George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  As a guest aboard the Eagle, Brant also won the admiration of Lord Howe’s personal secretary, Ambrose Serle, who noted that he “was remarkably easy and sensible in his discourse,” expressing “an air of gravity, which rendered it to me the more engaging. His remarks were pertinent, and bespoke a strong natural understanding.” Serle was especially impressed that Brant had “translated [a] great part of the English New Testament into the Mohawk language.” Indeed, in Serle’s opinion, Brant and a fellow chief were “abundantly less savages” and “more refined and more sensible than half at least of our ship’s company.”68

  To tackle Brant’s people, Sullivan was given an army of 2,500 veteran Continentals, supplemented by artillery and militia: about 4,000 in all. He proceeded with caution, and on August 29, defeated a force of outgunned Iroquois warriors and Loyalist rangers at Newtown. When they fell back to the British fort at Niagara on the Canadian border, the Iroquois heartlands—the Mohawk Valley and Genesee Country—lay undefended. Following Washington’s instructions, which reflected the strategy used against the Cherokees by James Grant in 1761, Sullivan implemented a systematic scorched-earth policy that destroyed the Iroquois cornfields and villages. Reporting the results of Sullivan’s “plan of chastisement” to Lafayette in September, Washington believed it would convince the Iroquois that their “cruelties are not to pass with impunity” and that they had been incited to “acts of barbarism by a nation which is unable to protect them.” Sullivan had “burnt between 15 and 20 towns,” along with “their crops and every thing that was to be found,” sending the inhabitants “fleeing in the utmost confusion, consternation and distress towards Niagara, distant 100 miles through an uninhabited wilderness.”69

  As the Seneca chief Cornplanter reminded Washington a decade later, by authorizing this comprehensive devastation, he had given new resonance to his old Indian name: “When your army entered the country of the Six Nations,” Cornplanter told him, “we called you Town Destroyer; and to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale and our children cling close to the neck of their mothers.”70 Although Sullivan’s expedition avenged Iroquois depredations, it did not cow the Six Nations’ warriors: incensed by their losses and increasingly reliant upon British support, in both 1780 and 1781, they fell upon the New York frontier with renewed fury.

  For all its ferocity, this ongoing Indian war remained distinct from operations on the eastern seaboard. There, the strategic situation had undergone a dramatic and, for Washington, perplexing shift. Requested to help Congress’s commander in the Southern Department—Major General Benjamin Lincoln—d’Estaing returned from the Caribbean and by September 1, 1779, was anchored off the Georgian coast. He’d no intention of lingering, but as long as the West Indian hurricane season ruled out further operations there, he was willing to join a Franco-American offensive against Savannah. On September 12, he landed 4,500 troops; combined with Lincoln’s army of about 3,000, they surrounded Prevost’s outnumbered garrison. But the siege moved slowly—far too slowly for d’Estaing, whose crews rapidly succumbed to sickness. When a bombardment failed to intimidate Prevost and his men, d’Estaing boldly resolved to storm the city’s defenses; always a risky undertaking, this decision went against the advice of a majority of officers. Like Washington’s cautious counselors during the siege of Boston, they were right to be wary. When the assault was launched on October 9, it was beaten back with more than 800 casualties; d’Estaing himself was seriously wounded. Although Lincoln wished to continue operations, d’Estaing had no desire to stay in Georgia. The siege was lifted on October 18, 1779. For a second time, direct French intervention had failed utterly to deliver the expected results.

  That September, after first intelligence arrived of d’Estaing’s appearance off Savannah, Clinton had gathered all of his available forces in New York City, evacuating Newport, Rhode Island, and his remaining posts in the Hudson Highlands. While these withdrawals indicated that a fresh British offensive in the north was unlikely, this massing of manpower nonetheless made it possible for Clinton to contemplate a strike elsewhere. Building upon the tidings of d’Estaing’s total defeat, on Boxing Day 1779, Clinton set sail from New York with 7,600 men: his objective was Charleston, South Carolina, where he had been thwarted so ignominiously by Charles Lee in 1776. If South Carolina was restored to Crown control, Lord George Germain now believed, it could become the base for a British thrust northward, harnessing resurgent Loyalists to methodically overrun and pacify the remaining rebel states.

  Although he longed to attack New York—the hub of British strength in America since the summer of 1776, and the scene of his own most humiliating defeats as commander of the Continental Army—Washington was powerless to exploit the absence of Clinton and thousands of his men far to the south. He was reduced to inactivity by a formidable combination of circumstances that were all beyond his control. The winter of 1779–80 was the coldest on record, and his army’s sojourn at Jockey Hollow, near Morristown, New Jersey (the same ground where it had quartered in January 1777, after Princeton), proved unremittingly grim, worse even than Valley Forge. On December 16, 1779, just days after occupying his new winter quarters, Washington sent a blunt circular letter to the states. The army’s supply situation was “beyond description alarming,” with all its magazines bare and the commissaries lacking the cash or credit to replenish them, he wrote. His troops had already been on half rations for five or six weeks; there was scarcely enough bread for three more days, and once that was gone they must glean the surrounding countryside. In the past there had been temporary glitches caused by “accidental delays in forwarding supplies,” Washington added, but this latest crisis was different in magnitude: “We have never experienced a like extremity at any period of the war,” he warned. Without “extraordinary exertions” by the states from which the army drew its supplies, it must “infallibly disband in a fortnight.”71

  The crisis was exacerbated by the unrelenting weather. Snowstorms were bad enough for poorly clad, shivering soldiers obliged to shelter under canvas until they had built ramshackle huts, but the deep drifts that soon accumulated also made the region’s roads impassable for supply wagons. Once local depots were emptied, there would be no prospect of relief from farther afield for weeks to come. Yet with the economy undergoing financial meltdown, local farmers refused to sell their surplus produce for the drastically depreciated Continental dollars. By the onset of 1780, Washington’s ravenous Continentals were plundering surrounding farmsteads of whatever they could find. Washington was well aware of the dire consequences of such pilfering for his army’s discipline and also for its precarious base of civilian support but, given the genuine distress of his men, hesitated to punish them. To prevent an escalation of marauding, Washington appealed to the county magistrates of New Jersey to impose requisitions of cattle and grain. Given the urgency of the situation, he had no doubt that the specified quotas would be delivered voluntarily: if not, they would be taken by force. According to Dr. James Thacher, Washington’s uncompromising invitation was “attended with the happiest success,” yielding sufficient supplies to save “the army from destruction.”72

  But this respite was temporary. With their bellies soon empty again, Washington’s desperate veterans continued to scour the vicinity for any morsel. General Orders of January 28, 1780 announced that Washington would no longer excuse “the plundering and licentious spirit of the soldiery”; according to the outraged magistrates, scarcely a night passed “without gangs of soldiers going out of camp and committing every species of robbery, depredation and the grossest personal insults.” For the future, any man found straggling beyond the sentries after retreat beating risked a hundred lashes on the spot; those detected in robbery or violence might receive up to five hundred lashes, at the discretion of the officer of the guard.73 The situation was so desperate that Washington was now prepared to exceed the penalties laid down in the army’s Articles of War. As Dr. Thacher testified, during the cr
ackdown, heavy floggings were inflicted, although many of the recipients made a point of receiving “the severest stripes without uttering a groan, or once shrinking from the lash.” Thacher attributed this to “stubbornness or pride”—along with the men’s habit of chewing a lead bullet “while under the lash, till it is made quite flat and jagged.”74

  Like the harsh weather, the supply crisis continued well into the spring of 1780. When Joseph Plumb Martin of the Connecticut Continentals arrived in camp in late May, he once again encountered his familiar companion, “the monster hunger.” For several days after rejoining the main army, Martin and his comrades “got a little musty bread,” with “a little beef about every other day”: but before long, he recalled bitterly, “we got nothing at all.” Now “exasperated beyond endurance,” such veterans faced a stark choice: starve to death or quit the army and go home. It was a cruel dilemma for men who, Martin maintained, were “truly patriotic,” who “loved their country” and had already suffered “every thing short of death in its cause.” Their discontent finally erupted on May 25. According to Private Martin, after a day spent “growling like sore headed dogs,” by evening roll call the soldiers were showing their teeth, defiantly back-talking their officers and ignoring orders. When the adjutant of Martin’s regiment called one of the men “a mutinous rascal,” his comrades spontaneously turned out and formed up on the parade ground beside him in a menacing show of solidarity. In an ensuing brawl, several officers were roughed up, and Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs of the 6th Connecticut Regiment was wounded with a bayonet. The outbreak was contained before it could escalate by a timely issue of provisions and the arrival of steady Pennsylvanian troops but nonetheless served warning that many seasoned Continentals were nearing the end of their patience with Congress.75

  This latest crisis had barely subsided when Washington received news of a shattering patriot defeat in the south. There Clinton’s switch of front had yielded spectacular dividends. On February 11, 1780 his storm-lashed force was within striking distance of its objective, Charleston. General Lincoln awaited Clinton’s advance within the port’s fortifications. On the night of April 1–2, the British began digging their siege lines. Enduring heavy bombardment, and with his escape route cut, Lincoln was ready to surrender the city on condition that he and his army went free. Disinclined to haggle, Clinton offered the alternatives of unconditional surrender or a bloody storm. Pressurized by Charleston’s skittish citizens, on May 12, Lincoln capitulated. Some 2,500 Continentals—virtually the entire regular army of the Southern Department—became prisoners of war, while hundreds of captured militiamen were released on parole. Captain Peebles of the 42nd described the Continentals as a “ragged dirty looking set of people as usual, but [with] more appearance of discipline than what we have seen formerly.” Some of their officers were “decent looking men”; they included another “old acquaintance” of Peebles from happier days, Colonel Nathaniel Gist of the 3rd Virginian Continentals, the son of Washington’s wilderness guide, Christopher.76 The fall of Charleston was an American defeat to rival Fort Washington, and it kindled British hopes that the revived southern strategy might yet hold the key to victory. Warned of the approach of a fresh French expeditionary force and fearing for his New York garrison, Clinton returned north on June 8, 1780 with 4,000 men, leaving Lord Cornwallis to continue the reconquest of the south.

  In the north, by contrast, the strategic situation remained stagnated. Even the arrival of the long-anticipated French fleet, which decanted 5,500 regular troops onto Rhode Island in mid-July, failed to break the deadlock. Although the French general, Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, would fall under Washington’s orders, his naval colleague Commodore the Chevalier de Ternay held an independent command; this meant that he could veto any joint operations that the French disliked.77 As Ternay’s fleet had been promptly blockaded in Newport by the Royal Navy, obliging Rochambeau to summon help from the New England militia to reinforce the defenses, there was clearly no immediate prospect for a new Franco-American offensive, whether against New York, or anywhere else.

  The fifty-five-year-old Rochambeau was an experienced officer with a distinguished record of service in both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. From the outset, Washington set about building a professional relationship with him and his countrymen. As he spoke no French himself, he used his trusted confidant Lafayette as a go-between: “All the information he gives and all the propositions he makes,” he told the French commander, “I entreat you will consider as coming from me.” Mindful of the tensions and resentments that had followed the collapse of the Franco-American attempt upon Rhode Island two years before, in announcing the arrival of Rochambeau’s force, Washington’s General Orders expressed a hope that “the only contention” between the Americans and the troops of His Most Christian Majesty would be to “excel each other in good offices and in the display of every military virtue.”78

  That summer brought more bleak tidings from the south. Against Washington’s advice, Congress sent Horatio Gates to assume command in that troubled sector. On August 16, 1780, the victor of Saratoga suffered a crushing defeat at Camden, South Carolina. Faced with Cornwallis’s veterans, Gates blundered by forming his entire left wing of militia, without the customary backbone of Continentals. The militia fled immediately, many without even firing their weapons, although the Continentals on the right staged a stubborn stand before being outflanked and broken; their bravery cost them dear, and the slain included the tough Bavarian veteran Baron de Kalb. One survivor, Colonel Otho Williams of the 6th Maryland Regiment, blamed the utter rout upon the “infamous cowardice of the militia of Virginia and North Carolina [which] gave the enemy every advantage over our few regular troops.” To Alexander Hamilton, Camden demonstrated “the necessity of changing our system” and eschewing amateur soldiers: Gates’s “passion for militia, I fancy will be a little cured, and he will cease to think them the best bulwark of American liberty,” he wrote.79

  For Washington, too, “the late disaster in Carolina” bolstered his consistent argument that it was fatal to depend upon militia. Writing to the latest president of Congress, Samuel Huntington, he rammed home the old message yet again: “Regular troops alone are equal to the exigencies of modern war, as well for defense as offence.” While useful as “light troops to be scattered in the woods and plague rather than do serious injury to the enemy,” militia could never acquire the “firmness requisite for the real business of fighting”: that prized quality “could only be attained by a constant course of discipline and service.”80 In fact, as Washington’s trusty subordinates in the south would soon demonstrate, provided their limitations were recognized, militiamen had the potential to complement the Continentals, not simply as hovering skirmishers, but in set-piece engagements.

  Building upon his success, Cornwallis marched into North Carolina, once again chasing the chimera of active Loyalist support. On September 26, he reached Charlotte, pausing to give his weary troops a breather. Meanwhile, to the west, Major Patrick Ferguson—the same officer who’d had Washington in his sights at Brandywine three years earlier—was advancing toward Charlotte at the head of a force of Loyalist provincials and militia. But the wild backcountry of the Carolinas was a hostile environment for Crown sympathizers: on October 7, Ferguson’s little army, which had taken up a defensive position on King’s Mountain, was overwhelmed by Tennessee backwoodsmen in a pitiless encounter. The gallant Ferguson died in a hail of rifle balls, along with many of his men; the major’s body was treated with unmerited disrespect, with the victors taking turns to urinate upon it.81 Some survivors were singled out for summary execution. Small in scale, King’s Mountain epitomized the brutality and vindictiveness of what had become a virtual civil war in the south—exactly the kind of unrestrained irregular conflict that Washington had been so keen to avoid elsewhere.

  Back in New York after his Charleston triumph, Clinton faced his own share of frustration
s in 1780. Still in aggressive mode, he had wanted to attack Rochambeau’s infantry on Rhode Island, but his curmudgeonly naval colleague, Lord Howe’s successor, Vice Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot, was lukewarm, and the strike was canceled. In addition, an advance by Washington toward King’s Bridge—the route from Manhattan Island to the mainland—gave cause for caution. On September 14, a far more dynamic sailor than Arbuthnot, Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney, reached New York bringing ten more ships of the line. Unlike Arbuthnot, Rodney was game to join Clinton’s redcoats in a crack at the French. But by now the mercurial Clinton had changed his mind: with all the delays, the enemy had fortified themselves too strongly to justify an attack.

  Still adjusting to their new surroundings, Rochambeau and his naval partner Ternay were determined to maintain a defensive stance. At a strategic summit held at Hartford, Connecticut, on September 20–22, 1780, Washington secured their agreement to his contention that “of all the enterprises which may be undertaken, the most important and decisive is the reduction of New York, which is the center and focus of all the British forces.” However, his suggestion that the French land and sea forces should separate, with the fleet heading for Boston and the troops reinforcing the American army above Manhattan, was rejected, Rochambeau and Ternay “observing that they had pointed instructions from their court for the fleet and army to support each other.” In an admission that boded ill for future allied operations, Versailles had ordered that the French troops should be confined “as much as possible on islands,” so minimizing friction with “American citizens.” Even the incentive of a joint “winter expedition to Canada”—a prospect that Washington had only recently regarded with horror—failed to excite Rochambeau: before “concerting” any such plan he must consult the ministry in France, “as he imagined there might be some political objections to the measure.” In short, there would be no offensive that year.82