in the wound by ordering the verdict to be written in every regimental orderly book and read out on parade. He was burned in effigy at least once. To his brother-in-law he wrote, “I must live in hopes of better times.”
Those times began a few months later when the old king fell dead of a heart attack while sipping morning chocolate on his toilet, to be succeeded by his grandson, George III, who admired Sackville and permitted him to kiss the new monarch’s hand. The stain of disgrace proved indelible but not disqualifying. In 1765, Sackville gained readmission to the Privy Council, and in 1769 a widowed, childless cousin left him her fortune and estate in Northamptonshire on the condition that he perpetuate her surname. And so, resurrected, he became Lord George Germain. On Sunday mornings, a friend wrote, “he marched out his whole family in grand cavalcade to his parish church,” prepared to upbraid any chorister who sang a false note—“Out of tune, Tom Baker!”—while dispensing sixpence to poor children from his waistcoat pocket. “In punctuality, precision, dispatch, and integrity, he was not to be surpassed,” one associate wrote. Another observed simply, “There was no trash in his mind.”
He completed his rehabilitation by hewing to Crown policy, particularly in aligning himself with ministry hard-liners on colonial matters. A “riotous rabble” was to blame in America, he had told the Commons a year earlier, people who ought “not trouble themselves with politics and government which they do not understand.” He was said by one acolyte to have “all the requisites of a great minister, unless popularity and good luck are to be numbered among them.” North was happy enough to have a brawler at his elbow on the Treasury bench. Though neither held the other in affection—Germain privately called North “a trifling supine minister”—they shared the king’s conviction that defeat in America spelled the end of empire, as the historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy later wrote.
The backbiting never ceased, of course. In the tony men’s clubs around St. James’s he was still “Lord Minden” or the “Minden buggering hero.” One witticism held that should the British Army be forced to flee on the battlefield, Germain was the perfect man to lead a retreat. If convivial in private over a glass of claret, in public his mien hardened. Some found him dogmatic, aloof, “quite as cold in his manner as a minister needed be,” in a subordinate’s estimation. A clergyman described “a reserve and haughtiness in Lord George’s manner, which depressed and darkened all that was agreeable and engaging in him.” One biographer later posited that it was “his pride, his remoteness, his intransigence, his indifference, his irony, his disdain, his self-command and self-assurance that inflamed mean minds.”
Even those who felt no rancor toward Germain greeted his appointment with skepticism. He had been accused of many things over the years, with more epithets to come, but no one had ever charged him with statesmanship. Not least among his ministerial challenges was the fact that more than a few of the men now leading the British Army in North America had served with him in the past, at least peripherally, including Howe, Clinton, and Carleton.
Despite the expanding war in the colonies, the American Department remained a modest enterprise. Bookcases, dusty cupboards, and desks upholstered with the usual green baize filled four large rooms on the second floor of the Treasury building in Whitehall. Maps of imperial and plantation geography hung on the white plaster walls. The staff comprised two deputies, a half dozen clerks to scribble dispatches and collate enclosures, a charwoman, and a porter whose apparent function was to make petitioners wait for hours before turning them away completely. The office could draw from a government pool of three dozen messengers, but Germain asked that couriers too obese to ride horseback faster than five miles an hour travel instead by coach. As secretary he was paid just under £2,000 annually, although various perquisites nearly tripled the salary, notably the £5 allotment from every fee paid on various documents signed by the king, including military commissions, licenses to sell trees, and appointments at King’s College in New York. He also was entitled to £3,000 in secret service funds, plus a thousand ounces of white plate. The £13 paid for an office clock—he was uncommonly punctual—and two books of maps came from his private purse.
Germain believed that hard work could heal most ills, and he threw himself into his new role with vigor: issuing commands, rifling through official papers, scratching missives in his jagged, runic hand, the precise time always affixed on his letters to the king. He had long argued that “natural sloth” impeded British administration, especially in the thicket of bureaucracies and office fiefdoms now entangled with centuries of inertia and bad habits. Good habits could help revive efficiency. An admirer described Germain’s executive style as “rapid, yet clear and accurate.… There was no obscurity and ambiguity in his compositions.” His task would be herculean—to direct the longest, largest expeditionary war Britain had ever fought, concocting an effective counterinsurgency strategy while coordinating troops, shipping, naval escorts, and provisions. The small details alone were bewildering. Might the army in Boston want several dozen Tower wall-pieces that could throw a two-ounce ball five hundred yards with precision? When should six thousand new muskets be shipped to Quebec and Virginia? By what means? Were the lower decks in leased Dutch transport ships properly scuttled to avoid suffocating the horses headed across the Atlantic?
Upon arriving at Whitehall in mid-November, Germain found only bad news from America. Several dozen letters from royal governors in the southern colonies showed that the Crown’s efforts to punish Massachusetts had transformed New England grievances into continental resentments. The southern governors believed themselves vulnerable to rude treatment if not assassination, and most had abandoned their capitals for the sanctuary of British warships. “A motley mob … inflamed with liquor” had chased Governor Josiah Martin from his palace in North Carolina. In South Carolina, where rebels had amassed “great quantities of warlike stores,” Governor William Campbell wrote from the man-of-war Cherokee, “I fear it is forgot that His Majesty has any dominions in this part of America.” Official dispatches and other royal mail had been stolen in Florida. Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, had fled from Williamsburg. “My clerk,” he wrote, “is prisoner.” Governor James Wright in Georgia seemed especially rattled. “Liberty gentlemen” had pilfered six tons of his gunpowder and snatched his mail. “I begin to think a King’s governor has little or no business here,” he reported. Rebels in Savannah, he added, included “a parcel of the lowest people, chiefly carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, etc., with a Jew at their head.” Wright’s dispatches grew increasingly frantic. “No troops, no money, no orders or instructions, and a wild multitude gathering fast,” he added. “What can a man do in such a situation?”
Reports from the northern colonies were just as disheartening. A naval captain in Rhode Island wrote of “rebels coming in shoals, armed with muskets, bayonets, sticks and stones,” yelling, “Kill the Tories!” Only a Royal Navy threat to put every insurgent to the sword had restored calm. A Connecticut clergyman warned that malice “against the loyalists is so great and implacable that we fear a general massacre.” Governor John Wentworth had retreated to Boston after a mob demolished his New Hampshire house. In New York, Governor William Tryon had been chased to the Duchess of Gordon in the East River, and the loyal president of King’s College had fled all the way to England. When regulars also boarded ships for safety, rebels ransacked their baggage, looted an ordnance magazine, and made off with shore guns from the batteries in lower Manhattan. “The Americans,” Tryon warned, “from politicians are now becoming soldiers.”
Germain found broad agreement in the government on Britain’s strategic objective—to restore the rebellious colonies to their previous imperial subservience—but disagreement on how best to achieve that goal. How to defeat an enemy that lacked a conventional center of gravity, like a capital city, and relied on armed civilians who were said to be “deep into principles”? Should British forces hunt down and destroy rebel forces in the thirteen colonies and Canada? Strangle the colonies with a naval blockade? Divide and conquer by isolating either New England or the southern colonies? Hold New York City while subduing the affluent middle colonies between Virginia and New Jersey?
Lord North and some others
