Washington [283]
Washington’s stay in Philadelphia was fraught with worry. He was on edge, having heard nothing from de Grasse or de Barras since they sailed from their respective positions. “If you get anything new from any quarter,” he entreated Lafayette, “send it, I pray you, on the spur of speed, for I am almost all impatience and anxiety.” 10 It was highly unorthodox for Washington to confess to such jitters. On the morning of September 5, after riding out of Philadelphia, he was overtaken at Chester by a messenger bearing phenomenal news: the Count de Grasse had shown up in Chesapeake Bay with a full panoply of military and naval power: 28 ships of the line, 4 frigates, and 3,500 troops. Washington shortly learned that de Grasse had engaged the Royal Navy under Admiral Thomas Graves off the Virginia capes, sending the British squadron scurrying back to New York and leaving the French in undisputed control of Chesapeake Bay. Between Lafayette’s small army on the land side and de Grasse’s massive fleet at sea, Cornwallis was bottled up near the end of the Yorktown peninsula.
As Rochambeau and his generals glided down the Delaware, they beheld something that overturned their preconceptions of a staid Washington. He stood on the riverbank in delirious elation, signaling gleefully with a hat in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. From across the water they heard him shouting “De Grasse.”11 “I caught sight of General Washington,” wrote Rochambeau, “waving his hat at me with demonstrative gestures of the greatest joy.”12 Once the French commander came ashore, the two men hugged with a mighty embrace. One French officer, Guillaume de Deux-Ponts, was amazed by Washington’s ebullience. Before, he had been convinced of Washington’s “natural coldness,” but now he had to reckon with the “pure joy” shown by the American: “He put aside his character as arbiter of North America and contented himself for the moment with that of a citizen, happy at the good fortune of his country. A child, whose every wish had been gratified, would not have experienced a sensation more lively.”13 The Duke de Lauzun agreed: “I never saw a man so thoroughly and openly delighted.”14 Washington’s boyish exuberance testified to the years of suppressed anxiety from which he was now beginning to feel emancipated.
Perhaps restoring his spirits, too, was knowledge that, for the first time in six years, he would soon set eyes on Mount Vernon. He spent a long day in Baltimore, trying to get more transports to ferry his men and enduring the ceremonial occasions he loathed. Then early the next morning he set out on horseback with a single aide, David Humphreys, and streaked across sixty miles of Virginia countryside in a day. The last time Washington had set eyes on Mount Vernon was May 4, 1775, when he departed for the Second Continental Congress, little realizing how his life would be turned topsy-turvy. To experience Mount Vernon anew after his long, itinerant military life must have been a heady sensation. The household was now enlivened by newcomers, especially the four children of Jacky and Nelly Custis, whom he had never seen; the baby boy had been christened George Washington Parke Custis. Humphreys, a young man of literary aspirations, versified the slaves’ reaction to Washington’s return: “Return’d from war, I saw them round him press / And all their speechless glee