CHAPTER 9

How Much Longer Can Fabius Last?

New Jersey had been rescued. The Continental Army’s precious artillery and stores remained intact at Morristown. But what about the rest of the barely breathing nation General George Washington was defending? The Marquis de Lafayette provided the first hint of hope in six months when he returned to America with welcome news: the French were sending a large fleet and army to rescue their struggling ally. Washington used the report to try to browbeat Congress into making a major effort to recruit more men for the army. “This is the time for America by one great exertion to put an end to the war; but for this purpose the necessary means must be furnished. The basis of everything else is the completion of the Continental battalions to their full establishment.”¹

July, with its celebration of the fourth anniversary of independence, brought no improvement. Of the thousands of men Congress had promised to find for Washington, not more than thirty had reported for duty. Worse, the troops in the ranks still suffered from shocking neglect. On July 6, 1780, Washington wrote to his brother-in-law Fielding Lewis that anyone at a distance would find it hard to believe that his soldiers “should be five or six days together without meat; then as many without bread, and once or twice… without either.”²

The news from South Carolina grew worse every day. Civil government had collapsed. Governor John Rutledge had fled the state. The British were marching into the backcountry, setting up forts staffed by a mix of regulars and loyalist militia volunteers. They aimed obviously for total domination. There was talk of a peace treaty that would return South Carolina and Georgia to the empire.

In Congress South Carolina’s delegates pleaded for help. The frazzled legislators decided to send a general who had, they believed, proven his ability to snatch victory from looming defeat. Soon Washington learned that General Horatio Gates had become the new commander in the south.

IF GATES succeeded, few doubted that Congress would ask him to take charge of the entire Continental Army, which had accomplished so little in the past two years. Washington, determined to avoid any hint of disapproval, gave Gates the two best regiments he had left in his army—the men from Maryland and Delaware—commanded by a burly professional soldier who had come to America with Lafayette, Baron Johann DeKalb.

The Marylanders and Delawareans had been on their way to Charleston when the city surrendered. They continued to advance cautiously, their progress delayed by an acute shortage of food. When Gates joined them on July 25, 1780, he brought with him about 1,500 Virginia and North Carolina militiamen, about 250 cavalry, and a baggage train nearly a mile long. The new commander emanated confidence. He had heard reports of victories over British outposts by South Carolina partisan bands. He seemed to think this activity would intimidate the British and permit him to set up a strong base camp in or near the town of Camden, on the border between North and South Carolina.

To his deputy adjutant general, Colonel Otho Holland Williams, Gates revealed how much of this confidence rested on fantasy. He estimated that he had 7,000 men. Williams asked each regiment to report its exact strength. Some quick addition revealed a total force of only 3,052 men. Gates casually dismissed this vital number. “Sir,” he said, “it will be enough for our purpose.” To another officer, Gates remarked that he expected to have breakfast the following morning in Camden, “with Cornwallis at my table.” The Saratoga victory had apparently rendered Gates susceptible to delusions of grandeur.³

General Gates was also oblivious of the existence of Banastre Tarleton. This newly promoted lieutenant colonel had already demonstrated a terrifying ability to strike suddenly and ferociously where the Americans least expected him. On May 6, 1780, at Lenud’s Ferry, he surprised and virtually destroyed the American cavalry, forcing many officers and men to leap into the Santee River to escape.⁴

After Charleston surrendered, only one unit of regular American troops remained in South Carolina, the 3rd Virginia Continentals commanded by Colonel Abraham Buford. They had been marching to Charleston when the city surrendered. Buford was ordered to retreat to North Carolina. Lord Cornwallis sent Tarleton and his legion in pursuit. Covering 105 miles in fifty-four hours, Tarleton caught up with the Americans at Waxhaws, on the Carolina border. The 380 Virginians were largely new recruits, few of whom had seen action before. Their commander, Buford, was a fool and a coward. Tarleton and the legion charged from front, flank, and rear. Buford ordered his men to hold their fire until the saber-swinging dragoons were on top of them. The American line was torn to fragments. Buford wheeled his horse and fled. Tarleton reportedly sabered an American officer as he tried to raise a white flag. Other Americans screamed for quarter, but some kept firing. A bullet killed Tarleton’s horse, and he crashed to the ground. This, he later claimed, aroused his men to a “vindictive asperity.” Thinking their leader had been killed, they bayonetted or sabered dozens of Americans who had already thrown down their guns and surrendered.

At Waxhaws 113 Americans perished, and 203 were captured; of the latter, 150 were so badly wounded that the British left them on the battlefield. Throughout the Carolinas, word of the massacre—as the Americans called it—passed from settlement to settlement. The slaughter, dubbed “Tarleton’s quarter,” did not inspire much trust in British benevolence among those urged to surrender.⁵

CORNWALLIS HAD taken command of British forces in the south when Henry Clinton returned to New York. He was in Camden, setting up a base from which he hoped to launch an attack on North Carolina. Several regimental commanders, notably William Smallwood, head of the Maryland regiment, disputed Gates’s assumption that his superior numbers and the partisan activity elsewhere in South Carolina would force the British to retreat.⁶ On August 16, 1780, the two armies met at dawn. Gates ordered his militia into the front line, on the left. His Continentals, the Marylanders and Delawareans, he placed in the center and on the right. Did Gates know he was fighting the battle in a way that directly challenged General Washington on the use of militia? One can only conclude that he did. Gates was gambling on a victory that would not only wipe out the humiliations he had suffered at Valley Forge, when he allowed others to push him for commander in chief, but enable him to heap scorn on Washington’s pretensions as a thinking general.

After a brief artillery duel, Cornwallis ordered a bayonet charge. As the howling regulars emerged from the gun smoke, most of Gates’s militia fled without firing a shot. Wheeling, the British assaulted the 1,200 Continentals from the flank and front. At first the regulars stood their ground, and the battle seesawed. Then Cornwallis unleashed Banastre Tarleton’s six-hundred-man British Legion. Their savage shouts and whirling sabers proved too much for regimental pride and military discipline to endure. The Continentals disintegrated and fled.

Far ahead of them, on the fastest horse he could find, was their commander, General Horatio Gates. He did not stop fleeing for two days and nights, finally halting at Hillsboro, North Carolina, 180 miles from Camden. There he set up a camp of sorts and welcomed the survivors who staggered in his ruinous wake. The retreat forever destroyed his reputation as a general.⁷

In New York, ecstatic loyalists ran an ad in one of their newspapers: “Lost: A Whole Army,” signed Horatio Gates, “late commander of the Southern Army.” It declared that Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress, promised to pay “Three Millions of Paper Dollars” to anyone who could help him find the missing army. This was first-class mockery. It not only demolished Gates’s reputation but satirized Congress’s pretensions of financing the war with its make-believe money.⁸

OUTSIDE BRITISH-HELD New York, General Washington faced another disappointment. The exhilarating news brought by Lafayette in the spring—that France was sending an army and a fleet—dwindled to another form of mockery when the French arrived in Newport. Their army consisted of barely 5,000 men, at least a fifth of them unfit for duty after the long voyage. The escorting fleet was too small to cope with the British squadron patrolling off Newport’s harbor. Washington’s recurrent dream of a successful attack on New York was indefinitely postponed.

On September 20, 1780, Washington journeyed to Hartford, Connecticut, to confer with the French commander, Lieutenant General Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau. The revelation that Washington had barely 3,000 men in his army rendered the stocky Frenchman almost speechless with shock. Rochambeau called Washington’s proposal for an attack on New York “a fantasy of expiring patriotism.” The two men could only agree to write to their governments, asking for the reinforcements needed to strike an effective blow at the enemy.

ON THE way back from Hartford, Washington decided to stop at West Point, where Major General Benedict Arnold had recently become commander. Washington hoped that Arnold’s leg wound, suffered at the climax of the battle of Saratoga, had healed sufficiently to permit him to assume a more active role in the Continental Army. The commander in chief did not know that while he conversed with Rochambeau, General Arnold was having a traitorous conversation with Major John Andre, adjutant general of the British army. It was the culmination of Arnold’s romantic brainwashing by his beautiful young wife, Peggy Shippen. Arnold had agreed to betray West Point to the British in return for £20,000 and a general’s commission in the Royal Army.

Things went disastrously wrong for the plotters after they sealed this bargain. American militia captured Andre when he attempted to return to New York and forwarded the incriminating papers they had found in his boot to General Arnold at West Point. Realizing his treachery had collapsed, Arnold fled down the Hudson River to a British sloop. When Washington saw Andre’s papers, he realized their import. “Arnold has betrayed us!” he gasped. “Whom can we trust now?”⁹

CONGRESS, ITS Fabian hostility mollified, humbly asked Washington to appoint a new commander in the south. If Arnold’s treason had not accidentally come to light, the commander in chief might have chosen him. Instead, Washington reluctantly named the general he valued most as a confidant and advisor: Nathanael Greene. In introducing Greene to Congressman John Mathews of South Carolina, he wrote, “I think I am giving you a general, but what can a general do, without men, without arms, without clothing, without stores, without provisions?”¹⁰

It was neither the first nor the last of Washington’s attempts to shock Congress into helping him and his generals maintain an army to look the enemy in the face. For the moment, he could do nothing more in his part of the continent. Would Nathanael Greene be able to apply his strategy of victory to rescue the south?

On November 19, 1780, the two men began a correspondence that would reveal the appalling difficulties Greene was about to confront and his remarkable grasp of Washington’s approach to the war. It would also display Greene’s penetrating insights into his situation and his readiness to add nuance to the strategy. Writing from Richmond, Greene told Washington that both Congress and the Virginia legislature were crucial to his hopes of success. “I must request, therefore, in the most earnest manner that your Excellency continue to animate both these bodies with your opinion and recommendations.” Otherwise, he was “very apprehensive the langour that is too apt to seize all public bodies will lull them into a state of false security; and the affairs of the southern Department will and must go to ruin.” Greene added a suggestion as daring as it was radical. “It has been my opinion for a long time that personal influence must supply the defects of civil Constitution; but I have never been so fully convinced of it as on this journey. I believe the views and wishes of the great body of the people are entirely with us. But remove the personal influence of a few, and they are a lifeless and inanimate mass, without direction or spirit to employ that means they possess for their own security.” These words reveal the crucial nature of Washington’s leadership, north and south.¹¹