Patriots (76 page)

—

George Washington’s letter about the coming campaign hadn’t been an example of guile but of something more characteristic in his life—a calamity shot through with luck. Early in July 1781, Washington did indeed meet with General Rochambeau at White Plains to plan a joint attack on New York. But soon afterward American advance parties trying to land secretly on Staten Island ran into British troops foraging for food. Washington cherished the weapon of surprise, and now that it was denied him he began to rethink his campaign.

In mid-August, Washington received news that his most fervent dream was about to come true, but with one significant change. Admiral François-Joseph-Paul Comte de Grasses was on his way to America with more than thirty ships of the French fleet and with thirty-two hundred fresh troops. Instead of coming as far north as New York, however, de Grasse was sailing for Chesapeake Bay, where he could stay only until the middle of October. If Washington wanted to launch an offensive supported by the French Navy, he had two months to do it. And he and Rochambeau would have to march their armies four hundred and fifty miles south.

Later, Washington learned that General Rochambeau had been planning a Southern campaign all along. At fifty-six, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, was seven years older than Washington and much his senior in warfare. Rochambeau had put himself nominally under American command, but when he thought Washington was mistaken, he felt no obligation to abet him. He had written secretly to Admiral de Grasse urging
him to sail directly from the West Indies to Chesapeake Bay.

A Southern campaign had never appealed to Washington, and he wasn’t at all sure it would work. He knew that if Cornwallis stayed where he was, he could hold off Lafayette’s troops. But if he heard that Washington and Rochambeau planned to move south, Cornwallis could march his forces inland to North Carolina, away from the French Navy’s damaging guns. And if Henry Clinton in New York learned of such a plan, he could put his men on ships, sail them down the coast and reinforce Cornwallis long before the Americans could get to Virginia on foot. Those were the obstacles Washington foresaw. When he realized that Rochambeau had forced the change on him, Washington had gone into a rage. Oblivious to the others in his headquarters room, he strode back and forth, crying out that his hopes were blasted and his country lost. That went on for half an hour, until Washington regained himself and apologized to a group of civilian visitors who had witnessed the scene. But then Washington burst out again: If only the French would either fulfill his expectations or not raise them at all. Washington had wanted desperately to retake New York. Now that would have to wait still another year.

Once he was resigned to the new strategy, General Washington took it as his own and became sly. On the morning of August 19, 1781, he moved advance troops into New Jersey in what appeared to be preparations for an attack on New York. Men suspected of being spies were allowed to glimpse secret reports that Admiral de Grasse was coming north to join the assault on Staten Island. American engineers laid down the outlines of a major camp in New Jersey so authentic that the ovens could bake thousands of loaves of bread.

Washington ordered that his own troops be told nothing. “
If we do not deceive our own men,” he instructed his staff, “we will never deceive the enemy.” He had determined that he could take twenty-five hundred of his own troops to Virginia, along with all five thousand of Rochambeau’s soldiers. As a line officer, Hamilton was now one of those kept mystified. He was heard complaining that the Great Man had set off on a wild goose chase.

—

Henry Clinton watched the preparations for an attack on Staten Island without surprise or suspicion, although he had heard rumors from his network of spies that the Americans might actually
be moving south. Benedict Arnold recommended that the British assault the troops that were left behind in order to force Washington to fight in the North. But Clinton hesitated. He had heard contradictory stories and for ten weeks had been relying on Washington’s captured letter to justify a defense of Staten Island. Clinton might have ventured out to see for himself, but he had always preferred to command—and quarrel—by letter. “
I’m a shy bitch,” he had once confessed unhappily, and he detested any sort of confrontation.

At the moment, everything seemed to be conspiring against Clinton. His housekeeper, a British captain’s wife, was pregnant with his child, and he was feuding with an ancient British general, James Robertson, whom Clinton accused of thievery and of roaming the countryside “
smelling after every giddy girl.” As pressure mounted for Clinton to make a decision, he was supplied with an unassailable excuse for not leaving his headquarters. Twice, he went temporarily blind. When he recovered, he continued to draft elaborate, even persuasive, plans on paper. He kept a meticulous record of how his own officers and the Ministry in London were failing him. But Clinton did not act.

In Virginia, Lord Cornwallis was being just as sluggish. He had begun his fortification of Yorktown on August 1, but the weather was scorching hot, and many of the blacks he had persuaded or compelled to serve the British were dying every day working on the walls and the trenches. Cornwallis usually would not force his soldiers to make that same exertion under the broiling sun. Even allowing for the heat, though, Cornwallis had arrived at a puzzling decision: in order to control Chesapeake Bay against the French fleet, he would fortify one town on each bank of the York River. Of the two sites, Yorktown was more essential, but Cornwallis ordered his men to build defenses first across the river at Gloucester. Because he had refused Henry Clinton’s call to send troops north, Cornwallis retained five thousand British regulars and eighteen hundred Hessians to hold the two defensive positions. But as he turned to fortify Yorktown, Cornwallis was having increasing doubts about the position he had chosen. It was not, he feared, very strong.

—

On the last Saturday in August 1781, as General Clinton waited in New York, three columns of the American and French armies
began their long march south. George Washington worked to the last moment to keep his ruse alive. His orders to the men covered only their route for a few days and gave no confirmation of their final destination. He was pleased to hear that soldiers in his own camp were betting over whether they would be fighting in New York or Virginia.

On August 29, Washington had dinner with Rochambeau at Princeton before riding on to Trenton and then to Philadelphia. After four days Washington had established the lead over Henry Clinton he had hoped for, but he was receiving only unreliable information about the size and location of the French and British fleets.
Washington knew the British had squadrons in the West Indies under Admirals Sir George Rodney and Sir Samuel Hood, and he hoped that they hadn’t intercepted Admiral de Grasse’s French fleet. One promising rumor had de Grasse defeating Hood’s large navy. If the French ships at Newport could link with those coming up from the Caribbean, Washington’s forces might possibly command Chesapeake Bay.

On Monday, September 3, 1781, members of the Continental Congress stood outside the State House in Philadelphia to accept a tribute from their army. Years earlier, Samuel Adams had warned Boston’s Town Meetings against the papist French. Now Adams was back home, and his colleagues were taking their hats off to General Rochambeau’s men. The French soldiers marched past in gleaming white broadcloth uniforms with pink and white plumes in their hats. Their commander had ordered his officers to salute the Congress as though it were, collectively, a crowned head.

As their allies paraded by, the delegates were hopeful that America’s ordeal was moving toward a climax, but George Washington was plagued by doubts which he confided only to the few men closest to him. He wrote to Lafayette that he was distressed beyond words that he didn’t know the whereabouts of the French ships that were essential to his campaign. Whatever happened, Lafayette was to keep
Cornwallis from retreating inland until Washington and Rochambeau arrived. “
Adieu, my dear Marquis!” Washington concluded. “If you get anything new from any quarter, send it, I pray you, on the spur of speed, for I am almost all impatience and anxiety . . .”

Washington’s admirers like Thomas Paine had painted him as a modern Fabius, a conservative general fighting a canny defensive
war. But, from the first, Washington had been suppressing a gambler’s instinct as strong as John Burgoyne’s. Defeat had provoked him at Trenton and Princeton into making gallant, foolish gestures, and he had won those rolls of the dice. More often he had been forced to rely on elements outside his control—disobedient or traitorous generals, independent French admirals, hostile weather, botched communications. His need was greater this time than ever before that all the pieces of the mechanism mesh and turn together, and this time even more of the pieces lay beyond his reach. Washington was no longer the inexperienced and overwhelmed commander William Howe had driven from New York. He had learned from his blunders and found confidence in his own decisions. Less than a month before, he had been determined to conquer New York. Now he was in the South, risking everything on speed and intuition. But this was another intricate strategy, perhaps as overly complicated as his worst failures, and again he had left himself at the mercy of events he could not control.

On the afternoon of September 5, Washington was riding south from Chester, Pennsylvania, when a horseman came galloping down the road toward him. Washington read through the dispatches the messenger brought and ordered his advance party to turn and go back to Chester. General Rochambeau was heading there by water from Philadelphia, inspecting river forts along the way, and Washington wanted to greet him with the news he had just received.

As Rochambeau’s boat approached the dock, General Washington was waiting for him. There was no mistaking Washington’s excitement. He was waving his hat to Rochambeau in great sweeps with one hand and waving his handkerchief with the other. When Rochambeau landed, Washington embraced him and explained his uncontrollable joy. On August 29 Admiral de Grasse had reached Chesapeake Bay from Santo Domingo in the West Indies and had brought three thousand French troops. Now there could be no more excuses. Washington laid out the alternatives starkly to Lafayette: “We must take Cornwallis or be all dishonored.” Providence, and His Most Christian Majesty the king of France, had given George Washington the chance to save his country and to enter history as one of its greatest generals.

The British surrender at Yorktown, October 18, 1781

YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

L
ORD
C
ORNWALLIS
could not see the entrance to Chesapeake Bay from his fort at Yorktown. He had to be told by a British naval lieutenant that the French fleet, led by Admiral de Grasse’s huge flagship, the 104-gun
Ville-de-Paris
, had arrived. Cornwallis urgently sent a message in code to General Henry Clinton: “
There are between thirty and forty sail within the capes, mostly ships of war and some of them very large.”

Before his message reached Clinton’s headquarters, the British fleet under Rear Admiral Thomas Graves had sailed from New York, heading for the Chesapeake. Graves knew only that de Grasse was somewhere on the seas and that Admiral Louis de Barras might have taken his ships away from Newport. But Graves, like Clinton, thought the Americans were preparing to strike at Staten Island, and he expected no opposition to his fleet at Chesapeake Bay.

Graves’s progress was leisurely, a mere three miles per hour. At dawn on September 5 he came in sight of the Chesapeake capes and planned to enter the channel by noon and contact Lord Cornwallis the next day. Then, at 9:30
A.M.
, a lookout on the admiral’s frigate sighted what looked like the masts of ships anchored in the bay ten miles away. A veteran navy captain assured the lookout that they couldn’t be ships but might be the
trunks of charred pines. Virginians often burned them for their tar, he said, and left them standing.

—

Admiral de Grasse was dismayed to find the British advancing. His scouts had first thought that the approaching fleet was Barras’s ships from Rhode Island. As they drew nearer, however, de Grasse was about to be forced into a sea battle he had not expected. He had just sent nearly two thousand officers and men ashore inside the bay to gather water and firewood. That meant he had twenty-four ships moored within the bay that must be readied for the attack. The gunships of both navies were designed to carry only their cannon; they were simply broad platforms, with masts and canvas sails that rose a hundred, even two hundred, feet, and were hard to move and turn. In battle, their crews were shut up with the cannon in narrow cells, where they shot off a thousand pounds of metal ball in each broadside. Their position left them exposed to enemy shells hurtling toward them, and before an engagement sailors scattered sand over the decks to keep from slipping on the blood that would soon flood over them.