Victory at Yorktown (37 page)

A year later the tenor of the girls' letters was transformed, with Betsy writing from Richmond to tell Mildred of an alarm that morning, with the British approaching by way of the James River. The next installment was from “the Cottage,” noting that when the British landed her family fled “in a winkling” with “Governor, council, everybody scampering.” (One reason for her apprehension was that her father was treasurer of Virginia.)

In each subsequent letter the news grew worse, and she was grateful that Mildred's residence was too remote for her to suffer “the outrages of these barbarians.” The enemy had chased them out of Richmond along with Jefferson, “our illustrious Governor, who, they say, took neither rest nor food for manor or horse till he reached C-----r's Mountain.”

Writing from Louisa Court House, she told how her father had taken to spending nights in his carriage in order to get out of harm's way quickly, while the rest of them crowded into the overseer's tiny building.

“When or where shall we find rest?” another letter begins. During that night they heard a terrible clatter of horses and the dreaded words “The British!” but upon opening the door discovered some “miserable militia”—local boys—who had come to tell them the enemy was marching through the country, but had no idea which route they had taken. Betsy's family decided to move at once and “traveled through byways and brambles” until they reached the plantation of a friend on the way to Charlottesville. No sooner had they arrived and spread pallets on the floor to get some rest than they were warned that “Butcher” Tarleton had just passed by and would catch the governor before he reached Charlottesville. Panicked by the thought that their father had taken the same route, they soon learned that he had been warned in time to escape and, sure enough, here he came to hurry them off to the same place they had spent the night. “Great cause have we for thankfulness,” she added.

Another year later, in 1782, Mildred Smith wrote from Yorktown to her friend Betsy, beginning,

Again are we quietly seated in our old mansion. But oh! How unlike it once was! Indeed, were you to be suddenly and unexpectedly set down in the very spot where you and I have so often played together—in that very garden where we gathered flowers or stole your father's choice fruit—you would not recognize a solitary vestige of what it once was.
Ours
is not so totally annihilated, being more remote from the shock and battery—but Heaven knows, it is shocking enough! Others that remain are so mutilated … as to grieve one's very soul. But it is over!… the great end is accomplished. Peace is again restored, and we may yet look forward to happy days.

But despite Mildred Smith's assurance, the war was not over.

*   *   *

IN FACT, THE
whole of America was in a state of watchful waiting, dreading a continuation of the fighting, wondering where and when and how it would break out again. Most of the waiting had to do with outside forces, beyond the control or ken of Americans, notably which of the European nations would prevail at sea, and during the winter months the balance of naval power began shifting against the French. De Grasse and the French fleet had sailed for the West Indies, but the British were determined he would not seize Jamaica, and with reinforcements joining the fleet, by April the Royal Navy outnumbered the French fleet. Rodney, who was now in command of the British, had thirty-six ships of the line, while de Grasse's numbers had been reduced to thirty, and when the inevitable clash came off Guadeloupe de Grasse was taken prisoner, five of his vessels were seized, and two more struck their colors and surrendered to Hood a week later.

*   *   *

GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS
painfully aware of the continuing presence of British troops in Halifax, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in Charleston, Savannah, St. Augustine, and, of course, Clinton's forces in New York—some thirty thousand enemy soldiers, altogether. For all he knew, the ministry would send reinforcements to America in time to launch a fresh campaign in the spring of 1782, and when the Comte de Grasse informed him that he could remain here no longer and sailed for the West Indies on November 4, it was obvious that the British were once again in command of American waters. After lingering at Mount Vernon for a badly needed rest and time dedicated to his plantation and family, Washington rode northward to rejoin his army. Writing to Nathanael Greene, he said he would stop in Philadelphia and try to stimulate Congress to prepare the way for a vigorous and decisive campaign. His greatest fear was that the delegates, persuaded by the victory at Yorktown that “our work [is] nearly closed, will fall into a state of Languor & Relaxation.”

Greene himself was in desperate straits. As he informed Virginia's governor, Thomas Nelson, “I have the mortification to hear no troops are coming from Virginia & but few from the other States.” If he received no reinforcements, the Carolinas and Georgia might well be lost to the enemy, which, with the reinforcements he heard were coming, would soon outnumber him three to one, not counting the Tories. The southern states had already been “ravaged and distressed so as to pain the humanity of every observer”; his own little army had no meat, not a drop of spirits, hardly a bushel of salt. If neither Virginia nor other states could send him Continentals or state troops, he continued, “I beg you will order out Two Thousand good militia immediately, well-appointed, well-armed, and properly officered to serve three months after their arrival at Camp.”

As ever, Washington wanted to be “prepared in every point for war”—not because he wanted hostilities to continue, only that the Americans must be ready for any eventuality. He had ordered the Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland troops to join Greene in South Carolina, while the rest of his army headed toward their old quarters in New Jersey and on the Hudson. Fortunately for Greene, the rumored British reinforcements proved false, and while he did get some Delaware and Maryland troops, no Virginians turned up; they refused to march unless they were paid for past duty.

Lafayette, who departed for France in late December, two months after Cornwallis surrendered, arrived at Versailles just in time to celebrate, with his wife and various members of the French court, the birth of the dauphin—a glorious event that had been awaited for eleven and a half years since Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were married.

In the Carolinas, sporadic fighting broke out between Greene's troops and loyalists, between Greene's men and those of General Leslie, but talk of peace was in the air, American officers were resigning, the “sickly season” of summer took such a toll that funeral services were omitted, and eventually neither the British forces nor Greene's were strong enough to attack the other. Finally, more than a year after Cornwallis's surrender, some of the loyalists and the remaining British troops boarded transports and evacuated Charleston.

*   *   *

FROM THE TIME
news of Yorktown reached England, what was to happen in the next session of Parliament was the question that riveted the attention of most Britons and Americans. One dark November day, from his house in Berkeley Square, Horace Walpole was writing a characteristically chatty letter to a close friend, Sir Horace Mann. On the previous Sunday, Walpole had learned that Washington and the French had captured Cornwallis and his army, and he was glad to hear it. At least the troops were not all cut to pieces, he wrote, though it could hardly have come at a worse moment; Parliament was to meet on the morrow, and this news put the king's speech and others “a little into disorder.” Pleased though he was, Walpole could not find it in himself to “put on the face of the day and act grief,” since whatever brought an end to the war in America would save thousands of lives—millions of money, too. It is not honorable, he concluded, to boast of having been in the right when your country's shame is what you predicted; nor would anyone want to join in celebrating France's triumph.

To the Earl of Strafford Walpole revealed his emotions. “I have no patience with my country! And shall leave it without regret! Can we be proud when all Europe scorns us? It was wont to envy us, sometimes to hate us, but never despised us before. James the First was contemptible, but he did not lose an America! His eldest grandson sold us, his younger lost us—but we kept ourselves. Now we have run to meet the ruin—and it is coming!”

Walpole was outraged at the way Cornwallis had abandoned the loyalists. The general surrendered to save his own hide and ensure his safe return to England, and for the sake of his garrison; “but lest the loyal Americans who had followed him should be included in that indemnity, he demands that they should not be
punished
—is refused—and leaves them to be hanged!”

The devastating news from America found Lord George Germain at the same time Walpole heard it. The secretary of state for the colonies was at home in Pall Mall, speaking with a visitor, Lord Walsingham, when a messenger arrived with official intelligence of the surrender. Without saying anything to another person, the two got into a hackney carriage, picked up several other ministers, and drove immediately to Downing Street, where they knocked on Lord North's door.

Someone asked Germain how the prime minister took the news when they informed him. “As he would have taken a ball in the breast,” Lord George replied, saying that North spread his arms and exclaimed wildly as he paced up and down the room, saying again and again, “Oh God! it is all over!”

Germain sent a message to the king, who was at Kew, and George III hesitated not an instant, returning his reply by the same messenger. After lamenting the misfortune in Virginia, the king—obdurate as ever—added, “I trust that neither Lord George Germain nor any Member of the Cabinet will suppose that it makes the smallest alteration in those principles of my conduct, which have directed me in past time, and which will always continue to animate me under every event, in the prosecution of the present contest.”

The king and Germain were as one on the subject of the war: as the latter put it, “we can never continue to exist as a great or powerful nation after we have lost or renounced the sovereignty of America.” For the next four months, while the opposition fumed, the king's supporters, the country gentlemen—those conservative stalwarts who had backed George III's policies loyally for so long—were beginning to turn against him, dropping off one by one. Meanwhile, the government was adrift, and no decision was forthcoming.

*   *   *

FROM LONDON, THE
rumor mill suggested that the king was determined to continue the war, but the public mood was shifting—the American war had proved too costly by far, as the country gentlemen had finally recognized. On both sides of the Atlantic, the war had bled the participants dry for years. As Vergennes had observed, “This war has gone too slowly; it is a war of hard cash, and if we drag it out the last shilling may not be ours.” (In fact, as early as the spring of 1781, with French finances nearing the breaking point and Vergennes fearing that the Spanish might give up and make a separate peace with England, Versailles had appeared willing if necessary to sacrifice the Americans for the sake of peace.)

When news of Yorktown reached the British public, the general reaction matched North's sentiments—“Oh God! it is all over!” It was, after all, the second time an entire British army had been surrendered to the American rebels, and the reaction was one of anguish and anger. London was a city in mourning, with “the wisest and most intelligent asking each other what was next to be done, to which the wisest and most intelligent could give no answer,” as one Englishman put it. Adding salt to the wounds, French sea power had made possible the victory at Yorktown, and for all anyone knew, that sea power might cost the empire its other colonies, its fisheries, and its commerce to boot. But Vergennes was a realist: Yorktown was an extraordinary success, it was true, “but one would be wrong to believe that it means an immediate peace; it is not in the English character to give up so easily.”

In a sense, he was right, for the war would drag on for another year, but it was no longer war on the same scale in America. There, neither side had the stomach for it, and nothing much was happening.

Then, on the penultimate day of February, 1782, the House of Commons repudiated Lord North's American policy by voting against further prosecution of the war, and a few days later passed a bill authorizing the crown to make peace with the former colonies. That was it for North, who announced his ministry's resignation on March 20. A week later the ministry of Charles Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham, swept into office, bringing a new broom to the task.

Still, there was no peace, but in America, the first action in what might be called the campaign of 1782 was not made until late August, when Washington's army moved down the Hudson from Newburgh to Verplanck's Point. This was in no sense a military maneuver, merely a move to a fresh supply of food and forage. From mid-September to mid-October Rochambeau's troops were camped nearby, on their leisurely journey to Boston, whence they would sail to the West Indies. So for a month or more the comrades-in-arms enjoyed the reunion with real affection—a pleasure darkened for the American officers by their inability to repay the Frenchmen's hospitality. All they had to offer, Washington observed, was “stinking whiskey—and not always that—and a bit of beef without vegetables.” Most of the Americans, the French were glad to see, were transformed—they were newly “uniformed and well-groomed”—but Congress's parsimony was visible to one and all, as was the army's status as “the most neglected and injured part of the community.”

The impotence of Congress was frightening. As James Madison reported to Arthur Lee in late May of 1782, “Notwithstanding the importance of the present crisis the number of states in Congress does not exceed 8, sometimes 7 only, and most of those represented by two members. The president is directed to write to the unrepresented states on this subject and urge them to supply the deficiency.”