Victory at Yorktown (13 page)

Sir Henry had received word of the mutiny on the morning of January 3, as did Washington—about eighteen hours after it began. Clinton was already well aware of the Continental troops' grievances, which the Congress lacked the ability or resources to resolve, and he quite rightly concluded that in the current situation “the least wrong step taken by the rebel rulers on such an emergency might be the means, with proper encouragement, of driving the mutineers in to us.” Obviously, Washington was taking pains to avoid that wrong step, but it was going to be touch-and-go.

To ensure that he could take advantage of any change in the situation, Clinton ordered the commander of the British elite troops, Major General William Phillips, and the officers in charge of the Hessian grenadiers and jägers to proceed by ferry to Staten Island, where they were to await further orders. Meanwhile, he dispatched three messengers to the mutineers by different routes, carrying offers of protection and pardons, with no conditions attached other than allegiance and submission to the British government, while assuring them that they would be under no obligation to serve in the British army and would receive all the back pay due them. Clinton admitted that this was in the nature of an experiment, worth trying, at least. He anticipated that the defectors might march into Pennsylvania, picking up other disaffected troops along the way, and could then be persuaded to move toward the Chesapeake, where Arnold would be waiting to lead them.

While Washington continued to debate whether he should go to the scene of the mutiny, news reached him that the committee of sergeants had refused to negotiate with one of Clinton's emissaries who arrived and had, instead, turned the man over to Wayne. That was good news, if true, but it was soon followed by contradictory word that the mutineers had not, in fact, delivered the emissary to Wayne but were holding him. Then, on January 15, Major General John Sullivan wrote to the commander in chief, “We are happy to inform your Excellency that the terms offered to the Pennsylvania troops are at length finally, and, as we believe, cordially and satisfactorily agreed on; and tomorrow we expect the Pennsylvania Line will be arranged in its former order.”

As welcome as this news was, it came at a terrible price. The mutineers agreed to lay down their arms and deliver the British agents to Continental officers, but in return they had been given a number of financial concessions, while half of the men were discharged and the others furloughed until April. That meant the departure of many experienced veterans the army could not afford to lose, and, for the present at least, the Pennsylvania line was no more. The beleaguered General could hardly help wondering if other units would not follow suit, and if the Continental Army itself might cease to exist. Yet he wrote to Rochambeau in Newport, reporting on the mutineers, “It is somewhat extraordinary that these men, however lost to a sense of duty, had so far retained that of honor, as to reject the most advantageous propositions from the enemy.”

Then the other shoe fell. In the third week of January Colonel Israel Shreve wrote Washington to say that the New Jersey soldiers in Pompton had mutinied and were marching toward Trenton. This time the General was determined that the matter be settled by the army, not by civilian authorities, and decided on drastic measures. He ordered the West Point garrison to be ready to march at once, had the Jersey militia assemble, told Sullivan to urge Congress not to intervene, and made the same request to Governor William Livingston of New Jersey. He intended to compel the mutineers to submit, for “Unless this dangerous spirit can be suppressed by force, there is an end to all subordination in the Army, and indeed to the army itself. The infection will no doubt shortly pervade the whole mass.”

In late January, with two feet of snow in the mountains west of the Hudson, a detachment of New England troops, under the command of Major General Robert Howe, surrounded the huts of the mutineers and ordered them to come out without their arms. When they did, Howe asked for the names of the three chief ringleaders. They were sentenced to death. Then he called out the names of twelve men who had been the most prominent supporters of the chief conspirators, sent them to get their muskets, brought out the three ringleaders, had them kneel before the firing squad in front of all the other mutineers, while three of their supporters were ordered to shoot at the head, three at the heart, and if the victim still struggled, the remaining six should finish him off. As a finale, Howe spoke to all the men by platoons, telling them the seriousness of their guilt and the outrage their actions represented to the civil authority to which they owed obedience. After that was done, he stated, “I think I may pledge myself for their future good conduct.”

*   *   *

IN THE EARLY
days of the war, as the British groped for a grand strategy that would win it, they had begun by moving against New England, that hotbed of sedition. When that failed, they transferred operations to the middle states, where capturing Philadelphia was expected to be a sure route to victory, but possession of a single city in the great American landmass achieved little. Then the planners figured that seizing the Lake Champlain–Hudson River waterway would cut off the New England states from those to the south, ending the rebellion, but this was foiled by the disastrous defeat and capture of General John Burgoyne's entire army at Saratoga in 1777. Now, British leaders concluded, if they subdued the southern provinces—where loyalist strength was believed to be strongest—the North would eventually tumble into their hands through isolation and attrition. To date, Savannah had fallen, then Charleston, more recently Camden, and prospects were looking up.

The war in the North was finally sputtering out, but in the South the fighting not only continued but surpassed in savagery what had gone on in most areas. From the autumn of 1775 on, Tories and patriots had been at each other's throats, cousin against cousin, with blood feuds exacerbated by the bitter arguments over one's loyalty. The first significant engagement in North Carolina, for example, was at Moore's Creek in February of 1776, when a group of Highland Scots and the so-called Regulators led by Brigadier General Donald McDonald fought the patriot militia. McDonald had fought at Culloden and was a cousin of Allan McDonald, whose wife, Flora, had helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape after his last battle. This internecine conflict had continued for a long time and was not easy for the British to comprehend or manage.

Oddly, Charleston had been the scene of Sir Henry Clinton's worst fiasco as a general as well as his greatest triumph. In 1776 he and his opposite number in the navy botched a joint effort by failing to plan and cooperate and by attacking an island in the harbor instead of the city. Yet four years later his reduction of Charleston was brilliantly handled. (When the British were besieging Charleston, a shell fired from a battery on James Island screeched across the Ashley River, up Meeting Street past St. Michael's Church, and into the intersection of Broad Street, where it slammed into the statue of William Pitt commissioned by the colony fourteen years earlier. As the ultimate irony, the ball broke off the Great Commoner's right arm and shattered the hand that held a copy of the Magna Carta.)

After defeating Benjamin Lincoln there in what was the most complete British victory of the war, with more than four thousand Americans killed or captured, Clinton returned to New York, leaving Charles, Earl Cornwallis, his second in command, to secure and enlarge the conquests already made. Sir Henry, who wanted in the worst way to be relieved of his command, yet perversely did
not
want that to happen, remarked after he arrived in New York, “I am by no means the fashion here with civil or military.… My successor, if I am permitted to resign the command, will start fair with both.”

The British commander was a short, dumpy man with a plain, round face and bulbous nose. Waspish, forever on the alert for a slight and more often than not detecting one, he had a monumental sensitivity to criticism. A loner since the death of his wife, a blow from which he never recovered, he was aloof, resentful, and self-reproachful. He had few friends other than John Jervis, later first lord of the Admiralty and Earl of St. Vincent, and William Phillips, Burgoyne's artillery officer, who was to die of typhoid fever on the Chesapeake in 1781. And in what was to prove fatal in the campaign about to begin, Clinton was disastrously at odds with the two men who were his assigned colleagues: Lord Cornwallis and the aging, irritable Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot. Clinton well knew how important it was to have a naval commander who would act in harmony with him and had, in fact, given Lord Sandwich at the Admiralty the names of five men with whom he could serve comfortably. But Arbuthnot was allowed to stay on as naval chief, and the inevitable trouble followed.

Cornwallis was a man of a different stripe. He was descended from an old, distinguished family that had played a significant part in English history for centuries. A short, thickset officer with graying hair and a cast in one eye—the result of a sports injury at Eton—he had the look and manner of an affable, agreeable fellow, which he was, except for the frequent occasions when he had fits of bad-tempered sulking.

Before he was eighteen he became an ensign in the Grenadier Guards, had a splendid record in Europe during the Seven Years' War, and was present at the fateful battle of Minden. By twenty-one he was a captain, later a lieutenant colonel of his regiment, and upon the death of his father became a member of the House of Lords. As a Whig, he voted consistently against the government's American policy but managed to remain a favorite of the king. In fact, the reason George III approved his assignment to the colonies was his belief that Cornwallis would remain loyal, despite his political views—and he was right. In America his record was spotty, with good performances at Long Island and Fort Lee, and a major failure when Washington's army eluded him and won the battle of Princeton, prompting Henry Clinton's acid comment that Cornwallis was guilty of “the most consummate ignorance I ever heard of [in] any officer above a corporal.” Subsequently, Cornwallis fought at Brandywine and Germantown and after returning to England, where his wife was dying, came again to America—this time to hold the South after the surrender of Charleston in May of 1780.

In sharp contrast to his superior, Sir Henry Clinton, Cornwallis was aggressive and eager to put down the rebels in North Carolina while holding on to the huge area of Georgia and South Carolina. Unfortunately for his relations with Clinton, he arranged to communicate directly with Lord George Germain in London, going over his superior's head. That, plus their mutual dislike, boded ill for the command system. Yet relations between him and Clinton were typical of the trouble that was endemic at British headquarters throughout the conflict—bad blood between the commander and his second in command. The latter had considerable latitude in advising his superior officer, but in the case of Clinton and Cornwallis (as with Sir William Howe and Clinton formerly) the man in charge usually rejected the advice and went forward with his own scheme. In the nature of things, the subordinate was ready and waiting if the plan should fail, in which case his views would be vindicated and, as likely as not, his own reputation enhanced. It goes without saying that this situation made for animosity and mistrust between the top men of the command.

Clinton's idea was for Cornwallis to use Charleston as a base, invade North Carolina, and systematically overrun all the American posts between South Carolina and the Chesapeake. He and Admiral Arbuthnot, in one of their few agreements, concluded that the two of them and their commands should remain in New York, ready to meet the French threat, which meant that Cornwallis would be in active command in the South. Meanwhile, after the French arrived in Rhode Island, Clinton drew up three plans and sent them to Arbuthnot for his opinion on which was feasible. Typically, the admiral was evasive and ignored the general's ideas, whereupon Clinton communicated his grievances to London, requesting that he or Arbuthnot should be removed. His complaints were also ignored, with the result that he and the admiral remained locked, all but incommunicado, in a state of paralysis for months on end.

Not only was the British leadership divided and flawed; the army itself was no longer a single fighting force but comprised three commands: one in New York, another in Charleston, and another that was created when Cornwallis departed Charleston and took off to invade North Carolina. Worse yet, Clinton had recently set in motion a fourth command on the Chesapeake, led by Benedict Arnold.

Adding to this dangerous division of the army was the naval situation, with an unreliable Arbuthnot expected to deal with a superior French fleet, whenever and wherever it appeared. Yet Clinton based his planning on the dubious assumption that Britain would always have control of the coastal waters.

Although neither Clinton nor Cornwallis realized it, the two of them were operating on entirely different premises. Clinton assumed that Cornwallis's offensive would come northward in deliberate stages and eventually merge with his chief's own operations on the Chesapeake. Above all, Charleston was to be secured before that occurred. Cornwallis, on the other hand, with an astounding victory at Camden under his belt, was confident that he could now move to the north, figuring that the South Carolina backcountry was secure enough to warrant Charleston's safety. Clinton had urged him to advance by way of Cape Fear and travel along the coastline, but the earl regarded that area as too unhealthy for his army and chose instead to travel by the highlands—a grievous error.

By doing so, he lost touch with the navy, which could have kept him reasonably well supplied. Instead of remaining long enough in any one place to capitalize on whatever loyalist support existed there, he had to keep moving, living off the land, unable to maneuver the enemy into a decisive battle. To cap it all, from January until late April of 1781 no direct message from Cornwallis ever reached Clinton. It was as though the two generals were fighting separate wars on different continents.