First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [112]
The period 1779–80 that followed the sorry disappointment for the Americans of d’Estaing’s naval intervention, the loss of Charleston, and the terrible privations of the winters at Valley Forge and Morristown, deepened by the miserly aid of Congress and the absence of vigorous popular support, was the worst year of the war when the Revolution sank to its lowest point.
In discouragement close to despair, Washington wrote in December, 1779, “I find our prospects are infinitely worse than they have been at any period of the war, and that unless some expedient can be instantly adopted, a dissolution of the army for want of subsistence is unavoidable. A part of it has been again several days without bread.” Battle in the Carolinas and Georgia, in spite of local victories, had brought reverses which now threatened to split the South in fatal division from the northern colonies. Misfortune augmented in May, 1780, when the fall of Charleston, with the capture of 5,000 American soldiers and four ships, marked the heaviest defeat of the war.
In September, 1780, Washington sustained a sharper personal blow in the treason of Benedict Arnold, whose planned betrayal to the British of West Point, key to the Hudson Valley, was foiled by the chance arrest of his go-between with the British, Major André, Clinton’s aide, only hours before the keys and plans to the fortress were to be handed over.
Winter quarters of 1779–80 at Morristown, New Jersey, were more severe even than the year before at Valley Forge. Rations were reduced for already hungry men who had been shivering in the snows to one-eighth of normal quantities. Two leaders of a protest by Connecticut regiments demanding full rations and back pay were hanged to quell an uprising. In January of 1781, Pennsylvania regiments mutinied and, with troops of New Jersey, deserted to the number of half their strength before the outbreak was suppressed. At the frontiers, Indians out of the woods guided by Loyalists were burning farms and homes and massacring civilians. Even to keep an army in the field was problematical, because soldiers of the militia had to be furloughed to go home to harvest their crops, and if leave were refused, they would desert. Fighting a war in such circumstances, said General von Steuben, the army’s Prussian drillmaster, “Caesar and Hannibal would have lost their reputations.”
Washington’s desk overflowed with letters from his generals in the field, pleading their shortages of everything an army requires: food, arms, field equipment, horses and wagons for a regular system of transportation, all of which had to be taken by military requisition from the local inhabitants, rousing antagonism toward the patriot forces. “Instead of having everything in readiness to take the field,” Washington wrote in his diary of May 1, 1781, “we have nothing and instead of having the prospect of a glorious offensive campaign before us we have a bewildered and gloomy defensive one—unless we should receive a powerful aid of ships, land troops, and money from our generous allies and these, at present, are too contingent to build upon.”
To rise above, and persevere, in spite of such discouragement required a spiritual strength, a kind of nobility in Washington rare in the history of generalship. It had something of the quality of William the Silent, making the possessor the obvious and only choice for Commander-in-Chief. This quality, conveyed abroad by another genius of America, Benjamin Franklin, and by the warmth of Lafayette, persuaded Louis XVI, last leaf on the dry stem of the old regime, to attach the monarchy’s faith and fortunes to the struggle of backwoods rebels against authority and royalty, the very props that supported Louis on the throne. In the wake