The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

midsummer. Burgoyne listed eight good reasons to make the move, including the large trove of loyalists there, access to food and forage on Long Island, and control of the Hudson valley corridor to Canada. But permission from London had been late in arriving, as usual, and now the season was too far advanced for a safe passage, given stormy weather, rebel pirates, and the lack of a single secure harbor between Boston and New York. Howe did some more arithmetic: unless five thousand regulars were left to hold Boston, complementing the twelve thousand needed in New York, at least a thousand Crown officials and loyalists would also have to be transported, along with £300,000 in goods, which, Burgoyne urged, “ought on no account to be left to the enemy.” Such an exodus would require far more British shipping than was currently available. Inevitably they would have to winter in Boston, as one private wrote, “like birds in a cage.”

Cardinal Richelieu, the great French statesman during the Thirty Years’ War, had warned, “History knows many more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies.”

Strongboxes stuffed with cash were shipped from London to Boston aboard Centurion, Greyhound, and other warships; by late fall, more than £300,000 had been requisitioned. But rebels often thwarted British efforts to buy supplies in New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere. Moreover, transaction fees had risen to a staggering 23 percent of the sums spent. Shortages of fodder required slaughtering milk cows in Boston for meat; more than three dozen vessels sailed to Quebec and the Bay of Fundy in search of hay and oats, an unfortunate, if necessary, use of precious shipping. In mid-November, Howe sent London another set of beautiful charts, with exquisite clerical calligraphy

Alcohol helped, too. American rum was deemed “new and unwholesome,” so in September the British government signed an initial contract for 100,000 gallons of West Indies rum to be delivered to the army, complementing 375,000 gallons of porter to help combat scurvy. By spring a half million gallons of rum would be purchased for the Boston garrison at three to five shillings a gallon, the largest single item of expense among government provisions; ten times more was spent on rum than on medicines. The Treasury Board also saw to it that British officials in America received hydrometers—each composed of a glass cylinder, a thermometer, and various weights carefully marked for Jamaica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and other sources of West Indies rum—along with three pages of instructions on how to test each lot to ensure that contractors delivered “the usual and proper proof.” Rum had long been a reward for difficult military duty; Howe quietly made it part of the regular ration, issued at a daily rate of a quart for every six men.

months earlier. But his instructions from Admiral Graves went far beyond personal revenge: Graves had been ordered by Lord Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, to “show the rebels the weight of an English fleet.… You may be blamed for doing little but can never be censured for doing too much.”

In early October, he’d told Mowat to “burn, destroy, and lay waste” nine maritime towns northeast of Boston. So far the chastisement had gone badly. Gales nearly wrecked two of Mowat’s ships off Gloucester. Houses in a couple of targeted towns were judged by his gunnery experts to be too scattered to be worth his limited supply of incendiary carcasses. Contrary winds kept the flotilla from reaching Machias, another town two hundred miles up the coast, where a British midshipman and several sailors had been killed in a bloody scrap in June. Falmouth would have to do. The town “had not the least right to expect any lenity,” Mowat told the emissaries. His orders were unequivocal. But because of “the known humanity of the British nation,” he would hold his fire if by eight a.m. all small arms, ammunition, and the five carriage guns known to be in Falmouth were surrendered.

from Parsons Lane to Fore Street. Britain had murdered another Yankee town. The Essex Gazette tallied 416 buildings destroyed, including 136 houses, the Episcopal church, various barns, the meetinghouse, the customs house, the library, and the new courthouse. Many of the hundred structures still standing were thoroughly ventilated by balls and shells, and the three-day rain that began at ten p.m. ruined furnishings that had failed to burn. Mowat counted eleven American vessels sunk or burned, four others captured, and a distillery, wharves, and warehouses “all laid into ashes.” With his ammunition nearly spent and the flotilla badly in need of repairs, he anchored overnight in ten fathoms, then sailed for Boston. The remaining eight towns on Admiral Graves’s chastisement list would be spared. The admiral claimed to have administered “a severe stroke to the rebels,” but he soon took a stroke himself when a letter from London arrived relieving him of command. Graves had done both too little and too much in six months of war; the Admiralty had grown weary of his excuses and the army’s complaints. He would be missed by no one except perhaps his nephews. As an act of vengeance, the razing of Falmouth may have brought brief satisfaction, but it made little sense tactically or strategically. While nearly two thousand residents sought shelter at the beginning of a Maine winter, couriers carried the news to the outside world. “It cannot be true,” the Gentleman’s Magazine opined whe...

The gilded coach carrying the king was unlike anything in the empire or, perhaps, the world: twenty-four feet long, thirteen feet tall, and weighing four tons, it was drawn—at a glacial pace—by eight Royal Hanoverian Cream horses, each

Violent crime had dropped, and fewer debtors were being jailed. Life for many might still be nasty, brutish, and short, but less so. The Americans, by contrast, appeared perpetually angry. How long ago it seemed that Harvard College had offered cash prizes for the best poems commemorating George’s reign—for the best Latin verse in hexameters, the best Latin ode, the best English long verse.

Bristol and Liverpool urging reconciliation, which he consigned to the “Committee of Oblivion,” or the annoying letters from John Wesley, that Methodist, who warned that the Americans “will not be frightened.… They are as strong as you, they are as valiant as you.” In the summer George had refused to receive what the colonials called their Olive Branch Petition, imploring the king to stop the war, repeal the Coercive Acts, and effect “a happy and permanent reconciliation.” He would not treat with rebels. Lord North warned him that the insurrection had “now grown to such a height that it must be treated as a foreign war.” Casualty reports from Concord and Bunker Hill certainly bore out the first minister, not to mention the sour rumors from Canada.

power that has protected and supported them.” Heralds read the edict at Westminster, Temple Bar, the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere; hisses were heard then, too. He shrugged them off. British colonial policy, quite simply, sought revenue for the greater good of the empire. But “that damned American war,” as North called it, forced the government to confront a displeasing dilemma: either accede to conciliation and forgo income from the colonies or prosecute a war that would cost more money than could ever be squeezed from America. Moreover, success in crushing the rebellion would likely be followed by an expensive, protracted occupation. Even from the lofty vantage of a throne, coherent British war aims were hard to discern.

In his precise, regal voice, the king went straight to the American question. Those who have long too successfully labored to inflame my people in America … now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion. They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force. They have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive, and judicial powers.

The government also was considering “friendly offers of foreign assistance,” with treaties likely. He saw “no probability” that the French or other adversaries would intrude in this family squabble. Finally: When the unhappy and deluded multitudes, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy.

But the Commons voted with the usual hefty majority to thank His Majesty, noting that “on our firmness or indecision the future fate of the British Empire and of ages yet unborn will depend.” An independent America would be “a dangerous rival,” in which case “it would have been better for this country that America had never been known than that a great consolidated American empire should exist independent of Britain.” The king could only agree. “Where the cause is just,” he would write, “I can never be dismayed.”

Young fops known as “Macaroni” pranced through Pall Mall and St. James’s Street in tight britches, high heels, and oversized buttons, their hair dyed red one day and blue the next. Oxford Magazine defined the Macaroni as “a kind of animal.… It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry … it wenches without passion.” It also gambled without guilt. If London was “the devil’s drawing room,” in the phrase of author Tobias Smollett, gaming had become a diabolical national passion despite the monarch’s disapproval.

London also had more than five hundred coffeehouses, and it was here that politics generally and the American question specifically might be discussed at any hour. Fratricidal war unsettled many Britons, who found it distasteful, if not unnatural. Some feared an endless war, citing published reports—often wildly exaggerated—that the Americans had two hundred thousand armed men, “well trained, ready to march,”

Others were even more strident, like Lord Mayor John Wilkes, described as “a charming, cross-eyed demagogue” who was elected to Parliament after marriage to an heiress gave him the fortune to bribe enough voters. In answer to the king’s Thursday address, Wilkes, whose noisy radicalism made him enormously popular in the colonies, called the war “unjust, felonious, and murderous.” The Americans, he warned, “will dispute every inch of territory with you, every narrow pass,

But opponents of coercion lacked strength and unity. When votes were tallied in the Commons, no faction proved more formidable than the government supporters known as the King’s Friends.

political opponents could whack North, Dartmouth, and other government ministers. In early August, the Stamford Mercury printed a table showing that more British officers died at Bunker Hill than in the great Battle of Minden in 1759. Other accounts described hardship and poor morale in the British ranks. The radical Evening Post denounced the war as “unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable.”

Biographical profiles of American leaders appeared, their heroic attributes often contrasted to the venality of British politicians, even if the portraits were at times ludicrous. A new article in Town and Country told readers how George Washington’s daughter had fled to England after the general’s men slew her loyalist lover. Of greater consequence were loosened restrictions allowing parliamentary debates to be reported without the six-month delay previously required—or without pretending, as one magazine had, that the published transcript was from the “Senate of Lilliput.” The subsequent coverage, as historian Troy O. Bickham would write, “made the American Revolution the first event in which the government’s handling of a controversial conflict was aired before an eager national audience.”

As October spilled into November, the king immersed himself in tactical details of the American war. George received copies not only of ministry dispatches to and from his generals, but also paymaster and commissary instructions. He reviewed intelligence on possible gunpowder shipments from Lisbon, clandestine activities in Amsterdam and Dunkirk, and river inspectors’ reports of suspicious cargoes on the Thames. He was consulted about the choice of commanders, the composition of particular regiments and where they should deploy, and the shipment of salt and candles across the Atlantic. He arranged, at an initial cost of £10,000, for twenty-four hundred German troops to serve at British garrisons in the Mediterranean, freeing regulars there for combat service in North America.

When Catherine the Great declined to rent him twenty thousand Russian mercenaries—“she had not had the civility to answer in her own hand,” George wrote North “at 2 minutes past 8 p.m.” on November 3—he insisted that German legions could be hired “at a much cheaper rate, besides more expeditiously than if raised at home.” On his orders, the colonel negotiating with various German princelings was told, “Get as many men as you can.… The King is extremely anxious.”

British exports to America plummeted from almost £3 million in 1774 to barely £220,000 this year. But many other businesses thrived. Britain would be at war for more than half of the years between 1695 and 1815, and there was money to be made in those years by traders and vendors, brokers and wholesalers. “The greater number of them begin to snuff … a lucrative war,” wrote Edmund Burke, the Irish-born political philosopher who represented Bristol in the House of Commons. “War indeed is become a sort of substitute for commerce.” Orders poured in from Germany and the Baltics. New markets emerged in Spain, Russia, and Canada. Military contracts boomed, for uniform cloth, munitions, shipping, and provisions of every sort. “We never knew our manufactures, in general, in a more flourishing state,” a London firm wrote to a former American customer.

That surely was the case for Lord Dartmouth, the Psalm Singer and secretary of state for America. Having started a war, Dartmouth had no appetite to wage it; he now often abandoned Whitehall for the solace of his country estate. Franklin had once considered him “truly a good man,” but one “who does not seem to have strength equal to his wishes.” By early November, the secretary had arranged to leave the American Department by becoming lord privy seal, a pleasant, toothless sinecure. “Lord Dartmouth only stayed long enough,” Walpole sniffed, “to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.”

North also showed weakness in the knees. While affecting a determined ferocity toward the Americans—“we propose to exert ourselves using every species of force to reduce them,” he had declared in October—the first minister was weary of relentless opposition attacks, even if they were said to “sink into him like a cannonball into a wool sack.”

In a silver-tongued brogue that his English colleagues at times had difficulty deciphering, the bespectacled Edmund Burke, for three hours and twenty minutes on Thursday, November 16, implored the House of Commons to abandon the war.

At Burke’s request, the Speaker, in his black gown and full-bottomed wig, ordered peace petitions from clergymen, clothiers, and tradesmen laid on the clerks’ table. Burke lamented “the horrors of a civil war … [that] may terminate in the dismemberment of our empire, or in a barren and ruinous conquest.” He warned that the longer the conflict persisted, the greater the chance “for the interference of the Bourbon powers” in France and Spain. At length he introduced a bill “for composing the present troubles” by suspending any taxes imposed on the Americans unless approved voluntarily by colonial assemblies. As Burke spoke, members squirmed on their benches, murmuring in assent or dissent. Some dozed or wandered out the door to Alice’s coffeehouse or to the barbershop.

Lord George Germain was known in Parliament for urging that Americans be treated with “a Roman severity,” and this week he had been appointed American secretary to replace the hapless Dartmouth.

What I have always held, I now stand in office to maintain. To the questions, what force is necessary? What do you mean to send? I answer … such forces as are necessary to restore, maintain, and establish the power of this country in America, will not be wanting.… If they persist in their appeal to force, the force of the country must be exerted. The spirit of this country will go along with me in that idea, to suppress, to crush such rebellious resistance. Just before four a.m., after fourteen hours of debate, Burke’s proposal was defeated, two to one. “Pity me, encourage me,” Germain told a friend, “and I will do my best.”

Married in 1754—his wife called him “my dearest man”—he proved a good father to five children even as tales circulated of his flagrant homosexuality, both a sin and a capital crime in his day.

Then came the great fall. On August 1, 1759, Lieutenant General Sackville was the senior commander of British forces serving in a coalition army when thirty-seven thousand allied troops battled forty-four thousand Frenchmen near the north German village of Minden. Subordinate to Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, a man he disliked and distrusted, Sackville failed to move with alacrity when ordered to fling his twenty-four cavalry squadrons against the faltering enemy. The French were defeated anyway, suffering seven thousand casualties in four hours. But they had not been routed. Ferdinand blamed Sackville for the blemished triumph, and a British captain denounced him as a “damned chicken-hearted … stinking coward.”

Though neither held the other in affection—Germain privately called North “a trifling supine minister”—they shared the king’s conviction that defeat in America spelled the end of empire, as the historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy later wrote. The backbiting never ceased, of course. In the tony men’s clubs around St. James’s he was still “Lord Minden” or the “Minden buggering hero.” One witticism held that should the British Army be forced to flee on the battlefield, Germain was the perfect man to lead a retreat.

Upon arriving at Whitehall in mid-November, Germain found only bad news from America. Several dozen letters from royal governors in the southern colonies showed that the Crown’s efforts to punish Massachusetts had transformed New England grievances into continental resentments. The southern governors believed themselves vulnerable to rude treatment if not assassination, and most had abandoned their capitals for the sanctuary of British warships.

Germain found broad agreement in the government on Britain’s strategic objective—to restore the rebellious colonies to their previous imperial subservience—but disagreement on how best to achieve that goal. How to defeat an enemy that lacked a conventional center of gravity, like a capital city, and relied on armed civilians who were said to be “deep into principles”? Should British forces hunt down and destroy rebel forces in the thirteen colonies and Canada? Strangle the colonies with a naval blockade? Divide and conquer by isolating either New England or the southern colonies? Hold New York City while subduing the affluent middle colonies between Virginia and New Jersey? Lord North and some others in the cabinet now inclined toward a land rather than a naval war in hopes that it would be quicker, cheaper, and less provocative to the French. Such a strategy would also give greater succor to American loyalists, whom most British officials, Germain among them, still believed constituted a colonial majority. Yet doubts persisted. “The Americans may be reduced by the fleet,” Secretary at War Barrington had written North, “but never can be by the army.” A War Office report warned that fewer than ten thousand regulars in the British Isles could be spared for overseas duty. Given the booming economy, no more than six thousand more were likely to be recruited in time for the 1776 campaign.

Too often the king and his men were forced to make crucial decisions in the dark, or at least the dusk. Voyages from England to America usually took ten weeks, though sometimes fifteen or more; return trips with the prevailing winds typically required six weeks. A minister might wait four months for acknowledgment that his instructions had been received, or he might wait forever: forty packet boats carrying the Royal Mail would be captured or founder in storms during the war. Misunderstanding, misinformation, and untimely orders were inevitable, particularly when London relied on such flawed sources of intelligence as loyalists desperate for Crown support and royal governors banished from their own capitals. “America,” General Harvey said, “is an ugly job.”

Cargoes taken on the high seas would be considered lawful seizures. Captured American mariners could be pressed into the Royal Navy. American ports were to be blockaded. The act amounted to “a declaration of perpetual war,” one British politician observed, although John Adams would call it an “act of independency” that galvanized American resistance. Parliament overwhelmingly approved the measure, and the king gave his assent on December 22. The king also had approved the Admiralty’s plan to recall Admiral Graves in hopes that his replacement, Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, a former governor of Newfoundland, would put a spark into the North American squadron.

The commanding general favored squeezing New England between the blockaded ports and the North River, also known as the Hudson, with an offensive launched into New York from Canada once the American interlopers were expelled from Quebec. Germain agreed: a robust fleet must be dispatched to the St. Lawrence, and another to Boston or New York. He immediately pressed the Admiralty to find sufficient ships not only in Britain, but also in Germany and Holland. More combat troops must also be found, from Scotland, Ireland, and the little German principalities.

Germain also knew that for the past two months, the king had been intimately involved in planning another expedition—to the southern colonies, where Scottish émigrés in North Carolina were “said to be well inclined” to the Crown. Within three days of taking office, Germain had adopted this adventure as his own.

Yet amid the green baize desks and the exquisite wall maps in Whitehall, certain truths about the American war remained elusive. Neither Germain nor anyone else in government had carefully analyzed whether Britain’s troop transports, storeships, men-of-war, and other maritime resources could support an ambitious campaign that now included ancillary assaults in the far south and the far north. Little coordination was imposed on one commander in chief in Canada or another in Boston, or with their naval counterparts. Subordinate generals were permitted, even encouraged, to offer their views directly to policy makers in London. Swayed by loyalist exiles and vindictive Crown officials in the colonies, king and cabinet continued to overestimate the breadth and depth of loyal support. No coherent plan obtained to woo the tens of thousands who straddled the fence in America, or to protect those who rejected insurrection but risked severe retaliation from the rebels.

It was said that in preparing for his own attack on Quebec sixteen years earlier, General Wolfe, who would die in the assault, recited Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” with its prescient line “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

“You can have no conception of what kind of men composed their officers,” a British major wrote. Interrogations revealed that in civilian life “one major was a blacksmith, another a hatter. Of their captains there was a butcher, a tanner, a shoemaker, a tavern keeper, etc., etc. Yet they all pretended to be gentlemen.”

What they failed to win by force of arms, the Americans claimed by sheer effrontery: rumors spread that Americans held the Lower Town, the bishop’s house, and British powder magazines; that six hundred defenders had been killed; that Montgomery had merely gone to fetch twenty thousand Bostonnais reinforcements; and that Carleton had hanged sixty Canadians for treason. Arnold knew better. To Washington he wrote that “upwards of one hundred officers and soldiers instantly set off for Montreal” after the failed assault; since most enlistments had now expired, “it was with the greatest difficulty I could persuade the rest to make a stand.” He was desperate for medical supplies, musket balls, troops, and gunpowder—the American stockpile in Canada was down to four tons.

A defeated general is always wrong, an eighteenth-century French commander once observed, and a dead one was especially at a loss. Perhaps the best this dead, defeated general could hope for was martyrdom. In that, Montgomery succeeded spectacularly. Poems and songs were composed in his honor, as if “millions of seraphs, clothed in robes of gold” sang his praises, as an ode in the Virginia Gazette suggested. Orations, sermons, and theatrical productions followed. The London Evening Post, ever keen to embarrass Lord North, eulogized Montgomery on a page bordered with heavy black margins, and the Scots Magazine compared him to the immortal Wolfe. Congress rejected a proposal to wear mourning crepe on the grounds that “the general is already embalmed in the heart of every good American.” With prodding from Benjamin Franklin, the personal sculptor of Louis XVI agreed to chisel a proper memorial, eventually shipped from Paris to New York in nine packing cases.

campaigning still to come. Arnold learned while recuperating that Congress had promoted him, too. “May heaven protect you that you may long be an ornament to your country,” Schuyler wrote the new brigadier general in January, “and sit down in an old age with the comfortable reflection that you have been a good citizen.” He had already done the impossible. Now he would be asked to do even more. “I have no thoughts of leaving this proud town until I first enter it in triumph,” Arnold wrote his sister on January 6. “I am in the way of duty, and I know no fear.”

Amusements, a corps dramatique to raise money for widows and orphans. Boston had long banned all theatricals, including puppet shows, as conducive to “immorality, impiety, and a contempt of religion,” but “Howe’s Strolling Players”—as they would later be known—delighted in lampooning such sensibilities. Young women were even permitted to play female roles, to the clucking disapproval of Boston matrons. Comedies like The Citizen and The Apprentice proved enormously popular, and The Tragedy of Zara, adapted from a Voltaire drama, was performed several times.

Clinton stared at the blue horizon, waiting and thinking. How could a civil war be won if the friends of the Crown had already lost in some colonies? How could hearts be gained, minds subdued, and fence straddlers assured that Britain would enforce order and security? In a dispatch to Germain, he warned that affairs in the South “had lately much changed for the worse.”

indicated that the “well-affected there had been defeated & dispersed.” Attacking Charleston “would be very difficult” and would do little to win back the larger province. He believed that a show of force in the Chesapeake before rejoining Howe for a concentrated campaign to secure New York was the wisest course. Further maneuvers in the South at this time would “only serve to inflame minds & sacrifice your friends to the rage and fury of the multitude.”

“The fate of this whole army and the town is at stake, not to say the fate of America.” Washington agreed. This was precisely the rumpus he’d yearned for. Anticipating a British lunge toward Dorchester, he had organized a counterstrike. Two floating batteries and forty-five bateaux—each capable of carrying eighty men—were positioned up the Charles River. Under General Putnam, four thousand troops in Cambridge stood ready to make an amphibious assault on Boston while much of Howe’s army was beating toward the heights. General Sullivan would land at the powder house on the west edge of town before capturing the batteries around Beacon Hill. General Greene would land at Barton’s Point, seize Copp’s Hill, and also fling open the gates at Boston Neck to permit Continentals from Roxbury to swarm through. Lookouts were posted on Washington’s order with “the best glasses

The empire would soon possess not a single port on the Atlantic seaboard between Canada and Florida. The ignominy of being evicted from Boston stung every man proud of his uniform. Notwithstanding the loan of food, many army officers blamed the navy for their predicament. “O the glory of the British Navy,” one major complained bitterly. “Flags flying with all the pomp of war, and the Yankee can spit in their face.” Yet others detected a broader culpability. “Hope to God,” a colonel wrote, “they will send us some generals worthy the command of a British army.”

By one tally, of eight thousand Continentals north of the border, more than three thousand were sick, mostly with smallpox, which was killing thirty men a day. Measles, dysentery, and other afflictions also took a toll. Of the twelve tons of salt pork and flour needed to feed the army every day, only a fraction had arrived from New York.