ROCHAMBEAU IN CONNECTICUT: TRACING HIS JOURNEY Historic And Architectural Survey Project Historian: ROBERT A. SELIG, Ph.D. Project Director: MARY M. DONOHUE Sponsors: State of Connecticut JOHN G. ROWLAND Governor Connecticut Historical Commission JOHN W. SHANNAHAN Director and State Historic Preservation Officer DAWN MADDOX, Ph.D. Preservation Programs Supervisor Co-Sponsor: Inter Community Historic Resources Committee Hans DePold, Chairman 1 1999 Connecticut Historical Commission 59 South Prospect Street Hartford, CT 06106 Tel.: (860) 566-3005 Fax: (860) 566-5078 E-mail: [email protected] Inter Community Historic Resources Committee Hans DePold, Chairman 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 8 METHODOLOGY 9 3.1 Criteria for Selection: How Sites Were Chosen for Inclusion 12 3.2 The Form 13 3.3 Other Parts of the Survey Report 14 3.4 Recommendations for Phase II of the Rochambeau in Connecticut Project 15 4. LEGISLATIVE HISTORY OF THE ROUTE 16 5. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 5.1 France and Great Britain on the Eve of American Independence 18 5.2 French Aid prior to the Alliance of 1778 21 5.3 The Failed Invasion of 1779 and the Decision to send Troops to America 30 5.4 The Comte de Rochambeau and the troops of the expédition particulière 31 5.4.1 The Officer Corps 32 5.4.2 The Rank and File 40 6. THE EXPÉDITION PARTICULIÈRE IN RHODE ISLAND 44 6.1 The Transatlantic Journey 44 6.2 The Old World Meets the New World 47 7. THE CONNECTICUT EXPERIENCE, 1781-1782 58 7.1 Order and Organization of the March 60 7.2 The March through Connecticut, June 18-July 3, 1781 71 7.3 The Return March through Connecticut, October 23-November 9, 1782 74 3 8. CONCLUSION 78 9. BIBLIOGRAPHY 82 10. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CURRENCIES AND EXCHANGE RATES 87 11. DOCUMENTS 90 11.1 Treaty of Paris (February 10, 1763) 90 11.2 Treaty of Alliance between France and the United States (February 6, 1778) 97 11.3 Act Separate and Secret (February 6, 1778) 100 11.4 Preliminaries of Peace (November 30, 1782) 101 11.5 Declaration for Suspension of Arms and Cessation of Hostilities (January 20, 1783) 104 11.6 Declaration signed in Paris by the American Commissioner (February 20, 1783) 106 11.7 Treaty of Paris (September 3, 1783) 107 11.8 Uniform and Equipment of a French Soldier 110 11.9 March of French Army from Providence to Yorktown and back 112 12. SITE PROFILES AND SURVEYED SITES: Order in which sites are listed in this report in chronological order following Rochambeau's march from the Rhode Island State line to the New York State line 13. SITE PROFILES AND SURVEYED SITES: Order in which they appear in the field going from the Rhode Island State line to the New York State line 14. Inventory Forms 4 From Yorktown's ruins, ranked and still, Two lines stretch far o'er vale and hill: Who curbs his steed at head of one? Hark! The low murmur: WASHINGTON! Who bends his keen approving glance Where down the gorgeous line of France Shine knightly star and plume of snow? Thou too art victor, ROCHAMBEAU! John Greenleaf Whittier INTRODUCTION In a recent interview in the historical magazine American Heritage, renowned author David McCullough claimed that "When you're working on the Revolutionary War, as I'm doing now, you realize what the French did for us. We wouldn't have a country if it weren't for them."1 On either side of the Atlantic few historians of that war would dispute the fundamental truth of this assertion. But to most Americans of today, the notion of Frenchmen fighting side by side with Continental soldiers for American liberty and independence comes as a surprise. Some 200 years after Yorktown, far too few Americans are aware of the crucial importance of America's French allies during the Revolutionary War. The critical support provided by French King Louis XVI toward the success of that war has been largely obliterated in the collective memory of the American people. Not just "out West," where no French soldier ever set foot, but even in states such as Connecticut it was until recently left to devoted individuals such as town historians, and to private organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of the American Revolution, or the Souvenir Français, to keep the memory of the Franco- American alliance alive. Only after long efforts by among others, State Representative Pamela Z. Sawyer and the Inter Community Historic Resources Committee, did the State Legislature in 1998 appropriate the first installment of funds for the "Rochambeau in Connecticut: Tracing His Journey" project to be administered by the Connecticut Historical Commission. The present report is part of a collaborative effort by archaeolo- gists, mapmakers, and historians to research, map, and document the route of the French expeditionary corps in Connecticut from 1780 to 1782 and to emphasize the significance of France's, and Connecticut's, contribution in the American Revolutionary War. The support of Connecticut was vital for the success of the comte de Rochambeau's mission and thus for America's success in her war for independence. Almost as soon as Rochambeau's forces landed in Newport, Rhode Island, Connecticut became a prime supply base for the French expeditionary corps. In December 1780, Rochambeau became 1"There Isn't Any Such Thing As The Past" American Heritage Vol. 50. No. 1, (February/March 1999), pp. 114-125, p. 124. 5 one of the many important personages to visit Governor Jonathan Trumbull in his War Office in Lebanon, the nerve center of Connecticut between 1775 and 1783. In two important conferences in Hartford in September 1780 and in Wethersfield in May 1781, the groundwork was laid for the successful cooperation of the two unlikely allies that culminated in Lord Cornwallis' surrender of Yorktown to the combined Franco-American army later that year. From November 1780 until June 1781, a French cavalry detachment under the duc de Lauzun was quartered in Lebanon. Finally, and that is the topic of this study, Rochambeau's army marched through the state during the month of June 1781 and again in October 1782, on its way to and from the battlefield of Yorktown where America's freedom was won. Despite some initial apprehension about "Papists" in their state, the citizens of Connecticut welcomed the foreigners as indispensable allies against a common foe. Most French officers shared the feelings of Baron Ludwig von Closen, a Bavarian captain in the Royal Deux-Ponts and aide to Rochambeau, who wrote in his journal: "The inhabitants of Hartford have heaped us with attentions, and beyond a doubt, Connecticut has been the province which has welcomed the French most."2 Personal contact between Americans and French obliterated, at least for the time being, many of the mutual prejudices fostering after a century of "French and Indian Wars." But as the Revolutionary generation passed away in the 1820s and 1830s, and canals and railroads altered modes and patterns of transportation in the 1840s and 1850s, the memory of the "gallant" Frenchmen under General Rochambeau marching from Newport to Yorktown, the memory of their crucial contribution to American Independence, and the memory of the bond forged in the crucible of that war, began to recede into the mist of history. A prime example of this development was given by Benson J. Lossing, who could write as early as 1852, that "a balance-sheet of favors connected with the alliance will show not the least preponderance of service in favor of the French, unless the result of the more vigorous action of the Americans, caused by the hopes of success from the alliance, shall be taken into the account."3 The tragedy of the Civil War and the turmoil of the (Second) Industrial Revolution brought massive economic and demographic dislocation in the 1860s and 1870s. As waves of immigrants from southern and east-central Europe settled along the coast in the 1880s and 1890s, interest in the French alliance was increasingly confined to professional historians and Americans living in France. The celebrations of the centennials of the American and French Revolutions in 1876 and 1889 saw the publication of Thomas Balch's Les Français en Amérique pendant la Guerre de l'Indépendance des États-Unis, 1777-1783, published in Paris and Philadelphia in 1872.4 In 1881 Henry P. Johnston published the still useful The Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis, and Edwin M. Stone followed with Our French Allies … in the Great War of the American Independence, published in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1884. 2 Evelyn M. Acomb, ed., The Revolutionary Journal of Baron Ludwig von Closen, 1780-1783 (Chapel Hill, 1958), p. 265. 3 Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution 2 vols. (New York, 1852), Vol. 2, p. 83, note 4. 4 An English translation appeared in two volumes in Philadelphia in 1891/95. 6 In Paris, Henri Doniol published his ambitious Histoire de la participation de la France à l'établissement des États-Unis d'Amérique. Correspondance diplomatique et documents in five volumes between 1886 and 1892. In 1903, Amblard Marie Vicomte de Noailles' Marins et Soldats Français en Amérique Pendant la Guerre de l'Indépendance des États-Unis, 1778-1783 ran off the presses in Paris. Finally, with the strong support of the "Society in France, Sons of the American Revolution," founded in Paris in September 1897, the French Foreign Ministry in 1903 published the names of thousands of Frenchmen who had fought in the Revolutionary War in Les Combattants Français de la Guerre Américaine 1778-1783.5 A few years later, the First World War brought the renewal of an alliance that had flourished some 140 years earlier.