Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
Washington, from the aptly named evacuation vessel, HMS Vulture: “The heart which is conscious of its own rectitude, cannot attempt to palliate a step which the world may censure as wrong.” He asked for gentle treatment of his wife and child, which was accorded. He became a commander of loyalist forces in the war and continued to be a capable combat general.17
The British conciliated the Indians and most of them rallied to the British, who had, to the extent they could be distinguished from the American colonists, been more civil and reliable than the Americans. This was to prove more than adequate justification for the Americans, after the war, to redouble their repressions, exploitations, and betrayals of the Indians. A read of Jefferson’s harangue on the evils of the Indians in the Declaration of Independence is instructive in that regard. Similarly, large numbers of slaves defected to the British, and as many as 60,000 of the slave population, now approximately 400,000, escaped to Canada and to Britain, or were shipped to free communities in West Africa, but in general, they were recaptured and ground down with even more severity than usual by the authors and adherents of the self-evident truths and inalienable rights with which the Creator had endowed all men.
Gates was appointed to the Southern Command by the Congress, over Washington’s support of Nathanael Greene, and the victor of Saratoga quickly suffered the worst American defeat of the war, at Camden, North Carolina, compounded by his headlong flight on galloping horseback to nearly 200 miles from the field of his complete humiliation. He was relieved, and Greene, perhaps the ablest military commander of the war, on either side, replaced him. The French, who were none too impressed with the performance of their ally, sacked the feckless d’Estaing and replaced him with Count de Guichen, and dispatched 5,000 more troops under the capable Count de Rochambeau, and the British gave the Caribbean command to one of the greatest admirals of their prodigious naval history, Sir George Rodney. The Spanish also escalated their efforts, sending 12,000 troops to the Caribbean, of whom a disconcerting 5,000 died like galley slaves en route on the overcrowded, under-provisioned Spanish ships. The shift in naval emphasis to the West Indies assisted the American revolutionaries, and Washington welcomed Rochambeau and his 5,000 soldiers at Hartford on September 21, 1780. Guichen and Rodney engaged and skirmished and the French did well to draw the issue with so distinguished an opponent. The state of the conflict was briefly stable, as the final act began.
Greene found the wreckage of Gates’s army, 1,400 “naked and dispirited” troops, at Hillsboro, on November 27, 1780, where the hero of Saratoga had fled after the Camden rout. He faced the British commander, the competent nephew of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Lord Cornwallis, who had performed well throughout the Revolutionary War in various commands, and had shattered Gates at Camden. What was later reckoned, in Jefferson’s pious words, “That joyful annunciation of that turn in the tide of success which ended the Revolutionary War” occurred on November 27, 1980, at King’s Mountain, on the border between the Carolinas. A little over a thousand British and loyalists commanded by a fierce Scot, Patrick Ferguson, met 1,400 “overmountain” men, virtual hillbillies, commanded by their militia-leading landlords, John Sevier and Isaac Shelby, and almost the entire British force was killed or captured. The overmountain men were tall and lean and agile, had matted hair, and seemed like savages to their enemies, and behaved accordingly. The rulebook having been dispensed with by Tarleton at Waxhaw, the Americans massacred many of the British and left many more to be eaten by wolves. They marched 700 prisoners off, but many of those perished also. The small and almost inadvertent engagement demonstrated, as would many sequels in other distant partly colonial, partly guerrilla wars, that the side that is in revolt only has to win occasionally to keep the fires burning, and the overseas power becomes easily demoralized by any defeat.
The British were now facing not only the war’s most able field commander in Greene and his deputy, Daniel Morgan, but also guerrilla warriors of genius, in Thomas Sumter and especially General Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion. Cornwallis moved cautiously from Camden toward Charlotte, and in January 1781, after the setback at King’s Mountain, he sent Tarleton to deal with the very able Morgan, while he went into North Carolina after Greene. Tarleton charged impetuously uphill after Morgan, at Cowpens on January 13. Morgan had 200 militiamen fire twice and then retreat as if in rout, and as the British reached the crest of the hill, in probably the most finely executed action of the war, Morgan’s main force poured fire onto the British, who broke and retreated, with the Americans on their heels. Tarleton bravely fought to the end, and was finally chased off with only 40 survivors, having lost over a thousand men to the Americans, who sustained only 70 casualties. Both armies regrouped and their combined forces met at Guilford Court House, North Carolina, on March 15, 1781, and Cornwallis did well to repel Greene, though outnumbered. It was not a decisive victory and the British lost 500 men to 300 American casualties. (Loyalists fighting with the British, when captured, often received a very rough and not infrequently mortal treatment; it had become a very nasty war.)
7. YORKTOWN
The Americans, with the advantage of interior lines, could reinforce Greene by land, but Cornwallis depended on supply from New York, and neither the timorous Clinton in New York nor the vacillating home government would send reinforcements. Finally, the masses of waiting loyalists upon whose existence the southern strategy was based didn’t exist and the whole British Americanization plan was a fiasco. Cornwallis, faced with the necessity to fall back to Charleston and pursue a southern redoubt strategy with no prospects of long-term survival, or make a huge gamble to try to win the war, marched for Virginia. Cornwallis arrived at the head of 1,000 regulars at Petersburg, a city that would recur in American military history (Chapter 6), on May 20, 1781, and was joined by Benedict Arnold at the head of 4,000 loyalists. Virginia’s governor, now Thomas Jefferson, had almost no forces, as almost all Virginians inclined to war-making were with Washington outside New York. Jefferson’s many talents did not run to military preparations. Richmond was being defended by Lafayette with 500 militiamen. Washington’s cousins offered supplies to a British contingent to prevent the sacking of Mount Vernon, eliciting a severe rebuke from the American commander, who would have preferred that “they had burnt my house and laid my plantation in ruins. . . . You should have reflected on the bad example of . . . making a voluntary offer of refreshments to them with a view to prevent a conflagration.”18
Cornwallis vainly chased Lafayette around Virginia, enduring the attrition of minor skirmishes as well as the harassments of Clinton, who kept ordering him to detach and divert packets of troops for footling purposes. The British held New York, Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah, but Washington, though enfeebled by desertions and mutinies, still held the rest of the North and Greene and Marion and Morgan roamed around the interior of the South at will. The British, after nearly seven years of fighting, could not suppress the revolt, and the Americans were still not able to win the decisive battle. But the inability of the British to win was permanent, as they were not winning over the population and could spare no more troops for the campaign. At some point, there was a danger that the Americans would win a main-force engagement, and reduce the British to mere perches on shore while domestic British support for this endless and costly attrition withered. And Britain could not keep large units of its navy endlessly overseas shuttling forces around the eastern shore of America. It was all right to chase the French and Spanish and Dutch fleets around, but not to leave them alone to transport a French army across the English Channel for months on end attending to distractions in America. Something finally had to give. The French had no confidence in the Americans and proposed a peace allowing both sides to keep what they held. Fortunately for the Americans, while Franklin led the opposition to such a settlement, George III would not concede an inch to the rebels.
Finally, Washington persuaded Rochambeau, who had been idling in Newport for a year, to bring his 4,000 men to join him in Westchester. The new French admiral Count de Grasse, as much more capable and aggressive than Guichen as Guichen had been compared with the hapless d’Estaing, sailed from the Dominican Republic on August 14, 1781, with 3,300 soldiers on board. Washington, in one of his several acts of both tactical and strategic genius in the long war, pretended merely to be shifting forces around New York as he rushed south in forced marches, but he left only 3,500 men facing the indolent Clinton with 11,000 Redcoats in New York City. Washington and Rochambeau had a triumphant progress through the streets and