by Sarah Vowell
Sherm holds up the Edison photo next to the monument, looking for a resemblance. He even compares the visage of the dead husband lying at Molly Pitcher’s feet to another picture of an elderly Edison in the same pose, taking a nap outdoors as two buddies sit nearby reading the paper.
The main reason he keeps the Edison pictures handy, Sherm says, is for pep talks with his seven-year-old son, Sam. “I like bringing him up in an ongoing conversation with Sam about Edison’s formula for genius of ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration and why it shouldn’t be flipped and turned into one percent perspiration as Sam would like it to be.” This seems like a more constructive use of historical figures to chasten children than the shivering soldiers of Valley Forge shaming an asthmatic little Teddy Roosevelt into weight lifting.
There was literal and figural perspiration aplenty at the Battle of Monmouth. The temperature was upwards of one hundred degrees. “The mouth of a heated oven seemed to me to be but a trifle hotter than this ploughed field,” recalled Joseph Plumb Martin. Around a third of the day’s casualties would die of plain old heatstroke, including George Washington’s horse.
The Continentals fought until dusk, pushing back each enemy advance until Clinton bailed, conducting his men back toward the village of Monmouth Courthouse and out of range of Knox’s artillery.
“We forced the Enemy from the Field,” Washington wrote to Henry Laurens, “and encamped on the Ground.” Intending to resume the battle at first light, the living slept there among the dead. Washington spread his cloak under an apple tree, stretching out next to Lafayette. Like boys at a sleepover, they gossiped about Charles Lee until drifting off.
Come morning, Washington discovered that Clinton had set decoy campfires to trick him into believing they would resume the engagement at sunup. But Clinton had stolen away in the dark, marching his army to Sandy Hook. Royal Navy transport boats were waiting there to ferry them to Manhattan and safety.
Before Sherm and I drive back to New York, we stop at one more historic site in Freehold, the former home of some twentieth-century relatives of one Private John Springsteen, who volunteered with the Monmouth County militia in 1775. This is the modest clapboard duplex at 39½ Institute Street where Bruce Springsteen was living on September 9, 1956, the night he watched Elvis Presley’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
After the broadcast, the six-year-old Springsteen talked his mother into renting him a guitar, “inspired,” he later recalled, “by the passion in Elvis’ pants.” (The pants always get a lot of play, and for good reason, but when I went back to the clips of “Hound Dog” and “Ready Teddy,” I was just as mesmerized by the carnal hilarity of Presley’s facial expressions—the finest eyebrow work since Groucho Marx.)
In a speech Springsteen delivered in Texas in 2012, he boiled down what he had learned that night from Elvis: “You did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self.”
Later, I e-mail Sherm to thank him for indulging me in that last stop. I was under the impression that he preferred our time at the museum in Monmouth Battlefield State Park, with me talking at him about the significance of Friedrich von Steuben’s army training manual on display there.
“Not only was stopping at one of Springsteen’s childhood homes appropriate,” Sherm replies, “it was an important part of the day for me as a Jersey boy, since it served as a great reminder that not all important fights take place on battlefields. Some take place in tiny houses, or half-houses, whether with family members or within oneself, and involve changing your course, convincing your mother to rent you a guitar (or my father to buy me a typewriter), and getting the hell out of that house, that town, that state. It’s a different kind of independence, personal instead of political, but one of the many things we won in that war fought over two centuries ago turned out to be the freedom of expression that let a dude from Jersey write a song like ‘Thunder Road.’”
• • •
The morning after the Battle of Monmouth, Washington’s orders had gushed, “The Commander in Chief congratulates the army on the victory obtained over the arms of his Britannic Majesty yesterday and thanks most sincerely the gallant officers and men who distinguished themselves upon the occasion.”
To Washington it was a victory. To nitpickers and spoilsports, it was more of a draw. The British did not so much retreat as achieve their objective of moving from Philadelphia to New York. Whether or not the Continentals won, they did not lose. If it was a draw, it was a respectable one. Steuben’s training had made the army more professional, coordinated, and skilled. After the morning’s Charles Lee hiccup, Washington, his officers, and the enlisted men worked in concert to right the ship. At last Washington could ask the question about whether these were the men with whom he must defend America and the answer might actually cheer him up.
In August, a few weeks after Monmouth, Washington was ensconced in new headquarters in White Plains, New York. He was there to keep a threatening eye on Clinton, who was holed up in Manhattan daydreaming about resigning from a post he would soon describe as “this mortifying command.” The last time Washington had been in White Plains was during the “times that try men’s souls” era of the New York campaign in ’76.
“It is not a little pleasing, nor less wonderful to contemplate,” Washington wrote to an old compatriot in the Virginia House of Burgesses, “that after two years maneuvering and undergoing the strangest vicissitudes that perhaps ever attended any one contest since the creation, both armies are brought back to the very point they set out from.” Except the second time around, things were looking up. His nimbler, tougher Continentals had proven themselves to be worthier opponents, and the king of France had his back.
The rebels were so optimistic that France’s entry into the war could only mean that the war was almost over, that when Steuben first heard the news of the French alliance back at Valley Forge, he sent Congressman Henry Laurens his congratulations, speculating, “I may not, perhaps, have an opportunity of drawing my sword in your cause.”
Laurens’s ominous reply: “There is blood, much blood in our prospect, and . . . there will be opportunity and incitement to unsheath your sword.” Laurens, suspecting that Steuben was underestimating the tenacity of the pigheaded Anglo-Saxon islanders with whom they were at war, foretold, “Britain will not be humbled by a stroke of policy; she will be very angry, and if she is to fall, her fall will be glorious. We, who know her, ought to be prepared.”
Laurens wrote those words on May 11, 1778. Which was three years and twenty-two days after the first shot at Lexington. And five years, three months, and twenty-two days until September 3, 1783, when Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay would sign the treaty with Great Britain officially ending the war.
So in August of 1778, when George Washington was up in White Plains looking on the bright side, he had no clue that Monmouth would be the last battle he commanded in the north. In fact, the whole reason he was hunkered down in that particular Westchester County suburb—aside from just generally putting the screws on Henry Clinton—was to plan a grandiose campaign in which the French would help him take back New York. Never happened. Moreover, Washington would not personally command another battle for three more years.
The Revolutionary War’s classic period ends at Monmouth. What a golden age of ideas and action that was! Remember when Jefferson got up out of his chair? And Henry Knox schlepped the cannons to Boston? And Paris fell for Franklin’s fur hat and everything the hat implied? Remember that night under the apple tree at Monmouth, when Washington slept on the ground, with Lafayette curled up beside him? Remember when Elvis and his pants went on Ed Sullivan? Well, until the day an older, hungrier Washington puts on his black leather suit and gets the old band back together at Yorktown, we’re
going to have to fast-forward through a few years of “Do the Clam.”
• • •
The physical manifestation of George Washington’s frustration is my neighbor. I live in Manhattan near Union Square, where a statue of Washington on horseback gazes across Fourteenth Street a few yards away from a wistful likeness of Lafayette the boy sculpted by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi of Statue of Liberty fame. The Washington is not as sugary as the Lafayette, but when wasn’t that true?
The big bronze commemorates Washington riding into New York City at war’s end. November 25, 1783—the day the last of the redcoats finally abandoned New York for the first time since occupying it in 1776—was such a relief that New Yorkers celebrated Evacuation Day as a cherished November holiday for decades. That is, until Abraham Lincoln came along and ruined it. Him and his stupid Thanksgiving.
So Washington’s equestrian likeness was meant to look triumphant, and it does. But then again, it’s the picture of a dream denied. Washington never fantasized about trotting into town in an orderly fashion after diplomats hammered out a deal. He yearned to recapture the city in some flashy Franco-American amphibious show of strength, culminating in the transformation of Sir Henry Clinton’s surname into a participle connoting humiliation like “getting Burgoyned.”
The main reason the patriots had pushed for the French alliance was to get their hands on the French navy’s enormous ships, vessels groaning under the weight of so much weaponry it was a wonder they stayed afloat. In July of 1778, a French fleet appeared off the Jersey shore, its four frigates and twelve ships of the line (including the ninety-gun flagship the Languedoc) commanded by Lafayette’s cousin-in-law Admiral Charles Hector, Count d’Estaing.
Washington licked his lips anticipating a grandiose joint operation in New York that history would look back on as the day that Clinton got Clintoned. Until d’Estaing, estimating that a sandbar made the channel into New York Harbor too shallow for his largest deep-sea Death Stars to squeeze through, nixed that plan.
So Washington’s dream was thwarted by math. At least that was d’Estaing’s excuse. In his landmark study The Influence of Sea Power on History—the imperialism starter kit for Theodore Roosevelt’s generation of warmongers—Alfred Thayer Mahan ruminates that d’Estaing “probably reasoned that France had nothing to gain by the fall of New York, which might have led to peace between America and England, and left the latter free to turn all her power against his own country. Less than that would have been enough to decide his wavering mind as to risking his fleet over the bar.”
As much as any alleged geopolitical cunning, d’Estaing’s “wavering mind” would be a deciding factor throughout this inaugural Franco-American campaign. That and the wind. A seasoned general (and therefore a confirmed landlubber), d’Estaing had been reappointed as an admiral by his chum the king. Which is why his sailors kept referring to him as “General” as a semi-snub. In fact, before putting the kibosh on a potentially conclusive attack on New York, d’Estaing had already goofed a potentially conclusive attack on Philadelphia, having put out from France with orders to blockade the Delaware Bay so as to trap the Howe brothers’ army and navy near Philadelphia; but he dillydallied crossing the Atlantic and arrived after the enemy had evacuated the capital.
D’Estaing’s timidity could be explained by simple lack of experience, especially when he was compared with Black Dick Howe, the human sea shanty he was up against. The older brother of the recently departed commander in chief General Sir William, Admiral Lord Richard Howe joined the Royal Navy at thirteen. Andrew O’Shaughnessy writes in The Men Who Lost America, “Howe pioneered the naval code of practice for amphibious warfare, in which the navy transported and gave logistical support to the army in beachhead landings.” Theory and practice—Howe was the whole package. Despite the superior size and firepower of the French fleet, d’Estaing would have been insane not to dread him.
D’Estaing hailed from Lafayette’s birthplace, Auvergne—a landlocked province that did not scream maritime potential. The presence of his fellow Auvergnat seemed to amplify Lafayette’s homesickness, perhaps reminding him of Britain’s role in his fatherless boyhood at Chavaniac. He egged on d’Estaing: “May you defeat them, sink them to the bottom, lay them as low as they have been insolent; may you begin the great work of their destruction by which we shall trample upon their nation; may you prove to them at their expense what a Frenchman, and a Frenchman from Auvergne, can do.”
For months, Lafayette had been calling the United States “my country,” sending Adrienne talking points on what the “wife of an American officer” should say. The coming of d’Estaing’s fleet Frenched him up considerably.
Washington, putting aside his New York revenge fantasy for the moment, convinced d’Estaing to sail north toward Narragansett Bay and occupied Rhode Island. The British had controlled Newport, on the southern coast of Aquidneck Island, since 1776. Half the city’s residents had fled, abandoning hundreds of homes and businesses that the six thousand enemy troops, mostly Hessians, tore down to burn as firewood. Thankfully, Touro Synagogue, the country’s oldest, still stands. To this day, it remains the grand symbol of Aquidneck Island’s backstory as a refuge for Jews, Baptists, Quakers, and other outcasts from Puritan Massachusetts, like the Protestant heretic Anne Hutchinson.
After the war, in 1790, Newport’s synagogue would go on to inspire one of Washington’s finer moments as a president and person. Responding to a letter from Touro’s Moses Seixas, who asked the new president if ratifying the Bill of Rights really was, to paraphrase, good for the Jews, Washington would send a letter addressed to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport. The First Amendment, he explained, exposed tolerance as a sham, because tolerance implies one superior group of people deigning to put up with their inferiors.
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” Washington wrote. “For, happily, the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Of course, before he could write that letter to Newport, Washington would have to pry the British out of Newport.
Washington sent Lafayette north with two thousand Continentals, who were to join up with the regional militiamen set to partner with d’Estaing. In his memoirs, Lafayette described their journey from White Plains to Providence “across a smiling country, covered with villages, in which the evident equality of the population distinctly proved the democracy of the government. From the apparent prosperity of each colony, it was easy to judge of the degree of freedom which its constitution might enjoy.”
Nathanael Greene, who was to share command of the regulars with Lafayette, was the descendant of Quakers drawn to the misfit magnet that was colonial Rhode Island. He was in spasms of envy when the commander in chief assigned the more senior General John Sullivan of New Hampshire to lead the joint operation with the French in his home state. Greene congratulated Sullivan on being “the first General that has ever had an opportunity of cooperating with the French forces belonging to the United States.” He added, “You are the most happy man in the World.”
Sullivan’s assignment required as much diplomacy as it did soldiering, which proved something of a challenge for a man Washington had recently reprimanded for his short fuse: “No other officer of rank in the whole army has so often conceived himself neglected, slighted, and ill-treated as you have done, and none, I am sure, has had less cause than yourself to entertain such ideas.”
In fact, after Sullivan had chewed him out, Admiral D’Estaing noted in a report that Sullivan had been a lawyer before the war. D’Estaing speculated that he “must have been an uncomfortable man for his clients.”
Convening in Rhode Island, Sullivan and d’Estaing quibbled from the get-go about which nation would have the honor of storming Newport first. They tabled this quandary
when news of the Royal Navy’s oncoming fleet made d’Estaing and his ships dash off to spar with Howe. Or that was the plan. They sailed straight into a storm instead. The tempest lasted three full days. Howe hustled back to New York. Winds bunted d’Estaing’s ships so far from port that Sullivan brooded for over a week about his allies’ fate. To Sullivan’s relief, the Frenchmen finally returned. To Sullivan’s dismay, this was more of a courtesy call. Having lost his flagship’s masts and rudder, d’Estaing just swung by to alert Sullivan that he and his walloped flotilla would have to skip the Newport operation altogether and proceed forthwith to Boston for repairs.
To Sullivan, the only thing worse than attacking Newport with those godforsaken Frenchmen would be attacking Newport without them. Because the regional militias had heeded Sullivan’s call for help, his forces had doubled to ten thousand troops, among them the starry Massachusetts militiamen and Sons of Liberty of yore John Hancock and Paul Revere. “It seems as if half of Boston was here,” Revere wrote home. Because of d’Estaing—or as d’Estaing might see it, the weather—half of Boston was about to be trapped on an island less than three miles from six thousand enemies who might be reinforced at any moment by Admiral Howe or a whole other British fleet that had been spotted off Long Island.
Sullivan had Greene and Lafayette ferried to the Languedoc to try to convince d’Estaing to stay and fight.
“If we fail in our negotiation,” Greene told Lafayette en route to d’Estaing’s ship, “we shall at least get a good dinner.” Washington should have chosen Greene, not Sullivan, to steer this mission. Besides his cool head and personal interest in helping his home state, Greene understood that whatever their shortcomings, the French could always be counted on to roast the hell out of a chicken.