Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (41 page)

The two men became friends on their visit. Washington had met Chastellux with ease, yet not with familiarity. Chastellux was an aristocratic savant accomplished in the arts and in war, and Washington dealt with him with respect, as he did most men. He kept his distance by not revealing too much of himself—or perhaps by simply being himself. A part of that self concealed a mild wit, shown only to friends. A few months after Chastellux visited Washington in his headquarters, the two were on terms that encouraged its expression. A sample could be seen when, in thanking Chastellux for sending a cask of claret, Washington wrote saying that he would not refuse the gift, which would “bring my patriotism under question, and incur a suspicion of want of attachment to the French nation.”
⁵

There was not much lighthearted banter in Washington’s life—nor did he yearn for it. He had to take care in his manner in dealing with the French in any case, and Rochambeau, with whom his relations mattered in more important ways, did not invite teasing. Rochambeau had a grand title and the rank of lieutenant general, but he had not been born into the aristocracy. He was a plainspoken man, a professional soldier, seemingly interested only in his calling. Fortunately, he was a soldier of genuine quality and, though the Americans did not know it, a thoughtful and patient man. He possessed his own distinction, won on the battlefields of Europe, but in America he faced responsibilities
that included fighting alongside an ally of doubtful strength led by a man who had made his mark in an earlier war against the French. The alliance on the American continent put Rochambeau’s army at a disadvantage on several scores: The British enemy outnumbered them, and most of the time they controlled the sea, where supremacy meant control of logistics and reinforcements from Europe. The assignment to lead the French effort in America was complicated by these facts, to say nothing about the responsibility of coordinating his operations with another set of forces in the West Indies.
⁶

In Rochambeau’s American assignment, he served under Washington. He acknowledged his subordination, but he and Washington both knew that his status was more ambiguous than his orders from his king indicated. France was the more powerful member of the alliance, and it had interests in Europe and the West Indies that complicated the relations with the new American nation. Rochambeau arrived in Rhode Island with a small but strong army and a navy clearly inferior to British naval forces everywhere. He was to cooperate with the Americans, take orders from their commander—a formidable man to be sure, but a colonial, and in most senses an unknown quantity.

Rochambeau spoke no English; Washington, no French. But Washington had Lafayette at hand and made him his translator and often sent him to the French headquarters. There were several officers usually present there who had a knowledge of English. Chastellux was one, and he was happy to serve his commander, though the blunt-speaking Rochambeau may not always have been delighted by his highborn colleague.

Washington did not know about tensions within the French command in Rhode Island. News of Commodore de Ternay’s death in December came to him in due course, as did the appointment of Destouches to head the French fleet in North America. Such changes were of interest, but the one he craved to hear—movement of the French to New York positions—did not come until May. The French in Rhode Island had always explained that they could not move without authorization from Paris. Referring to the far-distant authority forestalled pressure from the Americans, who were in the position of supplicants, an inconvenient but familiar posture, since they had already received money and weapons from the French.

The weakness of Washington’s standing with the French was never
clearer than it seemed to be in early February 1781, when he urged Rochambeau to send his naval force, with a heavy contingent of soldiers, against the British in the Chesapeake. The southern theater of operations had demanded attention since Gates’s disaster at Camden, in August 1780. Washington had indeed shipped troops off to General Greene, who had replaced Gates in October. Now, in the new year, Virginia was threatened by a detachment of about fifteen hundred troops sent there by Clinton and led by Benedict Arnold. The thought of Arnold operating in Virginia, destroying American militia and ravaging the land, was hard to bear. It is doubtful that Washington would have proposed shifting even more troops to the South or called upon the French to make an attack on the British there had a storm off New York not damaged and scattered Admiral Arbuthnot’s ships, stationed in Gardiner’s Bay, on the Long Island coast. The storm achieved something neither the Americans nor the French could do—it gave the French temporary naval superiority. Washington now argued for a major attack by the entire French fleet in Rhode Island and several thousand French and American soldiers. Because he recognized that their advantage would not last long, Washington delivered his message with urgency—and then, fully aware that his French ally did not ordinarily respond quickly to such appeals, he rode to Newport on March 5, hoping to quicken French blood.
⁷

The ride to Newport was not leisurely. Washington rarely walked a horse at any time; reports during the Revolution describe his riding almost always at a gallop. Newport lay about two hundred miles from New Windsor, headquarters of the American army, and he covered the ground in three days. On the way, his horse broke through a wooden bridge. Washington, who was fond of horses, knew them well, and rode them almost every day, may have been troubled by the death of this horse, but it produced only a short interruption in his journey. Mounting another horse, he was on his way again.

He arrived in Newport to discover the pleasing sight of the French troops on board their ships and prepared to sail southward. The pleasure departed immediately; the ships did not. The French had other ideas, among them a review of soldiers not yet aboard, a grand dinner, and a ball. Washington did not feel like dancing, but he made his way through the formalities the next day, saying nothing that angered his hosts. The next evening, March 8, the French set sail.
⁸

By this time, the British—both Henry Clinton and Marriot Arbuthnot—had learned that the French planned to send ships and men to Virginia. Arbuthnot, from the British station at Gardiner’s Bay, responded almost immediately, sending eight ships in pursuit of Admiral Destouches, who led a squadron of about the same size. The French reached the Chesapeake before the British, and though the two forces encountered one another and a certain amount of shooting ensued, neither of them delivered or received much damage. Each returned to its base in the North, and little was said about their encounter.

Washington refrained from commenting publicly on the affair, but privately he complained about the sluggish conduct of his allies in Newport. He managed to contain himself until he returned to New Windsor, but once he was back with the army, his disappointment and annoyance poured out. To Philip Schuyler he confessed his disappointment that the French had not sent their whole fleet and the full detachment of troops he had requested and thereby missed destroying Arnold during a time when the British fleet was in a “debilitated” condition. The delay in sailing was particularly “unaccountable.” “But,” he concluded, “it is our true policy to make the most of their assistance without censuring their mistakes, therefore it is I [who] communicate this in confidence.” He wrote in similar terms to the president of the Congress and two of his colleagues in Philadelphia, and he did not hide his feelings from senior commanders in the army. He hoped that news of his disenchantment would not find its way to the French, but inevitably it did. Several days later, evidently repenting of his candor, he wrote Luzerne, the French envoy to Congress, with no hint of the failure of the French expedition, but instead praise for the “good conduct and bravery” of the French officers and sailors involved. A similar letter went to Rochambeau on the same day. These efforts clearly pleased Luzerne and Rochambeau.
⁹

The rumbles with the French never reached the level of real thunder and lightning and soon gave way to more serious problems. They occurred at a moment in Washington’s life in which a variety of things were going wrong. Three weeks before he rode off to Rhode Island, he had endured a break with Alexander Hamilton, one of the key aides in his military “family.” He valued this group—his designation of them
as a family expressed his feeling of close personal regard, indeed affection, as well as a determination to use the conventional language of European armies. He was fonder of Lafayette than of any of these young men, but he was also closely attached to Hamilton, whose character and personality combined the genteel ideals of American aristocrats with the hard realism of men determined to rise in the world. Washington recognized his great ability and respected and trusted him. It was Hamilton he sent to the northern army and its chief, Horatio Gates, after Saratoga, to remind that esteemed general that, though he had won a splendid victory at Saratoga, he and his army remained under Washington’s command. Hamilton, a young officer with little experience compared with the veteran Gates, carried out this assignment with zest while managing, barely, to remain within the bounds of civility. There was an edge to Hamilton on occasions when decisiveness was required, as the joust with Gates revealed. There was also a set of attitudes in him that owed much to the code of an eighteenth-century gentleman, a side to him much in evidence in his dealings with Arnold’s wife, Peggy, and Clinton’s spy, Major John André.
¹⁰
The sentimentality exposed in the André affair assumed an almost silly form in his letters to Elizabeth Schuyler. These letters, in their extravagant appeals to the language of love, probably would have yielded both laughter and admiration among several of his brother officers in Washington’s family.

Washington probably never knew just how complicated a creature Hamilton was. In February, just before the troubles with the French in Newport, his regard for Hamilton received a sharp blow. The two men were in the army’s headquarters, a house of several stories. They met by chance on the stairs leading to an upper floor, where Washington stated that he wished to speak to him. Hamilton, on his way to deliver a letter to Colonel Tench Tilghman, replied that he would come to Washington immediately after he delivered a letter, and then proceeded down the stairs. This done, he encountered Lafayette on his way back up the stairs and stopped for a short time to talk. When he reached the top of the stairs, he met a Washington now angry at the wait. Washington, obviously upset, reproached him for keeping him waiting for “ten minutes,” adding, “I must tell you Sir you treat me with disrespect.” Hamilton’s account of his response, “given without petulancy,” he said, was a quick “I am not conscious of it Sir, but since
you have thought it necessary to tell me so we must part.” Washington responded, in “effect,” Hamilton reported, “Very well Sir if it be your choice,” and the interview ended. Not for long, however. Washington, evidently shocked and distressed by this explosion, sent Tilghman to Hamilton with a message telling of his “great confidence” in Hamilton’s “abilities, integrity, (and) usefulness” and of his desire to “heal a difference which could not have happened but in a moment of passion.” Hamilton responded to Tilghman that he was unwilling to discuss the incident—a conversation about it could not serve any purpose other “than to produce explanations mutually disagreeable”—but he would come to Washington if he “desired it.” Tilghman evidently conveyed to Washington a sense of Hamilton’s feeling that further talk was useless, and the break was clear. To Hamilton’s credit, he offered to remain in service on the staff until other members temporarily away from headquarters returned. Washington accepted Hamilton’s refusal to discuss the blowup further and thanked him for his offer to remain until others were once more in place. Thus, this sad affair ended with both men wounded but determined to maintain a working relationship for the time being.
¹¹

Hamilton was twenty-six years old when he broke with Washington, who was forty-nine. Not only was he young; he was young for his age—brilliant, proud, and extraordinarily sure of himself, but not a man who had mastered his vanities, nor would he during the war. Whether Washington recognized all of his aide’s weaknesses is not clear, but he dealt with them with sensitivity and generosity.
¹²

Perhaps he acted so thoughtfully because he recognized something of himself in Hamilton. While he lacked Hamilton’s intellectual talents, and his own judgment of men and their actions far surpassed Hamilton’s, in other ways the resemblance is striking. He had begun his military career when he was twenty, Hamilton when he was twenty-two; like Hamilton he was hot-blooded, impatient, and ambitious, hoping for a commission in the British army. Washington had also found a great family—the Fairfaxes—to attach himself to, though his connection occurred naturally and took on the character of an adoption. The Fairfaxes liked him and obviously received satisfaction from assisting his rise. There is little evidence, if any, of Washington’s conscious cultivation of this great family—he was only a boy when he came to know William Fairfax, and a naive boy at that. Hamilton had cultivated
the Schuylers, a wealthy Dutch family of New York. He became a favorite of Philip Schuyler, whose daughter Elizabeth would marry Hamilton later in the war. Washington seems not to have written witty and extravagant letters to young women like those that flowed from Hamilton’s pen to Kitty Livingston and Elizabeth Schuyler, though he was fond of Sally Fairfax and wrote her affectionate letters. His most romantic effusion came in his praise of the charming sound musket balls made in battles.

Another young man was giving him heartburn at about the time Hamilton uncovered his own resentment. The young man was John (Jack) Parke Custis, Martha’s son and Washington’s stepson. As we have seen, Washington felt fond of this young man and in a sense responsible for him. He had, when Custis was a boy, spoken directly to him of conduct that was not acceptable. In the background of his relationship with his stepson was Martha, who loved her son deeply; Washington might have exercised more discipline on Jack had he not recognized that doing so would have hurt Martha. Now, presumably, Jack Parke was grown up, an adult who sat in the Virginia legislature, though without attending its meetings. His reasons for staying away from the legislature were not clear, but Washington expressed his annoyance at Jack’s failure to attend its sessions. “So young a Senator as you are,” he wrote Jack, “little versed in political disquisitions, can yet have much influence in a populous assembly; composed of Gentlemen of various talents and of different views.” Moreover, as he reminded Jack, it was his duty. Washington left unsaid his feelings about the honor and responsibility of a gentleman to serve his country.
¹³