Victory at Yorktown: A Novel (44 page)

“You did the right thing,” Washington said softly as Peter, voice breaking, finished his narrative. “I could not have spared your friend, you know that. It would have been horrible, ghastly. You spared him that out of love for an old friend. And yes, I recall as well your friend as a man of honor, with a brother, who alongside you was crucial to our victory so long ago at Trenton.”

Not a word was shared for several minutes as Peter broke down in front of his general, and then Washington had placed a hand on his shoulder.

“You’ve been in the army how long now?” he asked.

“Since I was seventeen, sir, I joined back in ’76.”

“And this young woman you spoke of, who hid your friend?”

“Elizabeth Risher,” he replied woodenly.

Washington sat back, and nodded.

“Go to her.”

“Sir?”

“You have done splendid work, Peter, and you must know that I have dozens of others who did and still do such work for me as well.”

“Sir?”

“She has always been a Patriot, Peter. She was crucial in giving us information while Philadelphia was occupied, and if she stands accused now of being a Tory, that is false and you must help her.”

Washington smiled.

“This war is over for you, young sir. You have done enough, as has she. You will hold your commission until the army is demobilized, but I think it is time you went home to rest, and to peace.”

“What are you saying, Peter?”

He smiled and drew her close in an embrace.

“It is our child, Elizabeth. I have always loved you. Remember my one feeble attempt to dance with you so many years ago before this war, and you said I was a clumsy oaf?”

She actually smiled and nodded.

“I have loved you from that day. And I loved Allen, the brother I never had.”

“Peter, do you know what you are saying?”

He smiled.

“Of course I do dear, Elizabeth. We leave for my home in Trenton and will marry tomorrow. He will be our child, Elizabeth. The war is over for us and young Allen will be born an American.”

Epilogue

FRAUNCES TAVERN

NEW YORK CITY

DECEMBER 4, 1783

The room where he had asked to be alone for a few moments to gather his thoughts and prepare for the brief ceremony ahead was quiet, at least relatively quiet, when compared to the tumult just outside his third-story window. General of the Armies of the United States George Washington had to stand several feet back from the window, because if observed by the jubilant crowd on the street below, there would be renewed calls for a speech, something he felt absolutely incapable of doing on this most emotional of days.

The war had ended at last.

It was just over two years to the day since he personally gave his report to Congress in Philadelphia of the triumph at Yorktown. There had been wild prophecies by some, claiming that the war was over then and there.

The months after Yorktown had been heralded as the beginning of the end, but as a student of history and war, he knew better than most how many times a final victory had been snatched away at the negotiating table.

The news of Yorktown, of course, echoed resoundingly across Europe, and members of the British Parliament, some of whom had defiantly and openly expressed support of the American cause from the start, now called for an end to it all. Serious negotiations in Paris had at last begun, but it had taken nearly two years of that to see it through to this conclusion today.

For two more winters, his army, nearly as ragged and poor as before Yorktown, waited it out. The infusions of cash by Robert Morris, which had kept the flame of liberty alive on the march down to Yorktown, had totally exhausted any reserves left throughout the thirteen states. His men endured two more cold winters of scant rations, many of them shoeless, uniforms in tatters, after a grueling five-month campaign and nearly a thousand miles of marching. What he had feared might be a fatal blow that would reverse everything gained over the previous year were the orders from Paris the following spring, recalling his staunch ally Rochambeau and the entire French navy to Europe or deploying them to cover their possessions in the Caribbean. Rochambeau had openly wept with shame when he presented his orders to withdraw, and their parting had been a sad and bitter one, the parting of two comrades. Never would he forget the French general’s proud and haughty gesture when offered Cornwallis’s sword. He had refused it, pointing to him and announcing, “There is the commander of this army, present your surrender to him.” It was not just an acknowledgment of Washington himself; it was an acknowledgment of a new nation.

The announcement triggered fears that France might fold at the negotiating table and thus encouraged, England would just decide to let the war drag on forever by keeping a garrison in New York until hell did, indeed, freeze over. Bitter conflict still flared in the Carolinas and Georgia. One of the victims at this late stage, killed in some senseless skirmish, was his trusted aide, the son of the president of the Confederation, Colonel Laurens. Just as dead if he had fallen leading a “glorious charge” at Monmouth or Princeton, but instead gunned down in an ambush on a back-country lane, that would have no bearing on the outcome of this conflict, but dead, nevertheless. Some congressional representatives from New England had whispered that conceding the three most southern states to England in exchange for independence for the other ten might not be such a bad deal after all. He thanked heaven for men such as Benjamin Franklin, who had at this moment of renewed crisis pushed the negotiations forward in Paris. Franklin conveyed the impression to King George that even if standing alone again, America would be a wound that could never heal, would consume if need be a hundred million more pounds and fifty thousand more troops, with the other powers of Europe sitting back and smiling as English power was sapped away by this interminable struggle that could go on for generations. If they wanted another Ireland or Scotland, this one a hundred times worse, then let the struggle go on.

The threat worked. Even while negotiations in Europe dragged out, through “indirect” communications with General Carleton, who had replaced Clinton in New York City, an “understanding” was reached, that if one did not seek aggressive action the other would refrain as well, and let the diplomats sort it out.

Within his own ranks a true crisis had come during the winter of ’82–’83. A group of officers, actually loyal to him, had hatched a plot to simply give power to their commander, march on Philadelphia, throw Congress out on its heels, and just let Washington handle whatever was to come, starting with pay for those still in the ranks and supplies to keep them alive. It became known as the “Newburgh Conspiracy.”

He felt he could always recall that moment now with true pride in his response. If ever there was a temptation, the offer of a Faustian bargain such as Cromwell and so many others had grabbed hold of, it was that moment. Of course, the temptation was there to play along in innocence as others paved the way for him to be Cromwell or Caesar, but it was impossible. Men such as Cincinnatus and the hero of his favorite play, Cicero, had been his models since childhood, not Caesar.

He had rebuffed the “Cabal of Newburgh” with a simple gesture. When a brief speech denouncing the plot failed to draw the response he sought. Washington resorted to a bit of “stagecraft” by drawing from his breast pocket his spectacles. Few, except his closest aides, had ever seen him wearing them, a symbol appropriate for an intellectual such as Franklin, or an aging minister, statesman, or scholar, but certainly not for a general still robust and apparently in his prime.

The room had fallen silent at the sight of this gesture and with true humbleness he had said, “As you can see, I have gone old and near to blind in service to my country. I did not fight George the Third to become George the First.”

The potential rebellion had collapsed before he had even left the room.

As much as the memory of so many battles fought filled him at this moment with a sense of pride, it was turning aside that ultimate offer of power that he felt he could be proudest of.

Come spring, when it was clear that negotiations in Paris were coming to a successful conclusion, Congress ordered him to start the demobilization of his army. He knew it was to cut expenses, but there were some lingering doubts as well that he just might change his mind about the offer of an army, giving him the power of dictatorship. That any would believe such of him after so many years of service was an insult, but, as always, he obeyed.

As each regiment mustered for the last time, under their faded, shot-torn standards that they had carried before them in victory and preserved in times of bitter defeat, Washington had stood before them. His voice often choked with emotion, extolled them to return to their homes as free men, as honest men, that their pay was the glory they had won on so many battlefields, and the honor that they would be held in by all generations of Americans to come. They had heard him and gone home with barely a word of protest. He had clasped the hands of many thousands in those months, and could never forget the look in the eyes of so many. Poor, ragged, worn after eight years of war, they were free men, men of honor and pride, who looked him straight in the eye as he thanked each for their service to America.

Now it was time for him to go home as well.

Word had arrived on November 24 that the treaty of peace had been signed in Paris. A secure America, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, had been won.

The proper protocols and messages had been exchanged between him and General Carleton with the arrival of the notice of this Treaty of Paris. The final act would be the last British soldier embarking by the morning of December 4 for England.

The evening before he crossed the Harlem River via the “Kings Bridge” to the tip of Manhattan isle with his army, now less than a thousand men under arms. Shallow sunken graves still pockmarked the land, from the battles fought back in 1776, a final resting place of many a Patriot.

Dawn had come bright and clear, with early winter weather, but with the promise of a springlike warmth by midday as they marched down from the wooded heights, past farmsteads, some overgrown and abandoned by Patriots who had fled the British occupation and were now following along to reclaim their land and rebuild. As they came off those heights, in the distance, in the upper bay between Staten Island and Manhattan, all could see a small convoy of ships taking on the last of the British army, which had arrived here more than seven years ago with boasts that in three months’ time they would crush the rebellion and be back home by Christmas. If the wind was swift and fair, they just might make it back at last for this Christmas. Mingled in with them were thousands of tragic refugees, who, at this moment, he no longer bore ill will toward. Refusing to accept or trust in the treaty that promised insurance of their property rights (for those who even still held property), the Loyalists were now going into exile, most to Canada, some all the way back to England.

As the army started to disband throughout this year, there were many farewell ceremonies. His old friends and comrades Lafayette and Greene had come north after the British evacuations of Charleston and Savannah, and there had been a quiet evening of talking of future hopes and recollections of their past, in crisis and in the rare moments of triumph. Lafayette, imbued with a bit too much wine, had mused on how history might remember them, and what statues might someday be erected.

He had rejected the idea out of hand. They had fought to create a free republic, not an empire with statues of Caesars and conquerors. The argument had flowed back and forth, with some saying a republic needed models of heroes of the past, which history might someday record them as. Washington had finally conceded that at the least he could accept a statue to Benjamin Franklin, who all universally acknowledged was the intellectual leader and chief negotiator of their liberty. The topic had shifted to the various battlefields, Lafayette and Greene urging at least a statue of a soldier, dressed in rags but defiant, in the now abandoned winter grounds of Valley Forge, to mark the graves of the thousands who had died there during that terrible winter. Then had come the question of Saratoga.

There was a long moment of silence. The subject on their minds was Horatio Gates, the purported commander of the armies there, who was a pariah to all present. He had all but attempted an open coup against Washington during the Valley Forge winter. His supporters in Congress had finally forced through his command of the armies in the South, where at Camden, he had nearly thrown away the Revolution in a disastrous defeat, out of which Greene was dispatched to retrieve the situation.

“If our grandchildren someday decided upon statues at Saratoga,” Greene had mused, “what of Benedict Arnold? For even we must acknowledge that his gallantry that day turned defeat into glorious victory.”

Lafayette sighed, looking into his glass of claret, the wine the color of blood.

“I wish the bullet had been aimed but a bit higher,” he finally whispered, breaking the embarrassed silence.

“Which bullet?” Greene had asked.

“The one that struck his leg.”

Lafayette looked back up at his friends who were gazing at him curiously, not sure of his meaning.

He chuckled softly.

“I could think of no finer fate, after a few more years of life of course, and with children and grandchildren to remember me,” and those around him chuckled softly, “then to die for a cause such as we have fought for.”

There were nods of approval.

Then he sadly gazed back down at his glass of wine.

“If I were Arnold, for the rest of my life, I would wish that the bullet that had struck me in the leg at Saratoga had winged but a bit higher and struck me in the heart. For in that death my name forever after would be spoken of with reverence and honor. He did not fall upon the stage of this life when fate would have been most kind, and shall now live out a life alone, despised here as a traitor, mistrusted in the land to which he has fled to by those who faced us as soldiers who understood honor.”