Victory at Yorktown by Richard M. Ketchum Page A

Americans, half French, with Rochambeau to be in overall command and Greene leading the American troops. Washington himself would not accompany the task force since “the general situation of the Country … requires his presence and influence within the states; for in the present crisis there is no saying what may happen and Congress [may] stand in need of support.”
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    LEAVING GREENE IN charge of the army while he rode east to meet the French in Hartford, Washington and his staff officers on September 17 crossed the Hudson River at King’s Ferry, where he spent the night at the home of Joshua Hett Smith, about two and a half miles from the ferry, near Haverstraw. Smith was the youngest of fifteen children, of whom the eldest was his brother William, a prominent lawyer and historian who had advised many a governor of the colony of New York and became chief justice of the province in 1780 after refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the revolutionary state. Joshua was also a lawyer, and although his father and oldest brother were known to have loyalist sympathies, he was a member of the New York Provincial Congress, was active in the patriot militia, and had directed the secret service of Benedict Arnold, among other general officers.
    By chance, Arnold was at Smith’s dinner table when Washington and his party arrived, and brought the commander in chief up to date on his efforts to safeguard the area from British attack. Then he asked Washington for an opinion: should he consent to see the writer of a letter, one Beverley Robinson, in whose house Arnold had his headquarters? Robinson, who had married the wealthy Susanna Philipse and was one of New York’s richest landowners, was a former friend of Washington with strong loyalist views and had written Arnold from the British sloop of war Vulture, riding at anchor in the Hudson, enclosing a letter to General Israel Putnam, which he hoped Arnold would deliver. Robinson wanted to meet Putnam under a flag of truce on a matter that must be kept secret, and hoped Arnold would grant his request.
    Should he do so? asked Arnold, to which the General’s response was an immediate and emphatic no. If Robinson had any private business to transact, Washington advised, he should obtain permission to do so from the civil authorities in New York. Surely Arnold could understand that a meeting between him and Robinson would be viewed with suspicion. This whole business of flags of truce was proving a nuisance, in fact, and revealed how easy it was for unauthorized persons to slip through the lines. Recently, Colonel Elisha Sheldon had reported to Washington that one John Anderson of New York had attempted to enter the lines on a matter “of so private a nature that the public on neither side can be injured by it,” and when Washington asked Sheldon how he came by the letter from Anderson, the colonel replied that it came under a flag of truce. Arnold, it seemed, had recently opened a new avenue of communication to New York, and Anderson was a secret agent he employed.
    Washington and his retinue, with the guards who accompanied them, clattered off on forty horses early the following morning, were ferried across the Hudson, and then angled off north by east. Over the wooded hills separating New York from Connecticut they rode, crossed the Housatonic and Naugatuck rivers, trotting through one little community after another—not much more than clearings in the dense forest (including one called Washington, after their leader). Finally, after two days’ hard riding, they reached Hartford on the broad Connecticut River, bounded by rich bottomland between low hills, where they passed an uninterrupted collection of farmhouses and barns set amid trees and meadows.
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    IT IS DOUBTFUL if any of the conferees were aware of—or, if they were, gave much thought to—a profound change that had altered