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way. During the winter Washington had worked out in detail the plan that had long bewitched his mind: a siege of New York, with the Americans attacking Manhattan and the French Brooklyn. He cited the comforting statistic that Sir Henry Clinton, in sending detachments south, had cut his New York force in half. An operation against New York, he argued vigorously, would force Clinton to withdraw more troops from the South. Washington also had legitimate logistical concerns about the difficulties of marching his army to Virginia and its environs. He wasn’t opposed to a southern operation per se, but his unswerving passion for retaking New York was patent. “General Washington, during this conference, had scarcely another object in view but an expedition against the island of New York,” Rochambeau wrote.17

Rochambeau had to play a delicate game of deception with Washington. Although he didn’t want to stifle Washington’s enthusiasm or rebuff him outright, he tried to steer the conversation toward a joint operation in the South, where they might rendezvous with the French fleet and surprise Cornwallis. Even as Rochambeau humored Washington and initialed a document saying that New York held top priority, he secretly relayed word to de Grasse that he should think about sailing to Chesapeake Bay instead of to New York. In the coming weeks Rochambeau pretended to lend credence to Washington’s plans, while focusing his real attention on quite a different strategy.

Why did Washington botch this major strategic call? Aside from settling old scores, he may well have believed that his army would enjoy a paramount role in a New York siege, compared to an auxiliary role in any southern battle. Or perhaps he honestly believed that it was easier to concentrate American and French forces in the North and that a long march southward in summer heat would sacrifice large numbers of soldiers through sickness and desertion. Having prodded the northern states to aid his army in any Franco-American campaign, he doubtless feared that their enthusiasm might cool with any southern strategy. Since he believed that his army’s existence depended on the outcome of Heath’s diplomatic mission to the states, this counted as no minor factor in his thinking at the moment.

While both Washington and Rochambeau labored to fashion a harmonious facade of Franco-American amity, perceptive observers detected subtle tensions. Their interpreter at Wethersfield, the Chevalier de Chastellux, a man of many parts—soldier, philosopher, member of the French Academy, intimate of Voltaire—was well placed to study their complex interaction. A handsome fellow with watchful eyes, he was gathering material for a book about the United States and was immensely taken with the forty-nine-year-old Washington, applauding him as “the greatest and the best of men.”18 He was chagrined by the treatment Washington received from his French counterpart. Rochambeau, he claimed, handled the Virginian with “all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible,” and he worried that Washington would be left with “a sad and disagreeable feeling in his heart.”19 Washington secretly carried this grief but exposed it to no one outside a small circle of advisers.

When Chastellux arrived that winter, Washington was instantly charmed by this friend of Lafayette, whom he praised as a gentleman of “merit, knowledge, and agreeable manners.”20 At his first meals with Washington, Chastellux was struck by how Washington was “always free and always agreeable” with his officers, unlike the rigidly formal Europeans.21 When he couldn’t offer the Frenchman a separate bedroom for lack of space, Washington apologized, “but always with a noble polite-ness, which was neither embarrassing nor excessive.”22 For Chastellux, Washington seemed a man of the happy medium: “brave without temerity, laborious without ambition, generous without prodigality, noble without pride, virtuous without severity.” 23 He captured well how Washington was at once amiable and yet a shade aloof: “He has not the imposing pomp of a Maréchal