In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In the weeks ahead, Cornwallis retreated as far south as the town of Wilmington on the Carolina coast, where provisions could be shipped up from Charleston. “I assure you that I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures,” he wrote to his friend General William Phillips, who had succeeded Benedict Arnold as leader of the British forces in Virginia.

  While Cornwallis lingered on the coast, Greene headed into South Carolina. One by one, in the months ahead, he attacked the fortified posts upon which British control of the state depended. Victory on the battlefield once again eluded him, but the sheer pugnacity of his presence eventually forced the British to abandon the state’s interior and retreat to Charleston. “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again,” he commented with grim satisfaction.

  In the days immediately following the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, Greene wrote to his wife, Caty. After noting that he hadn’t “had my clothes [off] for upwards of six weeks” (a complaint perhaps inspired by thoughts of his beautiful wife), he became uncharacteristically optimistic for someone of his naturally pessimistic nature. “I should be extremely happy if the war had an honorable close,” he wrote; “and I on a farm with my little family about me. God grant the day may not be far distant when peace with all her train of blessings, shall diffuse universal joy through America.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE DAY AFTER WASHINGTON learned of the disappointment at Cape Henry, he received word of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse—yet another engagement that had come teasingly close to a victory. There was an important distinction between the two, however. Destouches had decided not to capitalize on his initial victory against Arbuthnot even though the French fleet was, relative to the British, close to full strength. Greene’s army, on the other hand, had been more than cut in half by the desertion of the militia, who began fleeing the field even before the battle began. Unlike Destouches, Greene would have been hard-pressed to continue the fight even if he had wanted to. “Although the honors of the field did not fall to your lot,” Washington wrote to Greene on April 18, “I am convinced you deserved them. . . . [T]he most flattering prospects may, and often do, deceive us, especially while we are in the power of the militia.”

  Greene, Washington knew, was determined to avoid the one catastrophic mistake that might mean the destruction of his army. If this careful approach had denied Greene the chance to crush Cornwallis, that was just fine with Washington. “We ought not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors and for the purpose of profiting by dear-bought experience,” he wrote. “To inveigh against things that are past and irremediable is unpleasing; but to steer clear of the shelves and rocks we have struck upon is the part of wisdom.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The End of the Tether

  THE MONTHS OF March and April 1781 were not kind to George Washington. Not only was the war not going particularly well; his family was giving him trouble. His twenty-six-year-old stepson Jacky Custis, a newly elected state legislator, had let it be known he was going to boycott future sessions of the Virginia assembly. Jacky had a history of erratic and infuriating behavior, none of which had diminished his exalted status in the eyes of his mother. Washington had to be careful when it came to his pampered and hotheaded stepson, whom he gently reprimanded with a word of advice: “hear dispassionately and determine coolly.”

  And then there was Washington’s mother, Mary, who seems to have been the only person in the United States unimpressed by the accomplishments of her eldest son. Mary had announced to the world that because of the neglect of her children, she was in need of financial help. There was even talk in the Virginia legislature of setting aside some public money for her support. Deeply humiliated by “a presumptive want of duty on my part,” Washington assured his friend Benjamin Harrison that his mother “has not a child that would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real distress. This she has been repeatedly assured of by me; and all of us, I am certain would feel much hurt at having our mother a pensioner while we had the means of supporting her; but in fact she has an ample income of her own.”

  Finally there was the case of his cousin Lund Washington, whom he’d left in charge of Mount Vernon. In April the British sloop of war Savage sailed up the Potomac, burning plantations everywhere it went. Mount Vernon, however, had been saved, largely because Lund provided the enemy with food and drink. Washington was outraged. “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me,” he wrote, “to have heard that in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my house and laid the plantation in ruins. You ought to have considered yourself as my representative, and should have reflected on the bad example of communicating with the enemy.”

  While Mount Vernon had been saved, Washington had lost seventeen slaves to the British, who had offered them freedom if they chose to desert their master. Although Washington claimed to have already resigned himself to both “the destruction of my houses” and “the loss of all my Negroes,” that did not prevent him from doing everything possible in the years ahead to recapture the slaves he had lost. For Washington in the spring of 1781, the Savage’s appearance on the Potomac was a source of embarrassment not because of the dubious light it cast on his own role as the supposed champion of American liberty and freedom, but because his cousin had dared to pander to the enemy.

  These personal matters were distressing, but as his correspondence that spring makes clear, it was the setback suffered at the Battle of Cape Henry that hurt the most. “The failure of this expedition . . . is much regretted,” he wrote to John Laurens, the former aide-de-camp who was now in France attempting to secure an urgently needed loan. Not only had Destouches’s unconsummated mission against the British fleet and ultimately Arnold wasted precious resources, it had raised and then dashed the country’s expectations just when “we stood in need of something to keep us afloat. . . . Without a foreign loan, our present force (which is but the remnant of an army) cannot be kept together this campaign.” Washington went on to list some of the other challenges facing the country and its exhausted army (such as Congress’s inability to exert “a controlling interest over the states”), then stopped himself. “But why need I run into the detail when it may be declared in a word that we are at the end of our tether and that now or never our deliverance must come.”

  One can only wonder how, after six years of war, after so many disappointments, both personal and professional, Washington was able to go on. As his letter to Laurens reveals, the prospect of “a superior fleet” from the French was all that he had left. “Alas!” he wrote wistfully, “The ruin of the enemy’s schemes would then be certain; the bold game they are now playing would be the means to effect it for they would be reduced to the necessity of concentrating their force at capital points, thereby giving up all the advantages they have gained in the Southern States, or be vulnerable everywhere.”

  His attention that winter had been directed toward the Chesapeake, but Washington had far grander ambitions for the spring and summer. Assuming the French could once again achieve naval superiority, he saw New York, not the Chesapeake, as the prize that might force the British government to renounce its claim on the American colonies. He estimated that there were approximately ten thousand British soldiers in New York—almost five times the size of the enemy force currently in Virginia. Assuming the states provided him with even a portion of the recruits he’d requested and the French fleet appeared at the harbor entrance at Sandy Hook, he would then be in a position to combine with Comte de Rochambeau’s army and take New York. Even if circumstances ultimately prevented him from attacking the city, the presence of a strong allied army outside New York would force the enemy to divert troops away from Virginia. “The most powerful diversion that can be made in favor of the Southern states,” he insisted to the Virginian Benjamin Harrison, “will be a respectable force in the neighborhood of New York.” He would
send Lafayette’s small army of less than a thousand soldiers (who were now in Baltimore) to Virginia, but that was all.

  It was true the majority of the fighting was occurring in the south. But with the enemy’s forces divided between Virginia and the Carolinas into two armies of about two thousand soldiers each, there simply wasn’t, as of yet, the opportunity for a French-American victory of sufficient magnitude to end the war.

  Five hundred and fifty miles to the south of Washington’s headquarters on the Hudson, in Wilmington, North Carolina, Lord Cornwallis was about to make a decision that changed all that.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE HAD GAINED GREAT HONOR at Guilford Courthouse, but he had destroyed his army. By retreating all the way to the Carolina coast at Wilmington, he had left the interior open to Nathanael Greene, who was now working his methodical way from post to post as he attempted to dismantle what remained of British rule in South Carolina.

  Cornwallis could have loaded his footsore army into a small fleet of transports and sailed for Charleston. There he could have personally led the defense of South Carolina. But like John Burgoyne before him, he judged any move that might be perceived as a retreat to be “disgraceful.” He must resume the offensive, this time in Virginia.

  It was exactly what George Germain and the rest of the ministry in London wanted to hear, but as Henry Clinton in New York and William Phillips in Virginia realized, the summer was no time to initiate any kind of offensive operation in the Tidewater. First of all, there was the heat, which made active military operations virtually impossible in July and August. Yes, the region’s many wide and navigable rivers were, as Cornwallis maintained in a letter to Henry Clinton, “advantageous to an invading army,” but as Benedict Arnold had discovered, those same rivers meant that Virginia remained vulnerable to attack from the sea. Until a defensible naval base was established in the Chesapeake (which had been the original objective behind Arnold’s and now Phillips’s missions), the Tidewater was a very dangerous place for the British army.

  And besides, what, exactly, would an offensive war in Virginia accomplish that had not already been attempted elsewhere? As Cornwallis had just proven in North Carolina—and had been proven time and again over the last six years, at Bunker Hill, Long Island, Brandywine, Germantown, Charleston, and Camden—even the most heroic of British victories did little to win the support of the people if nothing was done to ensure the security of the loyalists after the British army left to fight in another part of the country. The cumulative effect of “taking possession of places at one time and abandoning them at another” was to disaffect the loyalists and embolden the patriots to the point that it would have been better if the British army had never made an appearance in the first place. Admiral Samuel Graves, who had been in Boston for the Battle of Bunker Hill, likened the movements of the British army to “the passage of a ship through the sea whose track is soon lost.” In this instance, the absence of a strong federal government actually worked to America’s advantage. Broken up into thirteen largely self-sufficient entities, the United States was a segmented political organism that was almost impossible for the British army to kill.

  Even Cornwallis had to admit to the futility of what he had attempted in North Carolina. But that did not mean “the experiment” could not be attempted somewhere else. Increasingly fanatical in his determination to bring the Americans to battle, he convinced himself that Virginia was where the final apocalyptic encounter of the war should be fought. In fact, if he had his way, virtually all of His Majesty’s forces in North America would be diverted to the Tidewater. “If we mean an offensive war in America,” he asserted, “we must abandon New York and bring our whole force into Virginia. We then have a stake to fight for, and a successful battle may give us America.” To cede New York back to the enemy after an almost five-year occupation was, of course, absurd. These were not the words of an officer soberly attempting to further the interests of Great Britain; these were the wild and exaggerated claims of a punch-drunk brawler looking for one last fight.

  At this late stage of the war, with the Americans, to use Washington’s phrase, at the end of their tether, it behooved the British simply to wait it out until the high cost of this protracted war forced the French to the negotiating table at the end of the year. Instead, the fortunes of the Empire were in thrall to a dangerously reckless field general who defiantly disregarded the perils presented by the sea. A forceful commander in chief might have contained Cornwallis. Not Henry Clinton, who might quibble halfheartedly about his subordinate’s aggressiveness but had so far refused to take any steps to curb his behavior. In truth, Clinton’s hands were tied by the ministry’s enthusiasm for whatever Cornwallis wanted to do. “I am very well pleased to find Lord Cornwallis’s opinion entirely coincides with mine,” Germain enthused to Clinton, “of the great importance of pushing the war on the side of Virginia with all the force that can be spared until that province is reduced.”

  Cornwallis had become the increasingly desperate embodiment of Germain’s and the king’s determination to win the war at all costs. He must leave Wilmington as soon as possible, he announced, before “the return of General Greene to North Carolina . . . put a junction with General Phillips out of my power.” But that was not the real reason he needed to depart in such a hurry. It had come to his attention that a vessel was on its way from Charleston bearing dispatches from Henry Clinton. Having spent the winter doing exactly as he pleased, he was not about to be overruled by his superior. So on April 25, knowing that the dispatches were due any day, Cornwallis began the long march to Virginia.

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR THE MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE, who had reunited with his detachment in Maryland after the failure of the Destouches expedition and was about to head back into Virginia, this was personal. Twenty-one years before, on August 1, 1759, when he was not yet two years old, a cannonball fired from the battery directed by the present commander of the British forces in Virginia, Major General William Phillips, had killed his father at the Battle of Minden in Prussia. “General Phillips’s battery at Minden having killed my father,” he wrote to Nathanael Greene from Baltimore on April 17, “I would have no objections to contract the latitude of his plans.”

  Eight days later Lafayette and his army were in Fredericksburg; five days after that they were in Richmond, just in time to prevent Phillips and his force of 2300 regulars from taking the city. That he accomplished this with an army he estimated to be just a third of the enemy’s caused him infinite delight. “Phillips is my object,” he wrote to Washington, “and if with less than a thousand men I can oppose three thousand in this state, I think I am useful to General Greene.”

  Greene was indeed grateful for whatever Lafayette could do to keep the farms and manufacturing centers in Virginia producing the provisions and equipment on which his army in South Carolina depended. But he also knew the young marquis had to be careful. “I have only one word of advice to give you,” Greene wrote to Lafayette on May 1, “that is not to let the love of fame get the better of your prudence and plunge you into a misfortune in too eager a pursuit after glory. This is the voice of a friend, and not the caution of a general.” Doing his best to contain his naturally impetuous personality, Lafayette studiously avoided the confrontations that might mean the annihilation of his little army.

  By early May, Phillips had moved his army to Petersburg, Virginia, in anticipation of the arrival of Lord Cornwallis from the south. “When I look to the left,” Lafayette wrote to the Chevalier de la Luzerne, the French minister in Philadelphia, “there is General Phillips with his army and absolute command of the James River. When I turn to the right, Lord Cornwallis’s army is advancing as fast as it can go to devour me, and the worst of the affair is that on looking behind me I see just 900 Continental troops and some militia . . . never enough not to be completely thrashed by the smallest of the two armies that do
me the honor of visiting.”

  Although some relief was on the way (General Anthony Wayne was marching south from Pennsylvania with an army about the size of Lafayette’s), the marquis knew that once the two British armies had combined he would be powerless to prevent Cornwallis’s troops and Tarleton’s cavalry from rampaging across Virginia. Outnumbered and outgunned, all he could do was exactly what Greene had done during the Race to the Dan: stay out of Cornwallis’s way until the time was right to meet the British general under more favorable circumstances. What he never could have imagined in the spring of 1781 was how favorable those circumstances would ultimately be.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON MAY 13, Washington learned of the long awaited return of Rochambeau’s son. Not only did the Vicomte de Rochambeau have the latest word from France, he was accompanied by the new commander of the French naval forces in Newport, the Comte de Barras. It was time, at long last, for Rochambeau and Washington to discuss the coming campaign. Since the Connecticut state legislature was in session in Hartford (where the two generals had met the year before), a meeting was arranged for May 22 at the home of Joseph Webb in the nearby town of Wethersfield.

  Washington had suffered through a difficult spring, but so had Rochambeau. In April the British had published Washington’s letter criticizing the Destouches expedition. Then came the news from France—almost all of it unsatisfactory. After a great deal of deliberation, the ministers in Versailles had decided not to provide Rochambeau with the promised second division of soldiers, meaning that the force under his command would remain at half of what it should have been according to the original plan. This did not mean the ministers had lost confidence in him; quite the opposite, in fact, for he also learned that if he had been in France that winter the king would have, in all likelihood, appointed him minister of war. Unfortunately, this news only made his present situation in America all the more galling. In addition, many of his officers had been writing letters to their friends in France criticizing him. According to the Duc de Lauzun, Rochambeau was infuriated to learn that those “whom he had treated most kindly had by no means spared him in their letters.”