Jefferson and Hamilton (20 page)

Perhaps Jefferson’s most remarkable step was his audacity toward General Washington. Jefferson in effect told Washington that he was wrong, something virtually no one else was willing to do. Though not confrontational—he acknowledged that Washington was “situated between two fires,” a British army on Manhattan under Clinton and Cornwallis’s army in South Carolina—Jefferson told the commander that the prevailing “sentiment … in Congress and here” was that he must yield some of his army for the defense of the South. Jefferson even urged Washington to come south and personally take command. Incredibly, Jefferson pledged to “cheerfully transfer to you every power which the executive [of Virginia] might exercise.”
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Thomas Jefferson had not quite offered George Washington dictatorial powers in Virginia, but he had come close to it. It was to no avail. Rochambeau’s army landed in Rhode Island at almost the same moment that Jefferson’s letter reached Washington’s headquarters. Henceforth, the American commander’s focus was on a joint allied campaign to retake New York.
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The South was a minefield for Continentals. A rebel army had been destroyed in the defense of Savannah in December 1778, and a second—Lincoln’s army—surrendered in May 1780 following the siege of Charleston. In July, Horatio Gates, the victor at Saratoga as well as a rival whom Washington hated and feared, succeeded Lincoln as commander of the Continental army in the Southern Department. Gates acted rapidly—in fact, too hurriedly. Before he got the lay of the land, established an adequate intelligence network, or familiarized himself with his southern troops, Gates put his army in motion, marching southward from Hillsborough, North Carolina. (He set out just nine days after Jefferson implored Washington to come south.) Gates’s target was a small British force known to be operating near Camden, South Carolina. Unbeknownst to Gates, Cornwallis was personally bringing reinforcements toward Camden. The two armies stumbled into each other and squared off on August 16. The outcome was decided when Gates’s callow militiamen, including the Virginians that Jefferson had sent, broke and ran early in the engagement, setting off a contagious panic. It was a rout. One fifth of Gates’s men were casualties. The remainder had taken flight, with Gates running just as hard as his frightened men. He did not stop until his sweaty mount reached Charlotte, sixty miles away.
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The debacle at Camden gave Hamilton the opportunity for eliminating Washington’s last rival, and he made the most of it. In earlier attacks, Hamilton had sought to diminish Gates’s standing by questioning his role in the
victory at Saratoga, arguing that the spadework for victory been done previously by Schuyler. At Saratoga, Hamilton had argued, Gates had “hug himself at a distance” from the battlefield, leaving it to Benedict Arnold “to win laurels for him.” After the Battle of Camden, Hamilton once again went after Washington’s nemesis. Hamilton depicted Gates’s plans for battle as a “military absurdity.” With biting sarcasm, Hamilton wrote that the general “showed that age and the long labors and fatigues of a military life had not in the least impaired” his ability to run.
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Soon after the disaster in South Carolina, Gates was removed from command. As had been the case when Hamilton helped to finish off General Lee, Hamilton had yet again done his part in the elimination of one of the commander’s rivals. He had also demonstrated his value to General Washington.

Jefferson called Camden a “Misfortune,” but he knew that it had been an unmitigated disaster. Once again, no American army stood between Virginia and Cornwallis, and Jefferson thought it inconceivable that Virginia could defend itself. While he had it in his power to summon and arm three thousand Virginia militiamen, he knew that powder would be in short supply and that there would be no tents for the soldiery. In addition, much of the spare clothing and wagons that he had sent to Gates now belonged to the enemy. Atop these woes, Jefferson learned that hundreds of men from several counties had enlisted in newly established Loyalist units. Should the British invade Virginia anytime soon, Jefferson told Congress late in the summer of 1780, “they would find us in a condition incapable of resistance.”
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Jefferson’s fears were realized. The blow that he dreaded, and that Virginia had expected during the seventeen months since Collier’s naval raid, came in October 1780. The sortie was another raid, not an all-out invasion. It had been requested by Cornwallis, who saw the assault both as a diversion to prevent the deployment of Virginia militia farther south and as a means of interrupting the rebel supply line that ran through Virginia and into the Carolinas. As Virginia’s autumn foliage burst into its gaudy colors, a British fleet of six vessels and 2,200 redcoats under General Alexander Leslie fell on the state. In the third week of October, Leslie put his cavalry and 1,000 infantrymen ashore at Portsmouth, Newport News, and Hampton. Inexplicably, the early-warning network that Jefferson had painstakingly built failed, and Leslie took Virginia by surprise. Washington had earlier cautioned that a fleet was being readied in New York for an unknown destination; however, only a week before Leslie appeared, the American commander had advised Jefferson that the British were unlikely to deploy a force of any size southward before November or December. Washington thought the British would wait until the Franco-American armies were immobilized by the winter, a view that
Jefferson too had expressed a month earlier. Such thinking likely led officials up and down the line to decrease their guard.
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When Leslie’s raiders splashed onto Virginia soil, only the local militia was available. Poorly armed and devoid of a cavalry wing, the militiamen were ineffectual. Jefferson responded to the emergency with alacrity. He summoned thousands of militiamen from the inland counties and diverted units that had been ordered to North Carolina. He even attempted to persuade the French admiral in Rhode Island to bring his fleet to the Chesapeake, where in a joint operation the French and Virginians might trap, and doom, Leslie. There was little chance of that happening, and the possibility vanished once Leslie unexpectedly sailed away after only three weeks. His raiders had sown terror and inflicted considerable damage from below Cape Henry to the periphery of Williamsburg. With time, Leslie could have caused greater harm, but Cornwallis summoned him to the Carolinas, where the war had suddenly taken an unexpected, and ominous, turn for the British.
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Within a few days of the capture of Charleston, General Clinton had exulted that rebel resistance in South Carolina had been broken save for that of “a few scattering militia.”
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Clinton’s claim had seemed indisputable, but in July the inhabitants of South Carolina’s backcountry stirred, launching a guerrilla war. It started without help from Congress or the Continental army, and in the first months these rebels fought with little or no outside assistance. Many were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who had come to America to escape Great Britain and its Anglican Church, though some had been radicalized by the American Revolution, and others had taken up arms in response to depredations of the British army. Guerrilla wars tend to be dirty and ferocious, and this was no exception. In time, Cornwallis’s army suffered heavy attrition, the victim of partisans sustained by arms sent southward through Virginia. In part, Leslie had been sent to Virginia to interdict those supply lines, but just before he put his men ashore, the southern rebels in the Carolinas scored a sensational victory. In a battle fought on King’s Mountain, near the North Carolina–South Carolina border, the British lost more than one thousand men, roughly 20 percent of Cornwallis’s entire army. He ordered Leslie to South Carolina.
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Changes were occurring as well on the American side. Congress removed Gates following the debacle at Camden, spurred in part by the vitriol poured on him by Hamilton. Congress then asked Washington to name Gates’s successor. Congress had previously made similar requests of Washington, but he had always refused to act, seeing his involvement in such personnel matters as a potential political snare. But given the desperate situation, Washington overcame his reluctance and recommended the appointment of General Nathanael Greene.

Greene, a Quaker from Rhode Island who had never soldiered before 1774, had been chosen as one of the original general officers when the Continental army was created in 1775. He quickly caught Washington’s eye. An extraordinary judge of men, Washington saw things in Greene that escaped others. In time, Greene became Washington’s most trusted advisor. By 1780, he had acquitted himself as a leader under fire in engagements in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. If anyone could succeed in the South—and so far no one had—Washington believed it would be Greene.
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Following his appointment, Greene had a long meeting with Washington, then rode to Annapolis and Richmond to confer with the governors of Maryland and Virginia. He sat down with Jefferson two days after learning that Leslie had departed for South Carolina. Greene wanted immediate help, and he provided Jefferson with a lengthy shopping list of things he needed from Virginia. He told the astonished governor that he wanted ten thousand barrels of flour and five thousand of beef or pork; he also asked for two hundred hogsheads of rum or brandy, one hundred wagons, each furnished with four horses and an experienced teamster, forty skilled workers from assorted trades, and five thousand pounds in specie. He insisted that Virginia meet its quota by furnishing three thousand men to the Continental army, and he asked Jefferson to immediately provide him with an entire corps of militia adequately supplied for a winter campaign. Before leaving Richmond, Greene revealed that he had appointed General Friedrich von Steuben to command the Continentals in Virginia and to drill the state’s troops.
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Jefferson went to work, and within thirty days most of the supplies that Greene wanted were on their way to North Carolina. But Jefferson protested to Congress that Virginia should not be expected to arm the Continentals. He acknowledged that it was the state’s responsibility to arm its militia, which it had done, and he ordered the militiamen requested by Greene to march for North Carolina. However, when they arrived, Greene fumed that these men were “destitute of everything necessary either for comfort or convenience.” Barely containing his anger, Greene lectured Jefferson that it served “no good purpose to send men here in such a condition…. There must be either pride or principle to make a soldier. No man will think himself bound to fight the battles of a State that leaves him to perish for want of covering.”
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Stung, Jefferson secured authorization from the legislature to do what Washington had done unilaterally in 1777 when he sent Hamilton to Philadelphia with authority to confiscate civilian property. If it was the only way to obtain the items, Jefferson announced that he would “provide cloathing and blankets for the troops by seizing” them.
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Jefferson had boldly responded to the crisis that followed Gates’s defeat
and Leslie’s raid, but Virginia was overextended and overwhelmed. It was defending itself from invasion, helping in the struggle against Cornwallis, and waging war on the trans-Appalachian frontier. The sacrifices required in the never-ending war were taking a toll. During the fall, what Jefferson called a “very dangerous Insurrection” that aimed at thwarting militia mobilization was uncovered in two counties; both were suppressed just in the nick of time. But Jefferson presumed that the “dangerous fire” of rebellion against civil authority had not been “smothered” forever, and he was correct. Within a month, some militia officers who had been ordered to join Greene refused to march until they were paid and better supplied. The state met their demands.
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Jefferson privately confessed his mortification at the conduct of many Virginians. It ate at him. He grew more melancholy, a downcast turn fed by his longing to return home and pursue his “Love of Study and Retirement.” Around the time of his meeting with Greene, Jefferson confided to Page that he would not accept a third term as governor and that he might immediately resign. Other Founders, including General Washington, experienced similar moments of black despair, but none resigned. Page discouraged his friend from taking a step that would finish him forever as a public official. Nearly every state official thought him “eminently qualified” for his post, Page advised. He added that it was widely acknowledged that no other Virginian could have managed the recent war crises more adroitly. Only six months remained in Jefferson’s second term, Page added, and they would pass rapidly. He closed with an admonition: “Deny yourself your darling Pleasures.”
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Jefferson did not resign. But he had hardly read Page’s missive before his problems worsened immeasurably.

On the last day of 1780, a Sunday, a courier brought word to Jefferson that a British flotilla of twenty-seven vessels—considerably larger than the one Leslie had commanded—had been spotted off the Virginia coast. Two weeks earlier, Jefferson had learned from Washington that a British force would soon sail from New York. It was “destined Southward,” said Washington, but he could not be more specific.
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A year earlier, Washington had sent a similar warning. Jefferson had not summoned the militia to active duty, and it had been a wise decision. When Washington’s latest notification arrived, Jefferson thought it unlikely that another British fleet would descend on Virginia barely two months after Leslie’s departure. Besides, he was again hesitant about calling up the militia. On that Sunday when he received word of an enemy flotilla, Jefferson weighed his choices. He made an educated guess. He guessed wrong.