Conceived in Liberty (255 page)

But Clark was not finished with the year’s work. In retaliation, he swiftly raised a force of 1,000 Kentucky volunteers, who assembled on the Ohio River on August 1 with a captured cannon. He took his men up the Miami to punish the Shawnee, the Indian tribe most hated by the Kentuckians. Slashing swiftly upriver, Clark captured Chillicothe, a leading Shawnee town, and burned it and its adjacent cornfields to the ground. At the next town, Piqua, the heavily outnumbered Shawnee made a stand, but were routed by Clark and his cannon. The Americans then burned Piqua and its cornfields.

Despite the accelerating collapse of the paper dollar and subsequent economic chaos and shortage of supplies created by reversion to barter in the West, the emboldened Clark attempted to strike at the heart of the enemy and capture Detroit itself. Despite Virginia’s increasing military distress, he left for Pittsburgh in late January 1781. He had planned to assemble 2,000 militia at Pittsburgh, move down the Falls of Ohio, and northward to Detroit. But this year, the British decided to avoid the failing strategy of relying on massive Indian invasions and to rely instead
on a lengthy series of violent raids on the frontier. The Americans’ troubles were aggravated by the previously neutral Delaware Indians’ coming down on the British side. Finally, the Americans were forced to pull back from Kaskaskia, from Vincennes, and from Fort Jefferson.

To cap these problems, Clark found it impossible to recruit the necessary troops for his projected march. Thus, Daniel Brodhead refused to join Clark and instead struck westward from Pittsburgh to punish the Delawares for entering the war. With a force of nearly 300, Brodhead swiftly seized and burned Coshocton and murdered a batch of Delaware prisoners. The major effect of this brutality was to intensify the Delawares’ anti-American resolve, and they burned nine Kentucky prisoners in reprisal. Pennsylvania, moreover, was distrustful of Virginia’s lead in the projected Clark expedition, and sent no troops to support it. Finally, Clark’s potential recruits from the valley of Virginia refused to join his force; instead, they sprang to counter the British invasion of eastern Virginia and heeded Virginia’s decision to call off the expedition. Clark could only rely on local Kentucky and Ohio Valley settlers.

He finally assembled 400 volunteers at Wheeling; inauspiciously, the continuing mass desertions from his army forced him to start down the Ohio. Luck continued to fail him when the force of over 100 Pennsylvanians under Col. Archibald Lockry, marching to join Clark, was wiped out in late August in a sudden slashing attack by a slightly smaller force led by none other than Joseph Brant. At Louisville, a series of councils in early September had to decide Kentucky’s course. While Clark’s faithful Illinois officers argued for his plan to attack Detroit, the majority of the Kentucky councils realized that the force was too small for such a campaign. They decided there would be no American offensive, and a discouraged Clark lamented that “I have lost the object that was one of the principal inducements to my fatigues and transactions for several years past—my chain appears to have run out. I find myself enclosed with few troops, in a trifling fort....”

Brant had been shifted to the West in the early summer of 1781 to help check the expected drive by Clark against Detroit. Now, after the destruction of Lockry’s force, he proposed to move swiftly upon Clark at Louisville with his full force of Tories and Indians, while the Americans were still demoralized. But, once again, the Indians themselves were as fully demoralized by victory as by defeat, and learning of Kentucky’s abandonment of the Detroit invasion plan, they no longer feared destruction at the hands of an invading American force. They deserted
en masse,
as did the Tory Rangers, reducing a sizeable force to a mere troop of 200 men. The projected attack on Clark had necessarily become a surging terror raid of killing and plundering in the Kentucky settlements, at which point Brant was forced by the Indians’ satisfaction with their loot to turn back across
the Ohio. Because he could not conquer Kentucky, Brant finished out the war disgruntled like his counterpart Clark. Seventeen eighty-one ended with Kentucky still in the hands of American settlers and with the British back in control of the land north of the Ohio—roughly the status quo at the outset of the Revolutionary War.

In contrast to these mixed conditions, the New York frontier was in virtually a hopeless state during 1781. Brant and the Indians were emphatically in control of western New York. Indian terror raids began as early as January, and the American settlers were permanently confined to two dozen stockades, from which they dared emerge only to plant their fields under armed guard. Moreover, the redoubtable Fort Stanwix, the westernmost American stronghold in the Mohawk Valley, had to be abandoned under siege, and the western bastion fell back to Fort Herkimer. Raiding parties roamed and destroyed the New York frontier almost at will, and the two major upstate towns of Albany and Schenectady feared imminent attack. Left to defend the New York region was the radical young Col. Marinus Willett, who conducted guerrilla warfare on his own by using Canajoharie as his base from which to attack Indian raiding parties. But these were only last-ditch actions, and once again Washington felt that he could spare no men to assist in the grievous burden of defense.

One gauge of the terrible American losses on the frontier during the war was the depopulation of frontier Tryon County. At the start of the war, the county had 2,500 enrolled in its militia; by 1781 fewer than 800 were eligible. One contemporary estimate held that, of the mammoth reduction, one-third were casualties, one-third had joined the Tories, and one-third had fled eastward.

The final British thrust on the New York frontier came in the autumn of 1781, as Washington’s move south to Yorktown emboldened the British to try, for the third time, a three-pronged offensive to cut New York in two. The American force had dwindled to only 2,000 men under Gen. William Heath in the Hudson Highlands, and this seemed to provide a golden opportunity. Driving down Lake Champlain to Ticonderoga, St. Leger became embroiled in negotiations with the independent state of Vermont, and never proceeded further. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, commanding 16,000 idle men in New York City, failed with his typical indolence to make any move northward to attack Heath. Only Maj. John Ross moved from Oswego on October 10, falling upon the lower Scoharie. But Brant’s absence in the West deprived Ross of the bulk of the expected Iroquois allies, and his own force of nearly 500 was not sufficient to penetrate further than the outskirts of Schenectady. His withdrawal was harried by Willett, who had quickly assembled hundreds of militia. The engagements in the pursuit were inconclusive, but the settlers were immeasurably
cheered by the news that fallen in battle was perhaps the most hated man on the New York frontier, Walter Butler. As Van Every puts it: “There was more rejoicing in Tryon County over his death than over the coincidental news from Yorktown.”
*

Spain was willing to aid the American cause, but when it entered the war against Great Britain in 1779 it was to recapture her territory and weaken her old enemy Great Britain, not to aid republican revolutionaries. When Clark won his great victories in Illinois in 1778, and James Willing, brother of the partner of Robert Morris, headed a band early that year to plunder unmercifully the planters of Natchez in West Florida, Spain realized that the aggressive Americans, in the long run, posed a greater threat to her holdings and ambitions in the West than did Britain’s bases there. The only thing that Willing’s plunder accomplished for the American cause was to make confirmed Tories of the Natchez planters, and to lead Britain to construct a series of forts on the lower Mississippi that effectively blocked American navigation.

As soon as Spain went to war openly in 1779, she moved swiftly to recapture the coveted territory Britain had seized from her in the peace of 1763. Louisiana’s young governor, Bernardo de Gálvez, with remarkable swiftness, attacked and overwhelmed every English post on the lower Mississippi before the defenders had had a chance to learn that Spain was in the war. Fort Manchac, Baton Rouge, Fort Panmure, and Natchez all fell to de Gálvez in September, and Spanish ships defeated the British to gain control of Lake Ponchartrain, north of New Orleans. In a few weeks, de Gálvez had captured over 1,100 English troops and eight English ships. The following March, he captured Mobile, gaining control of the entire lower Mississippi Valley.

To forestall American settlers, Spanish commanders crossed the Mississippi further north in the winter of 1780–81 to assert Spanish claims to the formerly English east bank of the Mississippi. The Spanish flag was even hoisted in early 1781 over St. Joseph (now in southern Michigan), which had been captured by Capt. Eugene Pourre in a march from St. Louis. Spain’s final spoils of war was de Gálvez’ capture, in May 1781, of mighty Pensacola, the major English base in the south, a capture which included the final surrender by Britain of all of West Florida. Once in control of West Florida, the Spanish proved extremely lenient rulers, even to British rebels who had temporarily seized Fort Panmure.

*
Dale Van Every,
A Company of Heroes: The American Frontier, 1775–1783
(New York: Mentor Books, 1963), p. 283.

The main theatre of war, however, the theatre that decided victory or defeat, was not the North or the West. The South’s great travail had begun.

As John Shy has shown in a brilliant essay on British strategy during the Revolutionary War, that strategy proceeded in three successive stages.
*
The first stage, from the Coercive Acts in early 1774 until the end of 1776, was seen by the British as a quick police action, or punishment operation, against the main rebel center of Boston, after which the other colonies and even rural Massachusetts would quickly come to heel. But this strategy proved counterproductive, and the rebellion spread throughout the American colonies.

After the outbreak of the war, and with their troops bottled up in Boston, the British proceeded to the second stage of their strategy: a conventional inter-State war against the rebel Continental Army. When this strategy collapsed at Saratoga, they withdrew to bases at New York and Newport, and reconsidered their strategy. By late 1778, they had decided on seizing the nettle of new large-scale revolutionary war by conducting a full-scale campaign of counter-revolutionary and counter-guerrilla “pacification.” The idea now was that, instead of going from north to south as before, they would start in the deep south, and slowly move north, not moving until their rear had been thoroughly pacified by
Tory self-defense units and Tory instruments of government. This strategy depended upon the characteristic British overestimation of the extent of Tory sentiment among the American populace, especially in the South. It was a typical failure of imperialists in deluding themselves that the colonized masses are loyal, and that revolutions are only made by a malevolent minority of fanatics.

As Shy sums up the new strategy: “The basic concept was to regain complete military control of some one major colony, restore full civil government, and then expand both control and government in a step-by-step operation conducted behind a slowly advancing screen of British regulars. From a police operation, and then a classical military confrontation, British strategy had finally become a comprehensive plan of pacification directed against a revolutionary war.”
*

In this strategy, the first task was to capture Georgia, the weakest and least populous of the southern states, and also the one which could be readily attacked from the great British East Florida base St. Augustine. Georgia could also be approached readily by sea, where the British were dominant, and could then be used to supply the embattled British islands in the West Indies. The British plan was to drive northward, rolling up one state after another, depriving the northern and middle states of the benefits of the southern export trade, and blockading the North into submission. The southern Tories, protected from rebel fanatics by the presence of British troops, would then surely be able to resume stable government in their states. The British evidently did not learn from their disillusioning experiences with Tory strength in the North. As Alden writes: “Spokesmen for the Loyalists, insistent throughout the War of Independence that they formed the bulk of the population of the 13 states, were staunch in asserting their eagerness to pick up arms for Britain in areas as yet untouched by British troops. When the redcoats were in Boston, they were told they would be welcomed with open arms in New York; on Manhattan, they were informed that the Tories in New Jersey and Pennsylvania would rise as soon as they appeared; in Philadelphia, it was said that the supporters of the Crown in Maryland and Delaware needed only minimal assistance to throw off the yoke imposed upon them by their patriot neighbors... [; but] as [the British commanders] moved into the American interior they had found themselves surrounded by hostile militia rather than throngs of allies. In England, however, it was easier to accept Loyalist assertions at face value.”
**

While the proportion of Tories in Georgia and the Carolinas was certainly higher than the average in the North, it was scarcely as high as the
British liked to believe. More than overconfidence, however, was involved in the reliance upon the Tories and the consequent strategy they stubbornly insisted upon. Domestic political opposition in Britain revived and swelled after Saratoga, and the balance of power in Parliament was held by the country gentry. These nominally Tory, but instinctively libertarian, gentry were most deeply impressed with the tax burden upon themselves. Larger and wider war meant higher taxes on them, and there was the danger to the crown that they would let their aversion for taxation overcome their naive patriotism and join the opposition. Their main enthusiasm for the war had lain in the prospect of placing part of the imperial tax burden upon the Americans, but this was shattered by Lord North’s abandonment of the plan to tax America in early 1778.