First Salute (42 page)

Rodney did not make that attempt because he felt his primary duty was to keep his ships at hand to defend the islands, because the time needed for repair of Hood’s crippled ships left him with inferior numbers and, most of all, because his physical miseries drained the spirit of enterprise that normally would have carried him to seek out and destroy the French in his own vicinity. A negative mission lacks the propelling impulse of a positive one. He made no search and found no combat. He determined nevertheless that he must join Hood in pursuit of de Grasse, with the lingering hope that in the sea air of a northward voyage his illness would recede. His orders to Hood to sail in search of de Grasse were issued on July 25. Sixteen days followed of repair and provisioning before Hood was ready to depart. In the interim, Rodney,
in the severity of his ailment, felt that he could at last take his promised leave to go home for treatment of his stricture. (The word “prostate” was not then in use for the condition.) After signing orders on July 25 for Hood to pursue de Grasse, Rodney followed on August 1 accompanied by Dr. Blane, the fleet physician, with the hope that after leaving the torrid zone he would be well enough to continue on to America, resuming his place as an active admiral. In case of combat, he took with him the
Gibraltar
and the
Triumph
, two of the larger liners, both in need of repairs, and the frigate
Pegasus
, which he hoped, if his health permitted, would carry him on to America.

His condition did not improve on the voyage as he had hoped, and when he passed the latitude of the Bermudas with no relief, he realized he must make for home. As a result, the two warships he had with him were not present to add to the British naval force which was soon to contest naval superiority with the French fleet in American waters. To Carlisle he describes his distress, when about to proceed to America “with a force sufficient to curb or defeat” His Majesty’s enemies, “
to be deprived of that honour by a severe distemper which reduced me so much as to render me incapable of taking charge of the fleet destined for that service.” He returned to England on September 19.

Apart from rejoining his family, his homecoming was not entirely joyous, for sixty-four legal actions had been entered against him by St. Eustatius and St. Kitts merchants, and the political Opposition were prowling on the heels of Burke and Fox in readiness for parliamentary attack in a chorus of condemnation. Hints of a coming peerage receded
^*
under the cloud of disfavor, and when on his arrival he hurried to Windsor Castle to request an audience with George III to present his case, he was put off to another day. Worse was the news that Hotham’s convoy, with the bulk of the produce of St. Eustatius, had been captured by the French, causing a storm of abuse to fall upon the much-abused Sandwich for failure to provide adequate ships to protect the homecoming treasure.

To the public, Rodney still emitted rays of glory for the relief of Gibraltar and the Moonlight Battle. Dockyard workers cheered him at Plymouth and garlands were hung at the door of his house in London. He hastened to Bath to submit to the untender mercies of 18th century
surgery for his condition. For the next month (September–October), while he was in surgery and recovery, he was entirely out of affairs while the terminal crisis was reaching its climax in America.

The surgeon, Sir Caesar Hawkins, appears to have had a good result and to have “cured his patient,” according to Rodney’s biographer, although on November 4 Rodney himself writes to Jackson of the Admiralty Board that “my complaint has been and still continues.” His spirit, in spite of the “misery of a surgical operation,” was as ardent as ever. The government, once so neglectful, was now eager for his services. In November he was offered the post of Vice-Admiral of Great Britain, with promise of the 90-gun three-decker
Formidable
as his flagship. He accepted at once, though his friends found him thin and ill but “
determined to serve again.” Sandwich wrote him letters virtually pleading with him to rejoin, insisting, “Our loss will be great if we are deprived of your assistance.”

This raises a question: if he was so invaluable, why did the Admiralty not give him leave to come home for treatment of a “severe stricture … so serious and painful that I must soon return home” when he first asked, on March 2? Treated at that time, he instead of Graves, future loser in the crucial Battle of the Bay, might have been employed in America. Hood later generously acknowledged, referring to Rodney, that if “that Admiral had led His Majesty’s squadron from the West Indies to this coast, the fifth of September [date of the Battle of the Bay] would I think have been a glorious day for Britain.”

Judging by Rodney’s sensational victory over de Grasse a year later, in the Battle of the Saints, Hood was probably right. Rodney would certainly not have made such a muddle out of the Battle of the Bay as to lose its control to the French. If the British had held the Bay, they would, or might, have rescued Cornwallis, in which case Washington’s last chance would have failed; mediation by Catherine the Great might have been the only recourse, and under Imperial Russian influence, with Britain in the opposite corner, American independence and a constitution would have been unlikely to emerge. Rodney’s own judgment of the Battle of the Bay was unequivocal. “
In my poor opinion,” he wrote to Jackson on October 19, “the French have gained a most important victory, and nothing can save America.” He was right on both counts. The day he wrote the letter was the day of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, though it would not be known for another month in London.

In the West Indies during July, de Grasse completed his preparations
for the campaign, except for the last necessity of money. The loan he had hoped to raise from the inhabitants of Santo Domingo having been thwarted, he turned to another local Spanish source, the population of Cuba. By speedy frigate he sent a letter to the Governor of Havana explaining his need for a sum equivalent of 1.2 million livres. While official Spain was not eager for the success of the American rebels for fear of its effect on her own colonies, the population of Havana, remembering the assault on their city by the British less than twenty years before, were glad of the opportunity to retaliate. By popular subscription, the money for de Grasse is said to have been raised in less than 48 hours, with the help of Cuban ladies who contributed their diamonds, and was promptly delivered to his flagship. Less romantically, Tornquist states that “Cuba” issued a cash order for 700,000 piasters, which was delivered in cash in five hours. On August 5, 1781, missing his expected departure date by only two days, de Grasse sailed from Cap-Frančais for America and Chesapeake Bay with the money, the three Saint-Simon regiments and all 28 ships of his fleet.

To escape British notice, de Grasse took a difficult and little-used route through the Bahama Channel between Cuba and the Bahamas, a course of many obstacles which made for slow sailing. In spite of the American pressure for haste, his choice of the Bahama Channel proved wise—or lucky. Admiral Hood left Antigua on August 10, only five days behind de Grasse, failed to find him on the wide ocean and, because he took the most direct route for the American coast, arrived in America five days ahead of him. When he looked into Chesapeake Bay, he saw no sign of foreign sail, for de Grasse was still beating his way up from the Bahamas. By relieving the British of anxiety about the advent of de Grasse and confirming them in the belief that if he was coming at all, he was coming to New York, the mischance of missing him at this point was more significant than a physical clash.

Hood dutifully went on to a conference on August 28 with Graves and Clinton. The attention of neither was focused on the coming of de Grasse. Rumors of a French fleet coming to the American coast from the West Indies were probably the work, Graves assured Clinton, of a “
heated imagination” or, insofar as mention was found in intercepted French letters, it was French “gasconading,” the favorite word for any French statement, threat or promise. Hood certainly knew it was more than that, having himself only recently seen action against de Grasse in the West Indies. He knew the size of the French fleet and, with any
strategic sense, could have judged, as Rodney did, its destination, and though junior to Graves in rank Hood might have made a strong case for their sailing together to maintain control of Chesapeake Bay before the French occupied it. Had they done so, they would have changed the course of the war, but Hood did not argue for it, owing no doubt to the mischance of finding no enemy in the Bay when he first looked in. Judging by his subsequent inaction in the developing crisis over the rescue of Cornwallis, he seems to have caught the contagion of paralysis from the moment he set foot in America.

Clinton shared the complacency of Graves and Hood, having been assured by Lord Germain that he had nothing to fear from de Grasse because Rodney with a superior fleet was keeping careful watch of his motions. Old Admiral Arbuthnot, before his retirement, had suggested to Graves that it was quite impossible for Rodney, “be his vigilance ever so great,” to send reinforcements to America in time enough “to be here before them,” and that de Grasse, if he came, would have superiority in American waters, endangering Cornwallis in his vulnerable position on the Chesapeake. The prospect envisioned by the weary eyes was to come true to the letter, but the old man was gone at last and the New Yorkers felt no need to worry about the southern theater, which they saw as secondary. Their worry was for their own position, for everyone was certain that the French fleet, if it came, would be coming to New York. What Graves and Clinton feared was a descent by de Barras’ French squadron from Newport to join with de Grasse and gain supremacy over British sea power in America. Why did Graves never venture to neutralize de Barras by an attack at Newport instead of waiting passively for attack at New York? “Throughout the course of the war,” de Lauzun writes, in the nearest he ever came to critical thinking about war, “the English seemed to be
stricken with blindness.… They refused to seize the most obvious and most golden opportunities.” He cites the occasion still to come; when the Rochambeau army would leave Newport to join Washington for the final campaign, “the British then had only to attack the French fleet off Rhode Island to destroy it. This never occurred to them.” In fact it did occur to them, but Graves, fearing to be outnumbered, would never agree to the venture.

On the day when Hood, at the end of his fruitless pursuit of de Grasse, came into New York, report arrived from Newport that de Barras had in fact sailed, destination unknown. When tested, the British blockade of Newport, which was maintained at Gardiners Island fifty
miles away, not surprisingly had proved less than solid. All the New Yorkers’ fears revived, although the scene of action they envisaged and the scene de Barras had in mind were not the same. Obsessed with their own position, the English thought he was coming to join some action against New York. In fact, de Barras was bringing forward the transports and siege train in support of the Franco—American march to Virginia, of which Clinton and Graves were sublimely ignorant.

Washington’s allies were coming. His planned junction with them would be a last chance. Since the exciting prospect raised at Saratoga, the French, who had put large expectations in the abasement of Britain that American success would cause, had been disappointed by the weakness of the American military effort. Instead of an aggressive ally, they were tied to a dependent client, unable to establish a strong government and requiring transfusions of men-at-arms and money to keep its war effort alive. The war, like all wars, was proving more expensive for the Bourbons than planned. Since the alliance, France had advanced to the Americans over 100 million livres, about $25 million, in loans, supplies and gifts, and before it was over the cost of the American war for France would amount, by some estimates, to 1.5 billion livres, an historic sum that was virtually to bankrupt the French national budget and require the summoning of the Estates General in 1789 that led to the arrest of the King and the sequence of eruptions that became the French Revolution. The Americans were notified that the French government had already spent
more than “Congress had a right to expect from the friendship of their ally.” Vergennes made it clear that no more troops or ships or infusions of money would be forthcoming after 1781. This time, Washington knew, the Allied reinforcement must be made effective. But to march an army of sufficient strength for a major American role to meet the French in Virginia was not a project to be organized on air. It had to be fed, shod and supported by field guns.

In the American wilderness of want, the first angel to appear to revive offensive capacity was Robert Morris, richest of the merchants who had profiteered from the war and who in 1781 was elected by Congress to the post of Superintendent of Finance. In its abiding fear of centralized power, so like the Dutch, Congress for five years had avoided the submission of finances to a single governor. Only in 1781, when the state was sliding toward a collapse of credit, did it admit the necessity of a financial director. Morris, whose opinion of mankind grew worse “from my experience of them,” and who believed that public office
exposed an honest man to envy and jealousy and to the “malicious attacks of every dirty scoundrel that deals in the murther of reputations,” nevertheless accepted the post and, by virtue of the funds he generated, did as much as anyone at this hour to preserve the fight for independence. The rich have their uses; although assumed to be knaves, they can prove to be pillars of the state like anyone else. Virtue and patriotism are not a prerogative of the humble. Through the influence of his personal credit, Morris obtained contributions from the various states, reduced government spending, laid the foundations for a national bank and persuaded a group of Philadelphia bankers to make a substantial loan in cash. Altogether, he borrowed from Rochambeau and from the Phil adelphia businessmen a total of $40,000, which provided the ragged half-fed Continentals with their first touch of hard cash since enlistment, cut down desertions and even brought in recruits. More than that, the money enabled Washington to move to the offensive.