As we look back upon it now, it is wonderful to think what a daring thing it was for this small and scattered people, living in their little towns along the seacoast from Maine to Georgia, or on farms and plantations in the country, without an army or navy, without generals, and above all without money,—for money is needed to carry on war more than almost anything else,—to have thus made up their minds to stand up bravely and manfully against such a power as Great Britain (one of the greatest in the world), with all her troops and ships and immense revenues. That we should have come out successfully from a contest so unequal seems little short of marvellous; and we cannot but think that it was the hand of an overruling Destiny that enabled us to succeed, by giving us a general as skilful and prudent as Washington, statesmen as wise as Franklin and Jefferson and Adams, an enemy as indolent as Sir William Howe, and allies as powerful as our good friends the French.
Still, even from the beginning the colonists had some reason to hope for success, at least in the war on land. They had no standing army, it is true, but they were not without experience in the business of fighting. In the Seven Years' War, which had come to an end only twelve years before, they had furnished the soldiers who filled the ranks of the English armies on American soil. These were the men who had fought the bloody battles at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and whom the gallant Wolfe had led on the Plains of Abraham. The veterans of the old war were as ready to shoulder their muskets to protect themselves against the tyranny of the King as against the incursions of their Canadian and Indian neighbors. They knew something, too, of the soldiers who would be sent to subdue them, and what they had seen did not give them much reason to be afraid. They knew how hard it was for an invading army, thousands of miles away from home, marching through a thinly-settled country that was filled with enemies, to protect itself from those incessant and harassing attacks that wear out its strength and destroy little by little all its confidence and pluck. They knew that these gayly-dressed redcoats, who made war according to rule, would find a new kind of work before them among the wooded hills and valleys of America, where every patriot was fighting for his own homestead, where every farmer was a woodsman, and where every woodsman was a crack shot. When that quiet but observant young Virginian, Major Washington, went out with Braddock on his expedition against Fort Duquesne, and saw how the gallant Colonel of the Guards insisted blindly upon following in the backwoods his Old World tactics, and how easily his regulars were defeated in consequence, he learned something that he never afterward forgot; for neither Howe nor Clinton nor Earl Cornwallis himself was the man to teach him a new lesson.
But all this was fighting on land. At sea, the colonists had had no such training. The mother country, with her great fleets, had needed no help from them in her sea-fights, and indeed was rather jealous of any attempts that they might make toward a colonial navy. The colonists in the old wars had fitted out a few privateers that harried the enemy's commerce, but real naval warfare was wholly unknown to them. They had had no ships-of-war of their own to serve in, and such of them as had been admitted into the Royal Navy under the King's commission remained in it almost to a man.
On the ocean, therefore, the colonists were badly off, for Great Britain was here the worst enemy they could have. Her wooden walls had always been her chief reliance, and from the days when Drake and Howard and Raleigh defeated the Great Armada of Spain, they had asserted and maintained British supremacy at sea. During this long period of two hundred years the names of England's great naval captains had been a terror to all her enemies. There was Robert Blake, who beat off the Dutch, when Tromp sailed across the channel with a broom at his masthead as a sign that he would sweep the English from the seas. There were Sir Cloudesley Shovel and Sir George Rooke, who worsted the French in the great battle of Cape La Hogue; there was the doughty old Benbow, who, deserted by his captains, with his single ship kept at bay the squadron of M. Ducasse in the West Indies; there was Boscawen, who captured the fortress at Louisburg; Hawke and Anson, and finally Rodney and Howe, already famous, and destined to become yet more so in the war that was just begun.
The fleets that these famous admirals led into action were composed of line-of-battle ships,—immense structures, with two, three, or even four gun-decks, some of them carrying as many as one hundred guns, and the smallest of them rated at sixty-four. After these came the frigates, which had only one gun-deck, but which carried a battery on the spar-deck also. These were not thought of sufficient strength to be really counted as a part of the fighting force, although the largest size, the 50-gun frigates, were sometimes taken into the line of battle. But generally they served as scouts or outposts for the great fleets, or they cruised by twos and threes in light squadrons, or even singly, to attack privateers or unarmed merchantmen, or to make a raid on unprotected coasts and seaports, or to carry orders to the different stations. For all these uses they were of great service, being generally faster than the line-of-battle ships, and yet carrying guns enough to make them formidable to all the lesser craft. After the frigates came the sloops-of-war, ship-sloops, and brig-sloops, as the English called them; not the little boats with one mast that we are accustomed to call sloops, but square-rigged vessels with three or two masts, as the case might be, and carrying twenty guns or so. With all these three classes of vessels the British were well supplied, and the larger ships carried what at that day were heavy guns, 18-pounders and 24-pounders. In 1775, when the war broke out, the Royal Navy numbered one hundred line-of-battle ships, one hundred and fifty frigates, and three hundred of the smaller vessels, and before the war ended it had two hundred and fifty thousand seamen in its service.
The colonies, on the other hand, began the struggle without a single armed vessel afloat. They had merchantmen which they could fit out as privateers to cruise against the British merchantmen, but they had nothing that could stand up against a ship-of-war. Even in guns they were sadly deficient; for though there were scattered here and there in the colonies a few 12-pounders and 9-pounders, they had to depend largely upon sixes and fours, which were not much better than popguns; while of eighteens and twenty-fours they had scarcely any for naval use. Sailors they had, to be sure, all along the coast from New England down; and especially in the northern part there were numbers of bold and hardy men who had followed the sea since they were boys, some in fishing-smacks that made long voyages to the Banks, some in coasters, and some in the large merchant-ships that traded at ports beyond the sea. But of what use are sailors without ships or guns? Besides, as the Continental Navy was slow in forming, many of the best men went into the army, which promised an easier life, or into the privateer service, which held out greater prospects of reward; and when the navy finally got to work, it was very hard to man the vessels.
"BOLD AND HARDY MEN WHO HAD FOLLOWED THE SEA SINCE THEY WERE BOYS."
In spite of all these discouragements, the leaders in the country boldly resolved that they would face Great Britain on the sea as well as on the land. They bought or built their little ships, fitted them out with guns and stores that were partly captured from the British, manned them with crews from the sturdy mariners along the coast, and sent them forth to war upon the enemy as best they might,—by capturing his transports and storeships, by fighting his smaller cruisers when they could be found alone, and sometimes even by daring raids upon his very coasts. Their officers were volunteers from the merchant service; and though hardly any had ever served in ships-of-war, there were some among them whose name and fame have lived to our own day, and will live forever,—Biddle and Manley, Paul Jones and Conyngham, Barry and Barney, and Wickes and Dale,—the first men to show that American naval officers can hold their own against any others in the world.