Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  For the rest of the war, Monmouth was the closest that Washington came to winning a battle against the British in the north. His army was chronically undermanned, poorly clothed, short on equipment and supplies, and sometimes near starvation. Soldiers and officers alike often went without pay or were paid in nearly worthless Continental script. If an army travels on its stomach, as Frederick the Great of Prussia allegedly said at roughly this time, then it was amazing the Continental Army covered any ground at all. During that awful second winter at Morristown in 1779–1780, Washington imposed forced requisitions of livestock and grain on local farmers and temporarily turned a blind eye to plundering by starving soldiers. They had survived on half rations since fall but by winter, the army’s exhausted stores could not supply even this reduced amount. With heavy snows blocking access, hunger thinned the troops. By spring, desertion was rampant and mutiny in the air.

  The two summers between the Battle of Monmouth and that second winter at Morristown saw nothing but stalemate or setback for Washington’s army in the north, despite the redeployment of more than half of the British army southward. Once Clinton had concentrated his remaining troops in New York, Washington spread his army in a wide arc around the city from western Connecticut to northern New Jersey. He dreamed of the French navy blocking the harbor and his men storming Manhattan, but Washington never had enough strength to conduct anything more than borderland skirmishes in the war-ravaged lower Hudson River valley. The sole joint Franco-American operation in the north during this period, an assault on British-held Newport in 1778, bogged down after a gale dispersed a French squadron before it could engage the British navy off the Rhode Island coast. Yet a year later, the British abandoned Newport to send more forces south. With both sides adopting something of a Fabian strategy in the north, 1780 came and went with the two sides roughly where they had been following the Battle of Monmouth some two years earlier, and a sizable portion of Washington’s army settling in for a third hard winter near Morristown. After visiting those troops, Washington established his own winter headquarters at New Windsor in the lower Hudson River valley.

  Although not as harsh as the prior one, the 1780–1781 winter encampment near Morristown came close to breaking the army. It followed another dispiriting year. Going on the offensive in the south, British forces captured Charleston and much of South Carolina during the spring of 1780. An American army under Horatio Gates assigned to regain South Carolina was routed at the Battle of Camden in August 1780, when militia on the left flank fled without a fight. Their flight further convinced Washington that only disciplined Continental soldiers led by an elite officer corps could stand against British regulars.

  Then, only a month later, disillusioned in part by his own and the army’s treatment by Congress, one of Washington’s most trusted officers, General Benedict Arnold, offered to sell the center of the American defensive line around New York at West Point for £20,000 and a commission in the Royal Army. Exposed by chance on the eve of its consummation, giving Arnold just enough time to escape, the plot shocked soldiers and officers alike. Not only had Arnold been a hero of Ticonderoga and Saratoga, he was gravely wounded in the assault on Quebec after leading a death-defying late fall march to it.

  “Treason of the blackest dye was yesterday discovered!” Washington wrote in his general orders for September 26, 1780. “General Arnold who commanded at Westpoint, lost to every sentiment of honor—of public and private obligation—was about to deliver up that important Post into the hands of the enemy. Such an event must have given the American cause a deadly wound if not a fatal stab.”10

  When he heard about it in faraway Paris, Franklin said of Arnold, “His Character is in the Sight of all Europe already on the Gibbet & will hang there in Chains for Ages.”11

  Characteristically, Washington attributed exposure of the plot to providence—“convincing proof that the Liberties of America are the object of divine Protection,” he wrote—but could not as easily blame the betrayal on demonic forces.12 The despair reflected in Arnold’s act had human causes that went beyond a single man. Even Washington felt it.

  CONGRESS HAD FAILED THE TROOPS. Food was scarce, clothing scarcer, and pay scarcest of all. The Continental currency had become a running joke, war profiteers reaped large returns, and the army limped along at less than half its authorized size.

  At first Washington blamed the low caliber of the members serving in Congress. Good people had served at the outset, he knew—people much like himself and Franklin. Their number included John Hancock, John Adams, Roger Sherman, George Wythe, and Thomas Jefferson. By the end of 1778, however, Washington was asking, “Where is Mason—Wythe—Jefferson?” They were serving in state government, not Congress. “I think our political system may, be compared to the mechanism of a Clock,” he added in a telling Enlightenment era metaphor, “and . . . it answers no good purpose to keep the smaller Wheels in order if the greater one which is the support & prime mover of the whole is neglected.” Given one wish for America, he wrote, “I shall offer it as mine that each State wd not only choose, but absolutely compel their ablest Men to attend Congress.” None did, and the army suffered from galloping inflation and a lack of resources. “A great part of the Officers of yr army from absolute necessity are quitting the Service and the more virtuous few rather than do this are sinking by sure degrees into beggery & want,” he warned a former congressman.13

  In a development carrying profound implications for America’s political future, Washington soon realized that the system was more to blame than individuals. The Congress simply lacked sufficient power to execute the war or serve the common cause. “In modern wars the longest purse must chiefly determine the event,” Washington said of Britain. “Their system of public credit is such that it is capable of greater exertions than that of any other nation.”14 In stark contrast, Congress relied on requisitions to the states for money and troops, without power to enforce them. “One state will comply with a requisition of Congress—another neglects to do it. a third executes it by halves—and all differ in the manner,” Washington complained. “I see one head gradually changing into thirteen.”15 In a July 1780 letter pleading for the sort of federal union later forged by the Constitution, he argued that unless Congress obtained “absolute powers in all matters relative to the great purposes of war, and of general concern (by which the States unitedly are affected . . .) we are attempting an impossibility” in seeking and sustaining independence.16 “Our Cause is lost” without an effective union, he declared.17 “The contest among the different States now, is not which shall do most for the common cause, but which shall do least.”18

  The reactions of others in the Continental Army during these years of military stalemate and congressional inaction typically fell somewhere between the perfidy of Arnold and the protests of Washington. A few, like Washington, learned lessons in the importance of an effective central government with a strong system of public credit: Hamilton leaps to mind. Many, also like Washington, grumbled against public ingratitude and private profiteering.19 And some, unlike Washington, deserted or quit when their terms of enlistment ended—leading to something of a revolving door for service and enhanced inducements for recruiting soldiers and retaining officers. In 1778, for example, Congress acceded to the demands of officers (backed by Washington) that, for continued service to the war’s end, they (like British officers) would receive half-pay pensions. As the war wore on, many states offered hefty bounties for enlistment and began drafting soldiers to fulfill manpower requisitions for the Continental Army. The draft laws, like those from colonial days, allowed draftees to hire a replacement—a feature even Washington was willing to use to keep his nephew at Mount Vernon managing the plantation. As a result, by 1780, the Continental Army looked more like its professional British counterpart, with an elite officer corps and hardscrabble soldiery, than the republican citizens’ militia of 1776. Perhaps the new army fought for liberty, but it also expected pay.

  The
se developments form the backdrop of the dark winter of 1780–1781 in Morristown. Three years had passed since soldiers there from Pennsylvania had enlisted for “three years or during the war.” With their state now offering added rewards to new recruits, relying on the “three year” term in their enlistment contracts, these veterans demanded similar bounties to remain in service. Desperate for soldiers and devoid of resources, Washington relied on the “or during the war” wording to order continued service. Mutinying, the armed men marched on Philadelphia. Literally and figuratively, they were met halfway, in Trenton, by the president of Pennsylvania offering them release from service or added compensation, with most choosing the payment. When New Jersey troops in Morristown threatened a similar uprising, Washington had two ringleaders summarily shot. Without swift punishment, he warned Congress, “The infection will no doubt shortly pervade the whole mass” bringing “an end to all subordination in the Army, and indeed to the Army itself.”20 By soldiering on for one more year, Washington’s army, destitute and half naked, turned the world upside down.

  BELEAGUERED DUE TO A LACK of fiscal accountability and political responsibility by the same enfeebled Congress that bedeviled Washington, Franklin did as much as anyone to bring about the momentous events of 1781. Soldiering on for three years after signing the treaty with France in 1778, he held the alliance together and served as America’s senior diplomat in Europe, despite his advanced age and crippling bouts with gout and gall- or kidney stones. Once France recognized American independence, Congress named Franklin as the country’s sole minister to the court of Louis XVI. The prior triumvirate had proved awkward anyway, with each commissioner having his own ideas but only the celebrated Franklin having Vergennes’s ear. The embittered Francophobe Charles Lee had assailed Franklin as a doddering dupe of France. Matters had only grown worse when the proud and puritanical John Adams replaced Silas Deane as the commission’s third member and began questioning Franklin’s fraternizing with the French—“a Scene of continued discipation,” Adams said21—as well as his fidelity to America. Franklin had suffered it all with remarkable equanimity while performing his diplomatic duties (which he knew involved wining, dining, and flirting) with extraordinary success. He pitied the small-minded Lee and dismissed Adams as “sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”22

  During the years between Saratoga and Yorktown, Franklin had to maintain the alliance while continually asking the French for financial aid, naval support, arms, equipment, and troops. In addition, he arranged shipments of uniforms for the poorly clothed and partly shoeless American army, purchased war matériel from European suppliers, and negotiated for the care and release of prisoners of war held in Britain. Franklin also oversaw American navy ships and privateers operating from France and aided American merchants doing business in Europe. He vetted European military officers seeking commissions in the American army, helped American states secure loans from France, and conducted back-channel peace talks with British contacts. He even printed American passports and other documents on his own printing press. Not counting his active social life, which helped the cause by winning friends in high places and securing information, Franklin reported that he never worked harder in his life. “Certainly no one else could have represented America abroad as Franklin did,” historian Gordon Wood concluded. “He was the greatest diplomat that America has ever had.”23 The fact that the American army survived until 1781 despite its lack of food, clothes, and pay was partly due to Franklin. The promise that a French force would join it for the siege of Yorktown was largely due to him.

  Most amazing of all, Franklin achieved all this without having an effective nation to represent. Like Washington, in his official capacity when speaking of the collective, Franklin used the term “Americans,” not “Virginians” or “Pennsylvanians.” He envisioned the United States as a national union of people, not a confederation of states—or at least that is how he wanted to view it. At the outset of the Revolutionary War, by asserting the power to form an army, appoint generals, print money, demand and collect funds from the states, name diplomats, and declare independence, the Continental Congress acted as if it led a nation. Able leaders from the various states vied to serve in Congress and, if chosen, actively participated in its affairs: Washington, Franklin, Hancock, Morris, the Lees of Virginia, the Adamses of Massachusetts, Dickinson, Jefferson, and more.

  As time wore on and the Articles of Confederation began setting the tone, power shifted to the states, which could levy taxes and conscript soldiers. The caliber of the delegates in Congress, the influence they carried in their states, and the level of their contributions steadily waned. So many members did not even show up that, from 1777 on, Congress never had all thirteen states represented at any one time and sometimes lacked a quorum of seven. Some states, like South Carolina, started their own navies and had the audacity to ask Franklin, who was trying to secure warships for Congress, to help procure them for state fleets. And money, always money. Congress needed loans from France because it could not levy taxes and, by 1779, its paper money was worthless, but the states wanted loans too. “The Agents from our different States running all over Europe begging to borrow Money,” Franklin complained, “has excedingly hurt the general Credit, and made the Loan for the United States almost impracticable.”24 Much as Washington—the leader of its sole effective instrumentality, the army—came to symbolize the United States at home, Franklin did so abroad. Only he could have obtained continued credit for a disintegrating union.

  COMING OUT OF THE GRIM WINTER OF 1780–1781, prospects for American independence looked worse than ever. On the heels of the short-lived mutinies by troops from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, crippling desertions, raging camp illness, and the lack of pay for officers and men, Washington wrote to his former aide-de-camp John Laurens in April 1781 “that without a foreign loan our present force (which is but the remnant of an Army) cannot be kept together this Campaign; much less will it be encreased, & in readiness for another.”25 The army stood at about one-third of its authorized size. Many of the soldiers lacked a shirt, or shoes, or both.

  Congress had dispatched the twenty-six-year-old Laurens, the wealthy and winsome son of its former president Henry Laurens, to Paris to help Franklin secure an added loan from France by relating dire conditions in the field. With Congress utterly bankrupt by 1781, its leaders did not believe they could carry on the war without an immediate infusion of cash and feared that the aged Franklin could no longer secure the funds.26 Laurens did have a boyish enthusiasm that had charmed Washington and led to a close relationship with Hamilton in camp, but he lacked any diplomatic skills whatsoever and, with his impetuous demands, quickly alienated Vergennes.

  Fortunately, Franklin had secured a gift of six million livres from Louis XVI literally days before Laurens arrived. In the letter reporting this remarkable achievement to Congress, Franklin turned the tables on his critics by offering his resignation. At age seventy-five and after fifty years of public service, “I do not know that my mental Faculties are impair’d; [but] perhaps I should be the last to discover that,” Franklin wrote in an indirect rebuke of anyone who questioned his loyalty or ability.27 “I fancy it may have been a double Mortification to those Enemies,” he later confided in a friend, “that I should ask as a Favour what they hop’d to vex me by taking from me.” Of course, Congress insisted that he continue in office. “I call this Continuance an Honour, & I really esteem it to be a greater [one] than my first Appointment,” Franklin wrote with some satisfaction.28

  FRANCE’S BENEFICENCE COINCIDED with an unexpected upturn in American fortunes. After taking Charleston in 1780, the British general Henry Clinton left the task of rolling up the southern colonies to the brash aristocrat Charles Cornwallis, who took apparent pleasure at punishing rebels in what devolved into near guerrilla warfare for the rural Carolinas. He lost a supporting loyalist militia force at the Battle of Kings Mountain that October and a detachment of regulars at the B
attle of Cowpens early in 1781 before suffering heavy casualties in a Pyrrhic victory over a combined force of continentals and state militia under General Nathanael Greene at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in March.

  Unbowed by these setbacks—indeed, unwilling to see them as serious setbacks—Cornwallis marched his army north to Virginia, where he joined with a small British force under Benedict Arnold, which was already wreaking havoc in the state. Hoping to crush the Revolution in its Virginia heartland, Cornwallis fell back in August to the coast at Yorktown, on a tidewater peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay, where he confidently assumed that the Royal Navy could resupply and, if needed, evacuate his army.

  Responding to Franklin’s pleas, France had dispatched an army commanded by Comte de Rochambeau to Rhode Island in 1780 and a fleet under Comte de Grasse to Virginia in August 1781. Washington initially hoped to combine his army with Rochambeau’s to liberate New York but could not succeed without sea power. Upon learning of de Grasse’s plans, he shifted all available French and American troops to Virginia with the aim of trapping Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown.

  After the French navy blocked any escape or resupply by sea, some sixteen thousand French and American soldiers surrounded about eight thousand British troops at Yorktown and commenced classic European siege operations in September. Franklin received word of these developments from Congress’s new foreign secretary, Robert Livingston, in a message sent just before the trap sealed shut. “The enimy have evacuated their principal outworks,” Livingston wrote in mid-October, “and the least sanguine among [our] Officers fix the end of the month, as the era of Cornwallis’s captivity.”29 Upon receiving this letter, Franklin promptly alerted Vergennes, who, on the same day and with later news, informed Franklin of the British capitulation. A messenger sent by Washington soon confirmed the report. With his army’s outer defenses overrun, trenches reaching ever nearer the inner lines, and cannons shelling Yorktown from close range, Cornwallis had surrendered his entire force on October 19, 1781. Barred by the terms of surrender from displaying colors or performing martial music, legend has the British marching out of Yorktown with their bands playing the tune to a popular song, “The World Turned Upside Down.” To them, it was. “The Success has made Millions happy,” Franklin reveled in his reply to Vergennes.30