Washington [257]
Although Washington had resurrected his plan to besiege New York, Lafayette could not budge Rochambeau and Ternay from their resolve to wait for more French troops before setting their men in motion. The French balked at relying on their American allies. Rochambeau was secretly appalled at the minute size of Washington’s army and the bankruptcy of American credit. “Send us troops, ships, and money,” he wrote home, “but do not depend on these people nor upon their means; they have neither money nor credit; their means of resistance are only momentary and called forth when they are attacked in their own homes.”12 Privately he mocked Washington’s plan to attack New York as absurd, given the beggarly state of American finances, and blamed Lafayette for abetting Washington’s unrealistic fantasies. The French general would be two-faced in his relationship with Washington, pretending to credit his ideas, then doing exactly as he pleased. For political reasons, both sides subscribed to the polite fiction that Washington was in charge, but another year elapsed before the alliance with France bore fruit in a major joint military operation.
IN THE WAKE of the aborted “Conway Cabal,” George Washington had remained unfailingly polite to Horatio Gates, even though he thought the latter still intrigued against him. But his courtesy failed to mollify his implacable foe. In spring 1779 Gates protested to John Jay that Washington deliberately kept him in the dark, which led Washington, in turn, to pen an acerbic note to Jay, relating how he had sent Gates no fewer than forty letters in the last seven months of 1778. “I think it will be acknowledged,” observed Washington tartly, “that the correspondence was frequent enough during that period.”13 Far from snubbing him, Washington noted, “I made a point of treating Gen[era]l Gates with all the attention and cordiality in my power, as well from a sincere desire of harmony as from an unwillingness to give any cause of triumph to our enemies.”14
After the British captured Charleston, Gates was appointed to command the southern department of the army, and Washington refrained from comment so as not to be accused of meddling from personal pique. If Washington quietly rooted for Gates’s comeuppance, the British delivered it in shattering form near Camden, South Carolina, on August 16, 1780. Gates deployed a force of nearly four thousand men, considerably bigger than the force marshaled by Cornwallis, but many were callow militia. Determined British troops smashed through the American lines and sent men flying in terror. Only the detachment under General Johann de Kalb tried to withstand the frenzied onslaught. The British cavalry under Colonel Banastre Tarleton—nicknamed “Bloody Tarleton” and “The Butcher” for his take-no-prisoners approach—slashed at Kalb’s helpless men, while Kalb himself was bludgeoned to death with bayonets and rifle butts. Educated at Oxford, from a wealthy family, the young Tarleton was a beefy, redheaded man who was brash and cocky about his exploits on and off the battlefield. “Tarleton boasts of having butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army,” Horace Walpole reported.15 Having lost two fingers in battle, he delighted