Victory at Yorktown (7 page)

As for Rochambeau, he had no illusions about the American commander in chief. His orders specified that he was “in all cases to be under the orders of General Washington,” but a secret instruction added that he was to keep the French troops together, serving under their own officers, and not disperse them. He would do his utmost to remain on good terms with the American leader and to regard him as his superior, and he would obey orders scrupulously and serve as a cooperative subordinate, but he had doubts about the General's judgment and very real concerns about the quality and quantity of Washington's army.

The man Washington met—Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau—was fifty-five years old and, after training initially for the church, had embarked on a military career when his older brothers died, leaving him the only son. By now he had spent thirty-seven years in the army, principally in central Europe, where he had served as inspector of cavalry and maréchal de camp. He was stocky, considerably shorter than Washington (who was between six feet and six feet three inches), and had a battle scar over the left temple of his ruddy face and a bad limp from another serious wound. As Washington was to discover, this was a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact soldier whose concerns and conversation dealt almost exclusively with military matters—troop movements and battle plans. Rochambeau's assignment in America was completely unexpected. Suffering from inflammatory rheumatism, he had made plans to retire and in fact the horses and carriage were at his house in Paris ready to carry the family to his château in Vendôme when a messenger from the king showed up unexpectedly, ordering him to Versailles. There he learned that he was to lead an expeditionary force to America.

Of Washington's three proposals for combined operations, Rochambeau favored only the first—the capture of New York—but made it clear ever so tactfully that his orders required him to keep the king's fleet and troops together. The Frenchman clearly considered campaigning at an end for the year and had already turned his attention to 1781. As for the American, he had approached this meeting with one all-important consideration in mind. In the words of a position paper drawn up strictly for his aides, “… it should appear that we are ready and in condition to act.… It will therefore be good policy to keep out of sight the disappointments we met with in the number of men &c. and to hold up the idea that we should have been prepared to cooperate.… It will be necessary however that we should profess our wants and weaknesses very fully.…”

Hewing to this line, Washington mentioned that he hoped to have fifteen thousand troops by the spring of 1781 and—since Rochambeau told him that Louis XVI had promised to send a “second division”—urged the French to “complete” their army to that number. At the end of the conference Rochambeau said he would send his son to Versailles, slipping him through the naval blockade so that he could request reinforcements and hard money, to stimulate the American economy.

As the meeting broke up, Washington was disappointed with the lack of concrete achievement. Socially it had been a success; strategically, no. Writing to James Duane in Congress, he characterized the conference aptly: “We could only combine possible plans on the supposition of possible events and engage mutually to do everything in our powers against the next campaign.”

Riding back to the Hudson and his camp, he must have wondered whether that next campaign would bring new hope and purpose to the army. Surely his men—and the country—had endured all the misery and disappointment they could absorb. He was certain that more hunger and deprivation lay ahead, but if no major disaster came their way, the army might somehow hold together and survive.

3

SO HELLISH A PLOT

A story made the rounds
about Washington and Brigadier General “Mad Anthony” Wayne. It seems the two were discussing how some of the British-held positions on the Hudson River might be taken, and Washington asked Wayne if he thought he could storm Stony Point, a precipitous, rocky bluff that juts into the Hudson. The reply came at once: “I'll storm hell, sir, if you'll make the plans!” Washington looked at him silently for a moment or two and then, with a little smile, said, “Better try Stony Point first, General.”

In September of 1777, at Paoli, Pennsylvania, Wayne's division had been surprised in a skillful night attack by the British and suffered 150 casualties. The redcoats, led by Major General Charles Grey, were ordered not to load their weapons since gunfire would reveal their position, but to rely on the bayonet, with the result that their commander was known thereafter as “No-Flint” Grey. A court-martial acquitted Wayne of charges that he had failed to heed “timely notice” of the attack, and his opportunity for revenge came three years later at Stony Point, when he did indeed storm that position. On July 15 his light infantry brigade landed under cover of darkness and with fixed bayonets, but with no ammunition in their muskets, assaulted the position, and took over when the defenders threw down their arms and cried quarter. As a British officer wrote, “The rebels had made the attack with a bravery they never before exhibited.…” What he had seen was the fruit of lessons taught the Americans by the disciplinarian Baron Steuben, formerly of Frederick the Great's Prussian army—the proper use of the bayonet.

Several weeks after Wayne's victory, Washington was standing on a height overlooking Stony Point, watching the last detachment of his troops cross the Hudson at King's Ferry, when Benedict Arnold rode up and asked the General if he had “thought of anything for him.” It was a propitious moment for the commander in chief, who had admired Arnold's courage and bold leadership for years and rather regretted having had to reprimand him in general orders. Washington badly needed officers like Arnold, who was probably his best fighting general, and he was pleased to tell him now that he was to have a “post of honor” with the main army.

Arnold's reaction astonished the General. “His countenance changed and he appeared to be quite fallen,” Washington recalled, “and, instead of thanking me or expressing any pleasure at the appointment, never opened his mouth.” A long, uncomfortable silence followed; then, according to the General, “[I told] him to go to my quarters and get something to refresh himself, and I would meet him there soon.” It was a while before Washington returned, and when he arrived one of his aides, Tench Tilghman, took him aside and said that Arnold was walking with a pronounced limp, complaining that his leg, badly wounded at Saratoga, would not allow him to play an active part in a campaign. He said he even had trouble riding a horse.

When the commander in chief spoke with him later, “His behavior struck me as strange and unaccountable,” almost as if the man had lost his nerve and was fearful of going into action. It was a curious business, since Arnold was the captor, with Ethan Allen, of Fort Ticonderoga in the earliest days of the war, leader of the heroic winter expedition against Quebec, commander of a fleet of makeshift vessels that had prevented the British from taking Fort Ticonderoga in 1776, and the officer many army men credited with the great victory at Saratoga. For this soldier, who was known for his naked ambition and courage and daring in battle, to admit that he couldn't handle an important command was impossible to understand. Yet what he wanted, Arnold told Tilghman, was the post at West Point. Evidently, Washington believed he would change his mind, for when he announced the order of battle on August 1, Major General Benedict Arnold was to command the left wing. (When the news reached Arnold's wife, Peggy, at a dinner party in Philadelphia she went into hysterics, which was put down to fear that her husband might be killed or wounded on active duty.) The matter had been resolved almost immediately, when Washington's spies informed him that General Clinton had no intention of waging an active campaign outside New York, after which the commander in chief gave Arnold command of the garrison at West Point.

More than a month later Washington sent a note to Arnold, informing him that he would be passing through Peekskill on Sunday evening, September 17, on his way to Hartford to meet the French, and wanted a guard of a captain and fifty men, plus forage for about forty horses. In closing, he said, “You will keep this to yourself, as I want to make my journey a secret.”

The day that message was in his hands, Arnold encoded the secret information for the British, alerting them that the American commander in chief would cross the Hudson on a specific day and at a particular place, the idea being that armed vessels might capture him in midstream. At the same time he alerted the British, Arnold responded to the General, informing him that the guard and the forage would be supplied.

When Washington returned from the conference, he was accompanied by Lafayette, his chief of artillery, Henry Knox, and members of his staff. They rode through Fishkill and were heading toward West Point and a planned meeting with Arnold when they unexpectedly met the French minister to the United States, the Chevalier de La Luzerne, who was en route to visit Rochambeau. The minister was so eager to talk that Washington went back with him to Fishkill, where they spent the evening.

Next morning, September 25, the General headed off at daybreak—a ritual intensely unpopular with his staff, since it consisted of riding ten or fifteen miles before breakfast. He was eager to push on to Arnold's headquarters and teased his retinue by saying they could look forward to a good meal and the opportunity of admiring Arnold's lovely young wife, the former Margaret “Peggy” Shippen of Philadelphia (who happened to be first cousin to Tench Tilghman). Then he dispatched Lafayette's aide, Major James McHenry, and Captain Samuel Shaw of Knox's staff to ride on ahead and tell Arnold they were coming and to prepare for a number of hungry guests. Along the way to West Point, Washington made a careful inspection of several defensive positions on the east bank of the Hudson and shortly after ten o'clock came in sight of Beverley Robinson's house, which Arnold had taken over as his headquarters. The rambling, two-story mansion was about two miles below West Point, and the General anticipated a warm welcome from Arnold and his beautiful Peggy.

About ten-thirty the group reined up before the house and saw, instead of Arnold and his wife, a single figure, Major David Franks, Arnold's aide, who greeted them nervously and said that the major general had received a message at the breakfast table that required him to go immediately to West Point. When Franks asked if they had eaten, Washington said no, they would appreciate having some breakfast. Franks added that Mrs. Arnold was indisposed and in her bedroom, and that Lieutenant Colonel Richard Varick, the major general's chief aide, was laid up with a severe stomach disorder. Adding to Varick's discomfort was that nothing had come of his efforts to obtain a transfer from Arnold's staff. Franks was equally unhappy in his current job: he had suffered such “repeated insults and ill treatment from Arnold” that he was determined “not to remain with him on any terms whatever.” What's more, when Varick appeared, he and Franks observed that Mrs. Arnold had episodes of nervous tension “during which she would give utterance to anything and everything on her mind … so much so as to cause us to be scrupulous of what we told her or said within her hearing.” Service on the staff of Benedict Arnold was not an enviable assignment. Washington told Varick to go back to bed and not to worry, and after he and his officers enjoyed a leisurely breakfast they left Alexander Hamilton behind to receive any messages and rode to the dock, where Arnold's barge—an elegant vessel with seats and awnings—and a crew of eight oarsmen waited to take them upriver to the fort.

What greeted them at West Point was quite a sight—one the Chevalier Chastellux was to call “the most magnificent picture” he had ever beheld. Around the fort itself, which clung to the rocks at river's edge, the mountain summits bristled with redoubts and batteries—a complex that was an engineering triumph, designed by such skilled foreign engineers as Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Louis Duportail, and built with several years of hard labor by Continental soldiers. Above the fort were six additional works in the form of an amphitheater, positioned so as to protect each other. The highest and most formidable was known as Fort Putnam, named for General Israel Putnam, who had the lion's share of its planning and construction, atop a precipitous plateau of rock that made it virtually inaccessible. Once here, one had a spectacular view of thirty miles in every direction. To the north of West Point, angling into the middle of the river, was Constitution Island, which seemed to be secured to the west bank by an enormous iron chain, made of iron bars two inches square, with links twelve inches wide and eighteen inches long, floating on sixteen-foot logs, to prevent vessels from sailing upstream. The main guns of the fort were trained on this barrier, which was located at the point where the river made a ninety-degree turn to the east, creating a kind of embrasure formed over the eons through the sheer rocks of immense mountains. Below it the Hudson widened and plunged southward again.

As the barge neared the dock, where Washington expected to find a welcoming party, no sign of activity was evident other than a few sentries making their appointed rounds. Most unusual—no Arnold, nor had anyone seen him that morning. Probably, the General thought, he was at one of the outlying works and would undoubtedly be found during their inspection tour of the defenses. Of all the posts in the United States, Washington considered West Point the most important. Three years earlier the Burgoyne expedition's goal was to seize control of the Hudson and cut off communications between the northeastern and southern states, but fortunately that army of British, Germans, and Indians had been stopped at Saratoga in the victory that convinced the French to join in the war on the side of the Americans. West Point, which commanded the Hudson, had been called the Gibraltar of America, but when the General saw the condition of the place he was appalled.