Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (42 page)

As if to remove the sting Jack might find in his stepfather’s reproaches, Washington then stated his own ideas of what the present Congress was doing and how it should be reformed. What he had to say was what he had told others, some in the Congress, others in the army: Because the Congress was weak, it should be reformed, with “a controuling power in Congress to regulate and direct all matters of general concern.” The Congress could not fashion policy for managing such concerns; its powers were only to recommend actions to the states, yielding a situation in which one state gives “obedience” and another “refuses it,” and a third state “mutilates” and “adopts” only a part of the recommended policy, and all “vary in time and manner.”
Washington, in delivering this analysis of the workings of power, was taking John into his confidence—to what effect is not clear.
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Jack Parke Custis was a familiar problem, and so was Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, a lady, in the parlance of Virginia society, who expected deference apparently at all times and under all circumstances. Her expectations sometimes surprised her son and made him uncomfortable when they did not distress him. In February 1781, a time when the war seemed to be going badly and Alexander Hamilton had temporarily, at least, overturned the balance that usually marked Washington’s staff, Mary Ball Washington publicly embarrassed the family. She had long been a person who craved attention, and when she did not get it, she complained. At this time she pled poverty, a doubtful ploy perhaps, to get her taxes reduced. She made her discontent known to members of Virginia’s government, including the legislature. Few of these men knew her, but they knew her son and idolized him. Not surprisingly, they acted before thinking the matter through. The product of their thought was a proposal to provide her with a pension funded by the state.

In March, Washington’s friend Benjamin Harrison responded to this proposal by his legislative colleagues with strong disapproval. Washington, he told them, would be “displeased” by such an “application.” Harrison knew his friend well—Washington immediately asked Harrison to pass along his opposition to the idea, saying that he thought the entire family would not wish that a pension be granted as long as they were able to support her. To drive home his belief that his mother needed no public aid, he ran down the subsistence he had provided her several years before he was called into the army: He had bought her a house and lots near Fredericksburg, a location he chose for its proximity to his sister, Betty Lewis. He had also given her money, and while in the army he had instructed Lund Washington, the manager left in charge at Mount Vernon, to provide her with additional sums when she asked for them. Ask she did, though not often, confining many of her requests to a particular slave or some piece of household furnishing.
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She and her son rarely wrote one another, and he could not visit her during the war. Lund Washington sometimes mentioned her in his letters, and Washington received word of her health occasionally from others. Brigadier General George Weedon, a Virginian on a visit home, learned of her refusal to be inoculated for smallpox in 1778,
reporting that she apparently feared that the procedure would bring on the disease, not prevent it. Betty Lewis caught it in the natural way, and Weedon said, “It was in almost every House in Town and Country.”
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Washington had ordered that virtually every soldier who had not had the disease should receive inoculation, but he did not attempt to persuade his mother. Her concern about money presented a problem he could deal with or ignore; smallpox inoculation, he knew, was not something he could force on her. And now, in 1781, beyond getting word to the family to look after her, ignoring her surprising demands was about all that he could do.

The incomprehensible behavior of Mary Ball Washington, the irresponsibility of John Parke Custis, and the break with Hamilton all irritated Washington in different ways, but, if his correspondence in these weeks can be trusted, none of these tempests blew him off course. The course he wished to follow would see him leading a combined operation with the French in an attack to capture New York; he thought this might end the war with the British, convincing them that their efforts to put down the Revolution were futile. Such a hope at this time seemed a fantasy, yet he held it while at the same time confessing in a letter written in April to Colonel John Laurens that “we are at the end of our tether,” an admission that sounded as if he were prepared for final defeat. He was not, of course—what he was prepared for, personally, was combat.
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But he could not have his wish. Instead, as he explained to Henry Laurens, he had to find food for hungry soldiers, clothes for the naked, and medicine for the sick. These were familiar tasks, and he went about them with his customary vigor. For several weeks, nothing worked, his troops suffered even more, and civilians in Connecticut and New Jersey complained more than usual about the “calls” on them for meat and flour. The “calls” were actually impressments, and though Washington almost always ordered that warrants for payment for these provisions be given (though almost always the payment was to be made in the future), he knew that the process of acquisition irritated those providing the supplies.

No one was more irritated than his troops, who, in the winter, had resorted to plundering people near their camps. Washington feared
another mutiny and hated, though he understood, the plundering. To forestall open mutiny, he took action in May that violated his respect for propriety and law: He ordered that funds sent by the Massachusetts government as pay for its soldiers should not be used for that purpose but instead spent on provisions for the entire army. Washington had complained openly to Congress for years about support for the army, but his pronouncement that the army was at the end of its tether was new in its bleakness.
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The French failure in Virginia in March introduced its own sort of bleakness and reinforced Washington’s feeling that the game might be up. Once greeted as indispensable allies, the French seemed frozen in their position. This appearance may have had its origins in French perceptions of American weakness; whatever the case, Washington, in early May, though not willing to give up on the French, regarded them with little confidence.

As Washington was musing over impending disaster, Rochambeau wrote on May 11 asking for a meeting and, to Washington’s surprise, indicated that he was now willing to join his army to the American one for an attack on New York. Rochambeau’s change of mind owed much to the reports his son, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, had recently brought him from Paris. His superiors may have found wisdom in Washington’s designs on New York, but more likely they had come to favor a movement against the British in the southern states. Their preferences, shared by Rochambeau, continued to be based on the value of the West Indies, and they had decided to strengthen their navy there. Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse, the Comte de Grasse, would soon sail with a major force to the French islands, intending to make at least a short foray to Chesapeake Bay. Rochambeau did not reveal his own or de Grasse’s preferences in his first letter to Washington about the new strategy.
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Washington set out on May 18 for Wethersfield, Connecticut, where the meeting was to be held. He took with him Henry Knox, who commanded the artillery for the army, and the brilliant French engineer Brigadier General Louis Lebègue Duportail, who had come to America four years earlier and who had more than proved his worth. The American group arrived at Wethersfield a day later to discover that Rochambeau and his party had not yet made their appearance. Rochambeau rode in with Chastellux two days later; Admiral Barras,
now the commander of the French squadron in Rhode Island, did not attend.

Washington’s summary of his discussions with Rochambeau is not deeply revealing except on one point: he was committed to a New York operation—“our object is New York”—and opposed to a shift of French and American forces to the South. Rochambeau agreed to the strategy and declared his intention of marching his army to the North River. Privately, however, he disagreed and wrote to de Grasse in the West Indies, recommending that the French fleet make its weight felt in the Chesapeake—not in New York waters.
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The reasoning behind an attack on New York was entirely Washington’s: The British in recent months had weakened their defenses around New York through successive detachments to the South. Of course, if they successfully conquered the rebels in the Chesapeake, they could return these troops to the city. Moving American troops to the South had by this time little appeal to Washington, who commented on the wastefulness of such action, which wore out the troops and was costly in money and supplies. Besides, as he noted in his diary, northern soldiers were disinclined to make the move—the march would be long, and when they arrived they would find a climate not to their liking.
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Rochambeau, in his uneasiness about an attack on New York, had also raised questions about abandoning the base in Rhode Island; on this score, Barras echoed his colleague’s doubts. The navy had built up a store of supplies in Newport, and both army and navy had weapons, including heavy guns, there. Guns and supplies would be cumbersome to move, but they could not be abandoned. Rochambeau proposed that at least five hundred troops be left there when the march to New York was undertaken. Washington agreed, and over the next few weeks the number to hold in Rhode Island was settled.
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Three days after the conference ended, a letter from John Laurens, still in Paris, arrived that reassured Washington that Admiral de Grasse would be coming to America. Laurens also reported that the French would provide six million livres but did not say whether this sum would be a loan or a gift. Reassurance was not certainty: In early June, Washington heard from Rochambeau that he had suggested to de Grasse that after the navy delivered a “great stroke” against the British in the Chesapeake, it should come to New York with five to six
thousand men for the long-desired attack there, but this statement to de Grasse was not thunderous endorsement of the New York operation that assumed first place in Washington’s plans, and in fact Rochambeau did not report all that he had written to de Grasse. The substance of his communication made clear his doubts about the New York operation and indicated that his own study of strategy at this point led him to think that the Chesapeake should be the place to strike.
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Washington seems early on to have caught the hints that the French favored a shift southward and, with Rochambeau’s unenthusiastic letter in hand, noted in response that perhaps it would be best if the decision about the target of de Grasse’s effort were made after more was known of the strength of the British fleet in American waters. From the time of the French entry into the war, Washington had insisted that their military force should not be ventured unless it had naval supremacy. This belief—a strategic principle for him—defined his recommendations now, and he made his argument without reminding the French that, two months before, they had such superiority on the sea and failed to use it.
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His eyes remained fixed on New York even as he forced himself to think of the Chesapeake. The French army marched in from Newport to a staging ground at Dobbs Ferry on July 6, with the American army nearby. They looked like professional soldiers dressed in clean uniforms, carrying weapons they obviously knew how to use. The Americans, shabby and sometimes bare naked, were impressed. Two weeks later, on July 19, at a conference at Dobbs Ferry, Rochambeau pressed Washington for a clear understanding of where his combined force would be used. The answer he received did not please him: Washington’s response was that it was not possible to “fix a definitive plan” for the campaign. Where the combined force would fight depended upon the number of troops and ships de Grasse brought with him—their strength and that of the enemy. If de Grasse could remain along the coast of the mainland and force his way into New York Harbor, and provided that the British were in a divided condition, New York should be “our primary objective.” But if he brought no troops, a limited operation in Virginia would have to do.
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Two days after the conference at Dobbs Ferry, Washington wrote de Grasse telling him of his eagerness to see the French fleet off the coast. His hope for the arrival of the French fleet could not have surprised
de Grasse, but Washington explained it by reporting that Rochambeau’s army was now tied in with the Americans, with the joint force stretching down the Hudson River to the Bronx. Facing them, the British had about five thousand regulars (English and German) and perhaps three thousand loyalist militia. There were only six British ships of the line in the harbor. Their dispositions, he implied, were not strong, and this led him to believe that there should be no change in the plan to take New York—unless the British recognized the danger and returned troops from Virginia.
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At this time, late July and early August 1781, Washington struggled to anticipate not only British intentions but those of the French as well. His desire to strike at the enemy’s weakest point was undercut by his ignorance of what his ally intended to do. In fact, he did not even know where de Grasse was, and where de Grasse would use his fleet was equally unclear. Washington knew that Barras still sat in Rhode Island and seemed determined to remain there, despite the agreement reached at Wethersfield that he should sail his ships to Boston. Of course, it was obvious that if Barras should join his squadron to de Grasse’s, French naval superiority in American waters might be attained.