First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [92]
Britain’s greatest dread, the belligerency of France in alliance with the American rebellion, was now a fact. It put odds heavily in the balance against her and convinced many of the government party that the immediate necessity was to relieve Britain of a war both costly and profitless in order to free her to meet the French challenge, and the only way to do that was a settlement with the Colonies, as the Whigs had long been urging. Slowly the discouraging truth that the war was unwinnable was forcing itself on the notice of what Edward Gibbon called the “thinking friends of government,” meaning others like himself.* Chatham, formerly Pitt, the great Prime Minister, was the first to have pointed this out, in a speech on November 20, 1777. Before he knew of the American victory at Saratoga, he had told the House of Lords, “I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you cannot conquer America.…” The war was “unjust in its principles, impractible in its means, and ruinous in its consequences.” The employment of “mercenary sons of rapine and plunder” (meaning the Hessians and other German mercenaries) had aroused “incurable resentment.” “If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms—never—never—never.” By insisting on submission, Britain would lose all benefit from the Colonies through their trade and their support against the French, and gain for herself only renewed war against France and Spain. The only remedy was to terminate hostilities and negotiate a treaty of settlement.
The logistics, Charles James Fox added, pursuing the argument, made military success impossible. On land, generals were placed too far apart to aid each other, while America’s immensely long coast with its innumerable bays, estuaries and river mouths and her self-sufficiency in food, if not in arms, made her virtually impervious to sea power. Indeed, hostilities worked the other way around, by depriving Britain of the tall white pines from America for her masts, and of seasoned timber, tar and other naval stores for ship-building. Whereas in a European land war siege of a capital city usually led to surrender, the separateness of colonial regions meant that capture of New York or Boston or Philadelphia brought no finality. And there was a final problem that Chatham had also remarked. Even if you could conquer the Americans, you could not make them willing partners.
Failure to quell rebels by conventional military action was humiliating to Britain, and the failure to arouse active support by the Loyalists, who had been expected to rise up and overwhelm their misguided countrymen and had been counted upon as a primary component in the military suppression of the rebellion, was a major disappointment, which the British seemed not to realize was their own fault. In their persisting attitude of scorn for colonials, they made no effort to recruit Loyalists for an organized force of their own, or form Loyalist divisions or even brigades, or to offer them commissions as officers in the British Army. If the Loyalists had wished to fight as an organized force and do more than protect themselves from harassment and persecution by the patriots, what military command could they join? The British government, while paying German mercenaries at increasingly disagreeable cost and adding a few miserable results from Irish recruiting, did not use what they had at hand and complained unhappily when a Loyalist army did not arise out of the earth spontaneously. Loyalists, who mainly belonged to the propertied class, had in fact stronger feelings about the war than the ruling British. Their sentiments sprang less from devotion to the Crown than to their privileged position, which the Revolution threatened to overturn. Although the revolutionary leaders were landowners like Washington and Jefferson and men of wealth like the Morrises, they were felt to represent