A History Of The British Army – Vol. III (1763-1793)

Hon. Sir John William Fortescue

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782891291
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Sir John Fortescue holds a pre-eminent place amongst British military historians, his enduring fame and legacy resting mainly on his life's work "The History of the British Army",
According to Professor Brian Bond, the work was "the product of indefatigable research in original documents, a determination to present a clear, accurate, and readable narrative of military operations, and a close personal knowledge of the battlefields, which enabled him to elucidate his account with excellent maps. Most important, however, was his motivation: namely, a lifelong affection for the old, long-service, pre-Cardwell army, the spirit of the regiments of which it largely consisted, and the value of its traditions to the nation. An important part of his task was to distil and inculcate these soldierly virtues which, in his conservative view, contrasted sharply with the unedifying character of politicians who habitually meddled in military matters." ODNB.
This third volume covers the period from 1763-1793, the European Powersfought each other via proxy but great vigour in North America and India. The British Army would have great success in India under military leaders of the calibre of Abercromby, Cornwallis and Warren Hastings. however the loss of the American Revolutionary War, gained for the Americans their Independence and the British troops, hamstrung by political foolishness, a humbling defeat.
TIMES.—"Whatever Mr. Fortescue may do in the future, he has already, in his first three volumes, produced one of the most important military works in the English language. It is sincerely to be hoped that they will be read as widely as they deserve to be."
ARMY AND NAVY GAZETTE.—"The Hon. J. W. Fortescue is greatly to be congratulated upon the third volume of his very important History of the British Army....With the publication of this book the British Army is gaining a complete history really worthy of the name."
A MUST READ for any military enthusiast.

BOOK XI

CHAPTER I — AMERICA – 1763-1764

The new British Empire Ties that bound the Colonies to the Mother Country: the Tie of Sentiment — The Tie of Interest — The Tie of Commercial Legislation; Trade and Navigation Acts — State of Parties in England — England’s Position in Europe — Peace Establishment of the Army for 1764 — Neglect of the Question of Imperial Defence — Insurrection of Indians in America; Pontiac — Inadequacy of the British Garrison — Outbreak of the Insurrection — Attack on Detroit — Fall of the remaining British Posts — Amherst’s Difficulties in raising a Force to quell the Rising. — Colonel Bouquet advances upon Fort Pitt — Action of Bushy Run — Hostility of the Six Nations in the North — Siege of Detroit raised — Continued Apathy of the Americans — Bradstreet’s March to Detroit — Bouquet’s Advance to the Muskingum — Final Subjugation of the Indians by British Troops .

1763.

AN empire had been won: there remained the task of providing for its administration and for its defence. The gain in mere territory was in itself stupendous; and though much of it might be but thinly populated, yet new territory necessarily implied new subjects. Apart from India, where, as shall be told in its place, the work of conquest had not been bounded by the expulsion of the French, the Spaniard required to be conciliated anew in Minorca; while in the West Indies, and still more in Canada and Florida, there were not only French and Spanish Colonists that must be absorbed, but large tribes of Indians, formerly dependent upon them, who must be summoned suddenly to cancel ancient treaties and friendships, and, though themselves unconquered, to transfer their amity to the nation that had vanquished their former allies.

Nor was this all. In the West Indies and North America alike the newly acquired possessions lay alongside of clusters of British communities, which, though in the Caribbean Sea divided by but a few leagues of salt water and on the continent actually contiguous with each other, were riven asunder by passionate local and commercial jealousy. There was not one of these communities, not even the tiniest of the Antilles, but possessed its little legislature on the English model, and consequently not one but enjoyed facilities for excessive indulgence of local feeling, local faction, and local folly, to the obstruction of all broad measures of Imperial policy. Never yet had it been possible to combine the whole of the American provinces for common defence, even when the enemy was assailing their frontiers; never yet had the Leeward Islands suffered from a foreign foe, but Barbados had rejoiced over the weakening of a commercial rival. Thus the unification of the Old Empire, at any rate for purposes of defence, called as urgently for accomplishment as the incorporation of the New.

Such unity as the Empire had hitherto enjoyed was due to three principal causes: common attachment to the Crown as representing the Mother Country, common recourse to the Mother Country for protection, and common submission, which was rather nominal than real, to a commercial code imposed by the Mother Country. Thus there was one tie of sentiment, a second of interest, and a third which was entirely artificial and which might prove, if highly tested, to be opposed alike to interest and sentiment.

As to the first of these ties it is difficult, from the nature of the case, to speak with any precision; but there can be no doubt that there was in the Colonies at large a strong traditional attachment to the Crown, and, at the close of the Seven Years’ War, a genuine pride in the prowess of the British arms and in the extension of the British dominions. Had King George the Second lived for another ten years, it is likely that the loyal affection of the British beyond sea would have centred itself about his person. As matters stood, it fastened itself with unerring instinct upon the great though now discarded minister, William Pitt; that is to say, upon the head of a party and not upon the head of the State. But it must never be forgotten that the large measure of self-government vouchsafed to one and all of the Colonies from their foundation could not but foster continually a spirit of independence; and this spirit had displayed itself at critical times in the most unexpected quarters. In a former chapter I have spoken of the early assumption of independent sovereignty by the New England provinces, and in particular by Massachusetts; but it is less generally known that at the Revolution of 1688 such tiny communities as the Island of Nevis and the Bermudas had also attempted to put on the airs and graces of independent republics{1}. It must also be borne in mind that the chief delight of every Colonial Assembly lay in thwarting, in season or out of season, the representative of the Crown in the person of the Governor.

In truth, the sentiment that is strongest in the Colonist of Anglo-Saxon race is that of attachment to the land wherein he has made his home. This may still be found flourishing exuberantly in such unpromising soil as the tropical islet, where the white man’s offspring is pale, sickly, and listless, and the black man’s progeny alone can thrive and increase; much more must it abound in vast continents or great islands, where the white man can see his children and his children’s children growing up in health and vigour, spreading further and further over forest and plain, past mountain and river, insatiable till they reach the Briton’s true boundary, the sea. As a rule very little romance is to be found in the settler of a new country, and such as there is reaches not to the little group of islands, called the British, in Western Europe, not to the noble minsters which recall the birth of their civilisation, nor to the ancient cities which were the cradles of their freedom. The heart of the Colonist goes out to the natural grandeur of his own possessions, to the great forests which would hide whole English counties, to the huge trees which dwarf the British oak to insignificance, to the broad rivers which humble historic Thames to a rivulet, to the snow-capped mountains which bring low such paltry heights as Snowdon. To the European romance is of the past; to the Colonist it is of the present and future. The citizen of the old world looks down on the pioneer of the new as provincial; and the officers of Braddock and Amherst in America had carried this spirit of condescension to a height which provoked just and natural resentment. But be the Mother Country never so perfectly maternal, loyal sentiment is and must be powerless against local attachment in a Colony.

Strengthening the doubtful bond of sentiment there was the tie of interest. In a former chapter{2} I have sketched the early arrangements, hardly to be dignified by the name of organisation, which existed for Colonial and Imperial defence, and have traced the course of events which tended to throw the burden of that defence more and more upon the Mother Country. In the days of the Protectorate and of the Protestant Revolution even the West Indies had been able to furnish levies of white men not only for their own protection but also for attack upon the French and Spanish Islands; but this old order had speedily passed away, and there had not yet arisen the new system of forming permanent regiments of negroes. So for two full generations the brunt of the fighting ashore in the Caribbean Archipelago had fallen upon British troops, while the dominant factor had been, as it still is, the British Fleet. In North America, New England had long striven to dispense with British protection, and, as has been told, had early taken the offensive unaided against the French in Canada; but she had been obliged to invoke the help of the Mother Country; and the final expulsion of the French had been achieved only by uniting to the colonial forces the full strength, both in Europe and America, of the British Army and the British Fleet.

For the aid thus granted and for the success thus gained, Massachusetts, the chief of the New England States, had thanked the King in effusive terms, adding, doubtless with sincerity at the moment, that the people would show their gratitude by every possible testimony of loyalty and of duty. But gratitude is one thing and interest is another. Moreover, the Americans had taken a full share in the peril of the fighting and in the glory of the conquest—a fact which was full of significance, for young communities, like young hounds, must be blooded before they can take their place in the pack of nations. The deliverance of the American provinces from their dangerous neighbour in Canada—a neighbour whose presence had haunted New England night and day for a century—freed them, as they supposed, from all internal peril. For protection from external foes they relied on the British Fleet; and since the French had now no naval station on the North American coast, it was evident that any hostile operations of France against the continent must be beset by almost insuperable difficulties. Quebec, the most inviting point for a French attack, was held by a British garrison; and at New York also there was a small body of regular troops, paid by Great Britain, as a nucleus for defence. Spain, it is true, held New Orleans and Havana, but no Anglo-Saxon treated Spain seriously as a naval power; and, with the whole breadth of the Atlantic Ocean between them and any probable enemy, the Americans were not far wrong in considering themselves invulnerable. Thus the tie of interest, though as strong as ever in the West Indies, was seriously weakened in North America.

Finally, there was the artificial tie of commercial legislation. By the Acts of Trade and Navigation the trade of the British Empire was restricted to vessels built in British dominions and manned, in very large proportion, by British subjects, which was fair enough; but, besides this, certain enumerated articles of commerce were forbidden to pass between foreign countries and British Colonies except by way of England, while rigorous legislation prohibited all manufactures in the Colonies which could possibly compete with those of England. On the other hand, Englishmen were equally interdicted from the purchase of any tobacco except that grown in British Colonies; while bounties on certain colonial products and the favouring of others to the prejudice of foreign powers, went very far towards balancing the scale of advantage and disadvantage between Mother Country and Colonies. Such regulations, selfish though they might be, were the rule in those days, and must not be too hardly judged; but it is to be noted that they were purely commercial, and contained no suggestion whatever of a fund for Imperial defence{3}.

It need hardly be said that these restrictions on trade were absolutely impossible of enforcement. Many of them were winked at with the connivance of the authorities, and the whole of them were from the first evaded by a gigantic and scarcely concealed system of smuggling. In Great Britain the chief duty of troops in time of peace was the protection of revenue officers and reinforcement of the preventive service; and a sufficiently dangerous duty it frequently proved to be. The Isle of Man was described by Burke as a citadel of smuggling, and, when it was annexed to the Crown in 1762, it was found necessary to overawe it immediately by a squadron of light dragoons. On the immense Atlantic coast-line of America and in the West Indian Islands, where there was practically no preventive service, smuggling had flourished virtually unchecked for more than a century; and probably it was as well that this should have been so, for the Colonies would otherwise have been in a state of chronic rebellion. In many of the provinces and islands there was hardly a man, from the Governor downwards, who was not more or less interested in this illicit traffic; for it is the supreme danger of smuggling on a large scale that it involves the whole population, consciously or unconsciously, in violation of the law{4}. It may justly be pleaded that laws to impose artificial restraints on trade are an evil; but from violation of a bad law to general contempt of all law is but a very short step, especially where, as was the case in the Colonies, the executive is dangerously weak.

Thus, then, stood the relations between the Mother Country and the American Colonies at the close of the Seven Years’ War. The tie of sentiment was strengthened for the moment by gratitude and pride, but the tie of interest was weakened by the expulsion of the French from Canada and by the oversetting of what was called the balance of power in America. There remained the tie of commercial legislation; and it is significant that as early as in 1761, after the fall of Montreal but before the conclusion of peace, James Otis, a lawyer of Boston, had lifted himself into prominence by a violent attack upon the entire commercial code. Herein it is true that he was guided at first by private animosity alone, but the proceeding was ominous; for the close of a great war, as the Peace of Ryswick had shown, is always a dangerous period, when politicians and agitators, who have been long thrust to the wall by generals and admirals, return again to their places with louder voices and enhanced importance.

For Britain itself, of course, the same critical moment had come. At a time when the high problem of Imperial defence seemed likely to prove insoluble, except as part of the still higher problem of Imperial union, the country was torn by factions innumerable. Bute, albeit the most unpopular man in England, remained in office until April 1763; but as though there was not enough against him as an individual, the bitterest reproach levelled at him was that he was a Scotsman; and hence there arose a rage against the sister kingdom which was as mischievous as it was unworthy. On the other side, the once powerful Whig party was split up into four or more sections, owing to the petty jealousies of the leading Whig families; while Pitt, the only commanding figure among a host of pygmies, stood moody and implacable aloof. At a time when all public men should have been working together to secure the vast possessions acquired during the war, and to lighten the burden of debt which was one of its inevitable bequests, they were squabbling, intriguing, and caballing for their own supposed interests, forgetful of their country and of the Empire which was committed to their care. Abroad, England had not a friend in Europe. France and Spain, humiliated by defeat and loss of territory, awaited only the moment for taking their revenge. Frederick the Great, unmindful of the help that he had received, and remembering only that of which he had been disappointed, lay like some surly old dog, licking his wounds and growling as he thought how he had received them. No more unpromising time could have been conceived for the inception of a task that demanded the highest constructive statesmanship.

As must needs be at the close of every war, Bute’s first duty was the reduction of the Army to peace-establishment, which was effected by disbanding or dooming to disbandment all Infantry of the Line junior to the Seventieth Foot, and all Cavalry junior to the Eighteenth Light Dragoons{5}. The establishment for Great Britain was fixed at seventeen thousand five hundred men, including nearly three thousand invalids; that for the Colonies at ten thousand men; and that for Minorca and Gibraltar at rather more than four thousand men; which, with eighteen hundred artillery, and the invariable twelve thousand men on the Irish establishment, made up a total of rather more than forty-five thousand men in all. It was a paltry handful of troops to guard so vast an Empire, with its many important naval stations; and the King’s speech explained that the reorganised Militia was counted upon to secure the safety of Great Britain{6}. Yet it was less the weakness than the undue strength of the Army which met with reprobation from men of repute for wisdom. Edmund Burke wrote in 1774 of the “huge increase of the military establishment” at the peace, and could see no more in twenty new regiments than twenty fresh colonels capable of holding seats in the House of Commons. The comment is typical of the spirit in which the question of defence was approached. It is an undoubted and lamentable fact that colonelcies of regiments were freely given as rewards for political service; but it is not difficult to show that Burke’s contention was on the face of it childish. The foreign garrisons included Minorca, Gibraltar, Bermuda, the Bahamas, St. Vincent, Dominica, Tobago, Grenada and the Grenadines, Jamaica, New York, Halifax, Quebec, Mobile and Pensacola, besides a chain of posts extending for some three thousand miles from the St. Lawrence in the north to the lower Mississippi in the south of America. The whole of the West Indies were subject always to the danger of an insurrection either of negro slaves or of savage natives; while the entire western frontier of North America lay exposed to attack by Indians. Yet the huge force allotted for the protection of these possessions did not exceed fifteen thousand men.

Within a month of the voting of the new establishment, a sudden movement in America threw startling light on the vexed question of Colonial defence. It will be remembered that after the fall of Montreal in 1760, Major Rogers, the famous ranger, had been sent with a few troops to enforce the capitulation of the French posts on the great lakes and at the back of Canada. During his progress he was met by an Ottawa chief named Pontiac, who asked him what he did there, but, being answered that the French had surrendered the entire country to the English, seemed to acquiesce in the new state of affairs. None the less the whole of the Indian tribes were galled to the quick by the thought that the territory, which they claimed as their own, should have been transferred by one white nation to another, without a word of consultation with them. French traders and French adventurers who had penetrated into these remote regions, where they lived a half-savage life among the native tribes, lost no opportunity of inflaming the resentment of the Indians against the British; while the British on their side took small pains to conciliate their new subjects. Finally Pontiac, who went near to be a man of genius, planned a great confederation of all the Indian tribes, to attack the whole of the British posts simultaneously and to drive the hated intruders, as his ignorant followers hoped, into the sea. His emissaries flew far and wide to the various chiefs, northward to the head of Lakes Michigan and Huron, southward to the very mouth of the Mississippi; and by the spring of 1763 the weapon of offence was forged and Pontiac ready to strike.

On the British side the chances of parrying such a blow were slender indeed. Amherst’s force had been reduced to a mere skeleton by the costly expeditions to Martinique and to Havana; thousands of men had died and as many thousands had been rendered unserviceable by sickness. The consequence was that the posts for security of the Indian territory were held with ridiculous weakness, though there was hardly one of them within distance to support another. Beginning at Niagara and following the southern shore of Lake Erie, there came in succession Forts Presquile, Le Boeuf, and Sandusky; while Fort Detroit guarded the passage to Lake Huron, and Michillimackinac, now called by the sh...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• MAPS AND PLANS
• BOOK XI
• CHAPTER II - AMERICA - 1763-1774
• CHAPTER III - INDIA - 1758-1761
• CHAPTER IV - INDIA - 1762
• CHAPTER V - INDIA - 1763-1767
• CHAPTER VI - INDIA - 1763-1769
• CHAPTER VII - INDIA - 1769-1775
• CHAPTER VIII - AMERICA - 1774- 1775
• CHAPTER IX -AMERICA - 1775-1776
• CHAPTER X - AMERICA - 1776-1777
• CHAPTER XI - AMERICA - 1777
• CHAPTER XII - AMERICA - 1777-1778
• CHAPTER XIII - AMERICA - 1778-1779
• CHAPTER XIV- AMERICA - 1778-1779
• CHAPTER XV - EUROPE - 1778-1780
• CHAPTER XVI - AMERICA - 1779-1780
• CHAPTER XVII - AMERICA - 1779-1780
• CHAPTER XVIII - AMERICA - 1780-1781
• CHAPTER XIX - AMERICA - 1780-1781
• CHAPTER XX - AMERICA - 1781
• CHAPTER XXI - EUROPE - 1781-1782
• CHAPTER XXII - INDIA - 1755-1780
• CHAPTER XXIII - INDIA - 1780-1781
• CHAPTER XXIV - INDIA - 1782-1783
• CHAPTER XXV - INDIA - 1782-1784
• CHAPTER XXVI - EUROPE - 1784-1795
• CHAPTER XXVII - INDIA - 1784-1795
• CHAPTER XXVIII- INDIA - 1791
• CHAPTER XXIX - INDIA - 1791-1792
• MAPS