Salt of the Earth

Abu Muqawama offers some of his thoughts on how Britain could have employed counterinsurgency theory more successfully during the American Revolution. As long as we're talking strictly hypotheticals, I'm not sure this namby-pamby COIN business is the way to go. What if in early 1776 the British had burned Boston to the ground before retreating to Nova Scotia?

Then you're in a position to communicate to the colonists the basic shape of the situation. Britain, obviously, is not in a position to occupy the entire territory of the 13 colonies. By the same token, the colonies are in no position to defeat British naval power. The colonies thus have a choice -- they can submit, withdrawing their delegates from the Continental Congress, at which point all will be forgiven, or else they can continue to resist in which case their cities will be subjected to sporadic invasion and burning-to-the-ground. Communicate to the Indians in-or-near Massachusetts, that the Crown considers that colony to be a lost cause and he's prepared to support with weapons and money any attempt by natives to dispossess the white population there.

UPDATE: Now needless to say, this would have been politically untenable in England. And, of course, as a person of conscience I wouldn't recommend doing it. Even on a strategic level, this kind of policy wouldn't make sense -- Britain's interests are best-served by training to stay on good terms with the colonies, ideally by reaching a compromise that keeps them in the empire, but failing that by letting them go independent and just making sure they don't become a pawn of some rival power. In general, the best policy when faced with a country that doesn't wants your country to just go away is to go away and try to secure your interests from afar.

Photo by Flickr user Cernavodo used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

The British failed to burn Boston for a reason. They were only evacuating in the first place because Washington had brought the cannon from Ticonderoga and ringed the city with them, making Boston untenable for the English. The English agreed to leave without burning the city in return for Washington's promise not to fire on them as they left.

Posted by Vidor | March 24, 2008 5:54 PM

Communicate to the Indians in-or-near Massachusetts, that the Crown considers that colony to be a lost cause and he's prepared to support with weapons and money any attempt by natives to dispossess the white population there.

That part, the British actually tried.

Posted by rea | March 24, 2008 5:55 PM

Communicate to the Indians in-or-near Massachusetts, that the Crown considers that colony to be a lost cause and he's prepared to support with weapons and money any attempt by natives to dispossess the white population there.

That part, the British actually tried.

Posted by rea | March 24, 2008 5:56 PM

What if in early 1776 the British had burned Boston to the ground before retreating to Nova Scotia?

Among other things, a PR disaster on the home front. Don't forget, a substantial fraction of British subjects were sympathetic to the American cause.

Posted by James Gary | March 24, 2008 5:57 PM

So how do you think the British populace would have felt about that treatment of their cousins? How about the American Loyalists?

Part of the problem with these bloody fantasy strategies is that quite often, your own people are not bloodthirsty enough to make them work.

Posted by DTM | March 24, 2008 6:00 PM

Y'know, Grozny does seem to have been fairly quiet lately ...

Not that that justifies a "no survivors = no insurgents" strategy ...

Posted by Warren Terra | March 24, 2008 6:13 PM

I agree that the British could have more aggressively used their naval strength early on in the war, but that was in part made impossible due to their tensions with France.

The problem with burning cities is that the colonies were primarily rural -- burning cities doesn't really do that much to actually break the will of the people. Plus, the colonies were a critical trading partner -- they couldn't have burned the cities and destroyed ports without doing economic violence to mainland Britain. Perhaps, the Crown could have put soldiers and sailors in charge of running all the ports (which could have stopped privateer activity), but my hazy memory suggests that they just didn't have the manpower for it.

As mentioned before, they tried the coalition-with-natives thing; the colonists found their own natives. The British should have put more energy into a coalition-with-slaves.

Posted by dry_fish | March 24, 2008 6:13 PM

the problem with these bloody . . . strategies is that quite often, your own people are not bloodthirsty enough to make them work.

Exactly. In short, we were stabbed in the back by the cowardly Whigs. The Whigs lost us America.

Posted by Patriotic Briton | March 24, 2008 6:14 PM

I take Matt's "late update" as a sad acknowledgment that commenters took him much more seriously than he intended.

Especially "Patriotic Briton." Yikes!

Posted by Ted | March 24, 2008 6:21 PM

It was a lot more complex than you are allowing here. In particular because the official US histories of the revolution are mostly in denial as to a principal underlying causes: slavery and expansion into Indian territories.

It was the passing of the Canada act that was the big complaint for the colonists. Taxation was merely the pretext that everyone could agree on, it was the WMD of the revolutionary war.

The bigger dispute that the crown had with the colonies was that the colonies were constantly expanding into Indian territories and then expecting the crown to defend the result.

The concern on the revolutionary side came from the slave owners concerned that the 1772 Somerset decision would inevitably be extended to the colonies sooner or later - which of course it was but only in 1833. Mansfield's decision was that slavery did not exist in English common law. And what made it devastating for the colonist slavers was who it came from, probably the least sympathetic judge to the abolitionist cause. If a high Tory like Mansfield would rule against them they were unlikely to survive long.

The other aspect of the whole thing that is missed here is that the subsequent administration of the British empire was largely on the basis of lessons learned from the American colonies. It is highly unlikely that the political finesse that allowed 10,000 British troops to maintain occupation of the whole of India would have been developed otherwise.

Moreover there is no chance that Napoleon would have sold Florida to the British. The British would not have been interested in starting the war with Spain that made acquisition of Texas or California possible. So the most the British would have acquired is roughly a third of the current USA.

The other dimension is trade. Even though the USA was outside the British Empire it was still within the British cultural sphere despite being allied with rival powers. The USA was not a very interesting trading partner until after the transcontinental railroad was constructed. It was too far away and had an irritating habit of trying to make its own manufactured goods.

Britain could obtain access to US cotton regardless of whether it was in the Empire or not. Once the British had India the point was moot.

Posted by PHB | March 24, 2008 6:39 PM

I take Matt's "late update" as a sad acknowledgment that commenters took him much more seriously than he intended.
Especially "Patriotic Briton." Yikes!

I'm pretty sure Patriotic Briton's being ironic. As for Matt, it's easy enough to read the original post as a sort of whimsically wistful realpolitikal fondness for those pre-modern-media days.

Posted by James Gary | March 24, 2008 6:42 PM

Re Patriotic Briton

Maybe the British should have imposed Hama rules on Boston.

Posted by SLC | March 24, 2008 6:53 PM

"Taxation was merely the pretext that everyone could agree on, it was the WMD of the revolutionary war."

Well, that's simply not true. For starters, nobody in 1776 was shy about talking about the Quebec Act as one of the casus belli. It is listed in the Declaration of Independence.

Another side to this issue that people aren't really focusing on--it's very debatable, I think, to suggest that a more savage war on the part of the British would have won the day. I have heard people compare the British experience in America to America's experience in Vietnam. Wiping out villages and bombing the shit out of Hanoi did not make the North Vietnamese quit. One possibility is that a British army rampaging through the colonies and burning cities would have radicalized the American people even more in their resistance. Remember that it was the first really punitive measure that George III took, the Boston Port Act, that pushed things to the breaking point.

Posted by Vidor | March 24, 2008 6:54 PM

In general, the best policy when faced with a country that doesn't wants your country to just go away is to go away and try to secure your interests from afar

Huh? A "country that doesn't wants your country to just go away"? You mean a country that doesn't want to be ruled by your country?

In any case, why doesn't this apply to the Civil War?

Posted by Al | March 24, 2008 7:08 PM

Vidor nails it.

The reason the British left Boston unscathed was because if they didn't, the Americans would blow them up (courtesy of Henry Knox's guns and one very hard night's work dragging them and, basically, an entire fort, up the hills of Dorchester).

Of course, the reason the Americans didn't blow the Brits up was because they a) they'd rather cut a deal to save Boston and use it for themselves and b) some of those guns were actually painted logs.

Now, George Washington did want to burn New York as he retreated rather than leave it for the British, and he only failed to do it because the Continental Congress wouldn't give him the authorization. And Washington was tactically right, the British used NYC as their base of operations through the rest of the war. (That said, there was a fire the night the Americans fled NYC that burned down a big chunk of the city, but not nearly as much as I'm sure Washington would have preferred.)

Besides, the British did these kinds of little demonstrations. Beyond the well-known death ships in the New York harbor, they British burned Kingston, NY to the ground because they'd supported the Congress. Loyalists burned Fairfield and Norwalk in CT. Troops under Benedict Arnold looted and burned New London, CT. The Brits burned Portsmouth and Norfolk, VA.

Overall, the whole "if only we'd been willing to be bastards and do whatever it took we'd have won the war" is a childish view of history that is almost always totally unsupported by the actual facts of whatever war is being talked about.

This nonsense comes from a mix of two things, I think. The first is a sort of macho green lantern theory--your will to victory is demonstrated by your willingness to be an evil tough guy. The second thing is, I think, whitewashing the atrocities that are an inevitable part of war, to the point where one can deludedly believe that a particular war was atrocity-free, and that's why it didn't work.

Posted by anonymiss | March 24, 2008 7:17 PM

Matt, you're a smart guy, but _please_ stay away from ill-informed historical musings; at least read a few books before doing your standard pundit "what-if?" counterintuitive rhetorical pivot. It's times like this where it really shows that you studied how to think rather than the stuff about which we think while you were across the Charles in the People's Republic of Cambridge (meant with affection, I like the city).

As people said in the other thread, Bailyn's IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION is very good, as is Wood's RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

I also enjoyed Brendan McConville's THE KING's THREE FACES about royalist culture in America, but it has some flaws.

And though it can be a bit breezy, McCullough's 1776 is a pretty good run-down on the military situation at the beginning of the war, incl. the evacuation of Boston (for which we get March 17th off!).

As numerous others have pointed out, your conviction that we would have become just like Canada, Australia, NZ, etc., is rather undercut by the fact that it was only the American (and to some degree French) Revolutions that forced the Brits to grant popular government to those other colonies. I think, in fact, that Wood might be good, since you don't seem to grasp precisely how new and radical the colonial position -- on republicanism, on constitutions, on law and monarchy -- were in 1776.

Less time on the Internet, more time at the library (the same, of course, goes for me).

Posted by Ben Cronin | March 24, 2008 7:19 PM

don;t forget Falmouth, Maine (today's Portland), anonymiss. They burnt that one, too.

Posted by Ben Cronin | March 24, 2008 7:23 PM

Vidor nails it.

The reason the British left Boston unscathed was because if they didn't, the Americans would blow them up (courtesy of Henry Knox's guns and one very hard night's work dragging them and, basically, an entire fort, up the hills of Dorchester).

Of course, the reason the Americans didn't blow the Brits up was because they a) they'd rather cut a deal to save Boston and use it for themselves and b) some of those guns were actually painted logs.

Besides, the British did these kinds of little demonstrations. Beyond the well-known death ships in the New York harbor, they British burned Kingston, NY to the ground because they'd supported the Congress. Loyalists burned Fairfield and Norwalk in CT. Troops under Benedict Arnold looted and burned New London, CT. The Brits burned Portsmouth and Norfolk, VA. And, of course, sending in an invading army with all the terror such a thing imposes on the populace was, before they even fired a shot, an act of toughness and intimidation.

Overall, the whole "if only we'd been willing to be bastards and do whatever it took we'd have won the war" is a childish view of history that is almost always totally unsupported by the actual facts of whatever war is being talked about.

This constant overestimation of the utility of more savagery comes from a mix of two things, I think. The first is a sort of macho green lantern theory--your will to victory is demonstrated by your eagerness to use the tactics of an evil tough guy. These tactics are unique in military history because they are ALWAYS effective--the only question is whether one has the macho tough guy will to impose them.

The second thing is, I think, whitewashing the atrocities that are an inevitable part of war, to the point where one can deludedly believe that a particular war was sadly lacking in atrocity, and that's why it didn't work.

Posted by anonymiss | March 24, 2008 7:24 PM

Re: Patriotic Briton, more on defeatowhigs

"During its campaigns of 1775-1783, that force became vastly more professional, but ultimately failed to prevent the secession of the American colonies ... In their letters and diaries, these men recorded their frustrations with politicians and newspapers at home."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/13/comment.iraq

Posted by Simon | March 24, 2008 7:25 PM

The Brits should have moved the capital of their empire to Washington in 1800 instead of waiting until 1945. That would have saved everyone all kinds of trouble.

Posted by Gary Sugar | March 24, 2008 7:25 PM

Overall, the whole "if only we'd been willing to be bastards and do whatever it took we'd have won the war" is a childish view of history that is almost always totally unsupported by the actual facts of whatever war is being talked about.

I'd stress the almost part. Clearly, while rare, there are some real examples of extreme and wildly disproportionate levels of force squelching an enemy's will and ability to wage war. Mostly, it doesn't happen often because it's hard to achieve the disproportionality. Usually, if you come at your enemy with a gun while he's holding a knife, generally he manages to find a gun too before things get too far along.

Posted by dry_fish | March 24, 2008 7:40 PM

Warren Terra cites perhaps the most compelling modern and successful example of the scorched earth strategy.

Posted by dry_fish | March 24, 2008 7:45 PM

I'm not sure how either westward expansion or the fate of slavery can be seen as the main causes of a revolution which started, after all, in Boston.

Posted by John | March 24, 2008 7:49 PM

If the British had been willing to arm slaves in the South (which southern colonists were deathly afraid they would) they would have retaken all the U.S. south of Philadelphia, pretty much ending the rebellion.
The British didn't do so, because they were deathly afraid of slave revolts on the West Indian sugar islands, which were the real cash cow of their American empire.

Posted by JMG | March 24, 2008 7:58 PM

The British lost America before the war had even begun, and were not able to win militarily, because they could not govern any territory, which they did not occupy and garrison.

The Atlantic Ocean, in the circumstances, made sending an Army large enough to occupy a large part of several colonies simultaneously, simply impossible. The British did occupy Halifax and New York throughout the war, and retained Halifax, but could barely extend their domain beyond those two bases.

Moreover, when the British forces did show up outside commercial centers, they were likely to arouse the hostility of masses of pioneer farmers, who may have been undisciplined by 18th century standards (which called for massed firepower formations that required almost suicidal bravery), but were, nevertheless, better armed (having rifles, which were quite effective at a greater distance than muskets, and did not require massed firepower to be effective).

The long political struggle, with the King and his clumsy Ministers attemting, for the first time in 150 years, to govern and finance the North American corner of the Empire, was sufficient to reduce Tory/Loyalist sentiment from a strong one-third of the population to a vanishing and self-doubting minority of a few tens of thousands, while increasing patriot sentiment from a superficial and largely unselfconscious one-third to an enthusiastic and committed majority. All of that happened, mostly before the shooting started in earnest.

The sudden British interest in administering the Empire coincided with the elevation of George III to the throne, the first monarch since Queen Anne to speak English and show some interest in participating as a power in politics. Although the factional names of Whig and Tory are exceedingly vague, there is some truth to the generalization that George III assertiveness divided Parliament, and Lord North's administration marked the beginning of 70 years of Tory ascendancy, which would end only with the Reform of 1832. Whig enthusiasm for the American cause marked out the extent to which the American Revolution became a proxy revolution in Britain as well, muting with failure, the King's attempt to restore his authority, and reinforcing the precedent of constitutional monarchy, which had been advanced since Walpole.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | March 24, 2008 8:22 PM

I'd stress the almost part. Clearly, while rare, there are some real examples of extreme and wildly disproportionate levels of force squelching an enemy's will and ability to wage war.

Yep, pretty much

Posted by Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, etc | March 24, 2008 9:13 PM

I think the real issue is that England was far more concerned with controlling India than controlling the Americas. And they kept India for quite some time. We won because we cared about the conflict a lot more then England did.

Posted by fostert | March 24, 2008 9:14 PM

I think the real issue is that England was far more concerned with controlling India than controlling the Americas.

They retained control of the largest section of North America for a rather long time, despite the best efforts of the 13 southern colonies to try and grab it.

Posted by Keith | March 24, 2008 9:40 PM

I think the real issue is that England was far more concerned with controlling India than controlling the Americas.

They retained control of the largest section of North America for a rather long time, despite the best efforts of the 13 southern colonies to try and grab it.

Posted by Keith | March 24, 2008 9:42 PM

It was atrocities by Indian allies of the British -- scalping of some colonial women --which really pissed off the New England militia.

That militia exterminated British troops at Bennington --which laid the basis for the Patriot victory at Saratoga -- which convinced France to enter the Revolutionary War as an American ally.

Similarly, the atrocities of British Colonel Tarleton at Waxhaws --"Tarleton's Quarter" -- were repaid in spades by a hillbilly militia at Kings Mountain -- which damm near exterminated British Commander Ferguson's army. A crippling blow to Cornwallis' strategy to create a puppet Loyalist government in South Carolina and to split the South off from the rest of the Colonies.

The British Navy could not exert power inland because of the West Point fortress on the Hudson River and the Fall Line -- waterfalls at geological faults on the rivers of the MidAtlantic.

Mounted militia with rifles in the interior could use Mongol tactics -- rapidly assemble out of nowhere and then rapidly disperse.

With no centers of gravity that the British Army could march on and destroy other than a few boats at fords and a few grain mills which could be rapidly rebuilt. The Scotch Irish of the South were used to having their cabins burned down -- and to rapidly rebuilding them.

Plus the British occuptional Army sucked up money in huge fat globs. Money which King George III had to BORROW from Dutch bankers -- he couldn't raise it via taxes because when his subjects asked "why are we fighting in North America?", King George could only reply: "Because some of our aristocrats have investments there".

(OUR King George today , of course, avoids that probley by stealing $3 TRILLION from our Trust Funds for Medicare and Social Security. )

Posted by Don Williams | March 24, 2008 10:03 PM

1) While the British Cabinet was too stupid to realize the need for counter-insurgency, that ignorance did NOT extend down to some of the professional offficers fighting the Americans.

I recommend a little gem of a book by Hessian Commander Johann von Ewald called " Abhandlung über den kleinen Krieg "(1789)
(Treatise on Partisan Warfare).

2) Some of Ewald's suggestions are applicable to Iraq today --e.g., to make friends with the Local inhabitants (give money to those impoverished by the war ) and maintain tight discipline so your men don't alienate the locals.

The reason is to recruit some of the locals as loyal and dependent friends so that they will warn you when enemy units are in the area.

3) Ewald also noted the prevalance of enemy spies around you and the need to negate those spies with operational security (e.g., moving camp after nightfall )

Posted by Don Williams | March 24, 2008 10:28 PM

1) While the British Cabinet was too stupid to realize the need for counter-insurgency, that ignorance did NOT extend down to some of the professional offficers fighting the Americans.

I recommend a little gem of a book by Hessian Commander Johann von Ewald called " Abhandlung über den kleinen Krieg "(1789)
(Treatise on Partisan Warfare).

2) Some of Ewald's suggestions are applicable to Iraq today --e.g., to make friends with the Local inhabitants (give money to those impoverished by the war ) and maintain tight discipline so your men don't alienate the locals.

The reason is to recruit some of the locals as loyal and dependent friends so that they will warn you when enemy units are in the area.

3) Ewald also noted the prevalance of enemy spies around you and the need to negate those spies with operational security (e.g., moving camp after nightfall, fake movements,etc )

Posted by Don Williams | March 24, 2008 10:29 PM

I'd stress the almost part. Clearly, while rare, there are some real examples of extreme and wildly disproportionate levels of force squelching an enemy's will and ability to wage war.

You're right in that, good point. I'm not saying military force can't be effective in achieving political goals (although we can definitely talk about short-lived successes, which a lot of expansionist military moves tend to be). And it's absolutely unbeatable to have a strong military when it comes to deterring other people from invading your country. It's definitely useful.

My point is different, which is that once you're invading people's countries, it's a little ridiculous to suggest that subsequent failure is because your actions were insufficiently brutal. I mean, you sent in an army! How much more brutal can you really be? It's like a parlor game--if someone can think up a horror you did not inflict, than your failure is obviously a matter of choice and general "pussiness" than it is anything else.

And while I'm sure there's some historical example someplace of a guy who invaded and failed because he simply wasn't willing to be quite brutal enough, I just think that's the rare, rare exception. This is all self-serving ex post facto rationalizations.

It blames the dirty hippies for really causing failure (damn hippies won't let us pour water on the enemy!) and excuses the horrors that were committed by the invading army (see, we weren't nearly bad enough! And these savages don't care so much about the horror--they didn't even NOTICE it! They respond only to force, and clearly our failing was that we were too civilized and not gonna be truly evil...). It forgets that war is just politics by other means, and it conveniently avoids the question of whether military force was the most effective political tool to use.

It's just macho green lantern, imho.

LOL--Portland seems to have done amazingly well from its multiple burnings (go Wampanoags!). Made space for those beautiful Victorians...

Posted by anonymiss | March 24, 2008 10:29 PM

re: Portland -- thus the motto, "Resurgam."

Posted by Ben Cronin | March 24, 2008 11:03 PM

Cornwallis wrote after the war that the British allowed themselves to be defeated in detail. Something to that, I think. All the American victories of the war, except for Saratoga and Yorktown, were against isolated detachments. When we went up against the British in general engagements, we tended to get our ass kicked.

Clausewitz wrote about something called the principle of mass, which holds that in war you should concentrate your forces at the decisive point. The English rarely did that. In their greatest victories of the war, the ones on Long Island and Manhattan Island in the fall of 1776, they did well--reduced the size of Washington's army by some 80%, probably--but failed to push hard enough to bring what was left of Washington's army to decisive defeat. Thus Trenton. The most important American victory of the war, at Saratoga, was basically because Howe blew Burgoyne off and decided to take Philadelphia, thus allowing Burgoyne to be surrounded and forced to surrender.

Posted by Vidor | March 24, 2008 11:16 PM

Highly recommended blog on topic, and I think you will really like it, Yglesias:

http://boston1775.blogspot.com/

I found it by accident looking up some things after watching the first episode of "John Adams." I ended up spending a lot of time reading some of his old posts. It's obvious he's spent a lot of time in archival research and I came away quite impressed.

Posted by artappraiser | March 24, 2008 11:39 PM

The Brits should have moved the capital of their empire to Washington in 1800 instead of waiting until 1945. That would have saved everyone all kinds of trouble.

Lyndon LaRouche?

Posted by Quietus | March 25, 2008 12:24 AM