In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  What follows is an alphabetical listing of the major characters along with brief descriptions of what happened to them after the American Revolution.

  BENEDICT ARNOLD: Arnold left for England in the fall of 1781 in the same ship as Lord Cornwallis. The two generals got along famously, and in several instances in the years to come Cornwallis interceded on behalf of Arnold’s sons when it came to their education and military careers. Arnold’s friendship with Cornwallis proved to be one of the few bright spots in his postwar life. Without any military prospects in England, he moved to New Brunswick, Canada, where he established himself as a merchant. Bad business deals and controversy dogged him at every turn, and he was burned in effigy by his Canadian neighbors prior to his return to England, where he fought a bloodless duel with Lord Lauderdale over a disparaging remark made by the nobleman in Parliament. After years of unsuccessfully petitioning the British government for the financial favors he felt were his due, he died in 1801 at the age of sixty.

  In the early years of the war, Arnold had been one of the country’s best generals, but it was as a traitor that he may have done the most for the cause of the United States. Not only did the news of his treason have a galvanizing effect on the American people, his subsequent appearance in Virginia as a British brigadier general initiated the movement of troops that climaxed ten months later with the victory at Yorktown. Whether revered or vilified, Arnold was the lightning rod of the American Revolution.

  LOUIS-ANTOINE DE BOUGAINVILLE: After his brilliant performance at the Battle of the Chesapeake, Bougainville, along with several other French captains, was accused of failing to support Admiral de Grasse during the Battle of the Saintes. Although sentenced to a reprimand, Bougainville emerged from the controversy as one of France’s leading naval and scientific authorities. The French Revolution forced him into virtual hiding in Normandy, and after a brief stint in jail, he came to the attention of Napoleon, who appointed him to the French Senate. He died in 1811 at the age of eighty-one, recognized as one of the great global explorers of the eighteenth century and his key role in the naval battle that helped win the United States her independence almost forgotten.

  SIR GUY CARLETON: Having overseen the evacuation of New York with both humanity and forcefulness, Carleton was awarded the title of Lord Dorchester after his return to England. In 1786, he was named, for the third time, governor-general of Canada, a post he held for a decade. For many Americans, Canada provided an increasingly enticing example of what the thirteen colonies might have looked like had they remained within the British Empire. In the years to come, twenty thousand “late loyalists” emigrated north, where, ironically (given what inspired the Revolution in the first place), the taxes were considerably lower. Carleton died in England in 1808 at the age of eighty-four, one of the few British generals to have survived the Revolutionary War with his reputation intact.

  FRANÇOIS JEAN DE BEAUVIOR CHASTELLUX: Instead of departing from America with General Rochambeau and the rest of the French army, Chastellux stayed behind in Philadelphia, not returning to France until 1783. In addition to receiving honorary degrees from the College of William and Mary and the University of Pennsylvania, he penned a memoir of his time in America. Shortly after marrying the twenty-eight-year-old Marie Brigitte Plunkett, lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse d’Orléans, he died in Paris in 1788 at the age of fifty-four, a year before the outbreak of the Revolution that devastated the lives of so many of the aristocrats in the French army.

  SIR HENRY CLINTON: Refusing to serve as the scapegoat for Britain’s loss of her American colonies, Clinton launched a pamphlet war in which he enumerated the mistakes of his predecessors, Howe and Gage, but directed most of his ire against the highly popular Cornwallis. Although his pamphleteering won him few friends, Clinton made a comeback of sorts in his later years, being named governor of Gibraltar in 1794. Unfortunately, the onset of an illness prevented him from leaving England, where he died the following year at age sixty-five.

  BARON VON CLOSEN: As one of the most trusted members of Rochambeau’s staff, von Closen remained with the French general in Virginia throughout the winter after Yorktown, ultimately returning to France in 1783 after some unhappy months in the Caribbean and Venezuela. Von Closen remained loyal to the king during the early stages of the French Revolution, becoming a major general in 1792 before resigning his commission and returning to his native Germany, where he died in 1830 at the age of seventy-eight after a distinguished second career as a civil servant.

  LORD CORNWALLIS: Instead of bearing responsibility for the disaster at Yorktown, Cornwallis was judged to be the victim of the combined incompetency of Henry Clinton and Thomas Graves, and he returned to London a hero. His popularity and political connections enabled him to rise above the pamphlet war with Clinton, and in 1786 he was appointed field marshal and governor-general of India, where he enjoyed all of the military success that had eluded him in America. He subsequently served with distinction in Ireland before returning to India, where he died in Ghazipur in the northeastern portion of the country in 1805 at the age of sixty-six.

  JOHANN EWALD: One of the most capable light-infantry officers of the Revolutionary War, Ewald returned to his native Hesse-Kassel in 1784, where he published Essay on Partisan Warfare to much acclaim. Because he was the son of a shopkeeper, his opportunities for promotion were limited, and in 1788 he changed his allegiance to the Danish army, in which he served with distinction for a quarter of a century. He died in Kiel (then part of Denmark) in 1813, at the age of sixty-nine, a national hero in his adopted country.

  BERNARDO DE GÁLVEZ: After his great victory at Pensacola (which ultimately led to Spain’s regaining control of all of Florida), Gálvez was promoted to lieutenant general and named governor of Louisiana. He was also made a conde (the equivalent of a count), complete with a coat of arms featuring the phrase “Yo solo” (“I alone”) in reference to his having braved the entrance of Pensacola Bay without the support of the Spanish navy. Soon after being named viceroy of New Spain in 1786, he died of a fever in Mexico City, at the age of forty.

  HORATIO GATES: Within weeks of the demise of the Newburgh conspiracy in 1783, Gates returned to his plantation in Virginia to attend to his ailing wife Elizabeth, who died that June. In 1786, Gates married the wealthy spinster Mary Vallance, and the two eventually moved to an estate in Manhattan named Rose Hill, now part of the Murray Hill–Gramercy–Flatiron region of New York City. He died in 1806 and was buried in the yard of Trinity Church; he was seventy-eight.

  GEORGE III: Despite losing the American colonies, the British king experienced something of a renaissance in the years after the war. Personally frugal and devoted to his wife, he was increasingly admired by his people—good feelings reinforced by years of unprecedented economic growth and Britain’s ultimately successful war against Napoleon and France. Even as he succumbed to the madness associated with what seems to have been a blood disease, he remained a beloved symbol of the continuing resilience of the British Empire. He died in 1820 at the age of eighty-one.

  GEORGE GERMAIN: Unlike his sovereign, Secretary of State Germain could not escape the stigma of having mismanaged the war that lost the American colonies. The king offered some compensation by making him Viscount Sackville of Bolebrook in Kent, but this did not prevent his peers in the House of Lords from dubbing him “the greatest criminal his country had ever known.” He died in 1785 at the age of sixty-nine.

  COMTE DE GRASSE: Although an inquiry officially cleared him of wrongdoing at the Battle of the Saintes, de Grasse’s naval career was over. Barred from the court of the king, he retired to his estate, where in 1784 he received four British cannons captured at Yorktown as an expression of thanks from the American Congress. He died in 1788 at the age of sixty-five, just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, during which his Yorktown cannons were melted down to mint coins. His son and four daughters sought asylum in the United States, where they were
granted citizenship and stipends from Congress. In 1978, the U.S. navy commissioned the destroyer USS Comte de Grasse, which served until June 1998. After a stint as a parts hulk in the navy yard in Philadelphia, the Comte de Grasse was towed 275 miles off the coast of North Carolina for a naval training exercise and ultimately sunk in 12,000 feet of water.

  THOMAS GRAVES: Graves was never officially blamed for his performance at the Battle of the Chesapeake, although Samuel Hood and George Rodney were merciless in their condemnation. During his return voyage to Great Britain in 1782, Graves suffered the indignity of having to abandon his flagship in a storm (which also claimed de Grasse’s former flagship, the Ville de Paris) and arrived home in a troop transport. In 1794, Graves was second in command to Admiral Richard Howe in the British victory over the French at the Battle of the Glorious First of June and was awarded the title of Baron Graves of Gravesend in the County of Londonderry. He died in 1802 at the age of seventy-six.

  NATHANAEL GREENE: The southern states expressed their appreciation for Greene’s efforts on their behalf by awarding him land in the Carolinas and Georgia, where he, his wife, Caty, and their children ultimately settled at a two-thousand-acre plantation near Savannah called Mulberry Grove. On a hot day in June 1786, Greene was stricken by sunstroke and died at the age of forty-three. According to Alexander Hamilton, Greene’s premature death robbed the country of a “universal and pervading genius which qualified him not less for the Senate than for the field.”

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON: As Washington had recognized early in the war, Hamilton was one of the most brilliant men of his age. From The Federalist Papers, to the Constitutional Convention, to his role as secretary of the treasury, no one short of Washington, Jefferson, and possibly James Madison did more to create the form of government we have today. But as Washington also recognized, Hamilton’s immense ambition and impulsiveness courted controversy, and he died on July 12, 1804, of injuries sustained in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. He was forty-nine.

  SAMUEL HOOD: On his return to England after playing an important role in the British victory at the Saintes, Hood was praised by the king as “the most brilliant officer of the war.” With the outbreak of the French Revolution, he was named commander of the British fleet in the Mediterranean, during which he served as a mentor to the young Horatio Nelson. Unable to contain his need to criticize, he was ultimately dismissed from command after writing an indiscreet letter to the First Lord of the Admiralty. He died at Bath in 1816 at the age of ninety-one.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON: During the summer of 1781, as war raged in his native Virginia, Jefferson, who had just stepped down as governor of the state, went into seclusion and wrote Notes on the State of Virginia. Soon after the victory at Yorktown, Jefferson successfully defended himself against charges of neglect of duty during the invasion of Benedict Arnold. However, his performance as a wartime governor came back to haunt him throughout a political career that culminated in his becoming a two-term president of the United States. Even on his deathbed he was forced to confront the legacy of those years, when he spoke with the son of Henry Lee, whose account of the war included a condemnation of Jefferson’s actions. Jefferson died six days later on July 4, 1826, at the age of eighty-three.

  HENRY KNOX: Even before the war had ended, Knox spearheaded the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary association of American and foreign officers who had fought in the Revolution that still exists. At the time of its inception, however, the order was perceived by many (including Thomas Jefferson) as dangerously aristocratic. And, in truth, despite having fought to create a republic and having served as President Washington’s first secretary of war, Knox, the former bookseller, yearned to live in the style of the British nobility. After securing (through legally dubious means) a huge tract of land in Maine once owned by his wife Lucy’s loyalist family, he built a mansion in the town of Thomaston that dwarfed even Mount Vernon. Financially overextended and stricken by personal tragedy (he and Lucy outlived ten of their thirteen children while their only surviving son, Henry, proved a ne’er-do-well drunkard), Knox died in 1806 of an infection associated with a chicken bone that became lodged in his throat; he was fifty-six. Although esteemed for his role as artillery chief in the Continental army, Knox created a very different legacy in Maine, ultimately becoming the inspiration behind the grasping and unrelenting Colonel Pyncheon in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.

  GILBERT DU MOTIER, MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE: In the summer of 1784, the twenty-six-year-old Lafayette returned to America and spent ten days at Mount Vernon, reporting to his wife that “in retirement General Washington is even greater than he was during the Revolution. His simplicity is truly sublime.” On his return to France, Lafayette became a leading military figure in the French Revolution, where his reputation rose and finally fell as his country slid increasingly into violence and chaos. After several years in an Austrian prison, he retired to his wife’s property outside Paris. In 1824, by which time Napoleon had fallen and the Bourbon monarchy had been restored, Lafayette returned to America for a more-than-year-long tour where he was feted everywhere he went. Back in France, he lived once again in relative obscurity before briefly stepping back into the limelight during the Revolution of 1830. He died in Paris in 1834; at the graveside, his son George Washington Lafayette scattered soil from Bunker Hill over his casket. He was seventy-six.

  DUC DE LAUZUN: During the Siege of Yorktown, Lauzun’s legion, stationed across the river in Gloucester, outdueled Banastre Tarleton’s cavalry in a brief, ultimately indecisive skirmish. Since it was one of the few episodes during the siege that involved hand-to-hand combat, Rochambeau chose to award Lauzun, along with Guillaume de Deux-Ponts, who led the charge on redoubt number 9, the honor of delivering the news of Yorktown to France. Lauzun embraced the ideals of the French Revolution, only to be arrested and on December 30, 1793, executed by the guillotine during the so-called Reign of Terror. He was forty-six.

  HENRY LEE: After witnessing the surrender of the British at Yorktown, Lee pursued a political career, serving as governor of Virginia and returning briefly to the military at Washington’s request to help put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. On Washington’s death in 1799, Lee, then serving in the U.S. Congress, delivered the famous eulogy describing the former general and president as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Financial problems plagued Lee all his life, and he wrote his account of the Revolutionary War, Memories of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, from debtor’s prison. An ardent Federalist, he was badly beaten while protecting a political ally and friend during a riot in Baltimore in 1812. After five years in the Caribbean attempting to regain his health, Lee decided to return to America, making landfall at the island plantation in Georgia once owned by his commander in the south, Nathanael Greene. In failing health, Lee died under the care of Greene’s daughter on March 25, 1818, age sixty-two. Despite Lee’s ardent support of the Union, his youngest son, Robert, would become the commander of the Confederate forces during the Civil War.

  BENJAMIN LINCOLN: Following his tenure as secretary of war (1781–1783), Lincoln led the Massachusetts militia in the suppression of Shays’s Rebellion in 1787, the event that convinced political leaders throughout the country that the existing form of federal government needed an overhaul. The following year, Lincoln attended the Massachusetts state convention that ratified the United States Constitution, and in 1789, the newly elected president George Washington appointed him collector of the port of Boston, a lucrative sinecure that he held until 1809. He died in his native Hingham on May 9, 1810, age seventy-seven.

  JOSEPH PLUMB MARTIN: In the years after the war, Martin, with nothing to show for his seven years of service, moved to what is today Stockton Springs, Maine, at the mouth of the Penobscot River, land over which Henry Knox eventually established ownership. When Knox’s intermediaries demanded that he pay $170 (abo
ut $3200 today) for his hundred-acre farm, Martin was unable to come up with the money, and in December 1801 he wrote Knox a letter. “I throw myself and family wholly at the feet of your Honor’s mercy,” he pleaded, “earnestly hoping that your Honor will think of some way, in your wisdom, that may be beneficial to your Honor and save a poor family from distress.” Knox, however, turned a deaf ear to Martin’s appeal, and in 1818 the indigent veteran lost his farm. In 1830, by which time he was living on a military pension of $96 (about $2460 today) a year, Martin published his memoir, A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, perhaps the most insightful and refreshingly acerbic firsthand account of the war that exists. He died on May 2, 1850, at the age of eighty-nine, and is buried at the Sandy Point Cemetery in Stockton Springs.

  DANIEL MORGAN: Although lingering health problems prevented him from participating in the Siege of Yorktown, Morgan was able to oversee the housing of British prisoners near his home in Winchester, Virginia. According to local tradition, Morgan employed some of the Hessians under his supervision in building the stone mansion he called Saratoga in memory of the battle in which he played a vital part. Unlike so many of his military peers, Morgan proved to be a successful businessman and landowner. He came out of retirement in 1794 to play a key role in subduing the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, then served briefly in the House of Representatives, until poor health forced him to return to Winchester. When informed that he had less than a week to live, he reportedly told the physician, “Doctor, if I could be the man I was when I was 21 years of age, I would be willing to be stripped stark naked on the top of the Alleghany Mountains, to run for my life with the hounds of death at my heels.” Morgan died on July 6, 1802, at age sixty-six. His victory at Cowpens on January 17, 1781, stands as one of the most brilliant of the war, confirming his status as the greatest leader of light infantry in the Continental army.