In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Graves’s second in command at the Battle of the Chesapeake was Samuel Hood. Although Hood was an officer of considerable ability, his constant carping ill served the British fleet at the Battle of the Chesapeake.

  De Grasse’s flagship, the Ville de Paris, the largest ship of the line in the French navy.

  A 1962 painting of the Battle of the Chesapeake by V. Zveg.

  If there was an American counterpart to Spanish envoy Francisco Saavedra, who operated as the allied fixer in the Caribbean, it was Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris. Not only did Morris extend his considerable personal credit to help fund the Yorktown campaign, he worked tirelessly to consolidate the supply operations of both the American and the French armies.

  Just twenty-four years old, with an army less than half the size of the enemy’s, the Marquis de Lafayette did his best to prevent Cornwallis from escaping from his isolated outpost between the James and York rivers at Yorktown.

  To Lafayette’s regret, Washington chose the New Englander Benjamin Lincoln, who had commanded the American army during the fall of Charleston, to serve as his second in command at Yorktown.

  Artillery chief Henry Knox performed brilliantly at Yorktown. According to French general Chastellux, “It is impossible to know him without esteeming and loving him.”

  Despite being just twenty years old at Yorktown, Sergeant Joseph Plumb Martin had already fought in most of the major battles of the war. Here he is, almost seventy years later, with his wife, Lucy. Martin’s journal of his war experiences, published in 1830, is one of the best first-person accounts of the conflict. He died in 1850 at the age of eighty-nine in Stockton Springs, Maine.

  A watercolor drawing from the diary of Jean Baptiste Antoine de Verger showing, from left to right, a black private in the Rhode Island light infantry company, a soldier in the Canadian regiment commanded by Moses Hazen, a Virginia rifleman, and a Continental army gunner.

  Washington and his generals at Yorktown by Charles Willson Peale. Washington points toward the river with his riding whip, with Rochambeau to his left. Note the carcasses of the British horses on the river’s shoreline.

  A later depiction of Washington and his generals by Auguste Couder. Washington and Rochambeau are issuing orders in front of the tent.

  A view of the Siege of Yorktown and the York River sketched by a British officer on Gloucester Point.

  Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s sketch of Secretary Thomas Nelson’s house in Yorktown showing the extensive damage the structure suffered during the battle. According to a story told to Latrobe more than fifteen years later, the large hole between the window and the door on the left was made by an American artilleryman who, in answer to a bet, shot thirteen consecutive cannonballs through the opening.

  Alexander Hamilton before the attack on redoubt number 10 at Yorktown, painted by Alonzo Chappel.

  Accompanying Hamilton during the attack on redoubt 10 was his good friend and fellow former aide to Washington, John Laurens, who had spent the previous winter as an American emissary to France and would die the following year during a minor skirmish in South Carolina.

  Although the fortification is too large and the attack is being conducted in daylight rather than at night, this 1840 painting by Eugène Lami captures the energy and violence of the storming of the British redoubt.

  In John Trumbull’s rendering of the surrender at Yorktown, Benjamin Lincoln, mounted on a white horse, accepts the sword of Cornwallis’s stand-in, Charles O’Hara, as Washington and his officers watch on the right and Rochambeau and the French high command watch on the left.

  A different view of the surrender by Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe, showing the long gauntlet of allied soldiers through which the British were forced to pass and the area to the left where they deposited their weapons.

  Seven months after the Battle of the Chesapeake, Admiral de Grasse suffered a defeat so devastating that Washington feared the reversal had negated all that had been gained at Yorktown. Here de Grasse’s flagship, the Ville de Paris (to the right), is pummeled by Samuel Hood’s much smaller Barfleur at the Battle of the Saintes.

  We will never know how involved Horatio Gates was in what came to be known as the Newburgh conspiracy. Washington, however, was convinced that “under a mask of . . . apparent cordiality,” his longtime nemesis was doing everything he could to undermine his authority.

  Guy Carleton, Henry Clinton’s replacement as British commander in chief, oversaw the evacuation of New York in 1783. Despite Washington’s objections, Carleton insisted that any former slaves who had spent a year or more with the British would be protected from recapture by American slave catchers.

  John Trumbull’s 1824 painting of George Washington resigning his commission to Congress on December 23, 1783. Trumbull has taken the liberty of placing Martha Washington and her grandchildren on the balcony on the upper right. They were actually at Mount Vernon in anticipation of Washington’s arrival.

  To his “vine and fig tree” at last: Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s 1796 painting of George Washington and family enjoying the view of the Potomac from the piazza at Mount Vernon.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALTHOUGH THE Reverend Eugene McDowell did not live to see the publication of this book, he contributed greatly to its research, providing me with his own heavily annotated copy of John Buchanan’s indispensable The Road to Guilford Courthouse as well as the many pictures he and his wife, Cathy, took during a tour of the Revolutionary War battlefields of the Carolinas.

  My thanks to Michael Hill for his research help, especially when it came to the vast amount of primary source material (much of it copied from the Archives Nationales Marine in Paris) at the Library of Congress; thanks also to Jeff Flannery at the LOC. Thanks to Carol Harris for her expert translation assistance. Larrie Ferreiro, author of Brothers at Arms, could not have been more generous with his expertise and extensive contacts in France. Christian McBurney, author of Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island, was also most helpful. Without the Fifth Annual Conference on the American Revolution at Colonial Williamsburg in 2016 (led by Bruce and Lynne Venter and Ed Lengel), I might never have met Larrie, Christian, and a host of other Revolutionary War scholars. My special thanks to Mark Lender and James Kirby Martin, both regulars at the conference, for sharing two unpublished articles about Benedict Arnold. John Hattendorf at the Newport War College provided me with essential guidance at the beginning and end of the project. I owe Jean-Marie Kowalski of the Ecole Navale in Brest a huge debt of gratitude for his willingness to speak with me during a 2016 research trip to France. A conversation with Michael Crawford and Dennis Conrad at the Naval History and Heritage Command at Washington, D.C., was equally enlightening; thanks also to Alexis Catsambis of the Command’s Underwater Archaeology Branch for providing the great map of Destouches’s and Arbuthnot’s Race to the Chesapeake. My thanks to Ellen McCallister Clark, Library Director at Anderson House, the home of the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington, D.C., for her guidance in exploring the Society’s collection. Carolyn Vega, Associate Curator at the Morgan Library and Museum, helped me decipher a critical passage in a manuscript letter by Henry Knox. Arthur Kelly shared with me his exquisite collection of historic maps and trove of articles about Benjamin Franklin’s chart of the Gulf Stream. Special thanks to Curt Viebranz and Douglas Bradburn at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Fred W. Smith National Library. Papers delivered by Olivier Chaline and Jean-Marie Kowalski at the 2015 SAR Annual Conference on the American Revolution held at George Washington’s Mount Vernon were extremely helpful to me. Special thanks to the staffs at the National Park Service sites at King’s Mountain, Guilford Courthouse, and Yorktown.

  For reading and commenting on the manuscript, I am indebted to Admiral John Baldwin, Michae
l Crawford, Richard Duncan, Larrie Ferreiro, William Fowler, Peter Gow, John Hattendorf, Peter Henriques, Michael Hill, Bruce Miller, Jennifer McArdle Philbrick, Melissa Philbrick, Samuel Philbrick, Thomas Philbrick, and Admiral James Stavridis.

  Jenny Pouech was a huge help when it came to securing permissions for the images in this book. Jeffrey Ward did his usual stellar job with the maps. Thanks to Nate Roberts, Greg Derr, and John Mynttinen at Poets Corner Press on Nantucket for all the copying help.

  At Viking, I have had the privilege to work with the incomparable Wendy Wolf for twenty years and counting. Many thanks also to Brian Tart, Andrea Schulz, Bruce Giffords, Louise Braverman, Chris Smith, Terezia Cicel, Kate Stark, and Marysarah Quinn. Thanks also to Kathryn Court and Patrick Nolan at Penguin. Thanks to Jason Ramirez for the jacket design.

  My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, has provided me with essential guidance for more than twenty years. Here’s to another decade together. Thanks also to his coworkers Laura Usselman, Aemilia Phillips, Hannah Schwartz, and to everyone at SKLA. Thanks to Rich Green at ICM Partners for all his support and enthusiasm. Many thanks to Meghan Walker of Tandem Literary for keeping me connected to my readers through my website and social media.

  Finally, special thanks to my wife, Melissa, and to all our family members for their patience and support.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ACRA—The American Campaigns of Rochambeau’s Army, vol. 1, edited by Howard C. Rice Jr. and Anne S. K. Brown

  ANM—Archives Nationales Marine in Paris

  DAW—Diary of the American War by Captain Johann Ewald, translated and edited by Joseph P. Tustin

  DAR—Documents of the American Revolution, edited by K. G. Davies

  GJG—General Joseph Graham and His Papers on North Carolina Revolutionary History, edited by William A. Graham

  LAAR—Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution, Selected Letters and Papers, edited by Stanley J. Idzerda

  LOC—Library of Congress

  MHS—Massachusetts Historical Society

  NA, ADM—National Archives, Records of the Admiralty, in Greenwich, England

  PGNG—The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, edited by Richard K. Showman and Dennis M. Conrad

  WGW—The Writings of George Washington, edited by John C. Fitzpatrick

  WMQ—William and Mary Quarterly

  I have adjusted the spelling and punctuation of quotations to make them more accessible to a modern audience—something that has already been done by the editors of several collections cited below.

  PREFACE ◆ THE LAND AND THE SEA

  For an account of French admiral d’Estaing’s unsuccessful operations in North America, see my Valiant Ambition, pp. 216–19, 251–53. As far as the pivotal nature of the Battle of the Chesapeake, Harold Larrabee in Decision at the Chesapeake describes it as “the one decisive engagement” of the Revolutionary War while also citing Emil Reich’s claim that “it deserves the name of ‘British naval Waterloo off Cape Henry,’” p. xiii. According to W. M. James in The British Navy in Adversity, “Yorktown has often been described as one of the ‘decisive battles of the world,’ but it was the naval skirmish off the Chesapeake that was decisive,” p. 299. One of the few authors to give George Washington (subsequently referred to as GW) his due when it comes to his understanding of sea power is Dudley Knox in The Naval Genius of George Washington: “The cause of American Independence was indeed fortunate in having combined in Washington the rare qualities of a great general and a great naval strategist,” p. 6.

  CHAPTER 1 ◆ THE BUILDING STORM

  The Marquis de Barbé-Marbois’s Oct. 15, 1779, account of the sail from Fishkill to West Point with GW at the helm is in a note in The Papers of George Washington, 22:443. For information regarding GW’s youth in the Tidewater, I have looked to Jack Warren’s “The Childhood of George Washington” and Philip Levy’s Where the Cherry Tree Grew. Levy describes Ferry Farm as being painted red so as to give it “the appearance of being built in more expensive brick when viewed from a distance,” p. 46. David Humphreys’s unfinished manuscript Life of General Washington is particularly interesting because it includes insertions on the part of Washington that either correct or expand upon Humphreys’s account of his life. In one of those remarks, Washington wrote that his half brother Lawrence “received many distinguished marks of patronage and favor,” p. 8. Levy writes in Where the Cherry Tree Grew of how Lawrence’s proposal that his younger brother embark on a naval career placed him “at the center of a tug-of-war” between Lawrence and Mary Ball Washington, p. 64. The youthful GW’s insistence that “he will be steady and thankfully follow” his brother’s advice is in William Fairfax’s Sept. 10, 1746, letter to Lawrence Washington in Moncure Conway’s Barons of the Potomac and the Rappahannock, p. 238. Jack Warren in “The Childhood of George Washington” cites the cousin’s claim that “he was ten times more afraid of Mary than he was of his own parents,” p. 5799. While I agree with Warren’s insistence that there “is no evidence that Washington was enthusiastic” about Lawrence’s plan for him to enter the royal navy (p. 5808), I have less sympathy than he does for the position of Washington’s mother. While Warren insists that there “is no justification for the romantic tradition that Mary intervened at the last moment” (p. 5808), GW passed over without comment Humphreys’s claim that he had “his baggage prepared for embarkation but the plan was abandoned in consequence of the earnest solicitations of his mother,” p. 8. Humphreys’s description of Mary’s “entreaties and tears,” as well as his supposition that Washington might have become “an Admiral of distinction” if he’d followed Lawrence’s advice is in his Life of General Washington, p. 102. According to Samuel Eliot Morison in “The Young Man George Washington,” Mary “was a selfish and exacting mother, whom most of her children avoided as early as they could; to whom they did their duty, but rendered little love,” p. 40, adding, “Yet for one thing Americans may well be grateful to Mary Ball: her selfishness lost George Washington an opportunity to become a midshipman in the Royal Navy,” p. 41.

  William Fairfax reports that the young GW referred to Lawrence as his “best friend” in his Sept. 10, 1746, letter to Lawrence in Conway’s Barons of the Potomac, p. 238. Levy cites GW’s 1749 letter to Lawrence about his brother’s cough, p. 75. The Diaries of George Washington, edited by Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, vol. 1, contains a useful editorial note titled “Voyage to Barbados, 1751–52” that refers to GW’s use of “nautical acronyms” in his diary, p. 26. According to W. H. Smyth’s Sailor’s Word Book, hull down “is said of a ship when at such a distance that, from the convexity of the globe, only her masts and sails are to be seen,” p. 395. GW’s Oct. 19, 1751, description of how the seas are “jostling in heaps” is in the Diaries, 1:58, as is the entry “strongly attacked with the smallpox,” p. 82. Levy cites Lawrence’s letter in which he says he will “hurry home to my grave,” p. 75. Robert Dalzell and Lee Baldwin Dalzell in George Washington’s Mount Vernon write insightfully about GW’s renovation of Mount Vernon and how “[t]he placement of Washington’s elegant new parlor and dining room on the other side of the ground floor reversed that orientation, which symbolically may have been the most important of all the changes he made,” p. 52. According to James Flexner in George Washington: The Forge of Experience, GW “never showed any taste for the ocean, traveling, even at greater inconvenience, overland,” p. 31. The Dalzells make the same point, claiming that GW was “more at home on a horse than he would ever be on water,” while citing GW’s 1760 reference to America as an “infant woody country,” in George Washington’s Mount Vernon, p. 53.

  William Fowler in Rebels Under Sail estimates that that the cost of the Continental navy amounted to about 8 percent of all Congressional spending, p. 70. Jonathan Dull describes the efforts of the Continental navy as inflicting “no more than a few pinpricks against the British navy” in “Was the Cont
inental Navy a Mistake?,” pp. 168–69. For an alternative view, see Sam Willis’s The Struggle for Sea Power, in which he argues that the mere existence of an American navy “could, in essence, export the revolution, and show the world that the rebellious colonies were acting as a sovereign state with major pretensions at being a world power,” p. 92. See also William S. Dudley and Michael Palmer, “No Mistake About It: A Response to Jonathan R. Dull,” The American Neptune 45 (1985), pp. 244–48. My thanks to Michael Crawford for bringing these two sources to my attention. On the other hand, this kind of international image building did little to fulfill GW’s immediate needs during the Revolution. GW’s Oct. 4, 1780, letter to James Duane in which he refers to “false hopes” is in WGW, 20:118, as is his Oct. 5 letter to John Cadwallader in which he writes of “accumulating distresses,” p. 122. Larrie Ferreiro discusses the French government’s program of revanche in the years after the Seven Years’ War in Brothers at Arms, pp. 19–38. Jonathan Dull in The French Navy and American Independence writes insightfully about France’s aims in joining the American Revolutionary War against Britain. According to Dull, French foreign minister Vergennes realized that “the solution to his problems lay in reconciliation with England. . . . Anglo-French cooperation could greatly limit the power of the other continental powers which had great armies but not the finances to engage in major wars. . . . A half-century before, the England and France of Walpole and Fleury had cooperated as equals; France had been secure, but now England was the England of Pitt: arrogant, aloof, contemptuous of France. To reduce England to a position of equality, France had to take from her a share of her strength, her monopoly of American trade and markets,” pp. 10–11. Emmanuel de Fontainieu in The Hermione: Lafayette’s Warship and the American Revolution provides a good summary of the jousting between the French and British navies from 1778 through 1780, pp. 129–57. Andrew O’Shaughnessy in The Men Who Lost America details how the British allocated their fleet between the Caribbean and North America, p. 224. GW writes of the “chasm” between him and the French fleet in the Caribbean in a Nov. 10, 1779, letter to his stepson John Parke Custis, in WGW, 17:90–91.