During a four-hour truce the combatants collected their dead—in the hundreds for the French and Americans, less than a hundred among the British. D’Estaing, himself among the wounded, vetoed a Lincoln request to renew the assault. The admiral did continue the siege for another week but then felt compelled to reboard his troops and sail away. Shortly, several of his ships foundered in hurricanes and were lost with all hands. Additional large lots of French solders and sailors died from disease even after the fleet separated into several squadrons, some returning to the Caribbean, others (including d’Estaing’s and Noailles’s) to Europe, with three ships directed to winter over in Chesapeake Bay. De Grasse, upon reviewing the whole d’Estaing expedition, wrote, “Great God! It would have been necessary to have seen it to believe it, and in not saying the half, we would be thought to exaggerate and be partial.… The navy suffered a long time the fruits of that campaign.”
The failure to take Savannah put an ignominious end to the Franco-American campaign of 1779. In a report to Gérard, d’Estaing launched barbed arrows in every direction—at the former musketeer for the advice to go to Savannah, at Fontanges for telling him the American troops could do the job, at Lincoln for poor preparation and for not taking out the garrison at Beaufort, and at his own troops—he complained of not having enough regulars and having been forced to rely on “700 mulâtres et 200 hommes levés dans le rebut des vagabonds de St. Domingue” (seven hundred mulattoes and two hundred men lifted from the ranks of vagabonds at Saint-Domingue).
Lincoln, in his report to Congress made a point of lauding d’Estaing for bravery, courage, and for bothering to make the assault at all.
Because news from Savannah did not travel quickly, Clinton in New York, upon first learning that d’Estaing was near that city and figuring that he would next come north, made three decisions: First, not to dispatch four thousand men to the Caribbean, even though that would leave Jamaica undermanned in case of a potential Franco-Spanish assault. Second, to direct Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot’s fleet not to sail to the rescue of West Florida or British enclaves on the Gulf Coast but to remain in the New York area and prepare once more to defend Sandy Hook. Third, to abandon the garrison at Newport without a shot being fired.
But several months later, upon learning that Savannah remained in British hands and that d’Estaing’s fleet had once more quit the Atlantic Coast, Clinton and Arbuthnot made another decision: to mount an expedition aimed at wresting from rebel hands Charleston, the queen city of the South and the hub of its economic activity. On December 16, 1779, the vanguard of eight thousand British, Hessian, and Loyalist soldiers began to move onto transport ships in New York for a voyage that would take them to Savannah, from which they could mount an assault on Charleston.
PART FIVE
Together:
Struggling Through
1780 –1781
14
“The country that will hazard the most will get the advantage in this war.” —George III
By the turn of 1780 Lafayette had tired of living in Brest among idling troops and returned to Paris to do more to advance the American cause. Frustrated twice in attempts to visit Maurepas, on January 25 he pressed his case in writing:
The miscarriage of our great preparations in Europe, the defeat at Savannah, the [British] reconciliation with Ireland, perhaps the taking of Charleston: these are the events that will affect the credibility of the cause and the condition of American finances. The total ruin of commerce, the devastation of the coastal cities undertaken by small English corps, the very dangerous extension of British power in the southern states, offensive operations undertaken from New York.… These considerations … make our aid almost indispensable.
He was not asking for much for America, in his view, merely a well-equipped corps of six thousand in an appropriate number of warships—after all, France had allocated thirty thousand troops for the aborted invasion of Great Britain. He was less modest in suggesting for this corps a leader who knew both the French armed forces and the peculiarities of American commanders and political representatives—himself.
America needed the help. After five full years of war it teetered on the brink of exhaustion, the states unable to meet their quotas of new soldiers, and with many current ones unwilling to serve beyond their term of enlistment unless paid in a currency they could redeem for a reasonable amount of goods, something they then could not do because of the drastic devaluation of the Continental paper money. Beyond that problem was the resigned cynicism and spreading lethargy that William Bingham had found when after three years in the Caribbean he had recently returned to America: “The sentiments of the people in this country I found surprisingly altered since I left it,” he wrote to John Jay, lamenting citizens “no longer governed by that pure, disinterested patriotism, which distinguished the infancy of the contest; private Interest seemed to predominate over every other Consideration that regarded the public weal.”
As Lafayette intimated, Charleston was indeed in grave danger, now that Savannah had been taken and no French fleet prevented the British from moving troops along the Atlantic Coast. Having spent time in Charleston on first landing in the United States, he knew of its position in the country’s economy—one of the largest ports, a principal gateway for exportation of rice, tobacco, and indigo; should the British take Charleston, they might strangle the United States economically and push for an end to the war on their terms.
Lafayette’s friend John Laurens was just returning home to Charleston’s defense. The city had less protection from a seaborne invasion than did Philadelphia or Boston, mainly the natural barrier of a sandbar, augmented by a few cannons on a small fort on a peripheral island—no match for determined warships. The resident American navy squadron, even after the addition of the ships left by d’Estaing to overwinter in Chesapeake Bay, was only eight vessels. Three thousand Continental troops were on the way under the direction of de Kalb, but their march had been slowed to a crawl by the most terrible winter in America during the entire eighteenth century. Adding to Charleston’s woes, the South Carolina legislature again rebuffed Laurens’s proposal to enlist slaves in the army, even though the proposal would have freed the slaves only after they finished their service.
Laurens persuaded the American navy to sail him about to search for the British approach. They found it. Capturing horse transports and reading their manifests, Laurens learned that Clinton was on the way, with 140 vessels and many thousands of men—such a large force that Laurens considered the information suspect. When in mid-February the British fleet was sighted off Charleston, frantic exertions on the defenses followed, directed by two French engineers. In a March 4 note to Lincoln, one echoed the prevailing despair: “It is sorrowful for me to think that I will not be able to do more for this momentous place … with the means I have.” The navy fled, its commander contending that he could not adequately defend the sandbar. Washington in effect agreed, writing to Laurens, “The impracticability of defending the [sand]bar, I fear, amounts to the loss of the town and the garrison.” On April 8, at the time of the highest monthly tide, the unopposed British ships, after offloading cannon to lighten their drafts, passed the sandbar, entered the inner part of Charleston’s harbor, took up positions out of range of American cannon and began bombarding the city.
On April 25, Duportail, chief of America’s fledgling engineer corps, arrived at Charleston. A few Continental units had threaded their way to the city, but the British had been augmented by a second contingent from New York. Charleston was “in a desperate State, allmost intirely invested by the British Army & Fleet,” Duportail later recalled for Washington, adding that he had deemed the fall of the town “unavoidable” unless an Army arrived to the rescue.
Washington had advised Lincoln to trust Duportail completely, but when Duportail counseled Lincoln to evacuate the city because its safety could not be assured, Lincoln could not agree. He had already offered to surrender the city, so long as the Continental
forces were permitted to leave it with their weapons, and had been rebuffed. Duportail then asked permission to leave town. Lincoln refused—the engineer’s departure would dishearten the troops—so Duportail settled in to do what he could. Among the soldiers he discovered Pierre L’Enfant, still recovering from his Savannah burns. “I attached myself wherever I could do the most service,” L’Enfant recalled, working with Duportail and Laurens.
De Kalb’s troops were stuck in Virginia, more than four hundred miles north. Trying to acquire provisions, de Kalb, who had been a quartermaster in Europe, complained of the whole enterprise being “attended with many difficulties and delays which it was not in my power to remove as soon as I could have wished.”
On May 9 in Charleston, after a terrifying British bombardment, three hundred civilians begged Lincoln to renew negotiations. The Clinton and Arbuthnot surrender terms were very bad: the British forced the Continentals to march out on May 12 with their flags furled rather than unfurled, a procedure that rejected the usual military courtesy, and the British refused another usual courtesy, the parole of senior officers to their country’s capital, Philadelphia.
The loss of Charleston was the most devastating defeat for the Continental forces since the war began, with more than 5,500 regulars and militia taken prisoner, including Lincoln, Duportail, Laurens, and many other officers.
Laurens was granted a parole in place instead of being permitted to return to Philadelphia. It reduced him to a “state of inactivity [that was] the greatest and most humiliating misfortune of my life,” he wrote Washington. Many French officers were similarly paroled in place and endured what L’Enfant described as “hard captivity.” Although they did not have as harsh an imprisonment as the French and American soldiers who languished on prison ships in the harbor, they too were plagued by mosquitoes, inordinate heat, thirst, and hunger. “How many people have reproaches to hurl at Congress, at the state of Carolina, at Lincoln—I do not know who should consider themselves most to blame,” Duportail wrote to the French legation in Philadelphia. “Charleston could have been saved or, if the enemy was absolutely determined to have at it, at least they could have been made to evacuate New York.… In the sad situation in which I find myself such things become the objects of my meditation and the indignation they give me prevents me from falling into lethargy.”
Bingham wondered to Jay if losing Charleston was the “signal misfortune” that would finally rouse the populace to reinvigorated action. He himself took such action, in conjunction with Robert Morris and two other wealthy men; the four Philadelphians and eighty-eight more chipped in 315,000 pounds to create a Bank of Pennsylvania to act as a purchasing agent for the American military. Its first purchase was flour for General Greene’s army. Within weeks the banking idea was replicated in Boston and Baltimore. The French were impressed; they could no longer accuse their American partners of being unwilling to truly pledge their fortunes as well as their lives and their sacred honor.
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While Americans on the Atlantic Coast thought Spain’s entry into the war in the summer of 1779 was an empty gesture, they were mistaken, for that action soon had a direct impact on Great Britain’s ability to wage war, through Spain’s efforts along the Gulf Coast and in the adjacent lower Mississippi delta. The governor of Cuba transferred Spanish troops to New Orleans for use by Bernardo de Gálvez, and in September Gálvez’s Spanish-led force of 650, which included some Americans, some French military, members of several Native American tribes, and freed slaves, attacked British enclaves north of New Orleans, at Natchez achieving a victory without firing a shot. Seized letters confirmed Gálvez’s suspicion that the British were reinforcing Mobile, and accordingly in February 1780 he attacked that city. During a bad storm he lost four hundred men and had four ships run aground; undeterred, he salvaged materials and made scaling ladders to reach the fortifications. His siege of Mobile exhausted the British defenders’ ammunition and food supplies, forcing a surrender on March 14, 1780.
In April a large convoy of Spanish warships and supplies departed Cádiz, headed for Havana and to reinforce Gálvez for his assault on the next most important British-controlled target, Pensacola, which he hoped to take in the fall. That spring other Spanish troops at St. Louis, with the assistance of an American army contingent, defeated a substantial British attack by troops from Canada and members of various Native American tribes. On the British retreat north from St.Louis, they raided towns with what the Spanish commander, upon viewing disemboweled and severed corpses, labeled “unheard-of barbarity.”
Although these Spanish actions had the effect of helping the cause of the United States by keeping British troops and resources occupied outside the Eastern Seaboard, they had been undertaken by Spain primarily for the purpose of consolidating hegemony over the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast. In Philadelphia, the Chevalier de La Luzerne, the new French plenipotentiary, cheered on every report of these Spanish victories. He had been instructed to tell the Americans that France agreed with Spain that the United States had no right to Florida or to control navigation on the Mississippi, and to warn that in peace negotiations the U.S. would probably have to settle its western boundary at the Ohio River. Congress fumed at this notion. La Luzerne beseeched them “not to lose sight of the principle of equity and moderation which alone could render the Alliance desirable.”
* * *
In the early spring of 1780, Lafayette’s dream team of troops and ships, called the Expédition Particulière, was being readied at Brest, its men under the command of Rochambeau and its warships in the care of Admiral Charles-Henri-Louis d’Arsac de Ternay. The commanders had been told that their destination was America, but they did not tell the troops, claiming that the destination was in sealed orders to be opened only after being at sea ten days. The soldiers and sailors could deduce by the quantity of laded matériel that the goal was far away, but it could as readily be India, Africa, or the Caribbean as North America.
Among the officers was Fleury. On the eve of leaving Paris for Brest he had written Franklin that since he would be unable to receive the medal promised for his heroics at Stony Point, Franklin should please hand it to his father; and also, “The medall voted for me by congress, is a silver one; but I could wish, besides, to have one of gold struck at my own expences. It will not hurt the dies; I leave the money for that purpose in the hands of the medaillist. He will keep the gold medall for me till my Return. I hope you will not have any objection.” Franklin had none. Delays in departure allowed Fleury to receive the silver medal; thereafter he wore it constantly.
The single-minded devotion to war that Lauzun ascribed to Rochambeau was also applied by his comrades to Ternay; and a description of Ternay’s character as composed of “pride, hauteur, and almost of severity” fitted Rochambeau just as well. At Brest the commanders clashed on what should go aboard, Rochambeau arguing for artillery and horses and Ternay protesting that too much artillery was unwarranted and that horses required too much forage and water. Ternay won on these matters. Rochambeau had wanted eight thousand troops and Ternay, twenty ships of the line, but both had to be content with less. Rochambeau’s 6,000 were just four divisions out of more than a hundred, a small fraction of the 250,000 troops of the French army, beyond whom were 50,000 reserves, plus members of the coast guard who could be called to service.
The most precious item carried by the ships would be money, mostly in Spanish pesetas, the rest in letters of credit drawn on Chaumont’s accounts in America. It was expected to do more than pay for the French troops; Louis XVI’s council understood that financial assistance to America was as necessary to its survival as military assistance.
The yearly cost to the French treasury of the officers in France’s military services was 46 million livres, and that of the remainder of the soldiers and sailors another 44 million. Those proportions were reflected in the top-heavy Rochambeau army, whose five hundred officers included the son of de Castries, Rochambeau’s son and nep
hew, and kinsmen of other nobles. Only a few spoke English, notably the writer François Jean de Chastellux, the Duc de Lauzun, Noailles (who had spent time abroad), and Rochambeau’s aide Baron Ludwig von Closen, and even fewer had past experience serving with American troops. These latter veterans included du Bouchet and Fleury, but not Conway. It had become obvious that Conway would not be welcome in America, so he had been billeted for India. So had Bonvouloir, who had finally obtained a naval commission.
George III also did not know where the Expédition Particulière was heading. “The more I reflect on the fleet now equipping at Brest under the command of M. de Ternay, the more I am led to fix on North America as the most probable object,” he wrote, adding, darkly, “The country that will hazard the most will get the advantage in this war.” George’s encomium to aggressiveness did not stir his Admiralty; while it directed Admiral Thomas Graves to collect a fleet at Portsmouth to counter Ternay’s, it did not clear his way. In addition to having problems of supply similar to those of Ternay at Brest, Graves had one more, directly traceable to the Admiralty: The sailors had not been paid, so “There is a disposition in my ships’ company to require two months’ advance before they go to sea,” Graves noted. His impecunious tars mutinied, barricading themselves belowdecks. To pry them out consumed many days. So on May 2, when Ternay and Rochambeau got under way, the Graves fleet was not yet ready, which allowed forty-six French vessels to sweep into the Atlantic unopposed. Only after most of France’s sea “horses” had bolted did Great Britain shut the watery “barn door,” blockading Brest to prevent the remaining troops from going to America.
How the French Saved America Page 20