From
War Comes to the Islands: The American Revolutionary War in the Caribbean
by Timothy Neeno
Battle
The enemy fleet was approaching. As dawn rose over the blue waters of the Caribbean, the captain could see the long lines of ships getting closer, their sails billowing. For months the fleet had sought a decisive battle. They had been tracking the enemy for days, pursuing them northward. Now the French had turned. The captain gave the order to beat to colors, and in a moment the deck was a bedlam of activity. Gun ports sprang open. Experienced hands wheeled heavy guns into position, while crewmen set cannonballs and casks of powder in place. Marines scrambled up into the rigging, taking positions high in the swaying masts to pick off officers and men on the opposing ships as they came in range. Men began pouring buckets of sand across decks that would soon be slippery and red with blood. It was 7:00 AM, April 12, 1782. The Battle of the Saintes had begun.
Origins
Five times in the hundred years before the Battle of the Saintes, England and France had gone to war with each other, striving for command of the sea, and control of the trade that rode upon it. They had fought each other by land and sea from the sugar islands of the Caribbean to the distant ports of India and the icy waters of Hudson Bay. This time the British Empire stood divided. The English colonists in America had revolted, defying the British crown. In this war, a new nation would be born, the seeds of revolution would be planted in France and in Latin America, and the government of England itself would be forever transformed. For most of the war, the decisive theater of battle was the not the Thirteen Colonies, but the sunlit waters of the Caribbean. How did a war that began on Lexington Common spread to the shores of the Antilles and beyond? And how did the decisions of two men, gentlemen and admirals, shape the destiny of all the nations involved? These are questions this article will try to answer.
Americans tend to forget that the Thirteen Colonies were but a part of a vast empire that stretched from the gray shores of Newfoundland to the jungles of Nicaragua and Guyana and the spice entrepots of India. The islands of the Caribbean, first revealed to European eyes by Columbus, were a vital part of that empire. The islands of the West Indies were rich in tobacco, coffee, and above all, sugar, and the nation that could garner the greatest share of this trade would have wealth beyond comparison.
The American Revolution grew out of the long struggles between the British and the French that began in 1689. In the Seven Years War (1756-63), known in America as the French and Indian War, Britain inflicted a crushing defeat on the French. The English drove the French entirely off the North American continent. They broke the back of French power in India. Soon a new, British raj would spread across the subcontinent. The French had likewise been vanquished in the Caribbean, keeping only the sugar islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique and St. Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles. Her Spanish Bourbon allies lost Florida to the British, albeit being compensated somewhat in the Peace of Paris by gaining the former French holdings in what would later be known as the Louisiana Territory, west of the Mississippi.
The French almost got to keep Canada in the Treaty of Paris, in exchange for handing over the tiny island of Guadeloupe. It took the British parliament three weeks of earnest debate to decide that they would rather have Canada, with its fur trade. That the British chose to keep Canada was a triumph for the West Indian planters' lobby. The planters had a monopoly on providing Britain and her colonies with sugar. The twenty or so members of Parliament who owed their seats to plantation money, the so-called Creolians, did not want Guadeloupe. Britain already held Jamaica, the most important sugar island. Further acquisitions would have glutted the British domestic market and made sugar prices fall.
For the English colonists in America, the main result of the Seven Years War was that their traditional enemies, the French, were now removed from the scene. The colonists also gained a new level of cohesion and self confidence during the long war. Colonial leaders in the legislature and the militia learned to plan and coordinate large scale operations. They learned to cooperate with their counterparts in other colonies, and with the British military. Under the able leadership of William Pitt the Elder, the British government had accepted the colonial leaders as junior partners in the war, and had gotten results. But despite the final victory, the long war had been nearly ruinous for the British government. By 1763, England had spent £82 million to fight the war, leaving it with a crushing national debt of over £122 million. The British also estimated that it would cost another £300,000 a year to guard all their newly won possessions. George III's advisors came to a simple, and to them, natural conclusion: the war had been fought to protect the British colonies in North America. As the colonies were the prime beneficiaries from the war it was only natural that they should pay their fair share of the tax burden to pay off the war debt. But from the time they were established in the early 17th century the colonies had for the most part governed themselves. Colonists elected their own colonial legislatures, staffed the militia, and checked the power of royal governors by controlling the purse strings. Now, when the British began instituting new taxes, on sugar, on molasses, on printed materials, tea, etc., the colonial leadership saw it as an assault on their traditional autonomy.
Almost as bad, from the colonist's point of view, the British began enforcing the mercantilist Navigation Acts. The Navigation Acts had been on the books since the Dutch Wars of the 1650s. They required the colonies to trade solely with the mother country and other British dependencies. But for years they had been only sporadically enforced, and the New England colonies in particular did a thriving trade with the French, Dutch and Spanish colonies in the West Indies. Now the British began to enforce the rules with vigor.
Here we see just how closely tied together the economies of the American and West Indian colonies were. Most of the smuggling was in three commodities: molasses, rum, and sugar. For years the French subsidized the slave trade with their colonies in the West Indies. This allowed the French sugar plantation owners to undercut British prices. If the Americans were free to do so they would naturally buy from the French. Molasses was used in distilling rum, which was a huge business in Boston, Newport, Philadelphia and elsewhere. British sugar planters couldn't provide enough molasses to keep the distilleries running. Rhode Island distillers alone had to smuggle in two thirds of their molasses from French or Spanish sources. To cap it off, for years the French domestic brandy producers had used their political influence at the French court to keep distillers from importing rum into France. So French planters responded logically – they dumped their molasses on the market at a hefty markdown, making it even more attractive to American buyers. In short, the entire situation was a government regulated nightmare. It is no coincidence that Adam Smith came out with The Wealth of Nations , his watershed work advocating an end to these kinds of government monopolies, in 1776.
But this didn't help the American colonists. The colonists paid for products brought over from Britain by selling their own goods. The colonists had long been net exporters to England. But from around 1755 on, English manufactures tipped the balance of trade in Britain's favor. Distilling allowed the American colonies to restore the balance of trade somewhat in their favor, by giving Americans a product they could sell to buy the goods they needed from England. Now British mercantile laws were strangling a significant portion of the colonial economy. It is not a coincidence that John Hancock and the other most vocal leaders of the Sons of Liberty were smugglers.
The British now strove to impose their writ on the colonies, and stationed permanent garrisons there to make this happen. The hitherto autonomous colonials were outraged, and responded with riots and boycotts. In April of 1775 this escalated into armed resistance. The rebels, who proudly named themselves Patriots, were determined, organized, and fairly well led. British control collapsed with remarkable speed once the fighting began, with the main British garrison, in Boston, retreating to Canada by sea in March of 1776. Once it came to a fight rebel sentiment hardened. In July of 1776 the rebel colonists confirmed their defiance of the crown, proclaiming their independence from Britain as the United States of America.
Clandestine Arms Supplies – 18th Century Style
Even before they made a final break with the British crown, the rebels were acutely aware of their need for arms and outside supplies, especially one item: gunpowder. For all the rustic images of self-sufficient yeoman farmers standing up to the redcoats, the Continental Army was essentially a modern army in that it could not take the field without a steady stream of supplies. Gunpowder, cannon, muskets, bayonets, all require a manufacturing base, albeit by our standards a rudimentary one. As early as late 1774, before open fighting broke out, agents of the Sons of Liberty were quietly buying gunpowder in Amsterdam, and shipping it to New England via the Dutch West Indies.
Like the Irish rebels in roughly that same period, the Americans soon found themselves looking to Britain's traditional enemies, France and Spain, for money and arms. The French, still stinging from their defeat in the Seven Years War, were only too happy to oblige. In what we would today call a covert operation, the French foreign minister, the Comte d'Vergennes, in June of 1776 established a dummy corporation, Roderique Hortalez et Cie., to funnel arms clandestinely to the rebels. By early 1781 the French had provided the rebels with over 4.5 million livres worth of supplies and another 846,000 livres in subsidies through Hortalez & Company. In the first months of 1777 alone the Hortalez company sent out eight ships via Martinique, with 200 brass cannon, 300 flintlock muskets, 100 tons of gunpowder, 3000 tents, ammunition, and clothing for 30,000 men. It wasn't embattled farmers the British were facing, it was embattled farmers with covert arms shipments.
The Royal Navy had command of the seas, and harassed the rebels with a blockade of the American coast, but they could not be everywhere at once. Soon a thriving black market trade arose, centered on French Martinque and the Dutch island of Saint Eustatius, commonly referred to by merchants and seamen of the day as Statia. Statia was a volcanic rock, little over seven miles square, situated some 170 miles east and south of Puerto Rico. Since the Dutch were officially neutral, it was the perfect transfer point for clandestine arms supplies to the rebels. It was even more convenient in that ships from Statia could sail up the Atlantic coast from the Bahamas on the Gulf Stream, to Charleston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Ships would sail from Holland, ostensibly for Africa, and then once well out to sea, would set a course for Statia, crammed with arms. On Statia, gunpowder sold for a 120% profit. One vessel alone in 1776 carried 49,000 pounds of gunpowder for the rebels. At its peak nearly 3,200 ships arrived in Statia in just 13 months. One Statia merchant, Isaac van Dam, worked as an agent for the American rebels. In just one transaction he shipped 4,000 pounds of gunpowder to the Patriots in North Carolina, then sent £2,000 to contacts in France to buy more. In turn the Dutch bought American tobacco, 12,000 hogsheads in 1779 alone, indigo, and other products. By 1780 Statia was a runaway boomtown of 20,000 people.
The Spanish also smuggled their share of arms to the rebels, via New Orleans and up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to what is now Pittsburgh. However the Spanish were noticeably less friendly toward the rebels than the French or the Dutch. The Spanish leadership in Madrid rightly saw the American Revolution as a civil war within the British Empire. Spain was a declining power. The more they could get the English to kill each other, the easier it would be to hold onto their own possessions. It wasn't until 1780, after they had joined the war on the same side as the Americans that the Spanish gave in to economic necessity; opening up direct trade between their own West Indian colonies and the US. It made sense. Baltimore merchants could sell flour in Havana for nine times the cost, and buy sugar and arms in exchange. By 1782 American merchant ships totaling 6,800 tons were calling at Havana. That the Spanish long resisted what was clearly logical shows how little the government in Madrid trusted the Americans.
Some of the smuggling even went on through the British colonies in the West Indies. If the American colonists were tied into the West Indian economy the West Indian planters needed American products. Sugar and molasses from Jamaica and the Lesser Antilles were shipped to Boston, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. In turn the Americans sold lumber, flour and salted fish, fruits and vegetables, cattle, horses, casks and barrels and more to the West Indian colonies. The Caribbean colonists had many of the same grievances with the government in London as did their American brethren. As in North America each colony had it its own legislature made up of often disgruntled local property owners. The Caribbean planters also wanted to keep control of taxation and local affairs. There were protests and riots against the Stamp Act on Barbados and St. Kitt's in the Lesser Antilles as well as in Boston and Philadelphia. The Jamaican Assembly even offered in December of 1774 to mediate between the rebels and the Crown. Sympathy for the rebels was most to be seen in the tiny Leeward and Windward Islands on the eastern edge of the Caribbean, which were heavily dependent on supplies of food from the New England and Middle Colonies.
But unlike the Thirteen Colonies, the British West Indian colonies were truly dependent upon the mother country and especially on the Royal Navy. Being islands, the Caribbean colonies were very vulnerable to seaborne invasion by the French, the Spanish, or the Dutch. There was also another danger, that was in the minds of every White settler in the islands, whether he gave voice to it or not, and that was the huge number of African slaves brought over to toil in the cane fields. Black slaves were everywhere - in households, working as skilled craftsmen, and doing the heavy day-to-day work under the broiling tropical sun. So while some colonists in the Caribbean colonies were sympathetic to the rebels, in the end the British Caribbean colonies remained steadfastly loyal to the mother country, barring some smuggling, throughout the war.
The war soon brought hardship and want to the Caribbean colonies. As early as January of 1775 Creolian business interests met in London and petitioned Parliament to reach an accord with the Americans. Dependent on supplies of grain and salted fish for food, the tiny Leeward Island colonies in particular were hard hit. By 1776 there was famine on St. Kitts. In 1778 the population of Antigua was 20,000. Just three years later, only 4,000 people were left. Even on relatively large and well established Barbados, further down in the Windward Islands, the price of flour doubled between 1775 and 1776. By 1778 the slaves on Barbados were starving. The presence of so many fleets and garrisons, even if there to protect the islands, often made the supply situation worse, since commanders would sweep in and buy up whatever stocks of food they could find, even at inflated prices.
As food stocks dwindled, the slaves became more restive, and the planters became more fearful. In 1776, word that a regiment of the British garrison on Jamaica would be withdrawn to fight the rebels in New York led to an open slave rebellion. On St. Kitts in that same year the slaves launched a campaign of systematic arson, destroying the port city of Basseterre. In the rugged interior of Jamaica and on the still half wild islands of St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago, bands of maroons, escaped slaves living in the hills, raided the plantations. These warlike bands had their own villages, laws, and chieftains. Some, on Jamaica, retained their independence all the way through until the abolition of slavery in the 1830s.