by Flora Fraser
Far to the north, at Preakness, her husband worked on with his “family” (Alexander Hamilton, Tench Tilghman) and staff officers (Knox, Wayne, Robert Howe of North Carolina, and Captain of Guard Caleb Gibbs) to secure an end to the war. In December, New Windsor, immediately north of West Point, became their new winter home. Though he had not seen his own home for over five years, Washington could at least now look forward to the arrival of his wife.
Nathanael Greene, while on his journey from New Jersey to assume the command in the south, had stopped briefly at Mount Vernon with Baron von Steuben, engineer Du Ponceau, and other officers. They had found Martha planning to leave for the north “about the middle of this week.” If Martha was preoccupied by arrangements for that imminent and prolonged absence from home, she gave no sign of it. Hospitable and warm, she asked after Caty Greene, her companion in numerous winter headquarters, and promised to write to her. In a letter to Washington, Greene waxed lyrical about the commander’s home: “there is everything that nature and art can afford to render my stay happy and agreeable.…I don’t wonder that you languish so often to return to the pleasures of domestic life.” Du Ponceau years later recalled that at dinner at Mount Vernon the “table was abundantly served, but without profusion.” Afterward, while others viewed the grounds, Du Ponceau sat in the parlor “tête-à-tête” with Mrs. Washington. He recorded: “I shall never forget the affability, and, at the same time, the dignity of her demeanour. Our conversation was on general subjects. I can only remember the impression it left upon my mind.” Before the war Virginian Edmund Pendleton had likened Martha to a Spartan mother when she urged Washington to be bold at the forthcoming First Continental Congress. Du Ponceau rather thought of Martha as a woman from later antiquity: “she reminded me of the Roman matrons of whom I had read so much, and I thought that she well deserved to be the companion and friend of the greatest man of the age.”
While at Philadelphia, resting before her further journey north to New Windsor, Martha stayed with Joseph Reed, president of the Pennsylvania Council. The house was quiet. Reed was in mourning for his wife, Esther, who, following her recent exertions to secure donations from “American Ladies,” had unexpectedly died. Martha did receive de La Luzerne, the French minister, who had at all costs to be propitiated. With him came the Marquis de Chastellux, bearing agreeable news. He had visited Washington in New Jersey in late November, and told of the commander’s good health and apparent good spirits. De Chastellux took away an impression that Martha was “about forty or forty-five, rather plump, but fresh and with an agreeable face.” Martha would in fact be fifty the following June. Her energy as well as her pink and white complexion—and good white teeth, on which many remarked—remained youthful.
The Reed mansion was to be Martha’s last taste of comfort for many months, following her arrival in mid-December in New Windsor. Washington derided this settlement above the Hudson as a “dreary station.” Headquarters were a “plain Dutch house” belonging to one William Ellison, just outside the village. But at New Windsor the commander enjoyed the benefit of good communications by road and river with Congress, Rochambeau in Rhode Island, and Greene in the south. Up a hill at Vail’s Gate, Henry Knox and other key officers occupied a more commodious stone house. Lafayette installed himself, with Washington’s nephew George Augustine among his aides, in quarters across a creek.
Martha’s arrival lightened Washington’s mood. He wrote to Caty Greene in Rhode Island, enclosing a letter from her husband in the south: “Mrs Washington, who is just arrived at these my Quarters, joins me in most cordial wishes for your every felicity; & regrets the want of your Company—remember us to my namesake—Nat—I suppose can handle a Musket.” The Greenes had named their first two children after George and Martha. The birth of Nathanael, their fourth, had occurred in freezing Morristown this January.
Martha settled with apparent ease into the customary pattern of winter life in camp, though Washington told Lafayette their quarters were “very confined.” Dinner—meat, chicken, and vegetables, with pies and puddings to follow—was the great event of the day at headquarters. Washington, as ever, was much in conference with his staff and occupied, with the “family,” in anxious correspondence. Martha found time, on Boxing Day, to write to Peale in Philadelphia. She asked that a jeweler set, “neat and plain” and in matching bracelets, the miniatures of Jacky and Patsy that the artist had painted while her daughter still lived.
Pay and clothing for the army at New Windsor and in winter cantonments elsewhere were equally lacking that winter. Early in January 1781 Washington dispatched Knox on a mission to the eastern states. He had orders to beg from the governors of each “a sum equal to three months pay at least” for their troops and “a complete suit of clothes…shirts, vests, breeches, and stockings to carry them through the winter.” Knox was still on this thankless errand when Pennsylvania troops mutinied at Morristown. They raided the magazine for arms and set off for Philadelphia, declaring they would “demand a redress of their grievances from Congress.” The mutineers, following negotiation at Princeton, desisted. No mercy was shown to New Jersey troops, who were arrested the following month after they seized arms and marched. On Washington’s orders, their leaders were executed.
News came that 1,600 British and German troops had embarked at New York, their destination almost certainly the south. Still more unwelcome was the information, which Washington conveyed to Greene on January 2: “Arnold commands.” Greene wrote from Virginia to Alexander Hamilton at New Windsor that the commander-in-chief was adulated in his native state. Regrettably this veneration did not translate into a supply of men, clothing, provisions, or arms for Washington’s deputy. Cornwallis and his troops fortified southern positions and laid waste swaths of the Carolinas and of coastal Virginia. Greene could put up little defense. Washington took the decision to send Lafayette south with an auxiliary force consisting of 1,200 troops. At Head of Elk, Maryland, he was to combine forces with 1,200 French soldiers, who would come from Rhode Island by sea. Together they were to proceed to Virginia, to combat Arnold.
Washington’s decision to give this important command to the young French marquis, who was wholly unfamiliar with both the geography and the inhabitants of Virginia, was unpopular with many. Alexander Hamilton was one of several of the “family” who yearned for action and for an end to the daily drudgery of drafting and copying. One day in mid-February high words ensued between Washington and Hamilton, after they had been working at correspondence together till midnight the previous evening. Hamilton kept the commander waiting a few minutes. Washington lost his temper, and Hamilton seized the moment to resign. Though Washington apologized immediately, the insulted aide kept to his resolution. He remained at headquarters until David Humphreys, a new amanuensis, arrived and then secured, as he had long wished, command of a regiment.
So pressing was the need for communication with so many at this time that Martha herself turned secretary on at least one occasion: a February letter emanating from headquarters and bound for a clothier is in her handwriting. She may have been glad to pay a visit in March to Philip Schuyler at his elegant home in Albany. Dr. John Cochran, Schuyler’s brother-in-law and uncle to Betsy Schuyler Hamilton, was her escort.
Washington’s plans for Lafayette and French troops to confront Arnold were doomed to failure. A British naval armament at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay drove the French transports back to their base at Rhode Island. In the wake of this intelligence, the American commander ordered the marquis to head south and combine with Greene in Virginia against Cornwallis. Private as well as public humiliation was the American commander’s lot this spring. Toward the end of April, he and Martha learned that a marauding British warship had threatened Mount Vernon from the Potomac below. Custodian Lund had offered its captain refreshments and provisions in a (successful) bid to preserve the estate. Washington told his cousin on the thirtieth: “it would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that
in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my Houses, and laid the Plantation in ruins.” Martha too was exacting, writing in the third person to Lund a month later: “Mrs. Washington will be glad to know if the cotton for the counterpanes was wove and whitened. How many yards was there of it? How many counterpanes will it make? She desired Milly Posey”—aide to Lund—“to have the fine piece of linen made white. How is Betty?”—slave, spinning woman—“Has she been spinning all winter? Is [has] Charlotte”—house slave, seamstress—“done the work I left for her to do?”
If Martha was more than usually short with Lund, she had been suffering from what Washington described to Jacky, on May 31, as “a complaint in the Stomach, bilious, and now turned to a kind of Jaundice.” Though she was better than she had been, he wrote, she was “still weak and low.” He added: “As she is very desirous of seeing you, and as it is abt. the period for her returning to Virginia, I should be glad, if it does not interfere with any important engagements, if you could make her a visit.” Jacky excused himself. Nelly had at last given him, on April 30, a son and heir. George Washington Parke Custis, as the infant was named, was febrile in the early weeks of his life. His mother was unwell, as she had been following the birth of her third daughter. Jacky, an anxious husband and father, was reluctant to leave home.
Martha continued ill some weeks at New Windsor. In mid-June, Washington returned to a Loyalist donor restorative gifts including oranges, lemons and limes, pineapples, orgeat syrup, and hyssop tea intended for the invalid. No truck must be had with the enemy, however kind. When Martha left for home at the end of June, her health was still not firmly reestablished. Dr. James Craik, Alexandria physician turned army surgeon, was provided as a suitable escort for the journey to a state that was rapidly becoming a cauldron of war.
Cornwallis and Lafayette and Greene were skirmishing and fighting over much of southern Virginia. The defenses at Richmond, as Jefferson had feared, proved inadequate to resist British attack. Many of Martha’s relatives and friends, including her brother Bartholomew and brother-in-law Burwell Bassett, saw their estates damaged in the course of the fighting. Mount Vernon and the Potomac region did not suffer. Martha resumed control of her own household and, with it, responsibility for her grandson. The child, known as “Wash” or “Washy,” appears to have joined his elder sister Nelly in the Mount Vernon nursery, even before Martha reached home. Her daughter-in-law at Abingdon, it would seem, was once more, following childbirth, too ill not to relinquish care of her infant to others.
On the Hudson, Washington concerted numerous plans with Rochambeau to take New York, all of which failed. In mid-August came intelligence that the Comte de Grasse, admiral of a large French fleet in the West Indies, had responded to a plea from Rochambeau for aid. With 3,000 infantry on board, commanded by the Marquis de Saint-Simon, an experienced general, de Grasse and the fleet were headed for Hampton Roads. The time for a reckoning in the south had come, and Washington and Rochambeau, with their respective armies, headed swiftly south to bolster Lafayette’s forces in Virginia.
The marquis, encamped at Williamsburg, had skillfully backed Lord Cornwallis and the enemy into a defensive position at Yorktown, near the southern entrance to Chesapeake Bay. While heading south from Philadelphia, on September 5, Washington learned that de Grasse’s fleet had arrived off Cape Henry, in Virginia, at the southern extremity of Chesapeake Bay. An opportunity offered to invest Yorktown and force a British surrender.
Washington had resumed writing a journal earlier in the year. “Judging it highly expedient to be with the army in Virginia as soon as possible, to make the necessary arrangements for the Siege, & to get the Materials prepared for it,” he now wrote at Head of Elk, Maryland, “I determined to set out for the Camp of the Marquis de la Fayette without loss of time.” Leaving the northern army to make its way south under the command of Benjamin Lincoln, Washington pressed on. Leaving Baltimore early on the morning of September 9, he was soon in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which had been a British colony when he last left it. An entry in his journal is, though laconic, expressive of his pleasure in being, if briefly, at home: “9th. I reached my own Seat at Mount Vernon (distant 120 Miles from the Hd. of Elk).”
One evening only the Washingtons had for some degree of private pleasure together. On successive days members of the military “family”—Rochambeau, de Chastellux, and others—arrived. Mount Vernon was, until the allied commanders and suites left for Williamsburg on the twelfth, as much the scene of anxious conference as previous lodgings at Morristown or New Windsor. At this impromptu headquarters, Washington dared to hope for victory ahead at Yorktown.
20
Victory on the York and Private Grief, 1781
“General goes to Colonel Bassett’s where Mr Custis is very ill”
THOUGH WASHINGTON’S STAY at home in September 1781 was brief and the time he could give to Martha negligible, the master and mistress of Mount Vernon could congratulate themselves that they had upheld the honor of Virginia, even in wartime conditions. Aide Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., was dazzled by the “elegant seat and situation, great appearance of opulence and real exhibitions of hospitality and princely entertainment.” George and Martha were used to the comforts of their home. She now faced once more the prospect of a husband absent on a dangerous mission. Washington must prove a master puppeteer of the forces converging on Yorktown. De Grasse’s fleet and troops from the West Indies were at Cape Henry, and a further French squadron and troops were expected from Rhode Island. His immediate aim was to join Lafayette at Williamsburg as swiftly as possible.
Upon his arrival there, in mid-September, he urged hasty embarkation on his second-in-command, General Benjamin Lincoln, still at Head of Elk with the Continentals from the north: “every day we lose now is comparatively an age; as soon as it is in our power with safety we ought to take up our position near the enemy. Hurry on…my dear General, with your troops upon the wing of speed, the want of men and stores is now all that retards our immediate operations.” Cornwallis was daily improving his position at Yorktown, Washington added: “every day that is given him to make his preparations may cost us many lives to encounter.” The British general had made his headquarters at a handsome brick mansion close to the main fortifications above the river, property of Thomas Nelson of Yorktown, now governor of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, disgusted by the enemy’s easy reduction of Richmond, had declined to run again. All around, British and Hessian troops were fortifying the town and numerous inland outposts, as well as Gloucester, across the James River.
De Grasse had no intention of remaining off the American coast beyond early November. No future joint attack on New York could be planned. On the credit side, Admiral de Barras’s squadron bearing French troops and siege artillery from Rhode Island had now arrived. Allied plans for the siege of Yorktown and British surrender—a surrender to rank in terms of national humiliation with the Continental surrender of Charleston the previous year—could proceed.
At Williamsburg, Henry Knox, in conclave with engineers Du Portail and Gouvion, worked to assemble a heavy arsenal of siege artillery. Lincoln disembarked his Continental troops and stores, and French troops from Baltimore landed. Washington, on September 23, informed Thomas McKean, the new president of Congress, that the allied forces expected to be in a few days “before the enemy’s works at York and Gloucester.” Notwithstanding the lack of some supplies, including rum, which, he told Robert Morris, he deemed essential for the men’s health and spirits, Washington recorded in his journal: “28th…we commenced our march for the investiture of the enemy at York.”
The column of troops—Americans preceding the French—was more than a mile long. According to plan, they separated at a given point so as to adopt, at the prescribed encampment before the enemy lines, a semicircular formation—French troops to the left, Americans and militia to the right. Among these last was Thomas Nelson of Yorktown itself and many other delegates to the Virginia
Assembly, eager to play a part in the fray. “The line being formed,” wrote Washington, “all the troops, officers and men, lay upon their arms during the night.” The following morning the American and French forces made the welcome discovery that the British had, under cover of darkness, abandoned all their exterior works. They had retreated within redoubts and within the walls of Yorktown. Allied troops took up positions in the earthworks the enemy had abandoned.
Operations must be conducted without the assistance of any shipping on the James. De Grasse, notwithstanding the American commander’s “earnest solicitations,” declined “hazarding any vessels on that station.” The French fleet was at least in place in Lyndhaven Bay, near Cape Henry, to prevent the British from escaping out to sea. A week passed in which the opposing forces skirmished. American engineers, felling thousands of trees, built new earthworks and began to put their artillery in place. The British improved their defenses and, as rations grew scarce, sent out foraging parties.
During the night of October 6 the first allied “parallels,” or trenches, six hundred yards or so from the enemy works, were opened. Three days later, on the ninth, communication trenches between the parallels were open, advanced redoubts, or defensive emplacements, were complete, and allied batteries in place. That afternoon, Washington put a match to the first of the cannons, trained on the enemy’s works, to open fire. Smoke and pungent gunpowder filled the air as six American 18- and 24-pounders, mortars and howitzers, and a French battery of four 16-pounders, six mortars, and two howitzers, commanded by the Marquis de Saint-Simon, “began to play.”