First Salute

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The ferries for transport across the majestic river were broad-beamed one-masted schooners of shallow draft, the famed sloops of the Hudson, carriers of the river traffic north and south and across the stream for over a century. Dutch-built, the sloops at an average of 100 tons were 65–75 feet long, with rounded stern and wide decks, a large mainsail and small jib. The cross-stream passage from bank to bank made use of the long experience of Dutch skippers, more skilled than the English. Leaning on long heavy tillers, they took advantage of shifts in winds and tides and of every twist of the current around river bends that could advance their progress. They usually sailed at dark to take advantage of the moon’s tides and night breezes.

  In heavy rain on August 19, 1781, Washington’s and Rochambeau’s armies broke camp to march to the ferry crossings. One regiment crossed first at Dobbs Ferry, where the river is a mile wide, while the rest of the Americans and the more heavily loaded French with all their horses and equipment were to cross at King’s Ferry. Here, although the river was only a quarter of a mile wide, the ferry route followed a diagonal and longer course from Verplanck’s Point on the eastern shore to Stony Point, the western terminus, where one of three landings connected with the main road going south.

  Apart from the protection the militia could offer, the only safeguard was Clinton’s known difficulty in bringing himself to act. Would that be enough? Washington had laid several false trails pointing to Staten Island, which lies at the mouth of the Hudson where the river enters New York Bay, to give an impression that he was planning to use Staten Island as a base for assault on New York City. He had ordered that all boats moored along the lower Hudson and the shores of the Bay be collected as if in preparation for such an assault, and local patriots had been told to ask pointed questions about Staten Island in the taverns and in talk with neighbors.

  Clinton accepted these indications, which were eagerly collected and conveyed to him by Loyalist agents, convincing him in gloomy solipsism that he himself as Commander-in-Chief, together with New York, was the intended target of the rebel forces assembling in his back yard. He spent his days momentarily expecting assault and, while enduring the anxious wait, dared not move a man or a gun of his defense forces out of position to act against the enemy who were so plainly gathering with purposeful intention. A new anxiety reinforced his paralysis. Rumors were circulating of a French fleet coming to America from the West Indies, and they spoiled his sleep with the thought of his being robbed of naval superiority. The possible threat to his associate in Virginia did not trouble him, for, as he wrote to London on May 30, “Cornwallis is safe enough unless a superior fleet shows itself in which case I despair of ever seeing peace restored to this miserable country.” The “superior fleet” that he feared was, as he wrote, already in the West Indies on its way to America.

  By “peace,” Clinton meant, of course, suppression of the rebellion, and he was more aware than his naval colleagues of the danger to the British in relation to food and other supplies if naval superiority were gained by the enemy. Britain’s position in the Colonies depended on maritime control and active support by the Loyalists. One of these was already lacking and if she lost the other, her army and civil authorities would have to live on air. Clinton’s appreciation of this factor was particularly acute because, judging by the accounts that survive in his papers of orders for food and liquor, he lived high. He ordered brandy in 10-gallon lots. His food orders were equally generous, including beef, veal, mutton, tongues, beef rumps, fish, crabs, tripe, sweetbreads, eggs. On August 24, while the rebel army were in the midst of their crossing of the Hudson, Clinton ordered 43 pounds of beef, 38 pounds of veal, an illegible number of “birds,” crabs and turkeys and two calves’ heads (perhaps he was giving a party). He also ordered his boots from London and his stableboys’ shoes soled in London and a steady supply locally of lavender water and “Hemet’s dentifrice” and scented powder and, on August 27, a comb. One does not know how many persons of a very large headquarters staff dined at his table, but whatever the number (one mention refers to 148 general officers), they certainly ate and drank heartily. Could it be that all that brandy by the gallon helps to explain the slack performance of the British command? Were they dulled by alcohol?

  While the army was billeted downtown, Clinton’s place of residence was at the Beekman House, at the present 52nd Street and East River. Clinton himself actually occupied four different houses, perhaps to deceive a would-be assassin. “In and near New York,” according to a political journalist, “Sir Henry Clinton has no less than four houses; he is quite a monopolizer. At times, when he is visible, he is seen riding full tilt to and from his different seats; in this, he is the Ape of Royalty.” The possession of this multiple real estate and the existence of a longtime mistress, Mrs. Baddeley, by whom he had several children, were no doubt related to his obsessive desire to hold on to New York.

  Unimpeded by Clinton, Washington’s forces, a day after leaving camp at Philipsburg, reached the ferry crossings.

  Down the cobblestone slopes leading to the docks the procession of the Allied army came; provision wagons were hauled aboard the ferries, followed by the rank and file of foot soldiers as they crowded over the gangways, while reconnaissance officers kept a tense watch for approaching redcoats. No shots or sudden charge of cavalry with flashing sabers broke“ into their orderly progress. The ferries filled with men, ropes were uncoiled and flung over the side to waiting dockhands, sails were hoisted and the boats slid into the water.

  From an observation platform erected for him by the French on a plateau overlooking Haverstraw Bay, a bulge in the river five miles wide, Washington watched the ferries bearing his soldiers over the water on the journey to the last, best hope of victory in the long fight for independence. The Americans started crossing on August 20, and all were across by the next morning. Claude Blanchard, the French Commissary or Quartermaster General, standing next to the Commander-in-Chief on August 25 (the date given in his diary), as he watched the crossing, could feel the emotion stirring behind the impassive exterior. He sensed that as Washington surveyed the pageant moving across the broad stream “glittering in the sunlight,” he seemed “to see a better destiny arise, when at this period of the war, exhausted, destitute of resources, he needed a great success which might revive courage and hope. He pressed my hand with much affection when he left us at two oclock and crossed the river himself to rejoin his troops.” “I have the pleasure to inform Your Excellency,” Washington wrote to Rochambeau in a letter dated August 21 from King’s Ferry, on the far side, “that my troops arrived at the ferry yesterday and began to pass the River at 10 oclock in the morn and by sunrise of this day, they were all compleatly on this side of the river.” His date does not fit with Blanchard’s because Washington apparently came back after his first crossing and went over a second time with the French. The last of his troops landed after dinner in the darkness of the western shore at the foot of the Catskills, where the wail of the wildcat drifts through the undomesticated hills, and the rumble of thunder means that the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew are playing at bowls.

  The French, slowed by their longer march to their ferry and a heavier train of equipment, embarked several days later, and they too crossed safely without incident. The calm of the Hudson crossing had remained untroubled except for Rochambeau’s order to unload surplus burdens for storage in Peekskill, which “made the rank and file complain loudly,” as reported by Rochambeau’s aide, Ludwig von Closen. Closen had a happier piece of news for his journal when a message of crucial importance to the campaign was delivered on the day of the American crossing by an officer returning from Newport to say that de Barras, the French naval commander, was now agreeable to bringing down the transports with the troops, meat and siege guns, which “greatly eased” Rochambeau’s mind. All the French were across the river by August 25. The absence of British interference puzzled the Allies. “An enemy of any boldness or any skill,” wrote the Comte de Deux-Ponts
in his diary, “would have seized an opportunity so favorable for him and so embarrassing for us as that of our crossing the North River. I do not understand the indifference with which General Clinton considers our movements. It is to me an obscure enigma.” Even Clinton’s intelligence officer, William Smith, was conscious of the inertia. “There is no spirit of enterprise,” he wrote on September 3, immediately after the crossing of the river, “the general dulness kills the spark that happens to rise in the mind of any man.… Washington’s present movement from the Hudson is the severest censure upon the British commanders in this quarter.” It may have been partly due to the fact that Clinton, at the time of the crossing, was absent on Long Island at the conference with Graves that ended in the same spirit of inertia as governed New York. Admiral Hood had just come into Sandy Hook on August 28 after his vain pursuit of de Grasse from the West Indies. He had rowed over to Long Island to confer with Graves and Clinton, and they had agreed that Graves should sail to the Chesapeake with the combined English fleet of nineteen ships to seek and defeat the expected squadron of de Barras from Newport with his eight ships before de Barras could join his strength to de Grasse. Presumably, Clinton left someone in command back in New York capable of giving orders in the emergency he was always expecting. One cannot suppose that preparation for the Hudson crossing passed unnoticed by everyone in the area, or that Clinton’s headquarters was so naked of intelligence agents that none came a distance of fifteen miles or so to report. In fact, spies were constantly arriving at headquarters relaying in detail every move of the rebels’ advance, even to the report by a woman who claimed to have penetrated the camp and located Washington’s quarters. One can only speculate that headquarters was so relieved to see the enemy moving away from New York that it had no wish to interfere with their passage, or that lethargy and lost impetus had so far taken possession that the command no longer really cared about the war. A sense that the powers at home are not really interested in a war diminishes offensive spirit in the field, and just such a suspicion pervaded the mind of the British Commander-in-Chief, expressed in an extraordinarily revealing letter to his patron, the Duke of Newcastle. The letter complains of “reinforcements to every place but this,” and asks pointedly, “Is it because America is become no object? If so, withdraw before you are disgraced!” That was hardheaded advice that few would have ventured, and, like most displeasing advice, it was given no hearing. If Clinton’s “no object” is the clue to the British attitude in the war, it presents another enigma, for it does not fit with the predictions of the doomsayers at home that the loss of America would mean the decline and fall of the British Empire. People rarely take seriously reports of their own decline, and Britain’s war leaders were no different from the normal run. Dire prophecies of decline and fall to follow loss of the American colonies did not penetrate their thinking nor make them fight more effectively.

  Chiefly, Clinton’s passivity was the result of his fear to move any of his defense forces out of position lest they might leave a hole open for the enemy to enter. Afterward, in his postwar apologia, he claimed he could not have attacked the Allies after the river-crossing because their forces, as he calculated extravagantly, far outnumbered his own. In fact, after the arrival of 2,400 Hessians, who had joined him on August 11, more than a week before the crossing, the reverse was the case. More to the point, he did not move because he was transfixed by the notion of imminent assault on New York. One would think this was the moment to attack first, ahead of his opponents, but that would have required a quick hard decision, which was not Clinton’s way. He did nothing, as Washington had hoped, permitting the Allied army to walk away without hindrance. When a staff officer suggested to him that he might follow the rebels’ march on the other side of the Hudson, he demurred, “for fear that the enemy might burn New York in his absence.” Agents had reported to him that Washington had cached food dumps all across New Jersey, and other informants were citing evidence that indicated a march headed south rather than against New York. It is very difficult for a recipient of secret information to believe its validity when it does not conform to his preconceived plans or ideas; he believes what he wants to believe and rejects what does not verify what he already knows, or thinks he knows.

  Meanwhile Hood and Graves had not yet sailed for Chesapeake Bay. Neither of them had Rodney’s instinct for perceiving the shape of enemy strategy. Clearly the great effort of transferring an army across the Hudson would only have been undertaken by the rebels for a major strategic purpose which it would be important for the English to frustrate. That the plan was for the envelopment of Cornwallis to be carried out by the rebels’ combining with de Grasse in Virginia seems not to have been envisaged by the two admirals who, as seamen, did not concern themselves with land movements, nor did they even grasp the crucial naval necessity of preventing the French from gaining superiority in Chesapeake Bay. They were locked into two fixed assumptions: that de Grasse was coming to New York, not the Chesapeake, and that he would not be coming with more than an inferior number of ships—perhaps twelve. Besides, everyone assumed that bold Rodney in the West Indies, who had been emphatic in his assurances, would take care of de Grasse in the Caribbean or, at the least, arrive at the same time to equalize naval forces. Preconceived fixed notions can be more damaging than cannon. The assumptions about de Grasse were probabilities, not certainties, and not an excuse for the British failing to place themselves in the best position possible to meet the French fleet if it came, whether or not Rodney was just behind. Hood, who knew the extent of Rodney’s incapacitating illness and had himself been designated to substitute for him as the pursuer of de Grasse, could have disabused his colleagues of their expectation but did not; in his several inactions during this period, he is not easy to explain.

  The inability of all three British commanders, Hood, Graves and Clinton, to envisage the envelopment of Cornwallis by a combination of the rebel army and the French fleet on the Virginia coast was simple obtuseness, the more so as the destination of Washington’s march had been revealed by deserters and, so it is said, by an American girl, mistress of Rochambeau’s son—inadvertently, one hopes. As usual with clandestine information, Clinton and his staff did not believe it, and, as always, underrated their opponent. They could not believe that Washington would undertake so Herculean a task as a march to Virginia, or would leave the Hudson forts denuded of his main army. If there was to be a junction with de Grasse, it seemed obvious to Clinton it was planned for Staten Island, for attack on New York.

  In truth, a month of paralysis took hold of the British command in America when the French fleet entered the situation, as if each of the three—Clinton, the Commander-in-Chief; Graves, the Naval Chief; Cornwallis, General of the Army on the spot—had been administered a sedative. It began when a dispatch from Rodney reached Clinton on September 2 reporting that de Grasse’s destination was the Chesapeake, as he had learned from the pilots who came to meet de Grasse at Cap-Frančais. Though the news threatened Cornwallis and not directly himself, Clinton realized that a fateful moment was at hand. “Things appear to be coming fast to a crisis,” he wrote to Germain. “We are therefore no longer to compare forces with the enemy, but to endeavour to act in the best manner we can against them. With what I have, inadequate as it is, I will exert myself to the utmost to save Lord Cornwallis.” In short, he recognized at this point that Cornwallis had to be “saved.” On this day, too, he learned from Philadelphia, where the marching army he had thought on its way to Staten Island had arrived to a rapturous public greeting, that the land forces of Washington and Rochambeau were headed for a union with de Grasse at the Chesapeake. Clinton now had in his possession the full outline of the enemy’s scheme, and although he was by nature the most hesitant of the three commanders, he did act at once to order Graves to take on board 5,000 reinforcements to relieve Cornwallis, for departure on October 5, with the qualification, “as soon as the way is clear”—as if expecting that de Grasse, if indeed he had
come, would obligingly move out of the way. De Grasse had, in fact, arrived. After crossing the Atlantic without interception by Rodney or Hood, and after escaping Hood’s notice by the maneuver through the Bahama Channel, he entered Chesapeake Bay on August 30, while Graves and Hood were still considering the matter at New York. Graves was anchored in the harbor inside the bar and Hood outside. For three days they remained in place. It was not until August 31 that they hoisted sail for the Chesapeake, and no sense of urgency impelled them because they expected to retain numerical superiority in any event—provided they could block de Barras from adding his strength to the French fleet. But de Barras had already left Newport, on his way to the Bay on August 25, well before Hood and Graves left New York.

  Anxious to be on time for the rendezvous with de Grasse at the Chesapeake, Washington had ordered the Allied armies, as soon as they disembarked on the Jersey shore, to supply themselves with three days’ rations and be ready to move at four o’clock in the morning, with the New York First Regiment leading, followed by the artillery and the Rhode Island Regiment and the French First Division. The march to Virginia had begun. The journal of Rochambeau’s aide, Baron von Closen, is an invaluable record of the journey.

  Von Closen was a native of the Palatinate, the Rhineland district lying between France and Germany. He had adopted France as his country, and entered military service at fourteen as a “pleasing, industrious, extremely intelligent, especially well informed” young officer. Rapidly promoted, he obtained a commission with the Royal Deux-Ponts regiment, who came to America in 1780 with Rochambeau. The Deux-Ponts wore sky-blue uniforms with lemon-yellow collars and facings. Closen was among the foreign diarists of the expedition who, unlike the Duc de Lauzun, were interested observers of the scenes and persons of American life and studiously recorded their observations in journals which, after 200 years, give us glimpses of what America looked like where they passed, often with unexpected views and comments.