American affairs were now (at the beginning of 1780) at their lowest ebb. The struggle had lasted nearly five years. It was with difficulty that an army, nominally of 6,000 men, could be kept together. The men were “half-starved, imperfectly clothed, riotous, and robbing the country people ... from sheer necessity. Desertion was continual, from one to two hundred men a month going over to the enemy.... Only a miracle, thought Washington, could keep America from the humiliation of seeing her cause upheld solely by foreign arms. Throughout the land there was a weariness of war, a desire for peace at any price.”[9]
At least a third of our population is estimated to have been loyalist, and another third lukewarm. At several periods there were more loyalists in the British service than in our own. Nor was this situation wholly confined to the army, for in 1779 there were fitted out at New York one hundred and twenty-one privateers in British employ, thirty-four of which carried from twenty to thirty-six guns. The whole were manned by between 9,000 and 10,000 men.
The navy was reduced almost as much as the army. The Boston, Providence, Ranger, and Queen of France had arrived at Charleston on December 23, 1779. The first three fell into the hands of the enemy on the surrender of Charleston on May 11, 1780, and became part of the British navy, the fourth along with the South Carolina ships Bricole, 44; the Truite, 26; General Moultrie, 20, and Notre Dame, 16, had been sunk in the river, as also two small French ships-of-war L’Aventure and Polacre. There thus remained in the latter part of 1780 but one of the original thirteen frigates, the Trumbull, which with the Dean, Confederacy, Alliance, and Saratoga (the last a sloop-of-war), formed in this year the entire Continental navy in service. The Deane (renamed the Hague) and the Alliance were the only two of these to survive the year.
CHAPTER VIII
The now unopposed command of the sea by the British navy and the consequent invasion and overrunning of the South brought darkest gloom and despondency to the American cause.
It was well that Providence had given America Washington who, when all things seemed to fail, held firm and carried us to victory. Without him the nation could not have survived the throes of birth. Calm and undismayed, he made up for the inefficiency of Congress, the lethargy of the states, the discontent of all. Whatever our national shortcomings—past, present, or future—America can ever be proud of having produced this king of men, the greatest character in history. He was, in fact, the Revolution personified. The war was fought without even the semblance of a government, for even the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union” reported on July 12, 1776, by a committee appointed on June 10th (the same day as that on which the committee was appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence), were not agreed to by Congress until November 17, 1777, and a sufficient number of states under the conditions of these articles did not ratify the action of Congress until March 1, 1781. Thus nearly six years of war passed before we had anything approaching a confederacy, and even then, as Washington well said, it was “but a shade without a substance.” “The organized and carefully barricaded impotence of this scheme of government,” says an able authority, “is probably unequalled in history, with any nation surviving.” Congress could only “request” of the several states, and but too often these requests bore no fruit whatever. Attendance in Congress lagged, interest dwindled, and by 1780 but for Washington, so far as mortal can judge, the Revolution would have come to a dismal end.
But Washington’s time of cheer was at hand. From February, 1779, to March, 1780, Lafayette was in France and unceasing in his efforts in support of the American cause. It was chiefly due to his efforts that on May 2, 1780, seven line-of-battle ships and three frigates left Brest under the Chevalier de Ternay, convoying thirty-six transports carrying 5,027 troops, officers and men, under Lieutenant-General Count de Rochambeau. The enemy had, on October 25, 1779, withdrawn from Narragansett Bay to New York fearing an attack by d’Estaing’s great fleet after its operations against Savannah. The French fleet anchored at Newport on July 11th.
The death of de Ternay in December, due, in Lafayette’s judgment, to despondency caused by his hopeless view of things; the treason of Arnold which came to light in September; the blockade for most of the coming winter of the French squadron by, now, a superior British force; the arrival in the West Indies at the end of April, 1781, of the Count de Grasse with a powerful addition to the French fleet; the information that he expected to come on to the American coast; the pressing messages to him from Washington and Rochambeau to hasten his departure; the reply received on August 14th that he would sail on August 13th for the Chesapeake with 3,300 troops, artillery, and siege guns, and 1,200,000 livres (francs) in money, determined the move of the small allied armies to Virginia, where Cornwallis, now some months in that state, was finally to take up an entrenched position at Yorktown, his move from Portsmouth being completed on August 22d.
The American and French armies, after a whole year’s inaction, joined on July 6, 1781, taking position on a line from Dobbs’ Ferry to the Bronx. The Fates were surely with America. Everything conspired for the allies’ success; the position taken had convinced Clinton that New York was to be attacked; he pressed Cornwallis to send him every man he could spare, but Cornwallis could spare none. Rodney in the West Indies, misinformed as to De Grasse’s intentions, and thinking he was to take but half his fleet instead of the whole, detached but fourteen of his own command to go north under Sir Samuel Hood to reinforce Admiral Graves at New York. Rodney himself left for England on leave of absence, carrying four ships with him. The two vessels dispatched to Graves with information of British intentions never reached him. He was east with his squadron when one, arriving at New York, was sent on to him but was driven ashore on Long Island by a superior force and destroyed; the other and more important one, giving word of Hood’s departure, was captured. For this reason, though Graves returned to New York on August 16th, he still remained in the dark as to Hood’s movements. The whole was a marvel of good fortune for the Americans, while every move of De Grasse’s fleet and of the allied armies were to fit with the perfection of mechanism.