Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

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  CONTENTS

  A Note to Readers

  Prologue

  ♦ PART I

  CHAPTER ONE: A Sprig of Green

  CHAPTER TWO: To Crown the Brave

  CHAPTER THREE: The French Connection

  CHAPTER FOUR: Burned Forges

  CHAPTER FIVE: Fix Bayonets

  CHAPTER SIX: A Perfect Scribe

  CHAPTER SEVEN: A Bloody Day

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Idealist

  CHAPTER NINE: An Eerie Foreboding

  CHAPTER TEN: Blood on the Delaware

  ♦ PART II

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Relics of an Army

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Chaos in the East

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Trenton Redux?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Starve, Dissolve, or Disperse

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Best Answer to Calumny

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Integration

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Firecakes and Cold Water

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Civil War

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: An American Army

  CHAPTER TWENTY: “Howe’s Players”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Franklin’s Miracle

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: “Those Dear Raggedy Continentals”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Political Maestro

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Martha

  ♦ PART III

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Prussian Spring

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: The Rains Never Cease

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: A Trim Reckoning

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: A Rumor of War

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: “Long Live the King of France”

  CHAPTER THIRTY: The Modern Cato

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Knights and Fair Maidens

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: The Gauntlet Thrown

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: “You Damned Poltroon”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: “So Superb a Man”

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  For Ellen Drury Whitehurst

  For Leslie Reingold

  A NOTE TO READERS

  Eighteenth-century written English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, capitalized nouns erupting in the middle of sentences, and multiple spellings of the same word, all of which did not become standardized until comparatively recently.

  Throughout the following text we have endeavored to present to readers the voluminous writings of our characters precisely as they themselves put those words to paper.

  PROLOGUE

  His troops had never seen George Washington so angry. His Excellency, as most of them called him, had always been the most composed soldier on the battlefield. But on this sweltering late June morning in 1778 the commander in chief of the Continental Army could not mask his fury.

  He reined in his great white charger and trembled with rage. Rising in his stirrups, he towered over his second in command Gen. Charles Lee, the man he had charged with leading the attack. “What is the meaning of this, sir? I demand to know the meaning of this disorder and confusion!”

  Nearly two years to the day since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the fate of the American cause lay uncertain, all because the officer cowering before Washington had panicked and ordered a premature retreat. In a sense Washington blamed himself. General Lee had not wanted the assignment in the first place. He should have followed his instincts and left the Marquis de Lafayette in command. Lafayette had been by his side at Valley Forge, had witnessed and absorbed the esprit of the troops who had survived the horrors of that deadly winter. Valley Forge had been the crucible they had all come through together, the very reason the forces of the nascent United States were now poised to alter the course of the revolution. And was that same army now about to be destroyed because of one man’s incompetence and lack of faith?

  Charles Lee, dust-covered and dazed, gazed up at his superior. His eyes were dull, and his face wore the gray pallor of defeat. “Sir?” he stammered. “Sir?” The words were nearly unintelligible. He could find no others. Washington dismissed him and spurred his own horse forward.

  As he’d approached the rolling green hills and swampy culverts surrounding the small New Jersey village of Monmouth Court House, an astonished Washington had demanded of each brigade and regimental commander he encountered to know why his unit was falling back. None could give a coherent answer, other than that Gen. Lee had ordered it. Now, as Washington galloped up and down the lines before his weary and bedraggled soldiery, the determination on his face was evident. Those who witnessed it would never forget it. “A gallant example animating his forces,” one veteran artillery officer later recalled.

  Less than a mile to the east, 10,000 elite British troops had shed their packs, fixed bayonets, and were driving hard in counterattack. The British generals Henry Clinton and Charles Cornwallis could hardly believe their good fortune. After 12 months of a stalemated Philadelphia campaign, here was an opportunity to crush the colonial rebellion. If past was prologue, the mere sight of an endless wall of British “cold steel” would send the Continental rabble fleeing in disarray. A glorious rout would restore the transatlantic equilibrium. King George III would be ecstatic.

  Washington knew otherwise. The hellish winter at Valley Forge had taught him so. He and his army had not endured the mud and blood of that winter encampment only to be turned back now. Half hidden in the smoke and cinders of battle, he ascended a rise and gathered about him the remnants of his exhausted army. It was the critical juncture of the war, and the tall Virginian exuded a sense of urgency and inspiration. Thirsty men who had wilted in the hundred-degree heat rose to their feet in anticipation.

  “Will you fight?” Washington cried. “Will you fight?” The survivors of Valley Forge responded with three thunderous cheers that reverberated across the ridgeline. Lafayette, riding with Alexander Hamilton beside the commander in chief, was overwhelmed. “His presence,” the young Frenchman wrote, “seemed to arrest fate with a single glance.”

  The skies darkened with cannon shot just as Washington raised his sword and pointed it toward the approaching sea of red. He was about to spur his horse again when Hamilton jumped from his own steed and shouted, “We are betrayed, and the moment has arrived when every true friend of America and her cause must be ready to die in their defense!”

  Washington, his aristocratic reserve regained, replied in a calm voice. “Colonel Hamilton,” he said, “get back on your horse.”

  PART I

  The Enemy were routed in the greatest Confusion several Miles, we pass’d thro their Encampments & took some pieces of Cannon, in short we were flatter’d with every appearance of a most glorious & decisive Action when to my great surprize Our Men began to give way, which when the Line was once broke became pretty General & could not with our utmost Exertions be prevented & the only thing left was to draw them off in the best manner we could.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON TO GEN. ISRAEL PUTNAM, OCTOBER 8, 1777

  George Washington’s experiences—both good and bad—as a young officer in the Virginia militia fighting alongside British forces in the
French and Indian War served him well as commander of the American forces.

  ONE

  A SPRIG OF GREEN

  They marched in parade formation through the heart of Philadelphia, 12,000 strong. Down Front Street and up Chestnut Street they came, the heroes of Trenton and Princeton, the survivors of Long Island and Harlem Heights and White Plains, and they constituted a panoply foreshadowing the diversity that would define a future nation. The Grand Army, they were called: Irishmen, Germans, and Poles; French and disaffected Brits and Scots; a company of African American freemen, all now newly minted Americans. A “multiplicity of interests,” as James Madison would call them, forging a distinct national identity. Every man wore a sprig of greenery affixed to his hat or woven through his hair. It was a symbol of hope and victory.

  At their head, astride his white Arabian standing 16 hands high, rode the 45-year-old George Washington, his russet hair liberally powdered to look like a wig, pulled back into a queue and held in place by a black silk ribbon. In his elegant blue-and-buff uniform, the strapping Washington was a majestic and commanding figure, graceful to the point where contemporaries commented on his fluid dancing skills. But mounted, with his polished silver spurs girding knee-high black riding boots, he projected the powerful impression of martial virility itself. Six feet two inches tall, he had strong, narrow shoulders set atop a broad chest that flared out to a lifelong horseman’s wide hips and muscled thighs. But it was his hands that caught one’s attention—large and sinewy planter’s hands strong enough to crack hickory nuts.

  Washington was the centripetal force to which the soldiers parading through Philadelphia had each been drawn. Despite his imposing carriage, however, it was the general’s melancholy blue eyes with their flecks of gray that hinted at the merest trace of self-doubt. Those eyes, set deep in his craggy, sunburned face, flashed the tale of a man who, to paraphrase one historian, had constructed his own fierce stoicism to mask his combustible emotions and insecurities.

  The 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette was given the honor of riding beside Washington. He was famously soigné in his signature blue cocked hat and matching greatcoat with red facing, and his gold-braided epaulets bounced to the rise and fall of his cantering sorrel over the river cobblestones. Hard on the duo’s heels in their own long officers’ coats, boots shined to a luster and spurs jangling, came the indispensable polymath Alexander Hamilton—who at 22 had already proved his mettle on battlefields from White Plains to Princeton—and the leonine John Laurens, also 22, the son of the South Carolina delegate Henry Laurens, soon to succeed John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress. These three adoring aides constituted what the childless Washington deemed a veritable troika of surrogate sons. They each returned his affection.

  It was a feverish Sunday, August 24, 1777, almost 26 months since Washington had been culled from the Virginia delegation to the First Continental Congress and commissioned general and commander in chief of the army of the united colonies: a wealthy southern plantation owner tabbed to lead a revolution. Now, this morning, the flood tide of troops stepping smartly through Philadelphia’s city center to the beat of fife and drum had been transformed from the “lower class” militiamen whom Washington once described as exhibiting “an unaccountable kind of stupidity” into a force for freedom. Most of the soldiers remained shabbily clad in motley vestments. Washington, never a man for spontaneity, had ordered the green sprigs in order to provide some uniformity to the Continentals’ discrepant apparel. Despite their dishabille, they nonetheless awed the 40,000 inhabitants of the new nation’s capital as they made for the floating bridge spanning the Schuylkill River that would carry them to their new camp across the water in Darby, Pennsylvania.

  By 1777, Philadelphia stretched six blocks deep for two miles along the larger Delaware River, and for two solid hours the city’s residents gaped from windows, verandas, and rooftops or crowded out of doorways to line the muddy wooden curbs to view the passing troops. The spectators included members of the Continental Congress, whose delegates packed the redbrick bell tower of the statehouse Lafayette would one day dub Independence Hall. With each passing regiment rose a great huzzah for the men from Delaware and New Jersey and New York, from Connecticut and Massachusetts and New Hampshire, from Maryland and North Carolina and Virginia. The crowd saved their loudest cheers for their fellow Pennsylvanians and, of course, for the commander in chief himself.

  Washington had ordered the army’s wagons and excess horses kept out of view during the promenade. The baggage train, which suggested the true nature of his ill-provisioned force, was to take a roundabout route to the new encampment. Given the hundreds of local soldiers under his command, Washington also warned of a punishment of 39 lashes to anyone who abandoned the parade route prematurely to visit with family and friends. Despite his efforts, he could not prevent the army’s camp followers, perhaps 400 women and children, from pouring into the city behind the troops, “chattering and yelling in sluttish shrills as they went, and spitting in the gutters” below the rented rooms on Market Street where Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence.

  Still, the procession went off almost precisely as Washington had choreographed it, a splendid demonstration designed to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of the city’s large Loyalist community. Although the commander in chief was not an overly religious man, even he may have felt the hand of divine intervention when the previous night’s downpour had ceased abruptly at dawn and left the city’s streets washed clean. Only his inner circle was aware that today’s spic-and-span pageantry was mostly a bluff. For the British were coming. Soon. With a battle-tested force far greater than the number of Continental Army regulars. And they intended to take this city.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Since losing a series of battles and being driven from New York the previous summer, Washington and his closest advisers had been uncharacteristically flummoxed by General Sir William Howe, who led the 30,000-strong British expeditionary force in North America. Throughout the spring and summer of 1777, Howe had orchestrated a series of feints that forced Washington into exaggerated countermeasures. He had dispatched companies of his exhausted Continentals from their camp in Morristown, New Jersey, through rainstorms and searing heat as far north as the Hudson Highlands and as far south as the lower Delaware River. Each expedition was for naught, as Howe always pulled his troops back to New York before the Americans arrived. This was all a part of the British commander’s scheme; he was in no hurry to crush the rebels just yet. His superiors in Britain, particularly his friend King George III, hoped that the massive show of British force would bring the colonies to their senses and, subsequently, to the bargaining table.

  In period paintings the 48-year-old Gen. Howe bore an eerie likeness to Washington, most notably in his erect bearing, high forehead, and aristocratic gaze, which was somewhat offset by a set of uneven and probably false teeth that struck observers as similar to the perforations on a stamp. Contemporary descriptions of the general were less kind than his portrait artists, with one young American who met him describing “a large portly man, of coarse features [who] appeared to have lost his teeth, as his mouth had fallen in.” At least his similarity to the denture-wearing American commander in chief rings true.

  Howe and his older brother Adm. Lord Richard “Black Dick” Howe, commander of the British fleet in America, were scions of an aristocratic family that had attained its peerage a century earlier under the Dutch-born “King Billy” III. Both had attended Eton. The admiral’s taciturn demeanor and dusky complexion had earned him his nickname, and the general’s skin tone was also of a darker hue than that of most contemporary Englishmen. The younger Howe was fond of both gambling and whoring—he compensated his American mistress’s husband with a job as a prison commissioner. He had nonetheless earned his stars by showing valor on the front lines during the Seven Year’s War—what the American colonists called the French and Indian War—and, later, during his costly vic
tory at Bunker Hill. His energy and courage continued to endear him to his troops, who were the most highly trained in North America. Yet close observers also noted that the general “lacked the confidence, the sense of responsibility, and the professional dedication that distinguished” his older brother the admiral.

  After the British general John Burgoyne’s staggering recapture of upstate New York’s Fort Ticonderoga in early July, Washington was nearly certain that Howe would move north to join Burgoyne to control the Hudson River and effectively cut off the more rebellious New England colonies from the rest of the country.I Since then, however, the Continental spy network in New York had increasingly reported that the Howe brothers were secretly mustering pilots familiar with the Delaware River. If these communiqués proved true, common sense dictated only one target—the British were aiming for Philadelphia, the largest city in North America and home to the Continental Congress. The morale-breaking display of the American delegates fleeing before a conquering enemy army was what Washington had come to prevent.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  In late July Gen. Howe had teased Washington and his intelligence officers yet again when he loaded 17,000 of his British regulars and German mercenaries onto his brother’s fleet of 228 ships—the largest flotilla to ever ply American waters—and sailed from Sandy Hook, New Jersey.II Their destination was unclear. It was not lost on the Americans that Adm. Howe, so attuned to the world’s tides that he was known as “the human sea chantey,” had pioneered Britain’s naval expertise in amphibious landings, and rumors abounded. One report had the Howes tacking toward occupied Rhode Island in an attempt to retake Boston, the city they had been driven from 17 months earlier. Another had them sailing south to open up a new front below Virginia. General George Weedon, Washington’s fellow Virginian and longtime lieutenant, fretted that the Continentals were “in the dark with regard to [the enemy’s] designs.”