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By Root 830 0

was a go-getter who believed that Charleston could not be held unless all of its hinterland of South Carolina were secured, and that the South as a whole could not be conquered without taking Virginia—“opulent and prosperous Virginia,” as a Loyalist paper described it. As a peer, Cornwallis enjoyed a social superiority that made Clinton feel at a disadvantage. Headstrong and ambitious for professional advancement, Cornwallis was admired in the army as a bold soldier, almost a Bayard sans peur et sans reproche, and by his men as a paternal commander concerned for their welfare. Clinton saw him as an insubordinate officer whom he could not control because he felt constrained by his own lesser social rank and whom he suspected of intriguing to take his place. Since Clinton was always talking of resigning in favor of Cornwallis, who indeed carried a dormant commission as his successor (intended to avoid the possible accession of a German general if anything should happen to the chief), the question of succession was no secret, but it hobbled Clinton because he did not feel he should make plans for the commander who would follow him.

From the beginning of their association Clinton had suspected Cornwallis of a tendency to compose his own orders, writing in his journal, “I can never be cordial with such a man.” Believing Cornwallis to be Germain’s favorite, he felt himself disregarded in comparison. “I am neglected and ill-treated,” he complained to Germain, “every opinion but mine taken, every plan but mine adopted … forced into operations planned by others.” In his turn, Cornwallis was maddened by Clinton’s ambiguities of decision and shifts and postponements of plan. He asked the King’s permission to resign and come home, another of George III’s lieutenants who wished to give up his post. The request was refused. Mutual mistrust was not a good basis for command in the same theater of operations.

History’s design allows room now and then for individuals to have significant effect on the course of events as do larger impersonal forces like economics or the climate. Lord Cornwallis was one such individual. His seat was the borough of Eye in Suffolk, which his family had represented in Parliament off and on since the 14th century. He was born in 1738, the same year as George III. After school at Eton, having shown a military bent, he obtained a commission as ensign in the Grenadier Guards. At eighteen, while on a European tour with his tutor, a Prussian Army officer, he enrolled in the Military Academy of Turin, considered one of the best in Europe. In the relaxed Italian atmosphere, its curriculum had a charming irrelevance to the subject at hand. The students took ballroom dancing from 7 to 8 a.m., presumably on awakening, followed for contrast by the German language from 8 to 9 and for relief by two hours for breakfast from 9 to 11. Military instruction occupied one hour from 11 to 12, plus two hours for mathematics and fortifications from 3 to 5 in the afternoon. At five o’clock came more dancing lessons, visits, and attendance at the opera until supper. On two days a week students owed a duty of attendance at the King of Sardinia’s court. Turin, formerly a possession of Spain and then of France, was the residence of the Kings of Sardinia, whose royal title passed to the Dukes of Savoy and by them to the royal family of Italy at the time of the Unification of 1860.

If their studies did not deeply instruct Turin’s students in the science or the art of war, they provided a gentlemanly introduction to the military profession. War soon engaged Cornwallis in service with the Grenadier Guards as an ally of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick in a continental offshoot of the Seven Years’ War. In 1762 he inherited his title on the death of his father. On returning to England in that year to assume his seat in the House of Lords, he took up a surprising position by associating himself with the Whigs, the Opposition party which vigorously opposed the King’s and the government’s coercive policy toward the restive Americans. Whether the unwarlike