Enigmatic, intelligent, and indecisive, Shelburne was a voracious consumer of information. He cultivated a network of correspondents to keep himself up to date about everything from politics to science to culture. It was mostly innocuous, but it was not difficult for political rivals to wonder why he seemed to be running a domestic intelligence network. Many elites viewed him with the kind of suspicion normally reserved for characters like Varys “the Spider” from Game of Thrones; in Shelburne’s case, his nickname was “Malagrida,” or “the Jesuit of Berkeley Square.”1

He has been described as the cleverest man in public life; he was also a notably unsuccessful prime minister, thanks in large part to his complete inability to manage parliamentary coalitions.

You’ll note that Shelburne does not get named in the episode’s narrative:

Narrator: Meanwhile, in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens were trying to work out a permanent peace. Ignoring their instructions to include the French, whose assistance had ensured their astonishing victory, the American envoys decided to negotiate alone with British emissaries.

“Let us be honest and grateful to France,” John Jay said, “but let us think for ourselves.”

They had a draft treaty within a week.

As has been the case throughout the series, Burns’ privileges the American perspective. And that makes sense—he knows his audience. But in this case, it is misleading to ignore the British side of the negotiations. By definition, negotiations require two parties! So, what was Shelburne’s government trying to accomplish?

Initially, Shelburne wanted a federal union with the colonies. They would govern themselves but still retain allegiance to London in an arrangement roughly similar to the later Commonwealth. The American team was surprised—that was an obvious non-starter for them, which Shelburne should have known2—but they recognized the opportunity to insist on independence and to use that as a lever to extract additional concessions.

The resulting treaty looked like an American victory, as the episode summarizes:

Narrator: Its terms were generous to the Americans, so generous they would cause the new British government to fall, as well. It declared the 13 former colonies “to be free, Sovereign and independent states” and set expansive boundaries, stretching all the way from the Great Lakes to Florida and from the Appalachians westward to the Mississippi, a territory larger than England, France, and Spain put together. British troops were to be withdrawn with “all convenient Speed” and were barred, the agreement said, from “carrying away any Negroes or other Property of the American Inhabitants.” This provisional treaty was signed by the American and British negotiators on November 30, 1782.

A final comprehensive treaty would not come for another 9 months.

All that appears to be disastrous for Shelburne: he gave the Americans what they wanted and then lost his job.

But by skipping over those nine months, the episode actually misses one of the strangest aspects of the American Revolution and indeed Shelburne’s cleverness. When you survey the Anglo-French rivalry of the eighteenth century, the American Revolution stands out superficially as Britain’s largest defeat—they lost the thirteen colonies. And yet, from Yorktown in 1781 until the end of the war in 1783, Britain actually did quite well! None of Britain’s victories in that period had anything to do with the thirteen colonies, but remember that despite what Ken Burns would have you think, there is a world outside of North America. From London’s perspective, the victories were quite important:

In April 1782, Admiral Rodney won the battle of the Saintes in the West Indies, severely damaging French naval power in that region. That summer, news began to arrive that the British fleet in the Indian Ocean was holding its own against Admiral Suffren. Finally, in October, Admiral Howe led the third relief of the siege of Gibraltar by delivering a convoy full of supplies to the garrison in the face of a superior Franco-Spanish fleet.

Therefore, the American negotiators’ decision to abandon their French, Spanish, and Dutch allies was actually an opportunity for Shelburne. Conceding independence to the Americans divided his enemies. Being generous to the Americans also helped keep them happily separate from their European allies. Shelburne managed to cut Britain’s losses from the war and transform the negotiations into a referendum on the state of the war in 1782 among the European powers—and there, Britain was winning.

The comprehensive treaty referenced in the episode wrapped up the war like this:

• Britain: lost thirteen colonies and Minorca; kept Canada, Gibraltar and many West Indian islands; gained Dutch trading posts in India.

• France: gained Tobago, St. Lucia, and some trading posts in India.

• Spain: gained Minorca and Florida; gave up trying to take Gibraltar.

• United Provinces: lost trading posts in India.

If you’d offered that settlement to the then-prime minister Lord North immediately after Yorktown, he would have been thrilled. As defeats go, this really isn’t that bad. Britain began the war with twenty-six colonies, Gibraltar, and its growing presence in India. Britain ended the war with thirteen colonies, Gibraltar, and its growing presence in India. Meanwhile, France ended the war financially exhausted and disappointed. Yes, prying loose the thirteen colonies had damaged British prestige, but the French empire gained very little from its enormous expenditures and effort.

All that is a long way of saying that I don’t agree with the simplistic connection between the generous terms that the Americans got and the fall of Shelburne’s government. What Shelburne mismanaged was the politics of his success. Had he explained more effectively to his political partners that conceding American independence was a way to divide Britain’s enemies and force Spain and France to settle for very little, he might have lasted longer than an ignominious eight months.

Those are the six shortest tenures of prime ministers in British history, per Wikipedia. I’m not arguing here that Shelburne was a successful prime minister, but he probably doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with Liz Truss.

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Here are two omissions that I noticed that you might find helpful to supplement episode six. I’ll cover a third in next week’s post.

The poor chevalier de Ternay

In the summer of 1780, the French sent their second major expedition to North America to support the Patriots. The British had abandoned Newport in 1779, and so, armed with the knowledge of Narragansett Bay that they had gained on the first expedition in 1778, the French were able to occupy Newport with 4,600 officers and men. It was a useful base for operations on the eastern seaboard, but it wasn’t obvious what the best target for a Franco-American attack would be. To sort that out, here’s how the episode describes what happened:

Narrator: On September 21, 1780, Washington and four of his closest aides met in Hartford, Connecticut, with General Rochambeau and his entourage. The French army remained in Newport. Washington’s army was arrayed around New York.

For two days, the allied commanders discussed what steps they might take together to defeat the British. Washington and Rochambeau agreed that the most important objective was still New York City, but before an assault could take place, they would need to have naval superiority and a far larger combined army. Washington begged Rochambeau to ask his king for more help. Rochambeau said he would try.

That’s a broadly accurate summary of the meeting (an original account of which is available here) except for one key point: there was another senior French official present at the meeting. He was the commander of the naval forces in Newport, the chevalier de Ternay.

You might expect me to get up in arms about the omission of a naval officer—after all, that’s pretty much the point of this whole Substack enterprise. Moreover, the document linked above begins, “Summary of a Conversation between His Excellency General Washington, The Count De Rochambeau & The Chevalier De Ternay.”

But actually I totally understand why they left de Ternay out of the story. It’s a great illustration of the challenges that academics face when trying to tell a story for a broad audience. The academic in me wants to make sure that everyone knows that there was a third person at that meeting who mattered a lot at the time. Meanwhile, public-facing historians look ahead and notice that there’s no reason to add another French name to the story. And why is that? Well, after failing to come to an agreement about where to attack in September, the French spent the winter in Newport. On December 15, 1780, de Ternay died of typhus.

There was no Catholic church in Newport, so the French chose the fanciest church in town, the Anglican Trinity Church, and buried de Ternay there. Louis XVI had a grand gravestone designed for him, which you can see today in the narthex. The gravestone in the church yard is modern, placed there to keep the original out of the elements:

Command of the naval portion of the expedition transferred to the second-in-command, the chevalier Destouches—and he’s not mentioned by Burns either. By omitting de Ternay and omitting Destouches, Burns and his writers committed themselves to a narrative arc with two consequences:

1. Rochambeau became the stand-in for French commanders. Even though he was by no means the only decision-maker on the French side, it simplifies the story to say “Washington and Rochambeau agreed…” and “Washington begged Rochambeau…” etc.

2. Destouches’ subsequent contribution to the campaign also got omitted. If your viewers don’t know about de Ternay, it’s hard for them to be introduced to Destouches.

What did Destouches do, you ask?

The First Battle of the Capes

After the failure of the September 1780 conference, Washington, Rochambeau, and Destouches tried again. This time, in March 1781, Washington came to Newport. Greeted by cheering crowds, he reviewed the French troops. They discussed intelligence that there was a small British army recently landed in the Chesapeake that was isolated and might be a suitable target for a Franco-American attack.

Those familiar with the Yorktown campaign might think that this was the prelude to that battle. In fact, though, this army was commanded by Benedict Arnold, not Lord Cornwallis, and it was in Portsmouth, Virginia, not Yorktown.

Washington asked Destouches to move quickly, which he did. Destouches sailed from Newport on March 8 and arrived off Cape Henry, the southern mouth of the Chesapeake, just over a week later. But his departure from Newport had been spotted by British frigates, who told Vice-Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot in New York. He sailed on March 10 and managed to beat Destouches to Cape Henry. The two fleets fought an indecisive action known as the Battle of Cape Henry that prevented Destouches from landing any soldiers to attack Arnold. Frustrated, he returned to Newport, while Arbuthnot successfully evacuated Arnold.

This operation should have sent alarm bells ringing throughout the British chain of command in North America. It demonstrated that while the French remained in Newport, the British army was no longer safe when it reached the water (as had largely been the case since the beginning of the war). Arbuthnot had been lucky to beat Destouches to the Chesapeake, and since the French retained the initiative, he might not be so lucky next time.

Sure enough, that’s what happened at Yorktown. The Battle of Cape Henry was a dress rehearsal.

And that’s, of course, why Burns omitted it. Wars are incredibly complicated, and there’s never enough time to talk about every battle. Nevertheless, when I give tours of colonial Newport, I like to highlight that the French sailed from Newport not once but twice in 1781.

Next week I’ll look at another missing figure from episode six, Lord Shelburne.

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The episode’s fixation on the thirteen colonies comes with costs not only to our understanding of the global context, but also to the perspectives that the narrator and the historians bring to bear. Nowhere is that more true than when the episode discusses Charles-Henri, comte d’Estaing, the French admiral who led the first major expedition to support the Patriots in the spring of 1778.

My argument, in brief, is that the episode provides the Patriot perspective on d’Estaing but not the French perspective.

D’Estaing in New York

Here’s how the episode introduces d’Estaing:

The French fleet Washington had been waiting for finally appeared off New York in the week after Independence Day [1778]—12 ships of the line, 4 frigates, and over 4,000 French marines, all commanded by Vice Admiral Charles-Henri, comte d’Estaing, a veteran of warfare against Britain in India and Sumatra.

Iris De Rode: D’Estaing is a French aristocrat. He considers himself quite superior to these American “ragtag” army and is looking at them and thinks, “How am I gonna work with these people?” Because he thought, “I’m the French admiral. I know what to do here, so they better listen to me.”

Let’s handle the second paragraph first. I will freely admit that d’Estaing is not a particularly likable character, and he certainly carries with him the arrogance you would expect from a high-ranking French aristocrat. Louis XV thought so highly of him that he created a new position for him as one of the three most senior admirals in the French navy. And it is true that he had plenty of combat experience up to that point.

However, the idea that his fleet “appeared” off New York, as a bolt from the blue, gets us off on the wrong foot. It gives the impression that the arrogant d’Estaing never even considered coordinating with his American allies. The narrator doubles down on that impression when describing how d’Estaing approached British forces in New York:

Narrator: Washington hoped a coordinated attack with this new French force could trap Clinton in New York, take back the city, and, by so doing, persuade Britain that further prosecution of the war was hopeless.

Because d’Estaing had convinced himself that his heaviest ships would run aground trying to enter New York Harbor, he decided to move against the British garrison at Newport, Rhode Island, instead.

There are two problems here. First, d’Estaing’s landfall on the east coast was not New York but rather the Delaware Capes, where he discharged Conrad-Alexandre Gérard, the minister plenipotentiary to the Continental Congress, up the Delaware river. That’s about as coordinated as you can get in the eighteenth century: here’s a minister empowered to make decisions sent directly to the Patriot seat of power!

Second, as you can see in my bolding above, the narrator blames d’Estaing for not attacking the British in New York. While it is true that Washington was disappointed that d’Estaing couldn’t get over the bar, it wasn’t for lack of trying! In fact, d’Estaing was so eager to get at Admiral Howe’s inferior fleet (which had anchored itself just inside Sandy Hook in New Jersey) that he offered American pilots ever-increasing sums of money to get his fleet over the sandbar. The pilots did the math in terms of how much the French ships drew and how deep the water was, and declined.1

D’Estaing in Rhode Island and Massachusetts

Here’s how the episode describes d’Estaing’s arrival off Rhode Island:

Narrator: It was to be a coordinated assault with American ground forces under General John Sullivan, but neither commander spoke the other’s language. Sullivan, the son of Irish indentured servants, loathed aristocrats like the French commander, who, in turn, found Sullivan crude and inept.

[Cannon fire] It all went wrong. Without informing the French, Sullivan advanced a day earlier than had been planned. When a British fleet appeared offshore, d’Estaing sailed out to do battle... [Thunder] but a howling storm scattered and seriously damaged both fleets.

Franco-American coordination was poor, it’s true. And figuring out who was going to attack when and where was challenging. Nevertheless, the episode gives the impression that d’Estaing barely engaged British forces in Newport and chose to abandon Sullivan instead.

In fact, d’Estaing (who had no knowledge of the tricky waters of Narragansett Bay) blocked all three channels into the bay, causing the British to burn four frigates and sink ten transports2—the single biggest loss of British naval vessels up to that point in the war.

D’Estaing entered the main passage with eight ships of the line and engaged the British batteries guarding Newport harbor. He was all set to finish off the city when, unexpectedly, Admiral Howe appeared off the coast with reinforcements from Britain under the command of Admiral John Byron.3

Because French and American intelligence had so comprehensively failed to alert d’Estaing to Howe’s arrival, d’Estaing worried that he was going to be trapped in unknown waters between British shore batteries and a superior British fleet. So yes, it is true that he “sailed out to do battle,” but it wasn’t because he was some glory-seeking knight off to single combat—it was for legitimate tactical reasons.

I happen to disagree with d’Estaing’s choice (we now know that he was still superior to Howe) but I also think he had plenty of reasons to proceed with caution. Yes, he abandoned Sullivan, who had to retreat off Aquidneck Island in the Battle of Rhode Island a few weeks later. But he didn’t do that out of spite or out of haughty disdain for the American cause. I think the episode does d’Estaing a disservice here:

Edward Lengel: The French, in essence, leave the Americans in the lurch. Sullivan is barely able to extract his forces from what could have been a catastrophe.

It doesn’t get better in the next paragraph, which discusses d’Estaing’s departure for the West Indies in November 1778:

Narrator: The first joint French-American operation had failed. Once the repairs were finished in Boston, d’Estaing would set sail for the French West Indies without even bothering to tell Washington he was leaving.

There are lots of interesting details that the episode skips over here—the Bostonians did not provide a warm welcome to the French sailors, and d’Estaing’s time repairing his squadron was marred by riots and diplomatic crises—but the idea that d’Estaing left “without even bothering to tell Washington he was leaving” is false. In fact, the French (and the Bostonians) were worried that Byron would attack Boston—which in fact he tried to do, losing a 64-gun ship in the process—so d’Estaing’s first priority was to repair the fleet while maintaining the defenses of Boston.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Gérard, the marquis de Lafayette, and Congress contemplated an attack on Canada. Representatives from what had been French Canada visited d’Estaing in Boston, and in late October he issued a proclamation that was intended to make the British think that in fact Canada was his next target. That bought d’Estaing time to get the fleet to sea and turn south for the West Indies without being intercepted by Byron.4

In any case, it’s impossible to get a fleet ready for sea without the port of departure noticing preparations and asking questions. It simply isn’t the case that d’Estaing bolted from the American theater without telling his allies.

So what?

I’m working on a side project on d’Estaing at the moment, so I’m more sensitive to what the episode says about him than I would be normally. I’m not throwing the entire episode in the bin because Burns’ team got some details wrong about a now-forgotten French naval officer.

However, I think the missteps here are indicative of the broader structural problem of telling the story of the American Revolution after 1778 from the thirteen colonies outward. Burns has distinguished talking heads say that after French entry it was a global war, but he never grapples with the implications of that statement. The result is that he leaves his viewers with a distorted understanding of the war’s course and outcome.

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I’m a British naval historian, so naturally I had hoped he would have made a different choice. The vast majority of the interesting naval events of the war happen after 1778 and are sometimes unrelated to the thirteen colonies. Alas.

Speeding up the clock

Of course I know I’m not the target audience for the show, but that’s not the only reason I was disappointed in the episode. Compare the pacing of episodes two through four with episode five. I copied the dates directly from the episode titles:

1. May 1754–May 1775

2. May 1775–July 1776 (14 months)

3. July 1776–January 1777 (7 months)

4. January 1777–February 1778 (13 months)

5. December 1777–May 1780 (30 months)

6. May 1780–onward

Clearly they tried to pack more into episode five than into the previous three; ironically, that’s the time period when the war expands to encompass India, the Caribbean, and (most importantly) Europe.

I say most importantly because while I think it’s entirely justifiable to ignore the Indian Ocean campaign, it’s inexcusable not to spend more time explaining the geo-strategic implications of French entry. Burns didn’t have enough time to cover it in the same level of detail as he did other pivotal issues because of how he decided to carve up the narrative of the war.

Various sizes of potatoes

The strategic implications of French entry are not entirely absent, of course. Kathleen DuVal does an excellent job of setting the table, explaining how French entry relegated the fight in the thirteen colonies to a secondary theater:

Kathleen DuVal: The French decide to enter the war, and that changes everything for Britain. Britain knows that Spain and the Netherlands may be next. Suddenly, those 13 colonies that were rebelling are kind of the small potatoes of the war. They could lose their profitable plantation islands. They could lose Jamaica. The stakes are big in this war, and the 13 colonies have become just a tiny corner of it.

Yes! But then the next logical step for Burns to take would be to show that Britain’s need to focus on France and Spain meant that there were fewer forces available to deploy to North America. Moreover, it would make sense to explore how, exactly, the French and Spanish proposed to assist the Patriots, and how, exactly, Britain might need to re-think its strategy to counter them. I think that would flow logically from DuVal’s table-setting even if you adopt Burns’ focus on the thirteen colonies. After all, British, French, and Spanish strategies shaped not only Patriot and Loyalist strategies but also the outcome of the war.

Some of that happens in the next section, which covers Henry Clinton’s appointment as British commander-in-chief. The narrator mentions that Clinton decided to shift his forces south in part to reinforce the West Indies, and that he had insufficient ships to carry his army from Philadelphia back to New York. But I don’t think the narrative goes nearly far enough. After French entry, all the choices that Clinton made were made with the knowledge that a major French fleet might appear on the horizon anywhere in North America and possibly without warning. Moreover, examining Clinton’s decision-making covers just the “small potatoes” stuff—he’s at the mercy of the resources that his bosses allocated to him. The big potatoes (?) were in London, Paris, and Madrid, not New York.

Blundering aimlessly about

So let’s look at the war from London’s perspective after French entry. In 1778, the British strategic dilemma was whether to keep their forces divided on two sides of the Atlantic or to concentrate their forces in Europe.

If they kept their forces divided, then French expeditionary forces and fleets would be able to cross the Atlantic and attack British possessions or support the Patriots. However, the British would still have both naval and military forces on the western side of the Atlantic to defend their possessions and to continue to put pressure on Washington’s army. It was reasonable to think that those forces would be able to handle both Washington’s army and whatever the French sent.

If the British concentrated their forces in Europe, they might be able to bottle up the French navy as they had done in the Seven Years’ War. If they did that, then all of their possessions in the West Indies would be safe, and the French would be unable to support the Patriots. However, to achieve the necessary superiority in Europe, they would probably have to evacuate the British army from New York and leave the Loyalists to fight Washington’s army on their own.

We know what the British chose to do—George III could not countenance the idea of abandoning the colonies, so British forces remained divided—but I think there’s value in recreating that strategic dilemma. The British decision made life much more difficult for Washington’s army, which had to endure extraordinarily difficult winters at Valley Forge and Morristown. The episode does an excellent job of describing those challenges, again (understandably) maintaining its focus on the Patriot perspective. But I hope I’ve shown here that you can’t fully understand that perspective without the global context.

From a naval perspective, the British decision to keep fighting in the thirteen colonies meant that both the British and French sent squadrons across the Atlantic. Once they left European waters, it was up to the commanders to execute their missions and react to changing circumstances. And because there were lots of squadrons doing lots of different things (not to mention armies fighting in North America and the West Indies), circumstances changed frequently. The result was, as N.A.M. Rodger put it, “a series of undirected random cruises in which British and French squadrons blundered aimlessly about in the New World, occasionally encountering one another in strength and circumstances which were completely unpredictable.”1

The episode notes occasionally that both Washington and Clinton struggled to anticipate the movements of both French and British squadrons, but from my perspective, Burns missed several opportunities to explain why that was the case.

The Armada of 1779

The other great missed opportunity was the armada of 1779, which is left out of the episode entirely.

The French failed to convince the Spanish to join the war in 1778, but in 1779, the Spanish agreed. They had clear goals: recapture Minorca and take Gibraltar, Florida, and Honduras, in that order. To gain French support in achieving their goals, the price the Spanish paid was to contribute to a massive amphibious expedition aimed at capturing the Isle of Wight, which sits just outside Britain’s naval base at Portsmouth midway up the English Channel. In the summer of 1779, Louis Guillouet, comte d’Orvilliers, led sixty-six ships of the line up the Channel. His fleet was double the size of the Combined Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805—in other words, sixty-six is a big number.

To counter it, the British could muster just thirty (later thirty-nine) ships of the line. Remember, they had chosen to keep fighting in North America and they were worried about the West Indies. Disconcertingly outnumbered in home waters, the British retreated up the Channel and waited to see what the Combined Fleet would do.

The answer, it turned out, was get sick and go home. Amphibious operations are the most complex operations that navies and armies undertake, and this one was additionally challenging because the target landing area was so far away and because there were two armies and two navies (French and Spanish) involved. Typhus killed or incapacitated nearly 8,000 men in the squadron; the rest suffered from shortages of food and water caused by French logistical failures.

Nevertheless, the British navy did functionally nothing to prevent the Combined Fleet from achieving its goals. That was, to say the least, alarming. The British public thought the entire point of having the world’s best navy was to prevent invasion. The invasion panic of 1779 gave plenty of ammunition to those who wanted to end the war in America, and it called into question the competence of Lord North’s government.

Should Burns have focused on the armada? No. After all, recall the list of Spanish war aims. Notice that “win American independence” didn’t make the list. The armada was mostly about Anglo-Franco-Spanish issues, not about American independence.

Yet I still think Burns does his viewers a disservice by neglecting the European theater so completely. Whatever odds Washington faced in any of the battles of 1778–1780, those odds were shaped by events across the ocean. Britain could not focus all its attention on the thirteen colonies (as DuVal rightly says), but exploring why that was the case seems to me to be worth some of the documentary’s precious time.

This post is already longer than usual, so I’ll leave it there for now. Next week, I’m going to return to this episode to look at how it treats the comte d’Estaing, who led the first of those “undirected random cruises” to the American coastline in 1778.

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Narrator: These soldiers were different from the men who had rallied after Lexington and Concord.

Most of them had been farmers and artisans, propertied men with taxes to pay, creditors to appease, crops to sow and harvest.

From now on, the Continental Army would be made up predominantly of the poorest of the poor—jobless laborers and landless tenants, second and third sons without hope of an inheritance, debtors and British deserters, indentured servants and apprentices, felons hoping to win pardons for their service, immigrants from Ireland, and immigrants from Germany, or their descendants who had never learned English.

John Adams had worried that only “the meanest, idlest, most intemperate and worthless men” in America could ever be persuaded to serve more than a year.

But victory would be impossible without them.

Adams’ worries reflected the risks he was running. Before the Revolution, as a well-to-do lawyer and member of the colonial elite, he could fairly easily insulate himself from the working class. In the Revolution, though, suddenly his life depended on the performance of “the meanest, idlest, most intemperate and worthless men.”

The same was increasingly true for elites across Europe and the Americas in the revolutionary turmoil of the period 1770 to 1830.1 Adams legitimately feared execution if the Patriots lost the war. A dozen years later, the French Revolution raised the stakes of European war even higher—Robespierre and Danton were lawyers much like Adams.

The point is, the makeup of a country’s army might be the difference between life and death for more than just the rank and file.

The Scum of the Earth

As a result, Adams was not the only member of the elite to comment on the character of the rank and file during this period. When I heard Adams’ line about “worthless men,” I immediately thought of a similar episode in British history. Here’s how the Duke of Wellington described the British army he was commanding in 1813:

I don’t mean to say that there is no difference in the composition or therefore the feeling of the French army and ours. The French system of conscription brings together a fair sample of all classes; ours is composed of the scum of the Earth, the mere scum of the Earth. It is only wonderful that we should be able to make so much out of them afterwards. The English soldiers are fellows who have enlisted for drink, that is the plain fact, they have all enlisted for drink.2

Readers don’t like block quotes (how many of you skipped it?) so historians have tended to shorten the quote to the punchiest phrase, which I bolded to get you to read it.

As you can see, though, there’s more in the quote than “scum of the earth.” Some historians have noticed the other parts of the quote while others have left them out, but few have been able to resist using it in their discussions of the makeup of the British army.

For the next bit of this post, I’m going to survey the different ways that historians of the British army have interpreted Wellington’s quote. I admit that it’s not directly connected to the Continental Army in 1777, but I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to transpose some of these interpretations of Wellington in 1813 to Adams in 1777.

The most straightforward interpretation is that when Wellington says his soldiers were the scum of the earth, he’s stating a simple fact about the class differences between him and his soldiers. Literacy rates in the British army don’t seem to have been higher than fifty percent.3 Moreover, as we have discussed here before, probably they were drunk: “they have all enlisted for drink.”

Of course, the British army of 1813 was on the cusp of its most famous victory. How could it have won such a victory with “mere scum”? Well, some historians have given Wellington credit. Here’s Huw Davies: “Wellington had moulded an army from a rabble composed of the ‘scum of the earth’, had trained it in the course of six years of high-intensity warfare, had developed his tactical prowess from defensive to offensive, and had worn down, divided, and all but annihilated an opponent whose ubiquitous military skill had conquered much of Europe.”4

Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack have pointed out that Wellington’s quote really talks about the men before they enlisted. They focus on the line that immediately follows the scum of the earth, though they use a slightly different version: “It is really wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows that they are.” Service in the army made them worthy.5

Another strand of scholarship has taken the scum of the earth at more or less face value but then noted that improving the moral, physical, and spiritual qualities of the army’s rank and file became a preoccupation for reformers after the war.6 Finally, still other historians have rejected the idea that they were scum of the earth entirely. J.E. Cookson looked at pension records and argued that many were (or became) law-abiding respectable citizens.7

So there you have it, the full spectrum of historical interpretation. Either the British army was desperately lucky to have won with such a ragged crew, or Wellington was brilliant to win with such a ragged crew, or Wellington was a genius to train them into not a ragged crew, … or maybe they weren’t ragged at all! Phew. Historians are the worst.

Back to the Continental Army in 1777

What does this tell us about John Adams’ fears? Well, I’m speculating here. I know a lot more about the British army than the Continental Army, but I think you can see why Ken Burns’ writers liked Adams’ “worthless men” quote:

• It highlights the actual change in the kind of men volunteering for service after the heady days of 1775–76;

• It makes the achievement of American independence seem all the more impressive, since the Continental Army was a ragged rabble;

• It gives implicit credit to George Washington and other generals like Benedict Arnold and Horatio Gates for turning such a rabble into an effective fighting force that won the important victories (and survived the defeats) of 1777;

• It defines the social distance between Patriot leaders and the men on whom their success depended.

While Adams thought the soldiers were worthless, he might not be the best person to make that assessment given his socio-economic status and race. If the Continental Army was a true reflection of the society it served, and it endured through the hardships of 1777, then perhaps its men weren’t worthless at all.

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The Howes before and after 1776

The brothers appear in the episode without much in the way of an introduction, so here’s some background.

William Howe made his name in the Seven Years War, and specifically in the British assault on Quebec. I’ve written about that campaign before:

Early in the morning on September 13, 1759, William Howe led British troops up the cliff above the Anse au Foulon, surprising the French defenders and setting the stage for the British victory (and Wolfe’s death, above). The point is, William Howe was unquestionably brave and bold, and willing to lead from the front.

Richard Howe also made his name in the Seven Years War, but for very different reasons. Some historians like to say that Howe “fired the first shot” of the war, but that’s a generous way to interpret what actually happened.1 In 1755, before war had been declared, the British sent a squadron under Edward Boscawen to the Gulf of St. Lawrence to prevent the French from reinforcing Canada.

Boscawen’s squadron of eleven ships of the line and one frigate sailed from Plymouth on April 26. Meanwhile, a French squadron of nineteen ships of the line (some of which had had their guns taken out to accommodate troops) left Brest on May 3. Boscawen’s head start got him to Cape Race, Newfoundland, on June 3, where, in cold and foggy weather, he dodged icebergs and waited for the French to arrive. When the fog cleared on June 8, the British spotted three French ships of the line that had become separated from the rest of the fleet. Captain Richard Howe in Dunkirk ran down the French ship Alcide. The French captain called across to Howe, asking whether the two nations were at war. At the third time of asking, Howe finally replied, “At peace, at peace!” But Boscawen’s flagship was flying a red pennant that meant attack. Howe fired a full broadside, followed by several more, which disabled Alcide and convinced her captain to surrender. In ten minutes, the Alcide suffered 54 men killed and 50 men wounded; Dunkirk suffered 9 killed and 29 wounded.2

It’s going too far to say that Howe committed a war crime, but he clearly violated norms. It’s true that both sides knew that the only reason the French squadron had sailed was because both sides anticipated the war starting soon, but firing into a French ship immediately after saying the two nations were at peace was … ok, maybe war crime is the right phrase.

Richard Howe’s career suffered no ill effects from the incident. After his experience in the American War (see below), he became First Lord of the Admiralty and then commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet at the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars. He captured six French ships of the line in the battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794 and was honored by the visit of George III to his quarterdeck in the aftermath, pictured below. (Nobody mentioned that the essential grain convoy from the US to France got through…)

But that’s getting ahead of the story. Here are some thoughts on the Howes as depicted in Ken Burns’ documentary.

The Howes in 1776

There are two questions about the brothers that historians have spilled tons of ink answering, and that the documentary addresses as well. First, why were they not more aggressive in pursuing Washington and his army when both were trapped in the battles around New York? Second, in 1777 (covered in the next episode), why did William decide to attack Philadelphia instead of following through on the plan to meet Burgoyne’s army at Albany?

After 250 years, you would think we would have good answers to these questions. Alas. The episode does a good job of surveying some of the answers, but it doesn’t get into the weeds about why the answers are all unsatisfying. I’ll try to do that here.

Twice the episode uses voices from the time to insinuate that the Howes actually wanted to let the Americans win:

[Narrator]: General William Howe’s officers urged him to finish what he had begun, but instead of ordering an assault, Howe stood down.

He knew his brother Richard’s fleet was about to enter the East River and prevent the rebels from escaping by water.

The Americans were astonished.

“General Howe is either our friend or no general,” Israel Putnam said. “He had our whole army in his power.”

And later:

[Historian Friederike Baer]: The British essentially let Washington escape once again. Opportunities to just end this war right now are being wasted.

[Voice]: “Is it through incapacity or by design of our commander that so many great opportunities are let slip? I am inclined to adopt the latter.”

Captain William Bamford.

In the documentary, the historian Stephen Conway pushes back against Bamford’s accusation immediately after that, and he summarizes the historical consensus, which is that the Howes were not traitors. They behaved the way they did because:

• The Howes’ politics made them sympathetic to the American cause;

• Therefore they held out hope even after the Declaration of Independence that they could settle the dispute without too much bloodshed;

• And keeping Washington at large presumably would help convince the Americans that the forces of the empire weren’t there to kill everyone.

All that seems reasonable. The Howes probably were not traitors, but rather they hoped that adopting a less-than-full-bore approach to the war would lead to a peace settlement that would keep the colonies in the empire and prevent the French and Spanish from capitalizing on the opportunity presented by the rebellion.

But the point of this post is to say that we don’t really know! And that’s both frustrating and surprising. After all, these are fundamental questions about foundational events in American history. Surely historians could give us more than speculation!

What the episode doesn’t tell its viewers is that there are two good reasons why we have to speculate about the Howes.

The first is the unusual nature of their relationship. There were excellent strategic reasons to assign brothers to these positions. The British army and Navy consistently struggled to work well together. They lacked what today’s military calls joint command and control. An admiral could not technically order a general to do anything, and vice versa. Successful operations involving both services almost invariably depended on a good personal relationship between the officers.

From London’s perspective, what better way to guarantee a good relationship than to appoint brothers?

From a historians perspective: gah! How annoying! Brothers have a tendency to, you know, talk to each other. That means they don’t write down what they’re thinking. We have to rely on accounts from members of their staff (like Ambrose Serle, the general’s secretary) to know what they said to each other. Normally, in amphibious situations, both admirals and generals wrote long explanations of why the other side was entirely responsible for everything that went wrong while they were responsible for everything that went right. That requires its own kind of parsing from historians, but at least we have evidence to parse!

The second reason is that the bulk of the Howes’ papers were destroyed in a fire in 1826. That doesn’t mean that everything the Howes ever wrote was destroyed; it just means that the largest single collection (apparently enough to fill several trunks) is unavailable to us.

And that’s why historians have to speculate about why the Howes acted as they did, and why the episode, in turn, can implicitly accuse them of treason without straying too far from the evidentiary base.

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The main character in this episode is Benedict Arnold. He takes Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, which is one of the most important Patriot victories early in the war, and then he leads a difficult and ultimately failed expedition to Canada in 1776.

The narrator tells us that Arnold “was descended from a distinguished New England family that had fallen on hard times.” He doesn’t provide any additional details, though, so let me try.

The Arnold family was from Newport, Rhode Island, and it was distinguished because Arnold’s great-grandfather had been the first Governor of the Colony of Rhode Island under the Royal Charter. Confusingly (or helpfully, I guess) he was also named Benedict. He served as governor from 1663 to 1666 and then twice more in the next dozen years. You can visit the governor’s grave, as well as the graves of many of Arnold’s other ancestors, at the Arnold Burying Ground in Newport. It’s a small plot that for many years had been covered up, but in 1949 it was restored to what you see in these pictures:

By the time the famous Benedict Arnold was born, his branch of the family had relocated to Norwich, Connecticut. And obviously he is not buried in Newport—he’s in St. Mary’s Church, Battersea, London.

The Arnold Burying Ground sits on what was then Arnold family land, a strip that extended from the wharves up the hill to Touro Park. That kind of land arrangement was common in New England colonial port towns: access to the wharves was what mattered, so those were divvied up into small pieces. Those pieces in turn formed the distance between streets. Here’s a zoomed in version of this 1777 map of Newport that shows the strips of land that extend from the wharves up the hill behind:

The red lines demarcate the Arnold family’s original in-town landholdings. The yellow circle encloses the Old Stone Mill, which is a Newport landmark:

There’s a nearby museum that claims the “Newport Tower” is evidence of pre-Columbian contact—i.e. that it was built by the Vikings, or the Chinese, or medieval knights … or aliens. Bah. It’s actually the remains of the Arnold family’s seventeenth-century windmill.

I was impressed by the way the episode handled the challenges that the British faced in conducting a counterinsurgency campaign across a large ocean in an unpopular war. Here at the Naval War College, we sometimes use that kind of framing in our classes, and the students tend to “get it” without much trouble. After all, many of them spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan conducting operations not all that dissimilar from what the British army and navy were trying to do in the years before the French entered the American Revolution.

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Some of my comments will be nitpicks, since I study this period and I inevitably come across small points where I might have made a different choice. But that shouldn’t take away from my broader admiration for the documentary: it’s very good!

Framing the War

Episode one does three different things. First, it provides the stakes—why we should care about the war. Second, it explains the political conflict that brought about the Revolution, often from non-traditional perspectives. Third, it tells the story of the bloodshed of 1775.

Early on, the narration explains that the American Revolution was actually three overlapping wars:

It was fought in hundreds of places, from the forests of Quebec to the backcountry of Georgia and the Carolinas; from the rough seas off England, France and in the Caribbean, to the towns and orchards of Indian Country.

In other words, it was a global war.

It was also an insurgency, a rebellion against an empire:

The war grew out of a multitude of grievances lodged against the British Parliament by British subjects living an ocean away in 13 otherwise disunited colonies.

Finally, it was a civil war:

It was also a savage civil war that pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, American against American, killing tens of thousands of them.

I am in violent agreement with all three descriptions of the war. I use a similar framing when I teach the American Revolution.

What I found curious is that in the listing of the war’s geographic scope, the narration ignores India. This is low-hanging fruit—what could be more impressive than showing that a war that started at Lexington and Concord reached all the way to the other side of the world! Indeed in the description of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) that comes just a few minutes later, the historian grabs that fruit: “[The Seven Years’ War] is fought in the Caribbean, it’s fought in Africa, it’s fought in India, it’s fought in the Philippines.”

That’s true, but you could say almost the exact same thing about the American Revolution.

From 1780 to 1783, the British and French fought a bitter naval war across the Indian Ocean. A small British squadron under Sir Edward Hughes was on station providing effective support for the East India Company’s war against the Nabob of Mysore, Hyder Ali. Mysore’s French allies showed up at the end of 1781 with a squadron eventually led by Pierre André de Suffren, a naval officer’s naval officer. Suffren was “slovenly and foul-mouthed,” bold, aggressive, sarcastic, and brilliant. Hughes was exactly the opposite—reserved, genteel, safe.1

The two fleets fought five times over the course of 1782 and 1783, each time with no decisive result. Suffren’s squadron was more powerful; Hughes’ was more disciplined. The war ended before either side could achieve sufficient command of the Indian Ocean to achieve their strategic goals, but ever since, naval officers have studied the unusual campaign closely. Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, the head of the U.S. Navy in the Second World War, argued Suffren was one of the five greatest admirals in world history.2

The point is, Suffren vs Hughes was a large campaign involving tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors in a global war that had started in a Boston suburb. While the naval actions in the Indian Ocean ended without a decisive result, that in itself was important because it allowed the East India Company to continue its steady march to control most of the subcontinent. In naval history, Suffren’s aggression and harsh treatment of his subordinates served as a model for many subsequent naval officers who equated aggression, shouting, and a foul mouth with effectiveness.

But neither of those legacies has anything to do with American independence. While the omission of India from the documentary’s narration is a minor point, it reinforced my suspicion that its focus was going to remain on American independence über alles. It’s not obvious to an American audience why they should care about Suffren, so they left him out (for now, at least—let’s circle back in a few episodes). Given that framing, I’ll be interested to see how the documentary handles the many other aspects of the global war that are largely unrelated to American independence—not just India but also the League of Armed Neutrality and the fighting in the West Indies and more.

A World before Police

I had some preliminary concerns with the episode’s treatment of the Boston Massacre. The narrator and some of the historians treat London’s decision to send the army to the unruly colonies as a shocking development in peacetime: “An army during wartime makes sense,” says one historian. “Of course, you need that. But an army during peacetime is a standing army. And if you have an army during peacetime, the thinking is that its only use is to turn on poor, innocent subjects.”

As I’ve discussed on this blog, in fact, there weren’t any other options.

Here’s what I said in that post:

For mobs more serious than drunken rioting, the plan in the eighteenth century almost always involved sending the army. When soldiers arrived at the scene of a riot, often that was enough—even drunken rioters often said, oh crap, the army’s here, this is serious, time to go home. But if showing up wasn’t enough, things got tricky. Soldiers could march around and look imposing, or they could try to guard something.

If that still wasn’t enough, things usually got out of control. That’s where the massacres came from. Soldiers are not trained for non-lethal crowd control. That was as true in the eighteenth century as it is now. After parading and guarding something, soldiers often ended up firing over the heads of the crowd or advancing with bayonets. At the Boston Massacre in 1770, soldiers were guarding the Custom House when they got sick of getting pelted with bricks.

I’m not discounting how Bostonians felt about the arrival of the British army in the late 1760s; I’m just pointing out that it was highly ordinary for London to order army regiments into the colonies to keep them in line.

I was relieved, therefore, that Christopher Brown made a similar point later in the episode: “The British Government sees this as a police action, that if they can punish Boston and shut down Massachusetts, contain the rebellion, that the other colonies would get the message and that order could be restored with some grumbling.” Well there’s no other way to police the colonies than to send the army.

Those were my two thoughts about episode one; next week, I’ll do the same for episode two.

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If you want the gory details of the job market, Bret Devereaux has you covered. And all that was true before you even think about the threat from large language models.

These overlapping crises have spawned a thousand ideas for how to respond. One such idea is the newly-established applied history fellowships at the Institute for Historical Research. As the advertisement explains, the fellowships are aimed at “three pressing challenges”:

• the need to build sustainable bridges across different parts of the history community

• the deeply challenging academic job market

• the need to advocate for the utility of history beyond the [Higher Education] sector.

I am very lucky to have a job, but I too am feeling pressure to “advocate for the utility of history.” Among my civilian academic colleagues, the idea is to make studying history as useful as majoring in business or communications; in professional military education, the idea is to make history useful to policymakers.

So in this post, I want to try to unpack the fashionable term “applied history.” I’m doing this mostly for my own edification, but perhaps you will also find it interesting—or, I should say, useful.

Applied History as a Sub-Discipline

Applied history is not new, but the most recent iteration derives from the 2016 “Applied History Manifesto” published in The Atlantic by Harvard’s Niall Ferguson and Graham Allison. I’m going to go line-by-line through their first paragraph:

Applied history is the explicit attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing historical precedents and analogues.

To a non-academic audience, I suspect there’s nothing unusual in that sentence—it makes sense to try to leverage historical study for present-day concerns. You might look for lessons, or you might take the “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes” approach.

Academics read it slightly differently because of the word “explicit” and because we get nervous when people start rhyming. Let’s keep going to figure out why:

Mainstream historians begin with a past event or era and attempt to provide an account of what happened and why.

Any attempt to describe an entire discipline in one sentence is going to open itself up to exceptions, but I’m not going to focus on that. I can’t get over the first word, which immediately suggests that applied historians are setting themselves deliberately apart from the rest of the academy. Sure enough:

Applied historians begin with a current choice or predicament and attempt to analyze the historical record to provide perspective, stimulate imagination, find clues about what is likely to happen, suggest possible policy interventions, and assess probable consequences.

Consider my hackles raised. Here are three reasons:

1. We can’t address the crisis in the humanities by subdividing ourselves further, into “mainstream” and “applied” camps. I much prefer the applied history fellowship advertisement that I quoted earlier, which calls for applied history to build bridges across the historical community.

2. There’s already a discipline that looks at the present and future and then mines the past to provide guidance to policymakers: it’s called political science. Political scientists create knowledge deductively, by developing theories of how the world works and testing them against the historical record. I am skeptical of the idea that historians will flourish if we tread on political scientists’ turf.

3. Historians create knowledge inductively, by studying the historical record and then trying to make sense of it. There are lots of historians who recoil at the idea that the present should guide our research. Sir Herbert Butterfield put it like this: “The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word ‘unhistorical’.”

Ultimately, though, I’m not in a position to dismiss applied history. Not only do I need to think about it in my day job, but I don’t want to commit the same sin of dividing our forces in the face of the enemy. We need all the allies we can get at the moment.

There’s also something deeply, fundamentally honest about the applied history manifesto that all historians need to think about, which is that of course historians “begin with a current choice or predicament.” Historians can’t do history from any other time period than the present, because that’s the time period in which we all live! That means our work is inevitably shaped by the present.

History is what the present wants to know about the past. The challenge is to understand the role the present plays in our studies, suspend that as best we can, and then look at the past on its own terms.

A Middle Path?

Graduate school trains most people like me to aim for that suspension of the present. The Navy, an organization that is relentlessly practical and future-focused, wants me to do the opposite. I think there’s a middle path, between history for history’s sake and full-on political-science-lite applied history.

I recoil at the idea that my research can produce lessons. I’m even suspicious of the idea that history rhymes. My go-to cliché quote is different: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

But I have had some luck in studying the past to generate questions that we might want to consider today. That approach treats the past not as a guide to the future but rather as an enormous storehouse of knowledge and experiences that broaden our horizons and provide essential context. When we study the full sweep of the human experience, we can draw on it to identify issues that we might not have otherwise considered.

Since I’ve worked for the Navy, I’ve used my research to ask policy-relevant questions about seams in areas of responsibility, about the challenges of war termination, about the difficulties of transitioning veterans to civilian life, about the dangers of fighting the last war, and about who might come to a war college in wartime. Asking questions, it seems to me, allows decision-makers to maintain their focus on the present and future while still encouraging them to see their current predicament from a historically-informed and sometimes novel perspective.

I completely understand why decision-makers want historians to tell them how to apply the past to solve their problems, or at least to “assess probable consequences,” as the manifesto put it.1 I don’t think I can do that. All I can do is encourage decision-makers to support historical scholarship so that we can all understand that the past was different while also benefitting from the vast repository of human knowledge that history can provide.

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It’s so unexpected that one of the greatest naval theorists got the answer wrong. In 1911, Julian Corbett looked at the long history of convoys at sea (which date back to antiquity) and argued in his seminal Some Principles of Maritime Strategy that convoys were now obsolete in the face of new technologies like steam power, radio communications, and mines. Concentrating ships into convoys in this new world made for target-rich environments, and a cruiser in 1911 could do a lot more damage to a convoy than a frigate could in 1811. Better, he argued, to use radio to route ships around attackers. Britain could also use its geographical position to keep German cruisers from getting near the valuable North Atlantic trade routes by mining inshore waters.1

His analysis contributed to Britain’s belated introduction of convoys in the First World War. Lots of ships got sunk in the meantime, the majority of them by U-boats rather than cruisers. Look at all the little red dots on this map of U-boat sinkings in that war:

Corbett got lots of other things right, and in fact his analysis of why German surface raiders were unlikely to pose a major threat to commerce was spot-on. He could not have known that submarine technology would improve dramatically in the five years after Some Principles appeared. That failure is easily excusable; less excusable is his surprising failure to understand what made convoys effective at protecting trade.

We still read Some Principles at the Naval War College because in general it really is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. I’m not here to bury Corbett or suggest that the failure of British trade protection in the First World War was entirely his fault. I’m just pointing out that even Corbett didn’t understand how convoys worked.

Back to Basics

So, let’s start with some definitions. A convoy is a group of ships sailing together for mutual protection. Often, though not always, convoys have naval escorts—armed ships tasked with herding the flock and defending it from attack. Here’s a British convoy entering the Baltic in the Napoleonic Wars:

In narrow seas like that pictured above, convoy escorts were why convoys worked. They protected the shipping. That’s probably the most common answer to “why did convoys work”—the escorts fought off the bad guys. But it turns out that in many (most?) other circumstances, escorts weren’t the primary reason why convoys worked. In fact, convoys could be effective without escorts at all!

With apologies for my low-budget illustrations, let’s imagine a SLOC (sea line of communication, which is a fancy name for a trade route) starting on the left and ending on the right. If there is no naval control of shipping on that SLOC—if there is no convoy system—then it would look like this, with each black line representing a ship and the blue circles representing the distance at which the ship can be seen:

In contrast, if there’s naval control of shipping, you can concentrate all the ships into one “detection area,” otherwise known as a convoy:

Convoys worked because they relied on one core component of the maritime domain: the ocean is really big. Convoys concentrated ships into one small area that made them hard to find. If you have fifty ships sailing independently, you have fifty different points to attack and fifty different points to defend. Moreover, each ship is visible from a certain distance; putting them all together didn’t increase that detection distance by much and it removed all the detection areas from elsewhere in the ocean.

For that reason, the British and Canadians instituted naval control of shipping—the convoy system—on the first day of the Second World War. They did not repeat the mistake they’d made in the First World War. And they were right to do so, as the Germans themselves admitted in their Handbook for submarine commanders, which said that convoys made the sea routes “desolate.” Even in the war’s early months, when U-boats generally felt confident operating close to the British Isles where traffic was more predictable and concentrated, convoys proved difficult to locate, particularly in bad weather. It was really hard to spot a convoy from the conning tower of a U-boat pitching and rolling in the North Atlantic.

Combat was a part of convoy operations, but it was a secondary factor in their effectiveness. Through 1945, convoys also relied on the fact that even when concentrated, it was usually not possible for attackers to sink or capture all the ships in a convoy. There were more targets than torpedoes (again, usually).

Convoys also served as bait, luring attackers into a position in which escorts could engage them. If you put a convoy in the Western Approaches (the area where many of the sinkings are in the map above, north and south of Ireland), you didn’t need to go looking in the big ocean for little French privateers or German U-boats. They would come to you. That was what Alfred Thayer Mahan argued in his discussions of convoys: “The convoy system, when properly systematized and applied … will have more success as a defensive measure than hunting for individual marauders—a process which, even when most thoroughly planned, still resembles looking for a needle in a haystack.”2

That’s how convoys worked: they made detection more difficult; they relied on the difficulty that attacking forces had in carrying enough weapons to sink all the ships; and they brought attackers into a position where escorts could engage them.

I’ve written most of this post in the past tense because once again there seem to be good reasons to suspect that convoys are obsolete. Whereas Corbett thought that technology in 1911 had changed the balance of forces at sea mostly in favor of the defense, which made convoys unnecessary, today, technology seems to have changed the balance of forces in favor of the attacker. In a great-power maritime conflict today, no longer would the attacker be hunting for convoys from a submarine conning tower with a Mark 1 eyeball. Satellites and radar make finding ships on the ocean much easier now than it was eighty years ago. Moreover, putting a missile on a container ship today seems to be a lot easier than putting a torpedo in a tanker in 1942.

Nevertheless, there clearly needs to be some thought about how to protect shipping in a shooting war. It’s a core purpose of navies, and always has been. For most of the history of naval warfare, convoys have been the most effective form of commerce protection. That might not be the case any more, but we should at least understand why they worked.

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Being convinced that the situation of this country, demands the utmost exertion of every Individual to give effort to the measures so wisely adopted by the present administration, I trust the importance of the subject about to be submitted to your consideration, will plead an excuse, for the liberty I have presumed to take by laying before you a plan, for Manning the Royal Navy without having recourse to the very distressing custom of Impressing Sailors for that purpose.

A “fun” game I like to play with prose like this is to see how few words I can use to say exactly what Lyall says:

There’s a war on; here’s a plan to eliminate impressment.

Now you try.

This ‘stack remains enthusiastic about all things Patrick O’Brian, so I should state that Jack Aubrey would have agreed with Lyall that impressment was a “very distressing custom.” Of course, Aubrey would also have pointed out that there was a war on, and so sometimes the needs of the service had to come before individual liberties. Moreover, impressment was tradition, and Aubrey would have been very hesitant to upset a naval customary practice, no matter how distressing.

Documents like Lyall’s proposal were so common in the age of sail that the Navy Records Society published an entire 476-page volume of them in 1974 (though the one I’m discussing here is not included). Members of the public and naval officers regularly drew up plans that they argued would be superior to the Navy’s current manning system, which everyone agreed was fundamentally flawed.

Here’s how the British navy manned its ships. The navy recruited volunteers by paying bounties for skilled men, emphasizing patriotic service, and promising them prize money. In wartime, the navy supplemented its volunteers by impressing (or conscripting) men who “used the sea,” a deliberately vague phrase. Naval captains could impress men directly and did so frequently overseas, but in Britain from the middle of the eighteenth century, the navy centralized its impressment efforts in the Impress Service, which stationed captains in major ports to coordinate both recruiting and impressment efforts.

Again, the consensus was that the system was flawed, but why that was the case depended on the observer.

• Naval officers looked jealously at France and Spain, which had large centralized rotating conscription services that often provided more men at the beginning of a war than the British system.

• Merchants wanted their skilled sailors protected from impressment; failing that, they wanted a more predictable way to interact with the navy’s manning needs.

• A sizable portion of the political world called attention to the system’s unfairness and the hypocrisy of “the liberty of the subject” as a political slogan.

• Sailors had mixed feelings, ranging from accepting impressment as a fact of life at sea to outright violent resistance. Port towns tended to be the most resistant, as it was on them that the burden of having men forcibly removed for years at a time fell.

The bottom line is that there were a multitude of perspectives on why impressment was bad, and consequently a multitude of ideas for fixing it—which brings us back to Lyall’s proposal to the Admiralty in 1813. He approached the problem from the perspective of a shipowner sick of losing his crews to the Navy. He promised that his system would generate “in a very short time” twenty to thirty thousand ordinary sailors (not as skilled as able seamen but not unfamiliar with the sea, either).

For context, in 1813, the Navy had more than 140,000 men at sea, its largest-ever size in the age of sail. If Lyall’s plan worked, therefore, it was worth taking seriously. When I read this the first time in the archives, I thought: ok, let’s see what he’s got!

Well, uh, hmmm:

1. Draft “an average” of three 14-year-old boys from each parish poorhouse in Britain. He estimated there were about 15,500 parishes in Britain and Ireland.

2. The navy would train the boys into sailors. The navy would also provide clothing (deducted from the boys’ wages of course) and the government would fine any parish that refused to give up its boys.

3. If you did this every year, you would generate a steady supply of boys who would turn into sailors because “it being a well-known fact that none but those who go to sea when lads ever become good sailors.”

Lyall admits in a marginal note that the ethics of his proposal leave something to be desired. He says maybe the boys’ parents could get a bounty of £2, but in any case, most of them would be orphans.

There’s a real Hunger Games vibe here, with orphan boys as tributes!

The copy of the proposal that I read was in the Treasury archives (TNA, T 48/83), and it’s clear that Lyall understood his audience: “Should this plan be thought worthy of being adopted a great saving might be made in the Impress Service, as well as nearly all the Bounty that is now given, for most of the Sailors when Impressed, do afterwards by Entering (as it is called) take it.” In other words, Lyall claims that most of the pressed men in the navy were getting bounties that were supposed to be reserved for volunteers.1 If you no longer paid bounties to pressed sailors, you would save money—up to £200,000 per year, thought Lyall.

The bottom line, Lyall argues, is that even this draconian system “would be nothing compared to the infringement on the liberty of the subject by the custom of Impressing.” It would no longer be necessary to press men returning from long voyages, “men who after an absence of 18 or 20 months from their wives and families anxious to return to them. … Humanity alone would dictate to us, to adopt such a plan if possible.”

I don’t think he has that ethical calculation quite right, but nevertheless I thought the document was interesting. So too, apparently, did the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the First Lord of the Admiralty, who met with Lyall about it. How seriously they took it, I don’t know, but in any case, peace in 1815 removed the need to do any more with it.

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And from space:

And here’s how to help people.

What does this have to do with the naval history of the age of sail, I can hear you asking, quite reasonably. Well, as Melissa made landfall, I happened to be revising the chapter in my biography that covers a different hurricane that hit Jamaica, in 1751. The subject of my biography, John Jervis, was a midshipman on HMS Gloucester, the British flagship on the station. The goal of the passage below, which comes at the beginning of a chapter, was to describe what it might have been like for Jervis during the hurricane. I used the ship’s log to get a sense of the timing and the severity of the storm:

As the hurricane approached Gloucester’s anchorage, Jervis helped the crew strike the topmasts to the deck. Before they could, Townshend’s pennant blew away. The log upgraded the storm from “fresh gale” to “violent hard squalls with rain.” There was no way out, and nothing to be done except to endure. For those below decks, what stood out most was the sound. The hurricane-force winds reached a pitch that sailors did not normally hear. Everyone listened intently for signs of catastrophic damage while trying to wedge themselves into a position that kept them from being tossed around like beans inside a maraca. The worst moment was when the ship’s long boat tore loose and went overboard—was that the beginning of a serious break-up? On deck, air was water and water was air, all of it moving at astonishing speeds. The midshipmen watched Townshend who watched the rigging, the sea state, and most importantly the anchor cables. If they parted, Gloucester would be at the mercy of the wind and water and likely thrown ashore.

Gloucester was the biggest ship in the harbor, and over the course of twelve hours, she rode out the storm, though many smaller vessels were not as lucky. The Gloucester’s crew picked up four men whose sloop had capsized near them. Ferret lost all her masts, as did several other ships. It was the worst storm to hit Jamaica in decades. We do not know how many people died, but one frigate, three snows, two brigantines, seven schooners, and fifteen sloops were listed as total losses afterwards. One account recorded that ashore, “several Negroes, Cattle &c.” were killed, and the wharves were blown away. A copy of that printed account survives in St. Vincent’s papers, suggesting that he kept it as a memento. It was understandably a harrowing and formative experience for him.

This exercise made it clear to me that a picture really is worth a thousand words (and a video from a hurricane is worth even more), but such is the nature of historical writing that we have to make do with adjectives and imagination.

Here’s the memento I mentioned:

There are no notes attached to the memento, and it appears in Jervis’s files at the Staffordshire Record Office alongside other miscellaneous naval documents like the navy list. I am inferring from the document’s survival that the hurricane it describes lingered for a long time in Jervis’s memory—he doesn’t mention it specifically in any of his surviving correspondence.

Such are the limits of biography specifically and historical research generally: we infer, we imagine, and we describe, but there always comes a point at which we cannot really know.

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There are a few mistakes in there I wish I could go back and correct, but in general I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The lecture was part of the 8 Bells Series organized by the Naval War College Museum, and it took place at Sail Newport.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that historians have a superpower. I’ll also bet you didn’t know that whenever we use that superpower, we run the risk of blowing ourselves up. Our superpower is that we know the ending. In a sense, knowing the ending of a story is like being able to predict the future. Because we know the ending, we can identify parts of a story that matter. We can make connections that those who were living at the time couldn’t.

Here in the present, of course, we confront this problem every day. We all wish we could know the future—it would make life significantly easier. But we don’t. All we know is the present and the past, both imperfectly, and we definitely don’t know how our own stories will end. So when historians try to tell a story about the past, they are doing so with knowledge that those in the past did not have. That’s a powerful tool. A superpower, if you’ll allow it.

At the same time, it’s an incredibly dangerous tool to use. Because we know the ending, historians run the risk of telling those in the past that they should have understood something that they could not possibly have understood. Because we know the ending, ironically we have to forget that ending in order to recreate the world as it looked to those in it.

Alright, sorry, this is a terrible introduction. This sounds too much like a graduate seminar. Shut up, Wilson, I can hear you saying. I came here to hear about John Paul Jones and instead you’re scratching your chin about how time works.

But the reason I started with that irony, the irony of knowing the ending, is that it helps us put an event like October 13, 1775, in its proper context.

What was the event of October 13, 1775? On that day, the Second Continental Congress authorized the purchase of two armed vessels and created a committee to oversee naval costs. We use that day to mark the founding of the Continental Navy, and that’s the date that the U.S. Navy celebrates as its birthday. Therefore, as I’m sure you’re all aware, Monday, October 13, 2025, marks the 250^th birthday of the U.S. Navy. Happy Birthday, Navy.

I am employed by the U.S. Navy, and therefore I also have to tell you that the views and opinions I express today are not necessarily those of the Navy or the U.S. Government.

Back to October 13, 1775. We now know that two armed vessels and a committee to oversee naval costs eventually led to the globe-spanning superpower navy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But did Congress know that in 1775? Did the first men to serve on those two armed vessels? Did the British forces they fought? Did the British ministers in London? Of course not. Nobody then knew the significance of that date. And that’s the story that I want to tell you today. That’s the world I want to recreate—the world of uncertainty, of an unknown future.

How do we make decisions amid uncertainty? I don’t mean, how do we make good decisions amid uncertainty—there’s a whole business school apparatus dedicated to answering that question. I mean, how did Congress decide to found a navy? Well, as I said, nobody in October 1775 could possibly know with any kind of certainty that American independence, and specifically a united group of thirteen states, led by one federal government, was in their immediate future, nor exactly how the Continental Navy would help bring about that future. Instead, they formed their ideas as all of us do, by referencing a known past and an imagined future.

Let’s start with the known past. Colonial Americans understood that they lived in a maritime world. Not only did their colonies hug the coast, but water was the fastest mode of transportation over medium and long distances that man had ever known. The colonies depended on water transportation for food, goods, and livelihoods. Coastal trade linked the colonies with each other and with the Atlantic world—the triangle trade of enslaved people, rum, and manufactured goods, for example, provided the engine for Newport’s economy. The sea was where wealth came from.

Moreover, water was also what connected the colonies with the hinterlands. The great rivers—Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware—and the great bays—Narragansett, Chesapeake—were the colonies’ arteries. They formed natural barriers to overland travel but they also carried goods and people rapidly from port cities to inland settlements.

Since the colonists lived in a maritime world, it was logical that as relations with the mother country deteriorated, they would need to defend their maritime supply lines and move military forces by water. There were lots of different ways they might choose to do that, but the most obvious was to build a navy.

Those in favor of establishing a navy were led by none other than the delegation from Rhode Island. The Rhodies pointed out that not only did they already have a small state navy, but every colony except for Delaware had followed Rhode Island in establishing a naval force over the summer. Pennsylvania and Virginia were building galleys for river defense; Georgia had commissioned a sloop. Now was the time for Congress to form a service parallel to the army that was forming around George Washington, said the delegation from Rhode Island. A Continental Navy would provide for the common defense, not just the defense of individual colonies. Today’s Navy owes a special debt of gratitude to our small state. How appropriate that we are here in Newport tonight celebrating this birthday.

But what did Congress imagine that navy would do? What was its purpose? The great concern in Congress in late 1775 was that the British would cut off all the trade on which the colonies depended. The Continental Navy was needed to defend that trade. The other purpose was to solve a persistent problem that the colonists faced—a shortage of gunpowder. By commissioning some armed vessels, Congress hoped they could intercept British gunpowder shipments to supply the Continental Army.

Fair enough—and simple enough. These were obvious arguments for a navy. But there was an even more obvious argument not to establish a navy. That’s an argument that might seem strange to trot out at this birthday party—almost like parents telling their child that he was a mistake. But the argument had real merit, and we need to take it seriously, even though it lost the battle in Congress. Remember, historians have to be able to recreate the uncertainty of the past and to explore paths not taken. After all, we’re constantly confronted by choices in our own lives and in our own politics; the past was no different.

What, then, was the obvious argument against a navy? First, it was expensive, and the Continental Congress was not exactly swimming in money. Any money spent on a navy was money not spent on Washington’s army. Second, those opposed argued, even if the money was spent perfectly, the navy was destined to be defeated. The British navy was simply too powerful to challenge directly. They said that building a navy to fight the British was like “an infant, taking a mad bull by his horns,” according to John Adams’ notes on the debate.

And if you allow yourself to imagine the world of 1775 without knowing what was about to happen, you can see the argument, right? How could these small thirteen colonies hope to create a navy that would challenge the British? Let’s look at the balance of forces in 1775. Britain had 117 ships of the line and 82 frigates and sloops. Between the various state navies and some purchases that the Continental Navy made in the last months of 1775, we can plausibly say that the Continental Navy had four frigates. That December, they authorized the construction of thirteen frigates and three ships of the line. We can go ahead and add those to the ledger, even though none of the ships of the line ever saw service. That’s still not a fair fight!

Of course, historians can never fully forget the end of the story. You all know that even though the balance of forces here is laughable, and that the colonies on paper stood no chance, in fact, they won! So what I want to do for the rest of the talk is to figure out how the heck that happened. That’s the point of historians having their superpower: because we know that the colonists won, we can try to identify factors that contributed to that victory that might not have been obvious at the time. We still have to keep in mind, though, that we know those factors, but on October 13, 1775, only some of those factors were visible to those who created the Continental Navy. One of those factors that you can see on this chart and that the colonists could see as well was the importance of France and Spain, but remember that the colonies fought by themselves for nearly three years before France joined.

So what are the factors that we can see now that contributed to American independence, especially in the early years of the war? You might expect that the answer to the question of how the two armed vessels and a committee to oversee naval expenses ended up on the winning side against the largest and most powerful navy in the world involves a lot of heroism, of David-against-Goliath kinds of stories. To some degree, that’s true, and I’ll tell you a few stories. But I’m never entirely satisfied by those stories. I think that if you really want to understand how the American Revolution turned out the way it did, you have to spend time looking at the war from the other side of the ocean. After all, if the Continental Navy won, the flip side of that is that the British Navy lost. You can’t understand one without the other. So let’s look at the war from the British perspective to try to figure out how on earth they blew it. A naval version of 28 to 3, for the Pats fans in the audience.

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Let’s stay with our key date, October 13, 1775. We know what Congress was doing that day, but what did the war look like from London? Well, the first thing to say is that it was not yet a war. The colonies were in rebellion, and rebellions and wars are related but distinct. Moreover, the British Empire knew how to deal with rebellions. Rebellions usually started as civil disturbances, which is a fancy term for riotous mob. There was an established protocol for dealing with civil disturbances in the eighteenth century: get a bigger mob.

That sounds crazy to us today, but that’s because there were no police forces in the eighteenth century. Instead, whenever a situation got out of control, local officials called magistrates could empower citizens to form a competing mob to defeat the riotous mob. Before they did so, the literally had to read the Riot Act of 1714, which gave mobs an hour to disperse. That’s of course where the expression to read the riot act comes from. I’m mad at you and you better go home in the next hour or else.

“Or else” usually meant calling in nearby troops. For mobs more serious than drunken rioting, the plan in the eighteenth century almost always involved sending the army. When soldiers arrived at the scene of a riot, often that was enough—even drunken rioters often said, oh crap, the army’s here, this is serious, time to go home. But if showing up wasn’t enough, things got tricky. Soldiers could march around and look imposing, or they could try to guard something.

If that still wasn’t enough, things usually got out of control. That’s where the massacres came from. Soldiers are not trained for non-lethal crowd control. That was as true in the eighteenth century as it is now. After parading and guarding something, soldiers often ended up firing over the heads of the crowd or advancing with bayonets. At the Boston Massacre in 1770, soldiers were guarding the Custom House when they got sick of getting pelted with bricks.

The role of the army in suppressing dissent was fundamental to London’s view of the world in 1775. They expected that soldiers would be responsible for dealing with rebellious colonies because that’s what soldiers often did. They had recent experience, too. In 1745, the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland had managed to get an army together to march on London. If the rebels had had a little more nerve, they might have overthrown the government. In the aftermath of the ’45, the British recognized that they couldn’t risk another army marching south. So they sent the British army into the Highlands to “clear” them, which is a euphemism for occupying them and brutally suppressing dissent. Mostly, it had worked. By 1775, much of Highland Scotland was not only quiescent, but it was also providing lots of soldiers for the army. It was, in a sense, a successful counter-insurgency campaign. It was logical for ministers in 1775 to think sending the army to the colonies would have a similar effect, and many of the men who had served in Scotland were now preparing to deploy to America.

I think we can all see some problems with the “send the army” approach, but we don’t need to use our historian superpower to identify them. I can say that because people at the time said that. Some members of the Cabinet thought it might not be such a good idea to send the army to the colonies. Especially by October 1775, following Lexington and Concord in April and Bunker Hill in June, it was looking more and more like the Americans weren’t an unruly mob but were seriously thinking about fighting back in an organized way.

What was the alternative to sending the army? Well, maybe the navy could help. One idea floated in the Cabinet was to have the navy strangle the rebellion by cutting New England off from the sea—exactly what Congress feared. After all, the colonies depended on maritime trade; a close blockade of the eastern seaboard might hurt the colonies where it mattered most—in their pocketbooks and in their stomachs. Perhaps then the British could rely on the thirteen different American polities to tear themselves apart in recriminations and jealousies and come to a settlement.

But after the events of 1775, neither approach seemed like a sure thing. The army might be able to pacify the Highlands, which are roughly the same size as New Jersey, but colonies stretching from Maine to Georgia presented a different challenge. The navy might be able to strangle colonial trade, but was London sure that would actually bring an end to the rebellion? Wasn’t a blockade, in effect, admitting that the colonies were independent?

To give you a sense of how the British recognized the challenges they were facing, it was the Secretary at War (more or less the civilian head of the army) who suggested a blockade strategy, and the First Lord of the Admiralty (the civilian head of the navy) who suggested sending the army. The point is, both services recognized that winning in America was going to be difficult—let’s make the other service shoulder the burden.

The king chose to send the army. He believed that his coronation oath committed him to keeping the colonies in the Empire, and whatever the logic of a naval strategy, it seemed insufficient to rely on it alone. The blockade strategy still sounded like a good secondary idea, though, so the First Lord of the Admiralty ordered his admirals in North America to do as much blockading as they could. Their first priority, though, was to support the army.

And that brings us back to the size of the British navy. On paper, it sure looked capable of both supporting the army and blockading the coast. But in practice, all it managed to do was support the army (with one exception, which I’ll talk about). Why?

Yes, the British had a powerful navy, both at sea and in the dockyards, but it was mobilizing slowly. The usual pattern for the British was to build ships of the line in peacetime. That’s because ships of the line took so long to build. They were approximately 3,000 tons, carrying 74 or more cannon, and manned by more than 700 men. You had to invest in peacetime to make sure you were ready in wartime with your largest ships. The British were building ships of the line in the years leading up to the war, but what use was a ship of the line against the two armed vessels of the Continental Navy? (An armed vessel, I should explain belatedly, could refer to any boat with a gun on board. The actual act for equipping our first two armed vessels called for ten guns and eighty men per vessel.)

Ships of the line looked impressive, but they weren’t much use if the enemy didn’t have any ships of the line. Even if the Continental Navy built all three of its planned ships of the line (and that was a very big if at the end of 1775), the British wouldn’t need to build any new ships of the line to fight them. They already had more than a hundred!

The point is that the building that the Royal Navy was doing in the 1760s and early 1770s wasn’t really useful for a war in the colonies. Those ships were aimed at the French and the Spanish, and they weren’t involved (yet).

Frigates, on the other hand, were easier to build quickly, so the British tended to wait until hostilities started to build them. A frigate was a do-it-all ship in the age of sail. It usually had between twenty and forty guns, and a crew of 100 to 300, depending on the size. It was useful for cruising against enemy trade, escorting convoys, scouting for enemy fleets and delivering messages. They could also be built in private dockyards, unlike the ships of the line, which usually had to be built in royal dockyards.

So one question we need to ask is, did the British navy think that it was at war in 1775? In 1776? In 1777? Obviously, they were at war in 1778 when the French joined, but let’s leave that period of the war aside for now. Remember we’re trying to recreate the uncertainty of the world in October 1775. Did the British navy really need to mobilize to fight the Continental Navy, which existed almost entirely on paper? Didn’t they already have enough frigates? Again, the ratio here was 82 frigates in the British Navy to at-best and if-everything-went-perfectly 17 in the Continental Navy, and even then only after many months or even years of building and buying. That doesn’t seem like a problem that needs to be addressed.

In any case, mobilizing to fight the Continental Navy might spook the French and the Spanish, encouraging them to join the war sooner, which would make the situation more complicated. So the British chose to deal with the colonists largely with the forces they had already built. And that makes sense, right? They had plenty of frigates and ships of the line to deal with the nearly-nonexistent Continental Navy, surely. That’s the “imagined future” that the First Lord of the Admiralty and other members of the Cabinet had in mind in October 1775.

But believe it or not, the British imagined the wrong future. They tried to fight the rebellion without mobilizing, and it turns out that they didn’t have enough frigates.

To understand why they were short of frigates, we need to understand what the British thought they were doing in late 1775. The king said, send the army, and the Admiralty told its officers: your primary mission is to support the British army. What did it mean to support the British army, and why did that use up so many frigates?

It’s difficult to underestimate the logistical challenge that British military forces faced in this rebellion. They were fighting a rebellion—an insurgency—on the other side of an ocean. That meant that they had to carry their army across the ocean in transports escorted by frigates. Once they arrived in the theater, they had to be landed in a suitable port—first Boston, then New York, then Newport. But that wasn’t all. The navy couldn’t just abandon the army once it had delivered it to New York or Newport because the army couldn’t feed itself without the navy’s help. Armies famously march on their stomachs, and the British quickly discovered the dangers of trying to feed themselves off the land. It exposed them to Patriot raiding parties and tended to make them unpopular with the people who lived on that land. Better, whenever possible, to stay near water. When they were near water, they could always ask the navy for help in resupplying their forces.

Therefore, when the king said, send the army, and when the Cabinet said, the army gets priority, the navy had to expend an enormous amount of energy and ships just keeping the army functional in America. The British consistently overestimated the degree of support they would get from loyalists and underestimated the difficulty of maintaining their armies in the field. The maritime nature of the east coast—the coastal shipping and the rivers—meant that supply by water worked best, but it came at a cost: an enormous expenditure in frigates and sloops and transports.

The navy quickly felt this strategic dilemma. The army was demanding support but building more frigates to support the army might provoke the French and Spanish. The result was that they put all their effort into supporting the army and gave little thought to mission number two, which was to blockade New England.

The British built no new frigates in 1775, just 3 in 1776, and just 4 in 1777, and they purchased two more. One admiral calculated that to do both missions he needed 50 ships in North America with 22 near Boston in August 1775. Instead, just two sloops crossed the ocean between June and September of that year. In 1776, the navy thought it needed 70 ships on station, and by June 1776 there were 57 available … but all but a dozen of them were busy with the army. There were only 3 ships off the port of Boston that summer. When the Howe brothers nearly captured Washington at New York in late 1776, they stripped all the ships from the Delaware and the Chesapeake to help. It almost worked! But as we know it didn’t, and it left the Delaware and Chesapeake completely free from British naval presence.

The one period that they tried a blockade was December 1776 to May 1777, from the occupation of Newport for the next six months. Finally, in the aftermath of the battles around New York, the army was not demanding all of the navy’s attention and the British were able to see what a tight blockade might do. It’s a fascinating natural experiment, a true “what-if”—what if the British had prioritized a maritime strategy, a blockade, instead of a counterinsurgency?

The results of the experiment were and are interesting. Let’s start with the reason we’re here: how did the Continental Navy do when the British navy turned its focus on it? The question here, remember, goes back to the debate in Congress a year earlier. Was a navy necessary for national unity and maritime defense? Or would it be like an infant grabbing a mad bull by the horns?

The answer is pretty clear: like an infant grabbing a mad bull by the horns. The Continental Navy’s combat performance was dismal. When the far superior British Navy was able to ignore the army and concentrate on a naval mission, it was highly effective.

The blockade had political effects as well. Congress panicked. The currency was in trouble. Trade was curtailed. There was no way to finance the war. Congress desperately reached out to the French for help, but they weren’t willing to commit until the Americans could show that they could beat the British army in the field.

So: maybe the blockade would have worked for the British. But for all the reasons already mentioned, they couldn’t sustain it. By the summer of 1777, the army was calling again, this time for the assault on Philadelphia. The blockade thinned out, American commerce took to the seas again, and the crisis passed. I’ll talk later about why the Continental Navy’s record is not the whole story for the blockade, either.

Before I do that, though, let me wrap up this analysis of the British challenges in the early years of the war, before Saratoga in October 1777, that pivotal victory that convinced the French to commit to our cause. It’s not obvious how, exactly, Britain was supposed to win a counter-insurgency campaign across an ocean. Prioritizing the army hampered the effectiveness of the blockade, and the army wasn’t big enough to “occupy” all thirteen colonies—and of course there’s no guarantee that would have worked either. Counter-insurgency is hard. Ask any veteran of the U.S. military. Prioritizing the blockade might have been more effective, but I hope you come away from this lecture with some sense of the kinds of challenges that the British faced, especially during the pivotal first two-and-a-half years of the war.

Are those tensions, between the army and the navy, and between the counter-insurgency versus the blockade strategies, and their knock-on effects, why the British lost the American Revolution? Well, it’s a partial answer. There are many other factors that I don’t have time to talk about today. Certainly, the most important is the transition in 1778 of the war from a counterinsurgency focused on the thirteen colonies to a global war involving the French and then soon the Spanish and Dutch. Suddenly the British had much bigger problems than a rebellion in the colonies: they had a combined French and Spanish fleet sailing up the English Channel with an invading army aboard. Also, our allies provided essential financial and military support that helped us survive till Yorktown and then win at Yorktown in 1781. Again, even that is a partial list.

I just want to show you that the British perspective on the American Revolution makes me, at least, wonder less at how our little David beat their Goliath.

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For my last section today, I want to return to the Continental Navy. So far, I’ve covered why Rhode Island thought a navy was a good idea and why the on-paper mismatch between British and Continental power wasn’t quite so simple as you might think. Now, I want to ask, what happened the way that Congress expected it to in 1775, and what turned out differently? Remember my theme here: we know the ending, but they didn’t. So let’s return to the debates about whether to fund a Continental Navy and survey their expectations.

Congress expected the Continental Navy to provide maritime defense. I think I’ve shown you that it didn’t really do that. Mostly, the Continental Navy was bottled up in port, taken, burnt, or sunk. The skeptics who said that it was like an infant taking a mad bull by the horns were right, in the sense that most of the time the baby lost.

Congress also expected that the Continental Navy would not be the entirety of their maritime defense force. They knew that the most common and cheapest form of maritime defense would be privateers. They hoped that the two could operate in concert with each other. In fact, as was so often the case in eighteenth-century maritime conflicts, privateers cannibalized the navy, taking away sailors and supplies that would have been very useful to Continental Navy operations. Let me explain.

Here again we see the maritime character of the thirteen colonies. Small coastal vessels and deep-sea merchant vessels and whalers were common all up and down the eastern seaboard. It was simple enough to convert any of those sorts of vessels into privateers. Step one was to get a letter of marque, which the colonies began authorizing in March 1776. That legitimized the ship as a ship of war that could fight the British and not be accused of piracy. Step two was to get some guns, which entrepreneurs like John Brown in Providence quickly began producing. Step three was to get some men, which was generally easier for privateers than navies. Privateers paid less than the navy, but the crews got a higher share of any prizes captured. Navies, as you know, pay their officers and men salaries, which means they expect their officers and men to follow orders and not just go seek their own fortunes.

Another factor that contributed to the explosion of privateers all along the coast was that British reprisals against coastal shipping or fishing vessels had an annoying tendency (from their perspective) of creating more privateers. After all, if you take away a sailor’s fishing boat, it might make financial sense to turn to privateering. Also, you might be sufficiently pissed off at the British to want to fight back. Think of King George’s line from the musical Hamilton: “When push comes to shove, I will kill your friends and family, to remind you of my love.”

Nearly 2,000 shipowners applied for letters of marque during the war. About 800 ships managed to escape the half-hearted British blockade and get to sea. They captured an estimated 600 British ships. That made a difference, encouraging British shipowners to put pressure on the government to end the war and increasing yet again the navy’s need for frigates.

Notice that I still have not said, “and also the heroic performance of the Continental Navy.” So does that mean that the Continental Navy was a waste of time and money? After all, Congress wanted a maritime defense force and instead got a force that was largely bottled up and in conflict with the colonies’ most effective form of maritime warfare, privateers.

But actually I think there are reasons to celebrate the Continental Navy and its birthday. The primary reasons to do so were either unexpected or considered secondary by those who established it. Let’s use our historian superpower to understand what worked about the Continental Navy, even though those who founded it did not always anticipate the effects of their actions.

I don’t think the founders of the Continental Navy really expected it to attract dubious characters like John Paul Jones. He’s best understood as a mercenary rather than a patriot—he would fight for money if you were willing to pay him. He had also killed a man—he fled from Scotland to Virginia and changed his name (from John Paul to John Paul Jones) before joining the Continental Navy.

The most normal thing that Jones did is sail to France in November 1777 in his ship Ranger. He brought momentous news of the victory at Saratoga. This kind of diplomatic mission on an official Continental Navy vessel is clearly something that the founders of the Continental Navy envisioned, even if the French weren’t in the war when they founded it in 1775.

Like I said, though, that was the last ordinary thing he did. A French merchant gave him a former East Indiaman and named it Bonhomme Richard after Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. In that ship Jones intercepted a convoy in the North Sea just off the British coast. He took on the escort ship HMS Serapis and was nearly defeated, but he managed to lock Bonhomme Richard and Serapis together. Jones won the ensuing firefight, but then Bonhomme Richard started to sink so they all transferred to Serapis. While all that was happening, the convoy escaped. In all honesty, it was barely a victory. But it was right off the British coast, which gave the Royal Navy a black eye (nobody noticed the convoy escaped). These sorts of actions had an effect far beyond their specific military value. It was the daring nature of Jones’s actions that redounded to the glory of the Continental Navy, not the capture of one British ship. Again—an unexpected benefit of having a navy.

The other reason to celebrate the founding of the Continental Navy was its role in stitching together the colonies and the new republic. Part of that was what Jones did, but there were other aspects as well. At the most basic, literal level, the Continental Navy flew the flag. Maritime states like the United Colonies have navies, and having a navy helped legitimize the American project. When the Dutch colony of St. Eustatius saluted the Grand Union flag on November 16, 1776, it had an outsized impact on perceptions of American independence. When the Continental Navy ship Reprisal showed up in France with Ben Franklin aboard and two prizes in tow, it showed the French that our ambassador was important and that our military power was legitimate. Showing the flag mattered.

Navies require sustained capital investment, more so than armies, even today. You need the power of a strong state to build ships, equip them, man them, arm them, supply them, direct them, repair them, re-build them, pay them, and regulate them. You need uniforms and protocols and a thousand bureaucratic procedures. The individual colonies were like states, but collectively, they were anything but. Remember that it took Congress fifteen years, from about 1774 to 1789, to decide how what we now know as the U.S. Government would look, and the Continental Navy was founded in year two of that process. During the debate about the navy, Rhode Island was arguing, implicitly, that if the colonies were going to take the “Join, or die” print seriously, then they needed to band together, and building a navy was an effective way to do that.

I’m not denying that privateers and ad-hoc forces can be deployed to some effect at sea. But for the project of unifying the states, the Continental Navy was important. The basic requirements of naval power meant that the various colonies had to come together, in Congress, to establish the taxes and bureaucracies and regulations and uniforms and flags that characterized a naval service.

Did the founders of the Continental Navy know all that on October 13, 1775? To some extent, yes: that was why they were debating having a Continental Navy rather than relying on individual colonies to provide naval forces. But in general, it’s easier for us to see this stitching-together role now than it was for those at the time—our historian superpower strikes again. It was not a smooth process, I should say. After the war, the Continental Navy was disbanded in 1785 amid the debate over the national government—this was the era of the Articles of Confederation. The U.S. basically ceased to have a navy for the next nine years. Nevertheless, the experiment of a navy showed leaders like John Adams that federal authority was necessary for some things.

So we should celebrate the founding of the Continental Navy, and we should highlight the specific contribution that Rhode Island made to making the Continental Navy a reality. We should also be aware of the Continental Navy’s strengths and weaknesses, and its loose connection to today’s U.S. Navy (which, whisper it, wasn’t really founded until 1794). What I hope I’ve shown you today is that when the Second Continental Congress established a navy, they correctly imagined some of the things that it did to secure American independence, but not all of the things. Moreover, it’s easier for historians to see that the on-paper matchup between the infant Continental Navy and the mad bull of the Royal Navy obscures many of the challenges that the British faced in winning the war. So Happy Birthday to the U.S. Navy.

Because this was a lecture, I don’t have any footnotes or other citations. If you want to learn more, here are some suggestions for additional reading:

Willis, Sam. The Struggle for Sea Power: A Naval History of the American Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015.

Hattendorf, John B. “The Formation and Roles of the Continental Navy, 1775–1785,” in Talking about Naval History: A Collection of Essays. Newport: Naval War College Press, 2011.

Baugh, Daniel A. “The Politics of British Naval Failure, 1775–1777,” The American Neptune 52, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 221–46.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been going to various nearby archives to exploit smaller collections related to my current research. In casual conversations about these visits, I’ve learned that there are several common misconceptions about how, exactly, I go about conducting these visits. This post attempts to pull back the curtain a bit.

I hope it also makes clear how much historians rely on archivists and archives to do their work. There’s a reason most historians make a point of saying “thank you” to archivists in the acknowledgements of their books. We literally could not do what we do without them!

Who is allowed to look at documents?

Put another way, do you have to be a fancy historian to look at archival documents? Not usually. Most archives are open to the public at no cost. Government archives like the US’s National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) or the UK’s National Archives at Kew are open to the public by law—the documents they hold were largely produced by your tax dollars, so they are required to provide you access to them so long as they aren’t classified. Universities and local record offices operate in the same way even if they aren’t required to by law: the whole point of an archives1 is to facilitate access to the materials inside. I’ve never encountered an archives with an entrance fee.

Occasionally you’ll find archives that won’t let you in until you’ve proven that you’re there for serious historical reasons.2 Once I had to write a letter and mail it to a British university requesting access, stating my credentials and the project I was working on, just so that they could mail me back a letter saying “ok,” which I then had to bring with me when I visited the archives. That was silly. That was also unusual.3

The bottom line is that if you want to look at old documents, you probably can.

How do you know what documents are in an archives?

Online catalogues vary in quality and ease of use, but most archives provide some way for you to look for documents in advance. Once you identify what you’re interested in, you usually request the documents in advance of your visit by creating a free online account and clicking a “request” button. You often need to schedule an appointment as well—the best systems combine these two actions into one. Larger archives often require that you bring proof of your address so they can issue a reader’s card.4

One of the most frustrating parts of my recent visit to Harvard was that the online system allowed me to request as many items I wanted for any date I wanted … and then a week before my visit I got an email from the archives saying that 1) I didn’t actually have an appointment because appointments went through a different system and 2) I was allowed to request only 6 items, so they preemptively cancelled some of my items (without asking which ones) to get me down to 6.

At NARA, the online search tool is so unwieldy that it’s common to show up with a vague idea of what you need but not a specific document ordered for your visit. You speak with a subject-specialist archivist when you arrive who helps you figure out what you are actually looking for, sometimes using a paper catalogue to help. At Kew, the opposite applies: the online system is so robust that you rarely need to speak to an archivist.

What happens when you get to the archives?

Reading rooms are often grand affairs:

But sometimes they’re as simple as a room with a table and a few chairs. Archivists monitor the reading rooms in person and sometimes on CCTV to make sure you’re following the rules and handling the documents properly.

In the bad old days, archives had a wide range of policies about cameras. These days, with a few annoying exceptions, most archives operate with the same rules. You can bring a camera (usually your phone) and a laptop inside the reading room. Almost everything else is forbidden: definitely pens, sometimes pencils, often notebooks, always water and food. All of that stuff goes in a locker or in a different room from the reading room.

I was frustrated at the British Library a couple of years ago to discover that some documents I wanted were listed as “no photographs allowed.” I never did figure out why. Most archives in most cases, though, will let you take as many pictures as you want. I always bring my phone charger for that reason—taking a few hundred pictures does a number on your battery.

(Kids: it used to be the case that phone cameras were crappy, so historians would invest in nice digital cameras. I have owned several for this express purpose. In those days we also cared about things like camera stands. No more.)5

Inside the reading rooms there’s a desk where archivists process your requests. In smaller archives, they’ll ask you which documents you want to see and bring them to your table. Sometimes they all come out on a cart; other times they’ll be brought to you one box at a time. At Kew, you have a locker with your documents in it that corresponds to your assigned seat, so you retrieve your own documents in whatever order you prefer.

How do you handle the documents?

The whole point of this exercise is to find yourself sitting at your (often assigned) seat with a box or book sitting on the table in front of you. Now what? Well, you open it up and get to reading. Archival boxes vary in size, shape, organization, durability, ease of use, and so much more. Medieval documents often come in large rolls; eighteenth-century documents are often in heavy bound leather books; maps come in giant folders. What is in front of you depends on what you asked for and how it was handled by the archivists.

Usually the rule is one folder at a time from a given box, so the archivists give you something to mark the place in the box where it came from. Sometimes boxes have bundles of letters inside. You don’t know until you open it. Bound volumes like the one in the picture above need book rests to support their spines, so archives stock various kinds of cushions for that purpose.

There’s a common misperception that readers have to wear white gloves to hold old documents. In fact, the opposite is true: archivists prefer that you don’t wear white gloves when handling documents. Gloves can be just as dirty as fingers, and you lose a lot of dexterity when you wear them. That makes it more likely that you’ll accidentally tear the corner of a page. The only exception is for photographs—gloves are usually required for those.

Archivists worry that you’re damaging the documents, of course, but what they’re really worried about is that you’ll try to remove documents or cut out valuable parts of them. eBay is full of autographs from famous people—many of those were removed from archival documents using x-acto knives.

Don’t buy them! Be suspicious also of maps that used to be in books. There’s real money in this dirty business, which is why the British Library and Kew, for example, issue clear plastic bags to hold your stuff. Most archives also make you open your laptop when exiting to make sure you didn’t stick a document between the keyboard and screen.

What do you find in archives?

So many weird and wonderful and ordinary and moving and annoying things. This post is long enough, and I’ve talked about my archival discoveries elsewhere on this blog, so I’ll wrap it up with one cool find. Here’s a sketch of the Battle of Trafalgar by a Spanish participant. It wasn’t what I was looking for when I got to the archives, but sometimes the best finds are the ones that happen by accident:

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Having suffered through some disdainful editors, I grimaced, barked out loud, and sometimes denied my tears as Ignatius catalogues Lawrence’s fierce attacks on overused language. For example, Ignatius writes, “[w]hen I wrote: ‘A cloud seemed to pass over her face, darkening her features,’ Lawrence responded: ‘Something I have often heard & seldom believe.’” But another example is worth citing at length because of our collective interest in and love of Patrick O’Brian.

Ignatius writes, “Finally … Lawrence offered me a general admonition about writing: ‘Beware of the Obvious!’ he wrote in large letters. … Sometimes cutting beats revising … Try rewriting with the goal of leaving out everything you possibly can — the Patrick O’Brian technique of narration — and if the reader has to scramble a bit to understand, that’s okay. I once suggested to POB that a glossary in his books would be useful. ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘Ignorance of the cross-catharpin [a brace for a ship’s mast] is not necessarily fatal. Explanation of it surely is.’”

Not only did Lawrence edit O’Brian, but he was also the editor responsible for transforming O’Brian from a well-regarded British novelist with a modest income (in itself quite an accomplishment) to a best-selling writer worldwide. Lawrence met a cousin for a drink, and the cousin asked him how he could call himself a publisher if he wasn’t publishing Patrick O’Brian. And so he read Reverse of the Medal, the eleventh novel in the series (1986), and agreed—it was the pillory scene that convinced him.

Lawrence still had to overcome several obstacles to convince Norton to refit the O’Brian ship, however. The novels had not sold well to an American audience the first time. Lawrence argued they should be republished, starting from the beginning. He eventually prevailed, the books were republished in paper, and were soon celebrated again by the likes of John Bayley, the Oxford Don who wrote, “These are emphatically not adventure stories … not mechanical marine tales that spring from the wake of C.S. Forester.” And along the way, though Ignatius emphasizes that Lawrence was not fatherly or priestly, he had to console O’Brian, who was devastated by a pseudonymous reviewer in The New York Times. That reviewer, hiding behind the name Callendar, at best skimmed the book, got some facts wrong, and sneeringly wrote O’Brian didn’t have “Forester’s flair.” As much as I admire C.S. Forester, O’Brian’s language separates his books from simply being marine tales.

Starling Lawrence discovered many writers. Some books we remember include The Day of the Condor, Helter Skelter, and The Rotation Diet. He edited Michael Lewis in his Liar’s Poker, Sebastain Junger in The Perfect Storm, and, as we note, David Ignatius. But in the case of Patrick O’Brian, I for one was delighted to learn that Lawrence had no nautical history and was unsuccessful as a youth in sailing. He said he loved O’Brian’s language, not ships. I propose there are three kinds of readers of O’Brian: those readers content not to know what the hell a cross-catharpin was, but loved the drama of the sea yarn and that marvelous language; those sailors who could explain a cross-catharpin, I joke, with an unavoidable sense of naval righteousness, or one-upmanship; and those who could not let a word pass without knowing what it means, still searching in vain through the Oxford English Dictionary.

But let us finish with Lawrence’s summation of Patrick O’Brian’s technique: “Try rewriting with the goal of leaving out everything you possibly can.” In a previous post I have already complained about the length O’Brian goes to when he describes Jack overseeing the outfitting of his command. Clueless, I didn’t know half of what was happening, and I still think O’Brian might make his readers work too hard. But what he never does is explain too much, which gives his stories a sense of being true to experience. And for a novelist, that is all.

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That’s just science.1

What I’m trying to say is that every day I learn something new about St. Vincent, but I will never know him the way I know myself or even the way I know members of my family. My knowledge function approaches but never reaches the level of knowledge that I would like. That is frustrating.

I suppose that’s true of any work of history, but when just one person occupies so much real estate in your own mind for so long, the frustration of not knowing matters that much more.

I know a lot about my subject, of course, because I’ve read thousands of his letters and seven full-length biographies of him. But when you put in all that work and you still find gaps in his story, you want to do whatever it takes to fill them in.

That brings me to my recent archival hunting expeditions—or, it will, eventually. I’m going to take the scenic route.

Let’s talk about death

When we die, what do we leave behind? That’s a fundamental question for historians generally but for biographers specifically.2 I can think of at least four categories of our own legacies that matter to a biographer; I’m sure readers can think of more.

1. Memories of us in those who knew us (sometimes written down, sometimes not);

2. Our things;

3. Our correspondence;

4. Our bodies.

I’ll take them each in turn. My perspective, as I hope you gathered from the opening section, is that of a biographer searching for that little extra bit of knowledge that will bring me thismuch closer to knowing my subject, even while acknowledging that our knowledge of the dead (or even of other living people, for that matter) will always be imperfect and incomplete.

Memories of us in those who knew us matter enormously to biographers of the recently deceased—they can interview people who knew their subject. My subject died in 1823, but memory is still an important category of knowledge for me because two men who did know him wrote biographies of him in the twenty years after his death. Also, stories about him pop up in his family’s later correspondence, and his grand-niece was responsible for collecting and donating the largest portions of his correspondence that survive in the archives. How to treat this kind of personal knowledge is the subject of many books and much chin-scratching; I’m not going to focus on it in this post because I have a different agenda.

Our things tell us a lot about what we valued in life, and all biographers are naturally interested in their subject’s material possessions. In my case, his country estate burned down in the 1970s, long after his descendants had moved out. All I have besides his will are some descriptions of what the house was like. That’s useful, but I can’t sleep where he slept, the way (for example) an Austen biographer can:3

Obviously, then, what matters most to me for my biography is my subject’s correspondence. I don’t know how many letters he wrote and received in his life, but to take a wild guess, the lower bound probably approximates to the number of days he was alive: 32,193. Many are missing; the ones that exist were kept for reasons I need to understand. But I’ve read, or plan to read, as many as I can.4

Early in my research, I was excited to come across his signature. I felt like I was in his presence. He had touched that page; now I was touching that page. Since I cannot sit in his chair, like you can sit in Jane Austen’s chair, I had to forge a physical connection through less satisfying means.5 I know, of course, that touching the same paper does not actually help me understand the man, but as I said above, he occupies an enormous amount of intellectual real estate in my head. I was just happy to feel like I was making progress in getting to know him.

I think that explains why biographers also spend energy on the fourth legacy we leave behind: our bodies. I’ve previously told a story about coming across a part of St. Vincent’s body in the archives. That was certainly the most visceral experience I’ve had of trying to understand this man by being in his presence. I have not made it to his grave, which is in Staffordshire, but I expect I’ll want to go one day if only to be able to describe it to my readers.

The historian Erik Loomis takes this impetus to absurd lengths. He’s visited nearly 2,000 graves of various notable people and written short biographies of them. The series is amazing and awe-inspiring. He likes being in graveyards, which is part of his motivation, but he also puts his own body physically close to the people he’s writing about, even if all that’s left is some bones.

Horcruxes

Most of my early research on St. Vincent happened in four places: the Staffordshire Record Office, where his family was from; the National Archives at Kew, where most of his official naval letters are; the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, where he has several important volumes especially related to Nelson; and the British Library, where the bulk of his personal and family papers were deposited by his grand-niece. Since those were the four largest collections, I focused most of my energy there.

I still need to go back to some of them, but now I’m getting to the stage of the research process where I need to spend time on smaller collections scattered around the world.

That brings me, finally, to the purpose of this post.

I feel the need to honor Robert Caro’s call to “turn every page” in the archives. While highly impractical, I understand now why he made that promise. I admit that I can never truly know my subject, but so long as I have the means and the motivation, I don’t think I will be happy with the final product if I leave pages unturned. I will, I know, but my pride as a historian wants me to make the number of unturned pages as small as possible. The closest I can get to St. Vincent, and by far the best way for me to learn about him, is to read his letters.

Tracking them all down has made me feel a little like Harry, Ron, and Hermione in the last Harry Potter book. They (and Dumbledore before them) had to be Voldemort biographers to hunt for his horcruxes. Moreover, the horcruxes were pieces of Voldemort’s soul, and (if you’ll allow me to stretch this comparison to its breaking point) St. Vincent’s letters are as close as I can get to his.

Some of these letters, these pieces of him, are scattered around the world. I’ve identified fifteen other archives besides the four I already mentioned. The Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, has 31 letters, for example; there are another 59 at Duke and 4 at Harvard. Thankfully, St. Vincent’s horcruxes did not get created when he murdered people; rather, they are products of his letters being sent all around the British Empire and (in some cases) Gilded-Age Americans’ enthusiasm for buying British archival collections.6

Several of his letters are in places that I have known well. Just as Harry, Ron, and Hermione discover horcruxes in Hogwarts Castle, I’ve learned that I’ve been close to St. Vincent all this time. Little did I know when I visited my sister at the University of Michigan twenty years ago that it houses an essential collection of St. Vincent’s correspondence with the earl of Shelburne. I recently learned from letters at the British Library that when I lived in London, I lived just one block from where St. Vincent lived as a bachelor. Brown has several of his letters but also lots of caricatures of him, a collection that I would have almost certainly overlooked had I not moved to Rhode Island. He even shows up in the National Archives in DC, where I grew up, and at the Naval Academy, where I’ll be this week.

So my quest to turn every page is ironically bringing me back to places that I know well, but for an entirely new reason. I’m not making any pseudo-spiritual point here. I’m just struck by how my life has become intertwined with his life. My quest to know him perfectly will fail, but my goal is for it to fail as close to the line of truth as possible.

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After Jane Austen’s father died, the rectory in Steventon passed to the next rector, his son James. Three of the brothers then gave their mother about £200 a year. Cassandra and Jane were given nothing more. They moved for five years to Bath, which Jane hated, and traveled among other extended family homes before Edward at last made the offer of one of two houses—the first in Wye or the second in Chawton. The daughters persuaded their mother to choose the more familiar Chawton, with its garden, outhouses, six bedrooms, and garrets, and they moved there in July 1809. Jane lived and worked in the Chawton Cottage for eight years. At the end of her life she went to Winchester for medical care. She died there and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

It is misleading to say that she wrote all of her novels in Chawton.

Let’s look back. Jane, born in 1775, wrote constantly as a girl. After her extensive juvenilia she wrote Elinor and Marriane and First Impressions (later this became Pride and Prejudice), returned to a second draft of Elinor and Marianne and renamed it Sense and Sensibility, and then wrote the first draft of what would become Northanger Abbey. By then she was twenty-three. Her father thought so well of First Impressions he tried to get it published but the publisher wouldn’t look at it.

But in the next decade the momentum of writing had to ease. She spent a great portion of her time caring for nieces, nephews, cousins, and cousins in labor or recovering the weeks afterwards. She turned down two marriage proposals, the first unwanted and the second accepted until a sleepless night followed. The next morning she asked to speak to the large landowning suitor, a gentleman, the younger brother of her close friends, and explained she had changed her mind.

It was a decade later that she, Cassandra, and their mother moved into Chawton Cottage. She was 33. She could revise and write anew. So she settled into this charming cottage in a quiet village in Hampshire and published Sense and Sensibility, revised First Impressions into Pride and Prejudice and published it, and then finished or wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and the first twelve chapters of Sanditon. By my count, six-and-a-half manuscripts in eight years.

I am reminded of John Keats’ miracle year of 1819 (two years after Jane died). He wrote five of his six great odes, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia.” Let us also reference Patrick O’Brian’s output—after his other biographies and stories prior to 1969, he wrote twenty-one novels about Jack and Stephen in only thirty years.

The cottage impresses. As now seems ubiquitous in museums these days, the visitors’ traffic begins in the gift shop but then moves outdoors, on this a sunny Hampshire morning, to five dresses hanging on a line, a place to make bonnets, and multiple beds of flowers with riddles modeled after those in Emma.

Inside, any contemporary writer must feel appalled by the tiny space Austen used to write – a simple round table with a chair, tucked in the corner of a sitting room used by others, parchment, ink, and quill nearby.

An entire room is devoted to Cassandra’s watercolours. Upstairs hangs a painting of Charles’s victory in the Canopus at the Battle of Santa Domingo, as well as his portrait as Rear Admiral, and Francis’s portrait as Admiral of the White. As narrated in Persuasion, Jane Austen admired their courage and leadership and always made a strong defense of the Navy; she lived long enough to see Napoleon’s defeat.

Knowing their audience, even among avid readers of Austen, the cottage devotes an entire room to film history, including the manuscript of Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s film of Sense and Sensibility. The year 1995 was Annus Mirabilis for Austen films—Clueless, the aforementioned Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, and the six-part adaption of Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. Prior to 1995 the only film of Jane Austen was the 1940 Pride and Prejudice with Greer Larsen and Laurance Olivier. There have been over eight films since 1995, but 1995 nearly deserves a room of its own.

In the upstairs bedroom the four-poster displayed a measure of status, and its hanging fabric was pretty. The mattress was tiny, the pink nightdress laid on it for a small woman indeed. The other upstairs rooms boast innumerable memorabilia and walls with explanatory texts, but this is the proper place and time to remind us that most of Jane Austen’s actual letters, and there were many, not surprisingly, no longer exist. Cassandra decided to burn most of them. Many theories on Cassandra’s motivation exist. I join the critics who believe Jane had a fearsome wit, as is so gloriously evident in the novels, and too often she might have turned that wit on her own family and certainly on supposed friends and acquaintances. But one of our admirals, Francis, treasured the letters she sent him and kept them for fifty years (he died at 91). He left them in his will to his daughter Fanny, who apparently didn’t grasp how crucial they might be to posterity and destroyed them.

Before we walk up the road to the manor house, pause at a plaque in the far corner of an upstairs room. After Jane, Mrs. Austen, and Cassandra died, Edward of the manor house had no reason to keep Chawton Cottage and sold it to laborers. Their descendants occupied it until 1940. Miss Dorothy Darnell founded the Jane Austen Society then and began the process of buying the cottage. Not until after the war did they succeed, when Thomas Edward Carpenter bought it in memory of his son killed in the war. That plaque in the corner memorializes the young man.

A fine pub awaits across the street, abutted by two B&B’s and a good coffee shop. A few homes line the road. Jane and her sister walked this stretch often, going up to the manor house to help with children, to explore the garden and woods, and to enjoy food and drink. Edward’s family made the pleasurable reverse trip when they walked down to Chawton Cottage. The manor house is impressive (it could have easily found its place in one of the 1995 films). But I was less interested, I admit, in the number of posted family trees acknowledging the Knight family’s long and distinguished place in the English aristocracy. What did make me dream, though, was those magnificent lawns and woods, cherishing in Persuasion those long walks between Anne Eliot and another of our navy heroes, Captain Wentworth.

This entry reads like a travelogue, I acknowledge, but I would add that Winchester Cathedral is magnificent and has the graves of every measure of ruler from the Normans on. The Roundhead army sacked the inside and stole much of its treasure, but the townspeople were so offended they saved pieces of the west window. After the Restoration, the window was pieced back together over time—it is different, and it is glorious.

On the left aisle down the nave Jane Austen rests. Her brother arranged the early morning funeral before service began, and three attended (the church record has the date wrong). There is no mention of her writing in the burial plaque. Almost apologetically, a gold-lettered plaque on the nearby wall was placed later, when Jane was the Jane Austen we know and not simply the daughter, sister, aunt, and friend celebrated in 1817. I overheard some tour guides refer to the stained-glass window above that as “The Austen Window.” I looked closely. I confess it’s Saint Augustine, which is a stretch indeed.

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The couple also was busy in another way, having what one relative called “the violently rapid increase of their family.” Three sons were born in the first three years, and after a short pause, four more children in subsequent years. When the youngest of those seven turned three, and her mother was thirty-nine, a sixth and last son, Charles, was born.

As an adult Charles was a captain in the British navy for three decades. Evan wrote about his career in an earlier post:

His older brother, Francis William, was more distinguished. He became Admiral of the Fleet, was knighted, and lived until he was 91.

These are the Austen children – James, George, Edward, Henry, Cassandra, Francis, Jane, and Charles. I travel to Chawton for the seventh. It’s the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth.

And this is a Substack about Patrick O’Brian?

I first started thinking of this pilgrimage halfway through Post Captain, both the first time my children Evan and Emily and I listened to Patrick Tull on Recorded Books and my subsequent two readings, pencil in hand, decades apart. Innumerable works of fiction spring from love triangles, and in O’Brian’s case he creates one with Sophia and Diana becoming enmeshed with Jack Aubrey (substitute whatever word you find appropriate for ‘enmeshed.’) O’Brian sweetens the complication by having Stephen fall in love with Diana, who is fascinated by Jack and considers using him but does not love him. Stephen is a different matter.

Six of Austen’s best-known novels are structured this way. Take the best-known novel, Pride and Prejudice, a cash machine for filmmakers (Google’s AI tells me there are 17 films or series since 1938 and three other related films, including Bollywood’s Bride and Prejudice and the 2016 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Elizabeth Bennet finds Fitzwilliam Darcy grossly prideful and has a strong prejudice for the dashing soldier, George Wickham, only to see herself (after Wickham attempts to seduce her younger sister) as the one with the obtuse angle.

There are other reasons I thought of Jane Austen. Sophia’s mother Mrs. Williams in Post Captain is surely descending from some mothers and aunts in Jane Austen. Consider Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Miss Bates in Emma, and to a lesser extent, Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park. Mrs. Williams joins them as a nonstop, both sycophantic and self-righteous, endlessly boring talker who makes everyone else’s business, especially any daughters’ relationship with a man, her own business.

So I am an unabashed lover of Jane Austen and Patrick O’Brian. After listening to Patrick Tull, I committed to listening to or reading all of O’Brian’s novels, and in honor of Miss Austen, I have reread her novels prior to this journey. I will report back next week with the results.

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What sealed my purchase of the book, though, was the essay “Arms and the Man,” by none other than Charlton Heston.

Heston’s inclusion in the volume is not as surprising as you might think because the actor had long been an admirer of O’Brian’s. The two men had first met in London in June 1990, when Heston was promoting Treasure Island. As Dean King, O’Brian’s biographer, puts it: “In Heston, O’Brian made an exception to his general dislike of America and Americans.”1

At their first meeting, Heston spoke glowingly of Aubrey and Maturin to O’Brian, and then over the next several years, he used his celebrity to speak glowingly of them to everyone else. The culmination of his efforts was an event with O’Brian at UCLA in 1995 at which Heston gave a dramatic reading of the pillory scene in The Reverse of the Medal.

So with that context, let’s dive into Heston’s “critical appreciation” of O’Brian. Nobody is snootier or more insistent on gate-keeping than academics, so I want to state up front that I am glad that Heston chose to express his enthusiasm for O’Brian in such a setting. As unusual as it is for an actor to be published in an academic book, I think it should be encouraged. The academy needs all the help it can get right now. Don’t you think the world needs more essays like Iggy Pop’s appreciation of Edward Gibbon in the journal Classics Ireland?

[That’s a real link to JSTOR! Click on it!]

Heston begins by directly comparing O’Brian and C.S. Forester. His conclusion is clear: “O’Brian is the better writer, ‘by a long sea mile’, as Long John Silver, one of the greats of all sea-going characters, put it.” (I don’t think that sentence means what Heston thinks it means, but whatever—we get the point.) Heston points out, correctly in my opinion, how important humor is to O’Brian’s writing, especially in contrast to Forester’s.

The title of Heston’s essay, “Arms and the Man,” comes next as he speculates about why the greatest writers have tended to write about land warfare, from Virgil to Shakespeare to Tolstoy. “Melville and Conrad, the greatest writers inspired by the sea, never took up Virgil’s challenge,” he writes. The implication is that O’Brian belongs in their ranks. One major reason is the verisimilitude of O’Brian’s dialogue. “This is surely what they were like [in the early nineteenth century],” Heston says. “Only an extraordinary writer can do that.”

The most entertaining parts of Heston’s essay are his pithy assessments of O’Brian’s cast of characters. His expertise as an actor is on display here, as he gets right to the heart of each. Here are a few highlights:

Barret Bonden is “the essence of the British ranker from the Wars of the Roses through Desert Storm.”

Preserved Killick is “an absolute Jewish mother of a man, nagging, sulking, forever complaining and conniving for the Captain’s good, as he sees it.”

Aubrey is “open, sanguine, a highly physical doer and shaker.”

Maturin is “reserved, intellectual, and secretive … the most complete doctor in fiction.”

Heston concludes the short essay with an important point about the friendship at the heart of the books. Lest anyone take the idea of their “particular friendship” to be an indication of something, uh, more than friendship, Heston emphasizes that both men share “a firm interest in women.” Methinks he doth protest too much, but in any case, Heston is right to emphasize the relationship as almost a character in its own right. Unlike other famous pairings (Holmes and Watson, Huck Finn and Jim2) in which the friendship is simply declared, O’Brian’s readers experience the friendship’s evolution as well as its highs and lows.

Thus ends Heston’s essay—just five pages. Iggy Pop’s essay on Gibbon is just three pages. Perhaps academics need to learn the importance of brevity from these famous interlopers. I’ll follow their lead.

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