Washington was mortified to think that when the French finally did arrive, they would immediately see the desperate condition of the Continental Army and the helplessness of America, and sail away. Were they to arrive today, he warned the governors of the states, and “find that we have but a handful of men in the field,” they would surely doubt that “we had any serious intentions to prosecute measures with vigor.” In February, New York was the only state that had met its quota, and the deficiency of men in the ranks was reckoned at 14,436. By July 4, the fourth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the General’s best estimate of new recruits who had come into camp was, at most, thirty men. He had no alternative but to appeal repeatedly to the states: “The exigency is so pressing that we ought to multiply our efforts to give new activity and dispatch to our measures,” he wrote, “levying and forwarding the men, providing the supplies of every sort required.… So much is at stake, so much to be hoped, so much to be lost, that we shall be unexcusable if we do not employ all our zeal and all our exertion.”
The plight of the army was so bad that Lieutenant Colonel Ebenezer Huntington, who was clothed in rags and had not been paid for more than six months, wrote in a rage to his brother in Connecticut, hoping to shame his relatives into sending aid.
The rascally stupidity which now prevails in the country at large is beyond all descriptions.… Why don’t you reinforce your army, feed them, clothe and pay them?… [Do] not suffer yourselves to be duped into the thought that the French will relieve you and fight your battles … they will not serve week after week without meat, without clothing, and paid in filthy rags.
I despise my countrymen. I wish I could say I was not born in America. I once gloried in it, but am now ashamed of it … and all this for my cowardly countrymen who flinch at the very time when their exertions are wanted and hold their purse strings as though they would damn the world rather than part with a dollar to their Army.
* * *
FIVE YEARS OF unbelievably harsh circumstances had taught George Washington he must be patient, must never stop trying, and the wonder of it all was his capacity for resilience—his ability to bounce back again and again from shattered hopes and bitter disappointment, too many defeats, too few victories. Several disgruntled officers and certain New England members of Congress saw in that record confirmation that the General lacked ability, and they made every effort to discredit him and have him replaced. Generals Horatio Gates and Charles Lee—both former British officers who had joined the rebels—were continually scheming to undercut the commander in chief and (so each one hoped) succeed him. On top of these ugly rivalries, the Congress seemed incapable of providing Washington’s men with even the barest necessities. As the General put it, “… the history of the war is a history of false hopes and temporary expedients.”
Until recently Congress had borne the financial burden of the conflict, doing so by printing paper money that was not backed by hard currency. Finally, the reckoning had come, the Continental money was now utterly worthless,* and Congress decided to make the states responsible for raising funds, since they had the power to tax the citizens and Congress did not. The idea was that each state would pay its own line, as its regular forces were called, and provide soldiers with the necessities. Seeing at once where this would lead, Washington protested, in words that foreshadowed later arguments for a constitution of the United States.
Unless the states were willing to let their representatives in Congress speak and act for them, he said, and unless Congress was given absolute power to wage the war, “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.”
At no time in the long history of the war, Washington warned, has dissatisfaction been “so general and so alarming.” The only glue that held the army together was the soldiers’ extraordinary patriotism, but now some officers were resigning while the men in the ranks—who had no such option—“murmur, brood over their discontent, and have lately shown a disposition to enter into seditious combinations.” There were limits to men’s endurance, he told Congress, and observed that if the Connecticut regiments had marched off, as they had in mind to do, there would have been no stopping the rest of the army from following.
To these worries were added personal frustrations. His wife, Martha, had bravely joined him in camp recently, but their landlady continued to occupy two of the four downstairs rooms while the second floor was still unfinished for lack of boards. The Washingtons had no kitchen of their own, their servants were all suffering from bad colds, and, worst of all, the General’s favorite horse was laid up, another was still gaunt from the previous winter, his mare was in foal, and his reaction to a substitute animal sent him by a Virginia neighbor was to accept it “as men take their wives, for better or worse, and if he should prove a jade and go limping on, I must do as they are obliged to do: submit to the bargain.”
Further thwarting the General was the knowledge that if his own army were not so weak, the British commander in chief, General Sir Henry Clinton, would never have dared sail from New York with an expeditionary force consisting of most of the British fleet under Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot, plus as many as 8,000 troops, to besiege Charleston, South Carolina. Clinton had left behind some 11,000 soldiers, two-thirds of them Hessians and the others Tories, and while it was tempting to think they were vulnerable to attack, Washington knew he could accomplish nothing without a French fleet and many more soldiers to bolster his own feeble ranks in New Jersey and the Hudson Valley—2,800 of whose three-year enlistments would be up at the end of May.
* * *
ONCE FRANCE HAD decided to ally itself actively with the United States, the entire complexion of America’s war began to change, and for no one was this more significant than George Washington. Until now, everyone fighting on the rebel side had been directly or indirectly under his command, and his only involvement with sea power was to wish that a European enemy of Britain would bring it to his aid.
The French alliance called for a fresh approach to strategy and tactics. The Continental Army would be fighting alongside troops who neither spoke their language nor were directly subject to Washington’s orders. And who could say how the introduction of France’s warships would affect the existing equation? While England’s sea power was superior to that of France, the former country also had to reckon with Spain, whose navy when combined with that of the French could tip the scales.
Since protection of the homeland was of paramount importance to the English, they decided to keep their main fleet in European waters unless an enemy squadron was detached to the West Indies or America, but only after assuring themselves that the ships were definitely bound for North America could they dispatch a detachment in pursuit. That meant, of course, that the French, sailing first, were more likely to have the advantage and beat the English across the Atlantic. But there were inherent uncertainties, one being control of the waters of the West Indies, where French and British each had valuable properties. This was the real center of the Atlantic trade, where the naval forces of England, France, and other European powers were on the prowl and where the best-laid plans could be undone in the blink of an eye.
European diplomacy in the eighteenth century was a mirror image of Niccolò Machiavelli’s theory of practical statecraft. The end justified the means, and the end, as often as not, was the aggrandizement of the various monarchs and nobles. Not surprisingly, Europe’s capitals swarmed with spies, who were a continuing problem for the more naive American envoys. Beginning in 1763, the goal of France’s foreign policy was revenge—revenge for the humiliation it had suffered at the hands of England during the Seven Years’ War. Crushed militarily and stripped of its colonies by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France lost its position as the first nation of Europe and was reduced to the unprecedented position of a second-rate power.
Since the French king
Louis XV and his foreign policy had been largely in the hands of his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, from 1745 until her death in 1764, she deserved much of the blame for bringing on the Seven Years’ War, so disastrous for France. One of her favorites was Duc Étienne François de Choiseul, who managed the foreign affairs portfolio through the Seven Years’ War and obtained the best terms possible (meager as they were) at the peace table. It was Choiseul who perceived in Britain’s disgruntled colonies a likely tool for humbling France’s enemy across the Channel. In 1768 the monarch’s amours again played a hand in the nation’s diplomacy. That year the king took another mistress—one Marie Jeanne Bécu, who had until then performed the same services for Chevalier Jean du Barry while presiding over his gambling house. (It was a complicated life Madame du Barry led. She caught the eye of Louis XV and became his paramour while married to her former lover’s brother, Comte Guillaume du Barry. In 1770 she dismissed Choiseul, and she retired from the court when the king died in 1774.)*
Fortunately for the American colonies, Choiseul’s successor, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, saw their usefulness to France in precisely the same light as the duke. A clever, subtle statesman with experience in a number of the smaller European courts, Vergennes as early as the 1750s had observed presciently that if France lost Canada, “England will soon repent of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. They stand no longer in need of her protection. She will call on them to contribute towards supporting the burdens they have helped to bring on her, and they will answer by striking off all dependence.” Vergennes was also a guileful man, who once wrote to the foreign office from his post in Turkey, “… we should hide from the Turks the real end toward which we are driving them.… let us appear to be occupied only with what concerns them, without reference to ourselves.…” All of which suggests how he viewed relations with the Americans. He was wise enough, however, to be content to humble England, while avoiding the impression that “we are seeking her destruction. She is necessary to the balance of power in Europe, wherein she occupies a considerable place.… We shall be feared less if we content ourselves with cutting off our enemy’s arms than if we insist on running him through the heart.”
While Vergennes’s foreign policy differed little from that of Choiseul, at first he failed to recognize the effect Britain’s infamous Coercive Acts were having on the Americans in 1774, and this was brought to his attention by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who had risen from apprenticeship to his father, a watchmaker, to become a favorite at the French court. A man of many talents, he wrote the comedies Le Barbier de Seville and Le Mariage de Figaro, which later inspired operas by Rossini and Mozart. In 1775 Beaumarchais happened to be in England on a clandestine mission for Vergennes, and there he became acquainted with Arthur Lee, who represented Massachusetts as its agent in London. From Lee he heard how desperate the colonies’ situation was, and the two discussed the possibility that France might assist the rebels with arms and other necessities of war.
On the heels of these talks Beaumarchais returned to Versailles, where he spoke with Vergennes and the slow-witted king, who was not yet twenty years old, urging them to consider covert shipments of weapons to the Americans. His notion, as expressed by Spain’s cynical foreign minister, who had been approached by Vergennes to join France in providing secret assistance, was that the English and Americans should “exhaust themselves reciprocally,” enabling France and Spain to pick up the pieces. A resulting memorandum read by Vergennes to the king and his council set forth the reasons for supplying the colonial rebels with arms disguised as legal trade goods. First, it would diminish the power of England and increase that of France. Second, it would cause irreparable loss to English trade, while stimulating French commerce. Third, it would probably lead to the recovery of some former French possessions, such as the fisheries off Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “We do not speak of Canada,” the memoir concluded, indicating that any continental conquest would be up to the Americans, while the French would take over the prized British islands in the West Indies.
Vergennes argued further that the colonies—once they declared their independence—would undoubtedly form a republican government, which, by its very nature, would be weak and incapable of threatening European possessions in North America. (No one seems to have raised a question about the ethics of sponsoring a revolution. More astonishing, Vergennes and his master, Louis XVI, appear to have made no connection between a successful revolution against George III of England and the possibility that restive folk in another country might be encouraged to foment a revolution against their own ruler—especially in a land like France, whose shaky financial condition already contained the seeds that made future upheaval all but inevitable.)
As early as May 12, 1776, it was agreed that France would pursue a policy of secret assistance to the Americans, whereupon Louis XVI directed that 1 million livres’ worth of munitions be delivered to the rebels from the royal arsenals. This was to be handled by a fictitious trading enterprise created by Beaumarchais, called Hortalez et Cie. Eventually, Charles III of Spain contributed an equal amount of money, as did a group of French businessmen, and this company—managed by none other than Beaumarchais—was the channel through which shipments of arms from French arsenals were sent to such entrepôts as Haiti and Martinique, where they were received by American agents and reshipped to the colonies.
For its part, Congress named five of its members to the Secret Committee on Correspondence, and that group began corresponding with Arthur Lee in London and Charles Dumas, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s who lived in The Hague, in an effort to ascertain the potential support for America in Europe. After the signing of the Declaration of Independence the Continental Congress dispatched an official mission to France, composed of Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee, and Silas Deane. When these three commissioners arrived in Paris, they notified Vergennes that they were “fully empowered by the Congress of the United States of America to propose and negotiate a treaty of commerce between France and the United States.” But such an agreement was a long time coming.
* * *
WHEN FRANKLIN STEPPED onto the scene in Paris, he was by all odds the best-known American in the world and one of the most politically knowledgeable. He had served on the most important committees in Congress and had unrivaled diplomatic skills as a result of dealing with British statesmen, plus a shrewd knowledge of human nature. The Paris into which he came as a conspicuous newcomer was seething with intrigue. The British ambassador, Viscount Stormont, was alert to every move the French made and had a host of spies (including one who was Arthur Lee’s secretary) working for him, reporting what Franklin was doing, who his correspondents in England were, and even stealing some of his letters.
A thoughtful, witty, homespun philosopher, Franklin was a wise old owl who sensed immediately what the French thought of him and was more than willing to play the part. He was, after all, no backwoods bumpkin but an urbane gentleman who had lived among and corresponded with some of the world’s leading scientists and scholars, politicians, clergymen, and merchants. The French who sought the primitive virtues extolled by Rousseau believed they were personified in Franklin, and he did nothing to disappoint them. He had debarked in Brittany wearing a fur cap that had warmed him on the November crossing of the Atlantic, and he kept it on, even in Paris. Writing to a friend, he told him, “Figure me in your mind as jolly as formerly, and as strong and hearty, only a few years older; very plainly dressed, wearing my thin grey straight hair that peeps out under my only coiffure, a fine fur cap, which comes down to my forehead almost to my spectacles. Think how this must appear among the powdered heads of Paris.” He wore an old brown coat, carried a stick instead of a sword, seemed to relish his outmoded clothes, and if this jibed with the image Parisians had of an American sage, leader of a natural state against a corrupt, sophisticated empire, so be it.
He was the toast of France, but since it was impossi
ble for every French man or woman to see him, they must have his likeness, an engraving of him over the mantelpiece, his image in the lid of a snuffbox or set in a ring, plus busts, prints, copies—so many of them, he wrote his daughter, that they “have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.…”
Inevitably, it was to Franklin that so many French and other European officers came, hoping to be recommended to the American army. By the first of March in 1777 he had moved to Passy, which he described as “a neat village on a high ground, half a mile from Paris, with a large garden to walk in,” and here he was all but overwhelmed by visitors and correspondents—most of them men whose imaginations had been fired by the idealism behind the rebellion. As one nobleman wrote of America’s rebels, “Their cause was our cause. We were proud of their victories, we wept for their defeats.” And of course many of these young Europeans saw opportunities for glory and advancement in their chosen career as soldiers. Two men in particular who came to America with Franklin’s blessing proved invaluable to George Washington. One was the nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, eager to win fame by fighting against England; the other was the man who called himself Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. The latter had served on the Prussian general staff as an aide to Frederick the Great, but when he was introduced to Franklin he was an unemployed captain, and Franklin—to persuade Congress to accept another foreigner—raised his rank substantially, noting that he was “lately a lieutenant general in the king of Prussia’s service.…” Captain or lieutenant general, the baron brought new life to Washington’s army, making it over in a matter of weeks, drilling the men into soldiers, instilling real discipline in their ranks.
Victory at Yorktown Page 2
