First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [115]
Conversely, only if water transportation were made free to the Americans could the movement of troops make possible an offensive. This was the basis of Washington’s insistence on naval superiority. As he explained it to Colonel Laurens, son of the former President of the Congress, who was on a diplomatic mission to France, the British could not maintain “a large force in this country if we had the command of the seas to interrupt the regular transmission of supplies from Europe.… A constant naval superiority upon these coasts would instantly reduce the enemy to a difficult defensive.” Naval superiority “with an aid of money, would enable us to convert the war into a vigorous offensive.” Washington’s desire was for attack on New York, keystone of Britain’s military base in America. Recapture of Long Island and Manhattan from the British might, he believed, be the decisive blow. Because of the obstacle presented by the shallow draft of the waters at Sandy Hook at the entrance to New York, which had already barred the way to d’Estaing, and because of the better entry to Chesapeake Bay and its wider scope for action, his French ally Rochambeau, on the contrary, believed a campaign in the Chesapeake region would be more practical and more effective. Besides, it was here that the British Army under Cornwallis was the most active and menacing enemy force in the war.
Washington and other generals of the army deeply wanted America’s cause to be fought by her own people, but their hardest discouragement was the fainthearted patriotism of the country at large insofar as tangible support by the populace was evidence. At Valley Forge, Washington painfully acknowledged, failure of supply meant that there were men in his ranks “without the shadow of a blanket,” and they “might have been tracked from White Marsh to Valley Forge by the blood of their feet.” When levies were called for operations in the summer of 1780, fewer than thirty recruits had straggled into headquarters six weeks after the deadline. Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privations worse than their own. They were not anxious to join the emaciated ill-clad ranks of the Continentals. Farmers’ contributions of wagons and teams to carry supplies were no more forthcoming.
After the d’Estaing fiasco, the army began to deteriorate, grumbling in their grievances against Congress for leaving them unpaid and in contention among themselves over ranks and seniority, and threatening resignations. Even General Greene, the steadiest of them all, now serving as Quartermaster General, complained bitterly that Congress gave him money no more equal to his needs than “a sprat in a whale’s belly.” He became so enraged by the negligence of Congress when he was trying to plan an offensive for the recovery of Savannah that even he talked of resigning.
On New Year’s Day of 1781 Pennsylvania troops, quartered in Morristown for a second hungry and shivering winter after the bitter one at Valley Forge, reached outrage at being left in misery and want and unpaid, while civilians sat tight in comfort. Lack of clothes and leather for shoes, of horses and wagons for transport, of meat and flour and gunpowder in all units, of fresh recruits and of the confidence and support of the country, had left an army barely able to stand up. Generals’ letters reporting their shortages flowed over Washington’s desk. Even when provisions were on hand, they could sometimes not be brought to hungry companies for lack of transport. The troops took their only recourse to make their case: mutiny. Connecticut and New Jersey troops no less neglected joined the Pennsylvania line in its action and the outbreak was only contained by the example of the two from Connecticut who had been executed. “I have almost ceased to hope,” Washington had confessed in 1780 shortly before the mutinies. “The country in general is in such a state of insensibility and indifference to its