Fusiliers (31 page)

Once the army began accepting prisoners in large numbers it noted a marked drop in the fitness of its recruits. The officer responsible for
running the depot at Chatham complained loudly to his masters, ‘The magistrates from several parts had sent in wretched objects totally unfit for service.’ Few, though, were discharged for this reason, rather they were marched on to transports – volunteers and pressed men alike.

The scenes at the quay were vividly described by one recruit of the 33rd: ‘The cries and lamentations of the poor, raw country soldiers were sufficient to have excited the compassion in the breast of the rudest barbarians; and, as for myself, I thought I was going to the Devil, when they rolled us down the hatchways like so much lumber.’

Packed into their berths, the sick jail-house men often infected the volunteers. Certainly one officer in New York complained of many perishing from ‘epidemic distemper’ when they arrived later that year. This proved true of the 23rd’s recruits – more than half of those recruited in 1779 died of various fevers within two years of arriving in America, a far higher mortality rate than among the veteran soldiers serving there. A further factor in the poor health of those men gathered early in 1779 proved to be the inordinate length of their journey, berthed in fetid transports.

Calvert and his young friends had set off in high spirits at the end of March, but found themselves waiting many weeks at Spithead, the Nore and the Downs. First they were expecting other vessels to join them, then the winds were contrary and finally their naval hosts conceded that the presence of a powerful French fleet in the western approaches made it impossible for a large convoy of transports to sail. They would spend more than four months on board the
Anne
before reaching New York. In that time the Howe brothers inquiry and the future direction of the war would be decided in London.

Parliament’s examination of the American war proved a lengthy and involved affair. Beginning in late April 1779, witnesses were called throughout May and the first half of June. They gave statements, were examined by members of both houses and cross-examined by the Howe brothers and John Burgoyne. While the committee conducting this business was destined never to issue a report of findings or come to a verdict about the behaviour of its commanders, the machinery of British democracy did at least rumble into action, allowing a full discussion of why Saratoga had happened and whether the war might be won.

William Howe’s first witness, Earl Cornwallis, emphasised the difficulties of military operations in America, particularly with regard to supply and intelligence. In general his evidence underlined the hazards of armchair generalship in London, although when asked whether Howe should have supported Burgoyne instead of going to Philadelphia, Cornwallis stayed on the fence, saying only that this was a matter of opinion. Charles Grey, the general who had defeated the Americans at Paoli, proved a rather more useful witness, stating explicitly his view that Howe could not have supported Burgoyne more effectually than by attacking Philadelphia and praising as masterly dispositions for the battle of Brandywine.

Grey’s evidence proved most important, though, in informing future policy, for he stated baldly: ‘I think with the present force in America there can be no expectation of ending the war by force of arms.’ Whereas those called by the Ministry asserted the loyalty of the great majority of Americans, Grey pointedly noted that the army had behaved with no more lenience than it would have to any ‘foreign enemy’, and that ideas of using punishment to change minds were futile: ‘severity would not now signify’. Major General Grey sketched the difficulties of British troops trying to hold ground any distance from their fleet, and argued that vast numbers of troops would be required to hold ground if spectacles like the evacuation of Philadelphia were to be avoided. Of Washington’s troops Grey said that ‘the enemy were very far from contemptible’, and he pinpointed a key advantage they had enjoyed, that of being able to re-assemble forces after every defeat.

The Ministry used mainly political figures to support its case that the Howe brothers had failed to prosecute the campaigns in America properly. They talked about countless missed opportunities and insisted the majority of Americans were loyal to their King.

Major General James Robertson proved to be the Howes’ most significant military critic. He described the difficulties that General Washington had in maintaining the Continental Army, Sir William’s failure to stop looting (thus alienating the uncommitted) and the lost strategic possibilities of 1776 to 1777. Howe, having been given ‘a force that could beat any the rebels could bring against it’, had failed to go to Albany instead of Philadelphia, leading directly to Burgoyne’s defeat. A frigate, argued Robertson, could sail up the Hudson to within six miles of Albany in as little as twenty hours.

Lord Germain’s friends did not put forward a specific military strategy in these sessions. After several weeks of hearings, the inquiry petered out as the parliamentary session ended with Whig and Tory happy to draw their own conclusions. Such was the public interest in these proceedings that printed transcripts of the evidence rapidly sold through several editions.

As for Nisbet Balfour, he was not called upon to provide testimony, but had much time to reflect on the decisions made by Howe during the New York and Philadelphia campaigns, of which the colonel, as a member of his kitchen cabinet, had intimate knowledge. Balfour knew Howe had made mistakes, reminding one friend of an aphorism of Marshal Turenne: ‘The General who has taken the field and has not committed faults, has not served his country long.’ Overall, though, he considered the brothers ‘two great and injured men’, and fumed at the politicians – in both camps – who waged their war without regard for the lives of their armies or reputations of the country’s generals.

Balfour emerged from proceedings with a distinct bitterness towards Parliament, calling it ‘a nest of faction and disingenuity where every liberal, manly, sentiment must sooner or later be tainted’. He shared his master’s animus towards Germain and thought that General Grey’s evidence about the impossibility of winning must be ‘food for opposition and death to the American minister’. This did not prove to be the case, however, for during the very months of April, May and June that the hearings were held, a new strategy for America was evolving.

At the beginning of the year, the only thing that had kept the war going was a general conviction on the part of King and Prime Minister that it could not be allowed to fail. Balfour believed the Ministry had nailed its colours to the American mast, and would inevitably sink if forced to concede defeat. The colonel’s personal disdain for Germain had begun with that minister ignoring his plea for a pension for his mother. Germain, equally, was probably aware that Balfour had threatened his friend, the newspaper man, James Rivington, in New York.

As to the war, various secret plans had been travelling about Whitehall: one argued that the army should go back to Philadelphia in order to dominate the central states. Major General Robertson had also pushed a memorandum arguing once more for a war centred on the Hudson axis. Both plans shared an optimistic assessment of the kind of loyalist support that could be expected and in this sense were flawed. Both Germain in London and Clinton in New York, however,
knew exactly how little the promises of American Tories had proven to be worth in those very places during the campaigns of 1776 and 1777. The king’s desire to continue the war might therefore have failed to find any tangible form but for a series of events that opened a new horizon.

News reached London in February 1779 that a small British expedition had captured Savannah in Georgia in the far south. British forces had also re-taken St Lucia in the Caribbean, and then repulsed a French counter-attack, causing them great losses. The centre of gravity was moving southwards.

Further reports from Georgia showed that many loyalists had presented themselves for duty in a way that had been often promised but scarcely achieved before. Germain began to consider building on this success by moving against South Carolina, the neighbouring state to the north. Clinton had long nurtured a desire to return to Charleston, the great trading centre of the Carolinas, the reduction of which that general failed to achieve with his expedition there in 1776. How, though, could a continued war be sustained?

The imminent French threat to the British Isles, and the failure of ministerial strategy highlighted in the Howe hearings, meant that Parliament would never agree to large reinforcements for America. Germain knew that carrying on depended on getting the American loyalists to form more regiments, fighting increasingly for themselves. General Amherst produced another argument for switching the effort southwards – it would make the most of existing forces in America since many regiments might be shuttled down to the Caribbean or Carolinas in the winter when campaigning was impossible further north and then moved back again when these tropical climes became too unhealthy in the summer months.

George III did not make this new strategy, but he endorsed it enthusiastically. In June 1779, he wrote to Lord North arguing that the war must go on. Those who argued that it was unbearably expensive were ‘only weighing such events in the scale of a tradesman behind his counter’, whereas the King had a God-given duty to look at the principles at stake and believed the American war ‘the most serious in which any country was ever engaged’. George argued that defeat could set a juggernaut of dire consequences rolling: ‘Should America succeed … the West Indies must follow them … Ireland would soon follow the same plan and be a separate state, then this island would be
reduced to itself, and would soon be a poor island indeed.’

Germain knew that there were many obstacles to driving through his new plan of war: Rhode Island would have to be abandoned, and its 5,000 troops brought down to New York so that a large expedition could be sent south; somehow he would have to persuade that truculent General Clinton to do it – for he was insisting on resigning unless there was a substantial reinforcement; and there needed to be new leadership to launch the army on its southern campaign.

Late in 1778, one colonel had written from New York, ‘There is hardly one general officer who does not declare his intention of going home, the same with officers of all ranks who, if they could procure leave, would be happy to leave.’ The experiences of American war from Boston to Saratoga had convinced many that it was a conflict in which reputations could be lost but not gained. Clinton’s abrasive and suspicious personality had also alienated many of his senior commanders.

Help came in the form of Earl Cornwallis who had told the King in April 1779 that he was willing to serve again in America. This news produced unbridled joy among ministers, for Clinton might thus be used as a supreme administrative figure and Cornwallis as the principal field commander.

Cornwallis’s private views about whether the war could be won, it must be owned, did not differ very much from those of Charles Grey. The earl’s wife had died in February, leaving him distraught. He returned to America, in his own words, ‘not with views of conquest and ambition, nothing brilliant can be expected in that quarter, but I find this country quite unsupportable to me. I must shift the scene; I have many friends in the American army; I love that army.’

During early 1779 the Whigs had poured scorn upon the Ministry, but as the summer went on, they too had to acknowledge certain realities. The appearance of a powerful Franco-Spanish combined fleet in the Channel made it unpatriotic, treasonable indeed, to carry opposition to the King too far. Those fashionable ladies of the rich Whig families such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who had gone to parties dressed as American soldiers during the early years of the revolution, got themselves measured up for British regimentals once France entered the war. They accompanied their husbands to the great militia summer training camps as they awaited invasion of the home islands.

Die-hard opponents of the war could rail at the Ministry’s stupidity for carrying on in America when England and Ireland were under threat of invasion, but even they would have acknowledged that the American army could not have been extricated fast enough to have averted the crisis of August 1779, when the enemy fleet appeared off Plymouth and the Royal Navy stayed in port – fearful of defeat, touching off near hysteria.

‘How strange must our system of politicks appear in future ages,’ wrote Balfour, prevented from getting back to his regiment because of the crisis in the Channel, ‘when it appears, that while we were carrying on offensive wars in all quarters of the Globe with vast fleets and armies, that an enemy rode triumphant in our own harbours.’ The 23rd’s commanding officer had spent most of the year in Britain, but his time there would soon be over.

Balfour had been home to visit his mother Katherine. They had been overjoyed to discover that Walter Balfour had not after all been lost at sea, but she had reacted with horror at the idea that Nisbet must once again return to America, with all the risks that involved. But the colonel himself had grown listless. Just as he had been glad to leave America the previous November, he had found the partisan bear pit of Westminster too disgusting to stomach. He wanted to return to the Fusiliers, writing, ‘I hate to remain longer an idle spectator.’

There was little prospect of that, for although the colonel did not know it yet, the new course of the war had been set. The army would be heading for South Carolina, with Cornwallis, Balfour and the 23rd all centre-stage.

 

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