First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [108]
The withdrawal freed Rodney from anxiety for the fate of the Leewards under his command but not from his rage over the blundered battle, which had spoiled “that glorious opportunity perhaps never to be recovered of terminating the naval contest in these seas.” He craved a renewed opportunity for decisive action. Just at this time he learned from a captured American ship that a French squadron of 7 liners escorting troop ships had been sent to America to aid the rebels. This was de Ternay’s squadron bringing Rochambeau’s army. Perceiving that the added enemy would outnumber the British at New York and gain superiority in American waters, Rodney decided he must go to New York to save the situation. During his enforced idleness in Paris, he had kept his mind at work in studying a strategy for America, where he believed the war was being badly mishandled. He had formulated his thoughts in a letter to Sandwich in 1778, soon after France had entered the war. No copy is extant, but references by himself and others indicate that, first of all, Rodney believed in the necessity of viewing Britain’s conflicts as a whole, as a single war with a united plan for all its forces and a specific aim. Based on his recognition that French aid to the rebel colonies would now be a decisive factor, he advised that England’s effort should be to keep the French busy in the West Indies, so that they could not spare ships or men to intervene in America, and that during the hurricane months, when operations in the Caribbean were static, he should take his fleet to the American coast and, by uniting all available resources there, crush the rebellion. Sandwich had acknowledged and approved, or wrote Rodney a letter to that effect, but in fact England did not have enough ships to spare for action in the West Indies to keep the French busy.
While Rodney prepared for his venture, his friend Wraxall, who spent much time with him at his residence in Cleveland Row just before he left for America, found him “naturally sanguine and confident” and repeatedly prone to talk too much about himself.
The only change the British war ministers made was to name a new Commander-in-Chief of British forces in America. Sir William Howe, whose heart was not in the fight, was replaced by Sir Henry Clinton, who was not an improvement. The appointment of Clinton—a cousin of the Duke of Newcastle, manager-in-chief of political patronage—was not unrelated to his having the right “connections.” It gave direction of the war in the field to a man of neurotic temperament, whose constant hesitation always made him reach decisions too late for the event that required them.
Within three months of his appointment in May, 1778, Clinton’s survey of the elements of the situation—its immense geography, the fixed resolve of the rebels on nothing less than independence, as the Carlisle Commission was just then discovering, and the absence of active support by a large and eager body of Loyalists which the British had counted upon—left the new Commander-in-Chief with little enthusiasm and no illusions. Almost his first act, as he tells in his postwar narrative, was to solicit the King for leave to resign, on the ground of the “impracticability” of the war. Refused in his request, Clinton became as unhappy in his function as Lord North was in the premiership, not so much from North’s sense of personal unfitness for the post as from recognition, like Pitt’s before him, that the war was unwinnable. The means were too limited for the task. He complained of delay in promised reinforcements, which left him without adequate forces and “without money,