In February 1755, two British ships made landfall off the Hampton Roads, Virginia. On board were the first regular British troops to arrive in the American colonies for over fifty years. These British soldiers, numbering more than 1,000 men, formed the core of the command of General Edward Braddock, newly created commander-in-chief of the British colonies in North America. Braddock had been sent to check the expansion of the French, who had begun to encroach on British possessions. The French strategy was only now becoming clear to the American colonists: they planned to stake their claim to the enormous hinterland beyond the British colonies on the American seaboard. By building a chain of forts, the French hoped to link their possessions in Canada with their settlements in Louisiana. If they were successful, British America might eventually be confined to the coast.
Two years earlier, in late 1753, Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia had sent a young surveyor, Major George Washington, to remonstrate with the French in the critical area of the Ohio valley. After a series of exchanges, the French had made it clear that the land was now theirs, and London had charged the colonies to drive them out ‘by force of arms’.1 In April 1754, Washington, now promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Virginia Volunteers, had led 159 men from Alexandria to deal with the French at the Ohio forks. He soon had his first taste of battle when he ambushed a small detachment of French soldiers near Great Meadows in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. In the ensuing skirmish, the French leader, Ensign Jumonville, was killed, and the surviving French claimed that they had in fact been on a diplomatic mission attempting to contact Washington. Washington prepared a small fort, Fort Necessity, at Great Meadows to await the French reaction.
On 3 July, the French and their Indian allies attacked. After a day of fighting, with the Virginians hemmed in around Fort Necessity, and having suffered 30 dead and 70 wounded, Washington sued for terms. The next morning, he and his men were allowed to march out of the fort, but he had been forced to sign terms that amounted to a confession that his killing of Jumonville had been an assassination rather than an act of war.2 Far from dealing with the French threat to the Ohio valley, Washington’s expedition had actually increased the French influence with the Indian tribes in the area. The Fourth of July would remain Washington’s least favourite date in the calendar. These minor incidents in the backwoods of Pennsylvania precipitated outright war between Britain and France, which soon became a global conflict, with both powers competing for influence and territory in Europe, America and India. With the failure of the American colonies to deal with their security difficulties themselves, it was entirely logical that the British government decided to send regular troops to North America.
When General Braddock arrived with his troops in February 1755, he was received enthusiastically by the colonial authorities. Here was a clear sign that the British government was taking colonial problems seriously. Braddock had an enormous task before him. He proposed a four-pronged assault on the ring of French forts that hemmed in British North America. He himself would take the two regiments of British regulars and march on Fort Duquesne at the Ohio Forks; meanwhile, further freshly raised colonial regiments would attack Niagara and Crown Point on the borders of French Canada, while a New England force would conquer Acadia in Newfoundland. However, Braddock’s timetable was soon derailed. The colonial authorities could not – or would not – supply him with sufficient men and materiel for his long march. It was not until 10 May that he felt able to begin his campaign, with his regulars now augmented with nine companies of the newly raised Virginia Regiment. Braddock complained of the Virginia Regiment that ‘their slothful and languid disposition renders them very unfit for military service’.3 The new recruits were indeed unimpressive, but for good reason. The colonial military system, such as it was, relied for defence upon the militia, which was supposed to include virtually all able-bodied men. However, many militia men refused to leave their home districts, which meant that for offensive operations, colonies would raise provincial regiments of volunteers who enlisted for one campaign only.4 The ranks of these regiments tended to be filled with impoverished, recent immigrants or men who had yet to make a success in the new land. Given the lack of training and the temporary nature of provincial service, there was no equivalent of a ‘standing’ army in which continuity, experience and training could develop professional soldiers. Braddock’s sharp manner also alienated friendly Indians, who claimed that he ‘looked upon us as dogs, and would never hear anything that we said to him’ .5 George Washington, on the other hand, impressed Braddock, and although he could not secure a regular commission for the ambitious young man, he did take him along as his aide-de-camp and adviser on the expedition.
The advance of the expedition towards Fort Duquesne was painfully slow: 300 axemen had to cut a road through the virgin forest to enable the supply wagons and guns to traverse the steep ridges and valleys of the Allegheny mountains. Eventually, on 9 July 1755, after much toil, Braddock knew that one more march would put him within sight of his goal. When the army crossed the Monongahela River for the second time, the regimental standards were unfurled and the bands played in a deliberate attempt to overawe any watching French. Thomas Walker, a British soldier, claimed that ‘A finer sight could not have been beheld, the shining barrels of the muskets, the excellent order of the men, the cleanliness of their appearance, the joy depicted on every face at being so near Fort Duquesne, the highest object of their wishes. The music re-echoed through the mountains.’6 Washington later claimed that it was the finest military sight that he ever saw. Braddock and his officers had been apprehensive of a French attack, but they had now marched so close to the fort that they imagined there would be little if any resistance.
Yet soon after the crossing, Braddock’s advance guard was unexpectedly attacked by a mixed force of 108 French regulars, 146 Canadians and 600 Indians, led by Captain Daniel-Hyacinthe-Marie Lienard de Beaujeu, who emulated his Indian allies by going into battle stripped to the waist with only a silver gorget around his throat to show his rank.7 While the Indians fired from the cover of the dense woodland, the British wheeled into line, shoulder to shoulder, to deliver the controlled volleys of musketry that their drill sergeants had taught them were the key to victory on the battlefield. Unable to see their enemy, the British troops fired volley after volley into the trees with little effect, although one of their first rounds did kill Beaujeu. Indeed, it appears that many of the French troops melted away soon after the action began; it was the Indians, using their traditional tactics of rushing forward and firing from the cover of the trees, who continued the fight.
Eventually, with their ranks thinned by the sharp sniping of the invisible Indians, the remaining British troops broke and ran back just as Braddock appeared bringing up the main body of the British battalions. Very soon the entire force was clumped together in a confused mass, firing in all directions. Braddock shouted and swore at his men to re-form the line as the sniping continued. Terrified by the war whoops of their invisible enemies, the regulars even fired upon the Virginian volunteers. When some of the Virginians sought cover behind the trees to fight ‘Indian style’, Braddock forced them back into line.
After three hours of this unequal fight, Braddock, who had four horses shot under him, ordered a retreat. Soon after, he was shot off his horse and the British troops began to run. Washington said that ‘when we endeavoured to rally them, it was with as much success as if we had attempted to stop the wild bears of the mountains’.8 All was confusion, and the baggage and wounded were left to the Indians as the panic-stricken British and Virginians fled the field. One historian later explained that ‘British officers have declared that no pen could describe the scene . . . Regulars and provincials splashed in panic and dire confusion through the ford they had crossed in such pomp but three hours before. Arms and accoutrements were flung away in the terror with which men fled from these ghastly shambles.’9 The wounded Braddock, in severe pain, was dragged away by his aide-de-camp against his will. The retreat continued even though there was no pursuit, and on 13 July, Braddock died from his wounds. His final words were: ‘Who would have thought it? We shall better know how to deal with them another time’; but it was not given to him to learn from the disaster that had overcome him and his men.10
The shocking reality of Braddock’s defeat brought serious consequences for the American colonies. Britain had attempted but failed to protect them. Their frontiers were now open to continued French expansion and the depredations of Indian war parties. Angry colonists sought to apportion blame for the disaster, and the British officers, attempting to exonerate themselves, blamed their own men. Robert Orme, one of Braddock’s aides-de-camp, later stated that ‘when the General found it impossible to persuade them to advance, and no enemy appeared in view; and nevertheless a vast number of officers were killed, by exposing themselves before the men; he endeavoured to retreat them in good order, but the panic was so great that he could not succeed’.11 It might seem unfair to blame the ordinary soldiers for the disaster, but there was an unpleasant grain of truth in Orme’s assessment. The red-coated soldiers who looked so fine to the colonists’ untutored eyes were not the hardened veterans of the British Army who had won an unassailable battlefield reputation fighting against the French armies of Louis XIV and Marshal de Saxe. The War Office, desperately short of troops as it invariably was, had scraped together two understrength battalions for Braddock’s expedition. These had hastily recruited some new soldiers in Essex and Ireland before they sailed for America, but even then had to make up their numbers by recruiting more men when they arrived in Virginia. The core of old soldiers had worked hard to drill and train the new recruits before the expedition began, but the fact was that very few of the ‘British’ soldiers who fought with Braddock had ever seen service before. It was not so very surprising that in their first action against an alien opponent whom they could not see, most of the men panicked and eventually ran away. Unfortunately, the colonists, who had believed British infantry to be invincible, now took a very different attitude towards the redcoats. The Americans blamed the British for the disaster, while the British blamed the colonists for their unsteadiness under fire. Almost everyone blamed Braddock. Washington commented: ‘It is impossible to relate the different accounts that was given of our late unhappy engagement; but all tended greatly to the disadvantage of the poor deceased General, who is censured on all hands.’12
British soldier Charles Lee, who had marched with Braddock and later rose to high rank during the War of Independence, wrote that he hoped ‘there will come a day when justice will be done to this man’s memory, who has left few behind him that are his Equals, in courage, honesty and zeal for the Publick’.13 Washington, who knew Braddock as well as any American, was also forgiving towards his fallen general: ‘He was brave even to a fault and in regular service would have done honor to his profession. He was generous and disinterested – but plain and blunt in his manner, even to rudeness.’14 Braddock had promised Washington his support in gaining a regular commission in the British Army, but Washington’s hopes faded with the death of his patron.
However, these supportive voices were drowned out by the colonists’ howls of protest at the disaster. Benjamin Franklin’s assessment of Braddock seems to have established the dominant American view not only of this one unfortunate commander, but of British officers in general. Franklin admitted that Braddock was ‘a brave man, and might probably have made a good figure in some European war. But he had too much self-confidence; too high an opinion of the validity of regular troops; too mean a one of both Americans and Indians.’15 Franklin’s view of Braddock’s disastrous defeat established a pattern of American military thought that became remarkably enduring; Braddock and his disastrous expedition were long remembered in the United States, although soon forgotten in Britain.* The history of the two countries, let alone the history of their armies, was remembered very differently on either side of the Atlantic.
James Fenimore Cooper, in his classic novel The Last of the Mohicans, read by generations of American schoolchildren, illustrates how the events of 1755 were remembered in America.† Cooper stated that the colonists:
had recently seen a chosen army from that country, which, reverencing as a mother, they had blindly believed invincible – an army led by a chief who had been selected from a crowd of trained warriors, for his rare military endowments, disgracefully routed by a handful of French and Indians, and only saved from annihilation by the coolness and spirit of a Virginian boy, whose riper fame has since diffused itself, with the steady influence of moral truth, to the uttermost confines of Christendom.16
He went on to claim of this Virginian boy that:
Washington . . . saved the remnants of the British army, on this occasion, by his decision and courage. The reputation earned by Washington in this battle was the principal cause of his being selected to command the American armies at a later day. It is a circumstance worthy of observation, that while all America rang with his well-merited reputation, his name does not occur in any European account of the battle; at least the author has searched for it without success. In this manner does the mother country absorb even the fame, under that system of rule.17
Cooper protested too much and accorded Washington far greater importance in the retreat than he would ever have claimed himself. Yet the image of Braddock and his expedition that became fixed in the American mind was one of a brave but arrogant man, stubborn and unwilling to listen to American counsels, whose inflexibility brought a disaster that fell hardest upon the American colonists and their families. At the same time, it was believed that the clear courage and resourcefulness of the Virginians, as personified by George Washington, was deliberately ignored by the British. From Braddock’s time on, the soldiers of the American provincial regiments and militias began to lose their respect for British military prowess and developed a new interpretation of these events. Far from the British officers being able to teach the colonists the art of war, it was believed that only Americans knew how to fight on their continent, since the nature of the terrain, environment and enemy meant that there were distinctive forms of combat unique to the American continent. This led to another strand of American military thought: that the American military did not need to learn from the British but could and would learn its own lessons in its own way from its own experience. This theme of old world arrogance and fresh new world military thinking became an important strand that threaded its way through the relations between the British and American armies in the Second World War.
Ironically enough, the reaction to Braddock’s disaster by the British commander-in-chief, Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, belied the image of the British Army that was already being created and fixed in American minds. Cumberland was a tough and brutal soldier whose battlefield skills had waned but who still possessed a great ability to organise and reform the army. He understood that the tactics and drill suitable for European battlefields had ‘proved a broken reed’ in America, and that change and innovation were necessary.18 Cumberland took up the suggestion of a Swiss soldier of fortune, Jacques Prevost, who offered to raise a regiment of four battalions in America, with many of its original officers coming from Germany and Switzerland. Amongst these first officers was Henri Bouquet, a Swiss officer in Dutch service, who became the colonel of the first battalion of this new regiment and later won renown in the French and Indian wars that followed.
With remarkable speed, Prevost’s plan was enacted. On Christmas Day 1755, Lord Loudon, Braddock’s successor to the post of commander-in-chief of the army in North America, became colonel-in-chief of the new 62nd Royal American Regiment of Foot.‡19 The first soldiers of the regiment were Swiss and German mercenaries, augmented by recruits from the American colonies. This ad hoc recruitment of a polyglot regiment was just one example of a familiar situation for the British Army of drawing soldiers from many different nationalities yet still building an effective fighting force.
Far from blindly persisting with the rigid drills made famous by Frederick the Great’s Prussian infantry, the British Army in North America embraced the need for light infantry ‘capable of contending with the Red Indian in his native forest by combining the qualities of the scout with the discipline of the trained soldier’.20 The dramatic example of the Royal Americans – who cut the skirts off their coats, chopped their tricorne hats into jockey caps’ more suitable for the forest and took to wearing Indian leggings – was soon followed by the 80th Regiment, known as Gage’s Light Infantry, and the famous Rangers raised by Robert Rogers. Many other lessons were learned by the British Army, which, far from being arrogant and inflexible, proved itself capable of rapid adaptation and flexibility.
Although the British met with further disasters and crises as the war with the French expanded in North America, one of the expeditions that proved just how much they had learnt and absorbed from their American experience was the renewed attempt to seize Fort Duquesne in the summer of 1758. Brigadier John Forbes was given command of 6,000 men, the vast majority colonial volunteers, to take the fort. Four companies of the Royal Americans under Bouquet accompanied the column to act as scouts. Bouquet even acquired 16 longer-ranged rifles for his sharpshooters and devised new drills for forest fighting. The most famous of these new orders was ‘tree all’, which meant that the men should break ranks and each find a tree to hide behind and snipe at the enemy. Far from such forms of fighting being exclusively or distinctively American, Bouquet’s men demonstrated that the British had adopted and become masters of ‘Indian fighting’ while maintaining the discipline and order essential to a regular army.
This time there was no mistake. Forbes and Bouquet, his second in command, decided to build fortified depots every 40 miles along their route, so that in the final advance they could muster the maximum number of men without the encumbrance of a large supply train. George Washington advised that the expedition should follow Braddock’s original road, which seems to have been based on his desire to stimulate Virginian trade, but Forbes disagreed and insisted on cutting a fresh road on a shorter route from Pennsylvania. The advance was agonisingly slow, but steady. There was a major reverse when an advance party was ambushed in scenes reminiscent of Braddock’s defeat, but this only delayed the final outcome. Forbes had also established much friendlier relations with the Indians, and when the French called their allies to fight again in the autumn, most of them refused and simply returned home. On the night of 24 November 1758, the small French garrison blew up their own fort and retired towards Canada. Forbes, now seriously ill, entered the ruins the next day and renamed the rebuilt stockade Fort Pitt in honour of the British First Minister, who had masterminded the campaign in America.
With Fort Duquesne captured, alongside another success at Fort Frontenac nearby, the French position in America had been shaken, and in 1759, the miraculous ‘year of victories’, it was entirely broken. The brief but bloody battle on the plains of Abraham outside Quebec in 1759, which saw generals Wolfe and Montcalm both mortally wounded, also led to the end of French power in Canada. When the Treaty of Paris was signed on 10 February 1763, the French surrendered all of Canada to the British, in formal recognition of the victories won by British arms. The treaty also saw the formal expulsion of French influence from India. After the grievous start with Braddock’s expedition, British power and influence had expanded in an entirely unprecedented and unexpected way. When Forbes marched away from Fort Pitt, he left behind a detachment of Virginian provincials to ‘fix this noble fine country, to all her perpetuity, under the dominion of Great Britain’.21 In a great war for empire, Britain had achieved an outstanding success, but few people in 1763, least of all the colonists of British North America, could have predicted that this very victory would precipitate the crisis that led to the American Revolution.
The Seven Years War had cost the British treasury enormous sums of money, and once peace was declared, there was a real need to tighten expenditure and replenish the coffers. The British garrisons on the frontier, often composed of Royal Americans, were reduced to absurd levels now that there was no threat from the French. The Indians, used to receiving gifts and aid from both sides during the war, now found that all such bounty ceased. More significantly, the British government decided that the American colonies should help to pay for defence afforded them by the 10,000 regular troops now garrisoned in North America. It was this thinking that led to the passing of the Stamp Act.
As far as Parliament was concerned, the great victory that Britain had won had ensured the success of her empire and extended her dominion across vast swathes of territory worldwide. And dominion meant control. The American colonies, who had signally failed to provide for their own defence and seemed unable to organise effective military establishments, would have to be encouraged to accept greater direction and control from London to ensure that the French would never be able to return in strength to the North American continent. Yet the colonies’ growing sense of their own abilities and powers of decision, fostered by the success of the provincial regiments during the war, made them ever more unwilling to accept such control. The dispute between Parliament and the colonies that began as a justifiable claim of ‘No taxation without representation’ soon became infused with much more powerful ideas of liberty and independence.
As the crisis developed, New England stood out as the most vociferous and unruly opponent of the British government’s measures. Eventually the government decided to use military force to coerce New England and thus demonstrate to all the colonies that any dissension would be met with brutal military repression. The reality, however, was that by giving the colonists the same treatment as rebels, the British ensured that their fear of a colonial revolt became reality. As the rhetoric and protests of both sides became more heated, Boston was garrisoned with troops. In response, the New England militia began to ready itself for combat from 1774 onwards by holding regular training sessions and organising the best volunteers as ‘minutemen’, who would be ready to take up their arms at a moment’s notice, a tried and tested technique for countering the rapid threats of Indian warfare.22 While the militia as a military institution had decayed in most of the colonies, New England was an exception: its militia had been called out frequently to deal with the threat of Indians on the frontier, defend against French incursions or mount expeditions against the French in Canada. When the British marched on Concord, they encountered a ‘hornets’ nest’ of minutemen at Lexington that they would not have met in any other American colony in 1775.
With this initial foray to seize a reported arms dump, the conflict was finally precipitated into open war. Major General Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts and commander-in-chief of the army in North America, had become doubtful about Parliament’s policy of repression when he returned to the colonies in 1774. Gage, after all, had long experience of warfare in America. He had led the vanguard of Braddock’s army in 1755 and become familiar with the strength and resolution of the colonists during the French and Indian wars. He soon realised that his 4,000-strong garrison at Boston was inadequate to hold down an entire province of angry colonists, and was more likely to trigger further resistance. Nonetheless, Gage was ordered by Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, to make a show of force in the countryside around Boston, and he duly obeyed. The British column of 900 regulars, composed of grenadiers and light infantry, were being observed right from the start of their march, and by the time they reached Lexington Green, there were groups of minutemen waiting for them. The ‘shot heard around the world’ was almost certainly fired by a colonist, but as the British column retreated back to Boston, sniped at on all sides, they encountered all the problems that have beset regular forces when dealing with a ‘war amongst the people’.
The events at Lexington and Concord have, of course, gone down in American legend. The apparent military lesson espoused at the time, and frequently since, was that free citizens, fired with liberty, needed only weapons to defeat regular soldiers who were held to the colours by brutal discipline alone. As Kathleen Burk has argued, the popular conception of the American Revolution remains powerful even today: ‘The Revolution is the American Foundation Myth, a tale of unity and valour, of right versus wrong, of the simple God-fearing American fighting for his home and his liberty against the arrogant freedom-destroying Briton.’23 Burk has observed that the reality was much more complex, as was the subsequent war and the nature of the military problems it represented. Perhaps the war was not entirely ‘unwinnable’ for the British Army, but a regular army ordered to hold down a rebellious population that has become fired by a competing ideology has always faced acute difficulties. As General Sir William Howe, another unsuccessful British commander-in-chief in North America, later explained to Parliament: ‘If I had laid waste the country . . . would it not have had the effect of alienating the minds of the Americans from His Majesty’s government, rather than terrifying them into obedience?’24 British policy towards the American rebels tended to vacillate between conciliation and coercion and thus achieved neither.
The siege of Boston developed almost organically from the raising of the New England militia and the failure of the British to break out from the stranglehold. The Continental Congress, consisting of delegates from all 13 colonies, appointed George Washington as the commander-in-chief of American forces, the newly formed Continental Army. Not only had Washington worn his uniform as a colonel of militia to all the debates on the formation of the Continental Army, but he had a sound military reputation. Washington did, however, have rivals for the post. One of the most serious contenders was Major Horatio Gates, who later became commander-in-chief of the Northern Division, since he was a regular officer who had served with distinction in the 60th Royal Americans. The war caused agonies of loyalty within the Royal Americans, as it did throughout American society, which merely emphasised the fact that it was not just a conflict between competing forms of government but also a bitter civil war. Some soldiers of the 60th could not bring themselves to fight against the people they had pledged to protect, while others, including Gates, joined the rebellion against the British.
Washington’s later stature and eventual success as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army has often overshadowed the debate in Congress about the nature of the resistance to the British. Charles Lee, who had also served with Braddock, argued eloquently for a distinctively ‘American’ form of resistance through the use of militia, provincials and irregular guerrilla combat – adapting the Indian style of warfare. On the other hand, Washington was adamant that under his command the Continental Army had to be developed into a regular force that could meet the British Army in open battle on its own terms.
The battle that has gone down in history as Bunker Hill (even though most of the fighting took place on the neighbouring but less memorable Brede’s Hill) revealed the enormity of the problem facing the British Army in the conflict and the importance of its meaning to the people of America. The British Grenadiers who stormed Brede’s Hill displayed all the virtues of British regular troops: steadiness under fire, a willingness to close with the enemy and a determination to win. They took the American positions and forced the defenders to flee. However, they suffered heavily in the process. Bunker Hill was a British military victory, but more importantly it was a profound American political success. The British could win any number of such victories without being able to subdue the American will to resist. Thomas Gage seems to have understood the nature of the American resistance he had faced. He wrote in his official report:
These people shew a spirit and conduct against us, they never shewed against the French, and every body has judged them from their former appearance, and behaviour, when joined with the kings forces in the last war; which has led many into great mistakes.
They are now spirited up by a rage and entousiasm [sic], as great as ever people were possessed of, and you must proceed in earnest or give the business up.25
As Clausewitz later observed, a people fired with passion could ignore the ‘Verdict of battle’ and continue the struggle even in the face of military disaster. This was an entirely different kind of conflict, one with which the British Army was ill-equipped to deal.
However, Washington and his officers also faced a fundamental problem. The rage militaire that had grown up around the armed militia during the siege of Boston began to dissipate when the British evacuated the city. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, willingness to serve in the army began to wane. American patriots were fighting for liberty, but the soldiers of the Continental Army had to surrender that liberty in order to fight for the common good. And as the wealthier middle-class members of the militia could not, or would not, leave their farms or businesses, the Continentals had to be recruited from younger, poorer men with less of a stake in society. These men then needed to be subjected to military discipline rather than simple patriotic fervour in order to keep them in the ranks and ensure that their behaviour did not injure the wider cause. The Continental Army never became the exact copy of the British Army that Washington had aspired to join, but, through force of circumstance, it did become an ‘American approximation of them’,26 much to the chagrin of the more radical believers in the concept of American liberty.
Almost all American veterans agreed that the encampment of the Continental Army during the winter of 1777–8 at Valley Forge was fundamental in shaping it into an effective fighting force capable of standing up to the British Army in a straight fight.27 This period was a winter of discontent for many of the American soldiers. In a repeat of Braddock’s experience, neither the Congress nor the ramshackle and venal quartermaster’s department was able to procure and deliver sufficient supplies to keep the soldiers clothed and fed properly and, not surprisingly, desertion was rife. Despite these hardships, Washington took the breathing space in operations as an opportunity to train his men. He initially relied upon his own personal library of British military manuals to develop training and drill for his recruits, but he also sought advice from the number of European officers who had been attracted to the Continental Army. The most important of these was undoubtedly Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. He was a soldier of fortune, and thus in some respects very similar to Henri Bouquet, but although he was rumoured to have been a general in Frederick the Great’s army, the truth was much more prosaic. Steuben had affected the noble titles ‘Baron’ and ‘von’ to give himself greater credibility in America, but in fact he had served as a junior captain in the Prussian army for just two years before being cashiered in 1763, when Frederick had purged the officer corps of its non-noble members.§ Nonetheless, he was seized upon by Washington as an officer who understood the secrets of the famed Prussian drill. While the British had learnt from Braddock’s defeat that close-order tactics on their own were not enough in America, Washington knew that without them victory would never come.
Von Steuben could speak German and French but not English, and his first day as drill master resulted in complete confusion and frustration since he found it difficult to remember the English translations of his German orders, which had been helpfully written out for him by his aide, a future Secretary of the US Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. But eventually, with Hamilton’s assistance, von Steuben’s careful training of these raw American soldiers paid dividends. Von Steuben was impressed by the capacity for rapid learning displayed by his adoptive countrymen, and came to realise that teaching these independent-minded men was not a simple matter of rote learning. He commented that ‘The genius of this nation is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians or French. You say to your soldier, “Do this, and he doeth it”; but I am obliged to say, “This is the reason why you ought to do that”, and then he does it.’28 Each night, von Steuben wrote a chapter of what became his ‘Blue Book’, which was inevitably based upon Prussian rather than British principles. His text, published in 1779 as Steuben’s Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, remained the official military manual of the United States army for the next 33 years. Doctrine remained an important aspect of American military thinking and was a blend of ideas drawn from both American experience and European military thought. However, although Washington had wished initially to emulate his British opponents, the American Army would remain far more receptive to French and German military ideas than to British ones.
When the Continental Army was established, its first and principal enemy was the British Army. Yet just as the British Army consistently underestimated the resolve and determination of its American opponents, so the Continentals often misunderstood the redcoats. The image that became fixed in the American imagination was of a brutalised automaton controlled by fierce discipline and capable of wanton acts of cruelty. There are few stories concerning the British Army’s treatment of Americans during the Revolutionary War that sum up the American view of the redcoat as effectively as that of Andrew Jackson. He grew up in North Carolina, where the war, precipitated by British military policy, developed into a bitter guerrilla struggle between loyalists and rebels. Jackson volunteered for the Continental Army at the tender age of 14; almost as soon as he had enlisted, he was captured by British dragoons operating in support of a group of American loyalists. He was ordered by a British dragoon officer to clean his boots, but, with creditable confidence, refused and instead demanded to be treated as a prisoner of war. The officer flew into a rage and cut at him with his sword. Jackson parried the blow with his hand and suffered a serious wound. His brother Robert, who was wounded in the head in a similar incident, later died from his injuries. Understandably, Jackson blamed the British for his loss: ‘Thus early in life did Jackson become a soldier of the Republic and an unalterable enemy of Britain.’29 Jackson’s experience, sadly, was often repeated throughout the south, and the image of the red-coated soldier as a brutal oppressor became fixed in the American imagination.
For obvious reasons the Revolutionary War absorbed all the energies and attention of the Continental Army, since the outcome of the fighting meant survival or destruction as an independent nation. But for the British government and the British Army, rivalry and competition with the French in Europe and across the globe remained vital issues even as the war against the colonies continued. Indeed, in the aftermath of the disastrous defeat at Saratoga in 1777, the French entry into the war made the global situation much more serious for Britain and in some respects turned the struggle for the colonies into a sideshow. The French became the main target and opponent of the war. French assistance and, in particular, naval power proved decisive to the outcome at Yorktown in 1781, when, after a brief siege, the British general Cornwallis had to admit defeat. His troops may or may not have marched out of their battered defences to the tune of the popular song ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, but the French officers certainly invited Cornwallis and his officers to a lavish dinner while snubbing the Americans. Washington and his officers may have won, but they were not considered gentlemen. The news of Yorktown brought the King and Parliament to their senses and peace negotiations were begun.
The British Army emerged from the War of Independence with its reputation shattered. It is not too much to say that the army languished in the doldrums for almost twenty years, with the occasional minor development. Meanwhile the new Army of the United States was learning some pretty hard lessons in a series of campaigns against Indian tribes on the old ‘north-west frontier’. When Arthur St Clair led an expedition of poorly trained regulars and militia into the wilderness in 1791, the force dissolved under Indian attack in scenes reminiscent of Braddock’s disaster. This suggested that the supposedly distinctive American characteristics of ‘Indian’ fighting could be unlearned as rapidly as they had been learned.30 The demands of policing and conflict on the frontier would absorb much of the US Army’s energies for most of the nineteenth century.
Relations with the British in Canada remained tense. Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the idea of learning from one another or cooperation between the British and American armies was unthinkable. In its early years of existence, the United States’ main enemies, both potential and actual, remained the indigenous Indians and the British. Meanwhile, British energies and attention were fully absorbed in the struggle against Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. Britain’s dominance, indeed supremacy, at sea was confirmed after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Meanwhile, after a series of unfortunate expeditions, the British Army began to restore its reputation under a young general, Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington. From his first major action at the Battle of Vimiero, fought in the blistering heat of a Portuguese summer, Wellesley’s combination of the light infantry tactics first learnt at the hands of American Indians and the two-deep line first used in the War of Independence proved its worth against the French tactics of light skirmishers and heavy columns that had brought defeat to all their other European opponents.
However, the demands of prosecuting the long and deadly struggle against France meant that the British government became increasingly ruthless in its relations with neutral states. The second ‘war of independence’, or War of 1812, arose out of American frustration at British maritime policies that consistently violated their shipping rights and unilaterally closed American trade with valuable partners. The main bone of contention became two Orders in Council of November 1807, which in effect imposed colonial regulation on American trade: no foreign ship could sail or trade without British licence. This was a reaction to Napoleon’s continental system, which aimed to exclude British trade from the continent, but it bore hardest upon the American republic. While the British considered these measures perfectly justified since they were doing the lion’s share of work defending the world’s liberty against the great French ‘ogre’, the Americans understandably saw things rather differently.
The pressure placed upon American commerce was only enhanced by the bitter divisions in American politics between the Federalists, who were broadly sympathetic to the British, and the Republicans, who were determined upon war as a means of ensuring that republican principles were maintained. The president at the time, Thomas Jefferson – a Francophile from the days of the Revolution, and inveterately anti-British – and his successor, James Madison, saw British policies as a direct attack upon American independence. Eventually, American room for manoeuvre disappeared: the republic either had to fight to maintain its sovereignty as an independent state or, in effect, surrender those rights to Britain. Not surprisingly, Madison and Congress decided upon war. Ironically, American patience became exhausted at precisely the time that a new British administration was moving to repeal the Orders in Council. The British government repealed the legislation on 16 June 1812 and Congress declared war on the 18th. Although the war was primarily caused by these maritime issues, many Americans also saw it as an opportunity to deal with the problem of Canada. In August 1812, Jefferson argued that ‘The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighbourhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax . . . and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.’31
However, the war took a very different course from how either protagonist had imagined it. In fact, the American invasion of Canada, which began on 12 July 1812, soon went badly wrong. Much of the problem lay in the neglect of the American regular army in the years leading up to hostilities. The Republican principles that Jefferson and Madison espoused suggested that a regular army was incompatible with true liberty. Jefferson favoured the militia – the people in arms – but neither he nor Madison went as far as abolishing the regular army. This meant that the regular United States army in 1812 had a strength of under 7,000 men and was mainly officered by old veterans of the Revolutionary War and by political appointees. The burden of America’s defence would have to fall on volunteers and militia.32
With British forces strained by the demands of war with France, the overstretched Royal Navy squadrons in American waters were initially humbled by the small but powerful American navy before fresh squadrons tipped the naval war decisively in the British favour. Meanwhile, the very small regular forces, supported by Canadian militia, that made up the garrisons of British Canada were able to delay and defeat the ill-organised and virtually unsupplied American attempts to seize Canada. In 1813, American efforts met with greater success when a raid was able to capture the town of York (present day Toronto), which was then the capital of Canada; when they withdrew, the American forces torched the parliament buildings and the governor’s house. Although the fighting continued in Canada, its effects were inconclusive, with each side making offensive moves that were then defeated by the other. The balance of forces shifted in the British favour when, with Napoleon’s abdication in May 1814, they were able to release ships and troops from Europe for service in America.
The American government decided upon a pre-emptive invasion of Canada to seize key ground before the anticipated flood of British reinforcements could turn the war against them. The campaign that followed was bloody and abortive, but it was crucial for the survival and reputation of the US Army. Brigadier Winfield Scott had intensively prepared his brigade by drilling them for 10 hours a day: ‘the echoes from Valley Forge, 35 years earlier could be heard at Buffalo in 1814’.33 With a certain irony, Scott used a verbatim translation of the French 1791 regulations as his manual, even though these were considered obsolete in Europe, which had seen enormous changes in military tactics since the Revolutionary Wars. His men were clothed in short grey jackets due to a shortage of blue cloth, and this made them resemble militia rather than regulars in appearance. At the short but sharp Battle of Chippawa on 5 July 1814, the British commander, Major General Phineas Riall, seemingly mistook Scott’s brigade for ‘mere’ Buffalo militia, but on witnessing their steady advance under fire is reputed to have said, ‘Why, these are regulars!’ Riall’s words, suitably embellished to ‘Those are regulars, by God!’, became a matter of pride for the US Army and were used on countless recruiting posters. It is also said that the cadets of the United States Military Academy at West Point wear grey dress uniforms in remembrance of the American regulars at Chippawa.34 The performance of Scott’s brigade in the battle became legendary and enabled the US regular army to rescue its pride after an otherwise undistinguished performance during the war. The battle might have been more of a skirmish, with 2,100 British and 3,500 American troops engaged, and it might be the case that the only recorded source for Riall’s words comes from Winfield Scott himself, but whatever the truth, the memory of Chippawa became a powerful one for the United States army.35 Henry Adams later commented that:
The battle of Chippawa was the only occasion during the war when equal bodies of regular troops met face to face, in extended lines on an open plain in broad daylight, without advantage of position; and never again after that combat was an army of American regulars beaten by British troops. Small as the affair was, and unimportant in military results, it gave the United States army a character and pride it had never before possessed.36
Perhaps most significantly, by trumpeting the success at Chippawa, the American Army was still measuring itself against the British Army. After a larger and bloodily indecisive battle at Lundy’s Lane, the Americans were eventually forced to withdraw from Canada, but the campaign simply cemented Scott’s reputation and the prestige of the regular US Army. After these events, no American government could deny the need for a regular army, however distasteful its existence might be to its founding principles.
British reinforcements from Europe did soon make their mark on the war in America but never materialised in the numbers that the Americans had feared. The Duke of Wellington refused the opportunity to take command of the army in America and ‘give Jonathan one good thrashing’,¶37 and only a small fraction of the Peninsular Army was ever sent across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, the element that was sent had a disproportionate effect upon the war. Major General Robert Ross took a new expedition, composed of Peninsular War veterans, to mount diversionary raids on the coast to distract American attention from Canada. George Gleig took part in Ross’s expedition as a young subaltern and afterwards wrote a lively account of the campaign, #38 He admitted that ‘the hostilities carried on in the Chesapeake resembled the expeditions of the ancient Danes against Great Britain, rather than a modern war between civilized nations’, but that, in the main, the British soldiers, unlike the Vikings, did respect private property.39
In August 1814, Ross saw a chance to march on Washington itself, which appeared practically unguarded. The British were able to sail up the Chesapeake and land close to the American capital without any opposition. As Ross’s 4,000-strong force marched towards Washington, Madison and the War Department struggled to organise 6,000 militia men, leavened by only 350 regulars and a handful of sailors. The Americans decided to make a stand at the village of Bladensburg, four miles from the capital. Here was an echo of the minutemen of Lexington Green, as the citizen soldiery of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvannia were called from their homes to defend their new national capital. Yet there was a terrible irony in the fighting that took place at Bladensburg. Gleig had served under Wellington during the Battle of the Pyrenees against Napoleon’s Army of Spain, and he and his men had been schooled in the light infantry system developed by Sir John Moore that had originated with Henri Bouquet and the Royal Americans. Now those same tactics, enhanced by their experience of European warfare, were used against the Americans. Gleig’s criticism of the American defence of their capital was scathing:
In America, every man is a shot from his very boyhood, and every man serves in the militia; but to bring an army of raw militia-men, however excellent they might be as shots, into a fair field against regular troops, could end in nothing but defeat. When two lines oppose each other, very little depends upon the accuracy with which individuals take aim. It is then that the habit of acting in concert, the confidence which each man feels in his companions, and the rapidity and good order in which different movements can be executed, are alone of real service . . . they displayed great want of military knowledge in the disposition of both their infantry and artillery . . . The troops were drawn up in three straight lines, like so many regiments upon a gala parade . . . In maintaining themselves, likewise, when attacked, they exhibited neither skill nor resolution . . . Of the personal courage of the Americans, there can be no doubt; they are, individually taken, as brave a nation as any in the world. But they are not soldiers; they have not the experience nor the habits of soldiers. It was the height of folly, therefore, to bring them into a situation where nothing except that experience and those habits will avail.40
Gleig’s criticisms concerning the habits and experience of American soldiery would linger long, however unfairly, in British military minds. Bladensburg simply confirmed the British conviction that the inexperienced citizen soldiers of the militia could not stand against well-drilled regulars. Although the American regulars, artillery and some of the militia fought well at Bladensburg, the vast majority of the raw militia and volunteers were thrown into confusion and did not stand the test of battle. The British veterans, although outnumbered two to one, were able to rout the American force in a matter of three hours.
Ross rode into Washington with a flag of truce, with the intention of negotiating a ransom so that the town would not be destroyed. However, he was fired upon from a house and his horse was killed, and after this the British troops were sent in to destroy all the government buildings in an act of revenge: ‘In this general devastation were included the Senate-house, the President’s palace, an extensive dockyard and arsenal, barracks for two or three thousand men’ as well as the Library of Congress.41 Some British officers even sat down to enjoy President Madison’s dinner, which had been prepared for him, before proceeding to torch his palace. The British soldiers did however spare private property from the destruction. Gleig wrote that:
You can conceive nothing finer than the sight which met them as they drew near to the town. The sky was brilliantly illumined by the different conflagrations; and a dark red light was thrown upon the road, sufficient to permit each man to view distinctly his comrade’s face. Except the burning of St Sebastian’s, I do not recollect to have witnessed, at any period of my life, a scene more striking or more sublime.42
San Sebastian was the last fortress town that had fallen to Wellington’s army in Spain. During its plundering, accidental fires began that destroyed the town. Washington actually suffered less damage than many Spanish towns, but it proved that war could have very painful consequences.**
While the British had humiliated Madison and the American republic, as well as causing much destruction, they could not conquer. Ross’s force left Washington and marched on Baltimore, but made no headway against its much stronger defences. Ultimately, the British burning of Washington reflected little credit upon the British Army and came to be seen in America and Europe, if not in Britain, for what it was: wanton destruction designed to punish an opponent.
Gleig and his fellow officers remained unrepentant. In musing on any future conflict between Britain and America, he arrived at an idea of chilling prescience, arguing that:
in absolute monarchies, where war is more properly the pastime of kings, than the desire of subjects, non-combatants ought to be dealt with as humanely as possible. Not so, however, in States governed by popular assemblies. By compelling the constituents to experience the real hardships and miseries of warfare, you will soon compel the representatives to a vote of peace; and surely that line of conduct is, upon the whole, most humane, which puts the speediest period to the cruelties of war.43
Gleig had understood something of the new character of America in realising that it was governed by ‘popular assemblies’, but his view of how to fight against such a system prefigured the destruction wrought on the South during America’s greatest conflict, the Civil War. Sadly, his prediction that inflicting the misery of war upon entire populations would bring a swift end to any conflict was mistaken, as the American Civil War and both world wars were to prove.
By the winter of 1814, both sides began to realise that the war was wholly unproductive and unlikely to end in any decisive result. The Treaty of Ghent was signed on 24 December 1814, and although both sides claimed victory, the result was inconclusive to say the least. Perhaps the principal point was that the United States had, through fighting this second ‘war of independence’, ensured its sovereignty and settled some of the worst arguments between the Federalists and Republicans. The British came to realise that waging war against the United States would be more costly and require greater effort and preparation than any potential benefit was likely to yield. Yet although most British and American observers recognised the essentially unproductive and inconclusive nature of the war, Canada had defended her independence. American visions of an entirely united North America had been frustrated and the continued existence of loyalist Canada had been guaranteed in part by the British Army but more importantly by the Canadian militia. Ironically enough, given the importance of Chippawa to the US Army, the experience of the war provided powerful stimulus in Canada for the ‘militia myth’, the idea that Canada was defended against the depredations of the Americans primarily by its sturdy loyalist militia.44
It was perhaps typical of a war that had started at the very moment the main casus belli had been removed that the last battle was fought after the peace had already been signed. It took over two weeks for the news to reach America, and in that time, the Battle of New Orleans had been fought and won by the Americans. At New Orleans, Andrew Jackson, commanding a motley force of volunteers and militia, had his revenge on the British when they bungled an attack on some improvised defences. The battle elevated Jackson to the same status of military hero as Scott had achieved after Chippawa.
The Battle of New Orleans was an unhappy disaster for the British forces involved, but there was a tragic sequel for Sir John Lambert’s brigade. His men fought and won the last action of the American war when they took Fort Bowyer near Mobile, and were soon embarked on ships for home. They reached Portsmouth in May 1815, only to be re-embarked almost immediately. Napoleon had returned to France and a new European war was looming. The brigade set out from Ghent early on the morning of 16 June, and by dint of forced marching covered 51 miles in little more than two days and nights, with only two halts.45 They reached Wellington’s allied army posted along the ridge south of Mont-Saint-Jean at 11 a.m. on the morning of 18 June. The battle that followed dwarfed any of the engagements in America, which seemed mere skirmishes compared to the carnage that took place at Waterloo. After an extended rest during the morning and early afternoon, the 27th Inniskillings, one of Lambert’s battalions, was ordered forward to defend the critical crossroads above La Haye Sainte farm. For the next four hours, they had to hold their position against French cavalry charges, artillery fire and musketry. By the end of that long afternoon they had suffered 450 casualties amongst their 750 officers and men, and had taken heavier losses than any other British battalion present at Waterloo.46
The battles of New Orleans and Waterloo were thus inextricably linked by the experience of Lambert’s brigade. The British, by virtue of their dominance of the sea, were able to switch troops from one continent to another seemingly at will. Yet for the soldiers of the British Army, such flexibility and mobility also posed significant challenges. British Army units could never prepare for service in a specific theatre of war because they might be sent to any number of locations. Lambert and his men had been expected to participate in a difficult campaign against the Americans in Louisiana and then, in a matter of months, switch to fighting the French in Belgium in one of the most intense battles of the Napoleonic Wars, without faltering. No other army of the time could make such demands upon its soldiers. The dilemma of preparing troops for potentially very different conflicts would remain with the British Army throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, the great British military historian of the American Civil War, commented in 1900:
It is as useless to anticipate in what quarter of the globe our troops may be next employed as to guess at the tactics, the armament or even the colour . . . of our next enemy. Each new expedition demands special equipment, special methods of supply and special tactical devices, and sometimes special armament.47
With the eventual end of the Napoleonic Wars, Europe entered a long period of peace. Yet the British Army throughout the nineteenth century had to wrestle with important conflicting demands. It had to stand ready to deal with threatened invasions from the continent, while also meeting imperial commitments. It also mounted offensive campaigns to expand that empire, which grew at the rate of 100,000 square miles per year between 1815 and 1865.48 The problems that beset the British Army in the Crimea in 1854–5 were in part due to the fact that the army at home had ossified under the long shadow of the Duke of Wellington. This process was personified by the personal tragedy of Lord Raglan, who as a young man had been Wellington’s dashing aide-de-camp and military secretary in Spain, but presided over an ill-prepared and appallingly supplied British Army in the Crimea as a sick and increasingly embittered old man. Yet the more significant problem was that the army had fought campaigns in places as far distant as Afghanistan, Baluchistan and New Zealand but had not been organised or prepared to mount an expedition against a European opponent.49
Winfield Scott’s influence on the US Army came in some respects to resemble Wellington’s upon the British Army. Scott became the US Army’s ‘unofficial drillmaster and authority on tactics, molding American military practice to European theory’.50 Both armies were heavily influenced by the work of Baron Antoine Jomini, whose Summary of the Art of War, which codified and explained Napoleon’s system, formed the foundation for military education in both countries. Scott had worked hard to ensure that the US Army was ready for its next great test, which came with the Mexican War of 1845–6, and his influence continued until the outbreak of the Civil War, by which time his tactical ideas, if not his strategic concepts, were badly outmoded. Throughout this period, the American Army still viewed the British Army as one of its principal potential enemies. The US Corps of Engineers spent decades constructing forts and other coastal defences along the eastern seaboard of the United States to ensure that the British depredations of 1814 would not happen again. As the American engineers fortified their coastline, so the British developed the forts and citadels that protected Canada.51
However, the majority of the tiny United States Army spent most of the succeeding decades absorbed in the task of policing the ever-moving frontier between the United States and the indigenous Indians. Whatever the theories of war taught at West Point might have been, for most soldiers the reality was the tough practical life of a soldier in a small, isolated garrison. As one Civil War general later put it: ‘During my army service, I learned all about commanding fifty United States dragoons and forgot everything else.’52
In many respects, the experience of soldiering in the British Army during the nineteenth century was similar; with the notable exceptions of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny, most military tasks amounted to acting as a military constabulary in the growing reaches of the British Empire. Yet while the British fought numerous serious campaigns in the years after the Indian Mutiny, none approached the scale or intensity of the American Civil War, which ripped America apart and produced a cataclysm costing 620,000 lives. It began with a great wave of enthusiasm in 1861, but became a grim war of exhaustion and attrition which only ended when the Southern states had been ravaged and comprehensively beaten on the battlefield.†† It is hard to argue against Shelby Foote’s eloquent belief that any true knowledge of the United States ‘has to be based on an understanding of the Civil War . . . It defined us . . . if you’re going to understand the American character in the twentieth century you have to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads: the suffering, the enormous tragedy of the whole thing.’53 The losses suffered at Antietam, where 22,000 Americans were killed or wounded, remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. However, while Americans saw this as a unique experience, it was, in fact, America’s first introduction to the kind of mass casualties that had become common in Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.54 While many aspects of the war looked back to the Napoleonic legacy, there were also facets that were harbingers of the future: the North and South both deployed mass armies of volunteers and utilised the fruits of the Industrial Revolution in the telegraph, railroad and improved weaponry. The battles of the Civil War were bloody affairs but seemed indecisive next to the Napoleonic examples that the American generals had all studied at West Point.
The war put great strain on America’s relationship with Britain. Britain’s neutrality (even as her factories and shipyards produced weapons and warships for both sides) infuriated the North, but it was the Trent incident that brought the two countries closer to war than at any other time since 1812. The Trent, a British mail ship, was stopped by the USS San Jacinto on 8 November 1861 and the two Southern agents on board were seized, in complete contravention of international law, and taken to Boston. Ironically, it was British behaviour similar to this that had precipitated the 1812 war; this time, after serious diplomatic exchanges, war was averted. William Gladstone’s speech in October 1862 urging the North to ‘drink the cup’ and accept the secession of the South also put severe strain on relations. Northern resentment over Britain’s position of neutrality was so strong that it was not until the turn of the century that the grievance had properly faded.
By 1865, the North had emerged victorious and now possessed first-class military forces. Some hotheads amongst the Union even advocated turning the Great Army of the Republic northwards to seize Canada. Although this threat never entirely emerged, the last invasion of Canada from America did take place in 1866, when an ‘army’ of Irish Fenians crossed the border. After a series of skirmishes, the Fenians were defeated by Canadian militia and British regulars. The British government had found its defence expenditure on Canada an increasing burden and was never really willing to spend sufficiently to create a credible defence force. When the Confederation of the Canadas united to become the Dominion of Canada on 1 July 1867, it marked an opportunity for Britain to divest itself of these responsibilities. In 1869, Gladstone, now Prime Minister, announced Britain’s intention to remove all British forces from Canada, and the last British regulars left in November 1871.55 British troops would never campaign again in North America, breaking a continuity of experience dating back to Braddock’s expedition. The defence of Canada in the future would have to be borne by the new Canadian government, which continued to rely upon the traditional solution of the militia.
While most Americans saw their Civil War as distinctively American, it was of intense interest to the officers of European armies, who sent over numerous observers to learn what they could of the modern conditions of war.56 Although it was studied intensively, however, the American experience was often seen as unworthy of emulation: what, after all, could the professional officers and well-drilled conscripts of Europe learn from the actions of hastily raised and unmilitary volunteer forces? The Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke, mastermind of the Prussian victories of 1870–1, may not have actually said that the armies of the Civil War were like ‘two armed mobs chasing each other around the countryside’, but the phrase did sum up many European attitudes.
British interest in the American war was soon overtaken by events on the continent, and in particular the dramatic emergence of German military power as demonstrated in the Franco-Prussian War. Attention turned to von Moltke’s mastery of mobilisation and rapid movement through his use of what became known as the Great General Staff. The combats of even a few years ago now seemed outdated in the era of the French Chassepot rifle and the Millatreusse, an early machine gun. While the American Army had assiduously studied and copied French military thinking, doctrine and dress before and during the Civil War, after 1871 they – along with almost every other military, including the British Army – switched their allegiance to the Prussian model.
The Civil War nonetheless cast a very long shadow in America. American politics was bedevilled by memories of the war until the turn of the century, and its legacy to the US Army lasted much longer. There was an outpouring of documents and books on its causes and course. During the war, the United States had emerged as a first-rate military power, and American officers could now refer to home-grown examples of large-scale warfare rather than European ones. Through the voluminous tomes of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,57 amongst other books, future generations of officers learnt of American battles that matched European ones in their scale and intensity. Memories of the Civil War were still very much alive during the First World War and important even during the Second World War. It is perhaps strangely instructive to realise that the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which saw the last reunion of Union and Confederate veterans, took place in 1938.‡‡ The future commanders of the US Army in the Second World War all absorbed the history of the Civil War with enthusiasm, but in this they were simply representative of their generation, which looked back with pride to that seminal moment in American military history.
Although the Civil War was a crucial experience for the American republic, it did not mean that America had somehow become enamoured with large standing armies. The Civil War was seen as a national emergency, and after that crisis had passed, the regular army was allowed to decline into a small frontier force again. Nonetheless, the ‘Indian wars’ took on a new intensity after 1865, as greater numbers of white settlers headed west and took land from the indigenous Indians. Over the next 25 years, the US Army played a central role in ‘winning the west’, with countless skirmishes, raids, battles and campaigns against the plains Indians who fought against the encroachment of the United States.58
It was Colonel G. F. R. Henderson who revived British interest in the American Civil War. Henderson’s work and lectures at the British Staff College became the mainstay of military history for the British Army and influenced the generation of officers who would command in the First World War. His most influential work was undoubtedly Stonewall Jackson, in which he analysed Thomas Jackson as a military commander in minute and telling detail, emphasising speed, manoeuvre and the use of cavalry as mounted riflemen who could raid far into an enemy’s rear. It was significant that Henderson, and the other writers who followed him, concentrated upon the period of Confederate victories and the early war of manoeuvre and mobility, which was more closely akin to Napoleon’s methods. Henderson realised the importance of Grant and Sherman, though other writers tended to underplay the direct attritional strategy that Grant had been forced to adopt during the last years of the war to wear down and ultimately overwhelm the Confederacy.59
While Henderson was a skilled and intelligent military historian with an unrivalled feel for his subject, most British officers imbibed his knowledge in a bastardised form. Year after year, British officers had to pass the Staff College entrance examination, which asked questions concerning Jackson’s Valley campaign of 1862 in excruciating detail. This bled the subject of most of its real significance and forced officers to view the campaign and indeed the entire war from a very narrow military technical perspective. Thus the British Army of the late nineteenth century certainly continued to benefit from American experience, but at one remove: these were lessons learned in the classroom rather than on the battlefield. These examples later dovetailed neatly with the practical experience of the British Army in South Africa, where wide, sweeping movements by cavalry and mounted infantry in the style of Jackson and Sheridan had helped to achieve decisive successes over the Boers after the initial disasters of ‘Black Week’ in 1899. There was thus at least an indirect link running from Jeb Stuart and Sheridan’s cavalry of the Civil War through to the British cavalry and mounted infantry of the Boer War.
However, the British and American armies had actually grown apart over the course of the century. They were no longer likely enemies but nor were they potential allies. Although both had engaged in what might be termed colonial policing, they did not look to one another for information, advice or inspiration. When Elihu Root, the US Secretary of War, reformed the army in the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the subsequent Philippine Insurrection, he examined German rather than British organisation. Root was perhaps the first, but certainly not the last, US Secretary of War who hoped to utilise American business principles to reshape defence; he argued that ‘it does seem a pity that the Government of the United States should be the only great industrial establishment that cannot profit by the lessons which the world of industry and of commerce has learned to such good effect’, and the precise shape that these reforms took was distinctively American.60 Nonetheless, the establishment of the post of Chief of Staff as the senior military adviser to the President through the Secretary of War, a General Staff to work under him, and a War College to train and educate senior officers all stemmed from the German example.
Similarly, the British reforms that followed the Boer War were designed to solve particular British problems but were also inspired by the predominance of German military thinking at the time. Richard Haldane, as Secretary of State for War, introduced a series of reforms that reshaped the British Army and focused its attention on the 100,000-strong British Expeditionary Force, which would be ready for deployment in Europe or anywhere around the Empire. Haldane established a General Staff, although the British version never had the power or prestige of the Great German General Staff; his reforms included the abolition of the post of commander-in-chief and its replacement with Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who would act as the senior military adviser to the Prime Minister and cabinet. The establishment of the Territorial Army brought a final break with the shared military tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, in which forces were organised into regulars, volunteers and militia. These reforms were not due to experiences in America but were a summation of colonial experience and the distillation of European influence.
The British Expeditionary Force of 1914 has often been acclaimed as the best-trained and equipped army that Britain ever sent to war. Its excellence was a result of the shock administered to the army by the Boers but was also the fruit of a hundred years of tough campaigning in the Empire. Yet there were also echoes of the British experience in America. The Boer War had finally broken down all distinctions between the line infantry and the light infantry, which meant that every infantry soldier in the new British Expeditionary Force was trained and drilled in a system that had originated with Sir John Moore and looked back to the raising of the 60th Royal Americans in 1755. The Cavalry Division of the BEF maintained its belief in the close-order charge but every trooper carried a carbine that enabled him to act as a mounted infantryman in the role that had been pioneered during the American Civil War. The British Army of 1914 had been partially shaped, however indirectly, by its contact with America.
Sir John French, who was appointed the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, had never attended Staff College and thus had never heard one of Henderson’s lectures or read his work. French had emerged from the Boer War as a military hero for his decisive victory in 1899 at Elandslaagte, where he had utilised cavalry and mounted infantry to outmanoeuvre the Boers, culminating in a close-order cavalry charge.61 However, when the British Expeditionary Force went to war in 1914, it encountered radically different conditions of warfare, which produced a traumatic shock very similar to that of the unfortunate General Braddock but on an altogether different scale. French later wrote that:
No previous experience, no conclusion I had been able to draw from campaigns in which I had taken part, or from a close study of the new conditions in which the war of today is waged, has led me to anticipate a war of positions. All my thoughts, all my prospective plans, all my possible alternatives of actions, were concentrated upon a war of movement and manoeuvre.62
The new war overturned British assumptions and set at a discount much of the hard-won experience and knowledge gained over the previous century. It ushered in a new era of industrialised mass warfare, which engulfed the whole of Europe, and ultimately the world.
* The Braddock Road is still named from its original starting point just outside Alexandria, Virginia. Braddock was buried in the middle of the road that bore his name and Washington had the whole army march over his grave to erase any trace of it from plundering Indians. His remains were found and reburied a few yards away. American public subscription also paid for a fine memorial to this unfortunate general, which was erected in 1913.
† The depiction of Indian attacks in the 1995 film Last of the Mohicans owes more to the received memory of Braddock’s defeat than to the historical events at Fort William Henry in 1757.
‡ The regiment was soon renumbered the 60th Royal American Regiment.
§ Clausewitz’s father suffered a similar fate.
¶ ‘Jonathan’ was an early term for an American, later replaced by ‘Uncle Sam’.
# He later took Holy Orders and became Wellington’s personal chaplain.
** The pillaging of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian were notorious blots on the character of the British Army. The inhabitants of San Sebastian believed – probably wrongly – that the British had deliberately destroyed their town in order to reduce Spanish competition for trade after the war.
†† The Northern states were usually referred to as the Union, while the Southern states were known as the Confederacy.
‡‡ The events of the First World War are already further in the past as I write this than Gettysburg was when the Second World War broke out in Europe.