by Sarah Vowell
One of the French officers was horrified that at a dinner in Washington’s tent, His Excellency served the meal not in a succession of courses like in civilization. Apparently Washington “gave, on the same plate, meat, vegetables, and salad.” On the same plate? Were these Americans people or animals?
The French soldiers’ depth of training and experience, their access to good equipment, as well as their being used to such a high quality of life that they not only expected food every day, they expected foods plural served on plural plates, made them oddly appreciative of their rustic patriot cronies. After a few redcoats fired on a Franco-American team doing recon, one of Rochambeau’s aides marveled, “I cannot insist too strongly how I was surprised by the American Army. It is truly incredible that troops almost naked, poorly paid, and composed of old men and children and Negroes should behave so well on the march and under fire.”
One of the French government’s smarter moves was to order Rochambeau to report to Washington even though Rochambeau commanded more troops and had four decades of experience and the highest rank in the French army. For that reason, Rochambeau humored Washington’s designs on New York, accompanying him to the northern tip of Manhattan to sketch out a possible strike.
In the choice of New York or Virginia, however, both generals would ultimately have to defer to Admiral de Grasse. He controlled his ships and helping out the Continentals was a distraction from defending France’s lucrative sugar islands in the Caribbean. As Andrew O’Shaughnessy told me, “The French put particular stress on the Caribbean. They had Saint-Domingue—modern Haiti—which at the time was producing more sugar than anywhere else in the world. There was a real premium on sugar. It had become part of the regular diet of most people. It was hugely profitable.”
On August 14, Washington received news from de Grasse that the French fleet would arrive at the Chesapeake Bay by September 3. Virginia it would be.
While Washington mourned his now-dead dream of taking back Manhattan, he quickly got on with the business of figuring out how to transport thousands of men 450 miles in six weeks.
Washington wrote to Robert Morris, the Congress’s superintendent of finance, pleading for one month’s pay for his troops—in coin, not the worthless Continental paper currency. He explained, “The service they are going upon is disagreeable to the Northern regiments” and “part of the troops have not been paid anything for a long time.” In the end, Washington had to borrow the money from Rochambeau, who generously offered Washington half his supply of gold Spanish coins. There is no way to overstate how this gesture endeared the French to the patriot troops. Joseph Plumb Martin, the young man who paid his last few pence for a sip of water at Valley Forge, recalled, “We each of us received a MONTH’S PAY . . . This was the first that could be called money, which we had received as wages since the year ’76, or that we ever did receive till the close of the war, or indeed, ever after, as wages.”
On August 17, Washington heard from Lafayette that Cornwallis had hunkered down at Yorktown. I would like to think Washington laughed. He knew the place, an old tobacco port on the Virginia Peninsula, a finger of land between the York River and the James, both of which empty into the Chesapeake Bay. When Thomas Nelson, Yorktown native and signer of the Declaration of Independence, suggested to Washington that the Continentals build a fort there back in 1777, Washington rejected the proposal. Yorktown, he informed Nelson, “by being upon a narrow neck of land would be in danger of being cut off. The enemy might very easily throw up a few ships into York and James’s river . . . and land a body of men there, who by throwing up a few redoubts would intercept their retreat and oblige them to surrender.”
Two things: Washington’s 1777 assessment of Yorktown and being cut off and the bit about redoubts was exactly what was about to happen to Cornwallis in 1781. And just to make Thomas Nelson feel like even more of a jerk, Cornwallis had just commandeered Nelson’s Yorktown house as his headquarters. Cornwallis was probably sleeping in Nelson’s bed.
Washington ordered Lafayette to make sure to keep Cornwallis hemmed in. So as the British got on with fortifying the town, Lafayette encircled them with artillery. As the de facto Continental advance man, he also started hitting up regional governments for reinforcements and supplies. He asked Virginia to share its stores of beef, corn, and flour, and they were pretty Virginian about it. Luckily Washington and Rochambeau persuaded Admiral de Barras to sail his small French fleet down from Newport loaded with salt beef and siege guns.
On August 17, the first Continental forces crossed the Hudson en route to Yorktown, followed soon thereafter by French artillery and infantry.
Washington left some men and scores of empty tents near New York City to keep up the ruse that that was still the intended target. This con was helped along because the British had intercepted a letter from Washington to Lafayette and Greene with details about the upcoming Franco-American attack on Manhattan. Unfortunately for Henry Clinton, the letter was written before de Grasse made a beeline for the Chesapeake, and Washington had to scrap New York.
The French dandies caused a stir marching through Philadelphia September 3. The Marquis de Chastellux called their time there “a triumph.” Another officer boasted that the sharp-dressed foreigners “struck with astonishment the beauties of the city.” Rochambeau’s chaplain got a kick out of watching the townspeople and Continentals addressing a French army messenger as a general: “His embroidered [jacket], his tunic with silver fringe, his emblazoned headdress, his cane with its golden knob, were the sources of this mistake. Each time that he approached his master to get orders they thought that he was giving them.”
Returning from a boat excursion to check out the Delaware River forts, Rochambeau was startled to see “General Washington waving his hat at me with demonstrative gestures of the greatest joy.” As if that wasn’t out of character enough, Washington then gave Rochambeau a hug, telling him the news that Admiral de Grasse was already in the Chesapeake, along with twenty-eight large warships and a slew of smaller support vessels carrying more than three thousand ground troops. With the men already onshore backing up Lafayette and the French ships in the harbor, they had Cornwallis surrounded. “I never saw a man more thoroughly and openly delighted than was General Washington at this moment,” recalled the Duc de Lauzun.
De Grasse was in the Chesapeake but the Caribbean was on his mind. On September 4, he tried to coax Lafayette into an immediate assault on Cornwallis just to get it over with. This was contrary to Washington’s orders, which were to keep Cornwallis from escaping and wait for the allied army to arrive so they could all gang up on him together. De Grasse cajoled Lafayette by promising “to further your glory.” Lafayette later confessed, “The temptation was great, but even if the attack had succeeded, it would necessarily have cost a great deal of blood.” Therefore he decided “not to sacrifice the soldiers entrusted to me to personal ambition.” Lafayette was growing up. Two days later he turned twenty-four.
Meanwhile, en route to the Chesapeake, Washington stopped at Mount Vernon. He had not been home for six years. When he departed for Philadelphia in 1775, the Congress appointed him commander in chief and he rode straight to the siege of Boston, then from there to New York, then Trenton, Brandywine, Germantown, Valley Forge, and so on. Through it all, his homesickness was a source of both distraction and strength. In a letter to his cousin and Mount Vernon’s manager, Lund Washington, in September of 1776, Washington wallowed in the indignities of the debacle in New York: “I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.” Then he sought comfort in cheerier subjects: “With respect to the chimney . . .” He wrote that letter a month after throwing up his hands at Kips Bay in Manhattan, wondering if the fleeing quitters around him were the men with whom he was being asked to defend America. Imagining specific, attainable improvements to his Virginia house must have been a solace, a fantasy of comfort and control: “The chimney i
n the new room should be exactly in the middle of it—the doors and every thing else to be exactly answerable and uniform—in short I would have the whole executed in a masterly manner.”
Washington’s love of Mount Vernon had a profound impact on the character of the future republic. At war’s end, when an American painter explained to the monarch of Great Britain that rather than stay on as dictator or king, Washington planned to retire and return to his life as a farmer, George III remarked, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
Washington repeated this performance as president, leaving office after two terms rather than staying on as president for life, because he honestly wanted to live out his days, as Voltaire put it, cultivating his own garden—and painting his dining room the world’s most alarming shade of green.
Washington’s homebody side tempered his ambition, staving off the lure of power. Compare Mount Vernon to the abode of his closest counterpart, Napoleon Bonaparte, whose house outside Paris, Malmaison, is full of tented rooms meant to evoke the tents the soldier lived in on his military campaigns. If Malmaison’s walls could talk, they would say, I’d rather be anywhere else, conquering it. Napoleon lived as he governed—like a general barking orders at the citizens of the French “republic.” Forced into exile and introspection on Elba, Napoleon finally figured out, “They wanted me to be another Washington.”
Washington returning to Mount Vernon in September of 1781 after six years away was a premonition that the war would end. Riding ahead of his French cohorts gave him a little time to catch up with his family (and his slaves). Rochambeau and his officers arrived the next day. The Marquis de Chastellux found the house “simple” and Martha Washington “somewhat fat, but fresh and with a pleasant face.” On September 11, the anniversary of his defeat at Brandywine, Washington hosted a jolly dinner for the French. One of his aides, Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut, was wowed by “the “great appearance of opulence and real exhibitions of hospitality and princely entertainment.”
Resuming their trek to Yorktown the next morning, they bumped into a messenger with harrowing news. On September 5, a British fleet commanded by Vice Admiral Thomas Graves arrived in the Chesapeake from New York to aid Cornwallis. To avoid being trapped in the bay, Admiral de Grasse took off from Yorktown toward the open sea to confront the enemy.
There had been no news for days. Wherever the ships were, the fleet that prevailed and returned to control the mouth of the York River would control the fate of Cornwallis and ultimately the war itself. For that reason, some scholars consider this somewhat forgotten maritime dustup—referred to as the Battle of the Chesapeake or the Battle of the Virginia Capes or the plain old Battle of the Capes—to be the most important altercation of the American Revolution, a take that’s all the more astonishing considering not a single American took part in it. Nor did a single American even witness it once de Grasse’s ships followed Graves over the horizon.
Graves had nineteen ships of the line, compared with de Grasse’s twenty-four. The reason these big battleships were called that was because that is literally how naval engagements using them were fought—in two parallel lines. Their guns could fire only straight ahead, and squeezing into a row also prevented friendly fire accidents.
If the idea of a pair of enemies politely lining up across from one another in the middle of an ocean in an orderly fashion sounds quaint, it was. Or as quaint as possible for opposing vessels with up to a hundred cannons concurrently raining hell upon each other in the inherently fearsome Atlantic.
The stiff format had some wiggle room allowing for individual initiative, human error, currents, weather, or all of the above. Graves, for instance, formed his line at an odd angle, decreasing the potency of his guns. He also failed to line up his most powerful vessels with their scariest French counterparts, pitting some of the scrawnier British ships against de Grasse’s biggest. Still, after a couple of hours of nonstop shelling, there was no clear winner, though the French had been especially effective at ripping into the Brits’ sails and masts. The two sides bobbed along in a stalemate until September 9, when the second French fleet, commanded by Admiral de Barras, was spotted coming down from Newport en route to Yorktown. De Grasse peeled off to join them, and on September 12 returned to port, where they had Cornwallis overwhelmingly, definitively trapped. Admiral Graves, on the other hand, hobbled on back to New York, and that’s when Henry Clinton’s heartaches began.
“De Grasse should be given much greater billing,” Andrew O’Shaughnessy told me about the admiral’s place in American history. “De Grasse took a huge risk. Rather than split his fleet and send some of the ships back to convoy French goods to France, rather than leaving ships to protect the French islands, he took every ship with him. It’s often credited to Rochambeau, but de Grasse had suggested to Rochambeau that they liaise at the Chesapeake instead of attacking the British in New York, where the main army was based, that they attempt to cut off Cornwallis. That was not Washington’s plan originally; in fact, he resisted it for a while, and it was the French who persuaded him to adopt it. The reason it gets downplayed, not only is it foreign, but it’s also because many people don’t appreciate the naval aspect of the war and how important naval events were to the outcome. The British commander in chief had always recognized that the moment a superior French fleet arrived off the coast of America, Britain was doomed, because it could cut off any army. Which could then be surrounded by land troops. This is essentially what happened to Cornwallis. So the French victory at Chesapeake Capes was key to the victory at Yorktown. There were more French people present at Yorktown than Americans.”
Colonial Williamsburg does not shy away from the French contribution to American independence. In the Q&A with George Washington, for instance, the Washington sang the praises of Admiral de Grasse, Rochambeau, Lafayette, and the French engineers, “the most able engineers in the world.” (French engineering being a particular blessing during the siege of Yorktown.)
At the end of my visit, I went to Williamsburg’s Market Square to watch a performance called On to Yorktown and Victory: The General Reviews the Troops, a military presentation set on September 28, 1781, featuring Washington and Lafayette, a nod to their reunion before Yorktown. (When Washington arrived on September 14, Lafayette was waiting for him. A Virginia militiaman reported that Lafayette “caught the General round his body, hugged him as close as it was possible, and absolutely kissed him from ear to ear once or twice . . . with as much ardor as ever an absent lover kissed his mistress on his return.”)
The Lafayette reenactor, decked out in a buff and blue uniform, rode a white horse with impeccable posture and made a speech to the troops and assembled citizens. He uttered some pleasantries about the certainty of victory, acknowledged that the people and the soldiers were tired of war, and pointed toward the royal governor’s palace and said that the last royal governor would be the last royal governor. Then he said, “But you could not win this war alone. You would not win this war alone. You would need help from somewhere and somehow.” It was loud and clear and immaculately enunciated. And it was the truth.
I had spoken to the actor, Mark Schneider, that afternoon in Colonial Williamsburg’s research library. I was taken aback when he showed up for our talk wearing the full Lafayette getup. He was simply squeezing me in between performances, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was hallucinating or having another one of those dreams about having lunch with Puritan theologians or John Wilkes Booth.
Having portrayed Lafayette since 1999, Schneider knows his stuff. A veteran U.S. Army cavalry scout who served in Bosnia in the 1990s, he speaks of Lafayette with humor, affection, and respect, and embodies him with so much panache that I wasn’t surprised to find a Facebook fan page devoted to him on the Internet—one he has nothing to do with—in which his devotees post videos of him on horseback.
What I really wanted to ask him about was what it was like por
traying Lafayette circa 2003, when France refused to back an American resolution for military action against Iraq in the United Nations Security Council, inspiring an anti-French backlash most famously and stupidly symbolized by congressional cafeterias changing the name of French fries to freedom fries.
It’s how I originally got onto the topic of Lafayette in the first place. Representative Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida sponsored a bill called the American Heroes Repatriation Act of 2003. Intended to finance digging up the remains of U.S. war casualties buried in French cemeteries and reinterring them over here, the bill went nowhere. “The remains of our brave servicemen should be buried in patriotic soil, not in a country that has turned its back on the United States and on the memory of Americans who fought and died there,” Brown-Waite told the New York Times. “It’s almost as if the French have forgotten what those thousands of white crosses at Normandy represent.”
Not long after reading that, I happened to be in the Berkshire Mountains to attend a wedding and stopped in at Arrowhead, the house where Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick. I was struck by a tiny silk dress in a glass display case, said to be what Melville’s wife, Elizabeth Knapp Shaw Melville, was wearing as a two-year-old in 1824 when she was presented to the Marquis de Lafayette on his visit to Boston. That was when I started researching Lafayette’s return to America. If the French had forgotten America’s help in World War II—and they had not; they just opposed a preemptive war in the Middle East based on faulty intelligence that most Americans would end up regretting anyway—it seemed obvious that Americans had forgotten France’s help in our war for independence in general and the national obsession with Lafayette in particular. A fixation symbolized by a family hanging on to a little girl’s dress for generations because she was wearing it when she met him, an event Elizabeth Melville herself probably had no memory of.