With the American treasury empty, Washington could not contemplate a potent offensive campaign without French largesse. That winter the French had decided to send an enormous expeditionary force to America, commanded by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the Count de Rochambeau. It was the first time the French had supplemented a fleet with a massive army. France had elevated the illustrious Rochambeau to the lofty rank of lieutenant general but, in a diplomatic concession to American sensibilities, agreed that he would be placed, at least nominally, under Washington’s orders. The French fleet under the Chevalier de Ternay would also be subject to Washington’s control, yet after his frustrations with the mercurial d’Estaing, Washington entertained no illusions about exercising any real influence.

The person assigned to herald this impending force was a natural choice for the job. In early March Lafayette set sail for America, ready to resume his post as a major general and act as intermediary between Washington and Rochambeau. As soon as he disembarked in Massachusetts in late April, Lafayette, never bashful about his starring role in the American drama, rushed off a typically histrionic letter to Washington that throbbed with boyish excitement: “Here I am, my dear general, and in the midst of the joy I feel in finding myself again one of your loving soldiers . . . I have affairs of the utmost importance which I should at first communicate to you alone.”5 Washington grew emotional as he read the message. Then on May 10 the beaming author himself strode into his presence, and the two men eagerly clasped each other. Recounting this sentimental reunion, Lafayette wrote that Washington’s “eyes filled with tears of joy . . . a certain proof of a truly paternal love.”6 Washington lost no time in lobbying Lafayette for a Franco-American invasion of New York, which would possess the collateral advantage of lessening British pressure on the southern states.

Uplifted by the splendid news from France, Washington pressed Congress for an expanded army of at least twenty thousand Continental troops to cooperate with their ally. As a matter of both pride and policy, Washington didn’t want the stylish French soldiers to patronize his men in their tattered clothing, and he appealed to Congress to rectify the matter. His army had come to a standstill, lacking money and supplies. “For the troops to be without clothing at any time is highly injurious to the service and distressing to our feelings. But the want will be more peculiarly mortifying when they come to act with those of our allies.”7 In early July, with the arrival of the French fleet imminent, Washington was chagrined by the states’ failure to muster new troops or even keep him posted on their plans. He again blamed the bugaboo of a permanent military force—the “fatal jealousy . . . of a standing army”—for the shocking failure to buttress his army.8 “One half the year is spent in getting troops into the field,” Washington complained to his brother Samuel, “the other half is lost in discharging them from their limited service.”9

When the French fleet arrived in Newport on July 10, it proved almost anticlimactic. Only five thousand soldiers, it turned out, had made the crossing, and a significant fraction were unfit for service. No sooner did Washington learn of the French dropping anchor than he received dreadful tidings from New York: Rear Admiral Thomas Graves had arrived in the harbor with a British fleet of comparable size. Washington dispatched Lafayette to confer with Rochambeau and Ternay, introducing him to the French officers as “a friend from whom I conceal nothing . . . I entreat you to receive whatever he shall tell you as coming from me.”10 In assigning Lafayette as his go-between, Washington committed a terrible gaffe that betrayed his provinciality. However blue-blooded Lafayette was in social terms, he had been only a captain in the French reserve and was much too low in the military hierarchy to parley with a French lieutenant general with decades of service. Still worse, Lafayette had tried to wangle the very assignment Rochambeau now held. Undeterred, Lafayette poured out flattery so liberally that Rochambeau pleaded with him to stop: “I embrace you, my dear Marquis, most heartily, and don’t make me any more compliments, I beg of you.”11

Although Washington had resurrected his plan to besiege New York, Lafayette could not budge Rochambeau and Ternay from their resolve to wait for more French troops before setting their men in motion. The French balked at relying on their American allies. Rochambeau was secretly appalled at the minute size of Washington’s army and the bankruptcy of American credit. “Send us troops, ships, and money,” he wrote home, “but do not depend on these people nor upon their means; they have neither money nor credit; their means of resistance are only momentary and called forth when they are attacked in their own homes.”12 Privately he mocked Washington’s plan to attack New York as absurd, given the beggarly state of American finances, and blamed Lafayette for abetting Washington’s unrealistic fantasies. The French general would be two-faced in his relationship with Washington, pretending to credit his ideas, then doing exactly as he pleased. For political reasons, both sides subscribed to the polite fiction that Washington was in charge, but another year elapsed before the alliance with France bore fruit in a major joint military operation.

IN THE WAKE of the aborted “Conway Cabal,” George Washington had remained unfailingly polite to Horatio Gates, even though he thought the latter still intrigued against him. But his courtesy failed to mollify his implacable foe. In spring 1779 Gates protested to John Jay that Washington deliberately kept him in the dark, which led Washington, in turn, to pen an acerbic note to Jay, relating how he had sent Gates no fewer than forty letters in the last seven months of 1778. “I think it will be acknowledged,” observed Washington tartly, “that the correspondence was frequent enough during that period.”13 Far from snubbing him, Washington noted, “I made a point of treating Gen[era]l Gates with all the attention and cordiality in my power, as well from a sincere desire of harmony as from an unwillingness to give any cause of triumph to our enemies.”14

After the British captured Charleston, Gates was appointed to command the southern department of the army, and Washington refrained from comment so as not to be accused of meddling from personal pique. If Washington quietly rooted for Gates’s comeuppance, the British delivered it in shattering form near Camden, South Carolina, on August 16, 1780. Gates deployed a force of nearly four thousand men, considerably bigger than the force marshaled by Cornwallis, but many were callow militia. Determined British troops smashed through the American lines and sent men flying in terror. Only the detachment under General Johann de Kalb tried to withstand the frenzied onslaught. The British cavalry under Colonel Banastre Tarleton—nicknamed “Bloody Tarleton” and “The Butcher” for his take-no-prisoners approach—slashed at Kalb’s helpless men, while Kalb himself was bludgeoned to death with bayonets and rifle butts. Educated at Oxford, from a wealthy family, the young Tarleton was a beefy, redheaded man who was brash and cocky about his exploits on and off the battlefield. “Tarleton boasts of having butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army,” Horace Walpole reported.15 Having lost two fingers in battle, he delighted in waving his truncated hand and shouting, “These gave I for King and country!”16 At Camden, Tarleton’s men did their deadly work so efficiently that nine hundred Americans were slain and a thousand taken prisoner.