Adversaries in a Cauldron

c01.qxd 09/29/03 11:15 AM Page 1 One Adversaries in a Cauldron On Broadway across from Bowling Green in New York City, Benedict Arnold, American turncoat and now a brigadier general in His Majesty’s Royal British Army, limped into British army headquarters. It was late November 1780. Arnold had been summoned by Sir Henry Clinton, fifty, command- ing general of the British forces in North America, to get his marching orders for a new attack on the rebels. This was to be Arnold’s first action against his former compatriots, and he had been urging Clinton to let him attack Philadelphia, a storehouse for vast quantities of military supplies and also the seat of the Continental Congress—those dozens of gallows-bait revolutionists whom Arnold hated so passionately. Such a military strike could entomb the revolution. Clinton had declined. Arnold then urged an attack in one of the southern states. Clinton had taken time to think it over. General Clinton was squirming in a military and political cauldron. Nearly six years after the American Revolution had begun, the British army seemed no closer to defeating the rebels. In fact, for two and a half years, since the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey, George Washington and his ragged band of starvelings had been waiting a few miles north on the Hudson highlands for Sir Henry to come out of his New York fortress to challenge them again on the battlefield. The two men sitting here across from each other were the very yin and yang of personalities: phlegmatic Sir Henry, the ever-planning, cautious, slow-to-move British career soldier; and mercurial Arnold, the ever- dangerous, explosive, militarily gifted Connecticut soldier, a legend even among British officers. As a gifted military strategist and a very reluctant campaigner, Sir Henry—Harry to his friends—was searching desperately for the single masterstroke—entailing very little risk—that would bag that wily American fox, Washington, and ship him to the gallows in London—the stroke that would win the war, shower him with glory, and earn him a statue in St. Paul’s Cathedral. 1 c01.qxd 09/29/03 11:15 AM Page 2 2 The Day the Revolution Ended Sir Henry Clinton in 1787. A miniature by Thomas Day. (Courtesy of the R. W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport, LA) And here sitting across from him was the very paladin he needed—this ambulating maelstrom, this brilliant battlefield berserker. In his spanking- new British general’s uniform, thirty-nine-year-old Benedict Arnold had one thing on his volcanically erupting mind: revenge. Revenge on the pack of politicians in the Continental Congress who, he believed, had ganged up on him and driven him into his new red coat. From his first meeting with Sir Henry Clinton, Arnold had talked obsessively about his master plan for personally finishing the revolution. By pouncing on Philadelphia with a cadre of redcoats, he would destroy the vitally important manufacturing infrastructure and supply nexus of the Continental Army there, make an inferno of the supply ships and docks, then, surrounding the State House, pluck from it all his enemies in both the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania Assembly to haul them in chains across the ocean and fling them at the feet of George III, the whole rotten pack of them, a noose around each neck. Pennsylvanian Joseph Reed; that New England gang—especially the Adams cousins, Sam and John; Horatio Gates; James Wilkinson; Thomas Conway; and many more. That one stroke could destroy the core of the revolution and bring the resistance to a sudden end. And toward that end, with Clinton’s encouragement, he was busy forming a new, fast-moving, hard-hitting military legion to be composed of the very men who would be most highly motivated to attack—Ameri- can deserters, each with his personal score to settle. c01.qxd 09/29/03 11:15 AM Page 3 Adversaries in a Cauldron 3 But as the two talked now, Arnold realized that Sir Harry, while talk- ing about an attack in the South, was issuing some very strange orders. “You will be pleased to proceed with the troops which are embarked under your command to Chesapeake Bay,” Sir Henry told him. And with those 1,600 lightly armed and mobile troops, he was to set up a base of operations there at Portsmouth, strategically situated on the Elizabeth River, right in the comforting shadow of the masts and rigging of British warships—his built-in naval escape hatch in the event of major attack by land or sea.1 This was to be a temporary naval and raiding base, not a permanent major military installation. From there he was to mount a series of pun- ishing raids on the Tidewater region. Destroy the rebels’ military store- houses, particularly in Richmond and Petersburg. Stop the flow of troop reinforcements and supplies to General Greene in the Carolinas and cause his army in the South to wither and die. Ruin the Virginia econ- omy, which was helping to finance the rebel cause. Most of all, snap the spine of the colonial snake, thereby separating the North from the South, for piecemeal conquest. Sir Henry also specified certain other activities in those marching orders: Arnold was to issue a call to the Virginia Loyalists, those “well affected to His Majesty’s government,” then arm and train them—a whole army of them. Arnold was also to build a number of boats and assemble a naval force in Albemarle Sound “for the purpose of annoying the enemy’s communications and trade and securing means of intelli- gence or even of a retreat for his detachment in case a superior French fleet should take a temporary possession of the Chesapeake.”2 That single thrust into Virginia offered other benefits. It could dis- tract Washington from his plans to invade New York City. It would smooth the royal brow in London. Most important, it could regain the initiative for that fizzling Carolinas campaign from which Clinton had promised London so much. And always that timid stipulation: Do this only if it can be done “with- out much risk.” Sir Henry wanted daringly safe warfare. Then Clinton stunned Arnold, must have made him regret turning his coat. Arnold was not getting an unfettered command. He was part of a troika. Going with Arnold were lieutenant colonels Dundas and Sim- coe—“officers of great experience and much in my confidence.” Further, “I am to desire that you will always consult those gentlemen previous to your undertaking any operation of consequence.”3 In short, Clinton was putting Arnold on a leash—two leashes. Arnold’s actions could be vetoed by the other two lesser officers. In effect, the timorous Clinton was sending his prized new champion into battle hand- cuffed. Then he weakened his own orders to the level of request. Lord Cornwallis, in the South, would also be able to veto any of Arnold’s moves. c01.qxd 09/29/03 11:15 AM Page 4 4 The Day the Revolution Ended Clinton’s orders were explicit: “You are directed to obey His Lordship’s commands.”4 This was a typical Clinton move, cautious, equivocal, with built-in escape hatches, creating a self-canceling troika to fight a risk-free battle. Yet taking risks—audacious, breathtaking risks—was the one feature that had made Arnold such a ferocious, brilliant, and victorious general. One need not guess at Arnold’s opinion of Clinton. No other British general knew the Americans better than Sir Henry. Born in New Brunswick, Canada, he spent many of his boyhood years in New York City while his father, Admiral George Clinton, was royal governor of the Colony of New York. He had gone to school with colonists’ sons, and at fourteen received his first military commission, as captain-lieutenant of the New York militia. Few in the British army had spent more time fighting the rebels. Arriving in Boston right after the Battle of Lexington-Concord, he was present at the Battle of Bunker Hill, which the British, suffering an unimaginable slaughter, won only after the embattled farmers had run out of ammunition and left the field. The slaughter of redcoats on that hill on that day was so great (44 percent casualties—1,154 men and officers killed and wounded) that even the Americans were awed. Sir Henry had warned General Thomas Gage that the frontal attack uphill against an entrenched enemy was suicidal. He recommended instead that British troops outflank the Americans and cut off their escape route from Bunker Hill. General Gage ignored him. In the five intervening years, Sir Henry had fought many battles against the American army. The pivotal moment came on June 28, 1778, a brutally hot day at Monmouth, New Jersey, in a stand-up, head-on, thumb-in-your-eye battle. Clinton had been moving his army from Philadelphia to New York and was caught with a seventeen-mile wagon train behind him. The Ameri- cans took on the redcoats in classic European style, musket against musket, bayonet against bayonet. This time, the Americans didn’t run out of ammunition, didn’t break and run from the deadly British bayonets. Using the British army’s own tactics, they were winning when darkness descended. Historians still disagree over who might have won if the light had not failed. It is possible that dusk saved Clinton from the most disas- trous British defeat of the war. The next morning the Americans found that, on the plea of getting his army into camp in New York City, Clinton and his army had slipped away during the night, leaving Washington in possession of an empty battlefield.

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