To make the problem of André the more heartrending, the young officer behaved in his mortal danger with the utmost courage and the utmost charm. Washington was deeply touched, all the more because of André’s temperamental resemblance to Lafayette. Washington’s young aides, including Hamilton, were almost aswoon with sympathy for the prisoner. But a court-martial could not avoid the verdict that André had acted as a spy and must be sentenced to death.
Washington longed for some way to escape the inevitable. He could not pardon André out of hand without making it seem to American public opinion that the army was soft on treason. But supposing he could substitute on the gibbet the right man? Knowing that André was Clinton’s intimate friend, Washington sent unofficial (they could be no more) messages to his British opposite that he would be happy to release André if Arnold were made available for capture. But Clinton could not agree without torpedoing the whole British effort to win over American officers.
The most exquisitely painful issue then arose. Accepting his death as unavoidable, André asked to be shot (which was considered a gentleman’s death), not hanged like a varlet. But hanging was prescribed for spies, and Washington feared that changing the manner of death would give further ammunition to the British propaganda machine, which was already crying out that he intended to murder a legitimate prisoner of war. Although Hamilton growled angrily, “Some people are only sensitive to motives of policy,” Washington saw no way that he could interfere with the legally established penalty. It was for him a dreadful moment when the clock struck the hour of the hanging.
As Washington concocted an elaborate scheme—which misfired—to have Arnold kidnapped from New York City, the British tried to make every use of Arnold’s defection to disrupt patriot morale. The British propaganda machine ground out statements for Arnold which described his acts as true patriotism and tried, by opening up every sore that rankled in patriot minds, to induce others to imitate him. But hatred for the traitor swept the nation.
Washington’s investigations indicated (as was the fact) that there had been no widespread plot. Except for mean go-betweens, Arnold (and Peggy) had operated alone. Yet there remained a most dangerous issue. While in Philadelphia, Arnold had been supported by the conservatives, and he had long been a protégé of Washington’s. If guilt by association were accepted, the right wing of the patriot cause and the Commander in Chief would be tainted. It is terrifying to think what use a modern “super-patriot” rabble-rouser could have made of this issue. The radical Reed did take some initial steps, but then, frightened it seems by the possible consequences, stepped back.
Washington warned that witch hunts would serve the enemy “by sowing jealousies, and, if we swallow the bait, no character will be safe. There will be nothing but mutual distrust.” He labored to turn the popular emotion to gratitude that the plot had been foiled: “In no instance since the commencement of the war has the interposition of Providence been more conspicuous than in the rescue of the post and garrison of West Point from Arnold’s villainous perfidy.”
TWENTY
Virginia Endangered
(1780–1781)
As Rochambeau’s army, richly possessed of hard money with which to buy supplies, cozied themselves down on their island for the winter of 1780–1781, Washington could not keep in touch with his allies because he could not procure feed for his couriers’ horses. Occupying at New Windsor on the Hudson Highlands, “very confined quarters” at a “dreary station,” Washington had to use his own pocketbook to put food on the headquarters table. Formerly he had tried to keep as many Continentals in service as possible, but now he reduced the number of mouths to feed by inconspicuously leaking away the men whose enlistment would not outlast 1780. He warned Congress that to expect the unpaid, unfed, and naked army to “rub through” another campaign like the last “would be as unreasonable as to suppose that because a man had rolled a snowball till it acquired the size of a horse that he might do so till it was as large as a house.”
For the first time, Washington envisioned peace without victory. England, Spain,* and France, he heard, were getting tired of the war. Rumor reported that the mediation of neutral powers would establish peace in Europe. The American settlement would secure to England any colonies that she controlled at the time of the treaty. This possibility made the upcoming campaigns extremely crucial since their results might be perpetuated. And Washington could not, for the moment at least, see any way that such a European settlement could be overturned. The situation in the United States, he admitted, called for peace even at this price—or else a large loan from France.
Congress took another step towards using Washington as if he were President. Ordinary diplomatic channels having failed to procure enough help from France, Washington was to send a personal envoy. He instructed Colonel John Laurens to ask in Paris not for reinforcement to Rochambeau’s army, but rather for the money which such reinforcements would cost. If financially aided, “we shall be in a condition to continue the war as long as the obstinacy of the enemy may require.” Without financial support, the next campaign would be “feeble and expiring” and would put “in all probability, the period to our opposition.”
At about noon on January 3, 1781, Washington received such news as he had long dreaded. The Pennsylvania troops, who were stationed at Morristown, had mutinied, killed one officer and mortally wounded another. Under the command of sergeants and armed with cannon, they were marching on Philadelphia. They intended to present Congress with a series of demands. The most important of these: since bounties were being paid in cash for new enlistments while the soldiers already in service were not being paid, the mutineers wished to be allowed to resign and then, if they pleased, reenlist.
Washington rushed off a warning to the legislators not to flee from the mutineers. If the angry soldiers found Congress gone, they might join with the town rabble and sack the city. This was not necessarily the worst of the dangers. British agents were among the mutineers, offering them substantial pay in hard money if they would shift over to the British service. And the rest of the Continental Army was in the same financial plight as the protesting Pennsylvanians.
Although Washington did his best to keep the news from the troops in his own camp, they were sure to hear sooner or later. Discreet inquiries revealed that the situation on the Hudson was so explosive that his officers feared a revolt there should Washington ride off to deal with the existing mutiny. Furthermore, if he tried to lead a march on the mutinous troops, the soldiers might, instead of putting the insurrection down, join it. However, Washington decided to “hazard everything.” A thousand picked men should be prepared for the expedition by being—as far as was possible—clothed and shod and amply fed.
Before it became necessary to hazard all, word came in that the mutineers had been satisfied—but at what a price! Not only had the men won financial concessions, but half were to be given an absolute discharge and the other half a furlough until April. The Pennsylvania line had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist. What was to keep other state lines from seeking to achieve the same thing in the same way?
Washington could only wait for the next blow. When it came, he was not altogether regretful, for this mutiny was so small that it could be put down as a lesson to the whole army. Only some two hundred New Jersey soldiers were marching on the state capital at Trenton. Washington had some six hundred well-fed and well-armed men at West Point. They were sent in pursuit. The mutineers threw down their arms. Three were sentenced to death. Washington pardoned one, and the others were shot by their weeping companions.
This brought to an end (at least temporarily) the wave of mutinies. But the financial situation that underlay all difficulties was subject to no firing squad. “We are,” Washington mourned, “at the end of our tether.”
Even into Washington’s darkest moments a little light had filtered from his dream that, when the war was over, he would return in peace to Mount Vernon. But now the possibility of eve
r realizing that dream was menaced—and by whom? By the traitor Benedict Arnold.
Anxious to encourage defections among other American generals, Clinton had given Arnold a command in the British army. With fifteen hundred men, he was sent raiding in Virginia. Greene’s army was far away in the Carolinas facing Cornwallis. Neither Washington nor Rochambeau could send any troops against Arnold since the distance was too great for a march, and the French transports did not dare appear in a British-dominated ocean. Arnold, who was not averse to burning the property of rebels, had an almost free hand in Virginia.
Then, in February, 1781, a storm shifted the local naval balance. The British anchorage in Gardiners Bay, at the northern tip of Long Island, was less well protected than the French anchorage in Newport Harbor. Enough British ships were damaged to give the French a numerical advantage until the British shipwrights, who were instantly at work, could repair their vessels. And Arnold was ending up the winter in a base vulnerable to amphibious attack: at Portsmouth, Virginia, where the James River flowed into the Chesapeake.
Washington reasoned that the French should wake from their long somnolence, sail in full force for Portsmouth, annihilate Arnold’s detachment, hurry back to Newport before the British navy had adequately repaired their ships—and deliver Arnold up to him for hanging. But, before Washington’s plan could reach Rochambeau, the French sent out a small naval detachment, which reduced their main fleet into renewed immobility, but was itself too weak to do anything except conquer a few of Arnold’s ships. Washington’s disappointment was extreme. Then he heard that the French detachment had, after achieving nothing much, returned. His original plan was again feasible, but, as the British passionately refitted, the time was now shorter. Washington gathered the best-fed horses he could find and took off with his staff for Newport.
He did not pause when the horse he rode fell through Bull’s Bridge into the Housatonic River. Leaping free, he shouted that the horse be attended to, leapt on another mount, and was gone. But when he reached the French encampment at Newport, the tempo changed. Far from showing any urgency to sail and attack, the French received him with leisurely ceremony. He had to smile appreciatively as he was informed over and over that the seemingly endless honors paid him were ordinarily accorded to no one lower than a Marshal of France or a Prince of the Blood. Remembering his own hungry and tattered troops, he observed with wonder the elaborate French uniforms, which looked as if they had just come from a tailor’s shop, and the faces of the soldiers, lineless with rest and rubicund with plentiful food.
That evening there was a great ball. Washington opened it with the reigning belle of Newport, but his thoughts were absorbed by the fact that, despite a perfect wind, the French warships and transports showed no signs of preparing to sail. As he returned bows and tried to match compliments, the titular Commander in Chief yearned to urge action but recognized that he could not in fact attempt an order or even ask for an explanation.
The French eventually did sail—but they had waited too long. Having repaired enough ships, the British followed them. There was an inconclusive skirmish, and then the French slipped back into Newport Harbor, the opportunity lost.
Washington was inspired to a series of the most indiscreet letters he had written since he had been a fledgling commander in Cambridge. Marking his most violent attacks on the strategy of his French allies “private,” he forgot that the army’s inability to feed couriers’ horses made his letters travel in ordinary mailbags that were periodically captured by the British. And, sure enough, one of his letters surfaced in the British Tory press. This was the more embarrassing because in his rage and disappointment Washington had misstated the facts. He had implied that the first small French expedition, which had been dispatched before his suggestions arrived, had been sent contrary to his orders.
In came a courteously phrased protest from Rochambeau in which he gave Washington an out—perhaps the letter was a forgery—and fatuously repeated that his king had placed him under Washington’s orders.
Perhaps it was annoyance at the repetition of the fiction that gave him seeming responsibility without actual power that made Washington refuse to accept the evasion Rochambeau had proffered. He did not agree that the letter was a forgery. He expressed “extreme pain” that an “accident” had made public a letter “disagreeable” to Rochambeau. It had been a private letter to a friend totally unconnected with public affairs. It had been “written in haste and might have been inaccurately expressed.”
Although Washington’s disciple Greene made much trouble for Cornwallis in the Carolinas, he had been unable to dam the tide of British regulars and had been forced to flee into Virginia. Then the two armies switched positions. Cornwallis having decided to operate in Virginia, Greene returned to the Carolinas. This left Washington’s native state almost completely in the British power.
During April, 1781, the British sloop Savage sailed up the Potomac and trained her guns on Mount Vernon. Washington was horrified to hear that his estate manager had gone on board and bought immunity by supplying provisions. This, Washington wrote the manager angrily, “will be a precedent for others.” He would rather “they had burnt my house and laid the plantation in ruins.”
British raiders descended on the Virginia legislature, capturing several members and sending Governor Thomas Jefferson fleeing into the mountains. If, as seemed possible, the war would soon end with an agreement to preserve the then status quo, Virginia would, unless previously recaptured by the patriots, return to British rule. Washington might never be able to go home again.
In this situation, so harrowing to his emotions, temptations were laid before Washington. Governor Jefferson begged that he return to his native state. Jefferson feared that the inhabitants, seeing no other way out, might lie down under British rule. However, if Washington appeared, “the difficulty would then be how to keep men out of the field.”
Not so very long before, Washington would hardly have cared what happened to the rest of North America as long as Virginia was safe. Now he wrote, “Nobody, I persuade myself, can doubt my inclination to be immediately employed in the defense of that country where all my property and connections are.” However, he saw “powerful objections to my leaving this army,” and even more powerful objections to trying to march the army southward several hundred miles.
The government of Virginia being scattered and inoperative, Washington received anguished pleas from powerful leaders that he become political as well as military dictator over his native commonwealth. He brushed these suggestions aside.
* As an ally of France, Spain had entered the war against England. However, she remained hostile to the American Revolution. She had colonies of her own in the western hemisphere which she feared would get ideas and slip the leash.
TWENTY-ONE
Yorktown
(1781)
Since Washington’s favorite strategy (like the Indians’) was to catch the enemy by surprise, he took great precautions to prevent any leakage of his plans. Even major generals were, until the very moment of action, kept in ignorance. This had contributed to the charge, disseminated during the Conway Cabal, that the army was run by a small clique of Washington’s confidants and aides. When the French finally served beside the Americans, Rochambeau’s staff officers expressed amazement at how much less gossip about movements circulated in the American than in the French camp. But, all the more because of Washington’s indiscreet letter that had got into the Tory press, the French command did not trust Washington’s discretion.
When, in May, 1781, Washington met with Rochambeau at Wethersfield, Connecticut, to discuss the coming campaign, the French general withheld from his ally (and titular commander) the truly essential piece of information. Although Washington was informed that a large French fleet under the Count de Grasse was to operate during that summer in the Indies, he was given no hint that the fleet had been ordered to sail to North America during July or August. Rochambeau was, indeed, so obviou
sly evasive that Washington complained to the French diplomatic representative in Philadelphia, “It is not for me to know in what manner the fleet of His Most Christian Majesty is to be employed in the West Indies this summer, or to inquire at what epocha it may be expected on this coast.”
The information Rochambeau did confide was not encouraging. He expected few reinforcements and little money. Then he initiated what he said was speculation: Supposing a French fleet did appear, how should it be employed? Washington plumped as always for killing off the war by capturing New York City. Only if this proved impossible, should some objective be sought in the South. Keeping up the formal fiction of Washington’s command, Rochambeau signed a paper agreeing with this strategy.
In a secret dispatch Rochambeau urged de Grasse to ignore the official document. The admiral was to sail directly for the Chesapeake. Rochambeau would see that he would be met there by the combined American and French armies. The objective of this strategy was not (despite what many histories tell us) Yorktown or even specifically Cornwallis’s army. Cornwallis was now inland and there was no reason to suppose that he would settle on the coast, making himself vulnerable to amphibious action. Rochambeau hoped to pick off the shipping associated with Cornwallis’s expedition, and also the minor British post that was still being maintained at Portsmouth.
Although, during their conference, Rochambeau had behaved to Washington (according to another French general) with “all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible,” he had finally given in to Washington’s request that his army join the Continental Army on the banks of the Hudson. He was so obliging because the march would, without giving away his secret objective, carry his troops that much closer to the Chesapeake.
Rochambeau returned to Newport and Washington to the Hudson. There he heard from his own representative in Paris, Laurens, that the French West Indian fleet had been ordered to the North American coast. Laurens also stated that he had secured from the court at Versailles a gift of six million livres. The delegate attributed this success “to the exalted opinion which the Ministers have of your Excellency and everything which comes from you.”
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 17
