1775 (71 page)

River Fortification and Green River Navies

Despite the wishful belief of many Loyalists that Britain would negotiate an acceptable peace, the eight months after Lexington and Concord witnessed a steadily escalating American commitment to war, including river and harbor fortification. Despite its shortage of frigates and sloops, the Royal Navy represented a potential threat to keeping major rivers open.

The Continental Congress had voiced almost immediate concern over the Hudson, and in June the New York Provincial Congress chose a committee to inspect the Hudson highlands. A site for fortifications was agreed
to, and by summer, construction was under way, even if the site changed. That same month, worry over Portsmouth, New Hampshire, prompted George Washington to send General John Sullivan back home, where he quickly constructed a chained boom—raised and lowered by windlasses—across the mouth of the Piscataqua River. Fire ships and rafts with masses of combustibles waited above the boom as further protection.
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To protect Philadelphia and the Delaware River (as well as Congress), initial steps in September included constructing small warships—armed galleys—and emplacing a triple row of iron-barbed timbers named chevaux-de-frise, after their late-seventeenth-century origins in the Frisian province of the Netherlands. In October, officials agreed to site an artillery battery on Mud Island, at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, which eventually became Fort Mifflin.
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Chesapeake Bay represented a unique defensive challenge, given its size and 3,600-mile shoreline. The name itself comes from
K’che-sepiack,
Algonquin for “the Great Salt Water,” although only the lower bay was briny. Beyond its relative immensity, the bay’s several dozen islands and scores of navigable rivers lent themselves to effective operations by small naval craft—sloops, schooners, galleys, and pilot boats, a type of local schooner specially rigged for speed. Privateers and pirates (picaroons) also thrived on its waters during the Revolution. If British plans were only starting to unfold during the summer and autumn of 1775, little more could be said of Patriot activity.

The terrain surrounding the bay was mostly flat, especially below Annapolis and Easton. As the bay widened, its waters had an increasingly southern feel, accentuated by cypresses, green salt marshes, muskrats, dugouts called bugeyes, barge-riding bandits, and rivers with names like Chicamacomico that conjured up Georgia, Alabama, or Florida Indians. These lower reaches had the major islands, most notably Tangier and Smith. What is more, in sharp contrast to coastal New England, many of its shoremen and fishermen had Tory inclinations.
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Local poor white watermen, being ill disposed toward the Patriot gentry, generally threw in with the British. In Tory hands during most of the war, Tangier and Smith, along with nearby Hog Island, were used by the British and by Loyalist privateers through 1782. Had the king’s forces kept control of Norfolk, the islands would have meshed into a strong lower Chesapeake defense.

Not surprisingly, the language employed by December’s Virginia Convention
in authoring a provincial navy had emphasized river protection, so the new force had more origins in so-called green-water strategy than in blue-water thinking. Blocking the principal river channels and locating cannon at key points had been among the first measures considered. On the mainland side of Hampton Roads, local authorities sank derelict vessels in the channel of the Hampton River to block or slow down British incursions.
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During October, as Dunmore’s river raids escalated, Virginia’s delegates to Congress suggested to the provincial Committee of Safety that cannon could be positioned on particular heights along the James, York, and Rappahannock rivers.
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But after several months of deliberation, war vessels became the protection of choice.

In the upper bay, Marylanders were initially complacent about the Patuxent and Patapsco rivers. However, when Captain Squire took his infamous
Otter
toward Baltimore in March 1776, defenses were rushed. Depth-marker trees along the Patapsco were replaced by cannon and chains. Worn-out craft were ordered down to Whetstone Point—the later site of Fort McHenry—to be sunk as a channel barrier, and a battery was emplaced at Fell’s Point.
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However, the greatest spur to river protection in the Chesapeake region involved the strategic but vulnerable Potomac. When Virginians and Marylanders met during the autumn of 1775 to plan defenses where the river narrows, near George Washington’s plantation at Mount Vernon, they ruefully discovered that width and depth made obstacles impractical.
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Next, the Maryland Council of Safety approved the idea of placing warning beacons (to be lit) every five miles from the river’s mouth upstream to Alexandria. On foggy or misty days, lookout boats were to take over. But this proposal also went unimplemented.

The Alexandria (Virginia) Committee of Safety took charge because of invasion fears. One town history explained: “Rumor was rife in [October] 1775 that Governor Dunmore had dispatched an expedition of warships up the Potomac to ‘lay waste the towns and the country, capture Mrs. Washington and burn Mount Vernon.’ Martha Washington remained calm, and though finally persuaded by Colonel [George] Mason to leave home, she stayed away one night only.” Fears rekindled in January 1776, when General Washington’s plantation manager wrote that “Alexandria is much alarmed and indeed the whole neighborhood. The women and children are leaving the town and stowing themselves in every hut they can find, out of reach of the enemy’s cannon. Every wagon, cart and pack horse they can get is employed.”
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Partly as a result, Virginia decided in January 1776 to organize a squadron to protect the Potomac. The flagship—a 110-ton sloop named the
American Congress
—carried fourteen guns and 96 seamen and marines. Two row galleys were each to mount eighteen-pounder cannon. However, with the Old Dominion bearing full responsibility for defending the James, York, and Rappahannock rivers, Virginians asked Maryland authorities for Potomac region help. They supplied ten barrels of powder to the Potomac fleet’s flagship and helped the Virginians purchase the two eighteen-pound cannon from a Maryland ironmaster.
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In addition, a dozen schooners, sloops, and row galleys were bought or built to protect the other three rivers, and Virginia also funded two galleys to protect North Carolina’s Ocracoke Inlet. That entryway provided a back door to Norfolk and the Chesapeake via the Blackwater River.

Captain Hamond of the Royal Navy, who reached Norfolk in February in his 44-gun frigate
Roebuck,
quickly grasped the larger British opportunity: “On account of the navigable rivers of this Country, there is no part of the continent where ships can assist land operations more than this.” A small flotilla and a thousand men, he amplified, could “distress the colonies of Maryland & Virginia to the greatest degree, and employ more than ten times their number to watch them.”
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Dunmore had made almost the same argument for an aggressive naval strategy. However, the king, Lord North, and the Cabinet had aimed their southern expedition at North Carolina, and unlike Captain Hamond, the Admiralty may have lacked the acumen—or possibly even suitable maps—to picture the Chesapeake as the potential invasion highway that it was.

1775: Many Potential Loyalists, Few British Reinforcements

Demographically, too, the region could have been an invasion highway. Virginia far surpassed North Carolina in wealth, political influence, and strategic importance. But
Chapter 13
has explained how during the autumn of 1775, senior British officials accepted a poorly informed strategy for securing the southern provinces through a rendezvous off Cape Fear to support a Loyalist rising. When a small part of the Cape Fear force under General Clinton, the overall commander, stopped in Virginia in February en route from Boston, a frustrated Dunmore voiced his “inexpressible mortification.” He protested to the American secretary, now Lord George Germain, that North Carolina was a “most insignificant province,” while Virginia,
“the first colony on the continent, both in its riches and power, is totally neglected.”
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Dunmore was generally correct. The British did not perceive Virginia’s or the Chesapeake’s importance until it was too late. One Virginia historian elaborated: “If there had been towns of any size in Virginia [after Norfolk was burned], with royal forces to occupy them, or if there had been at Norfolk a fifth part of the army Howe wasted at idleness at Boston in the winter of 1775–76, the history of the Revolution in Virginia and of the Revolution in general, might have been different.”
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The many ships and seven regiments bound for Cape Fear that winter from Ireland and Boston might have made that difference. With Virginia and Maryland lagging in their military preparedness, a middling British fleet on the Chesapeake with three or four regiments might have sailed upriver to Alexandria, bombarded Baltimore, cut off much of the tobacco-for-ammunition trade, and turned an overawed Delmarva Peninsula into a recruiting ground for Loyalist regiments. Admiral Graves in Boston could have been bypassed.

Instead, by late December, when Dunmore abandoned Norfolk, he had received only 140 redcoats, mostly from the Fourteenth Regiment stationed in St. Augustine (70 arrived in August, 70 more in October). Considering the alarm and anxiety spread in southeastern Virginia by the 1,000 or so men he commanded at his November zenith of local influence, another 500 to 1,000 soldiers might have consolidated a British regional occupation. Despite intimations that autumn that Dunmore might receive the other companies from the Fourteenth, he never got them.

Despite his earl’s rank, unusual for a provincial governor, Dunmore’s bombast worked against him. As we have seen, he had strutted about his prospects for raising black and Loyalist units, telling Lord Dartmouth several times that “with a few hundred more with Arms, Ammunition and the other requisites of War, and with full power to Act I could in a few Months reduce this Colony to perfect Submission.” Gage in Boston had credited enough of Dunmore’s boasting to send seven officers, who arrived in August expecting to take up Virginia Loyalist commands, still nonexistent. In addition, Gage had approved the Connolly-Dunmore plan for mounting an invasion from the Great Lakes down the Potomac to Alexandria. This was to include a company of redcoats to be taken from Illinois.
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That scheme fell apart in November after Major Connolly was captured traveling through Maryland. Dunmore could not say that his ideas had been ignored.

For a waterborne force, Dunmore had begun the summer of 1775 with three warships and five or six tenders. His one or two sloops were effective in the rivers as well as in the bay. A single small frigate was also on hand—initially the
Fowey
(24 guns), replaced in July by the
Mercury
(20), and followed late in the year by the
Liverpool
(28). Occasionally, two frigates were present at one time. Dunmore also procured and partly refitted two merchant vessels: the
William,
which became his floating headquarters, and the
Eilbeck,
renamed the
Dunmore.
Both carried cannon, but not to the extent of a purpose-built warship. The
Roebuck
did not come until February. For purposes of comparison, Royal Navy Captain James Wallace had almost the same mid-1775 strength in Newport to patrol Rhode Island waters and the eastern end of Long Island Sound. Winning the Chesapeake would have been a greater prize.

Loyalists were relatively abundant. Although Virginia had a smaller ratio than North Carolina, from a British standpoint those in the Old Dominion were much more opportunely located. Whereas North Carolina’s emigrant Scottish Highlanders clustered 75 miles inland, Virginia’s Loyalists concentrated near the seacoast—in Norfolk and its environs, as well as across the bay in what both Virginians and Marylanders called Eastern Shore counties. Between late October and early December, when Dunmore seemed to be solidifying his control of Norfolk and nearby towns, thousands of formerly neutral or Patriot-minded residents put on red cloth badges and swore British allegiance. In fairness, the British Cabinet could not have learned of these inroads until December or January, and the slow-traveling news from Governor Martin in North Carolina also remained encouraging.

Among the Virginia Scottish merchants loyal to the Crown was Andrew Sprowle, proprietor of the colony’s biggest shipyard, at Gosport. Extending along a half mile of waterfront, Sprowle’s facility included a group of large stone warehouses, a smithy, wharves, and a large iron crane. His executor later noted that British ships usually lay there “in the winter months for the convenience of watering and other necessities, and occasionally careened, refitted, or repaired.”
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Even in 1775 this complex represented a prime naval resource; in later years it would grow into Norfolk Navy Yard.

Delmarva was a particular opportunity. Even without actual British military occupation during 1775 and 1776, the peninsula’s lower counties leaned toward Loyalism. Historians usually identify six: Sussex (Delaware); Dorchester, Somerset, and Worcester (Maryland); and Accomack and
Northampton (Virginia).
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According to one historian, “In the lower counties of Somerset and Worcester, Tories outnumbered Patriots possibly by as much as two or three to one, and, overall, one scholar has claimed that ‘with the possible exception of western Long Island, the Chesapeake peninsula had the highest proportion of Loyalists in the colonies.’”
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In these counties, tobacco was a lesser crop and generally of an inferior grade. Wheat was Delmarva’s mainstay. Patriot nonexportation beginning in September 1775 was also locally unpopular for interfering with a considerable volume of lumber exports (barrels, staves, and the like) to Britain and the West Indies.
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The interior of the Eastern Shore was poor land, the last part of the peninsula to be settled. High debt levels and uncertain livelihoods aggravated local frustration. Plausibly enough, poor whites saw little reason to fight for the wealthy tobacco planters or the Patriot-faction commercial elite in Baltimore and Annapolis.