THIS HIGHLY important task of shipbuilding was commenced on July 4th, the very day that the United Provinces signed the famous Declaration of Independence, formally breaking their ancient connexion with the Crown and people of Great Britain. This declaration anticipated by a few days the arrival of Admiral Howe at Staten Island, close to New York (where his brother, the General, was in command of an expeditionary force that had landed there) with orders from King George for the pair of them to act as Commissioners for restoring peace, though at the eleventh hour. Colonel Paterson, the Adjutant-General of the Forces, was sent with a letter to General Washington as the Commander-in-Chief of the American armies, stating that the Commissioners were invested with powers of reconciliation, and that they wished their visit to be considered as the first advance towards that desirable object.
After the usual compliments, in which, as well as through the whole conversation, he addressed General Washington by the title of ‘Excellency’, Colonel Paterson entered upon the business by saying that General Howe much regretted the difficulties which had arisen, respecting the address of the letters to General Washington. For, a few days before this interview, General Howe had sent a letter directed ‘To George Washington, Esquire’, which the latter refused to receive, as not being addressed to him in his official capacity. Colonel Paterson explained that the address was deemed consistent with propriety, and founded upon precedents of the like nature, by ambassadors and plenipotentiaries, where disputes of difficulties of rank had arisen. He added that General Washington might recollect he had himself last summer addressed a letter to General Howe, ‘To the Honourable William Howe, Esquire’. Lord Howe and General Howe, he said, did not mean to derogate from the respect or rank of General Washington, for they held his person and character in the highest esteem; and the direction, with the addition of ‘&c., &c., &c.,’ implied everything that ought to follow. The Colonel then produced a letter, which he did not directly offer to General Washington, but observed that it was the same letter which had been sent, and laid it on the table with the superscription ‘To George Washington, &c., &c., &c.’
The General declined the letter. He said that a letter directed to a person in a public character should have some description or indication of it, otherwise it would appear a mere private letter. It was true that ‘&c., &c., &c.’ implied everything, but they also implied anything. The letter to General Howe, now alluded to, was an answer to one received, under a like address from him, which the officer on duty having taken, he did not think proper to return, but answered it in the same mode of address. He should absolutely decline any letter directed to him as a private person, when it related to his public station.
Colonel Paterson then said that General Howe would not urge his delicacy any further, and repeated his assertions that no failure of respect was intended.
After an exchange of views on the subject of the treatment of prisoners on both sides, Colonel Paterson proceeded to say that the goodness and benevolence of the King had induced him to appoint Admiral Lord Howe and General Howe, his Commissioners, to accommodate this unhappy dispute; that they had wide powers and would derive the greatest pleasure from affecting an accommodation, and that he (Colonel Paterson) wished to have this visit considered as marking the first advances to this desirable object.
General Washington replied that he was not invested with any powers on this subject by those from whom he derived his authority. But, he said, from what had appeared or transpired on this head, Lord Howe and General Howe were sent only to grant pardons. Those who had committed no fault, wanted no pardon. The Americans were only defending what they deemed their indisputable right.
Colonel Paterson said, ‘That, your Excellency, would open a very wide held for argument.’ He confessed his apprehensions that an adherence to forms was likely to obstruct business of the greatest moment and concern.
Colonel Paterson was treated with the greatest attention and politeness during the whole business, and expressed acknowledgments that the usual ceremony of blinding his eyes had been dispensed with. At the breaking up of the conference, General Washington strongly invited him to partake of a small collation provided for him, which he politely declined, alleging his late breakfast, and an impatience to return to General Howe, though he had not executed his commission amply as he wished.
While these two royal Commissioners, the Admiral and the General, were endeavouring in their civil capacity to effect a reunion between Great Britain and the Colonies, in order to avert the calamities of war, Congress seemed more determined in opposition. They ridiculed the power with which the Commissioners were invested ‘of granting general and particular pardons to all those who, though they had deviated from their allegiance, were willing to return to their duty’. Their general answer to this was that ‘they who have committed no fault want no pardon’; and immediately entered into a resolution to the effect that ‘the good people of the United States might be informed of the plan of the Commissioners, and what the terms were with which the insidious Court of Great Britain had endeavoured to amuse and disarm them, and that the few Americans who still remained suspended by a hope, founded either in the justice or moderation of their late King, might now at length be convinced that the valour alone of the country was to save its liberties.’
This was immediately followed by another resolution, in order to detach the Germans who had entered into the service of Britain. It was penned in these words:
‘Resolved, that these States will receive all such foreigners who shall leave the armies of His Britannic Majesty in America, and shall choose to become members of any of these States, and they shall be protected in the free exercise of their respective religions, and be invested with the rights, privileges, and immunities of natives, as established by the laws of these States; and, moreover, that this Congress will provide for every such person, fifty acres of unappropriated lands, in some of these States, to be held by him and his heirs as absolute property.’
So there was clearly no other course to be followed but to prosecute the war with energy: and the campaign began with an attack upon Long Island and the capture of New York. Yet the same aggrieved Captain Montrésor, whose remarks upon the supposed blunders of the British I have already quoted, was very hot against this attempted reconciliation. He stigmatized as a greater blunder than any: ‘The sending of the two Howes out as Commanders-in-Chief and Commissioners for restoring peace, with the sword in one hand and the olive-branch in the other; and these two at the same time avowedly in the Opposition and friends to the Americans!’ It is true that General Howe did not prosecute the war with remarkable energy, and that the memory of his elder brother who had died in America in the previous campaign, greatly beloved by the colonists, made him more tender than he otherwise might have been towards them. He rejected the view common to most of his subordinates that ‘we must be permitted to restore to the King his dominion of the country by laying it waste and almost extirpating the present rebellious race, and upon no other terms will he ever possess it in peace.’ Yet Captain Montrésor’s hint of General Howe’s disloyalty to the royal cause cannot be readily accepted; nor the story that was current in the barrack-rooms that the King had warned both General Howe and General Clinton, when they evinced reluctance to serve in America, that they must either do so or starve. It was, I believe, more sloth than disloyalty that kept General Howe from pressing his advantage at the close of this year, when General Washington was almost beat and the war only kept alive by this eminent soldier’s peculiar courage and by the steadfastness of a handful of his adherents, to whom Congress showed itself a worse enemy than any officer of the Crown.
Mention has been made of German mercenaries serving with our forces. To their participation in the war and to that of our Indian allies, the strongest objection was raised both by the Americans themselves and by the Whig Opposition in Great Britain; though hardly with reason, granted the propriety of fighting a war at all. Was there any novelty in the hiring of German mercenaries either by ourselves or by any other nation? There was not. In the Seven Years’ War we had employed great numbers of them upon the battlefields of Europe, where the war was won that freed America from the power of the French. Protestant Germans had been called into Great Britain itself to help in the suppression of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745: as was natural, seeing that we had set a German Protestant dynasty upon the throne of England, while the defeated Papist dynasty had been Scottish. The Sixtieth Regiment, or Royal Americans, consisting of four battalions who were foreigners almost to a man, had not only protected the colonies from the incursions of the Indians under Pontiac but had been used as a police force against the turbulent border people of Virginia and Pennsylvania, to the great gratification of the provincial Assemblies of those colonies. Or was the consideration that these mercenaries were Germans, rather than Swiss or members of some other nation, a source of irritation to the Americans? Again, no. Great numbers of Germans were already residing in America and had been welcomed as the most peaceable, industrious, and valuable immigrants of all; and I have already quoted the resolution of Congress offering citizenship and land to every German soldier who cared to desert. (The ingenious Dr Franklin made sure that this offer came to the notice of those for whom it was intended, by printing it in German and wrapping it around a large number of packages of tobacco, which he allowed to be captured by Hessian foragers; it had a magnetic effect upon intending deserters.) When the question was later raised of a common language, other than English, to unite all the States under a Federal Government, the German was very favourably considered and, but for the opposition of those who favoured the Hebrew, would, I believe, have been adopted.
Or was the vexation that the Americans felt caused by a sense that the Germans should never have been employed in a civil war of British against British? Then the Americans should certainly have refrained from an appeal to the Canadian-French to rise against us, and should never have sent an army to annex Canada; since this was a war of aggression and not to be represented as one fought in defence of their own liberties.
The fact was, the Americans were aware of the very low point to which the war establishment of Great Britain and the Empire had been reduced, and believed that the regiments that could be spared for the purpose of suppressing the Revolution would be totally insufficient for the purpose. A number of Highland clansmen forced to leave their homes because of elevated rents and the poverty of the soil were glad to enlist in our Army; but few other recruits could be beaten up, even among Irish Papists, notwithstanding the increased value of the bounty paid on enlistment and a dangerous leniency in assessing the requisites of height, age, and health in a serving soldier. Nor was the militia of Great Britain in a fit state to be called out for the defence of their country, to take the place of troops sent abroad. The Americans did not reckon on our raising mercenaries at the tremendous expense that was clearly necessary. They believed we would consider that the wisest course was to cut our losses at once: for the cost of the war had already enormously outweighed the possible financial gains to be won by victory. But Great Britain never reckons profit and loss in a monetary sense when she considers her national honour at stake. There was talk of supplementing our forces in America by the hire of twenty thousand barbarous and hardy Russians from the Empress Catherine, and almost they were sent; but the Empress was in the end persuaded to refuse by her friend King Frederick of Prussia. She wrote to King George in her own hand, somewhat impertinently, to the effect that she had not only her own dignity to consider, but his also. To lend him troops in such numbers would be to imply that he was one of those monarchs who could not suppress with his own armies a rebellion in his own domains. Besides, she would not risk the loss of her brave subjects in another hemisphere of the globe, and so far removed from all contact with herself. This was a great disappointment to our people in America, who considered that the employment of the Russians would be in the highest degree politic; not only were they good soldiers and accustomed to extremes of cold and heat but, not having any connexion with America, nor understanding the language, were ‘less likely to be seduced by the artifice and intrigue of those holy hypocrites in Congress’.
However, there are always soldiers to be bought somewhere on the Continent, if the price offered be high enough: for in Germany especially soldiers are like cattle, and, in loyalty to the rulers whose property they are, and, in hope of plunder, will go wherever they are led or driven. They are trained, like spaniels, by the stick. The Duke of Brunswick had a few soldiers to sell. He was a relative by marriage of King George and undertook to provide four thousand infantry and three hundred dragoons in return for fifteen thousand pounds a year paid into his Treasury during their absence abroad, and thirty thousand a year during the two years following their return to Germany. They themselves were to receive the English pay corresponding with their ranks. As a Prince who professed to study the interests of his country, the Duke only detached from his regular forces two battalions of infantry and the dragoons, nor did he supply any horses with the latter. The remainder of the contingent were make-weights of an extreme wretchedness, young boys and worn-out old men unprovided with any material of war or the simplest soldier’s necessaries: they must be clothed and armed on their arrival at Portsmouth. The officers were veterans, living on half-pay which the Duke now threatened to withhold from them if they would not march at his orders.
The Landgrave of Hesse drove a harder bargain with King George, for he had better troops to offer and was well informed of our exigencies. The Hessians were tall, vigorous, well-trained men and so docile that it has always been a proverb in Germany that Hessians and cats are alike born with their eyes closed. He had twelve thousand of them disposable, and thirty-two pieces of artillery. The pay was to be English pay, but a bounty of £110,000 a year was also to be given the Landgrave so long as the troops remained out of his Principality, and for a twelve-month afterwards. For every soldier killed in action a compensation of thirty dollars was also agreed upon. Moreover, England was to pay for clothing and equipping these troops, and the manufacturers of Hesse were to enjoy the profitable contracts. The Landgrave followed the grocer’s fashion of his cousin of Brunswick in, as it were, sanding his sugar and adultering his tea: he mixed in with his Hessian subjects the off-scouring and scum of every barrack-room in Europe. By these means he raised his country from squalor to affluence, built roads, libraries, museums, seminaries, an opera house, and I do not know what else for the comfort and delight of his remaining subjects.
As for the troops sold to King George by the Margrave of Anspach, they were a bad case; they were forced aboard the transports that were to take them overseas by the use of heavy whips and volleys of musketry. Yet this was not a numerous contingent, and for the most part the Germans were as ready to do what was required of them as our own sailors forced to serve by the press-gang – which, by the bye, was exceedingly active at this time. We served beside the Brunswickers on several occasions during the campaign in the North but seldom with any sense of pleasure or security in their companionship. Except for ‘Old Red Hazel’, as our soldiers named General Riedesel, their commander, his two well-trained regular battalions, and the dragoons, they were like a stone round our necks. There seemed no intermediate age among them between grandparents and grandchildren, with the grandparents in the majority; they marched ill, worked slowly, complained much, were ridden with terror of death and were, in brief, wholly unfitted for an active and stern campaign in the frightful woods and deserts that we were to pass through. The famous Prince de Ligne has remarked that a soldier is not at his best when the sap has ceased to mount; most of these poor fellows were already withered – leaf, branch, and root.
A great outcry was also made when it was learned that we were employing Indian warriors against the colonists. It is true that the Indians were cunning, savage, and relentless, but if one side thought fit to employ them as scouts and skirmishers, the other would have been mad to forgo the same military advantages – for they were unequalled in this sort of warfare. It must be noted that the Americans were the first to invite the savages’ assistance in their war against us; for in 1775, while we hesitated, Congress had determined to purchase and distribute among them a suitable assortment of goods to the amount of forty thousand pounds sterling to gain their favour. They also sent a speech to them, couched in the simple language always used on such occasions:
Brothers, Sachems and Warriors! We, the delegates from the twelve United Provinces, now sitting in general congress at Philadelphia, send their talk to you, our brothers.
Brothers and Friends, now attend! When our fathers crossed the great water, and came over to this land, the King of England gave them a talk, assuring them that they and their children should be his children; and that if they would leave their native country, and make settlements and live here, and buy and sell and trade with their brethren beyond the water, they should still keep hold of the same covenant chain, and enjoy peace; and it was covenanted that the fields, houses, goods, and possessions, which our fathers should acquire, should remain to them, as their own, and be their children’s for ever and at their sole disposal.
Brothers and Friends, open a kind ear! We will now tell you of the quarrel between the counsellors of King George and the inhabitants of the colonies of America.
Many of his counsellors have persuaded him to break the covenant chain, and not to send us any more good talks. They have prevailed upon him to enter into a covenant against us; and have torn asunder, and cast behind their back, the good old covenant, which their ancestors and ours entered into and took strong hold of. They now tell us they will put their hands into our pockets without asking, as though it were their own; and at their pleasure they will take from us our charters, or written civil constitution, which we love as our lives; also our plantations, our houses and goods, whenever they please, without asking our leave. They will tell us that our vessels may go to that or this island in the sea, but to this or that particular island we shall not trade any more; and in case of our non-compliance with these new orders they shut up our harbours.
Brothers, we live on the same ground with you; the same land is our common birthplace; we desire to sit down under the same tree of peace with you; let us water its roots, and cherish its growth, till the large leaves and branches shall extend to the setting sun and reach the skies. If anything disagreeable should ever fall out between us, the twelve United Colonies, and you, the Six Nations, to wound our peace, let us immediately seek measures for healing the breach. From the present situation of our affairs, we judge it expedient to kindle up a small fire at Albany, where we may hear each other’s voice, and disclose our minds fully to one another.
Subsequently they besought the Mohawk nation to whet their hatchets against us, on the curious ground – among others – of the probable increase of Popery in Canada! They also persuaded Jehoiakin Mothskin of the Stockbridge Indians to take up the hatchet, who warned ‘King’ Hancock, as the President of Congress, that they must expect him to fight not in the English, but in Indian fashion. All that he desired was to be informed where his enemy lay. He was regularly enrolled in the Army of Massachusetts. Sir Guy Carleton had attempted in that same year to win over the Six Nations from the seductions of Congress; and had accordingly invited their chiefs, in a language they understood, to ‘feast on a Bostonian and drink his blood’. This meant no more than to partake of a roasted ox, of the sort brought up from New England by the drovers, and to wash the meat down with a pipe of wine. The American patriots, however, affected to understand this speech in a literal sense. It furnished a convenient instrument for operating upon the passions of the people, the more so as it was well known that the Mohawks were not by any means averse to eating the flesh of their foes. This they did (as also the Ottawa, Tonkawa, Kickapoo, and Twighee tribes), not from bestial gluttony but from a belief that the estimable qualities of the man they had slain, which centred chiefly in the heart, could be absorbed by the victor who partook of that organ roasted. Most Indians, however, looked upon cannibalism with the same horror that we Europeans do.
How to look upon our Indian allies was a question which greatly puzzled us. It was said that at one period the Indian had not been so ready to pick quarrels and perform wanton barbarities as then; and that Penn the Quaker, who founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, proved that his policy of fair, generous, and pacific dealings with the Indian chiefs was never disappointed by any act of spite or ingratitude on their part. He went unarmed in their midst, ate of roast acorns and stirabout with them, and even on occasion shook a leg at their dances. When the first English settlers arrived in New England they were at pains to cultivate the friendship of the Indians of those parts, who often succoured them in their worst need, when nearly dead of cold and starvation. It was only a hundred years later that wars arose. The cupidity or cruelty of individual colonists had excited the communal vengeance of the Indians. Similarly, the Quakers did not forfeit the affectionate respect of the tribes until overreaching them in the purchase of lands: they had covenanted to buy from them as much land as could be walked around in a day, but ran rather than walked, and quite omitted the usual custom of sitting down now and then, for good manners, for a smoke and a meal.
Gradually a very evil view came to be adopted by the colonists as a means of stilling the prick of conscience: namely, that the Indians, being heathen, had no claim upon the Christians for fair treatment. In the frontier districts of America, such was the readiness with which offence was taken against an Indian, that should a warrior so much as slap a white man for committing a criminal offence, the act would be eagerly seized upon and exaggerated, the whole white population would rush to war and the tawny men be hunted from their homes like wild beasts. Nor did even the adoption of Christianity serve to protect Indians from the animosity of the Americans: as witness the massacre in 1763 of the twenty peaceful, psalm-singing Conestogas at Lancaster in Pennsylvania by a mob known as the Paxtang Boys – they first burned the Indian houses early one morning and killed six, and later broke into the workhouse where the magistrates had put the fourteen survivors for safe keeping and killed them all – man, woman, and child. They scalped them too, in order to collect the bounty offered by the Government of Pennsylvania for Indian scalps of either sex. The Paxtang rascals were not grudged this blood-money or in any way punished for their wicked action.
There was no peace possible on the frontier, since agriculture, by which the settlers lived, and hunting, by which the Indians lived, are trades that cannot be practised compatibly in the same district; the plough and axe are always the victors. The Indians naturally resented being driven from their ancestral hunting-grounds, without compensation, and from the tombs of their ancestors, and were at their wits’ end how to act, for the American pioneers were terrible men and avenged their own losses, ten lives for one. These pioneers, being of a restless and dissatisfied turn of mind, not untainted with greed, instead of keeping within provincial territories where millions of acres remained unoccupied (but all had to be paid for), crossed the boundary lines into Indian territory with no by-your-leave and began to behave in a most proprietary manner. The Indians’ only hope now was to recover some of their losses at least by profiting from the disagreements of the white men. They sold their military services to the French, the English, the Americans in turn at the highest price obtainable.
They became, in effect, banditti and made war not for glory or for any generous motive but only in order to obtain money, rum, guns and powder – necessities of which they had once never even known the name. Many of them were now regular camp-followers, and periodical beggars at the gates of forts and trading-houses; and the alms or stipends given them to avert their hostility were sufficient, wretched as they were, to destroy their self-dependence. Supplied with munitions of war, their propensity for mischief was quickened by the increased means of gratifying it; and they knew their power to enforce tribute by intimidation.
Thus the Indian, who in his natural state was generous and hospitable and expected generosity and hospitality, had been to such a degree spoilt by his dealings with the white races that to expect him either to forget his wrongs suffered at their hands, or to relinquish new appetites that he had acquired and return to his simple state, was manifestly foolish. Even Dr Franklin, who had disapproved of the Paxtang Boys and who had joined in the ‘good talk’ quoted above between Congress and the Six Nations, believed firmly that the only solution to the problem of how to deal with the Indian was a gradual extermination of all the tribes.
Revenge is the emotion that burns most hotly in a savage’s breast, nor is he careful to distinguish between a particular wrongdoer and the wrong-doer’s associates. Let me take an example from the abuses of the fur trade, which were almost incredibly enormous. The Indians assembled at Montreal, Three Rivers, or some other trading-place in the autumn, to exchange the skins taken in the past season for arms, ammunition, blankets, and other articles needed for their support. For two or three hundred pounds’ worth of peltry, the product of a whole year’s hunting with all its concurrent fatigues and dangers, the hunter was plied with brandy and then given a kettle, a handsome firelock, a few pounds of powder, a knife, a duffel-blanket, some paltry ornaments of tin for his arms and nose, together with paints, a looking-glass, and a little scarlet cloth and cheap calico to make a dress for his squaw. The whole was not worth one twentieth part of the furs which the Indian had brought in. If then the firelock which he had been given proved as unserviceable a weapon as it too often was, despite its showy appearance, and burst at the first discharge, wounding him, he would be like to seek revenge, not on the fraudulent trader who supplied the weapon, but indiscriminately on the first party of white men whom he encountered.