The Futility of Force and the Preservation of Power: British Strategic Failure in America, 1780-83 D T. C aniel anfielD © 2012 Daniel T. Canfield The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is [to] establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.1 —Carl von Clausewitz I n the spring of 1763 Great Britain, basking in the warm afterglow of decisive victory in the Seven Years War, presided over a vast and unprecedented global empire. The small island nation seemingly, and rather suddenly, found itself without peer—enjoying a level of military and political hegemony not seen since the days of the Roman Empire.2 It was a unique, albeit fleeting, position. In the span of a mere twenty years, the world’s preeminent global power, despite enjoying a considerable advantage in almost every conceiv- able category used to calculate military potential, found itself disgraced and defeated by a start-up nation possessing a markedly inferior conventional mili- tary capability. Crippled by a grossly burgeoning national debt, diplomatically isolated, and politically divided at home, the North Ministry became embroiled in a protracted and unpopular global war that its policymakers and military leaders seemed incapable of understanding—much less winning—until it was far too late.3 The War for American Independence, especially if viewed from the British perspective, retains extraordinary significance for contemporary prac- titioners of national and military strategy. The conflict contains many valuable and exceedingly relevant insights regarding the rise, prevention, and chal- lenges of insurgency, the perils of a people’s war for a foreign power, and the Lieutenant Colonel Canfield is an infantry officer. He holds an MA in history from North Carolina State University, and advanced degrees from the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting, and the US Army War College. He currently serves as a strategic planner at US Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. 62 Parameters Report Documentation Page Form Approved OMB No. 0704-0188 Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. 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The British experience also provides timeless lessons regarding the difficulties of balancing ambitious political ends with limited military means, civil-military relations, and sustaining national will in democratic societies during protracted and unpopular wars. Finally, the conflict serves as a conspicuous example of the potential for irregular warfare to thwart the application of conventionally superior military force and thereby decide or influence the political outcomes of wars and campaigns. In that regard, Great Britain’s experience in the War for American Independence provides an impor- tant prologue for many of the contemporary challenges associated with the application of coercive force in a postcolonial and postnuclear world. While predicting the future remains problematic, the United States should, in all like- lihood, expect both the character and conduct of its future wars to more closely resemble that of the American revolution, albeit from the British perspective, than those of a bygone era where industrialized nation-states waged near-total wars of annihilation.4 This article uses an abbreviated examination of the Southern Campaign (1780-82) to explore the principal causes of British strategic failure in the War for American Independence. The subject demands more attention than it tra- ditionally receives, especially from the nation that has, in the span of a mere two generations, overtaken and largely assumed Great Britain’s once domi- nant role on the world stage. America’s ascendancy, however, has not come without cost. Ironically, several of the major political, economic, and military challenges confronting the United States today bear a remarkable similarity to those that plagued her one-time colonial master.5 Chief among them is perhaps the most daunting and perplexing military issue of our time—how to translate supremacy on the conventional battlefield into enduring political success in an age of austerity and limited war. In a conflict full of dubious assumptions and missed opportunities, the pinnacle of British political and strategic miscalculation occurred in the South.6 Though overshadowed by the dramatic events at Yorktown, the con- sistent and simultaneous application of both regular and irregular warfare during the Southern Campaign proved decisive. It, more than anything else, broke the political will of the loyalists in the region, helped wrest control of the Southern Colonies away from the British, and contributed, in no small way, to Britain’s eventual decision to abandon the war altogether. Ironically, the campaign produced no singularly decisive battle. Nor did it conform to the “traditional” view of limited dynastic warfare.7 Instead, American success was slowly sequestered, not seized, by Major General Nathanael Greene’s astute integration of conventional and unconventional forces in pursuit of a defini- tive political, not military, victory. The British, of course, made many crucial errors. Whether the Americans won the Southern Campaign or the British lost it remains an intriguing historical question significantly beyond the scope of this article. Greene, and his fellow patriots, however, realized what a host of Autumn 2012 63 Daniel T. Canfield British commanders and their political masters in Whitehall could not—the war in the south, like the Revolution itself, was a complex, unconventional, and violent political struggle for the loyalty and allegiance of the American population writ large. It could not, and would not, be decided by the application of conventional military force alone.8 The Devolution of British Strategy In December of 1774, a presumptuous King George III boldly asserted, “The New England governments are in a State of Rebellion. Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”9 With the clair- voyance of hindsight, however, the British decision to employ force in the spring of 1775 rested on two fundamental miscalculations. First, the authorities in London, both civilian and military, underestimated the fighting qualities and irregular capabilities of the American militia.10 Second, most, if not all, of these same men, severely misjudged the extent and veracity of popular support the patriot cause enjoyed, not just in New England, but throughout the thirteen colonies.11 Fiscal and political constraints in London demanded a quick and efficient termination of the conflict in America. An emphasis on the former, however, precluded a realistic and prescient understanding of the latter. The result was an overly sanguine view of the actual political situation in the colo- nies and the adoption of a British military strategy that, though it considered the alternative of a naval war, remained wedded to the promise of decisive battle until the twin disasters of Saratoga and the subsequent signing of the Franco- American alliance in February 1778 forced a dramatic reordering of priorities.12 The Americans, too, initially miscalculated. The wave of revolutionary enthusiasm that crested with the British evacuation of Boston and signing of the Declaration of Independence gave way to the harsh reality of Washington’s near destruction at New York and the stark realization that “native courage” and revolutionary zeal alone could not secure independence.13 Unlike his British counterparts, however, Washington demonstrated considerable pragmatism in the face of necessity.14 Although he longed for a “conventional” victory against British regulars, by September 1776 Washington curtailed his initial strategic designs in favor of a Fabian approach focused on the enduring political, not military, objective: “We should on all occasions avoid a general action, and put nothing to risk unless compelled by a necessity, into which we ought never to be drawn.” 15 The British never fully reconciled their faith in decisive battle with the fact that Washington, after barely escaping from New York in the fall of 1776, had no intention of giving it. Deeply flawed strategic assumptions combined with chance, the tyranny of distance in the age of sail, and episodes of tacti- cal blundering precluded the destruction of Washington’s fledgling continental army and led to the unconscionable surrender of General John Burgoyne’s entire command at Saratoga in the fall of 1777.16 Worse, France’s formal entry into the war in March 1778 transformed the suppression of an internal rebellion into a global conflict.17 Suddenly, Great Britain, for the first time in 150 years, 64 Parameters The Futility of Force and the Preservation of Power found herself without the aid or support of a single European ally while engaged in a dangerous and rapidly escalating war with her ancient Bourbon rivals.18 Operations in America, particularly for the Admiralty, became secondary to defense of the British Isles and larger economic interests in the Caribbean. Accordingly, in the spring of 1778, the North Ministry assumed a defen- sive posture in America.19 Diplomatically isolated and forced to react to the imminent threat of French sea power, the government recalled its Commander- in-Chief in America, Major General William Howe, ordered the evacuation of Philadelphia, and grudgingly dispatched the Earl of Carlisle on a desperate, and poorly timed, attempt to secure peace with honor in the colonies.20 By the close of 1779, however, it became increasingly clear that Great Britain, despite an enormous expenditure of blood and treasure, was losing the war.21 The revolutionaries maintained tenuous, but effective, control over the vast majority of the colonial population. British forces, by contrast, found themselves confined to the coastal enclaves of New York, Long Island, and Savannah, under the constant and very real threat of a menacing French fleet. More importantly, four years of military paralysis, France’s entry into the war, and a steadily deteriorating strategic situation emboldened a vocal and increas- ingly effective political opposition in the House of Commons.22 The 1778 naval crisis followed by Admiral Keppel’s court martial, the failure of the Carlisle Peace Commission, and the raucous parliamentary inquiry into Sir William Howe’s generalship produced a series of inimical public debates that exposed a pattern of ministerial blundering and an ominous break down in civil-military relations.23 The events cast a long shadow on the government’s planning and conduct of the war and unleashed a torrent of political blame and recrimination that very nearly toppled the North Ministry.24 The government’s tenuous and slowly eroding support in Parliament forced a tacit reversal of military policy. Only by insisting that the war for America could still be won, not with an endless and expensive supply of reinforcements buttressing a failed strategy, but rather by harnessing dormant loyalist strength to champion a new one, could the Ministry maintain the req- uisite political support to continue the war.25 The idea exploited long-standing, though increasingly questionable, assumptions about loyalist strength in the south and conveniently nested with the government’s plans to shift the seat of the war to the Caribbean.26 In December of 1779, Howe’s successor, Lieutenant General Henry Clinton embarked the majority of his army in New York harbor and sailed for Charleston, long viewed as the key to political control of the south- ern colonies and an important port for future operations in the West Indies. The seizure of Charleston, intended to relieve pressure on loyalist forces operating in Georgia, also constituted the initial phase of a larger “southern strategy” designed to ignite a counterrevolution in the Carolinas by reestablishing royal government and recruiting loyalist militia, supported by a small number of British regulars, to defend it.27 In many ways, the belated adaptation of a “paci- fication” strategy, conceived in the caldron of wartime domestic politics vice the crucible of deliberate military design, represented Britain’s last best hope.28 Autumn 2012 65 Daniel T. Canfield Unfortunately for the British cause, it was bungled in execution by an increas- ingly dysfunctional Ministry that continued to see and hear what conformed to its concerted view and a bold and audacious commander who stubbornly clung to the chimera of decisive battle until it was far too late.29 The Seizure of Charleston On 1 February 1780, a powerful expeditionary force under the command of Sir Henry Clinton landed on Simmons Island, thirty miles south of Charleston. By late March, Clinton, with approximately 12,000 troops, crossed the Ashley River and laid siege to the beleaguered city. Isolated and cut off, Major General Benjamin Lincoln reluctantly surrendered the city and its 5,500 defenders on 12 May. The disaster at Charleston, by far the greatest calamity to befall any American army during the war, emboldened the loyalists and nearly broke the back of the patriot cause in South Carolina. Clinton moved quickly to restore British authority. He organized provincial militia units and initially implemented a liberal pacification policy, whereby the majority of former patri- ots were paroled and allowed to return to their homes.30 By late May, however, Clinton and his naval counterpart, Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot, became increasingly concerned over reports of a French fleet headed for North America. As they hastily re-embarked for New York to counter the threat, the British Commander-in-Chief, still exultant in the wake of his stunning success at Charleston, made a fateful decision. Realizing his pending departure would dramatically reduce British troop strength in the Carolinas and that the benevolence of the crown’s original parole policies pre- cluded the recruitment of enough locally raised provincial militia to make up the difference, Clinton suddenly reversed himself. On 3 June, he issued a new proclamation forcing paroled former patriots to swear an oath of allegiance to the King and, more importantly, to actively engage in supporting royal author- ity. The decision, born out of practical military necessity, constituted a grievous political miscalculation.31 While it was reasonable to expect a former Whig to give up the fight and return home, it was quite another matter to now force him to take up arms against his friends and neighbors. Victory Was Never Enough Cornwallis assumed command of the Southern Army on 5 June. He wasted little time implementing Clinton’s new policy and expanding British control over the region. With his seaboard bases at Savannah, Beaufort, Charleston, and Georgetown now secure, Cornwallis aggressively projected British expeditionary power deep into the country’s interior. He established a series of garrisons along the Saluda River westward to Ninety-Six and pursued the scattered remnants of the Continental army north along the Catawba River valley. On 16 August, Cornwallis, with just 2,200 troops, shattered General Horatio Gates at Camden and sent what remained of the demoralized American army scurrying across the North Carolina border toward Charlotte. Ironically, 66 Parameters The Futility of Force and the Preservation of Power though no organized Continental force remained in the Carolinas, the seeds of political disaster, long ignored or completely misunderstood, now sprouted in the wake of Cornwallis’s conventional success.32 Cornwallis’s army, even with the addition of a substantial number of loyalist militia, was simply too small to consolidate British authority over so large an area. Moreover, the combination of imperial hubris and the flawed implementation of Clinton’s pacification policies ignited an insurgency that quickly metastasized into a ruthless and bloody civil war.33 American guer- rillas led by Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion, and Andrew Pickens attacked British outposts and threatened lines of communications.34 More significantly, while Cornwallis and his loyalist militia searched in vain for the remnants of Gates’ scattered Continentals far to the north, American partisans killed or intimidated large numbers of Tories, who suddenly found themselves outnum- bered and unprotected.35 On 7 October, a motley collection of rugged American mountain men destroyed one of Cornwallis’s flanking columns, under the command of Major Patrick Ferguson at King’s Mountain. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Watauga region established a semiautonomous community in the mountains of western North Carolina after the Battle of Alamance in 1771.36 They harbored no particular loyalty to either crown or the fledgling United States, but watched with increasing trepidation as Ferguson’s column, comprised entirely of loy- alist militia, approached their homes. When the aggressive and head-strong British Major threatened to “burn the whole country” if the frontiersmen did not turn over the Patriot Colonel Isaac Shelby, known to be taking refuge in the area, over a thousand backwoods riflemen emerged seemingly out of nowhere and quickly overwhelmed the column.37 The British lost 1,125 men in the hour- long battle, including at least nine prominent Tories who were hastily tried and summarily executed. King’s Mountain marked a significant turning point in the war. The shocking reversal all but destroyed the loyalist movement in the region and forced a stunned Cornwallis, then on the outskirts of Charlotte, to beat a hasty retreat south into the Palmetto State.38 The Road to Guilford Courthouse Nathanael Greene arrived in Charlotte on 2 December 1780. The former Quaker turned patriot inherited less than fifteen hundred disorganized and dispirited men.39 Upon his selection to replace Gates as the commander of the Southern Department, Greene undertook a detailed study of the topography and terrain of the region. He harbored no illusions, however, about the dismal prospects of defeating Cornwallis in a conventional military campaign. As such, Greene proposed “to equip a flying army of about eight hundred horse and one thousand infantry . . . and make a kind of partisan war.”40 On 4 December, he established communications with Francis Marion and other partisan leaders. Greene encouraged cooperation and implored patriot irregulars to provide intelligence and continue their subversive operations while he made plans and preparations to regain the initiative.41 Autumn 2012 67 Daniel T. Canfield In late December, Greene moved south and boldly divided his army in the face of Cornwallis’s superior force. On 17 January, Greene’s western detach- ment, commanded by Daniel Morgan, baited Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton into giving battle at Cowpens.42 The subsequent destruction of a second isolated British column in less than four months incensed Cornwallis, but did little to alter his thinking regarding the utility of conventional military force in a people’s war. As patriot militiamen simply melted back into the countryside, the enraged British general initiated a precipitous and ill-advised pursuit of Morgan that took him across the border and deep into western North Carolina. Greene hastened north and consolidated his ragtag army but refused to give battle. On 26 January, a frustrated Cornwallis, now operating over extended lines of communications and unable to catch the fleet-footed Americans, decided to burn his army’s baggage.43 The move did little to improve his mobility rela- tive to the Americans. Greene continued a cat-and-mouse game of provocation luring the British further north, while his partisans and militia continued to harass British foraging parties and communications. On 15 March, Greene, his ranks temporarily buoyed by an influx of militia, finally gave battle at Guilford Court House. The British held the field, but it was a classic pyrrhic victory. Over a quarter of Cornwallis’s army lay dead or wounded.44 Running dangerously low on supplies and realizing that another “victory” over Greene would destroy his emaciated army, Cornwallis left seventy of his most seriously wounded in a Quaker meeting house at New Garden, reluctantly turned his back on the Piedmont, and marched to the sea.45 The paucity of loyalist support, not logistical difficulties, proved deci- sive in Cornwallis’s fateful decision to abandon the Carolinas. Throughout the campaign, Cornwallis stubbornly clung to the belief that a decisive tactical victory over Greene would liberate or somehow empower the crown’s many loyalist friends to join him. Guilford Court House finally shattered his naiveté. Reflecting on the indecisive nature of the campaign, a frustrated Cornwallis observed, “Many rode into camp, shook me by the hand, said they were glad to see us, and that we had beat Greene, then rode home again. I could not get a hundred men in all the Regulator’s country to stay with us even as militia.” 46 Cornwallis’s army limped into Wilmington on 7 April. Three days later, the dejected general wrote to Clinton in New York, “I cannot help but expressing my wishes that the Chesapeake may become the seat of the war.” 47 Amazingly, even at this late hour, Cornwallis still thought “a successful battle may give us America.” 48 Greene, however, did not wait idle as the British con- templated shifting operations to Virginia. By 29 March, he decided to “carry the war immediately into South Carolina.” 49 As Cornwallis moved north toward his rendezvous with destiny, Greene and his American partisans returned to the very seat of British power in the South. Unlike Cornwallis, however, Greene’s objectives were political not military. Though he continued to lose battles, Hobkirk’s Hill on 25 April and Eutaw Springs on 8 September, he nonethe- less succeeded in further eroding British authority and political support among the people of South Carolina. One by one, isolated British outposts scattered 68 Parameters The Futility of Force and the Preservation of Power throughout the interior fell to Greene and his partisans. By October, the tide of British expeditionary power that had once stretched to the mountains of western North Carolina receded to the coastal bastions of Charleston and Savannah.50 Defeat by Indecision When the unfathomable news of Yorktown reached London in November 1781, the American Secretary, Lord George Germain, grasping for the straws of an increasingly unlikely military victory, proposed raising a force of 28,000 men to hold the coastal enclaves of New York, Charleston, and Savanna.51 Similarly, in late December, the Governor of New York, James Robertson, pleaded for reinforcements and the resumption of offensive warfare in the north, arguing that “an army without hope of getting back America should not stay in it.”52 Unfortunately for the North Ministry and the thousands of loyalists in America it was the Governor’s tacit admission, not his call for still more troops in support of an expensive and increasingly desultory war, which more accurately reflected the political reality of a deeply divided Great Britain.53 Germain, long buffeted by an angry sea of political recrimination, finally resigned in early February. His replacement, Welbore Ellis, addressed a skeptical Parliament on 22 February in a desperate attempt to rally the fragile and rapidly eroding political support for the King’s policies. Remarkably, the Ministry, rekindling the strategic debate after the Saratoga disaster, now adopted a subtle variation of the opposition’s long-standing argument against continuation of the war: As to the American war, it had always been his firm opinion, that it was just in its origin . . . but he never entertained an idea, nor did he believe any man in that House ever imagined, that America was to be reduced to obedience by force; his ideal always was that in America we had many friends; and by strongly supporting them, we should be able to destroy that party or faction that wished for war . . . . To destroy that faction, and assist our friends there in that desired object, was, in his opinion, the true and only object of the war. Whether that object was now attainable, was the matter . . . to be considered.54 The opposition, vindicated by the Ministry’s tacit admission of failure and galvanized by a rapid and unprecedented influx of political defections, decided it was not attainable. On 27 February, the House of Commons formally denounced “the further prosecution of offensive warfare on the continent of North America, for the purpose of reducing the revolted colo- nies to obedience by force.”55 Less than a month later, the North Ministry collapsed under the weight of a protracted, unpopular, and, in the minds of most Englishmen, an ill-advised, poorly planned, and increasingly unwin- nable war.56 On 27 March, the King, after briefly contemplating abdication, begrudgingly turned to the opposition who formed a new government under the leadership of the Marquis of Rockingham. The new Ministry quickly abolished the American Department and ordered the evacuation of New York, Charleston, and Savannah.57 In the process, the Rockingham Ministry accomplished what Washington’s intrepid army, even after it was augmented Autumn 2012 69 Daniel T. Canfield by powerful French expeditionary forces and buoyed by the British disaster at Yorktown, could never do—it physically removed the world’s dominant military power from America. War Turned Upside Down Insurgencies represent complex political, social, and military problems. They require an adroit, sophisticated, and flexible integration of all instruments of national power to defeat or prevent. It would be wrong to pin the crown’s failure in the South on Cornwallis alone, for the seeds of the British disaster in America lay deep and were sown many years prior by men occupying more influential positions.58 Yet, Cornwallis, like the vast majority of his British col- leagues, fundamentally misunderstood both the nature and the character of the war in the South. He embarked upon an ill-conceived and tragically flawed campaign that focused, almost exclusively, on the physical destruction of an enemy army. Moreover, Cornwallis’s tactical and operational plans, while bold and audacious, were not in consonance with the spirit or intent of Clinton’s instructions or the shift in British strategy made necessary by France’s entry into the war.59 The Americans, by contrast, employed a decentralized strategy that concentrated, not on the annihilation of British military forces, but rather on securing the political and popular support of the indigenous population.60 Throughout the campaign the British consistently overestimated both the extent and capabilities of loyalist support, failed to secure the local popula- tion, and seemed incapable of comprehending that the loyalty of the people trumped the quest for tactical glories.61 The destruction of unsupported Tory units at Ramsour’s Mill, North Carolina, and King’s Mountain, South Carolina, in 1780 stifled the further recruitment of fence sitters and sent a chilling message to would be loyalists. Though a significant percentage of the population were indifferent or actually harbored pro-British sentiment, Cornwallis, by and large, failed to secure it.62 Marauding Southern partisans prosecuted a shadowing, but effective, campaign of fear and intimidation that eventually cemented the loyal- ties and allegiance of the local population.63 Ironically, Cornwallis facilitated patriot political success by impetuously chasing Gates, and then Greene, into the strategically insignificant terrain of the mountainous southern back country and implementing flawed political-military policies that led to repressive acts of violence against the civil population under British control.64 Greene and the Americans, by contrast, owed their success to the con- fluence of three principal factors. First, the terrain in the Carolinas, both human and physical, facilitated patriot operations.65 The region’s ambiguous political loyalties, restricted mobility, and challenging topography all leant themselves to the type of isolated, hit and run, small-unit tactics employed by Greene and his partisans. Second, Greene’s sophisticated comprehension of the relation- ship between military means and political ends precluded the destruction of his undermanned army, fueled the insurgency, and ultimately consummated his military endeavors with enduring political success. Lacking in tactical acumen, he nonetheless proved patient and pragmatic only giving battle when 70 Parameters