First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [149]
To fight at the Chesapeake required a firm and daring decision grounded in a sense of no alternative, a recognition that this was the last resort. Washington was not a man to reduce himself to a miasma of hesitations. He made up his mind on the very day of receiving de Grasse’s letter. “I was obliged,” he wrote in his diary for that day, “from the shortness of Count de Grasses promised stay on this coast, the apparent disinclination in their Naval officers [of the French] to force the harbour of New York, and the feeble compliance” of his own country to his request for recruits and the “little prospect of greater exertion in the future, to give up all idea of attacking New York; and instead to remove the French troops and a detachment from the American Army to Virginia.” He was the more willing to give up New York because the military probe of Clinton’s defenses led by the Duc de Lauzun in July had shown them to be very strong and requiring a greater assault than Washington could dispose.
The American troops, for too long orphans of the battle, unkempt, underfed and unpaid while Congress rode in carriages and dined at well-laid tables, would not march without pay. Here the lubricant of Morris’ and the French funds overcame the obstacle. It put coins into empty pockets and restored the Quartermaster to business. Food would not be the problem it had been before. An army moving from place to place each day would not be the devouring incubus that a stationary force quartered on one spot through a long winter must be, consuming every last ounce of pork and grain to the destitution and alienation of the countryside. Washington was now able to store supplies of meat, flour and rum along the line of march. French silver and the credit of the Philadelphia bankers put the army in motion, but it needed de Grasse’s unhindered crossing of the Atlantic, bringing him to his planned junction with the Americans, to keep the Revolution on its feet and supply the necessary strength for an offensive. By itself, the American army was too small and riddled by every deficiency to have kept the field alone in 1781. Congress had no reserves. At the same time, British capacity was unequal to successful offensive action at this stage. Without the coming of the French fleet to precipitate a crisis, Britain and the Colonies would have floundered into some miserable compromise, for private sentiment on both sides was ready for mediation. Already in England stocks rose six percent in two days when news spread in March, 1781, that the Emperor and Empress of Russia had offered mediation and that all parties had accepted and that Sir Joseph Yorke was to depart, as Walpole reported to Mann, on the “wings of winds to Vienna to conclude the peace.” The stock market sadly sank back when the rumor proved unfounded and Sir Joseph stayed home. The same rumor of Russian mediation excited hopes in America, too, for war weariness was present in many places. Again, in September, the British were cheered by a rumor that the King had employed Yorke to seek a separate peace with Holland, removing Britain from at least one war. The Whigs, though in favor of peace, carped at the supposed overture, complaining, according to Walpole, that “it was the contemptible conduct of the court, to bully itself into war, and then meanly solicit a peace underhand.” This rumor, too, proved without substance. In all the flutter of peace talk, a public desire to be done with war, and a readiness