Setting the World Ablaze by John Ferling

Setting the World Ablaze by John Ferling

Author:John Ferling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-02-22T16:00:00+00:00


8

“The Womb of Fate”

Victory

In the summer of 1780, when Adams told Vergennes that the war could be won only if the French fleet acted in concert with the armies of Washington and Rochambeau, the French foreign minister had seen matters differently. He placed much of the blame for the military stalemate on General Washington. Writing to Lafayette, Vergennes revealed his unhappiness at “the inactivity of that American Army who before the alliance had distinguished themselves by their spirit of enterprise.” Not only was Washington’s army doing nothing, he said with some heat, but each year it somehow managed to consume more livres than would have been devoured by a French army four times its size. The foreign minister grumbled that he now had only “feeble confidence” in the ability of Washington and the United States to wage the war with zeal and energy.1

Three days after Adams sent his last communiqué to Vergennes, General Washington acknowledged to Congress that there is “a total stagnation of military business.” He attributed his inactivity to the absence of the French navy, but added that he could do nothing because only 6,000 of the 16,500 men whom Congress had sought to raise that year were under arms.2

Washington had a point, but so did Vergennes. The American commander had grown cautious since the Valley Forge winter. Once the alliance was consummated, Washington was unwilling to risk his army when the likelihood existed that he soon would be able to act in concert with the French. In 1779 he had ordered daring, but small-scale assaults, as when he sent crack troops under General Wayne to assault the British post at Stony Point above New York City. The only large campaign that he approved that year was against the Indians on the New York frontier, an operation that he assigned to General Sullivan. These initiatives produced some successes, but they were designed as much to bolster public morale as to substantively affect the course of the war. Washington was even less active in the first half of 1780. At the beginning of the year he had learned that a French army was being sent to America. He decided to embark on no adventures prior to its arrival.

However, caution is only a partial explanation for Washington’s behavior after Monmouth. He had grown obsessed with driving the British from New York. He posted his army near the city and waited, and hoped, that the allied forces might launch joint operations against New York. He turned a blind eye toward every alternative. Washington had become convinced that a great victory in New York—and probably only in New York—could end the war. He was tied to the belief that wars almost always ended with a great climactic victory.

That often had been true both in Europe and America, as when the British victory at Quebec in 1759 determined the outcome of the French and Indian War. Thinking along these lines was not new for Washington. He had objected to Dinwiddie’s “string of forts” concept in the 1750s, arguing relentlessly for a decisive assault against Fort Duquesne.



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