Washington: A Life (68 page)

From the retirement of his farm in Virginia, Charles Lee, as irascible as ever, continued to wage a campaign of vituperation against Washington. In 1780 he sent to Congress a letter whose tone was so obnoxious that he was cashiered for good from the armed forces. Before his death in 1782, Lee requested that he be buried somewhere other than a churchyard, stating that “since I have resided in this country, I have kept so much bad company while living, that I do not choose to continue it when dead.”
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EVEN AS THE CONTINENTAL ARMY FOUGHT in the gritty heat of Monmouth Court House, then filed wearily toward the Hudson River, blessed relief seemed to arrive when a French fleet dropped anchor off Delaware Bay on July 8, 1778. This majestic armada of twelve enormous ships of the line and four frigates, bearing four thousand soldiers, ended Britain’s undisputed dominance in sea power in the war. A few weeks earlier French and British ships had exchanged fire in the English Channel, dragging France irrevocably into the hostilities. Henceforth the Revolutionary War would gradually evolve into a global conflict, with theaters of battle extending from the West Indies to the Indian Ocean.

The French fleet was headed by a forty-eight-year-old French nobleman and vice admiral with a long, flowery name: Count Jean-Baptiste-Charles-Henri-Hector d’Estaing. D’Estaing had his own reasons for joining the fight, having clashed with the British in the East Indies and been captured by them twice. With his army background, he had never entirely gained the trust of skeptical naval officers, who sometimes reflexively addressed him as “General.”
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He had won the high-prestige American assignment less from naval prowess than from his intimacy with the royal family. The day he arrived off the Chesapeake, d’Estaing sent Washington a rather rapturous letter of introduction: “The talents and great actions of General Washington have insured him in the eyes of all Europe the title, truly sublime, of deliverer of America.”
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It proved a bittersweet moment for Washington, who imagined that, if the French fleet had shown up weeks earlier, it might have delivered a mortal blow to the British Army in Philadelphia; had that happened, Sir Henry Clinton might have “shared (at least) the fate of Burgoyne.”
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Destiny had robbed George Washington of a spectacular chance to eclipse Horatio Gates. Whatever his regrets, Washington dispatched his faithful aide John Laurens to coordinate plans with the admiral and reverted to his fond daydream of recapturing New York. From his camp in White Plains, he mused how the war had now come full circle, giving him an unexpected chance to redeem past errors: “It is not a little pleasing, nor less wonderful to contemplate, that after two years’ maneuvering and undergoing the strangest vicissitudes that perhaps ever attended any one contest since the creation, both armies are brought back to the very point they set out from.”
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Momentarily it appeared that d’Estaing might pull off a quick miracle. With his fleet anchored off Sandy Hook, the prospect arose that he could trap the Royal Navy in New York Bay. Then it was discovered that the harbor channel was too shallow for the deep draft of his huge ships, and Washington believed yet another exquisite chance to shorten the war had been fumbled.

The inaugural effort at cooperation with the French squadron ended up riddled with acrimony. The new allies decided to demolish the British garrison at Newport, Rhode Island, through a joint effort of the American army under Major General John Sullivan and the French fleet under d’Estaing. The swarthy Sullivan was a competent but notoriously cantankerous officer. A year earlier Washington had felt duty-bound to challenge his pretensions. “No other officer of rank in the whole army has so often conceived himself neglected, slighted, and ill-treated as you have done,” Washington warned him, “and none, I am sure, has had less cause than yourself to entertain such ideas.”
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The brawny Irishman hardly seemed the ideal person to coordinate a military mission with a highborn French count.

When an untimely storm and the appearance of a British fleet interfered with the Newport assault, d’Estaing decided to scuttle it and take refuge in Boston. For Washington, this was yet the third time that a stupendous opportunity had been bungled. “If the garrison of that place (consisting of 6,000 men) had been captured … it would have given the finishing blow to British pretensions of sovereignty of this country,” Washington asserted to his brother Jack.
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Fuming, Sullivan swore that the French had left his men dangerously stranded in Rhode Island. On August 22 he and Nathanael Greene sent an explosive letter to d’Estaing, accusing him of craven betrayal. However much Washington might have sympathized with their critique, he didn’t believe he could afford to spar with his French allies, so he tried to hush up the letter and sent the politic Greene to mend fences with d’Estaing. He also pleaded with Sullivan to restore cordial relations and avoid festering mistrust: “First impressions, you know, are generally longest remembered, and will serve to fix in a great degree our national character among the French.”
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With d’Estaing, Washington swallowed his pride and flattered the Frenchman’s pride unashamedly. “It is in the trying circumstances to which your Excellency has been exposed that the virtues of a great mind are displayed in their brightest luster,” he wrote, claiming that the unforeseen storm had stolen a major prize from the admiral.
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As part of the effort to repair frayed relations, John Hancock hosted a gleaming banquet at his Beacon Hill mansion in Boston, where the count was presented with a portrait of Washington. “I never saw a man so glad at possessing his sweetheart’s picture, as the admiral was to receive yours,” Lafayette reported from the scene.
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For Washington, the French alliance never flowed smoothly. The bulk of France’s fleet remained based in the Caribbean, which hindered joint operations, and the alliance with a mighty power placed Washington in an uncomfortably subservient position. By now he was accustomed to command, and a junior partnership didn’t suit his strong-willed nature. He admired French military know-how, but as an outwardly cool and reticent personality, he had limited patience with French histrionics. That summer he described the French as “a people old in war, very strict in military etiquette, and apt to take fire where others scarcely seem warmed.”
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Whenever he wrote to Count d’Estaing, his language seemed to grow more stilted, as if he were trying to ape French diplomatic language, and it never sounded quite natural. Somewhere inside Washington there still lurked the insecure provincial, trying to impress these snobbish Europeans.

Compared to their American counterparts, the French, in their handsome white uniforms, looked positively foppish, right down to their high-heeled shoes. On the eve of one operation with the French, Washington ordered his field officers to fix upon a uniform look for regimental clothing, explaining that “it has a very odd appearance, especially to foreigners, to see the same corps of officers each differing from the other in fashion of the facings, sleeves, and pockets, of their coats.”
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The French condescended to American soldiers, especially the militia. “I have never seen a more laughable spectacle,” said one French officer. “All the tailors and apothecaries in the country must have been called out … They were mounted on bad nags and looked like a flock of ducks in cross belts.”
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The Franco-American partnership soon gave way to reciprocal disillusionment. The French had imagined that Washington commanded an army double the size of the one they found, while Washington had hoped for more than four thousand French troops. His skepticism about French motives would harden into a corner-stone of his foreign policy. His fellow citizens, he thought, were too ready to glorify France, which had entered the war to damage Britain, not to aid the Americans. “Men are very apt to run into extremes,” he warned Henry Laurens. “Hatred to England may carry some into an excess of confidence in France, especially when motives of gratitude are thrown into the scale.”
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John Adams summed up the situation memorably when he said that the French foreign minister kept “his hand under our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.”
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In yet another sign of his growing political acumen, Washington generalized this perception into an enduring truth of foreign policy, noting that “it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.”
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For Washington, the Continental Army was a practical school in which he received an accelerated course in statecraft, completing the education started by the first tax controversies in Virginia. One suspects that his dinner table talk with well-educated officers and aides, ranging over a vast spectrum of political, military, and financial topics, made Washington well versed in many issues, belying the notion that he was a narrow, uncomprehending leader.

The question of French motives acquired more than academic interest when Lafayette advocated an invasion of Canada. For all his affection for his youthful protégé, Washington retained an admirable skepticism about his motives. “As the Marquis clothed his proposition when he spoke of it to me, it would seem to originate wholly with himself,” Washington warned Henry Laurens, “but it is far from impossible that it had its birth in the cabinet of France and was put into this artful dress to give it the readier currency.”
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If the French were embraced as liberators in Quebec, Washington feared, they might be tempted to reclaim Canadian territory relinquished at the time of the French and Indian War.

At first, Washington hesitated to voice opinions to Congress that went beyond his military bailiwick. Then in early November he sent Laurens a persuasive letter that laid out his misgivings about a northern operation. Any such invasion would introduce “a large body of French troops into Canada” and put them “in possession of the capital of that province, attached to them by all the ties of blood, habits, manners, religion, and former connection of government.”
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Once entrenched in Quebec, France would be well placed to control the United States, which was “the natural and most formidable rival of every maritime power in Europe.”
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Of this eloquent statement of realpolitik, Edmund Morgan has commented that it “remains one of the more striking examples of the quick perception of political realities that lay behind Washington’s understanding of power.”
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Perhaps corroborating Washington’s worst fears, Lafayette went to Philadelphia without seeking his approval and lobbied Congress for a Canadian invasion. To Washington’s dismay, some members endorsed the proposal with unthinking enthusiasm. When Lafayette traveled up the Hudson Valley to confer with Washington, the Frenchman fell ill with a high fever at Fishkill, New York, sixteen miles from the Continental Army camp. When it looked as if Lafayette might die, Washington was on such tenterhooks, according to Lafayette’s later florid account, that he rode over every day to “inquire after his friend, but fearing to agitate him, he only conversed with the physician and returned home with tearful eyes and a heart oppressed with grief.”
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By late November Lafayette had sufficiently recovered to leave for Boston, hoping to catch a ship back to France for a quick visit and “present myself before the king and know in what manner he judges proper to employ my services.”
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THAT FALL THE ATMOSPHERE grew thick with rumors that the British might evacuate New York, but even though a large number of British ships sailed south to destinations unknown in November, Sir Henry Clinton remained fixed in the city. As for winter quarters, Washington decided to house the main body of his troops at Middlebrook, New Jersey, west of Staten Island, in countryside much prettier than Valley Forge. Washington shared the home of the Philadelphia merchant John Wallace, who lived on the Raritan River, four miles west of Bound Brook. His extended absence from Mount Vernon preyed on his mind, for it began to look as if he might be trapped in some form of permanent exile. “I am beginning to throw the troops into cantonments for their winter quarters,” he told brother Jack, “giving up all idea this fourth winter of seeing my home and friends, as I shall have full employment during the winter to prepare for the campaign that follows it.”
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While the Continental Army was better clothed than at Valley Forge, it hadn’t solved all the problems of the previous winter, thanks to congressional ineptitude. By now, Washington had become habituated to a draining atmosphere of a perpetual, slow-motion crisis. “Our affairs are in a more distressed, ruinous, and deplorable condition than they have been in since the commencement of the war,” Washington insisted to Benjamin Harrison.
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He had learned a valuable lesson at Valley Forge, where he had made the mistake of concentrating his men in one compact group. This time he scattered his troops across a broad area, extending north to the Hudson Valley and as far off as Connecticut, a strategic dispersal that facilitated the hunt for forage and supplies. He also ordered the application of more sanitary methods in the camp, forbidding earthen floors in huts and requiring that they be roofed with boards, slabs, or shingles.

On December 23 Washington took a brief respite from his incessant labors and traveled to Philadelphia to confer with Congress about the prospective Canadian invasion. Perhaps in preparation for this trip, he ordered new clothing for Billy Lee—two coats, two waistcoats, and a pair of breeches—that would do credit to both slave and master in the city’s tony salons. Washington had already asked Martha to meet him in Philadelphia and she had eagerly awaited him there since late November. They would celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary in the city that January. The
Pennsylvania Packet
noted with gratitude that this sojourn was “the only relief” Washington had “enjoyed from service since he first entered into it,” yet the trip would prove anything but a vacation. Staying at the Chestnut Street home of Henry Laurens, Washington got a view of civilian life that would revolt him with an indelible vision of private greed and profligacy. Like soldiers throughout history, he was jarred by the contrast between the austerity of the army and the riches being earned on the home front through lucrative war contracts.