Victory at Yorktown by Richard M. Ketchum

feed if his army was to survive. To his brother Samuel he wrote that no one could possibly imagine “how an Army can be kept together under any circumstances as ours is in.” Determined as ever, though, he sent the militia home, ordered the Continentals to the vicinity of Hackensack, and told Benedict Arnold to collect his scattered troops and concentrate them so as to resist a likely attack in the Hudson Highlands.
    Then came news of yet another calamity. Horatio Gates, popularly (though incorrectly) known as the hero of Saratoga, had been defeated and his entire army destroyed at Camden, South Carolina, by Lord Cornwallis’s troops, exposing North Carolina and Virginia to invasion from the south. The rout was so complete that no one knew how many Americans were lost. Gates believed he had seven thousand men before the battle—a highly exaggerated figure, but whatever the number, most of them were killed, captured, or missing. Gates, whom Congress had appointed to command in South Carolina, * was said to have fled from the battlefield ahead of his routed militiamen, leaving the outnumbered Continentals to fight Cornwallis’s entire force. As Washington’s aide Alexander Hamilton described Gates’s escape in a scathing letter to his friend James Duane, “was there ever an instance of a General running away from his whole army and was there ever so precipitous a flight? One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a half. It does admirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life. But it disgraces the General and the soldier.” And to his fiancée, Elizabeth Schuyler, Hamilton said that Gates seemed “to know very little what has become of his army.… He has confirmed in this instance the opinion I always had of him.” In the wake of Camden, Congress removed Gates from command and ordered an inquiry into his conduct at the battle.
    General Washington and the French leaders were determined to meet and shape their plans for future operations and finally fixed on the date of September 20 for a meeting in Hartford, Connecticut. In preparation for this crucial encounter, Washington and Alexander Hamilton composed a working paper consisting of three proposals. Since everything depended on the relative strength of the British and French fleets, and no one could say when the ships blockaded in Brest might arrive on this side of the Atlantic, the General hoped for assistance from another quarter—Comte de Guichen, the French admiral in the West Indies. Guichen had been alerted by Ternay that the fate of America would depend on French naval superiority: the efforts of France, he had written, “will turn the scale.” If Guichen were to arrive by early October with enough strength to seize New York harbor, Washington reasoned, then the allied land forces should move on that city, and his paper included an elaborate description of how this operation would be conducted. But if no fleet under Guichen materialized, the allies would send a combined force of about twelve thousand troops south to take Charleston and Savannah.
    That was the initial proposal. The second was evidently suggested by Nathanael Greene, whose idea it was for the French fleet to sail to Boston, where it would be safe without the protection of land troops (a move approved by Ternay, who regarded the harbor at Newport as a suicidal choice of anchorage for a fleet outnumbered by the enemy). That done, Rochambeau’s troops would march to the Hudson, link up with the Continental Army, and carry on enough activity in that area to prevent Clinton from releasing any troops to join Cornwallis in the South.
    The third scheme called for a winter campaign against the British in Canada. This had been petitioned by some inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants (in what would become Vermont), who offered men and supplies, and the General proposed sending a force of five thousand men—half of them