On August 18, the Aigrette, loaded with six tons of coins but without Francisco Saavedra, who remained in Havana to make sure the promised Spanish men-of-war were sent to guard Haiti, rendezvoused with de Grasse’s fleet. The money was distributed throughout the fleet to ensure that the loss of one ship did not sink the entire treasure. The Spanish pilots were sent ashore, and by that evening the fleet had started tacking up Old Bahama Channel toward America, whisked along by the Gulf Stream.
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ON AUGUST 16, two days after he’d learned that de Grasse was destined for the Chesapeake, Washington received a letter from Lafayette. The young general had been having a difficult time figuring out what Cornwallis was up to. “You must not wonder, my dear general, that there has been a fluctuation in my intelligences,” Lafayette wrote. “I am positive the British councils have also been fluctuating.” However, it was now safe to say, the Frenchman had determined, that Cornwallis was in fact establishing his army on the high bluffs of Yorktown and across the river at Gloucester. “Should a fleet come in at this moment,” he speculated, “our affairs would take a very happy turn.”
Washington was intimately familiar with the geography of this peninsula between the York and James rivers. Back in 1777, he had received a letter from Thomas Nelson, then a brigadier general and now Thomas Jefferson’s replacement as governor of Virginia, proposing that he establish a small base at Yorktown, where his soldiers could monitor the movements of British ships. Washington had advised against it. Nelson’s troops, he warned, “by being upon a narrow neck of land, would be in danger of being cut off. The enemy might very easily throw up a few ships into York and James’s river . . . and land a body of men there, who by throwing up a few redoubts, would intercept their retreat and oblige them to surrender at discretion.”
Now, in the summer of 1781, it was, Washington later remembered, “as clear to my view as a ray of light”: if Lafayette could contain Cornwallis—and de Grasse’s fleet arrived as promised—the British general would be trapped. So much could still go wrong: Just as had happened in March, the British fleet might beat the French to the Chesapeake and force them to retire to the Caribbean. Cornwallis might realize the risk he was running and retreat into North Carolina before Washington and Rochambeau arrived with reinforcements. Clinton could put an immediate halt to the operation by attacking the allied forces as they attempted to cross the Hudson.
And yet, just when it seemed the American cause might be irredeemable, Washington now saw a way the war could be won. It required him to begin a five-hundred-mile trek under the very noses of the British, but it was worth the gamble. As soon as possible, they were marching for Virginia.
CHAPTER 7
“The Spur of Speed”
IT WAS THE CHANCE of a lifetime. But as revealed by his impassioned response to de Grasse’s letter, there was a part of Washington that writhed with anguished rage over the position in which he’d been placed by the French alliance. The bitter truth was that by the summer of 1781 the American Revolution had failed. With thousands of able-bodied citizens refusing to serve, with the thirteen states refusing to fund the meager army that did exist, and with the Continental Congress helpless to effect any constructive change, the very existence of the United States now rested with the soldiers and sailors of another nation. Washington had only 2500 men to take to the Chesapeake; Rochambeau had more than double that number, and there were 3100 additional French soldiers en route with de Grasse. “How will it sound in history,” Captain Samuel Shaw, aide-de-camp to American artillery commander Henry Knox, had written the year before, “that the United States could not, or rather would not, make an exertion, when the means were amply in their power, which might at once rid them of their enemies, and put them in possession of that liberty, and safety, for which we have been so long contending? By Heaven! If our rulers had any modesty, they would blush at the idea of calling in foreign aide! ’Tis really abominable, that we should send to France for soldiers, when there are so many sons of America idle.”
Washington, ever the pragmatic survivor, had done his best to lay this sense of humiliation aside in his dealings with Rochambeau, something that had been easier to do when the Expédition Particulière was still in Newport. But now, as the march to Yorktown commenced with a French army that was twice the size of his own, on their way to meet a French naval force beyond imagining, it was impossible to ignore that the American army was, in essence, a fly on the back of an elephant, and he, as that fly’s commander, was in no position to claim credit for a plan that had been essentially forced on him by the French.
In the letter Washington received on August 14, Admiral de Grasse had insisted he could stay in the Chesapeake only until October 15 before returning to the Caribbean. That gave Washington and Rochambeau just two months to get the allied army to Virginia and (assuming Cornwallis was still dug in at Yorktown when they arrived) begin a siege. As they all knew, sieges took time.
Unlike a battle, in which two armies fought it out until one side declared victory, a siege involved the methodical process of surrounding an enemy, cutting him off from the source of supply, and using artillery to gradually break down his defenses. Assuming Cornwallis had done everything possible to fortify his position, it could take months, not weeks, to dislodge his army. If de Grasse were to abandon them prematurely, they would be left open to attack by a British fleet. This was almost exactly what had occurred three years before, when de Grasse’s predecessor, Admiral d’Estaing, had abruptly ceased operations against Newport and forced the American army, left unprotected from the sea, to fight its way out of Rhode Island.
And then there was the matter of Admiral de Barras, stationed in Newport. Not only were his eight ships of the line needed to maintain naval superiority in the Chesapeake, he would be transporting the heavy artillery and provisions essential to conducting a siege. And yet de Barras had announced he had no intention of sailing south. To avoid the indignity of serving under Admiral de Grasse, whom he outranked, de Barras had decided to take his fleet north to, of all places, Newfoundland. With a British fleet in New York and, most likely, an even larger enemy fleet headed up the coast from the south (not to mention a third fleet of British warships expected any day from England under Graves’s replacement Admiral Digby), it was imperative that the French consolidate rather than scatter their naval resources. Rochambeau had already voiced his objections to de Barras’s proposal; now it was Washington’s turn. “I cannot avoid repeating,” he wrote on August 15, “in earnest terms the request of General Rochambeau that you form the junction, and as soon as possible, with Admiral de Grasse in Chesapeake Bay.” De Barras ultimately agreed to sail south, and on August 23 departed from Newport.
Washington had decided he must leave half his army at West Point under General William Heath. Once Clinton realized the allies had departed for the Chesapeake, he would almost certainly attack what was left of the American forces along the Hudson. Heath’s army would be outnumbered by nearly four to one by the British in New York, but at least the fortifications at West Point would give them a fighting chance in the face of a British onslaught. That left 2500 of the Continental army’s best soldiers for the march south under the command of Benjamin Lincoln, the general who had been forced to surrender Charleston to the British the year before and who had rejoined the American army in a prisoner exchange. Included in these ranks would be Washington’s former aide, Alexander Hamilton. Given their past history, Hamilton had assumed Washington would refuse to assign him to the field, and he had turned in his commission. But Washington chose not to accept it. Using his aide Tench Tilghman as an intermediary, he assured Hamilton that every effort would be made to secure him the appropriate command, and Hamilton was now a part of the army that was about to head south.
Washington might be on occasion snappish and overbearing, but as even Hamilton must admit, he was also something more: one of those rare individual
s with the capacity to rise above the emotions of the moment and, given time, recognize what really mattered. In the summer of 1775, when he first arrived at Boston to assume command of the American army, he had been horrified by the slovenly crew of New Englanders he had inherited, describing them as “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” Six years later, he had come to respect these same New Englanders—particularly the African American soldiers from Rhode Island—as some of his best and most disciplined men. As the French had realized after the skirmishes that accompanied the two reconnaissance missions to the edges of British-held New York, the Americans might not look like much, but they could fight. “It is incredible,” Baron von Closen commented, “that soldiers composed of men of every age, even of children of fifteen, of whites and blacks, almost naked, unpaid, and rather poorly fed, can march so well and withstand fire so steadfastly.” This was perhaps Washington’s greatest accomplishment. As one after the other of his British opponents, from Thomas Gage to William Howe (with Clinton and Cornwallis soon to follow), returned to England in disgrace, he had found a way, despite having lost more battles than he had won, to keep his army, and by extension his country, together.
Central to his durability was the aura of reserve that clung to him like a protective cloak, a rigorously maintained aloofness that no one—with the possible exceptions of Martha and Lafayette—could penetrate. “Be easy and condescending in your deportment to your officers,” he had advised one of his newly minted colonels back in 1775, “but not too familiar, lest you subject yourself to a want of that respect, which is necessary to support a proper command.” As the historian Edmund Morgan has written, “The remoteness that still surrounds [Washington] was a necessary adjunct of the power he was called upon to exercise.” And yet there was also a likeable humility about the commander in chief, a humanizing lack of pretension that saved him from the pomposity that afflicted so many of his contemporaries. “The calm and calculated measure of General Washington,” von Closen observed, “in whom I discover daily some new and eminent qualities, are already well known, and the entire universe accords him the homage of its highest esteem. . . . Everyone regards him as his friend and father.”
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BY THE SUMMER OF 1781, the cast of Founding Fathers with which the Revolution had begun had largely dispersed, with Thomas Jefferson currently out of public office in Virginia and with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and others in Europe. In the absence of a viable federal government, that left Washington to hold together both the army and the country on his own. Finally, however, Congress was making belated efforts to provide him with some support, particularly with the appointment of Robert Morris as superintendent of finance.
As Morris had explained to Washington when he visited the commander in chief at his headquarters in White Plains earlier in August, he was willing to extend his considerable personal credit as far as it might go to assist the nation in the ensuing campaign. (Back in 1776, it had been Morris who came up with the emergency funds Washington needed to cross the Delaware and secure victory at Trenton.) Morris also hoped to consolidate the supply operations of both the American and French armies. Up until then the two armies had been competing with each other for provisions, and since the French were able to pay in gold and silver as opposed to the worthless credit the American commissary agents had to offer, it was a competition the Americans were guaranteed to lose, even as it drove up the prices of goods for both armies. Unfortunately, Rochambeau refused to cooperate, and the Americans were left to their own devices. “The French agents have their riders all round the country,” Colonel James Hendricks complained, “buying flour and beef with specie. This will effectively prevent the [American] commissioners from procuring any, as there is not a probability of the people letting the state agents have an ounce on credit while they can get the French crowns and Louis.”
Despite this handicap, Morris took over much of the responsibility of securing supplies and established depots for the American army between New York and Yorktown. This enabled Timothy Pickering, Washington’s quartermaster, to concentrate on selecting the best route and campsites. Making Pickering’s efforts all the more challenging was Washington’s insistence on secrecy.
It was essential that Clinton be left in doubt for as long as possible as to where the French and Americans were headed. For now, the British commander assumed they were about to launch an attack on his army in New York via Staten Island, with naval assistance to be provided by de Grasse’s fleet at Sandy Hook. Luckily, the army’s first three days’ march through New Jersey was along the same route they would have taken to Staten Island. Any preparations made for the allied armies beyond those first three days’ march (as they veered off for Princeton and beyond that Trenton) might alert the British prematurely to their ultimate destination. As a consequence, Pickering would be left with only four days’ advance notice before he and his staff could begin to attend to the myriad details of getting the army to Philadelphia.
In the meantime, Washington used every means at his disposal to convince Clinton they were headed for Staten Island. In addition to making sure official correspondence alluding to an attack on New York was captured by the British, Washington insisted that his army lug forty carriage-mounted boats across New Jersey. Perhaps the most effective ploy concerned the French army’s well-known reliance on fresh-baked bread. French agents were sent out to New Jersey to purchase flour in communities along the west bank of the Hudson while bricks were collected along the Raritan River (a waterway that flowed into Arthur Kill near the southwestern tip of Staten Island) for the construction of ovens in Chatham, far enough inland that they were beyond the reach of the British but well situated to supply an army whose ostensible purpose was to attack New York.
But first the two armies needed to cross the Hudson River at a spot sufficiently removed from the British that it could be accomplished in relative safety. This required them to backtrack forty miles to King’s Ferry, a march over rain-soaked roads that took the French six tortuous days. The American army was the first to reach the ferry, completing the two-mile crossing in a day. The French, on the other hand, required three. Since the British had sent several warships up the river earlier in the summer, it was generally assumed they would do so again, especially given the easy target presented by a mass of slow-moving, soldier-packed boats. But for reasons known only to Sir Henry Clinton, the British let the two armies pass the river unimpeded.
To screen the size of the force from the enemy, the American and French armies were divided into separate columns that took different but parallel routes down the length of New Jersey toward the Delaware River. This overland portion of the march required hundreds upon hundreds of horses and oxen to pull the heavily loaded wagons and artillery, with each column extending for two to three miles as it made its dusty way through the relatively lush New Jersey countryside.
Only a select group of American and French officers were aware of the army’s true destination. Most believed they were, as all signs seemed to indicate, headed for Staten Island to begin an attack on New York. But no one knew for sure. As the surgeon James Thacher observed, since Washington “makes the great plans and designs under an impenetrable veil of secrecy . . . , our own opinions must be founded only on doubtful conjectures.” And with each step into New Jersey, the speculation mounted. “Our situation reminds me of some theatrical exhibition,” Thacher wrote, “where the interest and expectations of the spectators are continually increasing, and where curiosity is wrought to the highest point.”
The faster Washington could move his army through New Jersey, the more likely they were to get far enough south that Clinton could do nothing to stop them. However, given the logistical demands of moving more than seven thousand men, along with all their munitions and equipment, they were lucky to cover fifteen miles a day. As a consequence, the race was being conducted in agonizingly slow motion. That, however, did not c
hange the need to quicken the pace. “The success of our enterprise,” Washington reminded Lincoln on August 24, “depends upon the celerity of our movements; delay therefore may be ruinous to it.” And yet, if de Grasse and his fleet did not arrive as promised in the Chesapeake, all would be for naught.
Washington had hopes he would have word from the French admiral by the time the armies reached the vicinity of Springfield, which was almost even with the southern tip of Manhattan. But by August 29, he had heard nothing of the French fleet. Rather than continue and “discover our real object to the enemy,” he ordered the first division of the French army to halt and bring up the column’s rear.
Washington’s anxiety level continued to build as he sent out orders to Colonel Samuel Miles in Trenton and Robert Morris in Philadelphia to start assembling boats in anticipation of the army’s arrival. “I have delayed having these preparations made until this moment,” he explained to Miles, “because I wished to deceive the enemy with regard to our real object as long as possible. Our movements have been calculated for that purpose, and I am still anxious the deception should be kept up a few days longer, until our intentions are announced by the army’s filing off towards the Delaware.”
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