our greencoats [jägers] for we don’t let our fellows fire

unless they can get good aim, so that they dare not undertake anything

more against us.”

In fact, from the first they put the fear of God into

the Americans, as Colonel Samuel Atlee, commanding a Pennsylvania

battalion, attested at the battle of Brooklyn: “The opinion we had

formed of these [Hessian] troops determined us to run any risk rather

than fall into their hands.”

Forced to surrender, Atlee much preferred

to take his chances with a battalion of Highlanders which, given their

reputation for less-than-gentle treatment, seems like a choice between

the devil and the deep blue sea. The Hessians were noted for their use of

the bayonet, and it is probably this that put the wind up the unfortunate

Atlee.

Hessian desertion rates, certainly in the early ears of the war, were

surprisingly low. Even though Congress and Washington mounted a

concerted campaign to woo Germans, including the offer of fifty acres

for each deserter, only 66 men deserted in 1776 and just over 100 in

1777. As the war progressed, and as more Germans became prisoners,

desertion rates inevitably rose. The big jump was in 1778 (approximately

480) and can be explained by the large number of Germans taken

prisoner after Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in October 1777. The

rate fell off during 1779 and 1780 but began to climb again as war

weariness ground down morale. In 1782 it was about 500, and in 1783

approximately 750.

There were those who repaid the cynicism of their

patriot battles 52

rulers with a little of their own. An exasperated German officer wrote:

“Most of the recruits, mainly foreigners, behave very badly and desert at

the first opportunity . . . Many of them have intended to take the chance

of free passage to this country, and finally to quit Europe. They would

have had to work about four years to pay the cost of their crossing.”

the 30,000 who came to fight in America, 7,500 would lay their bones

there: 1,200 in battle and 6,300 by disease. Another 5,000 simply stayed

to make a new life in the new nation.



loyalists



They are the forgotten ones; sharing the gloomy penumbra of history

with impoverished White Russian aristos working as waiters in Paris

in the 1920s after the Bolshevik revolution, or once-wealthy, cultivated

South Vietnamese government officials opening delis in Los Angeles

and New York after their country fell. They have about them a sepia

sadness, the corners curled and the colors faded. Who cares? They were

the losers.

The traditional estimate of Loyalist strength (first proposed by

John Adams) is that one-third of Americans were patriot, one-third

pro-British, and the remaining third neutral or persuadable one way

or the other. Some historians think this three-way split is “too simple,

and too high for the king’s adherents”;

while others consider it too

low.

Somewhere between the two lay a very considerable body of

people for whom the patriot cause was the destruction of the known,

true, ordered, and trusted world, from which, at war’s end, over 80,000

of their persuasion would be banished.

There were two kinds of Loyalist. Claude Van Tyne in his classic,

Loyalists in the American Revolution (1902), one of the first books devoted

to their history, had no doubt who one kind was: “They were the

prosperous and contented men, the men without a grievance . . . Men

do not rebel to rid themselves of prosperity.” And for him they were

Loyalism. But his description is by no means true of many, if not

most. The other kind, particularly in the Carolinas and Georgia,

lobsterbacks 53

were backcountrymen, mainly Celtic Scots immigrants (as against the

predominantly Protestant Scotch-Irish), and mainly poor. They nursed

bitter grievances (particularly against the Whiggish plantation society

of the tidewater) that would, as the war progressed, work themselves

out in a bloody civil war of startling savagery.

The wealthier Loyalist came predominantly from the middle

colonies, particularly New York and New Jersey, which were the

strongholds of Loyalism during the revolution. Those two colonies

alone represented as much as 50 percent of American Loyalism,

a fact

reflected by Tom Paine’s outburst in the first issue of his broadsheet

“The American Crisis” of 10 December 1776: “Why is it that the enemy

hath left the New-England provinces, and made these middle ones the

seat of war? The answer is easy: New-England is not infested with

Tories, and we are.”

This particular strain is usually described as passive, overdependent

on its British protectors, lacking in initiative, hesitant, crippled by its

own gentility, and always a few fatal steps behind its better organized,

more energized, more determined patriot enemy. They may have

been relatively wealthier, but they were not effete grandees. When

Massachusetts passed its Act of Banishment in 1778, the occupations

of the 300 or so Loyalists slated spanned a broad gamut. A third were

merchants, lawyers and other professionals, and “gentlemen”; another

third were farmers; and the rest were artisans, laborers, and small

shopkeepers.

When over 1,000 Loyalists fled Boston with General

Howe, the majority were middle- and lower-class. Two hundred and

twenty-five were government officials, Anglican clergy, and large

farmers; but 382 were small farmers, traders, and “mechanics.” Another

213 were merchants, and 200 unspecified.

Nor should we assume that Loyalists were somehow more “English”

in their background. In fact, the crucible of the revolution was in the

most “English” of the colonies (Massachusetts and Virginia), and it was

here that Loyalism was relatively weak (only about one-tenth of Tories

were in the Northeast). In fact, perhaps the most militarily active strain

was far removed from genteel “Englishness.” The southern strand

(approximately one-third of all Loyalists), with its Celtic impetuosity,

patriot battles 54

its clannishness, its yearning for the heroic to the point of foolhardiness,

rose up early in the war and was cut down almost as precipitately. On

27 February 1776 a Loyalist force of about 1,600, of whom 1,300 were

Highland Scots under the command of Brigadier General Donald

McDonald, their vanguard swordsmen led by Captains John Campbell

and Alexander McCloud, charged across the bridge at Moore’s Creek,

North Carolina, to attack 1,000 patriots dug in on the opposite bank.

The Highland broadswords were met by concentrated musketry and

artillery. Campbell, McCloud, and 40 of their men were killed; 850 were

captured. The patriots lost one man killed and one wounded. A tribal

style of war fighting, no matter how passionate, could not alter the cool

mathematical logic of volleyed muskets and artillery.

Loyalism was a siren call for the British. They were constantly

bending their strategy to conform to the chimera of Loyalist support

that was assumed to be there but somehow never materialized. Howe’s

Philadelphia campaign and Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada, as well

as the British strategy in the South, were based on the assumption that

large numbers of Loyalists would rise in support, if only sufficiently

encouraged and protected, as many people—influential and

knowledgeable people—whispered seductively. Ambrose Serle was

among them. He had been an undersecretary to Lord Dartmouth when

Dartmouth was secretary of state for the colonies between 1772 and 1775,

and had come to America as Admiral Lord Howe’s secretary. Reporting

on the situation in Pennsylvania in May 1778, he confidently reported

Loyalist hopes: “Had some Conversation with Mr. Andw Allen. His

most material Remark was . . . that five Sixths of the Province were

against the Rebels, our Army had only to drive off Washington & to put

arms into the Hands of the well-affected, and the Chain of Rebellion

would be broken; especially if we restored the Province to the King’s

Peace . . . That this wd affect all the Southern Colonies; & that then the

Northern Colonies could not long stand out.”

In the South, James Simpson, the attorney general of South

Carolina, reported in August 1779 to General Clinton and Secretary

of State for the Colonies Lord George Germain: “I am of opinion,

whenever the King’s Troops move to Carolina, they will be assisted,

lobsterbacks 55

by very considerable numbers of the inhabitants, that if the respectable

force proposed, moves thither early in the fall, the reduction of the

country without risk or much opposition, will be the consequence.”

Perhaps the most powerful voice in the British ear was that of William

Knox, a wealthy Georgia landowner and sometime member of the

Georgia Council, who had come to England in 1761 as agent for the

state and had become undersecretary in the American Department.

In his opinion Britain should cast off the insurgent northern colonies

completely and re-form its empire in the South.

Broadly speaking, there were two main ways in which a Loyalist

could serve the Crown in arms: in provincial regiments or in the militia.

During the first years of the war Britain preferred, primarily for

reasons of economy, to encourage Loyalists to raise their own regiments

through a system known as “raising for rank.” It was, in essence, an

entrepreneurial activity by which a prominent citizen set himself up

as a recruiting agent (bearing most of the recruiting expenses) and

prospective colonel of his regiment. For the British the system had some

distinct advantages. It was cheap. Apart from shouldering the recruiting

expenses, the recruiting officer was eligible for pay only when he had

raised 75 percent of his regiment, and the officers of the regiment did not

qualify for permanent rank with the British army or go on to half pay if

the regiment was downsized or disbanded. At first, instead of a money

bounty, each private soldier was given a royal grant of 50 acres while

NCOs received 200 acres. Unlike the regular army, Loyalist regiments

had no provision for medical care, and wounded officers did not receive

invalid pay. And to underline their inferiority, if Loyalist field officers

served with a regular British regiment, they were demoted to the most

junior rank of the grade below their provincial grade.

As the pressure of the war bore down on resources, Britain was

forced to pay more attention to the Loyalists as a military resource. In

November 1776 Howe had asked Germain for 15,000 reinforcements,

a number that horrified him. He might be able to muster perhaps half

that, he thought. There would have to be more reliance on American

manpower, and this requirement, to an important extent, dictated British

strategy for the rest of the war. Howe’s 1777 invasion of Pennsylvania

patriot battles 56

and the capture of Philadelphia, a stronghold of Loyalism—dismissed by

most historians as strategically pointless and simply another indication

of British dim-wittedness—makes more sense when it is seen in the

light of the growing importance of hitching the Loyalist draft horse to

the royal wagon. The load was becoming too heavy for the regular army

to haul alone. As Howe explained in a rationale for his Philadelphia

strategy, “The opinions of people being much changed in Pennsylvania,

and their minds in general, from the late progress of the army, disposed

to peace, in which sentiment they would be confirmed, by our getting

possession of Philadelphia.”

Most of the important provincial regiments were raised following

the fall of New York in September 1776. They included Oliver De

Lancey’s brigade from New York; Robert Rogers’s Queen’s Rangers;

Cortland Skinner’s New Jersey Volunteers (“Skinner’s Greens”); Sir

John Johnson’s Royal Greens; Beverly Robinson’s Loyal American

Regiment; and the New York Volunteers from Nova Scotia. In the

winter of 1776 and spring of 1777, more important units were added,

including Edmund Fanning’s King’s American Regiment from New

York; John Coffin’s King’s Orange Rangers, a mounted rifle regiment

from New York; Monteforte Brown’s Prince of Wales American

Regiment, composed largely of Connecticut men; William Allen’s

Pennsylvania Loyalists, who could boast Sir William Howe himself

as their colonel; and James Chalmers’s Maryland Loyalists. Although

almost eighty Loyalist regiments were raised over the course of the war

(including black corps like the Jamaica Rangers, which was established

in the summer of 1779 and had about 800 men of all ranks) and an

estimated 15,000 men served at some time, it was those of 1776–77 who

formed the backbone of the provincial service and within whose ranks

two-thirds of all Loyalist troops would serve.

Three other units deserve special mention. Each was led by

charismatic and maverick officers. Major Patrick Ferguson’s American

Volunteers was raised in New York in 1779. Ferguson, an Irishman, had

been wounded at Brandywine in 1777 leading his specialized corps of

sharpshooters armed with Ferguson’s own invention, a unique breech

loading rifle. Appointed inspector of militia in May 1780 in South

lobsterbacks 57

Carolina, Ferguson quickly wearied of the dreariness of administration,

preferring the hand’s-on business of active soldiering. He would die at

the head of his men in a defiant sword-in-hand last stand trapped on

the summit of Kings Mountain, South Carolina, on 7 October 1780.

The famous, or infamous, British Legion was raised in New

York in July 1778 under its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre

Tarleton, a young British cavalry officer with a swaggering, almost

casual brutality that is reminiscent of the Confederate cavalry leader

Nathan Bedford Forrest. (Both men also shared a taste for flamboyant

hats.) Tarleton’s defeat of Colonel Abraham Buford at Waxhaws, South

Carolina, on 29 May 1780 was accomplished with an “astonishing

cruelty” that is illustrated by the comparative casualties: 113 Americans

killed and 150 wounded, while the Legion lost five killed and twelve

wounded. (“Tarleton’s quarter” would become a battle cry of revenging

patriot troops thereafter.) Tarleton would meet his own comeuppance

at the battle of Cowpens just over six months later at the hand of

Brigadier General Daniel Morgan when the Legion was cut to pieces

and its commander was lucky to escape with his life.

The name of the third regiment—the American Legion—has a

decidedly ironic twist when one considers its commander: Brigadier

General Benedict Arnold, the “Dark Eagle” of the war. It was raised

on Long Island, New York, in October 1780 and from there was led by

Arnold on its raiding campaigns into Virginia in June 1781, and New

London, Connecticut, in September 1781.

Spurred by the entry of France into the war following Burgoyne’s

defeat at Saratoga, the British authorities tried to jump-start Loyalist

enlistment by offering, in December 1778 and January 1779, a bounty

(initially three guineas but later increased by twenty-two shillings and

six pence) and £40 per year per regiment as a contribution toward

medical services. Provincial officers would now be entitled to half pay

if their regiments were reduced or disbanded, and, as George Germain

put it, if they “happen to be wounded in action, so as to lose a limb, or

be maimed, shall be entitled to the same gratuity of one year’s advanced

pay as officers of His [Majesty’s] established army.”

Unfortunately for

the British, these plums did not whet the appetite of too many enlistees.

patriot battles 58

By December 1778–January 1779, when the reforms were announced,

there were 7,400 men in the provincial line, and it rose only to 9,000

by December 1779 and 10,000 by December 1780, where it remained

steady.

The truth was, perhaps, that the British seemed never to have

had much respect for the “Friends of Government.” They neither

understood their culture nor knew how to harness their military

potential. Too often Loyalists were viewed as the country bumpkins,

the “provincials.” There were a few notable exceptions where British

officers—Major Patrick Ferguson, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre

Tarleton, and Colonel Francis Rawdon, for example—led Loyalist units

with a passionate commitment. Ferguson described his men as “very fit

for rough & irregular war, being all excellent woodsmen, unerring shots,

careful to a degree to prevent waste or damage to their ammunition,

patient of hunger & hardship & almost regardless of blankets, cloathing,

rum, and other indulgences.”

But on the whole the British military

establishment was superior and dismissive: “I should be very sorry to

trust any one of them out of my sight,” said Captain John Bowater of

the Royal Navy to Lord Denbigh on 5 June 1777. “They swallow the

Oaths of Allegiance to the King, & Congress Alternately, with as much

ease as your Lordship does poached Eggs.”

The Carolinian Loyalist

Robert Gray saw it clearly: “Almost every British officer regarded with

contempt and indifference the establishment of a militia among the

people differing so much in custom & manners from themselves.”

The “failure” of the Loyalists to flock to the royal standard cannot

be understood without appreciating how effectively they had been

locked down and neutralized by the patriots. Loyalists could not buy,

sell, or bequeath property or other assets. They were barred from all

legal recourse to recover debts or redress any other injury. They could

not practice law or teach unless they had taken an oath of allegiance to

the cause. They could not be executors of estates or be a guardian to a

child. “Any person who wrote, or spoke, or by any overt act libeled or

defamed Congress, or the acts of the Connecticut General Assembly,

should be brought to trial.” All known Loyalist sympathizers were

disarmed, yet they were coerced to join the patriot militia; any refusal