A MILITARY HISTORY OF ANGLO AMERICAN RELATIONS – PART ONE
A MILITARY HISTORY OF ANGLO AMERICAN RELATIONS – PART ONE
Many, perhaps most, Englishmen of any influence in the early 1770s saw nothing oppressive about asking the American colonists to contribute to the cost of their own defence. ‘No taxation without representation’ hardly washed when the vast majority of British residents had no vote, but assuredly paid taxes on much of what they used and consumed. Many Englishmen did, however, object strongly to Lord North’s government’s policy of threatening and then using force when some Americans decided that they would not pay. In the House of Lords of the British parliament one of the most vociferous opponents of coercion was Charles Cornwallis, who had succeeded to his father’s earldom in 1762. But Cornwallis was a soldier, and a good one, and whatever soldiers’ personal or political views may be, in a mature nation they do what they are told and implement to the best of their ability even those policies with which they disagree. It was ironic, therefore, that it was General Earl Cornwallis, besieged by over twice his own numbers of American and French troops at a place called Yorktown, at the tip of the Virginia peninsula, and with control of the seas temporarily lost, who surrendered to George Washington on 19 October 1781. Cornwallis pleaded sickness to avoid signing the instrument of surrender himself, and he went on to be an effective Commander in Chief India, and Master General of the Ordnance in the British cabinet. As Colonel of the 33rd Foot Cornwallis had as the commanding officer of his regiment from 1793 Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Wesley, later Arthur Wellesley and later still the First Duke of Wellington.
Whatever hope the British had of winning what had begun as a squabble about the rights of Englishmen in the colonies, and had progressed into a demand for independence, and which was effectively a civil war fought over the issue of who should govern America – a government far away in London, or the colonists themselves – vanished after Yorktown. The British government bowed to the inevitable. On February 17 1782 the House of Commons voted not to continue military action and on 5 March it asked the Crown to make peace. The Americans were in alliance with France, and the French were allied to Spain, so a peace settlement in America was complicated by Britain also being at war with both France and Spain, but by the Peace of Paris, signed on 3 September 1783, Britain retained Gibraltar and granted independence to the United States. The American boundary to the west was agreed as the River Mississippi (all to the west of that was Spanish), and the British kept Canada, Newfoundland and British Honduras (now Belize). Exactly where British Canada stopped and the United States began was not always clear, and Florida, to the south, was eventually agreed as belonging to Spain.
The loss of America was not the great national disgrace that it might appear in hindsight. Keeping the French and the Spanish at bay was always far more important, and consumed more ships, men and money, than stamping on rebellious colonials. Britain did not yet see herself as an imperial power per se, and there was no reason why trade between America and Britain could not continue. There were those in England who foresaw that the United States might become a great nation, but they were few and far between (as indeed they were in America), and most Britons still viewed Americans sympathetically, as country cousins to be patted on their collective national head and tolerated.
In the two hundred and forty years since the Peace of Paris the relationship between the United States of America and the erstwhile colonial power has been at times mutually resentful, sometimes fawning, often envious, occasionally outright inimical and frequently competitive. At various times it has swung between mutual suspicion, resentment, dependence, opposition, uneasy alliance and full blooded cooperation, but it has always been important. No British government, even in the heyday of empire, has been able to disregard completely the United States. Furthermore, despite American power eventually far surpassing that of her former master, most American leaders have known that the closest ally they are likely to get – and despite having been the world’s only superpower for the last twenty years or so, America still wants allies – is the United Kingdom. At the time of writing, despite the recent vagaries of Trumpism and Biden’s views on Northern Ireland, the two nations are more closely aligned politically and militarily than at any time since the Second World War, and yet that alignment – for which there are very many good and sound reasons that directly impinge on the British interest – is not always popular with some of the British population and might not survive a change of government in either country.
The British have always regarded the Americans as Englishmen abroad, and have always rather patronised them. There is, of course, much that tends to draw us together. Both nations share a common language and legal system, and a belief in a democratic system of government. While language and the law have mutated to some extent they are still instantly recognisable to Britons and Americans, and while many Britons have some difficulty in understanding exactly how the American system of government works, they would not doubt that it is based on universal suffrage and freedom under the law. In the years from 1820 to 2000 the United States absorbed over 65 million immigrants. The largest influx, at just over 10 million, came from the British Isles, well ahead of the next largest racial group, the Germans, at 7 million. That statistic alone would seem to ensure that a very British stamp has been put on the United States and that it is still there. However, of those ten million, almost half, or 4,800,000 were from Ireland, and while not all the Irish who emigrated did so to get away from the British, many did, which may at least partly explain why, despite fund raising for Sinn Fein having been (briefly) banned from time to time, the USA has been the major source of funding for the IRA. No IRA gunman has ever been extradited from the USA, and only when the events of 11 September 2001 brought it home to Americans that they too could be blown up in their own land was the IRA declared a terrorist organisation.
None of the shared values, however, have ever stood in the way of each country following her own national interest, and while conflict has sometimes been resolved by compromise, often it has not. Only once since independence have British and American rivalries erupted into outright war. Coming as it did at a critical point of the Napoleonic Wars, the war of 1812, or Madison’s War as the Americans style it, was a nuisance – if only because it prevented the British army in the Peninsula from importing its corn from the United States (the Germans now got the business instead) – but had little long term effect. Neither side was clear as to its war aims (at one stage the Americans debated declaring war on the French as well), nothing very much was achieved by either, and today even in the United States few people are aware that the White House is so called because the British marched into Washington in August 1814 and burned it down. Only once did we go to war, but there were many occasions when at least some on either side thought we were near to it. American merchants objected strongly to what they saw as restraint of honest trade in the West Indies, and what the young Royal Navy post captain chiefly responsible – one Horatio Nelson – saw as enforcing the law. British domination of the world’s oceans – and hence markets - throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was always a sore point with Americans, although the assertion by Admiral Benson, the US Chief of Naval staff, that the British always went to war with their trade rivals eventually and that America must therefore build a fleet to rival the Royal Navy, was a blatant piece of scare mongering designed to extract a larger share of the national pie than Congress was prepared to grant.
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