to the French. Such a strategy would also give greater succor to American loyalists, whom most British officials, Germain among them, still believed constituted a colonial majority. Yet doubts persisted. “The Americans may be reduced by the fleet,” Secretary at War Barrington had written North, “but never can be by the army.” A War Office report warned that fewer than ten thousand regulars in the British Isles could be spared for overseas duty. Given the booming economy, no more than six thousand more were likely to be recruited in time for the 1776 campaign. “Unless it rains men in red coats,” a British official wrote, “I know not where we are to get all we shall want.” Seventeen recruiting parties in Ireland were enlisting only one or two dozen men per week, combined. “This will never do,” wrote General Harvey, the adjutant general. “We are dribletting away the army, & to no purpose.”
Germain soon encountered other aggravations. Army recruiters competed with the Royal Navy and the East India Company for men. A dozen departments administered the army and overseas military logistics, with fitful coordination, when not outright rivalry, among them. Shipwrights resisting new efficiency rules had gone on strike, bringing Portsmouth and most other yards to a standstill; almost 130 were fired, hampering ship construction and repair. Too often the king and his men were forced to make crucial decisions in the dark, or at least the dusk. Voyages from England to America usually took ten weeks, though sometimes fifteen or more; return trips with the prevailing winds typically required six weeks. A minister might wait four months for acknowledgment that his instructions had been received, or he might wait forever: forty packet boats carrying the Royal Mail would be captured or founder in storms during the war. Misunderstanding, misinformation, and untimely orders were inevitable, particularly when London relied on such flawed sources of intelligence as loyalists desperate for Crown support and royal governors banished from their own capitals. “America,” General Harvey said, “is an ugly job.”
Like the man he called “the mildest and best of kings,” Germain often invoked the need for “zeal.” Sensing that the Americans had advantages of time and space, he vowed to bring “the utmost force of this kingdom to finish the rebellion in one campaign” before other European powers could intervene to aid the rebels. If the insurrection was to be crushed in 1776, half measures would never do.
Zeal could be found in the Prohibitory Act, introduced in the Commons by North on November 20. All vessels found trading with the Americans “shall be forfeited to His Majesty, as if the same were the ships and effects of open enemies.” Cargoes taken on the high seas would be considered lawful seizures. Captured American mariners could be pressed into the Royal Navy. American ports were to be blockaded. The act amounted to “a declaration of perpetual war,” one British politician observed, although John Adams would call it an “act of independency” that galvanized American resistance. Parliament overwhelmingly approved the measure, and the king gave his assent on December 22. The king also had approved the Admiralty’s plan to recall Admiral Graves in hopes that his replacement, Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, a former governor of Newfoundland, would put a spark into the North American squadron.
As for fighting the rebels on land, Germain relied heavily on General Howe’s assessment. An unconventional enemy required original tactics, and Howe’s experience with light infantry and irregular warfare—fighting from “trees, walls, or hedges”—seemed apposite. The commanding general favored squeezing New England between the blockaded ports and the North River, also known as the Hudson, with an offensive launched into New York from Canada once the American interlopers were expelled from Quebec. Germain agreed: a robust fleet must be dispatched to the St. Lawrence, and another to Boston or New York. He immediately pressed the Admiralty to find sufficient ships not only in Britain, but also in Germany and Holland. More combat troops must also be found, from Scotland, Ireland, and the little German principalities.
Germain also knew that for the past two months, the king had been intimately involved in planning another expedition—to the southern colonies, where Scottish émigrés in North Carolina were “said to be well inclined” to the Crown. Within three days of taking office, Germain had adopted this adventure as his own. On the king’s command, seven infantry regiments were to embark in Cork on December 1, with orders “to assist in the suppression of the rebellion.” By late November, His Majesty was informed that Howe and the southern governors had been given authority to raise loyalist troops who would receive British arms and be paid as much as regulars. A commodore, the capable Sir Peter Parker, would escort the expedition to the southern colonies with nine warships and fifteen hundred crewmen. The Admiralty ordered Hawke to Cape Fear on the North Carolina coast to recruit local pilots—with press warrants, if necessary—and to scout for landing sites.
All this was to be “a profound secret,” although, as usual, American agents in London learned of the plan immediately. An assault on the southern colonies would hardly come as a surprise. A recent proposal in the Commons—rejected for the moment—called for sending British regiments to foment slave uprisings, and Governor Dunmore in Virginia had declared that “it is my fixed purpose to arm all my own Negroes and receive all others that will come to me whom I shall declare free.”
Zeal, indeed, would be a hallmark of George Germain’s ministry. More aggressive than his generals, he intended to send them even more reinforcements than they had requested. Howe, facing a grim winter in Boston, praised “the decisive and masterly strokes … effected since your lordship has assumed the conduct of this war.” The American secretary’s moxie was so striking that even the opposition Evening Post predicted he would rise still further in his remarkable rebound to eventually become prime minister. The king was said to be pleased.
Yet amid the green baize desks and the exquisite wall maps in Whitehall, certain truths about the American war remained elusive. Neither Germain nor anyone else in government had carefully analyzed whether Britain’s troop transports, storeships, men-of-war, and other maritime resources could support an ambitious campaign that now included ancillary assaults in the far south and the far north. Little coordination was imposed on one commander in chief in Canada or another in Boston, or with their naval counterparts. Subordinate generals were permitted, even encouraged, to offer their views directly to policy makers in London. Swayed by loyalist exiles and vindictive Crown officials in the colonies, king and cabinet continued to overestimate the breadth and depth of loyal support. No coherent plan obtained to woo the tens of thousands who straddled the fence in America, or to protect those who rejected insurrection but risked severe retaliation from the rebels.
Finally, Germain, like the best of kings he served, could neither grasp the coherence and appeal of revolutionary ideals, nor comprehend the historical headwinds against which Britain now tacked. The American secretary’s lack of “genius sufficient for works of mere imagination” had been acknowledged ironically; that irony would haunt the rest of his days. For now, in a private letter to Howe, he praised the “cordiality & harmony which subsists between you, Clinton, & Burgoyne.” He added:
We want some good news to encourage us to go with the immense expense attending this war.… The providing [of] armies at such a distance is a most difficult undertaking. I do the best I can, and then we must trust to Providence for success.
They Fought, Bled, and Died Like Englishmen
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, DECEMBER 1775
John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and the royal governor of Virginia, had few rivals as the most detested British official in North America. Now forty-five, he was a short, pugnacious Scot whose father had been arrested for treason in the 1745 Jacobite rising. Young John subsequently chose to serve the English Crown as a soldier and was permitted to inherit the title after his father’s death in 1756. His estates in Perthshire provided £3,000 annually,
