Independence (43 page)

The prime minister knew that many within his ministry, as well as in Parliament, looked unkindly on any negotiations with the American rebels, at least until the provincials announced their compliance with the Declaratory Act and the North Peace Plan unveiled in February 1775. North additionally believed that the commissioner would need as much leverage as possible to bring the colonists to acquiesce in parliamentary sovereignty. Since July, North had dramatically augmented the power of Britain's armed forces in America and secured passage of the American Prohibitory Bill, the measure that was to shut down all colonial commerce. He saw both steps as necessary precursors for securing Parliament's approval of a peace commission and for making the Americans accede to Parliament's sovereignty. North got what he wanted. Just before Christmas Parliament consented to sending a peace commissioner who was to “confer with proper persons” and accept the Americans' recognition of parliamentary authority. North believed that the American capitulation—for that is what acquiescence to parliamentary authority amounted to—would be followed by the removal of all restrictions on colonial commerce, the repeal of the Tea Act and Coercive Acts, and by real and fruitful negotiations aimed at resolving other provincial grievances.

With a bit of luck, Lord Howe, the peace commissioner, might have alighted in America before the end of January 1776, announcing his readiness to parley and capitalizing on the spadework done by Drummond. But nothing was ever simple in British politics. Five months elapsed before Howe sailed for America.

Howe not only was an admiral; he also had sat in Parliament for nearly fifteen years. Never firmly aligned with any faction, he usually voted with those in orbit around Earl Chatham. He favored a conciliatory policy toward America, though he never advocated the surrender of parliamentary sovereignty. Like Burke, Fox, and Dartmouth, among others, Howe wished to avoid compelling the colonists to profess their utter capitulation to Parliament. To do so, he feared, would only drive the Americans to armed rebellion. Howe never doubted that the Americans could be crushed by force. But he knew that war would engender an American bitterness toward the mother country that would not vanish until generations had passed. However, Howe was a warrior and did not shrink from his responsibilities. When hostilities commenced, he accepted appointment as the commander of Great Britain's North American squadron. Crushing the rebellion on land, if it came to that, would be the responsibility of his brother, General William Howe. A month after he was commissioned to command the navy in American waters, and thirty days before Parliament agreed to a peace commission, Admiral Howe was asked by Dartmouth to go to America as the government's envoy to negotiate peace. Howe readily accepted. He appears to have believed that North favored negotiations and that he would have the latitude to conduct peace talks more or less on the terms demanded by the First Congress.
29

Howe had wished to sail for America before the end of 1775, but wrangles within the ministry over his selection, and friction over his instructions, led to interminable delays. Sandwich, the head of the Admiralty, did not relish having his naval commander serve as a peace commissioner. This view was shared by Germain, who entered the cabinet a few days after Howe's appointment. Germain feared that Howe was too soft on American issues to handle the responsibility. Howe responded to their caviling by threatening to resign as naval commander, a step that North desperately wished to prevent, fearing a political firestorm. The squabble dragged on from November until February 1776. It was resolved when the king intervened. Howe agreed to stay on after he was promoted to the rank of vice admiral. Sandwich and Germain were mollified by the appointment of General Howe to serve with his brother as a peace commissioner.

Skirmishing over the instructions for the Howe brothers was no less time-consuming. North left to Germain the responsibility for drafting the commissioner's instructions. Since before taking office, Germain had been adamant that there was to be no negotiation with the American rebels. In his maiden speech as American secretary, he had told the House of Commons that the colonists must lay down their arms and accept parliamentary sovereignty. Their refusal to do was to be met by British force until all “rebellious resistance” was suppressed.
30
If anything, Germain's position grew more rigid once he was in power. Never wavering, he asserted in one cabinet meeting after another that the Howe brothers must not be authorized to conduct negotiations until the Americans agreed to the authority of Parliament “in all cases whatsoever.” It struck William Knox, who as an undersecretary in the American Department had worked with Germain on a daily basis, that the new American secretary—a man who had once suffered the grossest humiliation for his purported failure as a soldier—was eager to resolve the Anglo-American quandary by military means. Germain, Knox implied, “having now collected a vast Force and having a fair prospect of subduing the colonies,” could not resist the allure of smashing the insurgents with armed force.
31

Howe, in contrast, wished to have the latitude to conduct serious negotiations when he thought it opportune to do so. Some opposition MPs saw the prudence of Howe's position. Offering the Americans both the carrot and the stick held the greatest hope of peace. Furthermore, Howe and his brother would be in America—“upon the spot,” as the king himself had said—where they could see clearly, and immediately, whether negotiations might be productive. It seemed to some to be injudicious, if not reckless, to refuse to negotiate. Thomas Walpole, for instance, chastised Germain for failing to “know of human nature.” It was unthinkable, Walpole said, that colonists who were willing to die “in the defense of their supposed rights” would abjectly surrender with no “adequate or just provision … for obtaining” those rights having been agreed to by British representatives through formal negotiations.
32
Others in Parliament made one last stab at forcing the government to negotiate. Grafton introduced a resolution in the House of Lords calling on the king to issue a proclamation announcing an armistice to be followed by genuine negotiations with the colonists. This would forestall what he called Germain's “new doctrine of unconditional submission,” a quite different policy, he believed, than Parliament had consented to when it approved the North Peace Plan a year earlier. Camden supported the motion, saying that negotiations alone could “lay the foundation for a treaty, which can be the only safe road to conciliation.” Grafton's motion was voted down by a three-to-one margin.
33

In the House of Commons, Fox tried to avert further hostilities by calling for an inquiry into “the disgraces the British arms [army] had suffered.” In a lengthy speech he left no doubt that he believed the two costly defeats in Massachusetts had arisen from “folly in the cabinet.” Some, like Isaac Barré, endorsed the proposal and charged North's government “with the loss of America.” Barré directly confronted Germain: “Give us back our colonies! You have lost America! It is your ignorance, blunders, cowardice, which have lost America.” Some, he said, were calling Germain “the [William] Pitt of the day,” which Barré thought was balderdash. “Pitt [was] a great man,” Barré said, but Germain was taking Great Britain down the road to ruination. “America would never submit to be taxed,” he declared. Germain and his fellow “architects” were leading Great Britain deeper into a needless and tragic war that would result in the nation being “buried in its ruins.” Fox's call for an investigation was defeated by a two-to-one vote.
34

While the battle raged in the cabinet and Parliament, North and Dartmouth threatened to resign, hoping their ploy would prompt ministers and MPs alike to grant the Howe brothers the freedom to conduct negotiations. As had been the case when Howe threatened to resign, this tempest was resolved by the intervention of the king. After persuading North to stay on, the monarch directed his prime minister to obtain, and follow, the advice of William Murray, Lord Mansfield, the lord chief justice. Mansfield agreed with Germain, who clearly had a majority of Parliament on his side. It was not what North had hoped for, but he and Dartmouth complied. Howe did not. He threatened for a second time to resign. Adding that his brother would probably refuse to serve as well, Lord Howe said that he was “disqualified” from serving in a capacity in which he was to offer the Americans the choice of surrender or the continuation of British military operations. Lord Howe proposed instead that he and his brother be authorized to declare an armistice should the Americans consent “to offer a contribution in lieu of taxation, lay down their arms, [and] restore the civil government” that had existed in each colony before the imperial troubles began. Howe envisaged this as only a first step. He also asked for the authority to open talks on the colonists' additional grievances once the armistice took effect.

Germain vociferously objected. He demanded that the Americans formally assent to Parliament's sovereignty before any further steps be taken. Once again, Lord Mansfield was called on to resolve the dispute. After a joint visit by North and Germain, the lord chief justice proposed the slightest compromise: The commissioners were not to demand the colonists' acquiescence in the Declaratory Act but were to wait to see what concessions the Americans offered. Only if the colonists voluntarily accepted the unlimited authority of Parliament, said Mansfield, should the envoys proceed. Having won again, Germain promptly consented. Howe, probably hoping to save face, did not accept Mansfield's terms, and during a span of six weeks he and Germain haggled, mostly over negligible points. Ultimately, Howe accepted instructions that in substance hardly differed from those that Germain had first drafted four months earlier.
35
At last, on May 3—some 125 days after Wilson and Dickinson sought to lay the foundation for talks with the commissioners—the king formally named the Howe brothers as his peace commissioners and vested them with their instructions. The commissioners were forbidden to negotiate with Congress or any colony still under a rebel government. Once the legitimate colonial assemblies agreed to adhere to the laws of Parliament and consented to make restitution to the Loyalists for the property losses they had suffered, and after all American armed forces had laid down their arms and all fortifications had been dismantled or surrendered, the Howe brothers were authorized to issue pardons, suspend the Coercive Acts and the American Prohibitory Act, and listen to the colonists' additional grievances.
36

Lord Howe and his brother were so-called peace commissioners, raising in the public mind in England, and among some wishful-thinking reconciliationists in Congress, the presumption that they were being sent to America to engage in sincere diplomacy to resolve the colonists' grievances. North would have liked for them to do that, but the vast majority in his cabinet and in Parliament never had the slightest intention of sending envoys for such purposes. From start to finish, the whole point of dispatching the commissioners was to secure the colonists' servility to the imperial government, an outcome that nearly all in the British government believed could be achieved through economic coercion and the triumph of British arms on American battlefields.

No one in the mother country understood better than Edmund Burke what was occurring, and why, and what almost certainly would be its outcome. He appeared to think that the Tory mentality—that is, the cast of mind of the most politically conservative of his countrymen—habitually fixated on resolving matters through the use of force. People of such persuasion “always flourish in the decay, and perhaps by the decay of the Glory of their Country,” he lamented. As Howe sailed away on his mission of futility, Burke added, “we are a people who have just lost an Empire.”
37

As early as mid-March the members of Congress knew from London press reports that one or more peace commissioners were to be sent. Only the most gullible, or desperate, believed this step would satisfactorily resolve Anglo-American differences. Grasping at straws, North Carolina's William Hooper chose to think that the commissioners would be empowered to present Congress with “proffers [that] will be liberal.” Drawing on the most optimistic puffery in English newspapers, he took as gospel that the “haughty monarch” had accorded his envoys the authority to negotiate “without limitations,” and even “to part with us” rather “than hold us upon … an ignominious condition.”
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Few in Congress were so sanguine. As the months piled up following the king's mention of peace commissioners, some delegates even suspected the monarch's emissaries would never come. Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut called them the “Phanptom … Commissioners.” If they did materialize, he added, it was an “idle Whim” to imagine that they would do more than offer pardons.
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John Adams thought only the deluded could expect substantive negotiations, and he predicted that a commissioner empowered to truly conciliate was “a Messiah that will never come.”
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Samuel Adams was certain that George III would concede nothing to his American subjects. He is “more unrelenting and malignant than was [the] Pharaoh towards the Israelites in Egypt.” But something good might come of it, Adams believed. Once and for all, “the doubting and … timid” colonists would see that London had nothing to offer America but the sword, and when at last they understood that truth, all their hopes “of reconciliation must vanish.”
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CHAPTER 10

“T
HE
F
ATAL
S
TAB
”

A
BIGAIL
A
DAMS AND THE
R
EALITIES OF THE
S
TRUGGLE FOR
I
NDEPENDENCE

FOR FEAR OF SHATTERING
wartime unity, the word “independence” had seldom been uttered in Congress in 1775. Times had changed by the spring of 1776. The delegates were daily “disputing … about independency,” one congressman remarked. Some deputies were certain that the severance of all ties with Great Britain was not far away. Elbridge Gerry had been in Philadelphia barely a month before he pronounced that the day when America will “give Law to herself … will soon take place.” John Adams and others believed that wartime exigencies dictated that independence must be declared before long. As colonists, “We have hitherto conducted half a War,” Adams said, but independence would enable Americans to trade with foreign nations, and that was essential for waging war more forcefully. Others thought the combination of British policies and hostilities had rapidly eroded the mood for reconciliation. The war, according to Richard Henry Lee, had made Americans aware of the “British crimes” of killing its colonists and seeking the “barbarous spoliation” of its colonies. Lee added that all but Tories and the most intransigent reconciliationists realized that one might as well “expect to wash an Ethiopian white, as to remove the taint of despotism from the British court.”
1

When John Adams returned to Philadelphia on February 8 from his winter furlough at home, he arrived with a list of measures that he planned to advocate at the appropriate times. They included issuance of an American currency; a ban on the exportation of gold and silver; a national tax to finance the war; congressional subsidies for flax, hemp, cotton, and wool; commercial treaties with France, Spain, Holland, and Denmark; a “
Declaration of Independency
”; a constitution for the new American nation; and alliances with France and Spain.
2

As the winter of 1776 faded, Congress appeared to be swept by the sense that it was treading water, awaiting events that would push it to do what by then almost certainly a majority of delegates were ready to do: set America free of Great Britain. Those who favored independence did not have long to wait. In a span of roughly seventy-five days beginning in late February, a series of occurrences and circumstances pushed Congress to the brink of declaring independence.

The first pivotal moment came on the next-to-last day of February. Freshly arrived newspapers from London brought word of the American Prohibitory Act. Listening as some of the newspaper accounts were read on the floor of Congress, the delegates learned that since New Year's Day American ships sailing off the coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland had been subject to capture. As of March 1, less than forty-eight hours away, all colonial vessels bound for or departing from American ports were “to be seized & confiscated” by the Royal Navy.
3
New England had been under a blockade since the outset of the war, but henceforth the commerce of every colony was to be interdicted. “Firmness in the strongest terms” was London's intractable answer to Congress's petition for conciliation, said one delegate, who also believed that Parliament's latest step “shew[s] that the Colonies are of but very little consequence to Britain.”
4

It may seem odd that word of London's having resorted to all-out war—economic as well as military—could so inflame the colonists. After all, a state of hostilities had existed for ten months, and the colonists had long since boycotted all trade with the mother country. Yet the news of the American Prohibitory Act was a savage blow to most Americans. In some measure this was because of their long and ardent affection for Great Britain. Throughout the eighteenth century the belief had been deep-seated in America that the mother country was the most benevolent, nurturing, and enlightened of all nations. But now, atop the realization that London was sending a huge army and a large fleet to crush the rebellion, the colonists had received the disquieting tidings that the British government was prepared to deprive colonial civilians of essential goods. For some, this confirmed the newfound wisdom that the English in reality “know so little of our feelings or character.” For others, it heightened the malevolent image of the parent state that had taken root during the past two years. Wishing to leave nothing to chance, Congress had its president, John Hancock, notify the colonies of the “Strain of Rapine and Violence” that drove the British government.
5

The timing of the American Prohibitory Act was important as well. For one thing, news of the legislation arrived at the same moment that word spread through the colonies of recently intercepted letters from Germain to Governor Eden of Maryland. The letters revealed not only that Maryland's chief executive had been transmitting sensitive military information to London but also that the ministry envisaged an invasion that year of the Carolinas and possibly Virginia. The purloined letters were sent to General Charles Lee, commander of the Continental army in the Southern Department, who passed them on to Richard Henry Lee in Congress. Like their northern brethren, southern colonists now knew that their trade was to be blocked and that their provinces faced an imminent assault by British military forces.
6
News of the blockage of trade also hit many colonists with singular intensity because they had expected the arrival of peace commissioners, not an escalation of punitive measures. Conjoined with what one congressman called Lord North's “declaration of war” came word—happily divulged by Franklin, who had gotten the information from friends in London—that Parliament had adjourned at Christmas 1775 without having confirmed any peace commissioners. Moreover, Parliament had no plans to reconvene until late January. London seemed to be in no hurry to parley with the colonists.
7

Every member of Congress understood that Britain's all-encompassing war on the colonists' trade meant that America must establish commercial ties outside the British Empire. To protect its economy, America would have to act as if it was independent, whether or not it had formally proclaimed itself a sovereign nation. Once again, the harsh realities of war were moving Congress a step closer to actually declaring independence. “It cannot surely after all this be imagind that we consider ourselves or mean to be considered by others in any State but that of Independence,” said Samuel Adams. Other delegates saw things in a similar light. The American Prohibitory Act “will cause a final separation,” New Hampshire's William Whipple predicted. Joseph Hewes, a delegate from North Carolina who had yearned to be reunited with the mother country, saw that there no longer was any “prospect of a reconciliation.” Despairing, Hewes said that “nothing is left now but to fight it out.” Some delegates, he reported home, already “urge strongly for Independency and eternal separation.” Others, he said, wished “to wait a little longer” until the voice of the people was heard or conversations with the peace commissioners took place, though not a few were so outraged that they hoped Congress would refuse to receive the peace commissioners if and when they arrived.
8

No one was happier than John Adams to learn of the American Prohibitory Act. He thought the legislation might more aptly be titled the “Act of Independency.” The “King, Lords and Commons have united in Sundering this Country, and I think forever. It is a compleat Dismemberment of the British Empire,” he rejoiced. He lamented that Congress was hamstrung awaiting the peace commissioners. “The Tories, and Timids … expect great Things from them,” though the majority anticipated only “Insults and Affronts.” But for the sake of unity the majority had to wait for the minority's inescapable disillusionment. Even so, Adams was not despondent. Less than three weeks after learning that Britain hoped to strangle the colonists' trade, Congress threw open every American port to trade from all nations. Parliament's age-old restrictions on American trade—to which the First Congress had been willing to adhere—had been repudiated. This prompted Adams to ask: If “This is not Independency … What is?”
9

The wrathful atmosphere created by word of the American Prohibitory Act also enabled John Adams and his faction to enact a measure they had unsuccessfully sought for months. Within days of learning of Parliament's sanction of a total American blockade, Congress legalized privateering, acting on a motion by Samuel Chase, who only a couple of months earlier had opposed the creation of a navy. Privateering was common in the warfare of the day and had long been an American practice during Great Britain's wars with France and Spain. Entrepreneurs invested in armed vessels and seamen signed on, all hoping to strike it rich. The prizes that were taken—that is, the enemy ships that were captured intact—were brought to port and the vessel and cargo were sold. The booty was then divided between the financiers and the armed ship's officers and crew. Since America lacked a navy, merchants and rebel leaders in New England had sought to have Congress make privateering lawful almost the minute that the war began. Their hope, of course, was that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American privateers would sail, intercepting shipments from Great Britain to its army. But many in congress were opposed, largely from fear that North's government would retaliate by attempting to halt the commerce of all the colonies. Now that North's government had done just that, congressional inhibitions instantly collapsed.
10

The American Prohibitory Act, especially as it followed hard on the heels of the debacle in Canada, drove Congress to take another step. Three days after learning of Parliament's legislation, Congress agreed to send Silas Deane to Paris to explore the depth of France's friendship for the American cause. Deane, a lawyer-merchant who had served in the Connecticut delegation from the beginning until January 1776, was chosen because he knew the mind of Congress and, as a former colleague observed, he had been “really Very Usefull here & much esteemed in Congress.”
11
This first-ever American envoy was to meet with private citizens whose names were supplied by Benjamin Franklin. Congress hoped that through these intermediaries Deane would be given access to Foreign Minister Vergennes. In his talks with the French, Deane was to attempt to establish commercial ties, but his first priority was to secure clothing and “Quantities of Arms & Ammunition,” including one hundred pieces of field artillery, for an army of twenty-five thousand men. Revealingly too Deane's instructions—written by Franklin and four reconciliationist congressmen, including Dickinson and Morris—also stipulated that he was to determine “whether, if the Colonies should form themselves into an Independent State, France would … acknowledge them as such” and enter into an alliance “for Commerce, or defence, or both.”
12

After word of the disaster in Canada, Congress yearned for good news from the military front. It got it before winter ended. When General Washington took command of the Continental army, he inherited the siege of Boston, which had begun on the day after Lexington and Concord. It had been successfully conducted for some seventy-five days before Washington arrived, and he maintained it for the next eight months. The operation succeeded in part because, save for the brief recruiting crisis late in 1775, the Americans were always numerically superior. The Continentals usually outnumbered General Howe's redcoats by nearly two to one, and if Yankee militiamen were to be summoned in an emergency, the British army would be confronted by an adversary that was several times its size. Even so, the British had total naval superiority, and Howe might have attempted to break the siege had he thought it worth the trouble. But he saw no sense in running the risk. From the moment he assumed command, Howe planned to withdraw from Boston and launch a campaign to take New York and the Hudson River. Unbeknownst to Washington, Howe remained in Boston through the fall and winter only because the troop transports that would take his army from the besieged city had not arrived.
13

All the while, Washington was eager for action. Vigorous and enterprising, the American commander was temperamentally ill-suited to passive behavior. Besides, he knew that some in Congress and many in New England wanted him to do something, and he also may have chafed under the realization that Artemas Ward—whom he had supplanted—had scored what was seen by all as a daring and magnificent victory at Bunker Hill. Washington also wished to act before British reinforcements arrived. In a September council of war he had raised the possibility of attacking Boston, but his officers nearly unanimously rejected such a course. They thought it too likely to result in an American defeat as great as the one the enemy had suffered at Bunker Hill.
14

Washington was frustrated—he privately complained of the “backwardness” of his officers—but he did not abandon his thoughts of an attack. When the first of autumn's inclement weather arrived in November, making a British attack highly unlikely, Washington sent Henry Knox, the twenty-five-year-old commander of the Continental army's artillery regiment, to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the British ordnance that Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen had captured in May. Knox performed brilliantly. Early in February 1776 he and his party reached Boston after an epic trek through the steep, ice-cloaked Berkshire Mountains. Knox presented to Washington thirty-nine field pieces—about four times the number previously available to the siege army—as well as two howitzers and fourteen mortars.
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