How the French Saved America by Tom Shachtman

Author:Tom Shachtman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

PART FIVE

Together:

Struggling Through

1780 –1781

14

“The country that will hazard the most will get the advantage in this war.” —George III

By the turn of 1780 Lafayette had tired of living in Brest among idling troops and returned to Paris to do more to advance the American cause. Frustrated twice in attempts to visit Maurepas, on January 25 he pressed his case in writing:

The miscarriage of our great preparations in Europe, the defeat at Savannah, the [British] reconciliation with Ireland, perhaps the taking of Charleston: these are the events that will affect the credibility of the cause and the condition of American finances. The total ruin of commerce, the devastation of the coastal cities undertaken by small English corps, the very dangerous extension of British power in the southern states, offensive operations undertaken from New York.… These considerations … make our aid almost indispensable.

He was not asking for much for America, in his view, merely a well-equipped corps of six thousand in an appropriate number of warships—after all, France had allocated thirty thousand troops for the aborted invasion of Great Britain. He was less modest in suggesting for this corps a leader who knew both the French armed forces and the peculiarities of American commanders and political representatives—himself.

America needed the help. After five full years of war it teetered on the brink of exhaustion, the states unable to meet their quotas of new soldiers, and with many current ones unwilling to serve beyond their term of enlistment unless paid in a currency they could redeem for a reasonable amount of goods, something they then could not do because of the drastic devaluation of the Continental paper money. Beyond that problem was the resigned cynicism and spreading lethargy that William Bingham had found when after three years in the Caribbean he had recently returned to America: “The sentiments of the people in this country I found surprisingly altered since I left it,” he wrote to John Jay, lamenting citizens “no longer governed by that pure, disinterested patriotism, which distinguished the infancy of the contest; private Interest seemed to predominate over every other Consideration that regarded the public weal.”

As Lafayette intimated, Charleston was indeed in grave danger, now that Savannah had been taken and no French fleet prevented the British from moving troops along the Atlantic Coast. Having spent time in Charleston on first landing in the United States, he knew of its position in the country’s economy—one of the largest ports, a principal gateway for exportation of rice, tobacco, and indigo; should the British take Charleston, they might strangle the United States economically and push for an end to the war on their terms.

Lafayette’s friend John Laurens was just returning home to Charleston’s defense. The city had less protection from a seaborne invasion than did Philadelphia or Boston, mainly the natural barrier of a sandbar, augmented by a few cannons on a small fort on a peripheral island—no match for determined warships. The resident American navy squadron, even after the addition of the ships left by d’Estaing to overwinter in Chesapeake Bay, was only eight vessels.

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