Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  As it was, by the time John Laurens strode into Washington’s Philadelphia headquarters in July 1777, he and his father had crafted a tentative peace. His circuitous return to America had taken him from London to Paris, where he met three times with Benjamin Franklin to offer his services. From Paris he journeyed to Charleston, South Carolina, by way of Bordeaux and the French West Indies. In an accident of history, Laurens presented himself to Washington in the same week that an even younger adventurer, the Marquis de Lafayette, had arrived in America’s capital city. As with the voluble Frenchman, Washington immediately took to the budding lawyer with the rings of sleeplessness around his low-lidded eyes. Apart from the obvious political advantage of mentoring the son of one of the most powerful members of Congress, the commander in chief was particularly impressed with Laurens’s proficiency in French, Latin, and Greek, as well as his familiarity with classical literature, mechanics, and—a field close to Washington’s heart—surveying.

  Yet what stirred Washington most about John Laurens was his intense devotion to the ideal of the United States—his amor patria, as the commander in chief would describe it in a letter to the historian Rev. William Gordon. Unlike Lafayette’s, however, Laurens’s application for official duty on Washington’s personal staff was initially rejected. Washington preferred that he serve as a volunteer aide, albeit one, he promised, eventually destined to “become a Member of my Family.” Now, several months later, as Henry Laurens fretted over his son’s safety, John had proved himself a fearless fighter, first at Brandywine—where Lafayette himself made note of his grace under fire—and later at Germantown, most notably with his actions at the Chew House. To some who witnessed Laurens’s perhaps foolhardy valor that October morning it appeared as if he had crossed the line between the coddled son of a gentrified planter and a hard-shelled warfighter. As his biographer Gregory D. Massey observes, “In constructing his new identity as a gentleman officer, John threw himself wholeheartedly into the struggle for liberty. So long as the British army remained a threat to America, he would remain an officer, renouncing his family in order to fulfill what he conceived to be his public duty.”

  Laurens and Alexander Hamilton rapidly became best friends despite their disparate backgrounds and, perhaps more pertinent, despite the latter’s natural veneer of reserve. Their shared antipathy toward slavery proved a building block. Hamilton never forgot the slave auction houses of his youth on Saint Croix, an island whose population was 90 percent of African descent. That this was but a way station for the human chattel en route to withering labor in the cane fields and sugar mills sparked in Hamilton an intense desire to get away. “I would willingly risk my life, tho’ not my character, to exalt my station,” he wrote to a friend at the age of 12. He foresaw only one route: “I wish there was a war.”

  Moreover, as Hamilton helped nurse Laurens back to health the two discovered their mutual admiration for the stern code of honor observed by the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome. Idealists in thought, word, and deed, they shared a vision of the future United States as modeled on archaic Greece’s Amphictionic League, and at one point Hamilton copied and presented to Laurens a passage from Plutarch’s Lives regarding the bonds formed by Spartan soldiers. “Every lad had a lover or friend who took care of his education,” Plutarch quotes the Spartan military reformer Lycurgus as explaining, “and shared in the praise or blame of his virtues and vices.” To modern ears the overtones of homoeroticism are inescapable, and though some historians have claimed with tenuous evidence that Laurens was a closeted homosexual whose marriage and child were a necessary cloak, an alternative interpretation through the lens of the era is more probable. Although alien to today’s military culture, for officers like Laurens and Hamilton the notion of applying the romantic imagery of the classical age to their unique status, separate as it was from both civilians and the rank and file, was quite flattering. For such peers in Washington’s army, thirsting for fame and glory while fighting for a cause larger than any individual, the battlefield bonds of friendship did indeed encompass a sense of love.

  However it stood, not long after the Battle of Germantown, Laurens was again preparing to share with Hamilton in either the praise or the blame for the Continental Army’s victories or defeats. As he saw it, with Washington’s troops recovering their spirit and Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer constituting a virtual Scylla and Charybdis on the banks of the Delaware, he was certain the British would soon be feeling the pressure from an American grip. As he wrote to his father, “If . . . we do our duty, Genl Howe will find himself in a situation which will require the utmost exertions of military talents to bring him off with honor.” In a postscript he added another provision to Howe’s downfall: “If our forts hold out.”

  * * *

  I. Congress acceded to the request, but in the end the South Carolina Provincial Congress rejected the proposal before John Laurens could effect it.

  NINE

  AN EERIE FOREBODING

  As autumn progressed, Washington, beset by military and political travails, was also facing an existential threat to his army as acute as any British cannon or congressional critic. From his new command center in Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, a limestone-laden tract 13 miles northwest of Philadelphia first purchased by William Penn nearly 100 years earlier, he took stock. The day after the retreat from Germantown, his Commissary Department reported that three days’ worth of provisions had been lost during the confused fallback. This was only the beginning of the Continental Army’s supply woes. On paper, the rations promised to an enlisted man appeared hearty enough. Every recruit was theoretically entitled to a daily pound of bread, three pints of dried vegetables, a pint of milk, a quart of spruce beer or cider, and a pound of either beef, pork, or salted fish, with one soldier observing that salt was “as valuable as gold.” The reality of the situation was something else. Men could not eat theories.

  The rapid depletion of the congressional treasury had combined with inept management of the army’s supply chain to make shipments of food, clothing, blankets, and ammunition sputtering at best. Salted meat and beef on the hoof were nearly nonexistent in camp, flour was in short supply, and the all-important stores of liquor were also diminishing. By this point in the war the typical Continental soldier considered beer as much of a necessity as bread, and Washington himself had long been a healthy consumer of English porter.I When informed that his soldiers were selling their clothing in order to purchase beer and whiskey from local brewers and distillers, he issued a General Order forbidding the sale of liquor by private vendors in and around the encampment. Should these “tippling house” purveyors persist, he warned that their alcohol would be seized and they would be lashed. But no executive decree could magically fill the army’s larders. Soon the officers in charge of the commissaries were hard pressed to provide victuals on a day-to-day basis, much less enough to sustain an all-out engagement against a dug-in enemy. If an army marches on its stomach, Washington’s troops were nearer to crawling, and the commander in chief was reduced to pleading with his quartermaster general, Thomas Mifflin, to rectify the situation as quickly as possible.

  Mifflin was an odd case. The son of a prominent Philadelphia merchant of the Quaker faith, he was a spirited orator and had once been described by John Adams as “the heart and soul of the rebellion.” Mifflin had graduated from the city’s eponymous college, now the University of Pennsylvania, and been elected to the First Continental Congress alongside Benjamin Franklin before resigning and—breaking with his family’s religious antiwar dictates—enlisting in the Continental Army.

  With his deep, wide-set eyes, sculptured cheekbones, and classic Roman nose, Mifflin cut a striking figure in his hand-tailored uniform. Washington had met him two years earlier while traveling to Boston to assume command of the army, and he was impressed enough to select the then 31-year-old as an aide-de-camp to complement Joseph Reed. He also promoted Mifflin to the rank of brigadier general. But Washington never lost his Virginia
planter’s instincts, and was always more interested in the stalk lurking beneath the showiest bract. The vain, urbane Mifflin may have looked as if he’d been robed in a vestry, but Washington was more intrigued by the young radical’s ardor for the revolution. Yet, again, he had acted in error. For all his lofty ideals, Mifflin proved an inadequate soldier.

  Their relationship had begun to fray the previous summer during the catastrophic Battle of Long Island. By relieving Washington’s rear guard too soon, Mifflin had nearly botched the Continental Army’s predawn evacuation from Brooklyn to Manhattan across the East River. In a rare instance of public censure, Washington exploded at Mifflin, “Good God! I am afraid you have ruined us.” Though the escape was eventually effected, Mifflin’s skin was as thin as his commander’s, and he never forgot nor forgave the shaming. Even after Mifflin’s actions at Trenton and Princeton had earned him a promotion to the quartermaster general’s post, he carried a grudge against the man who had recommended him for the position. The final straw for Mifflin was Washington’s failure to prevent his hometown, Philadelphia, from falling into British hands. For Washington’s part, sketchy rumors had begun to reach him that Mifflin was enriching himself and the civilian cronies he had hired to staff the Quartermaster Department’s supply depots. The two now circled each other warily.

  Whatever the commander in chief’s differences with Mifflin, more important was the near collapse of the Continental Army’s already tenuous supply chain. On October 14, after surveying the clothing needs of his troops, Washington penned a beseeching letter to John Hancock. “It gives me pain to repeat so often the wants of the Army,” he began, “and nothing would induce me to it, but the most urgent necessity. Every mode hitherto adopted for supplying them has proved inadequate, notwithstanding my best endeavours to make the most of the means, which have been in my power. The inclosed return will shew how great our deficiency in the most essential Articles.”

  The return Washington “inclosed” reported a shortage of 3,084 coats; 4,051 waistcoats; 6,148 breeches; 8,033 stockings; 3,236 pairs of shoes; 6,330 shirts; 137 hunting shirts; 4,552 blankets; 2,399 hats; 356 overalls; and 1,140 knapsacks. More distressingly, these figures did not include shortfalls from nine regiments whose commanders had yet to report in. Washington neglected to mention to Hancock that he and his aides had been sharing their meals on one tin plate for weeks.

  Toward the end of his supplication he added a coda that, in hindsight, reads like a rough draft of the more alarming communiqués he would soon be issuing from Valley Forge. “It is impossible that any Army so unprovided can long subsist,” he wrote, “or act with that vigor, which is requisite to ensure success.” In a dark harbinger of the events that would later alienate much of southeastern Pennsylvania’s civilian populace, he then commanded his foraging parties to seize arms, clothing, blankets, and food from any homesteads whose owners had either abetted Crown forces or refused to swear allegiance to the new republic. And in a move that surely dismayed his hungry troops, he ordered the dismantling of all gristmills at local farms lest they provide succor to the British.

  Yet even as the weather turned there remained in Congress a rather large bloc of delegates who audibly questioned why a commander in chief as allegedly brilliant as Washington lost so many battles. It was this faction that continued to urge Washington to make a final attempt to drive the enemy from Philadelphia. From a strategic point of view, however, Washington now had more pressing concerns. For after British engineers completed their great defensive barrier across the north end of the city, Gen. Howe again turned his gaze south toward the American forts blockading the Delaware River.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Contrary to both the popular contemporary and the historical conception, the vast majority of the British occupiers of Philadelphia that autumn were not in fact whiling away their days frequenting taverns and bawdy houses nor attending dances and theater productions by night. Crown officers, dwelling comfortably in private homes, did take advantage of the few delights the city offered. Yet the majority of Howe’s army—now swollen to nearly 15,000 with the reinforcements from New York—as well as the 2,000 or so women and children camp followers were for the most part stacked like tinned fish in hastily constructed barracks, warehouses, and the outposted wooden guard huts along the Schuylkill River defenses. The British brain trust understood that with the Delaware blocked and daily American patrols prowling the outskirts of town to confiscate provisions from local farmers heading into the city, the troops would be near to starving by midwinter. Prices of staples such as clothing, salt, and candle wax had already soared, and, as at the Continental camp at Whitemarsh, some foodstuffs such as beef had disappeared altogether. Firewood was so scarce that several of the town’s wooden structures had already been earmarked for demolition to provide heat when the cold set in. Howe was desperate to open the river to his brother’s supply ships, and the first Continental outpost to feel the British probe was Fort Mercer.

  Fort Mercer had been laid out and constructed on the high ground of Red Bank, New Jersey, by the Polish engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and was defended by 600 men and 14 artillery pieces. Across the river, just below the point where the Schuylkill poured into the Delaware, rose Fort Mifflin—a stone-and-wood fortification originally built by the British atop a marshy hump of cripple meadow known locally as Mud Island. Fort Mifflin was garrisoned by 200 regulars operating 10 cannons. Together, the two forts were capable of directing a nearly impenetrable wall of artillery fire at any ship that dared sail beneath their parapets. Yet either fort was useless without the other, as enemy vessels could merely skirt the opposite shoreline. Howe’s first target was the stronger of the two.

  A few weeks earlier the British had attempted to bomb the Americans out of Fort Mercer with a desultory land-based artillery barrage that came to nothing. This time Gen. Howe took a different tack. Under cover of darkness on the night of October 21 he ordered a unit of over 2,000 Hessians under the command of Colonel Carl von Donop ferried across the Delaware to Camden, New Jersey. Von Donop’s orders were to march south to Red Bank and attack Fort Mercer from the rear. Prior to this assault, six British men-of-war from Adm. Howe’s fleet would sail upriver and soften the fort’s defenders with a cannonade. Von Donop’s troops had been thrashed by the Continentals at Trenton, and he was eager to avenge what he considered a humiliation. As he vowed to his men, “Either the fort shall be called Fort Donop, or I shall have fallen.”

  At dawn the next day von Donop divided his regiments into two columns while the British warships lobbed shells into Fort Mercer. At a signal, the cannon fire ceased and the Hessian colonel ordered his Jägers forward. Von Donop personally led the southern spur of his force, which was encompassed in a murderous hail of musket and cannon fire before it even reached the fort’s nine-foot parapets. His northern prong fared little better. Though some men did manage to scale the ramparts of an abandoned section of the redoubt, once over the walls they were met by an abatis—a tangled mass of felled trees whose interlaced branches had been sharpened into deadly spears facing outward. As the Hessians clawed through this barricade they became easy targets for American marksmen firing down from the main wall of the fortification. Soon enough they joined von Donop’s wing in retreat. The colonel himself was wounded in the thigh during the assault and temporarily abandoned on the battlefield. Within two days he had bled out and died in the shadow of the fort he had vowed to rename after himself.

  The following morning a squadron of British ships returned to bombard Fort Mifflin. They were immediately swarmed by the swifter and more maneuverable American gunboats. Two of the enemy vessels—the ship of the line HMS Augusta with 64 cannons and the 18-gun sloop HMS Merlin—ran aground on shoals while attempting to thread the naval attacks and the embedded chevaux-de-frise. British sailors burned the listing Merlin to prevent it from falling into American hands. The Augusta’s crew ultimately managed to extract their ship from the shallows, but not before Continental artillery
had raked it from stem to stern with ball and grape. The Augusta sailed back downriver aflame, and exploded the next day.

  When news of the successful defense reached Washington’s headquarters in a cramped farmhouse at Whitemarsh, he and his staff were ecstatic. American spies in Philadelphia reported that the Hessians had lost nearly 350 men killed, including von Donop, with another 20 either captured or missing. The American casualties totaled 14 dead and 27 wounded. Washington immediately detached a brigade of regulars as a further bulwark against future pressure on both forts and dispatched a smaller force to cut off the wagon trains that the British had begun running by night between the fleet and Philadelphia. Finally, in a move designed to choke off any relief for what remained of the beleaguered Hessians still retreating through New Jersey, he petitioned the state’s governor, William Livingston, to have his militia lay ambushes for Redcoats marching to their rescue. He also ordered his light cavalry south to harass the enemy lines surrounding the city. The horsemen often galloped to within two miles of the city center, inflicting severe if scattered damage on enemy pickets. They even managed to capture a number of British soldiers from scavenging parties sent forth to plunder food in the countryside.

  These latter successes proved ephemeral, however, as they burdened the Continental commissaries with even more mouths to feed until the prisoners could be transferred to a holding camp in Morristown, New Jersey. One perhaps unintended consequence of these small units’ operations was that they actually alleviated some of the pressure on the kitchens at Whitemarsh by allowing the participating troops to effectively provision themselves in the field on an ad hoc basis. And when the British foraging parties became larger and better armed, so too did the American guerrilla units lying in wait for them along the roads and trails of Chester County.