The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Before the Continentals reached Trenton shortly after 8 AM, the wind had shifted, blowing the snow and hail into the Hessians’ faces, so that the Americans really did surprise them, coming at them from three directions, with Washington leading the main charge. Henry Knox fired his artillery straight down the town’s two streets with murderous effect, satisfied, he remarked with sober awe, that the resultant “hurry, fright, and confusion of the enemy” resembled “that which will be when the last trump shall sound.” When the Hessian commander tried to rally his troops to charge Washington, the General galloped to a group of Americans, cried “March on, my brave fellows, after me!” and headed off the commander and his men, wounding him mortally. In an hour, the Americans had won, killing or wounding 105 Hessians and taking almost 900 captive, as against two Continentals killed, plus four or five frozen to death on the march. “This is a glorious day for our country!” Washington congratulated his men, before turning to speak a word of comfort to the dying Hessian commander. But had these 2,400 failed, their Revolution might well have died with them, obliterated in the Jersey snow. “It may be doubted,” summed up the eminent Whig statesman and historian Sir G. O. Trevelyan, “whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.”56

  Battlefield sketch of the victory at Trenton by John Trumbull

  Charles Allen Munn Collection, Fordham University Library

  Sixty sleepless hours after they set out, Washington’s men had recrossed the river with their prisoners and trove of captured supplies and arms. “The General,” Washington told them on the morning of the twenty-seventh, rewarding them with cash and an extra tot of rum, “with the utmost sincerity and affection, thanks the officers and soldiers for their spirited and gallant behavior.” But that afternoon, he learned that they’d have to go back. Colonel Cadwalader and his 1,800 Philadelphia Associators, unable to negotiate the ice-treacherous river on Christmas, had finally made it across and, with their usual democracy, had voted to stay and fight. Washington would not leave the determined Pennsylvanians prey to the 8,000 British troops in south Jersey. He ordered his force across the river on December 29 in two groups. With the temperature plummeting, the first found the Delaware frozen enough to tiptoe gingerly across, though not enough to bear their artillery and tents; the second, with Washington at its head, had to wait until the thirtieth, and the guns couldn’t cross until New Year’s Eve.57

  Now what? Most of the troops’ enlistments would end when midnight tolled, and even Glover’s tars burned to get home to make their fortunes serving their country as privateers. The merchant-officers of the Philadelphia Associators told Washington that they had chipped in to offer a $10 bonus in hard money to any of their men who would stay on, and it had worked. Impressed, the General called his troops together and made them the same offer, with no idea where he’d get the money. “The drums beat for volunteers,” one soldier recounted, “but not a man turned out.” Washington, as a sergeant never forgot, “wheeled his horse about, rode in front of the regiment,” and said: “My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected; but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with the fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.”58

  The drummers drummed; the men spoke low to one another; a few stepped forward, and then nearly all did. The choice cost almost half of them their lives. An officer asked if he should enroll them in writing. No need, Washington replied. In his new ethic, a man with the merit of a gentleman was a gentleman, and his word of honor was enough.59 These were men whom sixteen months earlier Washington had described as “exceeding dirty & nasty people.”60 Now he knew them better. “A people unused to restraint,” he wrote a couple of weeks later, “must be led; they will not be drove.”61 And he had used the magic American word with them: consent.

  With the vengeful enemy barreling toward him—the enraged Hessians had orders to take no prisoners—Washington remembered a high knoll south of Assunpink Creek in Trenton, ideal for defense, and he ranged his army there, with artillery aimed at the bridge and possible fords. When the British thundered into Trenton toward dusk on January 2, 1777, the American advance guard struggled to get back over the bridge before the enemy cut them down. Washington raced to the stone span with a troop to protect them. One private, squeezed against Washington’s horse and boot during the skirmish, left an oft-quoted evocation of the quasi-mythical stature the General was now acquiring in his soldiers’ eyes: “The noble horse of Gen. Washington stood with his breast pressed close against the end of the west rail of the bridge, and the firm, composed, and majestic countenance of the General inspired confidence and assurance in a moment so important and critical. . . . The horse stood as firm as the rider, and seemed to understand that he was not to quit his post and station.” The British tried bravely three times to force their way across the bridge, until it “looked red as blood, with their killed and wounded and red coats,” a sergeant wrote. The enemy corpses, perhaps 365 in all (as against 50 Americans), “lay thicker and closer together,” another soldier recalled, “than I ever beheld sheaves of wheat lying in a field which the reapers had just passed.”62

  Still, the British outnumbered the Continentals by more than five to four. “We’ve got the Old Fox safe now,” Earl Cornwallis assured his staff as they met that night. “We’ll go over and bag him in the morning.”63

  WASHINGTON COULD figure the odds too, and he knew that his position, though strong, had vulnerabilities that Cornwallis’s greater numbers could exploit by getting to his rear, a peril insurgencies shun. He wanted to get his men to safety without damping “popular opinion.” The army’s morale was soaring, and Jerseyites now flocked to the militia and harassed the British continually, so whatever he did had to “give reputation to our arms,” maintaining the initiative and pressing on. By an inspiration of genius, he gave vent to his inner Washington, all boldness and enterprise, and turned a withdrawal into an attack. Seizing on information that Colonel Cadwalader had heard from “a very intelligent young gentleman” just come from Princeton that no sentries guarded the wide-open east end of the little college town, Washington decided to strike there. “One thing I was sure of,” he recalled, “was that it would avoid the appearance of a retreat, which was of consequence.”64

  By now he had the theatrics down pat. Cloth muffled the wagon wheels, watch fires sparkled with brighter-than-usual cheer, trenching tools crunched as noisily as if hundreds were auditioning for the grave digger in Hamlet. So silently did Washington slip away after midnight that “many of his own sentinels never missed him,” an officer chuckled. Roads that the British had labored along “halfleg deep” in mud had now frozen hard and smooth as the exhausted Americans virtually sleepwalked the sixteen-mile byroad to Princeton, leaving it “literally marked with the blood of soldiers feet,” a sergeant noticed. In the ice-bright dawn, two British regiments galloping to Cornwallis’s aid in Trenton ran smack into the Americans and “were as much astonished as if an army had dropped perpendicularly down upon them,” General Knox quipped.65

  No less astonished by the ferocity of the immediate British charge, the Americans fell back in panic. Just then, Washington materialized among the Associators, waving his tricorne. “Parade with us, my brave fellows!” he urged. “There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly.” The General led his men straight into the British fire with such defiant courage that one of his aides clenched his eyes shut, unable to watch his commander’s all-but-certain death. “Away, my dear colonel, and bring up the troops,” Washington said to him when the smoke cleared. “The day is our own!” A couple of hundred British took cover in the college’s Nassau Hall, only to b
e cannonaded into surrender by artillery commander Alexander Hamilton, just about to turn twenty-two. “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days,” pronounced one of the era’s foremost generals, Frederick the Great, “were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements.”66

  In retrospect, that was the turning point of the war, when Washington proved to himself, his troops, and the world his inspirational brilliance as a leader, and when a shocked Britain saw it could lose its American empire. But experience as you live it never feels the way it looks in retrospect, and, despite all the merit and achievement in the world, nobody reaches such an eminence without Nemesis raining down spite. “[W]hy should I expect to be exempt from censure; the unfailing lot of elevated station?” Washington sighed philosophically. “Merits and talents, with which I can have no pretensions of rivalship, have ever been subject to it.”67

  It was long after the 1777 fighting season opened—eighteenth-century commanders really thought in such terms—that the chastened Howes roused themselves, sailing out of New York Harbor in late July for Chesapeake Bay, from which they would march north and attack Philadelphia at last. Washington hurried his 12,000 troops there from their camp in Morristown, New Jersey, staging a morale-boosting parade through the threatened city, each soldier with a sprig of green in his hat signifying victory, all commanded, as the song says, to mind the music and the step, and with their commander in chief playing his role of national hero with swagger, out front on his slapping charger. He headed off the British at Brandywine Creek southwest of town on September 11, but, in a replay of the Heights of Guana debacle two years earlier, they turned his flank through a negligently unguarded ford, inflicting 700 casualties and capturing 400 Americans. Ten nights later they barbarously bayoneted hundreds more Continentals as they lay sleeping in the woods.68

  After Howe and Cornwallis marched into Philadelphia on September 26—Congress having fled “like a covey of partridges,” John Adams harrumphed—Washington, wanting “to remind the English that an American army still existed” and to avenge the bayonet murders, attacked two British regiments camped at Germantown, northwest of the city (and today absorbed into it) on October 4. As his army charged in the misty dawn, the enemy torched the sere autumnal fields, and in the blinding smoke and fog, “a bloody day” unfolded, Washington wrote, with American casualties more than double British losses—and with the bodies lying “as thick as the stones in a stony plowfield,” one rebel soldier grieved—but with both armies awed by the Continentals’ spunk in attacking so soon after a defeat. Also impressed was French foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, who moved closer to upgrading his secret financial support for America to a formal alliance, key to the Revolution’s success.69

  YET TO WASHINGTON’S disadvantage, it wasn’t he who won the big victory that prompted Vergennes to sign the vital treaty in February 1778. It was General Horatio Gates, who took British general John Burgoyne and his army prisoner after two blood-soaked battles at Saratoga, New York, on September 19 and October 7, 1777, just when Washington was suffering his Pennsylvania defeats. Following three previous victories that sent the king rushing into his wife’s room, crying, “I have beat all the Americans!” Burgoyne, his supply lines now stretched to breaking, was lumbering south from Canada, seeking to join his redcoats with Howe’s in New York, to accomplish what the British had long intended: to seize control of the Hudson Valley and split the colonies in two. He learned too late that the Howes had scrapped that strategy and gone to Philadelphia.

  Gates won thanks to General Benedict Arnold’s gross insubordination in seizing battlefield control and wielding it with skill, and Colonel Daniel Morgan’s lethal Virginia sharpshooters, who killed over forty British officers with rifles that famously could hit an orange at 200 paces, unlike the British army’s quicker-to-load but inaccurate unrifled muskets. But Granny Gates, as his men called the short, stout general, predictably chose to claim all the credit himself, and he decided that after such a triumph he deserved to be commander in chief.70 Unlike Washington, after all, he had once held a royal commission, bought for him by the Duke of Leeds, whose housekeeper his mother was—though with neither the money nor the successes to rise higher in the British army after his service in the Braddock expedition, the republican-minded Gates settled in Virginia and joined the rebels.71

  Gates had earlier disparaged Washington’s leadership to Congress, and now he dawdled almost a month before personally telling the commander in chief of his victory, a slight that Washington understood signaled a struggle for preeminence. To inform Congress directly, Gates sent a voluble young aide-de-camp, who by chance met an aide to one of Washington’s loyal generals on the way and told him with theatrical flair what contempt Gates felt for his superior. To heighten the anti-Washington drama, the young man displayed a toadying letter that General Thomas Conway had sent Gates, belittling the commander in chief by writing that “Heaven has been determined to save your Country; or a weak General and bad Counsellors would have ruined it.” Washington’s loyal friend immediately informed him of such “wicked duplicity of conduct.”72

  So Washington knew that treacherous undercurrents swirled beneath a rumor he’d heard that Congress planned to bypass worthier generals for promotion to major general and instead anoint Conway—an Irish-born professional soldier who’d made colonel in the French army before joining the Continentals as his next career move. Washington wasn’t having it. To make Conway a major general, he told Congress’s president, Richard Henry Lee, “will be as unfortunate a measure as ever was adopted,” for “General Conway’s merit . . . exists more in his own imagination than in reality.” If Congress jumped Conway over more senior generals, they would quit, said Washington, and so would he. “I have been a Slave to the service,” he wrote, “but it will be impossible for me to be of further service, if such insuperable difficulties are thrown in my way.”73 Taking up the challenge for preeminence, Washington tersely informed Gates and Conway that he’d heard the line about “a weak General.”74

  Still, their shadowy machinations—the so-called “Conway Cabal,” aimed at goading Washington to resign, to make way for Gates—got preliminary results. Congress named Gates president of a strengthened Board of War, with some authority over the commander in chief. The board in turn appointed Conway to the new post of inspector general, with the promotion to major general Washington had opposed—which he learned when Conway arrived in his camp just after Christmas 1777 to exert his new powers. He could do no such thing until Congress sent official notification of his appointment, Washington told him, with frigid correctness. Henry Laurens, the new president of Congress, wrote Washington that Conway had complained of his cool reception. Surely, Washington pointedly replied, no one would expect him to welcome warmly a “man I deem my Enemy.” Forced to make a choice of whether Washington really was commander in chief or not, Congress backtracked, assigning Conway elsewhere, over his noisy objections and threats to resign.75

  Gates rose to command the army’s southern department and suffered a career-ending defeat at Camden, South Carolina, in August 1780, running from the battlefield for 180 miles before he stopped. “One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a half,” Alexander Hamilton snickered. “It does admirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life.” General Conway threatened to quit once too often, and Congress took him up on it. He also publicly denigrated Washington once too often, and Philadelphia Associators commander Cadwalader challenged him to a duel, shooting him in the face and snapping, “I have stopped the damned rascal’s lying anyway.” But Conway didn’t die; he painfully recovered and went back to France. And in his brush with death, he clearly reexamined his own life. “I find myself just able to hold the pen during a few minutes, and take this opportunity of expressing my sincere grief for having done, written, or said anything disagreeable to Your Excellency,”
he wrote Washington on the eve of his departure. “You are, in my eyes, the great and the good man. May you long enjoy the love, veneration, and esteem of these states whose liberties you have asserted by your virtues.”76

  THE THEORY OF an insurgency is simple: hold off the enemy, harry him, outlast him. The practice is brutal. Endurance and fortitude may seem passive virtues, but they take a huge effort of active will. Just before Christmas 1777, Washington led his troops into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. And then, for the next three years, he and his men plumbed the meaning of waiting out the enemy.

  He had planned to spread his winter quarters widely, for better forage and sanitation, but Congress wanted the army pressed close to Philadelphia as a buffer against the British, who were occupying that city in comfort and even luxury: local Loyalists gave balls and dinners for wellborn British officers, and their daughters flirted with them, while General Howe dallied with his “flashing blonde” mistress, wife of an extra-loyal Loyalist.77 So Washington had his soldiers build a village of more than 2,000 earthen-floored log huts, each fourteen feet by sixteen and sleeping a dozen men in bunks three tiers high. To his volunteer aide-de-camp, the Marquis de Lafayette, the hovels seemed “scarcely gayer than dungeon cells.”78

  Life there was no gayer. “For some days past, there has been little less, than a famine in camp,” Washington wrote in February 1778. “A part of the army has been a week without any kind of flesh, and the rest three or four days.”79 They dined, one soldier said, on “a leg of nothing,” and they sang a song that went, “No bread, no soldier.”80 Two months later, Washington could only marvel at their fortitude. “To see Men without Cloathes to cover their nakedness, without Blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet, and almost as often without Provisions as with; Marching through frost and Snow, and at Christmas taking up their Winter Quarters within a day’s march of the enemy, without a House or Hutt to cover them till they could be built and submitting to it without a murmer, is a mark of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be parallel’d.”81