In the same fast frigate to the Caribbean that carried the British declaration of war on the Netherlands, the North government sent Rodney instructions to attack Saint Eustatius, the Dutch “golden rock,” an entrepôt through which had passed half the military supplies sent to America. He was to attack before the Dutch learned they were at war. Two days after receiving the message, Rodney’s squadron, with three thousand troops aboard, entered the Saint Eustatius harbor in such strength that he was able to persuade the governor to surrender the island without a battle; in the succeeding days he took the neighboring Dutch islands of Saint Martin and Saba.
In the Saint Eustatius harbor Rodney seized 130 ships, and for the next three months under his explicit direction the British forces avidly confiscated those ships’ property and the island’s. Moreover, by keeping the Dutch flag flying over Saint Eustatius he lured in many other ships that did not know he had taken control of the island, and seized them too.
* * *
As 1781 began, a weary Washington, with an assist from Hamilton, put in writing to John Laurens, who was going to France, a commander’s understanding of the current difficulties of the young United States of America. These were traceable to “inexperience in affairs … the want of sufficient stock of wealth, the depreciation of the currency, the general diffidence that has taken place among the people, the calamitous distress to which the army has been exposed.” The army’s “discontents,” now “matured to an extremity,” had brought the country “to a crisis which renders immediate and efficacious succors from abroad indispensable to its safety.” Laurens was being sent to secure loans from France, loans that the general emphasized must be “large enough to be a foundation for a substantial arrangement of finance, revive fallen credit and give vigor to future operations.” Without that money “we may make a feeble and expiring effort [in] the next campaign, in all probability the period to our opposition,” adding that it would be “better to diminish the aid in men … than diminish the pecuniary succor.”
“I suspect the French Ministry will try your temper,” Hamilton warned his close friend, Laurens, “but you must not suffer them to provoke it.” On Laurens’s way to a ship in Boston he was taught the same lesson by Washington’s way of dealing with mutinous Pennsylvania troops. Although Laurens, who had visited them earlier, had advocated subduing them by force, Washington, who understood the deprivation of the soldiers that had spurred the revolt, defused the crisis through a combination of permitting Pennsylvania’s civil apparatus to judge the ringleaders, and a personal appeal to Congress to generously assuage the mutineers’ needs.
Tom Paine accompanied Laurens as an unofficial adviser after declining a request to come along as his secretary. Colonel Armand joined them on board, having decided that he would be better off raising a new legion in France, where his nobility as the Marquis de le Rouërie was more respected than it had been thus far in America.
The visitors found the climate in Paris in the spring of 1781 not as dire as in America, but still worrisome. Dissent was being actively suppressed. A Beaumarchais screed regarding his activities in London was viewed by Versailles as antiadministration and the copies confiscated. Necker was forced to resign from the council for publishing the Compte rendu au Roi, a detailing of the government’s income and outgo—which almost inadvertently revealed the instability of the country’s finances. Raynal was arrested for publishing a new edition of his Deux Indes book; it contained two new chapters by Diderot on North America and its Revolution, in which the parallels between the need to overthrow an old British government and the activities of France’s thousand-year-old monarchy were underscored: “There is no form of government with the prerogative of being immutable; no political authority which created yesterday or a thousand years ago, cannot be abrogated in ten years or tomorrow; no power, however respectable or sacred, that is authorized to regard the state as its property.” The book’s most shocking passages were those addressed directly to Louis XVI, and which committed the further crime of using the intimate pronoun tu rather than the properly distant vous:
Cast your gaze upon the capital of your empire, and you will find two classes of citizens. The one, glutted with riches, displays an opulence which offends those it does not corrupt; the other, mired in destitution, worsens its condition by wearing a mask of prosperity.… Fix your gaze upon the provinces, in which industry of every description is dying out. You will see them bowing under the yoke of taxation and the harassment of the tax agents.
That spring, when a long-serving popular curate used his pulpit to direct similar truths at an audience that included Louis XVI—the information that half of the thirteen thousand foundlings in Parisian hospitals had died from neglect—the preacher was banished from the pulpit for the next several years.
For Laurens’s direct affronts to Louis XVI, he ran a similar risk of ostracism. Franklin told the young man, upon arrival, that his mission was useless because he, Franklin, had already applied to Vergennes for additional loans and had been rejected. Vergennes claimed that the American currency had depreciated too far for loans, Franklin reported, but had nonetheless dispatched 1.5 million livres to America and had also promised a 6 million livre gift from the king. Laurens insisted on seeing Vergennes, and in that meeting protested that the gift was not enough, warning that unless Versailles was also willing to grant a substantial loan, America would have to end the war, and America’s commerce and resources would be “restored to the tyrant of the European Seas, the ancient rival of France.”
Some accounts have Laurens antagonizing Franklin by such bluntness and by usurping Franklin’s position as negotiator with France, while others suggest that Laurens accomplished what Franklin could not. Such readings misinterpret the Franklin-Laurens relationship: In dealings with the ministers Vergennes, de Castries and Ségur, the Americans played good cop and bad cop, Laurens issuing demands and taking the hard line to make Franklin’s softer requests seem more reasonable. “Mr. Lawrens is worrying the minister [Vergennes] for more money,” Franklin wrote to Jay, “and we shall I believe obtain a farther sum.”
On April 8 Vergennes informed Laurens that the king had agreed to guarantee the principal and interest on a 10 million livres note that would come from the Netherlands. Given an inch, Laurens instantly asked for the mile—for the sum to be provided, in advance, from the French treasury. Laurens wrote directly to the king. He conveyed “the homage of the most ardent gratitude” but claimed “that although his Aid goes to the objective which His Majesty proposes, it is proved that in the state of things it is insufficient in view of the urgent needs … and [of] the exhaustion in which America finds itself, the absolute lack of Resources and Specie, and the enormity of the outlays necessary to make war with vigour.”
Vergennes complained to Franklin, Lafayette, and La Luzerne of Laurens’s effrontery in writing to the king in a manner “not … suited to the nature of his mission.” Laurens continued to press. Coordinating his efforts with Adams’s in the Netherlands—Adams had already applied for an extensive loan there—Laurens succeeded in obtaining more than the six million livres that Franklin had accepted prior to Laurens’s arrival. Evidence that Laurens had not overreached came in the form of a diamond-encrusted snuff box presented to him on behalf of Louis XVI, similar to the one previously given to Deane, and a testimonial from Franklin, who, far from resenting Laurens, suggested in a letter to him that if he could tear himself away from military affairs and the pursuit of glory, he would be an ideal replacement for Franklin as minister to France, as Congress “could not put their Affairs in better hands.”
During John Laurens’s very public visit to France, the British authorities made life worse for his father, Henry, in the Tower of London, and then suggested that Henry could lessen his troubles by condemning John’s mission or pressuring him to abort it. “I know [John] is so full of love and Duty to me, he would sacrifice his Life to serve me rightly,” Henry responded, “but he would not sacrifice his hono
r to save my life; his Maxim is my Country first and then my father. & I applaud him.”
* * *
De Grasse, taken ill during the latter part of his participation in the d’Estaing expedition in America, had been happy to reach Europe, landing at Brest in January 1781. At Versailles he was granted permission to add to his name “des princes souverains d’Antibes, marquis de Grasse-Tilly.” Shortly thereafter de Castries named three new commanders: Barras for taking over the Ternay fleet, Suffren for India, and de Grasse for the Caribbean. De Grasse returned to Brest on February 26 to take command of a convoy of 150 vessels including many ships of the line. His flag would be in the 110-gun, three-decker Ville de Paris, formerly Guichen’s flagship, and from whose top deck d’Orvilliers had fought Keppel at Ouessant. When de Grasse’s sailors threatened to mutiny because they had not been paid, like Graves’s in Portsmouth a year earlier, de Castries did for his men what Sandwich had not done for the British tars: The minister came to Brest and knocked on what de Grasse remembered as a hundred doors to obtain private loans to pay the sailors. De Grasse, for his part, showed up at the dock every morning at five to hurry repairs and lading. On March 22 he was elevated to the French equivalent of rear admiral, given the Croix de Saint-Louis, and with a very large fleet left for the Caribbean, under orders not to injure his health or tie up his ships in a “long and troublesome campaign.”
A week out to sea, Suffren’s squadron veered off to go to India, and a day later de Grasse dispatched the Sagittaire toward Boston, with thirty other vessels bearing additional troops, Rochambeau’s son, and more treasure.
* * *
Part of the reason that the winter of 1780–81 had been difficult for the French in Newport was being out of touch with Versailles, and a larger part was due to the uncomfortable situation. While several hundred senior officers secured billets in Newport’s homes, it was not palatable to the citizenry to house four thousand ordinary soldiers that way—the imposition on the populace of an occupying British army had been a prewar flash point. Special barracks were constructed for the soldiers but were not adequately outfitted for the rigors of a New England winter.
The Duc de Lauzun’s veteran hussars, with the steeds they had bought, were housed separately in Lebanon, halfway between Newport and Hartford. “Siberia alone can furnish any idea of Lebanon,” Lauzun grumbled to his diary; he didn’t like being away from the gaiety that he knew would attend the French officers in Newport, and pined for that of Versailles, where he had been a favorite of Marie Antoinette and rumored to be her lover. Lauzun hunted squirrel with the visiting Chastellux and made the occasional raid while awaiting the summons to greater action. His legion was an odd bunch, only a third of them French, mostly from the Alsace region, and the rest from fourteen other countries including Sweden, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Ireland; in camp their designated language was German. Lauzun’s men, more so than Rochambeau’s, were prone to desert, and Lauzun had two deserters shot dead.
The basic problem for the French troops, according to Rochambeau’s aide Comte Axel von Fersen, was that they “vegetate … in the most sinister and horrible idleness and inactivity.… We are a burden to [the American army]; we are not reinforcing [them yet] they are having to pay for us, too, as by increasing consumption we are making supplies more scarce, and by paying coin we cause their paper money to fall.” The British tried to exacerbate the chafing by publishing in a New York newspaper intercepted letters from French officers deprecating their American colleagues as “ignorant, superstitious, without education, without taste, without delicacy or honor,” and by insisting that the French had given Washington sixteen million livres so he could declare himself king of America.
On February 25, 1781, the Astrée made it into Boston’s harbor with the much-needed 1.5 million livres sent by Vergennes, but also the news that the second division was likely not coming to America. Rochambeau and Washington would have to make do with those French forces already in place.
Just as that news arrived in Newport, so did a welcome sight, the forty-four-gun British Romulus, now flying the French flag. Earlier in the month the Chevalier Destouches, who had taken over the Newport fleet after the death of Ternay, had dispatched four warships to Chesapeake Bay to counter the British troops. They had forced the British to retreat somewhat and had seized several British prizes while losing one of their own ships.
On the strength of this success, Washington urged Lafayette, in Virginia at the head of fifteen hundred troops, to try to further assail the British there, then led by William Phillips, who had been captured at Saratoga, exchanged, and promoted to command of a substantial army. Lafayette was keenly aware that Phillips’s father had fired the cannon shot that had killed his father, and was determined to avenge that deed.
In the Virginia campaign of the spring of 1781, Lafayette did heroic work defending Richmond. Then, facing a larger force, Lafayette hid Richmond’s munitions and abandoned the city to Cornwallis. The British in Virginia kept shifting leaders, as Phillips died and Clinton did not permit Benedict Arnold, Phillips’s temporary replacement, to retain command for more than a few weeks before ceding it to Cornwallis, a man generally acknowledged as Great Britain’s best field commander. To counteract Cornwallis, Lafayette solicited advice from Greene, Morgan, and “swamp fox” fighter Francis Marion, a hero at the battle of Camden, all of whom suggested tactics that were beyond Fabian and constituted guerrilla warfare. To blunt the effectiveness of Cornwallis’s cavalry, led by Banastre Tarleton, Lafayette’s men lured them into the woods where snipers picked them off. Locals outraged by Cornwallis and Tarleton’s rapacious treatment of the countryside and its inhabitants helped Lafayette’s army stay alive and gain reinforcements. His confidence grew: “The enemmy Have Been so Kind as to Retire Before us. twice I gave them a chance of fighting … But they Continued their Retrograde motions,” he wrote to Washington in late June, adding,
Our little action more particularly Marks the Retreat of the ennemy—from the place He first Began to Retire to Williamsburg is upwards of 100 Mile.… His Lordship did us no Harm of any Consequence lost an immense part of his former Conquests and did not make any in this State—general greene demanded of me only to Hold my ground in Virginia—But the Movements of Lord Cornwallis May answer Better purposes than that in the political line.
No sooner had Lafayette made that boast then he made a mistake. Trying to trap Cornwallis near Williamsburg, Lafayette sent Wayne’s division against the British rear, and they were nearly overwhelmed. Lafayette rode personally to the rescue. He had his horse shot out from under him but reached Wayne, and the two leaders managed to get themselves and most of the men to safety. That day was lost by the Americans, but Cornwallis did not consolidate his victory; rather, he continued on the move, first abandoning Jamestown for Portsmouth, and then at Clinton’s instruction leaving Portsmouth too, for Yorktown.
* * *
Many Saint Eustatius warehouses and companies had been enriched by the trade of transferring goods from Europe to the nearby French-controlled islands and to America. Rodney plundered Saint Eustatius on such a large scale that he soon ran into difficulties. Much of the property at Saint Eustatius belonged to British residents of other Caribbean islands, and some of it to Quakers in Philadelphia, who complained to La Luzerne that Rodney’s confiscations had caused them to lose 2.5 million livres, mostly garnered in illicit commerce with the English. They and ninety other Jewish and other Dutch, French, and British merchants sued Rodney for unlawfully confiscating their property.
He fought back, and his overinvolvement in the court cases distracted him from making further raids in the Caribbean. It also made Rodney unwilling to leave the Caribbean and sail to the American coast to assist Arbuthnot—and this cost the British during what could have been a decisive battle for them, off Chesapeake Bay.
Early in March 1781, Destouches, at Washington’s request and after having learned that three of Arbuthnot’s larger warships had been damaged
in a storm, took off from Newport for the Chesapeake, aiming to prevent the British from reinforcing their army. Arbuthnot learned of this sailing and in his faster, copper-bottomed ships reached the bay first. When Destouches arrived, a battle ensued. Although the two fleets did considerable damage to each other, the engagement was judged a draw. Destouches was unable to prevent the British fleet from investing the bay, but he was able to get away with his ships—if Rodney’s had also been present to help Arbuthnot’s, the outcome would likely have been a disaster for the French squadron.
* * *
At the conclusion of de Grasse’s Atlantic crossing to the Caribbean, when his lookouts spotted the isle of Martinique they also saw a British frigate, frantically signaling others. As the French soon learned, Admiral Samuel Hood’s squadron was lying in wait for them. After a dawn mass the following day, the British and French fleets lined up opposite one another and commenced firing. In that battle de Grasse’s forces seriously damaged six British capital ships, including Hood’s flag, Intrepid. But the British ships all managed to escape, giving the austere de Grasse reason to chastise his captains for not obeying signals. The next day the French did better in communicating, but were unable to reach the enemy. On the third day, a squall obscured de Grasse’s ability to see Hood’s vessels. Once it stopped, “I saw with grief that it was only too true that the sailing of the English was superior to ours,” de Grasse wrote to de Castries. “There were with me only eleven ships in range to attack; the others … were very far in the rear. Some even were out of sight.”
How the French Saved America Page 23