As nice as it is to discuss the brilliant men and great battles that allowed the American colonials to win the American Revolution, there is another way to see things –perhaps less enjoyable, but just as legitimate: looking at the great dunderheads and mistakes that allowed the greatest military power on earth to be defeated by a small group of undisciplined rabble. Here follows brief essays on my three top dunderheads: two British, one French. No one realized they were dunces until much later.
Pride of place goes, I think, to King Louis 16th of France. He helped us to win the war, and lost his own empire in the process. King Louis had nothing to gain by funding the American cause. And he had quite a lot to lose in men and money. He lost his ships and men in Rhode Island, lost colonies in India and the Seychelles, and spent millions he’d need when the famine of 1789 came. Worse, by supporting America, Louis put the bug of Liberty in the French ear. Far better (for Louis) would have been if he had waited, non-committally for another 3-5 years as the Dutch and Spanish did. He could have continued to host and honor Franklin, could have continued to sell weapons (to both sides) and could have even encouraged hot-head volunteers like Lafayette to go over and fight. We might still have won (see below) but at a greater cost to us and a fraction of the cost to the French monarchy. Let us thank God for fools. Here are my thoughts on when to get involved in a foreign war.
The basic of every great dunderhead is not seeing the disaster that hides behind a small-scale victory. And that tends to be funny.
British admiral George Rodney is my second, honored dunce. He had many victories, especially after the war was lost, but his major war achievement was not-relieving Cornwallis at Yorktown, and thus losing the war. In early 1781, Rodney was defending Jamaica and other British “Sugar Islands” in the Caribbean while waiting for orders to either fight the French fleet or relieve Cornwallis. As it was, he did neither but instead attacked a Dutch-held, Caribbean island, St. Eustatius. Rodney noticed that British freighters were being hijacked by pirates and that the island was a major trading port to the American colonists. By going after these pirates, he gained booty, but left the rest of the empire under-gunned. This allowed French Admiral, de Grasse Tilly to defeat Admiral Hood in the Caribbean; allowed him to take Tobago for the French. And then, while Rodney was still protecting his St Eustatius booty, de Grasse circled back to Virginia in time to bottle up Cornwallis. British Admiral Graves tried twice to dislodge de Grasse, but without Rodney he hadn’t the firepower. Cornwallis surrounded the day Graves gave up his second, failed attempt.
Rodney’s choice was one of greed, self-interest, and glory-seeking at the expense of British national interest. It isn’t unique in the Revolution or in British military history. Clinton’s move to attack Philadelphia when he was supposed to aid Burgoyne caused the loss of Burgoyne’s army and got the French in on our side, but I judge Rodney’s screw-up bigger if only because Cornwallis’s defeat ended the war and lost America.
Finally, I give the third-place dunce cap to General Banastre Tarleton, otherwise known as “Bloody Ban,” the most hated man in America. Tarleton was the son of a noted slave trader and mayor of Liverpool. He tended to win battles, but as fictionalized in the movie, The Patriot, he rarely differentiated rebel from loyalist, burning farms and churches of both. He also became known for “Tarleton’s quarter”, killing his enemies after they had surrendered. In the long run, this sort of thing turns your friends in to your enemies, and so it did here.
The view, common in Tarlton’s regiment, was that this was at least partially a religious war. If a congregation wasn’t Anglican — a church with the king as its head — it was a “sedition shop” and needed to be eliminated. He wasn’t totally wrong, but it rarely goes down well; for example the Sunni vs Shiite, Hamas vs ISIS wars. He certainly undermined Benedict Arnold’s claims that King George was serious in granting religious freedom.
A religious dissertation: resistance to a tyrant is obedience to God.
When Tarleton was given the job of capturing Marion Francis, the Swamp Fox, his approach, with Major James Wemyss and Captain Christian Hock (or Hook), was to burn the farms, churches, and plantations of anyone in the area. In one of Wemyss memoranda, he writes he had “burnt and laid waste about 50 houses and Plantations, mostly belonging to People who have either broke their Paroles or Oaths of Allegiance, and are now in Arms against us.” Note the word, “mostly.” These methods did succeed in drawing out the Swamp Fox, but it also drew out most everyone else in the south, even those who’d given up on the revolution. The now-farmless farmers enlisted and produced enthusiastic counter-attacks at Gibson’s Meeting House, Hill’s Iron Works, Fishdam Ford (Wemyss capture), Williamson’s Plantation (Huck’s Defeat), Blackstock’s farm and Cowpens. By the end, the colonials had even figured out how to use Tarleton’s enthusiasm against him.The right way to deal with your enemy is with focus and mercy, as Grant treated Lee at Appomattox. Tarleton’s methods would have made the Revolution a centuries-long, religious war IMHO, if the French had not gotten involved on our side.
Robert Buxbaum. July 16, 2015. If you have other classics of stupidity, please tell me. I’d like to recommend two books by A. J. O’Shaughnessy: “An Empire Divided,” and “The men who lost America.” As a final note: after the war Tarleton retired to Parliament where he served until 1833 as a fierce advocate for British slavery. Britain ended their use of slave workers in the Caribbean and south Africa in 1833, but didn’t stop their use in Ceylon and areas of East India company until 1843. Most Slaves who came to the new world did so in British ships.
