First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [109]
“For God’s sake, My Lord,” he wrote in one exasperated outburst, “if you wish me to do anything, leave me to myself and let me adapt my efforts to the hourly change of circumstances.” By September, 1780, he writes flatly to Germain his opinion of the “utter impossibility of carrying on the war without reinforcement.” This was wishing for the moon. Imperial Britain did not have the population to match the extent of her dominion, nor the funds to spend on more mercenaries, whose further employment would, in any case, have risked rancorous fury in the Opposition. Reinforcements would not be forthcoming. It was the old—and ever new—condition in war of ambitions outreaching resources.
Believing his field army in New York to be too few in numbers (which seems to have been a case of nerves, since he well knew that Washington’s army, suffering from shortages and mutinies, could not attack), and alarmed by “threatening clouds … which begin to gather in all quarters,” Clinton became prey to “the deepest uneasiness” and, like Lord North, repeatedly peppered the King with his wish to be relieved of the chief command and to turn it over to Lord Cornwallis, who was conducting the campaign in the South. Now in his uneasiness he not merely asked, but “implored” His Majesty to be relieved of the high command, and on a third occasion, his plea becomes a “prayer” for release. Though he was clearly not a general for the bold offensives wanted by the King, he was retained. King George, in his passionate conviction of righteous conquest and confidence in bold action, was left to depend for his chief lieutenants, one in the political and one in the military field, on a pair of reluctant coachmen, each of whom wished only to let go of the reins and descend from the coachman’s box. That is not the way wars are won.
The most active fight in America at this time was in the southern states, where the British campaign was intended to regain the area that contained the greatest number of Loyalists in the hope of mobilizing their support. Here the most active British Army leader from whom the most was expected, Lord Cornwallis, wrote ruefully to a fellow-officer in Virginia, “Now my dear friend, what is our plan? Without one we cannot succeed.” Clinton, he told his friend, has no plan “and I assure you I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures.” Supposed to advance northward through Virginia, the campaign was halted by the capacity of Nathanael Greene, Washington’s most reliable general, to stay in the field despite defeats and to wear down the British deployed against him. Greene was carrying out a Pyrrhic strategy foreseen by an enemy, General Murray, Wolfe’s lieutenant and Governor of Quebec, who had predicted that if the business was to be decided by numbers, the enemy’s (Americans’) plan should be on the Chinese model “to lose a battle to you every week until you are reduced to nothing.”
While land warfare in America tottered along inconclusively, Rodney felt he must play a personal hand at trying to infuse some purposeful motion. He undertook the mission to America on his own authority. His commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Leeward Islands and the seas adjoining gave him virtually a free hand in the Western Hemisphere. “I flew on the wings of national enthusiasm,” he wrote to a friend, “to disappoint the ambitious designs of the French and cut off all hope from the rebellious and deluded Americans.” If delusion was anywhere, it lay with the British in their belief, which Rodney clearly shared, that the Americans had somehow been deluded into rebellion by self-serving agitators. Recognizing no fundamental movement for independence, they failed to take the Revolution seriously.
On his arrival in America in September, 1780, Rodney swept the coast of the Carolinas and