After Yorktown
THE FINAL STRUGGLE FOR AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
Don Glickstein
WESTHOLME
Yardley
Copyright © 2014 Donald W. Glickstein
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Westholme Publishing, LLC
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Yardley, Pennsylvania 19067
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ISBN: 978-1-59416-603-7
Also available in hardback.
Produced in the United States of America.
To my mom, Lillian Hamlin Glickstein (1915–1965), an immigrants’ child and proper Bostonian who inspired me to love history, politics, and the arts, and who took me to my first baseball game.
And to Alvin F. Oickle, who, when I was a young journalist, challenged me to be fearless and creative. Thirty-five years later, he challenged me to write this book.
“Wild, tormenting rumours of an armistice and peace are in the air, they lay hold on our hearts and make the return to the front harder than ever. . . . Breath of hope that sweeps over the scorched fields, raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, of the most agonizing terror of death, insensate question: Why? Why do they make an end? And why do these rumours of an end fly about?”
—Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
CONTENTS
Reference Maps
Introduction: How to End a War
Part One: Surrender
1. The Treaty
2. O’Hara’s Wars
3. Rochambeau and Washington
Part Two: The South
4. Rice and the Low Country
5. General Leslie Comes to Charlestown
6. The Deputy Savior
7. The “Bloodiest, Cruel War”
8. North Carolina: Two Combustible Commanders
9. Georgia: “Making Bricks Without Straw”
10. Leslie’s Work
11. “Howlings of a Triple-Headed Monster”
12. The Swamp Fox Meets His Match
13. “Bloody Bill” Cunningham Raids the Backcountry
14. Laurens and His Glory
15. At Last, the Evacuation
Part Three: The Frontier
16. Indians
17. The Death of Colonel Butler
18. Massacre and Revenge
19. Ambush at Blue Licks
20. Final Fights on the Ohio
21. Sevier Hunts for Dragging Canoe
22. Arkansas Post and the Spanish Frontier
23. Between Two Hells
Part Four: The Caribbean
24. Riches
25. The Golden Rock
26. More British Humiliations
27. Battle of the Saintes
28. Flip-flops in Central America
29. A Future Hero
Part Five: The Sea and the Raiders
30. Britannia Doesn’t Rule the Waves
31. French Disaster, British Tragedy
32. Secret Mission to the Arctic
33. Coastal War: Halifax to Boston
34. Coastal War: Delaware to Chesapeake
Part Six: The Mediterranean
35. “Calamity Has Come On Us”
36. The Great Siege of Gibraltar
Part Seven: The Battle for India
37. Hyder Ali: The “Most Formidable Enemy”
38. Coote and Hughes to the Rescue
39. Suffren’s “Lust for Action”
40. The Final Battles
Part Eight: Washington and Carleton
41. New Leader, Old Leader
42. Refugees and the Book of Negroes
43. Evacuation Day
Notes
Bibliography and Acknowledgments
Index
INTRODUCTION
How to End a War
IN 1966, GEORGE D. AIKEN, 74, A FRUIT GROWER AND U.S. Senator from Vermont, made what he called “a far-fetched proposal” to end the Vietnam War. Vietnam was a “quagmire,” said one Pulitizer Prize–winning reporter; many adopted the metaphor. “Waist deep in the Big Muddy,” sang antiwar activist Pete Seeger. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson complained: “A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam.”1
Now, Aiken offered his proposal because “nothing else has worked.” He proposed that the U.S. “declare unilaterally that this stage of the Vietnam War is over.” Then, without losing face, the U.S. could regroup to strategic, defensible enclaves.2
Others summarized Aiken’s words with less nuance. In 2009, for example, a columnist applied Aiken’s concept to Afghanistan: “Some folks sneered and laughed when Sen. Aiken said the U.S. should quickly get out of a growing quagmire in Southeast Asia. Afghanistan is rapidly becoming a similar quagmire.” Two years later, a different columnist talked about the continued fighting: “We should declare victory and leave.”3
Many American wars—perhaps most, depending on how you define “war”—have been similar to Vietnam and Afghanistan. They were quagmires, with no clear path to victory, just exhausted, endless fighting. President James Polk, for example, in 1847, defended his quagmire in Mexico as that war’s popularity plummeted: “The continued successes of our arms may fail to secure a satisfactory peace. . . . [But] to withdraw our Army without a peace, would not only leave all the wrongs of which we complain unredressed, but would be the signal for new and fierce civil dissensions and new revolutions.”4
Senator Aiken delivered his proposal on October 19, 1966—185 years to the day that the British surrendered to French and rebel American armies at Yorktown, Virginia. The mythology of the surrender is that the American Revolution ended there and then, with Americans victorious.
Mason Locke Weems, an Episcopal parson from Maryland, was twenty-two when the British surrendered. In his bestselling, fictional biography of Washington, he wrote that the Yorktown surrender “was justly considered as the close of the war.” It is a hindsight that has endured. On the surrender’s 229th anniversary in 2010, comic-strip readers saw Beetle Bailey, an army private, chat with his fellow soldiers. “This is the anniversary of the British General Cornwallis surrendering,” Beetle says. “It was a very important event. It was 1781. The end of the war with England.” Even the U.S. National Park Service maintains the surrender meant the war was over. “And it was. The victory secured independence for the United States.”5
The reality was that nearly seven years after insurgent American colonists killed seventy-three royal infantry along a road from Concord to Boston, on what the British perceived to be a peacekeeping mission—seizing caches of rebel weapons—the war remained inconclusive with no end in sight, no pathway to peace. A quagmire.
This is the story of the people who continued to fight after Yorktown for nearly two more years because they had no orders to stop.
It is an important story in the twenty-first century, not because history predicts the future, but because it cautions us about the present. “If the study of history does nothing more than teach us humility, skepticism and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful,” said Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian. Acknowledging an enemy’s perspective doesn’t impugn one’s patriotism. Each data point of events obscure or known—enhances the pool of knowledge, the “big data” that strengthen our ability to make wiser decisions.6
A style note: Eighteenth-century writers spelled, punctuated, and wrote inconsistently. I
embrace the editors of Nathanael Greene’s papers who tried to make such manuscripts “intelligible to the present-day reader while retaining the essential form and spirit of the writer.” Likewise, Colin G. Calloway, a leading scholar of Native Americans, kept “the names of individuals and groups in the form I thought would be most readily identifiable for most readers.” Finally, I avoid terms like “patriot” and “traitor” that could be applied to both sides. There’s no question American Whigs were in rebellion—and thus, “rebels”—while Tories were “loyalists” to Britain. The term “American” applied to both Loyalists and rebels. As one exiled Loyalist said, “I am sometimes tempted to endeavor to forget that I am an American . . . but the passion for my native country returns.”7
PART ONE
Surrender
1. The Treaty
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ENDED ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, May 12, 1784, in Passy, a village near Paris.
Two and a half years had passed since a British army surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia. For thirteen months, enemy diplomats and politicians circled each other before agreeing to an armistice. Another sixteen months passed before three diplomats and their aides gathered in Passy, on a large estate “in a pretty house situated in a fine amphitheater-like garden.” There, one of the diplomats, an American named Benjamin Franklin, 78, lived as a guest of an international trader and arms dealer who had supplied gunpowder to the American rebel army.1
Franklin’s partner that evening was John Jay, 39, a thin, balding, hook-nosed lawyer from New York, former president of the Continental Congress, and minister to Spain. He was, said a diplomat, reserved, taciturn, and grave, all of which “give him greater regard than he seems to merit.” The future chief justice and New York governor made “a poor figure, being rather of a small size, remarkably thin,” said an acquaintance. But “this proves the falsity of judging by appearances.” A former law partner turned political enemy told Jay: “Your cold heart, graduated like a thermometer, finds the freezing point nearest the bulb.” Yet Jay would become a trusted advisor to two presidents.2
Franklin and Jay were in Passy to exchange peace treaty documents signed by Congressional leaders. Their British counterpart was David Hartley, a member of Parliament who had with him the treaty documents signed by George III.
Hartley, 52, had been an outspoken opponent of the war. Like Franklin, who was an acquaintance, Hartley wore glasses, opposed slavery, and was both a politician and a practical scientist. His noted contribution showed how to make buildings fire resistant by using iron and copper plates between floors. Unlike Franklin—celebrated for his wit, writing, discoveries, and inventions—Hartley was celebrated for boring people. “In Parliament,” wrote a fellow MP, “the intolerable length, when increased by the dullness of his speeches, rendered him an absolute nuisance, even to his own friends. His rising always operated like a dinner-bell.” Still, Hartley “possessed some talent, with unsullied probity, added to indefatigable perseverance and labor.”3
Why had it taken so long to reach this point when Franklin, Jay, and Hartley exchanged the ratification documents?
While George III insisted in the days after Yorktown that the war would continue, Parliamentary opposition grew. In February 1782, it voted to end an offensive war in North America. The prime minister resigned; the government fell. In fits and spurts, the enemies talked informally, but the American rebels refused formal negotiations unless the British first acknowledged their independence, which the British preferred to grant rather than assume. The new prime minister, the Marquess of Rockingham, dropped dead suddenly in July 1782. His successor, William Petty Fitzmaurice, Earl of Shelburne, agreed to the American terms of recognizing independence three months later.
Meanwhile, the diplomats crossed and double-crossed their own people and each other. American negotiators ignored their instructions from Congress to defer to the French. They discussed a separate deal with the British, who would be generous if it meant splitting the Americans from their French, Spanish, and Dutch allies. The French, Spanish, and Dutch, for their part, would sell out their American ally if it strengthened their interests in Europe, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and India.
The British and Americans reached a preliminary treaty on November 30, 1782. Given their spies’ abilities, it’s doubtful the French were blindsided, except by the quantity of British concessions. Nevertheless, Franklin apologized to his chief ally, and assured France that the treaty wouldn’t take effect until all the parties had reached an agreement. Then, Franklin asked France for yet another loan.
France, Spain, and Britain signed their preliminary peace treaty on January 20, 1783, when they also agreed to an armistice. (The Dutch continued to negotiate for another seven months.) A month later, Parliament approved the American treaty while censuring Shelburne for its generous terms—“more calamitous, more dreadful, more ruinous than war could possibly be,” said one MP. Shelburne’s government didn’t survive the censure.4
The final approved treaties were signed in September 1783 by the Americans in Hartley’s rooms in Paris, and by the French and Spanish at the Versailles palace. All that was left was ratification of the treaties by each government. Congress wasn’t able to accomplish this until mid-January 1784, and then, only at the last minute because it couldn’t get a quorum. Once the documents made their way across the wintry Atlantic, George III, in late March, signed his copies, and sent them to Hartley in Paris. (Hartley’s career ended after this mission. He retired from politics, continued to study mechanics and chemistry.)5
The day after Franklin and Jay exchanged papers with Hartley, Franklin celebrated in a letter to his friend, Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress: “Thus, the great hazardous enterprise we have been engaged in is, God be praised, happily completed—an event I hardly expected I should live to see.”6
During these lengthy diplomatic maneuvers, the American army got sparse and often conflicting information. Its commander, George Washington, worried that negotiations could fall apart. As late as February 1783, he ordered one of his generals to prepare to besiege New York as “a probable operation.” In America, in the Caribbean, around the world—for it had become a world war—the fighting continued for months after Yorktown.7
One of those fighters was Charles O’Hara, the British second-in-command at Yorktown. He had been fighting the war since 1777.
2. O’Hara’s Wars
TEN YEARS LATER . . . FRANCE, NOVEMBER 1793. THE PEACE treaty that ended the American Revolution was a decade in the past. Now, in 1793, Great Britain was again fighting a revolution, this time against America’s old ally, France, and its regicidal, republican government.
In late December, the terse first reports from France stunned Britain: The enemy had captured Lieutenant General Charles O’Hara, commander-in-chief of the allied armies in France and governor of the besieged Mediterranean naval port, Toulon. The circumstances of the capture, as reported in French newspapers, were unlikely. O’Hara had been with frontline troops attacking an enemy position.
“It appears so improbable that a commander-in-chief should so expose his person in a sortie, as to be taken prisoner, that we give no credit to the intelligence,” The Times reported. A French correspondent asked if O’Hara had exercised “imprudence, ineptitude, or something worse?” The British naval commander wrote London, “The governor promised not to go out himself, but unfortunately did not keep his word.”1
This War of the First Coalition was not going well for Britain and its allies. The war was the thirty-first England and France had fought dating back to 1066, and O’Hara’s third. It began in 1792 when revolutionary France declared war on Austria and Prussia. Over the next two years, the revolutionaries guillotined their former king, occupied Brussels, and fought against most of a Europe allied in name, but divided by future advantage: Britain, Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, Naples and Sicily, and Holland. Those were the enemies outside. Within France, a civil war with shifting alliances and ideologies: fe
deralists, royalists, republicans, Brissontins, Septembriseurs, Feuillants, Hébertists, Dantonists, Girondists, Jacobins, Les Enragés, Paris against Bordeaux, radical against reactionary, xenophobes, paranoids, terrorists.2
In Marseilles and Toulon, French federalists and royalists rebelled against the Paris regime, and asked Britain and Spain for support. The allies obliged. A British fleet arrived in Toulon in August 1793; other allies soon joined. A growing revolutionary Republican army met them and converged on the outskirts of Toulon.
O’Hara, 53, Gibraltar’s lieutenant governor and an experienced general, was ordered to take command in Toulon. He arrived in late October and sensed a debacle. His allied troops were unreliable, inexperienced, and undisciplined, giving “no very encouraging prospects in any attempts we may make.”3
Gilbert Elliot, the civil administrator, also newly arrived, said O’Hara was too pessimistic: “I never saw a man half so nervous, or half so blind to every side but the black one, as O’Hara. His strange rattling, and to all appearance, absurd and wrong-headed manner of talking, and indeed acting on some points, is more alarming in my eyes than any other circumstance. He is not without sense in his profession, and he has considerable military experience and knowledge, with personal courage in the highest degree, but he sees all the difficulties and can think and talk of nothing else.”4
Beyond the quality of his troops, O’Hara’s biggest concern was strategic. Ridges and hills of up to 1,900 feet nearly encircle Toulon’s harbor. If an enemy seized the heights, cannon could pummel the city and ships in the inner harbor.
A French revolutionary artillery captain did exactly that. Backed by political connections in Paris, Captain Napoleon Bonaparte, 24, assumed authority for the artillery placement. “Artillery persistently served with red-hot cannon-balls is terrible against a fleet,” he said.5
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