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By Root 25745 0

Washington reacted with unalloyed horror when he learned that Lund had boarded the Savage to negotiate with the enemy, and he promptly administered a grave rebuke to his steward for his decision to “commune with a parcel of plundering scoundrels,”11 as he dubbed them. “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me to have heard that, in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my house and laid the plantation in ruins.”12 Washington showed his classic stoicism here, his uncompromising refusal to beg or bow to anyone. Since Lund was his proxy, he felt personally humiliated by the incident. In a fatalistic mood, he concluded that, unless the French brought a superior naval force to Virginia, “I have as little doubt of its ending in the loss of all my Negroes and in the destruction of my houses. But I am prepared for the event.”13 He ordered Lund to remove at once any valuables from the estate. Martha Washington was then laid up with recurrent liver trouble, abdominal pain, and jaundice. So traumatized was her husband by the Savage incident that when the widow of a British Army paymaster sent Martha a parcel of citrus fruits as a get-well present—the Washingtons had stayed at her New York home in 1776—he brusquely returned it as an unacceptable gift from the enemy.

Sinking into a morose mood in the early spring of 1781, Washington again believed that the Continental Army was disintegrating before his eyes, that he had been doomed to lead a phantom army. So many enlistments had expired during the winter that it was at times difficult even to garrison West Point. His idle troops had languished since November, and “instead of having the prospect of a glorious offensive campaign before us,” he lamented, “we have a bewildered and gloomy defensive one.”14 As Greene and Lafayette won honors in the South, he was reduced to a helpless bystander, upstaged by his own disciples.

Washington dispatched Major General William Heath to raise supplies from the northern states and predicted his army would starve or disband without them. In May his hungry army was down to a one-day ration of meat. Even when states scraped up supplies, Washington couldn’t pay the teamsters to transport them. It was all too familiar and wearisome to Washington, who began to think he would never see the end of the conflict. As he confided to General John Armstrong, he didn’t doubt the outcome of the war, believing that “divine government” favored the patriots, “but the period for its accomplishm[en]t may be too far distant for a person of my years, whose morning and evening hours and every moment (unoccupied by business) pants for retirement.”15

THROUGH THE COMBINED EFFORTS of Benjamin Franklin and John Laurens in Paris that winter, the French agreed to an indispensable loan and a munificent gift of six million livres to purchase arms and supplies. For all that, the French foreign minister, Vergennes, was reluctant to commit more French troops. In the early going, he had fancied that the French would score a rapid victory; now, as things dragged on, he shrank from an open-ended involvement. All along Washington and Lafayette had stressed the vital importance of sea power, and Vergennes decided the French would mount one last naval effort. In the spring he notified Lafayette that a French squadron would cruise off America’s coast during the year: “M. Le Comte de Grasse, who commands our fleet in the Antilles, has been ordered to send part of his fleet to the coast of North America sometime before next winter or to detach a portion of it to sweep the coast and cooperate in any undertaking which may be projected by the French and American generals.”16 On May 8 the Count de Barras, the newly assigned French naval commander, arrived with the invigorating news that 26 ships of the line, 8 frigates, and 150 transports had sailed from Brest in late March, bound for the West Indies.

On May 21 Washington met in Wethersfield, Connecticut, with Rochambeau, who confirmed that an enormous French fleet under Admiral de Grasse was on its