In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  At least for now, Washington was unable to compromise his own financial interests for the greater good of not just the war effort but the future of his country. For as he and fellow slaveholder Thomas Jefferson came to recognize, slavery was the “moral depravity” that might one day tear America apart. “We have the wolf by the ear,” Jefferson would write, “and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

  Years later, the British traveler Benjamin Henry Latrobe commented on the “many wagon loads of the bones of men, women, and children, stripped of the flesh by the vultures and hawks” that still littered the Virginia countryside. Yorktown was the site of a great victory, but it was also where the road to the Civil War began. As Washington confided to his cousin Lund, to whom he had written two years before about the possibility of selling off all his slaves at Mount Vernon, there might one day be a “punishment . . . for our want of public, and indeed private virtue.”

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  NOTHING HAPPENED QUICKLY in the eighteenth century, especially with an ocean between America and Europe. It would be months before Washington learned anything definitive about how the news of Yorktown had been received in Europe, allowing the British army plenty of time to deliver the blow that could render the recent allied triumph meaningless. He had to assume the fighting was going to continue through 1782, if not beyond.

  The day after Cornwallis’s surrender, Washington sent de Grasse a proposal. Now was the time, he insisted, to turn their attention to Charleston. He knew the admiral needed to get back to the Caribbean, but if he would give him just two more months, they could “destroy the last hope” of the enemy.

  For the next two weeks, de Grasse considered the proposal, finally agreeing to the half measure of sailing Lafayette and a small army to Wilmington, North Carolina, which from Washington’s perspective was better than nothing. In the end, however, de Grasse rejected even that plan. Undeterred, Washington then asked him to think about a spring campaign. Trying to be polite, the weary admiral once again demurred. His “wretched health” made it impossible for him to look that far ahead. No one, whether it was in the French, American, or British military forces, had the stamina to keep up with the forty-nine-year-old Washington, even after six years of war.

  By November 5, he had finished attending to the countless details associated with the aftermath of the siege. The prisoners, ordnance, and stores had been distributed; reinforcements had been sent south to assist Nathanael Greene; the rest of the Continental army was headed back north to the Hudson River while Rochambeau and the French remained in Virginia for the winter. That morning Washington set out to rejoin his army. But first he needed to stop at the home of Martha’s brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett, in nearby Eltham, Virginia, where his twenty-six-year-old stepson Jacky Custis was recovering from “camp fever” contracted while serving as his aide at Yorktown.

  But as he soon discovered, Jacky’s illness had taken a sudden and tragic turn. Within minutes of his arrival, Washington later recounted to Lafayette, “poor Mr. Custis breathe[d] his last; this unexpected and affecting event threw Mrs. Washington and Mrs. Custis (who were both present) into such deep distress” that he put off all immediate plans of rejoining the army.

  Washington’s life had been full of death—his father, his beloved half brother Lawrence, and so many others had died before their time, and now the lighthearted and largely ineffectual Jacky was gone. Four years later, Washington would write his former aide Jonathan Trumbull on his father’s death. “I can offer nothing which your own reason has not already suggested on this occasion,” he consoled in what might be the least comforting letter of condolence ever written. “[N]or shall I add more on this subject to you as it would only be a renewal of sorrow by recalling afresh to your remembrance things which had better be forgotten.” This was a man who only looked ahead.

  By November 13, he and Martha were at Mount Vernon. On the way, he had stopped to see his mother, who was not at home. “My dear George,” she subsequently wrote, “I was truly uneasy by not being at home when you went through Fredericksburg. It was an unlucky thing for me. Now I am afraid I never shall have that pleasure again.” That her son had just won the victory of his already distinguished military career went, of course, unmentioned.

  And so, as the country around him celebrated the miraculous turn the war had taken, Washington spent the week in a house of mourning. “Mr. Custis’ death has given much distress in this family,” he wrote to his friend Benjamin Harrison. Already, however, his mind was turning back to the war. “My greatest fear,” he wrote to Nathanael Greene, “is that Congress viewing this stroke in too important a point of light, may think our work too nearly closed, and will fall into a state of languor and relaxation; to prevent this error I shall employ every means in my power.” On November 20, after only a week at Mount Vernon, Washington, Martha, and a few members of his staff started for Philadelphia.

  CHAPTER 10

  “The North River Captain”

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER the British surrender at Yorktown, Henry Knox wrote to his friend Nathanael Greene. The two had witnessed George Washington’s evolution from the rash, forty-three-year-old commander in chief who yearned to burn Boston to the ground in the winter of 1775–1776 to the careful yet cunning strategist capable of holding both an army and a country together through six years of war. His performance at Yorktown, however, had revealed facets of his character that not even Knox knew existed. “I cannot refrain adding one word more about our good General,” he confided to Greene. “He improves in his understanding & abilities hourly . . . , they appear greater in proportion to the opportunities. He is more and more confident of his own judgment which by far exceeds those whose opinions he condescends to.”

  Despite being a confirmed landlubber himself, Knox chose to capture Washington’s remarkable growth as a leader with a nautical reference. Recalling those days in New York when the commander in chief had demonstrated an unexpected talent for navigating a boat up and down the Hudson (also known as the North) River, Knox wrote: “[B]ut I will not now [go] into a panegyric on him. You must know him as the North River captain and know that it is only the exercise of his own judgment which was wanting to perfect his character.”

  It turned out to be a most prescient analysis. By that spring, Washington was back on the Hudson, this time in a house built of stone in Newburgh, New York. After several years of trying, French naval superiority had won him the victory that might persuade the enemy to negotiate an end to the war. However, given the communication lag between America and Europe, it might be months before he heard about possible treaty negotiations in Paris. For the foreseeable future, he must remain on the offensive, and for that to happen he needed the French navy. As he’d written to Lafayette before leaving Mount Vernon back in November, “No land force can act decisively unless accompanied by a maritime superiority.” Now, more than ever, he needed the Comte de Grasse.

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  TO A CERTAIN EXTENT, the Battle of the Chesapeake had been won in spite of the French admiral. His decision to sail out of the bay in a chaotic frenzy had resulted in a line of battle that would have provided a more competent opponent than Thomas Graves with the opportunity to destroy the French vanguard before the rest of the fleet could have come to its defense. On April 12, 1782, near an archipelago of islands between Guadeloupe and Dominica called the Saintes, de Grasse’s impulsiveness finally caught up with him. Even though a larger and faster British fleet was in pursuit of his own, he decided to rally to the defense of the Zélé, the French 74 that had just suffered its fourteenth collision in thirteen months by running into his own flagship. Admiral George Rodney, just back from medical treatment in England, did what Graves had refused to do off the Capes of Virginia: Instead of lining up his battleships in a careful row, he went in for the kill. After close to twelve hours of fighting, the British had captured five French
ships, including the Ville de Paris, requiring that de Grasse suffer the humiliation of surrendering to the enemy.

  The magnitude of de Grasse’s defeat prompted Spain and France to abandon their plans to attack Jamaica, which would continue to serve as Britain’s primary base in the Caribbean. When Washington learned of what came to be known as the Battle of the Saintes, he feared the catastrophe might inspire the British to renew the war effort. “The disastrous event of the naval action in the West Indies may indeed, and probably will now give a total alteration to the complexion of the campaign,” he wrote to Nathanael Greene. With their naval superiority restored, the British were free to resume hostilities in the south. “At present,” Washington admitted to James McHenry, another former aide, “we are enveloped in darkness; and no man, I believe, can foretell all the consequences which will result from the naval action. . . . To say not worse of it, it is an unfortunate affair.”

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  WORD OF CORNWALLIS’S DEFEAT at Yorktown reached London on Sunday, November 25, 1781. Prime Minister North received the news, according to Secretary of State Germain, “as he would have taken a ball in his breast. . . . For he opened his arms exclaiming wildly as he paced up and down the apartment, during a few minutes, ‘Oh God! It is all over!’ words which he repeated many times, under emotions of the deepest agitation and distress.”

  King George III, however, remained resolute, declaring that the defeat would not make “the smallest alteration in these principles of my conduct.” But in the months ahead, even the king came to recognize that he had little choice in the matter. The English people had grown tired of war, and once the news of Rodney’s victory at the Saintes reached London, it became possible for Britain to make peace with her former colonies in North America knowing that the Empire’s position in the all-important Caribbean was secure.

  By the summer of 1782, Sir Henry Clinton had been replaced by Sir Guy Carleton, the former military governor of Canada, making him the fourth British commander in chief Washington had faced since the beginning of hostilities in 1775. Unknown to Washington, who remained skeptical of Britain’s interest in peace, Carleton was under orders to begin the process of extracting the royal army from North America. Even after Carleton wrote to Washington on August 2, confirming that not only had “negotiations for a general peace . . . commenced at Paris,” but also that King George had instructed his chief negotiator to propose “the independency of the Thirteen Provinces,” the American commander in chief worried that the British were “only gaining time to become more formidable at sea; to form new alliances, if possible; or to disunite us.”

  He had ample reason for concern. If the pace of treaty negotiations did not increase soon, there might not be a country left to declare victory. It had only been the need for an army that had brought the country together in common cause. Now that the war seemed to be drawing to a close, the states were showing less and less interest in supporting what Alexander Hamilton, who soon joined Congress as a delegate from New York, called “Continental views.” Recent efforts to fund the federal government through the collection of import duties, while initially embraced as a sensible solution to the problem, were doomed to failure when Rhode Island and Virginia refused to approve them. Instead of a union of states, America was in danger of becoming a fractious collection of little nations, each one demanding that its own interests prevail.

  Already New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were squabbling about the territory between them as the settlers living in those contested lands (which they called Vermont) threatened to align themselves with British Canada if Congress did not grant them statehood. Even if America secured its independence, that did not guarantee it would become a viable republic. As Maurice Morgann, General Carleton’s secretary, predicted, a “federal union” based only on “verbal maxims of general liberty and brotherly love” would soon degenerate into “despotism and mutual rage.” Even now, with hostilities between the British and American armies drawing to a close, a brutal civil war continued to rage throughout the middle and southern states as patriots and loyalists battled it out in a seemingly ceaseless cycle of murder and retribution.

  That summer Washington made the mistake of inserting himself into a particularly nasty sequence of reprisals that had resulted in the hanging of a captured American army officer in Sandy Hook, New Jersey. If the British did not hand over the culprit responsible for the officer’s death, Washington vowed to execute a randomly selected British prisoner in his place. When the lot fell to Charles Asgill, a young Yorktown prisoner with the same genial charm that had made British spy chief Major John André such a sympathetic character, Washington realized that his attempts to contain the chaos had only added to the moral confusion of the times.

  He was ultimately saved from this largely self-created dilemma by the intervention of the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, whose letter on the behalf of Asgill’s terrified mother moved Congress to order the British officer’s release. Nonetheless, the incident gave Washington a renewed appreciation for how anger and vengeance could consume a country without a strong central government. “[F]rom the observations I have made in the course of this war,” he wrote to his friend Benjamin Harrison, who was now governor of Virginia, “I am decided in my opinion that if the powers of Congress are not enlarged and made competent to all general purposes, that the blood which has been spilt, the expense that has been incurred and the distresses which have been felt will avail us nothing; and that the bond, already too weak, which holds us together, will soon be broken; when anarchy and confusion must prevail.”

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  WASHINGTON HAD HOPED TO SPEND the winter of 1782–1783 at Mount Vernon. By the middle of October, he realized he must remain with the army in Newburgh. Never before, not even during the winter at Valley Forge, had there been “so great a spirit of discontent” among the officers of the Continental army. The American people, the officers had come to realize, did not want to pay them for having won their independence. “Hitherto the officers have stood between the lower order of the soldiery and the public,” he wrote to Joseph Jones, a Virginia delegate to Congress, “and in more instances than one, at the hazard of their lives, have quelled very dangerous mutinies. But if their discontents should be suffered to rise equally high, I know not what the consequences may be.” That winter he must “stick very close to the troops . . . and try, like a careful physician, to prevent if possible the disorders getting to an incurable height.”

  That fall, the Comte de Rochambeau and the French army paused briefly beside the Hudson on their way to Boston and eventual transportation to the Caribbean and France. Although Washington would be sorry to say goodbye to Major General Chastellux (who remained in the United States for another year), his farewell letter to Rochambeau was considerably more restrained. The two leaders had worked well enough together at Yorktown, but the road to getting there, during which Rochambeau had (in accordance to the dictates of his government) kept his American counterpart in the dark about the whereabouts of the French fleet, had left Washington embittered and resentful.

  In the years to come, when questioned about the Yorktown campaign, Washington insisted that his early preference for New York instead of the Chesapeake had been a mere ruse designed to deceive the British, and that “it was never in contemplation to attack New York.” Unfortunately, Washington’s diary makes clear that this simply was not the case. As his biographer Ron Chernow explains, it was “awkward for him to admit that he had . . . opposed a campaign that served as the brilliant capstone of his military career. He wanted to portray himself as the visionary architect of the Yorktown victory, not as a general misguidedly concentrating upon New York while his French allies masterminded the decisive blow.”

  In Washington’s defense, it was only hindsight that made the Chesapeake strategy look so brilliant. So many events outside of his and Rocha
mbeau’s control had to happen—from Admiral Rodney’s decision to return to England for medical attention, to de Grasse’s decision to sail to the Chesapeake with the entire French fleet, to Clinton’s refusal to interfere in any way with the allied army’s departure from White Plains, to Cornwallis’s determination to remain at Yorktown even after the arrival of a large French fleet—that it was impossible for either leader to know with any certainty in the summer of 1781 that the Chesapeake was where they might secure the victory that won the war. As we have seen, Washington had his reasons to initially prefer New York, especially since the appearance of the French fleet at Sandy Hook would have allowed for the transportation of the allied army by water—an opportunity lost by Rochambeau’s scheming behind his back. No wonder Washington remained sensitive and defensive about his role in the Yorktown campaign in later years.

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  IN OCTOBER 1782, he learned of the tragic death of his former aide John Laurens “in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina.” By then, Washington’s infected gums and decaying teeth had become almost unendurable, information that became public knowledge when the British gleefully published an intercepted letter in the New York press. And then there was the matter of his eyes.