I have been thinking how little the poor man foresaw that the time would come when in the valley of "Jeems River" the traveller would see the grave of the only President of the United States who ever in his old age turned rebel to the country which had honored him. How little he foresaw that other campaigns were impending, which would give more historical interest to the valley than even Cornwallis's marchings and countermarchings! how little he dreamed of Monitors and Merrimacks in fierce méleé before his own little Hampton! how little, while he sowed the wind that winter, he looked forward to the whirlwind-reaping,—of which, indeed, he lived to hear only the first fierce sigh!
This valley of "Jeems River," and the three other valleys which radiate like the four fingers of an open hand, and send their waters down into the great conduit of Chesapeake Bay, which is the palm to these four fingers, are in this very month of April, when I write, to become the great battle-field of the continent. How strangely history repeats itself, that, after eighty-one years, we should be looking out on the map the Rapid Ann and the Chickahominy, and Williamsburg and Fredericksburg, just as our fathers did in 1781,—that the grandchildren of the men who marched under Lafayette from Baltimore to Richmond, by the forced march which saved that infant capital from the enemy, should be marching now, with a more Fabian tread, to save the same Richmond from worse enemies! Does the Comte de Paris trace the footprints of the young Marquis-General, who afterwards, among other things, made his grandfather King? How strange it all is! While I wait to know where Fabius is hidden, and where those army-corps of hundreds of thousands are, which seem to have sunk into the ground at Warrenton the other day, you and I, Reader, will familiarize ourselves with the geography a little, by brushing the dust off those old campaigns.
They began by mere predatory excursions, which occupied, for a few weeks at a time, the English forces which could be detached from New York. "We march up and down the country," said Cornwallis, not overmuch pleased, "stealing tobacco." As early as 1779, on the 8th of May, the Raisonnable, sixty-four, five smaller ships of the English navy, and a number of privateers acting as convoy to a cloud of transports, entered the Capes of the Chesapeake. The Raisonnable drew too much water to go farther than Hampton Roads: they probably did not know the channel as well as the Merrimack's pilots do. But the rest of them went up Elizabeth River, as one Pawnee did afterwards,—and there, at Gosport, found the State's navy-yard, as the Pawnee found a nation's. There was a vessel of war, unfinished, of twenty-eight guns, and many smaller vessels,—and they burned them all. How exactly it begins as the history of another war begins! Different branches of this expedition destroyed one hundred and thirty-seven vessels, and tobacco beyond account,—and they were all snugly back in New York in twenty-four days after they started.
It is the second campaign which is the most picturesque, varied, and exciting of the campaigns of the American Revolution,—and which was fought on ground which will have been made sacred by another campaign, perhaps even before these words meet the reader's eye. The men engaged in it were men who have left their mark. Cornwallis and Baron Steuben share with each other the honor of inventing the present light-infantry tactics of the world. Cornwallis. in Carolina, had seen the necessity of divesting his troops of their impediments. Steuben had been doing the same with the American line, ever since he began his instructions on the 29th of March, 1778. The discipline thus invented was carried back to Europe by English and by French officers; and when the wars of the French Revolution began, the rapid movement of the new light infantry approved itself to military men of all the great warring nations, and the old tactics of the heavy infantry of the last century died away in face of the American improvement. Besides Cornwallis, and for a time under him, here figured the traitor Arnold. Against them, besides Steuben, were Wayne and Lafayette,—the last in his maiden campaign, in which, indeed, he earned his military reputation, "never but once," says Tarleton, his enemy "committing himself during a very difficult campaign." In the beginning, General Phillips, the same who had been captured at Saratoga, had the chief command of the English army. Lafayette notes grimly that General Phillips had commanded at Minden the battery by which the Marquis de Lafayette, his father, was killed. He makes this memorandum in mentioning the fact that one of his cannon-shot passed through the room in which Phillips was dying in Petersburg. Such were the prominent actors in the campaign. It is not till within a few years that the full key to it has been given in the publication of some additional letters of Lord Cornwall. Until that time, a part of his movements were always shrouded in mystery.
In October, 1780, the English General Leslie entered Chesapeake Bay again, and established himself for a while at Portsmouth, opposite Norfolk. But Colonel Ferguson, with whom Leslie was to cooperate, had been defeated at King's Mountain, and when Leslie learned of the consequent change in Cornwallis's plans, he returned to New York on the 24th of November. His departure was regarded as a victory by General Muhlenberg, and the Virginia militia, who were called out to meet him.
They had scarcely been disbanded, however, when a second expedition, which had been intrusted to the traitor Arnold, arrived from New York in James River. Baron Steuben, the Prussian officer, who had "brought the foreign arts from far," was at this time in command, but with really little or no army. Steuben was, at the best, an irritable person, and his descriptions of the Virginia militia are probably tinged by his indignation at constant failure. General Nelson, who was the Governor of the State, behaved with spirit, but neither he nor Steuben could make the militia stand against Arnold. They could not create a corps of cavalry among the Virginia Cavaliers, and Arnold's expedition, therefore, marched twenty-five miles and back without so much as a shot being fired at them. He established himself at Portsmouth, where Muhlenberg watched him, and he there waited a reinforcement.
Just at this juncture a little gleam of hope shot across the darkened landscape, in the arrival of three French vessel's of war at the mouth of James River. The American officers all hated Arnold with such thorough hatred that they tried to persuade the French officers to shut up Elizabeth River by sea, while they attacked him at Portsmouth from the land; but the Frenchmen declined cooperation, and Steuben was always left to boast of what he might have done. As he had but eight rounds of ammunition a man for troops who had but just now failed him so lamentably, we can scarcely suppose that Arnold was in much danger.
Washington, meanwhile, had persuaded the French Admiral, at Newport, to send his whole fleet to act against Portsmouth; and by land he sent Lafayette, with twelve hundred light infantry, to take command in Virginia. Lafayette left Peekskill, feigned an attack upon Staten Island in passing, marched rapidly by Philadelphia to the head of the Chesapeake,—they all call it the "head of Elk,"—crowded his men on such boats as he found there, and, like General Butler after him, went down to Annapolis. At Annapolis, with some of his officers, he took a little vessel, in which he ran down to Williamsburg to confer with Steuben. He then crossed the James River, and reached the camp of Muhlenberg near Suffolk on the 19th of March. The reader has only to imagine General Burnside shutting up Norfolk on the south and west just now, to conceive of Lafayette's position, as he supposed it to be, when, on the 20th, he was told that the French fleet had arrived within the Capes. But, alas! on the 23d, it proved that this was not the French fleet, but the English, which had so far injured the French fleet in an action that they had returned to Newport; so that it was Arbuthnot, and not Destouches, whose fleet had arrived at Hampton Roads. Under their protection the English General Phillips relieved Arnold with two thousand more men; and it is at this moment that the active campaign of 1781 may be said to begin.
General Phillips immediately took command of the English army, for which he had sufficient force of light transports, and proceeded up James River. He landed first at Burrel's Ferry, opposite Williamsburg, into which city, till lately the capital of the State, he marched unmolested. His different marauding parties had entire success in their operations; and it is to be observed that his command of the navigation was an essential element of that success. "There is no fighting here," wrote Lafayette, "unless you have a naval superiority, or an army mounted on race-horses." Under almost all circumstances a corps embarked on boats could be pushed along these rivers faster than an enemy marching on the land. This remark, constantly verified then, will be much more important in the campaign now pending, in which these streams will, of course, be navigated by steam. It must be remembered, also, that the State of Virginia was at this time the storehouse from which General Greene's army in Carolina was supplied. To destroy the stores collected here, and thus directly to break down the American army in the South, was Sir Henry Clinton's object in sending out General Phillips. To protect these stores and the lines of communication with the Southern army was the object of the American generals. Had these designs been left unchanged, however, I should not now be writing this history. Indeed, the whole history of the United States would have had another beginning, and the valley of the James River would have had as little critical interest, in the close of the American Revolution, as have the valleys of the Connecticut and the Penobscot. The important change came, when Lord Cornwallis, at Wilmington, North Carolina, took the responsibility of the dashing, but fatal plan by which he crossed North Carolina with his own army, joined Phillips's army in Virginia, and with this large force, with no considerable enemy opposed, was in a position to go anywhere or to do anything unmolested. Cornwallis was an admirable officer, quite the ablest the English employed in America. He was young, spirited, and successful,—and, which was of much more importance in England, he had plenty of friends at Court. He conceived the great insubordination, therefore, of this great movement, which must compromise Sir Henry Clinton's plans, although Sir Henry was his commander. He wrote to the Secretary for the Colonies in London, and to General Phillips in Virginia, that he was satisfied that a "serious attempt" on that State, or "solid operations in Virginia," made the proper plan. So he abandoned Carolina, to which he had been sent, to General Greene; and with the idea that Sir Henry Clinton, his superior in command, ought to quit New York and establish himself in Virginia, without waiting that officer's views, he marched thither himself in such wise as to compel him to come. In that movement the great game was really lost. And it is to that act of insubordination, that, until this eventful April, 1862, the valley of James River has owed its historical interest.
He wrote from North Carolina, directing General Phillips to join him in Petersburg, Virginia; and thither Phillips called in his different corps who were "stealing tobacco," and there he himself arrived, in a dying condition, on the 9th of May. "I procured a post-chaise to convey him," says Arnold, his second in command. The town is familiar to travellers, as being the end of the first railroad-link south of Richmond. They still show the old house in which poor Phillips lay sick, while Lafayette, from the other side of the river, cannonaded the town with his light field-pieces. One of his balls entered the house, killed an old negro-woman who was reviling the American troops, and passed through the room where Phillips lay. "Will they not let me die in peace?" he asked. Arnold was also in danger, one of the balls passing near him; and, by his orders, Phillips and all the household were removed into the cellar. General Phillips was afterwards taken to another house, where he died on the 13th. It is in his memoranda of this affair at Petersburg that Lafayette records the fact that his father died at Minden from one of the shots of Phillips's batteries.