Before Monmouth, George Washington had been unusually tolerant of the antic, impertinent behavior and self-congratulatory rhetoric of Charles Lee, but that patience had now expired. Retaining his elevated opinion of his own military genius, Lee blustered indiscreetly that he had been on the brink of rallying his men when Washington showed up and ruined everything. “By all that’s sacred,” he exclaimed, “General Washington had scarcely any more to do in [the battle] than to strip the dead!”42 To top things off, Lee said that Washington had “sent me out of the field when the victory was assured! Such is my recompense for having sacrificed my friends, my connections, and perhaps my fortune.”43

Charles Lee did not realize that he had crossed a line with Washington, and that anyone who offended his dignity paid a terrible price. He saw himself as the victim and, for two days after the battle, awaited an apology from Washington. Then he sent him an insolent letter in which he blamed “dirty earwigs” for poisoning Washington’s mind against him: “I must conclude that nothing but the misinformation of some very stupid, or misrepresentation of some very wicked person cou[l]d have occasioned your making use of so very singular expressions as you did on my coming up to the ground where you had taken post. They implied that I was guilty either of disobedience of orders, or want of conduct, or want of courage.” The presumptuous Lee then added that “the success of the day was entirely owing” to his maneuvers.44 This intemperate communication sealed Charles Lee’s fate.

With officers who crossed him, Washington tended to exhibit infinite patience and overlook many faults, but when a day of reckoning came, he unleashed the full force of his slow-burning fury at their accumulated slights. As with many overly controlled people, Washington’s anger festered, only to burst out belatedly. He now returned a blistering reply in which he branded Lee’s letter “highly improper” and said his own angry words at Monmouth were “dictated by duty and warranted by the occasion.” He accused Lee of “a breach of orders and of misbehavior” in not attacking the enemy “as you had been directed and making an unnecessary, disorderly, and shameful retreat.”45 When he received this rebuke, Lee said, “I was more than confounded. I was thrown into a stupor. My whole faculties were, for a time, benumbed. I read and read it over a dozen times.”46 To clear his name, Lee demanded a court-martial, and Washington called his bluff, promptly sending Adjutant General Alexander Scammell to arrest him and bring him up on charges.

Lee was charged with disobeying orders, permitting a disorderly retreat, and disrespecting the commander in chief. A court-martial, presided over by twelve officers, took testimony for six weeks, found Lee guilty, and suspended him from the army for twelve months. The verdict effectively ended his military career. With exemplary restraint, Washington did not comment on the decision until Congress certified it. As Congress procrastinated for four months, word of the verdict leaked out. Intent on fairness, Washington wrote in confidence to his brother Jack, “This delay is a manifest injustice either to the Gener[a]l himself or the public; for if he is guilty of the charges, punishment ought to follow; if he is innocent, ’tis cruel to keep him under the harrow.”47 Charles Lee proclaimed to anyone who would listen that he had been subjected to an “inquisition” worthy of Mazarin or Cardinal Richelieu.48 The inept Lee may not have been guilty of all the charges directed against him, but neither had he covered himself with glory at Monmouth.

Washington had not heard the last from Charles Lee. In early December Lee published a vindication of his conduct, contending that Washington had failed to give him definite orders at Monmouth Court House. If Washington chafed at the accusation, it wasn’t his style to engage in public feuding. At the same time he worried that, if he didn’t refute Lee’s charges, it might seem “a tacit acknowledgment of the justice of his assertions,” as Washington told Joseph Reed. He confessed that he had always found Lee’s temperament “too versatile and violent to attract my admiration. And that I have escaped the venom of his tongue and pen so long is more to be wondered at than applauded.”49

Even though Congress confirmed the court-martial verdict and suspended Lee in December 1778, Washington still worried that Lee’s charges had sullied his honor. In late December John Laurens, with Alexander Hamilton acting as his second, challenged Lee to a duel. “I am informed that in contempt of decency and truth you have publicly abused General Washington in the grossest terms,” Laurens informed Lee. “The relation in which I stand to him forbids me to pass such conduct unnoticed.”50 At the duel Laurens wounded Lee in the side, but the latter survived. Whether the duel had Washington’s tacit approval remains unclear. Unlike many military men, Washington opposed dueling and had advised Lafayette against fighting a duel that year, chiding him gently that “the generous spirit of chivalry, exploded by the rest of the world, finds a refuge, my dear friend, in the sensibility of your nation only.”51 On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that Laurens and Hamilton would have defied the explicit wishes of Washington, who had felt gagged in responding to Lee’s libelous comments.

From the retirement of his farm in Virginia, Charles Lee, as irascible as ever, continued to wage a campaign of vituperation against Washington. In 1780 he sent to Congress a letter whose tone was so obnoxious that he was cashiered for good from the armed forces. Before his death in 1782, Lee requested that he be buried somewhere other than a churchyard, stating that “since I have resided in this country, I have kept so much bad company while living, that I do not choose to continue it when dead.”52

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Pests of Society

EVEN AS THE CONTINENTAL ARMY FOUGHT in the gritty heat of Monmouth Court House, then filed wearily toward the Hudson River, blessed relief seemed to arrive when a French fleet dropped anchor off Delaware Bay on July 8, 1778. This majestic armada of twelve enormous ships of the line and four frigates, bearing four thousand soldiers, ended Britain’s undisputed dominance in sea power in the war. A few weeks earlier French and British ships had exchanged fire in the English Channel, dragging France irrevocably into the hostilities. Henceforth the Revolutionary War would gradually evolve into a global conflict, with theaters of battle extending from the West Indies to the Indian Ocean.

The French fleet was headed by a forty-eight-year-old French nobleman and vice admiral with a long, flowery name: Count Jean-Baptiste-Charles-Henri-Hector d’Estaing. D’Estaing had his own reasons for joining the fight, having clashed with the British in the East Indies and been captured by them twice. With his army background, he had never entirely gained the trust of skeptical naval officers, who sometimes reflexively addressed him as “General.”1 He had won the high-prestige American assignment less from naval prowess than from his intimacy with the royal family. The day he arrived off the Chesapeake, d’Estaing sent Washington a rather rapturous letter of introduction: “The talents and great actions of General Washington have insured him in the eyes of all Europe the title, truly sublime, of deliverer of America.”2

It proved a bittersweet moment for Washington, who imagined that, if the French fleet had shown up weeks earlier, it might have delivered a mortal blow to the British Army in Philadelphia; had that happened, Sir Henry Clinton might have “shared (at least) the fate of Burgoyne.”3 Destiny had robbed George Washington of a spectacular chance to eclipse Horatio Gates. Whatever his regrets, Washington dispatched his faithful aide John Laurens to coordinate plans with the admiral and reverted to his fond daydream of recapturing New York. From his camp in White Plains, he mused how the war had now come full circle, giving him an unexpected chance to redeem past errors: “It is not a little pleasing, nor less wonderful to contemplate, that after two years’ maneuvering and undergoing the strangest vicissitudes that perhaps ever attended any one contest since the creation, both armies are brought back to the very point they set out from.”4 Momentarily it appeared that d’Estaing might pull off a quick miracle. With his fleet anchored off Sandy Hook, the prospect arose that he could trap the Royal Navy in New York Bay. Then it was discovered that the harbor channel was too shallow for the deep draft of his huge ships, and Washington believed yet another exquisite chance to shorten the war had been fumbled.