The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Because Washington nursed dreams of retaking the New York he had lost—dreams that the French, though they humored him, thought delusory—he was much slower than they to see that the war had moved to the South, even though Britain had inaugurated its new southern strategy by taking a laughably ill-defended Savannah at the very end of 1778.114 Rochambeau stepped ashore in America just weeks after Clinton and Cornwallis had brought that strategy to a full boil by capturing Charleston in May 1780 after a textbook siege. American general Benjamin Lincoln, who’d watched as if spellbound as his many opportunities for escape vanished one by one, had to surrender his army humiliatingly into captivity in the worst American defeat of the war.115

  In August 1780, a month after the French commander arrived, Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga, whom Congress had sent south to halt Cornwallis in his blood-drenched conquest of the rest of the Carolinas, believed that by energy and dispatch he could defeat the divided British forces one by one; but unfortunately, thinking he was attacking only a small detachment, he bit into the tail of the whole British lion. Cornwallis turned snarlingly and pounced upon him, sending Gates’s green troops, and Gates himself, fleeing in terror, though some weren’t fast enough to outrun “Bloody” Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons, who inflicted their trademark “rout and slaughter” upon them, young Tarleton bragged.116

  Yet Washington dreamed of New York even as a savage guerrilla civil war between largely Anglican Loyalist bands and back-country Presbyterian Patriots convulsed the Carolinas; as the giant backwoods general Daniel Morgan, sciatica-plagued at forty-four, crushed Tarleton at the brilliantly executed Battle of Cowpens in January 1781, in which his soldiers terrified the enemy with their “Indian halloo” that became the Civil War’s rebel yell; and as Nathanael Greene, now commander of America’s southern division, inflicted such grievous casualties on Cornwallis at the Battle of Guilford Court House near Greensboro, North Carolina, in March that he rightly pronounced that the “Enemy got the ground . . . but we the victory.”117

  Washington even yearned for New York when the British began marauding in Virginia, and their sloop Savage anchored off Mount Vernon in April 1781 to free his slaves and demand provisions, which his cousin Lund, who went aboard bearing refreshments, agreed to provide if they’d leave the estate and the slaves alone. To “commune with a parcel of plundering Scoundrels; and request a favor by asking the surrender of my Negroes, was exceedingly ill-judged,” Washington rebuked him. “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my House, and laid the Plantation in ruins. You ought to have considered yourself as my representative, and should have reflected on the bad example of communicating with the enemy, and making a voluntary offer of refreshments to them with a view to prevent a conflagration.” Strong words about his beloved Mount Vernon: and he went on to say that he expected the enemy’s “plundering plan” to end “in the loss of all my Negroes, and the destruction of my Houses; but I am prepared for the event”—for him, very nearly the ultimate sacrifice.118

  EVEN THOUGH the southern war had grown hard to ignore, Washington, Rochambeau fretted, still “did not conceive the affairs of the south to be [of] such urgency.”119 Both Cornwallis and Greene had followed Guilford Court House by striking out on their own enterprising courses. Cornwallis, the man who had defied convention by marrying for love, disobeyed Commander in Chief Clinton’s orders to hold the Carolinas fast and instead headed to Virginia, where he aimed to disrupt rebel supply lines to the lower South. There he might bring the Americans to a decisive battle, unlikely in the militarily dispersed Carolinas. Greene, seeing the field clear, turned back to liberate South Carolina, which he brilliantly accomplished in ninety days, pushing the British back into their last redoubt of Charleston.120

  Cornwallis, after his burst of un-English initiative, had second thoughts: bureaucratic self-protection now seemed more urgent than making war. In mid-May, he met a British force whose commander had died just after Clinton had ordered him to set up a Virginia naval base. Cornwallis made the troops and the orders his own. For the base, he chose Yorktown. On a bluff where the York River narrows enough to afford a good escape route to the far bank, it was, he judged, a “safe defensive” site. He wrote to tell Clinton what he’d done, adding that if the commander in chief wanted to wage “offensive War,” he should come to Virginia, “the only Province, in which it can be carried on.”

  Outraged by Cornwallis’s insubordination, Clinton ordered him to send half his men to New York, where he believed Britain’s last chance of a climactic battle lay, now that its counterinsurgency had failed “to gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.” The other half should stay put—Clinton’s own stab at bureaucratic self-protection, since London wanted troops in Virginia. Fine, Cornwallis agreed, in a dispatch that now self-protectively belittled Yorktown as only a few “Acres of an unhealthy swamp” that “cannot have the smallest influence on the War” and is “ever liable to become prey to a foreign” navy.121 And there he remained, a sitting duck.

  With the South in ferment, Rochambeau and Washington met on May 21 to plan the 1781 campaign. Their conference was, as always, a charade. With Washington pushing for an attack on New York and the sharp-faced Rochambeau favoring Virginia—sometimes suavely, sometimes “with all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible,” a French participant said—the generals determined, as Washington recorded, either “to commence an operation against New York . . . or to extend our views to the Southward as circumstances and a Naval superiority might render more necessary and eligable.”122 Rochambeau was only pretending to agree with Washington that New York was primary, however; in fact, he directed the French admiral, Comte de Grasse, to bring his giant fleet from the Caribbean to the Chesapeake, not to New York.123

  Just before the French army, in their formfitting white uniforms and black cocked hats, marched into the American camp near White Plains on July 6, Rochambeau had informed Washington that de Grasse was sailing northward and had asked what his destination should be. The American, tantalizingly within striking distance of New York, vacillated, hoping he could muster needed reinforcements to pounce.124 But he couldn’t; and when news came that Cornwallis had trapped himself on the Yorktown peninsula, where the allies might squeeze him between their troops and de Grasse’s armada, Washington couldn’t help but give the answer Rochambeau wanted, and the two armies set off for Virginia on August 19, 1781.

  Rochambeau came south by boat, and when he reached Delaware, he saw, with amazement, “General Washington standing on the shore and waving his hat and white handkerchief joyfully.” When the count docked, the staid Washington hugged him and poured out the news that de Grasse (who at six foot two liked to call the six-foot Washington “mon cher petit générale”) had entered the Chesapeake and sent marines ashore to help a Lafayette-led American troop pin Cornwallis in place. Since the admiral couldn’t stay in Virginia beyond October, the allies stepped up their pace—though Washington couldn’t resist a flying detour with Rochambeau and his aides to Mount Vernon, his first visit in over six years and his first glimpse of his still-unfinished new dining room, which perhaps he inaugurated with a strategy-planning dinner with the French dignitaries amid the building materials.125

  As the troops marched, de Grasse’s twenty-eight giant warships poured out of Chesapeake Bay to trounce the Royal Navy’s smaller but faster copper-bottomed squadron, which had sought to bar a second French flotilla from bringing in essential siege guns from its Rhode Island base. This bloody and critical Battle of the Virginia Capes not only made the Yorktown siege possible but also weakened any hope that Clinton might reinforce or evacuate Cornwallis by sea. When the two allied armies, swollen by volunteer reinforcements to 19,000, arrived at Yorktown in late September and surveyed the by-the-book defenses of earthworks, artillery batteries, and redoubts that Cornwallis’s 9,000 troops had built, the experienced Roc
hambeau took charge of what would unfold as a textbook siege, all “reducible to calculation,” he told Washington with cool professionalism—though the textbook fails to calculate the misery the besieged suffer.126

  ON THE NIGHT of October 5, Washington swung a pick into the Yorktown earth so history could record that he broke ground for the siege’s first offensive parallel, two miles long, four feet wide, and four deep. “Not a word or a whisper was uttered—nothing but silent work” during the long, dark night, so as not to alert enemy sharpshooters, whom French infantrymen distracted with a diversionary attack while the utterly exposed sappers dug for dear life, one wrote. The British, Washington recorded, were “totally ignorant of our labor till the light of the Morning discovered it to them,” by which time “the trenches were in such forwardness as to cover the Men from the enemys fire.”127

  After the 1,500 sappers had toiled for four nights, digging and then easing the cannons into place, General Washington put the match to the first gun, a soldier wrote, “and Earl Cornwallis . . . received his first salutation” on the afternoon of October 9.128 The ball, rumor had it, crashed into an officers’ mess and hit the man at the head of the table.129 By October 10, almost a hundred allied cannon, double Cornwallis’s number, thundered away, hurling 150 balls an hour into the little fortified village by day and by night, when the projectiles streaked across the sky “like fiery meteors with blazing tails, most beautifully brilliant,” a Continental soldier exclaimed. The sappers zigzagged inexorably closer, until by October 14 they had dug enough of the second parallel so guns from there could methodically smash Yorktown into tangled rubble laced with body parts, with suffocating dust settling on dead and dying men and horses, while the living huddled in cellars or trenches, wondering if the inevitable defeat would find them alive or dead, whole or maimed.130

  A moment for old-fashioned military glory arrived that evening, and Alexander Hamilton, who had begged Washington for just such a chance, got the nod. To extend their second parallel fully, the allies had to capture Britain’s two remaining redoubts, sheltering artillery and marksmen close enough to be lethal. The French got the harder job of overrunning Redoubt Nine, and its 120 defenders killed almost a quarter of the 400 attackers before giving up. Hamilton’s 400 attackers, who like the French fought only with axes and bayonets so as not to shoot each other in the hand-to-hand fighting, poured into Redoubt Ten with an Indian yell and lost only a tenth of their number in the struggle against only 45 British defenders.131 Washington, who watched the victory from so exposed a position that he had to silence an anxiously fussing aide by telling him, “if you are afraid, you have the liberty to step back,” recorded with satisfaction that “The bravery of the attacking troops was emulous and praiseworthy”—his highest accolade.132

  As short-range howitzers from the second parallel lobbed shells over Yorktown’s walls, making the whole peninsula shake as they hammered the town with a new intensity of destruction, and as the smell of rotting horses shot for lack of fodder and thrown into the river fouled the already fetid air, Cornwallis, for bureaucratic form’s sake, made two symbolic but useless efforts from his subterranean bunker to strike back and escape.133 The face-saving seemed to work for the earl, though: he later went on to serve as governor-general of India and lord lieutenant of Ireland. But his career in this war was over.

  At ten in the morning of October 17, 1781, Cornwallis raised a white flag over his ruined fortress, and as the “thundering of our infernal machines” died away into “solemn stillness,” wrote two American soldiers, a red-coated officer emerged with a drummer beating the signal to parlay. Led blindfolded to Washington’s tent, across a battlefield strewn with corpses—including those of smallpox-infected blacks whom the British had sent out in a prototype of germ warfare—the officer presented a letter from Cornwallis proposing a twenty-four-hour cease-fire to settle terms for surrender. Washington asked for a written sketch of Cornwallis’s proposed terms, which, when it arrived two hours later, he and Rochambeau deemed a reasonable starting point for talks.134

  But the October 18 session deadlocked when Cornwallis’s negotiators refused to turn over the American deserters and Loyalists in their camp, or the slaves who had joined the British army, and Washington’s envoys insisted on subjecting the vanquished redcoats to the same ritual humiliation that the British had inflicted on the defeated American army at Charleston. Cornwallis knew he had lost and wanted quick care for his sick and wounded; Washington didn’t want victory to evaporate through some accident of weather or British reinforcements, which, after weeks of irresolution and incompetence, set sail from New York Harbor the next day. Each commander therefore told his negotiators that night to be fast and flexible. It took them but an hour the next morning to agree to each other’s fixed positions.135

  That afternoon—six and a half years to the day since the Battles of Lexington and Concord had begun the war—more than 8,000 sullen redcoats and Hessians filed out into captivity, their drums muffled in black, looking only toward the French, and flinging down their weapons hard, to try to break them. With an equal lack of grace, Cornwallis had claimed indisposition and sent his second in command to yield his sword—to Rochambeau. The allied officers told him to surrender to Commander in Chief Washington, who, with the same punctiliousness he had shown when refusing a letter addressed to “George Washington Esq., etc. etc.” in 1776, signaled his second in command to take the sword from the weeping Briton. One war legend worthy of being true is that the British band played a march called “The World Turned Upside Down.” What is certain is that Lafayette told the American band to blast out “Yankee Doodle,” forcing the sour redcoats to look their way.136

  THE WAR WAS OVER, but neither George Washington nor George III knew it, so different does lived experience look from history crystallized in books. Almost two more years passed before the Paris peace treaty was signed in September 1783. Meanwhile, the king burned to step up the war effort—even though his prime minister groaned, “Oh God! It’s all over!”—and Washington, knowing his adversary, felt sure that “the King will push the war as long as the nation will find men or money,” so Americans shouldn’t let Yorktown lull them into letting their guard down.137

  Far from over was the army’s hardship; and as the soldiers waited uncertainly in their cold, needy camp in Newburgh, New York, they fell into discontent, not relaxation. By October 1782, Washington sensed that “the patience, the fortitude, the long and great sufferings of this Army is unexampled in History; but there is an end to all things and I fear we are very near one to this.” He planned “to stick very close to the Troops this Winter and to try like a careful physician to prevent if possible the disorders getting to an incurable height.”138

  He had seen what such discontent could do—and not just when by chance he foiled the treason of the once-heroic Benedict Arnold, who, seething with resentment at what he thought shabby treatment after crippling wounds sidelined his career, nearly succeeded in betraying West Point to the British and helping them kidnap Washington himself for £6,000 and a royal commission in September 1780.139 Three months later, 1,300 Pennsylvania soldiers mutinied, killing and wounding the officers who tried to stop them from storming Congress to protest “the total want of pay for nearly twelve Months, [the] want of cloathing, at a severe season, and not unfrequently the want of provisions,” reported Washington, who understood their distress but also viewed their crime with horror and sent Anthony Wayne with troops to catch them. Wayne stopped them near Trenton, agreeing to discharge some of the men and furlough others, but insisting that a firing squad of mutineers execute a dozen of their ringleaders, at such close range that the powder flashes set their blindfolds alight. When 200 New Jersey soldiers mutinied less than two weeks later, Washington sent troops after them with orders not to negotiate. As before, a firing squad of vanquished mutineers had to shoot the ringleaders.140

  So as the officers at Newburgh grew restive over the back pay and pensions owed them—e
specially after the British abandoned Charleston in December 1782 and rumors of a peace deal spread in early 1783—Washington could not but worry when on March 10 a handbill went round the camp, calling officers to a protest meeting the next day. A second broadside warned officers to “assume a bolder Tone” than their previous pleas to Congress: they should appeal not to government’s “Justice” but to its “fears,” if they didn’t want to be discharged without pay and “grow old in poverty, wretchedness, and Contempt,” now that peace was at hand. And they should distrust anyone counseling moderation and forbearance—meaning Washington. The author: General Gates’s aide, John Armstrong, one of American history’s great wreckers, who in his later career as secretary of war pigheadedly disobeyed President Madison’s order to defend Washington, D.C., against the British attackers who torched it unopposed in the War of 1812.141

  Washington—though he sympathized with the officers’ unease and, he wrote Hamilton, feared that many faced debtors’ prison “if they are turned loose without liquidation of accts. and an assurance of that justice to which they are so worthily entitled”—forbade the meeting, which he thought could end with the officers “plunging themselves into a gulph of Civil horror from which there might be no receding.” He called an assembly of his own for March 15 in an echoing hall dubbed the Temple of Virtue.142 “Sensibly agitated,” one observer wrote, the General mounted the stage and beseeched his officers to pause for cool deliberation before letting an anonymous provocateur lure them into making demands of Congress at gunpoint, as Armstrong had insinuated. Surely officers don’t want to “tarnish the reputation of an Army which is celebrated thro’ all Europe, for its fortitude and Patriotism.” And surely, Washington implored, as “I have never left your side for one moment, but when called . . . on public duty” and “have ever considered my own Military reputation as inseparably connected with that of the Army”—surely “it can scarcely be supposed . . . that I am indifferent to its interests.” He would do all in his power, he promised, to make sure Congress dispensed “compleat justice for all your toils and dangers.”143