In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  ROBERT MORRIS: Without Morris’s personal financial support, Washington would have never been able to get the Continental army to Yorktown. When Washington became president, he offered Morris the post of secretary of the treasury, a position Morris chose to decline (and which ultimately went, at his recommendation, to Alexander Hamilton) in favor of serving in the U.S. Senate. Morris’s vast financial empire collapsed in the Panic of 1797, and he was ultimately forced into debtor’s prison. Not until Congress passed the Bankruptcy Act of 1800 was he able to secure his release, and he died in Philadelphia on May 8, 1806, at the age of seventy-two.

  CHARLES O’HARA: Having served as Cornwallis’s surrogate during the surrender ceremony at Yorktown, O’Hara declined his lordship’s invitation to accompany him to India, ultimately serving as military governor at Gibraltar. In 1793, he led British forces in the unsuccessful defense of Fort Mulgrave in Toulon, where he was captured by the young Napoleon. After several years imprisoned in Luxembourg and Paris, O’Hara was exchanged for Rochambeau’s son, and resumed his role as governor-general of Gibraltar, where his many affairs and passel of illegitimate children earned him the title Cock of the Rock. He died on February 21, 1802, at age sixty-one.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE DONATIEN DE VIMEUR, COMTE DE ROCHAMBEAU: On his return to France, Rochambeau was made governor of Picardy. He initially supported the Revolution and led the French army against the Austrians. After suffering several defeats and becoming disenchanted with the violent direction the Revolution had taken, he resigned from the army in 1792. In 1794, he was arrested and if not for the death of Robespierre, would have in all likelihood been guillotined. He withdrew to his home in Vendôme, and in 1804 was appointed to the Legion of Honor by Napoleon. On May 10, 1807, he died at Thoré, at age eighty-one.

  GEORGE RODNEY: Rodney returned to England a hero, only to have his conduct at St. Eustatius during the winter of 1781 destroy his life. In 1785, Britain’s High Court of Appeals for Prizes determined that Rodney must repay the island merchants for the goods he’d seized, a verdict that left him financially ruined. By then his repeated infidelities had prompted his second wife to leave him, and he died on May 24, 1792, in his son’s home, at the age of seventy-four. Erratic, self-centered, and overbearing, Rodney was nonetheless one of Britain’s greatest admirals, and Americans owe their independence, in part, to his not having been in command of the British fleet at the Battle of the Chesapeake.

  FRANCISCO SAAVEDRA DE SANGRONIS: When Spain decided not to invade Jamaica after de Grasse’s defeat at the Battle of the Saintes, Saavedra was assigned to Venezuela, where he served until 1788, when he returned to Spain. In 1797, he was appointed minister of finance, where he helped create the Bank of Amortization before being named minister of state. A serious illness required him to retire soon after, but when France invaded Spain in 1808, he returned to public service. He died on November 25, 1819, at the age of seventy-three, the largely unheralded Spanish emissary who had provided the often impetuous Admiral de Grasse with the ships, money, and organizational principles needed to achieve victory both on the Chesapeake and at Yorktown.

  FRIEDRICH VON STEUBEN: Although von Steuben’s performance in Virginia in 1780–1781 was marred by controversy, he had been indispensable three years earlier at Valley Forge, when he instilled much needed discipline and order in the Continental army. After commanding a division at the Siege of Yorktown, he assisted in the demobilization of the American forces until his discharge in March 1784. Along with Henry Knox, he took a leading role in the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati. He became an American citizen, and on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1780s, he appealed to Congress for financial assistance and was granted an annual pension of $2800 (about $55,430 today). He retired to a farm in Remsen, New York, where he died on November 28, 1794, at age sixty-four.

  BANASTRE TARLETON: It’s safe to say that no British officer (with the exception of Benedict Arnold) was as thoroughly despised by his American opponents as Tarleton. Fearing reprisals after Cornwallis’s surrender, he requested and received protection from the French; at one point he suffered the indignity of having his horse taken from him by its Virginian owner. Once back in England, however, he received a hero’s welcome. He became an intimate friend of the king’s dissolute eldest son and heir to the throne and boasted frequently of his conquests, both in battle and in the bedroom. In addition to unfairly criticizing Cornwallis in his self-congratulatory memoir of the war, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, Tarleton made a bitter enemy of the future Duke of Wellington. While many of his fellow officers served with great glory in the Napoleonic Wars, he languished in England. When his friend the Prince Regent became George IV, Tarleton was belatedly awarded the Order of the Bath. He died on January 16, 1833, at age seventy-eight.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON: Although he made much of his desire to retire to his “vine and fig tree” at Mount Vernon, the ever restless Washington soon began to pursue his dream of connecting the east to the west via the Potomac River by building a series of canals and locks under the direction of the Potomac Company—what would be accomplished forty years later with the completion of the Erie Canal. His central role in the Revolutionary War made it inevitable that he be called to serve his country once again. In 1787, he presided over the Constitutional Convention, and in 1788, he was elected the country’s first president. During the eight years of his presidency, he made sure to visit all thirteen states in an effort to create a greater sense of national solidarity. In the fall of 1796, he announced he would not be seeking a third term and was soon back at Mount Vernon for good.

  Around that time, he was visited by the young architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who had recently arrived in America from England. “Washington has something uncommonly majestic and commanding in his walk, his address, his figure and his countenance,” Latrobe recorded in his journal. “His face is characterized however more by intense and powerful thought, than by quick and fiery conception. There is a mildness about its expression; and an air of reserve in his manner lowers its tone still more. He is 64, but appears some years younger, and has sufficient apparent vigor to last many years yet.” As it turned out, Washington had just three years left to live.

  As Latrobe had sensed, Washington’s genius had to do with intensity and perseverance rather than the quick flashes of brilliance that characterized the jittery virtuosity of a Hamilton. No one had Washington’s ability to sort through the distractions of life and recognize what really mattered, and no one had his capacity to learn under some of the most challenging conditions a leader has ever known. In the beginning of the war he had come to understand that the dangers of a disastrous defeat far outweighed the promise of an overwhelming victory and that it was in his country’s best interests that he fight a primarily defensive war—a difficult, even agonizing decision given Washington’s naturally aggressive temperament. With the entry of France into the war in 1778, he saw that naval superiority was the key to an allied victory. For the next three years he pursued that goal with a single-minded determination that ultimately led to victory at Yorktown, even if it required him to pay deference to the often maddening demands of the French. With the arrival of peace, he recognized that the future of the country depended on a strong central government; once a new constitution was in place, he dedicated the next eight years to inventing the office of the presidency. By the end of his life he’d realized that the greatest threat to the country’s future came from slavery.

  During the Revolutionary War he had paid lip service to efforts to eradicate the institution and had even flirted with the idea of ridding himself of his own slaves in 1779. In each instance, however, he had continued to behave like a Virginia slave owner, insisting on the retrieval of escaped slaves at Yorktown in 1781 and at New York in 1783, and taking extraordinary (though unsuccessful) measures during his final year as president to retrieve the enslaved man and woman who had fled from his household in Philadelphia. This did not
prevent him from recognizing slavery’s pernicious effects. “I can clearly foresee,” Jefferson overheard him say, “that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union.” If slavery should ever come to divide the United States, he insisted, in an eerily clairvoyant anticipation of the Civil War, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the Northern [portion].” Washington, it is clear, would have never gone the way of Robert E. Lee. But what could he do at this late stage of his life to make his position known? He could change his will.

  In July 1799, he retired to his study and set to work. Of the 317 slaves at Mount Vernon, he owned only 124 outright. Forty were rented from a neighbor, and the rest, 153, were the property of the Custis estate and were to be inherited by Martha’s grandson on her death. At the very least, Washington could free his own slaves, thus becoming the only slaveholding Founding Father to do so.

  In December of that year, after a five-hour ride across his property in a freezing rain, he came down with a sore throat. Within a few days, his throat was so constricted that he could barely breathe. His old friend, the physician James Craik, was called for, but none of the traditional treatments, which included bleeding, did any good. “Doctor,” Washington said at one point, “I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.” He maintained a stoic calm until the very end and passed away on December 14, 1799, while taking his own pulse. He was sixty-seven.

  George Washington and his enslaved manservant Billy Lee beside the Hudson River with the fortress at West Point in the background. Washington became intimately familiar with the Hudson over the course of the war, often taking the helm of the vessel that was transporting his entourage up or down the river.

  The Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French Expédition Particulière. In the summer of 1780, a year after arriving at Newport, Rhode Island, Rochambeau and his army joined Washington at White Plains for the long march to Yorktown.

  François Jean de Beauvoir Chastellux visited Washington’s headquarters in November 1780 and was greatly impressed by the American commander in chief. The following spring he provided Washington with information about the French fleet under the command of the Comte de Grasse that Rochambeau had been ordered to withhold from the Americans.

  The French cavalry officer Duc de Lauzun also visited Washington at his headquarters on the Hudson and bore witness to the American commander’s frustrations with the French high command.

  Sir Henry Clinton, commander of the British forces in North America. As a subordinate of Thomas Gage and William Howe, Clinton had been full of daring and imaginative ideas, but once he became commander in chief he grew considerably less adventuresome, never straying from his base at New York City throughout the year of Yorktown.

  As secretary of state for the colonies, George Germain oversaw the British war effort in North America. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, he clung to the mistaken belief that most Americans remained loyal to the king and, if given the opportunity, would rise up to free themselves from patriot oppression.

  King George III in 1771, ten years before Britain suffered her crushing defeat at Yorktown.

  Raised as a Quaker in Rhode Island, Nathanael Greene proved to be one of the great strategists of the Revolutionary War. Although he never achieved victory on the battlefield, his pugnacious presence in North and South Carolina helped to lay the groundwork for the victory at Yorktown.

  While Greene battled the British in the Carolinas, Friedrich von Steuben remained in Virginia, where he helped to assemble the troops and provisions needed by the American army to the south.

  Daniel Morgan achieved one of the most spectacular victories of the war by defeating Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, in January 1781. A series of health problems forced him to retire to his home in Virginia before the Battle of Guilford Courthouse two months later.

  Before his defeat at Cowpens, the British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton had established a reputation for brutality and arrogance that made him one of the most hated men in America.

  Tarleton may have been despised, but no one could match the traitor Benedict Arnold when it came to arousing the passions of the American people. By sending Arnold, a newly minted British general, to Virginia in December 1780, Sir Henry Clinton initiated the movement of troops that would culminate in Lord Charles Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown less than a year later.

  Jaeger captain Johann Ewald, shown here at the end of his long and distinguished career, served under both Benedict Arnold and Lord Cornwallis during the British campaign in Virginia in 1781.

  Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson’s curiously lackadaisical response to Benedict Arnold’s appearance at the mouth of the James River in January 1781 would remain a source of controversy throughout his long political career.

  A fashionable Parisian woman wearing what was known as the “Belle Poule” hairstyle in tribute to the French frigate that took on a much larger British ship off the coast of Brittany in June 1778, soon after France’s entry into the war.

  This sketch made by an allied spy detailing the position of the British fleet anchored off Gardiners Island near Montauk, Long Island, was sent to Washington by Rochambeau on February 16, 1781.

  Mariot Arbuthnot, commander of the British fleet at the Battle of Cape Henry on March 16, 1781. Although French admiral Charles Destouches got the better of him in that instance, Arbuthnot was still able to save a besieged Benedict Arnold at Portsmouth, Virginia, six months before British general Cornwallis found himself in a similar situation at Yorktown.

  A series of diagrams made under the direction of French commander Destouches detailing the encounter between the French and British fleets at the Battle of Cape Henry.

  An engraving of the French grenadier aboard the Conquérant who lost a leg to a British cannon ball during the Battle of Cape Henry. According to one account, the soldier cried out, “Thank heaven I still have two arms and a leg to serve my King!”

  The French fleet anchored in Newport harbor in the spring of 1781 soon after its return from the Battle of Cape Henry.

  Although Lord Cornwallis was just the kind of aggressive officer the ministry in London wanted, his reckless pursuit of Nathanael Greene across North Carolina, followed by the bloody Battle of Guilford Courthouse on March 15, 1781, marked the beginning of the end for British fortunes in the south.

  Some of Cornwallis’s desperate aggression in North Carolina may have been in response to the death of his beautiful wife, Jemima, which, he claimed, had “effectually destroyed all my hopes of happiness in this world.”

  British General Charles O’Hara commanded the elite Guards in Cornwallis’s army and served as his commander’s surrogate during the surrender ceremony at Yorktown.

  Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee’s cavalry jousted repeatedly with Tarleton’s dragoons during the Race to the Dan. His youngest son, Robert E. Lee, would lead the Confederate forces during the Civil War.

  Before France could send a fleet from the Caribbean to North America, she had to attend to the needs of her ally Spain by supporting General Bernardo de Gálvez’s attack on the British outpost at Pensacola, Florida. When Gálvez succeeded in defeating the British on May 8, 1781, the way was clear for the French naval commander Comte de Grasse to begin planning an expedition to the north.

  Francisco Saavedra, the largely unheralded Spanish emissary who assisted both General Gálvez and Admiral de Grasse with the complicated financial and logistical details that proved essential to their successes.

  By arriving at Chesapeake Bay with twenty-eight ships of the line, the Comte de Grasse virtually ensured the capture of Cornwallis’s army. However, his insistence on initiating operations against the British army left him ill prepared
for the arrival of the fleet commanded by Thomas Graves. As Washington remarked, de Grasse’s considerable talents were “marred by his own impetuosity.”

  Although history has named de Grasse the hero of the Battle of the Chesapeake, it was Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and the French vanguard that did most of the fighting. As even de Grasse admitted, “the honors of the day” belonged to Bougainville.

  Admiral George Rodney, though a difficult, irascible leader, was one of Britain’s greatest naval commanders. Health problems, however, prevented him from participating in the Battle of the Chesapeake.

  With Rodney on his way to England for medical attention, command of the British fleet devolved to the less talented Thomas Graves.