It had seemed unlikely that there could be worse humiliation in store for Governor Jefferson, but in April Arnold returned as part of a new force led by Major General William Phillips, commander of the artillery at the battle of Minden, where Lafayette’s father had been killed. Avid for revenge but badly outnumbered, Lafayette protected Richmond and gave Jefferson the chance to move the capital again, this time to Charlottesville. Jefferson wrote another letter to Washington, pleading with him to come and save his native state. But Washington was developing a broader strategy, and though he answered Jefferson kindly, he stayed in the North.
Despair was leading Jefferson to a hatred of Benedict Arnold that calm reason could not purge. He hoped Arnold would be kidnapped and hauled around America, exhibited as a public display of infamy. Arnold knew how deeply his former countrymen longed for revenge. During this Virginia campaign, he had amused himself by asking a captured American officer what would happen to him if he were captured. The American said that Arnold’s left leg, wounded at Quebec and Saratoga, would be cut off and buried with full military honors. The rest of him would be hanged.
—
On July 1, 1781, the night before Jefferson was due to leave the governorship, a hulking American captain named Jack Jouett rode out on a mission that would have challenged the stamina of Paul Revere. Jouett left the Cuckoo Tavern, forty miles outside Charlottesville, with the same purpose for which Revere had ridden six years before—to warn a prominent patriot that the British were coming to seize him. This time their target was Thomas Jefferson. Jouett had stopped at the Cuckoo and found two hundred and fifty British dragoons and mounted infantrymen there. They were led by Banastre Tarleton, who had once vowed to cut off Charles Lee’s head. Earlier in the year, Tarleton had been defeated by Daniel Morgan in a South Carolina pasture called Hannah’s Cowpens. Now he was headed for Monticello to restore his reputation by taking Jefferson prisoner.
Jouett was a first-class horseman. Wrapped in a scarlet cloak, he rode over paths so thick with brush that when he reached Jefferson’s mansion before dawn his face was cut and bleeding. Governor Jefferson revived him with a glass of Madeira and told him to alert Virginia’s other officials in town.
Jefferson sent his wife, his daughters and their house guests to a neighboring estate. Building his mansion on a hill had seemed an impractical fancy during construction, but now its view of the surrounding countryside gave him a good start on any British soldiers coming to capture him.
Many stories sprang up later about Jefferson’s behavior in the face of the enemy. One of the few favorable ones had Jefferson riding up the slope behind Monticello until he reached Carter’s Mountain and turned a telescope toward Charlottesville. He saw no trace of the green-and-white uniforms worn by Tarleton’s men and decided that Jouett’s alarm had been mistaken and that he would not have to abandon his house. George Washington’s concern for Mount Vernon was evident in the long letters he wrote home, but when he heard that his caretaker had given food to a band of British troops to prevent them from destroying his house, Washington had sent a reprimand: Never again yield to blackmail. Jefferson’s feelings for his home were even more profound than Washington’s and now, with no enemy in sight, he turned his horse back to Monticello.
At that moment, the story continued, Jefferson noticed that his light walking sword had slipped from its sheath while he was kneeling on a rock to adjust his lens. Going back for the sword, he raised the telescope once more, and this time he found Charlottesville buried under a blizzard of green and white. Jefferson saw nothing logical about confronting the foe like Don Quixote; these were not windmills but prime British troops. He mounted his horse and, avoiding the road, headed to the safety of the next hill. From there he rode to the house where he had sent his family.
At Monticello, Jefferson’s slaves were doing their best to protect his property. Martin Hemings, Jefferson’s valet, had also done the household shopping during Martha Jefferson’s frequent confinements. As the British approached, Hemings gathered the family silver and began handing it to another slave in a hiding place under a plank of the front portico. When Tarleton’s dragoons rushed up, Martin Hemings dropped the board over the slave and the silver and stood on it. A British officer pressed the barrel of his pistol to Hemings’ chest and threatened to fire unless he told them where Jefferson had gone.
“Fire away, then,” Hemings said.
Instead, the unit’s commander inspected the mansion and ordered that nothing be touched. The British withdrew that same night, and Monticello’s slaves became its caretakers.
Lord Cornwallis made his headquarters at the Elkhill plantation that had come to Jefferson through marriage. There the British showed no restraint. They burned barns filled with corn and tobacco, carried off cattle and sheep and cut the throat of every horse too young to be ridden. They also induced Elkhill’s thirty slaves to desert their master and come away with them. Jefferson said afterward that had Cornwallis freed them he would have done the right thing. But Jefferson spoke of the runaways as though they had been abducted, even though they had left willingly. Most of them lost their chance for freedom when they died of smallpox in the British camp. Even after their defection, Thomas Jefferson owned two hundred slaves.
Jefferson remained in hiding over the next weeks and then crowned his luck by falling off his horse. The accident happened long after the danger had passed, but his detractors sneered that he had injured himself during an unbecoming flight from Monticello. In the bitterest moment of Jefferson’s career, a young political opponent demanded that the legislature investigate Governor Jefferson’s conduct over the past twelve months. Jefferson was convinced Patrick Henry was behind the move and never forgave him. The legislature eventually endorsed Jefferson’s ability, rectitude and integrity, and a friend consoled him for the indignities he had suffered by reminding him that “the envious only hate the excellence they cannot reach.”
—
Virginia’s politicians knew that Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry were estranged, but the marauding British troops still thought of them as partners in treason. Henry had fled as hastily as the governor, yet the difference in their popularity was reflected in a story about his flight from Charlottesville at about the time Jefferson was riding to Carter’s Mountain. Tarleton’s dragoons had already captured seven legislators, and other British soldiers were chasing down the road behind Jack Jouett’s bright cloak. Patrick Henry was trying to escape with a group that included the assembly speaker, Benjamin Harrison, and John Tyler, who had stood in the Burgesses’ doorway with Thomas Jefferson as a student and listened to Henry threaten George III with the fate of Caesar and Cromwell. As the fugitives struggled through the hills, they grew tired and hungry and stopped at a cabin for shelter. The woman who came to the door demanded to know who they were.
“We are members of the legislature,” said Henry, “and have just been compelled to leave Charlottesville on account of the approach of the enemy.”
“Ride on, then, you cowardly knaves!” the woman said indignantly. “Here my husband and sons have just gone to Charlottesville to fight for you, and you running away with all your might! Clear out! You shall have nothing here!”
Patrick Henry persisted. “But we were obliged to fly. It would not do for the legislature to be broken up by the enemy. Here is Mr. Speaker Harrison. You don’t think he would have fled if it had not been necessary?”
The woman did not give way. “I always thought a good deal of Mr. Harrison till now,” she said. “But he’d no business to run from the enemy.” She began to shut the door.
“Wait a moment, my good woman,” said Patrick Henry, and he named the other members of the party.
“They here?” said the woman dubiously. “Well, I never would have thought it.” She seemed to weaken, then recovered. “No matter. We love those gentlemen, and I didn’t suppose they would ever run from the British, but since they have, they shall have nothing to eat in my house. You may ride
along.”
As a final plea, John Tyler stepped forward. “What would you say, my good woman, if I were to tell you that Patrick Henry fled with the rest of us?”
“Patrick Henry! I would tell you there wasn’t a word of truth in it. Patrick Henry would never do such a cowardly thing.”
“But,” said Tyler, pointing to him, “this is Mr. Henry.”
The woman looked astonished and tugged at her apron as she considered the news. “Well, then, if that is Patrick Henry, it must be all right.”
She showed them into her cabin and went off to fix their meal.
—
Although Alexander Hamilton was still writing George Washington’s confidential military correspondence, his indignation over the hanging of John André continued to boil. Colonel Hamilton had changed somewhat since his impetuous outbursts at Monmouth Court House. During the winter of 1780 he had courted Philip Schuyler’s daughter Elizabeth. General Schuyler had endorsed the match, but Hamilton had been concerned about the difference between their fortunes and asked his fiancée, “Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor man’s wife?” The couple had married after Benedict Arnold’s defection and spent their honeymoon in the Schuyler mansion at Albany. By February 1781, Hamilton was back as Washington’s aide in the American headquarters at New Windsor, New York, and working until midnight on dispatches for the French allies at Newport. But secretarial duty was palling on Hamilton. He had applied twice for a field command and had been turned down each time.
One day after Hamilton and Washington had stayed up late the previous night drafting messages, both were weary and strained. Hamilton was going down from the second floor of the headquarters building on an errand when he passed General Washington climbing the stairs. “I would like to speak with you, Colonel Hamilton,” Washington said.
“I will wait upon you immediately, sir,” Hamilton replied.
He delivered his papers to another aide, Tench Tilghman, and was heading back upstairs when he met Lafayette in the hall. They had been hoping for permission to attack New York with Hamilton leading the light infantry, but lately their plan seemed to have been jettisoned. After some moments of talk, Hamilton pulled himself away and hurried up the staircase.
Washington stood at the top, wearing his coldest face. “Colonel Hamilton,” he said, “you have kept me waiting at the head of these stairs these ten minutes. I must tell you, sir, you treat me with disrespect.”
“I am not conscious of it, sir,” said Hamilton, “but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so, we part.”
It was not the response the commander in chief had expected. After a moment, Washington said, “Very well, sir, if it be your choice.”
Hamilton retired to his quarters. Within the hour, Colonel Tilghman brought him a message from Washington, assuring Hamilton of his great confidence in his abilities and integrity and inviting him for a candid conversation to heal their differences.
Hamilton had spent years with Washington and knew how hard humble appeals were for him. But he sent back a message asking to be excused from meeting with the general; he would stay on only until other aides could assume his duties. Hamilton wrote to his father-in-law that Washington was indeed an honest man and his popularity was essential to America’s safety, but “for three years past I have felt no friendship for him and have professed none.”
Hamilton kept his vow to leave and throughout the spring of 1781 wrote articles for the New York Packet on the new nation’s problems, especially in its economy. Congress had at last hammered out the Articles of Confederation, and after a long delay Virginia had ceded her claims to the Northwest. Maryland accepted the Articles and a national government could be organized, five years after independence.
Taxation remained a dilemma, however. Since only the states could levy taxes, the Congress was printing paper money that it could not back with gold. At last, in spring 1780, the members had voted to declare forty paper dollars worth one gold dollar. That devaluation cut the national debt from two hundred million to five million, but it did not produce more money for the hard-pressed Continental Army. To solve the problem, Hamilton urged Robert Morris, the Philadelphia banker, to accept the new federal office of financier. Hamilton also argued vigorously for a stronger central government that would enlarge the powers of Congress.
Publicly, Hamilton remained correct and formal with George Washington and even returned briefly to help extricate Washington from a rare indiscretion. In a letter to Mount Vernon, Washington had criticized the French for sending fewer ships to a maneuver in Chesapeake Bay than he had requested. British soldiers had intercepted the letter and printed it in a Tory newspaper. Washington needed the French as never before, and he personally oversaw the revisions of the apology that Hamilton drafted for him. When Washington’s French colleague, the Comte de Rochambeau, received the letter, he declared the incident closed.
As Hamilton was preparing to leave the staff again, he wrote to General Washington requesting a battlefield assignment. Washington responded the same day, embarrassed that he couldn’t oblige him and concerned that Hamilton might link his refusal to their past friction. With that, Hamilton took his wife, three months pregnant, home to the Schuyler estate in Albany and resigned his commission. Once more, Colonel Tilghman came to him on Washington’s behalf and urged him not to leave the army. Three weeks later Colonel Hamilton was named to lead two New York regiments. But the question remained, where would he lead them? Did Washington intend to attack Henry Clinton’s forces on Manhattan?
Nathanael Greene’s tough and clever campaign had been picking off exposed British outposts in the Carolinas, but Lord Cornwallis went on sweeping and burning through the South. His successes had no great strategic value, and a victory he claimed at Guilford in North Carolina cost him nearly forty percent of his army. Cornwallis’ constant motion perplexed the Americans and their allies. “These English are mad,” Lafayette said. “They march through a country and think they have conquered it.” All the same, Lafayette wrote to Hamilton that his Virginia troops were so badly outnumbered by Cornwallis’ men that he had to stay in camp and resist the urge to fight.
With the war in its seventh inconclusive year, every strategic decision was overshadowed by the question of what support the French would provide before the 1781 campaign ended. General Rochambeau, who commanded the five thousand French troops in Rhode Island, claimed he had forgiven Washington’s tactless letter, but he seemed so evasive in discussing France’s plans that Washington was becoming resentful. Rochambeau had good reason, however, to question American security. General Washington had developed no code for letters to his commanders in the South. On the last day of May 1781 he wrote openly to Lafayette in Virginia that French and American troops would launch a joint attack against New York. An alert British patrol got hold of the letter and brought it to Henry Clinton. Initially, the British commander was dubious. Couldn’t the letter be a ruse planted to deceive him? But the intercepted pouch also contained a letter from Martha Washington to Mount Vernon filled with domestic details, and another from Washington to his dentist, requesting a pair of pliers for repairing his teeth. All those homely touches guaranteed that the letter to Lafayette was legitimate. Knowing Washington’s intentions was invaluable to Sir Henry, and he willingly paid two hundred guineas to the man who had seized the pouch.
—
The proof that Manhattan would be America’s target was particularly welcome to Henry Clinton because he was locked with Lord Cornwallis in a test of wills and ambition much like the one that George Washington had faced from Charles Lee.
Clinton was now beginning his fourth year as commander in chief of Britain’s forces yet had little to show for his exertions. Lord Cornwallis, like Burgoyne before him, had used the excuse of his wife’s illness for a trip to England, where he spent his time ingratiating himself with George Germain. He returned to America with a document naming him Clinton’s replacement should the commander be killed or
incapacitated. Cornwallis—and apparently Germain as well—wanted to win the war in the South, even if that meant evacuating New York. Henry Clinton had rejected that strategy, and now Washington’s intercepted letter proved him right. The major engagement of 1781 would come in the North, and to prepare for it Clinton ordered Cornwallis to gather up his men and secure a base for the British Navy in Chesapeake Bay. Cornwallis suggested a site in Virginia near the settlement of Yorktown. Because the post would be only defensive, Clinton also directed Cornwallis to send two thousand troops to bolster New York’s defenses against an attack that might involve twenty thousand French and American soldiers. Cornwallis first stalled and then announced with bad grace that he would march his men away from Yorktown and put the requested troops on ships bound for New York. To do that, however, Cornwallis would have to give up Chesapeake Bay altogether.
That blackmail succeeded. George Germain was insisting on the bay’s importance, and Clinton, who already felt himself slipping in favor, did not want to cross the Ministry. Clinton was less lax about security than the Americans and wrote his revised orders to Cornwallis in cipher. But the decoding at Lord Cornwallis’ headquarters was somehow delayed, and it was a week before Cornwallis read the latest directive: he must stay at Yorktown and keep as many men as he needed to fortify that installation. Cornwallis was already grumbling about the difficulties in defending the site, although he had chosen it himself. He decided that to make Yorktown secure, he couldn’t spare any men for Henry Clinton.
—
George Washington’s letter about the coming campaign hadn’t been an example of guile but of something more characteristic in his life—a calamity shot through with luck. Early in July 1781, Washington did indeed meet with General Rochambeau at White Plains to plan a joint attack on New York. But soon afterward American advance parties trying to land secretly on Staten Island ran into British troops foraging for food. Washington cherished the weapon of surprise, and now that it was denied him he began to rethink his campaign.
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