Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

* * *

  I. “It is not now time to talk of aught, but chains or conquest, liberty or death,” Cato tells his daughter’s suitor Juba midway through Act Two. Later, when presented with the body of his slain son, he laments, “Who would not be that youth? What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country.”

  II. It is sometimes difficult to comprehend how the era’s commanders followed the delicate rules of war. During this cat-and-mouse harass-and-skirmish game, for example, Washington ordered one of his commanders to apologize to Gen. Howe “if there is any truth in report that an enemy flag was fired upon.” (“George Washington to Brigadier General William Maxwell, 5 September 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives. (Original source: Syrett, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. 1, p. 324.)

  III. Though the latter incident has been subsequently refuted, in some quarters the fact that Washington was known to hew so close to the front lines is telling.

  IV. The troughs plowed up by the British cannonballs across Birmingham Hill can be seen to this day.

  V. De Borre was drummed out of the Continental Army following this debacle.

  VI. The fact that three days later some 350 American prisoners of war were transferred from the field to a quickly established hospital near Wilmington, Delaware, suggests the validity of this latter figure. It would also indicate that only 50 or so Continentals had surrendered with either minor or no wounds.

  THREE

  THE FRENCH CONNECTION

  Even his name swaggered: Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette. He joked that he had been christened in honor of all the saints that could protect him in battle. He would need them.

  Lafayette had yet to celebrate his second birthday when his father was cut down by British cannon fire at the Battle of Minden during the Seven Years’ War. His mother died a decade later, leaving the 12-year-old marquis one of the wealthiest orphans in France. The boy was mentored by a bevy of aristocratic relatives on a rustic estate south of Paris in an area renowned for its redolent blue cheeses and a mythical man-eating wolf. He later wrote that his childhood was consumed by the same quest for military glory that had driven his forebears dating back to the Crusades. From an early age Lafayette exhibited a flair for horsemanship, and at 13 the ginger-haired youngster was commissioned an officer in King Louis XVI’s household cavalry, the marvelously named Mousquetaires Noirs, or Black Musketeers. Three years later he married into the de Noailles family, a clan even more wealthy and powerful than his own. He was soon appointed a captain in his father-in-law’s hereditary company of hard-riding dragoons.

  Despite the social obligations of peerage, Lafayette shied from the decadent banquets and masked balls he and his 15-year-old child bride Adrienne de Noailles were expected to attend in Paris and Versailles. For such a skillful rider, he had a foal-like clumsiness that served to endear him to veteran soldiers but proved a major impediment at court. Once, while dancing with Marie-Antoinette, he demonstrated such left-footedness that the queen laughed in his face. Despite his frustration with the social obligations of his blueblooded lineage, it was, ironically, a member of the English aristocracy who touched fire to the candle that would light Lafayette’s journey to America.

  Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, had fled to France from Britain in the wake of his older brother King George III’s very public displeasure over his decision to marry the illegitimate granddaughter of the British statesman Robert Walpole. One night at a dinner party Lafayette listened rapt as the duke extolled the exploits of the “liberty-loving Americans” who had just fired the first shots of the revolution at Lexington and Concord. The ambitious Lafayette, weary of what he called “the longueur of peace,” had always harbored a personal contempt for the English who had killed his father. The duke’s praise for the republicans across the Atlantic was all the push he needed. “From that hour,” Lafayette wrote, “I could think of nothing but this enterprise.”

  He was not alone among adventuresome and ambitious Frenchmen.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The United States needed la belle France in their war, and the French knew it. So did the British. And though Great Britain and France were technically at peace with one another at the time of America’s Declaration of Independence, the British were prepared to use their mighty Royal Navy to ensure that French provisions never reached the eastern seaboard of North America. However, despite the British mastery of the high seas, the Atlantic was a big ocean.

  France was secretly colluding to supply the United States with everything from arms to uniforms to tents to blankets to shovels long before Silas Deane, a former Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress, stepped off a clipper at the French port of Le Havre in July 1776 to help devise a way to smuggle those supplies. As the inestimable biographer of Lafayette, Sarah Vowell, has observed, “Jefferson’s pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder.”

  Deane was a rugged and handsome New Englander whose powdered wig obscured his ruddy complexion and thick shock of black hair. At 38, he had sailed to France posing as a merchant—not a stretch, considering that he had made a fortune in the West Indian sugar trade. In reality he had been authorized by the Continental Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence to lever France’s hostility toward England into support for the American uprising. The French were naturally bitter that the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763 had all but wiped out their holdings in the New World. Yet their defeat in that conflict had also depleted Louis XVI’s national treasury.I The French king and his bankers knew that they could not afford to trigger another overt war against the detested “Roast Beefs” across the Channel, particularly to prop up a rebellion that to this point had shown few signs of success. A needle in Great Britain’s arse in the form of covert assistance to the Americans, however, was an appealing alternative to the rambunctious 22-year-old ruler who had assumed the throne three years earlier.

  Aware of his king’s predilections, France’s foreign minister the Comte de Vergennes had already convinced Louis XVI to agree to secretly purchase military matériel to aid the Americans even before Deane arrived in Paris with cocked hat in hand. More than a decade before the Continental Congress’s ratification of the Declaration of Independence, de Vergennes had predicted that the American colonies would eventually rise against the British. He had more recently warned that, should their rebellion prevail, the United States would undoubtedly turn a lusty eye toward French holdings in the Caribbean.

  As a sort of insurance policy to forestall any such outcome as well as secure postwar amity with the Americans, the French king had allocated one million francs to fund de Vergennes’s scheme. He even convinced his cousin on the Spanish throne to match the donation. De Vergennes used the money to set up a shell company in the name of a nonexistent Spaniard to mask the shipments. The clandestine affair rose to opera buffa heights when the French polymath and budding secret agent Pierre Beaumarchais, celebrated author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, was placed in charge of the operation. That Beaumarchais—originally Pierre-Augustin Caron—had fabricated a family coat of arms to complement his fake last name made no difference to Deane, who hinted that future repayments for this extended line of credit would be made in favorable tobacco contracts.

  By December 1776, as Washington was preparing his stunning Christmas-night Delaware crossing that resulted in the capture of Trenton, nearly 300,000 pounds of French gunpowder, thousands of firelocks and cannonballs, and scores of field artillery pieces and mortars had been secreted aboard French vessels allegedly carrying grain and wine to the French Caribbean. But there was a problem. The British spy network on the European continent, including a double agent whom Deane had hired as his private secretary, had the particulars of the plot in hand. When Great Britain threatened France with war should those ships weigh anchor, Louis XVI backed down. In a public humiliation, the foreign minister, de Vergennes, was forced to issue a
proclamation ordering the immediate arrest of any sea captain delivering succor to the American rebels and any French army officer attempting to sail for America to volunteer his services. A small consolation prize for Deane and the revolutionaries was the three large merchant vessels that had already begun the transatlantic passage prior to the royal decree to stand down. They managed to dock at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and offload crates of clothing, gunpowder, 58 cannons, 12,000 muskets and bayonets, and enough tents to house 10,000 men.

  Lafayette viewed this as a start. He was soon to follow.

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  By the time news of the American victories at Trenton and Princeton reached France, Benjamin Franklin had arrived in Paris to oversee Deane’s secret treaty negotiations with Versailles. When Deane introduced him to Lafayette, Franklin instantly recognized the value of the “young Nobleman of great family Connections & great Wealth.” The American envoys happily accepted Lafayette’s offer of service and supplied the teenage marquis with a letter of introduction to John Hancock. Within weeks, however, Louis XVI made it a crime for any Frenchman to aid the colonies. Lafayette was nonplussed. Despite his wife’s first pregnancy, he had already purchased a 268-ton merchant ship in Bordeaux, renamed it La Victoire, and furtively stocked it with food and armaments. When his guardian and mentor the Comte de Broglie could not talk Lafayette out of his wild and now illegal adventure, de Broglie did the next best thing by recruiting the Bavarian soldier of fortune Baron Johann de Kalb to accompany Lafayette on his journey. De Kalb, a hulking 55-year-old whom the British had previously expelled from North America on charges of spying for the French, was more than eager to resume his antagonism toward the Crown.

  Perhaps feeling last-minute pangs of guilt over abandoning his pregnant wife for this “unique opportunity to distinguish myself, and to learn my profession,” Lafayette abruptly confessed his plans to his father-in-law Jean-Louis-Paul-François de Noailles, the fifth duc d’Ayen. He had given his word to the Americans, he told the duc, “and you would not have respected me had I gone back on it.” De Noailles was not happy with his son-in-law’s decision, but he reluctantly agreed to keep it secret. Writing years later of “the secrecy with which this negotiation and my preparations were made,” Lafayette set sail for the United States to join les insurgents in April 1777. The marquis spent most of the voyage studying the English language, blissfully unaware that Parisian salons and coffeehouses were atwitter with news of his audacity. By the time he arrived in Philadelphia in July, the king had privately forgiven him and Voltaire had even visited his wife, Adrienne, to bow in homage to her husband’s beau geste. It was this deftness with older male authority figures that allowed Lafayette to rapidly assume a filial role in Washington’s inner circle.

  The two met when the 19-year-old, sporting a major general’s sash, brashly introduced himself to Washington in Philadelphia’s City Tavern on the last evening of July. Elegant and slim, with full lips, an upturned nose, and a prematurely receding hairline, Lafayette charmed Washington with his youthful brio for poetic pronouncements as well as his ability to segue from diffident self-abasement to fervent ambition in mid-sentence. Adding to his cachet was his physical stature. In an era when men’s average height was five feet eight inches, the young Frenchman could directly meet the gaze of the Continental Army’s commander in chief. Washington invited Lafayette to join him the following morning for a tour of the Continental defenses along the Delaware River.

  The American general was certainly not blind to the diplomatic advantages of befriending a well-connected French nobleman. Yet Washington, whose own youth was rife with romantic paeans to justice and fair play, also saw something deeper in Lafayette’s earnest devotion to American liberty. “The happiness of America is intimately connected to the happiness of all mankind,” the marquis had written to his wife upon making landfall in the United States. Even if Washington expressed such sentiments less floridly, they were very similar to his own. There was, however, a limit to the commander in chief’s forbearance.

  Before intruding on Washington’s supper, Lafayette had presented himself to John Hancock armed with his letter of introduction from Franklin and Deane. In the accreditation papers, which Lafayette had apparently not read, the American diplomats cautioned Congress that the young man was so well ensconced in the French aristocracy that any harm that came to him might negatively affect the delicate treaty negotiations Franklin was conducting. Congress, impressed with Lafayette’s proposal to serve at his own expense, massaged this complication with a compromise. He would be commissioned a “volunteer” major general in the Continental Army—thus the sash upon his meeting with Washington—with the understanding that the appointment was expressly an honorary title. The delegates presumed that Washington would take Lafayette under his wing as an aide and keep him out of danger. This presented a problem: no one had informed the marquis of the arrangement.

  Not long after their river tour, Washington was perplexed when Lafayette requested two aides-de-camp. He also informed both Hancock and his new commander in chief that, as he was new to the conflict, he was graciously willing to initially test his mettle on the general’s staff before eventually being “entrusted with a division of the Army” due an officer of his rank. Washington was flabbergasted and complained to a fellow Virginian, the congressman Benjamin Harrison, “If Congress meant that this rank should be unaccompanied by Command, I wish it had been sufficiently explained to [Lafayette]. If on the other hand it was intended to vest him with all the powers of a Major Genl why have I been led into a contrary belief, & left in the dark with respect to my own conduct towards him?”

  Washington was used to masking his true emotions when dealing with the civil authorities. His political calculations often took the guise of false modesty. Sometimes these feelings were even genuine, as when he tearfully confessed to his friend Patrick Henry his inner fears of disgrace and failure upon accepting the commission to lead the Continentals. More often than not, however, his shows of humility were convenient contrivances that bordered on the sarcastic. In this instance, in case his point to Harrison proved too subtle, he added, “I know no more of this than the Child unborn, & beg to be instructed.”

  Despite this confusion, Lafayette’s infectious enthusiasm struck a chord in Washington’s fragile psyche. Throughout his service during the French and Indian War the young Virginia planter had chafed at the second-class citizenship to which the Crown had relegated him and his fellow colonial officers. His requests for a royal commission in the king’s regular army had been repeatedly rebuffed. And though he had risen to the rank of colonel in the militia, to his lasting resentment he too often found himself groveling for recognition from proper British officers of lower rank who treated him—as was their prerogative under the imperial system—as a provincial subaltern. It was a slight that rankled him still.

  In Lafayette, however, he had discovered an officer from a lofty and professional European army who proffered not only respect but subservience of rank to the diffident former member of Virginia’s middle gentry. Upon their initial inspection of the Continental Army, for instance, Washington’s old insecurities surfaced when he apologized to Lafayette for the threadbare clothing and substandard armaments of his troops. Without hesitation the Frenchman replied that he had come to the United States to learn from the Americans, and not to teach. Washington never forgot the moment.

  But Lafayette’s self-effacement in no way hid his thirst for battlefield accolades—the Frenchman’s very essence, observed one biographer, regularly required “the dignity of danger.” Though Washington may have viewed Lafayette’s passionate chivalry as a mirror reflection of his own youth, not all of his new American hosts were quite so taken. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were both initially leery of yet another arrogant and interloping Frenchman’s bountiful appetite for fame and flattery. Moreover, many of Lafayette’s detractors, descended from good Puritan stock, found off-putting his Gallic habit of hugging people
at the slightest provocation. Throughout his life, Washington had always shied away from any physical familiarity, instant or deliberate. His trust, respect, and friendship had to be earned. Even at that, a salute or a handshake would usually suffice. Yet there was something about Lafayette that penetrated the commander in chief’s hard shell. The young man was at heart an idealist who, despite his thirst for glory, was a true believer in the American cause. In other words, he was a rarity.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  On the whole, Washington had little use for the scores of French officers who swarmed to the United States to accrue personal glory fighting the hated British. Unlike Lafayette, whose English was by now at least rudimentary, many spoke none at all and were therefore useless in commanding American troops. Worse, from Washington’s point of view, the language barrier left them unable even to help raise recruits. Moreover, their ubiquitous demands for stations well above their European ranks stole jobs from more worthy Americans and engendered a deep “disgust” in the Continental Army’s officer corps. Although thankful for hardened warriors such as de Kalb, Washington repeatedly remonstrated with Franklin and Deane for burdening his command with the louche offspring of wealthy French aristocrats whose “every new arrival is only a source of embarrassment to congress and myself.” He went so far as to warn Hancock of the “evil” this transatlantic pipeline was bringing upon the revolution.

  At one point the army’s redoubtable chief artillery officer, Gen. Henry Knox, offered his resignation when Congress attempted to supersede him with a French “general” endorsed by the increasingly harried Deane. The Frenchman’s sole claim to expertise with cannon and shot was apparently a close affiliation with the ceremonial artillery displayed at Louis XVI’s Versailles palace. Henry Knox was not a soldier Washington could afford to lose, nor were the generals Greene and Sullivan, who also threatened to resign if Knox was supplanted by the French interloper. Luckily for the commander in chief, the stalemate ultimately resolved itself when the foreign courtier imperiously spurred his horse toward a ferry departing the banks of the Schuylkill, missed the platform, and drowned in the river. The horse swam to safety.