George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  Making steady progress, Washington’s men paraded through Philadelphia on September 2 in hot, dry weather. Knowing that the ladies were watching from their windows as they passed through the “splendid city,” Dr. Thacher regretted the thick dust that obscured the tramping columns.40 Given their ragged condition, some Continentals may have welcomed the dense pall kicked up by their bare feet. The French, who marched in over the next two days, had no such reason to hide their blushes. As Closen proudly reported, they “were much acclaimed by the inhabitants, who could never have imagined that French troops could be so handsome.” Compared with Washington’s threadbare Continentals, they must have seemed like soldiers from some fanciful oil painting: Closen’s own unit, the German-speaking Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment, wore sky-blue coats set off with citrus-yellow facings, although he conceded that it was the Soissonnais Regiment, “with its rose-colored lapels and facings, in addition to its grenadiers’ caps with great rose and white plumes,” that especially “impressed the fair sex.”41

  During the march to Philadelphia through New Jersey, Washington had remained unsure whether Cornwallis would maintain his positions straddling the York River. By the time he reached the city on September 2, it seemed clear that the earl intended to stand his ground, but Washington was now racked with anxiety over the whereabouts of de Grasse. He confided to Lafayette that he was “distressed beyond expression,” particularly as a British fleet was also reported to be steering for the Chesapeake. This worrying intelligence was correct: Admirals Graves and Hood, with nineteen ships of the line, had sailed from New York on August 31, while Clinton had embarked 4,000 troops ready to follow in their wake once the seas had been cleared of the enemy. If the British ships reached the Chesapeake first, Washington fretted, it would “frustrate all our flattering prospects in that quarter.” By now those hopes rested upon the elimination of Cornwallis: should the earl’s retreat by sea be cut off by French naval superiority, then Washington didn’t doubt that Lafayette would do everything he could to baffle his escape by land. Two days later, when he reported developments to Nathanael Greene, Washington remained in an agony of uncertainty. There was still no news of de Grasse or of Barras, who had left Rhode Island with his squadron carrying the French siege artillery on August 24. Washington added: “From the circumstances related, you will readily conceive, that the present time is as interesting and anxious a moment, as I have ever experienced.” He nonetheless hoped for “the most propitious issue of our united exertions,” which would trap Cornwallis and force him to surrender.42

  On September 5, Washington finally learned that de Grasse had arrived safely in Chesapeake Bay. Normally so restrained, he could no longer contain his excitement. Sailing with Rochambeau on the Delaware River toward Chester, Pennsylvania, Closen spotted “General Washington, standing on the shore and waving his hat and white handkerchief joyfully.” When they disembarked, Washington reported that de Grasse had brought twenty-eight ships of the line and 3,000 troops: the infantry had already landed to strengthen Lafayette’s force and prevent Cornwallis from breaking out overland, while the admiral would block his escape by sea. Baron du Bourg noted in his diary: “From this moment it was openly announced that we were marching upon Yorktown.” With so much at stake it was an emotional moment. Washington and Rochambeau “embraced warmly,” and the whole army shared their “joy in having their calculations work out so well.” For once, events had run like clockwork. Closen mused that Rochambeau “must indeed have felt deep satisfaction in having the time draw near when his long-considered plans would be executed and in winning the approval of General Washington, who originally had been bent upon a campaign against New York.”43

  In 1788, when quizzed about his own role in the genesis of the Yorktown campaign, Washington remembered things rather differently. He maintained that for almost a year he’d had no intention of attacking New York. Every attempt had been made to convince the enemy otherwise, but that was just an elaborate smoke screen. Even before the intervention of de Grasse, Washington remembered, it was “the fixed determination to strike the enemy on the most vulnerable quarter.” As New York was too strong, “the only hesitation that remained was between an attack upon the British army in Virginia or that in Charleston.” Following “several communications” and “incidents,” he recalled, the enemy’s “post in Virginia” was upgraded from a “provisional and strongly expected” target to “the definitive and certain object of the campaign.” 44 Either Washington’s memory was playing tricks upon him, or he was guilty of wishful thinking; as already seen, from the time of the Hartford conference in September 1780 until the following August, his gaze remained fixed upon the garrison of New York: if the men and supplies he wanted had materialized, he would have assaulted Manhattan. Yet neither could Rochambeau claim the lion’s share of the credit that the loyal Closen considered his due. When the French general proposed the Chesapeake as an objective in May 1781, he had envisaged a hit-and-run raid, not a full-blown commitment of sea and land power: and, as Washington’s subordinate, he was ready to abide by his wishes should he insist that New York must remain the priority. More than anything, it was de Grasse’s unilateral decision to sail for Virginia that paved the way for the operation, although only Cornwallis’s sudden vulnerability, which no one could have predicted when the admiral left the West Indies, provided the opportunity for the combined allied forces to land a devastating and potentially decisive blow. Given these exceptionally fortuitous circumstances, the real father of the Yorktown campaign was surely Washington’s faithful friend “Providence.”

  Yet as the allies moved south in September 1781, there was no guarantee of victory. In Maryland, Washington was once again served notice that, while his tattered and shoeless Continentals might not look like proper soldiers, they regarded themselves as such and expected to be treated accordingly. When Major General Benjamin Lincoln marched the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania Continentals to Head of Elk, they refused to continue without part of the back pay owed to them. These were not men to be trifled with: despite the firing squads of January, they were still demanding their “rights.” Given their timing Washington had little choice but to appease them. When desperate appeals to the newly appointed superintendent of finance, Robert Morris, yielded just $20,000, Washington was obliged to approach Rochambeau, who selflessly donated 50,000 of the 150,000 livres that he still had with him; this made it possible to issue the men a month’s pay in coin. Like the extraordinary bounty tendered after the Battle of Trenton, money talked. As Closen noted, this hard cash “raised spirits to the required level.” The next day, September 8, the pacified Continentals happily embarked for the voyage down Chesapeake Bay.45

  Having surmounted the latest hurdle in his path, Washington rode on ahead of his army, keen to start laying the groundwork for the impending siege of Yorktown. On September 9, Washington reached his “own seat at Mount Vernon.” It was more than six years since he had last seen his beloved home on the bluff above the Potomac River, and his long letters to cousin Lund leave no doubt that it was never far from his thoughts. Frustratingly, if predictably, Washington’s diary reveals nothing of the emotions he must have felt at that moment, simply noting that he stayed for three nights before pushing on again for Williamsburg. During that time, Rochambeau and the Chevalier de Chastellux were Washington’s guests. According to Washington’s secretary, Colonel Jonathan Trumbull, Mount Vernon had accommodated a “numerous family” of staff officers who enjoyed “great appearance of opulence and real exhibitions of hospitality and princely entertainment.” This sociable interlude was all too brief, as Washington was eager to meet Admiral de Grasse and agree “upon a proper plan of cooperation.” On September 13, while on the road to Williamsburg, the allied generals and their staffs heard reports that de Grasse had left Chesapeake Bay on September 5 to engage a British fleet; agonizingly, the outcome of the encounter was not yet known. Closen captured the tense mood, reporting that all were “very anxious to learn th
e result of the battle and if M. de Grasse [had] re-entered the bay, since we were aware of the absolute necessity for us to have his fleet in the Chesapeake to protect our operations.”46

  The wait for news was mercifully short. The following day, on the final leg to Williamsburg, the generals received intelligence that de Grasse was back on station after fending off the combined fleets of Graves and Hood. They had left New York on August 31, unaware that de Grasse had already reached the Chesapeake the day before. His pronounced superiority in ships was another unpleasant surprise: on the assurance of Admiral Rodney, they’d expected him to leave the West Indies with part of his fleet, not all of it. After an inconclusive cannonade, the fleets shadowed each other for two more days as they drifted south, allowing Barras’s squadron from Newport to slip into the bay with the vital siege artillery. No less crucially, after assessing the damage to his ships, Graves reluctantly returned to New York to refit.

  Increasingly concerned for Cornwallis, Clinton authorized a belated diversion intended to draw Washington’s attention back to the north. Benedict Arnold led a ferocious attack on the coast of his native Connecticut, torching New London and unleashing an assault on Fort Griswold, near Groton, in which the garrison was massacred after rejecting a summons to surrender.47 But Washington now refused to be deflected from his purpose, even by the hated Arnold. His arrival at Williamsburg on September 14, attended by just a handful of hard-riding aides and servants, quickly turned into another triumphal entry, with the French and Continental regiments parading and townsfolk flocking to catch a glimpse of him. According to Major St. George Tucker of the Virginian militia, the presence of the commander in chief had an immediate effect upon morale, giving “new hopes and spirits to the Army.”48

  On September 17, Washington and Rochambeau left for the meeting with de Grasse aboard his flagship, the Ville de Paris, off Cape Henry. The admiral agreed to extend his stay for a further fortnight, until the end of October. However, it was unlikely that he would be able to lend his strength to any other combined operations, which ruled out the attack on Charleston that the allied generals had mooted. Washington and Rochambeau returned to Williamsburg on September 22, knowing that they now had little more than a month in which to subdue Yorktown before the screening fleet departed, taking 3,000 French troops with it. Facing a fixed deadline, the allies couldn’t simply sit back and blockade the town in hopes of starving out the defenders. They would have to prosecute a formal siege, digging trenches and bombarding the garrison into submission or, if Cornwallis stubbornly refused to yield, taking his fortifications by storm.49

  Writing to de Grasse on September 25, Washington was confident that with “their superiority of strength and means” they had enough time, particularly for an operation that was “reducible to calculation.”50 This was quite literally true: of all the branches of eighteenth-century warfare, siegecraft was the most scientific, following a recognized sequence of moves that methodically yet inexorably increased pressure on the besieged: given enough men, guns, and munitions, the result should not be in doubt. By the time Washington wrote to de Grasse, the entire allied army had concentrated at Williamsburg: some 16,000 strong, of which just 3,000 were local militia; it outnumbered Cornwallis’s forces by two to one. In addition, in its swampy fastness, the earl’s army was rapidly succumbing to fevers, with barely 5,000 men fit for duty.

  After entering the James River, most of the transports carrying the American and French troops had disembarked near Jamestown. As the erudite Dr. Thacher observed, this “was the place where the English first established themselves in Virginia, in 1607.” Despite its historical significance, with just two houses still standing, the settlement no longer deserved to be called a town; its decline symbolized the degree to which the Old Dominion, like the rest of Britain’s former colonies, was outgrowing its roots and slaking off the past. By a remarkable coincidence, the birthplace of British America lay within an easy march of Yorktown, where the old regime would soon receive its deathblow.

  For a Yankee like Thacher, Virginia’s Tidewater presented an unfamiliar and sometimes disturbing scene. The region was famed for its excellent tobacco, while cotton, Indian corn, hemp, and flax were also cultivated. Yet, as Thacher reported with disgust, these crops all depended upon the labor of slaves, “a species of the human race, who have been cruelly wrested from their native country and doomed to perpetual bondage, while their masters are manfully contending for freedom, and the natural rights of man.”51

  For the many black soldiers in Washington’s army—both freedmen and slaves hoping to win their liberty as substitutes for whites unwilling to fight—the Virginian campaign must have stirred still stronger emotions. Such men included a veteran of the 2nd New Jersey Regiment with the suitably Republican name of Oliver Cromwell. “Brought up a farmer” and enlisting in the Continental Army in 1776 while in his early twenties, Cromwell had already fought under Washington’s command at Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, and Monmouth. Cromwell’s story was highlighted in the spring of 1852, when his local newspaper interviewed him on his one hundredth birthday. As New Jersey’s Burlington Gazette informed its readers, while many of them were familiar with this “old colored man,” few knew that he was “among the survivors of the gallant army who fought for the liberties of our country ‘in the days which tried men’s souls.’” It is a remarkable story, but Cromwell’s discharge certificate, signed by Washington himself, survives to affirm it.52 Cromwell died in January 1853: old as he was, even he hadn’t lived long enough to see the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson’s trinity of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” become the inalienable rights of all his countrymen. It would take another, far bloodier civil war to redress the glaring irony behind America’s fratricidal struggle for independence from Great Britain.

  At Williamsburg, the allies braced themselves for their final push to Yorktown, some twelve miles off. As he prepared to close in for the kill, Washington reverted to aggressive mode. General Orders issued to the American troops now recommended them to “place their principal reliance on the bayonet, that they may prove the vanity of the boast which the British make of their particular prowess in deciding battles with that weapon.” Joseph Plumb Martin remembered that they were directed to “exchange but one round” with the enemy before deciding matters with the bayonet.53

  General Wolfe, who had zealously championed such “volley and bayonet” tactics in the British Army during the 1750s and had famously demonstrated their effectiveness on Quebec’s Plains of Abraham, would certainly have approved of Washington’s methods, if not his cause. Such pointed directives offer further evidence of the striking extent to which Washington’s army now resembled its British enemy. Despite enduring popular perceptions of an organization that prided itself upon marksmanship, by the climax of the long war with Britain the Continental Army was increasingly putting its faith in cold steel, the trademark of the professionals. This gave immense satisfaction to Washington’s drillmaster, Baron Steuben. Reporting on the progress of his reforms to Franklin in September 1779, Steuben wrote proudly: “Though we are so young that we scarce begin to walk, we can already take Stony Points and Paulus Hooks with the point of the bayonet, without firing a single shot.”54

  The same trend was taken even further in orders governing the arming of Washington’s officers. Rather than shouldering the “fusils,” or light muskets, carried by their British counterparts, American officers were required to equip themselves with spear-like “espontoons.” At first sight, this was a curiously conservative move: while traditionally seen as the European officer’s badge of rank, the espontoon had long since been abandoned by the British Army in America; General Braddock, so often taken to epitomize outmoded Old World methods, had ordered his officers to leave theirs behind before marching for Fort Duquesne in 1755. Yet it is clear that Washington regarded the espontoon as especially suited to his conception of the ideal officer. At Valley Forge in December 1777, he ordered every officer �
��to provide himself with a half-pike or spear as soon as possible—fire-arms, when made use of, withdrawing their attention too much from their men.” Washington had a point: at White Plains, as Clinton noted with annoyance, the British attack on Chatterton Hill almost stalled after an officer paused to fire and reload his fusil. In American hands, the espontoon was not simply a symbol of authority, but a lethal weapon: Anthony Wayne requested fifty for his officers in 1779 and wielded one himself at the storming of Stony Point. Orders issued at Morristown in April 1780 warned that no officer, including captains, was “to mount guard or go on detachment” or “appear with his regiment under arms” without an espontoon. Two years later, Washington was still extolling the virtues of “that useful and ornamental weapon.” In another intriguing throwback to the clashes of antiquity that so fascinated Washington and his contemporaries, the Continental Army’s officers went into battle at Cowpens, Guilford Court House, and Yorktown armed much like the Spartans at Thermopylae.55

  While at Williamsburg Washington’s army received tidings of a bloody engagement in South Carolina in which Major General Nathanael Greene and his veterans had gathered fresh laurels. In his diary, Major St. George Tucker of the militia excitedly noted news of “a complete victory obtained over the British.” In fact, although Greene had written those very words to Lafayette, on September 8, he’d once again seen victory slide from his grasp. His attempt to surprise a British force at Eutaw Springs under Lord Rawdon’s successor, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Stewart, came frustratingly close to success. In what would be remembered as one of the most stubbornly contested fights of the war, Greene’s North and South Carolina militiamen performed well, standing firm and trading close-range volleys with Stewart’s redcoats. When Greene advanced his veteran Continentals, much of the British line caved in. But the right wing, under Major John Marjoribanks, held firm, repelling a cavalry charge and wounding and capturing its leader, Colonel William Washington. By now, Greene’s men had overrun Stewart’s camp. When their looting and drinking caused a breakdown of discipline, the redcoats’ staying power slowly turned the scales, just as it had at Germantown four years earlier. In another echo of that battle, the British rallied behind the walls of a substantial house before launching a decisive counterattack that drove the mortified Greene from the field.56