CH. XII. FIGHTING IN VIRGINIA. 437 cannon or sufficient ammunition, Montgomery soon found his position a hopeless one. His troops deserted in such numbers that only 800 remained.' They were turbulent, insubordinate, and half-trained; and they had enlisted for so short a period and were so unwilling to renew their contract that it was necessary to press on operations as quickly as possible. He fell on the last day of 1775 in a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to storm Quebec, and in the course of the following year the Americans evacuated Canada. In most parts of the colonies the British government simply perished through the absence of British soldiers, but in Virginia Lord Dunmore, the Governor of the province, made desperate efforts to retain it. Having removed a store of gunpowder from Williamsburg, in order to secure it from the provincials, he was obliged to fly from the palace to a British man-of-war. There were no English soldiers in the province, but with the assistance of some British frigates, of some hundreds of loyalists who followed his fortunes, and of a few runaway negroes, he equipped a marine force which spread terror along the Virginian coast, and kept up a harassing, though almost useless, predatory war. Two incidents in the struggle excited deep resent 1 Bancroft. The New Englanders,' wrote Montgomery, are the worst stuff imaginable for soldiers. They are homesick. Their regiments are melted away, and yet not a man dead of any distemper. There is such an equality among them that the officers have no authority, and there are very few among them in whose spirit I have confidence. The privates are all generals, but not soldiers, and so jealous that it is impossible, though a man risk his person, to escape the imputation of treachery.'-Bancroft, Hist. of the United States, viii. p. 185. The day after the capitulation of Montreal, Montgomery wrote to General Schuyler: I am exceedingly sorry that Congress has not favoured me with a committee; it would have had great effect with the troops, who are exceedingly turbulent, and even mutinous. . I wish some method could be fallen apon of engaging gentlemen to serve. A point of honour and more knowledge of the world to be found in that class of men would greatly reform discipline, and render the troops much more tractable.'-Washington's Works, iii. 180, 181. Washington writes (Jan. 31, 1776): The account given of the behaviour of the men under General Montgomery is exactly consonant to the opinion I have formed of these people, and such as they will exhibit abundant proofs of in similar cases whenever called upon. Place them behind a parapet, a breast work, stone wall, or anything that will afford them shelter, and from their knowledge of a firelock they will give a good account of the enemy; but I am as well convinced as if I had seen it, that they will not march boldly up to a work, nor stand exposed in a plain.'-Ibid. p. 277. See too p. 285. The failure and death of Montgomery, Washington ascribed to the system of short enlistments,' for had he not been apprehensive of the troops leaving him at so important a crisis, but continued the blockade of Quebec, a capitulation, from the best accounts I have been able to collect, must inevitably have followed.'—Ibid. 278. ment throughout America. The first was a proclamation by which freedom was promised to all slaves who took arms against the rebels. The second was the burning of the important town of Norfolk, which had been occupied by the provincials, had fired on the King's ships, and had refused to supply them with provisions. It was impossible, however, by such means to subdue the province. An attempt to raise a loyalist force in the back settlements of Virginia and the Carolinas was defeated by the arrest of its chief instigators in the summer of 1776, and soon after, Dunmore, being no longer able to obtain provisions for his ships, abandoned the colony. The unhappy negroes who had taken part with the loyalists are said to have almost universally perished.1 In the Southern provinces, and especially in the two Carolinas and in Georgia, there was a considerable loyalist party, but it was unsupported by any regular troops, and after a few spasmodic struggles it was easily crushed. Most of the governors took refuge in English men-of-war; a few were arrested and imprisoned. Provincial Congresses assumed the direction of affairs; except in the immediate neighbourhood of British soldiers the power of England had ceased, and there was no force in America competent to restore it. In the chief towns the stir of military preparation was incessant. When Franklin attended the Congress at Philadelphia in the September of 1775, he found companies of provincial soldiers drilled twice a day in the square of the Quaker capital, and the fortifications along the Delaware were rapidly advancing. Six powder mills were already designed, and two were just about to open. A manufactory of muskets had been established which was expected to complete twenty-five muskets a day. Suspected persons were constantly arrested, and the letter-bags systematically examined. Tories were either tarred and feathered or compelled to mount a cart and ask pardon of the crowd, and the ladies of the town were busily employed in scraping lint or making bandages for the wounded.2 Over the inland districts the revolutionary party was as yet supreme, but the whole coast was exposed, almost without defence, to the attacks of English ships of war, and all the Stedman. Bancroft. Ramsay, i. 252. 2 Parton's Life of Franklin, ii. 100. CH. XII. NEGROES AND INDIANS. 439 chief towns in America were seaport. The Americans possessed a large population of seafaring men who were eminently fitted for maritime warfare, but they had as yet not a single ship of war. The Government made large offers to gunsmiths to induce them to abandon America for England.' The manufacture of gunpowder was only slowly organised, and for many months the colonial forces were often in extreme danger in consequence of the scantiness of their supply. It was wisely determined to pay the provincial troops and to pay them well; but as all foreign commerce was arrested, and as most forms of industry were dislocated, there was very little money in the country, and paper was speedily depreciated. Some of the necessaries of life had hitherto been imported from England, and the great want of native woollen goods was especially felt in the rigour of the first winter of the war. Though the negroes, who were so numerous in the Southern States, were a cause of great anxiety to the colonists, they remained at this time, with few exceptions, perfectly passive; but one of the first consequences of the appeal to arms was to bring Indian tribes into the field. In the great French war they had been constantly employed by the French and frequently by the English, and it was not likely that so formidable a weapon would be long unused. Neither side, it is true, desired a general Indian rising. Neither side can be justly accused of the great crime of inciting the Indians to indiscriminate massacre or plunder, but both sides were ready to employ them as auxiliaries. Before the battle of Lexington the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts formed a company out of Stockbridge Indians residing in the colony.3 In the beginning of April 1775 they issued an address to the Mohawk Indians exhorting them to whet the hatchet' for war against the English," 1 See a letter of Governor Tryon, Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, viii. 647. 2 Thus J. Adams in 1775 gives an account of an interview with some gentlemen from Georgia. 'These gentlemen give a melancholy account of the State of Georgia and South Carolina. They say that if 1,000 regular troops should land in Georgia, and their commander be provided with arms and clothes enough, and proclaim freedom to all the re groes who would join his camp, 20,000 negroes would join it from the two provinces in a fortnight. . . Their only security is that all the King's friends and tools of Government have large plantations and property in negroes, so that the slaves of the Tories would be lost as well as those of the Whigs.-Adams' Works, ii. 428. 3 Washington's Works, iii. 175. Force's American Archives (4th series), i. 1349, 1350. and Indians were, as we have seen, employed by the Provincials in their invasion of Canada. In March 1775 Mr. Stuart, who managed Indian affairs for the Government in the Southern colonies, reported to the Government that General Gage had informed him that ill-affected people in those parts had been endeavouring to poison the minds of the Indians of the six nations and other tribes with jealousies, in order to alienate their affection from his Majesty," and New England missionaries appear to have been in this respect especially active.2 Up to the middle of this year the English professed great reluctance to make use of savages. In July, Stuart wrote very emphatically to the Revolutionary Committee of Intelligence at Charleston, which had expressed suspicions on this subject. I never have received any orders from my superiors which by the most tortured construction could be interpreted to spirit up or employ the Indians to fall upon the frontier inhabitants, or to take any part in the disputes between Great Britain and her colonies," and both English and colonists exhorted the Indians as a body to remain neutral. It is, however, certain that in the beginning of June 1775, Colonel Guy Johnson, who had succeeded Sir William Johnson in the direction of one great department of Indian affairs, had, in obedience to secret instructions from General Gage, induced a large body of Indians to undertake to assist his Majesty's troops in their operations in Canada,'5 and in July this policy was openly 1 March 28, 1775. MSS. Record Office (Plantations, General). 2 Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, viii. 656, 657. See too a letter of the Provin. cial Congress, dated April 4, 1775, to a New England missionary, urging him to use his influence to make the Indians take up arms against the English. Washington's Works, iii. 495. July 18, 1775. MSS. Record Office. In a speech to the Indians, August 30, 1775, Stuart said: "There is a difference between the white people of England and the white people of America; this is a matter which does not concern you, they will decide it among themselves.'-MSS. Record Office (Plantations, General). In August 1775, the Commissioners sent by the twelve colonies had a See 5 Documents relating to the Colonial Hist. of New York, viii. 636. See Secret Journals of Congress, June 27 1775. сн. XII. AMERICAN LOYALISTS. 441 avowed by Lord Dartmouth. It was defended on the ground that the Americans had themselves adopted it.' Few things were more terrible to the Americans than the scourge of Indian war. As it had generally been the function of the Government to protect the savages against the rapacity and violence of the colonists, England could count largely upon their gratitude, and the horrors which never failed to multiply in their track gave a darker hue of animosity to the struggle. But the greatest danger to the colonial cause was the halfheartedness of its supporters. It is difficult or impossible to form any safe conjecture of the number of real loyalists in America, but it is certain that it was very considerable. John Adams, who would naturally be inclined to overrate the preponderance in favour of independence, declared at the end of the war his belief that a third part of the whole population, more than a third part of the principal persons in America, were throughout opposed to the Revolution.2 Massachusetts was of all the provinces the most revolutionary, but when General Gage evacuated Boston in 1776 he was accompanied 1 July 24, 1775, Lord Dartmouth wrote to Colonel Johnson: The unnatural rebellion now raging in America calls for every effort to suppress it, and the intelligence his Majesty has received of the rebels having excited the Indians to take a part, and of their having actually engaged a body of them in arms to support their rebellion, justifies the resolution his Majesty has taken of requiring the assistance of his faithful adherents the six nations. It is, therefore, his Majesty's pleasure that you lose no time in taking such steps as may induce them to take up the hatchet against his Majesty's rebellious subjects.'-Documents on the Colonial History of New York, viii. 596. General Gage wrote to Stuart (September 12, 1775) telling him to hold a correspondence with the Indians, to make them take arms against his Majesty's enemies, and to distress them all in their power, for no terms are now to be kept with them.' 'The rebels,' he continues, 'have themselves opened the door. They have brought down all the savages they could against us here, who with their riflemen are continually firing on our advanced sentries.' -MSS. Record Office. On October 24, 1775, Stuart sent ammunition to the savages according to instructions, adding: You will understand that an indiscriminate attack upon the province is not meant, but to act in the execution of any concerted plan, and to assist his Majesty's troops or friends in distressing the rebels.'-Ibid. On November 20, 1775, Lord North said in Parliament: 'As to the means of conducting the war, he declared there was never any idea of employing the negroes or the Indians until the Americans themselves had first applied to them; that General Carleton did then apply to them, and that even then it was only for the defence of his own province.' -Parl. Hist. xviii. 994. 2 Adams' Works, x. 87. Many particulars about the strength of the loyalist party will be found in Mr. Sabine's very interesting book, The Loyalists of America. |