The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812, Vol II

In considering the use made of Great Britain's powers for war by the administration of the second Pitt, the broad outlines should be regarded, not as a simply military question,—such as the combinations of a general officer in a campaign,—but as efforts of statesmanship, directing arms in an attempt to compass by force the requirements considered to be most decisive in a political situation. The office of the statesman is to determine, and to indicate to the military authorities, the national interests most vital to be defended, as well as the objects of conquest or destruction most injurious to the enemy, in view of the political exigencies which the military power only subserves. The methods by which the military force will proceed to the ends thus indicated to it—the numbers, character, equipment of the forces to be employed, and their management in campaign—are technical matters, to be referred to the military or naval expert by the statesman. If the latter undertakes to dictate in these, he goes beyond his last and commonly incurs misfortune.

It is not likely that such a division of labor, between the statesman, the soldier, and the seaman, is ever formally made. It is enough if it be practically recognized by the due influence of the military element in deciding details, and by its cheerful obedience in carrying out the views of the government whose servant it is. In criticising results it is fair to assume, where not otherwise proved, that for the general direction of the war the government is responsible, and that in the particular management of military movements the advice of professional men has had just weight. A somewhat striking illustration of this is to be found in the change of naval strategy, within the limits of the Channel fleet, when, without any change in the government, the positive convictions and stringent methods of Lord St. Vincent set aside, in 1800, the traditions of Lord Howe and Lord Bridport.

What then was the general direction imparted to military movements by a government which had announced its object in the war to be the attainment of security, by "repressing the French system of aggrandizement and aggression"?

Owing to the distracted condition of France, many confusing cross-lights were at first cast upon that central theatre of European disturbance, by movements whose force it was impossible rightly to estimate. Such were the risings in La Vendée and Brittany, the revolt at Lyon, the delivery of Toulon to the allied fleets. Experience justifies the opinion that such insurgent movements, involving but a part of a nation, are best left to themselves, supported only by money and supplies. If, thus aided, they have not the vitality to make good their cause, the presence of foreign troops, viewed ever with jealousy by the natives, will not insure success. It is, however, the French Revolution itself that furnishes the surest illustrations of this truth, shedding upon it a light which Pitt did not have to guide him. Such embarrassments of the French Government were naturally thought to give opportunity for powerful diversions; the more so as the amount of disaffection was much exaggerated, and the practice of partial descents upon the French coasts had come down unquestioned from previous wars.

To this mistake, as natural as any ever made in war, and to the treaty obligation to support Holland, is to be attributed much of the misdirection given to the British army in the first two years of the war. When the illusion was over, and Holland conquered, the military effort of Great Britain was at once concentrated on its proper objects of ruling the sea and securing positions that contributed to naval control and commercial development. Even in 1793 a respectable force had been sent to the West Indies, which in 1794 reduced all the Windward Islands. Stretching its efforts too far, reverses followed; but in 1795 a powerful fleet was sent with sixteen thousand troops commanded by Sir Ralph Abercromby, the best general officer revealed by the early part of the war. From the first, Pitt had seen the necessity of controlling the West Indies. That necessity was twofold: first, by far the greatest fraction of British trade, over one fourth of the whole, depended upon them; and, second, the enemy's islands were not only valuable as producing, they were above all the homes of cruisers that endangered all commerce, neutral as well as British. To control the whole Caribbean region was, among those objects that lay within the scope of the British Government, the one most essential to the success of the general war. To sneer at the attempt as showing merely a wish for sugar islands is to ignore the importance of the West Indies to the financial stability of Great Britain; upon whose solvency depended, not only the maritime war, but the coalitions whose aid was needed to repress "the system of French aggression."

Abercromby restored England's control over the lesser Antilles, except Guadeloupe, and added to her possessions Trinidad and the Dutch colonies on the mainland. Although unable to retain Haïti, whose ports were for some time occupied, the British navy ensured its loss to France and the final success of the negro revolt; and commercial relations were established with the new government. During the same period the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, and other Dutch and French possessions in India were reduced by similar expeditions. These not only extended the sphere of British commerce; they contributed yet more to its enlargement by the security resulting from the conversion of hostile to friendly ports, and the consequent diminution of enemy's cruisers.

It is a singular fact that neither the extraordinary commercial prosperity secured by these successes, nor the immense development of the navy during Pitt's administration, is mentioned in the celebrated denunciation of his "drivelling" war policy by Macaulay. Of naval administration the latter speaks, in order to assign the credit to another; on commercial and naval expansion he is silent. Yet no factors in the war were so important. The one sustained Great Britain, on whose shoulders was upborne the whole resistance of Europe; the other crushed France by a process of constriction which, but for Bonaparte, would have reduced her at an early period, and to free her from which Napoleon himself was driven to measures that ruined him. These important results were obtained by lengthening the cords and strengthening the stakes of British commerce, by colonial expansion and safe-guarding the seas, and by the growth of the navy,—none of which objects could have been accomplished without the hearty support of the Prime Minister. From the co-operation of these causes, and the restrictions placed on neutral trade, the commerce of Great Britain increased by 65 480 per cent between 1792 and 1800, while the loss by capture was less than 2½ per cent on the annual volume of trade.

The directly offensive use of Great Britain's maritime power made by the ministry, in order to repress the French system of aggression, consisted in throwing back France upon herself, while at the same time cutting off her resources. The continental armies which begirt her on the land side were supported by subsidies; and also when practicable, as in the Mediterranean, by the co-operation of the British fleets, to whose influence upon his Italian campaign in 1796 Bonaparte continually alludes. To seaward the colonial system of France was ruined, raw material cut off from her manufactures, her merchant shipping swept from the sea. In 1797 the chief of the Bureau of Commerce in France wrote: "The former sources of our prosperity are either lost or dried up. Our agricultural, manufacturing, and industrial power is almost extinct." 481 At the same time, while not denying the right of neutrals to trade with ports not blockaded, every restriction that could be placed upon such trade by stringent, and even forced, interpretations of international law was rigorously imposed by a navy whose power was irresistible. Even provisions (and it will be well for Great Britain of the present day to recall the fact) were claimed to be contraband of war, on the ground that, in the then condition of France, when there was a reasonable hope of starving her into peace, to supply them contributed to prolong hostilities.

So severe was the suffering and poverty caused by this isolation, that in the moment of his greatest triumph, immediately after signing the peace of Campo Formio, which left Great Britain without an ally, in October, 1797, Bonaparte wrote: "Either our government must destroy the English monarchy, or must expect to be itself destroyed by the corruption and intrigue of those active islanders. Let us concentrate all our activity upon the navy and destroy England." The Directory, conscious that its navy was paralyzed and that its guerre de course, pursued since 1795 against British commerce, had not seriously affected the latter, although 1797 was the year of its lowest depression, could see no further means of injuring England except by attacking the neutral carriers of her wares. Affecting to regard them as accomplices in Great Britain's crimes against humanity, it procured from the Convention, in January, 1798, a decree that "every vessel found at sea, having on board English merchandise as her cargo, in whole or in part, shall be declared lawful prize, whosoever shall be the proprietor of the merchandise, which shall be reputed contraband for this cause alone, that it comes from England or her possessions." At the same time orders were issued to confiscate property of British origin wherever found on shore, and domiciliary visits were authorized to insure its discovery. Napoleon was therefore perfectly justified in declaring in later years that the Directory outlined the policy of his Continental System, embodied in his Berlin and Milan decrees of 1806 and 1807.

To the Directory the attempt thus to destroy British prosperity worked disaster. To Napoleon it brought ruin, owing to the greater vigor, wider scope, and longer duration which he was able to impart to the process. The aim of his Berlin and Milan decrees, like that of the Directory, was to undermine British trade by depriving it of the necessary concurrence of neutral carriers. As this alone would not be enough, he determined to support the decrees by excluding Great Britain from her principal market, to close the entire Continent to all goods coming from her or her colonies, or even passing through her ports. For this purpose—to carry out this gigantic project—edict after edict was issued to France and her allied countries; for this purpose annexation after annexation to the empire was made; for this purpose a double cordon of French troops lined the shores of the Continent from France to the Baltic; for this purpose British goods were not only seized but publicly burned throughout his dominions; for this purpose demands were made upon all neutral states to exclude British manufactures and colonial produce; for this purpose the calamitous Spanish war was incurred; 482 and finally, for this purpose reiterated and imperious complaints were addressed to the czar on his failure to enforce the exclusion, and, upon his persistence, the fatal invasion of Russia followed.

The justice or wisdom of this course is not here in question. It is enough to say that it nearly ruined Great Britain, but entirely ruined Napoleon. The noticeable point, bearing upon the wisdom of Pitt's military policy, is that Napoleon was forced into it by that policy, because England was destroying him and he had no other means of injuring her. Great Britain's success not only followed, but was consequent upon steady adherence to the main features of Pitt's policy. Military writers say that success on a battle-field is of slight avail if the strategic line of operations is ill-chosen, and that even a great defeat may be redeemed if the position has been taken in accordance with the strategic conditions of the campaign. This amounts to saying, in non-military language, that hard blows are useless if not struck on the right spot. Numerous reverses attended the coalitions against France, although few fell upon Great Britain herself; but none was fatal because the general policy, begun by Pitt and continued by his successors, was strategically sound with reference to the object in view,—namely, "the repression of that system of aggression" which was the very spirit of the French Revolution, formulated by the Convention, adopted by the Directory, inherited and given its full logical development by Napoleon.

It is the fashion with the political heirs of Fox, Pitt's greatest opponent, to draw a marked contrast between the war which preceded and that which followed the Peace of Amiens. In the former it is Great Britain which, in a frenzy of hatred or panic fear toward the French Revolution, becomes the wanton aggressor, and turns a movement that, despite some excesses, was on the whole beneficent, into the stormy torrent of blood that poured over Europe. In the second war, Napoleon is the great culprit, the incarnate spirit of aggression, violence, faithlessness, and insolence; with whom peace was impossible. It is, however, notorious, and conceded by French writers, that the French leaders in 1791 and 1792 wanted war on the Continent; 483 the impartial conduct of the British Cabinet was admitted by the French Government when acknowledging the recall of the British ambassador six months before war broke out; 484 the decrees of November 19 and December 15 are before the reader, as is the refusal of the Convention to give the former a construction conciliatory to Great Britain; the treaty rights of Holland had been set aside by the high hand without an attempt at negotiation, and there can be little doubt that the purpose was already formed to invade her territory shortly. Despite all this, not Great Britain, but the Republic, declared war. The treatment, by the Convention and the Directory, of the lesser states that fell under their power, 485 their dealings with Great Britain, their aggressiveness, insolence, and bad faith were identical in spirit with the worst that can be said of Napoleon; the sole difference being that for a weak, incompetent, and many-headed government was substituted the iron rule of a single man of incomparable genius. Scruples were known to neither. The Berlin and Milan decrees, in which was embodied the Continental System that led Napoleon to his ruin, were, as he himself said, but the logical development of the Directory's decree of January, 1798, 486 against which even the long-suffering United States of America rebelled. Both measures struck at Great Britain through the hearts of allies and of neutrals, for whose rights and welfare, when conflicting with the course France wished to take, they showed equal disregard; both were framed in the very spirit of the first National (Constituent) Assembly, which set aside institutions and conventions that did not square with its own ideas of right; which sought justice, as it saw it, by overleaping law.

It is, however, far more important to note, and clearly to apprehend, that both measures were forced upon the rulers of France by the strategic lines of policy laid down by the ministry of Pitt. The decree of January, 1798, followed close upon the rupture of the peace conferences of Lille, initiated by Pitt in 1797; a rupture brought on by a display of arrogance and insolence on the part of the Directory, similar to that shown by it towards the United States at the same period, that can only be realized by reading the correspondence, 487 and which is now known to have been due, in part at least, to the hope of a bribe from the British ministry. 488 The Berlin decree, which formally began the Continental System, was issued in November, 1806, when Pitt had not been a year in his grave. Both were forced upon the French leaders by the evident hopelessness of reaching Great Britain in any other way, and because her policy of war was hurting France terribly, while sustaining her own strength. In other words, Great Britain, by the strategic direction she gave to her efforts in this war, forced the French spirit of aggression into a line of action which could not but result fatally. 489 But for Bonaparte, the result, nearly attained in 1795 and again in 1799, would have followed then; not even his genius could avert it finally.

It is related that a leader of antiquity once cried to his opponent, "If you are the great general you claim to be, why do you not come down and fight me?" and received the pertinent reply, "If you are the great general you say, why do you not make me come down and fight you?" This was precisely what Great Britain effected. By the mastery of the sea, by the destruction of the French colonial system and commerce, by her persistent enmity to the spirit of aggression which was incarnate in the French Revolution and personified in Napoleon, by her own sustained and unshaken strength, she drove the enemy into the battle-field of the Continental System, where his final ruin was certain. Under the feeble rule of the Directory that ruin came on apace; within a year it was evident that the only gainer by the system was the foe whom it sought to overthrow, that France herself and her allies, as well as neutral Powers, were but being broken down to the profit of Great Britain. Despite the first failure, there was a plausible attraction about the measure which led Napoleon, confident in his strength and genius, to apply it again with the relentless thoroughness characteristic of his reign. For a time it succeeded, owing not only to the vigor with which it was used, but also to Great Britain being exasperated into retaliatory steps which, by forbidding the trade of neutrals to and between all the ports thus closed to British commerce, stopped at its source the contraband trade, which eluded Napoleon's blockade and kept open the way for British exports to the Continent.

The strain, however, was too great to be endured by the great composite political system which the emperor had founded, and through which he hoped to exclude his enemy from every continental market. The privations of all classes, the sufferings of the poorer, turned men's hearts from the foreign ruler, who, in the pursuit of aims which they neither sympathized with nor understood, was causing them daily ills which they understood but too well. All were ready to fall away and rise in rebellion when once the colossus was shaken. The people of Spain, at one extremity of Europe, revolted in 1808; the Czar of Russia, at the other, threw down the gauntlet in 1810, by a proclamation which opened his harbors to all neutral ships bringing colonial produce, the object of Napoleon's bitterest reclamations. In the one case the people refused the ruler put over them to insure a more vigorous enforcement of the continental blockade; in the other the absolute monarch declined longer to burden his subjects with exactions which were ruining them for the same object. The Spanish outbreak gave England a foothold upon the Continent at a point most favorable for support by her maritime strength and most injurious to the emperor, not only from the character of the country and the people, but also because it compelled him to divide his forces between his most remote frontiers. The defection of the czar made a fatal breach in the line of the continental blockade, opening a certain though circuitous access for British goods to all parts of Europe. Incapable of anticipating defeat and of receding from a purpose once formed, Napoleon determined upon war with Russia. He, the great teacher of concentration, proceeded to divide his forces between the two extremes of Europe. The results are well known to all.

It was not by attempting great military operations on land, but by controlling the sea, and through the sea the world outside Europe, that both the first and the second Pitt ensured the triumph of their country in the two contests where either stood as the representative of the nation. Mistakes were made by both; it was the elder who offered to Spain to give Gibraltar for Minorca, which the younger recovered by force of arms. Mistakes many may be charged against the conduct of the war under the younger; but, with one possible exception, they are mistakes of detail in purely military direction, which cannot invalidate the fact that the general line of action chosen and followed was correct. To recur to the simile already borrowed from military art, the mistakes were tactical, not strategic; nor, it may be added, to any great degree administrative.

The possible exception occurred at the beginning of the war, in the spring and summer of 1793. It may be, as has been claimed by many, that a march direct upon Paris at that time by the forces of the Coalition would have crushed all opposition, and, by reducing the mob of the capital, have insured the submission of the country. It may be so; but in criticising the action of the British ministers, so far as it was theirs, it must be remembered that not only did men of the highest military reputation in Europe advise against the movement, but that the Duke of Brunswick, then second to none in distinction as a soldier, had tried it and failed a few months before. For unprofessional men to insist, against the best professional opinions at their command, is a course whose propriety or prudence can only be shown by the event,—a test to which the advance upon Paris, now so freely prescribed by the wisdom of after-sight, was not brought. One consideration, generally overlooked, may here be presented. To attempt so momentous and hazardous an enterprise, when the leaders to whom its conduct must be intrusted regard it as unwise, is to incur a great probability of disaster. Even Bonaparte would not force his plans upon Moreau, when the latter, in 1800, persisted in preferring his own. Yet this must statesmen have done, had they in 1793 ordered their generals to advance on Paris.

Once lost, the opportunity, if such it were, did not recur. It depended purely upon destroying the resistance of France before it had time to organize. Thenceforward there remained to encounter, not the policy of a court, playing its game upon the chess-board of war, with knights and pawns, castles and armies, but a nation in arms, breathing a fury and inspired by passions which only physical exhaustion could repress. Towards that exhaustion Great Britain could on the land side contribute effectually only by means of allies, and this she did. On the side of the sea, her own sphere of action, there were two things she needed to do. The first was to sustain her own strength, by fostering, widening, and guarding the workings of her commercial system; the second was to cut France off from the same sources of strength and life. Both were most effectually accomplished,—not, as Macaulay asserts, by the able administration of Earl Spencer (whose merit is not disputed), but by the general policy of the ministry in the extension of the colonial system, in the wise attention paid to the support of British commerce in all its details, and in the extraordinary augmentation of the navy. Between 1754 and 1760, the period embracing the most brilliant triumphs of the elder Pitt, the British navy increased by 33 per cent. Between 1792 and 1800, under his son, the increase was 82 per cent. How entirely the military management and direction of this mighty force depended upon the sea-officers, and not upon the statesman, when a civilian was at the head of the Admiralty, will be evident to any one studying closely the slackness of the Channel fleet immediately under the eye of Earl Spencer, or the paltry dispositions made in particular emergencies like the Irish invasion of 1796, and contrasting these with the vigor manifested at that very moment under Jervis in the Mediterranean, or later, in the admirable operations of the same officer in command of the Channel fleet.

Few indeed are the statesmen who are not thus dependent upon professional subordinates. Pitt was no exception. He was not a general or an admiral, nor does he appear so to have considered himself; but he realized perfectly where Great Britain's strength lay, and where the sphere of her efforts. By that understanding he guided her movements; and in the final triumph wrought by the spirit of the British nation over the spirit of the French Revolution, the greatest share cannot justly be denied to the chief who, in the long struggle against wind and tide, forced often to swerve from the direct course he would have followed by unforeseen dangers that rose around the ship in her passage through unknown seas, never forgot the goal "Security," upon which from the first his will was set. Fit indeed it was that he should drop at his post just when Trafalgar had been won and Austerlitz lost. That striking contrast of substantial and, in fact, decisive success with bewildering but evanescent disaster, symbolized well his troubled career, as it superficially appears. As the helm escaped his dying hands, all seemed lost, but in truth the worst was passed. "The pilot had weathered the storm."