The Side of Canada

General Burgoyne brought it himself, on the last day of February, and stood by the fire while Dartmouth read it, which very few men would have done and nobody else would have done so well.

It was in his own hand, dated at the foot from his house in Hertford Street, and it was headed Thoughts for Conducting the War from the Side of Canada; and Dartmouth saw within a page that it was very good. It was clear, which most of the papers that came across his desk were not, and it was short, which almost none of them were, and it knew what it wanted. It wanted an army to come down from Canada in the summer by the lakes, by Crown Point and Ticonderoga and Lake George, to Albany, and to hold the line of the Hudson from the St Lawrence to New York, so that New England was cut off from every colony to the south of it. It wanted another, smaller force to go round by Lake Ontario and Oswego and come down the Mohawk River to meet the first. And it said what it would need: an operating army that ought not to consist of less than eight thousand regulars, rank and file; artillery; a corps of watermen; two thousand Canadians, including hatchet-men and other workmen; and one thousand or more savages.

Dartmouth read that line twice.

“You will want to know about the Indians,” said Burgoyne, from the fire.

“I was about to ask.”

“They must be managed, my lord. They can be managed. I have seen it done.” Burgoyne turned from the fire, handsome, fifty-five, with the fine voice that carried his comedy at Drury Lane. “Firmness, and presents, and a speech. They like a speech. They must be told plainly what is permitted and what is not. I mean it, my lord. And they must be there. A thousand of them in the woods on the army’s flanks are worth three thousand men on the road.”

“They are not to be used against the inhabitants.”

“Against the inhabitants, never. Against the inhabitants in arms, which is a different thing, they will be very useful indeed.”

Knox, at the side table, wrote something down. William Knox had been under-secretary in the American department since before Dartmouth came into it, an Irishman with a good pen and the hardest opinions in the building, who had proved in a pamphlet eight years ago that the colonies had no rights that Parliament had not given them, and had never since seen any reason to reconsider it. He approved of the paper. Dartmouth could see that from the back of his head.

When Burgoyne had gone, he read it again from the beginning, slowly, as he read everything that mattered, with Knox standing.

“Well,” he said at the end. “It is a plan.”

“It is the first we have had, my lord, if I may say so.”

Boston had been abandoned. Howe won at New York, spread his posts across the Jerseys and lost nine hundred Hessians at Trenton. Carleton beat the Congress’s fleet on Lake Champlain, then returned to Canada. Burgoyne criticised that withdrawal on his first visit to the office. Now he had brought a plan to replace it.

Dartmouth put the paper down and looked at it for some time.

He had found that he had no gift for a gentle war and no wish for one; a war fought gently was a war fought for ever. Nineteen months had persuaded him that the men in Philadelphia who wanted settlement would never be strong enough while the King’s army lost Trenton. The six colonies that refused independence lay south of the Hudson. Cut off New England and occupy Philadelphia, and those men must treat. Then grievances could be heard, as the King had promised. Dartmouth believed the promise even if the King had not. He looked again at Burgoyne’s estimate of the troops required.

It was not a cruel argument. He had examined it very carefully for cruelty and had not found any. It was only that it came out, at the end of all the examining, at one thousand or more savages.

---

The King had it by the Monday and sent it back the same day, with a paper of his own.

Queen’s House. March 3. 1777. 10 m. past 1 p.m. Lord Dartmouth will find my remarks enclosed, and may come at six. G.R.

The remarks were two sides of a sheet in the small fast hand, and they were exactly what Dartmouth had expected and better than he had hoped: practical, particular, and entirely without doubt. I should think not above 7,000 effectives can be spared over Lake Champlain, for it would be highly imprudent to run any risk in Canada. As Sir William Howe does not think of acting from Rhode Island into Massachusetts, the force from Canada must join him at Albany. The diversion on the Mohawk River ought, at least, to be strengthened by the addition of 400 Hanover Chasseurs. Burgoyne certainly greatly undervalues the German recruits. There was a passage in Burgoyne’s paper about bringing the army round to New York by sea if the lakes could not be forced, and the King had written against it only: I greatly dislike that idea.

And in the middle of the sheet, by itself: Indians must be employed.

The King received him in the room at the Queen’s House where he did his papers, standing, with a fire, and the remarks on the table between them, and he came to the point before Dartmouth had finished his bow.

“You have the Indians on your mind, my lord. I can see it.”

“I have, sir.”

“So have I. I have them on my mind because if we do not employ them the rebels will. They have tried. They have their missionaries among the Oneidas now, praying for the Congress, and if the Six Nations are not for us they will be against us, or they will sit in their castles and sell to whoever pays.” The King picked up his own paper and put it down again. “I have written that the measure must be avowed. I mean that. If they are employed, they are employed by my orders, and it is to be said so. I will not have it done and then denied, as if we were ashamed of our allies. We are not ashamed of them.”

“And restrained, sir.”

“By all means restrained. Write what you think fit about it. Burgoyne is to make them a speech.” The King looked at him with his pale, steady eyes. “You saw the Mohawk last spring. The one Warwick had painted.”

“Joseph Brant, sir. Yes.”

“I asked him whether the Six Nations were steady, and he said they were. He looked like a man who would know.” The King nodded, as though the matter had been considered from every side and closed. “Burgoyne is to command. I settled that with Lord North before Christmas. Carleton is a good officer, but he is too cold, and he went back across the lake. He is to keep Canada, which he does very well.”

“There is a party that would recall him, sir.”

“I know there is. Lord George was with me on Wednesday, and told me so for half an hour.” The King did not smile, but his mouth moved. “There is rancour there, my lord. I am aware of it. I find Lord George very useful, because he says to my face what half my Cabinet says behind my back, and I do not have to wonder what anybody is thinking. But I do not recall my generals to oblige him. Is there anything else?”

There was nothing else. Dartmouth bowed and went out, past a footman, down a cold stair, and found when he reached the hall that he was holding the King’s remarks in his hand, folded small, as though he had been afraid somebody would read them.

---

He met Lord George Germain at the levee on the Wednesday.

He would have avoided it, if it could have been avoided. It could not. Germain stood where he always stood at St James’s, near the door to the King’s closet, where everybody who went in must pass him: a tall heavy man of sixty-one with a long face and lidded eyes, who had been found by a court-martial unfit to serve His Majesty in any military capacity whatever, and had borne the sentence for seventeen years with such patience and such contempt that it now seemed to sit on him like a decoration. He had no office. He wanted none, he said, and very likely it was true; he had found a better one, which was to be right in the Commons once a week about everything the ministry did wrong, and to be listened to by the King.

“My lord.” Germain bowed exactly as low as was due and not an inch lower. “I am told you have a general who wishes to win.”

“I have several, Lord George. I am told so by each of them.”

“And Indians.” Germain said it as a man mentions a horse he had recommended and been refused, and now saw going well under another rider. “I congratulate you. I have been saying it for two years.”

“You have.”

“You will find, when it is done, that you have proclaimed them rebels after all,” said Germain, quite pleasantly. “Only with hatchets, instead of Mr Thurlow. It comes to the same thing in the end, you know. It merely takes longer to read.” He bowed again, and turned away to a bishop, and Dartmouth went in to the King and afterwards could not remember a word that had been said in the closet.

It was not true. He told himself so in the carriage, and again at his desk. A proclamation said that every man in the colonies who had borne arms was in open and avowed rebellion, and made him a man to be hanged. An Indian on the flank of an army said nothing at all about anybody’s allegiance. They were different things. They were not the same thing taking longer to read.

He found, when he looked down, that he had written the word hatchet on the blotter, and he tore the sheet off and put it on the fire.

---

The letter to Carleton went on the twenty-sixth of March.

Knox’s draft allotted Burgoyne seven thousand one hundred and seventy-three men for Albany, St Leger six hundred and seventy-five for the Mohawk diversion, and Carleton three thousand seven hundred and seventy for Canada. Canadians and Indians could supplement the expeditions. At Albany Burgoyne would place himself under Howe. Dartmouth softened the criticism of Carleton without removing it. He struck out rebel and put the forces in arms, as he had for nineteen months, because no rebellion had been proclaimed and he would not have one proclaimed by a clerk.

Then he took a fresh sheet and wrote a paragraph of his own.

It said that His Majesty, in permitting the employment of the Indian nations in the present service, expected and required that they be kept under the strictest command of the officers set over them; that they be restrained, by every means in the general’s power, from violence to the persons and property of the inhabitants; and that the aged, women, children and prisoners be held sacred, as His Majesty’s subjects, whatever the condition of the country in which they were found.

He read it over and was satisfied with it, and then sat for a while with his hand on it, as he had once sat with his hand beside a petition.

In July 1775 he had written Guy Johnson himself: It is therefore His Majesty’s pleasure, that you do lose no time in taking such steps as may induce them to take up the hatchet against his Majesty’s rebellious subjects in America. His signature was on it. For nineteen months he had been correcting that word in other men’s letters.

A Mohawk had stood in this office in a silver gorget and corrected his own interpreter, the small spots, not pieces, and had asked whether the people who held his land at Canajoharie were the King’s subjects; and Dartmouth had said that they were, because there was nothing else that was true. This summer Brant would be on the Mohawk River with St Leger against those same subjects. The King’s promise to him was that the land would be redressed when the troubles ended, and the sooner they ended the sooner it would be kept. That was sound, and Dartmouth did not like it any better for being sound.

He signed the letter. Then he called in Mr D’Oyly, the other under-secretary, who had come into the office when Pownall went to the Excise in the summer, and who was Sir William Howe’s friend and wrote to him privately by every packet; and he told him to send Sir William a copy of the whole of it, so that he should know what was intended from the side of Canada.

Burgoyne sailed on the Apollo with Le Maitre carrying the orders. A report from Brooks’s said he had wagered Fox a pony that he would return victorious by Christmas. Dartmouth distrusted gaming and most accounts of it. He hoped the wager was won.

---

Sir William Howe’s letter came on the eighth of May.

It was dated the second of April, from New York, and it was marked secret, and it said in Howe’s plain, unhurried way that he proposed to invade Pennsylvania by sea. He would take the greater part of his army round by water and land it somewhere south of Philadelphia, and take the city, and fight Mr Washington where he could find him. He would leave a force at New York, but not one that could do much. His hopes, he wrote, of ending the war that year were gone.

Dartmouth read it standing at the window, with D’Oyly and Knox in the room. Then he read it again sitting down.

“He has had the copy,” said D’Oyly. “Of General Burgoyne’s orders. I sent it by the March packet. He will have had it by now, or within the week.”

“He did not have it when he wrote this.”

“No, my lord.”

“Then he has decided to go to Philadelphia without knowing that Burgoyne is coming to Albany to put himself under his command.”

“He knew it was intended, my lord. Everybody did. He will make his arrangements.”

Knox said nothing for a moment, which was rare. Then he said, “Sir William might be ordered to the Hudson, my lord. It would reach him in July.”

He kept Howe’s letter for ten days, taking it to Cabinet, to the Queen’s House and home. Knox’s proposed order would be ready as soon as he authorised it.

An order would reach Howe in July, when he was already at sea or in Pennsylvania, and turn a campaign inside out. Generals given contrary orders across three thousand miles of water obeyed them late and badly, and blamed the minister. And Dartmouth held to a principle, that the man on the spot knew what the man at Whitehall could not. Philadelphia was the Congress’s own town, among the colonies that had voted against independence; with the King’s army there, the men who had voted against Mr Adams would have its protection at their doors. It was the political object of the whole war. He had said so himself a dozen times.

And Burgoyne would be at Albany by then, or near it, with seven thousand men and the lakes behind him, and Howe would be finished in Pennsylvania, and there would be time.

He put it to the King on the Friday. The King read Howe’s letter through twice, and said that Sir William knew his business, and that he did not like it, and that he approved it.

---

He wrote the letter himself, on the Sunday, at the house in St James’s Square, after morning service.

He did not, as a rule, write letters on the Sabbath, and he did not write this one easily. But the bag for the New York packet closed on the Monday morning, and if this did not go by it, it would wait a month; and he thought that the Sabbath had been made for man, as he had been taught, and that a month was a long time in a war. So he sat at the table in the library with the window open on to the square, where a boy was walking a dog round the railings, and wrote it out in his own hand, and did not give it to a clerk.

It was not long. He told Sir William that his letter of the second of April had been laid before the King. He told him that the King approved his design. And then he wrote the sentence that he had carried about with him for ten days, and found that it came out almost exactly as he had carried it.

As you must from your situation and military skill be a competent judge of the propriety of every plan, His Majesty does not hesitate to approve the alterations which you propose, trusting however that whatever you may meditate, it will be executed in time for you to co-operate with the army ordered to proceed from Canada and put itself under your command.

He read it over. It was not an order. He had decided that it would not be an order, and it was not. It was a trust, set down in writing by a man who had considered every alternative and found them worse, and it was signed with his name.

He sanded it, and folded it, and sealed it, and sent it down to Whitehall by his own servant for the bag. Then he sat on in the library for some time, with the window open, and the boy and the dog gone.