1775 (85 page)

On the morning of July 9, when Lewis was ready to attack, the
Otter,
the
Dunmore,
and a number of tenders positioned themselves to repel a Virginian amphibious attack relying on rowboats, canoes, and rafts. What took the British by surprise was bombardment from the two eighteen-pounders,
which the American gunners had been able to mount unobserved. The
Dunmore
was hit a dozen times before it could be towed out of range, the
Otter
was seriously damaged, and a half dozen tenders were burned or captured. The British artillery was also silenced. However, because the Americans had not yet collected many small boats, Lewis’s troops were not in a position to reach the island, and Dunmore was able to withdraw with his vessels that night.
⁴⁰

When the Virginians came ashore, they were appalled. Dunmore’s force had left some 300 graves at their Tucker Point facility, but Gwynn’s mortalities caused more shock. Andrew Lewis recorded that “on our arrival, we found the enemy had evacuated the place with the greatest precipitation, and were struck with horrour at the number of dead bodies in a state of putrefaction, strewed all the way from their battery to Cherry point, about two miles in length, without a shovelful of earth upon them.”
⁴¹
Another American officer recounted that “it is supposed that they buried 500 Negroes on the island.”
⁴²

Disease was the excuse Lord Dunmore conveyed to Lord George Germain and the American Department. Illnesses had wiped out “an incredible number of our People, especially the Blacks.” Without “this horrid disorder, I am satisfied I would have had two thousand Blacks, with whom I should have had no doubt of penetrating into the heart of this Colony.”
⁴³

From Gwynn’s Island, Dunmore and Hamond headed up the bay to St. George’s Island at the mouth of the Potomac. From here, the governor took a few warships and foraged upriver for food, until driven back by Virginia militia. But on August 4, back in the bay, he heard that General Clinton, having failed at Charleston, was heading back to New York. Now Dunmore’s flotilla broke up. About half, escorted by the sloop
Otter,
sailed for St. Augustine, and a smaller group, including Dunmore, headed for New York. Lord Dunmore’s second war—the all-important British counterrevolution in Virginia—finished in failure.

Dunmore: The Geopolitics of Personality

In the end, both Richard Henry Lee and George Washington were substantially correct in their assessments of Dunmore. As Lee thought, most Virginians did unite against his policies and personal behavior. Washington, writing from his command post near Boston, was correct about the need to
crush the governor before he could attract more followers. However, December proved to be a greater turning point than Washington could have known.

Could another royal governor of Virginia have done better? Probably not. Lacking Dunmore’s bold streak, his earl’s rank, and his partial success in catering to Virginians’ intense land hunger, a more conventional royal governor in Williamsburg might have been marginalized and forced out more quickly. In Maryland and Georgia, for example, Governors Robert Eden and James Wright, while locally respected and reasonably popular, could not straddle the difference between what London required and what a plurality of Marylanders and Georgians wanted. Both men had left their provinces before Dunmore vacated Gwynn’s Island and Virginia.

As we have seen, some historians have argued that had two or three more regiments of British regulars been sent to Virginia in October or November 1775, that force might have tipped the balance toward the Crown even with Dunmore as governor. On the other hand, some of Dunmore’s military judgment was poor—starting the cannonade that burned Norfolk, for example—and one naval historian has identified the need to detach several vessels to Dunmore as an important reason for the Royal Navy’s ineffectiveness in blockading Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay during 1775 and the first half of 1776.
⁴⁴
This ineffectiveness, of course, was felt in the many American vessels that were able to reach Europe and the West Indies with tobacco and other cargoes that they exchanged for arms and munitions.

On a larger dimension, Dunmore’s quirkiness might have worked to minimize the importance of what had occurred in the large and populous colony of Virginia. In Quebec, which had only one tenth of Virginia’s population, the rebels had to give up the winter siege of Quebec City, and the American retreat during the spring and early summer has been described, fairly enough, as a cavalcade of retreat, misjudgment, disease (smallpox), and death. Dunmore’s failure in Virginia likewise involved failure and the abandonment of a strategic city (Norfolk), a critical December 31–January 1 defeat, a gradual retreat, and ultimately, a late-spring and early-summer ignominy marked by smallpox and dead soldiers. But the analogy is never drawn.

It is understandable that British historians may not care to mention Lord Dunmore. Americans, on the other hand, have reason to be grateful that the counterrevolution in Virginia was led by a man with so much egotism and so little eventual success.

T
he silent Yankee canoes that scouted Castle William, the British Army’s island headquarters in Boston Harbor, a day after Lexington and Concord, may count as the first vessels in the American navy. A nervous Admiral Graves took their presence seriously enough to station two guard vessels.
¹

Somewhat larger craft are more plausible contenders, including the schooner that in mid-May 1775 led Benedict Arnold’s original tiny “navy” on Lake Champlain—as distinct from the larger flotilla he later commanded at Valcour Island. Whether or not Arnold’s
Liberty
can be called the first vessel in the United Colonies Navy, the taking of St. Jean and the sloop
George III
represented the first American amphibious operation.

Whaleboats were unusually conspicuous in the early fighting. In the words of one naval historian, “By late May and early June the Americans were waging a vigorous whaleboat war in Boston Harbor. Having scoured all the nearby creeks, inlets and beaches, the Americans had gathered several hundred of these open boats. Of shoal draft and fast over short distances with a few good men at the oars, these boats proved to be a great annoyance to the British. Darting out so quickly that the British barely had time to respond, they attacked the lighthouses in the harbor and landed on the islands to carry off foodstuffs and livestock.”
²

Graves had reason to worry. As we will see, he imagined the ultimate professional ignominy for a British admiral: that 20 to 30 whaleboats, carrying 400 or 500 men, might sneak up on and capture one of his clumsy and undermanned 60- or 70-gun ships of the line. Three years earlier, eight fast whaleboats in Narragansett Bay had captured the more nimble revenue cutter
Gaspee
and then burned it. On May 27, whaleboats sent to remove livestock and forage from several Boston Harbor islands figured in the Battle of Noddle’s Island, where Massachusetts forces, after outmaneuvering British longboats and fleet tenders, wound up burning a Royal Navy schooner, the
Diana,
that had run aground. They did not technically capture it, which as we will see is relevant.

Vessels in a few localities became involved inadvertently. On May 12, off Dartmouth, Captain John Linzee of the sloop of war HMS
Falcon,
fourteen guns, took an American merchant vessel just arrived from the West Indies. Putting on a prize crew, he sent it off for Boston with the
Falcon
’s small tender as escort. However, local Patriots, employing “a rag-tag squadron of small craft,” caught the tender and its captive near Martha’s Vineyard. Fourteen captured British seamen were sent to Taunton Gaol as prisoners.
³

1775: The Historic Firsts of American Naval History

Americans being a people enamored of records and record setting, even maritime and naval histories pay close attention to the war’s unfolding firsts. The episode near Martha’s Vineyard, because it antedated the
Liberty
’s May 16 taking of St. John and the sloop
George III
on Lake Champlain, can be called “the first naval action of the Revolution.” However, as a case of smugglers versus the Royal Navy—a commonplace in eighteenth-century American waters—it may not properly belong in a naval history.
⁴

By Massachusetts yardsticks, “the undisputed honor of being the first to attack and take a vessel of the Royal Navy” goes to the Patriots of Machias, far down east in the Maine district. In early June, two small merchant sloops,
Unity
and
Polly,
escorted by a modest Royal Navy schooner, the
Margaretta,
came looking for firewood and lumber to be carried back to Boston for British barracks. The people of Machias were to be paid in provisions needed by the community, but the political conditions attached became contentious. To make a long story short, after the youthful midshipman commanding the
Margaretta
threatened to fire on the town if its Liberty Pole was not taken down, the aroused Patriot faction seized both accompanying sloops. When the British schooner stood out to sea, several dozen Machias men used the two sloops to follow. The
Unity,
under local fire-eater Jeremiah O’Brien, overhauled, boarded, and captured the
Margaretta,
making her “the first vessel of the Royal Navy to surrender to an American force.” James Fenimore Cooper, in his
History of the Navy of the United States of America,
later described the encounter as “The Lexington of the sea.”
⁵

Some weeks later two other small British naval vessels, the cutter
Diligent,
eight guns, and its tender the
Tatamagouche,
entered Machias still unaware of hostilities and were likewise captured. In August, weeks before Massachusetts officially launched a provincial navy, the
Margaretta,
the
Diligent,
and the
Unity
(proudly renamed the
Machias Liberty
) were taken into provincial service as a down-east Maine guard force. O’Brien was put in command.
⁶
Here as elsewhere, Yankees made do with what they had: small vessels.

Many brigs and schooners voyaged for gunpowder during late 1774 or 1775 under orders from provincial regimes in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, for the most part purchasing munitions commercially in European or West Indian ports. However, several were specifically commissioned to capture British supply vessels or seize their cargoes.

Few Patriot organizations could match the South Carolina Council of Safety, military arm of the Provincial Congress, for its spring and summer attentiveness to the United Colonies’ gunpowder crisis. Its leaders—men like William Henry Drayton and Arthur Middleton—went far afield for purchases, bargains, or seizures. Whereas New England looked north and west to Lake Champlain and the Crown’s major Canadian posts, the Charlestonians pointed south and east to the Bahamas, Bermuda, British
East Florida, and next-door Georgia. In June, their Secret Committee heard of British munitions vessels on their way to Savannah and St. Augustine.
⁷

The entrance to the Savannah River, called Tybee Bar, became the Patriot rendezvous. In early July, two barges of seamen and militia from Beaufort, South Carolina, took the Inland Passage to Bloody Point, on their side of the river. Meanwhile, the Georgia Provincial Congress, encouraged by Carolina allies, commandeered and armed a local merchant schooner, the
Elizabeth,
promptly renamed the
Liberty.
This vessel, with its ten carriage guns, apparently inspired the more lightly armed Royal Navy schooner
St. John
to head for the Bahamas. On July 8, the powder-laden British merchantman
Philippa
arrived and was easily seized by the
Liberty
and taken to Cockspur Island in the Savannah River. There the South Carolinians and Georgians evenly divided the powder, each getting some 5,000 pounds.
⁸

By July 25, the Patriot leaders in Charleston borrowed—as in commandeered—a local sloop, the
Commerce,
and began refitting it for a raid on the British powder magazines on the island of New Providence. But two days later, word came that a British ordnance brig, the
Betsy,
was en route to St. Augustine with a cargo of military stores. When the
Betsy
was sighted off St. Augustine on August 7, the more lightly armed
Commerce,
with 21 white and five black sailors, took her by a clever ruse. According to South Carolina historians, Captain Clement Lempriere “apparently posted his black sailors conspicuously on deck, kept the rest of the hands below, and deceived the British crew into thinking the
Commerce
was simply a harmless country vessel manned by slaves. The British crew suspected nothing until the sloop pulled alongside the brig and sent over a boarding party armed with swords, pistols, muskets and bayonets.” Lempriere paid £1000 sterling for the between 12,000 and 14,000 pounds of powder he took, escaping a British sloop that chased the
Commerce
until giving up in the Inland Passage to Port Royal Sound.
⁹
If the former
Elizabeth,
now the
Liberty,
arguably founded the Georgia Provincial Navy, the
Commerce
played the same role for South Carolina.