The awful Valley Forge winter birthed many other dreams. The restless Colonel Armand decided that he must soon strike out on his own and, with Washington’s permission and Lafayette’s encouragement, petitioned Congress to raise and equip his own regiment. He began by taking some captured Hessians and other German-speakers who wished to serve the United States but had not been integrated to the Valley Forge fraternity. De la Balme, offended because Congress had appointed Pulaski as chief of America’s cavalry, in addition to starting to raise a similar independent regiment drew up plans to create a village for artisans just outside Philadelphia, where he would offer work to those in the countryside whose lives had been disrupted by the British occupation. In an advertisement he sought as candidates “Soldiers, Sailors, Deserters from any Troops (except the America Army and French Navy) Carpenters, Bakers, etc., of any Number” to work for “Good Wages, Victuals, Lodgings, Fuel, Candles and Washing.”
Steuben, in full military dress, conducted drill exercises twice a day and became beloved by the soldiers for cursing at them in three languages while molding them into units able to obey orders, which would eventually help them perform under enemy fire without breaking ranks, which some had done at Brandywine and Germantown. Among Steuben’s teachings was the use of the bayonet, which most Americans had not employed in battle even when there was opportunity to do so.
Steuben clashed a bit with Duportail on the design of the camp and its defenses, finding redoubts unfinished and other problems. Laurens wrote to his father, “The repeated cavils of some general officers have driven the engineer … to substitute lines to redoubts in fortifying the camp, whereby the labor of the soldier was greatly augmented.” Steuben also had disagreements with a Philadelphia physician over the proper sanitary and cooking facilities for the camp, but both agreed that latrines should be at one end, near the river, and cook tents at the other.
Gates himself gave Steuben little difficulty, writing to him, just after he had begun to train the soldiers, “Considering the few Moments that is left for us for this necessary Work, I should rather recommend the Discipline of the Leggs, than the Firelocks or the Hands; the preservation of Order at all Times is essentially necessary. It leads to Victory, it Secures a Retreat, it Saves a Country.”
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If the wisest of leaders is the one who chooses to listen to the broadest range of counsel, then the most closely listened to of those counselors is the one who speaks the truth even when that truth is painful. On April 20, 1778, Washington, as he habitually did when faced with an important decision, requested opinions from senior officers. Which of three plans for the near future should he adopt? One was to attempt to retake Philadelphia, the second was to attack New York while the British were still in Philadelphia, and the third was “remaining quiet in a secure, fortified Camp, disciplining and arranging the army, ’till the enemy begin their operations.”
The query was put at a moment when Washington finally had in camp the strategic counsel he had longed for, and it made itself known in the differing recommendations. While the American officers all urged making an attack on Philadelphia, the Europeans Lafayette, Duportail, and Steuben counseled against doing so (de Kalb was not present). The most persuasively argued of the essays was Duportail’s, mainly because it was brutally honest: “We were beaten at Brandywine—we were beaten at German Town altho’ we had immense advantage of a complete Surprise.… The diminution from Battle and principally sickness and Desertion, has been half the army.” These tough truths were prelude to Duportail’s recommendation, a strategy based specifically on Fabius’s against Hannibal: “To defend the country inch by inch, to endeavor to hinder the enemy from rendering himself master of it, consequently never to receive him but when we are protected by a natural or artificial fortification, in other words to carry on what is styled a defensive war.” Duportail advocated allowing the British to evacuate Philadelphia, and henceforth to give battle only under conditions that would ensure American success, namely, when small units could attack discrete sections of enemy forces.
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The failure of the Albany expedition and the growing consensus in Congress that Washington needed to be supported rather than replaced persuaded Gates to resign as head of the Board of War and thereafter to attempt to be a more properly deferential subordinate to Washington. In April, after Conway wrote Washington demanding the command of a division and the chief refused it, Gates and Mifflin did not intervene on Conway’s behalf. Conway submitted his resignation. This time Congress accepted it and awarded Steuben the title of inspector general, also appointing him a major general and arranging for his pay.
Late that month Simeon Deane arrived in America with the documents of the Franco-American alliance. By May 2, when Simeon reached York to officially present the treaties to Congress for ratification, news of his and their arrival had preceded him, as had the news that Great Britain had declared war on France. That last news eliminated any congressional reluctance to sign the treaties, and they were ratified on May 4. Some congressmen professed amazement at the generosity of the French terms—no territorial demands, nothing that was not commensurate with full and complete independence of the United States of America.
Washington shared the news of the alliance with his officers. Tears of joy streamed down Lafayette’s face, and the reactions of the other French reflected their mingled senses of relief, pride in their country, and exultation. On May 6 a stirring daylong celebration was held at Valley Forge. Under Steuben’s direction the army executed some fancy maneuvers, its divisions commanded by Stirling, Lafayette, and de Kalb. At Lafayette’s request, that day Washington granted clemency to two soldiers who had been sentenced to die. There was the ceremonial feu de joie musket firing. Its spectacular, near-continuous noise and smoke made Gates hold his hands over his ears. At the end of the day each soldier was given a gill of rum.
Then the war council of the generals, in a unanimous decision, adopted the Duportail-Lafayette-Steuben recommendation on what to do about the British in Philadelphia: they voted not to attack them there, nor to shift their focus to New York for actions, but rather to apply their energies to augmenting and equipping the army for the approaching campaigns, in which they dared hope that the French military would join.
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On May 18, at Walnut Grove in Philadelphia, the British army held an extravagant celebration in honor of the departing General Howe—and in defiance of the new Franco-American treaty. The Mischianza, as the event was titled, was organized mainly by Captain John André, twenty-eight, a favorite of Howe’s who was also a poet, actor, and artist. It followed in a tradition of army-written entertainments for the troops, notably Burgoyne’s The Blockade of Boston, presented during the siege of that city in 1776. The Mischianza (the word means “medley” in Italian) featured a parade, a regatta, a seventeen-gun salute, a jousting tournament, a dancing ball and banquet for 430, and fireworks, only briefly interrupted by a foray of a few Continental soldiers. The guests included the general’s brother, Admiral Richard Howe, the general’s successor, Clinton, and most of Tory Philadelphia, although not the general’s mistress, Mrs. Elizabeth Loring. Much work went into painting backdrops, building wooden triumphal arches, and arranging costumes and the jousting tournament. As André described it:
On the front seat of each pavilion were placed seven of the principal young ladies … in Turkish habits, and wearing in their turbans the favors with which they meant to reward the several knights who were to contend in their honor.… A band of knights, dressed in ancient habits of white and red silk, and mounted on gray horses, richly caparisoned in trappings of the same colors, entered the list, attended by their esquires on foot.… [On one’s] tunic was the device of his band; two roses intertwined, with the motto, We droop when separated.… Two young black slaves, with sashes and drawers of blue and white silk, wearing large silver clasps round their necks and arms, their breasts and shoulders bare, held [a knight’s] stirrups.
/> A display of excess, braggadocio, and nostalgia for a long-gone era, the event was far removed from the reality of the impending British retreat. When news of the Mischianza reached London, the Chronicle described the festivities as “nauseous,” and the Gentlemen’s Magazine as “dancing at a funeral, or [at] the brink of a grave.”
General Howe postponed his departure from Philadelphia after a rebel turncoat revealed that Lafayette and a contingent of several thousand troops had taken a position that exposed the marquis to capture. Howe lusted after the pleasure of seizing the French firebrand and taking him back to London in irons. The general even invited some Philadelphia ladies to dine with Lafayette and him the next evening, and with his brother rode out in a carriage to be voyeurs at the hunt.
Washington had given Lafayette permission to harass the British retreat but instructed him to take extra care in doing so because the loss of the 2,200 troops he led would cripple the army. To assure Lafayette’s safety Washington sent along Morgan’s sharpshooters. But Lafayette’s choice of encampments left him and his forces vulnerable to 8,000 British and Hessian troops and fifteen field pieces, which by dawn on May 20 had nearly surrounded the Americans bivouacked on Barren Hill, a promontory above the Schuylkill.
Lafayette, upon realizing that the enemy was near and in force, decreed several ruses to confuse the British. Parceling out small contingents of soldiers and a few cannons to each of several forested sites adjoining the barren hill, he ordered the troops to fire extravagantly at the British and then quickly move to another site and do the same. It was an attempt to trick the enemy into thinking that there were more Americans than there actually were. He also unleashed fifty warpainted Oneida to whoop as they attacked an approximately equal number of British cavalry. Lafayette ordered the main body of his troops down a defile to the Schuylkill and across the river, then running at a depth of four feet. Steuben’s training made possible the troops’ quick and disciplined retreat. When most had crossed to safety, Lafayette and a contingent of snipers took a position at the ford and with accurate fire deterred the British from following. So did the sound of big guns booming from Valley Forge, where officers had learned of the continuing engagement and touched off cannons to summon troops to Lafayette’s rescue.
General Howe did not ignore this obvious signal; deciding not to risk a larger engagement, he ordered the British back to Philadelphia. After this failure, he departed for Great Britain and Clinton’s forces prepared to leave Philadelphia. Clinton had brought with him new orders to send divisions to Nova Scotia and to attack St. Lucia, a French Caribbean outpost. Since the dispatch of these troops would seriously diminish his forces in America, Clinton decided to keep them all together until they reached New York and then to disperse them.
The Carlisle commissioners were already in New York, their ship’s destination having been changed for reasons revealed to them only when they landed: Clinton was evacuating Philadelphia. They requested he delay doing so until they could present their peace plan to the Americans. He didn’t give them much time. On June 9 Washington’s men intercepted a messenger sent to York with that peace proposal, which was promptly forwarded to Congress. Its cover letter stated, “We trust that the inhabitants of North-America … will shrink from the thought of becoming an accession of force to our late mutual enemy, and will prefer a firm, free, and perpetual coalition with the parent state to an insincere and unnatural foreign alliance.”
This offensive notion was echoed by others in the letter and the document, to the point that when the letter was read to Congress, the members became so outraged that discussion was halted and the proposal itself not even read until after the weekend, when Congress summarily spurned it. Laurens did not then write to Carlisle to say so, but did put Congress’s reasoning in a letter to Washington: “Nothing but an earnest desire to spare the farther effusion of human blood could have induced [the Congress] to read a paper, containing expressions so disrespectful to his Most Christian Majesty [Louis XVI], the good and great ally of these states, or to consider propositions so derogatory to the honour of an independent nation.”
Because circumstances prevented the Carlisle commissioners from making their entreaties in person, Congress was deprived of the opportunity of learning from them their secret instructions, which empowered the commissioners, in the event that the Americans insisted on recognition of independence before negotiations, not to reject that idea out of hand but simply to refer it to London and while waiting for a reply to agree to an armistice.
On June 18 General Clinton’s troops finally evacuated Philadelphia by land and sea. He took several days to load his four hundred transports and set his troops on the road north. Washington, interpreting the slowness of the Clinton departure as an attempt to invite the Continental army into a general action that the British could easily win, refused to rise to the bait, proving yet again that one of the prime assets of a person of action is a reservoir of patience.
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After the Admiralty had permitted d’Estaing’s force to sail uncontested to America, it ordered Admiral August Keppel’s Home Fleet to keep tabs on the substantial French fleet at Brest, opposite the southwestern corner of England at the point where the English Channel widens into the Atlantic Ocean. D’Orvilliers’s fleet also had units out looking for the British, more to be aware of their movements than to engage in battle—after all, Vergennes had emphasized to him France’s need to induce the British to fire the first shots, since France had not yet declared war.
The British obliged on the afternoon of June 17, 1778. The frigate Belle Poule, now under the command of a new captain, scouting with three other French naval vessels for the location of Keppel’s fleet, found more than they were looking for: a formidable flotilla featuring twenty-one ships of the line. Keppel saw the four French vessels, but rather than surround them he directed four of his ships to intercept them individually; to the Arethusa he awarded the task of halting the Belle Poule.
While the three other French ships were quickly captured, the Belle Poule was not. The Arethusa fired the first salvo, the Belle Poule answered, and for four hours they engaged in an intense firefight. Each captain followed his rule book: The British aimed their cannon for the hull of their enemy while the French aimed theirs for the rigging. The result was a blood-soaked raw. The Belle Poule hastened toward Brest, 102 dead out of a crew of 230; the Arethusa, although having lost only 44 of 198, had more severe structural damage, requiring that it be towed.
A messenger from the Belle Poule took the action report to Versailles. Louis XVI’s council heard it and concluded that the Arethusa’s attack on the Belle Poule constituted that incident of British aggression for which Vergennes had been waiting, causing a state of war to come into existence between France and Great Britain. Louis objected only to language in the declaration holding George III personally responsible for Great Britain’s assaults; at Louis’s insistence the wording was changed. The attack and France’s declaration also meant that its secret, second treaty with the United States of America, the military one, was now in force and that the two countries had become more than trading friends; they were now military partners united against a common enemy, Great Britain.
The ship’s intrepid captain was lionized as France’s first hero of a new war, and some women at Versailles had their hair done up in a style thereafter known as “coëffure à la Belle Poule,” bouffant, and topped by a model of the frigate with miniature red, white, and blue sails.
PART FOUR
Together: First Steps
1778 –1779
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“Concerting my operations with a general of Your Excellency’s repute.”
—Comte d’Estaing
The desired consummation had been effected: France and the United States of America had become allies, united against a common enemy, and they had already had a success, chasing the British out of Philadelphia in the expectation of a French fleet’s arrival at America’s capital.
Lee discussed solutions to nonexistent problems with Lafayette while to Washington he offered only obstruction. When Washington’s council debated tactics against the British, Lee asserted that Washington’s prior Fabianism—employing the tactics of the Roman general Fabius, who by guerilla tactics had beaten Hannibal—had not worked, but he then made a case for a very Fabian maneuver, what Lafayette called a pont d’or (bridge of gold), to allow the British to exit New Jersey unimpeded. However, Lafayette, as well as Washington, Duportail, Greene, Wayne, and another general, John Cadwalader, were unwilling to pass up an opportunity to deal Clinton’s forces a telling blow.
Washington offered Lee command of the forces to fight Clinton’s. Lee declined, so Washington awarded command to Lafayette, with Wayne as his second. The next morning Lee changed his mind and begged all to reconsider. Washington did not want to, so Lee appealed to Lafayette: “I place my honor and fortune in your hands. You are too generous to make me lose either of them.” Lafayette succumbed to the flattery and Washington acceded to their decision.
How the French Saved America Page 14