Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  Washington could not believe it had come so quickly. But he sensed a possible trap. Maybe Cornwallis had gotten word that reinforcements were en route, and was stalling for time. While he had “an ardent desire to spare the further effusion of blood,” he wrote in reply, he would agree to a ceasefire not of twenty-four hours but of “two hours from the delivery of this letter” so that Cornwallis could deliver his terms for surrendering. Cornwallis sent his terms. Washington found them agreeable. The cannons fell silent. The silence rose up and filled the skies above the heads of the thousands of hot, sweat-soaked, blood-and-mud-spattered men on both sides. The sun set, and the cold autumn sky filled up: with “ten thousand stars,” one soldier declared, and “numberless meteors gleaming through the atmosphere.”

  It was a big, wide, confusing world, as it had been since the dawn of time. General Sir Henry Clinton was still holed up in the fortress he had made of Manhattan Island. There were men in far-off places still locked in combat. A British fleet was out there somewhere, intent on menace. Washington knew it wasn’t over yet. But he also knew, or sensed at least, that it was.

  PART THREE

  Abraham Yates Jr.

  Chapter 17

  THE CAUSE OF HUMANITY

  Late November 1781, and people on the streets of London, huddled against an icy wind coming off the Thames, were talking of only one thing. Customs officials had seized a huge shipment of illegal brandy and had been transporting it to a warehouse when “a daring and outrageous Gang of Smugglers, on Horseback” swept in, armed with “Blunderbusses, Musquets, Pistols and other offensive Weapons,” attacked the officers and made away with the goods. The alert published in the London Gazette promised a smacking reward of 100 pounds for anyone with information of the crime.

  The very next day, other news arrived that shouldered aside gossip about brandy and reward money. The information from America had made its way first to France. The packet boat from Calais had no sooner tied up to the dock at Dover than copies of a French journal were unloaded. The journal, said Horace Walpole, contained an astonishing account, “of Lord Cornwallis and his whole army having been made prisoners at York Town by General Washington.”

  When George Germain brought the news to his prime minister, he was appalled to observe the normally reserved Lord North receive the information “like a ball in the breast.” Stern old soldier that he was, Germain was even more disgusted when North gasped weakly, “Oh God, it is all over!”

  In public houses and gentlemen’s clubs the reaction was much the same. Not that people felt, as North did, that their careers were ruined, but they felt that England, in its quest for global empire, was suddenly on a downward trajectory, which would affect their lives mightily. On the heels of the news from America came reports of French victories in the Caribbean and coastal South America, which took away valuable British possessions. James Lowther stood up in the House of Commons to declare that the American war had been “obstinately, fatally pursued” and that “the country was drained, exhausted, dejected.”

  The same members of the House who had long opposed Germain—Edmund Burke, Isaac Barré, Margaret Coghlan’s recent lover Charles James Fox—now renewed their attacks on the whole war effort, and in particular on the man who had led it. Their colleague Edward Gibbon, a member of the House of Commons, had published the first volume of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with unintentional irony in the year 1776; the Whigs now referred to it, likening the British situation to what Gibbon described as Rome began its collapse. One of them stood up to quote Gibbon on the signs of Rome’s decay, citing that the empire “ceased to be formidable abroad, and became odious and oppressive at home: that taxes increased with the poverty of the state; and that the emperors wasted the resources of the empire, in carrying on wars against rebels that they themselves had made.”

  Lord North, once he had recovered from the news of Yorktown, tried to fashion a new strategy, in which Britain would offer the Americans peace without outright independence but with a status as adjuncts to empire. “Peace with America seems necessary,” he told the king, “even if it can be obtained on no better terms than some Federal Alliance.”

  A problem with his strategy was that, while seemingly everyone in the country was ready for peace, one man who was not was George III. He vowed that he would abdicate before giving up. Instead, he called for a new general to lead the fight, and for new, more forceful military plans.

  The prime minister had suggested to the king that, in light of everything, Lord George Germain had to be replaced as American Secretary. The king was willing to consider this, but, he said, “above all I must be certain that a new Secretary is not of the yielding kind.” This put North in a quandary, for arguably the only man in government who was still not of the yielding kind on America was Germain himself.

  Indeed, Germain remained vigorously active. He wrote a lengthy memo to the king, warning him against heeding those who called for peace: “If you consider the consequences of totally abandoning the colonies, you must not confine yourself only to the dismembring the Empire, and to the losing the commerce you now enjoy, but you must reflect upon the additional weight and strength which France will derive from it.” He predicted that if His Majesty let go of America then Canada would “immediately fall, and your fisheries at Newfoundland and all your possessions in the W. Indies.” In short, relinquishing the American colonies would bring about the collapse of the British Empire.

  Completely in the face of most others in government, Germain pushed the king to fight on: to continue to hold New York in a vise-like grip while redirecting the fleet (which had put to sea too late to reinforce Cornwallis in Yorktown and then returned to New York) to launch attacks on ports along the American coast. He sketched out troop numbers and movements, and he reiterated the belief that there were thousands upon thousands of loyalists in America who could be relied upon.

  This was the sort of thing George III wanted from his ministers. He was inclined to support the plan, to support Germain. But men in Parliament were holding meetings. Peace was necessary, and it seemed to most of them that this would require granting America sovereignty. One by one, members of Parliament informed the prime minister that they would not support a continuation of the war. In particular, they would not support Germain.

  Germain got wind of this. He went to his country estate to ponder. When he returned to London, he tried to meet with the king, but now the king shunned him. Germain understood what was happening, but was never one for subtlety. He stood gruffly outside the Privy Council chamber, waiting for a meeting to end, and accosted His Majesty as he left. “Am I out?” he asked. The king ducked the question.

  Finally, in January 1782, Germain saw the inevitable and abruptly changed tactics. He wrote the prime minister, saying that he knew the government had to take firm actions, and asked Lord North “to dispose of me in that manner which may best answer your Lordship’s views for his Majesty’s service and the public good.” To an outsider Germain may have seemed to be offering to resign unconditionally, but North apprehended what he wanted. Honor was the primary coin of the realm, the true language that one such as George Germain communicated in, and if he were to go, it would be with honor.

  Germain received a formal audience with the king. “Is there anything I can do,” the king asked, “which would be agreeable to you?” “Sir,” Germain replied, “if your Majesty is pleased to raise me to the dignity of the Peerage, it will form at once the best reward to which I can aspire, and the best proof of Your approbation of my past exertions in Your affairs.” This had all been worked out in advance; the king gave his formal assent, and further agreed not just to make him a baron but to elevate him one step up, to the rank of viscount.

  On February 7, then, the now-retired Viscount Sackville, as he would henceforth be known, exhibited himself before his peers in the House of Lords. A larger than usual number of them were present for the occasion: 128 marquises, earls and dukes, a fo
rmidable panoply of powdered wigs and silk breeches and waistcoats. Unfortunately for him, however, they had not taken pains to be on hand in order to honor the new viscount. Rather, they were closing ranks.

  The Marquess of Carmarthen began by voicing his displeasure that “a person who had in his military character been publicly degraded” had been elevated to the peerage, and remarked that he considered this “a disgrace.” He charged that “Lord George Sackville is guilty of having disobeyed the orders of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick.” The Battle of Minden was rearing its head yet again, twenty-three years after the fact. The peers of the realm had not forgotten, and they would never forget. The Earl of Abingdon went further, declaring that the new peer was “the greatest criminal this country ever knew,” who had acted disgracefully as a military officer and “had been infinitely more guilty in his civil situation.”

  On and on the Lords went, their sonorous and censorious sentences echoing about the chamber, venting at Sackville, responding belatedly to years of his having so stridently pushed himself and his views on the government, all but accusing him of using the American war as a way of exorcizing his own personal demons, and releasing their pent-up outrage over the loss of America, over “the capture of York Town, the whole criminality of which might be brought home to the noble lord,” and denouncing the man as “the author of all the calamities of the war.”

  Germain—Sackville—sat silently through it all. At last he rose. In a strong voice but one tremored with anger, he recounted his career, revived the defense of his conduct at Minden, and added to it a defense of his management of the American war. The British public, he asserted with feeling, never had “a servant who shewed more unremitting assiduity, more close attention to the duties of his situation, or more zeal for promoting the interests of his country.”

  The whole thing was a demonstration unlike any the House of Lords had ever known. At last the display of aristocratic condemnation came to an end, and Viscount Sackville, shaken but unrepentant and unbowed, went home to his retirement.

  The room was dark and stifling. The patient lay on the bed, dying.

  Unexpectedly, George Washington found himself plunged from the exuberance of battlefield victory into a scene of intimate grief.

  He had ridden from Yorktown 40 miles north to the home of his wife’s brother-in-law in the little town of Eltham, where he planned to spend the night before continuing on to Mount Vernon. He was surprised to find Martha here, her face wracked by sorrow. Her son, Washington’s stepson, Jacky Custis, had served under him in the army at Yorktown. During the siege Jacky had caught “camp fever.” He had been brought here to his relative’s house to recover. He did not. He died shortly after Washington arrived.

  Washington stayed for six days, to assist and to grieve. The event turned his mood from celebratory to contemplative. Indeed, there would be much to contemplate in the coming months. The war existed still, but it went static. Meanwhile, Congress was in chaos. Soldiers had not been paid in years, and, now that they were idle, were turning ugly. American leaders seemed to have no strategy for dealing with the peace that now seemed in the offing. Many were gravitating toward the only governmental organizing principle that any of them had ever known; Gouverneur Morris of New York expressed himself openly on the subject to General Nathanael Greene: “I have no hope that our union can subsist except in the form of an absolute monarchy.”

  Alexander Hamilton wrote to Washington, trying to convince him that, in the event peace arrived, it was important that the army should remain, for without it anarchy would sweep in. Besides that, Hamilton argued, gingerly, that Washington should be the one to “guide the torrent.” Further, perhaps the greatest problem of the moment was the lack of public finances. Hamilton advised that a system of taxation was urgently needed. Men in Congress had no power to convince the state governments of this; but “in this the influence of the army, properly directed, may cooperate.”

  Many others were making variations of Hamilton’s argument: Washington should continue to lead the army and establish himself as the head of a new American government. Washington read his former aide’s words with alarm. His answer was direct. Such a situation, with the army and a general running the country, would he said, “end in blood.”

  It was a disorienting period. Washington was flooded with letters. He found himself being implored for advice from state leaders. He had reached exactly the position he had longed for as a young man: he was honored, revered, respected beyond measure. But in February of 1782, as his fiftieth birthday came, he was able to ponder one of the lessons of experience: that dreams, when achieved, inevitably differ from youthful imaginings.

  Washington was tired, and longed to step aside—as he said, to “pass the remainder of life in a state of undisturbed repose”—to let others organize the postwar order. But in the spring of 1782—as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Jay sat down with British negotiators in Paris to begin talks toward a treaty to end the war—one of Washington’s junior officers, who like many others was pondering these deep waters, wrote him a letter whose bracing vividness clarified things for him. Colonel Lewis Nicola, speaking on behalf of many in the army, stressed that war itself had “shewn to all, but to military men in particular the weakness of republicks.” Americans had inherited their traditions from Europe; they would accept a monarch. Washington, Nicola suggested politely but boldly, should become king.

  The letter seemed to wake Washington; he replied with eloquence and force: “Sir, With a mixture of great surprise and astonishment, I have read with attention the Sentiments you have submitted to my perusal. Be assured Sir, no occurrence in the course of the War has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the Army as you have expressed, and which I must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity.” Colonel Nicola’s notion, he went on, “seems big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country.” He concluded: “Let me conjure you, then, if you have any regard for your Country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your Mind, & never communicate, as from your self, or anyone else, a sentiment of the like Nature.”

  He understood now that he did not have the luxury to retire to Mount Vernon, at least not yet. In bringing America to the edge of victory, he had gathered a degree of weight, of political capital, that no one else had. It had to be expended. And he now knew toward what end.

  In November, American and English representatives signed a preliminary peace agreement. Over the next several months he was occupied with the details of the disbanding of the Continental army. Still there was no sign of an accord among the leadership of the states and of Congress regarding the way forward for the country. In June, Washington wrote a circular letter “to the army,” but really to the leadership of the state governments. He had spent the entire war enraged at Congress’s mismanagement of finances and the underfunding of the army. There had been a power vacuum in the American government throughout the war; now it threatened to open into a chasm. In the letter, he expressed his happy astonishment that what they had fought for had actually been achieved: that Americans were now “possessed of absolute freedom and Independency.” But he stressed that the structure for maintaining that freedom was lacking. Taking his cues from Madison and Hamilton, he suggested that what was needed was “An indissoluble Union of the States under one Federal Head.” This required that the individual states “suffer Congress” to exercise authority. Without this, “every thing must very rapidly tend to Anarchy and confusion.”

  His circular letter was long and eloquent, and it was widely read. It was big news that the commander of the army advocated the creation of a strong federal government. And Washington ended the letter with what was probably regarded as even bigger news. Having expressed his views on the formation of a government, the general ended: “I bid a last farewell to the cares of Office, and all the imployments of public life.”

  Word
of his intention to retire rather than accept the leadership of the newly independent nation—itself a momentous break from the long tradition of military victors becoming dictators—swept through the nation and beyond. In November, he traveled to New York. There, as the last British troops sailed off, he said farewell to a small group of his officers, who had gathered for a celebratory dinner in an upstairs room at Samuel Fraunces’s tavern. It was a moment when the reality of what they had done, of what he had been through, struck him with unusual force. He had, he told them, “a heart full of love and gratitude.” They believed it, for several of them were struck by the fact that, as their leader poured wine for a toast, his hand was shaking.

  From New York, he traveled south to Annapolis, which was the last of the string of temporary homes the Congress had chosen as it fled the British army. Two days before Christmas, following an evening of dining and dancing, he took part in a formal noontime ceremony with the leaders of the new United States, at which he formally relinquished his command. The room was packed, the wives of the congressional delegates filling the upstairs gallery. He ended his short speech with yet another indication of his weariness, saying, “I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.” Then he mounted his horse. His once vast retinue was now reduced to just two aides, who accompanied him on the forty-mile ride to Mount Vernon. Now, surely, he had done everything he possibly could for America and its cause of liberty. He was going home.

  At the end of a war, Cornplanter knew, came a period of confusion. He and his people had suffered through that time of pain and uncertainty. But it was now October 1784: more than a year since the Americans and the British had signed their peace treaty. He wanted clarity. And he hoped to get it from the man who stood before him here at Fort Stanwix: George Washington’s trusted aide, the Marquis de Lafayette.