Washington [276]
Technically a British victory, the battle cost Cornwallis dearly: 532 dead and wounded soldiers, more than a quarter of his force. As Charles James Fox pointed out in Parliament, “Another such victory would ruin the British Army.”2 Nathanael Greene concurred: “They had the splendor, we the advantage.”3 Cornwallis decided to move his bruised and exhausted troops into Virginia to link up with Benedict Arnold. He was being worn down by the wily, resourceful Greene, who came into his own during the campaign. Washington understood that Greene, despite the defeat, had acquitted himself nobly. “Although the honors of the field did not fall to your lot,” Washington told him, “I am convinced you deserved them.”4
With the war intensifying in Virginia, the piecemeal transfer of men to the South hollowed out Washington’s army. As British forces pushed deep into the Virginia heartland, they gladly laid waste to the estates of Revolutionary leaders, and Washington knew that Mount Vernon might be next. In January and again in April, Brigadier General Benedict Arnold led his British and Tory troops along the James River in a rampage of unbridled destruction, burning homesteads and tobacco warehouses. Britain’s naval strength operated to advantage in a state well watered by rivers. After activating the militia, Governor Thomas Jefferson appealed to Washington to move southward, saying his presence “would restore [the] full confidence of salvation.”5 For Washington, who longed to be home, this message was hard to hear. “Nobody, I persuade myself, can doubt my inclination to be immediately employed in the defense of that country where all my property and connections are,” he replied.6 Nonetheless he cited “powerful objections” to leaving his army or marching them hundreds of miles south.7 He had already diverted a large number of men to Virginia under Lafayette, but he didn’t wish to join him when there was a chance of collaborating with the French to take New York, which Washington still envisioned as the climactic battle of the Revolution.
Intermittently Washington lapsed into passing reveries about his old life at Mount Vernon. Early on he had written home frequently and at length, the mental connection with his estate still unbroken. Now, he told a correspondent, he had “long been a stranger” to such “private indulgences.”8 Nevertheless he still deluged Lund Washington with minute questions about a place he hadn’t set eyes on for six years. “How many lambs have you had this spring?” he asked in March 1781. “How many colts are you like to have?” He inquired about the progress of the covered walkways connecting the main house to the outlying buildings. “Are you going to repair the pavement of the piazza?” he wished to know.9
These nostalgic recollections of Mount Vernon were shattered weeks later when a British sloop, the Savage, dropped anchor in the Potomac near the plantation. Captain Thomas Graves had burned homes on the Maryland side to soften up his victims on the Virginia bank. Then he sent ashore a party to Mount Vernon to demand a large store of food and offered asylum to any slaves; seventeen of Washington’s slaves—fourteen men and three women—fled to the ship’s freedom, embarrassing the leader of the American Revolution. Lund Washington knew that his boss wanted him to resist any cooperation with the British, and at first he balked at their demands. Then he went aboard the Savage, bearing provisions as a peace offering. After this conference he consented to send sheep, hogs, and other supplies to save Mount Vernon and possibly to recover the departed slaves. Maybe Lund wondered whether Washington, at bottom, was prepared to sacrifice his majestic estate. An indignant Lafayette warned Washington of the unfortunate precedent Lund had set: “This being done by the gentleman who, in some measure, represents you at your house will certainly have a bad effect and contrasts with spirited answers from some neighbors that had their houses burnt accordingly.”10
As Lafayette expected,