At Wilmington, meanwhile, Cornwallis was confronted with the same problem that had plagued him throughout the Southern campaign: Where to go from here?
To battle up and down the Carolinas no longer made much sense to the British commander. He was weary of this inhospitable region of swamps and forests and rivers. It was the country as much as anything, he was certain, that had robbed him of the fruits of victory. Sparsely settled, producing little that could sustain an army, plundered by both friends and foes, plagued with snakes, mosquitoes, merciless heat, endless pine forests and creeks which would be called rivers in any other country – how could warfare be carried on in such a region? How could one claim a victory against an enemy who slipped away into the swamps and forests after every defeat, only to emerge stronger than before? As one of Cornwallis’ own officers wrote, “Our march thro’ this country may be compared to the passage of a Ship thro’ the Waves which gave Way on the least Impulse, but immediately close when the Body has passed.”
As Cornwallis saw it, his only hope to end the rebellion in the South was to track it down to its roots in Virginia. There he would destroy the very seat of resistance that had kept the war alive in the Carolinas and Georgia by sending them men and supplies. By conquering Virginia, Cornwallis reasoned, the provinces to the south of the Old Dominion would be forced to cease resistance as well. Virginia, in fact, became so important a target to Cornwallis that he even urged Henry Clinton to abandon New York, if necessary, in order to force a final showdown in the Old Dominion.
Geographically, Virginia had been virtually untouched by the war since early 1776, but in all other respects the state had contributed more than its share to the success of the Revolution. Its exports of tobacco had been a powerful prop of American credit in Europe; the state had been literally stripped bare of guns and military supplies in its support of Gates and later Greene in their struggle with Cornwallis for the Carolinas; its militia and Continental lines contributed everywhere to the strength of the American army.
On the other hand, Virginia, more than any other state, was teetering close to bankruptcy. No state had issued more paper money than had Virginia, and the paper money of no other state had depreciated as dangerously. Owing millions, its promise to pay broken repeatedly, without a trace of hard cash in the treasury, the State of Virginia had ceased to be even a poor risk – it was a virtual certainty that it would never pay its debts. Almost the only resource left to the government to procure supplies was to employ force against its own citizens.
In the spring of 1779, a strong British amphibious force from New York had appeared off the mouth of the James River and had taken possession of Portsmouth, and from that vantage point had bottled up whatever American shipping there had been on the Chesapeake. Small parties went out from Portsmouth to forage for food and destroy tobacco warehouses, and they inevitably returned laden with plunder and without ever having encountered serious resistance. Virginians cried that the British were “plundering women and children, burning houses and committing every kind of outrage . . .” yet they submitted with surprising timidity to such treatment. Even George Washington was dismayed at his home state’s failure to defend itself.
Encouraged by such successful hit-and-run tactics, Henry Clinton’s thoughts turned to the possibility of basing a permanent force on the James, and for its command he selected a man who would not be hampered by any sympathies toward the rebels. Back into action came Benedict Arnold, now a British brigadier general, with some 1,200 men. In January 1781, Arnold landed near Westover; by January 5 he was in Richmond, spreading havoc and destruction wherever he went. The governor, the Burgesses, and most of the citizens fled the town, which Arnold shortly after plundered and burned. A few days later he appeared in Westham, where he destroyed an important munitions works. He then fell back to Portsmouth and went into winter quarters.