by Sarah Vowell
August brought more bad news—a message from Vergennes that Rochambeau’s reinforcements were stuck at home because of a British blockade, and word of Horatio Gates’s embarrassing loss at Camden, South Carolina.
On September 20, Washington took Knox, Hamilton, and Lafayette to Hartford to meet with Rochambeau and his officers, including the Swedish count rumored to be Marie Antoinette’s lover, Axel von Fersen the Younger.
Fersen sized up Washington: “He is very cold, speaks little, but is courteous and frank. A shade of sadness overshadows his countenance, which is not unbecoming, and gives him an interesting air.”
Washington presented an eight-page plan to—what else?—attack New York before winter. But the French, Fersen noted, “would not be rushed.”
In the end, Washington agreed not to initiate a major battle unless the French held “at least temporary command of the sea along that part of the coast closest to the proposed action.”
Washington was disappointed about New York, but he told Lafayette, “We must consult our means rather than our wishes.” At least on his way back to White Plains he could look forward to stopping at West Point to visit his friend Benedict Arnold.
General Arnold was a no-show, and they soon discovered why. Hamilton alerted Washington that a British spy—John André, the aforementioned squatter in Franklin’s Philadelphia house—had been intercepted with papers from Arnold in his boot, including damaging information about West Point’s defenses and a letter about various military matters from Washington to Arnold. Washington asked to see Lafayette and Knox—Knox, who never could have made his daring journey to fetch the artillery at Ticonderoga if Arnold and Ethan Allen had not stormed that fort in ’75.
“Arnold has betrayed me,” Washington informed them. He wondered aloud, “Whom can we trust now?”
Answer: Franklin.
With Clinton controlling New York City, Cornwallis terrorizing the South, and the French preoccupied with sprucing up their digs in Newport, a desperate Washington contemplated another winter. In October of 1780, he wrote to Franklin, “Our present situation makes one of two things essential to us. A Peace, or the most vigorous aid of our Allies particularly in the article of money.”
After all those years in France cajoling, flattering, and making nice, the last-ditch letter Franklin wrote to Vergennes was void of sweet talk. It was simple and direct and full of fear. Congress was in danger. The redcoats were on the rise. If America were to fall, a separation like its current rift with Britain “may not occur again in the Course of Ages; and that the Possession of those fertile and extensive Regions and that Vast Sea Coast, will afford them so broad a Basis for future Greatness, by the rapid Growth of their Commerce: and Breed of Seamen and Soldier, as will enable them to become the Terror of Europe.”
He asked for twenty-five million livres. France kicked in six, which was six more than Washington had. This was among the happiest developments of the war (if you try not to think too hard about the guillotine).
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“My knowledge of his personal courage led me to expect that he would decide to blow his brains out,” Lafayette wrote of Benedict Arnold. No such luck. In fact, the newly minted British brigadier general was alive and well and commanding a Loyalist regiment in Portsmouth, Virginia. Washington ordered Lafayette to lead a division of New England and New Jersey light infantrymen to meet up with General Steuben in Virginia and, with the help of French forces sailing down from Newport, corner the traitor, then hang him.
The lack of funds made the trek south with twelve hundred men, many of them shoeless, extra arduous. Lafayette’s most annoying qualities—being a single-minded suck-up prone to histrionic correspondence—made him a first-rate advocate for his men. He charmed one city after another out of food and supplies. In Philadelphia he talked the new French ambassador into springing for flour and pork and convinced a bankrupt Congress to cough up some rum money.
That I have been to Arnold’s tomb in a London church is a testament to Lafayette’s failure to string him up in Virginia. The crypt area of St. Mary’s in Battersea currently functions as a kindergarten that keeps its fish tank next to the plaque honoring “the sometime general in the army of George Washington.”
Once the Royal Navy chased off the French ships carrying the troops that were supposed to help pin down Arnold at Portsmouth, Lafayette’s little division was forced to call off the manhunt. They departed Virginia and turned back around to rejoin the main army north of New York City.
In Maryland, Lafayette received new orders from Washington to trudge back to Virginia to “reinforce General Greene as speedily as possible.” Greene had taken over as commander of the army’s Southern Department after Horatio Gates rode north in a panic, abandoning his doomed troops in the Battle of Camden. So Lafayette’s dog-eared division had to backtrack through the same mosquito-infested terrain they had just trudged through to throw in with the decimated dregs of the Continental Army in the South that Greene was trying to rebuild with Steuben’s help, an especially difficult task given the forfeiture of five thousand men when Charleston surrendered. Greene described the severe deficiency of men, weapons, and supplies in the South as “totally deranged.”
Worn out from the aborted mission to capture Arnold, some of Lafayette’s troops deserted then and there. Exasperated and desperate for provisions, he wrote to the French ambassador such a melodramatic chronicle of his famished troops’ torn-up feet and scab-covered hands that once the letter was forwarded to Vergennes, the foreign minister promptly wrote to Lafayette, “The tableau you painted of the condition of the Americans is truly distressing.” He said the French government would guarantee another loan for the patriots of ten million livres from a Dutch bank.
Vergennes also informed Lafayette, “M. le Comte de Grasse, who commands our fleet in the Antilles, has been ordered to send part of his fleet to the coast of North America sometime before next winter.” Not a particularly poetic sentence, and yet it is so significant it’s worth rereading.
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I read somewhere that Colonial Williamsburg was supposed to be “Republican Disneyland.” But the actor-interpreter playing George Washington is perturbed that there aren’t enough taxes, saying that if Congress had the power to tax for revenue, this war wouldn’t have lasted six long years. States’ rights, he says, that’s the problem. A strong federal government would allow us to put behind us our local pursuits, our absurd and petty jealousies, and foster the greater good of the larger community. Then he says nice things about the French.
Not only is this fellow in the Washington getup railing against the trouble with states’ rights (and dropping the jaws of half the white guys in his audience), there is nothing remotely happiest-place-on-earth about his demeanor. In fact, my thirteen-year-old traveling companion describes this Washington as “super irritated.” And he is, though not nearly as irate as the colonial shoemaker I’d met that afternoon whom I’d mistakenly called a cobbler. (A cobbler repairs! A shoemaker makes!)
The Washington reenactor introduced himself as the “commander in chief of the combined allied armies that are presently gathering in this vicinity.” That would put him here in Williamsburg in September of 1781. He says Cornwallis is trapped at Yorktown thanks to “more French vessels floating at the mouth of the Chesapeake than the British have in all of North America.” So he’s hopeful but there’s a crabby catch in his voice because he is addressing us as the citizens of Virginia. “Virginia,” he says, “owes Lafayette a great debt, as he’s been defending you for months.”
General Anthony Wayne’s brigade of barefoot Pennsylvanians has marched down to help us, and apparently we Virginians cannot be bothered to scrounge them up some shoes. Thinking back to my altercation with the non-cobbler nearby, I resist the urge to raise my hand and utter the four most reassuring words in the English language: I know a guy.
This is my f
irst time to Colonial Williamsburg, and I had worried that it would be too chipper, too reassuring, an infomercial for the preindustrial good olde days that Frank Lloyd Wright once denounced for its “mawkish sentimentality.” But within the first hour of our arrival, my family and I fall in with an angry mob. If they are sentimental, it is only because they’re nostalgic for a time the government of Great Britain respected their constitutional rights as Englishmen.
They are storming the royal governor’s palace. It is April 20, 1775. Unbeknownst to them, the first shot at Lexington had been fired the day before. Patrick Henry had given a speech that alarmed Governor Dunmore. Dunmore—“that Scottish wretch!”—had ordered Royal Navy sailors to steal the town militia’s gunpowder supply in the middle of the night, and boy were they peeved.
Someone calls out, “The whole reason Virginia exists is to expand the British Empire.” I look around at the backdrop of restored or re-created red brick buildings—Georgian buildings, in the symmetrical style in fashion between the reigns of George III and his great-grandfather George I. When we got here, my sister said that Colonial Williamsburg “looks so foreign.” She meant that it looks like England, not America. And that is our angry mob’s point. The reason they are angry is because they’re British and they’re just supposed to put up with being treated like they’re Irish?
Robbed of gunpowder, their only available weapon is sarcasm. “I’m more British than some miserable wretch walking up the street in London and sitting in Parliament!” one of them yells.
These actors in period garb are not the upbeat butter churners I had dreaded. They are livid and loud. I am enjoying it. My sister is enjoying it. But then I look over at my nephew, Owen, wearing a Continental hunting tunic and tricornered hat and holding the wooden musket he had just picked out at Colonial Williamsburg’s costume rental shop. He is trying to blend in amongst the reenactors, joining their chant. “Liberty or death!” they holler. “Liberty or death!” Who better to identify with surly victims of tyranny raging against their oppressors than a teenager on a car trip with his aunt and mom?
Colonial Williamsburg could stage another reenactment composed entirely of readings from the morose letters exchanged among the leadership of the Continental Army in 1781 about the uphill task of defending Virginia without much help from actual Virginians. Greene informed Steuben, “The state is lifeless and inactive unless they are often electrified.”
After only five of the five hundred recruits the state government promised him bothered to report for duty, Steuben confessed to Greene, “I am not less tired of this state than they are of me.”
Lafayette wrote to Alexander Hamilton from Richmond that Cornwallis had him outnumbered five to one. Lafayette said he was waiting around for General Wayne to show up with his Pennsylvanians so that he “may at least be beat with some decency.”
Thomas Jefferson was Virginia’s governor. When Lafayette complained to him about the state’s lack of militia, food, horses, weapons, and just general dearth of military hustle, Jefferson agreed with him, admitting, “Mild Laws, a People not used to prompt obedience, a want of provisions of War & means of procuring them render our orders often ineffectual.”
Jefferson’s big accomplishment of 1781, aside from eluding the redcoats sent to Monticello to kidnap him, was writing the first draft of Notes on the State of Virginia. The book hints at the swooping magnitude of Jefferson’s mind, recording what he was thinking about architecture, Indians, farmers, slavery, other people’s gods, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah and the Potomac and “the moment of their junction,” how Virginia was “worth a voyage across the Atlantic” to behold. Basically, the governor of Virginia had thoughts on everything but how to arm and feed and reinforce the soldiers risking their lives to save his state.
In a desperate attempt to convince the state assembly to procure the Continentals some badly needed horses, Nathanael Greene wrote to Jefferson in April, “It is in vain to expect protection from an Army which is not supported.”
Virginia’s “government wants energy” was how Lafayette described Jefferson’s administration to Hamilton. “Militia are not numerous, without arms, and not used to war.” Adding to the deficit of material aid, Lafayette pointed out he was short on information: “There are accounts that Lord Cornwallis is very strong; others make him very weak. In this country there is no getting good intelligence.”
Forced to organize his own spy network, Lafayette recruited James, a slave from New Kent County. James pretended to be a runaway, volunteering as a servant and guide to Benedict Arnold, then Cornwallis, passing along intelligence about British troop movements to Lafayette. After the war, James successfully petitioned the Virginia Assembly for his freedom and a war pension, using a letter of recommendation from Lafayette to make his case. James took the last name of Lafayette in honor of his former commanding officer.
By May of 1781, Benedict Arnold had returned to New York, and Cornwallis took charge in Virginia. Lafayette’s assignment from Washington was to avoid a full-scale confrontation. “No rational person will condemn you for not fighting with the odds against you and while so much is depending on it,” wrote Washington. The goal was to keep Cornwallis flustered and tired while sidestepping the full force of Britain’s wrath.
Though avoiding warfare was never Lafayette’s first impulse, he reassured Washington, “Were I to fight a battle, I should be cut to pieces, the militia dispersed and the arms lost.” He vowed instead “to skirmish, but not to engage too far . . . I am not strong enough even to get beaten.”
With the arrival of Wayne in June and the addition of militia rounded up by Steuben, Lafayette ended up with nearly four thousand men. As Cornwallis ripped his way across Virginia, occupying Richmond and then Williamsburg, Lafayette was always on his tail, dispatching small parties of riflemen to snipe at the army’s periphery, dropping a handful of redcoats a pop, keeping them perpetually on guard, on edge, and on the move. In a letter to Clinton snatched by the patriots, Cornwallis promised to capture Lafayette. “The boy cannot escape me,” he vowed.
Celebrating the Fourth of July outside of Williamsburg, Lafayette crowed to Washington that the men he commanded were “far superior to any British troops . . . their presence here, I must confess, has saved this State.”
One of Lafayette’s aides, James McHenry, confided in a letter to Nathanael Greene that he worried about Lafayette and “Mad Anthony” Wayne egging each other on. “Wayne was impetuous,” he wrote, “and the Marquis loved glory.” McHenry feared that between the two of them, “military ardor should be too powerful for reason.” Greene advised McHenry to try to keep Lafayette in check: “You are useful to him in moderating his military ardor, which no doubt is heated by the fire of [Wayne] . . . who by the by is an excellent officer.”
On July 6 Cornwallis set a trap, and Lafayette and Wayne got caught in it. When the redcoats crossed the James River near Jamestown on their way to Portsmouth, Cornwallis tricked Lafayette into believing that most of the army had gone on ahead, leaving only a weak rear guard that would be an easy target for the patriots to polish off. Lafayette took the bait, dispatching an advance guard commanded by Wayne to pounce on the stragglers near Green Spring plantation—only to find Cornwallis’s entire army roaring back at them. According to Wayne, the sudden appearance of seven thousand British regulars presented him with “a choice of difficulties.” Wayne decided against a retreat and ordered its opposite—a bayonet charge against the Brits’ front line. Lafayette, watching nearby, immediately understood his mistake and galloped toward the fray. He personally led a Continental counterattack on Cornwallis to cover Wayne’s troops backing out, though twenty-eight of his Pennsylvanians were killed. Lafayette and Wayne’s shared knack for quick thinking and stupid bravery turned around a potential catastrophe. Because Cornwallis continued on to Portsmouth, Lafayette painted the Battle of Green Spring as a patriot victory rather than a mishap that could h
ave been worse. In a letter to Greene, Lafayette admitted, “There were serious blunders on both sides,” adding that at least the appearance of a British retreat “will look good in a gazette.”
Henry Clinton, failing to see the value in Cornwallis’s “unmeaning and unprofitable ramble through Virginia,” ordered him to return his troops to New York in case Washington and Rochambeau were up to something. Considering these would be the same troops who would soon be surrendering to Washington and Rochambeau, sending them north was not a terrible idea. Clinton, however, changed his mind and redirected Cornwallis and his army to proceed first to the Chesapeake Bay to build a fortified naval base at one of the harbors there. Cornwallis kept Lafayette busy the next few weeks skulking behind him as he tooled around coastal Virginia picking a spot. As the actor playing Washington at Colonial Williamsburg explained it, “Cornwallis did not make a mistake. We turned what he had done into a mistake.”
Back in May, Washington recorded in his diary that he had met with Rochambeau in Connecticut, where they began making tentative plans “to commence an operation against New York.” However, although in his report to Admiral de Grasse, Rochambeau included New York as an option for the impending joint operation, behind Washington’s back, Rochambeau nudged de Grasse toward the southern option. “The south-westerly winds and the state of defense in Virginia will probably make you prefer the Chesapeake Bay,” he opined, “and it will be there that we think you may be able to render the greatest service.”
On July 6, more than four thousand forces of the French Royal Army arrived from Rhode Island at Washington’s camp on the Hudson, poised to help the Americans invade some still-to-be-determined British stronghold.
As if stepping out of a Tchaikovsky ballet directed by Wes Anderson, the French soldiers wore plumed black hats and white on white, brightening their snowy leggings and jackets with pops of color on their lapels—their sometimes pink lapels. As opposed to their earthier allies, who were dressed, if they were dressed, in ripped and rotting homespun like zombie Tom Joads. Baron Ludwig von Closen, one of Rochambeau’s staff officers, pitied the Continentals: “It is really painful to see these brave men, almost naked.”