Observations on the Disturbances in the Madras Army in 1809

POSTSCRIPT.

After I had written these observations on the late disturbances at Madras, I perused a very able and ingenious article in the ninth number of the Quarterly Review, upon that subject. The first part of that article explains the progress of the violent proceedings of the Company's officers engaged in those disturbances, and enters into very full discussions to prove and establish the fact of their guilt. In almost all this part my sentiments differ little from those of the reviewer. I do not, however, agree with the opinions he has stated on the case of Lieutenant-Colonel Munro. He conceives, that if Government had allowed that officer to have been tried by a court martial, it would have been a base desertion, and a sacrifice of a public servant. I trust I have shown, that although Government had a full legal right to act as they did, a contrary conduct might have been adopted without any such desertion or sacrifice, and with every prospect of advantage to the public interests.

The reviewer dwells throughout the article upon the crude and violent Memorial to Lord Minto, and assumes, with great advantage to his argument, that it may be taken as a fair specimen of the sentiments of all the discontented officers at Madras. He is probably ignorant of the comparatively small number of those officers who approved of this intemperate production. He cannot, I think, be aware, that many of those whom he has blended in his general censure, merely because they were blended in the undistinguishing proscription of the Government of Fort St. George, never saw that document till it was published.

I have, in my observations on the disturbances at Madras, said little on the question of the suspension of Colonel Capper and Major Boles; but I conceive all that the reviewer has said upon that subject will be deemed by those who consider it attentively, as more ingenious than solid. The whole of that discussion would appear to resolve itself into a very short question. The act of disobedience to his superior, in a military officer or soldier, can alone be justified in a case where the civil law would punish his obedience. A great deal must of course be decided by the circumstances of the moment. "To your tents, O Israel!" would, in the present state of Great Britain, be an unobjectionable text. It certainly was not so in the reign of Charles the First. But we have only to suppose Major Boles on his trial before a civil court, for publishing, or aiding in the publication, of a seditious libel. Among the circumstances to be considered in such a case, that prompt and undeliberate obedience which it is the habit of an officer to give to the orders of his superiors, would assuredly be one of the most prominent; and an English jury would, I imagine, be slow in condemning an officer situated as Major Boles was. They would probably think, that the great and vital principle of prompt obedience, on which the existence of that armed force which guarded the civil community depended, was of too important and sacred a nature to have its plain meaning frittered away by casuists and lawyers. These reflections would certainly lead plain men to decide, that we ought not to refine too much upon such delicate points, and that no military order should be disobeyed, the illegality of which was not of so obvious a nature as to be clear to the most common understanding. But, after all, the justice or injustice of this act of authority is but a small part of a very large question. The wisdom and policy of the measure, (which is the point on which the character of the Government of Fort St. George is chiefly concerned,) appear, however, to be given up even by those who are the warm advocates of many other parts of that system which was pursued.

The writer of the review traces what he deems an exact similarity of character between Sir George Barlow's measures and those adopted by Lord Clive, in 1766, to quell a sedition among the officers of the Bengal army; and infers, from a general and sweeping conclusion, that the reputation of these two Governors must stand or fall by the same arguments. To those who are satisfied with the superficial and general facts,—that both Lord Clive and Sir George Barlow exercised power in India, that there were discontents and combinations among a part of the European officers of the native troops during their respective administrations, which terminated, on both occasions, in submission to authority,—the observations made in the Quarterly Review on this part of the subject will be satisfactory, and conclusive: but to such as examine the particulars of these two important events, and trace to its true cause the defection of the officers of the Bengal army in 1766, and then observe the open, military, and manly conduct of Lord Clive, there will appear much more grounds for a contrast than a comparison. The conduct of the officers of the Bengal army, their limited number, and the actual constitution of the native army[34] at that period of our dominion in India, make a still wider difference in all those considerations, that render the late measures of the Government of Madras, as they affect the personal attachment and fidelity of the sepoys to their European officers, dangerous to our future security. But supposing the difference in this respect did not exist, Lord Clive, when actually engaged in war, might have been compelled, by the conduct of officers, which the situation of affairs rendered doubly disgraceful, to adopt a measure that was most deeply injurious to those principles upon which our empire is founded. We have escaped this danger; but is that any reason for incurring a similar hazard? It has never been stated that the danger from weakening the respect and attachment of the sepoy for his officer was inevitable, and must be destructive to our power within a specific period. Its alarming tendency has been shown: and it is this which must be disproved, and the absolute necessity of having had resort to it established, before the course pursued in this instance by the Government of Fort St. George can be efficiently defended.

The reviewer appears resolved to deny every fact that can even palliate the guilt of the officers of the Madras army. He terms their desire to submit to Lord Minto a difference in point of form, "a saving to their pride, not to their consciences;" and he is amused with the assertion, that the love of their country had a decided operation in defeating their guilty proceedings. The man who reasons thus coolly upon such events, has probably never witnessed a scene at all resembling that of which he treats; or he would have discovered, that when passion seizes that ground which reason has abandoned, men act more under the influence of feelings than forms; and with minds deluded, but not debased, they make a vain attempt to reconcile the most opposite principles of conduct, and fall, self-subdued, by those virtues which are implanted too deeply in their hearts to be eradicated by the sudden action, however violent, of a guilty but transient impulse.

The able writer in the review conceives that he has at once discovered the chief cause of the late disturbances, and the best apology for the Company's officers concerned in them, in the constitution of the Company's service, and the habits of those that belong to it. The atmosphere they imbibe is calculated, in his opinion, to relax all just ideas of subordination; and they are, he infers, predisposed, from such causes, to an opposition to the authority placed over them. Some disposition to resistance may no doubt be found in every community, civil as well as military, that ever existed; and to the existence of this universal and natural feeling every excellence of human government may be traced. But let us suppose that this disposition had, from local circumstances and other causes, attained such a degree among the Company's officers in India, as to threaten the public tranquillity; what does this prove? It is, if true to the extent stated in the review, not an excuse for those who produced that crisis which has been described; but an eulogium, and a very high one, upon the wisdom and vigour of those rulers of our Indian possessions, who have not only repressed this disposition to opposition, but have rendered those to whom it is ascribed the instruments of the advancement of the interests and glory of their country: and a reflecting man would probably find much more to admire, than condemn, even in that case[35] which is triumphantly brought forward to prove this assertion. When events led a wise and moderate Governor-General[36], and an able and politic Indian minister[37], to prefer a course which certainly made many and important sacrifices of ordinary maxims of rule, but which led to a quiet and just settlement of all complaints; to the pursuit of a severe, inflexible system, which (anxious only for its own character) defends a principle at the hazard of a state: most persons, when they contemplated the great end, would at least pardon the means by which it was obtained, and perhaps see more of wisdom and generosity, than of "short-sightedness and absurdity," in the measures of those who exercised their powers with such temper, forbearance, and indulgence, upon that memorable occasion. Those who endeavour to heap obloquy upon their names, in order to exalt a contrary course of proceeding, will find no support to their arguments from the conduct of the officers of the Bengal army subsequent to that occurrence: that has been exactly the reverse of what it ought to have been, agreeable to the conclusions of the writer of the review; and the great progress made in the discipline of that army, their strict adherence to every principle of order and subordination, (particularly on the occasion of the late agitations at Madras,) affords a most convincing proof of the wide difference between a spirit of discontent carried even to the extreme of opposition to authority, among a body of officers, (who, however lost to reason and duty for the moment, must soon return, instructed by their deviation, to that order on which their condition depends,) and a mutiny of common soldiers. Men solely educated in civil life are too apt to confound this great distinction: and to that ignorance of the different shades of military feeling which varies from the proud but rational submission of a cultivated mind, to the mere habit of mechanical obedience in one of a more vulgar mould, a great part of the evils which occurred at Madras may be ascribed.

It has always been discovered, on a near view of human affairs, that smaller causes than the self-importance of man is willing to believe, produce the greatest changes in society. The difference between a general view of a subject, and a minute observation of all its parts, is immense: and to this difference, more than to any other cause, I am disposed to ascribe the opposite opinions I entertain, on many points of this large question, from the able writer of the review. He has, with a full sense of the advantage, dwelt upon those general principles that regulated the conduct of Sir George Barlow; and has enlarged, with great force and effect, upon their importance to good order and government. While he maintains this ground he is unassailable; and he seldom quits it: but if truth be the object of our search, we must go deeper. There perhaps never was an administration which exhibited, during the period of which we treat, so extraordinary a mixture of good principles, and a bad application of them; of an inflexible regard to form, and a total neglect of feeling, as that of the Governor of Fort St. George. It is from this reason, that every man of impartiality, who peruses a general statement of the late transactions at Madras, will give Sir George Barlow the highest praise: but if he looks further, and examines with a minute attention, not only his measures, but the season and mode of their execution; his admiration will infallibly diminish. He will be compelled (though perhaps reluctantly,) to abandon some abstract ideas regarding the beauty of general principles, which he may have long and fondly cherished, and to confess the force of that observation which experience taught Mr. Burke to make, upon all such general questions—"I have lost," said that great orator and statesman, "all confidence in your swaggering majors, having always found that the truth lurked in the little minor of circumstances."

In the conclusion of the article of the review the writer animadverts on the description given by Mr. Petrie of the cold and repulsive manners of Sir George Barlow; and in observing upon this "deficiency in the charm of demeanour," though he admits it must subtract from the influence of a statesman, he makes an allusive comparison (on the ground of common defects) between his character and that of some of the greatest names in history[38], who, notwithstanding their defective manners, have, by the force of their superior genius, been able to command the support of mankind: and, to give more effect to this allusion, the reviewer quotes a public dispatch from Lord Minto, in which that nobleman ascribes the great unpopularity of Sir George Barlow to "a pure and inflexible discharge of ungrateful, but sacred and indispensable duties." Self-defence has alone compelled me to discuss the acts of Sir George Barlow. On his character my opinion was long ago formed. It will be seen, that at the commencement of these disturbances I confidentially stated that opinion[39]. I then represented him as a man of excellent talent, of unsullied integrity, of indefatigable industry, and distinguished by long and meritorious services to the Company. I still retain that opinion; and no injustice of which he may be guilty towards me, shall ever prevent me from expressing it. I then foresaw that the defects of his character would, in his situation, probably produce very pernicious consequences. My opinion has been confirmed by the event. Experience seems to me to have most fully proved, that the very qualities which eminently fit a man for subordinate situations, may unfit him for the supreme; and that the rules which are necessary to the good order of many of the inferior departments, may, in their undistinguishing application, prove destructive in the general administration of a great state.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Cicero's Letters to his Friends, Vol. I. p. 194. Octavo. London, 1753.

[3] As if an unqualified refusal to forward these Memorials was not adequate to produce this dangerous effect, the names of all the officers who had signed the first Memorial were placed on a proscribed list, and deemed ineligible to any promotion in commands or staff situations. One fact will show the impression that this act made upon the most moderate. I wrote to Colonel Aldwell Taylor, an officer of high rank and respectability, expressing my earnest desire to see him placed in a command in which I thought his principles and character would be useful to Government. In his answer, which is dated the 29th of July, he details the causes of his being in a situation of actual retirement. When he had applied for a command to which his services gave him a right to aspire, he observes, that he was informed of the crime by which he had not only forfeited all hope of that particular station, but also (he adds), "that for having affixed my signature to a respectful address to my superiors and employers, I was placed at the head of a list of names comprising nearly two thirds of the army, and thereby marked by the extreme displeasure of Government, and thence deprived of every future hope of situations of honour and emolument. Whilst smarting under these most serious injuries, I felt it impossible to resume the command of Masulipatam, and made application to retire." This case is more marked than others of the same kind, because there can be little, if any doubt, the violent mutiny that took place at Masulipatam would never have occurred, if Colonel Taylor had remained in command of that garrison. The nature of this unavowed punishment (for though there is, I imagine, no doubt such a resolution was passed by Government, it was never published in any order,) is very peculiar; but it is very characteristic of the system of measures pursued. It was teasing and aggravating in its operation, without efficiency in its end.

[4] Vide the preceding note.

[5] Vide Mr. Pigott's Opinion, printed with the Memorial of Major Boles.

[6] This crude and violent address was never transmitted to the Governor General. The crime laid to the charge of the officers here mentioned, was being implicated in framing it and in promoting its circulation.

[7] There may be some rare exceptions to this rule, which apply to secret confederacies against a state, where the object is to deprive an individual of power, more than to punish as an example. This consideration could, on the 1st of May, have hardly applied even as a fair pretext to any one individual of the many that were punished.

[8] In this officer's case there was no impropriety or disrespect in the letter, that could have aggravated the offence; and the motive which made him state what he had done, was assuredly honourable.

[9] It is, of course, meant the most moderate among those who were at all discontented.

[10] I heard this plan mentioned by an officer high on the staff, the day before I sailed for Masulipatam, and protested against its principle, as directly contrary to that on which I had been desired to act, and indeed to every effort of conciliation. The Governor, to whom I immediately stated this fact, appeared to me to accord in my opinion; but, a few days after my departure, he was induced to adopt this measure, and to provoke disobedience to authority.

[11] The following are the sentiments of Colonel Close upon this subject, as expressed in his letter to Major Barclay under date the 24th of July, 1809, and published in the correspondence laid before the House of Commons:

"It is generally admitted as a sound maxim, not to hazard the giving of an order unless there be a fair ground of presumption that it will be obeyed. From the apparent circumstances of the time, the orders sent to Masulipatam were perhaps fairly hazarded; but, after those orders had been disobeyed, to send orders to Hyderabad for the march of a battalion, might have been regarded as a measure in some degree exceptionable. The officers, who have opposed the orders sent for the purpose, are now more forcibly tied together than before. The extreme of their proceedings is increased, and their danger and fear seriously heightened. Their impulse to act is become more violent; and accordingly the loss to the public cause must be in proportion to all these augmentations. But this is not all. If the measure of moving the battalion was meant to be useful, in having an experimental effect, Hyderabad was assuredly the very place at which the experiment should not have been made; confusion could not be so hurtful any where else."

Those who know the delicacy of this superior man will judge, from this extract, what must have been the strength of his feelings upon the subject.

[12] The trial of Lieutenant-Colonel Innes, and the removal from the general staff of some officers obnoxious to the malecontents, were among the demands in this paper.

[13] Lord Minto has, in his letter to the secret committee, noticed this feeling, as forming a strong and operative principle of action in the minds of these infatuated men.

[14] Vide Appendix.

[15] The names of the principal of these officers, Colonel Clarke, Colonel Rumley, Colonel Floyer, Major Russel, and Captain Noble, will be received by all parties as full evidence of the truth of this assertion.

[16] July, 1809.

[17] Emissaries of a similar character were at and before this period sent to all the native corps.

[18] Government could not have supposed men very deep in guilt, upon whose solemn assurance that they would fulfil the obligation of their commissions such reliance was to be placed. It was evident, that had they cherished any serious designs against their country, or any of its constituted authorities, they would not have hazarded the failure of their schemes by stickling at the little additional guilt that would have attended the breach of any test so forced upon their acceptance; they would have signed, and watched the opportunity of accomplishing their plans. But of this there was no apprehension: they were acknowledged, at the moment this pledge was presented, to be men of honour, and alive to all the obligations that word implies. And can it be argued that men, with such feelings, were not to be fixed in their duty, or reclaimed to it, by other means than such as almost imposed opposition as a point of honour, as by it only they could avoid the reproach of having been trepanned, alarmed, and coerced into a promise to perform that duty which they owed to the state they served.

[19] Captain Moodie, the commanding officer, and almost all the officers of the first battalion of the 6th regiment, were among this number, though that corps had, up to this date, been remarkable for never having joined in any one of the guilty or objectionable measures of the army. It was a sense of their past conduct that made such treatment more insufferable.

[20] The senior Company's officer at this meeting was Colonel Clarke, commanding the artillery, who was known to be exempt even from suspicion of any share whatever in the violent proceedings of a part of the army, and had been recently selected on that ground to command at the Mount. Was it not natural that a sense of his own conduct should have led this honourable officer to reject with indignation a proposition made in a mode so insulting to his feelings as a man and an officer.

[21] To many of this class it must have been an agreeable release from the rigid obligations of their commission. It offered a temporary retirement from their duty to the state; and, in doing so, changed in some degree the character of that duty. By signing the test they became volunteers against men whose guilt they had to a certain extent shared, and had no longer, to support their minds in so trying a situation, that plea of indispensable necessity which their commission imposed.

[22] This was the substance of the order that I recommended to be issued at this period, the principle of which has been so arraigned by the Government of Fort St. George. A copy of this order is inserted in the Appendix.

[23] I might fill a volume if I were to enter into any general reasoning on the vital wound given to military subordination by this measure. The relation of the private soldier to the subaltern has been well termed the key-stone of the arch: an army may survive any other change; but to disturb that relation, is to dissolve the whole: here begins the obedience of the many to the few. In civil society, this problem appears of difficult solution: but there, it is the obedience of the dispersed and disarmed many; it is rare, and in well regulated communities almost unfelt. In military bodies it is the hourly obedience, even to death, of the armed and embodied many. The higher links which bind subalterns to their superiors, and these to one chief, are only the obedience of the few to the fewer, and these fewer to one. These relations are easily intelligible. Honour, and obvious interest, are sufficient to account for these: and any injury they sustain can be repaired. But the obedience of the whole body of soldiers to their immediate officers, is that which forms an army, and cannot be disturbed without the utmost danger of total destruction. It was upon this act of the French Assembly that Burke observed, "They have begun by a most terrible operation; they have touched the central point, about which particles that compose armies are at repose; they have destroyed the principle of obedience in the great essential critical link between the officer and the soldier, just where the chain of military subordination commences, and on which the whole of that system depends." Sir George Barlow, it has been forcibly remarked, could discover no other mode of suppressing a rebellion of officers than by exciting a mutiny of soldiers.

[24] 1794 and 1795.

[25] There can be no doubt of the truth of the observation which a great and well-informed statesman formerly made upon this question. "The European character in India" (Lord Melville observes in one of his letters to the Court of Directors) "cannot be raised too high. If the natives should be accustomed to look upon persons in the British service with indifference and contempt, they will rapidly annihilate our Empire there, and with it the very few Europeans by whom that country is held in subjection." If this is true of Europeans in general, and our Indian subjects, with what particular force must it apply to the relations between the sepoy and his European commander?

[26] The most violent even among the officers were so alarmed at the evil this impression must produce to their country, that they carefully avoided, till the last extremity, any mention of it to the natives under their command: not, I am satisfied, from any fear of failing in their efforts to debauch them from their duty, but from a deep sense of the danger of such a communication: and those who believe that the defeat of this confederacy through the means adopted will for ever prevent the occurrence of a similar evil, should recollect, that it is just as likely to have an opposite effect, and to render that evil, if brought on by similar causes, far more dangerous. The European officers may, in their next quarrel with their local Government, be taught by this failure to league with the native officers, and to hold out advantages to them that will secure their most zealous co-operation; and such a conspiracy would lose India. It is dangerous even to hold an opinion that this Empire can be preserved by any means but the action of a wise, temperate, and just Government, which, though firm and powerful, must rule its British subjects with the greatest attention to those habits and principles which are, from the form and character of the constitution under which they are born, inherent in their nature, and which can never be disregarded or offended without a danger of sedition or convulsion.

[27] As a proof of this, the following fact will suffice. At the period the test was promulgated, a direct correspondence, in the native language, was opened by the chief civil and military officers of Government with the native officers. This was equally maintained with those corps, the European officers of whom remained firm in their duty, as others; and a respectable Company's officer, who had signed the test, and was commanding a corps at Madras, (on his senior subahdar bringing him letters of this description, which he had received,) made a representation of the circumstance; but was reprimanded for doing so, and told it was a general rule, from which it was not deemed proper to make any deviation. If it had been desirable to make any communications in the native languages to the men, such could assuredly have been forwarded to the European officer in command, and the principles of military discipline observed; but an observance of the general rule was the point to which importance was attached, even in a case where the operation was admitted to be baneful, and consequently where the more limited that was, the better for the public interests.

[28] Burke.

[29] These are not sentiments formed on a contemplation of the result of the disturbances. I presented a similar picture of their situation to the deluded officers at Masulipatam, and circulated a letter containing all the substance of these reflections to the army previous to the occurrence of any deliberate opposition to Government. Vide Appendix: Letter to Lieutenant-Colonel M^cLeod.

[30] Lord Minto.

[31] Vide Lord Minto's dispatch.

[32] General Maitland, late Governor of Ceylon.

[33] These words have been, in the course of the discussion regarding the disturbances at Madras, as they were during their existence, greatly distorted from their simple and plain meaning. Concession, I conceive, is to grant the original and substantial objects of the demands made by the mutinous army. To have restored the tent contract, to have promised an effort to obtain an equalization of their allowances with the officers of Bengal, would have been concessions: but if the exercise of a generous clemency, in pardoning those who had offended in a moment of general insanity, and to have held out hope to others of even deeper guilt, be deemed concessions which a Government cannot make, there can be no such thing as conciliation in act: and as to the profession of kindness and consideration, when the conduct observed by the ruling power is inflexible and severe in its measures, it can have no effect but that of aggravating men's feelings into greater crime.

[34] The whole power was in the commanding officers of the sepoy battalion, and the native officers had much greater influence than the European subalterns of the corps: the latter were not even attached to companies. It has been the labour of near twenty years to supersede the effects of this system, which was deemed bad, and to transfer the influence formerly enjoyed by the native officers to the European: and the eagerness with which the native officers grasped at a prospect of reviving their power, though it might have had a favourable operation for Government under that desperate expedient to which they had resort, must have given rise to dangerous feelings, and produced jealousy and distrust in that important link between the European and native officers, where complete confidence and cordiality is most essential to our safety.

[35] Disturbances in Bengal in 1794 and 1795.

[36] Lord Teignmouth.

[37] Lord Melville.

[38] William the Third, and Demosthenes.

[39] See the letters to Lord Wellesley and Sir A. Wellesley, p. 64, 65.

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