ALSO BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK
The Passionate Sailor
Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602–1890
Abram’s Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island
Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor’s Odyssey
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery; The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1832–1842
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Bighorn
Why Read Moby-Dick?
Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution
Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution
VIKING
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Copyright © 2018 by Nathaniel Philbrick
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Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Philbrick, Nathaniel, author.
Title: In the hurricane's eye : the genius of George Washington and the victory at Yorktown / Nathaniel Philbrick.
Description: New York, New York : Viking, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029041| ISBN 9780525426769 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698153226 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Yorktown (Va.)--History--Siege, 1781. | Washington, George, 1732-1799--Military leadership. | United States--History--Revolution, 1775-1783--Participation, French. | Southern States--History--Revolution, 1775-1783.
Classification: LCC E241.Y6 P55 2018 | DDC 973.3/37--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029041
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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TO MELISSA
CONTENTS
ALSO BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PREFACE ◆ THE LAND AND THE SEA
PART I
“AGAINST THE WIND”
CHAPTER 1 ◆ The Building Storm
CHAPTER 2 ◆ “An Enemy in the Heart of the Country”
CHAPTER 3 ◆ “Delays and Accidents of the Sea”
CHAPTER 4 ◆ Bayonets and Zeal
CHAPTER 5 ◆ The End of the Tether
PART II
“THE OCEAN OF HISTORY”
CHAPTER 6 ◆ “A Ray of Light”
CHAPTER 7 ◆ “The Spur of Speed”
CHAPTER 8 ◆ “Ligne de Vitesse”
CHAPTER 9 ◆ Yorktown
CHAPTER 10 ◆ “The North River Captain”
EPILOGUE ◆ Aftermath
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
The Land and the Sea
For five years, two armies had clashed along the edge of a vast continent. One side, the Rebels, had the advantage of the land. Even when they lost a battle, which happened more often than not, they could retire into the countryside and wait for the next chance to attack.
The other side, the Empire, had the advantage of the sea. With its fleet of powerful warships (just one of which mounted more cannons than the entire Rebel army possessed in the early years of the war), it could attack the Rebels’ seaside cities at will.
But no matter how many coastal towns the Empire might take, it did not have enough soldiers to occupy all of the Rebels’ territory. And without a significant navy of their own, the Rebels could never inflict the blow that would win them their independence. The war had devolved into a stalemate, with the Empire hoping the Rebels’ rickety government would soon collapse, and with the Rebels hoping for the miraculous intervention of a powerful ally.
Two years before, one of the Empire’s perennial enemies, the Rival Nation, had joined the war on the Rebels’ behalf. Almost immediately the Rival had sent out its own fleet of warships. But then the sea had intervened.
* * *
• • •
WHEN FRANCE ENTERED the American Revolutionary War in the spring of 1778, George Washington dared to hope his new ally had put victory within reach. Finally, the British navy’s hold on the Atlantic Seaboard was about to be broken. If the French succeeded in establishing what Washington called “naval superiority,” the enemy’s army would be left open to attack from not only the land but also the sea. But after two and a half years of trying, the French had been unable to contain the British navy.
First, an inexplicably protracted Atlantic crossing prevented French admiral Comte d’Estaing from trapping the enemy’s fleet in Philadelphia. Shortly after that, d’Estaing turned his attention to British-occupied New York, only to call off the attack for fear his ships would run aground at the bar across the harbor mouth. A few weeks after that, a storm off the coast of southern New England prevented d’Estaing from engaging the British in a naval battle that promised to be a glorious victory for France. Since then, a botched amphibious assault at Savannah, Georgia, had marked the only other significant action on the part of the French navy, a portion of which now lay frustratingly dormant at Newport at the southern end of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. By the fall of 1780, amid the aftershocks of devastating defeats at Charleston and Camden in South Carolina and Benedict Arnold’s treasonous attempt to surrender the fortress at West Point to the enemy, Washington had come to wonder whether the ships of his salvation would ever appear.
For the last two years he’d been locked in an unproductive standoff with Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in North America, in and around New York City. What fighting had occurred had been, for the most part, in the south, where British general Charles Cornwallis sought to build upon his recent victories by pushing into North Carolina. Between the northern and southern theaters of the war lay the inland sea of the Chesapeake, which had enjoyed a period of relative quiet since the early days of the conflict.
All that changed in December 1780, when Clinton sent his newest brigadier general, the traitor Benedict Arnold, to Virginia. Having already dispatched the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene to do battle with Cornwallis in the Carolinas, Washington sent the young French nobleman whom he regarded as a surrogate son, the Marquis de Lafayette, in pursuit of Arnold.
Thus began the movement of troops that resulted nine months later in Cornwallis’s entrapment at the shoreside hamlet of Yorktown, when a large fleet of French warships arrived from the Caribbean. As Washington had long since learned, coordinating hi
s army’s movements with those of a fleet of sail-powered men-of-war based two thousand miles away was virtually impossible. But in the late summer of 1781, the impossible happened.
And then, just a few days later, a fleet of British warships appeared.
* * *
• • •
THE BATTLE OF THE CHESAPEAKE has been called the most important naval engagement in the history of the world. Fought outside the entrance of the bay between French admiral Comte de Grasse’s twenty-four ships of the line and a slightly smaller British fleet commanded by Rear Admiral Thomas Graves, the battle inflicted severe enough damage on the Empire’s ships that Graves returned to New York for repairs. By preventing the rescue of seven thousand British and German soldiers under the command of General Cornwallis, de Grasse’s victory on September 5, 1781, made Washington’s subsequent triumph at Yorktown a virtual fait accompli. Peace would not be officially declared for another two years, but that does not change the fact that a naval battle fought between the French and the British was largely responsible for the independence of the United States.
Despite its undeniable significance, the Battle of the Chesapeake plays only a minor part in most popular accounts of the war, largely because no Americans participated in it. If the sea figures at all in the story of the Revolutionary War, the focus tends to be on the heroics of John Paul Jones off England’s Flamborough Head, even though that two-ship engagement had little impact on the overall direction of the conflict. Instead of concentrating on the sea, the traditional narrative of Yorktown focuses on the allied army’s long overland journey south, with a special emphasis on the collaborative relationship between Washington and his French counterpart the Comte de Rochambeau. In this view, the encounter between the French and British fleets was a mere prelude to the main event. In the account that follows, I hope to put the sea where it properly belongs: at the center of the story.
As Washington understood with a perspicacity that none of his military peers could match, only the intervention of the French navy could achieve the victory the times required. Six months before the Battle of the Chesapeake, during the winter of 1781, he had urged the French to send a large fleet of warships to the Chesapeake in an attempt to trap Benedict Arnold in Portsmouth, Virginia. What was, in effect, a dress rehearsal for the Yorktown campaign is essential to understanding the evolving, complex, and sometimes acrimonious relationship between Washington and Rochambeau. As we will see, the two leaders were not the selfless military partners of American legend; each had his own jealously guarded agenda, and it was only after Washington reluctantly—and angrily—acquiesced to French demands that they began to work in concert.
Ultimately, the course of the Revolutionary War came down to America’s proximity to the sea—a place of storms and headwinds that no one could control. Instead of an inevitable march to victory, Yorktown was the result of a hurried rush of seemingly random events—from a hurricane in the Caribbean, to a bloody battle amid the woods near North Carolina’s Guilford Courthouse, to the loan of 500,000 Spanish pesos from the citizens of Havana, Cuba—all of which had to occur before Cornwallis arrived at Yorktown and de Grasse sailed into the Chesapeake. That the pieces finally fell into place in September and October 1781 never ceased to amaze Washington. “I am sure,” he wrote the following spring, “that there never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs than those of the United States.”
The victory at Yorktown was improbable at best, but it was also the result of a strategy Washington had been pursuing since the beginning of the French alliance. This is the story of how Washington’s unrelenting quest for naval superiority made possible the triumph at Yorktown. It is also the story of how, in a supreme act of poetic justice, the final engagement of the war brought him back to the home he had not seen in six years. For it was here, on a river in Virginia, that he first began to learn about the wonder, power, and ultimate indifference of the sea.
PART I
“AGAINST THE WIND”
In any operations, and under all circumstances, a decisive naval superiority is to be considered as a fundamental principle, and the basis upon which every hope of success must ultimately depend.
—GEORGE WASHINGTON
to Comte de Rochambeau, July 15, 1780
The sea is not like the land. It deceives us sometimes and we have not yet found out a method of sailing against the wind.
—COMTE DE GRASSE
to George Washington, October 16, 1781
CHAPTER 1
The Building Storm
ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1779, the newly appointed French minister to the United States, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, arrived on the banks of the Hudson River at Fishkill, New York. He and his entourage were on their way to the American fortress at West Point, where they were to meet with His Excellency George Washington. Much to Luzerne’s surprise, the general himself arrived in the small vessel that was to take them the twenty-five miles down the river. Even more surprising, Washington was the one steering the boat.
They soon departed, and as they sailed south with the tide, the sky darkened and the wind began to shriek out of the surrounding mountains. Even though the vessel heeled ominously in the gusts, Washington refused to surrender the helm to a more experienced mariner. “The general held the tiller,” the secretary to the French delegation recorded, “and during a little squall which required skill and practice, proved to us that this work was no less known to him than are other bits of useful knowledge.” George Washington, a commander in chief who otherwise seemed rooted to his horse, was also a sailor.
* * *
• • •
HE WAS BORN IN TIDEWATER VIRGINIA, a flat, water-laced land between the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west and the Chesapeake Bay to the east. In the Tidewater, clear inland rivers blended with the turbid salt of the ocean as it ebbed and flowed along the marshy edges of the Chesapeake. On the Rappahannock River where Washington grew up (just across from the town of Fredericksburg), the tide’s three-foot rise and fall was a daily reminder that even though he was more than fifty miles from the Chesapeake, he was connected to a distant and unseen sea.
When he was eleven years old, his father died, leaving his mother, who had been his father’s second wife, with five young children to raise. Making their lot all the harder was his father’s decision to leave his most valuable properties, on the Potomac River to the north, to his sons from his first marriage, Lawrence and Augustine. With money tight, the young Washington was unable to attend the school in England to which his older half brothers had been sent. Life in the fairly modest clapboard house on the Rappahannock, painted red to look like brick, offered few opportunities for an ambitious boy looking to make his mark on the world. And then in 1746, when Washington was fourteen years old, his elder half brother offered him a way out.
Lawrence Washington was twenty-eight years old and a veteran of the Siege of Cartagena, an unsuccessful attempt by the British to take the Spanish port on the coast of what is today Colombia. Although the siege had been a disappointment for the British, Lawrence had received so “many distinguished marks of patronage and favor” from Vice Admiral Edward Vernon that he’d chosen to name the house he’d inherited from his father Mount Vernon in the admiral’s honor.
Lawrence and his stepmother, Mary Ball Washington, had differing ideas as to where George’s future lay. Mary insisted that her firstborn’s place belonged with her on the Rappahannock, on what came to be known as Ferry Farm. Lawrence, on the other hand, determined that, like his idol Admiral Vernon, his brother was destined for the sea. A British naval vessel had arrived in the Chesapeake, and from Lawrence’s perspective, a midshipman’s appointment offered his younger brother not only the prospect of a promising and honorable career but the chance to escape the possessive clutches of his widowed mother.
What the fourteen-year-old Washington thought about all this is
difficult to determine. Lawrence’s father-in-law and neighbor William Fairfax, who delivered letters addressed to both George and his mother regarding Lawrence’s proposal, reported that the boy “says he will be steady and thankfully follow your advice.” This hardly sounds like an enthusiastic response on George’s part to the prospect of a naval career. And yet, remaining with his willful and self-centered mother (Washington’s cousin later confessed “he was ten times more afraid of Mary than he was of his own parents”) also had its drawbacks.
After receiving Lawrence’s offer, Mary allowed her son’s plans to go to sea to reach the point that his “baggage [was] prepared for embarkation.” In a scene that remained indelibly seared into the young Washington’s memory, his mother waited until the last possible moment before intervening. “His mother interposed with her entreaties and tears so irresistibly,” Washington’s aide David Humphreys later recounted in an unfinished biography, “as to cause the project to be laid aside. Otherwise,” Humphreys surmised, “instead of having led the armies of America to victory, it is not improbable he would have participated as an Admiral of distinction in the naval triumphs of Britain.”
Rather than to the east, on the sea, Washington’s future lay to the west. Within a few years’ time, he’d begun a career as a surveyor. When he was sixteen, he set out into the frontier of the Blue Ridge, and with the support of Lawrence’s in-laws, the powerful Fairfax family, he began to purchase tracts of land, accumulating close to two thousand acres by the time he had turned eighteen. Having negotiated the competing demands of his mother and half brother, he’d forged an identity that was not only congenial to his talents (by then he was over six feet tall, physically strong, and blessed with remarkable endurance), it was his and his alone.
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