Lafayette (27 page)

The hanging of major andrÉ was the most exciting event of the 1780 campaign—indeed, the only event in the Northern Department. A few days later, Lafayette’s insatiable lust for action sent him stalking the perimeter of British positions around New York and yielded a plan for a lightning strike at British positions on Staten Island with “Light-Horse Harry” Lee.
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“We found all [Lafayette’s] troops in order of battle on the heights,” a French officer recounted, “and himself at their head, expressing by his air and countenance, that he was happier in receiving me there, than at his estate in Auvergne. The confidence and attachment of the troops, are for him invaluable possessions, well acquired riches, of which nobody can deprive him.”
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A new and inexperienced quartermaster general had replaced the resourceful Nathanael Greene, however, and sent only three small craft to carry Lafayette’s Light Division across the narrow channel from Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Infuriated, Lafayette canceled the attack and led his troops back to camp.

Fearful that inaction in the north and the Gates debacle in South Carolina would discourage further French aid to America, Lafayette pleaded with Washington for a major strike—to end the 1780 campaign with a Patriot victory to shore up American morale and renew the French government’s faith in the American Revolution. He suggested attacking a Hessian fort on the northern end of New York Island.

“Any enterprise will please the people of this country,” he told Washington, “and shew them that when we have men we do not lie still. . . . The
French court have often complained to me of the inactivity of the American army. . . . They have often told me, your friends leave us now to fight their battles, and do no more risk themselves: it is . . . of the greatest political importance to let them know, that, on our side, we are ready to co-operate.”
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Washington argued, “It is impossible to desire more ardently than I do to terminate the campaign by a happy stroke; but we must consult our means rather than our wishes. . . . We are to lament that there has been a misapprehension of our circumstances in Europe; but to endeavour to recover our reputation, we should take care that we do not injure it more . . . it would be imprudent to throw an army of ten thousand men upon an island against nine thousand, exclusive of seamen and militia.”
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Although Washington planned no further activity in the north until French reinforcements arrived, he acted to salvage the debacle in the Southern Department by replacing the discredited Gates with Nathanael Greene. Greene set out immediately for North Carolina, taking with him Lieutenant Colonel “Light-Horse Harry” Lee’s flying corps of horse and foot soldiers— Lee’s Legion, as they were called—and General Daniel Morgan and his renowned Morgan’s Raiders, who had been the victors at Saratoga. Although Horatio Gates took credit for the victory, he had sat miles away while Morgan’s Raiders hid behind the trees and in the branches above as Burgoyne’s unsuspecting regulars entered the forest into the murderous ambush of sniper fire that had forced their surrender. Humiliated British officers denigrated Morgan’s sharpshooters as cowards for not “standing up like men to fight” in traditional battle array, but the sniper emerged from Saratoga as the Continental army’s most effective new weapon.
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Rather than idle in northern winter quarters, Lafayette asked to join Greene. Noailles and Lafayette’s officer friends at Newport were equally restless and took leave to visit his camp near Preakness, New Jersey (now Paterson), and they, too, sought to fight alongside Greene. Washington graciously entertained the dazzling array of young nobles at his table and took them to visit the West Point fortifications—but denied their requests to join Greene.

Gates’s mismanagement in the south had left Greene with a mere 2,300 fighting men, and he needed troops more than officers. Those who had survived Camden were unorthodox bands of irregulars led by an eerie, unsmiling little man called the Swamp Fox—Francis Marion. Cornwallis and Tarleton had tried to crush Marion’s force, but soon learned to dread him. Marion invented a new type of unorthodox battle strategy, later called guerrilla warfare: ambushing British patrols with sniper fire, then melting away into dense forests and swamps or dissolving into the local population, only to re-form and strike again; never seizing territory; only stalking, striking, slaying, and vanishing.
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Marion avoided roads and trails; he swam
his horses across deep streams to avoid the visibility of fords, and when currents were too swift, his men laid blankets across wooden bridges to deaden the sound of their horses’ hooves. Using fear as well as fire to scourge Cornwallis’s army, Marion sent confederates into marketplaces and taverns to whisper rumors of his omnipresence and readiness to strike. When the British responded to rumors by shifting troops from one post to strengthen another, the Swamp Fox invariably struck the weaker position.

Greene, Morgan, and Lee were quick to embrace Marion’s amazingly effective strategy, which allowed a weaker force to dominate a far stronger one. With no place for traditional strategy, Greene rejected the requests of Lafayette’s French officer friends to come south, although he did so in the most tactful terms in a letter to Lafayette:

Was you to arrive, you would find a few rag[g]ed, half starved troops, in the wilderness, destitute of every thing necessary for either the comfort or convenience of soldiers: altogether without discipline, and so addicted to plundering that the utmost exertions of their officers cannot restrain them. Indeed my dear Sir the Department is in a deplorable situation; nor have I a prospect of its mending. The Country is laid waste and the Inhabitants plunder and destroy one another with little less than savage fury. We live from hand to mouth, and have nothing to subsist on but what we collect with armed parties. In this situation I believe you will agree with me, there is nothing inviting this way; especially when I assure you our whole force now fit for duty . . . dont amount to 800 men. I have made a small detachment under General Morgan . . . I give this the name of a flying army; and while its numbers are so small, and the enemy so much superior, it must literally be so.
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Without winter action, Lafayette took leave and went to Philadelphia, where he introduced his brother-in-law and the other French officers to Philadelphia society and guided them across the sites of his battlefield heroics at Brandywine and Barren Hill. By night they dined and danced; by day they discussed political theory with influential American political leaders and thinkers. Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society elected Lafayette its first foreign member.
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“What is still remarkable for a young man [Lafayette’s] age,” wrote one of his French companions, “is the influence, the consideration he has acquired in the political, as well as military sector. I do not fear contradiction when I say, that private letters from him have frequently produced more effect upon some states than the strongest exhortations of the Congress. On seeing him, one is at a loss which most to admire, that so young a man as he should have given such eminent proofs of his talents, or that a man so tried, should give hopes of so long a career of glory.”
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By late December, Congress had grown as anxious as Lafayette that the French might deny Rochambeau and Washington further military and naval support. Earlier in the year, the former president of Congress, Henry Laurens, had sailed to France to try to obtain such support, but the British had captured him at sea and imprisoned him for treason in the Tower of London.
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Congress asked Lafayette to complete Laurens’s mission, and, to add to its impact, the comte de Rochambeau agreed to send his son, the vicomte de Rochambeau, as his personal envoy. Lafayette refused to abandon Washington and the army again, however, and Congress sent Washington’s trusted aide, Colonel John Laurens, Henry Laurens’s son. Lafayette nonetheless provided strong logistical support to the mission with one of his most effective weapons: a barrage of letters to people in high places, with incontrovertible evidence that an American victory was not only possible, but ultimately in the best interests of France. He wrote to the foreign minister, to the minister of war, to Admiral d’Estaing, and to all his own, highly placed friends and relatives such as the comte de Ségur and his father-in-law, the duc d’Ayen.

Lafayette asked for money in a twelve-page letter to the marquis de Castries, his cousin, who had just been appointed minister of the navy. “Our Continental soldiers are excellent; our recruits are almost all men who have had more experience with gunfire than three quarters of the soldiers of Europe; our regular troops, as brave as any others, are more hardened, more patient, more acclimated. . . . Immense sums would be necessary to bring the same number of Frenchmen to . . . America, and they would cost very much more to maintain. . . . For the same sum we could have double the number of American regulars.”
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An even longer tome to Foreign Minister Vergennes explained the long inactivity of French and American forces: “With a naval inferiority,” he declared, “it is impossible to make war in America. . . . It is physically impossible that we should carry on an offensive without ships. . . . Pecuniary succors and a naval superiority are the two most essential points. . . . Nothing of any importance has been sent us. . . . It is necessary to clothe the American army, it requires arms, and, to be able to besiege places, a great augmentation of powder.”
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In the last of his letters, Lafayette wrote to Adrienne, to introduce Laurens. “The person who will deliver this to you, my sweetheart, is a man I care for very much and to whom I would like you to extend the warmest friendship. He is the son of president Laurens, who has just settled into the Tower of London. . . . General Washington is very fond of him; and of all the Americans whom I have sent to see you, he is the one I most particularly wish you to receive in the friendliest way. If I were in France, he should live entirely at my house, and I would introduce him to all my friends . . . and do everything in my power to assure his meeting people and spending time
profitably at Versailles.”
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After three days of letter writing, Lafayette was too focused on American affairs to broach personal matters. He railed over Benedict Arnold’s having “become an English general in Virginia, with a corps, which appears well pleased to serve under his orders; There is no accounting for taste.”
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In subtle terms with which she had become familiar, he sent her information he expected her to disseminate in Paris salons and at court. “The Americans continue to show me the greatest kindness; there is no proof of affection and confidence which I do not receive each day from the army and nation. I am serving here in the most agreeable manner possible. At every campaign I command a separate flying corps, made up of chosen troops; I have developed a friendship with them that comes only after long periods of shared dangers, hardships, good and bad luck.”
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Only in the final paragraph did Lafayette mention family matters. “Kiss our children a thousand times and a thousand times again for me; although a vagabond, their father does not feel less affectionate toward them or fail to keep them constantly in his thoughts. . . . My heart looks only to the moment when we may hold and caress them together.”
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As winter wore on, the previous year’s short rations and troop mutinies reached near-epidemic proportions. Unpaid for more than a year, with no money for food or other personal needs, 2,500 of Anthony Wayne’s Pennsylvanians killed two officers and wounded several others before marching off to Philadelphia to confront Congress. Ultimately, the men won their back pay, additional clothing, and redress of other grievances, but half quit the service. Two weeks later, the New Jersey line mutinied, but by then Washington had lost patience with mutineers and ordered 600 West Point troops to crush the revolt. The West Pointers struck by surprise, overwhelmed and disarmed the mutineers, restored the officers to their command, and executed two ringleaders.

The disheartening mutinies and mass desertions combined with Benedict Arnold’s invasion of Virginia to sink American spirits. Adding to Patriot pessimism was national insolvency. Congress had no money—not a sou left to spend and a national debt of nearly $200 million, which the states refused to cover with their own hoards of cash. There was little point printing more paper money: “Continentals” were worthless. Without money to pay or arm the Continental army, Congress began to debate sending a commission to negotiate terms of peace and reconciliation with England.

Late in January, however, the dismal pall over the nation lifted slightly. An excited courier arrived at Washington’s headquarters: Greene’s guerrillas—or, more accurately, Morgan’s Raiders and Lee’s Legion—had scored a stunning victory over the vaunted Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the barbaric cavalry leader at the battle of Camden. Morgan had lured the overconfident
British commander into what seemed a conventional confrontation with a line of retreating American infantry at the opposite end of a South Carolina meadow called Cowpens. As Tarleton’s colossal thoroughbreds thundered across toward the terrified American troops, Morgan unleashed his infantrymen and horsemen from the surrounding forest and shrubs on Tarleton’s flanks. “We made a sort of half circuit at full speed [and] came upon the rear of the British line, shouting and charging like madmen,” reported one American officer. “We were in among them with the bayonets.”
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The British force panicked, their horses rearing and spinning, hooves flying, riders hurled to the ground, stumbling to their feet hysterically, and fleeing in all directions. Professionals all in traditional warfare, none had experienced guerrilla tactics. Some—the perpetrators of the Camden massacre—dropped their rifles and fell on their faces, their arms spread-eagled on the ground as they sobbed for mercy. Morgan reduced Tarleton’s fearsome, thousand-man force as a factor in the campaign, killing 329 and capturing 600, at a cost of fewer than 75 American lives. “Not a man was killed, wounded or even insulted after he surrendered,” Morgan boasted to Greene.
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