by Sarah Vowell
On March 20, the American envoys were summoned to the Château de Versailles. Though Benjamin Franklin left his famous fur cap at home and wore a nice enough brown velvet suit, an eyewitness at the palace divulged, “I should have taken him for a big farmer, so great was his contrast with the other diplomats, who were all powdered in full dress, and splashed all over with gold and ribbons.”
Once the septuagenarian Franklin was ushered into the twenty-three-year-old king’s chamber, Louis asked him, “Please assure Congress of my friendship.”
Franklin promised the king that he could “count on the gratitude of Congress.”
Louis remarked, “I hope this will be for the good of the two countries.”
He hoped. It’s not as though either man could make an educated guess about how this sort of coalition usually works out. They couldn’t exactly look up what happened the last time the son of a Boston soap maker was in cahoots with the crowned head of the House of Bourbon. Sometimes there is something new under the sun, or, in this case, under the woefully bedazzled ceilings of a grotesque hunting lodge gone wrong.
Franklin, knowing how much courtesy mattered at court, flattered the king, “If all monarchies were governed by the principles which are in your heart, Sire, republics would never be formed.”
I reread the previous tricky sentence at least thirty-eight times, and I still can’t decide if Franklin actually meant it, considering the principles in Louis XVI’s heart had more to do with sticking it to the British for snatching Quebec from his grandfather. What is obvious is that the patriots lucked out having a cagey old pro like Franklin doing their bidding chez Louis. What a relief that our first official diplomat knew a thing or two about being diplomatic, considering that back home Steuben was lecturing the inexperienced recruits at Valley Forge about how that pointy knife thing attached to their musket barrels was more than just a skewer to barbecue kebabs.
Over a decade after the Treaty of Alliance was signed, in the early days of the French Revolution, a forlorn Louis XVI would answer a letter from his Indian ally Tipu Sultan of Mysore, who was seeking French help in his war with the forces of Britain’s East India Company under the command of our old pal Cornwallis. (This conflict on the subcontinent, by the way, became a footnote in U.S. history when the Mysoreans’ missiles intrigued a British Army engineer, who went on to design his own versions for the redcoats, including those fired by the British fleet at Fort McHenry in 1814 and witnessed by Francis Scott Key, who immortalized “the rockets’ red glare” in our national anthem, thus proving that the hippie saps are right and we really are all connected—by weaponry.) Anyway, Louis replied to the sultan, “This occasion”—being hit up for money, men, and arms to combat his old nemeses the British—“greatly resembles the American affair of which I never think without regret. On that occasion, they took advantage of my youth, and today we are paying the price for it.”
The most influential member of this “they” who talked Louis into the alliance with the Americans was undoubtedly his foreign minister Vergennes. After Franklin’s audience with the king, the treaty celebrations at Versailles culminated in a dinner hosted by Vergennes with Franklin seated next to him in the chair that traditionally had been reserved for the British ambassador. Nearly three years after Vergennes’s spy in Philadelphia gave Franklin vague assurances that France wished the rebels well, Franklin and Vergennes could finally rejoice in person, and more important, in public.
In the months between the signing of the Franco-American Treaty of Alliance on February 6, 1778, and its ratification by the Continental Congress on May 4, Britain declared war on France. At the same time, British prime minister Lord North also spearheaded a last-ditch effort at reconciliation with the colonies. North dispatched a doomed “peace commission” to meet with Congress and delivered an address to the House of Commons on February 17 suggesting that the British government should capitulate on all the Americans’ prewar sticking points, except for recognizing independence. His hope, however faint, was that the colonists would go back to being subjects of the crown if the Coercive Acts were repealed, Parliament gave up the right to tax the colonies, the Continental Congress was recognized as “a legal body,” and Americans were allowed to elect members of the House of Commons. According to a contemporary periodical’s coverage of this speech, the MPs’ reaction to these suggestions was “a dull melancholy silence,” then “astonishment, dejection and fear.”
What a waste. The previous twelve years of bad blood and corpses could have been avoided if these same astonished and dejected men had paid attention to Ben Franklin’s testimony about the Stamp Act before the House of Commons back in 1766. He acknowledged that while at that moment Britain “will not find a rebellion” in her colonies, he warned the members of Parliament that if their unjust laws were enforced at gunpoint, “they may, indeed, make one.”
There was no going back. “Nothing short of Independence,” Washington wrote to Henry Laurens, “can possibly do.” Of course the Continental Congress of the United States ratified the Treaty of Alliance with the nation that recognized the United States. “What they call in France, my new country,” cheered Lafayette.
But before we cue the brass section to blare “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots’ premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, “This is your Fourth of July, not mine.”
You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.
• • •
Ah, spring. May 1778, specifically. Coming up on cannon weather. But then who needs to pay for gunpowder when heatstroke kills for free?
William Howe would soon sail home, leaving his number two, Henry Clinton, as the new commander in chief. Ordered by Germain to evacuate Philadelphia and return to the British stronghold of New York City, Clinton skipped town the morning of May 18, leading an exodus across the Delaware River of more than fifteen thousand British and Hessian troops, three thousand Loyalist Philadelphians, and fifteen hundred wagons of supplies and sundries. With an unwieldy, twelve-mile-long caravan of sweaty slowpokes inching across New Jersey for weeks on end, Clinton was pretty much asking to be attacked.
In June Washington convened a couple of war councils to seek his generals’ advice on whether or not to hit Clinton from behind. Greene and Steuben were in favor. Ditto Anthony Wayne, who hoped to repeat the Saratoga surrender of Johnny Burgoyne by “Burgoyning Clinton.” In his memoirs Lafayette claimed that he “asserted that it would be disgraceful for the chiefs, and humiliating for the troops, to allow the enemy to traverse the Jerseys tranquilly; that, without running any improper risk, the rear guard might be attacked.”
In the bronze bas-relief sculpture depicting one of these meetings that’s on the nineteenth-century monument in front of the Monmouth County courthouse in Freehold, New Jersey, Lafayette leans over a table with a map on it, goading Washington on. The other generals appear convinced, except for an ever-so-skeptical Henry Knox, who grips a sword as if he’s fantasizing about stabbing Lafayette with it, and General Charles Lee, who scowls with his arms crossed with an invisible but implied thought bubble above his head saying, Harrumph.
Lee had recently been returned to the C
ontinentals at Valley Forge through a prisoner exchange. He was, technically, Washington’s second in command. The two had served together in the French and Indian War. An Englishman hailing from Cheshire, Lee spent nearly twenty years as an officer in His Majesty’s army before retiring and settling in Virginia in 1773. The more experienced Lee had expected the Continental Congress to appoint him commander in chief of the Continental Army back in ’75. He never really got over Washington getting the job instead. In 1776 Washington had one of the Continentals’ Hudson River forts renamed after him, which is how the city of Fort Lee, New Jersey, got its name.
Soon thereafter Lee was captured when the British tracked him to his lodgings in a country tavern, yanking him out in his bathrobe and slippers. He spent over a year as Manhattan’s most pampered POW, being wined and dined nightly in comfortable, officer-worthy digs while his patriot comrades jailed on the prison ships in the East River were getting their dietary protein by licking the lice off their hands.
Washington had his suspicions that Lee might have gotten treasonously cozy with his old redcoat coworkers. Eight decades would pass before someone nosing through the papers of William Howe’s secretary in 1857 found a document proving Lee’s collaboration with the British. A page with Lee’s advice to Howe on how to take and hold Philadelphia was labeled “Mr. Lee’s plan, March 29, 1777.”
In June of ’78, once Washington made the decision to attack Clinton at Monmouth, he offered Lee the command of the advance guard’s five thousand troops. Qualms or not, Lee had seniority. Lee declined, deeming it beneath him, more the purview of a “young, volunteering general.” Having a particularly puppyish one of those on hand, Washington offered the command to Lafayette. According to the diary of one of his aides, Lafayette was “in raptures with his command and burning to distinguish himself.” Then Lee wanted it back. Then Washington reminded Lee his heart wasn’t in it. Then Lee agreed and backed off. Then he changed his mind yet again. Washington threw up his hands and told Lafayette to proceed. Lee wrote to Washington to complain that if he were usurped by a junior officer, he would be “disgraced.” Lafayette was a good sport and wrote to Washington, “If it is believed necessary or useful to the good of the service and the honour of General Lee . . . I will cheerfully obey and serve him.” Alexander Hamilton wrote, “General Lee’s conduct with respect to the command of this corps was truly childish.” In the end, Washington followed protocol, deciding to let Lee lead the first wave of Continentals. Washington ordered Lee to attack Clinton’s rear guard.
The morning of June 28, Washington kept an ear out for the sound of Lee’s artillery. Hearing neither cannon nor mortar, only the occasional forlorn musket pop, Washington rode toward Monmouth to find out what the holdup was. Quizzing the torrent of Continentals who started coming toward him, Washington determined that Lee had ordered a retreat before much of the corps had even begun to execute his instructions to advance.
Washington, fuming, spotted Lee. Uninterested in Lee’s excuses for calling off the attack, Washington yelled, “Go to the rear, sir.” As Lee rode off, Washington let rip a spew of profanity.
General Charles Scott of Virginia, who had served with both Washington and Lee in the French and Indian War, claimed to hear the whole thing, getting a kick out of His Excellency’s meltdown: “Yes, sir, he swore on that day till the leaves shook on the trees. Charming! Delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing, before or since. Sir, on that memorable day, he swore like an angel from Heaven.”
Afterward, Lee was court-martialed and found guilty of disobeying orders, disrespecting the commander in chief, and “misbehavior before the enemy . . . by making an unnecessary, disorderly, and shameful retreat.” Lee was suspended from duty for a year, but his response to that was to send the Congress an offensive letter that insulted the delegates into booting him out for good.
In 2014, a scandal nicknamed “Bridgegate” outraged the tri-state area when news broke that the New Jersey governor’s deputy chief of staff allegedly ordered politically motivated, arbitrary lane closures on the George Washington Bridge at rush hour. The deputy e-mailed a colleague, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” The resulting traffic jams, meant to inconvenience commuters crossing the Hudson River, were reportedly acts of retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee for declining to endorse the governor in the gubernatorial election. There is an ongoing investigation as I write this. But no matter the outcome, the most important question this purported abuse of power brought to light is obvious: Why is Fort Lee still named Fort Lee?
Even setting aside the probability of Lee’s treason that was uncovered in 1857, surely getting kicked out of a struggling army that could not afford to be terribly picky about who was in it was grounds for renaming Fort Lee back in the day. Changing Hudson River fort names after personnel shake-ups was not unprecedented at the time. For instance, the patriots were quick to rechristen the New York citadel they had named after General Benedict Arnold once his treason was exposed, which is how Fort Arnold became Fort Clinton and then West Point.
The scene of Washington cussing out Charles Lee was for some reason not included in the series of bronze illustrations of the Battle of Monmouth on the monument at the county courthouse. Even though it was the most New Jersey–like behavior in the battle, if not the entire war.
What happened next is most definitely carved in bronze on the Monmouth monument and worth a look-see for passersby on their way to drug court. A dynamic account titled “Washington Rallying the Troops” pictures the commander on horseback, in flight. Washington shouts orders midair at some musket-wielding infantrymen. Unlike the horse, the grunt in the foreground is not wearing shoes. He’s not wearing a hat either, but only because he has taken it off to cheer his commander in chief. Washington’s coat and the horse’s tail bounce behind him as he points his sword to the future.
Sir Henry Clinton spared Washington the chore of chasing him. When Lee approached Clinton’s rear guard earlier that morning, the redcoats were waiting for him. When Lee fled, Clinton and Cornwallis pursued. So Washington was not rallying his retreating troops to turn around and go back to the front. He was convincing them to stand and fight because the front had followed them.
“His presence stopped the retreat,” recounted Lafayette. “His graceful bearing on horseback, his calm and deportment which still retained a trace of displeasure . . . were all calculated to inspire the highest degree of enthusiasm.” He added, “I thought then as now that I had never beheld so superb a man.”
Hamilton remarked, “I never saw the general to so much advantage. His coolness and firmness was admirable.”
The real story of Monmouth was the troops’ newfound cool, the payoff of Steuben’s drills at Valley Forge. “After they recovered from the first surprise occasioned by the retreat of the advanced corps,” Washington later wrote to the Congress, the army’s performance the rest of the day “could not be surpassed.”
General Wayne took charge of Lee’s retreating regiments, holding off the advancing Brits as Washington regrouped the main army behind him.
Greene would have the kind of gratifying day that only comes with comeuppance. Nine months earlier he was called on to cover his comrades’ panicked flight after Cornwallis spooked them at Brandywine. At Monmouth, Greene, backed up by a line of artillery positioned on a hill above him, led the Continentals, who repeatedly rebuffed elite infantry directed by Cornwallis himself.
One of the panels on the monument depicts Molly Pitcher, who was either an actual woman named Mary Hays or a tall tale or the composite of a lot of actual women including one named Mary Hays (or not) at different battles. Which is to say that Molly Pitcher was a folk hero. The story goes that during the Battle of Fill in the Blank, “Molly Pitcher,” an artilleryman’s wife, was fetching buckets of water for her spouse’s cannon crew to drink and to dampen the swabs they plunged into the barrel between firings to snuff out any burning embers be
fore cramming in the next round of gunpowder. When her wounded husband fell down dead, she stepped in and took his place on the crew. One colorful version of the tale has an enemy cannonball ripping her dress as it flew between her knees, but she shrugged it off, pointing out that things could have gone worse.
Since she may or may not have existed, there is more than one probably phony “Molly Pitcher’s spring,” the well where she allegedly drew her water. Before swinging by the monument at the county courthouse, my friend Jonathan Sherman and I spot a couple of Molly Pitcher’s spring contenders, one in Monmouth Battlefield State Park and another next to some railroad tracks nearby.
On the courthouse monument, Molly is front and center, a determined dame in a swirling frock shoving a rammer down the barrel of a cannon. A dead man, presumably Mr. Molly, lies on the ground near her feet. Henry Knox lurks off to the side.
I mention to Sherm that there’s a rumor the sculptor, James Edward Kelly, used a young Thomas Edison as a model for one of the artillerymen standing behind Molly. Sherm takes out his phone and retrieves a photo of Thomas Edison to see if any of the men in Molly’s vicinity resemble the inventor. By that, I do not mean that he calls up Edison’s picture from the Internet. He has an Edison portrait on his phone already, in between snapshots of his kids.
When I ask him why he has a photo of Edison handy, he replies, “I have lots of pictures of Edison on my phone. I find him inspiring.” He reminds me not to underestimate how much people from New Jersey love talking about famous people from New Jersey. Sherm was born in Morristown and grew up in Livingston, though it would have been impolite to point out that Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” was born in Ohio but grew up in Michigan.