Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
lobsterbacks 59
was met with heavy fines or punishments like tar-and-feathering or
riding a rail (“grand Tory Rides,” as a patriot called them). Although
these punishments may now seem comic (electricity has done so much
to improve our torture techniques!), they were in fact excruciatingly
painful. A patriot described the procedure for tarring.
First strip a Person naked, then heat the Tar until it is thin, and
pour it upon the naked Flesh, or rub it over with a Tar Brush,
quantum sufficit. After which, sprinkle decently with the Tar,
whilst it is yet warm, as many Feathers as will stick to it. Then
hold a lighted Candle to the Feathers, and try to set it all on Fire;
if it will burn so much the better.
66
Hot tar (pine was preferred) that has cooled will strip off a layer of
skin when it is removed. Riding a rail could cause severe damage to
the genitals and anus. The Committees of Safety and their enforcers
brought a Jacobin-like enthusiasm to suppressing and neutralizing
Loyalists. Cornwallis wrote to his superior, Sir Henry Clinton, on 29
August 1780: “We receive the strongest professions of Friendship from
North Carolina; our Friends, however, do not seem inclined to rise until
they see our Army in motion. The severity of the Rebel Government has
so terrified and totally subdued the minds of the people, that it is very
difficult to rouse them to any exertions.”
67
The young Lord Rawdon
wrote to Cornwallis, his commander in the South, on 5 December 1780
that those coming into his camp professing attachment to the Crown
were often fifth columnists: “My conduct towards the inhabitants,
and the extraordinary regularity of the troops under my command, I
must assert to have been such as ought to have conciliated their firmest
attachment; yet I had the firmest proofs that the people who daily visited
my camp . . . used every artifice to debauch the minds of my soldiers
and persuade them to desert . . . Several small detachments from me
were attacked by persons who had the hour before been with them as
friends in their camp.”
68
Throughout the war Britain disastrously mismanaged its Loyalist
dependents. Time after time, starting with Howe’s evacuation of
patriot battles 60
Boston in 1776, Loyalists who had exposed themselves by declaring
for the Crown during British occupations were abandoned and left to
patriot retribution—“the fury of their bitterest enemies,” as an English
officer put it. When Howe quit Boston the city was thrown into a
wild panic. A contemporary diarist reported the desperation: “We are
told that the Tories were thunder-struck when orders were issued for
evacuating the town, after being many hundred times assured, that
such reinforcements would be sent, as to enable the king’s troops to
ravage the country at pleasure . . . Many of them, it is said, considered
themselves as undone . . . One or more of them, it is reported, have been
left to end their lives by the unnatural act of suicide.”
69
This pattern
would be repeated when the British quit Philadelphia in 1778. Ambrose
Serle was ashamed of his country’s betrayal of its Loyal supporters in
the city.
This [the news of the army’s evacuation] was soon circulated
about the town, and filled all our friends with melancholy on the
apprehension of being speedily deserted, now a rope was (as it were)
about their necks, and all their property subject to confiscation. The
information chilled me with horror, and with some indignation
when I reflected upon the miserable circumstances . . . I now look
upon the contest as at an end. No man can be expected to declare
for us when he cannot be assured of a fortnight’s protection. Every
man, on the contrary, whatever might have been his primary
inclinations, will find it his interest to oppose and drive us out of
the country.
70
Like many colonial regimes since, the British were too often
ignorant and clumsy when it came to understanding the complex
dynamic between friend and foe. To some extent they were caught in the
classic colonial dilemma of trying to appease an enemy in an attempt to
win “hearts and minds” even when it resulted in undermining Loyalist
support. Howe’s policy of issuing general pardons to rebels who would
go through the motion of taking an oath of allegiance outraged Loyalists,
who denounced his “sentimental manner of waging war,” and even
lobsterbacks 61
roused Germain’s ire. He lashed Howe’s policy as “poor encouragement
for the Friends of Government who have been suffering under the
tyranny of the rebels, to see their oppressors without distinction put
upon the same footing as themselves.”
71
The British were trapped in this dilemma throughout the war.
Later, in the South, they stumbled around with the same uncertainty.
The Carolinian Loyalist Robert Gray detailed the mess.
The want of paying sufficient attention to our Militia produced
daily at this time the most disagreeable consequences. In the first
place, when the Rebel Militia were made prisoners, they were
immediately delivered up to the Regular Officers, who, being
entirely ignorant of the dispositions & manners of the people treated
them with the utmost lenity & sent them home to their plantations
upon parole . . . the general consequence of this, that they no sooner
got out of our hands than they broke their paroles, took up arms,
and made it a point to murder every Militia man of ours who had
any concern in making them prisoners, on the other hand whenever
a Militia Man of ours was made a prisoner he was delivered not to
the Continentals but to the Rebel Militia, who looked upon him
as a State prisoner, as a man who deserved a halter, & therefore
treated him with the greatest cruelty. If he was not assassinated
after being made a prisoner, he was instantly hurried into Virginia
or North Carolina where he was kept a prisoner without friends,
money, credit, or perhaps hopes of exchange. This line being once
drawn betwixt their militia & ours, it was no longer safe to be a
loyalist.
72
The “collateral damage” that is inevitable in insurgency warfare
hurt friend as well as foe. The Quaker merchant Robert Morgan watched
as British troops in Philadelphia in November 1777 destroyed Loyalist
houses because they were being used by patriot snipers: “This morning
about 10 o’clock the British set fire to Fair Hill mansion House, Jon’a
Mifflin’s and many others . . . The reason they assign for this destruction
of their friends’ property is on acco. of the Americans firing from these
patriot battles 62
houses and harassing their Picquets.” But what astonished Morgan was
the ignorant glee with which British troops burned the furniture of the
Loyalists, something, he points out, “Gen’l Washington’s Army cannot
be accused of. There is not one instance to be produced where they have
wantonly destroyed and burned their friends’ property.”
And in the end, for Britain, there was simply an implacable blank
wall. When Cornwallis (perhaps the only British senior commander
who felt a genuine bond with the Loyalists)
73
urged shifting the
main theater of operations into Virginia following the failures—his
failures—in the Carolinas, Sir Henry Clinton wrote to his pugnacious
subordinate: “Your Lordship will, I hope, excuse me, if I dissent from
your opinion . . . there is no possibility of re-establishing order in any
rebellious province on this continent without the hearty assistance of
numerous friends. These, my Lord, are not, I think, to be found in
Virginia; nor dare I positively assert, that under our present circumstances
they are to be found any where else, or their exertions when found will
answer our expectations.”
74
Still, Clinton could not help himself when
he added, “But I believe there is a greater probability of finding them in
Pennsylvania.” He still had an ear cocked to the siren’s call.
3
“Men of Character”
THE OFFICER CLASS
G
eorge Washington knew what he wanted. Just as he modeled
his Continentals on the British army—“a respectable army”
as he put it—rejecting a militia model as being wholly
inadequate to fight his war, so too did he strive to mold his officer corps
into an institution with decidedly European characteristics—a place for
gentlemen.
You must have good officers, [and] there are, in my Judgement, no
other possible means of obtaining them but by establishing your
Army upon a permanent footing, and giving your Officers good
pay, this will induce Gentlemen, and Men of Character to engage;
and till the bulk of your Officers are composed of such persons
are actuated by Principles of honour, and a spirit of enterprise,
you have little to expect from them—They ought to have such
allowances as will enable them to live like & support the Characters
of Gentlemen.
1
When he wrote this, in the early stages of the war, Washington was
struggling mightily with an army composed mainly of unruly militia
regiments and an officer corps that seemed to him utterly unprofessional,
patriot battles 64
ill-trained, and, above all, ill-bred: “Their officers generally speaking
are the most indifferent kind of people I ever saw.” Too many officers,
in his opinion, were not leaders of men but led by their men. The diary
of Aaron Wright, a New Jersey private, underlines Washington’s point.
Although Wright and his fellow common soldiers were “sworn to be
true and faithful soldiers in the Continental army, under the direction
of the Right Honorable Congress,” Wright goes on to say:
After this we chose our officers . . . When on parade, our 1st lieut.
came and told us he would be glad if we would excuse him from
going, which we refused; but on consideration we concluded it was
better to consent; after which he would go; but we said ‘ You shall
not command us, for he whose mind can change in an hour is not
fit to command in the field where liberty is contended for.’ In the
evening we chose a private in his place.
2
Washington, the patrician Virginia planter, and a man who always
kept a fastidious distance from those of lower rank, was aghast at the
easy familiarity between officers and their men. This New England
“leveling” spirit appalled him.
To attempt to introduce discipline and subordination into a new
army must always be a work of much difficulty, but where the
principles of democracy so universally prevail, where so great an
equality and so thorough a leveling spirit predominates [it is even
harder]
. . . . You may form some notion of it when I tell you that
yesterday morning a captain of horse . . . was seen shaving one of
his men on the parade near the house.
3
The British general Sir Guy Carleton was equally shocked when
he reviewed the American officers he had captured at Quebec in 1775:
“You can have no conception what kind of men composed their officers.
Of those we took, one major was a blacksmith, another a hatter. Of
their captains there was a butcher . . . a tanner, a shoemaker, a tavern-
keeper etc. Yet they all pretended to be gentlemen.”
4
Henry Knox, a
“men of character” 65
major general in the Continental artillery, put it a little more bluntly
when he wrote to his brother on 23 September 1776: “There is a radical
evil in our army—the lack of officers . . . the bulk of the officers of the
army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men, who might make tolerable
soldiers, but are bad officers.”
5
The early American officer corps had to be purged, and within a
few weeks after his arrival at Cambridge the commander in chief could
report that he had made “a pretty good slam” at doing so. A regimental
chaplain, William Emerson (grandfather to Ralph Waldo Emerson),
saw the new broom sweeping clean: “Great overturning in the camp
as to order and regularity. New lords, new laws. Now great distinction
is made between officers and soldiers. Everyone is made to know his
place and keep it.”
6
But there remained huge problems. Although
Congress reserved the right to appoint general officers, field officers
were appointed by individual colonies. Reform was a knotty problem,
made more difficult not only by the jealously guarded “rights” of each
colony but also because of a euphoric confidence that attended those
early successes of American arms: “The army of the united colonies
are already superior in valour, and from the most amazingly rapid
progress in discipline, we may conclude will shortly become the most
formidable troops in the world,” James Warren, a patriot leader from
Massachusetts, could brag to Samuel Adams in August 1775. It was
from this sticky treacle of self-congratulation that Washington would
have to extricate his army.
As the war progressed the American officer corps increasingly
reflected Washington’s ideals. It became more homogeneous in its social
caste and in its feeling of separateness from civilian society. Increasingly,
it came to resemble its British counterpart. Shared suffering welded
the Continental officer class into a tight-knit exclusivity, and at war’s
end this sense of brotherhood and shared grievances would almost tip
America over the edge into military dictatorship.
The old militia officer corps, although not exactly a democratically
elected body, was influenced by a certain egalitarianism. For example,
in the French and Indian War more than half of the officers in the
Massachusetts provincial regiments identified themselves with manual
patriot battles 66
occupations.
7
Corporal John Adlum, a member of the Pennsylvania
Flying Camp, was captured at New York in 1776 and during his
interrogation gave an interesting insight into the social composition of
the American officer corps during this early phase of the war.
The four companies of the town were commanded by Capt. Charles
Lukens, the sheriff of York County (and to which I belonged), Capt.
William Bailey, a respectable man, a coppersmith, Capt. Rudolph
Spangler, a silversmith, and Capt. Michael Hahn. I am not certain
as to his occupation, but I believe it was a smith . . . Lieutenant
Sherriff, who was appointed brigade major and who had been a
schoolmaster in Yorktown; Lieutenant Holzinger . . . was a fellow
prentice . . . to Michael Doudle, a tanner . . . of Captain Trett’s
company I only recollect Ensign Myers, a blacksmith, and who
was the most uncouth-looking man in the army and one of the
greatest dunces.
8
A French officer was disconcerted to find that “there are shoemakers
who are Colonels; and it often happens that the Americans ask the
French officers what their trade is in France.”
9
Colonial America,
however, although much more socially dynamic than the Old World,
was still hierarchical, and this balance was reflected in its officer
cadre—a very mixed bag indeed. For example, the colonel of Ipswich,
Massachusetts, militia regiment was the wealthiest man in town,
but the fourth wealthiest was only a lieutenant, while a captain and
two lieutenants were “poor.”
10
Officers would tend to come from the
wealthier segments of society, whether elected or not. Half of the militia
officers on Concord, Massachusetts’s tax list came from the town’s most
wealthy 10 percent; and in Goshen, New York, about one-third came
from the top 10 percent and two-thirds from the richest 20 percent.
11
In
the New Jersey Line, for example, 84 percent of the officers were drawn
from the wealthiest one-third of society, many of them coming from
the wealthiest 10 percent.
12
The Maryland Line was similar. Senior
regimental officers came from the colony’s political leadership. William
Smallwood and Francis Ware, the colonel and lieutenant colonel
“men of character” 67
respectively, had both been members of the Maryland Convention, as
had four majors.
13
The less wealthy were not disbarred from becoming
officers (as they were not in the British army, as we shall see), but
the general picture is fairly clear. As in the British army, wealth and
influence were important factors, particularly at the higher levels of
command.
At the outbreak of the war there were 3,700 infantry officers and 400
cavalry officers in the British army. Sixty-six percent of them had bought
their commissions, and it is this fact that seems the most difficult to
reconcile with modern ideas of an effective officer corps. The conclusion
that many popular historians jump to is that British officers must have
been, ipso facto, effete amateurs. Certainly, there were deadbeat young
twits who had bought their way into rank, but the overall picture is a
little different. At the highest levels of military command there is no
doubt that the wealthiest and the most powerfully connected dominated,
but at every level in between the officer corps was much more diverse.
About 25 percent of regimental officers and 50 percent of proprietary
colonels (“proprietary” because the colonel owned the business and ran
the regiment like a CEO) and general officers tended to come from the
highest echelons of British society. But the greatest source of officers
came from the broad swath of “good families”—the noninheriting
younger sons of respectable stock.
The commission purchase system (abolished in the British army
in 1871) is usually the single issue pounced upon by the “lions led by
asses” school of historians: the victory of privilege over merit; tradition
over efficiency. In fact, it proved to be more open to talent than might
appear at first glance. All ranks below that of colonel could be purchased.
(Colonels were appointed by the king.) The lower the rank, the less
expensive the price. (Exceptions were the engineers and artillery, whose
officers required technical expertise; they constituted a meritocracy
whose ranks were filled by middle-class technocrats, much to the distaste
of aristocratic officers. Wellington, for one, could not abide them.)
patriot battles 68
A vacancy occurred when an officer retired, sold out, transferred,
was killed, died, or was cashiered. Assuming the reason did not fall in
the last three categories, the seller usually had to offer his commission
to the most senior officer of the grade immediately beneath his. If that
officer declined, it was offered to the next senior, and so on, creating
a chain reaction of promotions. A retiring officer had a choice to
make. Either he could sell out and take the purchase price as a lump-
sum pension fund, or he could elect to go on half pay. If he chose the
former, the price he received was his original purchase price plus a
supplement. Since he had bought his office from the government, it was
the government that now paid back the purchase price. The purchaser
repaid the government, which held the funds in bond as an assurance of
good behavior; thus, if an officer was cashiered, he would lose his bond.
The purchaser paid the supplement—the “profit” on the commission—
directly to the retiring officer (a negotiation usually handled by the
regimental agent). The negotiations could be complicated. Here, John
Peebles, the senior lieutenant of the 42nd Foot, describes the Byzantine
horse-trading that went on to move himself up a rung in 1777. His
colonel had asked him to pay a little over the regulation price to the
vacating Captain Lieutenant Valentine Chisholm, who was too ill to
carry on in the service.
I thought it was too much [an extra £50], and am of the opinion
that Mr Chisholm should either sell or serve . . . if he sold the
regulation price was as much as he could expect in the current state
of affairs, however to facilitate the matter & make it as well for
poor Chisholm as we could I agreed to give the £50, 20 of which
Lts Rutherford and Potts agreed to make up equally betwixt them
on the above conditions & Ensign Drummond gives £30, which
with the regulation price from Ens. Campbell makes up the 600
guineas to Chisholm if I succeed to this captaincy.
14
Death also brought its reward, if not for the demised, then
certainly for his fellow officers. This was the opportunity for a free leg
up—a windfall from the fallen—because the families of the dead man