Victory at Yorktown (18 page)

When Arnold reached Hampton Roads on December 30, he learned immediately how easy the conquest of Virginia was to be when his scouts reported that the road to Richmond was open. Except for the burning of Norfolk in 1776 and a 1779 raid by British, Hessian, and loyalist troops that laid waste towns, plantations, and huge quantities of tobacco in the same area, eastern Virginia had been virtually untouched by war. The consequence, regrettably, was a certain amount of apathy, and now, for reasons known only to himself, Governor Thomas Jefferson had ignored George Washington's warning that the British were preparing to invade the state and waited three days before calling out the militia. Light-Horse Harry Lee, who was no friend to Jefferson, remarked that the governor, who was a gentleman “highly respected for his literary accomplishments, and as highly esteemed for his amiability and modesty,” had done nothing to prepare the state, leaving it vulnerable to attack by a relatively small force. “The government which does not prepare in time, doubles the power of its adversary,” he observed, “and sports with the lives of its citizens.…” In this instance, nine hundred British troops, led by the traitor Arnold, had dared leave their ships and march twenty-five miles to Richmond. “It will scarcely be credited by posterity,” Lee went on, “that the governor of the oldest State in the Union … was driven out of its metropolis, and forced to secure personal safety by flight, and that its archives, with all its munitions and stores, were yielded to the will of the invader.…”

Arnold struck quickly and ferociously, overrunning American forts, raiding supply depots and magazines, torching plantations, villages, and iron foundries, and destroying Virginia's state papers before returning to Portsmouth, where his troops went into camp for the winter.

At the same time that he learned from British intelligence agents that the Marquis de Lafayette was assembling a substantial force in Maryland to move against Portsmouth, Arnold had fallen out with his opposite number in the navy, Captain Thomas Symonds, over their joint division of prize money. It was the usual Arnold story—haggling over money, in this case the value of prizes taken on the James River, which the two had agreed to share. When Symonds's officers argued that the navy should get all the money, Arnold appealed to Sir Henry Clinton in so offensive a manner that Symonds refused to take his ships up the Chesapeake to attack Lafayette's transports. To make matters worse, the American traitor accused Symonds of cowardice for keeping his ships in shoal water: “I believe he is heartily inclined to do [so] whenever he thinks there is danger.”

During March and April the vindictive Arnold was virtually unopposed while burning thousands of hogsheads of tobacco and military stores near Petersburg despite a valiant attempt by militiamen under General Muhlenberg to hold them off. One by one the vital stores of weapons, food, and clothing desperately needed by Greene's army were being seized or went up in smoke, along with Virginia's great cash crop—tobacco.

Arnold, of course, was fighting for his life—in the sense that he
had
to win the laurels that would bring him the respect and renown he craved so badly as payment for his treason. To Lord George Germain, secretary of state for the colonies and George III's chief adviser on the American war, he had written suggesting that Washington and his army must be forced into a decisive battle—exactly what the American commander in chief had been trying to avoid for years. He also urged Germain to consider offering every rebel soldier who deserted his entire back pay. The sum of the Continental troops' arrears, Arnold suggested, would not cost Britain as much as continuing the war for a few months, and each soldier “taken from the rebel army and added to ours is as two men imported from Europe.” All this was a cogent argument at a time when British military sources were stretched dangerously thin.

Money, he believed, would “prove a more formidable argument than arms,” and he even urged Germain to consider offering a title to George Washington: the sort of award that “might not prove unacceptable.” As for himself, the turncoat requested promotion in rank to major general and a command in which he would be able to prove his worth to His Majesty.

The fact was that Arnold was restless and bored with the slow pace of his work in Virginia. Just then he was building fortifications at Portsmouth, preparing for a siege, and writing to Sir Henry Clinton, asking that he be ordered back to New York, “as a life of inaction will be very prejudicial to my health.” Clinton reacted to his appeal for relief by sending another detachment from New York, headed by Major General William Phillips, with orders to supersede Arnold.

In a letter to his old friend Phillips, Cornwallis conveyed his thoughts, reflecting his anger and contempt for Clinton.

Now, my dear friend, what is our plan? Without one, we cannot succeed, and I assure you that I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures. If we mean an offensive war in America, we must abandon New York and bring our whole force into Virginia; we then have a stake to fight for and a successful battle may give us America. If our plan is defensive, mixed with desultory expeditions, let us quit the Carolinas (which cannot be held defensively while Virginia can be so easily armed against us) and stick to our salt pork at New York, sending now and then a detachment to steal tobacco, etc.

Since no orders had arrived for Arnold, leaving him without an assignment, he tagged along with Phillips on yet another foray up the James River. On their return, after seizing rebel shipping and destroying more mills and warehouses, orders came from Cornwallis, directing them to join him in Petersburg. His army was in a “very critical situation,” he wrote, and they should collect supplies for his men—an enterprise they undertook vigorously during the next two weeks, raiding what rebel storehouses remained along the river and prompting Henry Lee to say of their operations: “… the restrained licentiousness of the unprincipled burst out, and shocking outrages were committed upon our unprotected fellow-citizens—disgraceful to British arms, and degrading to the name of man.”

When the two generals returned to Petersburg in early May, Phillips rode in a carriage, critically ill with a fever that killed him on May 13, before Cornwallis arrived. Arnold was himself in such a bad way, with gout in his hands and feet that kept him in agony, that he was put aboard a vessel bound for New York, where he found Clinton in a foul humor. The reasons were several, but not least was that the general had learned of a letter from Arnold to Lord George Germain criticizing Sir Henry's management of the war.

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CORNWALLIS'S CHARACTERIZATION OF
his army as being in a “very critical situation” had to do, ironically, with two victories he claimed to have won. After losing the race to the Dan River, he paid dearly for destroying all his supplies and had to return to Hillsboro. To prevent the British from picking up Tory recruits in the area, Greene recrossed the Dan, doing his best to harass the enemy, not giving them an opportunity to fight for three weeks. Then, having received some reinforcements from Virginia—enough so he finally outnumbered the British—he moved to Guilford Courthouse and laid out his battle plan, following the pattern used with such success by Morgan at Cowpens. In an engagement on March 15 that was “long, obstinate, and bloody,” Greene said his troops were “obliged to give up the ground and [we] lost our artillery, but the enemy have been so soundly beaten that they dare not move towards us since the action, notwithstanding the artillery, they have gained no advantage. On the contrary, they are little short of being ruined. The enemy's loss in killed and wounded cannot be less than between six and seven hundred, perhaps more.”

Greene had been certain of victory but his hopes were dashed by the failure of the North Carolina militia, who “had the most advantageous position I ever saw, and left it without making scarcely the shadow of opposition.” Many of the men threw away their weapons and fled even before a gun was fired at them. In fact, not a man was even wounded. Greene was elated with the performance of the Virginia militia and Lee's cavalry, which “performed wonders”: “Indeed, the horse is our great safeguard, and without them the militia could not keep the field in his country.” Then, appraising his small force, he added: “Never did an army labour under so many disadvantages as this; but the fortitude and patience of the officers and soldiery rise superior to all difficulties. We have little to eat, less to drink, and lodge in the woods in the midst of smoke. Indeed, our fatigue is excessive. I was so much overcome night before last that I fainted.”

Cornwallis had a narrow escape in the battle. His horse had been shot, so he took one of the dragoons' mounts and didn't notice that the saddlebags were hanging under the animal's belly. The underbrush here was thick and greatly slowed his movement, but the general was unconscious of his danger. At this point Sergeant Roger Lamb of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers caught hold of the horse's bridle and turned his head while warning Cornwallis if he had pursued the same direction he would have been surrounded and perhaps cut to pieces or captured. Lamb ran alongside with the bridle in his hand until the earl reached the 23d Regiment at the edge of the woods. Before the battle ended, the British were in such a bad way that Cornwallis took the desperate measure of firing grapeshot into a tangled crowd of men, killing his own men as well as Americans. While he proclaimed “a compleat Victory” because he occupied the field of battle, he had lost a quarter of his army, including some of his best officers, leading Charles James Fox of the opposition in Parliament to suggest, “Another such victory would destroy the British army.” And that, of course, was precisely the objective of Greene's campaign.

Immediately after the battle, Cornwallis raised the royal standard in Hillsboro and issued a proclamation calling on “all loyal subjects to stand forth & take an active part in restoring good Order & Government.” How many North Carolinians responded favorably is not known, but Cornwallis's diminished force was so worn out that he was forced to retire to the coast to refit and lick his wounds.

After Guilford Courthouse each of the opposing commanders had a major decision to make: which direction to take that would do the most damage to the enemy. For his part, Greene admitted to Washington that he was “at a loss what is best to be done,” yet he had decided to carry the war back to South Carolina. This move would be “critical and dangerous, and the troops exposed to every hardship,” but it had the advantage of forcing Cornwallis to follow him or to give up his posts in that state. Greene recognized that Lafayette, in Virginia, could count on support from Washington, and his proposal appeared to have no negative ramifications except for the strain on his men. He would share their troubles with them, he added, and had no doubt that they would “bear up under it with that magnanimity which has already supported them, and for which they deserve everything of their country.” He expected to be able to march in about five days, and since the move would be unexpected by the enemy, he would keep it secret as long as possible, so the element of surprise would work in his favor.

It was not an easy choice, but it was typical of Nathanael Greene, the studious onetime Quaker who had resigned himself to being a private in a Rhode Island militia company six years earlier because his members were ashamed to have an officer who limped. Now, as before, necessity obliged him to commit himself to chance, and, he said, “I trust my friends will do justice to my reputation if any accident attends me.”

As for Cornwallis, he had no qualms about moving his force to Virginia. Writing to Clinton on April 23, 1781, he told him, “My present undertaking sits heavy on my mind. I have experienced the distresses and dangers of marching some hundreds of miles, in a country chiefly hostile, without one active or useful friend; without intelligence, and without communication with any part of the country.” In a letter written to his superior two weeks earlier he had given him a veritable catalog of disaster. He had been unable to follow up on his “victory” at Guilford for lack of provisions and other necessities. He had remained on the battlefield for two days before marching to a town that was supposed to contain the greatest number of Tories, and most of them rode into camp, shook his hand, said they were glad to see him and hear that he had beaten Greene. Then they rode home again. “I could not get 100 men in all the Regulators' country to stay with us, even as militia.”

What Cornwallis did not say was that the past months' actions had earned him a reputation not unlike that of Tarleton. “Cornwallis is the scourge—and a severe one he is,” wrote Richard Henry Lee to Arthur Lee. On their march toward Virginia the British had shown little mercy: “'Tis said that 2 or 3000 Negroes march in their train, that every kind of stock which they cannot remove they destroy—eating up the green wheat and by destroying of the fences expose to destruction the other growing grains. They have burnt a great number of warehouses full of tobacco and they are now pressing on to the large ones on Rappahanock and Potomac Rivers and the valuable iron works in our northern parts.”

Yet in spite of Cornwallis's efforts to provide for his men, a third of his increasingly depleted army was sick or wounded, the rest without shoes and worn down with fatigue. Since January 15, he had lost 1,501 of the 3,224 men he had then. Proceeding to Cross Creek, he found to his mortification that it was impossible to obtain provisions or forage for his horses. Navigating the Cape Fear River was impracticable (“and the inhabitants on each side almost universally hostile”), so now he was looking impatiently for the expected reinforcements from Europe, trying to find supplies of all kinds, hoping “to preserve the troops from the fatal sickness which so nearly ruined the army last autumn.” He was in the dark, he told Clinton, as to plans for the summer's campaigns, but he had to say he hoped the Chesapeake would become the seat of war. Until Virginia was subdued it would be difficult to hold the Carolinas, and the rivers of Virginia are advantageous to an invading army. And for emphasis he added that “North Carolina is, of all the provinces in America, the most difficult to attack … on account of its great extent, of the numberless rivers and creeks, and the total want of interior navigation.” Furthermore, no material assistance could be expected of the inhabitants, as he well knew from experience. Indeed, the North Carolina Tories, on whose support Cornwallis had counted, failed him completely, he told Germain. “Our experience has shown that their numbers are not so great as had been represented and that their friendship was only passive.”