Conway did not take kindly to such assessments. What came to be called the “Conway Cabal” was more a gossip network involving a handful of disgruntled players within the Congress and the army that questioned Washington’s judgment than it was a full-fledged conspiracy to have him replaced, presumably with Gates. Once Washington let it be known that his own network of informants kept him fully apprised of the loose talk behind the scenes, both Conway and Gates fell all over themselves disclaiming any malevolent intentions and insisting on their total loyalty to him and to the cause. If Conway’s gossip campaign had the possibility to grow into a more serious challenge to Washington’s authority, or to the assumption that “His Excellency” and the cause were synonymous, this quickly evaporated with Washington’s deft exposure of the not-so-secret conversations. For their part, Conway and Gates had learned that questioning Washington’s judgment, and implicitly his unique authority, was akin to purchasing a one-way ticket to the sidelines, which, in the end, is where both of them landed.51
But the episode did generate more revealing reverberations within Washington’s own mind. Because the Fabian role had never rested comfortably alongside his own more aggressive instincts, the accusation that he should have been able to prevent the capture of Philadelphia reinforced his own sense of failure at Brandywine and Germantown. The whisperings in the corridors, in other words, echoed the whispering in his own head and his honor-driven belief that the refusal to engage Howe’s army in one all-or-nothing battle was somehow a betrayal of his personal reputation. He kept asking his staff to formulate plans for one more engagement, presumably victorious, that would then permit him to take his depleted and frazzled army, a third of whom did not have shoes, into winter quarters. The strategic decision to make the survival of the Continental army the highest priority, the realization that he must fight a protracted defensive war, remained at odds with his own more decisive temperament. Greene tried to remind him that he really had no choice: “your Excellency has the choice of but two things,” Greene advised, “to fight the Enemy without the least Prospect of Success . . . or remain inactive, & be the subject of Censure of an ignorant & impatient populace.” Knox chimed in with the same opinion: “But I believe there is not a single maxim in War that will justify a number of undisciplined troops attacking an equal number of disciplined troops strongly posed in redoubts and having a strong city in their rear such as Philadelphia.”52
The clear lesson of Brandywine and Germantown, Greene argued, was that the Continental army was no match for Howe’s regulars. Let the gossipmongers in the Congress, all blissfully ignorant of this unattractive truth, persist in their naive chatter and their veiled preference for another Gates-like victory. Washington’s greatest responsibility was to ignore such critics. He must also ignore those voices in his head that regarded the presence of Howe’s army in Philadelphia as a standing challenge to his reputation: “I wish that it was in our power to give that Army some capital wound—the reputation of the Army and the happiness of the country loudly calls for it—but in consulting our wishes rather than our reason, we may be hurried by an impatience to attempt something splendid into inextricable difficulties.” Washington’s highest duty was not to answer his critics or satisfy his sense of personal honor, but rather to win the war.53
He knew that Greene was right, but he could not resist the memory of the Trenton-Princeton successes of the previous winter and kept searching for the opportunity to repeat that moment of glory in order to end the current campaign on a triumphant note. Once again, Greene warned him against entangling his personal agenda with the strategic imperatives or his public responsibilities as commander in chief. “The successes of last winter,” Greene observed, “were brilliant and attended with the most happy consequences in changing the complexion of the times,” but they were really only psychological victories, and “if the bills of mortality were to be consulted, I fancy . . . we were no great gainers by those operations.” He concluded with another lecture:
Let us consider the consequences that will result from a disappointment in a measure of this nature—In the first place it will be attended with a vast expence and the loss of many lives to no valuable purpose—it will prove a great obstruction to the recruiting service and a defeat will give a general alarm and spread universal discontent throughout the continent—It will expose the weakness of the militia to the enemy and not only them but to all europe who now consider them much more formidable than they really are.54
It took every ounce of Washington’s legendary self-control to hear and accept Greene’s counsel, which ran against his grain, as well as his wounded pride at being the butt of unofficial criticism. But eventually he embraced Greene’s realistic appraisal as his own. This is one of several moments in Washington’s career when his decision not to act merits special recognition, since another major engagement with Howe outside Philadelphia risked the existence of the Continental army. It also marks the moment when Washington, who had been struggling with the unpalatable idea for over a year, finally and fully accepted his Fabian role, emotionally as well as rationally, along with the recognition that it would be a protracted war in which the preservation of the Continental army was the priority. These decisions, in turn, completed his transformation into a public figure whose personal convictions must be suppressed and rendered subordinate to his higher calling as an agent of history, which in this case meant that winning the war was more important than being himself. On December 17, the General Orders announced the end of the campaign and the decision to move the army into winter quarters near a previously obscure location in Pennsylvania called Valley Forge. The orders declared that “He himself,” meaning Washington, “will share in the hardship and partake in every inconvenience.” This, it turned out, was not really true. It was true, however, that the man and the cause were now completely synonymous, not just in the public mind, but in Washington’s as well.55
CHAPTER FOUR
Destiny’s Child
LOOKING BACK from the privileged perspective of the present, American victory in the War of Independence became inevitable after William Howe missed his chance to destroy Washington’s army in 1776, and then the disastrous British defeat at Saratoga the following year prompted France to enter the conflict on the American side. Space and time, so the story goes, then became the inexorable allies of independence, both swallowing up and wearing down British military pretensions. The decision by the British ministry to adopt a southern strategy in 1778–79 proved a futile effort, which bogged down in the Carolina swamps after a series of tactical British victories that, thanks to the inspired leadership of Nathanael Greene, added up to strategic defeat in a savage war of attrition. Eventually, Lord Cornwallis found his battered army marooned in the Yorktown peninsula, where Washington, with the invaluable assistance of the French fleet, delivered the decisive blow he had been dreaming about for six long years.
While this version of the Revolutionary War possesses all the seductive charm of a great adventure story with a happy ending, at least for the American side, it is not one that Washington himself would have recognized or endorsed. The problem is not simply that what we might call “hindsight history” glides smoothly toward preordained conclusions, whereas Washington was traveling a bumpy road toward an uncertain destination; the major problem is the presumption that time was an unalloyed American asset. In fact, to the extent that waging war was about raising money and men, time was on the British side, because the London government had developed, during the course of the eighteenth century, the most powerful and efficient machine for waging war in the world, fully capable of projecting and sustaining its power almost indefinitely.1
When Washington took his army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, on the other hand, the Continental Congress lacked the authority to supply either money or men, popular support for the war continued to decline, and few of the state governments were prepared to impose taxes on their residents or meet their enlistment quotas. “I am now
convinced beyond a doubt,” Washington wrote to Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress, “that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in that line, this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve—dissolve—or disperse.” The unpalatable and ironic truth was that the institutions that had alienated American colonists from the empire—Parliament’s taxing power and a well-equipped standing army—gave the British a significant advantage in a protracted war.2
How, then, did the improbable become the inevitable? Washington’s fullest answer, composed soon after victory was assured, suggested that historians would have a difficult time explaining the triumph.
If Historiographers should be hardy enough to fill the page of History with the advantages that have been gained with unequal numbers (on the part of America) in the cause of this contest, and attempt to relate the distressing circumstances under which they have been obtained, it is more than probable that Posterity will bestow on their labors the epithet and marks of fiction; for it will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed for eight years in Country could be baffled . . . by numbers infinitely less, composed of Men oftentimes half starved; always in Rags, without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress which human nature is capable of undergoing.3
More succinctly, Washington also observed that the war was won “by a concatenation of causes” which had never occurred before in human history, and which “in all probability at no time, or under any Circumstance, will combine again.” In the midst of the bedeviling concatenations, he called attention to one abiding core of perseverance, the officers and soldiers of the Continental army, whose sacrifices would never be fully understood or appreciated. He did not mention the other abiding presence—modesty forbade it.4
The crucial event, where the abiding pattern first emerged, was not Saratoga but Valley Forge. The heroes were not the mass of ordinary citizens, but rather a pathetically small collection of marginal men, the common soldiers of the Continental army. The main theme was not romantic but paradoxical; namely, the unattractive but irrefutable fact that the War of Independence had only been won by defying many of the values the American Revolution claimed to stand for. And the lesson Washington drew from that experience, learned not from books but from struggling on a day-by-day basis with its implications, was that the meaning of the American Revolution, at least as he understood it, had been transformed during the course of the war into a shape that neither he nor anyone else had foreseen at the start. It was a war not just for independence, but also for nationhood.
BLOOD ON THE SNOW
THE MOST GRAPHIC piece of visual evidence about the legendary winter at Valley Forge happens to be true. No less a source than Washington himself described the shoeless soldiers tracking blood on the snow. “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,” he recalled, “is a mark of Patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be parallel’d.” Most of the horses died from starvation or exposure, and their decaying carcasses filled the air with a stench that joined with the blood in the snow to create sensory scenes that Washington never forgot. When other leading members of the revolutionary generation subsequently spoke or wrote about the importance of virtue during the American Revolution, they invariably described a classical ideal enshrined in political treatises by prominent philosophers like Montesquieu. Washington’s understanding of virtue was more palpable and primal, shaped by direct exposure to scenes of mass suffering that, as he put it, “will not be credited but by those who have been spectators.” Nearly a century later, when Abraham Lincoln referred in his first inaugural to those “mystic chords of memory” that linked his Civil War generation with those predecessors who had created the American republic, the haunting imagery suggested a shared political idea. Washington’s memory was less mystic but equally haunting; it was men shedding blood.5
The men shedding most of the blood at Valley Forge, and throughout the remaining years of the war, came from the lowest rung of American society. “When men are irritated, and the Passions inflamed,” Washington observed somewhat caustically, “they fly hastily and chearfully to Arms.” Those exuberant days of popular enthusiasm for the war were now gone forever, as were the enlistments by yeoman farmers and men of “the middling sort” who had manned the barricades during the Boston siege. Their places in the ranks of the Continental army were now filled by indentured servants, former slaves, landless sons, and recent immigrants from Ireland and England. These were the young men, usually between fifteen and twenty-five years of age, who lived in the makeshift log huts at Valley Forge and signed on “for the duration” of the war because, in most cases, they had no brighter prospects.6
Washington harbored no romantic illusions about these ordinary soldiers, claiming that “to expect, among such People, as comprise the bulk of an Army, that they are influenced by any other principles than those of Interest, is to look for what never did, and I fear never will happen.” He was prepared to string them up if they attempted to desert or fell asleep on sentinel duty, and order one hundred lashes to their bare backs for minor infractions. For their part, the soldiery (as he called them) routinely defied regulations about hair length and decorated their uniforms with ribbons, feathers, and fur in order to make the very term “uniform” a standing joke. Despite the distance between them, which Washington regarded as an accurate reflection of the social hierarchy that God intended and all his experience as a Virginia planter-aristocrat confirmed, the general and his troops enjoyed a mutual sense of admiration. The soldiers were known to chant the singsongy tune “War and Washington” so endlessly that visiting civilians complained of mental paralysis. And Washington not only saluted their silent suffering at Valley Forge but also recognized their staying power as the decisive factor in the eventual American victory.7
Given the potent (if latent) egalitarian convictions of the American Revolution, the camp culture at Valley Forge was richly ironic: a near-perfect embodiment of the Aristotelian hierarchy—the one, the few, and the many. The enlisted men were obviously the many, a faceless multitude of castoffs that one soldier described, on the march, as “a cavalcade of wild beasts.” Washington was obviously the one, the singular figure whose birthday was about to be celebrated as a national holiday, like European monarchs, and who was first described in a Pennsylvania almanac for 1778 (albeit in German) as “The Father of His Country.” That left the officers as the designated few.8
During the Valley Forge encampment the officers of the Continental army began to assume the manners and trappings of a self-conscious American aristocracy. Their claim to elite status was not inherited bloodlines, though a few officers (i.e., Lord Stirling, Baron de Kalb) did affect full-fledged European titles. Their presumed superiority was based on their revolutionary credentials as the ultimate repository of commitment to the cause of American independence. They had come to see themselves—and Washington encouraged this perception—as the chosen few who preserved and protected the original ethos of 1775–76 after it had died out among the bulk of the American citizenry; they were the “band of brothers” that sustained the virtuous ideal amidst an increasingly corrupt and disinterested civilian society.
Whereas English aristocrats could rest comfortably in their privileged role—it was, after all, a socially sanctioned birthright—the officers at Valley Forge were constantly trying to prove they deserved their elite status. Washington spent countless hours overseeing questions of rank between officers who refused to serve under anyone they considered junior. Officers frequently demanded court-martials to answer hearsay accusations of negligence or cowardice bandied about at the campfires. General officers vied with each other for status by employing multiple servants to handle their horses and baggage. And in this honor-driven world of fragile egos, the ultimate recourse when one’s reputation was impugned was the
duel. Although dueling was officially illegal in the Continental army, it became commonplace at Valley Forge. (John Laurens felt the obligation to defend Washington’s honor against the libels of Thomas Conway, challenged him, and gained satisfaction by shooting Conway in the mouth.) As the soldiers shivered and starved in silence, their officers, who enjoyed more comfortable quarters and warmer clothing, made Valley Forge into a noisy arena for their personal pretensions.9
And if we think of Valley Forge as a stage, three men destined to have a significant impact on Washington’s career made their appearance on it at this time. The first was a young lieutenant attached to Daniel Morgan’s elite corps of Virginia sharpshooters named John Marshall. Even though he was recovering from a wound in the hand received at Brandywine, Marshall’s athletic prowess in footraces and jumping contests—he could supposedly leap over obstacles six feet high—caught the attention of the troops and earned him the nickname “Silverheels.” Though there is no record that Washington noticed him, Marshall certainly noticed Washington, and at Valley Forge began his lifelong role as the champion of Washington’s legacy in American history. Marshall wrote the definitive Washington biography of his time and subsequently imposed, for all time, Washington’s version of America’s original intentions in his landmark decisions as the nation’s preeminent jurist and most influential interpreter of the Constitution.10
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