Throughout his travels south, Greene had been accompanied by Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the Prussian officer responsible for instilling some much needed order in the beleaguered Continental army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1778. Now, in Richmond in the late fall of 1780, Greene realized that his future fortunes in the Carolinas depended on what supplies and men he could get from Virginia. The state had, for the most part, not seen much fighting and therefore possessed ample quantities of the food and manufactured goods that would be impossible to find amid the burned-out farms of the Carolinas. Von Steuben must remain here, in Virginia, where he could oversee the recruitment of soldiers and supplies for the southern army.
If Greene did not have the benefit of von Steuben’s personal counsel when he assumed command of the army in Charlotte, he did have a kind of surrogate. Von Steuben’s stories of his former commander in Prussia, the military genius Frederick the Great, evidently inspired Greene to seek guidance from the king’s writings. Over the course of the next few weeks, as he pondered how to contain Cornwallis’s larger and better-trained army, his letters refer time and again to the Prussian monarch. Greene also realized that military strategy and tactics meant nothing without a thorough knowledge of the terrain, particularly the rivers that flowed out of the mountains to the west before tracing their meandering way across the more than five-hundred-mile length of North Carolina to the sea. With the Polish engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko at the head, Greene sent out an advance guard to explore the possibility of constructing a fleet of small, portable boats to provide his army with a strategic advantage in negotiating the state’s rivers.
Greene soon saw firsthand that a brutal civil war was raging in the Carolinas. “The whole country is in danger of being laid waste by the Whigs and Tories [patriots and loyalists],” he wrote to Congressional president Samuel Huntington, “who pursue each other with as much relentless fury as beasts of prey.” The region around Charlotte was a “desert” that made it impossible to sustain an army for any length of time.
In early December, Greene hit on what one historian has termed “the most audacious and ingenious piece of military strategy of the war.” Contrary to conventional military wisdom (which insisted that you never divided your army in the face of a larger enemy), the general resolved to send a portion of his army one way while the rest of his army went the other. From a purely practical standpoint, a divided army had a better chance of feeding itself in this war-ravaged region. But it also presented Cornwallis with a dilemma. “It makes the most of my inferior force,” Greene explained, “for it compels my adversary to divide his and holds him in doubt as to his own line of conduct.”
Soon Brigadier General Daniel Morgan was headed west with a “flying army” of between 800 and 1000 American soldiers in hopes of luring a significant portion of the enemy away from Greene’s 1100-man force, which was headed east to Cheraw, South Carolina. Here, on a tributary of the Pee Dee River, Greene hoped to establish what he termed a “Camp of Repose” where he might rebuild the army into a force capable of meeting Cornwallis in the open field.
Over the course of the first two weeks of January, Greene’s strategy set the stage for one of the most brilliant American victories of the Revolution. On January 17, at Cowpens in South Carolina, Morgan’s army of mostly undisciplined militiamen defeated more than 1000 British soldiers led by Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton. It was an astonishing accomplishment, particularly given the enemy officer’s reputation as an unrelenting and remorseless foe. Taking advantage of Tarleton’s well-known impetuosity to entrap the vanguard of his cavalry within the lines of his surprisingly resolute mix of militiamen and Continental troops, Morgan succeeded in killing 110 enemy soldiers and capturing at least 500 more.
Greene was elated by the news of Morgan’s coup. Unfortunately, developments in Virginia threatened to put a halt to his southern comeback even before it had properly begun. British brigadier general Benedict Arnold had arrived in the Chesapeake with a fleet of forty-six vessels and 1200 soldiers, and he was headed up the James River for Richmond.
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THIRTY-FIVE MILLION YEARS AGO a meteor came screaming out of the sky and smashed into the waters near present-day Cape Charles at the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay. Billions of tons of seawater, mud, and bedrock were hurled hundreds of miles into the atmosphere as the force of the impact created a crater almost a mile deep and fifty miles wide. All evidence of the crater has long since been buried beneath an accretion of sediment (it was not until 1983, when fragments from the impact were discovered in the seabed off Atlantic City, that scientists first became aware of the possible existence of the crater), but we now know that the contours of the Chesapeake were shaped by this cataclysmic event.
The crater (larger than Rhode Island and almost as deep as the Grand Canyon) became a drain into which the bay’s 150 rivers and creeks began to flow. About two hundred miles to the north, the Susquehanna River was drawn irresistibly in the crater’s direction, ultimately carving the trough that established the bay’s north-to-south orientation. To the south, the James River veered dramatically to the east, where it combined with the Elizabeth and Nansemond rivers to form the wide and protected body of water known today as the Hampton Roads. It was here, on December 31, 1780, in the anchorage created by an ancient meteor, that Benedict Arnold, the most hated man in America, arrived in the Charon, a 44-gun frigate named for the ferryman of Greek mythology who carried the souls of the dead into Hades.
It had been a horrific ten-day passage from New York. On December 26 and 27, a “hard gale” had separated Arnold’s fleet. Several ships came close to foundering; one had been forced to jettison its cannons; a hundred of the expedition’s cavalry horses had been hurled into the sea. When the fleet finally re-formed off the entrance to the Chesapeake, four transports carrying a total of four hundred soldiers and one man-of-war were missing. That did not prevent Arnold from calling his remaining officers together on the deck of the Charon. They were to supply the troops with enough salted meat, biscuit, and rum for five days and start loading them into the open boats and sloops captured that morning by the advance guard of Arnold’s fleet.
Arnold’s commander in New York, Sir Henry Clinton, viewed the Chesapeake as essential to the ultimate defeat of the American insurgency in the Carolinas. All rebel communications between the north and the south had to go through the narrow corridor of land between the bulge of the bay’s southwestern edge and the Blue Ridge Mountains. By establishing a fortified naval post in the Tidewater from which British patrols could be sent into the interior, Clinton hoped to block the passage of information and supplies along the western edge of the Chesapeake. If Arnold met with success in Virginia during the winter of 1781, Greene’s forces in the Carolinas would be effectively starved into submission by the closure of their supply line to the north.
Clinton had reason to believe that Arnold, despite having suffered a severe leg injury at the Battle of Saratoga three years before, was ideally suited to lead this expedition. Described by Johann Ewald, the commander of the detachment’s Hessian jaegers, as “a man of medium size, well built, with lively eyes and fine features,” Arnold was energetic and, to Clinton’s mind, motivated to succeed on this, his first command since becoming a British officer. “I was induced to select Arnold for this service,” Clinton later wrote, “from the very high estimation in which he was held among the enemy . . . and from a persuasion that he would exert himself to the utmost to establish an equal fame with us in this first essay of his capacity.”
What Clinton had not counted on, however, were the emotions Arnold would arouse among his former compatriots. Even if Virginia’s officials proved woefully unprepared for what he was about to unleash upon them, the ordinary people of the Tidewater would ultimately demonstrate the kind of rage-stoked resolve that only a traitor could inspire.
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IN ADDITION TO ESTABLISHING a fortified base at Portsmouth, a low, swampy settlement several miles up the Elizabeth River from Hampton Roads at the mouth of the James River, Arnold had been given the latitude to destroy “any of the enemy’s magazines . . . provided it may be done without much risk.” The ever aggressive Arnold chose to interpret this last caveat quite loosely. Knowing that the element of surprise gave him a window of only a handful of days before the state’s militia had a chance to respond, Arnold resolved to sail quickly up the James, and if possible, attack the state at its new capital in Richmond—a town that Governor Jefferson had chosen because of its supposed safety more than a hundred miles upriver from Hampton Roads.
Working to Arnold’s advantage was the region’s vulnerability to an attack by water. Back in the seventeenth century, the Tidewater’s long, navigable rivers had helped transform this part of Virginia into one of the most prosperous tobacco-producing areas in the colonies. Now the rivers that had been the making of the region were about to prove its undoing. With the aid of Arnold’s fleet of sail-equipped boats (each of them packed so tightly with soldiers that Hessian commander Ewald complained of the sweltering heat generated within the confines of these overloaded cockleshells), the British were able to travel with frightening speed into the state’s interior.
Making matters worse from an American perspective was Governor Jefferson’s leisurely response to Arnold’s appearance at Hampton Roads. When on the morning of December 31 he was first informed of the arrival of a large fleet of unknown origin, Jefferson seemed reluctant to view it as a threat. Years later, William Tatham, who had delivered the news to Jefferson, remembered that the governor “suppose[d] [the ships] were nothing more than a foraging party, [and] unless he had farther information to justify the measure, he should not disturb the country by calling out the militia.”
Not until two days later did Jefferson, who had almost no military experience, decide to call out a portion of the militia. Not until two days after that, on January 4—by which time Arnold’s fleet had sailed past the rudimentary fort at Hood’s Point (which if it had been adequately prepared could have easily stopped the British dead in their tracks) and made short work of Virginia’s small fleet of armed naval vessels—did Jefferson see fit to call out the “whole militia from the adjacent counties” even as he led a disorganized attempt to remove the military stores and state records from Richmond. Making matters all the worse was his increasingly antagonistic relationship with General von Steuben, the one Continental officer in Virginia with the experience to oppose an enemy of Arnold’s caliber.
By January 6, as Governor Jefferson watched from a hill on the opposite bank of the river, Arnold had marched nearly unopposed into the state capital. By the following day, not only Richmond but the cannon foundry seven miles up the James were in flames. According to Arnold’s official report to Clinton, “26 pieces of cannon, 310 barrels of gunpowder, a magazine of oats, and various other stores . . . , a valuable ropewalk, with all its materials and stock, a large depot of quartermaster’s stores and several warehouses filled with rum, salt, sailcloth, and other goods” were destroyed.
Arnold clearly relished his role as the pillager of Richmond. On his arrival, an officer (who was, more than likely, Arnold himself) appeared at Jefferson’s residence brandishing a pair of silver handcuffs in hopes of capturing the governor. Later in the day, Arnold attempted to contact Jefferson about the peaceful surrender of large quantities of tobacco, liquor, and other valuable goods. When Jefferson refused to negotiate, Arnold accused the “so-called governor” of being “inattentive to the preservation of private property” and added the goods to the bonfire.
It was later claimed that not until the destruction of the city during the Civil War was there “such a smell of tobacco in Richmond.” Liquor from stove-in wine and rum casks flooded the town’s streets, and one witness remembered that “even the hogs got drunk.” According to Johann Ewald, “On the whole the expedition greatly resembled those of the freebooters, who sometimes at sea, sometimes ashore, ravaged and laid waste everything. Terrible things happened on this excursion: churches and holy places were plundered.”
By the morning of January 7, Arnold’s troops were in need of rest and sustenance. But Arnold insisted that they immediately begin the march back to Westover—a plantation thirty miles down the river where they had already established a base camp. Four years before, when he was an American general, he had led the Connecticut militia in an attempt to oppose a similar British raid on the inland town of Danbury. Arnold claimed that if the British “had marched two hours sooner from Danbury . . . they would have met without opposition; and if they had delayed it much longer they would have found it absolutely impossible to have regained their shipping.” This was enough to convince Arnold’s second in command, Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe, and soon the British, exhausted and famished, were marching through the rain to Westover. After a recuperative stay at the plantation, which happened to be owned by the widowed cousin of Arnold’s wife, Peggy, the British were headed down the river. Ten days later, on the morning of January 20, Arnold’s troops marched into the town of Portsmouth surrounded by the enveloping tendrils of the Elizabeth River.
Clinton claimed that Arnold’s “active and spirited conduct on this service . . . justly merited the high military character his past actions with the enemy had procured him.” While acknowledging that their commander was “bold, daring and prompt in the execution of what he undertakes,” many of the officers serving under Arnold found it distasteful to be associated with a traitor.
“If he really felt in his conscience that he had done wrong in siding against his mother country,” Ewald wrote, “he should have sheathed his sword and served no more, and then made known in writing his opinions with his reasons. This would have gained more proselytes than his shameful enterprise, which every man of honor and fine feelings—whether he be friend or foe of the common cause—must loathe.” In the days and weeks ahead, as the British built a series of redoubts around Portsmouth, Ewald found it increasingly difficult to be in Arnold’s presence. “This man remained so detestable to me,” he wrote, “that I had to use every effort not to let him perceive, or even feel, the indignation of my soul.”
Arnold tried to overlook the misgivings of his officers but found it impossible to ignore the hatred of the thousands of American militiamen who began to fill up the tangle of swamps and abandoned homes outside Portsmouth. Already he had been taunted by General Thomas Nelson, who threatened to “hang him up by the heels according to the orders of Congress.” Governor Jefferson was rumored to have offered a reward of five thousand guineas for his capture and subsequent hanging.
At one point, Arnold asked a recently captured militia officer what he thought the Americans would do if they caught him. “If my countrymen should catch you,” the officer replied, “I believe they would first cut off that lame leg, which was wounded in the cause of freedom and virtue, and bury it with the honors of the war, and afterwards hang the remainder of your body in gibbets.” Ewald reported that Arnold “always carried a pair of small pistols in his pocket as a last resource to escape being hanged.”
Making matters all the more tense for Arnold was the growing realization of how vulnerable he was in Portsmouth. For the time being, the redoubts protected him from an attack by land, but what if the French fleet of warships now anchored in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay should appear in the Chesapeake, much as he had done just the month before? Unless a comparable British fleet should arrive to oppose the enemy ships, he would be cut off from his supply line to New York. He would also run the risk of being surrounded. On an isolated peninsula, with the American militia on one side of him and the French navy on the other, he would have nowhere to go. Nine months before Yorktown, Arnold found himself in almost exactly the same situation that would lead to the downfall of Cornwallis.
Soon after the British ar
my’s arrival at Portsmouth, Arnold received some encouraging news from New York. As he and his troops had been plundering the Tidewater, Continental troops wintering in New Jersey had mutinied. After more than a year without pay, sufficient food, and proper clothing, and with many of their terms of enlistment having long since expired, the soldiers of the Pennsylvania Line had risen up against their commanding officer, General Anthony Wayne. If their demands were not quickly met, they intended to march to Philadelphia and threaten Congress at gunpoint. In hopes the uprising might herald the wholesale defection that could end the war, Sir Henry Clinton had sent emissaries to the mutineers to encourage them to switch sides.
Arnold was ecstatic. Not only did the mutiny prevent Washington from “detaching troops to disturb” him in Portsmouth, it justified his own decision to turn to the British. “This event will be attended with happy consequences,” he assured Clinton on January 23. “We anxiously wait in expectation of hearing that the malcontents have joined His Majesty’s army in New York.”
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AS IT TURNED OUT, Benedict Arnold served as an example to the mutineers, but not in the way the turncoat general had anticipated. When presented with the prospect of siding with the British—who offered them all the financial rewards they could have ever hoped for—the soldiers, according to Anthony Wayne, indignantly spurned “the idea of turning Arnolds (as they express[ed] it).” Instead of undercutting the American cause, Arnold’s treason had actually strengthened it by serving as a valuable cautionary tale during one of the darkest periods of the war. Without the vile example of Arnold staring them in the face, these despairing and angry Continental soldiers might have convinced themselves (as Arnold had done) that rather than an act of treason, turning to the British was a legitimate act of protest against a government that no longer functioned in their best interests. Several tense days lay ahead, during which Joseph Reed, the leader of the Pennsylvania legislature, negotiated a settlement with the soldiers, but for the time being the nation had withstood this terrifying challenge from within.
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