Victory at Yorktown (11 page)

Happily for Greene, Washington gave him the best possible support in the form of two officers: Baron Steuben and Henry Lee. Steuben was incomparable as a trainer of troops and could also serve Greene well as an experienced adviser, while “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was a superb horseman with a small but well-trained cavalry force.

After graduating from Princeton at the age of seventeen, Lee was about to leave for England and study law when the war broke out. Patrick Henry nominated him for a captaincy in a Virginia cavalry regiment, and it was not long before his military proficiency and exploits attracted the attention of the commander in chief. For his conduct during the campaign of 1778 he won a promotion to major commandant and was authorized to increase the size of his cavalry command, which would serve as an independent corps. A victory at Paulus Hook in 1779 earned him one of the eight medals voted by Congress during the war, and he was promoted to lieutenant colonel when he was only twenty-three.

Before Lee headed south to join Greene, Washington had a conversation with him about a subject of utmost importance. The General wanted desperately to get his hands on Benedict Arnold—not to have someone kill him but to give him a trial, sentence him, and make an example of him before the army and the world. The only possible way to accomplish this was to kidnap him from the British army, and to do this Washington asked his young friend Henry Lee to suggest a man from his command. Lee believed he had just the man for the job.

On the night of October 9 Lee summoned a sergeant major named John Champe to his headquarters, locked the door behind him, and disclosed an audacious plan. The idea was for Champe to desert from Lee's cavalry brigade, flee to the British in New York, insinuate himself into the corps Benedict Arnold was raising—his American legion—and somehow work his way into the good graces of the traitor. On top of this, he was to meet every second day with an American agent who would make himself known as Mr. Baldwin. When the circumstances seemed auspicious, they should take advantage of a dark night, seize Arnold, gag him, and, pretending he was a drunken soldier, carry him to a boat provided by Baldwin, cross the Hudson, and head for Bergen Woods, where a rebel patrol would meet them and take them to headquarters.

Champe was a tall, strong fellow in his early twenties who had been chosen by Lee as “a very promising youth of uncommon taciturnity and inflexible perseverance”—two qualities that were essential in this bizarre assignment. Lee knew Champe's family in Virginia and was confident that he would be faithful to his duty, but at first Champe was reluctant, not because he was afraid of the hazardous mission but because he hated the idea of even pretending to be a deserter. Obviously, he would have to run the risk any real deserter would face, but Lee promised to delay any pursuit of him as long as possible. Beyond that, Lee assured him that he would receive a promotion, and that if the plan miscarried and he was caught, his name would be cleared.

Lee wrote to Washington, saying he had arranged for two men to carry out the General's wishes. Champe was to be rewarded with a promotion; Mr. Baldwin was to receive “one hundred guineas, five hundred acres of land, and three Negroes.” Washington approved promptly, but only “with this express stipulation and pointed injunction”: “that he A——d, is brought to me alive. No circumstance whatever shall obtain my consent to his being put to death. The idea which would accompany such an event would be that ruffians had been hired to assassinate him. My aim is to make a public example of him.”

On the night of October 20, Champe and Lee met for the last time, the sergeant packed his gear in a knapsack, saddled his horse, and rode out of camp on his extraordinary mission. Thanks to Lee's efforts to delay pursuit, he had a head start of about an hour and a quarter and managed to reach the vicinity of a popular tavern, the Three Pigeons, on the ridge above salt marshes on the west bank of the Hudson. But there his luck ran out. As he was emerging from the woods about daylight on Saturday, October 21, he heard hoofbeats and saw dragoons near the tavern galloping after him. Riding hard for Bergen, about four miles distant, he managed to elude his pursuers, but they came in sight again just as he leaped from his horse, strapped his knapsack on his shoulders, and plunged into the Hudson.

Providentially, he had been spotted by a British officer on a frigate in the river, who realized at once that an American deserter was making an escape, and had a boat lowered to row toward him and pick him up while the ship's guns covered Champe. Hauled aboard ship, Champe identified himself and said he was seeking British protection in New York City.

On October 23 the escapee was interviewed by Assistant Adjutant General George Beckwith at British headquarters at 1 Broadway, the beautiful home built by Captain Archibald Kennedy of the Royal Navy. The deserter's story of unrest and terrible conditions rang true to British officers, who had heard similar tales from malcontents of the Continental Army, and Champe was invited to enlist in the British army. He was ready for this: to accept would heighten the risk of his being caught and hanged by the rebels, he argued, so he was allowed to look for a job in Manhattan.

Fortunately, Arnold's quarters were next door to Clinton's headquarters, and almost immediately Champe arranged to run into the traitor, who spotted the deserter's Light Horse uniform and was impressed by Champe's story that he had been led to desert by General Arnold's example. At the end of their conversation, Champe accepted a rank in the American legion that was equivalent to that which he had held in Lee's corps.

Within a matter of days the “deserter” discovered that Arnold had a regular habit of walking in his garden around midnight, just before retiring, and decided that this was the time and place to catch him. He then worked loose a number of palings in the picket fence so that he and his accomplice Baldwin could pass through quietly, jump on Arnold, stuff a gag in his mouth, and drag him into the alley behind the house and to a waiting boat at the pier behind headquarters. These precautions took time, and Champe was such a careful, meticulous planner that it was early December before he was ready to make his move. He set the date for the 11th of the month.

That winter afternoon as he waited for darkness to fall, General Arnold suddenly appeared and handed him an order. Champe was to leave immediately with the American legion, which was embarking for Virginia with orders to take the town of Portsmouth on Chesapeake Bay. Champe's efforts had been to no avail; now he had to join the loyalists struggling up the gangplanks with their gear and wait on board until the fleet sailed on December 20, leaving him with no chance to seize Arnold or notify Mr. Baldwin or call off the Continental soldiers who would be waiting in the Bergen Woods for the three men to appear.

As the transports bearing Arnold and his seventeen hundred men, including John Champe, set sail and slipped out of New York harbor on the evening tide, no one could have known it, but the Revolutionary War in the North was over.

4

BEWARE THE BACK WATER MEN

In Newport,
Rochambeau's French officers settled in for a comfortable season of sociability, having taken over a number of elegant houses after repairing the damage the British had done to them. But early in October they got their first taste of severe American weather when the howling tail of the hurricane that had devastated Martinique and Barbados blew into Rhode Island, driving ships aground, dismasting others, and blowing over all the tents in camp.

That same month came news of the “shocking treason” of Benedict Arnold as part of a plan to deliver West Point to the enemy. Washington had written to Rochambeau about it on September 26, saying, “By a lucky accident a conspiracy of the most dangerous kind … has been defeated. General Arnold, who has sullied his former glory, by the blackest treason, has escaped to the enemy.” In an attempt to allay any fears the Frenchman might have, he noted philosophically, “in a revolution of the present nature it is more to be wondered at” that there had been so few traitors. Rochambeau responded in words calculated to console the American general, but which proved to foreshadow a host of events in the campaign on which they were to embark: “I know not whether I should pity you, or congratulate you upon the discovery of Arnold's frightful plot; be this as it may, it proves to us that Providence is for us and for our cause, and of this I have had several examples since the beginning of this campaign.” Under present circumstances, it appeared that only the hand of Providence could save the rebel cause.

The tactful response was characteristic of Rochambeau, about whom Axel Fersen wrote, “Everyone was contented to be commanded by Rochambeau. He was the only man who was capable of commanding us here in America, and of maintaining that perfect harmony which existed between two nations so different in manners and language. His wise, prudent, and simple bearing did more to conciliate the Americans than four successful battles could have done.”

At the end of the month, after Vicomte Rochambeau, the general's son, left for Versailles, preparations began for settling the French army in winter quarters. Winter came early and the brutal cold obliged the officers to make huge fires in open fireplaces in their rooms, but they soon discovered how expensive this was going to be. Unavailable locally, firewood had to be hauled great distances since the English—who had occupied the town from 1776 to 1779—had stripped the island of its luxuriant forests and its renowned orchards.

Some of the men, including the Chevalier de Chastellux, were eager to explore the interior of America and left town in early November,
*
while those who remained behind gradually learned something of the mores of their hosts. They were struck by how unlike their own customs were those of well-to-do Americans—very easy and free, so that what would be regarded as bad breeding in France was, in this country, regarded as suitable behavior and generally accepted. At the table Americans leaned on their dinner companions, rested on their elbows, and used no napkin (a diner wiped his or her mouth on the tablecloth). Breakfast, the visitors learned, generally included coffee, chocolate, and slices of buttered toast, and the amount of sugar used marked the difference between poverty and affluence. Dinner consisted of boiled or roast meat with vegetables cooked in water. “They make their own sauce on their plates, which they usually load with everything on the table, enough to frighten a man, and pour gravy over it.… After dinner those in comfortable circumstances have the tablecloth removed, whereupon the ladies retire. Madeira wine is brought, and the men drink and smoke for quite a while.”

At dinner parties given by the well-to-do, so many healths were drunk that “one rarely leaves the table without being a little tipsy.…” In the evening a rather light supper was eaten about ten o'clock, and in every household they visited they found that grog,
*
cider, or beer was served to the thirsty. No glasses were offered; the liquid was in a bowl. The master of the house drank to the guests' health, took a drink himself, handed the bowl to the guest next to him, and it was then passed around the table.

Claude Blanchard, the commissary, dined frequently with Americans and was struck by their consumption of coffee and tea. In the case of country people, breakfast consisted of quantities of both coffee and tea, which they drank with roasted meats, butter, pies, and ham. Then they had supper, and in the afternoon, tea. It seemed to him that Americans were “almost always at the table” in the winter, and since they had little to occupy them besides spending days “along side of their fires and their wives, without reading and without doing anything, going so often to table” was “a relief and a preventive of
ennui.
”

Baron Closen was struck by the way an American's outward appearance often suggested carelessness or even thoughtlessness, yet despite this apparent indifference to the opinion of others, “these same people fight with so much bravery, can support a war, and have such trained and disciplined troops. Who would believe that an American, who scarcely dares to go out of his house on a rainy day, the moment he has a musket on his shoulder, braves every danger and the most difficult weather?”

One of his colleagues, the Comte de Clermont-Crèvecoeur, described the Americans as tall and well built, but thin, which made “most of them look as though they had grown while convalescing from an illness.” They do not live long, he concluded: “one notices that they live to be sixty or seventy, and the latter are rare.” Even so, he had seen a few octogenarians and one ninety-year-old man who was still riding horseback with ease.

As for the Rhode Island women, Closen found them unusual in their modesty and sweetness of demeanor, noting that they had very fine features, white and clear complexions, small hands and feet, but “their teeth are not very wonderful”—a fault he attributed to drinking great quantities of tea. The clothes and coiffeurs of most women were in the English style, but he hoped that “the visit of the French army will increase their taste for dress.” Fortunately, “they all like dancing, and they engage in it unpretentiously, as is their manner in general.”

The women struck Clermont-Crèvecoeur as very beautiful but also quite pale and rather frail. A girl of twenty would pass for thirty in France, he said, and while they have very little color, “nothing can compare with the whiteness and texture of their skin. They have charming figures, and in general one can say they are all pretty, even beautiful, in the regularity of their features.…” By the time he had been in this country for six months or so, he had given a great deal more thought to American women and reached a rather startling conclusion, which he phrased as a question: “In a country so new where vice should not be deeply rooted, why should there be such a large number of prostitutes?”

The answer, he decided, lay in the strange custom of bundling—an activity granted by parents that permitted a young man who declared himself to be in love with a girl to shut himself up in a room with her, lavishing tender caresses upon her in bed, but “stopping short of those reserved for marriage alone; otherwise he would transgress the established laws of bundling.” A truly virtuous girl would resist and conform to the letter of the law, while “those more amply endowed by nature in this respect succumb to this tender sport.” Bundling, he observed, was made for Americans; the “coldness and gravity of their faces proclaim that this sport suits them perfectly.” What's more, a couple could play this game for five or six years or longer before deciding to marry, without committing finally to wedlock. If a girl was seduced and had a child, it was not she who was disgraced, but the man. Respectable houses were closed to him, and he could not marry into one of the better families.