Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  “No,” he quipped, “Philadelphia has captured Howe.” For all of Franklin’s quick wit, there was usually a kernel of truth at the heart of his pithy aperçus.

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  By late September the first frost of the season had already whitened the rolling green hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. Short of a pitched battle to retake Philadelphia, Washington understood that his best chance to stymie Gen. Howe was to keep the British fleet literally at bay. If the Americans could prevent Adm. Howe from sailing his supply ships up the Delaware River, his brother would soon enough be hard pressed to feed his army. This meant relying on the Continentals’ riverside forts, and to that end Washington detached a regiment of close to 1,000 men to reinforce the stockades on the lower Delaware. He felt able to spare these troops upon receiving word that the brigade he had summoned from Poughkeepsie was now but a day’s march away. Yet when he discovered that this unit consisted of only some 900 men and officers, he sent word to Gen. Putnam to hurry another 1,600 troops south to Pennsylvania.

  Upon receiving this order Putnam was again astonished and angry—why not just invite the British to stroll up from New York City and seize the entire Hudson Highlands? Such were the perils of the era’s communication lines that Putnam and the other American generals stationed in the north were under the impression that Washington commanded an army of some 40,000 men—enough, one commented, to make the British in Philadelphia “but a breakfast” for the Continentals.

  In fact, not counting the 2,000 soldiers marching from Virginia and the combined detachments from Putnam’s command, at the moment Washington could field only around 5,000 fighting men, with but 2,000 of them considered battle-hardened regulars. A salient fact about the Revolutionary War is that out of a population of three million, the 13 colonies never managed to raise an army of more than 50,000 men at any one time, including state militias. Even that figure is misleading, as it counts the rolls of soldiers who technically enlisted but may or may not have served for any length of time. In truth, the entire Continental Army never numbered more than around 20,000, and Washington never had more than 12,000 or so troops under his direct command.

  For all of Putnam’s obstreperousness, Washington had a soft spot for the gnarled 59-year-old. With his crop of thick curls turned badger-gray to match the great puffy pouches underlining his eyes, “Old Put,” as his soldiers called him, wore the face of a melancholy sheepdog. He had been a popular and inspiring leader of men since his Indian-fighting days with Rogers’ Rangers, and it was only half-jokingly remarked that he was totally unfit for any venue except the battlefield. As a civilian Putnam had tried his hand at farming and sheepherding—he was rumored to have crawled into a wolf’s den to kill the last she-wolf in the state of Connecticut—but soldiering was his true calling. It was Putnam who at Bunker Hill had growled the command to hold fire “until you see the whites of their eyes,” and as a sentimental sop to the old warhorse, Washington sent instructions allowing him to consolidate his farther-flung American outposts spread about the Hudson Highlands. But even this peace offering received Putnam’s derision, with one of his officers fuming at the “Paper Men” of Washington’s army and mocking the “boasted Courage of the Southern Heroes.” After Brandywine and Paoli, the patriots of the north country had no idea of how much worse it would get for the paper men in Pennsylvania.

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  On September 28, Washington summoned a war council to solicit opinions about whether to “make a general and vigorous attack upon the enemy, or to await further reinforcements.” Early in his military career, while fighting in the French and Indian War, Washington had discovered that he made his best decisions after listening to a spectrum of suggestions from his subordinates. He found that weighing the judgments of others reliably led him to the correct course of action—a course he invariably stuck to once he had decided upon it. On this occasion the vote to defer an assault on Philadelphia until more troops arrived was nearly unanimous—a consensus that, historians suggest, Washington was in agreement with and knew was coming. It was often noted that Washington exerted more influence on events by concealing rather than advertising his preferences. “He possessed the gift of silence,” as John Adams noted years later. Within 48 hours the Virginia troops had reached York to the delight of the Continental Congress, whose members watched them step smartly through the town. Washington was decidedly less enthusiastic when he discovered their conspicuous dearth of firelocks.

  Still, as September wound down Washington was again cautiously stalking the British, moving his army to within 16 miles of Germantown. Congress, particularly the Pennsylvania delegation, was pressing him to attack. But he was not certain he had sufficient firepower to stand and fight the bulk of the British regulars stationed at Germantown, much less the total British force. Surprising the enemy would be his only recourse. But when and where? As it happened, events in the north went far toward settling the decision for him. For when word reached Congress that Gen. Gates was successfully blocking the British path to Albany, the pressure on Washington to mount an offensive only grew. As the Valley Forge historian Wayne Bodle writes, “The news [from the north] had its intended effect as a morale booster, and seemed to call for a corresponding triumph in the southern theater.”

  Once again, Gen. Howe solved his counterpart’s problem. As Washington suspected, by occupying Philadelphia, Howe had created an internal crisis. On the march to the city his troops had provisioned themselves by living off the countryside, particularly the farmsteads around Valley Forge. Now, however, his quartermasters reported their food and gunpowder supplies dwindling. It was imperative for Howe to break the stranglehold the Americans had on the Delaware River and allow his brother’s supply ships to pass. About four miles below the city, on either side of a narrow section of the Delaware, Continental regulars manned two forts that constituted a strategic choke point. In addition to the redoubts, a small flotilla of American ships—facetiously dubbed “George Washington’s Navy” and consisting of a motley collection of merchantmen turned privateers and several floating artillery batteries—patrolled the waters near the outposts. These were abetted by smaller craft crewed by local Pennsylvanians.

  Taken together, the forts and the ships constituted a formidable defense, and Gen. Howe was neither prepared nor inclined to meet it head-on. A few miles below the two riverside outposts, however, rose a much more vulnerable, half-completed earthen fortification at Billingsport, where the Delaware’s main channel swung hard against the New Jersey embankment. This outpost could conceivably form a threat to his brother’s supply ships offloading provisions farther downriver to be conveyed overland to Philadelphia. This would be the British general’s first target. He had no idea that his decision to assault the dilapidated stockade at Billingsport would inadvertently lead to a pitched battle 27 miles away, at Germantown.

  * * *

  I. Masters-Penn House, known today as President’s House, was later home to both President George Washington and President John Adams.

  II. In the letter, Hamilton described “the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed.”

  SEVEN

  A BLOODY DAY

  It was the opportunity for which Washington had been waiting. On September 29 his scouts reported two regiments of British soldiers departing Germantown and marching south. Washington correctly surmised their intention to seize the fortification at Billingsport. He had already ordered the stockade there abandoned and burned and its six cannons spiked. Which is how the enemy found it when they arrived 48 hours later. In the meantime, Washington led his army to within 15 miles of Germantown and convened another war council. It was one of the rare occasions when he was not content to act as a neutral sounding board for his generals. “The term of mercy having expired,” he wrote in his General Orders for October 3, “our dearest rights, our dearest friends, and our own lives, honor, glory and even shame, u
rge us to fight.”

  General Howe, he added, “Has left us no choice but Conquest or Death.” It was time to strike the enemy, hard, before winter set in. By dusk on the evening of October 3 the entire Continental Army had broken into four columns. These marched all night in preparation for a daybreak attack.

  The two center columns, led by the generals Sullivan and Greene, were made up of regulars, now numbering close to 8,000 men. Three thousand militiamen under the command of Gen. Smallwood and Pennsylvania’s Gen. John Armstrong were apportioned to either wing. Nothing was to be carried that could not fit into a haversack greased for rain, and each soldier was issued a sheet of white paper to affix to his hat in order to distinguish him from the enemy. Their objective: to encircle and converge in waves on the British at Germantown, driving them south toward Philadelphia before Cornwallis could lead reinforcements up from the city. Given the timing, tactics, and terrain, it was an intricate if well-conceived battle plan. It failed miserably.

  It was Washington’s bad luck that by sunrise on Saturday, October 4, the gorges and defiles that dominated the landscape in and around Germantown were obscured by a strange and unsettling fog so thick that his men could barely make out compatriots advancing a few yards away. Initially the two columns of regulars moved on parallel tracks through the misty shroud, with one of Sullivan’s divisions under Gen. Wayne’s command so surprising the British pickets as to make matchwood of their defenses. While the bulk of the enemy force fell back helter-skelter for nearly two miles, trilling cries of revenge for Paoli filled the air as the Continentals advanced into the village of Germantown itself. Wayne’s officers attempted, without much success, to prevent the furious Pennsylvanian troops from bayoneting wounded Redcoats left behind by comrades fleeing in wild disorder. This early stage of the battle proved both the highlight and the lowlight of the American effort. Though it appeared for a brief moment as if the rout would continue to Philadelphia—Washington watched from horseback as his regulars poured past abandoned enemy tents and discarded cannons—the militiamen on either flank inexplicably failed to push forward to engage and engulf.

  The offensive took an even more pernicious turn when the two inner columns, hindered by the fog, were unable to form up as planned to create a solid front. Greene’s plank had to this point made good headway, but now one of his divisions commanded by the Virginian Gen. Adam Stephen stumbled in behind Wayne’s men and began firing at any movement before it.I The identifying pieces of white paper proved ineffectual and the most forward Continentals were caught in a cross fire of musket balls, quick throbs of light in the soupy murk, at first a light patter, then a downpour. Some came from the direction of the retreating Redcoats, others from the upper stories of the town’s plethora of stone houses occupied by the enemy. And now more came from the mystery force to their rear. Many of Wayne’s troops turned and fired on Stephen’s soldiers. Though Gen. Armstrong’s Pennsylvania militia had tepidly engaged the Hessian Jägers on the British left flank, there was no sign of Smallwood and his men as the battlefield was transformed into a chiaroscuro of dripping mist and sulfurous gun smoke punctuated by the ripping-silk sounds of metal shot.

  The confusion accelerated when British sappers began to torch Germantown’s fields of hay and buckwheat. Plumes of black smoke further obscured the terrain until the bewildered American regulars finally collapsed onto themselves, Leonardo da Vinci’s lost Battle of Anghiari come to life. Officers raced up and down what they could only guess were the front lines, urging staggering units forward. Washington himself whirled like a top on his white charger, shouting commands to advance and striking retreating soldiers with the flat of his sword. When this failed he ordered a remuda of dray horses arrayed across the green meadows and pale amber fields abutting the main Germantown road to block any Americans falling back. Fleeing Continentals ran around the animals or crawled beneath their flanks.

  By now, nearly three hours into the engagement, Cornwallis’s reinforcements were streaking up from Philadelphia and pouring into the fight. Howe, at his headquarters perhaps a half mile behind the British main line of defense southeast of the village square, initially thought that he was responding to—and that his soldiers were running from—a raiding probe. It never crossed his mind that Washington’s rebels would dare attempt another pitched battle so soon after Brandywine and Paoli. It was later reported that in order to prevent one of his “stupefied” battalions from breaking and running, Howe had castigated them with cries of “For shame, Light Infantry. Form! Form! It is only a scouting party.” Yet with American grapeshot rattling the trunks and branches of the chestnut trees about him, an incredulous Howe soon realized that he was indeed facing an all-out assault. His admiration for the enemy’s temerity was matched only by his organizational skills. He and Cornwallis regrouped and rallied their troops as the Continental momentum ground to a dazed halt amid the miserable shouts and murmurs of bleeding men. Within moments, as the Redcoats and Hessians counterattacked, the American trickle to the rear became a torrent.

  For the third time in less than a month George Washington’s troops were in retreat. To Gen. Armstrong, they had seemingly “fled from victory.” Many blamed the miserable showing on the militiamen, including Gen. Armstrong’s. Armstrong himself later equated what he called “the infamous falling off” of his own troops with what “may with great justice be called desertion.” His words were echoed by scores of exhausted Continental regulars who finally came to a halt some 20 miles north of the battlefield.

  As at Brandywine, American officers who had been in the thick of the fight appeared to recognize how close they had come to Howe’s annihilation, and spoiled for another clash. Washington’s old friend and fellow Virginian Gen. George Weedon bemoaned the loss of the “Trophies that lay at our feet.” His Virginians, he wrote, “had no Objections to another tryal which must take place soon.” And Tench Tilghman, one of the commander in chief’s longest-serving aides, wrote to his father that only the “excessive fogginess” had saved Howe’s forces from defeat. One American surgeon wrote to his father that the men from whose bodies he had extracted musket balls were in such good spirits and so anxious for retribution that they were determined “to see it out this fall.” A New York company commander even boasted “that we are far superior in point of swiftness [and] in high spirits. Every action gives our troops fresh vigor and a greater opinion of their own strength.” Even Washington’s chief intelligence officer Lt. Col. Benjamin Talmadge—a circumspect spymaster rarely given to metaphor—lamented that he had watched a unit of Connecticut regulars chase the British from “post to post” before being forced to withdraw.

  General Lord Stirling was even more emphatic, if perhaps fanciful, in his assessment. Like the best Continental generals from Washington on down—and in stark contrast to most of their European counterparts—Lord Stirling was not content to view the bloody fighting from afar. He had been in the thick of it, and writing as if the complex arrangement for the four American columns to converge had actually succeeded, he noted, “This affair will convince the World that we Can out General our enemy, and that we know how to Retreat in good Order and defy them to follow us.” Like the others, Lord Stirling appeared to thirst for another crack at the British. “The Enemy will find that after every Battle our Army will increase and theirs diminish,” he wrote. “This is fighting at such a disadvantage that they must soon be Convinced that they can never Support the war in America.”

  Perhaps it was only natural for the optimistic officers to gild what was, under any circumstances, a distressing setback. The final tally would be 150 Continentals killed, some 520 wounded, and 400 captured, against 70 British dead, 450 wounded, and 15 Redcoats and one small terrier in American custody.II Nevertheless, when the reports of victory in defeat reached York, congressional enthusiasm was difficult to temper. Delegates called for Washington to maintain a relentless offensive posture that would drive the British not only from Philadelphia but, within the month, from the
nation’s shores. Once again there was talk of patriotic Christmas pageants and balls in the city’s inns and taverns.

  On the other hand, Washington’s bruised and bleeding rank and file tended to leave less writing for posterity. It is doubtful that they were as giddy as their superiors and the distant politicians over the prospect of a rematch. But in the aftermath of what Washington described to his brother John as “a bloody day,” the commander in chief’s impression of the engagement can be fairly summarized in several communiqués. To John Hancock he described the events as “rather unfortunate” although far from “injurious.” He later sent an addendum observing, “The tumult, disorder, & even despair, which seems to have taken place in the British Army were scarcely to be paralleled.” And in a letter to Thomas McKean, president of the Delaware House of Assembly, he dismissed any notion of his own troops faltering and, instead, encouraged all patriots to “rejoice that we have given a severe blow to our Enemies.”

  True to his written sentiments, within days the Continental Army was indeed slowly inching back toward Philadelphia. Even as squads of soldiers were assigned to moccasin-sewing duty to cover the hundreds of Continental bare feet and deserters were hanged in the camp’s parade ground, expectations ran high that the order to attack would come at any moment. Not even news of the British Gen. Clinton’s expedition from New York City to capture two American forts on the Hudson Highlands could dampen the aspirations of Washington’s troops. The same could not be said for Israel Putnam, who had predicted as much when the commander in chief had weakened his northern forces. Putnam could only sputter oaths over the fact that days before the British had taken his redoubts, Washington had assured him that if Clinton were to make a military move at all, the foray would almost certainly be through New Jersey “to form a junction with General Howe.”