Of French origin: `There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution' which in Canada might be rephrased as `There is nothing more compulsory than a voluntary program.'
The afternoon was lengthening toward evening. Larry proposed that they play through 1810 before calling it a day and the other two eagerly agreed. Of the three, Mike wanted to concentrate on Italy, Steve was growing more and more apprehensive about the American armies, and only Larry favored continuing the current war.
The Americans offered 75g for peace after Adirondack fell again to Ney, but Larry refused it. “I might give up Adirondack, but not Appalache.”
Steve looked up from the map. “Larry, it might be a good time to make a deal; Hull’s army is on the move from Catawba, headed north to Powhatan. LeBlanc is almost across to Powhatan, but the Americans will get there before Soult does.”
Larry paused the game, pondered for a moment, and shrugged. “Yeah, no point in getting in any deeper. We’ve got a lot at risk and not much to gain. Let’s see if they’ll deal.”
He pulled up the diplomatic menu and fired off an offer. “Our war score is 19% and we’re asking for Appalache at 6%, which means we should have a good chance of…”
The gold and black window hung on the screen like a funeral announcement. “The Americans have refused our generous offer of peace.”
Larry swore a blistering oath; Mike said nothing. Steve looked at the frozen map for a long moment, shook his head and finally said, “I hope this LeBlanc guy is smarter than Custer.”
“They are coming north at last,” the cavalry major said.
“Hah. We are within a few days’ march of their capital, after all. They should have marched last month when the ground was frozen. It is March now, and the mud and rain will slow them,” General LeBlanc replied.
“And slow us, too,” Dumaurier interjected.
“What, an infantryman dismayed to find mud in his path?” LeBlanc returned with a playfully raised eyebrow. “Never mind, Paul. Our messengers have found Marshal Soult and he concurs with my intentions. There is no profit in our moving into what the locals call ‘The Wilderness’. Their capital is surely too well protected for us to take in a sudden bound, and our failure would only hearten them. No need to go further west; we’ll stay close to the water and our supply ships. We will rest here, bring up supplies from the fleet, and wait for the Marshal. His men are in that valley, the Shenandoah, and marching hard.”
“Poor men! Soult will drive them like the very devil.” Dumaurier shook his head in mock pity.
“And a good thing too, Paul. It will be a very close race to see who gets here first.”
Stephen Rensselaer was disgusted. Rather than vent his anger, he took a stroll through the camp in the evening’s misty chill, puffing fragrant blue clouds of fine tobacco from his favorite pipe. He found it odd that Raleigh, which raised such fine tobacco crops, had so little good tobacco to sell. His own blend was running low and his favorite tobacconist was far away in Albany, but tonight he needed the calming influence of the pipe. He needed the manipulation of bowl and scraper and tamping and match, the familiar feel of stem between his teeth, needed something for his hands to do while he sorted out his thoughts.
I am accustomed to having my own way, he allowed. It does not come easily to me – the Old Patroon, the Lord of Albany they call me – to hold my tongue and take direction from other men. From Englishmen, when all my sires were Dutch.
I am not accustomed to taking orders from lesser men.
He frowned at that thought, but it sat there grinning defiantly like an imp of Satan and refused to be budged by his scowl. Hull had served well in the Revolution, had been capable in governing the Northwest Territory before this war. But he was proving a disaster in this command. No orders for weeks at a time, followed by flurries of contradictory and impossible ones. The general’s confusion and disorder had spread to the army as a whole, and if the men remained much longer in this filthy camp, disease and desertion would take them all.
The last courier from old Pinckney had stirred him up, however, where even the enemy’s proximity to Washington had not. Hough’s men would be departing on the morrow and the entire army would follow. Hull had agonized over ‘abandoning’ North Carolina, but Pinckney’s missive had been imperious and abrupt – come at once with all the army or turn command over to Van Rensselaer and come alone to a court-martial.
He supposed that moving such a force required multiple roads. His own advance from Albany to Lake Ontario had swamped the roads there and that had been in better weather with less than half this army’s numbers. But Hull’s plan seemed too dispersed, with Van Rensselaer’s northern men sent on a wide detour to the east while Hull’s main body followed Hough’s advance guard up the center. If all went well, the three sections of the army would unite with Harrison’s men north of Richmond and move en masse from there to wherever the enemy might be found.
If all had ever gone well we’d be dining in Paris tonight, he thought sourly. I will do as I am told and go as I am bid, but I’ll requisition me some horses along the way and find some men who know how to ride them. Some scouts – and some fast couriers – may come in very handy.
Soult could hardly see through the pouring rain. At least he was mounted; most of his men were squelching through mud up to their calves, and too many were clad in shreds and rags. The worst part of every day was making camp in the wet and trying to find dry wood for fires. The night the army had spent in Charlottesville had been an inexpressible delight; he had slept indoors in a real bed with a roaring fire to dry out his stiff old clothes.
LeBlanc was supposed to be waiting in northern Virginia, up where the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers flowed together; they’d be there in another day and a half. And there was regular courier service between them now and reliable reconnaissance of the American columns, swollen now to over 17,000 and making reasonable time. Soult wasn’t sure he could force-march his men to the rendezvous before LeBlanc was engaged; he had messaged the other general to be prepared to stand at least half a day by himself. Then Soult had thrown a cavalry force east from Gordonsville and been checked, hard, so the Americans were definitely east of him and in force.
At least LeBlanc’s men were being given a chance to rest, scout the battlefield and dig in. The place he’d chosen was a good one, a crossroads town with a good river bridge behind it now that the French navy had thrown two boat bridges across. Not that he intended to be defeated, but a bridge or two couldn’t hurt.
LeBlanc, for his part, had changed his mind and was hoping the rain would continue until Soult came up. Perversely, the rain quit that night and the next day, March 15th, dawned gray and cold.
The Battle of Fredericksburg
He’d moved his infantry onto the hills south and west of Fredericksburg, using some of his cavalry for aggressive reconnaissance and keeping the rest back by the town. The American vanguard, some 3000 infantry brigaded under Hough, came straight up the Chilesburg Road and angled northeast toward Fredericksburg. As the day wore on and the lead elements of Hull’s central column came up – another 7000 infantry – pressure mounted on Dumaurier’s brigade and the Americans began working around to the northwest, intending to turn the French right.
In this, they were sadly disappointed. Just as Dumaurier was preparing to pull back on Hazel Run, the lead elements of Soult’s cavalry struck down the road from Salem Church. The first day’s action then petered out into darkness and Soult’s weary men collapsed into their camps. For psychological effect, Soult had bonfires lit for miles along the road to the west.
Morning broke warm and sunny, with surprises for the French. Van Rensselaer had come up the Rappahannock Road with his 7000 men and launched a furious attack before the French could get their own attack underway. Dumaurier moved his brigade east as Soult’s infantry came up; Hull, intimidated and indecisive, made no move until the afternoon.
Van Rensselaer’s men had repeatedly gotten stopped in the waters of Deep Run. The French infantry on the high creek bank were too solid to be thrown back, so Van Rensselaer kept them covered with New York’s Washington Artillery and began feeling to his left for an opening.
Soult’s mid-morning attack down the Salem Church road had similarly bogged down against the American defenses. The line rolled up and down the Salem Church road through the afternoon and held steady in the woods in the center.
The crisis of the afternoon had two parts; first, General Harrison’s men (another 7000 men, bringing the American total to 24,000) came up and struck in the center. Soult had been pulling men from the center to feed his attacks on the Salem Church road; LeBlanc had been moving his men east from the center to support Dumaurier’s flank. Combined with Van Rensselaer’s fresh attack on Dumaurier’s right, the entire French center went rolling backward and was saved from collapse only by Hull’s timidity.
LeBlanc took personal command of the cavalry reserve, leading them west almost to Salem Church and launching them southeast into Harrison’s flank. More a threat than an actual impact, this caused the Americans to recoil into a defensive posture. Thus, the sun went down on the 16th with the numerically superior Americans unable to mount a coordinated attack and the French unable to press home an assault against them.
During the night, General Hull took counsel of his fears. Despite an officer’s meeting in which Van Rensselaer and Harrison both urged a renewal of the battle, Hull flatly refused to consider anything but retreat.
On the morning of the 17th, the American army began their withdrawal south and then west. Soult tried to get in a cavalry charge against Harrison’s division, but the Americans maneuvered quickly and checked it before the charge could develop.
Soult pronounced the final verdict. “An army of lions, led by a sheep.”
General William Hull was, indeed, court-martialed for cowardice, incompetence and treason. He was found guilty on the first two counts and sentenced to be shot. Appeals to President Pinckney for clemency fell on deaf ears, and the President himself was in attendance on the blazing July day when they stood Hull up against the wall of the Washington barracks in front of a firing squad.
As spring developed and the ground dried, Ney moved down the Lake Ontario shore to besiege Fort Oswego and Soult led his army back into the Shenandoah to strip the area of crops. By June, another corps from France had landed in Virginia and taken Richmond under siege.
The old man, councilor-no-longer, listened quietly as the men’s voices grew louder and angrier. At last he could restrain himself no longer; despairing of being heard over men so much younger than himself, he picked up the crystal brandy decanter and hurled it at the wall.
Into the shocked silence, he began to speak in a flat, deadly quiet voice. “Fools. You have seen nothing and learned nothing. The French defeated us in less than a season, and since they did not kill all of you at that time, you think they are
weak. You believe they will allow you to rebel against them. They have 70,000 men in Italy; if we arm even the children and men of my age we will not have but a third of that number. They have mastered England, Spain, Prussia and Austria – and us! – and now we are bankrupt and alone.”
“Fools. This time they will kill us all! They will tear down our walls, they will burn down our city. They will fill in the port!
They do not need us.”
He turned to go; there would be a time later to apologize to his host. He had taken perhaps three steps, had heard no-one come up behind him when he was seized and embraced from behind. He knew only an instant’s anger - and regret – before he felt the wet pain as the knife opened him from side to side.
The Ligurian revolt of the summer of 1810 drew in every French infantryman, horse and cannon in Italy. The conspirators had succeeded in seizing the fortifications and overwhelming the French garrison. When the French armies finally broke through and retook the city, their commanders turned them loose for an orgy of rape and pillage. The bourses were looted, the warehouses burned, the fine homes pillaged and wrecked. Even the churches were stripped of their gold and gems, and every bishop, archbishop and cardinal in the city was put out the eastern gates while their personal property was seized. Few of the city’s intellectual, wealthy or powerful survived.
With the Oswego forts secure at his back, Ney declined to advance into central New York State, instead turning west in September to besiege the Niagara forts in Onondaga.
Larry had just called for another round of war taxes when the game paused itself. The door across the game floor swung open, and an elderly gentleman dressed in antique style paced slowly through. As he came around the giant map, the Napoleon ‘bot came down from the dais to stand by Larry on the main floor.
The old man looked levelly at Larry for a moment, then opened a leather folder. “I am Rufus King, President Rufus King of the United States of America. The United States do earnestly and humbly beg for peace with the Empire of France on the following terms: we will concede to France every trading post she has occupied, give over the trading posts of Michilimakinac and Detroit, and cede the provinces of Appalache, Oswego and Adirondak. In addition, the colonial government of Savannah, Georgia has seceded from the Union and requests to be incorporated into New France. Do you accept these terms?”
Larry could only nod dumbly, it was Napoleon who said, “I was given to understand that Charles Pinckney held that office, sir; am I in error?”
The old man’s eyes shimmered for a moment and he seemed on the verge of tears. “He is dead, sir, and by his own hand. He shot himself in a fit of remorse over the destruction of his country, and has caused this burden to fall to me.”
The old man turned to go, then turned his head and delivered a parting remark. “I earnestly hope, sir, that there may come a day when France may need her friends and allies… and discover that, by her own actions, her world is filled with enemies.”
They stood in silence and watched him hobble out the door.
North America in 1810
