ON AUGUST 14, 1781, Washington received the word he had long awaited: that the promised French fleet, under command of Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, comte de Grasse, was on its way to America. The fact that he was sailing to the Chesapeake instead of New York was distressing, because Washington had hoped to mount his offensive against New York; but Rochambeau and his officers did not believe de Grasse’s force would be sufficient to tip the scales there, and Rochambeau had actually encouraged de Grasse to focus on the Chesapeake despite knowing of Washington’s contrary view. After learning of de Grasse’s plan, Washington admitted in his diary that the fight was moving to Virginia because of the narrow window of time and the preference of the French, but he was still convinced that by the time they got there, Cornwallis would be gone. He also knew that after a march which would be so long and so fast, both the French and American armies would arrive exhausted.
The next day, he wrote Lafayette to let him know that de Grasse and the fleet were coming and that the combined armies would soon be on the march. By the time they arrived, he was convinced that Cornwallis, having established the coastal port, would “detach part of his force to New York and go with the residue to South Carolina.” In any case, he gave Lafayette his orders: “Whether the enemy remain in force or whether they have only a detachment left, you will immediately take such a position as will best enable you to prevent their retreat…which I presume they will attempt the instant they perceive so formidable an armament.”
Two days later, Washington had cause to be a bit more optimistic: A letter from Lafayette told him that Cornwallis was using his entire army to fortify and build the port at Yorktown, apparently still unaware that he was in any danger. Now Washington began to worry less about Cornwallis leaving than that the convergence of forces would somehow be delayed or derailed. Marching his men quickly toward the rendezvous with Rochambeau’s land force—“we have not a moment to lose”—he arrived only to find that the French were days behind in crossing the Hudson River, slowed by too much equipage and too few pack animals. Beyond that, the comte de Barras, who was in charge of bringing the heavy siege artillery and salt provisions but was still in Rhode Island, was balking at serving under de Grasse, who was in rank his inferior. Though Barras had reluctantly agreed to do so, getting to the scene of battle meant sailing past the British in New York, which he had never been willing to do before.
There was also word that another British fleet was about to arrive on the American coast. With his artillery and food supplies in the balance, timing critical, and no further word of either Barras or de Grasse, Washington’s fabled calm failed him. In a letter to Lafayette on September 2, he confessed to being “distressed beyond expression to know what is become of the Count de Grasse and for fear the English fleet by occupying the Chesapeake (to which my last accounts say they were steering) should frustrate all our flattering prospects in that quarter. I am also not a little solicitous for the Count de Barras, who was to have sailed from Rhode Island on the 23rd ulto, and from whom I have heard nothing since that time…. If you get anything new from any quarter send it, I pray you, on the spur of speed, for I am almost all impatience and anxiety.”
Three days later, as Rochambeau’s ships drifted into port below Philadelphia at Chester, they beheld on the dock something never seen before or after: Washington, the austere commander in chief whom the French had found to be “of a natural coldness and of a serious and noble approach,” was jumping up and down and waving his arms in great, wide arcs, his hat in one hand and handkerchief in the other, a great smile on his face, and he was screaming at them: De Grasse was in the Chesapeake! At this moment, Washington appeared to one of Rochambeau’s officers like “a child whose every wish had been gratified,” as indeed they had been: De Grasse had arrived with twenty-eight ships of the line equipped with some two thousand cannon, along with three frigates, many transports, and almost twenty thousand men. Cornwallis and his army, trapped by Lafayette ashore, were now cut off from the sea and as good as captive. Another French officer said of Washington that he had “never seen a man more overcome with great and sincere joy….” When Rochambeau came ashore, Washington actually embraced him.
Two days after Washington learned that de Grasse was in the Chesapeake, reports reached him that the fleet had left it again, for unknown reasons. Several days passed before he learned that de Grasse had sailed out to meet the threat of a British fleet and after a sea battle had sent them back to New York, sealing Cornwallis’s fate. A few days later, after a short diversion for his first visit to Mount Vernon in six years, Washington rode into the American camp at Williamsburg with Rochambeau and the marquis de Chastellux. By then he had heard the other news he most needed to know, that the fleet under Barras had arrived from Newport with the heavy siege weapons.
Hearing that Washington had arrived, Lafayette rode toward Williamsburg at a gallop, jumped off his horse, ran to him with open arms, and, “with an ardour not easily described,” as one interested French observer put it, kissed Washington on both cheeks. As they parted, Washington may have noticed that Lafayette’s hair had got noticeably thinner and that his face wore the pallor of a high fever, which he had ignored to enjoy the happiness of this moment.
Lafayette had undergone several tests of character since they had last seen each other, the latest quite recently. As soon as de Grasse arrived in the Chesapeake, he had virtually commanded Lafayette not to wait for Washington and Rochambeau but to begin the assault on Yorktown immediately: Cornwallis could not escape, he argued, and their combined forces were at least equal to those of the British. This was a hard order to turn aside. De Grasse was after all Lafayette’s senior in the French military by several ranks and decades, and his proposal promised a lion’s share of glory for what was to be the decisive victory of the war. Once the main American army arrived, moreover, Lafayette knew he would be outranked by General Benjamin Lincoln and could only hope for a secondary command, after having spent the entire summer successfully overcoming impossibly long odds to bring Cornwallis to the point of surrender and keep him there.
Choosing to rebuff de Grasse and insist on waiting for Washington was out of character for the man who had arrived in America four years before, but Lafayette had changed. Blooded in battle, bonded with his men, sobered by the demands of leadership, and devoted not only to the principles of the Revolution but also to its leader, he had apparently come to recognize that there was more at stake than his personal glory, or that glory was a more complex alloy than he had known before. That knowledge had made him more thoughtful and less impetuous, as both his letters and his behavior showed. As he had written to Greene during one trying time in the field late that summer: “To speak truth I become timid in the same proportion as I become independent. Had a superior officer been here, I could have proposed half a dozen schemes.” Cornwallis’s very captivity in Yorktown was attributable to virtues that hardly characterized the younger Lafayette: discretion rather than boldness, caution more than intrepidity, and a regard for his men that mitigated his desire for acclaim. To Washington’s news that Benjamin Lincoln would have command of the American wing of the allied army, Lafayette asked only that “the division I will have under him may be composed of the troops which have gone through the fatigues and dangers of the Virginia campaign.…I confess the strongest attachment to those troops.”
He got what he asked for and more. The allied army arrayed itself before Yorktown with the French on the left and Americans on the right. The three Continental divisions were commanded by Lincoln, Steuben, and Lafayette. One of Lafayette’s two brigades was the force he had brought with him from New York. The other contained two regiments that Washington had recently designated “the Light Corps,” one commanded by Alexander Hamilton, the other by John Laurens—all of them under command of Lafayette, whose force was given the place of honor at the right side of the front line. Lafayette would end his American Revolution at the heart of the battle, at the head of his beloved light infantry, and with his two closest American comrades.
Preparations for it took several weeks, but the siege of Yorktown lasted only ten days. By the time Cornwallis surrendered his army on October 19, the British had lost 236 men, the Americans 53, the French 60; but de Grasse’s defeat of the British fleet in the Battle of the Capes had long since put the British defeat beyond doubt. Outnumbered almost two to one (thanks to Lafayette’s decision to wait for Washington and Rochambeau), Cornwallis held out as long as he did only because he had been promised that a second fleet would come to his rescue. That fleet did not leave New York until the day of his surrender, two weeks late.
At Lafayette’s urging, the British were denied full battlefield honors, to compensate for the same indignity visited on Americans at the surrender of Charleston. As they marched in dress uniform between the American and French armies, they made a point at first of looking only to the French on the left—all of them in spotless white uniforms, the Bourdonnais regiment with their crimson lapels and pink collars, the Soisonnais with their light blue collars and yellow buttons, Lauzun’s cavalry in their scarlet-and yellow-striped sashes. This clearly intended affront to the bedraggled Continentals on the right gave Lafayette, who stood with his American regiments, the chance to show his colors: He ordered his drum major to strike up “Yankee Doodle,” and that was the tune to which the British marched as they made their way to an open field, where they gave up their weapons and themselves.
Next day Lafayette gave himself the pleasure of writing to Maurepas: “The play is over, Monsieur le Comte; the fifth act has just ended.”
Within the month Lafayette was on his way back to France, and Washington returned to the task that had occupied most of his last two thousand days and would occupy him for the next two years as well: trying to provision the army and keep it together. That job was never more difficult than it was in the face of widespread jubilation at the prospect of victory and the end of war. Washington, of course, could not afford to share in the celebratory mood. His ruling assumption was, as it had to be, that peace talks would break down and that rumors of a breakthrough in the talks could be enemy disinformation, meant to encourage the American military to disband prematurely. At the same time, continually sounding that alarm raised the suspicion in some circles that Washington was simply trying to hold on to his base of power.
If the American public had been reluctant in its generosity toward the Continental Army before, it was even more ungenerous now that the war seemed almost over. As Charles Royster has observed, many American civilians were bruised by a sense of their own inaction or insufficient patriotism during the war—like sufferers from Rush’s “Revolutiana”—and so embraced the wishful belief that it was less the soldiers’ sacrifice than Americans’ common patriotic fervor that had won America its independence. The army’s pride was felt as a kind of rebuke to the people’s patriotism and war effort, and public resentment focused in particular on the pensions and back pay that had been promised to officers by Congress in the thick of the war.
By early 1783, the government was indebted to its officers for between $4 million and $5 million, and when there was no response to many polite but persistent requests for payment, the officer corps at camp in Newburgh, New York, very nearly dissolved in mutiny. Letters signed only “a fellow soldier” circulated among them, lambasting an ungrateful nation that “tramples on your rights, disdains your cries and insults your distresses,” and warning ominously: “The army has its alternative.” Washington sympathized with his officers’ demand for what they had been promised; but the suggestion that the army should refuse to disarm when peace came, or that it should refuse to fight a renewed war, leaving the government helpless, was more than he could bear.
At a meeting he called to quiet the rising anger, Washington denounced the anonymous writer (“My God!…Can he be a friend to this country?”). He told the men he supported their monetary claims and cited the difficulty of getting anything through Congress because of its competing interests. At last, he made a stirring appeal to their courage and devotion to high principle. By standing against this “fellow soldier,” he said, “you will give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue…And you will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say…‘had this day been wanting, the world [would] never [have] seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’”
That was the end of his prepared speech, but after gauging its effect, he apparently felt it was not enough. In his pocket he had a letter from Virginia congressman Joseph Jones that tried to explain the complications of getting the officers’ pay through Congress, and he began to read it to the men, but after a few sentences he reached into his vest pocket for a pair of glasses. This was new to Washington’s officers, who had never seen him in spectacles. Washington had got them from the manufacturer not long before, having said he needed a pair that would “magnify properly & show those objects very distinctly which at first appear like a mist blended together & confused.” Hearing a rustle in the audience as he put them on, he thought to say, “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in the service of my country and now find myself growing blind.”
Washington had a gift for the dramatic, but there is no indication this was anything but what it seemed, a slightly rueful moment of self-effacement that unintentionally yet movingly reminded his audience that every day of the past eight years had required of their commander in chief great personal sacrifice, relentless dedication to the cause, and unremitting hard work. He went on to read the letter from Congressman Jones, which was most certainly not the reason, after Washington left the room, that some of his officers were discreetly drying their eyes. Before the meeting adjourned, Washington’s officers unanimously passed a resolution declaring their gratitude toward him and their commitment to continued negotiations with Congress. Once again, Washington had held the Continental Army together with nothing but a demonstration of his own belief in and commitment to the righteousness of the American cause.
This was clearly a new kind of officer corps, indeed a new kind of person, this Continental soldier. Johann Ewald, captain of a company of German jaegers, was among those who tipped his hat to his ill-fed, barefoot enemies. “With what soldiers in the world could one do what was done by these men.…Deny the best disciplined soldiers of Europe what is due them and they will run away in droves…. But from this one can perceive what an enthusiasm—which these poor fellows call ‘Liberty’—can do.”
Like Ewald, Baron von Steuben came from a military tradition in which officers fought for military “glory,” and martial discipline was maintained by hierarchy and fear. He too had emerged from Valley Forge and finished his American Revolution as a different officer and a changed man, convinced of the motive power of comradeship and shared ideals. As he put it in his farewell to the New Jersey line in July 1783:
A desire of fame was my ruling motive for visiting America, but when I saw so many brave, so many good men encountering every species of distress for the cause of their country, the course of my ambition was changed, and my only wish was to be linked in the chain of friendship…and to render that country which had given birth to so many patriots, every service in my power.
Washington of course had learned the same lesson, in part from Steuben. But from the public’s strange resentment of their victorious military—from its reluctant support all along—he had learned another lesson as well: As good as a well-led force of men could be, the public, badly governed, could be as faithless and dangerous as a mob, potentially fatal to the best of causes. He enshrined this concern in his final Circular to the States, in June 1783, when peace was finally a fait accompli and he was bound for what he swore would be his final retirement from public life. In one of the most subtle and carefully crafted statements of his career, he began by paying flowery tribute to all the fruits of the Revolution—“absolute freedom and Independency…a fairer opportunity for political happiness, than any other nation has ever been favored with.” Then, noting Americans’ good fortune that this had been attempted not “in the gloomy age Ignorance and Superstition, but at an epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period,” he brought down the hammer:
At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a nation, and if their citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own…. It is in their choice, and depends upon their conduct, whether they will be respectable and prosperous or contemptible and miserable as a nation….[It]is yet to be decided, whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse….
What a strange farewell that must have seemed. Its burden, of course, was to convince the states of the wisdom of a strong central government, and of the alternative danger, “that unless the States will suffer Congress to exercise [its] prerogatives, every thing must very rapidly tend to anarchy and confusion….” He had seen what weak governance could do, and he had seen the ingratitude and shortsightedness of a feckless people. His officers were paying for both with their pensions.
Lafayette, like many of the French soldiers and officers, took back to France a less nuanced, entirely enthusiastic vision of the American Revolution, the story of a great-hearted people’s triumph over despotic power in the cause of their inalienable human rights, the creation of a new society based on equality and civil liberty. Almost as soon as he was home, Lafayette wrote Washington to express his enthusiasm for more movements of human liberation. He suggested that they jointly buy an estate somewhere in America as the site of a grand experiment: “to free the Negroes and use them only as tenants. Such an example as yours might render it a general practice, and if we succeed in America I will cheerfully devote a part of my time to render the method fashionable in the West Indies. If it be a wild scheme, I had rather be mad that way, than to be thought wise on the other tack.” The suggestion was both admirably idealistic and, if not mad, oblivious of political reality in the American South. Washington responded that the plan “is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your heart” and said he would be happy to join him but preferred for the moment to defer a discussion of details until their next meeting. As good as his word, Lafayette eventually proceeded with the plan, buying a plantation for the purpose in French Guyana. Washington wrote nothing more about it and took no part.
Always sympathetic to Lafayette and his idealism, Washington was never tempted to depart from what he knew to be realistically possible. In the same letter in which he talked about ending slavery, Lafayette told Washington he would like to be the person who carried the Treaty of Paris to London for signature, and in a letter to Congress’s secretary of foreign affairs Washington seconded his request. When the secretary objected, though, Washington immediately conceded: “There is no man upon earth I have a greater inclination to serve than the Marquis La Fayette; but I have no wish to do it in matters that interfere with…our national policy, dignity or interest.”
Deprived of its context, construed only as the victory of high ideals over corrupt power, the American Revolution turned out not to travel well. Years later John Adams tried to explain in a letter to the abbé de Mably, who was threatening to write a history of the glorious War of Independence, that Americans had been well prepared for their revolution by colonial institutions. Only by implication did he observe that these preconditions were entirely missing in France. The American people, he said, had long been knit together by their towns, schools, congregations, and militia. Public issues had always been subject to debate. Every turn of the revolutionary movement had been argued—as everything from grazing rights to local ordinances had always been argued—in town meetings (in other words, not decided elsewhere and dictated from above, as in France). Public education was the right of every American child and required in every town with sixty families or more, and these schools (not a social hierarchy) were responsible for turning out the community’s future leaders. The church’s congregations (not Rome, not hereditary wealth) determined who would preach in every pulpit, and church leaders (instead of having mistresses and barely if ever visiting their parishes) were held to practice what they preached. Finally, the core of the American military was its militia, a citizens’ army charged to protect citizens’ rights and public safety (not to enforce the king’s absolute rule or protect the privileges of an aristocracy).
After Yorktown, the marquis de Chastellux continued the tour of America that he had begun the year before, and he too sounded cautionary notes about the fate of the American idea in France. Revisiting Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and Dorchester Heights, he reflected on how odd it was that a Virginian, a man who had never seen Boston before, came to be its liberator. He was struck by the great differences among the states and their citizens, which prompted a reflection that the leaders of the French Revolution might have done well to take to heart: “States, like individuals, are born with a temperament of their own…which can never be entirely changed. Thus, legislators, like doctors, ought never presume to believe that they can bestow, at will, a particular temperament on bodies politic, but should attempt to understand the temper they already have, while striving to combat the disadvantages and increase the advantages resulting from it.”
Chastellux had a premonition that his country would be going through a radical transition, one that perhaps had already begun. In Philadelphia, an old Quaker asked him why, given the admonishments of the philosophes, there was still such intolerance in France. Chastellux said the man was right to have faith in the power of Enlightenment thinking in France, explaining only half facetiously that although they were still richly rewarded, prejudice and persecution increasingly faced the ultimate French rebuke: “They are no longer fashionable.”
Clearly, however, Chastellux was under no illusion that the American experience could be simply transplanted. Two weeks before sailing back to France, he was in Boston with a group of twenty other returning French officers when they visited with the Reverend Samuel Cooper, the eloquent, Francophile pastor of Boston’s Brattle Square Church. When the officers spoke eagerly about the triumph of liberty, Cooper cut them short. “Take care, young men,” he said. “You carry home with you the seeds of liberty, but if you attempt to plant them in a country that has been corrupt for so long, you will face obstacles far more formidable than we did. We spilled a great deal of blood to win our liberty, but to establish it in the old world, you will shed it in torrents.”*
Chastellux, a distant relative, became one of Lafayette’s most outspoken admirers, beginning the day they met in his camp. In light of events soon to unfold, Chastellux’s initial estimation of Lafayette achieved the force of prophecy: “Fortunate his country if she knows how to avail herself of [his talents]. More fortunate still should she stand in no need of them!”
Though he lived to see Lafayette rise to prominence in France’s early reform movement, Chastellux would never know how great was the role Lafayette would be called upon to play in their country, or just how horribly the zeal for liberation would play out there; because long before Lafayette found himself at the head of the French Revolution, long before the blood began to flow in earnest, Chastellux was dead. So was Vergennes; and Maurepas, the last man who was ever in control of Louis’s increasingly rebellious parlements, died just after he heard about the victory at Yorktown.
Vergennes hoped for a time that he could be Maurepas’s replacement, but Louis would never designate another chief minister, as much as he would need one. The day after Maurepas’s death, Louis called a meeting of his ministers, one of whom recorded in his journal afterward that the king had talked much more than usual that day, “as one saying to himself, ‘I want to reign.’”