First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [117]
When, on August 25, Washington learned from Rochambeau the news brought by a French frigate, that the promised French Second Division on which he had counted to reinforce Lafayette and Greene in the South was blockaded at Brest and could not arrive until October at the soonest, by which time the army would have consumed all the provisions the region could supply, his iron endurance of disappointments was allowed to crack in a letter to his brother Samuel. “It is impossible for any person at a distance to have an idea of my embarrassments or to conceive how an army can be kept together under any such circumstances as ours is.” Within days came news of the defeat at Camden in South Carolina, exposing Virginia to invasion from the South. Washington could only patch the hole by sending a regiment from Maryland to Greene and summon the confidence to meet his French allies for a conference at Hartford on a plan of campaign.
On their arrival at Newport, de Ternay and Rochambeau marched down from Rhode Island (100 miles) through Connecticut to the meeting at Hartford on September 20–22. Washington brought with him old reliable General Henry Knox, the onetime bookseller from Boston who had made himself an artillery officer and had dragged the captured guns from Ticonderoga over ruts and hills to drive the British out of Boston in 1776. No one arrived with good news. Lafayette came fresh from the fighting in the South where in August, 1780, only three months after the fall of Charleston, the Americans had suffered the crushing defeat at Camden. Here the pugnacious General Lord Cornwallis was pursuing a campaign to conquer the whole of the state. At Camden he had thrashed General Gates, the hero of Saratoga and, afterward, a conspirator in the Conway Cabal that attempted to discredit and supplant Washington by a whispering campaign of insults designed to provoke him to resign. Conscious that he was indispensable, Washington refused to be drawn, but he could not prevent the malcontents in Congress from engineering the appointment of Gates to take command in the South. Under Gates’s clumsy generalship at Camden, the Americans lost 800 killed and 1,000 taken prisoner, and were further embarrassed by the hasty departure of their General in a retreat so far and so fast that it carried him by the evening of the battle seventy miles to Charlotte, and did not stop until he reached Hillsboro in the mountains. According to a statement by Alexander Hamilton, Gates in his craven abandonment covered 180 miles in three and half days, an unlikely distance in the given time, even with relays of fresh horses, which obviously could not have been prepared for a retreat. Whatever the actual fact, the shameful retreat was enough to plunge Gates into disgrace and suspend him from the army. An official investigation was ordered but never took place.
The victor, after fastening the British yoke on South Carolina, was now moving north through North Carolina toward Virginia, the Old Dominion and richest state of the South. Narrowed at its waist by the indentation made by Chesapeake Bay, it was the place, in Cornwallis’ opinion, to cut off the richer resources of the South from the North and achieve the decisive stroke to end the war. “A successful battle