AMERICA'S OBLIGATIONS TO FRANCE.
The woes and crimes of unhappy France have attracted the mixed regards of the world; it has become an agreeable and timely diversion to look away from the distressing picture, to find whatever there is of compensation in the glories and virtues of her past; and the occasion is thus created to review our own obligations as a nation to this now stricken and humbled European power, and to determine how much we are indebted to France for our own independence and liberty. Another interest is added to the occasion in the fact that this part of our history has been but scantily told, and that, as the writer is persuaded, our national vanity, notoriously accumulated as it is about everything belonging to the Revolutionary period, has hitherto prevented a fair and full confession of the obligations referred to—has diminished the story, if not actually misrepresented it. But it is a mistaken vanity, the very opposite of a manly pride. A sentiment of the illustrious Lafayette fits in here. A citizen of both France and America, he stood between the two, and spoke happily for each, saying: "Comme un Français, dont le cœur brûle de patriotisme, je me réjouis du rôle que la France a joué, et de l'alliance qu'elle a fait. Comme Americain, je reconnais l'obligation, et je crois qu'en cela consiste la vraie dignité."
The severe truth of history and the constraints of true dignity alike compel the statement, that but for the French interposition the cause of the American colonists was likely to be lost; at least, that our independence would not have been obtained when it was, and as completely as it was, but for the succors of France. And this proposition, the writer thinks, may be made out from a summary view of the history of the period, yet calling attention to some facts that do not appear hitherto to have been calculated.
Accustomed as we are, in looking back upon the history of our Revolutionary struggle, to dwell upon its last signal triumphs, and naturally disposed to measure the preceding events by the conclusion, it is difficult for us of this day to realize how narrowly it avoided defeat, and in what extremity it at one time hesitated. In the winter of 1780, and at a time when the aid of France was most urgently implored, the American cause was almost at its last gasp. Many of its leaders had secretly despaired of it, and found it difficult to impose upon the public the countenance of hope. In a private letter, Mr. Madison wrote: "How a total dissolution of the army can be prevented in the course of the winter" [1780-1781] "is, for any resources now in prospect, utterly inexplicable." There was no money to pay the troops; and the fact was that the war was no longer kept up but by ill-digested and dilatory expedients. Meanwhile, the fate of arms accumulated against the colonists, and the fortunes of the field were as bad as the embarrassments of the interior administration. The more Southern States appeared to be already lost by the irruptions of the enemy upon an indefensible coast; and the whole army of General Greene was soon to be in full retreat before Lord Cornwallis through the State of North Carolina.
The two great wants of the colonists, and which had become vital, were money and a fleet. "The sinews of war" were nearly spent. The paper money of Congress was fast becoming worthless; the resource to specific requisitions was a mere indirection as long as the states supplied them by paper emissions of their own; and of this resource it was prophesied in Congress that "what was intended for our relief will only hasten our destruction."
The want of a counterpoise to the naval power of England was the main point of the military situation. Here was a fatal weakness; and events had progressed far enough to show that the hope of a decisive field anywhere in the colonies depended upon their maintaining a naval superiority in the American seas. In weighing the chances of the war, the configuration of the American territory is to be studied; and how vulnerable it was from the water had already been proved by the events of the war. At the time of the Revolution, the breadth of the American settlements from the Penobscot to the Altamaha did not average more than a hundred miles from the sea-line. This jagged strip of territory, traversed by estuaries and navigable streams, was so accessible to the enemy's vessels, that his navy might be considered as constantly equivalent to a second army operating on the flank of that engaged on shore. Wherever Washington might move, this apparition would cling to him—his flank constantly threatened, and every movement he made on land compelled to calculate the possibility of a counter-movement by the English fleet that hovered on the coast, and might develop an attack with greater expedition than he could change his front to meet it. It was the thorn in his side. When the baffled American commander spoke of retiring into the mountains of Virginia for a last desperate stand, it was not a rhetorical flourish, as it has generally been accounted, but a true military appreciation of the situation—the necessity of a barrier against the naval power of the enemy. If that barrier could be made on the water by the interposition of a fleet, then he would be (what he had not hitherto been) free to operate on the land, and make there a field that might be decisive. But the element of any such strategic combination was naval supremacy, and, until that was obtained, he could only hope at best for a desultory warfare, with constant exposure to a risk that he could neither meet nor avoid.
Now, the two vital wants of America—a foreign loan and a naval armament—were those which were precisely supplied by France. A foreign loan of specie, to the amount of twenty-five millions of livres, was asked of his Most Christian Majesty; and Franklin, reinforced by Col. Laurens, was instructed to impress the French king and his ministers with the especial need of a demonstration against the naval power of England. The succors were granted, and were beyond the expectations of the colonists. In July, 1780, the first French expedition, under the command of the Count Rochambeau, landed at Newport. And from that moment a new hope commenced for America, and a new inspiration was to bring to sudden buoyancy a sinking cause. The French force, however, was held inoperative for some time for the want of a sufficient navy to co-operate; and to this end the supplications of Congress to the French monarch had been redoubled. The expedition of Rochambeau consisted of five thousand men. It was to be reinforced by a fleet from the West Indies; but the orders had miscarried; and it was more than a year later when the second instalment of French aid was made available, and the conditions realized which fixed the last field of the war, and secured that final victory to which the French aids, by land and by water, were each indispensable. To this second aid reference will be made in its order.
Usually, a foreign contingent is not the best of the military material which a country may afford. The hireling and the adventurer enter largely into its composition, and its standard of service is low and suspicious. But this common imputation could not be cast on the expeditionary corps under Rochambeau. It was of the flower of the French army, and nobility did not disdain the service of the infant Republic. The illustrious Lafayette stood by himself, being a volunteer, and independent of the action of the royal forces. "The Marquis," as Washington never failed to punctiliously call him, won all hearts in America; and, though accused by Thomas Jefferson, who, however, was habitually envious, of having "a canine thirst for popularity," there is good reason to believe that he was actuated by a solid attachment to liberty and inspired by generous motives. Anyhow, he was destined, as we shall see, to perform one of the most brilliant and critical services of the Revolution. The Count Rochambeau was never popular in America; his manners were haughty, and he had a military exclusiveness; but he was an excellent soldier, and at one time he gave a striking example of his deference to republican principles in submitting to be arrested, in a group of his officers, at the hands of a petty county constable, on the complaint of a New England farmer for some acts of petty "trespass" on his fields! In his command, landed at Newport, there were names already illustrious in France, or destined to become so. Of such names were the Chevalier de Chastellux, performing the duties of major-general in the expeditionary corps, an encyclopædist and the friend of Voltaire; Berthier, afterwards risen from the rank of an under-officer to be a marshal of France and minister of war; the Count de Ségur, celebrated in literary as well as military life; the Duke de Lauzun, afterwards a general of the French Republic; the Count de Dillon, who, a few years later, met a tragic fate at the hands of the Revolutionary party in France; Pichegru, then a private in the ranks of the artillery; Matthieu Dumas, subsequently a peer of France; Aubert-Dubayet, afterwards minister of war under the French Republic; the Prince de Broglie, afterwards field-marshal, and one of the victims of the Revolutionary tribunal of 1794, etc.
Of the character of the soldiers we have some pleasant and vivid contemporary testimony. The idea which the sturdy American colonist, the backwoodsman with his Tower musket, had formed in advance of the French soldier, was not altogether a complimentary one. It was generally a caricature, popular at that day, of a dapper, ill-contrived individual who made ridiculous mistakes in the English language, ate frogs, memorable in the lampoon of Hogarth as toasting one of the amphibious at the end of a rapier, and had but the one virtue to make amends for his eccentricities—a courage that was unquestionable, though grotesque and physically inefficient. The picture was dispelled at the sight of Rochambeau's veterans—men who equalled in stature and in strength the best that England could display, who were inured to hardship and fatigue such as were scarcely supported by the green backwoodsman, and who marched hundreds of miles with an order and steadiness that never failed to be admirable. Mr. Madison, who saw these troops file through Philadelphia, after the fatigues of a march from the banks of the Hudson River, thus testifies his impressions of the spectacle: "Nothing can exceed the appearance of this specimen which our ally has sent us of his army, whether we regard the figure of the men or the exactness of their discipline."