Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Of his senior officers, Washington was fondest of Greene, who at 33 was the youngest major general in the Continental Army until Lafayette was commissioned. Dubbed the “Fighting Quaker,” Greene had quit the Society of Friends as a teenager after being scolded by his parents for ignoring his Bible studies in favor of military histories and journals. His fondness for alehouses further alienated him from his family’s religious community. Ignoring the reprimands of his father, a prosperous iron forge and sawmill owner, Greene helped found a militia in his hometown, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, where his reading habits expanded to include poetry, philosophy, and even the satire of Jonathan Swift.

  Though Greene suffered from bouts of asthma and walked with a pronounced limp from a childhood sawmill accident, portraits from the era depict him as a strikingly handsome man, with burning blue eyes, a narrow straight nose, full lips, and a pair of broad shoulders that tapered to a V-shaped torso. Appropriately, in Catharine “Caty” Littlefield, he had married one of New England’s most beautiful women. Despite his lack of formal education, in 1775 Greene was at Washington’s urging commissioned a brigadier by the First Continental Congress by dint of what one historian calls his “dawn-to-dusk work habits.” His personal bravery and his grasp of both strategy and tactics had impressed Washington during the siege of Boston—it was said that the Rhode Island militia’s tent camp was the most disciplined and professional in the entire army—and the commander in chief had even recommended to Congress that should he himself fall in combat, Greene be appointed to take his place.

  Washington would need all of Gen. Greene’s martial qualities, for by the evening of September 10, he had wheeled his army to face the Brandywine, with the greatest concentration of troops massed under Greene near Chadds Ford. It was a disastrous mistake. On the other side of the creek, Gen. Howe’s intelligence officers had recruited a clutch of Pennsylvania Tories with an intimate knowledge of the local terrain. Washington had apparently overlooked or chosen to ignore Howe’s oft-stated preference for flanking maneuvers as opposed to costly frontal assaults. It was one of the qualities that bound his men to him.

  The previous evening the civilian Loyalists had sketched for Howe a route that would take him farther north, where he could skirt the farthermost American pickets and cross the upper Brandywine’s two shallow forks. With Howe and his chief commander Lord Gen. Charles Cornwallis embarking on a lightning march up and across the streams, the British would fall on Washington’s right wing in a surprise attack. To complete the ruse, Howe left a rump force of some 6,000 Hessians on the west bank of the creek near Chadds Ford with instructions to their commander, Gen. Wilhelm von Knyphausen, to act as if the entire army were preparing for a bold rush across the water and into the teeth of the Continental line.

  So it occurred that in the predawn hours of September 11, guided by the local Tories under the cover of a dense fog, Gen. Howe and Gen. Cornwallis led close to 9,000 Redcoats north while the Americans, girding for battle at Chadds Ford, took von Knyphausen’s bait. Soon after sunrise the Hessians began cannonading the Americans; they also initiated a few minor skirmishes about the river as Washington rode the length of his line to the sound of cheering troops and, increasingly, the crack of muskets and the thunderous reports of artillery fire. Washington maintained that courage and cowardice alike flowed from the leadership of an army, and he practiced what he preached. At one point a British cannonball took the head off an American artilleryman standing but a few feet from him, and at another an enemy sharpshooter was said to have had the American commander in chief lined up in his sights just as Washington turned his back to him. The chivalric rifleman, Maj. Patrick Ferguson, refused to pull the trigger and shoot a man in the back.III

  As it was, the skirmishing at Chadds Ford was thick enough to lull Washington and his staff into overlooking the scattered intelligence reports arriving by couriers that indicated enemy movements to the north. There was no little irony in Howe’s subterfuge. The French and Indian War had taught Washington the valuable lesson that the rugged and thickly overgrown terrain of the New World inhibited the conventional warfare preferred by the great European armies, with lines of troops arrayed opposite one another on open battlefields. Whenever possible, Washington instead intended to fight the British as the French had done, with speed and stealth—“Indian style,” he called it. Such cunning had worked for him at Trenton and Princeton, yet now here was Howe employing a feint-and-flank maneuver perfectly consonant with the linear procedures of the great eighteenth-century armies.

  Around noon, Washington was informed that one of his scouting parties had spotted what they took to be several companies of Redcoats on the American side of the river to the north. But a second communiqué contradicted this and suggested that the movement was a British feint as the main army massed for an attack across Chadds Ford. It was not until midafternoon that a rider arrived at Washington’s temporary headquarters with definitive word that the greater part of Howe’s army had indeed crossed the Brandywine’s northern forks. His grand battle plan undone, the commander in chief spurred his horse north at a gallop to save what he could of both his army and his reputation. But here it was Howe’s turn to blunder.

  Had the British struck immediately at the Americans’ exposed right flank, the Continental Army would have shattered like spun glass. But by now the fog had lifted, the afternoon had turned into a humid swelter, and the Redcoats, having quick-marched nearly 17 miles since before daybreak, lagged in forming their attack columns. This gave Washington enough time to reach his two reserve divisions and instruct their commanders to take up positions atop a hill that rose between the enemy advance and the bulk of the patriot force. For one of these generals, William Alexander—an American-born ironmaster whose lapsed inheritance of a Scottish earldom entitled him to the honorific Lord Stirling—the order must have seemed eerily familiar. A year earlier, during the catastrophic Battle of Long Island, Gen. Lord Stirling had been captured while leading the 1st Maryland Regiment in fighting a rearguard action that allowed Washington’s main body of troops to slip away intact. Now, at the head of a division of New Jerseyans after a prisoner exchange, he and the Scots-born Gen. Adam Stephen, commanding two brigades of Virginians, were being asked to again sacrifice themselves for the good of the greater whole.

  General Howe moved on this makeshift line around four o’clock. Stephen’s Virginians and Lord Stirling’s New Jersey infantry had dragged several small field pieces to the crest of the hill, and their canisters and grapeshot combined with Continental musket fire to rip holes in the ranks of the advancing British grenadiers. This effectively gave the northernmost Americans stationed on the Brandywine—two brigades of Maryland regulars under the command of Gen. John Sullivan—time to fall back from the creek and join the reserve divisions, although they encountered murderous fire as they attempted to create a joined line with Stephen’s and Lord Stirling’s men.

  General Sullivan, a former New Hampshire congressman in overall command of this right wing of the American army, had also fought in the Battle of Long Island. After the British had similarly surprised Washington with a flanking maneuver then, his Continentals had so botched their fallback that the Hessians had openly mocked them as they bayonetted to death those who had thrown away their arms and surrendered in panic. Now, however, the majority of Sullivan’s soldiers stood rock-steady as the British softened up their positions with a cannon bombardment.IV Finally, the British fixed bayonets and charged the division holding Sullivan’s left flank. Following the lead of their confused commander, the Frenchman Gen. Preudhomme de Borre, most of the American units panicked and broke as Lafayette, who had turned 20 five days earlier and had pleaded with Washington to be allowed to take part in his first action, attempted to regain some of France’s honor. Spurring his horse, the marquis galloped up and down before the stampeding troops and, in his broken English, exhorted them to stand and fight.V On several occasions he jumped from his saddle to tackle soldiers runnin
g toward the rear. It was during one of these scrums that an aide noticed blood pouring from his left calf and helped him back onto his horse. Despite his boot filling with blood, Lafayette refused to leave the field as thousands of charging Redcoats swarmed Lord Stirling’s remaining division and the fight degenerated into “muzzle to muzzle” and hand-to-hand combat.

  Before they could be completely surrounded the New Jerseyans and Virginians under Gen. Lord Stirling and Gen. Stephen managed to fall back through the glades of the steep and rocky terrain pocked with giant bluestone volcanic rock, using the boulders and the thick trunks of pignut hickory and blackgum tupelos as cover as they crouched to reload and return fire. Like their English and German counterparts, most of the colonists were armed with smoothbore muskets, often called firelocks or flintlocks after the flint-striking-steel charge ignition in the gunlock. A well-trained soldier might load and fire such a weapon three times in a minute. But a portion of the backwoodsmen, particularly the Virginians, carried long rifles. Although these took longer to load, they were more accurate. This afternoon they made deadly use of them, and so slowed the enemy advance that even the haughty Lord Cornwallis was moved to concede to Gen. Howe that “the damn rebels form well” as he watched the fight unfold from a rise overlooking the battlefield. It was small consolation.

  By this time Washington had returned to his headquarters, from where he could clearly hear the artillery and musket reports of a major engagement taking place behind him. Before him across the Brandywine, meanwhile, he watched Gen. von Knyphausen’s Hessians prepare to attack. It was likely at this moment that he realized that he had lost the day.

  Praying that Gen. Greene’s regulars were as high spirited as he had boasted, Washington ordered Greene’s two brigades of Virginians pulled from their original position on the lower Brandywine and rushed north. As Greene’s division raced the nearly four miles up the east bank of the creek it actually had to break ranks to allow Gen. de Borre and his fleeing troops to pass through their battle line. After reforming on a battlefield that Greene described as raining “hot fire,” his Virginians stood firm against the British attack for over an hour, the riflemen from the Old Dominion fighting like Vikings with iron and oak. Their efforts bought Washington enough time to begin pulling his remaining troops back up the road toward Philadelphia. Finally, as the sky purpled to the color of a mussel shell, Greene’s troops, bone-weary and nearly out of ammunition, formed up and began to draw off in good order.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Back at Chadds Ford, Gen. von Knyphausen’s Hessians along with several detachments of British foot soldiers had already routed a corps of American light infantry who had waded through the Brandywine to patrol its west bank. After hearing Cornwallis’s cannons fire to the north, and sensing the depletion of the forces arrayed against him across the water, the German commander ordered a full assault. The air on the east bank of the creek was soon thick with flintlock smoke as tree branches cracked to the ground and cannonballs furrowed the forest floor. Outnumbered three to one, the 2,000 or so veteran Continentals remaining under the command of General Anthony Wayne held firm for several volleys before falling back. Great daubs of British and Hessian blood stained the creek red, but still the enemy came. Their advance was bolstered when a contingent of British Guards who had been lost in the forest fell in with von Knyphausen’s troops.

  Wayne, a 32-year-old Chester County native and Pennsylvania’s only active general in the field, had no formal military training prior to the war. But Washington admired his zeal and innate quick thinking in the saddle. His faith proved prescient; Wayne’s knowledge of the terrain and his savvy maneuvering during the running fight as his troops fell back pell-mell from height to height prevented von Knyphausen’s combined force from completely encircling and devouring the Pennsylvanians. With the recently arrived Polish count Casimir Pulaski’s 30 or so horsemen helping to blunt the British advance and screening the Continental retreat, the defeated Americans withdrew before halting at the town of Chester, Pennsylvania, some 14 miles to the east.

  To Washington’s astonishment, Gen. Howe declined to press his advantage that evening, deeming it out of the question to pursue the Continentals through the darkness without enough wagons to haul supplies, a decision he would be subsequently criticized for. While some exhausted Redcoats found shelter in nearby Tory farmhouses, most simply dropped and spread their blankets over the battlefield.

  The British listed 587 casualties, including 93 dead. Although no official American casualty list survives, Gen. Howe reported to his colonial secretary with only slight exaggeration that his troops had killed some 300 Continentals, wounded another 600, and taken 400 prisoners.VI The British had also captured 11 of the Americans’ artillery field pieces. So many Americans lay bleeding out near the Brandywine’s eastern bank and across the surrounding hills and fields that Gen. Howe would soon signal to Washington to send in Continental doctors under a flag of truce to minister to them. In the majority of cases this meant amputation without anesthetic.

  The various Pennsylvania militias attached to the Continental Army had at times appeared bewildered by their first whiffs of gunpowder fired in anger. “Fighting is a new thing with these,” Gen. Greene wrote to his wife, Caty, “and many seem to have a poor stomach for the business.” This was evident by the some 315 names of militiamen later posted as deserters. Yet the greater part of the American regulars had acquitted themselves with martial professionalism during the fallback. Washington’s officers, grasping for a silver lining, felt that the crumbling retreat they had overseen was actually a small victory of sorts, what one called a “mitigated defeat.” That night, in a letter to John Hancock to inform Congress of the “misfortune of the day”—the first draft of which Washington found too dispiriting to send—the commander in chief managed to convey a touch of optimism. “I am happy to find the troops in good spirits,” he wrote, “and I hope another time we shall compensate for the losses now sustained.” Even in defeat, especially in defeat, Washington was aware of his duty to keep afloat his army’s morale. And though it is tempting to view his communiqué to Hancock as a ploy to succeed in just that, his confident assurances were not all bluster or bravado.

  Washington’s private tendency was often to see the dark and pessimistic side in most of life’s occurrences. But by the next morning as stragglers continued to trickle into the Continental camp, the consensus had been reached among American officers and enlisted men that the British had achieved their victory through a sort of quirk of fate—specifically, the enemy’s reliance on sympathizers much more familiar with the terrain than the Continentals. Given the nature of Gen. Howe’s surprise attack, this theory went, the Americans had in fact turned what could have been a deathblow into a mere bruising. As soldiers continued to wander into Chester from as far away as Wilmington, Delaware, there was already talk of regrouping for another assault.

  Nevertheless, the stinging British victory at Brandywine Creek left more than enough grist for Washington’s political enemies to mill. Why had he merely stalked Howe’s army for weeks before choosing to fight? How could a foreign enemy have accrued such better knowledge of the landscape than an American force containing so many homegrown soldiers? How had a dust-raising force of over 8,000 Redcoats slipped past his reconnaissance units so effortlessly? It was also noted that at one point during their secret march the British had been forced to traverse a defile so narrow and deep that even their own officers feared their entire army could be pinned down by a handful of Continentals. Yet no Americans had been stationed to guard the pass. Most insidiously, the fiasco at Brandywine breathed new life into the vampirical criticism that had hounded Washington since his appointment as commander in chief—that he was a one-note general unable to adjust his field tactics on the fly and had surrounded himself with a staff of sycophants and toadies.

  Washington was aware of the old whispers about him that would soon be recirculating from Richmond to Boston. He was also forthrig
ht enough to step in and protest when a faction of congressional delegates attempted to place the blame for Brandywine on Gen. Sullivan. At least he could take solace from knowing that the faith he had placed in the “freakishly brave” Lafayette had been repaid in such a public manner. For as his army prepared to move to a new camp just northwest of Philadelphia, more than a few hardened veterans continued to remark on the mettle and composure the Frenchman had displayed in the face of murderous ball and shell.

  It was not until Lafayette had helped organize the orderly retreat from Brandywine Creek—forming his fellow soldiers into properly disciplined lines as they marched to Chester—that he finally allowed the musket ball to be dug out of his calf. It had hit neither bone nor nerve. He was then carried to a medical barge bound for Philadelphia by, among others, the 18-year-old Virginia captain and future president James Monroe. Washington was standing on the riverbank when Lafayette’s stretcher bearers arrived and advised the doctors on board the transport to treat the young Frenchman as if he were his own son. Given the American commander in chief’s well-known impatience with the preponderance of European military “volunteers” washing up on American shores, this was a telling portent.