Sinking into a morose mood in the early spring of 1781, Washington again believed that the Continental Army was disintegrating before his eyes, that he had been doomed to lead a phantom army. So many enlistments had expired during the winter that it was at times difficult even to garrison West Point. His idle troops had languished since November, and “instead of having the prospect of a glorious offensive campaign before us,” he lamented, “we have a bewildered and gloomy defensive one.”14 As Greene and Lafayette won honors in the South, he was reduced to a helpless bystander, upstaged by his own disciples.
Washington dispatched Major General William Heath to raise supplies from the northern states and predicted his army would starve or disband without them. In May his hungry army was down to a one-day ration of meat. Even when states scraped up supplies, Washington couldn’t pay the teamsters to transport them. It was all too familiar and wearisome to Washington, who began to think he would never see the end of the conflict. As he confided to General John Armstrong, he didn’t doubt the outcome of the war, believing that “divine government” favored the patriots, “but the period for its accomplishm[en]t may be too far distant for a person of my years, whose morning and evening hours and every moment (unoccupied by business) pants for retirement.”15
THROUGH THE COMBINED EFFORTS of Benjamin Franklin and John Laurens in Paris that winter, the French agreed to an indispensable loan and a munificent gift of six million livres to purchase arms and supplies. For all that, the French foreign minister, Vergennes, was reluctant to commit more French troops. In the early going, he had fancied that the French would score a rapid victory; now, as things dragged on, he shrank from an open-ended involvement. All along Washington and Lafayette had stressed the vital importance of sea power, and Vergennes decided the French would mount one last naval effort. In the spring he notified Lafayette that a French squadron would cruise off America’s coast during the year: “M. Le Comte de Grasse, who commands our fleet in the Antilles, has been ordered to send part of his fleet to the coast of North America sometime before next winter or to detach a portion of it to sweep the coast and cooperate in any undertaking which may be projected by the French and American generals.”16 On May 8 the Count de Barras, the newly assigned French naval commander, arrived with the invigorating news that 26 ships of the line, 8 frigates, and 150 transports had sailed from Brest in late March, bound for the West Indies.
On May 21 Washington met in Wethersfield, Connecticut, with Rochambeau, who confirmed that an enormous French fleet under Admiral de Grasse was on its way. During the winter Washington had worked out in detail the plan that had long bewitched his mind: a siege of New York, with the Americans attacking Manhattan and the French Brooklyn. He cited the comforting statistic that Sir Henry Clinton, in sending detachments south, had cut his New York force in half. An operation against New York, he argued vigorously, would force Clinton to withdraw more troops from the South. Washington also had legitimate logistical concerns about the difficulties of marching his army to Virginia and its environs. He wasn’t opposed to a southern operation per se, but his unswerving passion for retaking New York was patent. “General Washington, during this conference, had scarcely another object in view but an expedition against the island of New York,” Rochambeau wrote.17
Rochambeau had to play a delicate game of deception with Washington. Although he didn’t want to stifle Washington’s enthusiasm or rebuff him outright, he tried to steer the conversation toward a joint operation in the South, where they might rendezvous with the French fleet and surprise Cornwallis. Even as Rochambeau humored Washington and initialed a document saying that New York held top priority, he secretly relayed word to de Grasse that he should think about sailing to Chesapeake Bay instead of to New York. In the coming weeks Rochambeau pretended to lend credence to Washington’s plans, while focusing his real attention on quite a different strategy.
Why did Washington botch this major strategic call? Aside from settling old scores, he may well have believed that his army would enjoy a paramount role in a New York siege, compared to an auxiliary role in any southern battle. Or perhaps he honestly believed that it was easier to concentrate American and French forces in the North and that a long march southward in summer heat would sacrifice large numbers of soldiers through sickness and desertion. Having prodded the northern states to aid his army in any Franco-American campaign, he doubtless feared that their enthusiasm might cool with any southern strategy. Since he believed that his army’s existence depended on the outcome of Heath’s diplomatic mission to the states, this counted as no minor factor in his thinking at the moment.
While both Washington and Rochambeau labored to fashion a harmonious facade of Franco-American amity, perceptive observers detected subtle tensions. Their interpreter at Wethersfield, the Chevalier de Chastellux, a man of many parts—soldier, philosopher, member of the French Academy, intimate of Voltaire—was well placed to study their complex interaction. A handsome fellow with watchful eyes, he was gathering material for a book about the United States and was immensely taken with the forty-nine-year-old Washington, applauding him as “the greatest and the best of men.”18 He was chagrined by the treatment Washington received from his French counterpart. Rochambeau, he claimed, handled the Virginian with “all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible,” and he worried that Washington would be left with “a sad and disagreeable feeling in his heart.”19 Washington secretly carried this grief but exposed it to no one outside a small circle of advisers.
When Chastellux arrived that winter, Washington was instantly charmed by this friend of Lafayette, whom he praised as a gentleman of “merit, knowledge, and agreeable manners.”20 At his first meals with Washington, Chastellux was struck by how Washington was “always free and always agreeable” with his officers, unlike the rigidly formal Europeans.21 When he couldn’t offer the Frenchman a separate bedroom for lack of space, Washington apologized, “but always with a noble polite-ness, which was neither embarrassing nor excessive.”22 For Chastellux, Washington seemed a man of the happy medium: “brave without temerity, laborious without ambition, generous without prodigality, noble without pride, virtuous without severity.” 23 He captured well how Washington was at once amiable and yet a shade aloof: “He has not the imposing pomp of a Maréchal de France who gives the order . . . The goodness and benevolence which characterize him are evident in all that surrounds him, but the confidence he calls forth never occasions improper familiarity.” 24 Most impressive was Washington’s implicit submission to the people’s representatives: “This is the seventh year that he has commanded the army and he has obeyed Congress: more need not be said.”25 Later on, Chastellux left a fine epitaph for Washington when he said that “at the end of a long civil war, he had nothing with which he could reproach himself.”26
That Washington found it frustrating to be junior partner in the French alliance was confirmed when he returned to New Windsor after meeting with Rochambeau. At Wethersfield, Washington had advised Rochambeau to relocate the French fleet from Newport to Boston. Then the Duke de Lauzun arrived with a message that a French council of war had opted to keep it in Newport. This was a direct slap at Washington, who was “in such a rage,” the duke said, that he didn’t reply for three days. He had to accept that the French were his superiors, notwithstanding their public claims that he supervised the two armies. When Washington finally replied, he said he took “the liberty still to recommend” that the fleet be moved to Boston.27 The French seemed to acquiesce, for on May 31 he recorded in his journal that Admiral de Barras “would sail with the first fair wind for Boston.”28