He was “no harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm,” said a Connecticut congressman.2
After the war, Washington grew wealthy. He inherited wealth, married into it, innovated productive farming techniques, used slave labor on his farms, diversified with entrepreneurial ventures, and speculated in land. He eventually owned tens of thousands of acres from the Great Dismal Swamp on the North Carolina–Virginia border to farmland in the Ohio River Valley. The greatest fortunes, he said, were made by buying low and selling high, “taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable lands we possess.” Throughout his life, Washington’s most frequent theme in his letters was land—“more precisely, his own land,” said the editor of his papers.3
John Adams, who, as a congressman, promoted Washington’s bid to become commander in 1775, later became a sometime critic. He asked, “Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army or president of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis?”4
As commanding general of the rebellion against the British, Washington had a mixed record. His deployment of troops and artillery around Boston forced the British to evacuate. His well-executed raids on Trenton and Princeton in the early years strengthened him politically, and strategically helped the rebellion survive. Once it became clear the French wanted to move against Cornwallis, Washington created the diversions and feints that allowed the two allied armies to slip past the British stronghold in New York. But he lost or failed to win every other battle: Long Island, Kip’s Bay, White Plains, Fort Washington, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth.
He was an average general, but a superb politician, logistician, and administrator, a “spiritual and managerial genius.” He outmaneuvered rivals, suppressed mutinies, chose aides and generals who were abler than he was, and somehow kept his army intact despite enlistment expirations, starvation, epidemics, and the bankruptcy of what passed for a government.5
But 1781 was the war’s seventh year, and for most of it, Washington despaired. His army had been decimated by desertions, casualties, and lack of supplies. The rebels were broke. They engaged in check-kiting schemes to thwart creditors and buy supplies. The chief Whig financier, Robert Morris, listed the problems: “The derangement of our money affairs. The enormity of our public expenditures. The confusion in all our departments. The languor of our general system. The complexity and consequent inefficacy of our operations.”6
In secret, Washington laid out the situation to John Laurens, 27, an aide whom Congress chose to go to France to pry away more money: “Without a foreign loan, our present force (which is but the remnant of an army) cannot be kept together . . . We are at the end of our tether, and [therefore] now or never our deliverance must come.”7
Rochambeau also needed money. His troops couldn’t diplomatically forage or steal from allied civilians. Since the American Continental army couldn’t get enough food and supplies for its own use, the French needed periodic infusions of silver and other hard money. Some was supplied by his son, Donatien Marie Joseph de Vimeur, the Viscount of Rochambeau, who would later become O’Hara’s prisoner-exchange counterpart. The younger Rochambeau, the assistant adjutant general, was sent back to France with his father’s plea for reinforcements and money. He returned with money, but no reinforcements.8
That there was a strategy to rendezvous in Yorktown was no thanks to Washington. Washington obsessed about a joint land-sea attack against the British in New York, something Rochambeau and the French admiral, Grasse, thought bad strategy for reasons ranging from impregnable British positions to the difficulty of low-draft French ships entering New York’s harbor. Washington, Rochambeau said, “had scarcely another object in view but an expedition against the island of New York.” When the French made it clear that their fleet would only go to Chesapeake Bay, Washington became enraged in private. An eyewitness later described Washington’s “intemperate passion (which I shall not repeat),” an anger “so strikingly singular that I shall never forget it.”9
Like O’Hara, Rochambeau had entered his country’s army at an early age, fought in many battles, including Minden, and was seriously wounded several times. With Washington, he showed a diplomatic veneer; with his own men, he was gruff. One of his officers offered a mixed portrait:
“He mistrusts every one and always believes that he sees himself surrounded by rogues and idiots. This character, combined with manners far from courteous, makes him disagreeable to everybody.” Still, the officer conceded “that he is wise, that he desires what is good, and that, if he is not an able administrator, he is generally very active, having an excellent glance, readily becoming acquainted with a country, and understanding war perfectly. . . . [In America], people expected to see a French fop, and they saw a thoughtful man.”10
Washington named aide John Laurens as the Whig representative of the team that negotiated surrender terms at Yorktown. It was Laurens’s reward for what had turned out to be a successful mission to France, but it also sent a symbolic message to the British: Laurens had been captured in May 1780 when a Whig army under General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered Charlestown to Henry Clinton. Clinton imposed on the rebels what were, by eighteenth-century standards, humiliating terms: The enemy’s flags and banners couldn’t be unfurled as they marched into imprisonment or, for officers like Laurens, paroled. Washington, through Laurens, ordered these same terms.
Laurens represented another symbolic message. The British navy had captured Laurens’s father, Henry, a former president of Congress, while en route to a diplomatic mission to Holland. He was held under such harsh conditions in a British prison that he became “much emaciated.” The younger Laurens hoped that Congress would demand that his father be exchanged for Cornwallis.11
The surrender terms required the British army and their Hessian mercenary allies to march out from Yorktown at 2 P.M. to lay down their arms. They marched past a silent, mile-long gauntlet of French soldiers and marines on the southwest side of the road, and the rebels on the northeast. “Through these lines,” an officer wrote, “the whole British army marched, their drums in front beating a slow march, their colors furled and cased.”12
Now, it was the British who sent the symbolic messages. Protocol and tradition dictated that the defeated general, Cornwallis, lead his troops to the surrender field. The British emerged from Yorktown, but without their commander.
Instead, O’Hara led the column. Cornwallis, he explained, was indisposed. Some biographers suggest that Cornwallis might indeed have been ill, “perhaps a recurrence of the fever he had contracted in North Carolina.” Yorktown was “a hotbed of disease,” and both Rochambeau and Lafayette had been ill at various times during the siege.13
Contemporaries weren’t as generous. Cornwallis’s absence was seen as a deliberate snub. “Cornwallis held himself back from the humiliating scene, obeying sensations which his great character ought to have stifled,” said one Whig officer. A Rochambeau aide called Cornwallis’s illness a “pretext.” Besides, the British troops “showed the greatest scorn for the Americans.” A Whig military physician felt Cornwallis was “pretending.”14
“Elegantly mounted,” O’Hara was met by Rochambeau’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Guillaume Mathieu, Comte de Dumas. O’Hara asked Dumas to point him toward Rochambeau. “The English general urged his horse forward to present his sword to the French general,” Dumas remembered. This was no innocent error. The articles of capitulation specified that Washington was “commander in chief of the combined forces of America and France.”15
Rochambeau himself guessed O’Hara’s intent and nodded toward the Americans across the road. Simultaneously, Dumas intercepted O’Hara and accompanied him to Washington. Washington wasn’t going to be one-upped by accepting a sword of surrender from a second-in-command. He pointed to O’Hara’s counterpart, Major General Benjamin Lincoln, 48, “fat, lame, and undramati
c.” Lincoln, a Washington loyalist from Massachusetts, had led troops during the Boston siege, at White Plains, Saratoga, and Charlestown, South Carolina (where he surrendered). O’Hara offered Lincoln his sword; Lincoln touched it, and returned it. (Lincoln showed similar political savvy in his career after the war, suppressing, mostly peacefully, Shay’s Rebellion in 1786, serving as lieutenant governor, and, finally, collector of the Port of Boston.)16
For the rest of the day, British soldiers—drunk, angry, melancholy, miserable, disorderly, unsoldierly, sullen, humiliated—grounded their arms. About six thousand British regulars and Hessian mercenaries became prisoners. Cornwallis was allowed to fill one ship that sailed to New York unhindered and uninspected. He filled it with Loyalists, including some blacks and deserters who feared for their lives from a vengeful rebel enemy. Most officers, including Cornwallis and O’Hara, were paroled, and returned to New York, Canada, the Caribbean, or Europe with a pledge not to fight unless and until they were exchanged for paroled or imprisoned enemy counterparts. All sides usually observed this honor system.17
Before parole, however, there was protocol: dining with the enemy the next day. Cornwallis continued to plead illness, so O’Hara represented him. By all accounts, he made an awkward situation easier. O’Hara is “very social and easy,” said a Whig colonel. A French officer was “amazed” at how the British could be so sociable “the very day after such a catastrophe as had happened to them.” He praised O’Hara who “talked a great deal and very intelligently. He has traveled wide and has an extensive acquaintance everywhere.”18
For the foreseeable future, the war was over for Cornwallis and O’Hara. For Washington, it was only the celebration that ended.
Writing to Grafton the day after the surrender, O’Hara said, “America is irretrievably lost.” But he recognized that the politicians still needed to be “persuaded,” something he hoped the surrender would do. Even so, he predicted more fighting. The French would attack Charlestown. The French would take Britain’s few remaining Caribbean colonies. The Spanish would join in.19
Clinton admitted, “This is a blow,” and he expected the next round of fighting to be in South Carolina, Georgia, and the West Indies. He urged London to send “a superior fleet” to America.20
The Yorktown news reached London around noon on November 25, two days before George III was scheduled to speak before Parliament. George Sackville, Lord Germain, the hardline secretary of state for the colonies and day-to-day director of the war, brought the news to the prime minister, Frederick North.
North, 49, was “heavy, large, and much inclined to corpulency,” a fellow MP said. “His tongue, being too large for his mouth, rendered his articulation somewhat thick, though not at all indistinct.” He was nearsighted and possibly narcoleptic. Despite the frailties, he was smart, a policy wonk, “able and fluent in debate,” blunting opponents’ arguments with wit and humor. North was a man under pressure. The empire, a colleague wrote, “was shaken and convulsed in almost every quarter.” Britain’s finances were a mess because of war expenses. Enemy navies and privateers were preying on commerce.21
When Germain told North about Yorktown, the prime minister lost his poise and firmness “for a short time.” Reacting “as he would have taken a ball in his breast,” North “opened his arms, exclaiming wildly, as he paced up and down the apartment during a few minutes, ‘Oh, God! It is all over!’”22
Germain then informed the king. Although he had “sentiments of the deepest concern,” George III vowed that he and his government would continue “prosecution of the present contest.”23
Two days later, the king expanded on that theme to Parliament. While Yorktown was “very unfortunate” and of “great concern,” the cause was right, God was on their side, Britain would recover the initiative, and the war would continue: “I retain a firm confidence in the protection of Divine Providence, and a perfect conviction of the justice of my cause; and I have no doubt but that, by the concurrence and support of my parliament, by the valor of my fleets and armies, and by a vigorous, animated, and united execution of the faculties and resource of my people, I shall be enabled to restore the blessing of a safe and honorable peace to all my dominions.”24
A new war strategy leaked to the media in the next few weeks. Instead of focusing on America—a military black hole—it would focus on America’s enablers: the French especially, but also the Spanish and Dutch. It was, as one newspaper said, “the only means left for a renovation of our glory.” It had the advantage of playing to Britain’s strength, its navy. George III reinforced his intentions with North on December 15: “Though internal continental operations in North America are not advisable, the prosecution of the war can alone preserve us from a most ignominious peace.”25
Pro-government newspapers applauded the sentiment. “We must conquer America, or this country ceases to exist as a powerful commercial kingdom. The Americans are already exhausted in their finances,” wrote one commentator. “This is a war of necessity.” Another writer praised the new strategy. “Is the loss of Lord Cornwallis and a few thousand troops of such magnitude as to induce you to give up America? Is the loss of a finger, because it is painful, to justify the amputation of the arm? . . . It is no longer an American war, but a French war in America.”26
In France, Holland, and Spain, the allies’ belligerence was a mirror image of George III’s. Vergennes, the French foreign minister, warned of complacency. “We’d make a mistake if we think that an era of peace is imminent,” he wrote Lafayette. He told Lafayette that the Whigs must strengthen their army.27
In Holland, rebel diplomat John Adams reported that some Dutch believed that Yorktown would lead to an international peace conference. “But I cannot be of that sentiment,” he said. “The English must have many more humiliations before they will agree to meet us upon equal terms, or upon any terms that we can approve.”28
In Russia, the rebel envoy said speculation about mediation by the Russian empress was groundless. “We shall not hear much more of the mediation” until at least another year of military operations had concluded.29
In Paris, Franklin warned Congress to continue military efforts. The British, “tho’ somewhat humbled at present,” he said, might find that “a little success may make them as insolent as ever.” And to Washington, Franklin wrote, “The English seem not to know either how to continue the war, or to make peace with us.”30
In America, the reaction to Yorktown was three-fold: speculation about Britain’s next military offensive; planning for an allied offensive; and concern that politicians—and potential new recruits—would grow complacent.
Whig general Nathanael Greene, in South Carolina, reminded the Virginia governor that the enlistments of Continental soldiers from that state expired in December. British troops in Charlestown outnumbered Greene’s, and the enemy was “ready to take advantage of our weak state.” To Congress, Greene said, “I cannot help dreading . . . some untoward blow.” To a subordinate, Greene worried that the British might be reinforced, in which case, “we may have active operations again.” To the governor of North Carolina, where the British still occupied Wilmington, Greene predicted that “the enemy . . . will be encouraged to prosecute the war.”31
Washington shared Greene’s concern about complacency: “My greatest fear [is that Congress] may think our work too nearly closed, and will fall into a state of languor and relaxation. . . . Our grand project is to be prepared in every point for war.”32
He, Greene, and other military leaders shared a second concern—a diplomatic one. Eventually, there would be a truce. Without a complete British capitulation, a truce or treaty could result in an agreement that allowed Britain to keep the territory it held. This kind of agreement—in diplomatic language, uti possidetis—would mean the British would keep New York City, Charlestown, Savannah, Wilmington, strategic frontier forts from Detroit to upstate New York, East Florida, and a key post in Maine.33
Peace negotiations began
in April 1782. But throughout the summer and fall, fighting and skepticism continued. Richard Henry Lee, a former Virginia congressman, said, “I fear that our enemies have not yet drank deep enough of the cup of misfortune.” The British continued to interfere with inland water commerce. “These crews are made up of refugees, negroes, and such as fly from civil justice, who under the sanction of British commissions are warring upon women and children, stealing clothes and negroes, and committing every outrage.”34
The Whig negotiators in Paris were also skeptical about peace, even in fall 1782. “We may, and we may not, have peace this winter,” said Jay.35
Washington wrote John Laurens, then attached to Greene’s army, that the British navy continued to capture American ships, while in the west the British and their “savage allies” were “scalping and burning the frontiers.” To another former aide, he wrote that “the king will push the war as long as the nation will find men or money admits not of a doubt in my mind.”36
Washington’s own preparations for continued fighting began at Yorktown. He urged French admiral Grasse to participate in a joint land–sea attack against Wilmington and Charlestown. Grasse refused, citing the impending hurricane season and his commitments in the Caribbean. “Every argument and persuasive had been used with the French admiral to induce him to aid the combined army in an operation against Charlestown, I am obliged to submit,” Washington told Greene.”37
Another part of Washington’s plan was for Congress to plead for more money and troops from the states, although he was skeptical the states had the “abilities and inclinations” to supply them. He told the French he would be grateful for the appearance in spring 1782 of a “decisive naval force” and, of course, more “pecuniary aid from your generous nation.”38
After Yorktown Page 3