by John Ferling
Whatever Jefferson felt, he took his obligations seriously. In twenty-four months on the job, he returned home only twice from Williamsburg and then Richmond—which became Virginia’s capital in the course of his tenure—and both visits were quite short. He coped with tons of paperwork, conferred regularly with legislators, and met almost daily with the Council of State. Almost every item of business with which he dealt was war-related. In fact, Jefferson took office in the midst of the greatest wartime crisis that Virginia had faced since the first winter of the war, when the last royal governor, aided by loyalists and runaway slaves, had waged a brief campaign against the rebels.
Three weeks before Jefferson’s election, a British raiding force of more than 35 vessels and 1,800 men under Sir George Collier struck near Portsmouth. Meeting with only minimal resistance, the British sailed up the Elizabeth River to Gosport, home to one of the state’s largest shipyards. Collier’s men captured or destroyed at least 130 vessels and six million pounds of tobacco; laid waste to warehouses and naval supplies, including tons of seasoned wood for shipbuilding; seized large quantities of the militia’s supplies; liberated up to 1,500 slaves; and plundered numerous plantations, allegedly stripping rings and jewelry from frightened women. Reeling from the magnitude of the destruction, Jefferson embarked on his new job by boldly telling the authorities in Philadelphia that Congress had forsaken Virginia. Despite the existence of a Continental navy, it had never helped the state, which had suffered from a crippling blockade imposed by only a handful of British vessels.42
The British did not return to Virginia for seventeen months, though Jefferson had a scare just before Christmas of 1779. Washington notified him that a huge British armada thought to contain upwards of eight thousand redcoats had sailed south from Manhattan. “Their destination [is] reported to be for Chesapaek bay,” the commander warned. Cautioning that the enemy might invade Virginia, Washington exhorted Jefferson to “take any precautions which may appear to you necessary.”43
Washington’s warning was a false alarm. The British fleet was sailing instead for South Carolina. Virginia was fortunate. Jefferson had rushed supplies to the counties on the Chesapeake, and along the York and James Rivers that led to Williamsburg, but he had not mustered the militia. He had the authority to act but shrank from mobilization, knowing it would be costly and give “disgust” should the enemy never arrive. Besides, Jefferson gambled on a hunch: “I cannot say that I expect them,” he remarked. On this occasion, he was correct.44
After Collier’s damaging raid, Jefferson asked the state Board of War to prepare a plan of defense. In the months that followed, much of his time was consumed with establishing armories, finding weapons and powder, erecting coastal batteries, and building a network of sentinels and express riders in the hope that the state would never again be caught unaware and defenseless.45 In addition, Virginia was to provide eleven of eighty battalions for the Continental army, about the same number as required of the two other largest states, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Jefferson worked tirelessly to find recruits. Virginia fell back on its age-old inducements of cash and land bounties for enlistees, and Jefferson threw his weight behind a tax increase that fell heaviest on the wealthiest. Eventually, Virginia resorted to conscription and finally, in desperation, to the proffer of a healthy male slave between the ages of ten and thirty for each man who volunteered. Still, about one-third fewer men were raised under Jefferson than by Patrick Henry. Few blamed Jefferson. Most, including Henry, attributed it to war weariness and the abundant sacrifices already made by the citizenry.46
Jefferson also devoted considerable time to Virginia’s war in the west. A year before he became governor, the state had sent an army of 350 men under George Rogers Clark into what now is Indiana and Illinois. As the British were arming tribes in that region, Clark had been tasked with forcing the Indians to make peace. Not coincidentally, if Clark succeeded, Virginia’s claim to the region—which originated in the colony’s charter, granted by the Crown early in the seventeenth century—would be solidified.
By the time Jefferson took office, Clark had scored sensational victories in the Illinois country. He had captured Henry Hamilton, Britain’s lieutenant governor of Detroit, thought to be the mastermind behind organizing and arming the Indians, and thousands of bushels of corn had been destroyed, a step Jefferson characterized as Clark’s “happiest stroke.” Believing that Clark had pacified the frontier at least temporarily, Jefferson urged a thrust against Fort Detroit, the heart of British power in the Northwest.47 Despite Virginia’s financial problems, and the possible risk the state might face from the dispersal of its limited soldiery, Jefferson acted with a bold assertiveness that he seldom displayed in dealing with threats in the east. Several factors drove him. Possession of the west in the postwar period was crucial to his dream of cheap land and widespread property ownership, which he in turn believed was crucial for the success of republicanism. Furthermore, taking Detroit before the spring would free up to eight hundred militiamen from the western counties alone, men whose service would be useful if the British ever again raided coastal Virginia. A native of a frontier county himself, Jefferson also sympathized with those in western Virginia who faced the spread of “destruction and dismay.” The Indians, he said, were given to “savage irruptions” characterized by “cruel murders and devastations” visited on innocent civilians. In the end, the campaign against Detroit never materialized, in large measure because of opposition by the western militia, which had no appetite for campaigning so far from home. Jefferson let it pass. Just as he had been reluctant to hazard the displeasure of militiamen in the scare raised by the sailing of the British armada, he had no wish to provoke their anger over a crusade against faraway Detroit.48
Jefferson had acted responsibly, and with great vigor, in coping with the threats faced by Virginia. But the danger did not diminish. As the winter of 1780 faded, the British invasion of South Carolina began. From this point forward, the peril that Virginia faced grew greater, and the problems facing Governor Jefferson grew exponentially.
At first, few understood the significance of Britain’s southern strategy when it was unfurled in 1778. Even Washington initially shrugged off the enemy’s success in taking Savannah. He thought Britain’s campaign in the South was no more than a sideshow, one that would have little bearing on the war. Six months later, around the time that Jefferson became governor, Washington at last comprehended that London planned the reconquest of Georgia and South Carolina, with more to follow. But so long as a British army occupied New York City, he refused to deploy any of his army to the Lower South. However, Congress acted. It ordered Continentals from the Upper South to augment the army of General Benjamin Lincoln, commander of American forces in the Southern Department. Moreover, once the British flotilla sailed from New York in December 1779—and Washington learned its destination was South Carolina, not the Chesapeake Bay—he exhorted Jefferson to send all the help he could spare to Lincoln. There “never was greater occasion for the states to exert themselves,” Washington declared.49
Jefferson was in a bind. As Virginia had already been the target of one devastating naval raid, he could not ignore the possibility of another attack at any moment. Certain that he would receive little help from Congress, Jefferson believed that some men, and some supplies, had to be kept in Virginia for its defense. The legislature authorized the dispatch of upwards of 2,000 men to South Carolina, but Jefferson never considered giving up that many troops. Ultimately, he ordered some 400 men and some supplies to Charleston.50 Logistical problems slowed the operation, perhaps fortunately. About the time the Virginians marched into South Carolina, the British imposed an ironclad siege on Charleston. Lincoln’s army was trapped and no further reinforcements could enter the city. In May 1780 Charleston fell. The United States lost 5,500 killed and captured, but the men that Jefferson had sent south were not among them.
The news of the disaster at Charleston hit Jefferson with the impac
t of a body blow. With no Continentals remaining in the Lower South, at least for the time being, he feared the British army might waste no time before marching northward into Virginia. Nor was that his only concern. Shortly before learning of the debacle at Charleston, Jefferson received word from a friend in Paris that France would likely drop out of the war unless the allies soon scored a decisive victory.51 Never had America’s fortunes, or those of Virginia, looked so bleak. Given the magnitude of the crisis, Jefferson unhappily agreed to stand for a second term. The legislature reelected him in June 1780.
Jefferson worked furiously throughout that summer of 1780. Without exaggeration, he remarked that the “duties of the office I hold [are] so excessive.”52 He prepared for the defense of Virginia, but he did even more for the new Continental army in the Southern Department that was taking shape in North Carolina under the command of General Horatio Gates. Jefferson knew that if Gates stopped the British advance, Virginia might be spared further fighting. In a flurry of activity, Jefferson oversaw the outfitting of state infantry and cavalry units that were headed southward, renewed his recruiting efforts, sought “military furniture” for some “utterly unfurnished” regular battalions, and organized “a line of expresses” from Richmond to as near Charleston as possible. He calculated that his “speedy line of communication” would give him ample warning should the British army in South Carolina, now under the command of General Charles Cornwallis, plan an invasion of Virginia. In addition, he rounded up axes, tomahawks, wagons, horses, powder, flints, and cannonballs for Gates’s army, and sent him two thousand Virginia militiamen. Jefferson acknowledged that “we have not Arms” for Virginia’s militia, but he advised Gates that Congress was sending three thousand muskets.53
Perhaps Jefferson’s most remarkable step was his audacity toward General Washington. Jefferson in effect told Washington that he was wrong, something virtually no one else was willing to do. Though not confrontational—he acknowledged that Washington was “situated between two fires,” a British army on Manhattan under Clinton and Cornwallis’s army in South Carolina—Jefferson told the commander that the prevailing “sentiment … in Congress and here” was that he must yield some of his army for the defense of the South. Jefferson even urged Washington to come south and personally take command. Incredibly, Jefferson pledged to “cheerfully transfer to you every power which the executive [of Virginia] might exercise.”54 Thomas Jefferson had not quite offered George Washington dictatorial powers in Virginia, but he had come close to it. It was to no avail. Rochambeau’s army landed in Rhode Island at almost the same moment that Jefferson’s letter reached Washington’s headquarters. Henceforth, the American commander’s focus was on a joint allied campaign to retake New York.55
The South was a minefield for Continentals. A rebel army had been destroyed in the defense of Savannah in December 1778, and a second—Lincoln’s army—surrendered in May 1780 following the siege of Charleston. In July, Horatio Gates, the victor at Saratoga as well as a rival whom Washington hated and feared, succeeded Lincoln as commander of the Continental army in the Southern Department. Gates acted rapidly—in fact, too hurriedly. Before he got the lay of the land, established an adequate intelligence network, or familiarized himself with his southern troops, Gates put his army in motion, marching southward from Hillsborough, North Carolina. (He set out just nine days after Jefferson implored Washington to come south.) Gates’s target was a small British force known to be operating near Camden, South Carolina. Unbeknownst to Gates, Cornwallis was personally bringing reinforcements toward Camden. The two armies stumbled into each other and squared off on August 16. The outcome was decided when Gates’s callow militiamen, including the Virginians that Jefferson had sent, broke and ran early in the engagement, setting off a contagious panic. It was a rout. One fifth of Gates’s men were casualties. The remainder had taken flight, with Gates running just as hard as his frightened men. He did not stop until his sweaty mount reached Charlotte, sixty miles away.56
The debacle at Camden gave Hamilton the opportunity for eliminating Washington’s last rival, and he made the most of it. In earlier attacks, Hamilton had sought to diminish Gates’s standing by questioning his role in the victory at Saratoga, arguing that the spadework for victory been done previously by Schuyler. At Saratoga, Hamilton had argued, Gates had “hug himself at a distance” from the battlefield, leaving it to Benedict Arnold “to win laurels for him.” After the Battle of Camden, Hamilton once again went after Washington’s nemesis. Hamilton depicted Gates’s plans for battle as a “military absurdity.” With biting sarcasm, Hamilton wrote that the general “showed that age and the long labors and fatigues of a military life had not in the least impaired” his ability to run.57 Soon after the disaster in South Carolina, Gates was removed from command. As had been the case when Hamilton helped to finish off General Lee, Hamilton had yet again done his part in the elimination of one of the commander’s rivals. He had also demonstrated his value to General Washington.
Jefferson called Camden a “Misfortune,” but he knew that it had been an unmitigated disaster. Once again, no American army stood between Virginia and Cornwallis, and Jefferson thought it inconceivable that Virginia could defend itself. While he had it in his power to summon and arm three thousand Virginia militiamen, he knew that powder would be in short supply and that there would be no tents for the soldiery. In addition, much of the spare clothing and wagons that he had sent to Gates now belonged to the enemy. Atop these woes, Jefferson learned that hundreds of men from several counties had enlisted in newly established Loyalist units. Should the British invade Virginia anytime soon, Jefferson told Congress late in the summer of 1780, “they would find us in a condition incapable of resistance.”58
Jefferson’s fears were realized. The blow that he dreaded, and that Virginia had expected during the seventeen months since Collier’s naval raid, came in October 1780. The sortie was another raid, not an all-out invasion. It had been requested by Cornwallis, who saw the assault both as a diversion to prevent the deployment of Virginia militia farther south and as a means of interrupting the rebel supply line that ran through Virginia and into the Carolinas. As Virginia’s autumn foliage burst into its gaudy colors, a British fleet of six vessels and 2,200 redcoats under General Alexander Leslie fell on the state. In the third week of October, Leslie put his cavalry and 1,000 infantrymen ashore at Portsmouth, Newport News, and Hampton. Inexplicably, the early-warning network that Jefferson had painstakingly built failed, and Leslie took Virginia by surprise. Washington had earlier cautioned that a fleet was being readied in New York for an unknown destination; however, only a week before Leslie appeared, the American commander had advised Jefferson that the British were unlikely to deploy a force of any size southward before November or December. Washington thought the British would wait until the Franco-American armies were immobilized by the winter, a view that Jefferson too had expressed a month earlier. Such thinking likely led officials up and down the line to decrease their guard.59
When Leslie’s raiders splashed onto Virginia soil, only the local militia was available. Poorly armed and devoid of a cavalry wing, the militiamen were ineffectual. Jefferson responded to the emergency with alacrity. He summoned thousands of militiamen from the inland counties and diverted units that had been ordered to North Carolina. He even attempted to persuade the French admiral in Rhode Island to bring his fleet to the Chesapeake, where in a joint operation the French and Virginians might trap, and doom, Leslie. There was little chance of that happening, and the possibility vanished once Leslie unexpectedly sailed away after only three weeks. His raiders had sown terror and inflicted considerable damage from below Cape Henry to the periphery of Williamsburg. With time, Leslie could have caused greater harm, but Cornwallis summoned him to the Carolinas, where the war had suddenly taken an unexpected, and ominous, turn for the British.60
Within a few days of the capture of Charleston, General Clinton had exulted that rebel resistance in South Caro
lina had been broken save for that of “a few scattering militia.”61 Clinton’s claim had seemed indisputable, but in July the inhabitants of South Carolina’s backcountry stirred, launching a guerrilla war. It started without help from Congress or the Continental army, and in the first months these rebels fought with little or no outside assistance. Many were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who had come to America to escape Great Britain and its Anglican Church, though some had been radicalized by the American Revolution, and others had taken up arms in response to depredations of the British army. Guerrilla wars tend to be dirty and ferocious, and this was no exception. In time, Cornwallis’s army suffered heavy attrition, the victim of partisans sustained by arms sent southward through Virginia. In part, Leslie had been sent to Virginia to interdict those supply lines, but just before he put his men ashore, the southern rebels in the Carolinas scored a sensational victory. In a battle fought on King’s Mountain, near the North Carolina–South Carolina border, the British lost more than one thousand men, roughly 20 percent of Cornwallis’s entire army. He ordered Leslie to South Carolina.62
Changes were occurring as well on the American side. Congress removed Gates following the debacle at Camden, spurred in part by the vitriol poured on him by Hamilton. Congress then asked Washington to name Gates’s successor. Congress had previously made similar requests of Washington, but he had always refused to act, seeing his involvement in such personnel matters as a potential political snare. But given the desperate situation, Washington overcame his reluctance and recommended the appointment of General Nathanael Greene.