Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (44 page)

Throughout the meeting, Washington’s impression of de Grasse gradually seemed to improve. The French admiral’s style was far more demonstrative than Rochambeau’s, but tact, or courtesy, found only restricted space in it. He did not hide his belief that he had, in coming to the Chesapeake, already done “more than could be expected.”

Whatever the impression created by de Grasse’s attitude, Washington and Rochambeau could not have been less than pleased at the farewell the sailors in the fleet gave them. First, the officers of the
Ville de Paris
made their way into the launch by the dozens to bid Washington goodbye. Sunset approached before they cleared the coast, and as the launch moved through the fleet on course for home, several hundred sailors clung to masts and yards and, holding muskets, fired them in tribute to the visitors—most particularly, it is likely, to General Washington. It was an astonishing sight to Washington, and its flash and thunder found an echo in the ships’ cannon, shot off in a recognition that roared.

That demonstration was the best part of the return trip. For the weather shared no admiration of the occupants of the launch. A storm discovered the boat and pounded it with wind and rain. At times it faced a headwind and at other times no wind; some release was found in an inlet along the shore, but the winds relented only occasionally. Three days later the party went ashore at Williamsburg.

Washington remained buoyant, a feeling he almost never experienced, when he reflected on the conference and the strength de Grasse added to the armies arriving from New York. His army had made the journey largely intact, though he had feared that desertions and sickness would rob it of its power. In fact the Continental Army seemed prepared to fight its way into Yorktown. The prospects for success, he wrote, are “as favorable as could possibly have been expected.”
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Then came a letter written September 23 by de Grasse, who apparently was not the brave seaman Washington thought he was. The letter informed Washington that the French would be sailing their fleet out of the bay; it seems that they had learned that the British squadron in New York had been reinforced, perhaps by as many as ten ships of the line. De Grasse now reported that he would clear out from the Chesapeake and seek maneuvering room on the open sea. Two ships would be left at the mouth of the York River.

De Grasse had lost his bearings; his mind seemed disordered; he imagined the British squadron in New York roaring down on his fleet. Seeking maneuvering room from which to fight a British fleet sitting in New York was one course of action. In a battle that he imagined, the fighting might drive us “leeward and put it beyond our power to return.” In such a case he would reclaim the troops he had brought and had promised Washington he could use. In still another unmoored speculation, he considered sailing to New York to block the enemy’s fleet in New York Harbor.

This message reeked of indecision and perhaps panic, hardly the stuff that made heroes. Washington, appalled at the exposure of intellectual and moral weakness in de Grasse’s letter, wrote back immediately, pointing out the strategic value of the French squadron in the Yorktown operation. What Washington wrote constituted a short but telling lesson in strategic thinking. He reminded de Grasse of what the presence of the fleet meant to the campaign. The fleet was central to the allies’ efforts, even if it did not have to fight. Stationed in the
bay, it limited the British effort to deny food and other supplies to the American army. It held the British in place and prevented them from reinforcing their strongpoints. Left unsaid was an analysis of the importance of the French troops carried in de Grasse’s ships.
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What Washington left no doubt about was the importance of French naval power to the campaign for Yorktown and the strategic place the Chesapeake held for the progress of the war. In the end, this linkage in his argument for holding the de Grasse fleet in place may have been decisive. De Grasse’s departure from the bay, he wrote, “would be not only the disgrace and loss of renouncing an enterprise,” but it might lead to the disbanding of the army. And success in the enterprise “must necessarily go a great way towards terminating the war.” Put another way, what Washington said about the context of the move on Yorktown was that if “the present opportunity should be missed … no future day can restore us a similar occasion for striking a decisive blow …[and] an honorable peace will be more remote than ever.”

Lafayette carried this letter to de Grasse. Two days later, on September 27, Washington, on receiving a letter from de Grasse promising to stay, wrote that de Grasse’s resolution “proves a great Mind knows how to make personal Sacrifices to secure an important general Good.”
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De Grasse did not deserve such praise, but he had, with assistance, overcome his near panic. There was no guarantee that he would not change his mind. In any case, Washington was determined to use the opportunity that Cornwallis’s immobility gave him. The next step was clear: Move the Franco-American force into position and strike the enemy.

11

Yorktown

The British sat nearby, apparently satisfied and even complacent, after raiding Virginia. But Cornwallis, who had arrived in Virginia on May 20 with a much-depleted army, was anything but satisfied. He had marched through the Carolinas seeking battle with Nathanael Greene, and when in mid-March 1781 he got his wish at Guilford Courthouse, he won the battle, or at least controlled the ground on which it was fought, with Greene in retreat. But he had almost lost his army. He went into the battle with around two thousand men and came out with fewer than fifteen hundred. Earlier combat with Greene had also killed many of his troops, who were near exhaustion when Guilford Courthouse ended. His soldiers were also hungry and in tatters after slogging hundreds of miles through the rough country that made up the Carolinas.

Sometime in these days of bleakness, Cornwallis had decided that the key to ending the war lay in Virginia. So off he and his men went, marching to join the army already there, which he believed was commanded by his old friend William Phillips. When he arrived on May 20, he was told that Phillips had died five days earlier.

Cornwallis now commanded the entire army in Virginia. He seemed confused for a short time by his situation: Phillips’s death was a hard blow for him, and though in Virginia his military situation seemed both better—he now headed an army of around seven thousand—and worse, for his military chief, Henry Clinton, remained the same. Years before, he had shared Phillips’s delight at being paired with Clinton: When the three officers were younger, Phillips had written of their friendship in these terms: “How we should agree, how act, how triumph, how love one another!” Now Phillips was dead, and Cornwallis and Clinton did not love one another. They were so estranged that
Cornwallis did not even keep his superior informed of his movements in the Carolinas, and he did not tell Clinton of his march to Virginia until late May.
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Clinton had his own problems. The most immediate continued to be Admiral Arbuthnot. He and Arbuthnot had long since passed the point where they could plan, let alone carry out, joint operations. Theirs remained an ugly relationship—and the one Clinton had with his own superior, Lord George Germain, the colonial secretary, had even less beauty.

The Atlantic Ocean imposed part of the difficulty Clinton and Germain had with one another. The distance made communication treacherous—a letter sent to Germain based on information at hand often became irrelevant, because the information, reliable when it left Virginia for Germain in England, no longer described reality in Clinton’s America. Clinton did not always tell Germain of the conditions he faced in fighting Washington. Germain had little skill in making his wishes clear and little tact in expressing them, and Clinton’s tender spirit led him to resent almost any opinion Germain offered about the war in America; the resentment soon attained a heat that made him incapable of understanding what lay behind Germain’s efforts to exercise his authority. Two years earlier, in 1779, he had protested to Germain with a directness not ordinarily found in a general’s communications with his superiors. The heart of his complaint was that he was expected to act in impossible ways, given his limited strength. Such expectations carried the assumption that he would be blamed if “I should adopt other measures and fail; and, should I follow that system with success, I appear to have no merit.” He was on American ground, he reminded Germain—“I am on the spot. The earliest and most exact intelligence on every point ought naturally, from my situation, to reach me.” Was Germain, he asked, not prone to “adopt the ill digested or interested suggestions of people who cannot be competent judges of the subject, and puzzle me by hinting wishes with which I cannot agree yet am loath to disregard?” The conclusion to this blunt analysis was explosive: “For God’s sake, my Lord, if you wish me to do anything, leave me to myself and let me adapt my effects to the hourly change of circumstances. If not, tie me down to a certain point and take the risk of my want of success.”
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Germain obviously did not have great confidence in Clinton, and he
served in a cabinet that shared his doubts about the American war and its commander. Most did not understand the situation, but those who thought they did often failed to see the linkages between campaigns in the West Indies and those on the American continent. In 1781, Britain faced political problems at home, a growing threat on the European continent, and in the English colonies in America an opposition that refused to give up, no matter how depleted its army became.

In spring, Germain gradually came to see that the French were about to increase their efforts in the West Indies and on the American continent. When he received word that de Grasse had sailed in strength for America, his concern increased. But concern did not become alarm, and his report to Clinton in April that he thought de Grasse’s intentions included an appearance at Newport was put in a way best described as “casual.” In May, he speculated in a letter to Clinton that the French intended to attack Halifax or, perhaps, Penobscot, in Maine. In his April dispatch he had offered the reassurance that Admiral Rodney would follow de Grasse, implying that Clinton should not worry about the French navy.
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Clinton’s nerves and his judgment were unsteady at best during the spring and summer, and he so distrusted Admiral Arbuthnot, still the navy chief in America, that he seemed incapable of acting. He had known that Arbuthnot would be recalled, but nothing seemed possible to him until a replacement took over the navy in America.

Cornwallis was not exactly the victim of the disagreements between Germain and Clinton, but the failure of these two to work through their differences about strategy did not help him formulate his own plans. When he arrived in Virginia in May, he understood that he must operate according to the orders that had been given to Phillips. Those orders were to establish a naval base and to unsettle American forces by raiding the countryside. There was a good deal of inventiveness and confusion in such instructions, and they soon underwent frequent revisions because of Clinton’s demands that Cornwallis return troops to New York. Clinton did not disguise his dismay at Cornwallis’s movement into Virginia, but at the same time he insisted that he exploit the Chesapeake.
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The order to find a place for a naval station proved difficult to satisfy, because the naval officers rejected suggestions that they use Portsmouth after it was strengthened and then had to answer claims that
Old Point Comfort was a better spot. While discussions were taking place, the army pursued American units under Lafayette and Steuben and tried to satisfy Clinton’s requests that its troops, or some of them, be sent back to New York.

Near the middle of summer, amid a flurry of orders and actions, Cornwallis decided to keep his army intact, pull out units still remaining at Portsmouth, and dig in at Yorktown and at Gloucester Point, across the York River. These sites, he knew, were far from ideal. British generals always preferred the high ground; Yorktown was on low ground. The lay of the land left no choice but to fortify fields exposed to enemy artillery. Nor did the land lend itself to the protection of big ships. Cornwallis had his doubts about his orders, but he resolved to make the best of things, and put his men to digging in as August began.

Washington may have at first resisted the campaign in Virginia, but once he accepted the fact that in order to retain French support he would have to yield to their plan to strike in the Chesapeake, he gave it all the strength of will that he had. He also worked in his usual extraordinary way to make the change in plans effective. He never forgot that the objective of his army was the defeat of the British enemy.

As commander in chief of the French and American armies, he assumed the lead in the great effort to bring on the action that would destroy the enemy. He organized the effort: he told the French how to move their troops from Rhode Island to the South; he saw to it that they took the proper routes; and he helped to deceive Clinton for as long as possible that he and Rochambeau were not going to lead their armies away from New York. When de Grasse threatened to sail his ships out of Chesapeake Bay, he forced him to see that such action would be catastrophic, that it could even mean the loss of the war.

At the end of September, when the siege of Yorktown began, Washington ceded the intellectual leadership of the effort to Rochambeau. The French knew much more about how to conduct a siege than he; Rochambeau had led, or at least participated in, fourteen sieges in Europe, as he and his staff did not hesitate to point out. Washington’s pride was not involved, and he did not have to be persuaded to yield to the French prescriptions on how to go about squeezing Cornwallis into surrendering. The Americans needed help, and they followed French
instructions about laying out the trenches and redoubts that made up the parallels used to encircle the British.
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