Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
de Grasse disembarked his forces in Chesapeake Bay in the first days of September. Unfortunately for the British, Admiral Rodney, after many successes in the West Indies, returned to Britain to restore his health and fortunes and defend himself in Parliament, and the bumbling Admiral Sir Thomas Graves was left to deal with de Grasse. Graves was afraid to enter Chesapeake Bay and was thus unable to evacuate Cornwallis, who was now encircled on land by over 15,000 French and Americans around Yorktown.
Seven Years War in Europe. Courtesy of the Department of History, United States Military Academy
Clinton promised to relieve Cornwallis by land and send Graves back with adequate forces to disembark him, but neither occurred. Cornwallis had 8,300 men bottled up in Yorktown, at the southern end of Chesapeake Bay. Fearing British reinforcements by sea, as Clinton was not moving on the ground, Washington pressed the siege forward as quickly as he prudently could. The British surrendered on October 17, 1781. Cornwallis feigned illness and his second-in-command, Brigadier Charles O’Hara, handed his sword to Rochambeau, trying to maintain the pretense that the British had been defeated by the French alone. Washington had 8,500 men to Rochambeau’s 7,000, and had first seen the possibilities for Yorktown, but the French had the artillery and de Grasse drove off Graves, so it was a largely French battle in a mainly American war. Rochambeau treated Cornwallis very graciously, even lending him 10,000 pounds when he did appear, and the British band played “The World Turned Upside Down” as they marched out. As when he had crossed the Delaware with inferior forces and defeated the British at Princeton and Trenton, Washington had acted boldly and brilliantly, seeing at once the opportunity to concentrate forces around Yorktown and marching his and Rochambeau’s long-inactive forces at astounding speed through summer heat to the task. He was as brilliant in the swingeing stroke as he was implacable in the long periods of demoralizing inactivity, pecked at and aggravated by venal and spineless politicians.
Yorktown did not end the war but it was like Stalingrad, or Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954, or the Tet Offensive in 1968 (Chapters 11, 14, 15)—a dramatic (in the case of Tet, public relations, not military) victory that knocked the stuffings out of the morale of one side while lifting the other. As would happen to America in the Vietnam War, Parliament finally rebelled against the king’s policy and in November 1781 voted to refuse to approve any further offensive actions in America. Lord North was dismissed as prime minister after 12 disastrous years and the closest colleague of the late Earl of Chatham (who had died in 1778), the Marquis of Rockingham, was invested. (But power really resided in the conciliatory Earl of Shelburne, a friend of Franklin’s, who was theoretically charged with the nonsensical mission of talking the Americans back into the British realm. The British were still not, and probably are not yet, sure of what the Americans were so upset about.) Charles James Fox was put in charge of negotiating an exit from the war, and sent Thomas Grenville to Paris to deal with Franklin.
As war gave way to diplomacy, Franklin, now 76, reemerged as the key figure in the American leadership. The French wished to take back some of what had been lost in the Seven Years’ War; the Americans wanted unconditional independence for their territory and Canada; the British would give no more than they had to, but would prefer concessions to their belligerent American cousins (whom Rockingham and Fox had generally sympathized with) than to their ancient French foes. The Americans would not be a threat to them in the Americas, but French revival would. The French had effectively won the war for the Americans, with de Grasse, Rochambeau, and Lafayette, and had a strong moral argument opposite Franklin. The dithering Congress, fearing the inexhaustibly wily Franklin’s affinity for the French, had sent the incorruptible John Adams to help shore him up. This was not necessary, and the French found Adams stiff, unilingual, and self-righteous. He shortly moved on to the Netherlands to try to negotiate a loan with the Dutch. (It was nonsense anyway, as the same Congress had purported to instruct the commissioners to be guided by the French, which Franklin, who in practice acted on his own account for America until late on, ignored, as he carried on complex, secret discussions with all sides, inscrutable behind his mask as the affable and frank American frontier patriot and absent-minded scientist.) Franklin had had great success contracting loans with France during the active phases of the war. He was not prepared to offer more than moral appreciation for moral claims, and the issue was resolved when Admiral Rodney returned to the West Indies, discovered a French-Spanish plan to seize Jamaica, and smashed the enemy fleet, taking the doughty de Grasse prisoner. This timely whipping awakened the French from their reverie about regaining an empire in the Americas.
With all sides acting with extreme duplicity, and the Spanish not even recognizing American independence and seeking a comeback in North America themselves, Franklin, suffering from kidney stones, handed over negotiations to the recently arrived minister to Spain, the very able John Jay, but with continuing guidance and retaining general oversight. The British hand was strengthened by the repulse in 1783 of one of the longest sieges in history, by the French and Spanish at Gibraltar after four years. Britain raised the ante, demanding payment of American prewar debts that had provoked the taxes and the insurrection in the first place, and compensation for the expropriated and displaced American loyalists. Jay and Franklin accepted to compensate the loyalists, but did so on behalf of the 13 individual states, as they were about, officially, to become, knowing that it was unlikely they would produce a brass farthing. The British agreed to this flimflam, dropped their debt claims in the broader context of secret side deals dividing between them navigation rights on the Mississippi, and conceding, as between them, everything east of that river to the Americans; i.e., the British were inviting the Americans to evict the Spanish, including from Florida. In the final Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, Britain recognized American independence while retaining all of Canada and Newfoundland and its gains in the West Indies, returned Minorca again to Spain, but retained Gibraltar. Sir Guy Carleton, who was the last British commander in America, ignored Washington in the handover ceremonies in New York, and evacuated all 3,000 fugitive slaves from under plantationer Washington’s nose.
The Spanish gained nothing, and the French had been swindled by Franklin into providing and by Washington into deploying the margin of victory, as well as vital financial support, and had nothing to show for it but more war debts and the flashing sparks of republicanism and democracy in the dry straw and tinder that now underlay the French monarchy and aristocracy. They might have judged from the British experience as the colonists’ creditors how quickly the Americans would be repaying them.
Franklin had played the diplomatic cards brilliantly, and his construction, maintenance, and disassembly of the French alliance was one of the masterpieces of world diplomatic history, made more piquant by his masquerade as a guileless though witty yokel, pitched perfectly to the susceptibilities to narcissism and grandiosity of the French court, as he had previously so well gauged the temper of the ruling circles in London. Washington had made his mistakes but had been brilliant when necessary, and cautious when in error, and had maintained a largely unpaid, ragtag army in existence despite nearly eight demoralizing years of attrition and the endless prattling and meddling of contemptible politicians, masquerading as sovereign legislators in their forcibly itinerant Congress. Jefferson had not had a good war as a rather unresourceful war governor, but he had launched the great American claim to universal values and exceptionalism—a mystique that would grow and flourish for generations after the indispensable services of Washington and Franklin had receded into the mists of folklore and he would continue to propagate them in the new nation’s highest offices and then in a long and esteemed retirement.
8. ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION
Of the three resolutions of the Congress on Richard Henry Lee’s motions in June 1776, independence had been achieved and Jefferson’s independence declaration-drafting committee, like Washington’s specific military command, had been overwhelmingly successful. So had Franklin’s diplomatic mission. But the committee to produce “articles