Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (32 page)

For the United States, the impact of the new policy was felt almost immediately, with the British government ordering Clinton, who would assume command in May, to send five thousand men to St. Lucia and three thousand to the Floridas. The focus of the American war would now be the West Indies, not Philadelphia, which Clinton was ordered to evacuate. In the West Indies, the British navy was expected to lead the efforts to thwart the French. But naval strategy proved indecisive—even fumbling—at key points in the lead-up to the expansion of the war. Earlier the British had been slow to mobilize in the American war, and failed to bring the navy’s strength in big ships up to the standards reached in the Seven Years’ War. The navy had conducted a successful blockage of the French fleet in that war, thereby preventing it from bringing its might to bear against imperial trade. In 1778, the British navy did not possess the strength for a blockade, but it might have kept the Toulon fleet bottled up in the Mediterranean. That it did not do this was a costly failure, more than a little painful to a number of admirals. The cautious British strategy at this point arose from a profound disagreement between the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lord George Germain, secretary of the colonies, the key official guiding the army’s action. Sandwich was
defensive-minded, and reluctant to expose the British Isles to invasion should the French enter the war. The home fleet therefore remained in home waters, guarding against the French—and, from 1779 on, the Spanish as well—while Germain urged its use in combined army-navy operations in the American war. The caution that underlay the decision to hold a powerful fleet out of the war against the Americans cramped much of the planning and effort to put down the Revolution.
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When the French came in, these two men agreed that the British army in the colonies should provide reinforcements for forces in the West Indies. By that time the French fleet in the Mediterranean had sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar, its exact destination unknown but constituting a menace to the British West Indies. No one in Britain now doubted that the demands of the war had shifted away from the thirteen colonies.

Henry Clinton began the evacuation of Philadelphia on June 18, an assignment complicated by the need to transport three thousand loyalists out of the city. They would go by ship to New York; the army, about ten thousand soldiers, would march to the same place. Lord Richard Howe, who retained naval command until early autumn, handled the loading of the loyalists onto ships in the Delaware River.

The army began its march with fifteen hundred wagons filled with supplies—some essential and some not, including the baggage of officers, soldiers’ possessions, and a variety of things such as bakeries and blacksmith shops essential to eighteenth-century armies. There were other items in the wagons—tools of various sorts and ammunition. This great bloated mass set out at 3:00
A.M.
; it took seven hours to cross the Delaware at Gloucester, New Jersey. On the east side of the river, it covered twelve miles of road. Six days after the crossing, the army had crawled thirty-five miles to Allentown, near Trenton.

Washington, who learned of Clinton’s departure from Philadelphia the day the British pulled out, resolved to follow his enemy. Within a few days the entire American army had left Valley Forge, though Washington did not have a clear idea about how to deal with Clinton on the road. His preference was for an attack, a desire to inflict as much damage on men and matériel as possible without committing all of his force. He had between ten and eleven thousand troops. As he often did, he consulted the general officers in the army and found that most did not want to take on such risk. There were exceptions:
Greene and Lafayette were quite willing to lead an attack, and Wayne and Brigadier General Charles Scott advocated making a strong effort to strike Clinton, but the predominant sentiment among the generals was to avoid risk.

Two foreign officers, Baron Steuben and Charles Lee, by their professional standing seemed to be most qualified counselors. Steuben proved to be more than a counselor. A former officer in Frederick the Great’s army, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben had come to Valley Forge in February, recommended by Benjamin Franklin and accepted as a volunteer by Congress. He was in his claims for himself a fraud, having apparently told Franklin that he had been a lieutenant general in Frederick’s army, serving in a number of capacities, such as quartermaster general. It may be that Franklin misunderstood—he had little German, and Steuben even less English. Steuben did not reveal that he had never risen above the rank of captain and had been only a minor aide on Frederick’s staff in the Seven Years’ War. The title of nobility, which he gave himself, was also false. But he was an unusually qualified and capable fraud, and in late winter and early spring in Valley Forge, he taught the Americans much about the movement of soldiers in large units. He was more than a drillmaster: Though he evidently was excellent in drilling raw troops, he taught more than the simple skills of the parade ground, imparting a sense of discipline and professionalism. And when Washington took his army out of Valley Forge, they were a much improved force.

Steuben advised caution in following the British, but was not averse to an attack if the opportunity showed itself. Lee, as was his wont, was firm and at the same time puzzling in his opinion. He was at first almost dogmatic in his insistence that the British should be unmolested by Continentals on their way to New York. He apparently believed that the American army could not stand up to the British, but his advice was probably stained with disloyalty. He had in April returned from captivity in British hands—he had been captured by a British patrol in December 1776—a captivity in which he wrote a plan for ending the war in which British interests were served, not those of America. When offered the command of forces that were to lead the attack on Clinton’s forces, he refused; Lafayette was appointed in his stead. Soon after this difficult occasion, Lee managed to scramble
arrangements for battle by requesting that the command be given to him. Washington probably should have denied him, but he did not.

The battle that began June 28 covered the ground near a small village, Monmouth Court House (modern-day Freehold), New Jersey. Before it began, Clinton’s force was strung out on a road that divided near the courthouse, a branch going north to Amboy and a second to Middletown and Sandy Hook. Clinton hoped to embark his troops from Sandy Hook to New York City; he was not looking for a fight on his way there, but he was not surprised when Washington contested his passage. The battle began near Monmouth—mostly pine barrens, sandy, rough, and broken by small streams that had cut three ravines just north of the village. The road ran over the West and Middle Ravines—each could be crossed by a bridge or causeway.

Lee had about four thousand troops. Clinton spread out his army in three main divisions: Knyphausen’s Hessians in the van marching to the east, Cornwallis with the central position in the west, and Clinton with still another body of soldiers roughly in the middle of the great train of wagons and horses. Lee hit elements of the British covering group first, just southeast of the East Ravine. From that point on, for several hours, there were skirmishes, shifts of Lee’s group almost impossible to chart, and finally a disorderly retreat by the Americans until it was stopped when they ran into Washington’s army, which had come up to the west side of the West Ravine. Washington, dismayed and angry, had stopped the first regiments in flight when Lee rode up. He immediately confronted Lee with questions apparently liberally spiced with scorn and, perhaps, profanity. Little of this encounter is clear; what is clear is that Washington restored control, pulled Lee’s troops into fighting order, and stopped the British.

For the remainder of the day, the battle swirled near the West Ravine and the village. It was not good fighting weather—the British infantry wore heavy woolen uniforms even as the temperature hit ninety-plus degrees. These men had been marching for several days in the heat, and many had fallen from it, as well as from American artillery and infantry fire. Clinton and Cornwallis in these hours ordered one attack after another, four in all, and all failed to dislodge the Americans. Losses were heavy on both sides, until exhaustion and darkness took over. Cornwallis was apparently especially active in leading several
attacks, and Clinton himself was under fire. Though British officers later asked about the wisdom of these attacks, no one questioned the bravery of the troops involved or their officers.

The Americans had expected to resume the combat the next morning, but during the night the British quietly pulled out, and Washington did not attempt to follow. The British soon reached Middletown and by June 30 had arrived at Staten Island.

In the aftermath, questions were raised on the American side about Lee’s performance, and Washington soon brought charges against him. No one questioned Lee’s courage, but his judgment was a genuine issue. His career did not survive the court-martial, though the sentence was absurd—a year’s suspension from duty.
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Neither side could claim victory, though some American officers did. In fact, it was a draw. One thing was clear in the aftermath: Steuben’s training had had good consequences. The Americans had at times shown that they had absorbed his training in their movements in and out of battle. They still lacked full control under fire, but many would show the ability to resist panic when confronted by the enemy’s glittering bayonets. That circumstance could be developed—and could stiffen American pride.

PART THREE
 

Citizen of the World

8

Citizen of the World

Britain’s General Clinton, now Sir Henry, emerged from the Battle of Monmouth in a spirit far different from Washington’s. He did not feel defeated, but neither did he consider himself a victor of the battle. He was not really surprised that he had led his army to New York without crippling losses, though the “butcher’s bill,” as knowledgeable British commanders referred to a casualty list, was not small. In fact, it grew longer every day after he gained separation from the Americans, the increase coming in the form of enlisted men who deserted. German soldiers, who left the army in numbers, had come to despise service in America, and the countryside in New Jersey and Pennsylvania proved attractive.

William Howe had been a popular man in the army. His officers in America seem always to have liked him, though more than a few complained quietly of his propensity to enjoy himself when they thought he should be leading an army looking for combat. Henry Clinton never drew his officers’ affection, never showed his ease in military or other society, but also never displayed a preference for rest over action, as his predecessor had. Clinton in fact was a difficult man, uneasy with himself, sometimes aggrieved, often offended, under Howe’s command, that his chief rejected or ignored his suggestions, which sometimes became pleas to accept fresh plans. Clinton described himself as a “shy bitch,” a reference to the anxiety he felt in putting himself forward by pushing his own ideas in the war.
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Clinton, an English aristocrat born in 1730 in New York, spent his first nineteen years there, a period that included a stretch during his father’s service as governor. At nineteen he went to England and a commission in the army. In the Seven Years’ War he served Prince Charles of Brunswick as an aide, and though he never had a command,
he emerged from the war with a good reputation as an officer. He returned to America with Howe and Burgoyne to suffer through the first year of the war at Boston and New York. Those campaigns were not happy ones for him as he spent his time in perpetual impatience with Howe.

Now, in May 1778, the army in America was his, just as it was shrinking in numbers, both by detachments and by desertions of its soldiers. No British officer liked the idea of his troops melting away in America, and Clinton hated the idea. But he was gratified to have the command, even if he knew that in a short time his soldiers would serve other commanders. He had been ordered to send off some five thousand of them to the West Indies and soon after to detach three thousand for the Floridas. These instructions, drafted in March, reached him in April.
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That he was to be on the defensive soon became clear to him. At home early in the year, even before the ministry learned of the decision by France to ally itself with the Americans, fear increased that Saratoga would bring the French into the war. That feeling was just about the only conviction Germain, the colonial secretary, and Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, held in common. But Sandwich felt a caution about using the fleet overseas that was not shared by Germain and the army. Fear of invasion by the French filled naval heads, and to counter what they feared, they relied on a strategy of keeping the French navy preoccupied, or even bottled up in European waters. In the Seven Years’ War the French never managed to concentrate their sea power because of British action. French naval strength had begun that war divided between bases in the Mediterranean; Toulon, at the mouth of the Rhône; and the Atlantic, the main base being at Brest, on the Brittany peninsula. For the most part, the British navy had established its supremacy early in the war and continued to hold it throughout. That supremacy was evident in the blockade they imposed upon the French navy, which was largely confined to European waters.