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By Root 989 0

surrender of the enemy and the giving up of his purpose, whatever it may be, by the military destruction of his armed forces and his supporting resources, by penetration and occupation of his territory, by fear and despair induced in the population by terror. From the days of the Tarquins on the banks of the Tiber to the Germans in Belgium in 1914 and again at Lidice in Czechoslovakia in 1942, when every adult of the town was collected in a group and shot dead in retaliation for some act of resistance, this method has rarely brought the desired results, unless it is total and undeviating. Did Clinton and Tryon expect otherwise? More likely they and their soldiers were simply moved to vent violence by the angry frustration of unsuccessful war, which is what usually generates atrocity—as in the case of the Americans at My Lai—except when it is authorized and organized from above, as in the case of the Spanish in the Netherlands, the Japanese in China and the Germans in both World Wars. It is always possible to say, and is always said afterward, that the agents were merely acting on orders of higher authority, but when does normal inhibition in the common soldier or other agent cry stop? If inhibition has been systematically weakened by prevailing policy, it does not operate.

Given the firm intent of the British to hold their empire of the American Colonies and the equally strong intent of the Colonies to achieve independence, there was in fact no solution to the conflict. From King George down, every Englishman, including most of the Opposition, was convinced that Great Britain’s greatness depended on the possession of colonies and that to give up America would mean the fall of Britain as a world power and her reduction, as Walpole wrote, “to a miserable little island as insignificant as Denmark or Sardinia.” “If American independence were recognized,” declared Shelburne, a leader of the Opposition, “on that day, the sun of Great Britain is set.” Even if she won, trade and useful connection with an angry defeated people would dry up, unless measures were taken to recover their friendship. The Tryon raid did not seem the surest way to recover friendship.

Without trade or colonies, Britain’s ruin seemed foretold. “Like Carthage she will fall when the commerce on which she is founded is no more,” an official said, a prophecy that found an echo in the sage of Strawberry Hill. “She will lose her East Indian Colonies next,” Horace Walpole predicted, “and then France will dictate to us more imperiously than ever we did to Ireland.” France had every such intention, but history had laid out a different path. The challenge of Napoleon, thirty-odd years later, stimulated Britain to a revival of her energies and her will, and when her recovered navy under Nelson turned the challenger back at the Nile and at Trafalgar, Britain, instead of sliding as predicted to the level of Denmark or Sardinia, regained her dominant place as a world power and retained it for another hundred years until the crash of 1914.

In America, the Carlisle peace overture had brought only failure to finish a humiliating and interminable war. Faced with the absolute refusal of members of Congress to meet for talks, Carlisle and his fellow-commissioners went home in November, 1778, empty-handed. Their visit, like the Tryon Raid, had been an exercise in futility.

At the same time, American fortunes suffered a graver exercise in futility in the fiasco of the first military assistance produced by the French alliance—the more disappointing because it was naval assistance, the kind wanted most. Early in July, 1778, when the French first entered the war, a French fleet of 12 ships of the line and 3 frigates, under Admiral Count d’Estaing, had arrived on the coast of Virginia and moved up to New York. The plan of action contemplated a joint offensive on New York by the French fleet together with American land forces, but the large French warships found themselves unable to cross the bar at Sandy Hook in New York Bay. At Washington’s suggestion for a combined attack on