First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [91]
The danger in complacency is that it causes the possessor to ignore as unimportant the local factors and conditions that govern other people with whom it deals. Britons faced with the American Revolution were not interested in Americans or in their magnificent continent reaching from ocean to ocean. No British monarch had ever seen his domain across the Atlantic, and no British minister in the fifteen years, 1760–75, when insurgency was brewing to a boil visited the Colonies to learn what was exercising the unruly subjects or what kind of people they were. The consequence was ignorance, which is a disadvantage in war.
“Know thy enemy,” the sine qua non of successful military operations, was entirely lacking in the war with America, and complacency allowed no room for effort to make good the lack. Lord Sandwich, for example, employed no proper means to obtain intelligence of French naval movements, according to a charge in Parliament by Lord Stormont, the British Ambassador in Paris. His “negligence” was “inconceivable” in that it allowed French warships to leave their ports to sail for the West Indies without an alert to the British at sea who were watching for them. “We have no intelligence,” the Ambassador told the House of Lords. Stormont said he had done his utmost repeatedly to arrange for cutters to lay off the French ports to get information, but could not prevail on Lord Sandwich to grant them.
More fundamental was the attitude of the chief war minister, Lord George Germain, who had won his position through the King’s favor by advocating the “utmost force of this kingdom” to finish the rebellion in one campaign, which should conclude with an offer to the Colonies of submission or ruin. That was the extent of his government’s understanding of the rebels.
Planlessness followed from the start of the war, when the British assumed that no plan was needed to suppress a rebellion—only hard blows. Carelessness followed from the assumption that the superiority of British force was so great that it made taking pains in performance unnecessary. A more basic deteriorating factor was dissension at home.
Politics as much as anything defeated the British in the American war. The British have always been obsessed with politics, not so much in terms of opposing systems of belief as in terms of who’s in and who’s out. Transmitted to the navy by the Keppel-Palliser quarrel, it cut like a carving knife through the solidity of the senior service. “So violent was the spirit of party and faction” in the fleet, as Wraxall has told us, “as almost to extinguish every patriotic sentiment.”
Mistrust of Sandwich after the Keppel affair was virtually total except for the King, who relied on him and who, knowing nothing of the nuts and bolts required to keep a fleet serviceable, accepted what he was told and dutifully believed in the navy as a British eagle which would pounce upon and destroy his enemies. Constitutionally unable to change ministers for fear that the unknown would be worse than the known, he held on to Sandwich as he had held on to Bute and now Lord North, as a sinking swimmer might hold on to a post when the waters are closing over his head.
The Opposition despised the First Lord. One of its leading figures, the Duke of Richmond, wrote to Keppel when he was first offered command of the Grand Fleet, before Ushant, that he did not think it a matter for congratulation. If Sandwich has a “bad fleet” to send out, he would “be glad to put it under the command of a man whom he does not love.” He advised Keppel to have each ship examined