The American Connection

The American Revolution and the Second Anglo-Mysore War were the same war seen from two sides of the world. France entered the American war in 1778; Britain went to war with France, then with Spain, then with the Dutch. In July 1779 a British force took Mahé, the French port on the Malabar coast that lay under the protection of Nawab Haidar Ali Khan — an act he treated as a violation of his territory, and the immediate occasion of the war that followed.

In July 1780 Haidar Ali came down into the Carnatic with an army reported at eighty thousand. On 10 September 1780, at Pollilur, his son Tipu Sultan intercepted and destroyed Colonel Baillie's column before it could join Sir Hector Munro — a defeat British accounts called the severest blow the English had ever sustained in India.

This is not a metaphor about distant events rhyming. It was one exchequer, one navy and one pool of regiments. Every ship of the line sent to the Coromandel coast was a ship not in the Atlantic; every pound raised for Madras was a pound not raised for New York.

The naval bill was the heaviest part of it. From 1782 the French admiral Suffren fought a running series of fleet actions against Sir Edward Hughes in the Bay of Bengal, none of them decisive and all of them expensive; by one estimate about a fifth of Britain's ships of the line were drawn into Asian waters over the course of the war. The Royal Navy could not simultaneously contest the Indian Ocean and keep the Chesapeake open. In October 1781 it did not keep the Chesapeake open.

The financial bill fell on an East India Company that was already fragile. It had needed a government rescue in 1773 — the loan whose tea provisions helped produce the Boston Tea Party — and between 1769 and 1784 its share price fell by more than half. By 1782 the Company was fighting Mysore, the Marathas and the French at once, on credit, in the part of the empire Britain valued most.

That last point is the one usually missed. India was not a sideshow being neglected in favour of America. For the ministers and directors making the decisions, India was the asset worth keeping and the American colonies were increasingly the liability — which is precisely why the pressure Mysore applied was so effective.

The war in the Carnatic became a parliamentary scandal while it was still being fought. In January 1781 Lord North set up two committees of the Commons to examine the Company's conduct in India. On 30 April 1782 the Select Committee, driven by Henry Dundas, reported that Warren Hastings bore responsibility for having brought on the war with Haidar Ali — the beginning of the case against Hastings, and of the argument that the Company could not be left to govern by itself. It ended in Pitt's India Act of 1784.

When peace did come in Europe, it travelled the other way. Word of the preliminary Anglo-French peace reached India in 1783, French support for Mysore was withdrawn, and the British government instructed the Company to settle with Tipu Sultan. The result was the Treaty of Mangalore of 11 March 1784, on terms Hastings thought humiliating.

American interest in Mysore was not retrospective. It ran through the war in real time, at every level from Congress to the tavern.

As early as 1777 the Continental Congress discussed — on advice from the Irish-born French officer Thomas Conway — joining French expeditions to the subcontinent, and it encouraged American privateers to take East India Company shipping. On 10 June 1780 John Adams, writing from Europe to the President of Congress, passed on the movements of Admiral Hughes's squadron and referred to the famous Hyder Aly; the letter was read to Congress that September. On 25 June 1782 James Madison wrote to Edmund Randolph from Philadelphia with the news that Haidar Ali had the better of Eyre Coote in the field. These men were tracking the Carnatic because the terms they could get at Paris moved with it.

Below that, it was popular feeling. After the surrender at Yorktown, a celebration at Trenton raised a toast to the great and heroic Hyder Ali. To a Philadelphia reader in 1781 he was not an exotic figure but a co-belligerent — a distant ruler tying down British armies at the far end of the world while Washington fought them at the near end.

In 1781 Pennsylvania fitted out a merchant vessel as a state warship and named her the Hyder Ally, after him. She carried sixteen light guns and was given to a twenty-three-year-old captain, Joshua Barney, to protect shipping in Delaware Bay. To find a crew, Barney used a recruiting poem written by Philip Freneau — later known as the poet of the American Revolution, and later still Jefferson's editor.

On 8 April 1782 the Hyder Ally met HMS General Monk, a heavier and better-armed Royal Navy sloop. Barney won by a trick: he gave his helmsman orders by the rule of the contrary — every command to be obeyed in reverse — so that the order the British could overhear was the opposite of the manoeuvre he made. The General Monk fouled her rigging on the American ship and was raked at close range until she struck. The action lasted about half an hour.

Freneau then wrote the victory up as a ballad, and it was sung in the new republic — the sort of thing heard in taverns rather than read in drawing rooms. He was explicit about the name: the ship takes it from an Eastern prince, one smit with freedom's sacred flame. One of the most celebrated American naval victories of the Revolution was won by a ship named for the ruler of Mysore, and Americans sang about why.

The connection runs to the very end of the war. On 20 June 1783, off the Coromandel coast near Cuddalore, a British fleet under Hughes fought Suffren's squadron, while ashore a Franco-Mysorean force under Bussy and Sayed Sahib faced the British siege lines.

Peace had already been signed in Europe. The news had not yet reached India. Suffren drove the British fleet off and landed reinforcements; Bussy was planning a fresh assault when a ship arrived with word that the war was over. By 2 July both sides had agreed to stop.

The final action of the American Revolutionary War was therefore fought in India, with the army of Mysore in the line — five months after Haidar Ali's death, under the command of his son.

Not the document. No clause of the Constitution, no speech recorded at the Philadelphia Convention, and no number of The Federalist turns on Mysore, Haidar Ali or Tipu Sultan. The men who had written about the Carnatic in 1782 were in the room in 1787, but they were arguing about representation, taxation and executive power, and India is not in that argument.

What the connection is, is a chain of events, and it holds at every link. Mysore was one of the theatres that made Britain's war global and unaffordable. Britain conceded at Paris in 1783. That concession produced an independent republic, which then had to solve the problem of governing itself, failed to solve it under the Articles of Confederation, and met at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. In that sense — and it is a real sense — the Convention that finished its work on 17 September 1787 sat downstream of a war fought on the Coromandel coast.

The traffic went both ways. The British general who surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1781, Lord Cornwallis, was made Governor-General of India five years later and took half of Mysore in 1792. The young colonel who commanded at Mallavelly in 1799, Arthur Wellesley, would defeat Napoleon sixteen years later. The wars of the late eighteenth century were fought by a small number of people who kept meeting each other on different continents, and Mysore is where several of those careers turn.

American sympathy did not outlast the need for it. Within a generation the United States had consuls at Calcutta and Madras, a trade to protect, and no further use for the idea that Mysore and the republic were fighting the same enemy.