Victory at Yorktown

by Richard M. Ketchum

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  ON SEPTEMBER 3 the real show began in Philadelphia with the appearance of the first French brigade. As Chastellux put it aptly, “The arrival of the French troops … was in the nature of a triumph.” The soldiers had halted about a mile outside the city, where they “spruced up,” powdering their hair and donning dress white uniforms so they were “dressed as elegantly as ever were the soldiers of a garrison on a day of royal review.” With flags unfurled and drums beating and a cannon at the head of each regiment, with slow match lighted, they followed Lauzun’s chasseurs down Front Street and up Vine to the Commons at Centre Square with brass bands playing, the crowds wild with enthusiasm, as “the ladies appeared at the windows in their most splendid attire. All Philadelphia was astonished to see people who had endured the fatigues of a long journey so ruddy and so handsome.” Perhaps nothing emphasized the dramatic difference from their American allies so much as the runners who carried orders from one command to another wearing short, tight-bodied coats, rich waistcoats with a silver fringe, rose-colored shoes, cap adorned with a coat of arms, and a cane with an enormous head. Word went through the crowd that all these young fellows were princes (they looked it but were not).

  At the last they passed in review in single file before assembled congressmen and the president of that body, who was “wearing a black velvet coat and dressed in a most singular fashion,” past the commanding generals and the French minister, and then went into camp on the large plain near the river. For the American onlookers, the spotless, colorful uniforms of the French were like nothing they had seen: all were white, but the different regiments could be identified by the different colors of their lapels, collars, and buttons. The Bourbonnais had crimson lapels, pink collars, and white buttons; the Soissonais, who put on a brilliant exhibition of the manual of arms a day or so later for some twenty thousand spectators, wore rose-colored lapels, light blue collars, and yellow buttons, plus white and rose-colored feathers in their grenadier caps. The climactic moment came when Lauzun’s cavalry clattered into view—German, Irish, and Polish mercenaries, many of them—wearing sky-blue jackets with white braid, yellow trousers, sashes with scarlet and yellow stripes, black boots, and towering black fezzes. Even their horses had saddle blankets of white sheepskin trimmed in light blue. It was not lost on the Philadelphians that many of the young officers came from old titled French families, and to cap it all, the Duc de Lauzun, the only duke to fight in America, rode at the head of this extraordinary procession. It was an experience that was remembered for years in great detail by Philadelphians and passed along to succeeding generations as one of the most memorable moments in the city’s history.

  The Comte de Clermont-Crèvecoeur and several friends paid a call on two of the city’s prominent scientists: Pierre Eugène du Simitière and Dr. Abraham Chovet. The former showed them his museum of natural history, as yet unfinished, and later they looked with wonder at Dr. Chovet’s life-size wax figures of a man and a woman, with removable organs, which he used in teaching anatomy. It was impossible to behold these, the count wrote, “without shuddering.”

  What struck the French visitors about Philadelphia was its cosmopolitan character. While the Quakers outnumbered other religions, the city “probably contains every religious sect in the world. Freedom of conscience is tolerated here,” one of them wrote, and “Little by little this superb city has been settled from every country in Europe and has become quite a commercial center. Since the war this seems to be the only city in America whose trade has not declined; in fact, the war seems to have made it even more prosperous”—a phenomenon that owed a lot to the extremely large Quaker population. He went on to say that the Philadelphians seemed to take little interest in who was winning the war. They were almost all merchants, and several told him that they didn’t want peace—it would only hurt their trade.

  Everywhere the French went, they discovered something about Americans that surprised or sometimes shocked them, and Philadelphia was no exception. In that city, they learned, young people received as fine an education as they could obtain in Europe, and their schools offered every type of instruction, which led Clermont-Crèvecoeur to speculate on the class system in Philadelphia. While neither rank nor distinction existed among ordinary citizens—all of whom believed themselves equal, enabling a cordwainer, a locksmith, or a merchant to become a member of Congress—“The rich alone take precedence over the common people.” One effect of this was to create a scramble for lucrative jobs, which were usually bestowed on the wealthy because they could make “their alleged talents shine in the light of their gold,” letting the right people know they had money. To put it another way, Americans considered themselves equals but showed a certain deference to those with money, “who associate only with one another.”

  He saw poor families whose daughters “could not be better dressed. They would rather dress well and look rich than eat better food,” and while the wardrobes of these girls were not large, “One sees no girls here in town or country whose hair is not dressed in the French fashion. Those who cannot afford jewelry make up for it by substituting ordinary ribbons and feathers … and nature’s richest ornaments—flowers.” On the other hand, Americans had an unrivaled casualness, and anyone who tried to instill in them a taste for the social life comparable to France’s was wasting his time and trouble.

  Once again Clermont-Crèvecoeur took a swipe at bundling—this time, at the habit of girls and young women who visit a female friend for five or six days at a time. What can one make of this? he asked. “Certainly nothing favorable to these belles. Do they not bundle with one another? This is what many people think. One dare not state it as a fact. But their attitude towards men, their conduct when in their company, the disappearance of the lilies and roses of their youth at the age of twenty to twenty-eight, and their distaste for bundling with men are all good reasons for believing that one is not mistaken.”

  Officers in Rochambeau’s army were astonished to find a low regard for the military profession in America. While high-ranking officers were held in esteem, lieutenants were “virtually scorned,” and an American general would never invite a lowly lieutenant to join him at a meal. The difference, of course, was that every commissioned officer in the French military had to produce proof of nobility, so that a lieutenant, for example, might enjoy the same social status as a general. But they gradually became adjusted to the American attitude. “Since the two armies are now joined, the same rules had to apply to both. For a long time we were unhappy about this situation, but after a while no longer thought about it.”

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  ONE OF THE many rivers that flows into Chesapeake Bay is the Elk, and Washington planned to load his troops for embarkation at what was called Head of Elk. On September 5 he said farewell to Rochambeau—who wanted to travel from Philadelphia to Chester by water—and rode southward while the count and his staff drifted down the Delaware in a small boat and had a memorable trip. “It would be difficult to have a more beautiful sight than that of Philadelphia as one leaves it by water,” one of them wrote, before they passed by some of the landmarks of the 1777 campaign: Mud Island, Red Bank, and Billingsport.

  Downriver, approaching Chester, the French officers could see an American officer dancing up and down, waving his hat with one hand and a handkerchief with the other. At first they thought it might be Washington, but that was impossible; the behavior of His Excellency, the Comte de Deux-Ponts knew, was “of a natural coldness and a noble approach.” But Washington indeed it was, and Deux-Ponts said, “his features, his whole bearing and deportment were now changed in an instant.” Suddenly, he was “a citizen happy beyond measure at the good fortune of his country.” The Duc de Lauzun, who was also there, wrote, “I never saw a man so thoroughly and openly delighted.”

  “I caught sight of General Washington,” Rochambeau recalled, “waving his hat at me with demonstrative gestures of the greatest joy. When I rode up to him, he explained that he had just receiv
ed a dispatch … informing him that de Grasse had arrived.” Then, as Baron Closen wrote, “MM. De Rochambeau and Washington embraced warmly on the shore” (surprising Closen, who had been troubled earlier by the obvious coolness between the two over the question of attacking New York). Rochambeau must have felt enormous satisfaction that his plans were coming to fruition, the baron observed, noting that “The soldiers from then on spoke of Cornwallis as if they had already captured him; but one must not count his chickens before they are hatched. It is true that he will be taken soon.”

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  AS EAGERLY AS Washington and others looked forward to the arrival of de Grasse’s fleet, the brief history of relations between America’s army and France’s navy hardly inspired confidence or enthusiasm. Colonial suspicion of the French was an old one, of course, dating back to the numerous French and Indian wars, when their neighbors in Canada succeeded in setting the frontiers aflame, with murderous attacks, kidnappings, and the pillage of villages and isolated farms. These savage conflicts were largely quiescent after the peace of 1763, but that was less than a generation ago, and in New England, particularly, dislike of French Catholicism and Bourbon despotism remained a tenet of Puritanism.

  So in the best of circumstances a Frenchman arriving in America was greeted with a certain wariness, to say the least. Nevertheless, the alliance with France that came after the rebels’ astonishing victory over Burgoyne’s army in 1777 not only was welcomed by many Americans but was seen as the avenue to victory and real independence, a view that engendered a great deal of overconfidence. Unhappily, the coalition got off to a very rocky start.

  In the spring of 1778, not long after the treaty of alliance took effect, a large fleet under the command of the Comte d’ Estaing sailed from Toulon and made an incredibly slow crossing of three months, missing a rare opportunity to catch a British fleet in Chesapeake Bay that was ferrying Clinton’s army to New York after the enemy evacuated Philadelphia. By the time d’Estaing arrived at the Delaware capes, he was low on water and provisions and had sick men on board every ship. He sailed north, only to be told by local pilots that the depth of the water at Sandy Hook, at the entrance to New York’s harbor, was no more than twenty-one feet at low tide, and his ships drew twenty-seven feet. The pilots added that they could take him into New York Bay only when a northeast wind coincided with a strong spring tide—which meant that he would have to wait until the following year to make the attempt.

  On July 20 he sailed for Newport in response to a recommendation by Congress, expecting to cooperate with Major General John Sullivan’s force there to capture the three-thousand-man British garrison. At one point the Americans had an army of ten thousand—most of them militia—greatly outnumbering the British, but through a series of mishaps and misunderstandings the effort turned into a giant fiasco, with a breakdown of communications and Sullivan peremptorily ordering d’Estaing to do this and do that. One of the French officers left a vivid description of the American militia: “I have never seen a more laughable spectacle. All the tailors and apothecaries in the country must have been called out.… One could recognize them by their round wigs. They were mounted on bad nags and looked like a flock of ducks in cross-belts.… I guessed that these warriors were more anxious to eat up our supplies than to make a close acquaintance with the enemy, and I was not mistaken; they soon disappeared”—five thousand of them in a few days’ time. Admiral d’Estaing was gentlemanly enough to ignore Sullivan’s criticism, but it was plain to see that the American had created a real rift with the new allies, especially when he implied that they had run from a fight. Then, when d’Estaing’s fleet—badly damaged by a storm—sailed off for Boston, leaving Sullivan to fight the British garrison alone, the reputation of the French plummeted. The situation was made even worse when Sullivan and his generals signed a letter saying the French departure was “derogatory to the honor of France, contrary to the intentions of his Most Christian Majesty and the interest of this nation, and destructive in the highest degree to the welfare of the United States of America, and highly injurious to the alliance formed between the two nations.” In the aftermath, attempting to ameliorate the effects on the alliance, Washington urged Lafayette “to afford a healing hand to the wound that unintentionally has been made,” at the same time appealing to d’Estaing to forgive and forget. Both sides put the ugly incident behind them, but the damage had been done.

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  THE UNHAPPY TALE of the joint effort to take Savannah in 1779 is quickly told. It began in the spring of 1778 when His Majesty George III, who spent a good many waking hours doing his best to micromanage the war in America, looked at the map, realized how remote the Carolinas and Georgia were from the rest of the states, and decreed that General Clinton’s strategy should include an attack “upon the southern colonies with a view to the conquest … of Georgia and South Carolina.” Once in British hands, those territories would revert to royal colonies and serve as stepping-stones to North Carolina, the Chesapeake, and Virginia. The king decided that two thousand men would be enough to seize and retain Savannah, and, taking another step, he laid out a plan by which Georgia’s most important port should be reduced in an operation in which “large numbers of the inhabitants would flock to the King’s standard.…” Clinton was also instructed to dispatch 3,500 men under Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell to meet General Augustin Prevost, who would bring a detachment from the British garrison at St. Augustine plus a number of Indians. The two of them would converge on Savannah, and Savannah would be in British hands.

  In the waning days of December Campbell, without waiting for Prevost because the number of Americans protecting Savannah was fewer than a thousand men, had an aged slave guide part of his force through the swamps while another approached from the other side. Taken by surprise in front and rear, the Americans lost more than five hundred dead, wounded, and missing, and the few survivors headed for South Carolina.

  In the meantime General Benjamin Lincoln, an obese Massachusetts militia officer with an undistinguished record, who was reckoned by Washington to be an “active, spirited, sensible man,” had been named commander of the southern department and reached Charleston early in December. Lincoln had some eight hundred Continentals in Charleston, and he and John Rutledge, the South Carolina governor, had written to Admiral d’Estaing urging him to join them in an operation to retrieve Savannah from the British. Suddenly, early in September 1779, they received word that d’Estaing was actually off the coast of Georgia with four thousand men and could stay no longer than two weeks, since the hurricane season would soon be upon them. Lincoln collected every soldier within reach, sent out a call for South Carolina and Georgia militia, and took off through the piney woods to Georgia, arriving there to join d’Estaing on the 16th of the month. It turned out that the count—without waiting for Lincoln—had told Prevost to surrender but then, instead of storming the city with his superior forces, had done nothing. The Briton took advantage of the lapse by increasing his numbers with the garrison from Beaufort and strengthening his defenses so that by the time the allies had their batteries ready to lay siege to the town, the British were ready for them.

  When days and nights of cannonading the town proved fruitless, although almost every dwelling was damaged, d’Estaing and Lincoln were bickering over just about everything (including the quality of meals at the latter’s table), and the Frenchman was increasingly anxious about heavy weather in the offing. At his insistence, they made a direct assault on the enemy’s works. It was the worst decision that could have been made; within an hour the British ditch “was filled with dead” from the allies’ army, “many hung dead and wounded on the abatis,” and beyond the defense perimeter “the plain was strewed with mangled bodies,” according to an Englishman. D’Estaing himself was badly wounded, and the American and French casualties were more than eight hundred to the enemy’s loss of fifty-seven.

  D’Estaing, with his crews dying from scurvy and fever, and his ships
threatened by the onset of hurricane weather, was determined to leave at once despite the pleas of the Americans, and a badly disappointed Lincoln reluctantly led his shattered army beyond the Savannah River as the French disappeared over the horizon. The cost of this failure was enormous. Their successful defense of the town had given the British a vital foothold from which they could move north, just as George III had in mind, with the strong possibility of reducing the Americans’ hold on all the southern states. Thanks to the failure of allied arms, the enemy had an entirely new and promising field of operations.

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  EARLY IN 1780 the inept, hapless d’Estaing returned to France, where he was influential in persuading the government to send Rochambeau with an army to America,* but regrettably, the sour taste of the admiral’s failures had so poisoned the attitude of the rebels that news of yet another French fleet on its way was greeted with little enthusiasm by the general public.

  The successor to d’Estaing was another count—François-Joseph-Paul, Comte de Grasse, a giant of a man, six feet two inches tall, heavyset, extremely handsome, and a member of one of France’s oldest aristocratic families. Now fifty-nine years old, he had attended naval school at the age of eleven, served in several campaigns against the Turks, and fought in the War of Jenkins’s Ear in 1740, when he was taken prisoner by the British. Held for three months, he profited from the experience by making a number of English friends and collecting invaluable information about their navy. After serving in the Indian Ocean, West Indies, and Mediterranean, he took command of the seventy-four-gun Intrépide in 1778, the same year he became a commodore. Subsequently, he served with d’Estaing in the West Indies and was present at the action at Savannah. After a spell of bad health when he remained in France, he was promoted to rear admiral and sailed from Brest with twenty ships of the line—all carrying seventy-four guns or more—three frigates, two cutters, several heavy freighters, and a convoy of 150 vessels for the West Indies. At the same time he was given the rank of lieutenant general, which made him senior to all the other French general officers (including Barras, who accepted reality and served under his orders until the War for Independence ended).