The American Revolution: A Very Short Introduction by Robert J. Allison

Author:Robert J. Allison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190225063
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

So ended the first joint effort of the Americans and the French, and General Sullivan was furious. He blasted d’Estaing for not supporting the assault on Newport. A mob in Boston attacked French bakers, killing the Chevalier de Saint-Saveur, twenty-eight-year old diplomat and chamberlain to Louis XVI’s brother. The alliance was crumbling.

Washington had Sullivan tone down his language, and Massachusetts pledged to build a monument for Saint-Saveur. But the British and French fleets both sailed for the West Indies. Washington, still without a naval force, kept the British garrisons pinned down in New York and Newport.

Spain declared war on England in April 1779, not to help Americans but to retake Gibraltar and weaken Britain in the West Indies and North America. French and Spanish warships patrolled the English Channel and threatened to invade England itself. North’s government had “created a war with America, another with France, a third with Spain, and now a fourth with Holland,” a London journalist wrote. “The candle they have lighted in America may, and probably will, make a dreadful fire in Europe.”

The fire in Europe came from the sea. Washington had no sea power to transport troops or support military actions; but Americans did not shy from the sea. Privateering proved more lucrative to ship owners, crews, and captains than blockading, transporting, or bombarding. Between 1775 and 1778 American privateers took about a thousand British merchant ships. Annual captures doubled when Spain and France entered the war, opening their ports to American prizes.

John Paul Jones raided English and Scottish coastal towns on the sloop Ranger in 1778 and even captured a British warship in Britain’s home waters. A former British merchant captain, Jones was the first captain to raise the American flag on a warship, on the Providence in August 1776. Now France outfitted Jones with a privateer, naming it Bonhomme Richard (Poor Richard) in Franklin’s honor. He attacked a British merchant convoy in the North Sea late in the summer of 1779; the British warship Serapis engaged Bonhomme Richard, setting it on fire. When Captain Pearson saw Bonhomme Richard’s officers lowering their sinking vessel’s flag, he asked if they surrendered. Jones replied, “I have not yet begun to fight!”

Jones forced Pearson to surrender, crowded his own survivors onto the Serapis, and sailed to Holland. “Humanity cannot but recoil from the prospect of such finished horror,” he lamented to Franklin “that war should produce such fatal consequences.” A famous American victory, it was Jones’s last under the American flag.

American attacks so close to England’s coast and French, Dutch, and Spanish threats demoralized the British public, who now questioned the war effort. A Parliamentary investigation turned into an argument among politicians—the lord of admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich, and Secretary of State Germaine—and military leaders, such as the Howe brothers. Each side blamed the other for mismanagement and incompetence.

Clinton held New York and Newport; Washington’s army remained in the Hudson and New Jersey. The focus of fighting shifted west and south. Americans based at Fort Pitt and the British in Detroit both tried to enlist Native American warriors in the interior.

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