Lafayette (18 page)

Washington decided to fight. Two small forces of 1,000 men each were stalking the British, and Washington ordered a 4,000-man brigade to join them and attack the enemy rear guard. If the attack succeeded, Washington’s main army would join the battle; if the British proved too powerful, the main army would cover an orderly retreat by the forward brigade. By protocol, Washington placed Lee in command, but the Englishman refused it contemptuously, calling it a passport to disaster and disgrace. Washington turned it over to the next-highest-ranking combat officer, Lafayette, who eagerly accepted. The French knight rode off to anticipated glory with Wayne, his second in command.

By evening he had encamped just five miles from the British, when Charles Lee suddenly appeared at his tent. He had changed his mind about commanding the assault, but Washington had refused to unseat Lafayette without the Frenchman’s consent. “My future and my honor are at stake,” Lee pleaded with Lafayette. “I place them in your hands. I know you are too generous to cause me to lose either.” The crafty old soldier knew his young adversary’s intractable sense of chivalry, and, with Lafayette’s consent, Lee took command.

Early that evening, Washington surveyed the English forces, then rode into Lee’s camp and ordered a dawn attack. But at dawn the next day, when Lafayette, Wayne, and the other generals asked Lee for instructions, he claimed he lacked adequate intelligence and urged them to stand down. Seeing the army immobile, Washington again sent Lee orders to attack, but Lee gave his generals conflicting orders. The result was chaos: one company moved forward, another veered left, a third veered right. British commanders saw the disorder and sent their forces charging toward the disorganized Patriot lines, all but encircling Lafayette’s company. Intuiting what had happened, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, true to his sobriquet, ordered an insanely impetuous charge that forced the British to retreat long enough to allow both his and Lafayette’s forces to retreat and escape capture.

Finally, as if to prove his point about British superiority, Lee ordered a mass withdrawal of Patriot forces. Outraged, Washington galloped forward to Lee and shouted angrily, “What is the meaning of this?” After issuing a public reprimand, Washington relieved Lee of command and, suspecting he was a British spy, ordered him to the rear.
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Washington assumed command himself and, with Wayne as his second, reformed the lines, with Lord Stirling commanding the left wing, Greene the right, and Lafayette the second line, on a rise reinforced by cannons aimed at oncoming British troops in the ravine below. With cannon blasts blazing overhead, Washington led a huge infantry frontal attack. Great horseman that he was, Washington charged heroically, atop his huge horse, through shot and shell, calling to his men, inspiring them to follow. He was
magnificent. With a surge of energy, the Patriots repelled a cavalry charge led by General Clinton himself and sent British forces reeling back toward Monmouth Court House.

“General Washington was never greater in battle than in this action,” Lafayette recalled. “His presence stopped the retreat; his strategy secured the victory. His stately appearance on horseback, his calm, dignified courage, tinged only slightly by the anger caused by the unfortunate incident in the morning, provoked a wave of enthusiasm among the troops. Wayne distinguished himself; Greene and the brave Stirling led the first line forward in the most excellent fashion.”
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Before Washington could seal his victory and destroy the British force, darkness set in, and the exhausted commander in chief spread a mantle on the ground beneath a tree, where, according to Lafayette’s memoirs, Washington and his adoptive French son lay side by side to rest for the night, “talking about the conduct of Lee.”
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Later, in the dead of night, Clinton deprived Washington of victory by quietly leading his army away to Sandy Hook, a spit of land on the Jersey shore at the entrance to New York Bay, where transports took them to New York. Although the battle was indecisive—each side suffered about 300 dead—the Americans claimed victory: they had forced British evacuation of Philadelphia and New Jersey. Patriot forces now controlled a huge swath of territory in the middle-Atlantic states, stretching down the west shore of the Hudson River in New York, through New Jersey into Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.

Had Lee not ordered the initial retreat at Monmouth Court House, the Patriots might well have destroyed a significant part of the British army. The next morning, Lafayette recalled later, Lee sent Washington “a very improper, impudent and insubordinate letter of protest . . . and was placed under arrest.”
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Recognizing his error in having replaced the aggressive Lafayette with the defeatist Lee, Washington ordered Lee court-martialed for “disobedience of orders in not attacking the enemy . . . misbehaviour before the enemy . . . making an
unnecessary, disorderly
and
shameful retreat
. . . [and] disrespect to the Commander in Chief.”
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With Wayne and Lafayette testifying against him, a court-martial found Lee guilty and relieved him of all command for one year. He spent the time writing abusive letters to Washington. Colonel John Laurens challenged Lee to a duel—and wounded him. Before Lee could resume his career, Congress dismissed him from the army, and he died in disgrace in Philadelphia in 1782. Evidence later surfaced that while a prisoner of the British, Lee had plotted with British general William Howe to defeat Washington’s army.

A few days after the Battle of Monmouth, the victorious American army gathered near Brunswick (now New Brunswick) on July 4, to celebrate the second anniversary of American independence. Adding to the festivities
was the news that a French fleet under General-Vice-Admiral Charles-Henri, comte d’Estaing, had sailed into Delaware Bay near Philadelphia, with twelve ships of the line, five frigates, and an invasion force of 4,000 men.
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The French could not have made a worse choice to lead their first expeditionary force of the alliance. The fifty-five-year-old d’Estaing was a soldier—and a brave one—but he was no sailor and had never commanded a fleet or even been to sea. But he had been a close, lifelong friend of King Louis XV, and Louis XVI had chosen him over all the senior naval officers to lead the great fleet that would avenge his grandfather’s loss of Canada and restore French glory.

D’Estaing’s original mission was to trap the British fleet in Delaware Bay, while Washington cut off the British army’s retreat northward, but the French leader lost time chasing British privateers and arrived three days after the British had evacuated Philadelphia and sailed for New York. Washington sent d’Estaing up the New Jersey coast to Sandy Hook to trap the British fleet in New York Bay and the British army on New York Island (now Manhattan). Washington, meanwhile, marched his army northward to Paramus, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York, to attack from the west while d’Estaing sailed in from the south. But d’Estaing’s ships drew too much water to cross the sandbars into the bay, and, as the British fleet bobbed tantalizingly in the water beyond cannon range, a discouraged d’Estaing admitted he would have to abandon his American mission. “It is terrible to be within sight of your object,” he fretted, “and yet to be unable to attain it.”
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Washington had an alternative strategy for d’Estaing, however: a joint attack with American forces on the 6,000-man British fortification at Newport, Rhode Island, to rid New England of the last British troops. D’Estaing’s fleet could attack from the sea, while an American army under General John Sullivan attacked from the north. Washington sent Lafayette and 2,000 Continentals to link up with Sullivan’s 3,000-man army north of Newport and 6,000 militiamen from Boston under the command of Massachusetts governor John Hancock. Washington named Lafayette field commander under the overall strategic command of Sullivan. The two had worked well together at Brandywine, and Lafayette was the only commander who knew both languages well enough to coordinate the forces of the two nations.

By the time d’Estaing reached the waters off Rhode Island, however, his enthusiasm for the American Revolution had given way to pessimism. Already chastened by bad timing at Delaware Bay and bad planning at New York, he was ready to sail home. Weeks at sea under short rations had killed many of his marines and left the rest too weak to fight. Moreover, his cautious eye saw nothing but a design for disaster on the navigation charts. Three narrow
arms of the sea reached into Narragansett Bay and wrapped themselves around two islands—desolate little Conanicut Island and the larger Rhode Island, with Newport near its southern tip. Rhode Island was—and is—indeed an island in Narragansett Bay, while the mainland that embraces the bay was called the Providence Plantations.* To clear the waters of British ships, d’Estaing would have to send a lone frigate into each waterway, where it would have little room to maneuver and could easily be trapped if a British fleet approached from the sea. D’Estaing needed to strike swiftly, before the British commander could send to New York for help, but Sullivan ordered him to wait until Hancock’s troops arrived from Boston.

From the first, d’Estaing and Sullivan despised each other. It did not help that neither spoke the other’s language. A rough-hewn New Hampshire lawyer and virulent Francophobe, the quick-tempered Sullivan was unused to European niceties of military protocol, and his gruff, direct tone offended the elegant count. Lafayette stepped in to mediate—only to have d’Estaing express “political anxiety about receiving a French officer who had violated the king’s orders not to leave for America.” After much discussion, Lafayette calmed d’Estaing by vowing that “he had come to fight the English to learn to serve his master [the French king].” D’Estaing finally accepted the young man’s word, and, in his report to the French naval minister, the admiral concluded that “no one is in a better position than this young general officer to become an additional bond of unity between France and America.”
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As his next task, Lafayette set about restoring cordiality, if not amity, between the French and American commanders, rowing back and forth from ship to shore to ship and back again. Lafayette told Sullivan that the admiral’s haughtiness stemmed from “his wants of every kind, provisions, water, etc.”—an explanation that Sullivan set to remedy. With Sullivan’s animosity subdued, Lafayette poured balm on the admiral’s sores. “General Sullivan,” Lafayette pledged, “has sent in every direction to collect provisions . . . and orders have been given to bake biscuits at several different places. . . . You will also receive several boats loaded with barrels of water.” Once reprovisioned, d’Estaing ordered his frigates to sprint through the narrow channels. With cannons ablaze and marines firing from the top rails, the French captured, burned, or rammed every British vessel they could find, including one frigate and two corvettes.
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Three other British frigates were left ablaze and sinking—set afire by the British themselves to prevent their capture.

The rest of the Newport campaign proved far less successful, however. Although Sullivan and d’Estaing agreed on a joint assault on Newport, Sullivan suddenly attacked without notifying d’Estaing. The admiral and his officers were furious over what they perceived as an insulting breach of protocol. Sullivan scoffed, calling d’Estaing “unduly sensitive and punctilious.”
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Colonel John Laurens echoed his commander’s words: “The French officers sounded like women disputing precedence in a country dance, instead of men engaged in pursuing the common interest of two great nations.”
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The dispute quickly became moot, though, when a cry from a crow’s nest heralded the approach of thirty-six enemy sail on the horizon. As d’Estaing had feared, the British had sent to New York for help, and Admiral Howe had responded. D’Estaing ordered his frigates to rejoin the ships of the line at sea. They maneuvered throughout the night in the tight channels, and, by morning, they lay in position offshore to repel the British attack. Then the winds shifted, and, seeing an opportunity to attack and destroy Howe’s fleet, d’Estaing sailed out to sea “in the most beautiful weather in the world,” according to Lafayette, “and in sight of both the English and American armies. I never was so proud as I was that day.”
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With the approach of d’Estaing’s powerful fleet, Howe’s ships turned toward New York, with the French in pursuit under full canvas. The chase continued all day and night and most of the next day, with the French closing in by the hour. At the end of the second day, Howe had no choice but to come about and engage, but, before the titanic battle could begin, the sea began churning angrily. Violent waves and winds gripped both fleets and sent their ships tossing in the air, spinning them in different directions, out of control, rolling and pitching violently, ripping sails and snapping masts like twigs. The gale roared relentlessly throughout the night. By morning both fleets lay crippled, barely able to steer, let alone battle. D’Estaing’s flagship had lost its masts and rudder and bobbed about helplessly. A second man-of-war had lost two of its three masts, and a third was out of sight, either beyond the horizon or at the bottom of the sea. A British ship of the line tried to sink the crippled French ships, but the bigger French guns held it off, and the British abandoned the attack and limped off to safety in New York.

D’Estaing regrouped the ships he could find and sailed slowly back to Rhode Island, his flagship in tow. Although his officers urged that they sail to Boston for repairs, d’Estaing insisted on fulfilling his pledge to Sullivan to return. When he arrived, however, he found an alarming shrinkage in Sullivan’s force. Many troops had deserted after the French fleet sailed away, and the British garrison had turned the full fury of its artillery on the depleted American land force. The unholy storm that followed put thousands more soldiers to flight, and still others left for home to harvest their
fields, after their fifteen-day enlistment periods ended. Hancock’s 6,000-man Massachusetts militia shrank to a mere 1,000, and, seeing the expedition against Newport all but lost, he too left the muck of the rain-drenched battlefield and returned to Boston.