Washington
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In this marathon, daylong battle, the fighting ground on until six in the afternoon. Though tempted to pursue the British, Washington bowed to the exhausted state of his men and decided to wait until morning to storm enemy positions. Clinton pulled his men back half a mile, beyond the range of American artillery. To keep his weary troops ready, Washington had them sleep on their arms in the field, ready to resume their offensive at daybreak. They inhabited a battlefield strewn with blood-spattered bodies. That night Washington draped his cloak on the ground beneath a sheltering tree, and he and Lafayette sat up chatting about Charles Lee’s insubordination before falling asleep side by side. They could see campfires burning on the British side, unaware that it was a ruse used by Clinton to camouflage the British Army stealing off at midnight. At daybreak Washington awoke and realized that the British had quietly drifted away, headed for New York. He had been tricked by the same gimmick that he himself had employed at Brooklyn and at Trenton. With his men spent from battle, Washington knew it was pointless to trail after the fleeing British.
Both sides claimed victory after the battle, and the best casualty estimates show something close to a draw: 362 killed, wounded, or missing Americans, versus British casualties that ranged anywhere from 380 to 500. After the drubbing at Brandywine Creek and Germantown, Washington may be forgiven for crowing about Monmouth as a “glorious and happy day.”37 Having weathered the horrendous winter at Valley Forge, American soldiers, with new élan, had proved themselves the equal of the best British professionals. In general orders for June 29, Washington trumpeted the battle as an unadulterated triumph: “The Commander in Chief congratulates the army on the victory obtained over the arms of his Britannic Majesty yesterday and thanks most sincerely the gallant officers and men who distinguished themselves upon the occasion.”38 Washington’s joy at the outcome owed much to the fact that he had rescued the army from a disaster in the making.
As always, however, Washington disclaimed credit and directed attention to a higher power. He ordered his men to put on decent clothes so that “we may publicly unite in thanksgiving to the supreme disposer of human events for the victory which was obtained on Sunday over the flower of the British troops.”39 The Battle of Monmouth added luster to Washington’s reputation as someone who could outwit danger. Writing on behalf of Congress, Henry Laurens predicted that Washington’s name would be “revered by posterity” and alluded to his miraculous escapes from harm: “Our acknowledgments are especially due to Heaven for the preservation of Your Excellency’s person, necessarily exposed for the salvation of America to the most imminent danger in the late action.”40
Washington’s role at Monmouth stands out with special vividness because it was the last such major battle in the North during the war. Henceforth the British high command would shift its focus to the South, where it hoped to exploit widespread Loyalist sentiment. This move would thrust Washington into the odd situation of often being an idle spectator of distant fighting in the South. Not until Yorktown, more than three years later, would he again be directly exposed to the hurly-burly of a full-scale battle. The Battle of Monmouth clarified that Washington did not need to save towns but only to preserve the Continental Army and keep alive the sacred flame of rebellion. As he told Laurens, the British were now well aware “that the possession of our towns, while we have an army in the field, will avail them little. It involves us in difficulty, but does not by any means insure them conquest.”41 A war of attrition, however deficient in heroic glamour, still seemed the most certain path to victory.
Before Monmouth, George Washington had been unusually tolerant of the antic, impertinent behavior and self-congratulatory rhetoric of Charles Lee, but that patience had now expired. Retaining his elevated opinion of his own military genius, Lee blustered indiscreetly that he had been on the brink of rallying his men when Washington showed up and ruined everything. “By all that’s sacred,” he exclaimed, “General Washington had scarcely any more to do in [the battle] than to strip the dead!”42 To top things off, Lee said that Washington had “sent me out of the field when the victory was assured! Such is my recompense for having sacrificed my friends, my connections, and perhaps my fortune.”43
Charles Lee did not realize that he had crossed a line with Washington, and that anyone who offended his dignity paid a terrible price. He saw himself as the victim and, for two days after the battle, awaited an apology from Washington. Then he sent him an insolent letter in which he blamed “dirty earwigs” for poisoning Washington’s mind against him: “I must conclude that nothing but the misinformation of some very stupid, or misrepresentation of some very wicked person cou[l]d have occasioned your making use of so very singular expressions as you did on my coming up to the ground where you had taken post. They implied that I was guilty either of disobedience of orders, or want of conduct, or want of courage.” The presumptuous Lee then added that “the success of the day was entirely owing” to his maneuvers.44 This intemperate communication sealed Charles Lee’s fate.
With officers who crossed him, Washington tended to exhibit infinite patience and overlook many faults, but when a day of reckoning came, he unleashed the full force of his slow-burning fury at their accumulated slights. As with many overly controlled people, Washington’s anger festered, only to burst out belatedly. He now returned a blistering reply in which he branded Lee’s letter “highly improper” and said his own angry words at Monmouth were “dictated by duty and warranted by the occasion.” He accused Lee of “a breach of orders and of misbehavior” in not attacking the enemy “as you had been directed and making an unnecessary, disorderly, and shameful retreat.”45 When he received this rebuke, Lee said, “I was more than confounded. I was thrown into a stupor. My whole faculties were, for a time, benumbed. I read and read it over a dozen times.”46 To clear his name, Lee demanded a court-martial, and Washington called his bluff, promptly sending Adjutant General Alexander Scammell to arrest him and bring him up on charges.
Lee was charged with disobeying orders, permitting a disorderly retreat, and disrespecting the commander in chief. A court-martial, presided over by twelve officers, took testimony for six weeks, found Lee guilty, and suspended him from the army for twelve months. The verdict effectively ended his military career. With exemplary restraint, Washington did not comment on the decision until Congress certified it. As Congress procrastinated for four months, word of the verdict leaked out. Intent on fairness, Washington wrote in confidence to his brother Jack, “This delay is a manifest injustice either to the Gener[a]l himself or the public; for if he is guilty of the charges, punishment ought to follow; if he is innocent, ’tis cruel to keep him under the harrow.”47 Charles Lee proclaimed to anyone who would listen that he had been subjected to an “inquisition” worthy of Mazarin or Cardinal Richelieu.48 The inept Lee may not have been guilty of all the charges directed against him, but neither had he covered himself with glory at Monmouth.
Washington had not heard the last from Charles Lee. In early December Lee published a vindication of his conduct, contending that Washington had failed to give him definite orders at Monmouth Court House. If Washington chafed at the accusation, it wasn’t his style to engage in public feuding. At the same time he worried that, if he didn’t refute Lee’s charges, it might seem “a tacit acknowledgment of the justice of his assertions,” as Washington told Joseph Reed. He confessed that he had always found Lee’s temperament “too versatile and violent to attract my admiration. And that I have escaped the venom of his tongue and pen so long is more to be wondered at than applauded.”49
Even though Congress confirmed the court-martial verdict and suspended Lee in December 1778, Washington still worried that Lee’s charges had sullied his honor. In late December John Laurens, with Alexander Hamilton acting as his second, challenged Lee to a duel. “I am informed that in contempt of decency and truth you have publicly abused General Washington in the grossest terms,” Laurens informed Lee. “The relation in which I stand to him for
bids me to pass such conduct unnoticed.”50 At the duel Laurens wounded Lee in the side, but the latter survived. Whether the duel had Washington’s tacit approval remains unclear. Unlike many military men, Washington opposed dueling and had advised Lafayette against fighting a duel that year, chiding him gently that “the generous spirit of chivalry, exploded by the rest of the world, finds a refuge, my dear friend, in the sensibility of your nation only.”51 On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that Laurens and Hamilton would have defied the explicit wishes of Washington, who had felt gagged in responding to Lee’s libelous comments.
From the retirement of his farm in Virginia, Charles Lee, as irascible as ever, continued to wage a campaign of vituperation against Washington. In 1780 he sent to Congress a letter whose tone was so obnoxious that he was cashiered for good from the armed forces. Before his death in 1782, Lee requested that he be buried somewhere other than a churchyard, stating that “since I have resided in this country, I have kept so much bad company while living, that I do not choose to continue it when dead.”52
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Pests of Society
EVEN AS THE CONTINENTAL ARMY FOUGHT in the gritty heat of Monmouth Court House, then filed wearily toward the Hudson River, blessed relief seemed to arrive when a French fleet dropped anchor off Delaware Bay on July 8, 1778. This majestic armada of twelve enormous ships of the line and four frigates, bearing four thousand soldiers, ended Britain’s undisputed dominance in sea power in the war. A few weeks earlier French and British ships had exchanged fire in the English Channel, dragging France irrevocably into the hostilities. Henceforth the Revolutionary War would gradually evolve into a global conflict, with theaters of battle extending from the West Indies to the Indian Ocean.
The French fleet was headed by a forty-eight-year-old French nobleman and vice admiral with a long, flowery name: Count Jean-Baptiste-Charles-Henri-Hector d’Estaing. D’Estaing had his own reasons for joining the fight, having clashed with the British in the East Indies and been captured by them twice. With his army background, he had never entirely gained the trust of skeptical naval officers, who sometimes reflexively addressed him as “General.”1 He had won the high-prestige American assignment less from naval prowess than from his intimacy with the royal family. The day he arrived off the Chesapeake, d’Estaing sent Washington a rather rapturous letter of introduction: “The talents and great actions of General Washington have insured him in the eyes of all Europe the title, truly sublime, of deliverer of America.”2
It proved a bittersweet moment for Washington, who imagined that, if the French fleet had shown up weeks earlier, it might have delivered a mortal blow to the British Army in Philadelphia; had that happened, Sir Henry Clinton might have “shared (at least) the fate of Burgoyne.”3 Destiny had robbed George Washington of a spectacular chance to eclipse Horatio Gates. Whatever his regrets, Washington dispatched his faithful aide John Laurens to coordinate plans with the admiral and reverted to his fond daydream of recapturing New York. From his camp in White Plains, he mused how the war had now come full circle, giving him an unexpected chance to redeem past errors: “It is not a little pleasing, nor less wonderful to contemplate, that after two years’ maneuvering and undergoing the strangest vicissitudes that perhaps ever attended any one contest since the creation, both armies are brought back to the very point they set out from.”4 Momentarily it appeared that d’Estaing might pull off a quick miracle. With his fleet anchored off Sandy Hook, the prospect arose that he could trap the Royal Navy in New York Bay. Then it was discovered that the harbor channel was too shallow for the deep draft of his huge ships, and Washington believed yet another exquisite chance to shorten the war had been fumbled.
The inaugural effort at cooperation with the French squadron ended up riddled with acrimony. The new allies decided to demolish the British garrison at Newport, Rhode Island, through a joint effort of the American army under Major General John Sullivan and the French fleet under d’Estaing. The swarthy Sullivan was a competent but notoriously cantankerous officer. A year earlier Washington had felt duty-bound to challenge his pretensions. “No other officer of rank in the whole army has so often conceived himself neglected, slighted, and ill-treated as you have done,” Washington warned him, “and none, I am sure, has had less cause than yourself to entertain such ideas.”5 The brawny Irishman hardly seemed the ideal person to coordinate a military mission with a highborn French count.
When an untimely storm and the appearance of a British fleet interfered with the Newport assault, d’Estaing decided to scuttle it and take refuge in Boston. For Washington, this was yet the third time that a stupendous opportunity had been bungled. “If the garrison of that place (consisting of 6,000 men) had been captured . . . it would have given the finishing blow to British pretensions of sovereignty of this country,” Washington asserted to his brother Jack.6 Fuming, Sullivan swore that the French had left his men dangerously stranded in Rhode Island. On August 22 he and Nathanael Greene sent an explosive letter to d’Estaing, accusing him of craven betrayal. However much Washington might have sympathized with their critique, he didn’t believe he could afford to spar with his French allies, so he tried to hush up the letter and sent the politic Greene to mend fences with d’Estaing. He also pleaded with Sullivan to restore cordial relations and avoid festering mistrust: “First impressions, you know, are generally longest remembered, and will serve to fix in a great degree our national character among the French.”7
With d’Estaing, Washington swallowed his pride and flattered the Frenchman’s pride unashamedly. “It is in the trying circumstances to which your Excellency has been exposed that the virtues of a great mind are displayed in their brightest luster,” he wrote, claiming that the unforeseen storm had stolen a major prize from the admiral.8 As part of the effort to repair frayed relations, John Hancock hosted a gleaming banquet at his Beacon Hill mansion in Boston, where the count was presented with a portrait of Washington. “I never saw a man so glad at possessing his sweetheart’s picture, as the admiral was to receive yours,” Lafayette reported from the scene.9
For Washington, the French alliance never flowed smoothly. The bulk of France’s fleet remained based in the Caribbean, which hindered joint operations, and the alliance with a mighty power placed Washington in an uncomfortably subservient position. By now he was accustomed to command, and a junior partnership didn’t suit his strong-willed nature. He admired French military know-how, but as an outwardly cool and reticent personality, he had limited patience with French histrionics. That summer he described the French as “a people old in war, very strict in military etiquette, and apt to take fire where others scarcely seem warmed.”10 Whenever he wrote to Count d’Estaing, his language seemed to grow more stilted, as if he were trying to ape French diplomatic language, and it never sounded quite natural. Somewhere inside Washington there still lurked the insecure provincial, trying to impress these snobbish Europeans.
Compared to their American counterparts, the French, in their handsome white uniforms, looked positively foppish, right down to their high-heeled shoes. On the eve of one operation with the French, Washington ordered his field officers to fix upon a uniform look for regimental clothing, explaining that “it has a very odd appearance, especially to foreigners, to see the same corps of officers each differing from the other in fashion of the facings, sleeves, and pockets, of their coats.”11 The French condescended to American soldiers, especially the militia. “I have never seen a more laughable spectacle,” said one French officer. “All the tailors and apothecaries in the country must have been called out . . . They were mounted on bad nags and looked like a flock of ducks in cross belts.”12
The Franco-American partnership soon gave way to reciprocal disillusionment. The French had imagined that Washington commanded an army double the size of the one they found, while Washington had hoped for more than four thousand French troops. His skepticism about French motives would harden into a corner-stone of his foreign pol
icy. His fellow citizens, he thought, were too ready to glorify France, which had entered the war to damage Britain, not to aid the Americans. “Men are very apt to run into extremes,” he warned Henry Laurens. “Hatred to England may carry some into an excess of confidence in France, especially when motives of gratitude are thrown into the scale.”13 John Adams summed up the situation memorably when he said that the French foreign minister kept “his hand under our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.”14 In yet another sign of his growing political acumen, Washington generalized this perception into an enduring truth of foreign policy, noting that “it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.”15 For Washington, the Continental Army was a practical school in which he received an accelerated course in statecraft, completing the education started by the first tax controversies in Virginia. One suspects that his dinner table talk with well-educated officers and aides, ranging over a vast spectrum of political, military, and financial topics, made Washington well versed in many issues, belying the notion that he was a narrow, uncomprehending leader.
The question of French motives acquired more than academic interest when Lafayette advocated an invasion of Canada. For all his affection for his youthful protégé, Washington retained an admirable skepticism about his motives. “As the Marquis clothed his proposition when he spoke of it to me, it would seem to originate wholly with himself,” Washington warned Henry Laurens, “but it is far from impossible that it had its birth in the cabinet of France and was put into this artful dress to give it the readier currency.”16 If the French were embraced as liberators in Quebec, Washington feared, they might be tempted to reclaim Canadian territory relinquished at the time of the French and Indian War.