Washington: A Life (73 page)

Uplifted by the splendid news from France, Washington pressed Congress for an expanded army of at least twenty thousand Continental troops to cooperate with their ally. As a matter of both pride and policy, Washington didn’t want the stylish French soldiers to patronize his men in their tattered clothing, and he appealed to Congress to rectify the matter. His army had come to a standstill, lacking money and supplies. “For the troops to be without clothing at any time is highly injurious to the service and distressing to our feelings. But the want will be more peculiarly mortifying when they come to act with those of our allies.”
⁷
In early July, with the arrival of the French fleet imminent, Washington was chagrined by the states’ failure to muster new troops or even keep him posted on their plans. He again blamed the bugaboo of a permanent military force—the “fatal jealousy … of a standing army”—for the shocking failure to buttress his army.
⁸
“One half the year is spent in getting troops into the field,” Washington complained to his brother Samuel, “the other half is lost in discharging them from their limited service.”
⁹

When the French fleet arrived in Newport on July 10, it proved almost anticlimactic. Only five thousand soldiers, it turned out, had made the crossing, and a significant fraction were unfit for service. No sooner did Washington learn of the French dropping anchor than he received dreadful tidings from New York: Rear Admiral Thomas Graves had arrived in the harbor with a British fleet of comparable size. Washington dispatched Lafayette to confer with Rochambeau and Ternay, introducing him to the French officers as “a friend from whom I conceal nothing … I entreat you to receive whatever he shall tell you as coming from me.”
¹⁰
In assigning Lafayette as his go-between, Washington committed a terrible gaffe that betrayed his provinciality. However blue-blooded Lafayette was in social terms, he had been only a captain in the French reserve and was much too low in the military hierarchy to parley with a French lieutenant general with decades of service. Still worse, Lafayette had tried to wangle the very assignment Rochambeau now held. Undeterred, Lafayette poured out flattery so liberally that Rochambeau pleaded with him to stop: “I embrace you, my dear Marquis, most heartily, and don’t make me any more compliments, I beg of you.”
¹¹

Although Washington had resurrected his plan to besiege New York, Lafayette could not budge Rochambeau and Ternay from their resolve to wait for more French troops before setting their men in motion. The French balked at relying on their American allies. Rochambeau was secretly appalled at the minute size of Washington’s army and the bankruptcy of American credit. “Send us troops, ships, and money,” he wrote home, “but do not depend on these people nor upon their means; they have neither money nor credit; their means of resistance are only momentary and called forth when they are attacked in their own homes.”
¹²
Privately he mocked Washington’s plan to attack New York as absurd, given the beggarly state of American finances, and blamed Lafayette for abetting Washington’s unrealistic fantasies. The French general would be two-faced in his relationship with Washington, pretending to credit his ideas, then doing exactly as he pleased. For political reasons, both sides subscribed to the polite fiction that Washington was in charge, but another year elapsed before the alliance with France bore fruit in a major joint military operation.

 

 

IN THE WAKE of the aborted “Conway Cabal,” George Washington had remained unfailingly polite to Horatio Gates, even though he thought the latter still intrigued against him. But his courtesy failed to mollify his implacable foe. In spring 1779 Gates protested to John Jay that Washington deliberately kept him in the dark, which led Washington, in turn, to pen an acerbic note to Jay, relating how he had sent Gates no fewer than forty letters in the last seven months of 1778. “I think it will be acknowledged,” observed Washington tartly, “that the correspondence was frequent enough during that period.”
¹³
Far from snubbing him, Washington noted, “I made a point of treating Gen[era]l Gates with all the attention and cordiality in my power, as well from a sincere desire of harmony as from an unwillingness to give any cause of triumph to our enemies.”
¹⁴

After the British captured Charleston, Gates was appointed to command the southern department of the army, and Washington refrained from comment so as not to be accused of meddling from personal pique. If Washington quietly rooted for Gates’s comeuppance, the British delivered it in shattering form near Camden, South Carolina, on August 16, 1780. Gates deployed a force of nearly four thousand men, considerably bigger than the force marshaled by Cornwallis, but many were callow militia. Determined British troops smashed through the American lines and sent men flying in terror. Only the detachment under General Johann de Kalb tried to withstand the frenzied onslaught. The British cavalry under Colonel Banastre Tarleton—nicknamed “Bloody Tarleton” and “The Butcher” for his take-no-prisoners approach—slashed at Kalb’s helpless men, while Kalb himself was bludgeoned to death with bayonets and rifle butts. Educated at Oxford, from a wealthy family, the young Tarleton was a beefy, redheaded man who was brash and cocky about his exploits on and off the battlefield. “Tarleton boasts of having butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army,” Horace Walpole reported.
¹⁵
Having lost two fingers in battle, he delighted in waving his truncated hand and shouting, “These gave I for King and country!”
¹⁶
At Camden, Tarleton’s men did their deadly work so efficiently that nine hundred Americans were slain and a thousand taken prisoner.

The debacle knocked Gates off his perch, especially after the terror-stricken general scampered away on horseback and raced 180 miles before mustering the equanimity to report to Congress. Washington, who had an unerring knack for letting his enemies dig their own graves, was tight-lipped about the defeat. Still, his loyal aides heaped scorn on the discredited Gates, who became the laughingstock of Washington’s staff. “Was there ever an instance of a general running away, as Gates has done, from his whole army?” Alexander Hamilton whooped with glee. “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.”
¹⁷
With the American defeat, Georgia and the Carolinas fell under British sway, making Virginia more vulnerable to invasion. For the moment, Lord Cornwallis looked invincible. Drawing the moral for Congress, Washington sidestepped Gates’s cowardice to concentrate on the militia’s amateurish performance. “
No militia
will ever acquire the habits necessary to resist a regular force … The firmness requisite for the real business of fighting is only to be attained by a constant course of discipline and service.”
¹⁸

After the Camden battle, Congress relieved a chastened Gates of his command and launched an inquest into his ignominious behavior. Gates had been the last serious rival left to Washington, whose supremacy now stood unchallenged. Gates’s downfall paved the way for the return to power of General Nathanael Greene, who yearned to get back to the battlefield. He had labored successfully at the thankless job of quartermaster general and was fully rehabilitated from the disgrace of Fort Washington. Washington praised Greene for introducing both “method and system” to army supplies and reposed more confidence in him than in any other general.
¹⁹
Despite Washington’s patronage, however, Greene could be an anxious, insecure man, very sensitive to slights. After the Battle of Brandywine, he had licked his wounds when Washington didn’t single out for praise his division, which had included a Virginia brigade under General Weedon. “You, sir, are considered my favorite officer,” Washington told him candidly. “Weedon’s brigade, like myself, are Virginians. Should I applaud them for their achievement under your command, I shall be charged with partiality.”
²⁰

Greene often experienced Washington as a difficult, caviling boss, which was hard for him as he needed periodic hand-holding and reassurance. In 1778 Greene wrote a self-pitying letter to Washington that almost begged for praise: “As I came into the Quartermaster’s department with reluctance, so I shall leave it with pleasure. Your influence brought me in and the want of your approbation will induce me to go out.”
²¹
However brusque he could be to his colleagues, Washington was also finely responsive to their psychological needs. He replied to Greene’s letter: “But let me beseech you, my dear Sir, not to harbor any distrusts of my friendship or conceive that I mean to wound the feelings of a person whom I greatly esteem and regard.”
²²

In removing Gates from his command, Congress certified Washington’s consolidation of power by ceding to him the choice of a successor. Always sure-handed in dealing with Congress, he decided to “nominate” Nathanael Greene for the southern command instead of choosing him outright, and Congress confirmed this superb choice on October 14, 1780. The story is sometimes told that Greene initially rejected the demanding post. “Knox is the man for this difficult undertaking,” he told Washington. “All obstacles vanish before him. His resources are infinite.” “True,” Washington retorted slyly, “and therefore I cannot part with him.”
²³

Owing to the huge British presence in New York, Washington didn’t think he could spare many men for the southern campaign. In giving Greene instructions, he revealed his own remoteness from the southern theater: “Uninformed as I am of the enemy’s force in that quarter, of our own, or of the resources which it will be in your power to command … I can give you no particular instructions, but must leave you to govern yourself entirely.”
²⁴
When Caty Greene expressed concern about her husband being sent south, Washington made the magnanimous offer to serve as her post office and relay messages to her husband. “If you will entrust your letters to my care,” he told her, “they shall have the same attention paid to them as my own.”
²⁵

 

 

AS THE END OF SUMMER APPROACHED, it seemed more than a little peculiar that Washington still hadn’t set eyes on the Count de Rochambeau and the Chevalier de Ternay. The simple truth was that he feared the American army might fall apart in his absence and was too embarrassed by its frightful shape to chance an encounter with the French. Aside from more men, he estimated that he needed five thousand muskets and two hundred tons of gunpowder to field a viable force. When Lafayette informed him of Rochambeau’s express wish to meet him, Washington owned up to the problem: “With respect to the Count’s desire of a personal interview with me, you are sensible, my dear Marquis, that there is nothing I should more ardently desire than to meet him. But you are also sensible that my presence here is essential to keep our preparations in activity, or even going on at all.”
²⁶
It was an extraordinary commentary on his army’s enfeebled state. In late August the bread shortage grew so alarming that he faced the severe dilemma of whether to dismiss the militia because he couldn’t feed them or accept new recruits and let them “come forward to starve.”
²⁷
In early September, in order to conserve food, he sent home four hundred militiamen.

In mid-September 1780, accompanied by Lafayette, Hamilton, Knox, and an entourage of twenty-two horsemen, Washington set out for his long overdue rendezvous with Rochambeau and Ternay. The spot chosen for the parley, Hartford, Connecticut, stood equidistant between the two armies. Washington dealt with the French from a weakened position: he had only ten thousand soldiers in his army, half the number he wanted, and the total would be halved on January 1 as enlistments expired. He thought it essential that Americans, not Frenchmen, should have credit for winning the American Revolution: “The generosity of our allies has a claim to all our confidence and all our gratitude, but it is neither for the honor of America, nor for the interest of the common cause, to leave the work entirely to them.”
²⁸
En route to Hartford, Washington and his retinue paused near West Point so that he could lunch with its commandant, Benedict Arnold. Pleased with Arnold but apprehensive about the state of West Point’s defenses, Washington promised to stop by on his return trip and tour the fortifications.

As Washington approached Hartford, then a humble village consisting of a single road along the Connecticut River, French cannon thundered thirteen times and local citizens broke forth in ecstatic cheers. With Lafayette acting as translator, Washington and Rochambeau had their first chance to size each other up. Rochambeau looked the part of a rough-hewn soldier who had put in thirty-seven years in the army. Short and thickset, he had a scar above one eye and shuffled about with a mild limp from an old war wound. Whatever his reservations about Washington’s military plans, he was tactful, even affable, at this first meeting, but too temperamental to keep his moods in check for long. Claude Blanchard, his chief quartermaster, claimed that Rochambeau distrusted everyone and saw himself “surrounded by rogues and idiots. This character, combined with manners far from courteous, makes him disagreeable to everybody.”
²⁹

Perhaps because they had to humor a crotchety boss, Rochambeau’s staff were instantly charmed by Washington. Blanchard professed to be “enchanted” with the American general, who exhibited “an easy and noble bearing, extensive and correct views, [and] the art of making himself beloved.”
³⁰
Washington suited the idealized expectations of the world-weary French as to how a New World liberator should behave. “We had been impatient to see the hero of liberty,” said the Count de Dumas. “His dignified address, his simplicity of manners, and mild gravity surpassed our expectation and won every heart.”
³¹
Count Axel von Fersen found Washington “handsome and majestic” but was perceptive enough to discern trouble behind the placid countenance. “A shade of sadness overshadows his countenance, which is not unbecoming and gives him an interesting air.”
³²
It is perhaps surprising that more French officers didn’t pick up the anxiety that beset Washington that summer.