First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [155]
Meanwhile Hood and Graves had not yet sailed for Chesapeake Bay. Neither of them had Rodney’s instinct for perceiving the shape of enemy strategy. Clearly the great effort of transferring an army across the Hudson would only have been undertaken by the rebels for a major strategic purpose which it would be important for the English to frustrate. That the plan was for the envelopment of Cornwallis to be carried out by the rebels’ combining with de Grasse in Virginia seems not to have been envisaged by the two admirals who, as seamen, did not concern themselves with land movements, nor did they even grasp the crucial naval necessity of preventing the French from gaining superiority in Chesapeake Bay. They were locked into two fixed assumptions: that de Grasse was coming to New York, not the Chesapeake, and that he would not be coming with more than an inferior number of ships—perhaps twelve. Besides, everyone assumed that bold Rodney in the West Indies, who had been emphatic in his assurances, would take care of de Grasse in the Caribbean or, at the least, arrive at the same time to equalize naval forces. Preconceived fixed notions can be more damaging than cannon. The assumptions about de Grasse were probabilities, not certainties, and not an excuse for the British failing to place themselves in the best position possible to meet the French fleet if it came, whether or not Rodney was just behind. Hood, who knew the extent of Rodney’s incapacitating illness and had himself been designated to substitute for him as the pursuer of de Grasse, could have disabused his colleagues of their expectation but did not; in his several inactions during this period, he is not easy to explain.
The inability of all three British commanders, Hood, Graves and Clinton, to envisage the envelopment of Cornwallis by a combination of the rebel army and the French fleet on the Virginia coast was simple obtuseness, the more so as the destination of Washington’s march had been revealed by deserters and, so it is said, by an American girl, mistress of Rochambeau’s son—inadvertently, one hopes. As usual with clandestine information, Clinton and his staff did not believe it, and, as always, underrated their opponent. They could not believe that Washington would undertake so Herculean a task as a march to Virginia, or would leave the Hudson forts denuded of his main army. If there was to be a junction with de Grasse, it seemed obvious to Clinton it was planned for Staten Island, for attack on New York.
In truth, a month of paralysis took hold of the British command in America when the French fleet entered the situation, as if each of the three—Clinton, the Commander-in-Chief; Graves, the Naval Chief; Cornwallis, General of the Army on the spot—had been administered a sedative. It began when a dispatch from Rodney reached Clinton on September 2 reporting that de Grasse’s destination was the Chesapeake, as he had learned from the pilots who came to meet de Grasse at Cap-Frančais. Though the news threatened Cornwallis and not directly himself, Clinton realized that a fateful moment was at hand. “Things appear to be coming fast to a crisis,” he wrote to Germain. “We are therefore no longer to compare forces with the enemy, but to endeavour to act in the best manner we can against them. With what I have, inadequate as it is, I will exert myself to the utmost to save Lord Cornwallis.” In short, he recognized at this point that Cornwallis had to be “saved.” On this day, too, he learned from Philadelphia, where the marching army he had thought on its way to Staten Island had arrived