First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [168]
Much of it had already faded. On September 13, the day before Graves’s grim letter was received, another Council of War of general officers in New York was summoned. In frustration at the failure to launch a rescue, Councils were being held every few days. William Smith privately thought the staff officers “servile … not a man of business or enterprise among them.” At the Council on September 13, a forceful plea for action was made by Major General James Robertson, military governor of New York, who was considered an administrative officer rather than a man of war. He was a sport among the servile insofar as he took seriously the subject they were met to consider. For the sake of making haste and for the greater chance of bringing the relief force through the enemy lines, he proposed that the expedition sail without transports, but instead that all the 5,000 men be crammed aboard the Robust, the only ship of the line available in New York.
Thoroughly shocked at the thought of a procedure so unorthodox and even dangerous, Clinton and the Council vetoed the idea. Robertson nevertheless put it in writing for the next day. Inaction leading to the loss of Cornwallis, he claimed, could bring down the whole cause in America. The reinforcements, if brought to bear, would enable Cornwallis to attack the enemy with his whole force. Dangers were probabilities, whereas doing nothing was certain death.
He did not carry the day. Instead, Clinton convened another Council, on September 14, at which the letter from Graves was read, and put to it a leading question with the answer built-in: whether the relief should be hazarded during “our present naval inferiority,” or, given that the enemy has mastery of the Chesapeake and that officers recently returned from Yorktown when questioned have asserted that Cornwallis could hold out until the end of October and could feed 10,000 on full allowance for that time—indeed, it was their opinion he could defend the post “against twenty thousand assailants,” Clinton claimed—whether it would be better to wait until receipt of “more favourable accounts” from Admiral Graves or until he had made a junction with Admiral Digby. The Council, taking its indicated cue, declared in favor of waiting.
Cornwallis’ own spirit had gone slack. For an interval of ten days after the Battle of the Bay, when he knew that its outcome had left the French in control of the seacoast with the resulting odds against his own rescue, he made no move to prepare to escape from the pocket he was in before the Washington-Rochambeau troops arrived to close his back door. When the Bay was known to be lost, this was the time when he might still have fought his way out by land—if not all the way to New York, at least through Maryland to the mouth of the Delaware. Unless he could count on Clinton’s promise of relief as a sure thing, the risk of a march through semi-hostile country, with Tarleton to cut a path, was less than the certain disaster to come if he were enclosed. From September 6, when Washington’s army had passed through Chester and Head of the Elk, unless intelligence was nil, Cornwallis must have known they were coming. On what day he learned of their advance we do not know, but it was doubtless at about the same time he learned of the naval outcome which elicited Admiral Graves’s dismaying report on September 9 that the French were “absolute masters of navigation” in the Chesapeake. Recognizing the prospect of siege, Cornwallis wrote Clinton as Commander-in-Chief on September 16-17, “If you cannot relieve me very soon, you must be prepared to hear the worst.” The “worst” was left ambiguous. If the “worst” meant defeat or surrender, it must be inferred that Cornwallis, without a ready source of provisions, had no intention of fighting his way out by land. When that letter was received in New York, on September 23, a War Council was summoned