General Washington and the French leaders were determined to meet and shape their plans for future operations and finally fixed on the date of September 20 for a meeting in Hartford, Connecticut. In preparation for this crucial encounter, Washington and Alexander Hamilton composed a working paper consisting of three proposals. Since everything depended on the relative strength of the British and French fleets, and no one could say when the ships blockaded in Brest might arrive on this side of the Atlantic, the General hoped for assistance from another quarter—Comte de Guichen, the French admiral in the West Indies. Guichen had been alerted by Ternay that the fate of America would depend on French naval superiority: the efforts of France, he had written, “will turn the scale.” If Guichen were to arrive by early October with enough strength to seize New York harbor, Washington reasoned, then the allied land forces should move on that city, and his paper included an elaborate description of how this operation would be conducted. But if no fleet under Guichen materialized, the allies would send a combined force of about twelve thousand troops south to take Charleston and Savannah.
That was the initial proposal. The second was evidently suggested by Nathanael Greene, whose idea it was for the French fleet to sail to Boston, where it would be safe without the protection of land troops (a move approved by Ternay, who regarded the harbor at Newport as a suicidal choice of anchorage for a fleet outnumbered by the enemy). That done, Rochambeau’s troops would march to the Hudson, link up with the Continental Army, and carry on enough activity in that area to prevent Clinton from releasing any troops to join Cornwallis in the South.
The third scheme called for a winter campaign against the British in Canada. This had been petitioned by some inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants (in what would become Vermont), who offered men and supplies, and the General proposed sending a force of five thousand men—half of them Americans, half French, with Rochambeau to be in overall command and Greene leading the American troops. Washington himself would not accompany the task force since “the general situation of the Country … requires his presence and influence within the states; for in the present crisis there is no saying what may happen and Congress [may] stand in need of support.”
* * *
LEAVING GREENE IN charge of the army while he rode east to meet the French in Hartford, Washington and his staff officers on September 17 crossed the Hudson River at King’s Ferry, where he spent the night at the home of Joshua Hett Smith, about two and a half miles from the ferry, near Haverstraw. Smith was the youngest of fifteen children, of whom the eldest was his brother William, a prominent lawyer and historian who had advised many a governor of the colony of New York and became chief justice of the province in 1780 after refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the revolutionary state. Joshua was also a lawyer, and although his father and oldest brother were known to have loyalist sympathies, he was a member of the New York Provincial Congress, was active in the patriot militia, and had directed the secret service of Benedict Arnold, among other general officers.
By chance, Arnold was at Smith’s dinner table when Washington and his party arrived, and brought the commander in chief up to date on his efforts to safeguard the area from British attack. Then he asked Washington for an opinion: should he consent to see the writer of a letter, one Beverley Robinson, in whose house Arnold had his headquarters? Robinson, who had married the wealthy Susanna Philipse and was one of New York’s richest landowners, was a former friend of Washington with strong loyalist views and had written Arnold from the British sloop of war Vulture, riding at anchor in the Hudson, enclosing a letter to General Israel Putnam, which he hoped Arnold would deliver. Robinson wanted to meet Putnam under a flag of truce on a matter that must be kept secret, and hoped Arnold would grant his request.
Should he do so? asked Arnold, to which the General’s response was an immediate and emphatic no. If Robinson had any private business to transact, Washington advised, he should obtain permission to do so from the civil authorities in New York. Surely Arnold could understand that a meeting between him and Robinson would be viewed with suspicion. This whole business of flags of truce was proving a nuisance, in fact, and revealed how easy it was for unauthorized persons to slip through the lines. Recently, Colonel Elisha Sheldon had reported to Washington that one John Anderson of New York had attempted to enter the lines on a matter “of so private a nature that the public on neither side can be injured by it,” and when Washington asked Sheldon how he came by the letter from Anderson, the colonel replied that it came under a flag of truce. Arnold, it seemed, had recently opened a new avenue of communication to New York, and Anderson was a secret agent he employed.
Washington and his retinue, with the guards who accompanied them, clattered off on forty horses early the following morning, were ferried across the Hudson, and then angled off north by east. Over the wooded hills separating New York from Connecticut they rode, crossed the Housatonic and Naugatuck rivers, trotting through one little community after another—not much more than clearings in the dense forest (including one called Washington, after their leader). Finally, after two days’ hard riding, they reached Hartford on the broad Connecticut River, bounded by rich bottomland between low hills, where they passed an uninterrupted collection of farmhouses and barns set amid trees and meadows.
* * *
IT IS DOUBTFUL if any of the conferees were aware of—or, if they were, gave much thought to—a profound change that had altered the dynamics of warfare at this stage of the eighteenth century. It began with the premise that Britain could no longer assume that it had command of the seas. Beginning in the 1770s, France had been investing heavily in its own navy. An annual naval budget that was around 30 million livres* during the Seven Years’ War was consistently being increased until it would reach the staggering total of 200 million livres a year by 1782. By 1780, France had sixty-six ships of the line,† and those numbers were supplemented by its allies Spain with fifty-eight and Holland with twenty. So although the Royal Navy had more warships than any single rival, its enemies, collectively, outnumbered them. What’s more, the British fleet had to be broken up into a number of squadrons in order to guard the homeland, watch over Gibraltar, patrol the Baltic Sea, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, plus escort convoys in the Atlantic.
Furthermore, even if it still had maritime supremacy, Great Britain would be obliged to cope with the realities of geography and distance if it was to suppress the rebellion of its former colonies. The land war with the Americans had to be supplied and fought three thousand miles from home, demanding that every musket ball, every shoe or shirt or cap required by a British soldier, every one of the hundreds of items needed by an army must be transported across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. Another critical—and all but unsolvable—problem confronting the British was communications. Instructions from Whitehall to General Clinton’s headquarters in Manhattan might take two or three months to arrive, and the reply—even if Clinton responded at once, which was unlikely—could require another month or six weeks. So there was almost no way officials in London could effectively direct the war, much as the king and his ministers might wish to do so.
Finally, to conquer the Americans, the British had to hold on to the territory they had won, but with a limited number of troops they couldn’t possibly turn them into occupation forces and conduct a war at the same time. Yet the moment they withdrew, the rebels moved back in—a pattern that was prevalent in the South, where guerrillas seemed to move about at will.
* * *
AT LAST THE General and his aides greeted the allies from France they had been longing to see. The feeling was mutual, for these French officers were intensely curious to meet the famous leader of the Revolution. They found him to be a man they admired immediately. “Enchanted,” Claude Blanchard summarized their reactions, noting his “easy and noble bearing, extensive and correct views and the art of making himself beloved.…” Comte Mathieu Dumas was impressed by the way “His dignified addr
ess, his simplicity of manners, and mild gravity surpassed our expectation and won every heart.” Baron Ludwig von Closen said, “I could not find strong enough words to describe” Washington’s remarks to the group. Another count, the Swede Axel Fersen, who was rumored by gossips at the French court to be a favorite of the queen and who had sailed to America in March as an aide to Rochambeau, saw Washington in a slightly different light: “His face is handsome and majestic but at the same time kind and gentle, corresponding completely with his moral qualities. He looks like a hero; he is very cold and says little but he is frank and polite. There is a sadness in his countenance, which does not misbecome him and indeed renders his face more interesting.” Louis-Alexandre Berthier, already marked by his superiors as a young man with a promising military future, said of the General, “The nobility of his bearing and his countenance, which bore the stamp of all his virtues, inspired everyone with the devotion and respect due his character, increasing, if possible, the high opinion we already held of his exceptional merit.”
As for Rochambeau, he had no illusions about the American commander in chief. His orders specified that he was “in all cases to be under the orders of General Washington,” but a secret instruction added that he was to keep the French troops together, serving under their own officers, and not disperse them. He would do his utmost to remain on good terms with the American leader and to regard him as his superior, and he would obey orders scrupulously and serve as a cooperative subordinate, but he had doubts about the General’s judgment and very real concerns about the quality and quantity of Washington’s army.
The man Washington met—Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau—was fifty-five years old and, after training initially for the church, had embarked on a military career when his older brothers died, leaving him the only son. By now he had spent thirty-seven years in the army, principally in central Europe, where he had served as inspector of cavalry and maréchal de camp. He was stocky, considerably shorter than Washington (who was between six feet and six feet three inches), and had a battle scar over the left temple of his ruddy face and a bad limp from another serious wound. As Washington was to discover, this was a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact soldier whose concerns and conversation dealt almost exclusively with military matters—troop movements and battle plans. Rochambeau’s assignment in America was completely unexpected. Suffering from inflammatory rheumatism, he had made plans to retire and in fact the horses and carriage were at his house in Paris ready to carry the family to his château in Vendôme when a messenger from the king showed up unexpectedly, ordering him to Versailles. There he learned that he was to lead an expeditionary force to America.
Of Washington’s three proposals for combined operations, Rochambeau favored only the first—the capture of New York—but made it clear ever so tactfully that his orders required him to keep the king’s fleet and troops together. The Frenchman clearly considered campaigning at an end for the year and had already turned his attention to 1781. As for the American, he had approached this meeting with one all-important consideration in mind. In the words of a position paper drawn up strictly for his aides, “… it should appear that we are ready and in condition to act.… It will therefore be good policy to keep out of sight the disappointments we met with in the number of men &c. and to hold up the idea that we should have been prepared to cooperate.… It will be necessary however that we should profess our wants and weaknesses very fully.…”
Hewing to this line, Washington mentioned that he hoped to have fifteen thousand troops by the spring of 1781 and—since Rochambeau told him that Louis XVI had promised to send a “second division”—urged the French to “complete” their army to that number. At the end of the conference Rochambeau said he would send his son to Versailles, slipping him through the naval blockade so that he could request reinforcements and hard money, to stimulate the American economy.
As the meeting broke up, Washington was disappointed with the lack of concrete achievement. Socially it had been a success; strategically, no. Writing to James Duane in Congress, he characterized the conference aptly: “We could only combine possible plans on the supposition of possible events and engage mutually to do everything in our powers against the next campaign.”
Riding back to the Hudson and his camp, he must have wondered whether that next campaign would bring new hope and purpose to the army. Surely his men—and the country—had endured all the misery and disappointment they could absorb. He was certain that more hunger and deprivation lay ahead, but if no major disaster came their way, the army might somehow hold together and survive.
3
SO HELLISH A PLOT
A story made the rounds about Washington and Brigadier General “Mad Anthony” Wayne. It seems the two were discussing how some of the British-held positions on the Hudson River might be taken, and Washington asked Wayne if he thought he could storm Stony Point, a precipitous, rocky bluff that juts into the Hudson. The reply came at once: “I’ll storm hell, sir, if you’ll make the plans!” Washington looked at him silently for a moment or two and then, with a little smile, said, “Better try Stony Point first, General.”
In September of 1777, at Paoli, Pennsylvania, Wayne’s division had been surprised in a skillful night attack by the British and suffered 150 casualties. The redcoats, led by Major General Charles Grey, were ordered not to load their weapons since gunfire would reveal their position, but to rely on the bayonet, with the result that their commander was known thereafter as “No-Flint” Grey. A court-martial acquitted Wayne of charges that he had failed to heed “timely notice” of the attack, and his opportunity for revenge came three years later at Stony Point, when he did indeed storm that position. On July 15 his light infantry brigade landed under cover of darkness and with fixed bayonets, but with no ammunition in their muskets, assaulted the position, and took over when the defenders threw down their arms and cried quarter. As a British officer wrote, “The rebels had made the attack with a bravery they never before exhibited.…” What he had seen was the fruit of lessons taught the Americans by the disciplinarian Baron Steuben, formerly of Frederick the Great’s Prussian army—the proper use of the bayonet.
Several weeks after Wayne’s victory, Washington was standing on a height overlooking Stony Point, watching the last detachment of his troops cross the Hudson at King’s Ferry, when Benedict Arnold rode up and asked the General if he had “thought of anything for him.” It was a propitious moment for the commander in chief, who had admired Arnold’s courage and bold leadership for years and rather regretted having had to reprimand him in general orders. Washington badly needed officers like Arnold, who was probably his best fighting general, and he was pleased to tell him now that he was to have a “post of honor” with the main army.
Arnold’s reaction astonished the General. “His countenance changed and he appeared to be quite fallen,” Washington recalled, “and, instead of thanking me or expressing any pleasure at the appointment, never opened his mouth.” A long, uncomfortable silence followed; then, according to the General, “[I told] him to go to my quarters and get something to refresh himself, and I would meet him there soon.” It was a while before Washington returned, and when he arrived one of his aides, Tench Tilghman, took him aside and said that Arnold was walking with a pronounced limp, complaining that his leg, badly wounded at Saratoga, would not allow him to play an active part in a campaign. He said he even had trouble riding a horse.
When the commander in chief spoke with him later, “His behavior struck me as strange and unaccountable,” almost as if the man had lost his nerve and was fearful of going into action. It was a curious business, since Arnold was the captor, with Ethan Allen, of Fort Ticonderoga in the earliest days of the war, leader of the heroic winter expedition against Quebec, commander of a fleet of makeshift vessels that had prevented the British from taking Fort Ticonderoga in 1776, and the officer many army men credited with the great victory at Saratoga. For this soldier, who was known fo
r his naked ambition and courage and daring in battle, to admit that he couldn’t handle an important command was impossible to understand. Yet what he wanted, Arnold told Tilghman, was the post at West Point. Evidently, Washington believed he would change his mind, for when he announced the order of battle on August 1, Major General Benedict Arnold was to command the left wing. (When the news reached Arnold’s wife, Peggy, at a dinner party in Philadelphia she went into hysterics, which was put down to fear that her husband might be killed or wounded on active duty.) The matter had been resolved almost immediately, when Washington’s spies informed him that General Clinton had no intention of waging an active campaign outside New York, after which the commander in chief gave Arnold command of the garrison at West Point.
More than a month later Washington sent a note to Arnold, informing him that he would be passing through Peekskill on Sunday evening, September 17, on his way to Hartford to meet the French, and wanted a guard of a captain and fifty men, plus forage for about forty horses. In closing, he said, “You will keep this to yourself, as I want to make my journey a secret.”
The day that message was in his hands, Arnold encoded the secret information for the British, alerting them that the American commander in chief would cross the Hudson on a specific day and at a particular place, the idea being that armed vessels might capture him in midstream. At the same time he alerted the British, Arnold responded to the General, informing him that the guard and the forage would be supplied.
Victory at Yorktown Page 5
