Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (4 page)
Authors: Conrad Black
BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Even the placatory British prime minister, Newcastle, was outraged and worried when he learned of this debacle. He relied on what he portentously described as his continental “system” of alliances with the Spanish, Austrian Empire, Danes, Hanover, and some other German states to contain France, while he launched a counter-blow in America. With George II’s favored son, the Duke of Cumberland, Newcastle concerted a plan for sending two Irish regiments out to America under the command of Major General Edward Braddock, a spit-and-polish professional with no experience or knowledge at all of American warfare, to uproot the French fort system that Duquesne had built. Cumberland blew any security with public announcements about the new armed mission, which came to the attention of the French ambassador in London as to any informed person in the British capital. The French rushed to send reinforcements to Canada, though they suffered from the ice-shortened season for dispatching forces up the St. Lawrence.
3. THE OUTBREAK OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WARThe English position in those colonies was not much strengthened by the arrival of Braddock and his Irishmen in February 1755. The colonists resented Braddock’s high-handed manner and the British army’s rules, which were that any British officer, even a lieutenant, could order about like pirates any colonial officer, even Washington and his few peers, and that the colonial militias were subject to British military discipline. This was heavy going for these rough and ready frontiersmen, who were unaccustomed to taking orders, other than at the approach of and during outright exchanges of live fire. Nor were they much enamored of submitting themselves to a regimen that was unsparing in meting out floggings and even drum-head executions.
From May to July 1754 in Albany, New York, there was what was called the Albany Congress, to pursue unity of the colonies. The leading figure at the Congress was the ambitious Philadelphia inventor, scientist, printer, postmaster, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Behind his jaunty humor there lurked a sophisticated political operator who would prove himself more than able to master the sternest and most tortuous challenges that could be posed in the chancelleries of Europe. He was already the principal public figure among the colonists, and Washington was a rising young officer and landowner, the one an amiable intellectual and sly maneuverer, the other a physically imposing and capable officer, though personally stiff and somewhat limited by being a plantation inheritor and, beyond elemental education, an autodidact. But both were investors in and advocates of trans-Allegheny development, and both had a vision of a rapidly expanding America that would brook no interference from the French, and whose attachment to the British was essentially much less a reflexive submission to the Crown than a tactical association with the presumed facilitator of their local ambitions.
Franklin had already done a stint as Pennsylvania’s representative in London. However flickering might be their imperial enthusiasm, the colonists had no ability at this point to replace the British with any locally generated or spontaneous cohesion. The Albany Congress broke up in disharmony, and the Quaker majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly, dominated by and servile to the Penn family, roundly deserted Franklin and repudiated any notion of colonial union for the unholy purpose of armed combat, especially for the purpose of enriching the less pious of their number in extra-territorial speculation.
Braddock started off with a fantastically ambitious plan for blotting the French out of the continent, which Cumberland and his entourage had devised in complete ignorance of North American conditions or of the likely correlation of forces, and in defiance of Newcastle’s chimerical hopes of avoiding war with France. Admiral Edward Boscawen was to blockade the Gulf of St. Lawrence, strangling New France of reinforcements. Braddock and his Irish regiments were to take Fort Duquesne, which was now a formidable fortress. Braddock named the governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, a major general and told him to reactivate disbanded regiments and march to Niagara at the western end of Lake Ontario and seize the large French fort there, following which Braddock, who would clear the French out of the several hundred miles of French forts and garrisons between what are today Pittsburgh and Buffalo, would join forces for the final mopping-up of New France. It was an insane plan, made even more absurd by Braddock’s impossible personality and incandescent contempt for the colonials.
Braddock rejected suggestions from a couple of the colonial governors that instead of attacking the southern French forts, including Duquesne, he attack with all his forces at Niagara, the northern terminus of the French supply route into the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi country. This would have been the correct strategy for concentrating all available force on the point of maximum vulnerability. Cumberland and the other London creators of the Braddock attack plan had no idea that the supposedly navigable rivers often had rapids and that the trails that were supposed to be avenues for British supply wagons were narrow and often soft underfoot and could only be used at a snail’s pace, and a not very motivated snail at that. Nor were they aware that almost no Indians could now be induced to assist the British as guides or scouts and that only they knew their way to the designated targets. Washington prudently declined the command of a Virginia regiment and instead accepted to be an unpaid aide to Braddock, presumably, after his harrowing combat command debut at Fort Necessity, to avoid blame for another shambles, and to increase his chances for a British commission that would give him some status in the parent-country forces, which would clearly be needed in ever larger numbers if the French were to be successfully resisted.
Braddock also made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin. His severe demands for horses and supplies frightened the Pennsylvania legislature out of its Quaker aversion to the somewhat louche and worldly Franklin, who was sent as a placatory envoy to Braddock. Franklin, now America’s most accomplished diplomat, as Washington was its foremost soldier, though nothing in the past of either indicated the heights they would achieve in the balance of their careers, exploited Braddock’s unsuccessful foraging in Maryland and Virginia. Franklin sent boxes of fine food and good wine to the junior officers of Braddock’s units, and Pennsylvania was thereafter excused from the general’s rages against the colonials.
Braddock, with Washington at his side suffering from dysentery and acute hemorrhoids, plunged through the wilderness toward Fort Duquesne, his force’s movements faithfully reported by Indians to the French commander, Contrecoeur, the victor of the Fort Necessity encounter and brother-in-law of the “assassinated” Jumonville. On July 10, Braddock’s so-called “flying column” of about 1,500 men, including several hundred civilian workers and a number of the officers’ whores, which had managed about five miles a day, was attacked by about 800 French, Canadians, and (in the majority) Indians. The attackers infiltrated the dense forests on each side of the road and without warning, disconcerting the English with the nerve-rattling screaming of the Indians, poured down precise, rapid sniper-fire. The well-trained British formed into rectangles in the road, consolidating themselves as better targets for the enemies they could not see, and were steadily mowed down. Braddock remained mounted, and acted with great bravery, as did Washington, who had two horses shot from under him. After several hours, Braddock was mortally wounded, and died on the retreat two days later. A rout began, with Washington trying manfully to prevent a complete shambles, organizing the transport of the wounded, and trying to keep the retreat in some sequence. The French took 23 dead Indians, and about 16 wounded, compared with about 1,000 British dead and wounded, scores of whom were scalped by the Indians. Fortunately for the British, and as was their custom, the Indians had no interest in following up on their victory beyond taking the heads and picking the pockets of the enemy and whatever could be had from their wagons. The wreckage of Braddock’s flying column and the balance of his force arrived like a grim tornado in Philadelphia and, although they were in the searing heat of late July, demanded winter quarters.
The British did better in Acadia, and seized the French fort at the narrow isthmus connecting Cape Breton to Nova Scotia. There followed the expulsion ultimately of about 14,000 French and Franco-Indian civilians from Acadia (mainly Nova Scotia, and what are now New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), an eerie foretaste of some greater deportations of helpless civilian populations in the centuries to come, an ethnic cleansing. The Acadians had generally refused an oath of allegiance to the British Crown, because of conflicting loyalties, a refusal to draw a hostile line with French and Indian relatives, and fear of being deprived of their right to practice as Roman Catholics and to retain their language. In about equal numbers, they were assimilated into New England, went to Louisiana and laid the base of the “Cajuns,” returned to France, or returned to the area of their expulsion when conditions had improved. It was a shabby affair, and there was no excuse for it, though it was conducted less brutally than more modern deportations, including by the United States of its southeastern Indians.
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The British also had a modest success on Lake George, south of Montreal, where both sides took several hundred casualties and continued into the winter more or less as they had entered the spring, though with the French toiling to build a larger fort. Admiral Boscawen had seized two ships and several hundred soldiers, but the main French reinforcements for Canada, under General Montcalm, had arrived successfully in Quebec. The attack on Niagara, which was the only one of the projected operations that made much sense, was not launched in 1755, as planned. Despite repeated acts of war and probably 2,000 casualties or prisoners taken, while Britain stood clearly in the eyes of the world and such international law as there was as an aggressor, France and Britain were still officially at peace. The rout and death of Braddock and the failure of the rest of the British plan had heavy repercussions in London, where Newcastle’s legendary talents at political survivorship would be put to a serious challenge. William Pitt’s hour had almost arrived.
Implausibly, Newcastle still thought he might be able to avoid war with France in Europe. He was trying to maintain his continental “system” of alliances with Austria, the Netherlands, and Georgian Hanover and some neighboring German states, against France and Prussia, steadily emerging as the chief acquirer of German states and a potential rival in central Europe to Austria, whose empire was largely in the polyglot and irredentist Slavic and Italian wards of eastern and southern Europe. Newcastle proposed to try to add Russia to this alliance, to put a rod on Prussia’s back, concerned always, Pitt and his faction claimed, more with the welfare of Hanover than of Britain.
The rise of Prussia under George II’s brother-in-law, Frederick the Great, caused George II to fear Prussian designs on Hanover, as Frederick had already seized Silesia from Maria Theresa. Acting on this concern, Britain proposed and negotiated renewal of its defensive treaty with Russia in 1755. Frederick feared Russia even more than George feared Prussia, and after first rejecting an overture from Britain on news of the renewal of the Anglo-Russian treaty, Frederick proposed, and in January 1756, concluded with Britain, a non-aggression pact, which became one of mutual assistance should any aggressor disturb “the tranquility of Germany”—i.e., attack either Hanover or Prussia.
This appeared to be a brilliant consolidation of Hanoverian security, but Newcastle had outsmarted himself. Maria Theresa was so outraged at Britain’s treaty with Prussia, from which she proposed to recover Silesia, that she terminated her alliance with Britain. Russia declined to ratify its treaty renewal with Britain; France renounced her treaty with Prussia and formed a new alliance with its rival of 250 years, Austria. This was the real beginning of the 200-year Franco-German conflict. Far from being secure, Hanover was now threatened by France and Austria.
In an attack that replicated his sudden seizure of Silesia, Frederick invaded the Austrian protectorate of Saxony in August 1756. Austria, France, and Russia declared war on Prussia. While it was reminiscent of the seizure of Silesia, the attack on Saxony, coming on the heels of the arrangements with Britain, also presaged the German attack on Poland immediately after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. And the cascade of treaty-triggered declarations of war would be somewhat replicated 158 years later at the outbreak of World War I (Chapters 8 and 10).
France would protect Austria, but Austria was not bound to assist France—it was sufficient incentive for the French to detach Austria from the British. These tergiversations became known as the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756.
In 1755, the Thirteen Colonies had about 1.5 million people, compared with a little more than four times that in Great Britain (excluding Ireland), around 15 million in France, 3.5 million in Prussia, and just under two million in the Netherlands. The American colonies had a faster rate of growth and higher standard of living than any of the major powers. They were politically primitive but, as events were to prove, had political leadership more talented than the governors the British haphazardly sent to rule over them, and even than the mature European powers themselves. The instances of statehood were already close to hand, though few thought in these terms, especially as the French menace loomed larger and more imminently than ever. The myth of the paltry obscurity of a handful of disparate and insignificant settlements, however, is much exaggerated, both by British snobbery and by the requirements of the mythos of America’s birth.
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