His Excellency: George Washington (22 page)

The fall brought more bad news, this time from a direction Washington least expected it. In August he had sent Benedict Arnold to command the garrison at West Point, which Washington regarded as the linchpin of the Hudson corridor and therefore the most strategic location in the entire northern theater. On September 25 he wrote Greene that “Transactions of a most interesting nature and such as will astonish you have just been discovered.” Arnold, it turned out, had for several months been negotiating with the British for a substantial bribe in return for delivering West Point into their hands. The plot was exposed at the last moment and almost by chance when Arnold’s British contact, Major John André, was stopped and searched by local militia. Arnold himself got word of his exposure in the nick of time and escaped down the river to New York, where he was instantly welcomed into the British army. André was tried and convicted as a spy. Despite pleas from several of his aides, including Hamilton, that André be executed by firing squad as befits a soldier, Washington ordered that he be hanged as a spy. He was not in a sentimental or generous mood.

In addition to creating the most notorious traitor in American history, the incident intensified Washington’s fears that the sacrifices made by his officers’ corps over the past three years, and the virtuous code they embodied, had both reached the breaking point. After all, if Arnold could sell out, the prospects were dim indeed. Though modern biographers have concluded that Arnold’s treachery was more predictable and prosaic (that is, a matter of money), at the time Arnold seemed to symbolize the crumbling of an ideal and the collapsing of the cause.
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Events in January 1781 seemed to confirm this end-of-the-road reading. A large delegation of one thousand troops from the Pennsylvania line, who had not been paid in over a year and had no winter clothes, decided to march on the Continental Congress brandishing several artillery pieces. Two officers who attempted to stop them were shot down. The mutineers made a point of declaring that they were not traitors (“We are not Arnolds”), but rather dedicated soldiers fed up with broken promises. A second mutiny occurred three weeks later in the New Jersey line, this time the mutineers threatening to march on the state capital at Trenton with similar grievances. The first group was persuaded to turn back without further incident. But Washington ordered his officers to make an example of the second group, who were surrounded by six hundred loyal troops, then required to watch as the two leaders of the mutiny were executed on the spot.
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It was the lowest point of the dip. The British army was victorious in the south, and the Continental army was on the verge of dissolution in the north. And, rather incredibly it seemed to Washington, the Continental Congress claimed to be powerless to reverse the course by providing revenue. (To complete this depressing picture, the main French fleet was still cruising in the West Indies.) Whether one thought that the British were winning the war or the Americans were losing it, the end result was the same for Washington. Having pledged his life, his fortune, and his honor, he was about to lose them all. He told John Laurens that “our present force (which is but the remnant of an Army) cannot be kept together this Campaign” and the once glorious cause was now “suspended in the Balle; not from choice but from hard and absolute necessity.”
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STRANGE VICTORY

W
HEN WASHINGTON SPOKE
of “a concatenation of causes,” he was referring to the jagged course of the war as he experienced it. But it was a characterization that applied with special intensity to the last seven months of the conflict, which began in April 1781 with the American army and economy in disarray, and ended in October at Yorktown with a devastating British defeat that struck the British ministry “like a ball in the breast,” as one witness reported, ending both the ministry itself and the bulk of the British Empire in North America. It was as if a spirited but overmatched boxer, reeling and about to collapse from exhaustion, stepped forward in the final round to deliver a knockout punch.
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How did it happen? The story begins with a series of double-edged developments that seemed to offer hope and then snatch it away, all in one motion. On the political front, after five years of haggling, the states finally managed to ratify the Articles of Confederation, thereby providing a constitutional foundation for that new entity called the United States of America. But the operative term remained “confederation,” because sovereignty resided in the states rather than their union. The establishment of a new frame of government did permit long-overdue administrative reform, primarily a quasi-cabinet system creating secretaries of finance, war, and foreign affairs that presumably would provide greater coherence in managing the war effort. But as Robert Morris, the new secretary of finance, told Washington, the coffers of the government remained an empty cavern, or more accurately a large bottle of red ink, because the state delegations refused to approve new taxes. If one looked for financial relief to rescue the army from dissolution, Philadelphia was less promising than Paris, where Benjamin Franklin was attempting to arrange a French loan.

A French army of six thousand troops commanded by Count Rochambeau, a battle-scarred veteran of the European theater, had landed in Rhode Island the previous summer. But the force remained encamped at Newport throughout the following year as Washington and Rochambeau corresponded and met in three conferences to negotiate its deployment. Washington remained convinced that the only worthwhile target was the British garrison at New York. But that target required naval supremacy for any chance of success and—the problem of the missing French fleet again—Rochambeau refused to commit his troops as long as British ships controlled the Atlantic. Finally, in May 1781, at a conference in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the deadlock was broken when Rochambeau agreed to move his troops overland to link up with Washington outside New York. While the union of the French and American armies buoyed Washington’s hopes for fulfillment of his New York dream, the failure of the states to meet their troop levies left his own army pitifully small—he expressed embarrassment when Rochambeau arrived and saw how undermanned and poorly equipped they were—so until fresh troops arrived in sufficient numbers, New York remained impregnable.
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Finally, news from the southern theater took a turn for both the better and the worse. On the better side, Washington learned in February 1781 that Daniel Morgan’s riflemen had combined with local militia to inflict a stunning defeat on Cornwallis’s troops at Cowpens. Then word arrived that Greene, though vastly outnumbered, was working his customary magic as the ultimate American Fabius, inflicting heavy losses with hit-and-run tactics that historians would eventually describe as the most brilliantly conducted campaign of the war. In one of the few full-scale battles, at Guilford Court House in March, Greene’s army abandoned the field only after leaving it littered with a quarter of Cornwallis’s troops dead or wounded.
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But the rays of light in the Carolinas were overshadowed by ominous clouds in Virginia, where none other than Benedict Arnold, now a British general, was running amok over an almost defenseless countryside. In retrospect, it seems strange that the British army had steered clear of Virginia for so long, since it was a major cradle of revolutionary fervor that was also topographically tailor-made for amphibious operations along its long rivers and Chesapeake coastline. Washington had sent two thousand troops under Lafayette to counter the British campaign in Virginia, but by April 1781 it had become clear that this meager force could only harass the larger and more mobile British army, which was about to be rendered even more formidable by the imminent arrival of Cornwallis’s troops moving up from North Carolina. And if Virginia fell to British occupation, all of Greene’s splendid efforts further south would mean little, because the British would be able to cut off supplies from the north, then isolate and suffocate Greene’s army.
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By the early summer of 1781, then, before the Yorktown opportunity materialized, the prospects for an American victory appeared remote in the extreme. Washington believed, as did several other American statesmen, that the resources of the country were exhausted and the Continental army was on the verge of extinction. The current campaign had to be the last. In the absence of a decisive outcome, the most likely development was a negotiated settlement the following year. We cannot know in detail the particular features of this alternative American future, but two aspects of the likely outcome seem clear: first, that the settlement would have reflected the military situation on the ground at war’s end, so that considerable British diplomatic leverage would follow from its control of New York, Charleston, Savannah, and substantial segments of all the states south of the Potomac; second, that complete American independence would not be possible.
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Years later, when Washington was asked when he first envisioned leading a southern campaign against Cornwallis, he claimed that the idea was broached at a meeting with Rochambeau in September 1780. Strictly speaking, this was true, but the larger truth was that Washington remained obsessed with New York and resisted pressure from the governors of South Carolina and Virginia to take his army south well into the summer of 1781. He claimed that their understandable sense of desperation needed to be assessed in the broader context of the war, that he was “acting on the great scale.” What he meant was that the American cause needed a decisive victory, and he believed that only New York could provide it. A Chesapeake campaign was in fact Rochambeau’s preference, which Washington was willing to include as a secondary option only in deference to his French ally. His subsequent distortion of the historical record was designed to make the Yorktown victory a possibility he saw early on, whereas his correspondence reveals that New York had dominated his mind’s eye for so long that he only gave it up grudgingly and gradually. Paradoxically, Clinton’s interception of letters in which Washington identified New York as his abiding target—this was in June 1781—convinced the British that any Franco-American movement to the south was a mere diversion, thereby delaying their efforts to rescue Cornwallis until it was too late.
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Among the multiple reasons why Washington’s New York dream had no chance of becoming a reality, one was paramount; namely, the French fleet was not going to New York because Rochambeau did not want it there. In May, without informing Washington, Rochambeau had instructed his colleague, Count de Grasse, to sail his fleet no further north than the Chesapeake. It is difficult to fathom what was in Rochambeau’s mind as he and Washington reconnoitered the British defenses around New York in July, since Rochambeau knew full well that New York was never going to be the target. Perhaps he realized that he was dealing with a stubborn man who needed to abandon a long-standing obsession in his own time. That, at any rate, is what happened. In his diary entry for July 30, Washington confessed his concern about “my obstinacy in urging a measure to which his [Rochambeau’s] own judgment was oppos’d.” Three days later he wrote Robert Morris to request delivery of thirty transport ships in Philadelphia as soon as possible, observing that New York had been “laid aside” and that “Virginia seems to be the next object.”
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Once Washington shifted his focus from New York to the south, he never looked back. If it was characteristic of him to cling tenaciously to his deepest convictions, it was also characteristic of him to let go when those convictions kept running afoul of what providence obviously intended. And by early September there appeared on the southern horizon an unexpected convergence of forces that could only be described as providential. In August, Cornwallis had moved his entire army of more than seven thousand troops onto the Tidewater peninsula at Yorktown. On September 2, as Washington prepared to board ships at Head of Elk in the northern reaches of the Chesapeake, de Grasse and the main French fleet appeared off Yorktown at Cape Henry. Washington could hardly believe the news or contain his excitement: “You See, how critically important the present Moment is,” he wrote Lafayette. “If you get any thing New from any quarter, send it I pray you
on the Spur
of
Speed,
for I am all impatience and anxiety.”
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Most military operations begin with a detailed plan that unravels and requires improvised adjustments as the details collide with messy realities. The Yorktown operation followed precisely the opposite course. Initially, Washington was unsure of his destination; he mentioned Virginia, but also Charleston and the Carolinas as prospective targets, all contingent on the location of the French fleet. But then, as he and Rochambeau moved south, the ingredients for a spectacular triumph aligned themselves as if players in a drama written by the gods. Washington gave providence a helpful push by sending forward a vanguard of two thousand troops to join with Lafayette’s force and block Cornwallis’s escape route off the peninsula. Once the French fleet appeared and Cornwallis realized his predicament, he had only a few days to attempt a breakout. But in a monumental case of miscommunication that rivaled the earlier Howe-Burgoyne fiasco at Saratoga, Cornwallis apparently believed that Clinton had ordered him to stay put. By the time Washington and the main Franco-American army arrived on September 15, the Yorktown trap was sealed shut. “What may be in the Womb of Fate is very uncertain,” Washington wrote the following week, “but we anticipate the reduction of Ld. Cornwallis with his Army, with much Satisfaction.” The climactic battle that Washington had been envisioning for six years was at last at hand, though later than he expected and not at New York; indeed less than thirty miles from the dower plantation he inherited from Martha, close enough to allow his young stepson, Jackie, to join him as an impromptu aide.
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