First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [122]
More emphatic than if he had spoken up, he stood with a brave little minority of four peers in support of Lord Camden’s motion in March, 1766, opposing the Declaratory Bill. The Bill was a government measure to assert Parliament’s right of taxation of the Colonies, intended to counteract what was seen as appeasement of the Americans by the repeal of the Stamp Act. As far as was reported, Cornwallis did not open his mouth in the debate on the Bill, but the remarks in the House of Lords by Lord Camden, for whose position he voted, were unequivocal. The Declaratory Bill, Camden said, was “absolutely illegal, contrary to the fundamental laws of this constitution,” itself “grounded on the eternal and immutable laws of nature,” because “taxation and representation are inseparably united.… this position is founded on the laws of nature for whatever is a man’s own is absolutely his own; no man hath a right to take it from him without his consent. Whoever attempts to do it attempts an injury, whoever does it, commits a robbery; he throws down and destroys the distinction between liberty and slavery.” These words could have been spoken by Tom Paine or Patrick Henry if not John Adams, who would never have allowed himself so romantic a view of “natural law.” They were presumably approved by Lord Cornwallis, since he voted with the speaker. Yet he did not refuse to take a command in the war, as did Lord Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Ralph Abercromby, a hero in the Brunswick war and an outstanding soldier in the army, and others who disapproved of coercing America. On the contrary, Cornwallis volunteered for an assignment when the Americans took up armed rebellion and the British Army needed reinforcements in America. Governed by an exacting sense of duty, he felt that as a soldier holding the King’s commission it was his duty to help suppress rebellion. Yet either duty worked slowly or else ambivalence was already operating, for it was seven months after the Americans fired the shots at Lexington before he decided to accept a command in the suppression of the rebellion. The lag was due in part to the pleas of his wife, to whom he was deeply attached. In February, 1776, however, he departed for America in command of seven regiments, which he took to Halifax where General Howe had retired after yielding Boston. Cornwallis saw action in the battles of Long Island and White Plains. He captured Fort Lee on the Jersey shore of the Hudson and afterward pursued Washington across New Jersey to Trenton. Here he frustrated Washington’s advance in the Battle of the Brandywine and went on to occupy Philadelphia.
Cornwallis does not appear to have been too strongly gripped by the duty that had brought him to America, for war against a tattered colonial militia did not appeal to him as likely to add to a Guard officer’s reputation. Accordingly, he took the long voyage home on leave in 1777. Promoted to Lieutenant General, he returned to duty in America in 1778, sailing on the same ship with the Carlisle Peace Commission. His concern that his suite might be crowding the space wanted by the commissioners for their own use was outweighed by the enjoyment of the two earls’ friendly games of whist. In America he found himself named second in command to Sir Henry Clinton, who had been appointed Commander-in-Chief to replace the inglorious William Howe and who soon showed himself even less aggressive than his predecessor. When given command of the southern front, Cornwallis, despairing of Clinton’s inaction and convinced, like Rodney, that the war was being mismanaged, made his attempt to resign that was