plainly declared that there was but one good plan, which was to reconquer the South—that one, strange to say, was neither Washington nor Rochambeau, and was not in the United States either as a sailor or a soldier, but as a diplomat, and in drawing attention to the fact I am only performing the most agreeable duty toward a justly admired predecessor. This wise adviser was La Luzerne. In an unpublished memoir, drawn up by him on the 20th of April and sent to Rochambeau on May 19, with an explanatory letter, in which he asked that his statement (a copy of which he also sent to Barras) be placed under the eyes of Washington, he insisted on the necessity of immediate action, and action in the Chesapeake:
“It is in the Chesapeake Bay that it seems urgent to convey all the naval forces of the King, with such land forces as the generals will consider appropriate. This change cannot fail to have the most advantageous consequences for the continuation of the campaign,” which consequences he points out with singular clear-sightedness, adding:
Advantages of a Southern offensive
“If the English follow us and can reach the bay only after us, their situation will prove very different from ours; all the coasts and the inland parts of the country are full of their enemies. They have neither the means nor the time to raise, as at New York, the necessary works to protect themselves against the inroads of the American troops and to save themselves from the danger to which the arrival of superior forces would expose them.” If the plan submitted by him offers difficulties, others should then be formed; but he maintains that “all those which have for their object the relief of the Southern States must be preferred, and that no time should be lost to put them in execution.”
At the Weathersfield conference, near Hartford, Conn., between the Americans and French, on the 23d of May (in the Webb house, still in existence), Washington still evinced, and not without some weighty reasons, his preference for an attack on New York. He spoke of the advanced season, of “the great waste of men which we have found from experience in long marches in the Southern States,” of the “difficulty of transports by land”; all those reasons and some others, “too well known to Count de Rochambeau to need repeating, show that an operation against New York should be preferred, in the present circumstances, to the effort of a sending of troops to the South.” On the same day he was writing to La Luzerne: “I should be wanting in respect and confidence were I not to add that our object is New York.”
To Virginia's rescue
La Luzerne, however, kept on insisting. To Rochambeau he wrote on the 1st of June: “The situation of the Southern States becomes every moment more critical; it has even become very dangerous, and every measure that could be taken for their relief would be of infinite advantage. . . . The situation of the Marquis de Lafayette and that of General Greene is most embarrassing, since Lord Cornwallis has joined the English division of the Chesapeake. If Virginia is not helped in time, the English will have reached the goal which they have assigned to themselves in the bold movements attempted by them in the South; they will soon have really conquered the Southern States. . . .
“I am going to write to M. de Grasse as you want me to do; on your side, seize every occasion to write to him, and multiply the copies of the letters you send him”—that is, in duplicate and triplicate for fear of loss or capture. “His coming to the rescue of the oppressed States is not simply desirable; the thing seems to be now of the most pressing necessity.” He must not only come, but bring with him all he can find of French troops in our isles; thus would be compensated, to a certain extent, the absence of the second division.
The fate of the United States hangs on de Grasse
Rochambeau soon agreed, and, with his usual wisdom, Washington was not long in doing the same. On the 28th of
