The Glorious Cause - Jeff Shaara [345]
59. WASHINGTON
TO THE CONGRESS, AND MOST OF THE PEOPLE NORTH OF VIRGINIA, Yorktown was the victory that had ended the war. But Washington could not enjoy their celebration, cautioned against assuming the British would simply vanish with barely a whimper.
The command in the Southern Department was still Nathanael Greene’s, and the news of Yorktown had not slowed Greene from the enormous task that still confronted him. The names meant little to people in the north, Hobkirk’s Hill and Ninety-Six and Eutaw Springs, but each was a fight worthy of anyone’s comparison to Brandywine, Princeton, or Monmouth. Though Greene claimed none of these extraordinary fights as victories, the British were so bloodied that their commanders were forced to abandon their inland outposts and withdraw the entire British command to the safety of Charleston.
After Yorktown, Anthony Wayne had gone south to reinforce Greene, and by the following spring, Wayne’s ragged army had cleared the British completely out of Georgia. By the summer after Yorktown, the entire British presence in America was reduced to the city of Charleston and the main headquarters at New York.
Though Washington was still hesitant to claim victory, in England, the government there was doing it for him. Henry Clinton had been recalled, replaced as overall commander by Governor Guy Carleton of Canada, the fourth man to hold the command. By all rights, that position should have fallen to Clinton’s second in command, but Cornwallis knew that Yorktown was a catastrophe that no one could overlook. Even worse for King George, the news of Yorktown, and all its implications had reduced Lord North’s cabinet to a shambles. King George had no choice but to accept a new government, run now by the principal voices of his hated opposition.
Throughout the entire war, the most significant and impactful pieces of news that had reached England had been the defeats of their army, from Boston to Saratoga, and now Yorktown. Even the king conceded that his army could no longer hope to prevent American independence. By early 1782, a new peace commission was established, with none of the pretense or arrogance of their predecessors. They would not sail to America with lofty demands, would not pose and preen before the congress. They would go instead to Paris, and they would negotiate the final and humiliating terms of a peace treaty. The man to lead the negotiations for the Americans would, of course, be Ben Franklin.
As with every communication, the distance between Philadelphia and Paris and London would make any process a slow one. Though the negotiations dragged on for more than a year, the outcome was rarely in doubt. Every condition the Americans insisted upon was agreed to. On September 3, 1783, the treaty was signed by delegations from both sides. The following January, it was ratified by the United States Congress. What most Americans had known since the fall of Yorktown was now made official to the entire world. The United States of America had earned its rightful place as an independent nation.
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 1783
Washington had waited for the last of the British command to set sail before he would ride into the city. There would be no purpose for meetings or even social gatherings. He had admitted to himself that his hesitation was symbolic as well, something he rarely focused on. He simply didn’t want to be in the city with those people, didn’t want to hear sorrowful congratulations for his efforts, no empty platitudes about a war justly won. His deeply sown hatred for the British was muted now, no one in the British camp he could single out with particular prejudice. But the city itself had been