In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Washington worked tirelessly to ensure that the magnitude of the crisis was properly appreciated by both Congress and the states. General Henry Knox was immediately sent on a tour of New England to inform the region’s leaders of “the alarming crisis to which our affairs have arrived by a too long neglect of measures essential to the existence of an army.” As early as November, Washington had written to John Sullivan, a major general from New Hampshire who was now serving in the Continental Congress, about increasing the efficiency of the legislative body by “committing more of the executive business to small boards or responsible characters than is practiced at present.” By February, with the example of the Pennsylvania mutiny before it, Congress began to lose its fear of investing too much executive power in any single individual and placed superintendents at the heads of the departments of war, marine, treasury, and foreign affairs. Instead of wasting time in ceaseless debate, Congress now had the potential to get something done.

  As part of this last-ditch campaign to deal pragmatically rather than dogmatically with the momentous challenges facing the nation, one of Washington’s former aides, Colonel John Laurens, was sent to France to provide, in Washington’s words, “a military view” of the current state of affairs. Reinforcing the message already delivered by Rochambeau’s son in December, Laurens was to emphasize the desperate need for, in Washington’s words, “effectual aid, particularly in money and in a naval superiority.”

  And then on January 21, just as it seemed the crisis created by the Pennsylvania mutiny had passed, Washington received word of a second mutiny, this time of the New Jersey Line. As Washington had feared, the excessively generous terms state officials had granted the earlier mutineers had emboldened another group of soldiers to follow suit. Although he could hardly blame these starving, unpaid soldiers for wanting some kind of respite from their sufferings, he knew he had to put down this second mutiny with a brutal show of force. Otherwise his entire army might desert. To put an end to this “very pernicious influence on the whole army,” all negotiations involving civil officials must cease.

  On January 25, with close to two feet of snow on the ground, he sent orders to Quartermaster Timothy Pickering for a “sleigh, pair of horses and driver.” Two days later Washington and a detachment of Continental soldiers under the command of General Robert Howe were in Ringwood, New Jersey, close behind the mutineers, who had left their winter quarters and were on the way to Trenton. After giving Howe detailed instructions on how to subdue the rebels, Washington remained in Ringwood while Howe and his soldiers set out at midnight for the mutineers’ encampment.

  By dawn, Howe’s soldiers had surrounded the huts of the mutineers, who were ordered out into the snow. Three of the ringleaders, Howe announced, would be “selected as victims for condign punishment.” After being tried on the spot, they were sentenced to be immediately executed by a firing squad composed of “the most guilty mutineers.” “This was a most painful task,” a surgeon from Plymouth, Massachusetts, named James Thacher remembered; “being themselves guilty, they were greatly distressed with the duty imposed on them, and when ordered to load, some of them shed tears. The wretched victims, overwhelmed by the terrors of death, had neither time nor power to implore the mercy and forgiveness of their God, and such was their agonizing condition, that no heart could refrain from emotions of sympathy and compassion.” After two of the men had been shot to death, Howe announced that the third was to be pardoned. “This tragical scene,” Thacher wrote, “produced a dreadful shock, and a salutary effect on the minds of the guilty soldiers. Never were men more completely humbled and penitent; tears of sorrow, and of joy, rushed from their eyes, and each one appeared to congratulate himself that his forfeited life had been spared.”

  Later that day Washington informed the commissioners selected to “redress the grievances of the New Jersey Line” that their services were no longer required. “Unconditional submission,” he wrote, “has been effected this morning; and we have reason to believe the mutinous disposition of the troops is now completely subdued and succeeded by a genuine penitence.”

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  ON JANUARY 20, three French warships sailed out of Newport harbor. When British admiral Thomas Graves learned of the movement, he immediately assumed the enemy ships were headed to Virginia to attack Benedict Arnold’s army in Portsmouth. Graves and his fleet of nine ships of the line were stationed almost sixty miles to the southwest of Newport at Gardiners Bay at the eastern end of Long Island. While sending word of the development to his superior, Admiral Arbuthnot in New York, Graves, fifty-five and married to the sister of Prime Minister Lord North, responded to the French challenge by dispatching three ships of his own—the Culloden, Bedford, and America.

  It was an order he soon regretted. A winter storm that a British officer stationed in New York claimed was “the severest that has been felt here for many years” erupted over the waters off eastern Long Island. The 74-gun Culloden never made it past Montauk and was wrecked at the edge of Fort Pond Bay. The Bedford, another 74, lost all her masts to the gale and ultimately had to be towed back to Gardiners Bay, a shattered and leaking hulk. The America was the only ship to make it past the eastern tip of Long Island, where it was blown all the way to Virginia by the gale.

  As it turned out, the French had had no intention of attacking Benedict Arnold; instead, the three ships had merely sailed out to meet two frigates returning from Boston and were safely back in Newport before they could fall victim to the storm. In just a day, naval superiority in the region had shifted from the British, who now had only six available ships of the line, to the French with seven ships. The question was, what would the French, whose spies in Connecticut provided them with precise and timely information about the status of the British fleet, do with this newfound advantage?

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  • • •

  FOR WASHINGTON the answer was obvious: The French in Newport should send their entire fleet to the Chesapeake with an army of a thousand soldiers and the siege guns required to capture Benedict Arnold. For Washington, and the American people as a whole, it was intolerable to think that the “arch traitor” was free to plunder Virginia and was now industriously fortifying a British navy base at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay that might stop the flow of supplies to Greene’s army in the Carolinas. To seize and hang Arnold in the winter of 1781 would give Washington’s recruitment efforts that spring an incalculable boost. It was the kind of opportunity that came along only once (or, as it would turn out, twice) in a war, and the French fleet in Newport must make the most of it while they still had the numerical advantage in warships.

  Unfortunately, Washington had not yet received confirmation of the losses to the enemy fleet in Gardiners Bay. Until he knew for sure that the French fleet enjoyed a significant advantage, he could not formally request the naval expedition south. That, however, did not prevent him from deciding to send a twelve-hundred-man force of Continental soldiers overland to Head of Elk, a Maryland town at the northern tip of the Chesapeake, to reinforce a possible naval expedition to Virginia. “This will give a degree of certainty to the enterprise,” he explained in a letter to General Rochambeau in Newport, “which will be precarious without it.”

  Tensions at the American headquarters in New Windsor, New York, mounted as Washington waited for the intelligence he needed to finalize his plan. The situation in Newport had been complicated by the recent death of French admiral de Ternay, whom Lafayette sardonically claimed had “found no way to bypass [the British blockade] except by way of the next world.” Charles Destouches, de Ternay’s second in command, inherited a poorly prepared fleet under (according to British intelligence) a “wretched system of discipline,” and no one knew how quickly he could set sail—if, in fact, he was so inclined.

  On February 7, Lafayette reported from headquarters that Washington “is waiting to form some kind of plan not only until
the news is confirmed but until we know how much Destouches can take advantage of it and assure himself naval superiority. The toast of [the] general[’s] headquarters is ‘May M. Destouches soon be squadron commander!’”

  It was a torturous time for Washington, who had watched in impotent rage as Arnold laid waste to his home state. For months Washington had been urging Governor Jefferson to prepare Virginia for the inevitable attack by water, even sending him detailed plans for a 25-foot flat-bottomed boat that fit into a standard-sized wagon for transport across the peninsulas of the Tidewater. “We could then move across from river to river with more rapidity than [the enemy] could go down one and up another,” he explained to Jefferson, “and none of their detachments would be ever secure by having the water between them and us.” Jefferson had demurred, postponing production of the very boats that might have prevented Arnold from reaching Richmond.

  Now Washington worried that the presence of Arnold would cause Jefferson to neglect the supply needs of Greene’s army to the south—a concern confirmed by General von Steuben’s letters criticizing the governor’s management of the war effort. “For while there is an enemy in the heart of the country,” Washington wrote to Nathanael Greene, “you can neither expect men or supplies.” Adding to his worries about the southern army was the unusually aggressive behavior of Lord Cornwallis, who had responded to the setback at Cowpens by pursuing Morgan’s exhausted and prisoner-encumbered troops into North Carolina.

  But it was the status of the French fleet that concerned Washington the most. Part of the problem was the agonizingly long time it took to get letters to and from Newport. A lack of funds had forced him to disband the system of couriers that had once linked the two headquarters, and the mails proved both slow and prone to theft by British agents. Not until February 15 was Washington finally able to write the letter with which he formally proposed sending the entire French fleet to Virginia.

  In the days that followed, his headquarters became a hive of intense and tension-filled activity. He’d put Lafayette in command of the division that was to be in the Tidewater when the French fleet descended upon Arnold, and there were countless details to be worked out before the French marquis could start marching with his men to Head of Elk. At one point, it became necessary for Washington to visit West Point, ten miles down the river. Accompanying him were Lafayette and several members of Rochambeau’s staff. It was cold and windy, and after a day of touring the fort, Washington noticed that Lafayette’s leg, which had been injured at the Battle of Brandywine three years before, was giving him trouble. So as not to further tire the marquis, Washington suggested they return to New Windsor by water since “the tide will assist us in ascending against the stream.”

  A barge was found and once the necessary number of oarsmen had been assembled, they were off. As night came on, it began to snow. Coupled with the large floes of ice bobbing in the river, it made for a difficult passage, especially as the boat became increasingly filled with water. As had so often happened in Washington’s experience, the water had proven to be a treacherous way to travel.

  They were edging along the rocky shore near New Windsor in the darkness, looking for a place to land. “Perceiving that the master of the boat was very much alarmed,” Washington took over the helm, proclaiming, according to an aide-de-camp to Rochambeau, “Courage my friends; I am going to conduct you, since it is my duty to hold the helm.” Whether or not he was referring to his role as commander in chief of the allied forces, this was a man who insisted on being in control, especially in times of greatest peril. Soon after making this pronouncement, he steered them into a gap between the rocks and they pulled the boat onto the shore.

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  • • •

  BACK IN NOVEMBER, French major general François Jean de Beauvoir Chastellux had visited Washington’s headquarters at New Windsor. A highly sophisticated man of letters whose command of English would enable him to act as liaison officer between Washington and Rochambeau, Chastellux was deeply impressed by the American commander.

  His stature is noble and lofty, [he wrote], he is well made, and exactly proportioned; his physiognomy mild and agreeable, but such as to render it impossible to speak particularly of any of his features, so that in quitting him, you have only the recollection of a fine face. He has neither grave nor a familiar air, his brow is sometimes marked with thought, but never with inquietude; in inspiring respect, he inspires confidence, and his smile is always the smile of benevolence . . . ; a hero in a republic, he excites another sort of respect, which seems to spring from the sole idea, that the safety of each individual is attached to his person.

  What Chastellux did not detect was the intensity of the passions—described by the New York lawyer Gouverneur Morris as “almost too mighty for man”—that seethed beneath Washington’s usually placid exterior. Those who lived and worked with him, however, knew another, darker side, and on February 16, his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton became the target of his unchecked wrath.

  Hamilton had just left Washington’s upstairs office with a letter “of a pressing and interesting nature” for the army’s commissary when he ran into Washington himself on the staircase. Anyone who has encountered a noted public figure has only an inkling of the charismatic force field Washington commanded. Three and a half years before, a British officer who found himself in Washington’s presence had been, in the words of Henry Knox, “awestruck as if he was before something supernatural.” Hamilton had spent enough time with the American commander to know that Washington’s public persona (like all public personas) was, to a certain degree, an act. “It was not long,” he confided to his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, “before I discovered he was neither remarkable for delicacy nor good temper.” That, however, did not diminish the sometimes terrifying potency of his commander’s personality, and as they passed each other on the staircase, Washington told Hamilton he wanted to speak to him. “I answered,” Hamilton wrote, “that I would wait upon him immediately.”

  But first he needed to deliver the letter to another one of Washington’s aides, Tench Tilghman, who was working on the first floor. On Hamilton’s way back to Washington’s second-floor office, he was stopped by Lafayette. Although beloved by Washington, the young French nobleman could be highly emotional, willful, and impatient. Soon after the arrival of the Expédition Particulière, he had so pestered Rochambeau with his incessant cries for action against the British in New York that the French general had accused him of placing “private or personal ambition” ahead of the safety of the French army. “The warmth of your feelings,” Rochambeau lectured Lafayette, who was less than half his age, “had somewhat overheated the calmness and prudence of your judgment.”

  On February 16, Lafayette’s enthusiasm for the upcoming mission to the south threatened to prevent Hamilton from returning to Washington in a timely fashion. Hamilton did his best to extricate himself from the excitable marquis. “He can testify,” Hamilton wrote, “how impatient I was to get back, and that I left him in a manner which but for our intimacy would have been more than abrupt.”

  Washington, Hamilton soon discovered, was waiting for him, not in his office, but at the head of the stairs, and he was in a towering rage. “Colonel Hamilton,” he snarled, “you have kept me waiting at the head of the stairs these ten minutes. I must tell you, Sir, you treat me with disrespect.”

  “I am not conscious of it, Sir,” Hamilton responded, “but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so, we part.”

  “Very well, Sir,” he said, “if it be your choice.”

  So ended one of the great collaborations of the war. “For three years past,” Hamilton confided to his father-in-law, “I have felt no friendship for him and have professed none. The truth is our own dispositions are the opposites of each other.” During the winter of 1781, Washington was operating under tremendous stress. Hamilton was brilliant but also mercurial and desperate to move out of
Washington’s ever lengthening shadow. He had hoped to get the posting to France that had gone to his friend John Laurens. One has the sense that Hamilton was as much at fault as Washington in the rupture.

  By February 19, Washington still had not heard from Rochambeau about the proposed naval expedition to the Chesapeake. “The destruction of the detachment under Arnold is of such immense importance,” he wrote to the French commander. “I impatiently wait to be favored with Your Excellency’s answer to these points.”

  Six days later, on February 25, Washington learned that the British warship America “had got into Gardiners Bay after being long out.” Even worse, Arbuthnot, who had joined Graves at the eastern end of Long Island, was overseeing the repair of the dismasted Bedford, which was being outfitted with the wrecked Culloden’s undamaged spars. “This again gives Arbuthnot the superiority,” he wrote sadly to Lafayette, who had already departed with his soldiers for the Chesapeake, “and puts it out of Monsieur Destouches’s power to give us any further assistance.”

  But as Washington was to learn, it was a little more complicated than that.

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  • • •

  EVEN BEFORE WASHINGTON HEARD that three British ships of the line had been taken out of action by the January storm, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee had written Congressional delegate Theodorick Bland in Philadelphia with a proposal to capture Benedict Arnold. If the French in Newport sent just one ship of the line and two frigates to the Chesapeake, “the militia now in arms [would be] strong enough to smother these invaders in a moment.” Without consulting Washington, Congress then urged French minister Chevalier de la Luzerne, based in Philadelphia, to pass along the proposal to Destouches in Newport. Knowing that the enemy fleet in Gardiners Bay had been recently hobbled by the storm, Destouches decided to do as the politicians had requested. On February 9, having not yet heard from Washington about sending his entire fleet to Virginia and making no effort to check in with the American commander in advance, Destouches sent French captain Le Gardeur de Tilly to the Chesapeake with a single ship of the line and two frigates.