Washington: A Life (81 page)

THROUGH THE COMBINED EFFORTS of Benjamin Franklin and John Laurens in Paris that winter, the French agreed to an indispensable loan and a munificent gift of six million livres to purchase arms and supplies. For all that, the French foreign minister, Vergennes, was reluctant to commit more French troops. In the early going, he had fancied that the French would score a rapid victory; now, as things dragged on, he shrank from an open-ended involvement. All along Washington and Lafayette had stressed the vital importance of sea power, and Vergennes decided the French would mount one last naval effort. In the spring he notified Lafayette that a French squadron would cruise off America’s coast during the year: “M. Le Comte de Grasse, who commands our fleet in the Antilles, has been ordered to send part of his fleet to the coast of North America sometime before next winter or to detach a portion of it to sweep the coast and cooperate in any undertaking which may be projected by the French and American generals.”
¹⁶
On May 8 the Count de Barras, the newly assigned French naval commander, arrived with the invigorating news that 26 ships of the line, 8 frigates, and 150 transports had sailed from Brest in late March, bound for the West Indies.

On May 21 Washington met in Wethersfield, Connecticut, with Rochambeau, who confirmed that an enormous French fleet under Admiral de Grasse was on its way. During the winter Washington had worked out in detail the plan that had long bewitched his mind: a siege of New York, with the Americans attacking Manhattan and the French Brooklyn. He cited the comforting statistic that Sir Henry Clinton, in sending detachments south, had cut his New York force in half. An operation against New York, he argued vigorously, would force Clinton to withdraw more troops from the South. Washington also had legitimate logistical concerns about the difficulties of marching his army to Virginia and its environs. He wasn’t opposed to a southern operation per se, but his unswerving passion for retaking New York was patent. “General Washington, during this conference, had scarcely another object in view but an expedition against the island of New York,” Rochambeau wrote.
¹⁷

Rochambeau had to play a delicate game of deception with Washington. Although he didn’t want to stifle Washington’s enthusiasm or rebuff him outright, he tried to steer the conversation toward a joint operation in the South, where they might rendezvous with the French fleet and surprise Cornwallis. Even as Rochambeau humored Washington and initialed a document saying that New York held top priority, he secretly relayed word to de Grasse that he should think about sailing to Chesapeake Bay instead of to New York. In the coming weeks Rochambeau pretended to lend credence to Washington’s plans, while focusing his real attention on quite a different strategy.

Why did Washington botch this major strategic call? Aside from settling old scores, he may well have believed that his army would enjoy a paramount role in a New York siege, compared to an auxiliary role in any southern battle. Or perhaps he honestly believed that it was easier to concentrate American and French forces in the North and that a long march southward in summer heat would sacrifice large numbers of soldiers through sickness and desertion. Having prodded the northern states to aid his army in any Franco-American campaign, he doubtless feared that their enthusiasm might cool with any southern strategy. Since he believed that his army’s existence depended on the outcome of Heath’s diplomatic mission to the states, this counted as no minor factor in his thinking at the moment.

While both Washington and Rochambeau labored to fashion a harmonious facade of Franco-American amity, perceptive observers detected subtle tensions. Their interpreter at Wethersfield, the Chevalier de Chastellux, a man of many parts—soldier, philosopher, member of the French Academy, intimate of Voltaire—was well placed to study their complex interaction. A handsome fellow with watchful eyes, he was gathering material for a book about the United States and was immensely taken with the forty-nine-year-old Washington, applauding him as “the greatest and the best of men.”
¹⁸
He was chagrined by the treatment Washington received from his French counterpart. Rochambeau, he claimed, handled the Virginian with “all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible,” and he worried that Washington would be left with “a sad and disagreeable feeling in his heart.”
¹⁹
Washington secretly carried this grief but exposed it to no one outside a small circle of advisers.

When Chastellux arrived that winter, Washington was instantly charmed by this friend of Lafayette, whom he praised as a gentleman of “merit, knowledge, and agreeable manners.”
²⁰
At his first meals with Washington, Chastellux was struck by how Washington was “always free and always agreeable” with his officers, unlike the rigidly formal Europeans.
²¹
When he couldn’t offer the Frenchman a separate bedroom for lack of space, Washington apologized, “but always with a noble polite-ness, which was neither embarrassing nor excessive.”
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For Chastellux, Washington seemed a man of the happy medium: “brave without temerity, laborious without ambition, generous without prodigality, noble without pride, virtuous without severity.”
²³
He captured well how Washington was at once amiable and yet a shade aloof: “He has not the imposing pomp of a
Maréchal de France
who gives
the order
… The goodness and benevolence which characterize him are evident in all that surrounds him, but the confidence he calls forth never occasions improper familiarity.”
²⁴
Most impressive was Washington’s implicit submission to the people’s representatives: “This is the seventh year that he has commanded the army and he has obeyed Congress: more need not be said.”
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Later on, Chastellux left a fine epitaph for Washington when he said that “at the end of a long civil war, he had nothing with which he could reproach himself.”
²⁶

That Washington found it frustrating to be junior partner in the French alliance was confirmed when he returned to New Windsor after meeting with Rochambeau. At Wethersfield, Washington had advised Rochambeau to relocate the French fleet from Newport to Boston. Then the Duke de Lauzun arrived with a message that a French council of war had opted to keep it in Newport. This was a direct slap at Washington, who was “in such a rage,” the duke said, that he didn’t reply for three days. He had to accept that the French were his superiors, notwithstanding their public claims that he supervised the two armies. When Washington finally replied, he said he took “the liberty still to recommend” that the fleet be moved to Boston.
²⁷
The French seemed to acquiesce, for on May 31 he recorded in his journal that Admiral de Barras “would sail with the first fair wind for Boston.”
²⁸

On June 10 Rochambeau informed Washington that the Count de Grasse would bring his fleet north that summer to coordinate an attack with the French and American armies. Washington reiterated his hope that de Grasse would sail to New York. In reply, Rochambeau continued to string Washington along, contending that de Grasse had been informed “that your Excellency preferred that he should make his first appearance at New York … that I submitted, as I ought, my opinion to yours.”
²⁹
In reality, Rochambeau alerted de Grasse to his private preference for heading first to the Chesapeake Bay.

In the early years of the war Virginia had been spared bloodshed, but in June 1781 fighting raged there with blazing ferocity. Lord Cornwallis had joined forces with Benedict Arnold, and despite able defensive maneuvers by Lafayette, the two men spread terror through the state. “Accounts from Virginia are exceedingly alarming,” Washington told Rochambeau, reporting that the enemy was marching through the state “almost without control.”
³⁰
Still bent on taking New York, Washington pleaded that an attack there would be the best way to siphon off British troops from Virginia. In mid-June he wrote again with a new twist—if they had clear naval superiority, he would contemplate targets other than New York: “I wish you to explain this matter to the
Count de Grasse,
as, if I understand you, you have in your communication to him, confined our views to
New York
alone.”
³¹
Clearly Washington had been fooled as to what Rochambeau had whispered in the admiral’s ear.

With the benefit of hindsight, Washington’s preoccupation with New York seems a colossal mistake, just as Rochambeau’s emphasis on Cornwallis and Virginia seems prescient. As a rule, Washington did not tamper with history and implicitly trusted the record. In this case, however, he later tried to rewrite history by suggesting that his tenacious concentration on New York was a mere feint to mislead the British in Virginia, while maintaining the political allegiance of the eastern and mid-Atlantic states. Responding to a query from Noah Webster in 1788, Washington defended his behavior with unusual vehemence, as if the inquiry had touched a raw nerve. He alleged that his preparations against New York were intended “to misguide and bewilder Sir Henry Clinton in regard to the real object [i.e., the Chesapeake] by fictitious communications as well as by making a deceptive provision of ovens, forage and boats in his neighborhood … Nor were less pains taken to deceive our own army.”
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He went so far as to say that “it never was in contemplation to attack New York.”
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But in confidential correspondence with Rochambeau he pushed for no Chesapeake operation, and the record shows that he had repeatedly favored a strike against New York. Only on the very eve of the Yorktown campaign did he undertake the deceptive maneuvers described to Webster.

In general, Washington lived up to his vaunted reputation for honesty, but it was awkward for him to admit that he had, at least initially, opposed a campaign that served as the brilliant capstone of his military career. He wanted to portray himself as the visionary architect of the Yorktown victory, not as a general misguidedly concentrating upon New York while his French allies masterminded the decisive blow. Washington made it difficult for people to catch his lie because he alleged that he had tried to deceive his own side as well as the enemy; hence any communication could be construed as part of the master bluff. When Washington’s letter to Noah Webster was published in the
American Museum
in 1791, Timothy Pickering, the former adjutant general and quartermaster general of the Continental Army, shook his head sadly. “It will hurt [Washington’s] moral character,” he wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush. “He has been generally thought to be honest and I own I thought his morals were good, but that letter is false and I know it to be so.”
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Whatever his shortcomings as a military strategist, the French understood that Washington’s greatness as a general lay in his prolonged sustenance of his makeshift army. He had done something unprecedented by cobbling together a creditable fighting force from the poor, the young, the black, and the downtrodden, and he had done it in the face of unprecedented political obstacles. In early July the French and American armies camped close together near Dobbs Ferry, on the east bank of the Hudson, giving the French officers a chance to study the Continental Army and marvel at what Washington had wrought. It was a heterogeneous, mongrel army such as no European had ever before witnessed. “I admire the American troops tremendously!” said Baron von Closen. “It is incredible that soldiers composed of men of every age, even of children of fifteen, of whites and blacks, almost naked, unpaid, and rather poorly fed, can march so well and withstand fire so steadfastly.” He gave all credit to “the calm and calculated measures of General Washington, in whom I daily discover some new and eminent qualities.”
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Von Closen’s amazement was shared by his colleague the Count de Clermont-Crèvecoeur. As the latter roamed about the American army camp, he was stunned “by its destitution: the men were without uniforms and covered with rags; most of them were barefoot. They were of all sizes down to children who could not have been over fourteen. There were many negroes, mulattoes, etc. Only their artillerymen were wearing uniforms.”
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Such tributes are the more noteworthy in that Washington was ashamed of the slovenly state of his army, which only heightened the admiration of the flabbergasted French.

Predictably, French officers carped at the quality of American food. On the other hand, they couldn’t fault the quantity, except the way it all seemed thrown indiscriminately on one plate: “The table was served in the American style and pretty abundantly: vegetables, roast beef, lamb, chickens, salad dressed with nothing but vinegar, green peas, puddings and some pie, a kind of tart … all this being put upon the table at the same time. They gave us on the same plate beef, green peas, lamb & etc.”
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One wonders how Washington squared this groaning table with his constant pleas to Congress about food shortages. The French stared in amazement at all the beer and rum consumed and the interminable toasts with raised glasses of wine. They found Washington in an expansive mood at these dinners, convivial and relaxed—the Count de Ségur spoke of his “unaffected cheerfulness”—and he lingered long into the night after the evening meals.
³⁸

On July 18 Washington and Rochambeau wandered along the Hudson at the north end of Manhattan, surveying enemy positions. So many years had elapsed since 1776 that land denuded of its thick vegetation early in the war had started to grow back. “The island is totally stripped of trees and wood of every kind,” Washington wrote, “but low bushes (apparently as high as a man’s waist) appear in places which were covered with wood in the year 1776.”
³⁹
He knew that de Grasse’s arrival off the coast was imminent, though he didn’t know whether it would be off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, or the Virginia capes. Meeting with Rochambeau the next day, Washington reprised his idée fixe: that if de Grasse’s fleet could navigate its way into New York Harbor, then “I am of opinion that the enterprise against New York and its dependencies should be our primary object.”
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In his journal Washington confessed that the Massachusetts governor hadn’t responded to his plea for more men and that he was petrified that, after de Grasse’s arrival, it would be found “that I had neither men nor means adequate” for a military operation.
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Even as he knew he might be on the brink of a major triumph, he was also distraught at the impotence of his position vis-à-vis his French allies. When he wrote to the Count de Grasse on July 21, he ducked the essential question of exactly how many men he had. “The French force consists of about
4,400
men,” he told the French admiral. “The American is at this time but
small,
but expected to be
considerably augmented
. In this, however, we may be disappointed.”
⁴²
Contrary to his later statement, Washington told de Grasse that he hoped there would be no need to go to Virginia, “as I flatter myself the glory of destroying the British squadron at New York is reserved for the king’s fleet under your command.”
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