by John Ferling
In particular, the worsening situation in Virginia caught Hamilton’s eye. He knew that Washington, in the wake of Arnold’s raid on Richmond, had dispatched 1,200 men to the state under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette. In March, Sir Henry Clinton countered by sending 1,600 men under General William Phillips—who, while a prisoner of war in Albemarle County in 1779, had dined with Jefferson—to reinforce Arnold. Hamilton anticipated plenty of action in Virginia, and he wanted to be part of it.
In April, he once again asked Washington for an independent command. That more troops would be sent “to the Southward, I take … for granted,” Hamilton added. Never short of chutzpah, Hamilton, who had been a lieutenant colonel for five years, asked to be promoted to the rank of colonel in the light infantry and sent with the deployment to the Southern Department. Washington refused. To jump Hamilton over others who had served in the field would provoke a tempest, he said. In reality, Washington thought Virginia would be a mere sideshow. He was certain that the real action would be in New York, and he wanted Hamilton near him7
While Washington looked toward New York as the solution to America’s dilemma, Jefferson knew that America’s most pressing problem was on his doorstep. In mid-February, about six weeks after Arnold’s raid, Nathanael Greene notified Jefferson that Cornwallis might soon attempt to “push through Virginia.”8 The British invasion of the South, which had commenced in Savannah two years earlier, had moved steadily northward. Virginia’s turn might be next.
Ironically, it was Greene’s success that brought about the likelihood of Cornwallis’s descent on Virginia in 1781. Having taken command of the Southern Department late in the previous year, Greene had waged the most audacious campaign conducted by any American general since Washington’s Trenton-Princeton actions four years before. Greene divided his army of some 1,400 men, sending half west of Charlotte under General Daniel Morgan while he took the remainder far to the east. It was an open invitation to Cornwallis to come into North Carolina after the rebels. Cornwallis did not need to be coaxed. In January 1781, at the very moment of Arnold’s raids, Cornwallis divided his larger army and went after the two American divisions. Although each of Cornwallis’s divisions was about twice the size of its counterpart, his hope of decisive victory soon went awry.
Cornwallis sent Colonel Banastre Tarleton after Morgan. Tarleton commanded the 1,200-man British Legion, a Loyalist regiment of infantry and cavalry. He almost immediately found his prey at Cowpens in South Carolina, not far from Kings Mountain. The two forces fought a pitched forty-minute battle on January 17. At its end, Morgan had won a stunning victory. The British had lost nearly one thousand men. Tarleton was one of the few to escape.9
Greene, meanwhile, was pursued across North Carolina by Cornwallis. Staying just a step ahead, Greene won the race, escaping across the Dan River and into Virginia on February 14. The following day, Greene wrote to Jefferson to warn that Cornwallis might push into Virginia.
Cornwallis lingered in North Carolina, regrouping after losing some 250 men in the grueling chase after Greene’s tattered rebel army. Meanwhile, Greene replicated Washington’s 1776 post-Trenton recrossing of the Delaware River by recrossing the Dan into North Carolina. He did not, however, immediately seek a fight with Cornwallis. Greene awaited reinforcements, including those he had demanded from Jefferson. Given “the spirit of the Virginians,” Greene wishfully told Jefferson, he was sure of receiving ample men and supplies. To this point, the campaign had unfolded “greatly to our advantage,” Greene said, and with adequate numbers even greater success could be achieved. But without them, he added, North Carolina “is inevitably lost,” in which case Virginia would be next on Cornwallis’s list. “You will consider the necessity and act accordingly,” he advised Jefferson.10
Greene was not alone in urging Jefferson to act. General Friedrich von Steuben besieged him with requests for tents, kettles, clothing, tools, munitions, workers, boats, and wagons that could be channeled to Greene. Jefferson did his best to comply, though when Steuben urged him to seize horses from civilians—as Washington had ordered Hamilton to do in 1777—Jefferson refused. He pleaded that the governor lacked authority for such an act, and he did not seek greater powers. He must have thought it useless to ask, as the legislature had recently refused his entreaty for harsher punishments of militiamen who refused to serve and the Council of State had not permitted Steuben to seize and outfit privately owned vessels.11
At this same moment, Washington himself appealed to Jefferson. The commander understood that Jefferson must be alarmed by Britain’s “predatory incursions” into Virginia but asked the governor to consider the “injury to the common cause” that would result from the subjugation of the Carolinas and Georgia. The “danger to your state in particular,” he told Jefferson, would be enhanced. To this, Washington added: “I am persuaded the attention to your immediate safety will not divert you from the measures intended to reinforce the Southern Army and put it in a condition to stop the progress of the enemy in that Quarter.”12
Jefferson was in a bind. Should he send men to Greene in another state or keep the soldiers in Virginia to guard against further raids? Jefferson sent what he thought he could spare. He was active in other ways too. He drafted a proclamation to the German troops serving under Britain’s flag, offering them “lands, liberty, safety” if they would desert and make their home in Virginia.13 At the same time Jefferson begged Congress to send assistance, pointing out that most of Britain’s army was in the southern theater and that General Clinton could be expected to send “still larger reinforcements” to Virginia. It was “inconsistent,” he said as diplomatically as possible, for Virginia to have dispatched aid to the northern states for years, only to have those same states now ignore the plight of their brethren below the Potomac. Congress quickly ordered wagons, clothing, arms, and munitions to Virginia, but six weeks later those supplies were still gathering dust in the cargo hold of a vessel in Philadelphia’s harbor.14 However, more immediate help was on the way. It was at this moment that Washington ordered Lafayette to Virginia with 1,200 men.15
For an instant it appeared that Virginia’s salvation was at hand. Not only did Lafayette and his men arrive, but also, at nearly the same moment in March, Jefferson learned that the French were sending a large fleet and 1,100 men under the command of Chevalier Charles-René-Dominique Sochet Destouches to the Chesapeake. Jefferson rushed 4,000 militiamen to Lafayette and rejoiced that the joint Virginia-Continental-French operation would succeed in “lopping off” the British in Portsmouth from Cornwallis’s force in North Carolina. The normally pessimistic Steuben was cautiously optimistic as well. If the allies succeeded, he said, the “seat of war” would be removed “from the frontiers” of Virginia.16
Few operations went according to plan in this war, and this was not one of them. When Destouches reached Cape Henry on March 16, he discovered a large British squadron awaiting his arrival. The fleets clashed immediately, but as soon as the British got the better of it, Destouches broke off the fight and returned to Rhode Island. “I am truly Unhappy,” Lafayette told Jefferson, and he confided to Washington that “Never has an operation been more ready (on our side) nor Conquest more certain.”17
Arnold’s force was still in Portsmouth, and Cornwallis was just south of Virginia’s border. Greene had delayed acting for nearly a month after recrossing the Dan, as he gathered men and supplies. Toward the middle of March, Greene at last could report that the “Militia have flocked in,” though he was “disappointed in the reinforcement” from Virginia. Nevertheless, he could wait no longer, as he knew that he would have the militiamen for only a few days. Greene maneuvered to face Cornwallis, and on March 15—the day before Destouches’s abortive naval engagement—the two armies clashed in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Greene rightly called it a “severe conflict.” At its conclusion, Cornwallis was technically the victor, as he held the blood-soaked field when the shooting stopped. But in fact the British general h
ad won a pyrrhic victory. Cornwallis lost 550 men, twice the number lost by Greene.18
Greene now sensed the opportunity for a major victory. Cornwallis was hurting. “The Enemy are retireing and we advancing,” he told Jefferson. He wanted Jefferson to send still more men and provisions, and to increase the length of the militia’s service from six weeks to a three months. If Jefferson helped, said Greene, the American army in the South might achieve something of consequence. If not, “the Army must inevitably fall a sacrifice.” Greene said that his “greatest dependence is on Virginia for support, and without her exertions I cannot keep the field.” He pleaded with Jefferson to do more. “I have committed my life and reputation to your service.” Be a leader, he in effect said to Jefferson. “[C]ivil polity must accommodate itself to the emergencys of war, or the people submit to the power of the enemy. There is no other alternative.” With greater help from Virginia and Virginia’s governor, Greene closed, he could pin down Cornwallis in North Carolina, or possibly even drive him back to South Carolina. In either case, he could keep “the war at a distance from you.”19
But the war was already in Virginia. By the time Jefferson learned of Greene’s success at Guilford Courthouse, General Phillips’s large force had arrived at Portsmouth and linked up with Arnold’s. There now was a British army of some 3,500 men on Virginia soil. By then, too, Steuben had concocted a bold plan. Steuben proposed that about half of the Virginia militiamen that Jefferson had summoned to protect against the British raiders, some 2,000 men, join with Lafayette’s Continentals to bottle up Arnold and Phillips in Portsmouth, preventing them from rendezvousing with Cornwallis. In the meantime, the remaining 2,000 Virginia militiamen would march south and reinforce Greene. At last, Greene would have a superior force with which to fight Cornwallis. The plan had wide support. Lafayette endorsed it. General George Weedon, who commanded a militia brigade near Williamsburg signed off on it, calling it a maneuver that would catch the British by surprise and “terminate the war.” Richard Henry Lee, the Speaker of the state assembly, thought it had the potential to be “one of those Master strokes.”20
But both Jefferson and his Council of State rejected the scheme. They wanted all of Virginia’s troops on Virginia soil, especially as they were unconvinced that Lafayette’s force, devoid of a naval arm, could succeed in confining Arnold and Phillips. Steuben was outraged, and convinced that Jefferson failed to understand the depth of America’s crisis. Weedon was no less furious, in private charging that Jefferson had “not an idea beyond local security.” Though more restrained, Greene bristled at the thought of a state governor spurning a plan developed by a general in the Continental army. He thought Virginia was “lifeless,” but in the same breath he complained of it being overextended, as Jefferson continued to wage war in the West. Nor could he resist telling Jefferson that Virginia’s militia, by itself, would accomplish little in defending against British raiders. Southern “pride induces them [the Virginians] to wish to be thought powerful,” but “they deceive themselves,” he said caustically.21
Jefferson was bitter too. He had already told Congress that he believed Virginia had been let down by the northern states. Now, privately, Jefferson questioned Washington’s acumen as a strategist, recounting how for the past three years the main Continental army had sat idle outside Manhattan while the British reclaimed Georgia and made considerable inroads toward reconquering the Carolinas. In reality, Jefferson argued, Great Britain no longer thought it could accomplish anything above the Potomac. “The Northern States are safe.” Yet, while Britain’s focus was entirely on the South, New York remained Washington’s focal point. Washington was as obsessed with retaking New York as Spain was with reclaiming Gibraltar, said Jefferson, and he predicted that America’s commander would be no more successful than had been Spain’s king, As Jefferson’s fury spilled forth—not unlike Hamilton’s in his headquarters confrontation with Washington a month earlier—it was apparent that he believed it was Washington who had let down all who had fought in the South. But he still thought that there was a chance for victory: With proper assistance from Washington, “the Continental war would be totally changed, and [in] a single Campaign” the British could be defeated in the South and the allied victory could be won.22
Meanwhile, Jefferson and his fellow contemporaries were unaware that the war in the South had reached its tipping point. In the aftermath of Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis withdrew his bloodied army to Wilmington, on North Carolina’s coast, for rest and refitting. While enjoying the warm ocean side sunshine, Cornwallis wrestled with his choices. His orders were to remain in the Carolinas until both states were thoroughly pacified, but he was aware that Phillips had united with Arnold. If he marched his army northward, the number of redcoats in Virginia would exceed 5,500 men. What is more, Cornwallis knew that he could not subdue the rebels in the Carolinas as long as provisions flowed down the supply line through Virginia. Cornwallis had made his fateful decision. He and his regulars stepped off from Wilmington on the long march northward to Virginia just as April was shading into May.23
Phillips had already gone into action in Virginia, launching a raid of his own. This foray was up the Potomac River, and under the command of Captain Thomas Graves. Proceeding in three heavily armed schooners and several smaller craft, Graves sailed as far as Alexandria, destroying property, seizing livestock, and liberating slaves, including seventeen of Washington’s chattel at Mount Vernon. Three weeks later, just as Cornwallis commenced his march toward Virginia, Phillips, with Arnold at his side, launched another raid. Taking 2,500 men, including cavalry, the British raiders yet again sailed up the unobstructed James River, this time in fourteen naval vessels. Jefferson quickly summoned the militia, but it was ineffective. In some places it responded slowly, and nearly everywhere the militiamen were poorly equipped, outnumbered, and never a match for enemy infantry with a cavalry wing. The raiders laid down what Jefferson subsequently called a “Circle of Depredation.” While Phillips sowed destruction in the vicinity of Williamsburg, burned shipyards on the Chickahominy River, and torched ships and tobacco warehouses in Petersburg, Arnold captured or destroyed twenty-three vessels and burned two million pounds of tobacco up the James River. The two British divisions had planned to link up just below Richmond and lay waste to the town. They rendezvoused and sailed to Manchester, across the James from the capital, but learning that Lafayette and his Continentals were marching on Richmond—where some 500 militiamen were already posted—Phillips reconsidered. After some probes and skirmishes, the redcoat commander scrapped his plan, preferring to withdraw to Portsmouth and await Cornwallis’s arrival. His raid had been a success. Indeed, the outcome had been precisely as Greene had always told Jefferson it would be. Virginia simply could not defend itself against the British raiders.24
Only a month remained of Jefferson’s second term as governor when Phillips brought to an end his costly raid. Perhaps no Revolutionary War governor had faced greater difficulties, or had to make more burdensome decisions, than Jefferson. He led an exhausted and war-weary state. On taking office, Jefferson discovered that those free men who were willing to serve in the Continental army had long since enlisted, leaving him to lament the “difficulty, nay impossibility, … to get men.” So widespread was what he called the “Spirit of disaffection” against military service, that by late 1780 he wondered whether the militia in much of southwest Virginia would respond to a call to arms.25
Jefferson also presided over a state that was averse to a strong government. Aside from his year in the Continental Congress, Jefferson had been a Virginia assemblyman for nearly a decade before becoming governor. He knew the mentality of Virginia’s legislators, and he understood the limits they imposed on the state’s governor. That realization restrained him from asking for emergency powers, and when he refused to confiscate the property of civilians, it was partially from personal reservations, but also from an understanding that to do so would only arouse opposition to the war in a sta
te already suffering with war fatigue. Continentals such as Steuben and Greene thought Jefferson weak and unsuited for leadership in a time of crisis, and a case can be made for their viewpoint. However, an effective leader has to understand the governed, and from the outset Jefferson recognized that he walked a fine line in coaxing from civilians as much as possible effort without extinguishing their continued support for the war.
Could he have done more? Yes. He might have sought at least some small increase in his authority. To be sure, he might have wielded his mighty pen to rally a greater war spirit. But rhetorical appeals were not common practice among the Revolutionary War governors, or even by Congress.
Toward the end, Jefferson burned his bridges with many Continentals by refusing to support Steuben’s plan for a campaign against Cornwallis in North Carolina. It might have succeeded, though war plans that look good on paper are not always successful, as the scheme for the joint Lafayette-Destouches campaign demonstrated. Nevertheless, Jefferson’s opposition exposed a timidity and shortsightedness unbecoming of a leader in an emergency. His role in thwarting the Steuben plan was a greater blunder than his better-known failure of having responding languidly to intelligence that Benedict Arnold was bearing down on the state in January 1781. Even had Jefferson acted with alacrity at the news of Arnold’s approach, it is difficult to imagine that Virginia could have offered a more effective resistance. Given the state’s resources, Arnold’s greater mobility, and the incredible expanse that had to be defended, there was little that Jefferson or any other governor could have done to lessen the damage that the raiders inflicted. Indeed, no one accused Jefferson of permitting the state to be caught off guard by Phillips’s raid, yet that incursion was no less successful than its predecessors.