In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown
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In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown
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Overview
"Nathaniel Philbrick is a masterly storyteller. Here he seeks to elevate the naval battles between the French and British to a central place in the history of the American Revolution. He succeeds, marvelously."--The New York Times Book Review
The thrilling story of the year that won the Revolutionary War from the New York Times bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower.
In the concluding volume of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick tells the thrilling story of the year that won the Revolutionary War. In the fall of 1780, after five frustrating years of war, George Washington had come to realize that the only way to defeat the British Empire was with the help of the French navy. But coordinating his army's movements with those of a fleet of warships based thousands of miles away was next to impossible. And then, on September 5, 1781, the impossible happened. Recognized today as one of the most important naval engagements in the history of the world, the Battle of the Chesapeake—fought without a single American ship—made the subsequent victory of the Americans at Yorktown a virtual inevitability. A riveting and wide-ranging story, full of dramatic, unexpected turns, In the Hurricane's Eye reveals that the fate of the American Revolution depended, in the end, on Washington and the sea.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780698153226 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2018 |
| Series: | The American Revolution Series , #3 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 120,991 |
| File size: | 72 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
In 1986, Philbrick moved to Nantucket with his wife Melissa and their two children. In 1994, he published his first book about the island’s history, Away Off Shore, followed by a study of the Nantucket’s native legacy, Abram’s Eyes. He was the founding director of Nantucket’s Egan Maritime Institute and is still a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association.
In 2000, Philbrick published the New York Times bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. The book is the basis of the forthcoming Warner Bros. motion picture “Heart of the Sea,” directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson, Benjamin Walker, Ben Wishaw, and Tom Holland, which is scheduled for release in March, 2015. The book also inspired a 2001 Dateline special on NBC as well as the 2010 two-hour PBS American Experience film “Into the Deep” by Ric Burns.
His next book was Sea of Glory, published in 2003, which won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize and the Albion-Monroe Award from the National Maritime Historical Society. The New York Times Bestseller Mayflower was a finalist for both the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction, and was named one the ten Best Books of 2006 by the New York Times Book Review. Mayflower is currently in development as a limited series on FX.
In 2010, he published the New York Times bestseller The Last Stand, which was named a New York Times Notable book, a 2010 Montana Book Award Honor Book, and a 2011 ALA Notable Book. Philbrick was an on-camera consultant to the two-hour PBS American Experience film “Custer’s Last Stand” by Stephen Ives. The book is currently being adapted for a ten-hour, multi-part television series. The audio book for Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick? (2011) made the ALA's Listen List in 2012 and was a finalist for the New England Society Book Award.
Philbrick’s latest New York Times bestseller, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution, was published in 2013 and was awarded both the 2013 New England Book Award for Non-Fiction and the 2014 New England Society Book Award. Bunker Hill won the 2014 book award from the Society of Colonial Wars, and has been optioned by Warner Bros. for feature film adaptation with Ben Affleck attached to direct.
Philbrick has also received the Byrne Waterman Award from the Kendall Whaling Museum, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for distinguished service from the USS Constitution Museum, the Nathaniel Bowditch Award from the American Merchant Marine Museum, the William Bradford Award from the Pilgrim Society, and the Boston History Award from the Bostonian Society. He was named the 2011 Cushing Orator by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and has an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where he delivered the commencement address in 2009.
Philbrick’s writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. He has appeared on the Today Show, the Morning Show, Dateline, PBS’s American Experience, C-SPAN, and NPR. He and his wife still live on Nantucket.
Hometown:
Nantucket, MassachusettsDate of Birth:
June 11, 1956Place of Birth:
Boston, MassachusettsEducation:
B.A., Brown University, 1978; M.A., Duke UniversityWebsite:
http://www.nathanielphilbrick.comRead an 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.
Table of Contents
Preface The Land and the Sea xi
Part I "Against the Wind"
Chapter 1 The Building Storm 3
Chapter 2 "An Enemy in the Heart of the Country" 22
Chapter 3 "Delays and Accidents of the Sea" 47
Chapter 4 Bayonets and Zeal 73
Chapter 5 The End of the Tether 104
Part II "The Ocean of History"
Chapter 6 "A Ray of Light" 129
Chapter 7 "The Spur of Speed" 153
Chapter 8 "Ligne de Vitesse" 179
Chapter 9 Yorktown 204
Chapter 10 "The North River Captain" 239
Epilogue Aftermath 263
Acknowledgments 281
Notes 285
Bibliography 325
Illustration Credits 347
Index 351
