Fusiliers (11 page)

Among soldiers there were many unofficial drinking dens or ‘dram shops’ that did business in outbuildings and darkened doorways. Quite a few of these were run by soldier’s wives, and various attempts by General Gage to restrict their activity proved ineffective. In one General Order, he had spoken of ‘most scandalous drunkenness at this critical time among the troops’, and he ordered that they stop women selling liquor or they would be ‘immediately seized and put on board ship’. But soldiers and officers alike could sniff out bluff, and Gage retained little authority.

‘There was an order of this kind some time before,’ recorded one jaundiced observer in his journal, ‘but was taken little notice of notwithstanding the word
immediately
, which scarce a General Order has been without since we came to the Continent.’

Such were the grim realities of life in Boston during the latter months of that year. The man placed in charge on the other side of the lines though had a bewildering set of difficulties of his own to deal with.

On 3 July George Washington had arrived in the American camp to take command. He was to prove a figure of tremendous stature in every sense: broad and well over six feet tall he was physically commanding; as a veteran of earlier confl
i
ct on the continent he understood very well the qualities of the fighting men as well as their opponents; and being a wealthy Virginia landowner, he was steeped in the tangled political realities of colonial life.

At Bunker Hill, Burgoyne had written of the British army that ‘the
zeal and intrepidity of the officers … was ill seconded by the private men’. Washington, appearing in the American camp shortly after that battle, diagnosed the precise opposite: ‘The principal failure that day, was in the officers … but the soldiers generally showed great spirit and resolution.’

These two perceptive generals had between them formulated one of the defining truths of the emerging conflict. A rebellion launched under the banner of ‘Liberty’ – quite literally, since many of the early flags simply carried that word on a plain-coloured cloth – opened a utopian panorama for the mechanic or indentured labourer hoping to transform his life. The ‘haves’ could not gain from such an upheaval, merely struggle to preserve what they had, or so many of the gentry who sided with the King in opposition to the revolution believed. The messages of the Patriot party could therefore inspire their own rank and file more easily than British officers could raise the men through exhortation.

As Washington toured the lines, at first he found many of the militia companies called to arms after 19 April. These were packed with enthusiasts – many wore the red ‘liberty cap’ or had the words ‘Liberty or Death’ stitched on the fronts of their shirts. In forming their bands, they elected officers, and those men usually came from the same strata as their soldiers. As the excitement of the early weeks gave way to the hardship and boredom of siege lines, the limits of that initial spirit showed themselves too. Many of these men began to think about going home, leaving their officers unequal to the task of maintaining discipline.

In his dealings with militia commanders, Washington saw ‘an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people’. This statement revealed a whiff of landowner prejudice even if it was grounded in a sound observation:

There is no such thing as getting officers of this stamp to exert themselves in carrying orders into execution – to curry favour with the men (by whom they were chosen, and on whose smiles possibly they think they may again rely) seems to be one of the principal objects of their attention.

One month followed another on the siege lines and the militia started to drift off. Many had only enlisted for short periods and they insisted on going when their time was up. Their officers generally went with them. In their place, Washington marched new regiments of the
Continental Army, a force summoned from across the thirteen provinces by the Continental Congress. The character and skill of these detachments varied a great deal. Prescott and Stark’s veterans of Bunker Hill were transformed into regiments of the new army without too much difficulty, but some of the others left much to be desired.

Consternation had been caused by the arrival at Boston of several hundred riflemen from Pennsylvania and Virginia. These were the troops who attacked Lieutenant Lenthall’s Fusiliers in July. Loud, hard-drinking and violent, they embodied frontier spirit and proved almost impossible to discipline. The arrest of several for insolence led to a general mutiny on Prospect Hill in September 1775.

Washington’s ability to curb such excesses was initially stymied by the ethos of enthusiastic amateurism that had brought many of his soldiers to the colours. His political masters were loath to permit flogging and it took more than one year for a proper scheme of punishments to be set in place. Until then, lashes for any offence were limited to thirty-nine, although desertion carried the death penalty from November 1775 onwards. Dozens of mutinous riflemen from Prospect Hill received no more than a fine.

Problems of keeping order competed for the commander-in-chief’s attention with a host of others, from finding enough powder to procuring clothing and rations. After a few weeks, though, it dawned on Washington that ‘the enemy, by their not coming out, are, I suppose, afraid of us’. Gage’s inactivity created opportunities for an enterprising enemy commander to serve his own cause. A large detachment was sent north, to try to snuff out the British garrisons in Canada. Washington stepped up raids on land and at sea, giving privateers permission to stop the supplies coming in to Boston.

As the months passed, Congress appointed senior officers to its armies. Some were British-born army veterans. Others were men of property, kings of their own counties with far more wealth to their name than any officer of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. They sought to confirm their status with colonel’s or general’s commissions, producing squabbles and rivalries over patronage almost identical to those negotiated daily at Horse Guards, the British army’s headquarters in London.

There was another category of subordinate that came to serve Washington – those who, like the ordinary soldiers, took advantage of the heady possibilities of revolution. The most impressive of these were two men who found themselves in senior positions on the basis of
drive and self-education alone: Henry Knox, a Boston bookseller who read his way to the command of the American artillery, and Nathaniel Greene, a Quaker from Rhode Island who turned his back on the pacifist ideology of his sect, enlisted in the militia, and was by his thirty-fourth birthday in June 1775 appointed the youngest Brigadier General in the continental service.

By October, Washington’s new initiatives to drive the British altogether from America (starving them in Boston and invading Canada) were having tangible effects. Down in the town below his lines, though, dramatic change was under way.

The
Cerberus
sailed into Boston Harbour on 6 October after a lengthy passage of the Atlantic. Information, along with many other commodities, had been in short supply and the frigate brought important news. The London newspapers carrying reports of Bunker Hill and of the response to that event were snapped up in every coffee house. Official letters, more importantly, signalled that the debacle of 17 June had cost General Gage his job. William Howe was to take over.

For those seeking advancement, the news of Gage’s ouster (dismissal) launched a bewildering array of possibilities. One officer writing home noted, ‘The dependents on the present commander-in-chief are down in the mouth and those who have expectations from the new one proportionately in spirits.’

Appointments, like everything else, had gone on in a slow and befuddled way since the war had begun. With Howe taking over, the scene was set for wholesale change and for dizzying displays in the black arts of patronage. Adding to the pace of change, the Ministry responded to the outbreak of war by planning a huge expansion in the army, and the miserable conditions of the siege caused quite a few officers to sell out, creating vacancies.

Thomas Mecan was one of the first to benefit. In November 1775 orders were published setting out a plan to expand the Fusiliers and other regiments doing duty in America to an establishment of more than 850 men. Given that there were only about 300 men fit for duty in Boston by that time, this would involve upheaval for the 23rd.

Two regiments serving in Boston were to be broken up, the rank and file going to others, while the serjeants and officers went home as the bones upon which new bodies of men could be built. The regiments remaining in America were asked to appoint two new company
commanders, along with subalterns and non-commissioned officers, to go home for the same purpose. The creation of these two new captain’s jobs allowed Mecan to get his step without buying the post. Mecan being Mecan, he traded his place recruiting in England with another officer, taking command of that man’s company in America.

Advancing Mecan created a possibility for Frederick Mackenzie at last, and he took the Irish officer’s post as captain lieutenant and with it also gained, after his long years of waiting, command of a company. Two other lieutenants moved on too, one worthy but penniless old officer benefiting from the Secretary at War’s patronage to gain promotion into another regiment, the other getting the second recruiting captain’s job in the Fusiliers and with it his ticket home.

A passage back with the recruiting parties ‘pleases them not a little’, wrote one of the officers forlornly staying in Boston. In addition to danger on the lines and startling rates of sickness, some men were staring ruin in the face. The annual pay of a 2nd Lieutenant of Fusiliers (the lowest officer rank, called an ensign in other regiments) was just under
£
67, of lieutenants a little more. Yet by the winter the price of a chicken had gone up to 6/- and of a bushel of potatoes to 12/-. Most were paying rent too and some trying to sustain wives and children. Many subalterns were unable to keep up the struggle and sold out.

On 13 December, Major Francis Hutcheson received an urgent summons to the townhouse that served as General Howe’s headquarters. Hutcheson served on the staff and as unofficial ambassador for Major General Fredrick Haldimand, formerly number two to Gage who had returned to England. Both Hutcheson and his master had been guests at the Welch Fusiliers’ Saint David’s dinner in March.

As the major made his way through the frigid streets, it is unlikely that he guessed the sudden order concerned General Haldimand’s nephew Anthony, who, less than one month earlier, had transferred into the Fusiliers. Hutcheson was summoned into the General’s presence to hear a story of woe. Howe said there was a lieutenant in the 45th for whom recent months had proven altogether too much. So indebted was the lieutenant that he asked Hutcheson to ‘pay the unfortunate fellow to keep him from starving one hundred pounds’. If this douceur was received, then the man would clear his debts and sell out his lieutenancy. The general’s nephew, 2nd Lieutenant Haldimand,
might then buy the lieutenancy in the 45th for the usual price of
£
500.

Major Hutcheson quickly drew a bill (on General Haldimand’s bankers) for
£
115 (the bargain proved
£
15 more expensive than he had expected) and the deal was completed. Young Anthony Haldimand had been promoted out of the 23rd after less than one month in the regiment, and just over one year all-told in the army. The major was gratified that Howe had asked for no favour in return, for the dispensers of army patronage were often keen on dictating a quid quo pro. Perhaps, Hutcheson reasoned, this would be requested later of General Haldimand. Hutcheson wrote to that senior officer, with more than a hint of personal bitterness, ‘The respect which is due to you has gained the young man in 13 months a rank that I had three years of hard service to acquire.’

The case of 2nd Lieutenant Haldimand showed what could be achieved with connections and money. But quite a few of those engaging in the hectic traffic of commissions or appointments that autumn in Boston had no cash. In their case the support of a general or noble in England could suffice.

One of those queuing up for a passage home was Lieutenant Richard Baily. He had been commissioned from the
ranks
during the Seven Years War and made the 23rd’s quartermaster. He left Boston following an intervention by the Secretary at War, Lord Barrington, who asked for him
by name
to marshal supplies for the American armies. Installed within months as the Embarkation Officer at Portsmouth, Baily would be organising dozens of ships and dispensing thousands of pounds, receiving rapid promotion to captain too, epitomising that practicality bred in the ranks so essential for operation of the British war machine.

Baily’s promotion would in turn create a vacancy and there were already so many of those that the regiment would struggle to fill them. Before the year was out, Major Blunt would be gone, seizing his chance to buy the lieutenant colonelcy of the 4th – a heady transaction he could not really afford – and Blakeney, wounded at Bunker Hill, would sail for home. Of those remaining, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard became a marginal figure on the edge of his regiment, for his wounded thigh from 19 April had not healed and he remained unavailable for duty; others among the captains would also be stricken with fevers.

With winter gripping, the city became an even unhealthier place. Soldiers were laid low with fluxes, smallpox and consumption.
Occasionally, supply ships brought in fresh rations, but the diet was execrable and the soldiers increasingly reduced to pulling down houses for firewood.

In this unhealthy situation, Lieutenant Richard Williams, the well-educated Fusilier officer who enjoyed sketching the city, began to succumb to consumption. He would be allowed a passage home and permitted to sell out extra quick in order that he might be able to settle his affairs before he died, early in 1776.