Third, Washington’s plan for the attack on Trenton, like most of his tactical schemes, was excessively intricate, calling for a carefully timed four-pronged assault. Three of the four American units never made it across the river, confronting Washington with the decision to proceed with questionable resources or abandon the attack. He chose to run the risk, figuring that the American cause was so desperate that boldness ran fewer risks than caution. It was an all-or-nothing wager, and he won it.36
A week later he did it again at Princeton. Embarrassed at the unexpected defeat at Trenton, the British sent General Charles Cornwallis with a superior force to attack Washington’s army encamped at Trenton. But Washington learned of the planned attack and quietly slipped away in the night, marching his six thousand troops toward Princeton, where Cornwallis’s rear guard was stationed. Again the British were surprised, this time in a more conventional battle with several artillery exchanges and bayonet charges.
Sighting: January 3, 1777
The Pennsylvania militia have just broken in the face of heavy musket fire and grape shot. Suddenly, Washington appears among them, urging them to rally and form a line behind him. A detachment of New England Continentals joins the line, which first holds and then begins to move forward with Washington front-and-center astride his white English charger. The British troops are placed behind a fence at the crest of a hill. Within fifty yards bullets begin to whistle and men in the front of the American line begin to drop. At thirty yards Washington orders a halt and both sides exchange volleys simultaneously. An aide, Colonel Edward Fitzgerald, covers his face with his hat, certain that his commander, so conspicuous a target, was cut down. But while men on both sides of him have fallen, Washington remains atop his horse, untouched. He turns toward Fitzgerald, takes his hand, and says: “Away my dear Colonel, and bring up the troops. The day is ours.” And it was.37
The Trenton-Princeton combination did not inflict serious military damage on the British, but it did force Howe to rethink his troop deployments in New Jersey, and, most importantly, it had a massive psychological effect on American public opinion. What had appeared to be a lost cause now enjoyed a new lease on life. The two actions also served as defiant gestures by Washington himself that fight was still in him. Having made that point, though his aggressive instincts would remain a dangerous liability, he never again felt it necessary to risk his entire army in one battle. It was as if he had successfully answered the challenge to duel, and now could afford to adopt a more defensive strategy without worrying about his personal honor and reputation. He also began to realize that the way to win the war was not to lose it.
THE FABIAN CHOICE
EVEN BEFORE HE entered his winter quarters at Morristown, Washington apprised Hancock that his only non-negotiable request, verging on a demand, was for “a permanent standing army” which he would have total power to shape into the kind of hard and sharp instrument necessary to persevere in a long war. “It may be said, that this is an application for powers, that are too dangerous to be intrusted,” he acknowledged. “I can only add, that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and with truth declare, that I have no lust for power but wish with as much fervency as any man upon this wide extended Continent for an Opportunity of turning the Sword into a ploughshare.” The Continental Congress granted his request for a temporary delegation of dictatorial power—the situation truly was desperate, and they had no alternative—but its own limited power over the states to fill the manpower quotas meant that Hancock’s strong expressions of support, plus the bounties offered for volunteers who served three-year enlistments, remained hopeful wishes that never quite came true. “It is certainly astonishing and will hardly be credited hereafter,” wrote one of Washington’s in-laws, “that the most deserving, the most favorite General of the 13 united American States, should be left by them, with only about 2500 men, to support the most important Cause that mankind ever engaged in agst the whole Power of British Tyranny.” Actually, as enlistments expired in January 1777, Washington’s army probably numbered about three thousand, though he felt obliged to conceal the real number, lest the British realize that a winter campaign would surely end the war, almost by default. Washington spent much of the winter waiting to see if enough new recruits would show up to form an army capable of a spring campaign.38
He made two important decisions at Morristown. First, he recognized that the smallpox problem required a more comprehensive solution. “If the Hospitals are in no better condition,” he told Hancock, “our Regiments will be reduced to Companies by the end of the Campaign, and those poor Wretches who escape with life, will either be scattered up and down the Country and not to be found, or if found, totally enervated and unfit for further duty.” Given his manpower difficulty, he could ill afford to see a quarter of his troops incapacitated, as had occurred in New York; or else, he warned, “we must look for Reinforcements to some other places than our own States,” presumably referring to the Kingdom of Heaven. In March 1777 he made inoculation mandatory and set up special hospitals in Philadelphia to implement the new policy.39
Second, less out of conviction than a realistic recognition of his limited resources, Washington came to accept the fact that he must adopt a more defensive strategy and fight a “War of Posts.” Also called a “Fabian strategy” after the Roman general Fabius Cunctator, who defeated the Carthaginians by withdrawing whenever his army’s fate was at risk, it was a shift in thinking that did not come naturally to Washington. A Fabian strategy, like guerrilla and terrorist strategies of the twentieth century, was the preferred approach of the weak. Washington did not believe that he was weak, and he thought of the Continental army as a projection of himself. He regarded battle as a summons to display one’s strength and courage; avoiding battle was akin to dishonorable behavior, like refusing to move forward in the face of musket and cannon fire. Nevertheless, he was now forced to face what he called “the melancholy Truths.” New York had demonstrated that the Continental army could not compete on equal terms with British regulars on the conventional battlefield; and given the reduced size of his current force, “it is impossible, at least very unlikely, that any effectual opposition can be given to the British Army with the Troops we have.” The most bitter and melancholy truth of all was that popular support for the war, the essential engine for producing new recruits, continued to sputter despite the Trenton and Princeton victories. (One French partisan of the cause claimed that “there is a hundred times more enthusiasm for the Revolution in any Paris café than in all the colonies together.”) In effect, he had no choice but to become an American Fabius, or else simply surrender.40
In late March 1777 he dispatched Nathanael Greene to brief the Continental Congress on his revised strategy. “I explained to the House your Excellency’s Ideas of the next Campaign,” Greene reported; “it appeared to be new to them.” The Congress was apparently taken aback, because a Fabian strategy meant that Washington did not intend to defend Philadelphia at all costs if Howe chose to make it his target. His highest priority was not to occupy or protect ground, but rather to harass Howe while preserving his army. Adams, writing from Philadelphia, assured Abigail that he was safe: “We are under no more apprehensions here than if the British Army was in the Crimea. Our Fabius will be slow, but sure.” Richard Henry Lee, another delegate in the Congress, informed Washington not to worry about defending Philadelphia: “Your Army Sir, feeble as it is, and the North river, are more tempting objects.”41
What Lee called the North River was another name for the Hudson. Lee’s assessment, in retrospect, was strategically correct: Howe should either have attempted to destroy Washington’s army, or he should have occupied the Hudson corridor, probably by joining up with General John Burgoyne’s army coming down from Lake Champlain. Each of these goals had decisive strategic implications. Instead, Howe decided to capture Philadelphia, which had symbolic but no strategic value, and he chose to launch his campaign in the most roundabout manner imaginable. R
ather than march overland across New Jersey, he loaded his army onto ships at Staten Island, sailed out into the Atlantic, and eventually circled back toward Philadelphia through the Chesapeake Bay. Befuddled by Howe’s summer cruise, Adams joked that he “might as well imagine them gone round Cape horn into the South Seas to land at California.” If nothing else, Howe’s odd tactics thoroughly confused Washington, who needed to keep his troops ready to move quickly either toward the Hudson or toward Philadelphia, contingent on where the winds carried Howe. By August 1777, once it was clear that Howe’s army was coming up from the south toward Philadelphia, Washington entered his Fabian phase.42
The orders issued from headquarters continued to reflect the old patriotic rhetoric and the old Washington preference for decisive and aggressive action: “Now is the time for our most strenuous exertions—One bold stroke will free the land from rapine devastations and burnings, and female innocence from brutal lust and violence. . . . The eyes of all America, and of Europe are turned upon us, as on those on whom the event of the war is to be determined.” His personal correspondence also exhibited his reflexive urge to throw caution to the winds and engage Howe without fear and without constraints: “I shall take every measure in my power to defend it [Philadelphia],” he wrote to one worried city official, “and hope you will agree with me that the only effectual Method will be to oppose Gen. Howe with our whole united Force.” But in all the councils of war his generals, especially Greene and Knox, kept reminding him—and one senses that they had to keep reminding him—that preserving the Continental army was a higher priority than protecting Philadelphia. The lion had to become the fox.43
The first battle occurred at Brandywine Creek on September 11, 1777. Washington was outmaneuvered by Howe’s quite simple flanking tactic, which split the American defenders and created a complete rout. Howe subsequently claimed that the entire Continental army could have been destroyed but for the cover of darkness at the end, but that extravagant assessment failed to recognize that Washington had left himself an escape route once the battle went badly. (It also failed to recognize the upside of the American troops’ failure to stand and fight; namely, they ran away very well.) British casualties totaled about six hundred, American nearly double that number. In the aftermath of what was clearly another British victory, Washington attributed the defeat to bad luck and claimed, in an eighteenth-century version of spin control, that American casualties were fewer than the enemy’s, a falsehood that he probably justified as a public service to the wavering cause. Brandywine reinforced two unattractive facts: first, that the superior discipline of British regulars made them masters of the battlefield unless vastly outnumbered; and second, that Washington’s inexperience at managing his force on a large battlefield beyond his visual control virtually guaranteed that he would be outgeneralled by Howe.44
The second battle occurred at Germantown on October 4. A textbook illustration of the phrase “the fog of war,” Germantown was a near victory for Washington that was transformed into a defeat when, at a crucial moment in the battle, American troops fired on each other amidst dense fog and smoke, thereby permitting the British to regroup. Washington’s original attack plan was an excessively intricate four-pronged scheme that proved impossible to coordinate, especially during the night march toward the British lines. The attack was intended to be a complete surprise, but Howe was alerted to Washington’s plan at the last moment by Loyalists.
Sighting: October 4, 1777
With the battle in the balance, Washington has ridden forward with his staff to the sound of heavy musket fire. The American advance has stalled at a stone house, a sturdy two-and-a-half-story dwelling owned by Benjamin Chew, now occupied by over 100 British troops pouring a murderous fire from the windows. Washington asks his staff whether this formidable fortress should be by-passed or attacked. Henry Knox insists on the latter course (“we must not leave a castle in the rear”) and Washington defers to his judgment. Knox then directs four light cannons to fire on the house, but the cannon balls bounce off the stone walls. The heavy fog thickens, limiting visibility to a few yards and causing confused American troops to fire on one another. An officer volunteers to go forward under a white flag to propose terms of surrender to the defenders, but they shoot him down in the foggy confusion. Washington supervises several assaults on the house, all futile. The Chew house is never taken, the American advance is stalled, perhaps fatally. After-action reports agree on two points: the fortress should have been by-passed; and seventy-five American bodies lay bayoneted in the doorways and windowsills, while the interior walls, splattered with blood, resembled a slaughter house.45
At the end of the battle the British still held the field, and American casualties, about one thousand, doubled those on the British side. Nevertheless, Washington insisted that the battle could easily have gone the other way. The troops had fought valiantly, exposing the British army as “not that Invincible Body of Men which many suppose them to be.” In his correspondence afterward, he again distorted the casualty lists to exaggerate the American achievement and, in effect, claimed victory. He even adopted the posture of the victorious commander toward Howe, making a point of returning Howe’s dog, which had been found wandering the battlefield searching for his master. A grimmer version of Germantown as an example of strategic victory came from Thomas McKean, a prominent Pennsylvania lawyer and ardent patriot: “If your Excellency attacks & disables a thousand of the Enemy a week, and are constantly reinforced equal to the numbers you lose, as I trust you will, You must soon prove triumphantly victorious, and get the game, tho’ you should not throw sixes,” presumably meaning risk and lose your entire army in the process.46
As Washington was learning to play his new role as a somewhat aggressive fox, the pivotal battle of the war—actually a series of battles—was being waged north of Albany. Throughout the summer of 1777, Washington received regular reports about the steady progress of General John Burgoyne’s army as it moved down from Canada, presumably for a rendezvous with Howe somewhere along the Hudson corridor. Howe’s inexplicable decision to sail south toward the Chesapeake takes on truly bizarre status in the larger strategic context, since it left Burgoyne’s force of eight thousand troops marooned in a sea of hostile militia from western New England, which rallied by the thousands to reinforce the contingent of Continentals commanded by Horatio Gates. Washington sent Benedict Arnold, his most daring and battle-tested general, along with Daniel Morgan’s brigade of sharpshooters, his elite infantry unit, to assist Gates, but the Battle of Saratoga became a textbook example of the decisive role that swarming militia could play when teamed effectively with regulars. (It was also one of the few occasions in the war when militia functioned according to the Minuteman ideal, prompting Washington to observe that he could have obliterated Howe’s army outside Philadelphia if New Jersey and Pennsylvania militia had rallied with equivalent zeal.) The outcome was devastating to British presumptions of inevitable victory. On October 17, Burgoyne surrendered the surviving remnant of his battered army, nearly six thousand men.47
Saratoga radiated shock waves as far as London and Paris, causing the British ministry to consider getting out of the war and the French government to consider getting in. Tremors were also felt within the Continental Congress, where the stupendous success at Saratoga cast Gates’s star in ascendance and invited behind-the-scenes comparisons with Washington’s failure to prevent Howe’s capture of America’s capital city. The discrepancy was not lost on Washington, who found it difficult to acknowledge that he had played only a minor role in America’s greatest victory of the war. His congratulatory letter to Gates ended on a sour note: “I cannot but regret,” he wrote Gates, “that a matter of such magnitude and so interesting to our General Operations, should have reached me by report only,” meaning that Gates should have sent a letter under his own signature. Gates was also informed that Washington was sending one of his most trusted aides, Alexander Hamilton, to Albany in order to detach the bulk o
f Gates’s force and bring it down to Pennsylvania to join “the Main Army” under his direct command. Saratoga, in short, was a splendid victory, but it must not encourage anyone, including Gates himself, to forget who was the commander in chief.48
The truth was that Saratoga unleashed a whispering campaign against Washington that had been simmering beneath the surface ever since the debacle at Fort Washington. The larger truth was that criticism of Washington could only take the form of whispers, since his transcendent status as “His Excellency” levitated above all political squabbles, making direct criticism almost sacrilegious. Nevertheless, there were audible murmurings in the corridors of the Continental Congress, asking how such a supposedly brilliant general could lose so many battles, the last one permitting capture of America’s capital city. Benjamin Rush, who had once championed Washington’s distinctive status as quasi-king, now wondered out loud whether such power was compatible with republican principles. Most of the criticism was more muted. John Adams offered the shrewdest assessment: “Now we can allow a certain Citizen to be wise, virtuous, and good, without thinking him a Deity or a saviour.”49
Within the army anti-Washington sentiment was especially virulent among the small but politically influential group of French officers who had been promised high rank by members of the Congress anxious to encourage a Franco-American alliance. As a general rule, these French claimants were unqualified in all areas except their own exhaggerated sense of superiority. And it was invariably Washington who was forced to inform them that neither the promises made nor their inflated military credentials would suffice to qualify them as generals. One of the most arrogant and irritating of the group, Philippe Du Condray, ended his protests dramatically by spurring his horse onto a ferry on the Schuylkill River, then drowning when the horse, which could swim much better than Du Condray, kept going out the other end of the ferry. But the most troublesome protester was Thomas Conway, an Irishman by birth who had risen to the rank of colonel in the French army. Washington had described Conway’s proposed promotion to general as “as unfortunate a measure as ever was adopted,” and Conway himself as a man whose “importance in the Army, exists more in his imagination than in reality.”50
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