Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  As a defense against the Royal Navy vessels advancing up the Delaware, Washington’s volunteer French military engineers had constructed a series of underwater obstructions known as chevaux-de-frise, or “Frisian Horses,” at various points along the river. These stockade-like rows of thick, iron-tipped wooden spears—employed during European wars since medieval times to impede cavalry charges—were weighted to the river bottom by heavy crates filled with rocks and designed to pierce the hulls of enemy craft. Washington did not have much faith in the contraptions. He wrote to a subordinate that “the idea of preventing ships from passing up & down rivers . . . has proved wrong . . . unless the water is narrow.” He was more confident in the string of riverside forts the Continentals occupied, including two strong redoubts on opposite banks south of Philadelphia at just such a “narrow” point in the river. The Continentals hoped that taken together, all these obstacles would prove to be an impassable choke point.

  Howe appeared to agree, and on August 23—the day before the Continental Army’s grand show of force in Philadelphia—reports reached Washington that the entire enemy squadron had reappeared and anchored off the capes of a northern inlet of Chesapeake Bay at the head of Maryland’s Elk River. Within days, Gen. Howe’s army had disembarked. This struck the Americans as an odd location from which to begin a march to capture a city over 50 miles away. But that is not what the Britisher had in mind. A week earlier a message had reached Howe, who was aboard his brother’s command ship, from Lord George Germain, secretary of state for the Americas. In it, Germain suggested that after capturing Philadelphia and subduing the other Middle Atlantic colonies, Howe was to leave the conquered territories to be maintained by Loyalist militias while he drove north to join Burgoyne in upstate New York. Germain, a dour misanthrope with no patience for rebels of any stripe, strongly hinted that the Crown expected Gen. Howe to crush this bothersome uprising before 1777 was out. Thus Gen. Howe’s primary intention was to lure Washington and his entire force into a major, war-ending confrontation. As it happened, this was what Washington also looked forward to—“One bold stroke [to] free the land from rapine, devastations, and burnings,” he wrote to Gen. Benedict Arnold.

  Meanwhile, the commander in chief was privately encountering a different kind of enemy, threefold, bureaucratic in nature, and wielding paper instead of guns: the Continental Congress, the civil government of Pennsylvania, and the Board of War. The third of these, officially titled the Board of War and Ordnance, had been established in June 1776 as a temporary liaison between the civil authorities and the military. Staffed by five congressional delegates and a skeleton crew of clerks, the board was charged with overseeing various functions of military administration from enlistments to promotions while remaining an arm’s length from the physical army. But by April 1777 the original board members, burdened by mountains of organizational duties, reported to Congress that they could not keep pace with the workload. They suggested their own replacement by a permanent body of professional soldiers. Congress was deliberating just such a move, which Washington correctly viewed as a threat to his authority, even as he prepared to meet Gen. Howe’s army.

  Moreover, there were those in Congress, particularly among the New England contingent, whose confidence in Washington’s leadership was eroding. Memories of the Continental Army’s surprise Christmas victories of 1776 at Trenton and Princeton were fading, replaced by ennui over the lack of movement across the spring and summer of 1777. The fiery John Adams, one of the most influential members of the Continental Congress, feared handing Washington untrammeled power, and worried aloud that the country’s growing devotion to the commander in chief was producing the very type of regal figure whose yoke America was fighting to throw off. More to the point: who was Washington to deserve this veneration if he remained unable to use the momentum of his victories in New Jersey to further the rebellion?

  Finally, what was perhaps of most pressing, and distressing, importance to Washington was the Pennsylvania state government’s apparent laissez-faire approach to the impending military clash. This attitude was most evident in the state’s request that a portion of its militiamen be temporarily released from his command in order to return to their farms to plant winter corn. There was a precedent for this seeming indifference. The Continental Congress had always been wary of a standing national army, and the Pennsylvania state politicians followed suit. They were even, incredibly, under the impression that Washington’s mixed force of regulars and militiamen was already “far too numerous.” The absence of a few units, they reasoned, would not much be missed.

  Washington knew better, no matter how far his host of raw recruits may have evolved since Bunker Hill. He understood perfectly that what seemed a formidable force to the throngs of cheering Philadelphians was in fact about to meet the most disciplined and confident armed force in the world. He had seen with his own eyes what could result.

  Over two decades earlier, while fighting for the British during the French and Indian War as a 22-year-old lieutenant colonel, Washington had been charged with leading a ragtag unit of Virginia militiamen into the uncharted territory then called the Ohio Country—a vast area west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and south of the Great Lakes. His orders: to backstop a company of British regulars dispatched to drive the French from what is now western Pennsylvania. When the Redcoats and their colonial attendants found the French and their Indian allies, a murderous fight ensued. Though Washington’s backwoodsmen had never seen action against trained soldiers, he was confident that their frontier wiles and experience would stand them well. Yet his green recruits withered under concerted and coordinated enemy fire, retreating and falling on their own rum supply in fright and despair. Washington had kept his composure and comported himself with dignity during what became a bloody slaughter, but the memory of his callow militiamen breaking against professional troops never left him.

  So even as the huzzahs from Front and Chestnut Streets still echoed, he dispatched couriers west and south from his campsite at Darby with urgent requests for fresh regiments. He also took the opportunity to recross the Schuylkill and personally implore individual congressional delegates to pressure their states’ recruiting officers to send more men as soon as possible. He reminded them that the hopes for independence so raised by his army on parade only a few days earlier were about to be sorely tested, and it would not be soaring rhetoric that beat back the enemy at the city’s gates, but hard flint and steel. In response, the solons of the Continental Congress vowed to appoint a steering panel to explore the army’s understaffing problem. And they did. It would be one of 114 committees they created that year.

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  I. As certain as Burgoyne, whose plan for isolating New England from America’s middle and southern colonies depended upon it.

  II. Though King George III had “rented” his foreign troops from the rulers of six German principalities, the vast majority of them—close to 19,000—hailed from the Prussian landgraviate of Hesse-Cassel. They combined with another 2,500 from Hesse-Hanau to lend the name Hessians to all German mercenaries. The second-largest contingent, just over 5,700 men, had come from the principality of Brunswick.

  TWO

  TO CROWN THE BRAVE

  The distant echo of British boots had a sobering effect.

  In late August, as news spread through Philadelphia of Gen. Howe’s landing, the Pennsylvania state legislature rescinded its request to release soldiers for the summer planting season and instead ordered its militia commanders to station 5,000 men along the city’s southwestern heights in a line of defense. The British army, no longer aboard a ghost fleet adrift somewhere on the Atlantic, was now a palpable threat, and a terrain that had previously seen little fighting suddenly pulsed in anticipation of battle. As the historian Wayne Bodle observes, “A summer of anxious maneuvering was finally about to culminate in combat.”

  It was with this sense of urgency that Congress ordered great stores of food, clothing, and military e
quipment heaped onto carts and hauled from Philadelphia into the western Pennsylvania towns of Lancaster and York. A trickle of the city’s citizens followed the juddering wagon trains, the same civilians who had cheered loudest during the Continental Army’s parade through the city only days earlier. Now, in anticipation of Gen. Howe’s arrival—and not a little apprehensive over Washington’s ability to stop him—they, too, headed inland.

  And then, in an anticlimax of a sort, a stillness fell over the city. Even as Washington directed his divisions south to head off the British, he and his staff remained confounded by the enemy’s sluggish pace. The Americans had no way of knowing that, for the moment, Gen. Howe’s Redcoats constituted a recovering army after having been battered by a series of ferocious storms during their monthlong sea voyage. The British horses that hadn’t been chucked overboard owing to a lack of fresh water were so malnourished as to be useless, and the cramped troopship quarters had turned the infantry into a shambolic mob less keen on fighting rebels than on looting Maryland’s barns and grain sheds. Howe himself recognized that any movement toward Philadelphia would have to wait until his army regained its land legs, so he limited his forays to scouting parties sent north to report back on the most expeditious routes into Pennsylvania.

  Earlier in the year there had been ephemeral hopes among England’s war planners that Howe would quickly dispose of Washington’s ragtag regiments before leading his British and German forces north to join with Gen. John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne’s army marching south from Canada. This was the plan the satanically handsome Burgoyne had personally put forth the previous winter to King George in London. Burgoyne was renowned for his fondness for British gambling houses, German mistresses, and French champagne—the English Whig antiquarian Horace Walpole coined the phrase “all sail and no ballast” in his honor—and the bon-viveur’s horseback rides with the king through Hyde Park had inspired talk in Whitehall of putting an end to the American insurgency by Christmas. Now, Howe’s leisurely pace rendered this timetable moot.

  Unlike Burgoyne, Gen. Howe was by nature a cautious man. Upon landing in Maryland he wrote to George Germain that he was shocked to find patriotic passion running stronger than he anticipated among the inhabitants of the middle colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. He had issued a general order offering protection to all civilians who remained in their homes and turned over their arms. Yet along the roads he passed scores of abandoned farmsteads, their fields and orchards ready to be harvested, their fat cattle untended. At least his soldiers ate well. In his letter to Whitehall he also grumbled that there was little hope of ending the war in 1777 “without the sizable addition of reinforcements from England.”

  This admission was eerily similar to his complaint of 18 months earlier, after he and his forces had been driven from Boston. Then he had written to Germain confessing apprehension about putting down the American rebellion as rapidly as London expected. Both justifications, of course, were fairly standard military tactics—underplay one’s prospects for quick victory. Howe was also demonstrating a remarkable lack of self-awareness as to how he was being painted in London as a defeatist. In any event, after his abandonment of Boston and the humiliating defeat at Trenton, Howe’s die was cast in Pennsylvania. When he was denied his request for 15,000 more troops, this was rationale enough for him to allow the Redcoats already under his command to halt intermittently to plunder local farmsteads while moving through Maryland and Delaware at a glacial pace. Oddly, with his insouciant strategy, Howe was matching Washington’s own lagging pace.

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  Long before his civic virtues began to inspire comparisons to the selfless Roman citizen-soldier Cincinnatus, Washington was already known among his officer corps by another Roman epithet, “the Great Fabius.” This was an homage to the general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, whose tactics of sideslipping pitched battles with Hannibal’s stronger Carthaginian invasion force in the third century BC eventually led to Rome’s victory in the Second Punic War. However, Fabius’s disposition toward eschewing direct assaults in favor of a guerrilla approach of ambush and harassment, particularly of the enemy’s supply lines, did not come naturally to Washington. In fact, it went against everything in his aggressive temperament, as was noted by Hamilton: “The enemy will have Philadelphia . . . unless we fight them a pretty general action,” he complained to the New York congressman Gouverneur Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the man destined to write the preamble to the United States Constitution. But to this point in the war, a Fabian strategy of bleeding not only the enemy force around its edges, but also the British taxpayers, had proved more efficacious for Washington. His was the weaker army, and if the fact of its simple survival mandated that the British spend their time and energy continually attempting to find and defeat it, he surmised that sooner or later King George and Parliament would decide that they were paying too steep a price to retain their American colonies.

  Further, many of Washington’s subordinates carried in their rucksacks well-thumbed copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars to read aloud in Latin by firelight. What he and his officer corps were quick to recognize was that despite the invention of gunpowder and firearms, core military principles had not altered significantly since ancient times. Washington was fond of quoting key battle scenes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry V at his war councils and, not surprisingly, his favorite play was Joseph Addison’s Cato, a Tragedy, a drama in which he had performed some 25 years earlier. In its depiction of the stoic Marcus Portius Cato’s republican resistance to the tyranny of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship, the play served as a rather obvious metaphor. As Washington’s biographer Ron Chernow notes, “The rhetoric of Cato saturated the American Revolution.” Both Patrick Henry’s famous appeal for liberty or death and the captured spy Nathan Hale’s lament that he had but one life to give for his country were taken nearly word for word from two of the play’s most famous lines.I

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  By early September, Continental scouts had located the British army plodding inexorably north through Delaware. Washington was forced to conclude that, sooner than later, his Fabian strategy could no longer abide. Yet true to the cautious nature he had adopted, over the next week he was content to merely shadow Howe while, with his farmer’s instincts, he himself kept a close eye on the terrain for any battlefield advantage. A few units of Pennsylvania militiamen were pulled from their posts south of Philadelphia and ordered to harass Howe’s rear. And forward pickets from the two maneuvering forces did sometimes skirmish, blundering into each other mostly by accident.II But as the days ground on the two generals were still marching their armies on parallel tracks in a generally northwest direction, with Washington always positioning his main body of troops between the enemy and Philadelphia.

  It frustrated Washington that the scores of prisoners his forward parties captured could provide no solid information as to Howe’s intentions. And as the two opponents continued to probe each other like prizefighters searching for a weakness—Washington was reported by several British officers to have been observed personally raising a spyglass on a faraway hill—there were some on the commander in chief’s staff who argued that Howe’s northwest trajectory signaled not a move on Philadelphia at all, but a thrust toward the Continental caches of weapons and food stored in the state’s interior. Washington publicly acknowledged the “Mystery” of Gen. Howe’s plans, but privately entertained “little doubt” that the American capital city remained his ultimate target.

  Finally, on September 8, Howe showed his hand when he ordered his troops north toward Philadelphia. Forty-eight hours later the two armies found themselves separated by mere miles on opposite sides of a wide and fast-flowing watercourse called Brandywine Creek.

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  Brandywine Creek, often mistaken for a river because of its width and depth, is formed by the confluence of two smaller rivulets with headwaters in Pennsylvania’s wes
tern Chester County. On its journey to Delaware Bay it courses through a terrain of plunging ravines and rocky rises blanketed by thick spinneys of tulip poplars and towering black oak. Its current is strong enough to power gristmills, sawmills, and even the paper mill that pressed the sheets on which the Declaration of Independence was written. Washington recognized immediately that this topography formed the last natural line of defense on the road to Philadelphia, some 25 miles to the northeast. The British, having shorn themselves of all “tents, trunks, chests, boxes, other bedding and [extra] cloaths,” were camped in the craggy hills that rose from the creek’s western bank. The Americans, traveling similarly light, occupied an eight-mile belt on the opposite side of the water.

  Of the half-dozen possible crossings along the Brandywine, the optimal one was Chadds Ford, a stretch of waist-deep water running about 150 feet from bank to bank situated on the “Great Post Road” that connected Baltimore to Philadelphia. Washington detached small units to guard the fording sites to the north and south with the intention of funneling the British toward Chadds Ford. He placed six or seven field pieces on the high ground overlooking the ford, and took as his headquarters the stone house of a miller just east of the crossing. He knew well what was at stake on the banks of the rushing Brandywine.

  Washington was a reluctant public speaker, and days earlier he had used a General Order to inform his troops that they were about to embark upon what very well might be the most decisive battle of the war for independence. A defeat of the British here and now, he’d announced, “and they are utterly undone—the war is at an end. The eyes of all America, and of Europe are turned upon us [and] the most important moment is at hand . . . [where] glory awaits to crown the brave.” To emphasize the importance of every soldier steeling himself for this momentous engagement, he had each commander muster his troops to announce that any men caught fleeing the battlefield “would be instantly shot down as a just punishment to themselves and for examples to others . . . to prevent the cowardly from making a sacrifice of the brave.” Now, with their “arms cleaned and put in the best possible order . . . their bayonets fixed . . . and their flints screwed in fast,” the Continentals were, in the words of the Rhode Island general Nathanael Greene, “in high spirits” and burning for a fight.