How the French Saved America

by Tom Shachtman

  By then Lafayette had sailed ahead. To formally take leave of Louis XVI he had worn his American officer’s uniform, and in l’Hermione he was accompanied by officially provided munitions, including fifteen thousand rifles, shot, and uniforms for the Continentals. The formality, openness, and positive sanction of this 1780 departure were in pronounced contrast to his disobedient, surreptitious escape of 1777.

  Lafayette’s most audacious recent accomplishment at Versailles had been to dictate Rochambeau’s instructions on conducting combat in America. Mirroring the language of earlier Lafayette letters to the ministry, these were repeated in a Montbarrey letter to Rochambeau on behalf of Louis XVI. The most important directive: “The general to whom His Majesty entrusts the command of his troops should always and in all cases be under the command of General Washington.”

  Here was a stunning instruction to which any French commander might have objected had it not been issued over the seal of the king and stated in such unequivocal terms. The directive was aimed at preventing a recurrence of the mistakes at Newport, in which Lafayette had been a participant. That intent was made even clearer by accompanying instructions: “The French troops, being only auxiliaries, should on this account, as was done in Germany in the campaign of 1757, yield precedence and the right to the American troops.” The sentence was specifically designed to resonate with Rochambeau, who had participated in that campaign against Frederick the Great. Standard orders were that during an assault, the right-hand side always had precedence; Montbarrey’s letter emphasized this by explicitly stating that on the American battlefield, American officers of equivalent rank to the French would have command.

  While the Expédition Particulière was in the mid-Atlantic, Louis XVI sent a message to the French clergy, then holding a “quinquennial” conclave. He demanded a gift of 30 million livres to prosecute the war. Since a year earlier he had asked for and received 7 million from the clergy, this new demand, according to an attendee, “produced at first the most profound astonishment.” The king’s messenger explained that the various economies introduced by Louis had made it possible to sustain the greatest navy that France ever had, currently fighting in many places throughout the world, at the same time that “the people have been preserved … from new taxes.” The king required assistance to continue doing both wonderful things. The clergy cried poor but then saw the need to “concur in obtaining liberty of commerce and the safety of the seas.”

  Near the American coast, Ternay and Rochambeau learned that Charleston had already fallen. Changing course, they arrived at Chesapeake Bay on July 4, 1780. During the night Ternay glimpsed in the fog unknown ships moving among his; he deduced that they were Arbuthnot’s, returning Clinton’s men to New York from Charleston—and did not fight them. Ternay “chose to pass up an engagement that would have gained nothing [for the expedition] other than personal glory,” Rochambeau remembered, and concluded that Ternay was “always occupied with his main task of convoying the troops to their destination.” In the morning, the interlopers gone, the French fleet proceeded to Newport, Rhode Island. Arrangements had been made through Lafayette for the Americans to set signals for them at the edges of Narragansett Bay. If the French were clear to land, they would see the French flag already flying, but if the British had chosen to return and give battle, then there would be only the American flag. The incoming ships spied the fleur-de-lis flag, and with no opposition began to disembark.

  15

  “My command of the F–Tps at R Is-d stands upon a very limited state.”

  —George Washington

  When a war widens, its original intent is inevitably subjected to new and different pressures. In 1780, Great Britain’s war against its rebelling colonies burst the boundaries of a familial dispute, as British forces had to fight those of France and Spain, in addition to those of the United States, off the northern and southern coasts of Europe, in the Caribbean, in the Gulf of Mexico, on the Mississippi, and off Africa and India. The fate of the American Revolution had always hung in the balance in this war, but now, so also did Great Britain’s decades-long dominance of the European powers.

  The two became closely linked in the spring. Great Britain had been wooing Empress Catherine II of Russia to become an ally, promising her that at the war’s end she would receive such spoils as the Mediterranean island of Minorca. Now, Catherine did more than spurn Great Britain’s suit; she declared that henceforth her ships at sea would act as armed neutrals, authorized to resist attempts by any belligerent power to examine their cargoes for contraband and confiscate them, something the British had been doing with impunity. For years Vergennes had urged Russia to defend its honor on those grounds, and now he had further reason to cheer as Denmark and Sweden joined Russia in the League of Armed Neutrality. Very quickly France and Spain agreed to abide by the league’s freedom-of-the-seas principles. Great Britain did not. The Netherlands asked the league to guarantee its colonies, which Russia would not do, and so the Netherlands did not immediately join the league. Although the northern powers’ strength at sea was negligible compared to that of the Royal Navy, by declaring their neutrality Russia, Denmark, and Sweden deprived Great Britain of allies.

  Britain’s sea power was also being compromised by its ministers, whose disagreement on where and when to use it occasioned several failures, principal among them permitting the Ternay-Rochambeau fleet to escape from Brest. Another French fleet, led by the Comte de Guichen, seventeen ships of the line, and a convoy of sixty other vessels carrying 4,400 troops, was similarly able to make an unmolested journey to the Caribbean because the fleet of Admiral George Brydges Rodney was busy relieving Gibraltar.

  A third significant missed British opportunity allowed a Spanish Caribbean resupply fleet to leave Cádiz on April 28 with twelve ships of the line, eleven thousand troops, and 146 merchantmen and transports. During the six weeks that it took the fleet to cross the Atlantic, it was not harassed, and upon reaching the Caribbean it was shepherded to port by Guichen’s ships. This arrival gave to the French and Spanish in the Caribbean a combined superiority of troops and ships, stymieing British plans to capture the French and Spanish sugar islands.

  During the summer of 1780, British unwillingness to detach ships of the line to escort British convoys across the Atlantic also resulted in the Spanish capture, near Cádiz, of a convoy of sixty-one British merchantmen whose combined value was put at 1,500,000 pounds.

  Another Admiralty failure was having kept Rodney out of action for the previous four years, and for an odd reason—his indebtedness. Early in his career Rodney had made a fortune in the same way that most British naval commanders had done: by being entitled to part of the value of the goods he confiscated on ships that he had captured. But then he had overspent on his estate and in pursuit of a political seat, and in 1774 had had to flee to Paris to escape creditors. Four difficult and fallow years followed for him because of Lord Sandwich’s insistence that Rodney repay his debts before being recalled to action, and Rodney’s lacking the money to do so. Then in 1778, to Rodney’s amazement, just after the signing of the Franco-American alliance but before Great Britain declared war on France, a French marshal offered to pay Rodney’s debts, a gift from one gentleman to another. Maurepas and Louis XVI agreed to this extraordinary offer, which enabled Rodney to return to Great Britain and to command.

  He began in a spectacular way, encountering and destroying a Spanish squadron on the way to Gibraltar, seizing several ships of the line and causing another to blow up. He then provisioned Gibraltar, which had been on short rations, opened supply lines for that island with Tunisia, and went on to relieve Minorca before proceeding to the Caribbean. News of these Rodney victories cheered London.

  * * *

  John Adams’s hiatus from diplomatic work lasted only six months after his return home following a frustrating year in Paris. In the fall of 1779, Congress appointed him minister plenipotentiary, empowered to negotiate peace with Great Britain on terms that C
ongress had spent the better part of a year debating. Adams considered this appointment as the highest civilian position that the government could then bestow, and delayed his departure only to participate in the Massachusetts convention, for which he had written the state constitution. Before he sailed, he thoroughly researched American documents bearing on matters likely to come up in a peace negotiation, such as America’s northern and eastern boundaries, and fishing rights off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.

  Disembarking in Spain toward the end of 1779, Adams, his two older sons, John Quincy and Charles, and his secretary, former representative Francis Dana, made their way overland to Paris. To prevent a repetition of prior cavalier treatment, Adams attempted to have Congress specifically instruct Franklin to pay his expenses and to order all American ship captains to take him wherever he needed to go without checking with Franklin. He also chose to reside in Paris so as not to be under Franklin’s thumb at Valentinois.

  On February 11, 1780, Adams and Franklin met with Vergennes, and the next day Adams wrote the minister, “I am the only person who has the authority to treat of peace,” so “if any propositions on the part of Great Britain should be made to his Majesty’s ministers … they [should] be communicated to me.” For Vergennes this rang a very loud alarm. It reinforced his suspicion, earlier voiced by Gérard, that the Lee-Adams contingent in Congress was attempting to reconcile America with Great Britain. Adams denied that to Vergennes directly, and La Luzerne, when consulted, advised that Adams had become so avidly anti-British that the British should fear him in negotiations.

  Balance had seemed about to be restored to the Adams-Vergennes relationship when news arrived in May that further upset it. Congress had radically devalued the American currency, pegging it at forty new Continental dollars to one old one. Chaumont protested to Adams, seeking an arrangement by which the Continental would be devalued at home but remain at par in repaying France for loans and goods previously advanced—a distinction between foreign and domestic creditors that European nations had frequently honored. Adams derided the idea. Then Vergennes agreed with Chaumont, telling Adams, “While I admit, Sir, that [Congress] might have recourse to the expedient [of devaluation] in order to remove their load of debt, I am far from agreeing that it is just & agreeable … to extend the effect to strangers as well as to citizens of the United States.”

  It was a critical moment in the affairs of the two allied countries, a clash of conflicting narratives about a single event; and, as often happens in romantic partnerships, the point of disagreement was money. Each had assumed that the other felt the same way about the debt obligation, and now that assumption was shattered by their disagreement—and the crisis went beyond the money problems and the personal acrimony between Adams and Vergennes. It concerned the future sovereignty of the United States and its position in the postwar world, matters that Adams had specifically addressed in his model treaty of 1776 and that Vergennes had purposefully ignored in his writing of the 1778 Franco-American pacts. As Adams continued to spar with Vergennes, his xenophobia and rudeness poisoned the atmosphere. Vergennes, the seasoned diplomat, parried Adams by citing his rudeness as reason for Congress to recall the seeming Francophobe as a danger to the alliance. For that purpose, on June 30 Vergennes handed Franklin copies of all of his Adams correspondence and a request to transmit them to Congress and recommend Adams’s recall. Franklin too was angered at Adams but would not undermine his colleague with such a recommendation.

  But Adams had a way to make a riposte to Vergennes. Henry Laurens, given the task of obtaining a loan from the Dutch, had been captured at sea en route to the Netherlands and was now imprisoned in the Tower of London. Adams had been designated to take over that task. In his last letters to Vergennes before he left for Amsterdam, he hinted that he would use the Dutch city as a base from which to negotiate peace with Great Britain. This, finally, was too much for Vergennes. He informed Adams that he would henceforth deal only with Franklin. By then Adams had departed, telling Franklin that his objective in Amsterdam was learning “whether something might not be done to render us less dependent on France.”

  When Franklin finally read Congress’s actual instructions to Adams (forwarded by La Luzerne to Vergennes, who gave them to Franklin), he apologized to Vergennes: “The Sentiments therein express’d are so different from the Language held by Mr. Adams … as to make it clear that [his conduct] was from his Indiscretion alone.… It is impossible that his Conduct … Should be approved by his Constituents.” Then, in a letter to Congress, Franklin rejected Adams’s way of dealing with the French:

  This Court is to be treated with Decency & Delicacy. The King, a young and vigorous Prince has, I am persuaded, a Pleasure in reflecting on the generous Benevolence of the Action, in assisting an oppress’d People, and proposes it as a Part of the Glory of his Reign; I think it right to increase this Pleasure by our Thankful Acknowledgments; and that such an Expression of Gratitude is not only our Duty, but our Interest.

  Adams’s difficulties with Vergennes were exceeded by Jay’s with Floridablanca. Jay’s original plan had been to come to Paris and from Paris apply for Spanish credentials. But when his ship was forced by bad weather to Cádiz, he decided it would be silly to exit Spain only to then seek admission, and so sent missives to Madrid saying he was America’s official representative. Floridablanca replied that until “the manner, the forms, and the mutual correspondence” concerning the relationship of Spain to the United States had been established, “it is not proper for your Excellency to assume a formal character.” As a sop, Floridablanca encouraged Jay to come to Madrid anyway. When Jay did, he and Floridablanca clashed, partly because Jay said just the wrong thing to him: Jay tried to press Congress’s wish to control navigation on the Mississippi. This ran afoul of Spain’s desire to do so, already buttressed by its military triumphs in that region. As an internal Spanish document put it, “Since His Majesty’s armed forces had captured all that territory [on the Mississippi] from the English … the Americans have no settlements in it and therefore are totally without any right to the slightest claim.”

  Part of the reason for Floridablanca’s distancing of Jay came from Spain’s continuing diplomatic attempts to obtain Gibraltar from Great Britain. To hasten the end of the war, Spain did many things, among them participating in talks with unofficial and semiofficial British emissaries in Madrid, and encouraging the efforts of Russia and later Austria to act as mediators, even as Spain suspected that all such mediation efforts were only being kept afloat by the British to detach Spain from France and the United States.

  * * *

  In the early summer of 1780, coursing south through Virginia and the Carolinas toward Charleston, Baron de Kalb and his several thousand men were in agony from “the intolerable heat, the worst of quarters, the most voracious of insects of every hue and form,” including ticks, whose bites had the baron black and blue. Moreover, he wrote home, “of the violence of thunderstorms in this part of the world Europeans cannot form any idea.” “I meet with no support, no integrity, and no virtue in the state of Virginia,” he wrote a friend, and the same had been true in North Carolina. His orders were to continue the march south even after the loss of Charleston, his original objective. But because of the difficulties when word reached de Kalb, just after crossing into South Carolina, that he was to cede command to Horatio Gates, he was grateful.

  “Take care lest your northern laurels turn to southern willows,” Gates had been warned (by Charles Lee) on learning of this appointment. But in the South Carolina camp, Gates’s arrogance continued unrestrained. Even though de Kalb agreed to stay on as Gates’s second in command, neither the baron nor any other officer was able to influence Gates as the small army kept moving in a search for Lord Francis Rawdon’s British forces. When Gates’s officers complained of needing to halt to wait for supplies, or to find places to forage, Gates insisted that supplies would follow them, and “plenty will soon succeed the unavoidable scarcity.” He a
ppeared not to have learned from his Saratoga victory that an army without supplies is doubly vulnerable, both to the lack of sustenance and to the mistakes that scarcity exacerbates. He regularly and repeatedly refused to colloquy with his ranking officers or read their written suggestions. Among his unilateral decisions was, on the night before the expected battle near Camden, since there was no rum to serve the soldiers, he gave them molasses, which made many of them ill.

  Around midnight on August 15, 1780, the British and Americans tried to attack each other, making first contact but then retiring to wait for dawn. Only then did Gates learn from a captive that he was facing not only Francis Rawdon’s troops but also Cornwallis’s three thousand—the two British contingents, which had been marching separately, had finally combined. “The general’s astonishment could not be concealed,” an officer later wrote about Gates. Only at this penultimate moment did he ask his senior commanders for their opinions. Most considered it too late for a retreat. De Kalb, whose counsel Gates had so often overruled, said nothing.

  Shortly after dawn, Armand’s cavalry advanced and was beaten back. The British and Hessian troops soon overwhelmed the American troops, which aside from de Kalb’s and a few other units were rural militia, almost 2,500 of whom “threw down their loaded arms and fled in the utmost consternation,” as an American officer wrote. De Kalb and his seasoned troops held fast but to no avail. His horse was killed and he was sabered on the head. Bloody and on foot, he suffered ten more wounds by bayonet thrusts, saber cuts, and bullets; grievously hurt, he was assaulted by British and Hessians coveting his elegant uniform and boots until his comrade shielded his body with his own, and the two were found and rescued by Cornwallis. After three days, and despite the attentions of Cornwallis’s surgeons, de Kalb died. Rawdon learned from the comrade, himself wounded four times, of the tactics that de Kalb had suggested to Gates: a surprise attack when first apprised of Rawdon being in the area and before Cornwallis’s troops had joined with them. Rawdon later wrote that Gates, by rejecting de Kalb’s very good idea, “gave us three days to meet him in a country favorable to me.”