In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

• • •

  HE HAD BEEN ABOUT THREE MILES to the south of Chester when he was handed a packet of letters forwarded to him by General Mordecai Gist in Baltimore just the day before. De Grasse and a fleet of twenty-eight ships of the line had arrived at the Chesapeake with 3100 French soldiers, more men than in the entire Continental army then encamped outside Philadelphia.

  “One must experience such circumstances,” Baron von Closen later wrote, “to appreciate the effect that such gratifying news can have.” When word of de Grasse’s presence in the Chesapeake reached Philadelphia later in the day, the city went wild with jubilation. “Some merry fellows mounted on scaffolds and stages,” James Thacher wrote, “pronounced funeral orations for Lord Cornwallis. . . . The people ran in crowds to the residence of the minister of France and ‘Long live Louis the Sixteenth!’ was the general cry.”

  But as Washington had come to learn, the realization that a long coveted goal was almost within reach was one of the most dangerous feelings in the world. To be distracted by the prospect of an outcome that had not yet been achieved could be disastrous. How many times had he been on the cusp of victory only to watch in horrified astonishment as his opponent capitalized on a moment’s complacency and his army had gone down in defeat? (The battles of Brandywine and Germantown, both fought within less than twenty miles of his present location, were just two of the more notorious examples.) Now, with the French fleet in the Chesapeake and Cornwallis trapped at the end of a solitary point, was when Washington needed his powers of concentration at their highest. Under no circumstances should he succumb to the self-indulgent urgings of expectation. He should continue to Head of Elk and attend to business.

  But Washington could not help himself. The unrelenting pressures leading up to this moment had made it an almost physical necessity that he surrender himself to his emotions. He turned his horse around and rode back to Chester to tell Rochambeau the good news.

  * * *

  • • •

  I HAVE NEVER SEEN A MAN more overcome with great and sincere joy than was General Washington,” the Duc de Lauzun wrote with wonder. “His features, his physiognomy, his deportment,” Guillaume de Deux-Ponts remembered, “all were changed in an instant. He put aside his character as arbiter of North America and contented himself for the moment with that of a citizen, happy at the good fortune of his country. A child, whose every wish had been gratified, would not have experienced a sensation more lively, and I believe that I am doing honor to the feelings of this rare man in endeavoring to express all their ardor.”

  The cutter nudged up to the wharf, and Rochambeau and Washington “embraced warmly on the shore.” Soon the news had spread to both armies. “The soldiers from then on spoke of Lord Cornwallis as if they had already captured him,” Baron von Closen observed, adding ominously, “one must not count his chickens before they are hatched.”

  * * *

  • • •

  EVEN BEFORE WASHINGTON learned of de Grasse’s arrival in the Chesapeake, Henry Clinton had received disturbing intelligence of the sighting of a large French fleet off the American coast. And then on September 6, the day after Washington and Rochambeau’s emotional embrace, he received a fifteen-word message from Cornwallis written in cipher on a note of Continental currency: “An enemy’s fleet within the Capes, between 30 and 40 ships of war, mostly large.”

  “I can have no doubt that Washington is moving with at least 6000 French and rebel troops against you,” Clinton responded on September 6. “I think the best way to relieve you is to join you as soon as possible, with all the force that can be spared from hence, which is about 4000 men.” Washington might have gotten the jump on him, but since Clinton had access to troop transports, he could still get an army of reinforcements to Cornwallis before the arrival of the American and French land forces. The only problem was the issue of naval superiority. If the French fleet was as large as Cornwallis claimed, Clinton could not set out until he knew that Graves and Hood had met and defeated de Grasse. Clinton assured Cornwallis that the reinforcements “are already embarked and will proceed the instant I receive information from the admiral that we may venture.” Washington had outgeneraled Clinton for the moment, but all it would take was a British naval victory to turn the tables on the enemy, and as Frederick Mackenzie recorded in his journal, “There is little doubt [that] an action must ensue.”

  While the citizens of Philadelphia applauded and cheered, a whole different mood gripped the British high command in New York. “This is an hour of anxiety!” the loyalist William Smith wrote on September 4. “A week will decide perhaps the ruin or salvation of the British Empire!”

  * * *

  • • •

  BY SEPTEMBER 6, Washington was at the wide tidal creek Head of Elk, where a fleet of eighty vessels, including eighteen schooners, twelve sloops, and a few dozen smaller vessels, most of them oyster boats, had been appropriated for use by the allied army. There weren’t enough vessels to come close to accommodating both armies, but given that the British had done their best to destroy as many watercraft as possible on the bay, this “mosquito fleet” was not a bad showing. Soon 1450 Continentals and their equipment began boarding; in the days to come another 1200 French soldiers and their artillery would be loaded aboard, leaving 4000 French and 1000 American soldiers to start the march to Baltimore and beyond that Annapolis, where it was hoped additional shipping could be secured from de Grasse.

  Already word of the impending campaign against Cornwallis had started to spread across the nation. “The country through which we have passed,” Washington’s aide Jonathan Trumbull wrote, “[was] greatly pleased with the prospect of our expedition.” That morning Washington officially announced the news of de Grasse’s arrival to his troops. “As no circumstance could possibly have happened more opportunely in point of time,” the general orders of the day read, “no prospect could ever have promised more important successes, and nothing but our want of exertions can probably blast the pleasing prospects before us. The general calls upon all the gallant officers, the brave and faithful soldiers he has the honor to command to exert their utmost abilities in the cause of the country and to share with him (with their usual alacrity) the difficulties, dangers, and glory of the present enterprise.”

  In truth, Washington realized that many of his “brave and faithful soldiers” had reached the breaking point. As the American army marched through Philadelphia, Robert Morris had worriedly noticed “great symptoms of discontent” among the ranks. Desertions were on the rise and might become wholesale if Morris didn’t come up with the money Washington had requested to pay the soldiers a month’s salary. Before he continued on to Virginia, Washington felt compelled to remind Morris “in the warmest terms to send on a month’s pay at least, with all the expedition possible. I wish it come on the Wings of speed.”

  From Morris’s perspective, the most important part of the news about de Grasse’s arrival in the Chesapeake was knowing the admiral had the 500,000 pesos collected by Saavedra in Havana. With that amount of money waiting for the French army in Virginia, Rochambeau was now willing to loan Morris the twenty-five thousand dollars in coins needed to pay Washington’s soldiers. Not only were the French providing the United States with a navy, they were paying its army. The day after Washington reached out to Morris, kegs of silver dollars began to arrive at Head of Elk. The soldiers watched in wonder as the paymaster knocked the heads off the barrels and the coins spilled out across the ground. “I received the only pay that I ever drew for my service during the war,” thirteen-year-old private John Hudson of the First New York Regiment later remembered, “six French crowns.”

  By September 8, Washington was on his way to Baltimore, a ride of sixty miles that he completed in a single day. “Great joy in town,” Jonathan Trumbull noted, “illuminations, addresses, etc.” Washington was determined to keep pushing south. Although Williamsburg (where Lafayette was now headquartered)
was his ultimate destination, he had decided to visit Mount Vernon on the way. Both Nathanael Greene and Lafayette had stopped there during recent trips through the state, and Washington now longed to see the patch of ground that meant more to him than any in the world, a place he had not set eyes on in six years and four months.

  So much had happened during those years—both throughout the United States and at Mount Vernon. Even before he married Martha, he had doubled the size of the house by adding a story. In 1773, he had decided to embark on a second major renovation, which would double the house’s size once again with the addition of two large spaces at either end while adding the features that have come to define what we think of today as Mount Vernon: a central pediment in the front, a cupola on top, covered arcades (which Washington called “ways”) connecting the sides of the house to buildings on either side of it, and a relatively new architectural feature for the late eighteenth century—a piazza on the back overlooking the river. More than a decade after shifting the orientation of the house inland, Washington had decided, at long last, to provide himself with a view of the Potomac.

  With the outbreak of the war in 1775, it seemed ludicrous (at least to his caretaker Lund Washington) to continue with these costly and very complicated plans for a house that might be burned to the ground by the enemy at any moment, particularly since its owner was notorious as the leader of the American army. But Washington pushed forward with the renovations, badgering Lund with a ceaseless stream of instructions and questions.

  It was when Washington’s fortunes were at their lowest that he hungered most greedily for news of his distant and much loved house. In September 1776, after losing the Battle of Long Island and on the verge of being forced to retreat across New Jersey to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, he had written Lund an extraordinary letter in which he admitted to never having been “in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born,” only to turn his thoughts to the new room being built on the north end of the house. “The chimney . . . should be exactly in the middle of it, the doors and everything else to be exactly answerable and uniform—in short the whole executed in a masterly manner.” The following year, after losing Philadelphia to the British and undergoing the tortuous political machinations surrounding the Conway Cabal as his troops languished at Valley Forge, he remotely oversaw the construction of the cupola and piazza. By March 1781, amid the frustrations of the failed Destouches expedition and myriad other woes, he had written his most recent existing letter about Mount Vernon: “Is your cover[ed] ways done?” he had plaintively asked Lund. “What are you going about next? Have you any prospect of getting paint and oil? Are you going to repair the pavements of the piazza? . . . An account of these things would be satisfactory to me, and infinitely amusing in the recital, as I have these kind of improvements very much at heart.”

  On the night of September 8, with Baltimore in a jubilant uproar, he resolved to leave early the next morning for Mount Vernon, another sixty miles away.

  * * *

  • • •

  SO AS TO TRAVEL as quickly as possible, he brought with him only a single aide, David Humphreys, as well as his enslaved manservant Billy Lee, who had been at his side throughout the war. The rest of his military family would catch up to them at Mount Vernon the following day, as would Rochambeau and his entourage.

  All along the dusty road, past Annapolis, and across the Potomac into Virginia, Washington was pleased to observe what he described, in a letter to Maryland governor Thomas Sim Lee, as “a spirit of exertion.” At long last, the American people were taking an interest in the outcome of the war.

  By evening, in the last light of day, after riding a total of 120 miles in forty-eight hours (a figure Washington proudly noted in his diary), he made the familiar turn to Mount Vernon. Over the course of the last six years he had ordered Lund to supervise the replanting of trees on either side of the house so that it no longer stood alone on the top of its bare hill. He must have looked with a certain satisfaction on the changes he had made to the house. Thanks to the angular formality of the new pediment projecting from the roof (with an oval “oxeye” window in the center) and the cupola rising above, the horizontal additions were now balanced by a much needed upward reach into the sky above.

  His first series of renovations, started back in 1758, had turned Mount Vernon into a conventional southern house. But now it was something else altogether: a wonderfully idiosyncratic (Washington called it “not quite orthodox”) expression of a planter who, after being denied the English education of his father and half brother, had fully embraced the wayward freedom of a country at the edge of a wilderness. His neighbor Bryan Fairfax had been immediately struck by the changes Washington had made, writing in the spring of 1778, “I like the house because it is uncommon for there has always appeared too great a sameness in our buildings.”

  We know that Washington found the time that evening to write a letter requesting that the local militia be immediately employed in improving the roads in anticipation of the army’s supply train of 1500 horses, 800 oxen, and 220 wagons. But we know nothing else of his first night at Mount Vernon. In addition to Martha and his stepson Jacky Custis and Jacky’s wife, Eleanor, there were four new grandchildren—three girls and an infant boy—all of whom had been born since the beginning of the war.

  The house renovations were by no means finished—the large public room in the north end of the house had not even been plastered. The new roof had already begun to leak and much else was left undone, but at some point he must have taken a seat on his new piazza with its soaring, two-story-high columns and looked out on the starlit serenity of the Potomac. Now, twenty-two years after the renovations that had turned the house away from the river, he was able to gaze upon its waters with the knowledge that more than 150 miles to the southeast a fleet of French warships was anchored just inside Cape Henry.

  By the next afternoon, the rest of Washington’s military family had arrived; later that evening came Rochambeau and the following day General Chastellux and his retinue. “A numerous family now present,” Trumbull recorded on September 11. “All accommodated. An elegant seat and situation, great appearance of opulence and real exhibitions of hospitality and princely entertainment.” At one point Washington wrote to Lafayette about their travel plans, adding in an uncharacteristically cheerful postscript, “I hope you will keep Lord Cornwallis safe, without provisions or forage until we arrive. Adieu.”

  After a day of rest on September 12, Washington left for Williamsburg, still more than 150 miles away. He had gone only 15 or so miles when, halfway between the towns of Colchester and Dumfries, he received an express. “The French were gone out from the bay in pursuit of the English,” Trumbull recorded. What had happened after that “was not known.”

  Suddenly all vestiges of the elation Washington had felt the previous week had vanished. If the French fleet had been beaten and the British regained control of the Chesapeake, the dozens upon dozens of allied vessels heading down the bay were at risk. He must order them to seek shelter until the results of the battle were known. Trumbull had only two words to describe Washington’s response to the news: “Much agitated.”

  On they rode through the familiar countryside toward Williamsburg, not knowing what lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Ligne de Vitesse”

  ON AUGUST 30, 1781, Admiral de Grasse’s squadron of twenty-eight ships of the line and five frigates sailed into the Chesapeake. Finally, after three years of trying, the French had established naval superiority along a portion of the North American coast.

  By assembling a fleet of close to thirty ships of the line and successfully anchoring them inside the Chesapeake, de Grasse had made possible what looked to be a great victory. As Louis Lebègue Duportail, the engineer Washington had sent to the Chesapeake to prepare for the army’s arrival, wrote from the Ville de Paris, de Grasse’s flagship, on September 4, “We must
take Lord Cornwallis or be all dishonored.”

  And yet the French fleet still faced at least one significant challenge. It was only a matter of time before the British sent a large fleet of their own to the Chesapeake. De Grasse’s highest priority was to prepare for that inevitable confrontation. He must keep his fleet of battleships poised and ready at the bay entrance while his frigates patrolled the waters beyond the Virginia capes for any signs of the enemy. Once Washington and Rochambeau reached Virginia, it would then be time to cooperate with the land forces in securing Cornwallis’s defeat. Until that point (which was weeks away), his fleet must remain ever vigilant at the bay entrance, since to lose control of the Chesapeake was to lose everything.

  Almost a decade before, during a training cruise off the coast of France, de Grasse had impressed his superiors as “the best skilled captain in the squadron.” But there had been a caveat. “His frequent collisions with other ships during the cruise seems to demand something more perfect in his estimate of a situation at a glance.” As Washington would come to recognize in the weeks ahead, de Grasse’s considerable talents as a naval commander were “marred by his own impetuosity.”

  Even before his fleet had dropped anchor, de Grasse was preparing to disembark the more than three thousand soldiers under the command of the Comte de Saint-Simon. “Feeling the full cost of time,” de Grasse longed to begin the assault on the British posts at Yorktown and Gloucester and even considered attacking Cornwallis before the arrival of the armies from the north. Luckily, a conversation with Duportail convinced him that the enemy’s fortified positions “shall be forced with difficulty,” and that he better wait for Washington and Rochambeau. Once the two generals had arrived in Williamsburg and joined with the army under Lafayette, the allied land forces could begin the thirteen-mile march across the peninsula formed by the James and York rivers to Yorktown.