French and
American soldiers had riotous fights in Boston and a French officer
was killed. The British, meanwhile, were landing at small ports on
the coast, which had been the haunts of privateers, and were not only
burning shipping and stores but were devastating the country with
Loyalist regiments recruited in America. The French told the Americans
that they were expecting too much from the alliance, and the cautious
Washington expressed fear that help from outside would relax effort at
home. Both were right. By the autumn the British had been reinforced
and the French fleet had gone to the West Indies. Truly the mountain
in labor of the French alliance seemed to have brought forth only
a ridiculous mouse. None the less was it to prove, in the end, the
decisive factor in the struggle.

The alliance with France altered the whole character of the war, which
ceased now to be merely a war in North America. France soon gained an
ally in Europe. Bourbon Spain had no thought of helping the colonies in
rebellion against their king, and she viewed their ambitions to extend
westward with jealous concern, since she desired for herself both sides
of the Mississippi. Spain, however, had a grievance against Britain,
for Britain would not yield Gibraltar, that rocky fragment of Spain
commanding the entrance to the Mediterranean which Britain had wrested
from her as she had wrested also Minorca and Florida. So, in April,
1779, Spain joined France in war on Great Britain. France agreed not
only to furnish an army for the invasion of England but never to make
peace until Britain had handed back Gibraltar. The allies planned to
seize and hold the Isle of Wight. England has often been threatened and
yet has been so long free from the tramp of hostile armies that we are
tempted to dismiss lightly such dangers. But in the summer of 1779 the
danger was real. Of warships carrying fifty guns or more France and
Spain together had one hundred and twenty-one, while Britain had
seventy. The British Channel fleet for the defense of home coasts
numbered forty ships of the line while France and Spain together had
sixty-six. Nor had Britain resources in any other quarter upon which she
could readily draw. In the West Indies she had twenty-one ships of the
line while France had twenty-five. The British could not find comfort
in any supposed superiority in the structure of their ships. Then and
later, as Nelson admitted when he was fighting Spain, th