Victory at Yorktown by Richard M. Ketchum Read Free Book Online Page A

suggested alternative, collected no useful intelligence, produced no plan of his own, and then criticized Clinton for his failure to act. The final straw came in August, when Arbuthnot suggested that he and Sir Henry should confer at Gardiner’s Bay at the end of Long Island. Clinton made the three-day trip by carriage in insufferable heat, during which his coachman perished—probably of heat prostration—and arrived only to find that Arbuthnot had departed, leaving behind a note saying that the French fleet was reported to be putting to sea (it was not) and that he planned to intercept it. To put it mildly, Clinton was apoplectic.
    For sixteen days “the old woman” Arbuthnot cruised off Newport, learning nothing about the French disposition or defenses except to say, “The enemy were not to be come at.” At last he sailed to Gardiner’s Bay to refit and grouse about Clinton.
    The middle of September came and with it Admiral Sir George Rodney with ten sail of the line. Suddenly, the British navy held an overpowering advantage over the French, who “gave themselves up for lost on the arrival of Rodney,” according to a Newport loyalist. Rodney was by far the most famous officer in the Royal Navy, an aggressive fighter and first-rate tactician, who tended to be prickly and quarrelsome. Though the opposite might have been expected, he and Clinton were friends, and since Rodney outranked Arbuthnot and was the senior officer present, Sir Henry was delighted and Arbuthnot infuriated.
    Admiral Rodney’s initial inclination was to launch a combined attack on Newport, which General Clinton opposed vigorously. The general could spare only three thousand soldiers, he said (not the six thousand he had mustered before), and they would be badly outnumbered by the Americans and French, who were said to have ten thousand men. Furthermore, he told Rodney, he would greatly prefer “the plan I laid before you yesterday.”
    This was a reference to a top-secret plan to seize West Point, the fort that was the key to the Hudson Valley and New York’s Highlands—a project that had come to the general’s attention through an offer purportedly from the American Benedict Arnold to betray the post he now commanded.
    Why this should negate an attack on Newport is unclear, but the simplest answer is that Sir Henry now believed it impossible to dislodge the French, even with a vastly superior naval force. In any event, Rodney agreed to give him the assistance he needed for the West Point operation, and Clinton’s agent, a young officer named John André, was instructed to continue negotiations with the mysterious figure who was assumed to be Arnold. When that drama had played out, it was time for Rodney to depart from New York. He was responsible for the West Indies and sailed away in mid-October after writing a warm note to Sir Henry, concluding, “God bless you and send me from this cold country and from such men as Arbuthnot!”
    At the same time Rodney wrote to the Earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, in sharply different terms, condemning the inactivity and lassitude of the New York command, the grievous error of evacuating Newport in the first place, and the procrastination in establishing a post in the Chesapeake. Writing to Lord George Germain, secretary of state for the colonies, he carped about Clinton’s “four different houses” in New York, where “without any settled plan [the general] idles his time and … suffers himself to be cooped up by Washington with an inferior army, without making any attempt to dislodge him.” The army officers, instead of fighting, put on plays, he added scornfully. What Britain needs here is a general who “hates the Americans from principle.” Rodney was not the only officer to complain, as he did to Sandwich, about the divisive squabbles at headquarters: “When commanders in chief