With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783

by Matthew H. Spring

Overview

The image is indelible: densely packed lines of slow-moving Redcoats picked off by American sharpshooters. Now Matthew H. Spring reveals how British infantry in the American Revolutionary War really fought.

This groundbreaking book offers a new analysis of the British Army during the “American rebellion” at both operational and tactical levels. Presenting fresh insights into the speed of British tactical movements, Spring discloses how the system for training the army prior to 1775 was overhauled and adapted to the peculiar conditions confronting it in North America.

First scrutinizing such operational problems as logistics, manpower shortages, and poor intelligence, Spring then focuses on battlefield tactics to examine how troops marched to the battlefield, deployed, advanced, and fought. In particular, he documents the use of turning movements, the loosening of formations, and a reliance on bayonet-oriented shock tactics, and he also highlights the army’s ability to tailor its tactical methods to local conditions.

Written with flair and a wealth of details that will engage scholars and history enthusiasts alike, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only offers a thorough reinterpretation of how the British Army’s North American campaign progressed and invites serious reassessment of most of its battles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806141527
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	07/15/2010
Series:	Campaigns and Commanders Series , #19
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	260,978
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Matthew Spring holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Leeds and teaches history at Truro School, an independent secondary school in Cornwall, England.

Read an Excerpt

With Zeal and with Bayonets Only

The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783

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By Matthew H. Spring

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2008 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8424-1

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CHAPTER 1

The Army's Task

It is not a war of posts but a contest for states dependent upon opinion.

Nathanael Greene to Brigadier General Thomas Sumter,

8 January 1781

In the short term, the attempt to restore royal authority in North America by force of arms depended on the ability of the British Army to achieve three related objectives. These were to defeat and disperse the rebels' conventional military forces; to encourage the populace to cease supporting Congress's war effort, and even to transfer that support to the Crown; and to induce the rebel leadership to give up the armed struggle in favor of a political settlement.

The Rebel Leadership

In the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, Great Britain successfully waged war against a variety of enemies that included the great powers France and Spain and the insurgent Jamaican Maroons and Jacobite rebels. Supported by the Royal Navy, British troops engaged in what would today be styled conventional, guerrilla, amphibious, and counterinsurgency warfare in theaters as diverse as the plains of Flanders, Germany, Iberia, and India; the Scottish Highlands; the North American wilderness; and the jungles of the Caribbean. Arguably then, Britain's armed forces should have been well prepared to deal with the conflict that erupted in the American colonies in 1775.

But in one vital respect, the American War presented Britain with an unprecedented military and political problem: she was neither contesting for limited political, territorial, or commercial advantage nor even attempting to defend and uphold royal government against usurpation by an insurgent movement. Instead her war aim was the dismantling of an established enemy regime. This regime effectively gained control over the thirteen colonies in the months before the outbreak of hostilities as the leaders of the colonial opposition worked through sympathetic provincial assemblies, committees, and militia officers to marginalize royal authority and to prepare for the clash with the mother country that few of them feared, many of them eagerly anticipated, and most of them assumed would be of brief duration. Once the shooting started in April 1775, all vestiges of royal authority were speedily eliminated throughout the colonies save in those few enclaves occupied in force by Crown troops, the last of which (the port of Boston) the British evacuated in March 1776. Between then and July, when British forces began to concentrate on Staten Island for the great offensive that Lord North's ministry expected would break the revolt, the rebel leadership and its supporters effectively controlled every inhabited acre of the colonies.

The task of dismantling this hostile regime was rendered more difficult by the uncompromising stance of its leadership. Once these men had gained full control of local and national government, they were understandably reluctant (as Captain William Duff tartly put it in April 1778) "to relinquish it, and return to their original obscurity." Although they dared not say so publicly, the radicals at the head of the colonial opposition were never genuinely interested in a political accommodation with the mother country over the issues that had fueled American resentment since the 1760s. In July 1776 they judged that the time was right to declare America's independence, not least because they knew that the ministry had empowered its military and naval commanders in the colonies (General William Howe and Vice Admiral Richard Lord Howe) as peace commissioners and feared that American popular opinion would galvanize behind a movement for reconciliation if it were allowed to gather momentum. This assumption of full sovereignty not only facilitated the rebels' efforts to attract European allies but also enabled Congress to dismiss imperiously the limited peace overtures made by the Howe brothers in August 1776 and by the Carlisle Commission in 1778.

The dismantling of the rebel regime was also complicated by the fact that it had no political center of gravity, the elimination of which would have brought about its immediate submission. The thirteen rebellious colonies were essentially a confederation of self-governing states, not a centralized state on the European model; although Congress assumed the functions of a national government, it was an extralegal body with little real power over the various state legislatures. Hence the temporary restoration of British control in New Jersey, Georgia, and South Carolina in 1776 and 1779–80 had little effect on rebel authority in neighboring states, while the fall of the rebel capital, Philadelphia, in 1777 merely temporarily displaced Congress.

Despite these problems, one should not assume that an advantageous political settlement was permanently beyond Britain's reach. Most eighteenth-century conflicts ended with a negotiated peace once the belligerents' governments calculated that the economic and political costs of continued military effort would outweigh the likely benefits. In the case of a war for independence like that in America, a precedent of sorts existed in the way the Austrians translated militarily ascendancy into a favorable negotiated end to the Rákóczi Uprising (1703–11). A similar outcome in America was less improbable than it might at first appear. Most of the key rebel leaders were men of means with a great deal to lose by maintaining their resistance to the bitter end. In addition, the colonies were, politically, culturally, and geographically, far from perfectly united. On one level the tensions between local and national interests undoubtedly hampered the rebels' attempts to coordinate their war effort, as evinced by the perceived tardiness with which the various state governments fulfilled their obligations to support the Continental Army and its operations. Indeed, more skillful and sustained British diplomacy might have succeeded in exploiting the kinds of internal rivalries that led Ethan Allen to enter into negotiations over the future of Vermont between 1780 and 1783. Alternatively, the nominal independence of each state from its neighbors made possible the option of a compromise peace based on the principle of uti possidetis (the retention of territory by the possessors at the close of hostilities), especially from 1779, when the British overran and (at least temporarily) subjugated large tracts of the South.

Particularly during the war's early campaigns, some soldiers and statesmen believed that British military success might bring the rebel leadership to the negotiating table. As Howe put it in January 1776, "From what I can learn of the designs of the leaders of the rebels ..., it is my firm opinion they will not retract until they have tried their fortune in a battle and are defeated." Crucially, the rebel leaders were able to rebuff British peace proposals in 1776 and 1778 because, in both years, the Crown was not negotiating from a position of strength. When the Howes made their modest overture in August 1776, they had neither smashed General George Washington's army nor even prized New York City from its control. Similarly, in 1778 news of French intervention and the imminent abandonment of Philadelphia fatally weakened the British diplomats' hand. Yet had British arms succeeded in puncturing the rebels' confidence in the inevitability of colonial victory, the leaders of the revolt might well have changed their tune.

The Continental Army

The Continental Army was the foremost obstacle to the restoration of British authority in the colonies. Divided between six commands (or departments), this regular-style, permanent military establishment was brought into being by Congress in June 1775 to make possible a coordinated and sustained challenge to British military coercion. With the support of local militia and state-controlled regular forces (which could not independently undertake major operations), the Continental Army's commanders were tasked with eliminating or inducing the withdrawal of Britain's military forces and thereby breaking her capacity and/or will to dispute American independence.

This task took far longer than most of the rebel leaders initially envisaged, principally because they grossly miscalculated their ability to force a favorable military decision. To resolve the war speedily, rebel armies needed to adopt the strategic offensive and overwhelm the Crown's forces and their fortified bases, especially the major coastal population centers (including Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Charleston) on whose port facilities the British depended. Yet as the failure of the operations against Canada (1775), Newport (1778), Savannah (1779), and South Carolina (1780) demonstrated, the rebels were only rarely able to assemble and maintain in the field the superior military resources (particularly heavy artillery and warships, which only their later French allies could provide) that they needed to prosecute major offensives successfully. Combined with the mobility that naval superiority conferred on Crown forces, this factor ensured that the British generally maintained the strategic initiative in America. Consequently, for the greater part of the war, the Continental Army was constrained to act on the defensive.

For the rebels, the simplest method of contesting British offensive operations was what might be styled a strategy of "forward defense." Washington and his ablest subordinates never doubted that "we should on all occasions avoid a general action." Yet influenced by political considerations and impressed by the carnage at Bunker Hill, they initially believed that their forces could cover exposed assets like the principal major population centers by taking up strong (preferably fortified) positions that the British would not be able to force without incurring unsupportable casualties. In this fashion, in 1776 and 1777 Washington tried to hold New York City and Philadelphia, respectively, by fortifying western Long Island, Manhattan, and the northern shore of New Jersey and by attempting successively to contest a British advance over the Brandywine Creek, the South Valley Hills (the "Battle of the Clouds"), and the Schuylkill River. Likewise, in 1777 Major General Horatio Gates entrenched his army at Stillwater to bar the British drive on Albany, while in 1778 and 1780 Major Generals Robert Howe and Benjamin Lincoln attempted to defend Savannah and Charleston by offering battle outside the former and by attempting to withstand a siege of the latter.

The problem with this bold defensive strategy was that British armies (especially when supported by the Royal Navy) proved very capable of turning, encircling, or bypassing exposed rebel positions. This produced a string of variously disastrous reverses, the worst of which included the near-destruction of much of the main rebel army on Long Island in August 1776, the loss of 3,000 men at Fort Washington that November, and the capture of the southern army at Charleston in 1780. Moreover, the apparent collapse of popular support for the rebellion in New Jersey in late 1776 clearly demonstrated how closely the Revolution's survival was linked to the fortunes of the Continental Army. For the rest of the war, the overriding need to preserve the latter from disintegration restrained Washington's naturally bold temperament. As he warned Major General the Marquis de Lafayette in 1780, "we must consult our means rather than our wishes; and not endeavor to better our affairs by attempting things, which for want of success may make them worse."

Consequently, after Washington's withdrawal from Manhattan in 1776, and particularly after the fall of Philadelphia, the rebel conduct of the war tended to be characterized by a Fabian strategy. Prudent rebel commanders shunned major confrontations on any but the most advantageous terms by ensconcing their armies in inaccessible and/or virtually impregnable fortified camps in the interior (like Washington at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania or Morristown in New Jersey) or by exploiting space and topography to evade British pursuit (like Major Generals Nathanael Greene and Lafayette in the Carolinas and Virginia). By keeping their forces intact in this fashion, rebel commanders were nevertheless able to erode Britain's military ability and political will to continue the war. First, they were able to engage their forces against the King's troops under controlled conditions in what contemporaries called the petite guerre. In this near-continuous petty skirmishing, rebel commanders were able to drain British manpower and blood their regulars and militia in the type of fighting that best suited their lack of formal military discipline and enabled them to win the kind of minor successes that boosted morale and stimulated popular support for the rebellion. Second, the rebels preserved the option of taking the offensive when the opportunity arose to strike a heavy blow; as Greene put it, "I would always hazard an attack when the misfortune cannot be so great to us as it may be to the enemy." Hence Washington pounced upon isolated Crown forces at Trenton and Princeton in the winter of 1776–77, Stony Point in 1779, and Yorktown in 1781 and attempted (less successfully) to crush Howe's depleted army at Germantown in 1777 and to cut off Sir Henry Clinton's rearguard at Monmouth Courthouse in 1778. Likewise, after the "Race to the Dan" in 1781, Greene doubled back into North Carolina and sold Lieutenant General Charles, Earl Cornwallis his ruinous victory at Guilford Courthouse. Third, the rebels' ability to destroy isolated forces made it very dangerous for the British to disperse troops in garrisons. By default, this left the countryside (where most of the population lived) in rebel control thanks to the efforts of the local militia. As Greene put it in South Carolina in May 1781, "if [the British] divide their forces they will fall by detachments, and if they operate collectively, they cannot command the country."

If the Continental Army stood squarely in the way of the restoration of royal authority, it was necessary for the British to neutralize it. As historians have been so fond of pointing out, the most direct way to achieve this would have been (as the turncoat Brigadier General Benedict Arnold pointed out in October 1780) "to collect the whole British army to a point and beat General Washington (which would decide the contest)."

Here, however, we must pause to recognize that there were significant strategic, operational, and tactical constraints on the implementation of a battle-seeking strategy in conventional eighteenth-century European warfare before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792–1815). Perhaps the principal cause of this phenomenon was the eighteenth-century state's limited ability to replace its expensively recruited, trained, and maintained long-service professional soldiers. In the field this limitation manifested itself in a concern not to lose troops unnecessarily to sickness and desertion by exposing them to hardships like short rations and inclement weather. In turn this curbed a field army's mobility by shackling it to magazines, bread ovens, and baggage trains.

This lack of mobility militated against the adoption of a battle-seeking strategy in two ways. First, it was extremely difficult to bring on an engagement that was decidedly disadvantageous to the enemy. If a commander on the defensive believed that the conditions were unfavorable, it was usually possible for him to refuse battle by withdrawing. Conversely, if he was confident of success and was therefore prepared to stand and fight, it was less likely to be in the interest of the commander on the offensive to oblige him. Furthermore, unless one or the other commander made serious mistakes, an action that occurred by mutual consent was liable to exhaust both armies and cost each one between a fifth and a third of its numbers. A commander who won this kind of hard-fought battle was unlikely to be in a position to throw sizeable reserves of fresh troops into a pursuit of the scattered and demoralized enemy forces. When the fruits of battlefield victories therefore frequently extended little further than possession of the field, the prospective "butcher's bill" made most commanders very cautious about the circumstances under which they were prepared to engage.

Second, it was not practical to undertake operations inside territory that was covered by enemy-controlled fortresses, for field armies (which did not commonly exceed 40,000 men) were usually too small to detach screening forces to protect their lines of communication against sorties by enemy garrisons. Indeed, before the 1790s, especially in the most commonly contested and thus most heavily fortified theaters (particularly the Low Countries, northern France, and northern Italy), the main objectives of offensive operations tended to be the siege and capture of key fortresses, either as springboards for further operations or as tangible strategic assets to be retained or bargained away at the peace negotiations that terminated most eighteenth-century conflicts. Even in less heavily fortified theaters, however, commanders often preferred to maneuver against the enemy field army's communications rather than to incur heavy casualties by attacking it directly, particularly if it was well posted. In the right circumstances it was possible, at limited cost, to induce an enemy force to abandon successive strong positions and make rapid withdrawals during which it was likely to suffer serious losses to sickness, straggling, and desertion, much as the Austrians succeeded in doing in 1744 when they drove Frederick the Great from Bohemia without a battle.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from With Zeal and with Bayonets Only by Matthew H. Spring. Copyright © 2008 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

List of Tables x

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xv

1 The Army's Task 3

2 Operational Constraints 24

3 Grand Tactics 50

4 March and Deployment 76

5 Motivation 103

6 The Advance 138

7 Commanding the Battalion 169

8 Firepower 191

9 The Bayonet Charge 216

10 "Bushfighting" 245

11 Hollow Victories 263

Notes 283

Bibliography 343

Index 367