1775 (57 page)

What New England shipyards specialized in were small, handy craft. Schooners were well designed, built for speed, and relatively cheap to construct. In 1774, Graves had recommended the purchase of “three or four good Marblehead schooners” to the Admiralty.
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The admiral would have been happy to have more in 1775.

As for New England mariners, few had ever wanted to serve in the Royal Navy. Only a handful ever became officers. In wartime, what better suited American masters and seamen alike was the relative informality of provincially commissioned small ships and fast privateering vessels. Throughout 1775, New England mobilized waterborne forces as avidly as army companies and regiments. But the confusing political and legal status of the vessels employed—and of the seamen who manned them—has detracted somewhat from narrative attention.

To simplify, and for a purpose to which we will return, by September 1775 five notable categories of Patriot vessels could be identified: (1) those
privately owned (often unexpectedly drawn into action by some local British act); (2) those privately owned but engaged on a provincially authorized mission; (3) those purchased, leased, or operated by a province or by its provincial navy; (4) those privately owned schooners leased by the Continental Army and operated by mariners and seamen serving in George Washington’s Boston-area army regiments (“Washington’s Navy”); and (5) those privately owned and operated but commissioned either by a province or by Congress to take British merchant ships as prizes. Confusion was rampant.

If these distinctions seem unnecessary, they mattered at the time. The legal status of an American ship or seafarer could, literally, be a matter of life or death. During those months, many British naval officers preferred a simpler, unequivocal term—
pirate.
Furthermore, any captured seaman could be pressed into the Royal Navy, which had a high mortality rate. Striking back was risky business.

On the other side of the ledger, many New England mariners, seamen, and fishermen, angry enough to risk life and limb, brought great skills to a new wartime calling. A smuggler with a decade or two of West Indies experience could outfox the Royal Navy as easily in the waters off St. Kitts or Martinique as in the approaches to Cape Ann or along the Connecticut coast. Yankee fishing vessels, now barred from the Grand Banks fisheries, refitted by the hundreds for commerce raiding. The first six vessels leased by Congress for Washington’s own naval force were Marblehead fishing schooners.
¹⁶

Fishermen also fought back by enlisting in the waterborne army—most famously, in Colonel John Glover’s “Webbed Regiment” from Marblehead. As recalled by one participant, “Col. Glover’s Regiment was stationed as Marine Corps at the Port of Beverly near Salem for the purpose of manning from time to time small vessels of War fitted out…to intercept and capture British Ordinance [
sic
] vessels and transports bound to the British Army in Boston.”
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His men would fight far beyond Massachusetts waters. In the predawn hours of August 29, 1776, after Washington’s troops had been defeated in the Battle of Brooklyn, the hardy Marbleheaders were on hand to row them a half mile across to Manhattan almost under British noses. Four months later, before joining in combat themselves, Glover’s oarsmen ferried Washington’s soldiers across the ice-packed Delaware River for the Battle of Trenton. This time, instead of whaleboats, they used Durham boats, the 45-foot carriers utilized at the Durham ironworks fifteen
miles upstream. Britain would have been better off allowing the Marbleheaders to keep fishing.

The Extent of British Unpreparedness

Some naval historians blame First Lord Sandwich, Admiral Graves, or both for the failures during 1775 and into 1776. The vulnerability of British supply lines, that argument goes, reflected both unpreparedness and weak leadership.

Army officers were among the critics. General John Burgoyne, watching from Boston in 1775, mocked Graves in a letter home. It was difficult, said Burgoyne, to say what the admiral was doing but easier to list what he was not doing: not supplying the army with fresh meat, not defending the islands in Boston Harbor, not preventing the destruction of “King’s armed vessels,” not using his ships for communications or intelligence gathering. William Eden, the competent British secret service chief, described Graves as “a corrupt Admiral without any shadow of capacity.”
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Sandwich, too, was widely derided. The
Advertiser
of London, for example, noted that Sandwich’s mistress, one Martha Ray, was known for raising money for her wardrobe by selling naval commissions.
¹⁹

Experts have criticized the long-standing division of authority over wartime transport within the British military—control was split between the Navy Board, the Treasury (which moved the army), the Victualling Board, and the Ordnance Board. The Navy Board, which played a vital institutional role alongside the Admiralty, lent itself to caricature. Its membership dated back to Henry VIII. One senior member—the clerk of the acts—held an outside position created in 1214, and the titles of his subclerks evoke Chaucer more than Gilbert and Sullivan’s
H.M.S. Pinafore.
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But mockery seems petty. The clerk of the acts had not gotten in the way of British naval triumphs between 1758 and 1761.

Naval historian Syrett, in his chronicle
Shipping and the American War, 1775–1783,
summed up that Whitehall’s “failure to understand the relationship between strategy, logistics and shipping resources permeated almost every aspect of the British conduct of the war.”
²¹
As noted at this chapter’s beginning, British military historian Mackesy allowed that strains on shipping curtailed the dispatch of troops.

Blame reached to the apex of British government. An obvious dearth of small sloops, brigs, and schooners, combined with new challenges in provisioning
and in managing long-distance transport, was magnified by the confusion and delay of a weak cabinet. Setting aside King George, the War Cabinet—Lord North and five or six others, notably the three secretaries of state, plus Sandwich at the Admiralty—made repeated misjudgments in 1774 and 1775. They continued, one after another: the excesses of the Coercive Acts, the political underestimation of the Continental Congress, the reduction rather than increase of the naval budget as late as December 1774, the steady overconcentration of troops in nonstrategic Boston, the serious miscalculation of British popularity in French Canada, and the adoption and eventual mismanagement of unrealistic timetables for the all-important invasion buildup in New York. The Cabinet further stumbled in letting itself be gulled by French diplomatic reassurances and by counting on Catherine of Russia to provide mercenaries. By the twentieth century, governments had fallen for less.

No marginally prepared navy or transport system, asked to do so much so quickly, could have performed well when further impeded by this sequence of Cabinet-level mistakes and mind changes. North, despite being an acknowledged master of parliamentary politics, freely admitted having no military experience, but the king would not let him resign. Dartmouth, a weak reed in the American Department, was no more experienced in military terms. Lord George Germain, who succeeded Dartmouth in November 1775, had been cashiered from the British Army twenty years earlier. His agenda in office was colored by grudges and factionalism, and he frequently blamed Sandwich—not without justification—for undercutting his military plans by failing to produce transports or warships.
²²

The interaction between grandiose plans and inadequate logistics was costly. During the period between late 1774 and early 1776, Britain lost a geographic control of the thirteen rebelling colonies that she was never able to restore. Especially in the North, regaining those grass roots was beyond reach by 1778 and 1779, when French and Spanish entry signaled the transformation of an American Revolution into a global war. Britons were soon forced into tougher decisions, but their strategic de-emphasis of New England and resurrected prioritization of the plantation South came four or five years too late.

The limitations of British and American naval strategy between mid-1774 and mid-1776 will be touched on again in
Chapter 23
. For now, it is in order to return to the supply war. An increasingly successful British naval blockade, biting hard by 1777, would put the new United States economy “in irons” through 1780–1781.
²³
The British also paid in ships lost to privateers
and high insurance rates, but the American economic loss was arguably greater. By contrast, the small-craft river, sea, and harbor wars of 1775 and early 1776—fought by smugglers, gunrunners, and Yankee merchants, and then by government-commissioned schooners and sloops with strange new flags displaying pine trees, palmettos, and rattlesnakes—achieved short-term successes that gave the fledgling government breathing room.

Within weeks of Bunker Hill, Gage and Graves understood that much of the remaining conflict of 1775 would be over provisions, armaments, stores, and how to intercept the other side’s vessels at sea. But comprehension in England lagged at the Cabinet level. Senior American officials, by contrast, reflected a bourgeois mindset and instinctively grasped the importance of the supply war. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress had a merchant and seafaring bias. Connecticut and Rhode Island were both governed by longtime merchants, Trumbull and Nicholas Cooke. The Continental Congress met under the presidency of a merchant, John Hancock. And two Philadelphia merchants-cum-politicians, Thomas Willing and Robert Morris (of Willing and Morris), would manage backstage commercial warfare and munitions procurement once Congress launched its Secret Committee in September. Even the supposed landed aristocrats of the United Colonies—Washington, Schuyler, and others—had spent many prewar hours on plantation management, inventories, transport, and storekeeping.

Until Bunker Hill, Graves had avoided aggressive use of the navy. Important commercial and naval enforcement deadlines were at hand, but only a few had gone by. Activity increased in July, reflecting both the aftermath of a bloodbath and the Royal Navy’s effective date, under the Restraining Acts, for seizing vessels of the nine cited colonies for trading with
any
ports outside Britain and the British West Indies. That sweeping prohibition included Virginia vessels bringing goods to Maryland or Rhode Island schooners taking rum to South Carolina. In Philadelphia, Congress, too, was slowly but surely shifting its military posture from defensive to a more aggressive mode with respect to Canada.

The relationships between war and commerce were also changing. Congress was beginning to poke holes in the nonexportation program drafted nine months earlier so that tobacco and other highly salable commodities could be shipped to buy desperately needed munitions. From their Boston perch, Gage and Graves were likewise finding the year-old prohibitions of
the 1774 Boston Port Act highly inconvenient. That occupied city was now the only British-controlled New England port and had to be opened to prizes taken by British warships and to vessels bringing lumber, fuel, and provisions. So much for the high-flying commitments of 1774.

Confrontation would grow during August and September as British naval activity escalated, the king declared the thirteen colonies in rebellion, and George Washington turned his own eyes seaward to attack British supply lines. American leaders were moving beyond emphasis on protecting their own coasts and trade. To a surprising extent, they would take the offensive on sea as well as land.

George Washington and the Supply-Raiding Origins of the American Navy

No available statistic tells how many American vessels were captured by the British during the transition months of July and August. However, given that the total taken and brought into Boston and Halifax between June 1775 and April 1776 was at least 120, the two-month figure could have been 20 to 30, principally in New England waters.
²⁴
As for British ships taken or emptied by rebels during these months, the number would have been smaller, perhaps eight to ten. That included two British transports carrying powder, the
Philippa
and the ordnance brig
Betsy,
taken by vessels instructed by the South Carolina Council of Safety.
²⁵

George Washington found himself taking an interest. Upon assuming his new Boston-area command, he had ordered a close watch on the Royal Navy. His general orders of July 9, 1775, specified a daily report “mentioning particularly all Arrivals of Ships and Vessels in the bay; and what changes and alterations are made, in the Stations of the Men of war, Transports and floating batteries &c.”
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It was watchfulness shared up and down coastal New England.

Both in Congress and the individual colonies, the initial concern had been to protect local trade and harbors. On July 18, the delegates in Philadelphia resolved that “each colony, at their own expense, make such provision by armed vessels or otherwise, as their respective assemblies, conventions or committees of safety shall judge expedient and suitable to their circumstances and situation for the
protection
[italics added] of their harbors and navigation on their seacoasts, against all unlawful invasions, attacks,
and depredations from cutters and ships of war.” A June debate in Massachusetts about arming vessels had also emphasized “the protection of our trade.”
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Rhode Island and Connecticut used similar language.

Even so, bolder rebels like Rhode Island’s Cooke and South Carolina’s Christopher Gadsden, along with Josiah Quincy and James Warren of Massachusetts, had begun to argue for capturing provisions vessels and store ships. Warren, president of the Provincial Congress, contended on July 11 that “ten very good [sea-]going sloops, from 10 to 16 guns, I am persuaded would clear out our coasts.”
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Washington, after rejecting an aggressive approach in June and July conversations, took a bolder tack in August. He was interested in capturing unescorted and unarmed British transports, as well as in the possibility of recovering some of the Patriot provisions vessels seized by the Royal Navy but then sent to Boston with only small prize crews.
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