Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  7. YORKTOWN

  The Americans, with the advantage of interior lines, could reinforce Greene by land, but Cornwallis depended on supply from New York, and neither the timorous Clinton in New York nor the vacillating home government would send reinforcements. Finally, the masses of waiting loyalists upon whose existence the southern strategy was based didn’t exist and the whole British Americanization plan was a fiasco. Cornwallis, faced with the necessity to fall back to Charleston and pursue a southern redoubt strategy with no prospects of long-term survival, or make a huge gamble to try to win the war, marched for Virginia. Cornwallis arrived at the head of 1,000 regulars at Petersburg, a city that would recur in American military history (Chapter 6), on May 20, 1781, and was joined by Benedict Arnold at the head of 4,000 loyalists. Virginia’s governor, now Thomas Jefferson, had almost no forces, as almost all Virginians inclined to war-making were with Washington outside New York. Jefferson’s many talents did not run to military preparations. Richmond was being defended by Lafayette with 500 militiamen. Washington’s cousins offered supplies to a British contingent to prevent the sacking of Mount Vernon, eliciting a severe rebuke from the American commander, who would have preferred that “they had burnt my house and laid my plantation in ruins.... You should have reflected on the bad example of ... making a voluntary offer of refreshments to them with a view to prevent a conflagration.”43

  Cornwallis vainly chased Lafayette around Virginia, enduring the attrition of minor skirmishes as well as the harassments of Clinton, who kept ordering him to detach and divert packets of troops for footling purposes. The British held New York, Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah, but Washington, though enfeebled by desertions and mutinies, still held the rest of the North and Greene and Marion and Morgan roamed around the interior of the South at will. The British, after nearly seven years of fighting, could not suppress the revolt, and the Americans were still not able to win the decisive battle. But the inability of the British to win was permanent, as they were not winning over the population and could spare no more troops for the campaign. At some point, there was a danger that the Americans would win a main-force engagement, and reduce the British to mere perches on shore while domestic British support for this endless and costly attrition withered. And Britain could not keep large units of its navy endlessly overseas shuttling forces around the eastern shore of America. It was all right to chase the French and Spanish and Dutch fleets around, but not to leave them alone to transport a French army across the English Channel for months on end attending to distractions in America. Something finally had to give. The French had no confidence in the Americans and proposed a peace allowing both sides to keep what they held. Fortunately for the Americans, while Franklin led the opposition to such a settlement, George III would not concede an inch to the rebels.

  Finally, Washington persuaded Rochambeau, who had been idling in Newport for a year, to bring his 4,000 men to join him in Westchester. The new French admiral Count de Grasse, as much more capable and aggressive than Guichen as Guichen had been compared with the hapless d’Estaing, sailed from the Dominican Republic on August 14, 1781, with 3,300 soldiers on board. Washington, in one of his several acts of both tactical and strategic genius in the long war, pretended merely to be shifting forces around New York as he rushed south in forced marches, but he left only 3,500 men facing the indolent Clinton with 11,000 Redcoats in New York City. Washington and Rochambeau had a triumphant progress through the streets and banqueting halls of Philadelphia as de Grasse disembarked his forces in Chesapeake Bay in the first days of September. Unfortunately for the British, Admiral Rodney, after many successes in the West Indies, returned to Britain to restore his health and fortunes and defend himself in Parliament, and the bumbling Admiral Sir Thomas Graves was left to deal with de Grasse. Graves was afraid to enter Chesapeake Bay and was thus unable to evacuate Cornwallis, who was now encircled on land by over 15,000 French and Americans around Yorktown.

  Seven Years War in Europe. Courtesy of the Department of History, United States Military Academy

  Clinton promised to relieve Cornwallis by land and send Graves back with adequate forces to disembark him, but neither occurred. Cornwallis had 8,300 men bottled up in Yorktown, at the southern end of Chesapeake Bay. Fearing British reinforcements by sea, as Clinton was not moving on the ground, Washington pressed the siege forward as quickly as he prudently could. The British surrendered on October 17, 1781. Cornwallis feigned illness and his second-in-command, Brigadier Charles O’Hara, handed his sword to Rochambeau, trying to maintain the pretense that the British had been defeated by the French alone. Washington had 8,500 men to Rochambeau’s 7,000, and had first seen the possibilities for Yorktown, but the French had the artillery and de Grasse drove off Graves, so it was a largely French battle in a mainly American war. Rochambeau treated Cornwallis very graciously, even lending him 10,000 pounds when he did appear, and the British band played “The World Turned Upside Down” as they marched out. As when he had crossed the Delaware with inferior forces and defeated the British at Princeton and Trenton, Washington had acted boldly and brilliantly, seeing at once the opportunity to concentrate forces around Yorktown and marching his and Rochambeau’s long-inactive forces at astounding speed through summer heat to the task. He was as brilliant in the swingeing stroke as he was implacable in the long periods of demoralizing inactivity, pecked at and aggravated by venal and spineless politicians.

  Yorktown did not end the war but it was like Stalingrad, or Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954, or the Tet Offensive in 1968 (Chapters 11, 14, 15)—a dramatic (in the case of Tet, public relations, not military) victory that knocked the stuffings out of the morale of one side while lifting the other. As would happen to America in the Vietnam War, Parliament finally rebelled against the king’s policy and in November 1781 voted to refuse to approve any further offensive actions in America. Lord North was dismissed as prime minister after 12 disastrous years and the closest colleague of the late Earl of Chatham (who had died in 1778), the Marquis of Rockingham, was invested. (But power really resided in the conciliatory Earl of Shelburne, a friend of Franklin’s, who was theoretically charged with the nonsensical mission of talking the Americans back into the British realm. The British were still not, and probably are not yet, sure of what the Americans were so upset about.) Charles James Fox was put in charge of negotiating an exit from the war, and sent Thomas Grenville to Paris to deal with Franklin.

  As war gave way to diplomacy, Franklin, now 76, reemerged as the key figure in the American leadership. The French wished to take back some of what had been lost in the Seven Years’ War; the Americans wanted unconditional independence for their territory and Canada; the British would give no more than they had to, but would prefer concessions to their belligerent American cousins (whom Rockingham and Fox had generally sympathized with) than to their ancient French foes. The Americans would not be a threat to them in the Americas, but French revival would. The French had effectively won the war for the Americans, with de Grasse, Rochambeau, and Lafayette, and had a strong moral argument opposite Franklin. The dithering Congress, fearing the inexhaustibly wily Franklin’s affinity for the French, had sent the incorruptible John Adams to help shore him up. This was not necessary, and the French found Adams stiff, unilingual, and self-righteous. He shortly moved on to the Netherlands to try to negotiate a loan with the Dutch. (It was nonsense anyway, as the same Congress had purported to instruct the commissioners to be guided by the French, which Franklin, who in practice acted on his own account for America until late on, ignored, as he carried on complex, secret discussions with all sides, inscrutable behind his mask as the affable and frank American frontier patriot and absent-minded scientist.) Franklin had had great success contracting loans with France during the active phases of the war. He was not prepared to offer more than moral appreciation for moral claims, and the issue was resolved when Admiral Rodney returned to the West Indies, discovered a French-Spanish plan to seize Jamaica,
and smashed the enemy fleet, taking the doughty de Grasse prisoner. This timely whipping awakened the French from their reverie about regaining an empire in the Americas.

  With all sides acting with extreme duplicity, and the Spanish not even recognizing American independence and seeking a comeback in North America themselves, Franklin, suffering from kidney stones, handed over negotiations to the recently arrived minister to Spain, the very able John Jay, but with continuing guidance and retaining general oversight. The British hand was strengthened by the repulse in 1783 of one of the longest sieges in history, by the French and Spanish at Gibraltar after four years. Britain raised the ante, demanding payment of American prewar debts that had provoked the taxes and the insurrection in the first place, and compensation for the expropriated and displaced American loyalists. Jay and Franklin accepted to compensate the loyalists, but did so on behalf of the 13 individual states, as they were about, officially, to become, knowing that it was unlikely they would produce a brass farthing. The British agreed to this flimflam, dropped their debt claims in the broader context of secret side deals dividing between them navigation rights on the Mississippi, and conceding, as between them, everything east of that river to the Americans; i.e., the British were inviting the Americans to evict the Spanish, including from Florida. In the final Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, Britain recognized American independence while retaining all of Canada and Newfoundland and its gains in the West Indies, returned Minorca again to Spain, but retained Gibraltar. Sir Guy Carleton, who was the last British commander in America, ignored Washington in the handover ceremonies in New York, and evacuated all 3,000 fugitive slaves from under plantationer Washington’s nose.

  The Spanish gained nothing, and the French had been swindled by Franklin into providing and by Washington into deploying the margin of victory, as well as vital financial support, and had nothing to show for it but more war debts and the flashing sparks of republicanism and democracy in the dry straw and tinder that now underlay the French monarchy and aristocracy. They might have judged from the British experience as the colonists’ creditors how quickly the Americans would be repaying them.

  Franklin had played the diplomatic cards brilliantly, and his construction, maintenance, and disassembly of the French alliance was one of the masterpieces of world diplomatic history, made more piquant by his masquerade as a guileless though witty yokel, pitched perfectly to the susceptibilities to narcissism and grandiosity of the French court, as he had previously so well gauged the temper of the ruling circles in London. Washington had made his mistakes but had been brilliant when necessary, and cautious when in error, and had maintained a largely unpaid, ragtag army in existence despite nearly eight demoralizing years of attrition and the endless prattling and meddling of contemptible politicians, masquerading as sovereign legislators in their forcibly itinerant Congress. Jefferson had not had a good war as a rather unresourceful war governor, but he had launched the great American claim to universal values and exceptionalism—a mystique that would grow and flourish for generations after the indispensable services of Washington and Franklin had receded into the mists of folklore and he would continue to propagate them in the new nation’s highest offices and then in a long and esteemed retirement.

  8. ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION

  Of the three resolutions of the Congress on Richard Henry Lee’s motions in June 1776, independence had been achieved and Jefferson’s independence declaration-drafting committee, like Washington’s specific military command, had been overwhelmingly successful. So had Franklin’s diplomatic mission. But the committee to produce “articles of confederation” had not produced a viable framework for a united country. The fulfillment of the founders’ dreams would require that this subject be addressed before this brave new world would be fairly launched. The Congress had purported to spend about $200 million but had no power to tax and was dependent on the colonies, or states, to back its obligations. These jurisdictions were not much friendlier to central authority than they had been with the British, and efforts to pass a federal constitution, including Franklin’s original effort and John Dickinson’s sequel, were rejected. In November 1777, Articles of Confederation were approved which made the states sovereign and ignored federalism. In fact, the only authority in the shattered jurisdiction was General George Washington and his army. The strength, wisdom, and character of the example he set can be best understood by the results when the Latin American republics, 40 years later, revolted and yielded to the temptation of military rule. Washington rejected such overtures, and condemned petitions to Congress urging Greene and others to seize power after vehemently declining to do so himself.

  Washington urged his countrymen “to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man who wishes, under specious pretenses, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.”44 He consented reluctantly to the demobilization of the Continental Army, but warned that it remained to be seen whether the Revolution he had led to victory was “a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.” He called for “an indissoluble Union of the States under one Federal Head”; the honoring of public debt; the establishment of armed forces; and a spirit of cooperation and sacrifice among all the states. Washington took leave of his comrades at New York on December 4, 1783, in probably the most emotional public occasion of American history, and on December 23 handed over his sword to the president of the Continental Congress (Thomas Mifflin, whom he despised and had fired as quartermaster general of the army), taking “leave of all my employments of public life.” Mifflin replied with a majestic statement written by Jefferson, concluding somewhat ambiguously with “earnest prayers that a life so beloved may be fostered with all His care; that your days may be happy as they have been illustrious, and that He will finally give you that reward which this world will not give.” Washington was not quite prepared to sign off on the possibilities of the present world, though he returned to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, and wrote to friends and even casual correspondents of his relief at being able now to live quietly on his estates.

  In fact, he put himself at the disposition of the public and in the reserve of the new nation, the chief facilitator of the American project, with a greater right than anyone to require that the supreme sacrifices of the 15,000 or so Americans who had died and the devastation that had laid waste much of the country and reduced the economic product by about 45 percent45 not have been in vain. He was charging the Congress with the task of justifying and completing the Revolution, knowing that the chances of it doing so were zero.

  In Paris and Versailles, despite the abrasions of the peace process, Franklin was a national hero, even appointed by King Louis XVI to a scientific commission. He and Washington were almost universally admired, and Franklin was the lion of the salons of both London and Paris, in a manner probably never approached by anyone else. He became acquainted and often friendly with the leading philosophes, and counseled liberal reforms but warned against anything violent. As always, his advice was good, and as was often also true, it was not followed. He retired his commission in 1785, aged 79, and then stopped with friends in England, his immensely alluring personality and intelligence overcoming all the vexations of epochal disputes. He was reconciled with his son, the former governor of New Jersey, and returned to a hero’s welcome in Philadelphia.

  The Congress and all the states were printing money and the Congress eventually devalued all currency by 97.5 percent. Washington’s brilliant but impulsive aide, Alexander Hamilton; Jefferson’s understudy, James Madison; and Robert Morris, the Philadelphia financier who financed much of the war, proposed a 5 percent import duty, but a number of the states refused to cooperate. To some extent the states reneged on their financial obligations generated by the Revolutionary War, just as they had refused to contribute to the British to help pay for
the eviction of the French from Canada. It was the same stingy impulse, but they were now largely, themselves, the creditors of their own almost worthless war debts.

  Poverty stalked the country except for parts of Pennsylvania and New York and New Jersey; debtors’ courts were busy, and reformers such as Jefferson, whose talents were much more evident in peacetime as he abolished primogeniture and proposed universal education, broadened the franchise to assure a voice to the less prosperous. It was clear by 1785 that the system was not working, as the British, in particular, had predicted.

  A land dispute between Maryland and Virginia had been settled amicably under Washington’s auspices at Mount Vernon, and Washington asked the 34-year-old James Madison, a brilliant Virginian lawyer and legislator, to convene a meeting between representatives of the states to discuss interstate commerce. Five states were represented at Annapolis, Maryland, at the meeting in September 1786. Shays’ Rebellion in late 1786 and January 1787, an uprising of destitute Massachusetts farmers, was put down by swiftly recruited militia, but led to suspension of some taxes, and emphasized the absurdity and impotence of the political system. Congress was reduced to asking the states to grant it the power to impose certain taxes, and New York vetoed this.