Winning Independence by John Ferling

Author:John Ferling [Ferling, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER 10

FATEFUL CHOICES

General Washington had last seen Nathanael Greene in October. What he had heard from Greene following his arrival in North Carolina, communiqués penned in December that were weeks old by the time they reached the commander, had not been encouraging. Greene had not been sure his army deserved to be called an army. He advised Washington that the southern states had provided only a few poorly equipped militiamen and that the countryside had been “laid waste” both by winter and militia that had remained on active duty during the last six months. So barren was the region, said Greene, that his army would have to remain on the move foraging for provisions. His only cheery news was that both the partisans and Colonel Washington’s cavalry were having some success in harassing the enemy. Greene had also divulged his unorthodox plan to divide his army, a step that Washington, and perhaps Washington alone, regarded as being “supported upon just Military Principles.”1

Washington, who two years earlier had looked on the war in the South as an inconsequential sideshow, now saw things differently. Given the devastating defeats at Charleston and Camden, and the arrival of a British army under Arnold in Virginia, Washington now understood that Britain might have the means of suppressing the rebellion in three southern provinces, an outcome that would be fatal to the quest for independence. He looked on Henry Clinton’s decision to dispatch Arnold as a clever stroke. Given Britain’s naval superiority, Washington understood that Clinton was pursuing a game plan that could result in a deadly threat to Greene. Arnold’s army could block the flow of supplies to the southern army, pin down Virginia’s militia so that it could not assist Greene, and possibly join with Cornwallis in a campaign to snare the rebel army.2

Washington wrote Governors Nash and Jefferson, gently chiding the former for North Carolina’s failure to meet its manpower quota for the Continental army or to furnish adequately supplied militia forces. He appealed to Jefferson to see the bigger picture. He told Virginia’s governor that Britain’s “predatory incursions” into the Old Dominion were damaging and dispiriting, but he counseled that the greater danger to realizing independence lay in the lower South. Virginia, Washington added, must provide ample assistance to Greene to assure that Cornwallis was denied victory.3

Now fully engaged with regard to the grave dangers posed by Britain’s southern strategy, Washington, in December, had approached General Rochambeau about sending men and a fleet to the South, either to destroy Arnold in Virginia or assail the British in Charleston. Washington intimated that the United States would never agree to a peace settlement until the British “relinquish their conquests in South Carolina and Georgia.” Washington, like Clinton and the French leaders, understood that the key to breaking the stalemate rested with naval superiority—“how might the enemy be crushed if we had it,” he wistfully remarked to one of his young officers—but the question remained: Would it be Britain’s navy or France’s that was instrumental in the decisive action.

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