Conceived in Liberty (244 page)

Washington appeared to accept this sober advice, and followed Clinton’s army, harassing them along the flanks, and outracing them to Cranbury in central New Jersey. Reaching Allentown, east of Trenton, Clinton feared a possible attack crossing the Raritan River, possibly combined with a move southward by Gates; he veered east from the New Brusnwick-Amboy
road to take his army to Sandy Hook on the Atlantic Ocean, there to evacuate his men to New York by ship. Washington was anxious to reverse the council’s decision for limited harrying operations, and at another council of war on June 24 he suggested a general open attack on Clinton’s army. Washington was seconded by Wayne, Lafayette, and by his aide and theoretician, Col. Alexander Hamilton. Lee, on the other hand, argued trenchantly that it would be “criminal” to risk a general engagement against Clinton’s professionally trained and equipped troops, and that it would be far better strategically to “build a bridge of gold” to speed Clinton on his way to the strategically valueless nest in New York. Other generals, however, wanted to have their cake and eat it too, calling for a partial attack that would not risk the entire American army. In a typically muddled compromise, the council decided to keep the main army in reserve, while 1,500 men attacked the British flank and rear. This partial attack would accomplish little, and, at worst, as Lee cogently warned, it would rapidly escalate into the very general frontal engagement that most of the generals were trying to avoid. Greene’s naively optimistic view that “I think we can make a partial attack without suffering them to bring us to a general action” was linked with his psychological argument for having the action at all: “People expect something from us.” On the other hand, Lafayette and Wayne wrote letters protesting what they regarded as too soft a decision; Hamilton wrote bitterly that the council’s decision did “honor to the most honorable body of mid wives and to them only.”

Lee angrily refused to lead the 1,500 attackers, and the command was given to Lafayette, itching to get into action. He was ordered eastward, to harass or strike at the enemy as he saw fit. But when Washington decided to escalate the partiality of the attack, and to commit 5,000 men —fully half of his army—to the engagement against Clinton, Lee changed his mind and insisted on assuming command of the front-line forces, the possibility of defeat now being far more grave. Lee camped at English-town, and the British lay at Monmouth Courthouse, five miles to the east.

On June 27, Washington ordered Lee to attack Clinton’s rearguard the following day to prevent Clinton from reaching Sandy Hook, even though neither Washington nor Lee had had time to reconnoiter the terrain. Before this attack, Lee was to send out a skirmish force of 600, which, joined with Morgan’s 600 men on the British right flank, were to harass and scout the British force when it began to march northeast. Morgan’s men, however, were too outnumbered to do any good. As the harassment began the following morning, Washington ordered Lee to advance to Monmouth with the rest of his men, and to attack the British rearguard “if possible” and “as soon as possible.” Washington was to remain at Englishtown in support of Lee, but because the terrain between English-town
and Monmouth Courthouse could only be traversed across three morasses, or “ravines,” any support he gave Lee would not be effective. Lee halted upon receiving contradictory information about Clinton’s movements, then pressed on to Monmouth, not knowing that Clinton had anticipated the American attack and stood behind Cornwallis’ rearguard of over 1,500 men with a crack force of more than 4,000.

After some indecisive skirmishing, Lee saw that Clinton’s large force stood right behind the rearguard. He ordered Lafayette to defend the right flank against assault, but instead Lafayette retreated, without authorization, followed first by his fellow blowhard Anthony Wayne and then by Gen. Charles Scott. Lee had no choice but to retreat back toward English-town, and he managed to do so in good order, and he later admitted that Lafayette had done the proper thing by retreating. Lee’s estimate of the futility of a large-scale attack had been vindicated against Washington’s rashness and poor judgment.

When Washington, making his advance, met Lee’s force retreating, he gave him no chance to explain the retreat. He cursed Lee publicly in a vile manner, halted the retreat, and roused the soldiers to a demagogic pitch. After an attack by the British and furious fighting, the British withdrew from the attack, leaving approximately 350 casualties on either side. The Battle of Monmouth ended in a futile draw, with Clinton satisfied that he had conducted a model rearguard action; that night he slipped away, and was soon at Sandy Hook, and, on July 5, in New York.

The long march across Jersey, the pursuit of Clinton, and especially the Battle of Monmouth accomplished nothing but the loss of lives. The order for attack at Monmouth, over poor terrain, was Washington’s responsibility and his alone. Lee was correct in opposing the campaign, and especially the attack at Monmouth; his retreat was required by the circumstances. Washington’s public outburst against Lee was typical of his habit of passing the blame for his own defeats and blunders onto his hapless subordinates. Unluckily for Lee, he was not the man to stand for this sort of despicable treatment. He quickly wrote an angry letter to Washington accusing him of “an act of cruel injustice” and demanding “some reparation.” The letter led to a court-martial which, subservient to Washington, found Lee guilty of not attacking according to orders, unnecessarily retreating, and being disrespectful of his superior officer in his letters of complaint. It was characteristic that the major force in prosecuting Lee was the reactionary Hamilton, who had exploded at Lee on the field at Monmouth and had accused him of treason. The court-martial suspended Lee from command for one year.

Congress’s approval of this unjust verdict led Lee to denounce Congress itself, and he was discharged from the army altogether. Yet both votes in
Congress—for approving the verdict of the court-martial and for dismissing Lee from the service—were close, surprisingly so since the campaign against Lee in Congress was largely made a test of confidence in Washington. The Left, led by Sam Adams, James Lovell and especially Richard Henry Lee, lobbied vigorously for Charles Lee; Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote angrily that the congressmen were beginning to “talk of
state necessity
and of making justice yield... to policy.” Lee placed equal responsibility for his fall on Washington and his aide Hamilton. Also participating in the savaging of Lee were Lafayette, Wayne, Steuben, Scott, and Washington’s aristocratic South Carolinian aide, Col. John Laurens. Defending Lee among the high officers (in addition to his legal aides) were Horatio Gates, Henry Knox, who had distinguished himself at Monmouth, Gen. Alexander McDougall, Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, who had been wounded and crippled at Saratoga, and Col. Aaron Burr, who had also fought at Monmouth. Even Nathanael Greene, staunch supporter of Washington and personally estranged from Lee, acknowledged the grave injustice of Lee’s treatment. Indeed, most officers acknowledged privately that Lee was right, but sided opportunistically with their commander-in-chief in public. Even General Clinton, certainly no friend of Lee’s, thought the treatment of him grossly unjust, and agreed that Lee’s able retreat had saved the American army from a smashing blow by his forces.

When Charles Lee heard the verdict of Congress, he turned to one of his beloved dogs and exclaimed, “Oh, that I was that animal! That I might not call man my brother.” Despite his being deeply hurt by the decision, he gamely fought on for vindication, publishing effective defenses in the press. In this, he pointed to Washington’s series of severe military defeats, and keenly raised the point of the similar treatment of General Conway by Washington. Finally, isolated and embittered, he retired to a Virginia farm; as he had wittily written to Aaron Burr, he would “learn to hoe tobacco, which I find is the best school to form a consummate general.” There he was to die impoverished before the end of the war, consoled only by a few friends such as the young Virginian James Monroe, who rallied round. Even in death, Lee shocked the respectables, as his will revealed him to be a confirmed deist. His final estimate of Washington was apt: a man whose stern and composed visage masked an impoverished intellect and a vindictive cunning that destroyed every man who aroused his envy or injured his pride. His only military victory in an innumerable stream of defeats was in “one successful surprise of a drunken Hessian.”

Monmouth was the last major battle of the war to be fought in the North. From that point on, the strategy of the war was to undergo a sharp change; it was now an international war, and the British government’s aim
for a quick knockout in the North had to be abandoned. From then on, only minor skirmishes and forays were waged in the North, with the bulk of the British Army concentrated in New York City; the scene of major conflict would now shift to the hitherto unscarred South.

The great aim of American diplomacy during the 1776–78 period was to induce France to expand her role from that of staunch but covert supporter to open ally at war with England. Pressures played upon the French Government: the masses, and the political opposition led by former Foreign Minister Comte Etienne François Choiseul were eager for war; but Foreign Minister Comte Charles Gravier de Vergennes, though deeply sympathetic to the new republic, cautiously drew back from open war, especially after American reverses in the summer of 1776 and in 1777. France and Spain had been about to go to war with England when Washington’s ignominious defeat at the Battle of Long Island changed Vergennes’ mind; and France again drew back from the break after Burgoyne’s capture of Ticonderoga. Finally, Britain tried to intimidate France by threatening war if she did not cease her aid, while the Americans responded with subtle blackmail and threats of a separate peace with Britain—threats that conjured up to the French the fearsome vision of old Pitt heading a unified Anglo-American war to crush France.

Negotiations for the fledgling United States with France were first handled by Silas Deane, who arrived in France in early July 1776. He was succeeded by a three-man commission appointed by Congress to negotiate treaties and agreements in Europe, consisting of Deane, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee. The commission arrived in Paris at the end of December 1776. The wily old tactician Franklin proved to be a master at the intricacies of lying, bamboozling, and intriguing that form the warp and woof of diplomacy. Moreover, the old rogue was a huge hit with the
French, who saw him as the embodiment of reason, the natural man, and
bonhomie.

This three-man commission was guided by a model set of treaties, the “Plan of 1776,” drawn up while Deane was still on his own in France by a committee of independence. The committee submitted its model in mid-July 1776 and Congress adopted it in mid-September. The plan, which furnished the model for all the eighteenth century treaties of the United States, did not propose a formal political alliance with France, for John Adams had led Congress in adopting Tom Paine’s “isolationist” view that America must be self-reliant, abstain from entangling alliances in the unremitting wars of Europe, and avoid possible domination by any of the powers. Instead, the Plan proposed French recognition of the independence of the United States, and a perpetual treaty of commerce and friendship resting on the great international law principles safeguarding the rights of neutral nations: free ships make free goods; carefully restricted lists of contraband that could be seized by belligerents; and freedom of neutral shipping between belligerent ports. All of these emerging libertarian principles went totally against the practice of Great Britain, the world’s dominant and aggressive naval power. The American model also proposed total freedom of trade and reciprocity between France and the United States. As Professor Gilbert puts it: “Whereas usually commercial conventions were sources of friction and instruments of power politics reinforcing political alliances by commercial preferences, the Americans wanted to establish a commercial system of freedom and equality which would eliminate all cause for tension and political conflicts.”
*

In other terms of the plan, no separate peace with Britain would be made by either party in case France should be involved in the war, and the United States was to pledge not to interfere with Spanish possessions in South America. France, in turn, was to give up any claims it might have to territory on the North American continent.

In the Plan of 1776, as Felix Gilbert points out, the infant United States set forth a shining new libertarian conception of how nation-states should deal with one another: political isolationism coupled with cultural and economic internationalism. There was to be no political meddling by governments, but rather full freedom for peaceful and productive relationships between individuals and peoples. This conception put into practice the foreign policy views that were being developed by the French
philosophes.
The
philosophes
recognized that the expansion of international
commerce was rapidly creating one interdependent economic world, a true family of nations welded together through trade for mutual benefit. The task of governments, then, including their foreign policy, is to get out of the way of this natural social intercourse. Militarism, the chimera of the “balance of power,” treaties and alliances, the frauds of diplomacy, all were denounced as old-fashioned and incompatible with the new international order of peace and freedom and reason, the only order compatible with the rapid emergence of one economic world. Or, as the French physiocrat and libertarian Nicolas Baudeau put it, in 1767: “The essence of power politics consists of divergence of interests; that of economic policy of unity of interests—the one leads to war, frustrations, destruction, the other to social integration, cooperation, and free and peaceful sharing of the fruits of work.”
*
The “old policy” of aggression and restriction was to be replaced by the “economic policy” of unrestricted freedom of trade, mutual benefit, and harmony among nations. In brief, in the world to come, “foreign policy” per se would disappear; in a free and rational world, foreign policy and diplomacy, “a typical phenomonon of the ancien regime... would become unnecessary.”