Before entering the military Saavedra had been a theological student, and his intelligence had aided his rise in the Spanish government, in diplomatic and council posts, before he was sent to Havana. France had agreed that in the Caribbean, Spain’s would be the dominant force and the French would be under their command. Learning of de Grasse’s imminent arrival in Haiti a week in advance, Saavedra went there and was well acquainted locally by the time he and de Grasse met aboard the Ville de Paris on June 17.
There the leaders formulated a two-step plan. De Grasse would best the British in North America, and then in the fall return to the Caribbean to take part in a joint Franco-Spanish operation against Jamaica, the most valuable of the British possessions. In regard to the North American venture, as Saavedra put it in his diary, they “could not waste the most decisive opportunity of the whole war”—to take advantage of the British naval inferiority in the American Atlantic. The most vulnerable British point, in the view of Saavedra and de Grasse, was Virginia, because the British troops there enjoyed only sporadic naval protection from squadrons based in New York and the Caribbean. De Grasse was also not inclined to attack New York because he knew that d’Estaing had not been able to pass the bar at Sandy Hook. Letters from Rochambeau and La Luzerne championed a Chesapeake Bay focus, as did Saavedra’s positive reports of the success of the action at Pensacola against a well-defended British stronghold. De Grasse would go to Virginia.
The most important strategic decision of the war, to attack the British on the Yorktown Peninsula, was made by French and Spanish military men in a Haitian harbor.
To receive permission to depart for American waters, de Grasse had to obtain his ships’ formal release by Spain. Gálvez authorized that, but Saavedra vetoed allowing de Grasse to take Spanish ships with him, as de Grasse had requested, on the grounds that their fighting directly for America might be construed as de facto recognition of American independence, which Madrid was at pains to avoid. The Spanish fleet, by remaining in the Caribbean and protecting both French and Spanish colonies, would tie down Rodney’s squadron, as the British admiral would not risk going to the aid of his brethren in the north for fear that the Spanish would use his absence to seize more British sugar islands.
De Grasse was under instructions from Rochambeau to raise specie to pay the French troops, whose stash was running out. He was unable to coax very much from the French Caribbean colonists, even after public notices advertising a very favorable credit exchange rate. Saavedra then stepped in. Deciding that “without the money the Conde de Grasse could not do anything and the delay … would put his fleet in jeopardy,” the young captain told the admiral to start his ships toward America and that he would have conveyed to them at sea the needed money, which he would obtain from Cuba. In just six hours, by an “emergency appeal” to the populace in Havana, he collected five hundred pesetas and had them ferried to de Grasse. The admiral then took off northward with his fleet, sending ahead a letter that his destination was Chesapeake Bay.
* * *
Received by Barras on August 11, 1781, de Grasse’s letter was sent to Rochambeau at the North River. Rochambeau received it on August 14 and showed it to Washington: de Grasse was en route to Chesapeake Bay, “the spot which seems to be indicated by you, M. le comte, and by MM Washington de La Luzerne and de Barras as the surest to effect the good which you propose.”
Washington had seen this decision coming, had even somewhat prepared for it, and had come to realize that New York’s fortifications and beefed-up forces made any proposed Franco-American attack there risk turning into a disaster. But he was still upset. Not only was his dream of retaking New York dashed, but the decision on where to make a joint attack on the British had essentially been made without him.
One mark of a great leader is, when definitively blocked to seize the moment by expanding into what has become the necessary direction. As soon as Washington realized that his army, and Rochambeau’s, and Barras’s fleet now had no choice but to go to the Yorktown Peninsula, there to meet de Grasse’s fleet and Lafayette’s army and Steuben’s—six different forces!—and take on the British, he did not hesitate. Rather, he issued a flurry of orders. Barras had brashly suggested a sally against Nova Scotia. Washington scotched that. He told Lafayette to seal off the Yorktown Peninsula so that the British could not escape. He directed Barras to lade on board, in addition to Rochambeau’s left-behind twenty-fours, which would be needed for a siege, the salted provisions that he had stashed at Newport.
Writing to de Grasse, in a letter cosigned by Rochambeau, Washington conceded that the decision not to force New York had been ratified by the arrival there of three thousand more British troops, which raised the number of the city’s defenders to above fourteen thousand, more men than he and Rochambeau commanded. What Washington did not then know was that those new troops were the ones captured by Gálvez at Pensacola, who had been paroled to New York on the promise that they would not henceforth war against the Spanish, but who had made no such agreement in regard to fighting the Americans or the French.
* * *
Lafayette had previously had important assignments, but none had ever been so critical to the future of his adopted country as keeping Cornwallis bottled up on the Yorktown peninsula. The British general had boasted, “The boy cannot escape me”—echoing what General Howe had said of Lafayette in 1778—and Cornwallis’s arrogance was also evident in rejecting the advice of his predecessor as head of the Virginia forces, Benedict Arnold, who had warned him not to settle at Yorktown but to pick a site further inland so that he would have more avenues by which to escape a trap. Throughout the late spring and early summer Cornwallis pursued Lafayette but was unable to make good on his boast to capture him, and in August he allowed the “boy” to turn the tables. Lafayette, by repeatedly but lightly engaging Cornwallis’s men, coaxed the British into concentrating their forces to repel a full-scale attack, a massing that left the British and Hessian troops even more vulnerable to encirclement.
Among Washington’s flurry of orders, issued once he had learned definitively that de Grasse was on his way to Chesapeake Bay, was an instruction to Lafayette:
You will immediately take such a position as will best enable you to prevent [the enemy’s] sudden retreat thro’ North Carolina, which I presume they will attempt the instant they perceive so formidable an Armament [as de Grasse arriving].… You will be particularly careful to conceal the expected arrival of the Count, because if the enemy are not apprised of it, they [will stay] on board their transports in [Chesapeake] Bay, which will be the luckiest Cercumstance in the World.
Lafayette had already begun to take such positions, and by August 21 could report to Washington that he had stationed troops at the forks of the York River and nearer to Williamsburg, had written to the Virginia governor to raise more troops and send them his way, and to General Wayne to hurry a junction of their troops to block any Cornwallis exit. “Taking Whatever is in the Rivers, and taking position of the Rivers themselves while the Main Body defends the Bay—forming a jonction of land forces at a Convenient and safe point—Checking the Ennemy But Giving Nothing to chance Untill properly Reinforced—this is the plan,” he wrote to Washington. And so far, it was working.
“Checking” the enemy at every turn had also been serving Nathanael Greene well in his battle against those British forces in the South that were not controlled by Cornwallis. Since Greene had taken over from Gates, by dividing his forces with Daniel Morgan so they would not risk another wholesale capture, Greene in a series of strategic retreats, countermarches, small picked battles, and lightning raids had evicted the British almost entirely from the Carolinas, forcing them toward confinement in the fortified cities of Charleston and Savannah.
* * *
In late August, two days after learning that de Grasse was on the way, Washington’s sense of urgency was palpable as he laid out for Rochambeau a route south, noting, “I have named no halting day because we have not a mo
ment to lose—and because the Troops will more than probably, be detained sometime at Trenton—but if you should think it absolutely necessary, Whippany will be a good place for a halt; as there is a good road leading from thence through Chatham (five Miles distant) to Elizabeth Town and Staten Island.” The planned halt at Chatham was in part for the purpose of exploiting a recently discovered British weakness.
While the French army had been at Phillipsburg, along the North River, Baron von Closen, a Rochambeau aide-de-camp and a captain in the Deux-Ponts Regiment, had noted in his diary that the British sailing up the river in their direction had as their object “the seizure of some bread and other provisions … from Peekskill, where the quartermaster had built some ovens.” Later that evening Closen learned that the British in their raid on a French warehouse had taken “1000 rations of bread,” and fifty “recently-dyed” outer coats intended for the cavalry. Two days later, as the British raiders were passing back downriver, French howitzers fired at them, causing half the crew of their flagship to jump overboard. “You can be sure … that they will no longer crave our white bread,” Closen smirked to his diary.
Closen’s ability to read and speak English had helped him become an enthusiastic appreciator of the American cause and of what the Americans had accomplished thus far during the war; he had taken the time when in Boston to tour Bunker Hill and he read to augment his knowledge of America. When escorting Washington, Closen endeared himself to the commander by asking to be shown locations where events of importance to the war had occurred. Washington happily obliged.
Because the armies were to cross the North River at a point well above New York and then turn south, it became imperative to deceive the British into thinking that the armies’ target was still New York. “Is it not advantageous to pursue the preparation for the attack of New yourk[?],” Duportail had written to Washington the day after the decision was made to go to Virginia. “If the enemy perceive that we give up the idea of attacking New york they will reinforce Portsmouth Virginia, may be before we can get there.” Washington agreed, as did Rochambeau. The American commander then sent Duportail south with instructions to meet de Grasse the moment that the admiral hove into sight.
By this point in the war, the ruse that Washington had so often used—constructing excess tents and fires to make the British believe that more troops faced them than actually existed—was shopworn. Moreover, in this instance he felt it necessary to avoid leaks by preventing the American and French troops from knowing precisely where they were heading or that a ruse was being constructed. So he proposed building pontoons, and taking thirty landing craft with the army as it moved, which the British (and his own troops) would reason was necessary only if the attack was to be through Staten Island to New York. Rochambeau agreed with these ruses, and proposed an additional one.
It began to take shape on August 19, when the French forces reached Chatham, twenty-five miles west of New York. Closen was rhapsodic about New Jersey’s “beautiful country … a land of milk and honey, with game, fish, vegetables, poultry, etc.,” which made quite a contrast to New York State, “where misery is written on the brow of the inhabitants.”
If the British believed that French were making a permanent camp at Chatham, Rochambeau figured, they would reason that such a camp meant that the French were aimed at New York, not only to attack there but to be available to support de Grasse should he appear at Sandy Hook. But if the French forces were headed south, Rochambeau believed that the British would conclude, the French camp at Chatham would only be a temporary one.
So Rochambeau dispatched his quartermaster to buy up all the spare bricks to be found along the Raritan River and in the vicinity, as he later wrote, for the purpose of “establishing a boulangerie at Chatham.” The quartermaster did as ordered and was fired upon while doing so, which pleased Rochambeau. The ovens were constructed and put to work baking batches of aromatic, crusty French bread. Washington ordered an American unit to guard the ovens. All was done, Closen reported to his diary, “to make Clinton believe that we were seriously considering an attack on New York and that the army would remain camped in the region.” As a Washington aide-de-camp also noted in his diary, other ovens were ordered built even nearer Sandy Hook, contracts given for forage, and preliminary settings for emplacing batteries were made, so that “By these maneuvres and the correspondent march of the Troops, our own army no less than the Enemy are completely deceived.”
By a few days after the boulangerie was in place in Chatham, guarded by an American unit, the bulk of the French and American troops were well down the state toward Philadelphia. “This maneuver prevented General Clinton from sending forces to the rescue of Cornwallis,” Rochambeau would state. Letters sent by Clinton in this period reveal his belief that the French and Americans were still in Chatham. Also, since New York could be de Grasse’s target, Clinton was not prepared to do much but to remain where he was. Not until August 28 did Clinton learn definitively that Washington’s troops were nearing Trenton, thirty miles from Philadelphia, that Rochambeau’s troops were not far behind, and that Barras had sailed southward from Newport. On September 2 Clinton finally informed Cornwallis that Washington’s forces were on their way toward his, accompanied by Rochambeau’s substantial French forces and expecting to meet Admiral de Grasse’s force there.
Neither at that time nor later did Clinton ever acknowledge that at the most important moment of the war, he had been effectively tricked into complacency by the British taste for French bread.
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“The measures which we are now pursuing are big with great events.”
—George Washington
In mid-August 1781, Admiral Hood’s fleet was at the northern edge of the Caribbean, looking for the arrival of de Grasse’s, when Hood learned from a messenger ship sent from New York that de Grasse was likely to attack New York. The message said that de Grasse would first go to Newport, join with Barras’s fleet, and then both would attack the British stronghold—so Hood should hasten to New York to help fend them off. Departing the Caribbean for the American coast, on August 25 Hood “made the land a little to the southward of Cape Henry.… Finding no enemy had appeared either in the Chesapeake or Delaware, I proceeded [to] Sandy Hook.”
Forty-eight hours later, de Grasse’s fleet arrived at Chesapeake Bay, with twenty-eight ships of the line, four frigates, and three thousand French soldiers.
A small boat came out to meet the Ville de Paris. Despite seeing its fleur-de-lis flags and its sailors dressed in white, not in British blue, those in the small boat asked where Admiral Rodney could be found. The visitors were conveyed to de Grasse’s cabin where they were informed that they were now prisoners. The banquet they had brought, intended for Rodney, was eaten by the French officers while offering toasts to him. To forestall any Cornwallis exit from the peninsula, de Grasse sent some ships to block the York and James Rivers. Shortly Lafayette’s associate Jean-Joseph Soubadère de Gimat came aboard with news that Rochambeau and Washington were marching down the Atlantic seaboard to link with the fleet.
Those two commanders were just then reaching Philadelphia and a profuse welcome. At Washington’s request, Rochambeau loaned to Robert Morris twenty thousand dollars in specie. The term was short—one month. The French general’s own troops’ wages were waiting on cash that de Grasse was bringing from Cuba and the money that Laurens had carried from Versailles. Morris then gave Rochambeau a gift of flour from his warehouses—perhaps after hearing the bakery-deceit story, which Rochambeau became fond of repeating—and added ten thousand dollars of his own to the twenty thousand for Washington. The thirty thousand dollars enabled the commander to surprise his troops with a month’s pay in hard cash. “This was the first that could be called money, which we had received as wages since the year ’76,” the diarist Joseph Plumb Martin recalled: six French crowns each, paid only to line soldiers, not to officers.
The army’s poverty was reflected in its ragtag appearance as th
e men marched through Philadelphia in a line two miles long, stirring clouds of dust. Continental officers in handsome uniforms provided a bright contrast, though not as startling as that furnished the next day by the French. After a halt at the outskirts to powder wigs and make white uniforms glisten, the French marchers paraded through Philadelphia, resplendent far beyond the British in the 1777–78 occupation. Lauzun’s Legion, riding on draped steeds, wore the most exciting multicolored garb. The Soissonnais Regiment put on a show of intricate rifle handling.
Washington smiled at the guests during the formal receptions in Philadelphia but was “distressed beyond expression,” he confessed in a letter to Lafayette, at not knowing whether de Grasse had made Chesapeake Bay. In moving the land forces toward Virginia, Washington had taken a huge gamble: Should de Grasse not arrive on schedule, or be bested by the British fleet, the American and French armies, rather than Cornwallis’s, might be trapped and the war lost.
By the time Washington reached Philadelphia, his emissary to de Grasse, Duportail, had boarded the Ville de Paris and introduced himself. The admiral was in the process of putting ashore three thousand troops, led by Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon to link up with Lafayette’s forces, which were approaching from Jamestown. Offloading was always a time of peril since the force was not in a good defensive position and therefore was vulnerable. Saint-Simon’s officers were amazed that Cornwallis did not attack. They made haste in the unloading, which stoked de Grasse’s desire to use the combined troops to attack the British immediately.
How the French Saved America Page 25