Victory at Yorktown (4 page)

On December 17, one day shy of two weeks after the news reached Passy, the American commissioners were notified that His Majesty Louis XVI was ready to acknowledge the independence of the United States and enter into a treaty of amity and commerce. On the evening of February 6, 1778, that treaty was signed, embodying most-favored-nation trading privileges and certain maritime principles along with recognizing independence. A second treaty—a “conditional and defensive alliance” that was to have a profound effect on the revolution in America—provided that in the event of war between France and Great Britain as a consequence of the first treaty, the United States and France would fight the war together and neither would make peace with the enemy without the formal consent of the other. Further, they would not lay down their arms until the independence of the United States was assured by a treaty ending the war.

France at once conveyed to the British government the treaty of amity and commerce (though not the alliance), not realizing that a spy had already given George III's agents a copy of both treaties. The spy was an American double agent, Dr. Edward Bancroft. Originally from Massachusetts, he had studied medicine in England and settled there to pursue scientific interests, through which he met Benjamin Franklin. When the latter went to France, Bancroft arranged to work as a spy for him, as he did, beginning in 1776, for Silas Deane as well. At the same time he was an agent of the British, who paid him a handsome £1,000 annually, with a promise of a pension of £500 a year. (It might be added that he was rewarded further through speculations in the market, based on the secret information he obtained.) As a final achievement, he arranged to be appointed secretary of the American Peace Commission negotiating the final settlement with Great Britain, and so effective was his cover that his career as a spy was not suspected until a century after he had died. As he put it after the war in a letter to Britain's foreign secretary, he went to France and “during the first year resided in the same house with Dr. Franklin, Mr. Deane, etc., and regularly informed this Government of every transaction of the American Commissioners.…”

If the stakes had not been so high, the frenzied activity of espionage agents milling around in the little house in Passy would have seemed a joke. In addition to British agents, Louis XVI's secret service spied continuously on the American commissioners, suspicious that they might be carrying on behind-the-scenes negotiations with England while working for a treaty with France.

At the center of British efforts to divine the relationship between France and the American colonies and prevent an alliance between the two was William Eden, an undersecretary of state and chief of the Secret Service in London. His man in charge of the Paris operation was Paul Wentworth, an American loyalist, Harvard graduate and classmate of John Adams, and until recently the London agent for New Hampshire. He was related to Benning Wentworth, who served as the first royal governor of New Hampshire, and his reason for becoming a secret agent was not the £500 a year he was paid, but the promise of a baronetcy, which meant a seat in Parliament and a position of some prestige in English society. Always prepared, he carried with him a cipher with recipes for several invisible inks, used as many as twenty assumed names, and devoted himself unstintingly to his work, with results that were of incalculable value to the British government. He prided himself on being a gentleman, yet he was capable of such outrageous acts as stealing a friend's visiting card and seal and going to any lengths to buy or pilfer documents. However, he was never to achieve the goal he most desired. Lord Suffolk believed that Lord North should reward his services; Lord North thought the king should do it; but George III did not like Wentworth (or other agents, for that matter), who kept reporting French actions to assist the Americans, which the king didn't want to hear.

The monarch discovered a way to rationalize his prejudice against Wentworth: when he discovered that he liked to gamble, he took to calling him a “stock-jobber” and a “dabbler in the alley,” who was not to be trusted because such men were easily hoodwinked. Thanks to Wentworth and Bancroft, among others, the British government was far better informed about the secrets of its rebellious colonies than most Americans were, but the reason this knowledge had so little impact on the conduct of the war was the king's unreasonable animus against financial speculation and his conviction that his secret agents were involved in gambling—which they were. If he had paid attention to his agents, he would have realized that no more than a handful of American leaders were advocating independence in the early stages of the war.

For example, a letter to William Lee in London, written in October of 1775 and signed “J.A.” (almost certainly John Adams), was intercepted by British postal authorities and known to the Secret Service, if not the king's ministers. It read:

We cannot in this country conceive that there are men in England so infatuated as seriously to suspect the Congress or people here to erect ourselves into an independent state. If such an idea really obtains amongst those at the helm of affairs, one hour's residence in America would eradicate it. I never met one individual so inclined but it is universally disavowed.

To be sure, that was written late in 1775, but two years later Benjamin Franklin was still reluctant to push the French too hard by revealing his advocacy of independence. Not until he heard the news of Saratoga in December of 1777 did he feel sufficiently confident that the French would back the Americans with an alliance and, better yet, warships and troops, so that he could speak openly about independence.

In other words, by heeding Lord Stormont's reports from his spies, George III might have understood that an opportunity existed to settle affairs with the Americans short of independence, while keeping the colonies within the empire. Not until after the American victory at Saratoga was Wentworth instructed to propose terms secretly to Franklin—terms which North announced in Parliament two months later. But by then it was too late by far.

In a last-minute desperation move aimed at reconciliation with the former colonies, a peace commission headed by Frederick Howard, Lord Carlisle, the twenty-nine-year-old, extremely rich friend of the opposition politician Charles James Fox, was dispatched to America in 1778, bearing terms that would take relations back to where they had been in 1763—basically granting the Americans everything they wanted except independence. The hope was that this proposal would persuade the Congress not to ratify the treaty with France, and a British ship bearing the commission and a French vessel carrying the treaties raced each other across the Atlantic.
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The French won, though even had they not done so Congress would not have agreed to any proposal that did not include independence. On May 2 the treaties were presented to the legislators in York, Pennsylvania, where Congress was sitting, and were ratified two days later. Their significance was soon evident. On July 11, 1780, an express rode up to General William Heath's headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, with news that the fleet of “our illustrious ally” had been sighted off Newport. After dispatching a messenger to George Washington, Heath hurried down to the dock, boarded a packet to Newport that arrived about midnight, and next morning called on the Comte de Rochambeau, who had come ashore the previous evening with his staff, and was understandably perplexed when no American officer greeted them and they found “no one in the streets; only a few sad and frightened faces in the windows.”

That was the beginning of a long, enduring friendship between the two men, and the down-to-earth Heath also had an opportunity to meet and size up a number of Rochambeau's fellow officers, one of whom was the Chevalier de Chastellux, a distinguished philosopher-soldier, veteran of campaigns in Germany during the Seven Years' War, darling of the Paris salons, a famous author and friend of the great Voltaire, with a coveted membership in the forty-member French Academy. The group also included Admiral the Chevalier de Ternay, commander of the squadron of seven sail of the line and five smaller vessels that had escorted the transports carrying more than five thousand French soldiers. The fleet had sailed from Brest on May 2 and traveled by the southern route, where it was less likely to encounter British men-of-war, but even so, they had had several brief engagements.

An indication of how terrible these long ocean journeys were for the soldiers who were sandwiched like sardines in quarters that were inhuman, to say the best for them, is that as many as 2,600 soldiers and seamen were sick by the time they landed—two-thirds of them suffering with scurvy—and the first order of business on shore was to set up hospital facilities for them. On board one ship, with two servants and all his personal effects (which included “large stores of sugar, lemons, and syrups”), was Baron Ludwig von Closen, a Bavarian whose adopted country was France. On the crossing he had shared what he called a “large compartment” with nineteen others. The space was fifteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and four and a half feet high; it was “not too comfortable,” according to the baron, especially considering the noise, “exhalations and other bad odors produced by the passengers.” If these were quarters for officers, those for the troops and ordinary seamen can only be imagined.

The Deux-Ponts regiment alone lost nine men during the seventy-two-day passage and counted 450 sick when they disembarked. Those who had suffered most on the voyage were big, robust men, and the Germans among them proved to be the worst sailors. (Led by Guillaume, Comte de Deux-Ponts, this regiment came from the ever-shifting borderland between France and Germany; as many as one-third of Rochambeau's army was made up of German and Swiss troops.)

Happily for posterity, Closen kept a diary of his experiences in America and later wrote a full account of the French expeditionary force from the spring of 1780 until its return to France in June 1783. Sprightly, candid, and humorous, the memoir and the drawings he made reveal a great deal about life in colonial America as well as Closen's keen interest in the land's flora and fauna, climate, people, customs, and food (especially the food), his own love of liberty and antipathy to slavery, and his fascination with the notable figures he met (Washington, Jefferson, and John Hancock, among others). Closen was a short man—just five feet four inches tall—blond, with blue eyes and a slightly turned-up nose. A good enough linguist that he often translated for Rochambeau, he became one of his aides-de-camp
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and a trusted “Count's Courier,” partly because he was a skilled draftsman, spoke good English, and was related to a former comrade-in-arms of Rochambeau, a Bavarian major general from whom Closen had inherited “military virtues and an unalterable attachment to France.”

In addition to Heath, who was there to provide Rochambeau with information about the countryside and its resources, Washington had sent Lafayette and a small contingent of militia to join the French in what the American general expected to be an attack on New York. When the British commander, General Sir Henry Clinton, returned to that city from his victorious expedition to Charleston, however, Admiral Thomas Graves arrived at Sandy Hook with six ships of the line, which, added to Admiral Arbuthnot's fleet, gave the British a thirteen-to-eight superiority over Ternay's force, immediately foiling Washington's plans.

But the failure of British naval forces to attack the French before they could establish themselves in Rhode Island was deplored at the time by General Clinton, who saw it as a turning point in the war and wrote years later: “our not being able to crush this reinforcement immediately upon its arrival gave additional animation to the spirit of rebellion, whose almost expiring embers began to blaze up afresh upon its appearance.”

2

FRANCE WILL TURN THE TIDE

Despite the arrival
of the French force, what confronted Washington was a bulging inventory of disaster. From Newport came word that the French ships that had been unloaded carried no arms, no gunpowder, no uniforms for his destitute, half-naked veterans. At the end of July Nathanael Greene had written to the congressional delegates resigning his post as quartermaster general, informing them that nothing would induce him to stay on in that frustrating job, which had almost driven him to distraction. Apparently, some of the congressmen found Greene's letter offensive and thought he should be cashiered. Washington, alarmed by the criticism of his favorite lieutenant, who had been wearing two hats—one as a field commander, the other as quartermaster general—wrote immediately to Congress hoping to prevent them from creating a real crisis. It was essential that Greene be persuaded to stay on until the man Congress had named to succeed him—Timothy Pickering—could learn the rudiments of the job. Otherwise, Washington would be forced to cease preparations for the next campaign and “be obliged to disperse, if not disband the Army for want of subsistence.” Happily, Greene realized he had been overly inflexible, Congress made no more of the problem, and it disappeared.

In addition to their other wants, Washington's troops did not have enough horses and wagons to join the French in an operation anytime soon. Not a day passed without Washington hoping for news of that “second division” of France's ships and soldiers that Admiral Ternay had told him was on the way, but all he heard on that front was silence. His plan for the army was to put Greene in command of the right wing and give the left to Benedict Arnold, but Arnold was begging off, saying his left leg—badly wounded at Saratoga—was still too weak for so active a command. He asked instead for a more sedentary post—specifically, to take charge of the fort at West Point—even though Washington tried to shame him out of it by saying his garrison would consist of militia and invalids.

So lackadaisical were the states about providing food for the army that the commander in chief was obliged to authorize a program he detested. Here it was the harvest season, a time of abundance, yet appeals to the states had produced no results worth noting, forcing the General to resort once more to scavenging his own country. “Either the Army must disband,” he wrote, “or what is, if possible, worse, subsist upon the plunder of the people.” The result was that every few days he moved his camp, letting the men forage for anything within reach, and when the area was stripped clean, move on to another and repeat the process.