The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History) by Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy

Author:Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Yale University Press (Ignition)
Published: 2013-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

“Bagging the Fox”

CHARLES, EARL CORNWALLIS

On the eve of the state opening of Parliament in November 1781, George III was due to give a speech from the throne announcing expectations of a great British victory in America. Throughout the year, Lord George Germain had been enthusiastic about British prospects there. In the early months of 1781, Sir Henry Clinton had shed his usual pessimism and was beginning to think victory possible. Their optimism appears absurd in hindsight and is often cited as an example of the home government being out of touch with the realities of the war in America.1

Such hopes were not totally delusional, however. In 1781, the chances of success seemed very promising. In January, Admiral Sir George Rodney and General Sir John Vaughan eliminated one of the major sources of supply to the Continental Army when they conquered the Dutch island of St. Eustatius. Britain was quickly closing the gap in naval strength, and since the spring of 1780, France and Spain had begun to tire of the war. As an American diplomat in Paris, John Adams worried that France might try to arbitrate a negotiated compromise between Britain and the United States. The French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, was simultaneously warning Louis XVI that “we have need of peace.” There were well-supported rumors that France and Spain were not willing to continue the war beyond the end of 1781. Silas Deane, a former commissioner of the Continental Congress to France, had become convinced that the best option for America was reconciliation with Britain.2

The rebellion seemed on the verge of collapse, with a depreciated currency and a bankrupt treasury dependent on subsidies from France. By May 1781, the Continental dollar had fallen in relation to the pound from 125:1 to 700:1. There was widespread disaffection throughout the Continental Army over wage arrears and poor conditions, causing mutinies in line regiments in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Between October and December 1780, the force commanded by Washington had dwindled from 17,586 troops to 8,742, of whom only 5,982 were fit for duty. Ethan Allen gave the impression that he might declare Vermont for the British. In a letter intercepted by the British less than six months before his great victory at Yorktown, George Washington had written that if the war did not end with the next campaign, the cause would die of poverty and exhaustion: “we are at the end of our tether . . . now or never our deliverance must come.”3

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