Victory at Yorktown Read Free

months.” This meant that the troops would continue to plunder the surrounding neighborhood for food, but there was no helping it and Washington’s officers were as disgusted as he was. Major General Nathanael Greene grumbled that “a country overflowing with plenty [is] now suffering an army employed for the defense of everything dear and valuable to perish for lack of food,” and Colonel Samuel Webb cried out in frustration, “I damn my country for lack of gratitude!”
    Ever since the rebel victory at Saratoga, in 1777, had convinced France to sign a treaty of alliance with the United States, George Washington had been waiting and praying for French intervention to come soon, but as the weeks and months passed with no sign that help was on the way, his hopes waned. The situation suited many a Francophobe in America, like the New York attorney and loyalist William Smith, Jr., who wrote, “I dread France—She will be guided only by motives of Interest—No Promises will bind her—She will percieve it more advantageous to her Ambition to ferment animosities than hastily to plunge into a War—She will decieve both Parties that her ends may be achieved at our Expence.”
    Fortunately for the patriots, the young French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette, a volunteer who had been serving in Washington’s army, returned to Versailles in 1779 and came back to America a year later with the welcome news that seven French ships of the line, ten to twelve thousand veteran troops led by Comte de Rochambeau, and a war chest of 6 million livres were on the way and should arrive in Rhode Island in June. Even more encouraging to Washington, who believed that the key to victory in this war was to recapture New York from the British, the French had orders to join the American forces in an attack on that city. But what of the rebels who were to fight alongside the French? When Lafayette rejoined Washington in Morristown, he was appalled to find “An Army that is reduced to nothing, that wants provisions, that has not one of the necessary means to make war.” However prepared for such squalor he may have been by his knowledge of past distress, “I confess I had no idea of such an extremity,” he wrote.
    Washington was mortified to think that when the French finally did arrive, they would immediately see the desperate condition of the Continental Army and the helplessness of America, and sail away. Were they to arrive today, he warned the governors of the states, and “find that we have but a handful of men in the field,” they would surely doubt that “we had any serious intentions to prosecute measures with vigor.” In February, New York was the only state that had met its quota, and the deficiency of men in the ranks was reckoned at 14,436. By July 4, the fourth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the General’s best estimate of new recruits who had come into camp was, at most, thirty men. He had no alternative but to appeal repeatedly to the states: “The exigency is so pressing that we ought to multiply our efforts to give new activity and dispatch to our measures,” he wrote, “levying and forwarding the men, providing the supplies of every sort required.… So much is at stake, so much to be hoped, so much to be lost, that we shall be unexcusable if we do not employ all our zeal and all our exertion.”
    The plight of the army was so bad that Lieutenant Colonel Ebenezer Huntington, who was clothed in rags and had not been paid for more than six months, wrote in a rage to his brother in Connecticut, hoping to shame his relatives into sending aid.
    The rascally stupidity which now prevails in the country at large is beyond all descriptions.… Why don’t you reinforce your army, feed them, clothe and pay them?… [Do] not suffer yourselves to be duped into the thought that the French will relieve you and