De Grasse returned to his main task, ferrying into Martinique the huge convoy that he had brought across the Atlantic without having lost a single vessel. He next sent several ships and thirteen hundred marines to take Tobago, where they captured twelve hundred soldiers and their munitions. Rodney’s squadron, which had not arrived in the area in time to fight alongside Hood’s, tried to engage de Grasse but soon backed off. De Grasse, now master of the Caribbean, was then able to turn his attention to North America.
* * *
A new phase of the Franco-American alliance was marked by the arrival of the Sagittaire in Boston in May 1781. On board was Rochambeau’s son, as well as additional troops, treasure, the good news that de Grasse was on his way to the Caribbean and would then come north, and the bad news that no second division was being sent. Donatien Rochambeau told his father that the king’s brothers were laughing at Louis XVI for the inaction of the Rochambeau forces in America. In the packet of instructions for Rochambeau was a letter from Louis XVI saying that had Rochambeau been in France he would have been offered the post of minister of war. His ambition had “never aspired to such an important function,” Rochambeau would recall, but just then the scantiness of his resources and the difficulty of the situation produced a pang of regret at not being home to accept this plum.
The remainder of the Sagittaire’s contents fired him up, though, and he quickly fixed with Washington a time and place for another formal meeting: Wethersfield, on Monday, May 21, 1781. Both set out for it, Washington accompanied by Knox, Duportail, and others, but not by Hamilton.
For some time Hamilton had been agitating for a field command, and Washington, who had granted such posts to other aides, had refused, insisting that Hamilton was too valuable at headquarters. In February, after the Americans had returned from the Newport meeting with Rochambeau, Hamilton had kept the commander waiting once too often; Washington rebuked him for disrespectful behavior, and Hamilton quit on the spot.
At Wethersfield, Rochambeau was accompanied by Chastellux but not by Ternay’s replacement, the Comte de Barras, who had arrived in Newport recently and taken command from Destouches. Barras did not attend because the British fleet had reappeared and he felt he must remain with his ships in case of an attack. Six weeks earlier, during Washington’s flying visit to Newport—an occasion mainly notable for its lavish reception and dinners—the American commander had urged that the French sail their troops to Chesapeake Bay to harass the British there. Barras, apprised of that plan, did not want to chance such a maneuver against a recently enlarged British fleet, and when the subject was brought up again at Wethersfield, and Barras’s reasoning became known, Washington yielded gracefully: “However desirable such an event might have been, the reasons now assigned by the Count de Barras are sufficient to prove its impracticability.”
The Wethersfield conference was further impacted by Washington and Rochambeau’s needs to conceal secret knowledge from each other. Rochambeau knew that the de Grasse fleet, then en route to the Caribbean, would definitely come to the Atlantic states after action there, but he had been enjoined by Ségur not to say so. Washington knew more about de Grasse’s plans than he could let on, thanks to Chastellux, who had become an admirer and was chagrined at Rochambeau’s treating Washington with “all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible.” Just prior to the conference, Chastellux had written to Washington what “may be considered a transgression,” a private note conveying that de Grasse’s fleet would indeed join Barras’s.
Washington and Rochambeau shared a laugh over captured correspondence between the British Lord Germain and General Clinton that equally disparaged both French and Continental troops, morale, finances, and courage.
At Wethersfield, Washington proposed that the armies join now for action against the British, with American militia left behind to defend any French ships remaining at Newport. Barras had objected to this proposal in advance, believing that the ships would not be safe in the care of such a guard, and threatening that if the action were undertaken anyway he would obey prior orders to sail to Boston. Go ahead to Boston, Washington responded; if the fleet’s moving to Boston was the price of having Rochambeau’s forces join his at the North River, he’d bear it. Rochambeau immediately deflected that notion by breaking the news that de Grasse was expected momentarily in the Caribbean and would come to America in the summer, so “What are the operations that we might have in view at that Epocha?”
“Should the West India Fleet arrive upon this Coast—the force thus Combined may either proceed in the operation against New York, or may be directed against the enemy in some other quarter, as circumstances shall dictate,” was Washington’s ready answer. New York was preferable to Virginia as a target because of “The great waste of Men (which we have found from experience) in the long Marches to the Southern States, the advanced season now to commence there in—and the difficulties and expence of Land transportation thither.” Six years into the war, Washington believed New York to be the only stronghold whose recapture could end the conflict. The United States would win the war eventually if it could hold out, and if British patience could be exhausted prior to that of the American public and of Congress. But for a quick ending to the war only the taking of New York would suffice; recapture of Charleston or Savannah would not be as productive. More as a sop to Rochambeau than as a firm conviction, Washington did agree, as he told his diary, to “extend our views to the Southward as circumstances and a Naval superiority might render more necessary & eligible.”
The decision to fight the British at Yorktown did not come out of the Wethersfield conference. Rather, as Washington wrote in his diary, at that conference he had “Fixed with Count Rochambeau upon a Plan of Campaign” against New York, to begin once the French had marched across Connecticut to join him. Within a week of the conference Washington received John Laurens’s note about Louis XVI’s gift of six million additional livres. Two days later he directed Duportail to “make the estimates of the articles in your department necessary for the operation [against New York] that the previous arrangements for the siege … may be put in the best train.” Within a few weeks he moved headquarters from New Windsor southward twenty miles to Peekskill, to be in a better position to attack New York when Rochambeau arrived.
Shortly before the French troops were to depart Newport, Rochambeau’s nephew made an offer to buy du Bouchet’s horse, commenting that du Bouchet would have no use for it as he was scheduled to remain behind, in charge of the heavy artillery. Du Bouchet took the comment as an unnecessary slap and forced a duel. The nephew’s saber stuck under du Bouchet’s collarbone and was difficult to remove, but du Bouchet’s honor was salvaged by his lost “grand quantity of blood.” And so on June 10, when Rochambeau and his train began to leave Newport, du Bouchet was not with them.
The French forces departed at the rate of a regiment a day—approximately one thousand soldiers and officers—for four days. The forces were understrength; some detachments had been used to replace ailing sailors, and still others were unavailable as soldiers either because they were still in hospitals or were employed as teamsters. The contingents continued westward in their thousand-man groups, each succeeding regiment occupying the beds that the previous one had been in the night before. Engineers and sappers forged ahead to prepare and repair roads. Rochambeau’s army trailed eight twelve-pound cannons and six mortars, but not the largest cannons, the twenty-fours—there had not been time to construct the heavy carriages necessary to transport the twenty-fours over America’s terrible roads. That the twenty-fours would have to be shipborne to the eventual battle site was evidence that Rochambeau knew they would not be used against New York but against a target in coastal Virginia.
PART SIX
A Triumph and a Fare-Thee-Well
1781–1783
17
“Could not waste the most decisive opportunity of the whole war.”
—Francisco de Saavedra
While the French troops were marching across Connecticut to link up with the Americans at the North River, preparatory to attacking either New York or another target, in Philadelphia La Luzerne was completing a conquest of Congress. At the start of 1781 he had had an important instrument all but drop into his lap: former general and current New Hampshire representative John Sullivan. He and Sullivan had been acquainted, but their relationship changed when Clinton decided to send to Philadelphia Sullivan’s brother Daniel, a prisoner in New York, ostensibly to obtain his own exchange but really to suborn John; a note that Daniel carried, supposedly from a British Loyalist admirer in New York, extolled his brother as “a gentleman of the first abilities & Integrity in the Government.… Much I think is expected from you in this matter … pray save the further Effusion of the Blood of your Countrymen[.] Step forth & let Negotiation Originate.” John Sullivan was being asked to sponsor the reconciling and reuniting of America and Great Britain. He tore up the note, sent Daniel back to New York, and gleefully related the story to La Luzerne, who offered him cash to be his man in Congress. Sullivan accepted and was soon helping La Luzerne realize his goals.
Some were salutary for America and some were not. La Luzerne argued to Congress that the United States must become more federalized; he assisted in persuading the last state holdout, Maryland, to sign the Articles of Confederation; and he championed the establishment of centralized ministries of finance, state, and war. Morris became the finance chief, Knox the war department head and, with a strong assist from La Luzerne, Robert Livingston became secretary of state for foreign affairs. La Luzerne pushed hard to prevent Arthur Lee from being awarded the foreign affairs post or an appointment to represent the United States in expected peace negotiations. He backed John Jay for that post, and also to have Congress retain Franklin, whose allegiance to the alliance and to France had been strong, and to ditch Adams. Congress refused the last notion, reconfirming Adams as a minister for peace negotiations to be held in Russia, so La Luzerne managed to have others appointed to surround and outvote Adams, namely Jefferson and Henry Laurens, the latter still in the Tower.
Then La Luzerne went even further. Since France through its good offices was to handle American participation in the Russian mediation, he asked that the instructions to the “ministers plenipotentiary,” adopted on June 15, 1781, read:
You are to accede to no treaty of peace which shall not be such as may 1st effectually secure the independence and sovereignty of the thirteen states according to the form and effect of the treaties subsisting between the said States and His Most Christian Majesty; and 2ndly in which the said treaties shall not be left in their full force & validity.… You are to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without [the French ministers’] knowledge and concurrence and ultimately to govern yourselves by their advice and Opinion endeavouring in your whole conduct to make them sensible how much we rely on His Majesty’s influence for effectual support in every thing that may be necessary to the present security or future prosperity of the United States of America.
This was an extraordinary coup: At a stroke Congress had taken from its emissaries the power to themselves determine the future destiny of the United States of America, while instructing them not to act without first obtaining the permission of the king of France. “I regard the negotiation as now being in His Majesty’s hands, save for independence,” La Luzerne bragged to Vergennes.
The biggest loser, as a result of these instructions, was Congress; for either they would permit France to unilaterally take over negotiations for ending the war, or force Congress’s own emissaries to reject the instructions. As Jay put it upon reading the new instructions, “As an American I [feel] an interest in the dignity of my country, which renders it difficult for me to reconcile myself to the idea of [our] ministers to be absolutely governed by the advice and opinions of the servants of another sovereign.” Vergennes was miffed that any American might misperceive the benevolence or sagacity of Louis XVI in future negotiations—or the weakness of America’s own position; after all, he wrote to La Luzerne, there was “no province [of America] in which the English do not have some sort of establishment.” But since the Russian and Austrian would-be mediators had been pushing Great Britain, Spain, and France to agree to a plan in which the United States was specifically not considered to be an independent country, nor invited to be part of the large-country discussions, he worried that the American commissioners would not agree to the condition. Accordingly he took the emotionally difficult step of asking Adams, with whom he had so deeply clashed, to return from the Netherlands to discuss the matter.
When Adams arrived in Paris in July 1781, he had not seen the new congressional instructions and was acting only on the old ones. Once apprised of the Russian mediation scheme, which was in the form of a proposal, he translated it from the French, made notes, and in a point-by-point letter to Vergennes, rejected every iota of it:
As there is upon Earth no judge of a sovereign State but the Nation that composes it, the United States can never consent, that their Independence shall be discussed or called into question by any Sovereign or Sovereigns however respectable, nor can their interests be made a question in any [Peace] Congress, in which their Character is not acknowledged and their Minister admitted.
Adams was willing to be a party to a peace conference, but only if Russia and Austria would, as a preliminary, “acknowledge … the Sovereignty of the United States.” This was expressly what Russia and Austria did not want to do. Two days later Adams amended his ideas to say that independence did not have to be established prior to discussions but would have to be an expected outcome. Then he changed his mind again. By the time he returned to The Hague he felt so in the grip of a nervous disorder that after five or six days in which he had totally lost awareness of the world, it brought him to “the Gate of Death.” Among the contributing factors was his fear that peace for America on good terms was a long way off. His recovery was slow.
Silas Deane, no longer an American agent but having returned to Europe, seemed also to be close to mentally ill, writing letters to everyone he could think of, pointing out what he saw as the perfidy of France toward America, France’s growing despotism, and the need for the United States to immediately end the war and begin a new and better relationship with Great Britain. He left France for the Netherlands and expressed his desire to return soon to London.
* * *
Once Rochambeau’s troops had encamped near the North River—on the left, as the Montbarrey orders had dictated—they and the Continental troops meshed somewhat. There were nightly dinners attended by top officers from both groups, but the midlevel officers and the troops of each army were kept separated.
Rochambeau and Washington spent days together on horseback, with Duportail and Chastellux to interpret, making reconnaissance patrols of New York. They edged ever closer to Manhattan. At dawn one day they rode to a point at which at low tide they could cross to an island just off Long Island; they did so in strength, including some ninety horses. While Duportail and his colleagues made measurements for potential emplacement of batteries, the two senior commanders took a nap. When they awoke, they realized that the tide had come in more rapidly than expected. They could be trapped or drowned. Fortunately some soldiers had also realized this and had brought a boat into which the commanders, along with their bridles and saddles, were taken back to safety, while the horses were swum across. Duportail’s report judged that a siege of New York would be almost as difficult to accomplish as a frontal assault, and would require about twenty thousand troops—more than twice the number then available to Washington and Rochambeau.
* * *
A third matter of importance to the Revolutionary War also came to fruition in the same time period, early summer of 1781, while Rochambeau was marching across Connecticut to link with Washington, and while La Luzerne was persuading Congress to allow Louis XVI and Vergennes to negotiate America’s future. In June, in a harbor in
Haiti, the Comte de Grasse and the Spanish nobleman Captain Francisco de Saavedra, thirty-five, sat down aboard the majestic Ville de Paris to decide where in North America de Grasse’s fleet would go.
Saavedra had credence in this meeting because he had recently been involved in successfully besieging a British stronghold in North America, Pensacola. Saavedra, a special emissary from Carlos III appointed to coordinate the activities of France and Spain in the Caribbean, had put together the forces for the Pensacola attack—the Spanish and French soldiers, the vessels, and their commander, Gálvez. Back in May, that Spanish fleet and polyglot army had started to attack that Gulf Coast city. Bernardo de Gálvez’s 1,315 troops had been ferried there on Spanish ships from Havana, some of those ships and troops having recently crossed the Atlantic to reinforce the Spanish Caribbean fleet.
The first Spanish ship to enter Pensacola Bay had run aground and the fleet commander refused to attempt the bar with any of his other vessels. Gálvez was furious, and his situation was shortly remedied by the arrival of more ships sent by grateful American residents of New Orleans, ships that were put under his sole command. With these he passed the sandbar, and then needled the Havana-based ships into following him through. During the ensuing siege he was wounded twice. Saavedra then arrived with more reinforcements, Spanish regulars accompanied by eight hundred French troops and some free blacks. By May 1781 in Pensacola Bay Gálvez commanded seven thousand men—more soldiers than Rochambeau had at Newport. On May 8, a Spanish cannonball pierced the walls of Crescent Fort and hit the powder magazine, which exploded, killing 105 men and making it possible for the Spanish to fire without opposition at the main Pensacola defensive works, Fort George. Two days later the British surrendered. It was a major victory. Together with the Spanish-led takeover of the lower Mississippi, it left control of the Mississippi Delta and the nearby Gulf of Mexico in Spanish hands. Gálvez, promoted to field marshal in charge of all Spanish military forces in the Caribbean and New Spain, elevated Saavedra to strategist of all future military activities.
How the French Saved America Page 24
