First Salute (33 page)

In discouragement close to despair, Washington wrote in December, 1779, “I find our prospects are
infinitely worse than they have been at any period of the war, and that unless some expedient can be instantly adopted, a dissolution of the army for want of subsistence is unavoidable. A part of it has been again several days without bread.” Battle in the Carolinas and Georgia, in spite of local victories, had brought reverses
which now threatened to split the South in fatal division from the northern colonies. Misfortune augmented in May, 1780, when the fall of Charleston, with the capture of 5,000 American soldiers and four ships, marked the heaviest defeat of the war.

In September, 1780, Washington sustained a sharper personal blow in the treason of Benedict Arnold, whose planned betrayal to the British of West Point, key to the Hudson Valley, was foiled by the chance arrest of his go-between with the British, Major André, Clinton’s aide, only hours before the keys and plans to the fortress were to be handed over.

Winter quarters of 1779–80 at Morristown, New Jersey, were more severe even than the year before at Valley Forge. Rations were reduced for already hungry men who had been shivering in the snows to one-eighth of normal quantities. Two leaders of a protest by Connecticut regiments demanding full rations and back pay were hanged to quell an uprising. In January of 1781, Pennsylvania regiments mutinied and, with troops of New Jersey, deserted to the number of half their strength before the outbreak was suppressed. At the frontiers, Indians out of the woods guided by Loyalists were burning farms and homes and massacring civilians. Even to keep an army in the field was problematical, because soldiers of the militia had to be furloughed to go home to harvest their crops, and if leave were refused, they would desert. Fighting a war in such circumstances, said General von Steuben, the army’s Prussian drillmaster, “
Caesar and Hannibal would have lost their reputations.”

Washington’s desk overflowed with letters from his generals in the field, pleading their shortages of everything an army requires: food, arms, field equipment, horses and wagons for a regular system of transportation, all of which had to be taken by military requisition from the local inhabitants, rousing antagonism toward the patriot forces. “Instead of having everything in readiness to take the field,” Washington wrote in his diary of May 1, 1781, “
we have nothing and instead of having the prospect of a glorious offensive campaign before us we have a bewildered and gloomy defensive one—unless we should receive a powerful aid of ships, land troops, and money from our generous allies and these, at present, are too contingent to build upon.”

To rise above, and persevere, in spite of such discouragement required a spiritual strength, a kind of nobility in Washington rare in the history of generalship. It had something of the quality of William the Silent, making the possessor the obvious and only choice for Commander-in-Chief. This quality, conveyed abroad by another genius of America,
Benjamin Franklin, and by the warmth of Lafayette, persuaded Louis XVI, last leaf on the dry stem of the old regime, to attach the monarchy’s faith and fortunes to the struggle of backwoods rebels against authority and royalty, the very props that supported Louis on the throne. In the wake of Lafayette—whose charm won Washington to love him like a father and Congress to appoint him Major General, and American recruits, who did not like to serve under foreigners, to fight willingly under his command—the young nobles of France flocked to volunteer in the American battle. Restless in the boredom and vacuum of court life, where the only excitement lay in vying for a nod from an overfed King in a powdered wig or a languid wave of his hand inviting their presence at the morning ritual in his dressing room, they craved manhood in military exercise, traditionally the path to reward, and a chance to devote their valor to the magic goddess Liberty, who was opening hearts of men in the tired and quarrelsome realms of the Old World. “Government by consent of the governed,” that magic phrase promised by the American Declaration of Independence, thrilled the minds and hearts of subjects ruled for generations by the dictatorship of monarchs and nobles. The promise seemed personified by the young new nation fighting for birthright in America. Her appearance in the world, they felt, would herald a new order of liberty, equality and the rule of reason for old Europe. What higher task could there be for men of liberal mind than to dedicate their arms and fortunes to aid the coming of that event?

A more mundane desire to retaliate for the loss of Canada revived the old impulse to fight the British that had stirred in their bones ever since William the Norman found a reason for quarrel in the 11th century. The King and Vergennes, his astute and hard-driving Minister for Foreign Affairs, thought rather of keeping the Colonies’ battle alive as a military cat’s-paw in France’s power struggle against Britain. By strengthening and augmenting the rebels’ resources, they could blunt the British sword, gain for themselves the advantage in North America, and by harassing British sea power and seizing a sugar island or two, they might even break down those wooden walls to invade the British hearth.

French purpose as conceived by Vergennes was not to assist the Colonies to victory or strengthen them to a level that might lead Britain to offer a reconciliation, leaving her once more free to knit up the torn fabric of empire and again concentrate her forces against France. Rather, it was to reinforce the Colonies enough to keep their battle going and keep Britain occupied in its toil.

So it was that out of desire to replace Britain as top dog, Bourbon France, placing a large block of irony across the path of history, lent her finances, fighting men and armaments in aid of a rebellion whose ideas and principles would initiate the age of democratic revolution and, together with its drain on the French budget, would bring down the
ancien régime
in the tremendous fall that marked forever the change from the Old World to the modern.

IF THE FRENCH
did not recognize the significance to themselves of what they were doing in aiding the rebels, neither did the British as a whole consider what place their conflict with the American Colonies had or would have in history. They thought of it simply as an uprising of colonial ingrates which had to be put down by force. To those with a larger world view, it was an imperial power struggle against France.

Ideologically, in the eternal struggle of left and right, the rebellion was seen as subversive of the social order, and the Americans as “levelers” whose example, if successful, would set alight revolutionary movements in Ireland and elsewhere. The British government and its partisans, as opposed to Whigs and radicals, felt themselves to be the upholders of right and privilege who should be receiving Europe’s support instead of hostility in their fight for existence. With France and Spain as enemies and Holland about to be another, and with the prospect of the Neutrality League contesting sovereignty of the seas, Europe in not coming to Britain’s aid, or in actively aiding the Americans, was seen as cutting her own throat; if the Americans won, she would herself experience the tramp of radicals and hear the shout of “Liberty!” across her lands.

Of all people, the somnolent Prime Minister Lord North, who was
always begging the King to let him resign because he felt inadequate to the situation, perceived the historical context of the conflict in which his country and its colonies were engaged, and the historical consequences of an American victory. “
If America should grow into a separate empire, it must cause,” he foresaw, “a revolution in the political system of the world, and if Europe did not support Britain now, it would one day find itself ruled by America imbued with democratic fanaticism.”

The mutinies and privations of Mr. Washington’s army (the British could not bring themselves to accord him the title of “general”) offered a gleam of hope that the American Revolution was lagging, as could be seen in its want not only of material and finances but of fresh recruits. Encouraged, Clinton told himself comfortably, “
I have all to hope and Washington all to fear.” Logically he was right, but a detached observer would have drawn no encouragement, for “hope” to Clinton meant further reason not to act, and “fear” for Washington meant a factor that existed to be overcome.

So certain were British managers of the war in their superiority of force that they remained convinced the rebels would have to give in and make peace. As Lord Germain, the King’s chief adviser, expressed it, “So contemptible is the rebel force now in all parts … 
so vast is our superiority that no resistance on their part can obstruct a speedy suppression of the rebellion.” Settled complacency allowed no other thought. Expectation of the rebels’ early collapse was all the more intense because it was sorely needed—for despite complacency, British resources were badly strained; recruiting was poor, victualing inadequate and finances on stony ground. The British clung to the belief that if only they could keep the war going, the Americans would have to surrender. Congress’ authority would fade and public opinion turn back to the mother country. Most cogent in their thinking was belief in the Americans’ early financial collapse. “I judge,” wrote General Murray from Minorca, “that the enemy finds the expense of this war as intolerable as we do.” A civilian skeptic was Walpole’s correspondent Horace Mann: “
Unless some decisive stroke,” he wrote to his friend, “can be given to the French fleet either in America or in Europe, perseverance of the rebellious colonies and the
point d’honneur
of France will prolong it and wear us out.” George III himself could contemplate no such outcome. He insistently believed that victory was just over the hill, that the truly loyal people were about to rise and that with one or two hard blows the rebellion would collapse.

What made the difference in expectations on both sides was French
intervention. The sinking to its lowest ebb in 1780 of the American cause prompted joint Franco-American planning to keep the Revolution alive and fighting. Washington had asked the French for money, for troops and, despite the mortifying results of d’Estaing’s campaign, above all for naval aid. He was absolutely convinced that without command of the coasts and freedom of the sea, the Americans could not win and that only by this means could Britain be defeated. The British arch in America rested upon New York and Virginia where Chesapeake Bay opened a long coastline on the Atlantic; communication between New York and Virginia, while the Americans held Pennsylvania and New Jersey in between, could only be had by water. Nor could the British Army live off the land, because of the hostility of the inhabitants; their supply and deployment within the country depended on transportation by water and control of ports and estuaries. If this could be blocked or wrested from them, the British would starve. Indeed, Clinton was to note afterward, of the period when he was afraid of losing naval superiority to d’Estaing, “
Army three times in danger of starving.” If the statement was anxiety more than reality, it reflects Clinton’s sense of the deplorability of everything in the self-justifying account he wrote after the war.

Conversely, only if water transportation were made free to the Americans could the movement of troops make possible an offensive. This was the basis of Washington’s insistence on naval superiority. As he explained it to Colonel Laurens, son of the former President of the Congress, who was on a diplomatic mission to France, the British could not maintain “a large force in this country if we had the command of the seas to interrupt the regular transmission of supplies from Europe.… A constant naval superiority upon these coasts would instantly reduce the enemy to a difficult defensive.” Naval superiority “
with an aid of money, would enable us to convert the war into a vigorous offensive.” Washington’s desire was for attack on New York, keystone of Britain’s military base in America. Recapture of Long Island and Manhattan from the British might, he believed, be the decisive blow. Because of the obstacle presented by the shallow draft of the waters at Sandy Hook at the entrance to New York, which had already barred the way to d’Estaing, and because of the better entry to Chesapeake Bay and its wider scope for action, his French ally Rochambeau, on the contrary, believed a campaign in the Chesapeake region would be more practical and more effective. Besides, it was here that the British Army under
Cornwallis was the most active and menacing enemy force in the war.

Washington and other generals of the army deeply wanted America’s cause to be fought by her own people, but their hardest discouragement was the fainthearted patriotism of the country at large insofar as tangible support by the populace was evidence. At Valley Forge, Washington painfully acknowledged, failure of supply meant that there were men in his ranks “
without the shadow of a blanket,” and they “might have been tracked from White Marsh to Valley Forge by the blood of their feet.” When levies were called for operations in the summer of 1780, fewer than thirty recruits had straggled into headquarters six weeks after the deadline. Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privations worse than their own. They were not anxious to join the emaciated ill-clad ranks of the Continentals. Farmers’ contributions of wagons and teams to carry supplies were no more forthcoming.