Rick Atkinson - The British Are Coming

Still, the king felt sure of his course. To North he wrote on February 15, at precisely 10:06 a.m.: “I entirely place my security in the protection of the Divine Disposer of All Things, and shall never look to the right or left but steadily pursue the track which my conscience dictates to be the right one.”

For more than three centuries, the Tower of London had issued departing armies the ordnance needed to fight Britain’s expeditionary battles, from field guns and shoulder arms to bullet molds, powder flasks, and musket flints. In the early spring of 1775, the place grew busy again. “Many thousand firearms sent out of the Tower and shipped on board the transports,” a visiting American artist wrote. “Kegs of flints marked ‘Boston’ on each keg, with all the implements of war.” A Tower armory reportedly held eighty thousand stand of arms, “bright and shining.” Visitors could pay four pence to view the “Royal Train of Artillery,” from 6-pounders to 24-pounders, some with new leveling screws for quicker aim and greater accuracy. The train also included 13-inch mortars and “carcass” shells packed with combustibles designed to incinerate enemy towns. New brass cannons filled an adjacent storehouse more than a hundred yards long, with sponges, rammers, handspikes, drag ropes, and other gunnery tools, plus four thousand harnesses for pull teams. Obsolete weapons decorated Tower walls in fantastic sculptures, like the seven-headed hydra constructed from old pistols. Stacked bayonets and ancient firelocks formed a corkscrew pillar twenty-two feet high. The place was a tabernacle of firepower.

Gun shops clustered along the Thames below the Tower walls assembled the flintlock musket known as the Brown Bess. Smiths fitted the barrels and locks, mostly forged in the Midlands from imported Swedish iron, to walnut stocks; they then attached the “furniture”—brass and iron mounts, including triggers and butt plates. Each musket cost one pound, thirteen shillings, plus four pence to prove the barrel and fit a bayonet. Tower officials also tested the potency of gunpowder made in government and private mills. The British appetite for powder was voracious: each foot regiment typically received 42,000 powder charges a year, enough for every soldier to fire 60 to 120 lead balls. That allotment would increase in heavy combat. A single warship of 100 guns might carry 535 barrels, nearly 27 tons; even a small naval sloop could carry 6 tons, more powder than would be found in all the rebel magazines around Boston a few months hence. “Incredible quantities of ammunition and stores shipped and shipping from Tower Wharf for America,” another correspondent reported.

Precisely how this formidable strength should be wielded against America remained in dispute among the king’s men. “A conquest by land is unnecessary,” the secretary at war, Lord William Barrington, had advised in December, “when the country can be reduced first to distress, and then to obedience, by our marine.” That marine—the Royal Navy—might have its own woes, but General Edward Harvey, the adjutant general and the highest army official in Britain, agreed that “attempting to conquer America internally with our land force is as evil an idea as ever controverted common sense.” He added bluntly: “It is impossible.”

The army’s small size fueled this consternation. In 1760, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, Britain had mustered more than 200,000 men, including mercenaries. Now the army’s paper strength had dipped below 50,000—less than a third the size of France’s army—and no more than 36,000 soldiers actually filled the ranks, of whom thousands kept the restive Irish in check. Recruiting was difficult, and although many of the army’s 3,500 officers had combat experience, the force had fought few major battles since Quebec and Minden, sixteen years earlier. A few prominent commanders refused to fight the Americans, among them Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who had led North American forces against the French from 1758 to 1763. While some junior officers were keen to earn their spurs in New England, enough were leaving the service that in February the king declared he would “not listen to any further requests” from those hoping to sell their commissions rather than embark for America; he deemed such behavior a “great impropriety.” Lord North, as early as September 1774, had suggested that “Hessians and Hanoverians could be employed if necessary.” During the winter, secret negotiations had begun in Kassel to retain German hirelings, should war erupt in America.

A fateful momentum swept the government along. Something must be done; even those wary of war agreed that American rebellion could not be condoned. Much of the particular planning fell to slender, rigorous William Legge, the Earl of Dartmouth and the colonial secretary, who was so pious a Christian that he was known as the “Psalm Singer”; his country home near Birmingham had provided a refuge for evangelical preachers and for revival meetings of sobbing, hysterical worshippers. Raised in the same household as North, his stepbrother, Lord Dartmouth was hardly a warmonger. But he believed that prideful rebels disobeyed both their British masters and their God. Obedience and Christ’s redemption were needed to set things right, along with a few regiments. After a decade of fitful, indecisive political skirmishing, a short, sharp contest of arms offered an appealing clarity.

And so war stuffs spilled from the Tower and other depots to be loaded onto westbound ships: canteens, leather cartridge boxes, watch coats, tents, five-ton wagons by the dozen, muskets by the hundreds, powder by the ton. There was a run on New World maps, although one London skeptic later wrote, “The small scale of our maps deceived us, and as the word ‘America’ takes up no more room than the word ‘Yorkshire,’ we seemed to think the territories they represent are much the same bigness, though Charleston is as far from Boston as London from Venice.”

Troops tramped toward the ports. A London newspaper reported that a light cavalry regiment preparing to deploy had inscribed “DEATH OR GLORY” on its caps, with an embroidered skull. Seven regiments of foot bound for America were brought to strength by drafting soldiers from units left behind. Each regiment was also permitted to take sixty women, twelve servants, and eighty-six tons of baggage. On the southern coast of Ireland, Cork grew so crowded that officers waiting to embark on transport ships complained of difficulty in finding lodging. Soldiers living in hovels on Blarney Lane or Brogue Market Street practiced the manual of arms, though some lacked muskets. Each would be issued a bunk, a bolster, a blanket, and a spoon for the voyage. The usual drunken sprees and fistfights between soldiers and sailors kept officers alert; dragoons preparing to sail from Cork found the ships’ holds stacked with so many casks of porter being smuggled for sale in Boston that they could not reach the stalls to feed their horses.

As the squadrons awaited a fair wind, a vague unease drifted through the kingdom. “Our stake is deep,” wrote Horace Walpole. “It is that kind of war in which even victory may ruin us.” But the man who reigned over that kingdom remained constant, as ever. “When once these rebels have felt a smart blow,” George told his Admiralty, “they will submit.”

Blows would decide, as the king had predicted. Yet no one could foresee that the American War of Independence would last 3,059 days. Or that the struggle would be marked by more than 1,300 actions, mostly small and bloody, with a few large and bloody, plus 241 naval engagements in a theater initially bounded by the Atlantic seaboard, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico, before expanding to other lands and other waters.