The Fate of Battle
1780
In the early months of 1780, George Washington found out where British general Henry Clinton was headed. Charleston, the South’s major port and the nation’s fourth-largest city, was suddenly in peril. Still camped north of New York City, his Excellency could do nothing to counter the threat. He had few troops to spare. He had to depend on his commander in the South, General Benjamin Lincoln.
According to the quasiscientific humoral theory widely accepted in the eighteenth century, Lincoln’s personality was of the phlegmatic type: affable and steadfast, but potentially slow and diffident. Contemporaries described the forty-seven-year-old Lincoln as “judicious,” “very gracious,” and “exceedingly popular” with his militiamen. Friends referred to his “composure and self-possession.”1
The “uncommonly broad” Lincoln dressed plainly. “His speech was with apparent difficulty” due to an impediment.2 All his life he suffered from the condition we now know as narcolepsy, which left him liable to drop off to sleep “in the midst of conversation, at table, and when driving himself in a chaise.”3
A phlegmatic type might make a good farmer, which was Lincoln’s profession before the war, but he was perhaps too easy-going to be a stellar general. He certainly did not lack the will. The very day that violence broke out at Lexington, Lincoln marched his corps of volunteers the fifteen miles to Cambridge from his home in Hingham, Massachusetts. A year later, the state made him a general of militia. He commanded troops at White Plains during Washington’s 1776 retreat from New York.
During the controversial promotions of February 1777, Congress vaulted Lincoln over generals like Benedict Arnold and John Stark, raising him to major general in the Continental Army in spite of his limited experience. Sent north to help stop Burgoyne, he cooperated with the resentful Stark during the maneuvering before the Battle of Bennington. Afterward, he commanded the fortifications at Saratoga. He saw no action there except during a patrol, when he was shot in the ankle.
On recovering from his wound in the autumn of 1778, he took command in the South just as the British shifted their attention in that direction. Washington warned that the region suffered from “internal weakness, disaffection, the want of energy.” South Carolina authorities were stingy with supplies and tried to dictate Lincoln’s every move. He hoped he would not be driven to “altercating with the civil power.”4 Altercation was not Lincoln’s style.
The British had attacked Charleston twice before 1780. In 1776, Colonel William Moultrie, with some help from General Charles Lee, had prevented a British fleet from entering Charleston Harbor. Three years later, the enemy, having captured Savannah, made another attempt on Charleston. Lincoln was able to fend off this raid, in spite of civilian leaders’ impulse to capitulate.
In September of 1779, French admiral Charles d’Estaing arrived at the port with a powerful fleet, six thousand soldiers, and a plan to cooperate with Lincoln to retake Savannah. The joint operation collapsed during a brutal hand-to-hand melee in the trench before the town. The allies lost one of their bloodiest fights since Bunker Hill. A discouraged Lincoln returned to Charleston.
* * *
By the end of 1779, Henry Clinton had decided to shift even more of the focus of the war to the South. He hoped to spark a loyalist uprising, the perpetual British panacea for curing the rebellion. In the South he would not face the bulk of Washington’s annoying Continental Army. He would also be closer to Britain’s valuable West Indies territories should the French launch an attack there. In preparation, he had withdrawn the men who had been idling in Rhode Island since Clinton had captured Newport in 1776. Then he embarked 8,700 soldiers and sailed away, leaving New York under the command of General von Knyphausen.
After a rough passage, Clinton and his men landed just south of Charleston. The city lay on a peninsula between two rivers, the Ashley to the west and the Cooper to the east. Fort Moultrie, whose guns had thwarted Clinton’s first attack back in 1776, still protected the mouth of the harbor.
The city’s location offered opportunities for a spirited defense. Lincoln had sufficient time to complete its fortifications as Clinton crept forward, his men’s minds haunted by tales of wolves, venomous snakes, and sixteen-foot “Crocodiles.” It was not until March 29 that British troops crossed the Ashley and began to fortify the neck that joined the city to the mainland, preparing for a slow strangulation.
The amiable, round-faced Lincoln had no use for military affectation—he wore his gray hair unpowdered and lived the frugal, pious life of a New England Puritan. In spite of his rank, he wielded a shovel on the earthworks to set an example. The state had pressed six hundred slaves into the effort, but white citizens remained reluctant to perform manual labor. Nor would they listen to proposals to enlist blacks into the army in exchange for freedom. Moreover, the coastal planters’ chronic conflict with poorer inland residents prompted the backlanders to ignore state requests for aid and militia service.
Lincoln’s defenses included a stone “citadel” housing sixty-six cannon, a water-filled canal across the neck, and a fleet of three frigates and numerous gunboats to protect the harbor. He drew more troops into the city until 2,600 Continentals and more than 2,500 militiamen manned the works. Then it dawned on him that he had made a mistake.
On April 10, Clinton sealed the neck, trained his guns on the American fortifications and demanded that Lincoln surrender. Two days earlier, British ships had run past Fort Moultrie virtually unscathed to enter the harbor. Lincoln could feel the noose tightening.
His hope was that, like Washington at Brooklyn Heights, he could still escape. His small fleet kept British ships from the Cooper River. If he ferried his men and supplies across, he could preserve a formidable army in the South at the price of relinquishing the city.
Lincoln knew that he was in over his head. He had written to Washington about his “insufficiency and want of experience,” asking to be relieved.5 What was he to do? His honor would not allow him to surrender. Any hope of reinforcements arriving in time was a pipe dream. On April 13, 1780, the British guns opened up. Bombs rained on the houses and fortifications. Fires raged through the town. British sappers kept digging, preparing gun emplacements ever closer to American lines.
The time for escape was now. When Lincoln called a war council, he unwisely included representatives from the civilian government. They would not hear of a retreat. They told him that if he tried to abandon the city they would burn his boats, throw open the town gates, and aid the British in destroying his army.
The chance to break out faded as the British established themselves east of the Cooper River. By May 8, Clinton had fourteen thousand men working on the siege. His guns kept pounding the American defenses. Lincoln saw that all hope had evaporated. He asked for a cease-fire to discuss terms. A blessed spell of quiet settled on the town, but Lincoln was in no position to bargain. Unconditional surrender was Clinton’s only offer. The American commander could not accept.
The next day, hostilities resumed. A tremendous cannonade erupted from both sides, two hundred guns firing at once. “It appeared as if the stars were tumbling down,” an observer reported.6 The apocalyptic fury pointlessly destroyed houses and killed more citizens and soldiers.
Now the residents of Charleston, anxious to save their town from utter ruin, petitioned Lincoln to surrender. On May 11, an American soldier ran up a white flag. Clinton would not let the defeated army march out of the city with the honors of war, their flags flying and the troops released on parole, as was the custom. More than 5,500 ragged and humiliated American troops headed for British prisons, where inhuman conditions killed almost half of them. Their sad departure from the city was known derisively as the “Lincolnade.”7
The loss at Charleston staggered patriots in all the colonies. An entire army captured: irreplaceable troops, four hundred cannon, thousands of muskets, valuable stores of gunpowder, three frigates. Across the Atlantic, joyful Britons greeted the news as an indicator that “a speedy and happy termination of the American war” was imminent.8
* * *
While celebrating his victory, General Clinton received word that a force of about 350 Virginia Continental soldiers under the command of Colonel Abraham Buford had come south to reinforce Lincoln. Forty miles from the city, they learned of Charleston’s fate and turned back north. Although the rebels had a hundred-mile lead, Clinton sent Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton to chase them down. The twenty-six-year-old Tarleton had cemented his reputation as a daring cavalry leader by capturing American general Charles Lee during the 1776 debacle in New Jersey. A natural warrior, Tarleton was praised for his “velocity.” Now he set out with his mounted 130-man British Legion, composed mostly of loyalists. Forty regular army dragoons rode with him. They galloped north at a punishing pace, commandeering fresh horses as their animals dropped under them. They caught up with Buford at a settlement called Waxhaws on the North Carolina border.
Claiming he had more men than he did, the young cavalryman sent Buford a surrender demand under a white flag. Buford refused. The British horsemen and infantry swept toward Buford’s men on open ground. The American commander decided to stop them with a single volley of musketry. His men held their fire until the stampeding attackers were only ten yards away. The muskets exploded in unison. The shock of fire met the shock of hurtling horseflesh. The momentum of the cavalry prevailed. In an instant, the dragoons were in the midst of the rebels, slashing with razor-sharp sabers.
Without time to reload, the Americans were helpless. Blades cut into men’s arms, tore their necks, sliced open their faces. Blood gushed. Buford tied a white handkerchief to his sword and ordered his men to ground their muskets. Tarleton’s troopers hacked those who stood and ran down those who fled.
“I have cut 170 Off’rs and Men to pieces,” Tarleton bragged afterward.9 As at the bloody battle at Paoli, it was not firearms but the more intimate edge weapons that decided the matter at Waxhaws. Patriots loudly proclaimed it a massacre.
They had a point. More than a quarter of Buford’s men were killed “on the spot.” Another 150 were wounded too badly to walk away. Buford himself escaped with about ninety others. Tarleton said his men acted with “vindictive asperity not easily restrained.” A British officer later wrote that “the virtue of humanity was totally forgotten.”10
Like the murder of Jane McCrea, the Waxhaws Massacre became a centerpiece of American propaganda. The British scored a tactical victory but enraged their enemies. For the rest of the war, the image of “Bloody Tarleton” fueled the patriot fighting spirit, and “Tarleton’s quarter,” meaning no quarter, remained the bitter catchphrase that excited American vengeance.
But the immediate outcome disheartened patriots: British control of South Carolina was now complete.
* * *
Washington had to respond to the Charleston catastrophe. In addition to Buford’s small contingent, he had already sent a corps of his best Continentals marching south. In Virginia they learned of the fall of Charleston. Leading these crack Delaware and Maryland troops was Baron Johann de Kalb. The son of Bavarian peasants, the fifty-nine-year-old de Kalb was, like Steuben, a soldier of fortune and a dissembler. Not really a baron, he was something better: a hardened and expert warrior. Having come over with Lafayette in 1777, the tall, graying, broad-shouldered de Kalb had become one of the Americans’ most valuable foreign officers.
Hearing of Lincoln’s fate, de Kalb encamped his men in North Carolina. His regiments of Continentals were now the only obstacle preventing the British from charging all the way to Virginia. He formed a base at Hillsdale, near present-day Raleigh, and waited.
Congress turned to Horatio Gates, the “Victor of Saratoga,” to redeem patriot hopes. The former British officer had served as head of the War Board and had commanded in New England during the previous two years of relative quiet. He yearned for action.
Gates was still popular among New England congressmen, but his alleged plotting against Washington during the Valley Forge winter had left him out of favor with the commander’s allies. His friend Charles Lee, who had come a cropper at Monmouth Courthouse, warned him, “Take care lest your Northern laurels turn to Southern willows.”11
Gates arrived in de Kalb’s camp on July 26, 1780. The force Gates called his “grand army” was far from grand: 1,400 Continentals, six field guns, and a tiny remnant of cavalry. Gates had to depend on a North Carolina militia brigade already in the field and the hope that other militiamen would turn out. He admitted to “an army without strength—a military chest without money.”12 Food was scarce—the countryside had little to offer, and Tory farmers refused to supply rebels.
Administration and logistics were Horatio Gates’s strong suit. He might have spent time consolidating and rebuilding his army and prying supplies from Virginia and North Carolina authorities. But he knew that British general Cornwallis, whom Clinton had left in South Carolina with a substantial force of redcoats, presented a grave danger to the southern states. Intelligence reports suggested that if Gates rushed his men south within two weeks, he could manhandle the advance corps of the British at Camden, South Carolina, and capture a tempting supply depot as well. The time seemed right to strike.
Gates was an optimist. He had always believed in the ability of militia to carry the fight. “There is every Reason to Hope,” he told his men, “that this Campaign will decide the War.”13 The day after he arrived, he announced that the army would march toward the enemy—tomorrow.
His officers expressed “blank amazement.” Not only were they to be on the march at three in the morning, but they would be taking a route that de Kalb had already ruled out. It was the most direct path to Camden, but it passed through barren territory thinly populated by loyalists. De Kalb’s plan had been to circle west through an area of patriot farms, where they might scrape together provisions. A few officers protested the new route, but Gates was decided.
Off they went through sandy pine barrens. Nothing to eat—Gates’s promises that food would catch up with them were empty. Already foot-weary after their six-hundred-mile trek from New Jersey, the Continentals soldiered on, punished by the South Carolina heat, electrified by mosquitoes, sand flies, and ticks. They marched another 150 miles, “living on green apples and peaches, which rendered our situation truly miserable.”14
Gates’s men overtook and merged with the force of North Carolina militiamen on August 7. Twelve miles from Camden, Gates received reports of about two thousand British troops standing guard north of the city. In spite of his superior numbers, he ruled out a frontal assault. From long experience, he knew that the outcome of any battle is uncertain. No general could control all the unforeseen factors that dictated victory or defeat. He preferred a chess match, a war of maneuvers in which calculation and stratagem could shift the odds in his favor.
He continued his march, seeking a strong defensive position. He finally encamped, after seventeen hungry days on the road, at a place called Rugeley’s Mills. The British fell back toward their main camp just north of Camden. Encouraged by the enemy’s timidity, Gates remained confident. Seven hundred Virginia militiamen under General Edward Stevens arrived to swell his grand army. Because Rugeley’s Mills did not offer the solid defensive position Gates wanted, he decided to move to a more favorable spot along Sanders Creek, seven miles closer to Camden. He ordered his officers to have their men on the road at ten o’clock that night. Again they were dumbfounded. A march through the dark was a challenge for the most disciplined troops. Raw militiamen could easily fall into confusion and lose all cohesion. Gates asked no advice and would listen to no dissent.
Before they left, an aide informed Gates that a count of his effective rank and file stood at three thousand, not the six thousand that, with the influx of militiamen, he had assumed were under his command. The general stated simply, “These are enough for our purpose.”15
Under a sky of silver-rimmed clouds, the men headed off. Fingers of moonlight illuminated the carpet of pine needles under their feet. At two in the morning, the troops had only a mile to go before they reached the ridge where they could dig in. Suddenly, a startled shout broke the lukewarm stillness. A rifle crack. A rumble of horses’ hooves. Men’s hearts bounded.
They had collided with the enemy in the dark. Danger crackled around them. British cavalrymen thundered ahead. Gates’s outnumbered horsemen gave way. American riflemen opened up. The five-minute fire-fight ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. Both groups of startled soldiers fell back.
Told that he faced a substantial force commanded by Cornwallis himself, Gates’s “astonishment could not be concealed.” One of the most experienced of all American commanders was suddenly rattled.
Gates could only guess what had happened. Cornwallis, hearing of the Americans’ approach, had galloped north from Charleston to join his men. Figuring he would substitute surprise for numbers, he had put his force on the road that night at the exact moment Gates’s troops were stepping out. He planned to assault the American camp at dawn. The extraordinary coincidence brought the cavalry of the two ignorant armies together in the dark at a spot where neither commander had planned to fight.
Gates’s men hunkered down six hundred yards from the enemy. Calling a quick council of war, Gates at last asked his officers for advice. None wanted to risk his honor by advocating a retreat. Militia general Stevens suggested they fight—it was too late for anything else. In retreat the army would be vulnerable, especially to Tarleton’s dragoons. No one objected. Gates affirmed the decision. They would fight.
In spite of their numbing fatigue, few of the Americans slept. Sporadic gunfire punctuated the unholy hours. Before light, the men moved into position on the rolling ground under a cathedral of longleaf pines. The Continentals formed on the right under de Kalb. The North Carolina men stood in the center behind eight cannon. The Virginia militia, exhausted after their punishing forced march, held the left. Swamps protected both flanks. Two Maryland Continental regiments waited behind the lines as reserves.
As light leaked into a nervous sky, Cornwallis ordered his men ahead in columns, regulars on the right, Tory militia to the left. The arrangement of the armies put two of the best regiments of redcoats directly opposite the Virginians, many of whom had never seen an enemy soldier before that morning. General Stevens hurried back to Gates and excitedly suggested that his men could attack the British before they fully deployed into a line of battle. Gates said, “Let it be done.”16
The patriot artillery opened up. The guns’ detonations took the men’s breath away. The Virginians moved forward with timid steps. The well-drilled British regulars formed quickly. Their glistening bayonets floated toward the militiamen as if disembodied. From behind the imperious prongs of steel roared the confident chant: “Hus-SAH! Hus-SAH! Hus-SAH!”
The Virginians stood awestruck. “We have bayonets, too!”17 Stevens screamed at them. The redcoats halted, shouldered their muskets, and fired a crashing volley. Some militiamen fell. The rest panicked. Most dropped their weapons without ever firing. They turned toward the reassuring rear. They ran faster than they had ever run, officers as well as men. The panic, one observer remembered, was “like electricity”—it operated instantly and was “irresistible where it touched.”18
The terror spread to the battalions of North Carolina militiamen. The troops of every regiment but one turned and sprinted away. One soldier ran because “everyone I saw was about to do the same. It was instantaneous.”19 Men tripped, fell, got up, ran on. By this time, the battlefield had become an inferno: the cannon pulverized the silence; great clouds of smoke clogged the motionless air; visibility shrank to a few yards; ears were assaulted by screams, shots, the tramp of feet and hooves, incomprehensible shouting, wails of pain, whizzing balls, and the otherworldly braying of gutted horses.
Gates ranged behind the lines, trying to gain control of his troops. To no avail. He cantered away from the lethal melee and continued to marshal the stampeding soldiers behind the line. The men, caught up in a fever dream, ignored him. The chaos brought to mind the scene on the Monongahela a quarter of a century earlier, where a young Horatio Gates had felt a sickening thud tear his chest amid a similar disaster.
“They ran like a Torrent,” Gates later reported, “and bore all before them.”20 He decided to ride on ahead of the soldiers and rally them at the camp they’d left the night before. Even there, with the sound of the guns a distant rumble, the men would not cohere into a fighting force.
Gates now knew that the worst had happened. Soon the British cavalry would come charging along the road to scoop up the fleeing rebels. If they could capture a general of Gates’s stature, the blow to the American cause might be fatal. He must pull together a new army. To do that, he must survive. To survive, he must put distance between himself and the scene of the cataclysm. Gates and a small group of aides took off. By nightfall they had covered the distance to Charlotte, sixty miles from the scene of the action. Cold military logic dictated Gates’s decision, but leaving a battlefield where his men were still hotly engaged would indelibly stain his reputation.
After Gates fled, the fight continued. De Kalb actually believed he was winning. The smoke and disorder kept him from perceiving the collapse of the militia. His Maryland and Delaware men had rushed at the Tories opposite. They attacked “with great alacrity and uncommon bravery, making great havock” among the enemy.21 They took fifty prisoners. The reserve battalions stepped forward to try to cover the yawning gap on the left.
But de Kalb’s six hundred could not stand against two thousand. His horse collapsed bleeding. A saber stroke opened his scalp. He fought on. The battle grew elemental: men looked each other in the eye, grappled, swung muskets as clubs. De Kalb mounted one last bayonet charge. He and his troops surged ahead, stepping over heaps of dead men. He fell, mortally wounded. “After that last effort of the continentals,” Tarleton reported, “rout and slaughter ensued in every quarter.”
Defeated armies of the day often managed a more or less orderly retreat. Sometimes they surrendered. Only rarely was an armed force utterly obliterated. This was the fate of Gates’s grand army. By noon that hot day, 650 Americans had been killed or wounded, 300 captured. The rest had scattered to the winds.
Having failed to designate a fallback position for his men, having established no base in Charlotte, Gates felt his only option was to continue all the way back to Hillsborough. He was desperate to start rebuilding a force that could keep the enemy from sweeping through that state and into Virginia. “I proceeded,” he wrote, “with all possible Dispatch.”22 He covered the two hundred miles in three days.
Horatio Gates was no coward, but in the wake of Camden he was both reviled and ridiculed. “Was there ever an instance of a general running away, as Gates has done, from his whole army?” young Alexander Hamilton sneered.23 The unfortunate general was berated for his “military absurdity.” The loss of another entire army barely twelve weeks after the disaster at Charleston brought the hopes of patriots crashing down.
In November, Gates learned that his beloved twenty-two-year-old son Robert, young Bob, his only child, had died of illness a month before. His aides had not dared add to his suffering by telling him earlier. He was devastated. “None but an unfortunate soldier, and a father left childless,” an officer wrote, “could assimilate his feelings.”24 In December, amid the weeping willows, a stricken Gates turned over the southern army to Nathanael Greene and headed home to his Virginia farm. All hope of glory was gone. He made no excuses, simply stated an eternal truth of war: “The fate of battle is uncontrollable.”25
* * *
Prospects had not looked so bleak for Washington since the dark days at the end of 1776. Now, well into 1780, he was struggling just to hold his meager army together. Even during the summer, his troops were forced to survive on short rations. Except for Anthony Wayne’s stroke at Stony Point, the commander in chief had no recent victories to boast off. He had not commanded troops in battle since Monmouth, two years earlier. The interim he had spent waiting, worrying, and frantically working to keep his army intact. His hope that the entry of France into the war would bring a quick resolution had faded. The grinding stalemate frustrated him beyond measure.
The state of civilian society was even more depressing. An officer spoke of “the dreadful gloom which now overspreads the United States.”26 Continental currency was “fit for nothing But Bum Fodder.” A hat cost $400, a horse $20,000. Lacking buying power, the army was forced into outright confiscation of civilian property. But confiscation crippled the people’s morale. Unable to sell crops for cash, farmers had no incentive to produce a surplus.
A taste for luxury on the part of many patriots had become a sickness. “Speculations, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration and almost of every order of men,” Washington lamented. He called profiteers and hoarders “pests of society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America.”27 In Philadelphia, leading citizens enjoyed expensive feasts while fighting men went hungry.
Congress had exacerbated supply problems by unwisely turning the responsibility over to the states. Nathanael Greene protested that the representatives were simply multiplying problems. They responded by removing him as quartermaster general. Fortunately for the American cause, they did not dismiss him from the army altogether.
The country, Greene said, was allowing “an Army employed for the defense of every thing that is dear and valuable, to perish for want of food.” Writing to Steuben, Washington lamented, “The prospect, my dear Baron, is gloomy and the storm thickens.”28
One glimmer of hope. On July 15, 1780, a French fleet sailed into the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, and disembarked 6,500 soldiers. With these professional troops under his command, Washington was determined finally to attack Clinton and regain New York. He would endeavor “by one great exertion to put an end to the war.”29
Henry Knox suggested besieging the city. Lafayette favored a direct assault. The French commander, the Comte de Rochambeau, remained wary. A large British fleet had just arrived to protect New York. Washington’s small army and shaky finances appalled the Frenchman. “Do not trust these people,” the Comte wrote back to Versailles.
Direct talks between the allies were essential. In mid-September 1780, Washington traveled with Knox, Lafayette, and a guard of twenty horsemen to the small village of Hartford, Connecticut, to meet Rochambeau. Washington was reluctant to leave his own army, partly for security reasons—he remembered Charles Lee’s capture in 1776—and partly because his presence kept the beleaguered force from succumbing to desertion and discouragement. But now he entrusted the troops to Nathanael Greene and rode off. Crossing the Hudson, he lunched with Benedict Arnold, who had for the past month commanded the Hudson Highlands and the army’s important fort at West Point.
The American officers could not convince Rochambeau to cooperate in an attack on New York. The tough, mistrustful French soldier had more military experience than all of them combined. The meeting established some rapport between the two commanders, but it was clear that Rochambeau, nominally under Washington’s authority, was not to be commanded. The meeting left Washington discouraged. “I see nothing before us but accumulating distress.”30
Ever wary, Washington led his entourage back by a roundabout route that brought him to Fishkill, a village and supply depot along the Hudson. The next day, he would ride south to dine with Arnold and his wife at their mansion on the east side of the river and to inspect the crucial fortifications at West Point.
The group rose early on Monday, September 25, and trotted their mounts through a pristine late-summer morning. Stopping to look over some defensive positions along the way, Washington sent two aides ahead to let Arnold know they would be late for breakfast. He noted Lafayette’s impatience—his young colleagues were all in love with Mrs. Arnold, Washington joked. He was referring to Peggy Shippen, the lovely twenty-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia loyalist. Arnold, while commander there, had played Othello to her Desdemona, wooing the petite, clever blonde with his gallantry and tales of military exploits. They had married against her father’s wishes, and she had recently borne him a son.
On arrival, the group learned that General Arnold had already crossed to West Point. After breakfast, Washington and his aides were rowed across the river themselves to examine the complex of forts that protected the crucial narrows of the river. No salute or welcoming party greeted them, only a handful of surprised guards. Arnold was not there. Washington later noted that, “the impropriety of his conduct, when he knew I was to be there, struck me very forcibly.”31
Washington’s puzzlement turned to alarm as he toured the site. Arnold had assured him that he was restoring West Point from its weakened state. Yet the undermanned fortifications were clearly vulnerable to attack.
Disconcerted, Washington and the others went back across the river. If the British were to take the Highlands, cutting the link between New England and the southern colonies, it was unlikely the Revolution could survive. It would be the crowning disaster in a year of sinking fortunes.
Arnold had not returned to his headquarters. Washington went upstairs to rest before dinner. His aide Alexander Hamilton brought him a packet of dispatches. One was a message from a Colonel Jameson, in charge of an outpost near the American lines to the south. A man calling himself Anderson, possibly a spy, had been taken there with suspicious documents hidden in his sock. Washington glanced through these papers. They contained detailed information about West Point and its defenses as well as minutes of a council of war that Washington had entrusted to the fort’s commander. The papers made clear that this “Anderson” was involved in a plot instigated by Benedict Arnold himself.
He sent Hamilton to bring Lafayette to him.
“Arnold has betrayed us!” a stunned George Washington told him. “Whom can we trust now?”32
The very notion that the most accomplished general on the American side, the hero of Quebec, Valcour, and Saratoga, could turn traitor made the brain reel. Washington’s question hung in the air. If Arnold could go over to the enemy, which other wavering or disgruntled officers might follow?
The commander in chief ordered Hamilton and another aide to chase after Arnold, who they learned had headed down the river by boat. In the surreal atmosphere, an even more bizarre scene was unfolding. Peggy Arnold had gone mad. One of Arnold’s aides had found her wandering the hallways, naked but for her morning gown, raving and hysterical. Washington went in to see her. He was not Washington, she said, but a demon come to murder her child. Arnold had gone, gone through the ceiling toward heaven.
Learning that Arnold had received dispatches just before Washington’s initial arrival and had spoken with Peggy before hurrying away, the men were convinced that the sudden news of his treachery had driven his wife insane. The truth—that the delicate Mrs. Arnold had plotted with her husband from the beginning, had aided his treason, and was putting on a mad act to cover his escape—would not be accepted until much later.
Still wary, Washington ordered the house sealed while he and his entourage ate dinner. “Gloom and distrust seemed to pervade every mind,” Lafayette wrote about that curious meal, “and I have never seen General Washington so affected by any circumstance.”33
When Hamilton returned, he reported that Arnold had escaped to the British warship Vulture. Hamilton had advised Nathanael Greene to put the Continental Army under marching orders. Anthony Wayne’s brigade set out for West Point at once. Washington was afraid the British fleet might arrive at that vulnerable place at any moment. A hasty letter delivered from Arnold aboard the Vulture admitted that he was changing sides. Peggy calmed down. No fleet appeared. Washington knew that pure chance or “the interposition of providence” had prevented 1780 from ending in utter ruin.
The story came out piecemeal. In June 1779, two months after his marriage, Arnold had sent “a tender of his services to Sir Henry Clinton.”34 He had asked Washington for the West Point command to further his treachery. After a year and a half of intrigue, the British commander had insisted on a face-to-face meeting with the turncoat. He sent his close aide and spy master, John André, up the river on the Vulture to meet with Arnold. André had come ashore to discuss the plan to turn over West Point and the money the American general was to receive in exchange.
Arnold’s haggling prevented André from returning to the ship. Instead, he set out with a loyalist guide to cross the river and proceeded back through no-man’s-land on horseback, disguised and under an assumed name. Before reaching British territory near New York, he was accosted by a group of motley militiamen. André, equipped with a pass signed by Arnold, might have bluffed his way through and kept the plot alive. Instead, he lost his composure and said to the gunmen, “Gentlemen, I hope you belong to our party.”
Both loyalist and patriot bands, irregular militiamen and bandits, roamed the area.
“What party is that?” the wary man with the rifle asked.
With the outcome of the war perhaps riding on his answer, André guessed, “The lower party,” meaning the British.
“Get down,” the man said. “We are Americans.” He and his companions searched the stranger, found the papers, and refused a bribe to set André free. Their actions pulled the thread that caused the whole scheme to unravel. A panel of American officers tried André the following Friday and condemned him on Saturday. The elegant young man was hanged by his neck at noon on Monday.
* * *
What had prompted Arnold’s astounding reversal? During his three and a half years of service since leaving for Quebec, he had not once been paid. When the time came for a well-deserved promotion, he had been snubbed by Congress. The corruption that permeated the land both appalled and tempted him. He enjoyed the friendship of wealthy Philadelphia Tories. Having engaged in some shady business transactions, he had been hounded by the civil authorities in Pennsylvania, a “set of artful, unprincipled men,” he called them. A court-martial for some missteps had ended in a gentle reprimand from Washington, who deeply admired his enterprising subordinate. But the cause had turned septic for Arnold, and he was convinced it was as good as lost.
“I daily discover so much baseness and ingratitude among mankind,” he wrote to his wife, “that I almost blush at being of the same species.”35
That Arnold would be resentful was understandable. Many officers were frustrated by an inept Congress and a greedy populace. But Arnold had plotted to hand three thousand American soldiers over to death or imprisonment. He had casually betrayed the comrades who had followed him to Quebec and fought at his side. He had done it for money. No explanation or excuse could encompass such treachery.
Some patriots saw Arnold’s perfidy as a symptom of the pervasive malaise. The love of money had replaced the love of country, had sapped the will of the friends of liberty. Arnold, “freedom’s champion,” had become “mammon’s sordid slave.”
“Never since the fall of Lucifer has a fall equaled his,” Nathanael Greene said. Even loyalists were repelled by Arnold’s “horrid unnatural barbarity.”
Arnold possessed the cold heart of a man of action. The quality had served him well through much of his life. Finally it led him astray. A British general who knew him commented, “Arnold does nothing by halves.”36 His words summed up the inner dynamic of the most heroic of battlefield generals and the most odious of traitors.
* * *
If that awful year needed a gloomy and dangerous cap, it came on January 1, 1781. Officers of Anthony Wayne’s Pennsylvania Line were celebrating at a meager New Year’s dinner in their camp in central New Jersey. They heard strange sounds and ran outside to find that their men had left their quarters, guns in hand. The soldiers refused orders to stand down. A skyrocket went up. The men “began to huzza.” When superiors imposed on them, they shot one officer dead, mortally wounded two, and beat others. They seized the unit’s artillery and fired the pieces as an alarm. Wayne, who had been afraid to leave his sullen troops, as he usually did in winter, appeared on horseback. He could not calm them. “With inexpressible pain,” he reported to Washington that a “general mutiny and defection” had occurred. He alerted members of Congress to prepare to flee Philadelphia.37
It was not the first mutiny in the Continental Army. The previous May, Connecticut soldiers had demonstrated against the intolerable neglect of enlisted men. Washington and some of the other officers sympathized. “The men have borne their distress with a firmness and patience never exceeded,” their commander had noted.38
“Our soldiers are not devoid of reasoning faculties,” wrote Wayne. “They have served their country with fidelity for near five years, poorly clothed, badly fed and worse paid.”39 Slow recruitment and rapid inflation had compelled Congress and the states to offer bounties of $200, $300, even $1,000 to the new men who now stepped forward to join the army. The veterans, who had enlisted for the duration, resented the newcomers appearing in camp flush with cash.
Now the Pennsylvania men had had enough. Fifteen hundred soldiers marched out of camp fully armed. They would, if necessary, proceed to Philadelphia and confront Congress. They observed the strictest military discipline on the march. They insisted they were not deserting. “We are not Arnolds.”40 They were only demanding what their country owed them.
Apprised of the mutiny, something he had “long dreaded,” Washington worried that it could spread. He imagined that his troops would, like Arnold, join the enemy. Or they might ravage the land, taking what had not been provided for them. Or they might simply go home.
The mutineers stopped at Princeton, New Jersey. Joseph Reed, now the president of Pennsylvania, rode out to negotiate with the sergeants. They reached an agreement that covered the payment of bonuses to those who reenlisted and the release of those who wanted no more soldiering. Many experienced fighters left the already undermanned army.
The unrest did not end there. Before the end of January, troops of the New Jersey Line, with similar grievances, left their camp and marched toward Trenton. Learning along the way that their demands had been addressed, they likewise returned to their camp. Marching back, they still grumbled loudly against their officers. Washington could not let the epidemic go any further. He worried about an “end to all subordination in the Army, and indeed to the Army itself.”41
The New Jersey men awoke in their camp to find loyal Continental troops surrounding them. They were ordered to come out of their huts, instantly, without their arms. From a list of the worst offenders, three were chosen at random and told to kneel. Twelve of the mutineers were handed muskets and ordered to execute them. Two of these ringleaders were shot dead, the third pardoned.
The British, when they heard about the mutinies, were ecstatic.
Washington was dismayed. He sent Henry Knox on an urgent tour of New England to beg for funds and supplies from what Knox called “vile water-gruel governments.”42 The results were paltry. The erosion of the army continued.
“We began a contest for liberty and independence ill provided with the means for war,” Washington wrote after the mutinies, “relying on our own patriotism to supply the deficiency.”43 The downward trajectory of the American cause suggested that patriotism might not be enough.
But already, in this blackest of nights, flickers of light were beginning to appear in the most unexpected of places.