Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  But the contretemps was indicative of the larger problem. Franklin, more circumspect than Deane, had a better reading of the French character. In a nation besotted by both Enlightenment ideals and Rousseau’s teleological paeans to nature, the urbane Franklin had taken to playing up the homespun nature of his fellow Americans by wearing a fur trapper’s beaver cap on his visits to Versailles. But Franklin was also acutely aware of Washington’s frustration at having to accept a modicum of vain and preening adventurers as the price to pay for future French comity. He only half facetiously observed that he had become reluctant to accept invitations to Parisian salons for fear of being engulfed in a sea of military supplicants in their pink collars and velvet lapels.

  Conversely, one group of French volunteers whom Washington did hold in high esteem were the country’s military engineers. Most of these officers had graduated from the prestigious Royal Engineering School at Mezières and were considered the finest in the world. Despite Washington’s wariness about the efficiency of their chevaux-de-frise to hamper British naval advances, over the course of the Revolutionary War he relied upon them to erect fortifications, map terrain, and lay out trenches and encampments. Among these officers was the 34-year-old Louis Duportail, who arrived in America as a volunteer in early 1777 and by that July had risen to the position of chief engineer of the Continental Army. Duportail had an impressive reputation for reforming and revising the regulations of the French army’s corps of engineers, and Washington’s regard for his skills was such that he almost always deferred to the Frenchman’s opinion. Although Lafayette lacked the combat experience of Duportail and was not an engineer by training, he proved “a fast study, showed courage under fire, and had an imaginative mind for military schemes.” And as he had demonstrated at Brandywine, he also possessed a knack for inspiring soldiers while chasing the martial honors he so badly wanted.

  Hence it was fair to wonder how Washington felt the news of Lafayette’s injury during the fight on the Brandywine would be received in Versailles, as he stood on a bank of the Delaware and watched his wounded protégé sailing upriver on a medical barge. Little did he know that rumors would soon spread through Paris, and beyond, that Lafayette was dead.

  * * *

  I. In no small slice of irony, the successive British levies that sparked the American Revolution—the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, the Tea Act of 1773, and the Coercive (or “Intolerable”) Acts of 1774—had been largely instituted to pay off British war debts from the same conflict. So perniciously meticulous were the accountants in the British Exchequer that one of the Intolerable Acts’ demands was repayment for the 342 chests of tea tossed into Massachusetts Bay during the Boston Tea Party the previous December.

  FOUR

  BURNED FORGES

  Three days after what came to be known as the Battle of Brandywine Creek, George Washington and his Continental Army were encamped near the settlement of Germantown, about six miles northwest of Philadelphia’s old town center. The hamlet, since incorporated into the city proper, was at the time a patchwork of dense hardwood forest broken by natural meadows and cleared fields of wheat, flax, and corn set amid neat rows of peach and cherry orchards. The lush plantations, founded by Quaker and Mennonite families almost a century earlier, were irrigated by scores of rocky, spring-fed brooks splashing down to the Schuylkill—Dutch for “Hidden River”—from the surrounding hills. Seventy-two hours of rest and recuperation in such a pleasant landscape had given the American troops a new wind.

  As the Continental companies and regiments licked their wounds and re-formed, there was a palpable ripple of excitement. Washington’s brigadiers realized that the number of dead and wounded was far lower than they had feared. Even most of the army’s baggage, such as it was, remained secure, having been evacuated before the fight. The soldiers, particularly the officers, were in a combative mood; the yearning for retribution was amplified when news spread that the British, still camped along the Brandywine, were so desperate for medical assistance that they had begun forcibly conscripting Chester County’s civilian doctors. Several bellicose junior officers vowed to be the first to dance a victory minuet in Philadelphia after they’d had another go at Gen. Howe’s Redcoats. Their attitude was reflected by Alexander Hamilton, who informed the New York congressman Gouverneur Morris, “The militia seem pretty generally stirring, [and] our army is in high health and spirits.” Nathanael Greene went even further, boasting to his wife that “the next action would ruin Mr. Howe totally. We are gathered about him like a mighty cloud charg’d with destruction.”

  As usual, Washington himself was more circumspect. He was gratified by the combination of courage and initiative his troops had exhibited while extricating themselves from the enemy’s flanking maneuver along the Brandywine. But he also recognized the great part that fortune had played in the escape, particularly in the long time it took Howe’s battalions to form a battle line after crossing the creek’s upstream branches. Overall, he could take solace from the fact that his soldiers, so many of them green recruits, had come face-to-face with the world’s foremost military machine and had not collapsed. This was something to build on. But that construction could begin only with an influx of troops. To that end, while his force girded for a rematch, he pressed Congress to supply him with more able bodies.

  In Philadelphia, John Laurens’s father, Henry, proved a sturdy ally. In his capacity as an influential member of Congress, Henry Laurens dispatched riders to the commanding officers of the New Jersey and Maryland militias requesting immediate reinforcements for the Continental Army. He had also taken in the wounded Lafayette and would soon spirit him to the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where a sect of German-American Moravians had set up a field hospital.I The Frenchman, unaware that rumors of his death would soon to be rocking the court at Versailles, spent his days writing blithe missives to his wife, Adrienne, extolling the sights, the sounds, even the smells of battle. He also added the occasional aside recording his surgeons’ astonishment at his body’s rapid healing powers. It would be weeks until his letters reached Adrienne, informing her, and all of France, that he was alive.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It was not lost on Washington that he trod a political fault line with his increasingly strident requests for more troops. From its inception, the Continental Congress had been wary of establishing a standing army of professional soldiers. Only 14 months earlier it had declared its independence from a despotic king whose arbitrary and unaccountable law enforcement policies had been carried out by a collection of “forced men” and mercenaries—“Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance,” as the Declaration of Independence had it. The delegates feared that such a homegrown institution might one day become a similar instrument of tyranny. Instead they hoped to throw off the British yoke with citizen militias formed within the individual colonies and aided by several corps of federally funded if temporary “provincial regiments.”

  The British occupation of Boston had altered this romantic notion considerably. On June 14, 1775, two months after Continental militiamen had forced the Redcoats to retreat from Lexington and Concord, the congressional delegates voted to place the Massachusetts militia under its authority and ordered the establishment of 10 additional regular-army rifle companies from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. The following day it voted unanimously to offer command of this nascent Continental Army to Washington. This made eminent political sense. Virginia was the union’s wealthiest and most populous state, and the delegates determined that for the sake of political solidarity the common ruck should cohere around the laconic experimental tobacco farmer from Mount Vernon. Moreover, John Adams’s quip that Washington was selected because he was always the tallest man in the room hints at the physical majesty conveyed by the new commander in chief. Still, not all were thrilled.

  In appointing Washington, Congress had chosen a man more familiar with Indian forest-fighting tactics than with le
ading and directing large bodies of troops. He had never commanded any unit larger than a regiment, and had only recently begun rather frantically purchasing books to teach himself the intricacies of cavalry maneuvers, artillery deployment, and military engineering. This was not lost on several New England officers who felt that their efforts at Lexington and Concord had been slighted. Nor did Washington’s inexperience pass unnoticed by two British-born American generals, Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, soon to be selected by Congress to serve under the new commander in chief. Both men were highly decorated veterans of previous Crown campaigns; both had settled in the colonies and volunteered to fight for the cause of independence; both would harbor simmering resentments throughout the revolution at having to understudy what they considered a tomahawk-wielding bumpkin from the cow paths of Virginia.

  At the same time that Congress stood up a national American army it also stipulated that the force’s regulars would serve for just one year. Rather astonishingly, the delegates believed that the British would be driven from the former colonies within that period. By 1777, as reality set in, the subscription limit had been raised to three years, and eventually it would be extended “for the duration of the war.” Regiments accepted volunteers as young as 16 years of age, 15 with parental consent. An artillery “man” from New Jersey named Jeremiah Levering, who enlisted at 12, is cited by historians as probably the youngest soldier to volunteer. Yet the civil authorities to whom the commander in chief deferred still preferred to wage their revolution with state militias that, as one experienced American officer noted, “may as well stay at home, for not one fourth of them are of any use [and] three fourths of them run off at the first fire.” The respected French engineer Col. Duportail—soon to be charged with laying out and overseeing the construction at Valley Forge—was still more waspish in his appraisal. Even if an infusion of militiamen bloated Washington’s force to twice its current size, he wrote, “we would not double our strength by a great deal, we would triple our trouble.” Portraits of Duportail emphasize his symmetrical face graced by an aristocratic nose and hooded eyes that seem to sparkle ominously, as if expressing both amusement and threat. His views of the Continental Army captured both emotions.

  In any case, Washington took personally these intra-army criticisms. At the same time, he understood and respected the unique responsibility Congress had granted him to lead a force of citizen-soldiers, with the emphasis on citizen. Sixteen years of service in Virginia’s House of Burgesses had ingrained in him a reflexive esteem for the fundamental proposition of civilian control over the military. He recognized that this principle was no mere nicety, but essential to the democratic rule for which he was fighting. The signers of the Declaration of Independence understood that they were in the process of creating a new kind of government, one designed to prevent precisely the system of martial decision-making advocated by strategic thinkers as ancient as Thucydides. Though the Athenian general was cognizant of war’s corrosive effect on a democracy, his observation that military conflicts are fought for either one or a combination of three reasons—fear, honor, and interest—certainly still held. But it was in the interest of Washington’s military strategy that no matter how meddling the delegates, civilians should always set policy. He was merely tasked to execute it. If they preferred militiamen to full-time soldiers, so be it.

  As duly appointed commander in chief, however, he needed no political permission to realign his regulars. In his desperate attempts to swell his regiments he immediately dispatched officers to scour the temporary military hospitals scattered about western Pennsylvania for able-bodied convalescents. He also sent riders into Philadelphia with warnings that any household, inn, or tavern lodging wayward American regulars would be subject to forfeiture. Simultaneously, he ordered a brigade of 1,000 Continentals from the Hudson River Highlands to immediately march south from Poughkeepsie, New York. These soldiers, under the command of Gen. Israel Putnam, were acting as a buffer between the British troops who had remained in New York City and Gen. Burgoyne’s army storming down the Champlain Valley from Canada. Washington’s order incensed Gen. Putnam, who felt his defenses were already stretched too thin along the river. It was well understood by combatants on both sides that what was then called the “North River” was, in the words of Washington’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, “the jugular of America, the severance of which meant death” to the revolution. Washington ignored Putnam’s protests. He needed every musket-bearing man available for the return engagement with Gen. Howe.

  Meanwhile, the high spirits among the troops at Germantown were far from being shared in Philadelphia. There, both the Continental Congress and the state legislators, taking a more realistic view of the events at Brandywine Creek, were already making preparations for the defense of the city in haste that bordered on panic. Militiamen were hurriedly formed into construction gangs to dig breastworks and haul cannons to the fords and ferry crossings along the Schuylkill River northwest of the city; the Liberty Bell was crated for passage to Allentown so it could not be melted down by the British for ammunition; and all of the city’s printing presses save one for emergency proclamations were disassembled and carted into the state’s interior.

  Within days the presses were followed by the delegates from both houses who, sensing the futility of staving off a professional army with a collection of half-trained farmers and shopkeepers, voted to reconvene in the town of Lancaster some 80 miles to the west. While the state legislators remained in Lancaster, the national delegates of the Continental Congress were again soon on the move, relocating their operations to the small town of York another 30 miles distant. These signals were not lost on Philadelphia’s Whigs, who were soon enough piling their own belongings onto wagons, carts, and carriages in anticipation of the arrival of an occupying force.

  While civilians’ anxieties were concentrated on the imminent arrival of Gen. Howe’s army, Washington fretted equally over the Royal Navy vessels lurking somewhere about the mouth of the Delaware. Philadelphia is a city virtually surrounded by water, with the Schuylkill to the west and the Delaware to the east forming natural barriers before their confluence south of the city. If Adm. “Black Dick” Howe’s fleet managed to break through the obstructions the Continentals had strung across the lower Delaware or, worse, to overrun the American riverbank forts, Washington suspected that instead of hosting dances for young American officers, the city’s taverns and bawdy houses would soon reverberate with the lyrics of British and German drinking songs.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Back on Brandywine Creek, Gen. Howe continued to be stalled by a shortage of wagons to carry supplies and remove his wounded. Washington took advantage of the enemy’s standstill to withdraw across the Schuylkill and march back through Philadelphia to position his own force northwest of the city in eastern Chester County. There he would form a line of defense between the British and the capital. He also posted pickets on the roads that led to the Continental storehouses farther inland. While passing through Philadelphia his army was met by a decidedly muted reaction compared with that of a month earlier. This time green sprigs were in short supply, and many American officers noted the absence of fighting-age men among the thin, sullen crowds lining the lanes.

  From here events played out rapidly. On the evening of September 14, Howe’s scouts informed him that they had located the Continental Army in Chester County. In hopes of swiftly finishing what he had started on the Brandywine, Howe had his troops marching the next morning—by pure coincidence the same day that Washington, having followed his lifelong farmer’s habit of rising at dawn, led his army out of its camp and recrossed the Schuylkill. The next afternoon advance parties from the two forces stumbled into each other quite by accident 26 miles west by northwest of Philadelphia. Neither of the commanders had planned on a major engagement quite so soon. As they frantically assembled their lines, providence intervened in the form of a ferocious northeaster, part of a tropical storm system that roiled the
entire Mid-Atlantic region that day.

  It began as a thick mist that hardened into a cold drizzle. Then the sky turned livid, awash with blinding neurons of white lightning as buckshot bursts of rain inundated the two armies. The downpour came in blinding sheets, so saturating each side’s cartridges and powder horns that what was later dubbed the Battle of the Clouds was in reality not much more than a sidewise skirmish. Desultory shots were fired from the opposing lines before both sides fell back through the bulking gloom, a retreat not entirely to Washington’s dissatisfaction. As the historian Ron Chernow notes in his masterly biography, “Despite his own hard-charging nature, Washington realized that, in view of the fragility of his army, it was sometimes better to miss a major opportunity than barge into a costly error.”

  With the inevitable fight postponed, Gen. Howe pushed southeast toward Philadelphia with his troops, the Hessians in particular, plundering and burning as they marched. The Continentals plodded across swollen streams and through calf-deep mud before again fording the Schuylkill and moving northwest toward the small German Lutheran enclave of Yellow Springs to obtain dry powder. Washington left behind Gen. Wayne and close to 2,000 of his best Pennsylvania regulars as a rear guard. Wayne’s orders were to track the British troops’ movements and harass their baggage train. Wayne was also told to expect reinforcements from the nearly 2,000 Maryland militiamen under the command of Gen. William Smallwood racing north in answer to Henry Laurens’s appeal. The idea for one final and massive strike on the British before they reached Philadelphia was already forming in Washington’s mind.