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

by Rick Atkinson

Instructions from Congress to “contest every foot of the ground” were absurd, impossible. If the army was trapped at the mouth of the Richelieu, Sullivan’s senior officers told him, he “alone must answer for it.” After a long, tense pause, Sullivan agreed

No one had been more insistent on retreat than Arnold, who several days earlier had traveled from Montreal to inspect the flimsy defenses at Chambly and St. Johns. All hope for luring Canadians to the American cause was now gone, he wrote Sullivan. “Let us quit them & secure our own country before it is too late. There will be more honor in making a safe retreat than hazarding a battle,” he urged. “I am content to be the last man who quits this country, and fall so that my country rise. But let us not fall together.”

The town had served as the capital of American Canada for six months, but with British troops reportedly only a dozen miles distant, it would be abandoned without a fight. Across the St. Lawrence, Arnold torched his boats, then led his men through mud “half a leg deep” to La Prairie and on toward St. Johns, burning bridges and felling trees across the road behind them as they fled. Three other corps—two British and one American—were now heaving toward the same destination.

Barns and sheds were jammed with smallpox victims, most unattended by medicos except, occasionally, to be bled. “Some dead, some dying, others at the point of death, some whistling, some singing & many cursing & swearing,” a New England physician, Lewis Beebe, noted in his diary. “Nothing to be heard from morning to night, but ‘Doctor, doctor, doctor,’ from every side.… Add to all this, we have nothing to eat.”

Sullivan seemed stupefied by the misery he commanded. “By a strange reverse of fortune,” he wrote Schuyler in another prolix dispatch, “we are driven to the sad necessity of abandoning Canada.” This nightmare seemed more “like the effect of imagination than the history of fact.” Men in his “decayed and decaying army,” he reflected, “are daily dropping off like the Israelites before the destroying angel.”

So ended a botched campaign of liberation and aggrandizement, laden with miscalculation and marred by mishap. As always in war, contingency played an outsized role, starting with delays the previous summer in marching north and in reducing St. Johns. Carleton’s narrow escape from Montreal, the disastrous attack at Quebec, and malady all contributed to the American failure. Even

Some in the colonies could hardly hide their indignation. “The subject is disgusting to me,” Samuel Adams said. “I will dismiss it.” But John Adams insisted on an investigation. “For God’s sake,” he wrote Sullivan, “explain to me the causes.” To Abigail he wrote, “Our misfortunes in Canada are enough to melt a heart of stone.… The smallpox has done us more harm than British armies, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hanoverians, Hessians, and all the rest.” His long list of supplemental reasons included “our inability to procure hard money,” indifferent generalship, and clumsy, fickle support from Congress. Others noted provincial jealousies, quarreling senior officers, and a misreading of Canadian enthusiasm for being conquered into liberty.

The American penchant for subjugating those deemed in need of deliverance was hardly extinguished by the calamity in Canada. As the historian Eliot A. Cohen has observed, that impulse would recur often in the centuries to come, “with mixed motives and uncertain outcomes.” Canada proved a foreshadow. Yet even in the summer of 1776, thin silver linings could be glimpsed. The failure to capture Quebec in December precluded having a large army trapped within the walls by enemy reinforcements in the spring. British plans for a thrust into New York were disrupted, momentarily, and some combat strength had been diverted from Howe’s main force farther south. If few American commanders enhanced their reputations—“Canada has been a very unfortunate place for generals,” Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Vose noted in his journal—the hard school of war transformed some amateur soldiers into warriors. The likes of Anthony Wayne and Daniel Morgan had shown their mettle. “The Canada struggle was a dress rehearsal for the war,” historian Justin Harvey Smith later wrote. “It made plain some things that could be done and some that could not.”

Arnold certainly saw the danger ahead. The British, he warned Washington in late June, “will doubtless become masters of the lake unless every nerve on our part is strained to exceed them in a naval armament.” Not a moment should be lost in replenishing the Northern Army and assembling carpenters, timberjacks, shipwrights, smiths, sailors, and others needed to build an inland fleet capable of challenging the Royal Navy on Lake Champlain. A back door had swung open, imperiling New York and New England, and threatening the American cause.

NEW YORK, JUNE 1776 Pretty little New York perched on the southern tip of what the Indians called “Mannahatta,” the hilly island. The town now comprised four thousand wooden and brick buildings within less than a square mile, linked by cobblestoned lanes and sidewalks of flat stone shaded with beech, locust, elm, and linden trees. Dutch houses with step gables and red or

The last war had brightened the town’s prospects—“New York is growing immensely rich,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1756—not least because merchants sold goods to both the British and, surreptitiously, the French. The metropolis continued to spread north, with new streets and churches—lovely St. Paul’s, Brick Presbyterian, Scotch Presbyterian, and the Lutheran and Methodist meetinghouses had all been built in the 1760s. Milestones

The current war, however, had defaced New York. “This haughty city is now subjected to all the inconveniences of a garrison town,” Lieutenant Colonel William Tudor, the Continental Army’s judge advocate, wrote a friend in the spring of 1776. “The fife & drum are continually dinning our ears with Yankee music, & we have few sights more entertaining than the parading & marching of the ill-dressed ragamuffins which compose the army.” Hardly a shot had been fired in anger around New York, but perhaps half or more of the twenty-five thousand residents had fled their homes in fear of bloody things to come. “The city looks in some streets as if the plague had been in it, so many houses being shut up,” a loyalist pastor told his diary. Those who remained were confined at night by a military curfew. “We all live here like nuns shut up in a nunnery,” one letter writer complained.

That Howe was coming from Halifax, perhaps soon, no one doubted. Every report of approaching sails—a recent sighting proved to be a fogbank—sent more frightened New Yorkers fleeing in carts and coaches piled high with baggage. New York was considered the least disloyal of the thirteen colonies, and those well-affected to the Crown lay low and waited for their hour to come round. At noon on Tuesday, June 4, Tryon’s small squadron fired a protracted salute to honor the king’s birthday. Loyalist churches lighted candles that evening to pray for His Majesty’s good health and continued wisdom. For now, however, allegiance was best whispered; those heard singing “God Save the King” were marched to jail. Meanwhile, more rebel trenches were dug, more ramparts built, more cannons pointed. Precisely how the mighty Royal Navy was to be defeated, along with General Howe’s army and whatever other legions were en route from Britain, remained uncertain. “Great numbers of angels,” a Connecticut preacher assured his flock, “no doubt are encamping round our coast for our defense and protection.”

rifleman captured at Quebec and shipped in chains to England had just escaped and then made his way home with documents hidden in his waistband that confirmed reports of Britain hiring thousands of German mercenaries to fight in America this summer. But all in all, Washington had reason to consider his trip to Philadelphia a success. Congress had lauded his achievement in Massachusetts and affirmed his plan for defending New York. He intended to further strengthen fortifications in Brooklyn and secure the East River while building fire rafts and row galleys to safeguard the Hudson. On the assumption that Britain would fling 10,000 men against Ticonderoga and 12,500 at New York, American commanders would be reinforced to provide a two-to-one advantage—20,000 men for the Northern Army and 25,000 for Washington’s force. The colonies were to provide another 30,000 militiamen, a third of whom would form a strategic

Congress also seemed to be moving toward a proclamation of independence. That would give Washington a clear strategic objective, an American definition of victory: formal separation from Britain and the creation of a new nation. Such clarity in war was invaluable. If the country was asked to sacrifice, the purpose would now be evident. If men were asked to die, they would know why. The sun had begun to dip over

The grand army under Washington had yet to fight a general action, but in the past year hundreds of American troops had died of disease, misadventure, or wounds incurred in various skirmishes, plus the thousands lost in Canada. What would casualties be like once the fighting began in earnest? Congress had made clear its determination to defend New York to the death; John Adams described the city as “a kind of key to the whole continent,” and Washington agreed it was “a post of infinite importance.” Should the British “get that town & the command of the North River,” he added, “they can stop the intercourse between the northern & southern colonies, upon which depends the safety of America.” By now he had sufficiently scouted the terrain—on Staten and Long Islands, and along the rivers—to confirm the difficulties that Charles Lee had identified when Washington sent him to oversee New York’s defenses in late winter. “What to do with the city, I own puzzles me,” General Lee had written him. “Whoever commands the sea must command the town.” The city of New York was set in an archipelago with almost eight hundred miles of waterfront, carved by the advance and retreat of glaciers fifty millennia earlier.

Washington still yearned for decisive battle. Bleeding the enemy in New York would dampen support for the war in Britain, while emboldening France and other potential American allies. But where to find favorable ground here? Britain’s maritime mobility allowed Howe to keep the initiative, landing where and when he chose.

The national fathers in Congress displayed a gift for debate and committee work but only a modest aptitude for organized warmaking. A fifteen-thousand-man force required a hundred thousand barrels of flour and ten thousand tons of meat annually, by Washington’s calculations. Where that would come from, and how it should be purchased, transported, and distributed, was unclear. The same held true for a hundred other vital commodities, from flints and wagons to shoes and blankets. Congress had sensibly, if belatedly, acknowledged that the 1774 policy of restricting imports and exports was a failure, hurting the American cause far more than the British economy. Overseas trade had plummeted to less than 40 percent of prewar levels. Prices on many goods would jump 25 percent this year over last; in the coming year they would more than double.

Gunpowder, that unum necessarium, had become relatively abundant by the summer of 1776. Virginia sent at least seven vessels on powder cruises. Massachusetts sent thirty-two. Many were given French names and phony papers. Every few days a ship managed to elude, outrun, or outwit Royal Navy pursuers to bring powder into American ports: five tons into Charleston from St. Eustatius, in the Caribbean; eleven tons into Newburyport from Bordeaux; seven tons into Philadelphia from Le Havre aboard the Morris, along

In a three-week period in the spring, over sixty tons of powder arrived in the colonies. In early summer it was reported that more than a hundred additional tons could be had in Martinique and St. Eustatius, where the supply was ample enough to push down prices.

pledges or flee to British refuges in Florida. But for decades South Carolina’s militia had been designed primarily to suppress slave revolts. After the bloody Stono Uprising of 1739 left scores of blacks and whites dead, white men were required to carry weapons to church on Sunday and plantations had to employ at least one white for every ten blacks in servitude. Slaves now outnumbered whites in South Carolina, 104,000 to 70,000, despite efforts to curb chattel imports, and the vast majority lived in the low country along the Atlantic seaboard. British encouragement of slave defections and the emancipatory antics of Governor Dunmore in Virginia had sparked hysteria in South Carolina. It was said that King George had promised every slave who murdered a master the right to keep his plantation.

South Carolina law now made it a capital crime for slaves to seek sanctuary with the enemy. Anyone encouraging chattel to abscond would also be executed “without the benefit of clergy.”

That such a boiling, rebellious, beaky grave opener had become Washington’s most senior lieutenant reflected both Lee’s credentials and the fluidity of high command in the young American army. The son of a British colonel, Lee was commissioned in his father’s regiment at age fourteen, sailed to America to fight the French, survived a gunshot to the chest that shattered two ribs at Fort Carillon, and found time to take a Mohawk wife, a chief’s daughter who bore him twin sons. He never saw that family again after his unit left New York, and he never married conventionally. Lee later served in Portugal under Burgoyne, winning plaudits for an intrepid raid across the Tagus River to strike his Spanish foes from the rear. But the peace that followed the Seven Years’ War left him bored and jaded; reduced by his army to half-pay purgatory, he spent most of the next eight years as an itinerant soldier of fortune in Europe—a “vagabond,” in his description—frequenting spas in Hungary, Italy, and Switzerland between campaigns and earning enough gratitude from the king of Poland to become a Polish army major general, sporting that Stanislaus star.

Now he was squinting at those canvas wings, fifty sets of them, in Five-Fathom Hole and the adjacent anchorages. With the help of accurate intelligence, including intercepted dispatches from Germain, he had surmised correctly: General Clinton and his comrades intended malice against Charleston. To save the town, the colony, and perhaps the South, Lee had sixty-five hundred troops, about half of them Continentals. Wearing a blue sash as his badge of rank, and given command over Colonels Moultrie, Thomson, and their militias,

Charleston, and his caustic manner ruffled others. Lee might be “a strange animal,” one South Carolina officer concluded, but “we must put up with ten thousand oddities in him on account of his abilities and his attachment to the rights of humanity.” Nothing worried Lee more than the vulnerability of Fort Sullivan, which he considered a flimsy palmetto “slaughter pen” for its defenders. “I never could … understand on what principle Sullivan’s Island was first taken possession of and fortified,” he told John Rutledge, the newly elected president of South Carolina.

If the Americans faced mortal peril in Charleston, the British encountered their own hazards. Getting the ships across the bar and into position was difficult enough, requiring calm seas and precise navigation. Commodore Parker nudged his frigates and transports over one by one—

Charleston would be exposed to assault. On June 14, Clinton and Cornwallis joined the Long Island camp, followed the next day by soldiers from five troop transports. Three more days would be needed, until nightfall on June 18, to land nearly three thousand men with ten guns through squalls and a high swell from the Atlantic fetch.

Sullivan’s Island in hopes of distracting rebel defenders. No landing on the mainland was feasible because of impenetrable swamps, and while the inlet was too deep to wade, it was too shallow for any man-of-war to provide gunfire support. The squadron had brought fifteen flat-bottomed assault boats, but they could transport less than a quarter of Clinton’s force at one time to Sullivan’s Island and would then land through treacherous surf “in face of an entrenchment well lined with musketry.” Such a fragmented attack, without adequate firepower, would easily be defeated in detail. Clinton believed that Colonel Thomson might have several thousand men at the north end of the island, and a brigade of Continentals also waited to counterattack from Haddrell’s Point.

astonished and dismayed by this news, Parker was reluctant to concede defeat. The honor of the Royal Navy was at stake, even if the army had been neutralized. He believed that the rebels would crumple under a bombardment unlike anything ever imagined in these precincts. No doubt Clinton was correct that there was no time to lose: navy crews had lived on two-thirds rations for a month and had not eaten fresh meat since North Carolina. Some sailors were already too weak to man their battle stations; volunteers from the transports were recruited for duty aboard the men-of-war. Bad water and the broiling sun made conditions even worse on Long Island. Not only was “the suffocating heat the most insufferable I ever felt,” a surgeon told his diary, but the cay was infested with “spiders, their bodies as large as my coat button.”

Long Island

heroic efforts by the crew to warp free. Her captain, Christopher Atkins, had vowed upon leaving England to “give those fantastic scoundrels a good banging who have dared to treat the mother country with impunity and ingratitude.” Now Captain Atkins faced his own banging. At three p.m., Moultrie ordered his guns silenced after hearing that Clinton had landed between Fort Sullivan and Thomson’s outpost; for ninety minutes, until the report was disproved, all powder was reserved for the infantry to contest an enemy beachhead. Scores of frigate balls smacked the palmetto curtain and bastions, unanswered, including one that snapped the flagstaff and brought down the garrison colors. “The Yankees have done fighting,” a British sailor bellowed.

His frigates would fire some 7,000 rounds and burn more than 12 tons of powder—220 barrels between Bristol and Experiment alone—compared to 960 shot and 4,766 pounds for the Americans. Yet overwhelmingly the damage had fallen hardest on the king’s ships. Experiment was so riddled that several gunports had merged into one jagged hole.

praise of South Carolina’s militia even as he strutted a bit himself. “It would take a volume to tell you how many clever things were said of you,” the physician and congressman Benjamin Rush would write Lee from Philadelphia. “It has given a wonderful turn to our affairs.” “Glorious news from So. Carolina,” a headline in the Virginia Gazette proclaimed. “Huzza!” Victory at Sullivan’s Island was a welcome antidote to the disconsolate news from Canada. It further diminished the loyalists, proved the Royal Navy vulnerable, thwarted British ambitions in the South, and boldly punctuated the new assertions of independence emanating from Philadelphia. Reports of Parker’s shredded britches provoked a savage snatch of doggerel: “If honor in the breach is lodged / It may from thence be fairly judged, / Sir Peter’s honor’s gone.” One brief battle would hardly defeat the Royal Navy or deflect the empire’s determination to remain intact.

The Americans had demonstrated that they “were trained to stratagem and enterprise,” Clinton grudgingly acknowledged. “They knew every trick of chicane.” Yet the expedition sailed off with several convictions oddly intact, including the certainty that a faithful multitude of southern loyalists still awaited liberation and that defeat at Sullivan’s Island—“one of the most singular events that has yet conspired to degrade the name of the British nation,” in Captain Murray’s sour assessment—had resulted from bad luck and tactical blunders rather than faulty intelligence and strategic misapprehension.

Like their commanding general, many of the king’s men had grievances to nurse and scores to settle. Like Clinton, they would be back. It might take years, but they would be back.

Two postscripts would complete Britain’s rout in the southern colonies, strengthening the rebellion and guaranteeing a huge rebel sanctuary of more than a quarter million square miles, from the Chesapeake to Florida. In the first episode, disaffected Cherokee warriors, angry at white encroachment and swindles by villainous land speculators, slathered themselves in black paint before attacking white frontier settlements from Georgia to Virginia in July. More raids followed in the South Carolina backcountry. With the British threat on the coast conveniently dispelled, militia and Continental regiments counterattacked in four expeditions, razing villages and killing some two thousand Indians. “I have now burnt down every town and destroyed all the corn,” Colonel Andrew Williamson, the South Carolina commander, reported. Captured Indians were declared “the slave and property of the taker.” The failed uprising eviscerated the Cherokees, stripping away an additi...

the American South. The diversion of Royal Navy ships to Virginia, Cape Fear, and South Carolina had hindered efforts to blockade the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, allowing American gunrunners virtually unimpeded passage for months. Rebels completely controlled four colonies that now called themselves states—Virginia, Georgia, and the two Carolinas—and for the most part they would be left in peace for the next several years. Virginia loyalists, shattered and dispersed, never again formed a potent force. Thousands of rebel troops, now free to reinforce the Continental Army, tramped off to help General Washington.

Some died even before the battle was joined, for summer diseases had lacerated the army. “I am extremely sorry to inform Congress our troops are very sickly,” Washington wrote Hancock in early August. Of his 17,225 privates, only 10,514 were present and fit for duty; many were unfit, as an ensign informed his diary, because “a dysentery prevails considerable in the army at this time.” Typhoid and typhus also prevailed; the diseases, respectively spread by fecal contamination and by lice, would not be distinguishable until the next century. Malaria grew common, too. “The air of the whole city seems infected,” an American doctor wrote. “In almost every street there is a horrid smell.” Camp filth and fetid water—some ponds were used for both drinking and washing—contributed to a third of the army falling sick in the summer of 1776.

bushes, were the sick to be seen.” Some regiments could hardly muster a shadow of themselves. The 17th Continental, mostly drawn from eastern Connecticut, was reduced in August to 214 present-and-fit soldiers of the 728 men authorized.

be invented for another four decades—and treatment frequently was limited to bleeding eight to forty ounces from a sick man, regardless of his symptoms. Medical officers found too few nurses willing to work for the fifty cents a week offered by Congress, and for every caring doctor another seemed to be accused of negligence, incompetence, peculation, or selling medical exemptions to healthy troops.

Washington also recognized the threat to his right wing from the British sortie up the Hudson, and for weeks he had sought a remedy to this fluvial vulnerability.

After a few final strokes, the rowers shipped their oars, cast off the ropes, and swung back to Manhattan, leaving Sergeant Lee to submerge in his odd vessel—the Turtle—with the intent of blowing Admiral Howe’s flagship out of the water.

Turtle carried on her back a hollowed oak powder magazine that was attached by a rope to a sharp iron auger; Lee was to screw the auger into the frigate’s keel, using a handle above his head near the hatch. He would then set the timing mechanism, made for Bushnell by a watchmaker and connected to a gunlock trigger, to detonate the powder in an hour. After jettisoning the magazine—still tied to the auger embedded in Eagle’s hull—he would make his escape. But there would be no blast, no shattered ship tossed from the sea like a hogshead of rocks. The auger would not bite; by mischance, Lee was trying to drill into a heavy metal bar that held the frigate’s rudder hinge to the stern. When he shifted Turtle in search of better purchase, she abruptly bobbed to the surface next to the frigate, “like a porpoise.” With dawn breaking through his little deadlights, as Lee later reported, “I thought the best generalship was to retreat as fast as I could.” Cranking his propeller furiously, he crept back across the bay in a heavy swell, surfacing frequently to check his heading. Abreast of Governors Island and fully exposed by the morning light, Lee spotted several hundred redcoats crowding the parapet, pointing and gaping at the odd craft zigzagging toward Manhattan. Abruptly a twelve-oared British barge put in and gave chase. When the pursuers had closed within fifty yards, Lee armed his powder charge and cut loose the oak magazine.

Admiral Howe, unaware that the age of submarine warfare had dawned with this day, stood on Eagle’s quarterdeck, scanning the silver bay for enemies. Two miles away, Putnam preened along the water’s edge shouting, “God curse ’em! That’ll do it for ’em!” Soldiers with block and tackle hoisted Turtle onto a sloop for transport up the Hudson to Fort Washington in hopes of better luck on another day.

The narrow escape was only the latest and would not be the last for Richard Howe in a swashbuckling career that spanned six decades and seven seas. Known as “Black Dick” for his swarthy complexion, he was burly, weathered, and heavy-browed—“a pretty man does not make a good portrait,” the painter Joshua Reynolds said of him in admiration.

capturing that ship and then another. The battle at Quiberon proved to be the greatest English sea victory since Drake’s day, a triumph that confirmed Britain as a world power. “Give us Black Dick,” his sailors boasted, “and we fear nothing.” Now fifty, three years older than his brother William, he was esteemed as a pioneer in gunnery, amphibious tactics, and naval hygiene, including the careful scrubbing of decks and sailors’ togs. Even as a vice admiral he fussed over details—kedge anchors, medicos, spar lengths—

cured. Partly as a sop to Britons who still hoped for a negotiated settlement, George in the spring had reluctantly agreed to also appoint the Howe brothers as peace commissioners in a last-ditch attempt to end the war. For months the cabinet had wrangled over how far the Howes could go in conciliation; in the end, it was not far at all. Lord Germain, denouncing “a sentimental manner of making war,” insisted that the commissioners be constrained in any negotiations. Twenty-four paragraphs of instructions issued in May directed that no blanket pardons be given or concessions tendered until the rebels dissolved Congress and their state assemblies, disbanded their armies, surrendered all forts, guaranteed compensation to injured loyalists, and agreed not to tax British imports.

overture to Washington to discuss “the King’s benevolent intentions” had been rebuffed in July; among other defects, the invitation was addressed “to George Washington Esqr. &c. &c.,” pointedly omitting his military rank. The rout on Long Island provided another opening, and Howe hosted the captured generals, Stirling and Sullivan, for several dinners aboard the Eagle. He spoke of his family’s gratitude for the compassion shown by New Englanders when, almost two decades earlier, his older brother was killed at Fort Carillon. Sullivan took the bait: released from captivity, he arrived in Philadelphia in early September to assure Congress that the admiral was sympathetic to the cause, opposed British meddling in American affairs, and had broad powers of negotiation. Admiral Howe wanted but “half an hour’s conversation” with a few members “in their private capacities.” At two p.m. on Wednesday, September 11, Richard Howe stood on a sandy beach just below the Billopp mansion, a fieldstone manor house built on the southwestern nob of Staten Island almost a century earlier, with massive white oak beams and slave quarters in the garret. To please the nose, fresh moss and flowering sprigs had been scattered that morning on the red oak plank floors in the entrance hall and adjacent parlor. Brother William was busy preparing the army’s return to action, so the admiral would handle today’s encounter alone. Howe wore a knee-length blue uniform coat with white lapels, the buttonholes e...

Even at a distance Howe recognized the broad shoulders and domed forehead of the senior American in the trio. He and Dr. Franklin had met half a dozen times in London, introduced by the admiral’s attractive widowed sister, Caroline, who had become Franklin’s chess partner. In the months before Franklin sailed for home in March 1775, Howe served as an intermediary for the government in fitful discussions to find a diplomatic solution to the American crisis. Nothing had come of the effort. Now the two men would try again.

The “declaration of independency” complicated his task, he said, because he had no authority “to consider the colonies in the light of independent states.” Nor could he acknowledge Congress as a legitimate body. Therefore he must negotiate with his guests not as congressmen but “merely as gentlemen of ability and influence” whom he hoped would help “put a stop to the calamities of war.” Franklin agreed that “the conversation might be held as amongst friends.” Adams quipped that the admiral could consider him “in any character which would be agreeable to your lordship except that of a British subject.” Howe eyed him curiously. “Mr. Adams,” he said, “is a decided character.” The king’s “most earnest desire [is] to make his American subjects happy,” he continued, but that required repudiating independence. If the Americans “return to their allegiance and obedience to the government of Great Britain,” it was possible they could control their own legislation and taxes. America might again provide “solid advantages” to the empire, in commerce and manpower.