The American Revolution

Vast Importance of the principles laid down by Catherine

This successful assertion of the rights of neutrals was one of the greatest and most beneficent revolutions in the whole history of human warfare. It was the most emphatic declaration that had ever been made of the principle that the interests of peace are paramount and permanent, while those of war are subordinate and temporary. In the interest of commerce it put a mighty curb upon warfare, and announced that for the future the business of the producer is entitled to higher consideration than that of the destroyer. Few things have ever done so much to confine the area of warfare and limit its destructive power. If the old doctrine were in force at the present day, when commerce has expanded to such enormous dimensions, and every sea is populous with merchant ships, it would be well-nigh impossible for any two maritime powers to go to war without dragging all the rest of the world into the struggle. For the speedy accomplishment of this great reform we have chiefly to thank the Empress Catherine, whose action at the critical moment was so prompt and decisive. It is curious to consider that an act which so distinctly subordinated military to industrial interests should have emanated from that country of Europe which had least outgrown the militant stage of civilization, and should have been chiefly opposed by that country which had advanced the farthest into the industrial stage. It is a brilliant instance of what may be achieved by an enlightened despot when circumstances are entirely favourable. Among the many acts of Catherine which, in spite of her horrible vices, have won the admiration of mankind, this is doubtless the most memorable; and as time goes on we shall realize its importance more and more.

Relations between Great Britain and Holland

The immediate effect of the Armed Neutrality was to deprive England of one of her principal weapons of offence. To add to her embarrassment, there now came war with Holland. While there was strong sympathy between the British and Dutch governments, there was great jealousy between the peoples which had so long been rivals in the colonial world. Hence there were two parties in the Netherlands, – the party of the Stadtholder, which was subservient to the policy of the British government, and the popular party, which looked with favour upon the American cause. The popular party was far the more numerous, including all the merchants of the most mercantile of countries, and it was especially strong in the city of Amsterdam. A brisk trade – illicit from the British point of view – was carried on between Holland and the United States, chiefly through the little Dutch island of St. Eustatius, in the West Indies. An equally lively trade went on between Holland and France, and against this England felt that she had an especial right to make complaint. Her relations with Holland were regulated not simply by the ordinary law of nations, but by careful and elaborate treaties, made in the days when the two peoples were leagued in sympathy against the aggressive policy of Louis XIV. In 1678, it had been agreed that if either England or Holland should be attacked by France, both powers should make common cause against their common enemy; and in 1716 this agreement had been renewed in such wise as to include the contingency of an attack by Spain, since a younger branch of the House of Bourbon had succeeded to the Spanish throne. When, in 1779, Spain declared war against England, the latter power accordingly called upon the Netherlands for aid; but no aid was given, for the Dutch felt that they had an especial right to complain of the conduct of England. By that same treaty which in 1674 had finally given New York to the English, it had been provided that in case either England or Holland should ever go to war with any other country, the ordinary rules of maritime law should not be enforced as between these two friendly commercial powers. It was agreed that either power might freely trade with the enemies of the other; and such a treaty was at that time greatly to the credit of both nations. It was made in a moment when an honourable spirit of commercial equity prevailed. But it was one of the chief symptoms of the utter demoralization of the British government in 1778, after the untimely death of Lord Chatham, that these treaty obligations were completely ignored; and in the general plunder of merchant shipping which went on at that time, no nation suffered like the Dutch. George III. now felt that he had got everything into his own hands, and when the Dutch complained he gave them to understand that, treaty or no treaty, he should do as he pleased. Under such circumstances, it was rather cool for England to ask aid against Spain, and the Dutch quite naturally turned a deaf ear to the demand.

Holland joins the Armed Neutrality

It was thus a very pretty quarrel as it stood at the end of 1779, when Fielding fired upon the flagship of Count Bylandt, and Paul Jones was allowed to stay with his prizes ten weeks in a Dutch harbour. Each party was thus furnished with an “outrage.” The righteous anger of the Dutch over the high-handed conduct of Fielding was matched by the British chagrin over the victory of Jones. The Stadtholder’s weak efforts to keep the peace were quite overwhelmed in the storm of wrath that arose. After much altercation, England notified Holland that all treaties between the two countries must be considered as abrogated, owing to the faithless behaviour of the Dutch in refusing aid against Spain, in trading with France and America, in resisting the right of search, and in sheltering Paul Jones. Having thus got rid of the treaties, England proceeded to act as if there were no such thing as international law where Dutchmen were concerned. During the summer of 1780, the wholesale robbery on the high seas grew worse than ever, and, with a baseness that seems almost incredible, the British ambassador at the Hague was instructed to act as a spy, and gather information concerning the voyages of Dutch merchants, so that British cruisers might know just where to pounce upon the richest prizes. Thus goaded beyond human endurance, Holland at last joined the Armed Neutrality, hoping thereby to enlist in her behalf the formidable power of Russia.

Capture of Henry Laurens and his papers

But the policy of England, though bold in the extreme, was so far well considered as to have provided against such an emergency. She was determined to make war on Holland, to punish her for joining the Armed Neutrality; but if she were to avow this reason, it would at once entail war with Russia also, so that it was necessary to find some other reason. The requisite bone of contention was furnished by a curiously opportune accident. In October, 1780, an American packet was captured off the banks of Newfoundland, and among the prisoners was Henry Laurens, lately president of Congress, now on his way to the Hague to negotiate a loan. He threw his papers overboard, but a quick-witted tar jumped after them, and caught them in the water. Among them was found a project for a future treaty of commerce between the Netherlands and the United States which had been secretly concerted two years before between Jean de Neufville, an Amsterdam merchant, and William Lee, an American commissioner to Berlin. It was signed also by Van Berckel, the chief magistrate of Amsterdam; but as it had been neither authorized nor sanctioned by the States-General or by Congress, it had no validity whatever. Quite naturally, however, the discovery of such a document caused much irritation in England, and it furnished just the sort of excuse for going to war which the ministry wanted. To impose upon the imagination of the common people, Laurens was escorted through the streets of London by a regiment of soldiers, and shut up in the Tower, where he was denied pen and paper, and no one was allowed to enter his room. A demand was made upon Holland to disavow the act of Van Berckel, and to inflict condign punishment upon him and his accomplices, “as disturbers of the public peace and violators of the rights of nations.” In making this demand, it was foreseen that the States-General would disavow the act of Van Berckel, but would nevertheless decline to regard him as a fit subject for punishment.

Great Britain declares war against Holland, Dec. 20, 1780

The message was sent to the British ambassador at the Hague on the 3d of November. It was then known in England that Holland contemplated joining the Northern league, but the decisive step had not yet been actually taken by the States-General. The ambassador was secretly instructed by Lord Stormont not to present the demand for the disavowal and punishment of Van Berckel unless it should become absolutely certain that Holland had joined the league. At their meeting in November, the States-General voted to join the league, and the demand was accordingly presented. Everything happened according to the programme. The States-General freely condemned and disavowed the Amsterdam affair, and offered to make reparation; but with regard to the punishment of Van Berckel, they decided that an inquiry must first be made as to the precise nature of his offence and the court most fit for trying him. England replied by a peremptory demand for the immediate punishment of Van Berckel, and, without waiting for an answer, proceeded to declare war against Holland on the 20th of December. Four days before this, the swiftest ship that could be found was sent to Admiral Rodney, who was then at Barbadoes, ordering him to seize upon St. Eustatius without a moment’s delay.

Catherine decides not to interfere

Whatever other qualities may have been lacking in the British ministry at this time, they certainly were not wanting in pluck. England had now to fight single-handed against four nations, three of which were, after herself, the chief naval powers of the world. According to the Malmesbury Diaries, “this bold conduct made a great and useful impression upon the Empress” of Russia. It was partly with a view to this moral effect that the ministry were so ready to declare war. It was just at this time that they were proposing, by the offer of Minorca, to tempt Catherine into an alliance with England; and they did not wish to have her interpret their eagerness to secure her aid as a confession of weakness or discouragement. By making war on Holland, they sought to show themselves as full of the spirit of fight as ever. To strengthen the impression, Harris blustered and bragged. The Dutch, said he, “are ungrateful, dirty, senseless boors, and, since they will be ruined, must submit to their fate.” But in all this the British government was sailing very near the wind. Prince Galitzin, the Russian ambassador at the Hague, correctly reported that the accession of Holland to the Armed Neutrality was the real cause of the war, and that the Amsterdam affair was only a pretext. Upon this ground, the Dutch requested armed assistance from Catherine, as chief of the league. The empress hesitated; she knew the true state of the case as well as any one, but it was open to her to accept the British story or not, as might seem best. Dispatches from Berlin announced that Frederick was very angry. When he first heard the news, he exclaimed, “Well! since the English want a war with the whole world, they shall have it.” Catherine then sat down and wrote with her own hand a secret letter to Frederick, asking him if he would join her in making war upon England. On second thoughts, the King of Prussia concluded there was no good reason for taking part in the affair, and he advised Catherine also to keep her hands free. This decided the empress. She did not care to make war upon England, except with such overwhelming force as to be sure of extorting some important concessions. She accordingly chose to believe the British story, and she refused to aid the Dutch, on the ground that their quarrel with England grew out of a matter with which the Armed Neutrality had nothing to do. At the same time, after dallying for a while with the offer of Minorca, she refused that also, and decided to preserve to the end the impartial attitude which she had maintained from the beginning.

TYPES OF BRITISH CARICATURE

Capture of St. Eustatius, Feb. 3, 1781

Meanwhile, on the 3d of February, 1781, a powerful fleet under Rodney, with the force of 5,000 men which had been detached in November, 1779, from Clinton’s army in New York, appeared before the island of St. Eustatius, and summoned it to surrender. The Dutch governor, ignorant of the fact that war had begun, had only fifty-five soldiers on the island. He had no choice but to surrender, and the place was given up without a blow. The British had an especial spleen against this wealthy little island, which had come to be the centre of an enormous trade between France and Holland and the United States. Rodney called it a nest of thieves, and declared that “this rock, only six miles in length and three in breadth, had done England more harm than all the arms of her most potent enemies, and alone supported the infamous American rebellion.” His colleague, General Vaughan, who commanded the land force, regarded it as a feeder for the American “colonies,” of which the summary extinction would go far toward ending the war. With such feelings, they made up their minds to do their work thoroughly; and accordingly they confiscated to the Crown not only all the public stores, but all the private property of the inhabitants. Their orders were carried out with great brutality. The goods in the warehouses were seized and laden upon ships, to be carried away and sold at auction in the neighbouring islands. Every kind of private and personal property was laid hold of, and the beggared inhabitants were turned out of doors and ordered to quit the island. The total value of the booty amounted to more than twenty million dollars.

Shameful proceedings

Among the victims of this robbery were many British merchants, who were no better treated than the rest. Rodney tore up their remonstrance without reading it, and exclaimed, “This island is Dutch, and everything in it is Dutch, and as Dutch you shall all be treated.” The proceedings were fitly crowned by an act of treachery. The Dutch flag was kept flying as a decoy, and in the course of the next seven weeks more than fifty American ships, ignorant of the fate of the island, were captured by the aid of this dirty stratagem.

The conduct of the government in declaring war against Holland was denounced by the Whigs as criminal, and the true character of the shameful affair of St. Eustatius was shown up by Burke in two powerful speeches. But the government capped the climax when it deliberately approved the conduct of Rodney, and praised him for it. Many of the British victims, however, brought their cases before the courts, and obtained judgments which condemned as illegal the seizure of private property so far as they were concerned. On the continent of Europe, the outrage awakened general indignation, as an infraction of the laws and usages of civilized warfare, the like of which had not been seen for many years; and it served to alienate from Great Britain the little sympathy that remained for her.

To the historian who appreciates the glorious part which England has played in history, the proceedings here recorded are painful to contemplate; and to no one should they be more painful than to the American, whose forefathers climbed with Wolfe the rugged bank of the St. Lawrence; or a century earlier, from their homes in New England forests, heard with delight of Naseby and Marston Moor; or back yet another hundred years, in Lincolnshire villages defied the tyranny of Gardiner and Bonner; or at yet a more remote period did yeoman’s service in the army of glorious Earl Simon, or stood, perhaps, beside great Edward on the hallowed fields of Palestine. The pride with which one recalls such memories as these explains and justifies the sorrow and disgust with which one contemplates the spectacle of a truculent George Germain, an unscrupulous Stormont, or a frivolous North; or hears the dismal stories of Indian massacres, of defenceless villages laid in ashes, of legalized robbery on the ocean highway, or of colossal buccaneering, such as that which was witnessed at St. Eustatius. The earlier part of the reign of George III. is that period of English history of which an enlightened Englishman must feel most ashamed, as an enlightened Frenchman must feel ashamed of the reigns of Louis XIV. and the two Bonapartes. All these were periods of wholesale political corruption, of oppression at home and unrighteous warfare abroad, and all invited swift retribution in the shape of diminished empire and temporary lowering of the national prestige. It was not until after the downfall of the personal government of George III. that England began to resume her natural place in the foremost rank of liberal and progressive powers. Toward that happy result, the renewal and purification of English political life, the sturdy fight sustained by the Americans in defence of their liberties did much to contribute. The winning of independence by the Americans was the winning of a higher political standpoint for England and for the world.

CHAPTER XIII

A YEAR OF DISASTERS

After the surrender of Burgoyne, the military attitude of the British in the northern states became, as we have seen, purely defensive. Their efforts were almost exclusively directed toward maintaining their foothold, at first in the islands of New York and Rhode Island, afterward in New York alone, whence their ships could ascend the Hudson as far as the frowning crags which sentinel the entrance of the Highlands. Their offensive operations were restricted to a few plundering expeditions along the coast, well calculated to remind the worthy Connecticut farmers of the ubiquitousness of British power, and the vanity of hopes that might have been built upon the expectation of naval aid from France. But while the war thus languished at the centre, while at the same time it sent forth waves of disturbance that reverberated all the way from the Mississippi river to the Baltic sea, on the other hand the southernmost American states were the scene of continuous and vigorous fighting. Upon the reduction of the Carolinas and Georgia the king and Lord George Germain had set their hearts. If the rebellion could not be broken at the centre, it was hoped that it might at least be frayed away at the edges; and should fortune so far smile upon the royal armies as to give them Virginia also, perhaps the campaigns against the wearied North might be renewed at some later time and under better auspices.

State of things in the Far South

In this view there was much that was plausible. Events had shown that the ministry had clearly erred in striking the rebellion at its strongest point; it now seemed worth while to aim a blow where it was weakest. The people of New England were almost unanimous in their opposition to the king, and up to this time the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut in particular had done more to sustain the war than all the others put together. Georgia and the Carolinas, a thousand miles distant, might be regarded as almost beyond the reach of reinforcements from New England; and it might be doubted whether they possessed the ability to defend themselves against a well-planned attack. Georgia, the weakest of the thirteen states, bordered upon the British territory of Florida. In South Carolina the character of the population made it difficult to organize resistance. The citizens of Charleston, and the rich planters of English or Huguenot descent inhabiting the lowlands, belonged mostly to the revolutionary party, but they were outnumbered by their negro slaves; and the peculiar features of slavery in South Carolina made this a very embarrassing circumstance. The relations between master and slave were not friendly there, as they were in Virginia; and while the state had kept up a militia during the whole colonial period, this militia found plenty of employment in patrolling the slave quarters, in searching for hidden weapons, and in hunting fugitives. It was now correctly surmised that on the approach of an invading army the dread of negro insurrection, with all its nameless horrors, would paralyze the arm of the state militia. While the patriotic South Carolinians were thus handicapped in entering upon the contest, there were in the white population many discordant elements. It was commonly said that the Quakers and men of German ancestry took little interest in politics, and were only too ready to submit to any authority that would protect them in their ordinary pursuits. A strong contrast to the political apathy of these worthy men was to be found in the rugged population of the upland counties. Here the small farmers of Scotch-Irish descent were, every man of them, Whigs, burning with a fanatical hatred of England; while, on the other hand, the Scotchmen who had come over since Culloden were mostly Tories, and had by no means as yet cast off that half-savage type of Highland character which we find so vividly portrayed in the Waverley novels. It was not strange that the firebrands of war, thrown among such combustible material, should have flamed forth with a glare of unwonted cruelty; nor was it strange that a commonwealth containing such incongruous elements, so imperfectly blended, should have been speedily, though but for a moment, overcome. The fit ground for wonder is that, in spite of such adverse circumstances, the state of South Carolina should have shown as much elastic strength as she did under the severest military stress which any American state was called upon to withstand during the Revolutionary War.

SEAL OF SOUTH CAROLINA (OBVERSE)

SEAL OF SOUTH CAROLINA (REVERSE)

Georgia overrun by the British

Since the defeat of the British fleet before Charleston, in June 1776, the southern states had been left unmolested until the autumn of 1778, when there was more or less frontier skirmishing between Georgia and Florida, – a slight premonitory symptom of the storm that was coming. The American forces in the southern department were then commanded by General Robert Howe, who was one of the most distinguished patriots of North Carolina, but whose military capacity seems to have been slender. In the autumn of 1778 he had his headquarters at Savannah, for there was war on the frontier. Guerrilla parties, made up chiefly of vindictive loyalist refugees, but aided by a few British regulars from General Augustine Prevost’s force in Florida, invaded the rice plantations of Georgia, burning and murdering, and carrying off negroes, – not to set them free, but to sell them for their own benefit. As a counter-irritant, General Howe planned an expedition against St. Augustine, and advanced as far as St. Mary’s river; but so many men were swept away by fever that he was obliged to retreat to Savannah. He had scarcely arrived there when 3,500 British regulars from New York, under Colonel Campbell, landed in the neighbourhood, and offered him battle. Though his own force numbered only 1,200, of whom half were militia, Howe accepted the challenge, relying upon the protection of a great swamp which covered his flanks. But a path through the swamp was pointed out to the enemy by a negro, and the Americans, attacked in front and behind, were instantly routed. Some 500 prisoners were taken, and Savannah surrendered, with all its guns and stores; and this achievement cost the British but 24 men. A few days afterward, General Prevost advanced from Florida and captured Sunbury, with all its garrison, while Colonel Campbell captured Augusta. A proclamation was issued, offering protection to such of the inhabitants as would take up arms in behalf of the king’s government, while all others were by implication outlawed. The ugly temper of Lord George Germain was plainly visible in this proclamation and in the proceedings that followed. A shameless and promiscuous plunder was begun. The captive soldiers were packed into prison-ships and treated with barbarity. The more timid people sought to save their property by taking sides with the enemy, while the bolder spirits took refuge in the mountains; and thus General Prevost was enabled to write home that the state of Georgia was conquered.