by Paul Lussier
Throughout the chase, Nathanael Greene, like Morgan, made a brazen and precedent-breaking military choice not to concern himself with winning or losing, instead just to keep Cornwallis zigzagging through the countryside in drenching rains and mud. Greene knew he hadn’t the manpower to outfight Cornwallis, but there was advantage in that too. Lighter by several thousand pounds, he could move fast enough to force Cornwallis to lighten his load in order to keep up, to consign his army’s baggage and possessions to the torch, to hack his wagons to bits, to jettison his food supply, salt, and medical stores, and to drop his sick and wounded by the side of the road. To deplete Cornwallis’s resources sufficiently to put their forces on par.
Two hundred and twenty-seven desertions later, with no heavy equipment left and devastated troops, Cornwallis would finally meet Greene in a humiliating stalemate at Guilford Court House, North Carolina, in March 1781. Although Greene was disappointed in not being able to declare victory, for all practical purposes triumph was his. Immediately thereafter, Cornwallis made a blue streak out of the Carolinas (he was a lot lighter now) and retreated to Virginia—bringing him one step closer to his undoing.
And what kept Nathanael Greene going, you ask, given the criticality of his situation? With no provisions but what could be plucked, shot, and stewed on sight? With no ready supply of ammunition? With no boots or clothing for his few hundred men?
The answer is simple: Mrs. Steele, a tavern keeper. Quite literally out of the darkness she came, inviting Nathanael inside one chilly night. “I am alone, tired, hungry, and penniless,” he confessed. “I cannot pay.”
He ate at her board gratis. And after he was done, Mrs. Steele brought him two bags filled with cold hard cash. “You need them more than I do,” she said, placing them in his hands. And so, with Mrs. Steele’s bags, the war chest of the Grand Army of the Southern Department of the Continental Army came to be.
After Cornwallis fled the Carolinas for Virginia, it was Lafayette’s turn. The relay race to the finish was on.
I had parted with Lafayette reluctantly, as the French marquis had been of great assistance since 1777 and was like a son to me: I was very attached. But with Benedict Arnold (yes, that old traitor was back, as a British general) sacking Richmond, Virginia, and Cornwallis holding the line, I felt I had little choice but to send someone I trusted, which these days meant someone I loved. I didn’t care that Lafayette’s assignment brought criticism from my detractors. He had zeal and was driven by ideals.
And—ah, I might as well be out with it. The truth is I picked Lafayette because I wanted him in the thick of victory somewhere in the South (preferably the Chesapeake) to celebrate with me when we won.
And what about Lafayette? How did he dog Cornwallis six more months, outnumbered as he was, two and sometimes three to one? With the help of a black slave, that’s how, who posed as a servant to Cornwallis and kept Lafayette informed of the earl’s movements by the week, the day, the hour.
So with all these pieces in place, I still maintained my ruse of attacking Clinton in New York and praying that I would meet up with you, John. I heard news of the imminent arrival of Admiral de Grasse and his French fleet and thought: Good work, John!
But how did de Grasse and his French fleet know to come to the Chesapeake? Even you, John, didn’t know where they would end up after leaving France, and so could not have told him. Ah, now there, John, is the greatest mystery of all! No one has ever figured that one out! But only because no one wants to believe the claims of one spymaster and cavalry man, Allen McLane, who after the war claimed to have sailed to de Grasse’s ship in the West Indies well in advance, and convinced the French naval commander—somehow—to sail to the Chesapeake.
“Apocryphal,” they say. “Impossible! Mr. McLane could never have taken such a mission. How could he possibly have had access to de Grasse, unless Washington had sent him. . . . And why on earth would Washington send an old, reckless cavalryman on such an assignment?” Besides, at the time this encounter allegedly took place, in July 1781, I was supposedly preparing to invade New York.
Well, there were a lot of things I knew that I couldn’t or shouldn’t have. Maybe it’s because I knew the right people—at the right time.
Yorktown, you see, wasn’t a battle, more like a fait accompli waiting to happen.
Indian summer. Bright, hot mid-October sun. I prayed for clouds to lessen the visibility of the workmen who would be digging the trench opposite Cornwallis’s main defense in Yorktown, where the American and French cannon would be installed and readied for battle.
When the clouds didn’t come, the sappers and miners began digging anyway. As they did, on October 5, 1781, the weather turned to rain.
In the mire spreading across the plain, I walked out on the line, cloaked to disguise my rank, ignoring those exhorting me to pull back to safety.
October 6. I returned to the line with a pickax and struck a few blows.
October 9. The rain lifted. Brilliant sunshine. American soldiers ran up our new red, white, and blue flag.
I came forward and fired the first cannon shot myself.
In twenty-four hours, Yorktown and its harbor took thirty-six hundred volleys.
By October 11, Cornwallis had already lost seventy men. Our guns were moved closer to town, where Cornwallis was ensconced in a bunker, living underground.
October 14. We decide to attack two advance British redoubts near the river.
“Rush on, boys,” Rochambeau (with whom I was sharing command) ordered his soldiers, all of whom had marched to Yorktown with me from New York. “I have great need of you tonight,” he added.
And so, with muskets unloaded so as to remove all possibility of noise, the combined French and American brigades crawled their way through the abatis to storm both outposts, in total silence.
Then there were only the sounds of clashing steel. Like bells.
Americans poured over the walls from every direction into the darkness. Among them, I caught a fleeting glimpse . . . of both you, John, and Deborah.
True to the nature of the Revolution, the most critical battle of the American War for Independence—indeed, one of the most important battles the world has ever seen—was over in five minutes. The British flung down their muskets and begged for quarter, and with that, the war was done.
Oh, Cornwallis attempted an escape, crossing the river at his rear, a maneuver that, since I was powerless to stop it, was causing me grave concern.
No worries. A miracle ensued, one which I’d have never believed had I not witnessed it with my own eyes. Nature, again, intervened.
Driving rains and near-hurricane winds hailed without advance warning from the northeast, scattering and toppling Cornwallis’s rescue boats, carrying them straight back to our shores.
October 17. A young British drummer boy wearing a red coat and carrying a drum climbed up on a rock and beat the signal for a parley. An officer appeared behind him, waving a white flag.
That night, a rare meteor shower streaked across a deep black sky leaching iridescent stars. And that night, I, George Washington, cried. I said “God bless you” to the stars and I wept neither from joy nor relief, but from appreciation for all the wonders I had been privileged to behold.
October 18. The sun returned. The surrender ceremony was set for two o’clock in the afternoon, along Yorktown Road. Cornwallis, feigning illness, didn’t show. Instead, he sent a deputy to surrender his sword to the Americans.
I declined to take the sword myself, assigning it to a deputy instead. History has always assumed this was my way of parrying Cornwallis’s slight (which clearly Cornwallis meant it to be), the intent behind this construed to mean that I, the lofty commander-in-chief of the Continental army, would not allow Cornwallis to surrender to me via an aide.
That wasn’t it at all. I turned the sword over because I felt I had to. It didn’t belong to me, but to the spirit of the men and women who had stood by me. Fought with me. Died next to me. I had
come too far, however slowly, in my apprehension of this intelligence to touch that saber. And I think that somehow Cornwallis knew that too. He had been beaten not by me but by the Americans—by the Revolution.
The British soldiers, shaken, were ordered to lay down their arms and march back. Most were drunk, weeping and crying out loud. Some hugged and kissed their guns, bidding them farewell. Then they were ordered to walk the gauntlet of French and American lines, away, away. . . .
A bright and shining scarlet line, away, away. . . .
Through it all, the British band played a melancholy tune to these words:
If ponies rode men and if grass ate cows
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse
If summer were spring and the other way ’round,
Then all the world would be upside down.
The tune is an old British nursery rhyme: “The World Turned Upside Down.” And indeed it was, on that hillside.
Yes, I can see him now. . . .
It’s George. . . .
George: before the parties celebrating victory . . . before the parades through the streets . . . before Congress quite consciously adjusted its attitude toward me to create a hero where “there hadn’t been one” because “America needed that” (better the credit go to Washington, as lame as he was, than France!).
Before the marble busts . . . the laurels . . . the portraits . . . the pushing, shoving crowds I began to fear . . . the cups, saucers, hatpins, pipes, and kitchen utensils bearing my likeness and name . . .
Before the presidency . . . the endless ceremony . . . the levees . . . before the deathbed phobias of being buried alive . . .
Before all that was a man, humbled by Revolution, incapable of taking that sword. A man whose transition from dreams of glory to the struggle for justice began in Cambridge when, chin in hand, he laid eyes upon that exotic creature kissing her black friend. It was something new. Like the man I would have to become—open, in between, truthful, American.
So come back, my friend, myself; leave the field and come home.
And in my bedchamber at the end of a century, the room fixed in silent grief, amid the fields and creatures I had loved, I, George, held up my hand and uttered two words, signaling I was ready to go:
“’Tis well.”
CHAPTER 35
John Arrives
As for me, John Lawrence, I landed in Boston in August 1781, and instead of immediately joining the march to Yorktown along with Rochambeau and Washington and some fifteen thousand troops, I hastened to Long Island, to the Jersey prison ship, resolved to rescue Deborah, whose location I’d learned via the Revolution underground shortly after my release from prison earlier that year.
As with my experience in France, it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t know how I would rescue her.
I, like George, had come too far for that.
I decided to let the fact that it was impossible for me to imagine life without Deborah guide me on my way, resolving only to stay on that shore and wait until rescue presented itself—forever, if need be. As near to Deborah as possible was where I belonged.
I arrived at the Connecticut coast to find, however, that the ship was gone.
“Sunk to the bottom of the sea,” I was told by a village fishwife. “Set on fire by a prisoner. Most everyone lost . . . but me.”
I turned, and my life was redeemed.
“Deborah.”
“John.”
She gave me her hand: “I knew you’d come.” She smiled.
She had burned that floating hell to the waterline. By holding a fragment of glass up to a tiny slice of sun squeezing through a crack in the hull, she’d managed to ignite a bit of seaweed and bring the ship down.
It had taken months. But she knew she could wait, forever if need be.
And so, exchanging no words and holding hands, we ran, like once we had to the ferry. Only this time we were bound for Yorktown.
We caught up with Washington’s troops on the seventeenth, the day the redoubts were occupied and felled.
It was in the darkness of the redoubt that I felt her fingers crawling up my chest, into my mouth, holding it slightly open for her lips, which, after sixteen years, she finally found again.
That night, Washington feted Cornwallis, while from outside, his soldiers listened and watched. And I could feel the presence of George, already locked outside.
How could this be that George and the people were shut out? I asked Deborah all night long.
The next morning there was a note inside the tent we had shared, after becoming lovers at last. It was from Deborah, and it read:
There’s work to be done. I’m off. I love you, John. Be near. We shall meet again, as sure as Ezekiel swings upon the scaffold. As sure as his dust blows pell-mell in the wind.
And we did indeed meet again.
Upon my grave.
Shortly after Yorktown, I left military service for politics, with the idea of raising a black battalion, a standing army of former slaves to be summoned as the first line of defense against marauders, against attack. Since my father, Henry, was in Paris, along with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, negotiating the treaty with England (plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose), I took it upon myself to offer up the slaves he’d purchased since he’d been made president of Congress.
My career in politics, needless to say, was short-lived. Freeing black men was clearly not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
So what did I have in mind? I asked myself.
For there was quite simply no way to live what I knew. No way to speak it, to do it, to let it be known. Helpless as I had been with the Green Dragon back in Boston in ’65, I turned to my imagination, imagining a day, maybe even two hundred years past my time, when things would be different. When the Revolution just might finally have taken hold. And once I did that, there was simply no place for me to live but there, in that far country in my mind.
Washington would go on to be crowned President. Soldiers would head home penniless and farmers in Massachusetts would plot a revolt against taxes and indebtedness, taking up arms against then-Governor Bowdoin in Shays’s Rebellion of 1786 in the very same way they had once fought the power of Hutchinson. And I would come home to myself—in my swamp.
That was where I took my life.
I spurred my white horse and rode, without warning or ado, straight into British gunfire outside Charleston, a city King George still held and would surrender only after the treaty was signed in 1783. The last sound I heard as I fell from my horse was the clattering of Apollo’s necklace, my personal bell, announcing my liberation into the life of the imagination.
And, of course, there she was. Kneeling among the bulrushes, holding my hand, as my blood seeped away into the cool green mud. The dragon stood behind her, finally at peace.
One year later, she came to my grave. She was wearing the uniform of a soldier, again disguised as a man.
The war was over.
The Revolution wasn’t.
Kneeling at the stone for which my father had paid, she told me she had loved kissing me in the redoubt that day and that she would always love me as both a woman and a man. Fine with me.
Deborah spent the rest of her life dressed as a man, speaking publicly and without humility of her trials, contributions, and travails in the Great War. Few believed her. George Washington never spoke of her.
She didn’t care.
She knew the truth.
She died smiling.
She only visited my grave that once. She planted a single daffodil and she said, “Me know you.”
Such is the way of America.
May she always smile Deborah’s smile.
No Country on Earth ever had it more in its power to attain . . . blessings. . . . Much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to . . . depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to, so plainly. . . . The great Governor of the Universe has led us too long and too far . . . to forsake
us in the midst of it. . . . We may now and then get bewildered; but I hope and trust that there is good sense and virtue enough left to recover the right path.
—George Washington to Benjamin Lincoln,
June 29, 1788
AUTHOR’S NOTE
JOHN LAWRENCE is loosely based on one Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, who, in 1777, at age twenty-seven and with no military training whatsoever, began his tenure as one of Washington’s chief aides-de-camp. Captured in the siege of Charleston and later released, he was dispatched by Washington to France to solicit help from French King Louis XVI. He managed the task somehow, returning to America in August 1781 with a ship weighed down with gold coin and a nice little snuffbox as a personal gift from Louis himself. He fought at Yorktown and was handpicked by Washington to negotiate the terms of surrender with Cornwallis’s aides. Shortly after the surrender, his attempts to form a black battalion of freed slaves brought such ignominy upon his head that he was forced to abandon all political ambitions, taking charge instead of a tiny military fort in the swamps outside Charleston, where on August 27, 1782, he rode directly into the British line of fire for reasons that were inexplicable at the time and was killed.
DEBORAH SIMPSON is a composite of several characters who actually lived, primarily Deborah Sampson, who, as “Robert Shurtleffe,” enlisted and fought in the Continental army as a man. Her story is melded with those of several other spies, from John Honeyman (who paved the way for American victory at Trenton) to Lydia Darragh (who conveyed intelligence to Washington at Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, from enemy-occupied Philadelphia) to John Champe (who was sent to kidnap traitor Benedict Arnold after his defection), and many more ordinary people with whom Washington regularly conferred.