Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (46 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

Tags: #History, #United States, #Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Military

BOOK: Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader
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On October 17, after twenty days of siege and with no help from Clinton imminent, Cornwallis sent an officer to Washington to conduct negotiations for surrender. At the beginning of the discussions, Cornwallis hoped that Washington might grant parole to his soldiers. Washington disabused him of any such notion, insisting that surrender meant that the British and German soldiers would be prisoners of war.
After a day of talk, Washington’s terms were accepted, and on October 19 the formal ceremony of surrender was held.
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Washington undoubtedly took satisfaction at this transaction that saw a British army surrender—and on his terms. Yet though he was pleased, he made no demonstration of it—no vainglorious sentiments left his lips, and no prideful letters came from his pen. Nor did he attempt to humiliate British officers and men. He had always respected his enemy in the Revolution, with the possible exception of the German commanders at Trenton and British ministers and their king in England.

The British commander and his soldiers nevertheless felt humiliation at whatever Washington intended on October 19. The ceremony took place at 2:00
P.M.
, with the British soldiers, aside from the incapacitated wounded, marched from their positions in Yorktown, muskets on their shoulders, between two detachments of French and American troops. The two lines were spaced to permit the passage of several files, but even with this separation, it must have felt like a gauntlet. A British band played a dirge, probably “The World Turned Upside Down,” music matched by sad and angry British faces, though the Hessian and Anspach regiments were probably largely impassive. The French line on the British right showed off clean and crisp infantry, dressed in white uniforms, well turned out in every respect. The Americans, the poor country cousins, badly dressed and not always of disciplined bearing, waited in a second line across from the French. Washington, Rochambeau, Admiral Barras (de Grasse did not leave his ship), General Benjamin Lincoln, who had given up Charleston the year before, and assorted staff officers sat quietly on their horses. They had expected Cornwallis to lead his army out, but—under what Baron von Closen called “the pretext of an indisposition” he excused himself from this sad ceremony, and Brigadier General Charles O’Hara served in his stead.

When General O’Hara arrived where Washington and his colleagues sat astride their horses, he attempted first to present his sword to Rochambeau, who refused it and pointed to Washington as the allies’ commander. Washington, probably miffed at Cornwallis’s absence, pointed to Lincoln, who took the sword, only to return it immediately. The British soldiers were then ordered to leave their weapons in a pile nearby, an action they performed with ill grace, attempting to break
their muskets by forcefully throwing them to the ground. American officers soon stopped this petulance and the surrender was completed.
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Washington gave a dinner for Cornwallis that night, with Rochambeau and senior French and American general officers present. Brigadier General O’Hara again filled in for his commander. The occasion, though more comfortable, apparently never gave way to the type of warm exchange of sentiments so common to gatherings of European officers. The restraint in such a gathering was not present elsewhere in the weeks following.

Washington dispatched Colonel Tench Tilghman, one of his favorite aides, to Philadelphia the next day with the news of the surrender. It was greeted with joy there, and almost everywhere in America there were grand celebrations. The reactions in Britain were understandably quite different: Lord North’s exclamation at hearing the news—“O’ God, it is all over”—described his administration more accurately than it did the war. Washington was concerned that Americans would assume that Yorktown ended the need for full support of an army; that assumption was indeed to plague the effort Washington and others were to make in the next two years.
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The War’s End

Despite its greatness, Washington’s victory at Yorktown set off conflicting impulses within him. One was a sense of caution, almost a distrust of the event itself. Most Americans around him on his staff and in the army, as well as civilians all over the country, assumed that Cornwallis’s surrender meant that the war was over. Such a feeling also existed across the Atlantic in British governing circles, with at least one powerful exception: George III dissented from claims of its importance immediately after the news arrived. For different reasons, Washington agreed with the king that the war would go on.

The sense of caution that so often shaped Washington’s attitudes ran up against his hope—a feeling that Yorktown had created promising possibilities leading to peace, if only others could see them. The others in this case were the French, to whom he felt immensely grateful, from Louis XVI on down. He had always respected Rochambeau and had often made his appreciation clear; de Grasse was more difficult to deal with, but Washington’s recognition of the necessity of naval supremacy compelled him to thank him for his support in the capture of Yorktown. Gratitude might have been expressed in various ways: Washington threw to the winds his own sense of balance and, with it, his moderate, matter-of-fact style of expression, in favor of the extravagant. It was to de Grasse, he said, that victory at Yorktown should be ascribed. This judgment appeared in a letter Washington wrote to de Grasse on October 28, in which he also praised de Grasse’s “mastery of the American Seas” and “the Glory of the French Flag.” This characterization was a warm-up to his ultimate accolade: “de Grasse is the Arbiter of the War.” He also assured de Grasse of his “attachment to your Glory.” These effusions were an example of laying on the flattery with a trowel—and perhaps were necessary. They did not bring out
the modesty in de Grasse, nor did they evoke a willingness to undertake an expedition with the Americans against Charleston, Savannah, or New York—all places Washington wished to attack.
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The ceremony on the field of surrender was hardly over when Washington began asking that the French provide the naval cover for an attack on Charleston. The French under de Grasse had no desire for such an effort and, putting aside Washington’s requests, praise and solid reasoning notwithstanding, sailed off in early November for the West Indies. For a few days before sailing, they made a tentative offer to transport two thousand American soldiers to Wilmington, but soon explained that the French court had ordered the shift of naval forces to the West Indies without further delay. The Americans feared that should the French navy clear out of the Chesapeake too soon, a British squadron rumored to be coming from the south would destroy troops and supplies still near the edges of the bay. This concern failed to move the French, and in early November de Grasse took his ships to the French islands.
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That the French navy would remain in North American waters was never more than a faint possibility. For the French, clearing the American states of the British army never assumed the importance that the Americans accorded it. Had Washington commanded without restrictions all the allied forces in North America, including the French fleet, he would have forced the British out of not just Charleston and Savannah, but New York as well. In the plans he announced to the French, Charleston assumed the highest priority. There were several reasons for this ranking: He knew that with Rochambeau’s army in Virginia, where it would remain throughout the winter, and de Grasse seemingly committed to the West Indies, the only conceivable chance he had of involving the French lay in persuading them that a southern campaign might be managed within their larger plans. To be sure, a southern campaign had other attractions for Washington. It would please delegates to Congress from the Carolinas, and it would give relief to Nathanael Greene, whose army had fought well at Guilford Courthouse and who now wished to reclaim the southern states for the nation, a design that Washington also believed in. But Washington’s deepest desire remained recapturing New York City.
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Several historians have commented unfavorably on Washington’s attempt to bring about a major move against New York. His judgment,
they say, may have been founded on a desire to revenge himself on an enemy that in 1776 drove him from the city in a most humiliating manner. He was caught asleep on Brooklyn Heights, according to this interpretation, and then put to flight up New York Island, his army disorganized and running for its life. The running did not end until he crossed the Delaware River, the remains of his force in tatters. Apparently, if this theory of his defeat is to be believed, he never recovered emotionally and would not until he recaptured New York City.

There is little doubt that Washington felt anger at the British or that his feelings rose to hatred. He had commanded men in New York who suffered and died following his orders, for a cause he believed in without reservation. He knew that he had acted against one of the great powers of the world and that it had acted in ways that would destroy the liberties of a people who asked little of the empire but gave it much. They fought and he fought at their head to protect a liberty that had a long existence in America.

These feelings did not, however, form his understanding of how New York related to American strategy. He had clear ideas about how the war should be fought if it was to bring victory to his country. New York’s importance seemed obvious to him, and the British agreed with him. New York had been since 1776 the key to their efforts. Holding it strengthened the ties that connected New England to the Mid-Atlantic states, not just New York State but Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as the Chesapeake, including both Virginia and Maryland. The British testified to its importance through much of what they did and how they used its harbor and rivers. Most British troops entered the United States through New York; the major part of the army made its home there and conducted operations through its port. The commander in chief of all British forces made his headquarters in the city. The city also contained the highest number of loyalists. Washington decided early on that he must defeat the British there if independence was to be won. This understanding of the war can be explained in various ways, but the major element in his comprehension rested on judgment—on military realities—not an obsessive desire for revenge.
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British intentions concerning the war in 1781 remained unknown to him—and to the British themselves. This uncertainty underlay virtually
all that occurred in the next year. As far as danger to their national power was involved, the British government had to calculate how continuing the war with the colonies (as they still referred to the American states) would affect their effort to hold off the French and the Spanish in the West Indies. With the failure, in 1779, of the French and Spanish fleets to bring off an invasion of Britain, that sort of threat faded. They also had to contend with the Dutch, now an important challenger in overseas trade. The war on the North American continent, now entering its seventh year, appeared to have no end—two large armies had surrendered to the rebels, and only two major ports were firmly in imperial hands. Generals Gage, Howe, Clinton, Cornwallis, and Burgoyne had all given their best, only to see their efforts yield to near collapse, and two of their number captured. A similar list of failed admirals could also be drawn up—Lord Richard Howe, Marriot Arbuthnot, and Thomas Graves, for example. They had fought well at times (when they fought), but none had been able to bring Britain’s full naval power to bear. Perhaps accidents, bad luck, and the weather had undone their fleets more than the French navy had, but even when their ships had the weather gage in a strategic sense, they somehow allowed their superiority to fade away. The ragtag American army, often dismissed by the regulars as amateurs, seems to have grown in skill even as its troops suffered from a lack of supplies. By 1782, several British leaders were coming to see that leadership was something the Continental Army did not lack. George Washington’s toughness, his endurance, impressed more and more of the enemy.
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The circumstances shaping the war were grim enough, but at the beginning of 1782, the British had also to face the fact that the French had begun to exert themselves both on the North American continent and on the sea. Taken together, these realities and recent history offered a bleak future for Britain at war. It was not only Lord North who believed it was all over—and, as the realists in Britain recognized, there was little reason not to accept the American claim to independence, no matter how that admission soured the mouth.

Washington expected the worst from the British as he pondered a future that now seemed simpler, lacking, as it did, a large enemy force in the Chesapeake. The British, he thought, might trick the Americans in a
peace treaty with terms that allowed them to renege on a recognition of independence; or they might mount a new military campaign while supposedly they negotiated peace. For a few weeks after Yorktown, he had smaller matters to deal with. The easiest to face was presented by General Horatio Gates, still in disgrace and wanting something to do in the war. He might be ignored, but Congress could not, and it wanted Washington to do something with Gates. The difficulty in satisfying both Gates and Congress lay in the history of the Battle of Camden. There, Gates had run, not stopping for about sixty miles. What Congress might have in mind was not clear, though as Gates wrote in a letter to Washington, Congress intended that he should be “employed in service” as Washington “should direct.” But Gates also told his old commander in this letter that he would not serve until the “Stigma” under which he “laboured” was “removed.” How Washington might fetch a stain-free reputation out of the catastrophe of Camden, Gates did not say, and Washington simply replied that Gates’s “circumstances” were “distressing,” but he could not direct Congress to provide “relief” to Gates. There the problem sat, with Gates fuming and Washington probably thinking, “You brought this mess on yourself.”
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