Interview

Q: Your two previous books, Bunker Hill and Valiant Ambition, have given readers a new way of looking at the American Revolution. With IN THE HURRICANE’S EYE, you return to the subject, focusing on the events leading up to Yorktown, the siege that ultimately broke a years-long stalemate with the British and earned America her freedom. What drew you back to this time-period, and what new, noteworthy, or interesting things will readers take away from it?  

A: Even before I finished Valiant Ambition, which ends with the traitor Benedict Arnold’s unsuccessful attempt to surrender the fortress at West Point to the British, I knew I had to see the story of the American Revolution to the end.  I was too emotionally involved with all these amazing characters—Arnold, Lafayette, Hamilton, Nathaniel Greene, Henry Knox, and especially George Washington—to simply walk away from the time period.  I also knew that what happened next—the action-packed year of Yorktown—made for an incredible story. And being a writer who has always had an interest in the sea, the fact that the victory at Yorktown was preceded by not one but two important naval battles between the French and the British, made this a book I had to write.  

Q: In chronicling the last year of the Revolution, an incredibly nuanced portrait of George Washington emerges. Throughout your research, what surprised you most about the general?

A:  Our image of Washington is entirely land-bound.  We think of him as a Virginia planter, a surveyor, and a general who was almost always astride his horse.  But he also had a strong connection to the water, especially when it came to the bays and rivers of his upbringing in the Virginia Tidewater.  For most of the war, the Continental army was stationed on the Hudson River, above British-occupied New York. Over the years, Washington developed the habit of steering the vessels that were used to transport his entourage up and down the river, and IN THE HURRICANE’S EYE begins with an account of him navigating the boat bearing the envoy from France through a dangerous squall.  This is not the George Washington with whom most of us are familiar, and it was his understanding of the importance of sea power that ultimately made possible the victory at Yorktown.

I was also surprised by how emotional Washington was during the year of Yorktown.  At one point he erupts in anger at Alexander Hamilton, at another he is literally leaping with joy when he learns that the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse has sailed into the Chesapeake.  It was fascinating to watch Washington get whipsawed by the events of that amazing year.

Q: Many readers might be surprised to know that the French weren’t exactly enamored of their American allies. The French leadership was deeply suspicious of the American people’s commitment to the war effort and viewed Washington’s early preference for attacking British-occupied New York as stubborn and myopic. In many ways, the tension-filled political climate during the Revolutionary War was very similar to today’s. What lessons can our current political leaders learn from Washington, who seemed to prioritize America’s alliance with the French over his own ego and setbacks?

A:  I think there is a tendency to see America’s alliance with France during the Revolutionary War as a kind of ideal partnership, but it was anything but.  Time and again during the year leading up to Yorktown, Washington was driven to near distraction by the actions of the French leadership, but he never let his emotions imperil his relationship with his ally.  As Washington said at one point, he was acting on “the great scale,” and he could not allow his personal interests or frustrations to interfere with winning the war. His patience, his ability to lay aside his own ego for the greater good of his country was what won us the Revolution.

Q: In the epilogue of IN THE HURRICANE’S EYE, you note that Washington recognized the pernicious effects of slavery and that he was the only slaveholding Founding Father to free his own slaves. Since slavery is still at the root of some of today’s biggest cultural divides—can you elaborate more on how Washington, at the end of his life and almost clairvoyantly, finally came to realize slavery would threaten the stability of our Union.

A:  Even before the Revolutionary War was over, Washington was considering ways of divesting himself of his slaves. But that did not mean he was willing to come out publicly against slavery.  In fact, at Yorktown he insisted on the retrieval of the slaves who had escaped to the British, and when he became President he took extraordinary measures to retrieve the enslaved man who fled from his household in Philadelphia.  By the end of his life, however, he came to acknowledge (along with Thomas Jefferson) that the biggest threat to the future of the United States came from slavery. Unlike Jefferson, Washington actually did something to make those concerns known by including a provision in his will that freed the 124 slaves he owned at Mount Vernon.  It’s only speculation, but I think it’s pretty clear Washington so valued the importance of the Union that he never would have gone the way of Robert E. Lee and taken up arms against the nation he had worked so hard to help create.

Q: IN THE HURRICANE’S EYE is, essentially, the culmination of your twenty-year engagement with American history and its relationship with the sea. Here, you highlight how the Atlantic Ocean, the east coast’s rivers and inlets, fortuitous hurricane’s and other weather patterns set the stage for America’s triumph over the British. Can you elaborate on this point?

A: Since In the Heart of the Sea (2000) I have been making the point that before there was the wilderness of the American West, there was the wilderness of the sea.  But I have to say even I was surprised by the impact that water had on the course of the Revolutionary War. As Washington realized from the very beginning of the alliance, the only way to defeat the British was with the help of the French navy.  Only then could he break the British navy’s stranglehold on the Eastern Seaboard and win the victory that made possible American independence. Ultimately the course of the war came down to America’s proximity to the sea, the watery realm that I’ve been writing about since I moved to Nantucket 32 years ago.

But for me, it goes back even further than that.  I grew up racing sailboats, and in 1973, when I was sixteen years old, I was the youngest competitor in the Sunfish World championships in Martinique, where I sailed in the same bay that sheltered de Grasse’s fleet in 1781.   Several months later I raced in the Sunfish North Americans at Fort Monroe, Virginia, at the very tip of the peninsula formed by the James and York Rivers, not far from where the French fleet lay at anchor on the day of the Battle of the Chesapeake.  Back then, I was much more interested in racing sailboats than American history, but now it seems like fate that as a teenager I sailed in the same waters plied by de Grasse’s fleet in 1781.

Q: In the book, you suggest that the Battle of the Chesapeake, which made the siege at Yorktown possible, is not only one of the most important naval engagements in the history of the world but also one of the most misunderstood. What is so unique about this battle?

A: The Battle of the Chesapeake is often looked to as a mere warm up for the main event at Yorktown, but in reality the siege would have never taken place without the French naval victory, a battle fought without a single American ship.  It may not be the message a lot of Americans want to hear, but we wouldn’t be an independent nation without the intervention of the French navy, whose heroic performance at the Chesapeake made the more famous victory at Yorktown a mere fait accompli.  

Another point:  Although de Grasse rightly gets a lot of the credit for this historic victory, he did make several strategic and tactical mistakes before and during the battle.  As de Grasse later acknowledged, it was Captain Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and the handful of ships in the French vanguard that did all the fighting. For my money, Bougainville (who was the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe and for whom the Bougainvillea flower is named) is the unrecognized hero of the Battle of the Chesapeake.

Q: You spent the better part of a decade studying, researching, and writing three books about the American Revolution. With the third book now finished, are there one or two things that you’d like readers to understand that might contradict what they were taught in the classroom?

A: When I was growing up, the story of the American Revolution was about how a group of citizen soldiers rose up to defeat the mightiest military power on earth and thereby threw off the shackles of British tyranny and won us our independence.  But as I’ve come to understand, it’s a lot more complicated than that. The citizen soldiers may have started the Revolution, but it was the French that finished it—something that would have never happened without George Washington’s realization that victory depended on the intercession of a powerful ally.  From the very start, this country depended on other nations—something that is as true today as it ever was.

Q: How did it feel finishing this trilogy after spending so much time and energy studying it?

A:  It’s strange, but I was gripped by an overwhelming sense of sadness.  After close to ten years with these characters it was hard to let them go.  I had become so involved in Washington’s story that I had hoped he would finally find some well-earned peace at the end of the war.  But Congress made sure that wasn’t going to happen when its delegates failed to provide the Continental army with its promised pay, creating wide-spread discontent among his officer corp.

I ended up finishing IN THE HURRICANE’S EYE on Christmas Eve, the same day of the year that Washington returned to Mt. Vernon after surrendering his commission to Congress in Annapolis.  Needless to say, it was a different kind of Christmas for me after eight years with His Excellency and the American Revolution.

Q: What’s next?

A:  My wife Melissa and I and our dog Dora are going on a road trip.  When Washington was elected President in 1789 he realized that something needed to be done to create a sense of solidarity in the new nation, so he decided he must visit all thirteen states.  It was a journey that took him as far north as Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and as far south as Savannah, Georgia, and we’ve already begun following in his footsteps. It’s going to be a different kind of book for me, part travelogue, part history.  I can’t wait to get back on the road.

Excerpt

Preface

The Land and the Sea

For five years, two armies had clashed along the edge of a vast continent.  One side, the Rebels, had the advantage of the land.  Even when they lost a battle, which happened more often than not, they could retire into the countryside and wait for the next chance to attack.

The other side, the Empire, had the advantage of the sea.  With its fleet of powerful warships (just one of which mounted more cannons than the entire Rebel army possessed), it could attack the Rebels’ seaside cities at will.

But no matter how many coastal towns the Empire might take, it did not have enough soldiers to occupy all of the Rebels’ territory.  And without a significant navy of its own, the Rebels could never inflict the blow that would win them their independence.  The war had devolved into a stalemate, with the Empire hoping the Rebels’ rickety government would soon collapse, and with the Rebels hoping for the miraculous intervention of a powerful ally.

Two years before, one of the Empire’s perennial enemies, the Rival Nation, had joined the war on the Rebels’ behalf.  Almost immediately the Rival had sent out its own fleet of warships.  But then the sea had intervened.  


When France entered the American Revolutionary War in the spring of 1778, George Washington had dared to hope his new ally would put victory within reach.  Finally, the British navy’s hold on the Atlantic seaboard was about to be broken.  If the French succeeded in establishing what Washington called “naval superiority,” the enemy’s army would be left open to attack from not only the land but also the sea.  But after two and a half years of trying, the French had been unable to contain the British navy.

First, an inexplicably protracted Atlantic crossing had prevented French Admiral d’Estaing from trapping the enemy’s fleet in Philadelphia.  Shortly after that, d’Estaing had turned his attention to British-occupied New York only to call off the attack for fear his ships would run aground at the bar across the harbor mouth.  A few weeks after that, a storm off the coast of southern New England had prevented d’Estaing from engaging the British in the naval battle that promised to be a glorious victory for France.  Since then, a botched amphibious assault at Savannah, Georgia, had marked the only other significant action on the part of the French navy, a portion of which now lay frustratingly dormant at Newport at the southern end of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay.  By the fall of 1780, amid the aftershocks of devastating defeats at Charleston and Camden in South Carolina and Benedict Arnold’s treasonous attempt to surrender the fortress at West Point to the enemy, Washington had come to wonder whether the ships of his salvation would ever appear.

For the last two years he’d been locked in an unproductive standoff with Sir Henry Clinton in and around British-occupied New York.  What fighting had occurred had been, for the most part, in the South, where British general Cornwallis sought to build upon his recent victories by pushing into North Carolina.  Between the northern and southern theaters of the war lay the inland sea of the Chesapeake, which had enjoyed a period of relative quiet since the early days of the conflict.

All that changed in December of 1780, when Clinton sent his newest brigadier general, the traitor Benedict Arnold, to Virginia.  Having already dispatched the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene to do battle with Cornwallis in the Carolinas, Washington sent the young French nobleman whom he regarded as a surrogate son, the Marquis de Lafayette, in pursuit of Arnold.

Thus began the movement of troops that resulted nine months later in Cornwallis’s entrapment at the shore-side hamlet of Yorktown when a large fleet of French warships arrived from the Caribbean.  As Washington had long since learned, coordinating his army’s movements with those of a fleet of sail-powered men-of-war based two thousand miles away was virtually impossible.  But in the late summer of 1781, the impossible happened.

And then, just a few days later, a fleet of British warships appeared.  


The Battle of the Chesapeake has been called the most important naval engagement in the history of the world.  Fought outside the entrance of the bay between French admiral Comte de Grasse’s twenty-four ships of the line and a comparable fleet commanded by British Admiral Thomas Graves, the battle inflicted severe enough damage on the Empire’s ships that Graves returned to New York for repairs.  By preventing the rescue of 7,000 British and German soldiers under the command of General Cornwallis, de Grasse’s victory on September 5, 1781, made Washington’s subsequent triumph at Yorktown a virtual fait accompli.  Peace would not be officially declared for another two years, but that does not change the fact that a naval battle fought between the French and the British was largely responsible for the independence of the United States.

Despite its undeniable significance, the Battle of the Chesapeake plays only a minor part in most popular accounts of the war, largely because no Americans participated in it.  If the sea figures at all in the story of the Revolutionary War, the focus tends to be on the heroics of John Paul Jones off England’s Flamborough Head, even though that two-ship engagement had little impact on the overall direction of the conflict.  Instead of the sea, the traditional narrative of Yorktown focuses on the allied army’s long overland journey south, with a special emphasis on the collaborative relationship between Washington and his French counterpart the Comte de Rochambeau once they arrived in Virginia.  In this view, the encounter between the French and British fleets was a mere prelude to the main event.  In the account that follows, I hope to put the sea where it properly belongs:  at the center of the story.

As Washington understood with a perspicacity that none of his military peers could match, only the intervention of the French navy could achieve the victory the times required.  Six months before the Battle of the Chesapeake, during the winter of 1781, he had urged the French to send a large fleet of warships to the Chesapeake in an attempt to trap Benedict Arnold in Portsmouth, Virginia.  What was, in effect, a dress rehearsal for the Yorktown campaign is essential to understanding the evolving, complex, and sometimes acrimonious relationship between Washington and Rochambeau.  As we will see, the two leaders were not the selfless military partners of American legend; each had his own jealously guarded agenda, and it was only after Washington reluctantly—and angrily—acquiesced to French demands that they began to work in concert.  

Ultimately, the course of the Revolutionary War came down to America’s proximity to the sea—a place of storms and headwinds that no one could control.  Instead of an inevitable march to victory, Yorktown was the result of a hurried rush of seemingly random events—from a hurricane in the Caribbean, to a bloody battle amid the woods near North Carolina’s Guilford Courthouse, to the loan of 500,000 pesos from the Spanish citizens of Havana, Cuba—all of which had to occur before Cornwallis arrived at Yorktown and de Grasse sailed into the Chesapeake.  That the pieces finally fell into place in September and October 1781 never ceased to amaze Washington.  “I am sure,” he wrote the following spring, “that there never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs than those of the United States.”

The victory at Yorktown was improbable at best, but it was also the result of a strategy Washington had been pursuing since the beginning of the French alliance. This is the story of how Washington’s unrelenting quest for naval superiority made possible the triumph at Yorktown.  It is also the story of how, in a supreme act of poetic justice, the final engagement of the war brought him back to the home he had not seen in six years.  For it was here, on a river in Virginia, that he first began to learn about the wonder, power, and ultimate indifference of the sea.

Excerpted from In the Hurricane’s Eye by Nathaniel Philbrick. Copyright © 2018 by Nathaniel Philbrick. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.