Independence (48 page)

In September 1775 Willing was among the initial batch of delegates chosen to serve on the Secret Committee, Congress’s panel for making sub rosa arms purchases. However, hard on the heels of Morris’s election to Congress six weeks later, Willing resigned from the committee, and Morris—who not only had a proven track record in landing government contracts but also had been privately trading for munitions in the West Indies since the outbreak of the war—took his place. In no time, Willing, Morris and Company obtained several contracts from Congress for trafficking in gunpowder, gunlocks, arms, artillery, and bayonets. It also had a share of the nearly three hundred thousand dollars that Congress appropriated for opening trade in Europe and a guarantee of 5 percent of the profits turned by that commerce. Morris developed cozy ties with the army’s paymaster in Virginia, who channeled business to Willing, Morris and Company in return for government contracts that the congressman secured for him. Morris saw no ethical conflicts in his actions. “[I]t seems to me,” he said in 1776, that “the present opportunity of Improving our Fortunes ought not to be lost especially as the very means of doing it will Contribute to the Service of our Country at the same time.” By mid-February 1776, when Morris came to think that a congressional declaration of independence was a certainty, he was working hard to land a contract to export tobacco from the Chesapeake colonies to France, commerce that long had been illegal under Great Britain’s trade laws. Morris badly wanted a share of that trade.
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Morris appeared to be playing every angle. Early in 1776, he let business contacts in England know that he believed “the Power of Great Britain [was] insurmountable” and that he favored reconciliation. But what Morris really believed was that the war would not go on long before nearly every nation in Europe would “be glad to treat and trade with us on our own terms.” He wanted a role in that traffic, for as commerce with Great Britain dried up in the course of the war, the European trade would be his company’s salvation. Morris had another reason for wanting to get involved in trade with Europe. He thought the most likely outcome of the war would be a stalemate. Great Britain would be unable to crush the rebellion; the colonists would lack the ability to gain victory; a stalemated war would end in a negotiated peace. Morris appeared to believe that after all was said and done, the America colonies would remain part of the British Empire, but London would have to grant greater autonomy to the colonies, including more liberal trading rights outside the empire.
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Morris presumed that the European trade connections he forged during the war would serve him well following hostilities.

Robert Morris and Thomas Willing were still part of the anti-independence bloc in Congress. Each had lived in England, loved England, and was loyal to old country ties. Willing, Morris and Company had innumerable commercial contacts throughout the British Empire and had prospered within the Anglo-American union. As Morris observed just before Christmas 1775: “I abhor the Name & Idea of a Rebel. I neither want or wish a Change of King or Constitution.”
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But both men—Morris especially—were opportunists, and Morris in particular knew that a declaration of American independence was on the horizon. The colonists, he said, “have been drove into it step by step with a reluctance on their part that has been manifested in all their proceedings.”
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He also believed that American independence might serve his interests. If Willing and Morris were typical of the powerful Philadelphia merchants, and of merchants throughout America’s cities, they were a weak reed for Dickinson to depend on in his continued fight against American independence.

“Where the plague are these [peace] Commissioners,” Morris exclaimed as spring dawned in Philadelphia. Nearly one hundred days had passed since the colonists learned of the king’s address, with its vague reference to commissioners, and not a single envoy had been seen. Morris, who had been willing to make peace on the terms worked out with Lord Drummond, prayed for the arrival of a commission empowered to offer “terms fit for Freeman.” If and when the commissioners arrived, he added, they must be willing to negotiate with Congress. Should that not be the case, he said, “they may as well stay where they are.”
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When Morris offered his thoughts in April, the peace commissioners alluded to by the king in October had not been formally appointed. The long delay in dispatching the commissioners was not due to the novelty of the idea. The notion of sending an envoy to America to negotiate a settlement went back at least to early 1774, when Dartmouth, in the course of the debate over how to respond to the Boston Tea Party, had proposed that the ministry send an emissary to the colonies. A year later, during the cabinet’s final peacetime discussions on using force, Dartmouth had again pressed for sending a representative across the sea armed with authority to conduct talks with the colonists. A mission of the sort had been politically untenable for North prior to the outbreak of hostilities, and the prime minister—and, above all, the monarch—also thought it ill-conceived. North had remained convinced that when confronted with the prospect of British force, the colonists would come to their senses, throw out the firebrands and demagogues who had come into power since the Stamp Act crisis, and accept London’s terms leading to reconciliation.

But as news of the bloody disasters suffered by the British army along Battle Road and on Bunker Hill poured into London in the summer of 1775, North quietly grew to think that a negotiated settlement offered Great Britain the best possible way out of its American dilemma. While North was unbending on the issue of parliamentary sovereignty, he privately considered almost everything else to be fair game for negotiations, though he was too adept politically to say so openly.

North’s first challenge was to secure authorization for a peace commissioner. As was customary, the prime minister had a hand in writing the king’s address that opened Parliament in October 1775, and it was North who inserted in the rough draft the puzzling sentence about “persons … so commissioned” to restore the rebellious colonies to the empire. For North, the passage meant that a commissioner would be sent to America to negotiate with the rebels. It is not clear what George III believed he was consenting to, but once the king agreed to the insertion of the passage, North set about naming a commissioner. Dartmouth, in one of his final acts as American secretary, offered Lord Howe the post of peace commissioner. He did so, of course, with North’s approval.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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