by Sarah Vowell
Greene and Lafayette pleaded their case, but d’Estaing and his officers would not change their minds. They said their vessels were so damaged that a potential skirmish against one, much less two British squadrons would sink them for sure. However, d’Estaing invited Greene to stick around and make his case in writing.
“The expedition against Rhode Island was undertaken upon no other consideration than that of the French fleet and troops acting in concert with the American troops,” stressed Greene. If the French were to forsake them, the mission would be in vain, causing “a great discontent and murmuring among the people.” D’Estaing was unmoved.
Lafayette wrote to Washington that d’Estaing had received clear orders from Louis XVI “to go to Boston in case of an accident or a superior fleet.” D’Estaing, he said, suffered “true affliction not being able to assist America.”
The next day Sullivan convened a council of war. Greene and Lafayette attended. Everyone but Lafayette helped craft a letter to d’Estaing threatening that France would be dishonored if the fleet deserted its ally “upon an Island the midst of an Expedition agreed to by the Count himself.” Also, they warned, the fleet’s withdrawal from Newport would injure the alliance between France and the United States. Greene signed the letter. The general of the Massachusetts militia also put his John Hancock on it. “I refused to sign,” Lafayette declared.
In the meantime, d’Estaing had vanished. “The french,” a colonel in the Second Rhode Island Regiment confided in his diary, “left us in a most Rascally manner.”
Sullivan raged to Henry Laurens that d’Estaing’s departure “has raised every voice against the French nation, revived all those ancient prejudices against the faith and sincerity of that people, and inclines them most heartily to curse the new alliance.”
Lafayette took umbrage—just gobs and gobs of umbrage—at the patriots’ vilification of his countrymen for leaving Newport. Here’s hoping George Washington was in the mood for some long letters.
“It is not to the commander-in-chief, it is to my most dearest friend, General Washington, that I am speaking,” Lafayette unburdened himself. “Frenchmen of the highest character have been exposed to the most disagreeable circumstances . . . I am more upon a warlike footing in the American lines than when I come near the British lines at Newport.” So much for the “smiling country.”
Lafayette’s split loyalties tormented him. He confessed in a letter to Adrienne, “Half the Americans say that I am passionately fond of my country, and the other half say that since the arrival of the French ships, I have become mad . . . Betwixt ourselves, they are a little in the right; I never felt so strongly what may be called national pride.”
Sullivan sent Lafayette to Boston to plead with d’Estaing to turn around and come back. D’Estaing was happy to see him, but the fleet stayed put.
Regardless of whether d’Estaing was justified in absconding to Boston, the fact remained that the whole point of targeting Newport in the first place was that the French fleet was supposed to make ganging up on the relatively modest British garrison there a snap. Which was how Sullivan had successfully recruited five thousand regional militiamen—overwhelming force, guaranteed win, no fuss. Without backup from the French fleet, a foregone conclusion had turned into possible suicide. Most of them took off for home, including Hancock and Revere.
Greene wrote to Washington that their troop levels were down to a “vexatious and truly mortifying” four thousand to five thousand men, a dangerous tally in light of the six thousand redcoats and Hessians a stone’s throw away, not to mention the ever-present threat of the Royal Navy lending a hand.
On August 29, British and Hessian forces did harass the American withdrawal from the island. But considering the mercifully low death toll of thirty patriots—the potential for slaughter was in the hundreds—the engagement led by Sullivan and Greene on Aquidneck is mainly remembered for the solid performance of the First Rhode Island Regiment, a segregated Continental unit of freed slaves.
Lafayette missed out on the action in Rhode Island because he was still in Boston buttering up d’Estaing. So Congress presented him with a counterintuitive commendation apologizing for keeping him out of harm’s way. They sure had his number. The resolution recognized “the sacrifice he made of his personal feelings, when, for the interest of the United States, he repaired to Boston, at the moment when the opportunity of acquiring glory of the field of battle would present itself.”
In his patient, paternal reply to Lafayette’s agitated letters, Washington explained, “I feel for you and for our good and great allies the French . . . and, lastly, I feel for my country.” Reasonable people, he said, appreciated d’Estaing and his fleet’s effort. Washington then unearthed the upside to the patriots’ harsh appraisal of their allies: “In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude; every man will speak as he thinks, or, more properly, without thinking, and consequently will judge at effects without attending to the causes.” Washington was reminding Lafayette that even though the establishment of a free and republican government comes with half-baked tomfoolery and half-cocked bile, every now and then someone who has something to say gets to say it.
In the end, the British held on to Newport, which Mahan credits to Admiral Howe’s “energy and confidence in himself as a seaman.” Mahan points out that if not for Howe, who had the guts to go after d’Estaing’s bigger, better fleet, thereby drawing the French out to sea and into the storm that smacked them into submission, “the gale would not have saved the British force at Newport.”
Howe’s moves were more significant than the preservation of a specific British outpost. In fact, the British would willingly evacuate Newport the following year to consolidate their troops to conquer Charleston. Howe’s nerve and poise had set in motion a rift between the Americans and the French that put the Franco-American alliance in danger. An alliance that was awkward from the start, not just because it was a partnership between republicans and monarchists but because of, as Sullivan put it, the Americans’ “ancient prejudices” against the French. Prejudices that stretched back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and that were reawakened by the recent French and Indian War.
In Common Sense, which Washington ordered read aloud to Continental troops in Boston after it was published in January of 1776, Thomas Paine took aim at William the Conqueror in his enumeration of arguments against “the evil of monarchy . . . and that of hereditary seccession.” Regarding the claim of divine right by the royal heirs of the Norman invader, Paine carped, “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.”
What if Howe in his sixty-four-gun ship barreling after d’Estaing’s ninety-gun ship had as much to do with his innate English impulse to heckle the French as it did his “energy and confidence in himself as a seaman”? Naturally, dealing with the French fleet was within Howe’s job description. But before heading up the armada that would engulf New York in 1776, Admiral Howe had harbored mixed feelings about Britain’s war on her colonists. As a member of Parliament, he had voted against the Coercive/“Intolerable” Acts of 1774, the retribution for the Boston Tea Party. I would imagine that chasing after Frenchmen in 1778, on the other hand, gave him no pause in any sense of the word. So Howe’s spirited pursuit of the French and the patriots’ overreaction to the French abandoning Newport might be related.
The Americans, who had been British for centuries and not British for only three years, were quick to turn on the French after Newport—too quick. Most of that ire can be explained by the current events in Rhode Island, but some of the patriot disdain was older, in their blood. They certainly said so.
When John Laurens wrote to his father about observing the hostility toward France spread across New England, he echoed Sulliv
an’s language about ancient prejudices: “I saw very plainly when I was at Boston that our ancient hereditary prejudices were very far from being eradicated.”
Alas, more than French feelings were hurt. In Boston, an altercation between French troops and a mob of locals “proceeded from harsh words to more dangerous blows,” reported Laurens. “Two valuable French officers who attempted to quell the riot were much abused, and one of them, the Count de Sauveur it is feared will not recover.” He did not.
Killing one’s ally is always an awkward moment in any alliance. What made the situation with the departed Chevalier de Saint-Sauveur even more of a pickle was that his was a Catholic corpse.
In 1778, Catholicism was still illegal in Protestant Boston. France being a bulwark of Catholicism was another source of the Anglo-French feud, and Massachusetts inherited that legacy. The Boston we know as the Catholic capital of America was decades off, the product of mass immigration from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s. Boston was founded in 1630 by Puritans who wanted to purge the Church of England of its Catholic trappings. They also despised the actual Catholic Church of Rome so much that “Antichrist” was what Massachusetts Bay colonists called the pope.
Which explains in part why the new U.S. commissioner in France, the Puritan descendant John Adams of Massachusetts, would have such a fitful, frustrating time in Paris. Adams himself described his image among his hosts as “a Man who did not understand a Word of French—awkward in his Figure—awkward in his Dress—No Abilities—a perfect Bigot—and fanatic.”
Even the prettiest thing Adams would ever write—a late-in-life appreciation of the aesthetic merits of an ice storm wrecking the fruit trees at his farm—celebrated nature’s terrible beauty at the expense of his old allies. “Every tree was a chandelier of cut glass,” he wrote. “I have seen a queen of France with 18 millions of livres of diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub.”
In order to placate Admiral D’Estaing and his troops over the slaying of the French lieutenant, the Boston fathers did offer Saint-Sauveur a proper burial, a hush-hush funeral in the middle of the night in the crypt of King’s Chapel on Tremont Street. King’s Chapel being the church at the burying ground where lie the city’s Puritan forebears, Governor John Winthrop, of “city upon a hill” fame, and his minister John Cotton, who preached the farewell sermon when Winthrop and his shipmates departed England in 1630. I could say something about how being buried near some French papist was probably making Calvinists like Winthrop and Cotton roll over in their graves, but I believe in science.
The city promised d’Estaing it would build a monument in Saint-Sauveur’s honor, which it finally got around to plopping down in front of the chapel during the later French alliance of World War I. (Fun fifteen-minute field trip: At King’s Chapel, pay respects to Saint-Sauveur, Winthrop, and Cotton, remembering to glance at the other charming headstones—say what you will about Puritans, they knew how to carve a winged skull. Then mosey a few hundred feet up Tremont to Granary Burying Ground, where lie John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Samuel Adams—known to the French as “the famous Adams,” grumbled his not-as-famous cousin John.)
Boston’s remorse over Lieutenant Saint-Sauveur’s death went a long way in patching things up with the French after Newport. Reporting to the king of France, d’Estaing described “the public and sincere marks of the regret of the Americans.” At a party for the French at John Hancock’s house on Beacon Hill, Hancock gave d’Estaing a portrait of George Washington as a gift. Lafayette wrote to Washington, “I never saw a man so glad at possessing his sweetheart’s picture, as the admiral was to receive yours.”
The alliance endured. And endured and endured. The French entrance into the war, contrary to Steuben’s hunch, did not so much end the war as delay its conclusion. In Paris, John Adams wrote of foreign minister Vergennes’s knack for “keep[ing] his Hand under our Chin, to prevent Us, from drowning, but not to lift our Heads out of Water.”
In November of 1778 Washington ruminated on the alliance in a letter to Henry Laurens, “Hatred to England may carry some into an excess of Confidence in France; especially when motives of gratitude are thrown into the scale.” He added, “I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favourable sentiments of our new ally.”
Washington would not be inaugurated for more than a decade but this letter makes clear he was not only thinking ahead; he was also already thinking like a head of state. He mulled over the unforeseen consequences of approving Lafayette’s request to lead an attack on Canada for France. While Washington was not sure what a postwar Canada reoccupied by France would mean for a postwar United States, he was sure he did not want to find out.
He connected various dots—Spain’s control of New Orleans, the French king’s diplomatic (and familial) ties to Spain, France’s more cordial history with Indian tribes. Would a Franco-Spanish-Indian confederation have the United States surrounded?
While he did not question Lafayette’s motives in wanting to bring Quebec back into the French fold, Washington was suspicious of the puppet masters at Versailles. Besides, even if France conquered Canada with, he wrote, “the purest intentions, there is the greatest danger that, in the progress of the business . . . and, perhaps, urged on by the solicitations and wishes of the Canadians, she would alter her views.”
Foreshadowing his later isolationism as president, Washington opined, “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.”
In the end, France would be too preoccupied fighting off the British in the Caribbean and India to summon the energy and resources needed to reconquer Quebec. And when France reacquired Louisiana from Spain, Napoleon promptly sold it to the administration of Thomas Jefferson for a song—that song being “Don’t Fence Me In.” However, the War of 1812 did confirm that Washington was dead-on about keeping an eye on those shifty Canadians.
In January of 1779, Lafayette sailed home for a yearlong visit. After a few days of house arrest (in a fancy house) as a nominal punishment for his insubordinate exit from France, Louis XVI forgave him. “I had the honor of being consulted by all the ministers and . . . of being kissed by all the ladies,” Lafayette boasted.
Once the French government turned down his request to storm Canada, he turned his attention to planning a French attack on the British homeland, a plot that also came to naught, though rumors of French invaders did put London on alert. The most concrete accomplishment of his trip home was once again knocking up his wife, who gave birth to Georges Washington Lafayette on December 24, 1779.
Lafayette made a nuisance of himself writing letters and calling upon government officials such as Foreign Minister Vergennes and Prime Minister Maurepas, lobbying for French reinforcements to be sent to his American friends. Whether or not Lafayette’s efforts helped—and Franklin was also on the case—they did not hurt.
On March 5, 1780, Vergennes ordered Lafayette back to America to resume his post in the Continental Army. To that end the government had purchased a frigate, the Hermione, to ferry him back to the United States so as to reassure Washington that a considerable French expeditionary force would soon follow (and, one suspects, to get Lafayette out of Vergennes’s hair).
On May 6, 1780, Lafayette wrote to Washington from Boston Harbor, “Here I am, my dear general . . . in the midst of the joy I feel in finding myself again one of your loving soldiers.” According to Lafayette, upon the news of his return, Washington’s “eyes filled with tears of joy.”
On May 10 they were reunited. It was a happy occasion until Lafayette took a look around the camp. He noticed “an Army that is reduced to nothing, that wants provisions, that has not one of the necessary means to make war.”
An opinion confirmed two d
ays later when Charleston fell: General Benjamin Lincoln, a veteran of the Boston Siege and Saratoga, surrendered to British commander in chief Sir Henry Clinton, turning five thousand Continentals into prisoners of war. Already in control of Georgia, Clinton would leave Cornwallis to finish off the Carolinas, raising the question, Whither Virginia?
On July 10, 1780, the promised French fleet bearing six thousand troops commanded by Lieutenant General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, put in at Newport, the British garrison there having decamped to smite Charleston. Good news, no doubt, though Rochambeau had to put out from France with only a fraction of his ships, troops, and supplies such as gunpowder because an enemy squadron was on his heels.
Washington dispatched Lafayette to Newport. His brother-in-law, the Viscount de Noailles, was happy to see him. Rochambeau less so. Washington had forwarded a letter confirming he trusted Lafayette as a general and friend. But before the fifty-five-year-old Rochambeau could dwell on the travesty of having to confer with some twenty-two-year-old whippersnapper, Lafayette briefed him on their bigger problems. Namely, the sorry state of Washington’s army and the travesty of five thousand patriot POWs at Charleston.
Naturally, Washington had assigned Lafayette to propose a collaborative attack on New York. Rochambeau said it would have to wait for the rest of his troops to arrive. Especially since a new British fleet reached New York a couple of days after the French landed at Newport. And speaking of Newport, the town that would be the French base of operations for the next year was not in move-in condition. His troops would need housing. His troops would need cheese.
Lafayette pressed Rochambeau so hard to reconsider that he would be forced to apologize for overstepping. After that, Rochambeau communicated with Washington directly and the correspondence was so cordial, they remained pen pals until Washington’s death.
