Victory at Yorktown (6 page)

The failure of the British to attack, and possibly fatally wound, the French at Newport was calamitous in the long run. Because of the feud between General Clinton and Admiral Arbuthnot the French troops, who were, after all, some of the finest units of a veteran, first-class army, remained unharmed and within easy sailing distance of New York. Their presence in Rhode Island was a constant threat to the British, and, as George Washington discovered, even the pretense of an attack was likely to alter whatever plans Sir Henry might have made.

Nor was the French army the only beneficiary of the British headquarters infighting. Ternay's capital ships—seven of them—remained in Newport, a menace Arbuthnot had to deal with by maintaining a blockade, tying up vessels that could be more profitably employed elsewhere. And the blockade, as the French were to discover, was no guarantee that those seven ships of the line could not escape.

During that summer of 1780 Sir Henry Clinton lost the initiative and never regained it. For eight more months he and Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot would remain locked in a harness of mutual hatred that precluded any possibility of cooperation between the services they led.

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WHILE THE BRITISH
high command vacillated about attacking Newport, Washington was at his wit's end, hoping for congressional guidance on what he was supposed to do when his army and the French finally did join hands, and, on another topic, what the legislators suggested he might do now that the latest appeals to the states for troops had fallen far short of expectations.

Speaking of the French, he informed Congress of his need for “measures which have been judged essential to be adopted for cooperating with the armament expected from France.” The allies had arrived, yet he had “no basis to act upon” and no instructions regarding “what we can or cannot undertake.” Unless he was informed as to what support he could expect from the states, he foresaw an “awkward, embarrassing, and painful situation” and was “altogether at a loss what to do.” Lest the congressmen suppose that his need was for troops only, he told them of the army's humiliating condition: “We have no shirts … to distribute to the troops,” who are “absolutely destitute.” The same was true of overalls—a situation that was bad enough at any time, but “peculiarly mortifying” for men and officers when they were about to act with their new allies.

As for the militia, their numbers “will fall as far short of the demand as the Continental troops.” Provisions had not been received in anything like adequate amounts; forage and transportation were still worse—resulting in a practice he abhorred, of impressing horses and wagons, which was “violent … oppressive and … odious to the people.”

The atmosphere at Washington's headquarters brightened when news from Rochambeau reached the General on August 25, saying he had received a dispatch reporting the arrival of the French frigate
Alliance
, bearing much-needed arms and powder. But as usual, bad news accompanied the good: the long-awaited “second division” of fleet and soldiers was blockaded in the harbor at Brest. At best, the ships might break out in time to arrive in America in October, but to Washington that meant no campaigning until the following year and a lot of mouths to feed if his army was to survive. To his brother Samuel he wrote that no one could possibly imagine “how an Army can be kept together under any circumstances as ours is in.” Determined as ever, though, he sent the militia home, ordered the Continentals to the vicinity of Hackensack, and told Benedict Arnold to collect his scattered troops and concentrate them so as to resist a likely attack in the Hudson Highlands.

Then came news of yet another calamity. Horatio Gates, popularly (though incorrectly) known as the hero of Saratoga, had been defeated and his entire army destroyed at Camden, South Carolina, by Lord Cornwallis's troops, exposing North Carolina and Virginia to invasion from the south. The rout was so complete that no one knew how many Americans were lost. Gates believed he had seven thousand men before the battle—a highly exaggerated figure, but whatever the number, most of them were killed, captured, or missing. Gates, whom Congress had appointed to command in South Carolina,
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was said to have fled from the battlefield ahead of his routed militiamen, leaving the outnumbered Continentals to fight Cornwallis's entire force. As Washington's aide Alexander Hamilton described Gates's escape in a scathing letter to his friend James Duane, “was there ever an instance of a General running away from his whole army and was there ever so precipitous a flight? One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a half. It does admirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life. But it disgraces the General and the soldier.” And to his fiancée, Elizabeth Schuyler, Hamilton said that Gates seemed “to know very little what has become of his army.… He has confirmed in this instance the opinion I always had of him.” In the wake of Camden, Congress removed Gates from command and ordered an inquiry into his conduct at the battle.

General Washington and the French leaders were determined to meet and shape their plans for future operations and finally fixed on the date of September 20 for a meeting in Hartford, Connecticut. In preparation for this crucial encounter, Washington and Alexander Hamilton composed a working paper consisting of three proposals. Since everything depended on the relative strength of the British and French fleets, and no one could say when the ships blockaded in Brest might arrive on this side of the Atlantic, the General hoped for assistance from another quarter—Comte de Guichen, the French admiral in the West Indies. Guichen had been alerted by Ternay that the fate of America would depend on French naval superiority: the efforts of France, he had written, “will turn the scale.” If Guichen were to arrive by early October with enough strength to seize New York harbor, Washington reasoned, then the allied land forces should move on that city, and his paper included an elaborate description of how this operation would be conducted. But if no fleet under Guichen materialized, the allies would send a combined force of about twelve thousand troops south to take Charleston and Savannah.

That was the initial proposal. The second was evidently suggested by Nathanael Greene, whose idea it was for the French fleet to sail to Boston, where it would be safe without the protection of land troops (a move approved by Ternay, who regarded the harbor at Newport as a suicidal choice of anchorage for a fleet outnumbered by the enemy). That done, Rochambeau's troops would march to the Hudson, link up with the Continental Army, and carry on enough activity in that area to prevent Clinton from releasing any troops to join Cornwallis in the South.

The third scheme called for a winter campaign against the British in Canada. This had been petitioned by some inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants (in what would become Vermont), who offered men and supplies, and the General proposed sending a force of five thousand men—half of them Americans, half French, with Rochambeau to be in overall command and Greene leading the American troops. Washington himself would not accompany the task force since “the general situation of the Country … requires his presence and influence within the states; for in the present crisis there is no saying what may happen and Congress [may] stand in need of support.”

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LEAVING GREENE IN
charge of the army while he rode east to meet the French in Hartford, Washington and his staff officers on September 17 crossed the Hudson River at King's Ferry, where he spent the night at the home of Joshua Hett Smith, about two and a half miles from the ferry, near Haverstraw. Smith was the youngest of fifteen children, of whom the eldest was his brother William, a prominent lawyer and historian who had advised many a governor of the colony of New York and became chief justice of the province in 1780 after refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the revolutionary state. Joshua was also a lawyer, and although his father and oldest brother were known to have loyalist sympathies, he was a member of the New York Provincial Congress, was active in the patriot militia, and had directed the secret service of Benedict Arnold, among other general officers.

By chance, Arnold was at Smith's dinner table when Washington and his party arrived, and brought the commander in chief up to date on his efforts to safeguard the area from British attack. Then he asked Washington for an opinion: should he consent to see the writer of a letter, one Beverley Robinson, in whose house Arnold had his headquarters? Robinson, who had married the wealthy Susanna Philipse and was one of New York's richest landowners, was a former friend of Washington with strong loyalist views and had written Arnold from the British sloop of war
Vulture,
riding at anchor in the Hudson, enclosing a letter to General Israel Putnam, which he hoped Arnold would deliver. Robinson wanted to meet Putnam under a flag of truce on a matter that must be kept secret, and hoped Arnold would grant his request.

Should he do so? asked Arnold, to which the General's response was an immediate and emphatic no. If Robinson had any private business to transact, Washington advised, he should obtain permission to do so from the civil authorities in New York. Surely Arnold could understand that a meeting between him and Robinson would be viewed with suspicion. This whole business of flags of truce was proving a nuisance, in fact, and revealed how easy it was for unauthorized persons to slip through the lines. Recently, Colonel Elisha Sheldon had reported to Washington that one John Anderson of New York had attempted to enter the lines on a matter “of so private a nature that the public on neither side can be injured by it,” and when Washington asked Sheldon how he came by the letter from Anderson, the colonel replied that it came under a flag of truce. Arnold, it seemed, had recently opened a new avenue of communication to New York, and Anderson was a secret agent he employed.

Washington and his retinue, with the guards who accompanied them, clattered off on forty horses early the following morning, were ferried across the Hudson, and then angled off north by east. Over the wooded hills separating New York from Connecticut they rode, crossed the Housatonic and Naugatuck rivers, trotting through one little community after another—not much more than clearings in the dense forest (including one called Washington, after their leader). Finally, after two days' hard riding, they reached Hartford on the broad Connecticut River, bounded by rich bottomland between low hills, where they passed an uninterrupted collection of farmhouses and barns set amid trees and meadows.

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IT IS DOUBTFUL
if any of the conferees were aware of—or, if they were, gave much thought to—a profound change that had altered the dynamics of warfare at this stage of the eighteenth century. It began with the premise that Britain could no longer assume that it had command of the seas. Beginning in the 1770s, France had been investing heavily in its own navy. An annual naval budget that was around 30 million livres
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during the Seven Years' War was consistently being increased until it would reach the staggering total of 200 million livres a year by 1782. By 1780, France had sixty-six ships of the line,
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and those numbers were supplemented by its allies Spain with fifty-eight and Holland with twenty. So although the Royal Navy had more warships than any single rival, its enemies, collectively, outnumbered them. What's more, the British fleet had to be broken up into a number of squadrons in order to guard the homeland, watch over Gibraltar, patrol the Baltic Sea, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, plus escort convoys in the Atlantic.

Furthermore, even if it still had maritime supremacy, Great Britain would be obliged to cope with the realities of geography and distance if it was to suppress the rebellion of its former colonies. The land war with the Americans had to be supplied and fought three thousand miles from home, demanding that every musket ball, every shoe or shirt or cap required by a British soldier, every one of the hundreds of items needed by an army must be transported across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. Another critical—and all but unsolvable—problem confronting the British was communications. Instructions from Whitehall to General Clinton's headquarters in Manhattan might take two or three months to arrive, and the reply—even if Clinton responded at once, which was unlikely—could require another month or six weeks. So there was almost no way officials in London could effectively direct the war, much as the king and his ministers might wish to do so.

Finally, to conquer the Americans, the British had to hold on to the territory they had won, but with a limited number of troops they couldn't possibly turn them into occupation forces and conduct a war at the same time. Yet the moment they withdrew, the rebels moved back in—a pattern that was prevalent in the South, where guerrillas seemed to move about at will.

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AT LAST THE
General and his aides greeted the allies from France they had been longing to see. The feeling was mutual, for these French officers were intensely curious to meet the famous leader of the Revolution. They found him to be a man they admired immediately. “Enchanted,” Claude Blanchard summarized their reactions, noting his “easy and noble bearing, extensive and correct views and the art of making himself beloved.…” Comte Mathieu Dumas was impressed by the way “His dignified address, his simplicity of manners, and mild gravity surpassed our expectation and won every heart.” Baron Ludwig von Closen said, “I could not find strong enough words to describe” Washington's remarks to the group. Another count, the Swede Axel Fersen, who was rumored by gossips at the French court to be a favorite of the queen and who had sailed to America in March as an aide to Rochambeau, saw Washington in a slightly different light: “His face is handsome and majestic but at the same time kind and gentle, corresponding completely with his moral qualities. He looks like a hero; he is very cold and says little but he is frank and polite. There is a sadness in his countenance, which does not misbecome him and indeed renders his face more interesting.” Louis-Alexandre Berthier, already marked by his superiors as a young man with a promising military future, said of the General, “The nobility of his bearing and his countenance, which bore the stamp of all his virtues, inspired everyone with the devotion and respect due his character, increasing, if possible, the high opinion we already held of his exceptional merit.”