Lafayette (28 page)

Infuriated at the humiliation, Cornwallis pursued Morgan into North Carolina, where the American raider linked up with the main body of Greene’s force and retreated northward into Virginia. But news of the victory sent spirits soaring at Washington’s camp on the Hudson, and the commander in chief decided the time had come to act. With British forces scattered across the south in partial disarray, Washington ordered Lafayette to lead his Light Division to Virginia to join Baron von Steuben’s Virginia militia in a strike at Benedict Arnold’s force near Portsmouth. While Greene engaged Cornwallis in North Carolina, Lafayette and Steuben were to surround Arnold and pin him against the shore, where a French squadron would block his escape by water and force his surrender.

Washington ordered Lafayette to hang Arnold if he captured him: “You are to do no act whatever with Arnold that directly or by implication may skreen him from the punishment due to his treason and desertion, which if he should fall into your hands, you will execute in the most summary way.”
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Recognizing the enormous political consequences of the venture, Lafayette attacked his assignment with demonic energy. The vision of a French aristocrat-turned-American-republican capturing and executing an American republican-turned-British-aristocrat provoked devilish laughs as he pictured the effects on Patriot morale in America and on public sensibilities in England and France.

To disguise Lafayette’s destination, Washington sent a small company to Elizabethtown, New Jersey, to set up an array of empty tents that deceived the British into believing Lafayette was planning another attack on Staten Island. As they reinforced their position, Lafayette and his men slipped to
the south unseen, and, within a week, they were one hundred miles away in Trenton, New Jersey, with Lafayette charming, coaxing, and, when necessary, ordering his men to ignore fatigue and march still farther. He used the same tactics with farmers, townsmen, and local officials along the way to get food and shelter for his men. He was indefatigable—and remarkable—often riding miles ahead at full gallop to prepare the next town, then doubling back to smarten up his weary, footsore troops for a confident, heads-held-high march into town, with him in the lead, atop his great white horse, winning cheers and hospitality instead of sullen looks and locked doors.

He allowed his men two days’ rest in Trenton while he rode ahead to Philadelphia, where he commandeered several hundred men from General Wayne’s Pennsylvania line, along with twelve heavy cannon and six smaller ones. He obtained medicines, tools, and fifteen hundred pairs of shoes from the quartermaster general; he coaxed Congress into giving his men a month’s pay in Pennsylvania currency to buy rum and other personal provisions; and he convinced French ambassador La Luzerne to give him French supplies of flour and salt pork.

At dawn on March 1, Lafayette’s weary little army of twelve hundred gladly boarded boats for a restful float down the Delaware River from Trenton, past Philadelphia to Wilmington, Delaware. From there, they marched eighteen miles over two days to Head of Elk, Maryland, where they expected that a French naval squadron would sail them down Chesapeake Bay to Virginia. But to everyone’s dismay, the French were nowhere in sight. A British flotilla had intercepted them, and the ensuing engagement had sent the French sailing back to Newport to lick their wounds.

No less determined to capture Arnold, Lafayette sent a message to Washington to send a second, stronger French fleet directly to Portsmouth, while he found alternative means to get his men to Virginia to rendezvous with Steuben. He then rode off to Baltimore to coax the city’s merchants to give him transport vessels to take his men to Virginia. As other American cities had done, Baltimore eagerly embraced and fêted the renowned French knight. Now a consummate diplomat, he shook every hand, smiled, pleaded and cajoled—and soon had Baltimore’s merchants bidding against each other to equip his excursion. They gave him boats, guns, ammunition, wagons, horses, oxen, fodder, medicine, clothing, bread, meat, stoves . . . and on and on—along with enough cash to pay his men and buy more supplies en route.

It was all for naught.

Lafayette’s men sailed only sixty miles down Chesapeake Bay before a British flotilla forced them to put into Annapolis, on the west shore of Chesapeake Bay. Still undiscouraged, the marquis took a reconnoitering party of thirty troops to chart an overland route to Virginia, but when he
reached Steuben’s camp at Yorktown, the British fleet had attacked the second French squadron as it tried to enter Chesapeake Bay and sent it fleeing back to Newport. The reversal, he reportd to Washington, “destroys every prospect of an operation against Arnold,”
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and Washington ordered Lafayette to return to Annapolis and lead his men back to the main Continental army encampment in New York.

Lafayette was furious at what he called the arrogance of French military and political leaders who had repeatedly sent smaller fleets and fewer troops to battle Britain, believing, as Vergennes had put it to the king, that France was “established by Providence” and destined by “right to influence all great affairs.”
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In America, at least, Providence had left the French with nothing better than a military stalemate in the north and a series of humiliating setbacks at sea. “Had the French fleet come in Arnold was ours,” Lafayette wrote dejectedly to his friend Alexander Hamilton. “The more certain it was, the greater my disappointment has been.”
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As Lafayette prepared to return to Annapolis, Steuben showed him a plan for trapping Cornwallis’s army in North Carolina. Cornwallis had scored a pyrrhic victory over Greene at Guilford Courthouse, but lost nearly one-third of his men and had retreated to his coastal base at Wilmington. Steuben suggested moving his men in from the west while Lafayette’s troops marched from the north and Greene’s troops marched from the south to encircle the British. Lafayette agreed, and Steuben sent his plan to Washington for approval, while Lafayette returned to Annapolis.

Finding no new orders when he reached Annapolis, Lafayette assumed that Washington had rejected the Steuben plan. Lafayette ordered his men to begin the long trek back to New York. Singing songs of home and dreaming of reunions with their families, they marched happily for two days back to Head of Elk—only to find a courier waiting with new orders from Washington, apparently adopting Steuben’s strategy for trapping Cornwallis. Lafayette was to make an about-face and march to Virginia to assume command of the state’s military operations, under the overall southern command of Greene: “Your being already three hundred miles advanced, which is nearly half way,” Washington wrote, “the detachment under your command should proceed and join the southern army . . . to reinforce General Greene as speedily as possible.”
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The orders stunned Lafayette. The useless, monthlong encampment at Annapolis and the march back to Head of Elk had exhausted troop supplies; Baltimore merchants were unlikely to reprovision a force that had consumed a month’s worth of supplies idling comfortably on the banks of Chesapeake Bay. The new orders so outraged his troops that many mutinied. Instead of returning home, they now faced another trek—this time without adequate supplies—over the same ground they had traveled senselessly from Head of
Elk to Annapolis and back again. Most were northerners unused to the south’s oppressive summer heat and choking humidity—and the inevitable outbreaks of yellow fever. Lafayette himself was all but ready to mutiny, believing he was being relegated to the Virginia backwater while the Continental army in the north prepared for the decisive battle against the British in New York. He wrote to Washington hinting at his own disappointment and asking for a delay in “the execution of superior orders” because of “the Great want of Monney, Baggage, Cloathing, Under which Both officers and Men are Suffering. . . . I write to the Board of War for to get Some Shoes and other parts of Cloathing.”
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Infuriated and frustrated by the accumulated failures of his expedition, Lafayette vented his anger on what he deemed the source of those failures: the French government, which had failed to live up to its promises to provide adequate aid to the Americans. In a letter designed to embarrass French political leaders, he wrote to French ambassador La Luzerne in Philadelphia: “We have neither money, nor clothes, nor shoes, nor shirts, and in a few days we will be reduced to eating green peaches; our feet are torn for want of shoes and our hands are covered with scabs for want of linens; when I say ‘we’ I mean it in every sense, for my own baggage has been stolen.”
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As Lafayette knew he would, La Luzerne sent his frightening description to Versailles, and Foreign Minister Vergennes responded to Lafayette: “The tableau you painted of the condition of the Americans is truly distressing, and we believe . . . it necessary to give them additional help. You can tell General Washington that the King has decided to guarantee a credit of 10 million
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[equivalent to $100 million in today’s currency], on which the United States may now draw through Holland [banks].” Vergennes promised to send clothing, but said nothing of the arms and provisions he had pledged to the Americans—or the additional ships and 10,000 troops Rochambeau had demanded. In fact, Vergennes had decided against sending more French troops to America, concluding that the more Frenchmen he sent to fight, the less incentive Americans would have to risk their own lives in battle. He did, however, pledge help from a huge French fleet, then on its way to defend the French West Indies. “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,” Vergennes told Lafayette, “or to detach a portion of it to sweep the coast and to co-operate in any undertaking which may be projected by the French and American generals.”
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Despite Lafayette’s plea for time to resupply his men, Washington refused to change his orders, and, fearful that his letter might fall into the hands of spies, he could not tell his young friend that, far from depriving him of a role in the decisive campaign against the British, he was giving him a key
role. For the decisive campaign was not, as Washington took pains to indicate to the British, to be against General Clinton’s force in New York. It was to be in the South, and Washington told no one—not Rochambeau, not Greene, not Lafayette, not even Steuben, whose own plan had suggested the new strategy. Washington’s moves and apparent preparations along the Hudson River north and west of New York were a feint to draw as many British troops into New York as possible. As he later explained in a letter to his friend, lexicographer Noah Webster, his strategy was “to misguide & bewilder Sir Henry Clinton in regard to the real object by fictitious communications, as well as by making deceptive provision of Ovens, Forage & boats in his neighborhood. . . . Nor were less pains taken to deceive our own Army.”
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In fact, Washington’s plan was simple: a multipronged attack, with Lafayette striking from the west, Steuben from the southwest, and Greene from the south, to force Cornwallis to the coast, where a French fleet would sail in from the east to block escape by sea. The combined armies of Washington and Rochambeau would then sweep down from the north to strike the decisive blow. It was important to move swiftly, however, before Cornwallis linked up with Arnold’s force at Portsmouth and moved inland against Richmond, the primary arms and munitions depot of southern Patriots.

To soothe Lafayette’s evident disappointment with his southern assignment, Washington sent his nephew, George Augustine Washington, to serve as Lafayette’s aide and deliver a letter with Washington’s sympathies for the plight of the troops—and a flattering reaffirmation of his affection for and faith in his French friend:

“You must endeavour to get Shoes,” Washington conceded, “before you can move, from Philada. . . . The difficulties which you will experience on the score of provisions and transportation would have been common to any other Body of Troops. They will I know be great, but I depend much upon your assiduity and activity. . . .

“I shall be glad to hear from you—the time of your setting out from Elk, your prospects of getting on and the temper of the Troops, and above all I shall ever be happy in knowing that you are well and that every thing contributes to your happiness and satisfaction.”
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Washington promised to reinforce Lafayette’s army by sending his trusted friend, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, and the eight hundred Pennsylvanians who had not mutinied. Greene made the southern campaign more attractive by asking Lafayette to move against Arnold at Portsmouth, while he, Greene, moved against Cornwallis in the Carolinas. Adding one more enticement was the presence of British major general William Phillips, who had arrived with reinforcements for Arnold. Twenty-two years earlier, Phillips had commanded the battery that killed Lafayette’s father at the Battle of Minden in Prussia, during the Seven Years’ War.

On April 10, Lafayette issued the order he knew his men would dread— to make an about-face and return southward toward Baltimore. They began deserting: eight troops, the first day; eleven more the second; nine the day after, as they approached the Susquehanna River. “Nothing can make me more unhappy than the incessant desertion of our best, finest and most experienced soldiers,” he wrote to Washington, warning that “they will be still more reduced by the disorders of that unwholesome climate [in the South].” Lafayette discovered three Tory spies among his men and ordered one of them hanged, and, after crossing the Susquehanna, he began arresting deserters. “These men say that they like better one hundred lashes than a journey to southward . . . if this disposition lasts, I am afraid we will be reduced lower than I dare expect.”
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Once across the wild Susquehanna, however, the prospect of a difficult recrossing discouraged desertions. As Lafayette put it, “I am anxious to have rivers, other countrys, and every kind of barrier to stop the inclination of the men to return home. . . . I wish we might soon come near the enemy, which is the only means of putting a stop to that spirit of desertion.”
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