Another difficulty was the fundamental nature of the American economy. A nation devoted almost exclusively to agriculture, handicrafts being on a small scale and scattered, could not produce the goods necessary to carry on the war. Not only were heavy manufactures like cannon impossible, but it was extremely difficult to concentrate in one place enough of such ordinary supplies as shoes and clothes to supply an army. Equally serious was the fact that agrarianism—assets being in land and slaves and a basic means of exchange being barter—failed to produce fluid capital. The government might offer bonds for sale, but where was the cash to buy them? Washington was so impressed with this situation that he became worried by his own passionate, ancestral dedication to agriculture. He admitted to his favorite brother that his continuing desire “to have my property as much as possible in lands … is not consistent with national policy.”
During the summer of 1780, Washington’s business friends were to achieve a most impressive demonstration. The Continental currency being by then even more worthless than in 1779, the merchants of Philadelphia decided to establish a new and separate system of paper money that would not depreciate because it would be guaranteed by actual funds. Their means was to establish such an institution as had not formerly existed in America: a bank. They subscribed as capital over a million pounds in Continental currency. The existence of a large capital fund meant that certificates of indebtedness—more or less the equivalent of modern checks—drawn on the Bank of Philadelphia could at any time be cashed. Thus, there was no pressure on the holder to change his draft into currency. It was more convenient for him to pass the draft on to another man in payment of a debt. That creditor, having equal faith in its value, was glad to receive the draft, which he handed on to a creditor of his own. The paper of the Bank of Philadelphia was circulating as sound currency. And, since there was no reason to suppose that every holder of a draft would want cash at the same moment, the bank did not need to keep all its capital in its vaults. A part could be applied to bolstering the general economy and supplying the army.
Enchanted with this development, Washington urged that similar banks be started in other cities, but the idea was too novel. The certificates of the Bank of Philadelphia remained a tiny island in the boundless sea of depreciating paper. The memory of what it had achieved was to come back to Washington during his Presidency, when Jefferson was feuding with Hamilton over the Bank of the United States.
As Washington conferred with Congress about the 1779 campaign, it became clear that the only way to keep the cause afloat was to pare the expenses for the army down to the smallest amount possible without losing the war. Washington considered it essential to replace the 4,380 regulars whose enlistments were expiring, but he did not request a force large enough to take any initiative. Unless d’Estaing—from whom nothing had been heard—should reappear with his marines, in the main military theater only defensive operations would be feasible.
Washington was preparing to apply the strategy which, when reminiscing as an old man, he defined thus succinctly: “Time, caution, and worrying the enemy until we could be better provided with arms and other means, and had better disciplined troops to carry on, was the plan for us.”
Washington relied for his immediate defenses on the twin conceptions that the British would not risk their scarce manpower by attacking patriots fortified on strong ground, and would not endanger vital supply lines by skirting around American strong points. There were three directions in which the enemy could march from New York. The route up the coast to New England was blocked by an American encampment on the heights around White Plains and New Castle. On the Hudson, the patriots were ever strengthening their major fortification, West Point. And the road through New Jersey to Philadelphia was blocked, as of old, by American forces on the heights at Morristown. This bought time but would not, alas, bring victory.
Washington was now visualizing his army in three categories, each suited to a different kind of warfare. The militia, deployed across the countryside, were prepared to harass those “foraging parties” which were forced to emerge from the enemy fortifications to procure food for man and especially for beast (one horse needed twenty-four pounds of fodder every day). Not only did such service keep the militia out of the main encampments, thus preventing them from undermining the discipline of the regulars, but it gave them tasks to which they were ideally suited. Since they were usually inhabitants of the countrysides they defended, they were familiar with every path, cliff, and stone wall. Their natural skills enabled them to take cover, fighting in detachments as small as one man. And, if British action proved too strong, they could, by merely hiding their guns, turn into farmers wandering, it seemed, innocently around their fields. Should the British, unable to determine who was a soldier and who was not, be incited to random violence against men grasping plows, this too served the patriot cause by engendering hate against oppressing invaders.
Washington’s second arm consisted of elite corps, sometimes riflemen (although he found these frontiersmen dangerously unwilling to obey orders), more often the light infantry companies that were attached to every regiment, but could be assembled for a specific mission. Their function was to beat up in sudden raids any considerable group of the enemy who became exposed. During 1779, the light troops, under General Anthony Wayne, surprised a British-held fortification at Stony Point on the Hudson, carrying off prisoners and cannon. Although they had to abandon the post almost instantly after taking it, this exploit gave, in the middle of the long doldrums, something to boast about.
Neither the militia nor the elite corps was capable of any military action that would in itself end the war. Washington was trying to develop the main Continental Army into a force that could deliver a sledgehammer blow. Although his numbers were vastly insufficient, he did have a nucleus. His regulars were tough, disciplined veterans, immune to camp diseases. Trying to build for the future, he insisted that, however much the arrival of desperately needed recruits might be slowed, none might join the army until—the process then took several weeks—they had been inoculated against smallpox.
As the spring, summer, and autumn of 1779 wore slowly away, patience was the virtue Washington most needed. He tempered it with the hope that something would turn up to dispel his frustration. How his heart leaped at reports that d’Estaing, who had won a naval battle in West Indian waters, was on his way back to the North American coast! Sick of half measures, Washington revealed, as he made feverish plans, the strategic conception which was to remain dominant in his thinking. If the war were to be brought to a quick end, the key British base in New York City must be captured.
Officers waiting with fast boats on the Jersey coast were to streak out to the French fleet as soon as it appeared. They were to urge d’Estaing not to pause lest his arrival warn the British, but to sail directly up New York Harbor. At the sound of their cannon, Washington would move. A few triumphant hours, and the homesick planter could turn his back on war!
But d’Estaing never appeared. After an abortive attempt on some minor British fortifications on the Georgia coast, the French admiral returned to a winter anchorage in the Indies. The campaign of 1779 was over. Victory was not one inch closer.
EIGHTEEN
Enter a French Army
(1779–1780)
During the winter Washington encamped his main army—it was small—all together on Morristown Heights. A new method of procuring supplies had been inaugurated for which Washington at first had hopes, however faint.
Congress, despairing of being allowed adequate revenue by the states, had requested that every state supply its own regiments. Most of the states were far away. All proved lax. And when some local government did in fact move, there developed an emotionally difficult situation: one regiment was eating while its neighbor was not. What hope Washington had that the system might possibly work slid away. He was spurred into formulating, years before the Constitution was drafted, its basic principle: “Unless the states will
content themselves with a full and well-chosen representation in Congress, and vest that body with absolute powers in all matters relative to the great purposes of war and of general concern by which the states unitedly are affected, reserving to themselves all matters of local and internal polity … we are attempting an impossibility and very soon shall become (if it is not already the case) a many-headed monster, a heterogeneous mass, that never will or can steer to the same point.”
The soldiers too were seething. Greene pointed out that “a country overflowing with plenty are now suffering an army employed for the defense of everything that is dear and valuable to perish for lack of food.” One colonel stated, “I damn my country as void of gratitude!” and another expressed a wish to bathe his hands in the blood of the villains who were starving the army.
Washington lived in daily fear of mutiny. The Connecticut line did emerge from their huts and threaten to go home. They were dissuaded. Had they not been dissuaded, Washington warned Congress, the whole army might have followed. “The prospect, my dear Baron,” he wrote Steuben, “is gloomy and the storm thickens.” However, he was inured to difficulties. He refused to despair.
Since the very start of her husband’s military service, Martha Washington had journeyed from Virginia to spend with “the General” the months during which there was no fighting. Every year, she dreaded the journey and half hoped that she would not be summoned, but, when called, she went, and in whatever encampment the tides of war had designated, she labored, with all her charm and social skill, to lighten the grimness. “The poor General,” she summarized, “was so unhappy that it distressed me exceedingly.”
When Martha had made her first hegira—this time to Cambridge—that terrifying Boston bluestocking, Mercy Warren, had been charmed into writing, “The complacency of her manners speaks at once the benevolence of her heart, and her affability, candor, and gentleness qualify her to soften the hours of private life, or to sweeten the cares of a hero, and smooth the rugged pains of war.”
For Washington, his wife’s visits had an almost magical significance. Mount Vernon had become what seemed an inaccessible dream. Mrs. Washington brought with her, in addition to intimate companionship, a feeling of his hearth, a sense that he was breathing the air of home. With the shades drawn, the fire burning, and his wife working quietly on the fine needlework she enjoyed, he could almost forget the war. Almost.
One of the pleasures of Martha’s visits was that she attracted to headquarters a circle of ladies whose soft complexions, gentle words, and frivolous costumes cheered the General. He enjoyed flirtatious banter. During the previous winter the wife of a Virginia colonel had written a female confidante, “Now let me speak of our noble and agreeable commander, for he commands both sexes, one by his excellent skill in military matters, the other by his ability, politeness, and attention.” Although usually busy in the morning, “from dinner till night he is free for all company. His worthy lady seems to be in perfect felicity when she is by the side of her Old Man as she calls him. We often make parties on horseback.” Then General Washington “throws off the hero and takes on the chatty, agreeable companion. He can be downright impudent sometimes—such impudence, Fanny, as you and I like.”
An example of Washington’s “impudence” is supplied by a note written—as it happened in Martha’s absence—to a handsome widow, Annis Boudinot Stockton, who had sent him an ode in his praise with the coy request that he give her absolution for writing poetry. Washington replied that if she would dine with him “and go through the proper course of penitence, which shall be prescribed, I will strive hard to assist you in expiating these poetical trespasses on this side of purgatory.” He might even prescribe that she write more poetry. “You see, Madam, when once the Woman has tempted us and we have tasted the forbidden fruit, there is no such thing as checking our appetites, whatever the consequences may be.” On thinking this passage over, Washington clearly considered it a little fresh—but he liked it too much not to send it. To tone things down, he added that he deserved nothing more from Mrs. Stockton than “the most disinterested friendship has a right to claim.”
The extent of the strain that filled the air at Morristown during the winter of 1779–1780 is indicated by the fact that on this occasion Martha’s arrival proved an additional cause of tension. The Commander in Chief had been able to procure for his wife, aides and servants only some rooms in a not commodious house. He promised Martha to make the situation bearable by having a separate kitchen erected. He gave the order, but was told that the necessary boards could not be procured. Then, as he rode through the camp, he saw other officers’ quarters being made comfortable with boards. He wrote the commissary general that “to share a common lot and participate in the inconveniences has with me been a fundamental principle”—but this was too much. At about the same time, he got into a roaring rage with the commander of the headquarters guard over a trivial matter concerning a tent.
A dinner party given by Colonel Clement Biddle, the deputy quartermaster general, started out convivially enough. Trouble began only after the ladies had withdrawn, leaving the gentlemen sitting over their wine. The officers observed that George Olney, a civilian commissary who could be considered one of those who were starving the army, wore a look of disapproval while he watched the officers drink. As Olney’s wife later put it, the officers retaliated with an “unpolite and irrational attempt to sink him below the brute creation by getting him drunk.” Olney fled to the ladies.
Then, so testified Washington’s aide Tench Tilghman, “It was proposed that a party should be sent to demand him, and, if the ladies refused to give him up, that he should be brought by force.” Washington volunteered to lead the invasion. The officers advanced “with great formality to the adjoining room, and sent in a summons which the ladies refused. Such a scuffle then ensued as any good natured person might suppose.”
But good nature was shattered when Mrs. Olney shouted to Washington “in a violent rage” that, if he did not let go of her hand, “I will tear out your eyes and the hair from your head.” At this, General Greene’s plump and handsome wife came to Washington’s defense in a fury which she later admitted had been “unbecoming.” Greene separated the ladies, led both Olneys into another room, and told the commissary that he should “adopt a less positive and blunt way of refusing to drink.”
The Olneys seem to have been spirited away since there, for the moment, the controversy ended. But Mrs. Greene told everyone that Mrs. Olney had insulted the General; Mrs. Olney thereupon insulted Mrs. Greene; Mr. Olney appealed to Washington to come to the rescue of his wife’s reputation. Washington refused to get into the controversy, handing the matter over to Tilghman. The aide’s reply treated the incident as a joke. Washington, he wrote, remembered only “good humor and gaiety.”
As Washington stagnated at Morristown, the main action of the war moved, for the first time, southward. Some eight thousand soldiers and most of the British fleet had sailed from New York and were besieging Charleston. Remembering the lesson taught him at the fort that had borne his name, Washington warned General Benjamin Lincoln, who commanded in South Carolina, to beware lest his army be trapped in the fortified city.
Washington cursed the national laxness which had allowed his own army to become so weak that he could not take advantage of the absence of so considerable a British force by taking New York City. Then, in May, 1780, he received electrifying news: a French expeditionary force, accompanied by a fleet, was on its way to North America. Again Washington prepared plans for the French to sail, without pause, against now-weakened New York. He was all alertness when a fleet was sighted actually on its way there. But the ships sailed into the harbor without being fired on. Alas, it was the British expeditionary force coming home.
Lincoln having ignored Washington’s advice, the British had captured not only Charleston but twenty-five hundred Continentals and two thousand militia. This now ranked as the patriot army’s worst defeat. But Washington s
aw a bright side in the fact that the British second-in-command, Lord Cornwallis, had been left in South Carolina with a force considered large enough to subdue the South. Dimly foreseeing Cornwallis’s eventual surrender at Yorktown, Washington wrote, “The enemy, by attempting to hold conquests so remote, must dissipate their force, and, of course, afford opportunities for striking one or the other extremity.”
For the time being, Cornwallis raged through South Carolina like an invincible lion. Gates, whom Congress rushed off to the rescue, only succeeded in demonstrating the impossibility of fighting British regulars on open ground with militia. His helter-skelter army was trounced by a smaller British force at Camden, with a loss of two thousand men. Organized resistance in the Carolinas was now at an end. As Gates followed Conway and Charles Lee into involuntary retirement, Congress threw the whole mess into Washington’s lap. He sent General Greene, his ablest disciple, to command in the South.
On July 10, four French regiments, complete with cavalry and artillery—five thousand men—appeared in American waters. There was no possibility of their joining Washington in a surprise attack on New York, since they were convoyed directly to the island off the Rhode Island mainland which the Hessians had recently evacuated. After the accompanying fleet anchored in Newport Harbor, the army made themselves comfortable in the town.
Washington, who had suffered so during the French and Indian War from British determination that their regular officers, of however low rank, should automatically command American officers however exalted, was pleased to learn that the French had leaned over backwards on this issue: Americans were not only to command Frenchmen inferior to them but even of the same rank. The French commander in chief, the Count de Rochambeau, was to obey Washington.
That there were also secret orders Washington did not know. Although the French ministry, not wishing to encourage the conflict between allies which d’Estaing had incited, had put forward a conciliatory front, they had no intention of really risking their army by entangling it with provincial amateurs. Rochambeau was instructed not to allow a pretense of subservience to make him follow Washington into any strategy of which he disapproved. Having established his encampment on an island, Rochambeau was to stay there, keeping the two armies entirely separate until the need for active cooperation was overpowering. As it turned out, the French regular was not, during the entire war, to bolster the inexperienced Americans by assigning to their service a single expert: artilleryman, engineer, or whatever. Washington’s French experts were all, like the engineer Duportail, volunteers who had enrolled, entirely independently of the French expeditionary force, in the American army.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 15
