Newport: The Alliance's First Test

The British had held Newport since December 1776, and twice before, American forces had tried and failed to take it back. In the summer of 1778, with France newly committed as an ally, the plan looked different: a French fleet of twelve ships of the line would land troops on the west side of the city while General John Sullivan's army of roughly ten thousand attacked from the east. The two forces landed within a day of each other. A storm wrecked the plan before either side fired a shot in earnest, and the army that Sullivan led off Aquidneck Island five days later had to fight its own rear guard action without the ally it had been counting on. Sullivan's letters to Washington describing both the landing and the battle survive at Founders Online, as does the letter Washington wrote afterward working to keep the alliance from fracturing over what had happened.

A British expeditionary force seized Newport in December 1776, drawn by a harbor that rarely froze and a position useful for any future move against Boston. American forces under Major General Joseph Spencer tried to dislodge the garrison in 1777 and failed twice, undone by inadequate preparation and bad weather. Washington replaced Spencer with Major General John Sullivan in March 1778, and Sullivan began planning a third attempt. What changed the odds was not anything Sullivan brought to the field himself. France had signed a treaty of alliance with the United States that February, and in April a fleet under the Comte d'Estaing, twelve ships of the line and roughly four thousand troops, sailed for North America with orders that gave its admiral wide discretion to strike wherever he judged best.

D'Estaing's first target was New York, but his pilots warned him the sandbar at the harbor mouth could not take his largest ships. Newport became the alternative: a smaller, more vulnerable British garrison that French naval power could isolate by sea while Sullivan's army pressed it by land. Washington sent Nathanael Greene and the Marquis de Lafayette to Rhode Island to support Sullivan's command, and New England militia poured into Providence through late July in numbers no one had expected.

D'Estaing's fleet sailed into Narragansett Bay on August 8, driving the British to scuttle their own ships rather than let them be captured. Sullivan's troops crossed onto Aquidneck Island on August 9, a day earlier than the joint plan called for, after scouts reported the British had abandoned the island's northern end. The same day, a British relief fleet under Admiral Richard Howe appeared off the coast. D'Estaing put back out to sea to meet it, and Sullivan watched the chase unfold from shore.

The pursuit never reached a decision. On August 11 and 12, a two-day storm later remembered as the Great Storm scattered both fleets and damaged ships on each side badly enough that neither could fight when the weather cleared. D'Estaing reappeared off Newport on August 20 with twelve battered ships and told Sullivan he intended to sail for Boston immediately to refit, over the strong objections of the American officers who had been counting on his support. The French troops who had begun landing on Conanicut Island a week earlier reboarded their transports and left with the fleet. Sullivan was left to continue the siege alone, against a garrison he no longer had the naval support to fully isolate.

Word reached Sullivan that a second British relief force was being organized in New York, and on August 28 his council of officers voted to abandon the siege rather than risk being caught between Newport's garrison and reinforcements arriving by sea. Sullivan withdrew his army to a defensive line across the northern part of the island overnight. The British garrison under Major General Robert Pigot, learning of the withdrawal from deserters, marched out of Newport the next morning and attacked Sullivan's rear guard. The fighting fell hardest on Turkey Hill, at the American right, where the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, a unit raised that spring that included a substantial number of Black soldiers, many of them formerly enslaved men who had been promised freedom in exchange for service, held its ground against three separate assaults by Hessian troops. Sullivan reported the day's results to Washington that same night.

The military outcome at Newport mattered less, in the end, than the diplomatic damage the campaign had nearly caused. Sullivan and several of his officers had criticized d'Estaing's departure openly and in writing, language sharp enough that Lafayette, serving under Sullivan's command, considered it an insult to French honor. Washington, who understood what an open rupture with America's only foreign ally would cost, wrote to Sullivan within days of receiving news of the battle. His letter praised the army's conduct on the field and then turned, deliberately, to the larger stakes.

Washington closed his letter to Congress that same week by recommending the matter be treated with discretion, and Congress followed his lead. D'Estaing's fleet completed repairs in Boston and remained a French asset in American waters for the rest of the war. Newport itself stayed in British hands for another fourteen months, evacuated without a fight in October 1779 once it no longer served any strategic purpose the British army still needed.