The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

by Rick Atkinson

Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, served not only as French foreign minister, but as the king’s chief strategist and closest adviser.

The American rebellion, now entering its third year, provided a perfect vehicle for sapping British strength, giving France time to brace for war and to enlist Spain’s military assistance under the Family Compact, which bound the Bourbon dynastic regimes in Versailles and Madrid and required them to provide mutual support.

“If we are forced to make war on England,” the king wrote, “it must be solely with the aim of trying to ruin her commerce and undermining her strength by supporting the revolt and the separation of her colonies.” French aid to the American cause, if artfully managed, would draw Britain “deeper and deeper into that war. And the more they fight, the greater their mutual destruction.”

“There hardly ever existed such a thing as a bad peace or a good war,” Franklin would assert in an oft-quoted aphorism.

In Paris he served as his country’s preeminent gunrunner. With help from the two other American commissioners serving in France, the Connecticut merchant Silas Deane and the Virginian Arthur Lee, he made covert purchases of war stuff, organized an intricate transatlantic smuggling network, arranged secret military and financial aid from European powers, waged a nimble propaganda campaign, and orchestrated the naval attacks against British shipping.

“We shall be stronger the next campaign than we were in the last,” he told Priestley, “better armed, better disciplined, and with more ammunition…. This war must end in our favor.” He and Silas Deane wrote Congress in April, “All Europe is for us…. We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature…. Every nation in Europe wishes to see Britain humbled, having all in their turn been offended by her insolence.”

“The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of mankind,” the marquis wrote in another letter to Adrienne. “She is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, of equality, and of peaceful liberty….

Burgoyne exuded the high-spirited complacency obligatory at the beginning of every military calamity.

Two hundred miles downriver from Fort Edward, New York had again become precisely what London promised for all of America whenever the rebels returned to their senses: a prosperous, peaceable outpost of the world’s greatest empire. The city’s population of twenty-five thousand before the war had dwindled to five thousand during Britain’s violent eviction of Washington and his army in August 1776. Now the number had climbed back above twelve thousand, with hundreds more returning each week to revive their businesses, seek work, or help the king’s men crush the insurrection.

Loyalists—called Tories by contemptuous patriots—wore long red ribbons as a token of fidelity to the Crown; some of the enslaved even bedecked their caps with scarlet rags. Refugees and returning residents were advised to formally record their allegiance on the rolls kept at Scott’s Tavern, near city hall, where they might find propaganda pamphlets like The Duty of Honoring the King. Engravers, clockmakers, cobblers, and blacksmiths set up their shops, happy to be paid in British pounds rather than chaffy Continental dollars. Milliners, glovers, perukers, and silversmiths were again swamped with orders, and housewrights, bricklayers, masons, and glaziers had more work than they could handle. “Flying machines”—public coaches—rattled up and down the city streets. Everyone seemed in a hurry.

According to the historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, the state of New York ultimately provided more fighting men for loyalist units—some twenty-three thousand—than for the Continental Army.

Instead the army increasingly derived from the landless young, the poor, the desperate, and sometimes the shiftless. These ranks included unemployed laborers, apprentices, farmhands, servants, drifters, and recent immigrants, notably Irish Protestants driven to America by crop failures and the collapse of the weaving industry.

Still, the numbers fell short, far short. All nine North Carolina regiments had joined the main army in July, but instead of 7,000 authorized men, they collectively included only 131 officers and 963 enlisted troops. With Manhattan and Long Island in British hands, New York reduced its regiments from seven to five. The 2nd Maryland mustered 147 men—less than a quarter of its nominal strength—plus four officers, three of them lieutenants; the rest had resigned in a dispute over rank. Washington’s native Virginia, the largest state, sent a dozen regiments to the army but with barely 2,500 soldiers fit for duty, one-fourth the requested total. “Enlistments go badly,” Governor Henry admitted. “Indeed they are almost stopped.”

Every state except Delaware would build at least one gunpowder mill, but only a third of the powder burned by American troops in the past two years had been made domestically, and much of that required imported saltpeter, the critical ingredient. Happily, resourceful smugglers from Holland, Spain, and France slipped through the British cordon to stock American magazines, including seven tons recently brought into Boston aboard the sloop Republic and another fifty tons from Nantes that arrived in New Hampshire in mid-May, aboard Mercure. Each month powder brigs, schooners, and sloops from St. Eustatius, Curaçao, Guadeloupe, and other transshipment ports in the West Indies sailed up the James, York, or Rappahannock Rivers in Virginia.

bridge, Baum watched rebels darting to and fro through his spyglass

Once again, as on Long Island and elsewhere, the British failed to convert a tactical battlefield whipping into a decisive strategic triumph.

As for Saratoga, Henry Clinton succinctly summed up the campaign as “the height of impropriety and bad policy.” The battle shattered British pretensions in New England, weakened the empire in Canada, and in all thirteen states demoralized loyalists and inspirited rebels. Perhaps most telling, the American victory commanded admiration in Versailles and other European capitals.

Runaway slaves, rebel deserters, and loyalist refugees soon flooded the town. Howe ordered five thousand uniforms to outfit provincial troops willing to fight for their king; he failed to fill more than a quarter of them, despite recruitment posters that offered loyalist enlistees a bonus of fifty acres “where every gallant hero may retire and enjoy his bottle and lass.” Even so, taverns echoed with the roar of loyalists belting out “Britons, Strike Home” or “God Save the King.” Transport ships brought merchants and artisans in long leather aprons from New York and Halifax to open new shops on Water, Front, and Second Streets.