“Preface” in “Storm Over Savannah: The Story of Count d’Estaing and the Siege of the Town in 1779”
Preface
EARLY in September in the year 1779 a great French naval armada appeared suddenly off the coast of Georgia. Aboard the fleet were four thousand troops of His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI come from the West Indies to cooperate with the Americans in destroying in the Southern colonies Britain’s military power, which was then centered upon Savannah.
Much has been written about our French Allies in the North during the American Revolution, of Rochambeau and Lafayette, and of how the army and navy of France took part in the great victory of Yorktown. A score or more books deal with that phase of the War of American Independence. But no one has ever essayed to write the history of the French at the Siege of Savannah. For that matter, little enough is known of the Siege itself. For some reason there has been a tendency to overlook an event that possessed qualities of drama and color rarely matched elsewhere in American history.
Charles-Henri, Comte d’Estaing, who commanded the French land and naval forces that came to Georgia in 1779, has been a mere name in American history books. He was, as these pages reveal, an extraordinary individual. If the portrait of the Count, who is the central figure of this study, is at times unflattering, I can only reply that he has been painted as his contemporaries saw him.
A galaxy of soldiers and sailors of l’Ancien Régime accompanied d’Estaing. They numbered famous French sea fighters, celebrated global navigators, noblemen with thousand-year-old names, elegant beaux of the Petit Trianon, future generals and admirals of the Republic and the Empire, and youths destined for prominent parts on the political stage of France in the turbulent times that lay ahead. They were a brave and entertaining, if sometimes unharmonious, lot. The Siege of Savannah would have been a far less lively episode without them.
The failure of the bloody assault by the French and American forces upon the British lines on October 9, 1779, affected the whole course of the American Revolution. Contemporaneous British sources attest the significance of the defeat of the Allies. “I clearly saw,” wrote the Royal Governor of Georgia at the time, “that if this Province then fell, America was lost and this I declared on every occasion.” General Prevost’s troops “have preserved the Empire,” exulted the Chief Justice of New York when he learned of the victory. Colonel John Maitland of the Seventy-first Regiment of Scotch Foot, a martyr of the Siege, had “heroically re-established,” to quote a writer of the time, “the declining glory of the British arms, in one of those most important and critical moments which decide the fall or the rise of nations.” If any partiality for this son of the Sixth Earl of Lauderdale seems reflected in these pages it stems from my desire to rescue from oblivion a great soldier of the Empire.
With good cause the defeat of the Allies at Savannah was celebrated in London by the firing of the Tower guns and at New York with parades. Had Georgia been lost, the only foothold remaining to George III in his American colonies would have been the city of New York. British morale was tremendously boosted by the victory at Savannah which steeled the Ministry in its decision to continue the effort to subdue America. The victory permitted the transfer of the main theatre of war to the lower South. General Clinton who had embarked some of his troops for the projected attack on Charlestown returned to New York when he heard that d’Estaing’s fleet was off Savannah, advising Lord Germain that “Should Georgia be lost I shall have little hope of recovering that Province and also of reducing and Arming South Carolina.” Three years of cruel civil war that followed in Georgia and in the Carolinas might have been spared if Savannah had fallen to the Allies in 1779.
When I began my researches for this book, which was first published in 1951, I suspected that the key to the proper telling of the story of the Siege lay in France. Little in the way of source materials in that country had been utilized by historians at that time. The French version of the event was practically an unknown chapter. My research was pointed toward France, along trails which, as far as d’Estaing’s Savannah campaign was concerned, were then untravelled by American scholars.
The Archives Nationales and the records in the Library of the Service Hydrographique de la Marine in Paris proved a veritable Pandora’s box of manuscript material relative to d’Estaing’s expedition: some 2,000 pages of military and naval records, letters, orders, journals, reports, logs, and returns. Routine in the main, they offer many revealing items. A surprising number of French journals or diaries were located. The most important of the manuscripts is the “Observations” of Count d’Estaing which he wrote aboard the Languedoc after the Siege. They consist of his notes or commentaries upon the journal kept by a French officer named O’Connor. Though not given to serious analysis of America the Count wrote interestingly and frequently well, with a continuous thread of sarcasm on the subject of the “Insurgents.” If the bibliography appended at the end of this book seems unduly long, my justification is that it may be useful to those who labor hereafter among these and the other source materials I utilized.
I said Pandora’s box by design. For to one whose schooling in French lay nearly a quarter of a century in the past, the task of reading several hundred pages of eighteenth century manuscript material, to say nothing of a mass of published writings in that language, loosed a plague of worries. Translation offered no serious difficulties where the writing was legible, but oh the penmanship of some of the French officers! Where assistance was needed it was kindly supplied by Abel Doysié of Paris. It was Monsieur Doysié who located for me the d‘Estaing-O’Connor manuscript in the Bibliothèque de Service Hydrographique. Mary Catherine Mauduit of Savannah also deserves my acknowledgment for the assistance she gave wherever proper translation was a problem.
I am indebted to no one more than to Lilla M. Hawes, Director of the Georgia Historical Society, whose familiarity with Southern archives is extensive. My indebtedness to the various libraries, historical societies, and individuals that made materials available to me is a considerable one. This blanket acknowledgment is a poor medium of repayment. Whether in this country, or at Paris, London or Edinburgh where my research was vicarious, I found a readiness to assist and a courtesy that truly lightened my labors.
In the Preface to the first edition in 1951 my thanks were extended to my efficient secretaries, Barbara B. Kehoe and Norma B. Meehan, who typed and retyped many drafts of the original manuscript. It is with pleasure that seventeen years later I express a like obligation to them in the typing of the revision.
Since the publication of the first edition of Storm Over Savannah, additional source materials, including the journals of several French officers, have come to my notice. I have drawn on them in the new edition. Numerous minor revisions in the original text and a few corrections have been made.
ALEXANDER A. LAWRENCE
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