And that, despite London having been aware of French and Spanish invasion designs since early spring and having obtained such specific information as the names of troop unit commanders, the number of troopships, the quantity of stores aboard them, and the main targets, Portsmouth and Plymouth.
The British preparations were almost as inept as the French and Spanish. Lord North had sent the information about the French-Spanish plans to George III in a locked box; the king had lost the box’s only key, and a locksmith had to be summoned to break it open. Once the king read the materials in the box and understood the danger from the combined fleets of France and Spain, he offered to take active command of the British forces on land during the invasion.
That proved unnecessary. No large-scale invasion of the British Isles took place. Nor did any climactic sea battle, although the combined French and Spanish fleets did get into the Channel and sail about in late August and part of September, when, infrequently, they could best the wind. Fogs contributed to the absence of action. On several occasions, the Franco-Spanish fleet and the British one narrowly missed each other. As significant a contributing factor was the commanders’ timidity. A tough observer aboard Hardy’s flagship wrote of him, in words that could also be applied to the French and Spanish admirals in this endeavor, “He means to take as small a share of responsibility upon himself as possible … to procrastinate as long as he can and when he is obliged to act he will make Ministers responsible for the consequence if he fails.”
The largest armada assembled since 1588 for invading Britain came to naught—at a cost to France of one hundred million livres, much more than had been expended to aid the American rebels. Lafayette, summing it up in a letter to Congress, acknowledged that the Franco-Spanish invasion of Great Britain had failed, but at least it had “exhausted England and detain’d at home forces which would have done much mischief in other parts of the world.”
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The big invasion produced nothing, but John Paul Jones’s was still in the offing, though it had been delayed. In June and July, while the Bonhomme Richard was being repaired in Lorient, Jones had taken on additional hands, including former British sailors, and had to put down a potential mutiny by some of them. He also became ill. In early August, Sartine had dispatched Chaumont to the port to hasten Jones’s departure—and to meddle in the captains’ willingness to obey Jones’s commands. On August 9 Jones quickly left dockside and on August 14 passed the outer anchorage with the Bonhomme Richard, the Alliance, two French privateers, and three other French warships.
Once the small squadron was out of the harbor, one French privateer decided not to continue. Jones was powerless to halt his defection. The remaining six ships proceeded toward the Irish coast, taking several merchantmen. Problems cropped up everywhere, from Landais, whose ship fired at Jones’s, from the polyglot crew—the Irish members stole the flagship’s barge and rowed themselves ashore—from the desertion of another French naval vessel, and from the veering off of the second French privateer after capturing a prize and wanting to get it into port.
Jones, at odds with Landais, nonetheless continued to take merchantmen and menace the coast. “Not a day passed but we are receiving accounts of the depredations committed by Paul Jones and his squadron,” according to a letter that soon appeared in the London Evening Post. Jones then landed at Leith, Edinburgh’s seaport, aiming to exact a two-hundred-thousand-pound ransom in exchange for not burning the town, which was defenseless; but when the wind died suddenly Jones and his captains decided to return aboard and row themselves away, lest they be caught by the Royal Navy. Similar attempted raids and narrow escapes followed until September 22, when off the Yorkshire coast Jones spotted a fine target, a convoy of forty merchantmen. Able to seize some of them immediately, Jones learned that they were being guarded by two Royal Navy vessels, the larger being the Serapis, listed as forty-four guns but that Jones believed had between forty-six and fifty, mounted on two decks. In the ensuing fight off Flamborough Head, Serapis’s cannons ripped through the Bonhomme Richard so thoroughly that it was close to foundering, causing the British captain to ask Jones if he had struck his colors; he famously replied: “I have not yet begun to fight.” Ramming his ship into the Serapis, Jones then had his men grapple on, and they fought the British hand to hand in one of the most sanguinary close encounters of the war, which left nearly three hundred of the six hundred men dead. An exploding American grenade ignited gunpowder kegs and put Serapis’s cannon out of action. Its captain surrendered just in time for Jones to transfer into it with what remained of his crew and their prisoners, which he did because the Bonhomme Richard had become unstable.
An isolated victory, Jones’s feat was militarily insignificant, but in a season in which the larger invasion of Great Britain and the Franco-Spanish armada had come to such utter failure it was a notable success. The feat transformed John Paul Jones into a hero and it justly celebrated his crew, which included many French sailors as well as those of a dozen other nationalities.
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Among the British reactions to the Franco-Spanish near-invasion were doubling the size of the militias, eliminating many loopholes through which young Britons had been able to avoid military service, and making conciliatory overtures to Ireland to abate rebellion, including the easing of exclusionary practices against Catholics. In France the combination of Franklin, Adams, and finance minister Necker—Protestants all—began to advocate for similar elimination of second-class treatment of Protestants, and progress was made on that front.
Liberalizing in France had repercussions in America. It assisted congressional supporters of the Franco-American alliance by stripping from the anti-Gallicians the use of the canard that they intended to take over America and force Catholicism on its citizens. The anti-Gallicians found another opening when it became necessary to dispatch a plenipotentiary to Madrid. Jay was nominated, but the antis kept bringing up various objections that became confabulated with the Silas Deane/Arthur Lee impasse and took time to resolve. Finally Jay was approved, Lee was dismissed from his previous post, and Deane was offered a payment of $10,500, which he rejected as an attempt to buy him off for a few cents on the dollar.
In October 1779 Jay and his wife embarked for Spain on the same ship returning Gérard to France. Jay had decided that because of Lee’s poor reception by Madrid he must now approach Spain gingerly, going first to Paris and from there applying for entry. Once at sea, a storm necessitated changing course; in the argument over whether to head for the Caribbean or reattempt a more direct crossing, Gérard and Jay disagreed, and finished the voyage as less than friends.
“I don’t know what can be done regarding America,” Vergennes wrote Lafayette in the fall of 1779 at Le Havre, where the marquis had remained. “Our plans can no longer be unilateral; they require a preliminary agreement. It is obvious that the concern for America’s welfare requires that troops be sent, but that alone would not be doing enough.” He added a complaint about the Americans: “We hope they will have exerted themselves more than they have done up to now.” He excepted from this complaint the John Paul Jones victory, and the one at Stony Point that, he noted with pride, had been led by Lafayette’s colleague and friend Fleury.
Shortly Fleury returned to France and at Lafayette’s urging completed a memo of his time with the Continental forces, to which he appended comments on what should be done next. It echoed Vergennes in contending: “America is in a state of crisis that is alarming but not hopeless,” and went beyond the minister in its insistence that France could best prevent the states’ reconciling with Great Britain by “sending arms, clothing, money, or more assistance.”
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To combat the British danger to the southern states, the American Congress passed an act authorizing South Carolina and Georgia to “raise three thousand able bodied negroes” to supplement the states’ regulars and to pay slave owners a thousand dollars for each slave who passed muster. A New Hampshire delegat
e recognized the implications of the congressional edict as laying a “foundation for the abolition of slavery in America.” To lead the new regiment Congress tapped John Laurens. His father allowed him to use in this regiment as many of the family’s slaves as circumstances permitted. But John was sidetracked in the establishing of the regiment by the need to defend Charleston from British sorties, and was joined in this effort by Pulaski’s cavalry, which had also been sent south. Throughout the summer of 1779 the American forces managed to keep Charleston in American hands and to reject the British demand for surrender. Still, the civilian leaders of South Carolina refused to go along with using the state’s slaves in a Continental regiment. His father wrote to John, “I learn your black Air Castle is blown up, with contemptuous huzzas.”
In mid-August 1779, Admiral d’Estaing was about to depart the Caribbean for America. “I know I have been disobedient,” he wrote to Maurepas after being accused of breaches of protocol in the conquest of Grenada. “I beg you to recommend that [the warden of the Bastille] give me, upon my return, commodious lodgings.”
Such insolence was characteristic, and was further expressed in d’Estaing’s attitude toward his forthcoming American mission: He was willing to help, but not to do too much. Although Washington had deemed it well within the d’Estaing force’s capabilities to wrest Savannah from British control, the admiral committed himself only to staying at Savannah for a week before going on to Halifax and Newfoundland. But on September 1, when upon reaching the mouth of the Savannah River he was able to surprise and capture a few British vessels, he decided he might do a bit more before moving on. Then a hurricane struck, wrecking d’Estaing’s fleet. Several weeks would be required, he learned, to obtain adequate new timbers for the repairs. “The damage done to my ships,” he wrote to Sartine, “has imposed on me the melancholy necessity of acting where I should not and did not wish to act.”
But he did not act immediately, thus disobeying for the second time his own tenet that surprise was the best asset of an attacking force. He also made only a halfhearted attempt to avoid repeating another Newport mistake, disregard of an ally’s needs. Although he sent Major General François de Fontanges to Charleston to consult with General Benjamin Lincoln, he didn’t wait long enough for Lincoln’s response. In Charleston, Fontanges and Lincoln had fixed the day of a joint assault on Savannah for September 11, but Lincoln was delayed in reaching Savannah because the Charleston civilian authorities had not wanted him to leave. While Lincoln was en route, d’Estaing, who had not learned of the delays, decided to act unilaterally.
He was encouraged to do so by his progress thus far. After managing, despite a lack of pilots, to broach the mouth of the Savannah River, d’Estaing found the guard island abandoned. The British had withdrawn eighteen miles upriver to the city itself. Upon reaching there, the French counted twenty-three cannons behind the city’s barricades, and soon saw that the number was growing daily as General Augustine Prevost augmented his fortifications through the work of several hundred of the city’s slaves, which went on day and night. As a French officer wrote, Prevost’s situation was fortunate, since by virtue of having swamps on two sides of the city, and British cannon-laden ships in the river, Prevost “had nothing to fear from the rear, or from the right and left. It was necessary therefore to provide for the defense only of the front or southern exposure of the city.” Nonetheless, d’Estaing demanded that Prevost surrender the city to the forces of Louis XVI. Prevost had not yet responded to the surrender ultimatum when Pulaski’s cavalry arrived in the Savannah area, ahead of Lincoln’s troops from Charleston and also of another small American army that was coming from mid-state. Pulaski did all that was possible to overcome such obstacles as a dearth of ferryboats—he had his men dismount and swim their horses across the river, after which they “so thoroughly cleared the way, and broke up all the enemy’s advanced posts, as to afford Major General Lincoln the opportunity of an interview with the French General … on the 16th.” Before that interview could take place, Prevost stalled and d’Estaing did not press. The stalling paid off, for the very next day eight hundred British troops from Beaufort managed to slip through both the American and French lines to join Prevost inside the city.
Only then did Lincoln arrive. Apprised of the situation he expressed annoyance that d’Estaing had asked for surrender in the name of the French king only, which brought out old American fears of the French taking over. Lincoln demanded the sending of a new surrender note with his signature added to d’Estaing’s. The admiral obliged, but now the reinforced Prevost rejected the ultimatum. French and American leaders then blamed one another for having allowed the extra British troops to slip into the city, Fontanges in such a blistering way that d’Estaing was certain that John Laurens, his hotheaded American friend, would surely challenge Fontanges to a duel. Laurens did not rise to that bait, having learned better than d’Estaing the third lesson of the Newport debacle, the peril of taking undue offense at an ally’s remarks.
The American and French commanders then jointly made a poor decision, to besiege the city rather than storm it, even though they had better resources to storm it, 7,000 men to the defenders’ 4,800. Their siege began classically with the digging of entrenchments, the time-honored tool for creeping ever closer to barricaded positions. British sorties destroyed almost all trench progress as soon as it was made, and at one point caused French and American troops to mistakenly fire on one another, with resultant casualties. When Noailles and his unit attempted to storm a British redoubt, mistakenly aimed French firebombs forced them to retreat.
Lincoln and d’Estaing did not get along, although for different reasons than those that had set apart the French nobleman from Sullivan at Newport. The admiral, according to one of his officers at Charleston, “always knows how to make jokes in the least amusing circumstances,” in contrast to Lincoln, who neither drank nor cursed and was notably fastidious, much more so than the raucous Sullivan. D’Estaing contemplated abandoning the siege but understood, as he later wrote: “If I had not attacked Savannah, I would have been considered a coward. London, America, and even Paris would have done more than dishonor me. They would have supposed I had secret orders not to assist the Americans.”
The poor results of the allies’ sporadic sallies seemed to justify d’Estaing’s reluctance to attack in force. During one sally, on September 22, the diarist officer noted that a Noailles lieutenant, “carried away by his courage, disregards the instructions … and, being incautious, rushes straight upon the enemy, attacking with full force a post that should have been taken by surprise.” On the twenty-fourth, a larger endeavor also met with disaster: “Our imprudence in leaving our trench to pursue [six hundred British troops] exposed us to the artillery fire of their redoubts and batteries, and caused the loss of seventy men killed or wounded.”
On October 4 d’Estaing began a bombardment by fifty-three heavy cannons and fourteen mortars, “with more vivacity than precision,” the diarist wrote, attributing the miscues to the gunners having imbibed too much rum the previous night. They took great return fire, too, not only from the 23 emplacements that the French had seen upon reaching Savannah but also from the 123 that Prevost had since amassed. On October 6, as the Franco-American bombardment continued Prevost asked for permission to remove women and children from the city; d’Estaing and Lincoln refused, fearing another stalling ruse. By then, a month since the hurricane, d’Estaing’s ships had been somewhat repaired, and he felt the need to soon set sail or be bottled up by worsening weather. Seven of his ships had already lost their rudders, and scurvy and other ills were consigning some thirty-five men a day to watery graves. Moreover, as the diarist noted, “We begin to lose confidence upon discovering that all this heavy firing will not render the assault less difficult. We should not have constructed works. In doing so, we afforded the English time to strengthen theirs. We regret that we did not attack on the very first day.”
Both d’Estaing and Lincoln con
tinued to assert that the siege and bombardment would soon produce surrender. Laurens sent word through a messenger to Washington that it would only be a matter of two or three days. On October 8 L’Enfant, serving under Laurens, attempted with a small group to set fire to the abatis. The wood was still wet and the fire did not take. He suffered burns.
D’Estaing called a council of war at which his chief engineer said that he required ten more days to complete the entrenchments, which time d’Estaing could not afford. Lincoln insisted that they now either make a direct assault on the defenses or abandon the siege. D’Estaing agreed to the assault and to personally lead some troops, as Laurens and Pulaski would also do. Fontanges’s corps of volunteer black Haitians was to be in the thick of the battle; a d’Estaing written order called for people of color to “be treated at all times like the whites,” because since they aspired “to the same honor, they will exhibit the same bravery.” Also in the mix would be a French regiment composed of Irishmen, and another of Hessians and British deserters.
On the eve of the attack d’Estaing decided suddenly to reorganize the French troops, putting many of the soldiers under new officers. The ensuing muster was sloppy and delayed the attack beyond the most advantageous hour.
Prevost was more than ready for them. Acting on information from a deserter as to the location of the emphasis of the impending Franco-American attack, he replaced Loyalist militia with seasoned British troops at that vulnerable point. His cannons fired grapeshot, which killed many attackers and mangled even more, including d’Estaing. Fontanges was also grievously wounded, along with many Haitians. Of the Americans, Laurens was one of the first to reach the redoubts, but he and his group were repulsed, along with most other units. As Pulaski and his cavalry were preparing to breach an area between redoubts, the Pole was fatally wounded. After that his men refused to continue. A Noailles-led retreat avoided even more carnage in the French-American ranks. The entire Franco-American attack ground to a halt. It had lasted less than an hour.
How the French Saved America Page 19
