With the Revolution going nowhere in the north, the British turn their attention to the south.

Join us on social media!

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@uspoliticalpodcast

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ushistpodcast

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/USPoliticalpodcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uspoliticalpodcast/

Website: https://www.uspoliticalpodcast.com/

Bibliography: https://uspoliticalpodcast.com/?page_id=196

Hello and welcome to the political history of the United States.

Episode 4.53 the War Moves south over the course of our last few episodes we have been busy talking about how the entrance of the French into the war had really changed everything.

Now, to this point, despite my statements, little honestly has felt much different.

Monmouth certainly was nothing all that unique compared to what we had seen before.

The abortive battle of Newport was only really different because the battle itself never really came to pass, although things did appear to be largely as they had been before on the surface.

I promise that I have not been lying to you when I said that the war really was changing.

This week we are going to begin a more meaningful look into just how the American War of Independence was changing.

Of course, that is also ignoring the fact that they had lost their entire army in Canada, as well as the fact that Howe had just months earlier occupied Philadelphia, something which Clinton had been forced to abandon.

Either way, it was abundantly clear to Henry Clinton that he was going to have to change his strategy.

No general in history has ever relished the thought of giving up half the army under his command, and Clinton was no different.

After months of dragging his feet on the matter, Clinton finally relented and sent 5,000 troops to St.

Lucia under the command of our old friend James Grant.

With the loss of such a substantial portion of his army, Clinton was well aware that a change in strategy was coming.

The core of the Southern Strategy came from the idea that the southern colonists were somewhat more loyal than their northern brethren.

Much of the grousing during the imperial crisis had indeed flowed from the northern colonies.

Sure, Virginia had their complaints, but south of there a sense of more general hesitation had long been present.

Recall back to the First Continental Congress that Georgia decided to sit it out altogether.

And then for the second Congress.

They only begrudgingly sent a representative.

The British were banking on the idea that the southern colonists were still loyal, just waiting for their British saviors to come and rescue them.

Their hope was that the entire war was being driven by a minority number of rabble rousers, mostly concentrated in the northern colonies.

Should the British arrive, surely they would be treated by a loyal population eager to help dispatch that handful of radicals amongst them and return everything back to order.

For much of that year, Lord Germain instructed Clinton to maintain a defensive posture and let the Carlisle Commission do their thing.

Per Germain, unless there was an opportunity to knock Washington out of the war and bring that much sought after general engagement fall back into a defensive position.

Clinton very nearly got his chance to bring about such a general engagement at Monmouth.

However, as we know, that had gone down as a nominal American victory.

The second part of the instructions to Clinton was that if he could not goad Washington into a general engagement and smash him, then it was about time to abandon operations in the north and move the show to the south.

Moving the war provided certain advantages for the British.

With the French entry into the war, the British realized that they needed to reinforce not just the West Indies, but their holdings in Florida as well.

What the British wanted to do was secure that northern border of Florida from a potential Franco American invasion.

It is likewise possible that George III and the Ministry were being pragmatic and were attempting to cut their losses.

The war in the north was not going well, something that we have talked about in depth now.

In a moment when the British back home were increasingly pessimistic about their chances of retaining the colonies.

The King may have viewed the southern strategy as a play to retain at least a few of the holdings, while giving a disappointed but tacit acknowledgement that the northern colonies were probably out of British reach.

Really, though, the move to the south was a sound strategy.

All of those loyal subjects down there would surely flock to fight with their British brethren to expel the radical element that had forced an unwanted independence down their unwilling throats.

The King and his ministry, including Germain, were acting on intelligence from their former royal governors.

Men like Dunmore from Virginia, Josiah Martin of North Carolina and William Campbell of South Carolina all busily reassured the King and Germain alike of the large number of loyal colonists in the south, something which both George III and Germain chose to believe.

Further reinforcing this belief in the practical soundness of the Southern strategy was Indian agent and occasional American boogeyman, John Stewart, who assured London that the local tribes, specifically the Cherokee, would happily jump to the British cause and were eager for an opportunity to stick it to the Americans.

With so many men having been peeled off to protect British assets in the West Indies and in Florida, Clinton could move a reduced force to the south, which would then in turn be reinforced by all of those Loyalists who were itching for the opportunity to retake their country.

By design.

A small corps of British regulars could become the nucleus of an army made up of those Loyalists, thus allowing the British to use their increasingly precious resources to protect their holdings in the Caribbean.

The Ministry further hoped that if everything went down perfectly, the Southern campaign, more than just recapturing land in their wayward colonies, may disrupt the economic engine that was the south, thus bankrupting the American colonies.

It is noteworthy, however, that Henry Clinton looked at this plan with more than a little skepticism.

Where had those hordes of Loyalists been then?

There were ample clues everywhere that were plain to be seen that the British may have been overestimating their own situation.

Whenever engagements in the south had come in the past, those masses of Loyalists were nowhere to be seen.

When Damour was trying to reestablish his authority in Virginia, his declaration to free the slaves had actually forced many Loyalists into the rebel campus, not because they necessarily were politically aligned, but because the prospect of emancipation and turning slaves against enslaver struck a deep nerve in the Americans that few in the south were willing to accept.

As we are going to see moving forward both today and in the future, the mass swell of support from the supposed Loyalists in the south simply never materialized.

In the case of the Cherokee steward was not exactly wrong that they would have relished the opportunity to punch the Americans teeth in.

They were also able, however, to read the room and recognized their precarious position.

The very last thing that they wanted to do was give the Americans a reason to annihilate them.

In was again a failure of the British to fully understand the problem that they had on their hands, a failure to understand that, although more conservative than their Northern brethren, the Southern states too had chafed under the final years of British rule in America and were little more eager to rejoin the empire than the Northern states were.

Although Henry Clinton marched into the Southern strategy dubious that this party was going to materialize.

He had his orders and misgivings intact.

He was going to follow them.

Although personally less than convinced that the American Loyalists would be showing up in the droves that Germain and the Ministry seemed to believe that they would, Clinton was accepting his new directives and preparing for a move to the South.

On November 27, he sent some 3,500 men made up of a mixture of British regulars, Hessians and Loyalists who had decided to join the fight down towards the new British objectives in the south.

Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell, the British arrived off the coast of Georgia on December 23rd.

As a point of interest on Campbell, he had actually spent most of his war in American custody, having been captured following a skirmish in Boston Harbor.

The British had just recovered Campbell, trading him for the British captive.

Ethan Allen, if you will recall, and I seriously don't blame you if you do not recall.

We talked about it back in episode 4.32 if you want to go listen again.

Campbell landed on the coast of tybee island some 15 miles from Savannah, and the British quickly set off towards their target.

Now, if you are looking at the dates here, specifically the fact that we are mere days away from Christmas when the British troops arrived and you're wondering why everybody was not in their winter camps, it was hardly a mere accident.

Well, fighting in, say, Canada in late December meant a real risk of exposure and potentially frostbite.

Recall those miserable conditions for Benedict Arnold & Co.

The opposite was true in the South.

Rather than freezing to death, the risk came from heatstroke during the stifling summer heat.

This is to say nothing of the mosquitoes that would threaten to eat a man alive.

The Americans, for their part, were being commanded by Robert Howe, who was of no relation to the other Howes that have appeared in this show.

The task laid before Howe was nearly impossible.

He had only 850 men under his command, meaning that he was very badly outnumbered.

There would not be some Spartan like stand here either.

With minimal effort, Campbell was able to overwhelm Howe, who quickly found himself outflanked.

And when the dust settled, The Americans had 83 dead with another 11 wounded in addition to 453 captured.

The British, on the other hand, counted just seven dead and another 17 wounded.

The battle had been about as one sided as possible.

And just like that, the British had captured Savannah.

With Savannah now in British hands, it was only a few Short weeks before, the British controlled all of Georgia.

Really, though, Georgia was never the prize that the British coveted in the South.

Rather, it was always meant to be a mere stepping stone to what they really wanted control over.

So what was that grand prize, you ask?

Well, what the British really were after was the valuable port town of Charleston.

And just a quick note on names here.

At this point, it was still Charlestown.

However, for the sake of continuity, we're just gonna go ahead with Charleston here.

Okay.

Anyway, back to the story.

The capture of Georgia also marks the beginning of an interesting period in the revolution, one that would be marked by very little action.

There would be some skirmishes, and we are going to talk at some length about the fighting between the British and the United States allied native tribes.

So knowing that, I want to spend the remainder of our time today looking at the events going on politically, primarily back in Britain, so that we can better understand where the war was and where it is heading.

George Washington had no idea that following the admirable showing by his troops at Monmouth that he would see very little in the way of major fighting until Yorktown.

This period for Washington, was amongst the most frustrating of the entire war for him.

His biographer, John Fairling, states that Washington spent a considerable amount of time around this period completely baffled by Clinton's intentions.

As Washington was waiting to see what the British were planning, he learned that there was an active discussion about another trip into Canada.

Unsurprisingly, this thrust was coming primarily out of New England and was led by their recent champion, Horatio Gates.

The logic behind another foray into Canada was that if the Americans could evict the British, the seemingly endless supply of weapons flowing into the hands of the British allied tribes would quickly dry up.

I mentioned just a moment ago that this is a topic that we are going to cover more fully in an upcoming episode.

But suffice it to say for right now that the frontiers were a very dangerous place that were steadily becoming worse.

Furthermore, by forcing the British to fight up in Canada, it would further overextend the British troops who were already thin to begin with, and would mean that the nexus of the fighting would move out of the United States.

Washington was not feeling this mission.

Arguing that the Continental army lacked the manpower to check the British in Rhode island and New York while simultaneously holding Canada, Washington argued that the entire mission was unimportant to the overall American war effort.

Here again, we turn to John Fairling, who writes that by this point, Gates posed a legitimate threat to Washington.

Fairling suggests that Washington's hesitation to a second Canadian invasion may well have been his hesitance at handing that kind of power over to a rival in Gates.

This is reinforced by the fact that a few years later, when it was clear that Gates would not command a Canadian campaign, Washington suddenly showed far more interest in such a bold endeavor.

Solid idea or not, Washington had successfully killed the prospect of a second Canadian invasion.

With the war in the north having bogged down, the Americans began preparing to enter into winter quarters.

After some scouting, Nathaniel Greene settled on Middlebrook, New Jersey, as being the main quarters.

From there, the Americans could make sure that the British did not try something unexpected from their continued base of operation in New York.

As the war shifted to the south, Washington would enter into camp with more questions than answers.

It was obvious to everybody involved that the British were preparing to try something new.

As the American commander, it was going to fall to Washington to figure out exactly how to counter that plan.

However, I want to finish up today by looking at the situation back in Great Britain.

If the war was not going the way that they had all imagined it would, somebody surely would need to answer the question that was on everybody's why wasn't the war going to plan?

What had the American War of Independence really meant for Great Britain?

At the most basic level, it meant that the empire was dealing with a dangerous civil war which threatened to strip away several of Britain's valuable colonies.

Going a step further, though, it posed a real risk to the empire as a whole because of what it stood for.

What if more and more colonies realized that they could emulate the Americans and achieve the same outcome?

What if, horror of horrors, the British lost to the American rabble?

What would it mean for the Empire and their standing as a global superpower?

If the mighty British Empire could not beat back a bunch of backwater provincials, well, then, who could they beat?

The Americans had nominally won the Battle of Monmouth, despite the British doing their absolute best to pretend otherwise.

The British had retained Newport during that abortive American assault.

However, it was lost on nobody that it was the decision of d'estaing to back out of the battle that probably played a pretty big part in the ability of the British to withstand the Americans.

Really, then, the only pure victory of the year for Clinton and company was the capture of Savannah at the very end of the year.

However, even George Washington mostly just shrugged this off.

Of course, he did not like hearing about American territory being captured by the enemy.

However, Washington mostly viewed the capture of Savannah and then later Augusta the following year as being unimportant strategically.

For all of the troubles and efforts that the British had put into this war, they were looking at a conflict that was not going well for them.

The British, despite their best efforts, could never manage to strike that killing blow.

Of course, we know that although the British had quite a bit of success in the field, they had also suffered losses.

In the case of Bunker Hill, which we will categorize as a Pyrrhic British victory, the British had suffered catastrophic losses at Saratoga.

There wasn't even as much as a Pyrrhic victory to be had.

The Americans had destroyed the entire British northern army.

I have said it before, but it bears repeating.

Oh, and yeah, the French had joined the war, taking a regional civil war and threatening to blow it up into a full scale global conflict.

As was the case then, much as it is now, when things are going poorly in a war, the play is to begin pointing fingers.

This battle broke down into two general camps.

In one corner, you had the ministry, whose war plans had been so solid that any competent general would have been able to crush the rebellion at the onset of hostilities.

On the other side, you had the military leadership from North America arguing that had they been given the necessary resources, they would have fought to far different results.

For the ministry, there was little else they could do other than to point the finger at the military commanders.

With Suffolk's death, a whole lot of ambitious men became interested in getting a promotion.

The effect of this was a widespread campaign to basically discredit anybody in power who could be seen as a competitor for the job.

With the war going poorly, the fight in America became a low hanging criticism that could be easily hurled around.

And right into this messy fray stepped William Howe.

William Howe was not having any of this and demanded that an inquiry be held.

Howe was determined to clear the family name and to lay the blame for the state of the war directly at the feet of the Ministry.

The Howes were, at a very minimum, always an interesting choice for the command in America.

They had shown at least some sympathy towards the Americans in the past.

Benjamin Franklin and Richard Howe had, on the eve of the war, formed something of a friendship.

Even as the war got going, William Howe showed that he was never under the false illusion that the war in America would be quick and easy.

In the aftermath of Bunker Hill, Howe worried about the abilities of the Americans to fortify hills all throughout the country and force the British into slaughter after slaughter.

This was a very real concern for Howe, that the British could potentially win every battle, but pay such a steep price for victory that they would end up losing the war.

As Howe expressed, there was nearly an endless supply of places for the Americans to fortify.

Although the Howe brothers had at least a degree of sympathy for the Americans, and William Howe personally believed that the war was going to be a much more difficult affair than the Ministry realized.

That is not to suggest that they had done anything other than give their best effort.

William Howe proceeded to subject Parliament to a score of witnesses coming to extol the work that he had done in America.

Among these witnesses was Major General Charles Gray, who explained the practical difficulties of fighting a war in America.

Gray pointed out that the Americans were fighting a defensive war and that their caution made them a far more difficult enemy to defeat.

In their defense, the Ministry fell right back into their old ways of thinking.

Much as the Southern Strategy was based around the idea that the majority of the American population remained loyal to the King, so too did Germain base his arguments against Tao.

The American population adored their King.

They were desperate to be saved from the radicals who had completely upended their lives.

All Howe needed to do was press his clear advantage and the rebellion would have been wrapped up in no time to prove this point, Germain got the testimony of Major General James Robertson.

Ut made clear that the vast majority of Americans absolutely despised the Declaration of Independence and were more than happy to give aid and information to defeat that small handful of rebels.

This battle produced little in the way of tangible results and really amounted to little more than an attempt on everybody's part to shift the blame of the war onto somebody else.

Arguably, the blame for the condition of the war laid at the hands of just about everybody.

It is difficult to fully exonerate Howe, who at times seemed to be overly cautious, and in the case of Saratoga, dangerously unconcerned as to the actions and movements of Burgoyne.

The Ministry has, since the very beginning of the crisis, been laboring under the delusion to the scope of the problem that they had.

They had refused to believe that the outbreak of this entire crisis was anything more than a handful of loud rabble rousers getting everybody all riled up.

Earlier today we had talked about the fact that this was never really the case.

It is a telling fact that those who had been on the ground in America were under no such belief that the people were overwhelmingly loyal.

Henry Clinton knew the truth when he was heading south.

Regardless of if the Ministry truly believed in the widespread loyalty of the Americans, or if they deep down knew that it was not true, does not really matter.

The Ministry had found this particular fact as something that they needed to desperately cling to, like a life raft, which, while politically is fine, becomes a far more dangerous prospect when they are planning the strategy for a war around it.

The British media had no problem throwing around to blame at anybody who they could get it to stick to.

The war in America had been a difficult subject for many in Great Britain.

Although there was a general understanding and acknowledgement among the population that the conflict was necessary, nobody felt particularly good about it.

British citizens may not agree with the American positions.

They may have supported the army forcing the recalcitrant colonies back into line.

Yet that was often as far as they were willing to go.

Few took joys in hearing about the gory details of the war.

A story about some great battle against, say, the French that resulted in a British victory, one which produced thousands of French casualties.

Well, that was applauded with patriotic fervor.

A story about dead Americans, however, well, that was just sad.

As historian Troy Beckham writes, the British viewed the war as a domestic tragedy.

They understood the necessity of the war, but that did not mean that they had to like it.

Somewhat ironically, among the more popular figures in the war in Britain was George Washington.

Washington's perceived aloofness from the political affairs of Congress made him a sympathetic figure.

This likewise tells us that for many Britons, they blamed Congress and the radical elements in America for the ongoing struggle.

Washington, a Virginian, therefore found insulation simply for the fact that he was not from New England.

The British media found themselves needing to proceed carefully when talking about the war in America because of the often precarious public opinion surrounding it.

Nobody wanted to take an official stance that would run contrary to the often fickle public opinion.

This led to reporting of the war being far more factually based as opposed to opinion based.

This again gives us clues into the population and how they felt about the war.

Even if the population understood and even agreed with the necessity of it, it still remained deeply unpopular.

Returning to Troy Beckham for a moment, he postulates that the British found themselves oddly ticketing with Washington, largely because there was an absence of heroes in Great Britain at the time.

The British were unhappy with their own leadership and what they saw as a lack of virtue.

Washington might be the enemy, but in him they could see those things, that sense of civic virtue that they longed for in their own leadership.

Still, however, there are going to be a few engagements that we need to discuss, which is what we are going to do.

Until then.

I hope you all have a wonderful two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe, and I will see you back here next time.