Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  On October 30, still simmering over having received no official word from Gen. Gates about his reported triumph at Saratoga, Washington dispatched Alexander Hamilton to upstate New York with instructions to collect two of Gates’s three brigades to further shore up the Delaware River forts. The communiqué from the commander in chief that Hamilton carried began with another perfunctory congratulatory note on Gates’s success at Saratoga. Then Washington slipped in the blade. “At the same time,” he wrote, “I cannot but regret, that a matter of such magnitude and so interesting to our General Operations, should have reached me by [secondhand] report only.” Had Gates’s triumph so gone to his head, he wondered, that the general had neglected to send “a line under your signature, stating the simple fact”?

  Riding hard, Hamilton covered the 300 miles to Albany in five days. Gates, irritated by the tone of Washington’s letter, also took umbrage at having to deal on an equal footing with a representative he considered no more than a callow youth—an irritation that Washington may very well have intended. Gates initially attempted to stonewall Hamilton, insisting that he could spare not a man. He was, he said, still wary of Gen. Clinton’s attempting another foray north from New York City. At this, Hamilton slyly wrote to Washington, he “was sorry to find [Gates’s] feelings did not correspond with yours for drawing off the number of troops you directed.” After several cantankerous meetings during which an obviously frustrated Hamilton took pains to at least fake the proper deference, he finally inquired if it was Gates’s position that he should return to Pennsylvania and report to the commander in chief that the general refused to obey his orders. At this Gates reluctantly agreed to part with one brigade. It included Gen. Poor’s New Hampshire regiment and Dan Morgan’s Virginia sharpshooters.

  By early November it had become increasingly evident to both sides that the Pennsylvania campaign had devolved into a battle of nerve and attrition. The stalemate was exacerbated by the unusually heavy rains that flooded the roads that fall. The few Continental supply trains that could be mustered were unable to pass over the washed-out arteries, and Washington’s commissary officers were driven to further despair. Concurrently, some 20 miles to the southeast, Gen. Howe’s despondence over von Donop’s miserable performance at the Battle of Red Bank was palpable. Entrenched in his command center in the elegant Masters-Penn House, the British commander recognized that if the Continentals could continue to hold their river forts until the Delaware froze over—conceivably in mere weeks—he would have little choice but to abandon the city. His reputation as commander in chief of Crown forces in America already dented by the defeat at Saratoga, he could not help intuiting that in certain parliamentary circles his decision to move on Philadelphia was not worth the trade-off of the loss of Burgoyne’s army.

  Although his letter of resignation was dulling his taste for combat, Howe had no choice but to attempt another downriver offensive. This time his target was Fort Mifflin.

  * * *

  I. Following the signing of the Declaration of Independence he had forsworn British comestibles in favor of home-brewed—“I use no porter or cheese in my family, but such as is made in America,” he wrote to Lafayette—but now even those staples were scarcely arriving. (Hucklebridge, The United States of Beer, p. 108.)

  TEN

  BLOOD ON THE DELAWARE

  For all his frustration with the course of the war, Gen. Howe was not a fool. He had now twice absorbed the lessons of attempting to dislodge the Americans from their riverside forts with a primarily overland assault. If the redoubts were to fall, it would have to be from a combined attack by land and water. So, in cooperation with his brother, he organized a plan to engage the defenders of Fort Mifflin with three times as much firepower as he had brought to bear the previous month against the larger and better-defended Fort Mercer. Less than two miles to the rear of Fort Mifflin on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, a spit of land called Province Island protruded from the river’s shallows. For years it had been used as a sanctuary by local Indians harassed by a vigilante group of Scots-Irish known as the Paxton Boys. In the first week of November, the British general ordered the island’s Indian population cleared as his cannoneers hauled their artillery onto the foreland that jutted out nearest the Delaware River.

  In the interim since von Donop’s strike at Fort Mercer, the garrison at Fort Mifflin had ballooned to some 400 Americans, including the young diarist Joseph Plumb Martin. At daybreak on November 10 they awoke to a fusillade that would be the largest extended bombardment of the Revolutionary War. Over the next four days British artillery from Province Island rained continuous fire on the rickety outpost—balls launched directly at its wooden barracks and walls; mortar and howitzer shells lobbed over its parapets; grapeshot rattling its bastions at the merest glimpse of a cocked hat or musket barrel. The fort’s 10 cannons proved ineffectual in response, “a Burlesque upon the art of Fortification,” wrote one Continental regular. When the Continentals’ lone 32-pounder ran out of ammunition, the fort’s commander offered a gill of rum, about four ounces, to any soldier who dared enter the parade ground to recover British cannonballs to be fired back at the enemy. Each night, under the tireless direction of the French engineer Maj. François de Fleury, the defenders attempted to repair the damage and shore up their crumbling walls. By the next afternoon the enemy’s artillery would have reduced their efforts to rubble.

  For the moment the Americans found redemption only in the weather. A series of intense squalls had blown in from the north, roiling the currents on the river and preventing Adm. Howe’s ships from reaching their target. On the night of November 14, however, the veil of clouds lifted to reveal a black canopy bristling with pinpoints of starlight. The coup de grâce was delivered the next morning, when the river tides carried eight British gunboats armed with 228 more cannons upriver. Keeping out of range of the artillery at Fort Mercer, the vessels encircled the little fort on Mud Island and fired at will. The waterborne show of force was no match for what even Washington referred to snidely as the “Gondolas and Guard Boats” of the Continental Navy. During one hour over 1,000 cannonballs reportedly fell within Fort Mifflin’s walls.

  With his gift for limpid, simple prose, the diarist Joseph Plumb Martin sketched a grisly portrait from the perspective of boots—or, in his case, bare feet—on the ground. “I have seen the enemy’s shells fall upon it and sink so low that their report could not be heard when they burst, and I could only feel a tremulous motion of the earth at the time,” he wrote. “At other times, when they burst near the surface of the ground, they would throw the mud fifty feet in the air.” Martin witnessed comrades “split like fish to be broiled” while he himself “endured hardships, sufficient to kill half a dozen horses.” He was six days shy of his seventeenth birthday.

  As the battle progressed, the converted British East Indiaman Empress of Russia managed to ride the current into the narrow channel that separated the fort from the mainland. British marines, clambering to the ship’s crow’s nest, heaved scores of hand grenades down on the Continentals firing from the parapets. That night, with ammunition running low and over half of the redoubt’s exhausted and starving men either killed or wounded, Fort Mifflin’s commanding officer, Colonel Christopher Greene—a third cousin of Nathanael Greene—ordered its evacuation. Just prior to midnight, with the oars of their longboats muffled with sheepskins, the Americans slipped their dead into the Delaware’s currents and rowed across the river to Fort Mercer. A small unit was left behind to spike the cannons and set the outpost ablaze before its members, too, crossed. The escapees included Joseph Plumb Martin. The following morning the British took possession of the charred and splintered remnants of the little citadel.

  General Howe—buoyed by casualty reports of only 13 British dead and 24 wounded during the siege—immediately ordered Gen. Cornwallis to lead 3,000 men to storm Fort Mercer. Washington briefly considered reinforcing the New Jersey outpost, but a team of generals he sent to assess that c
ontingency advised against it. On November 20, five days after the fall of Fort Mifflin, Col. Greene ordered Fort Mercer’s walls abandoned. Cornwallis’s detachment moved in the following morning. To his delight, Cornwallis also found himself in possession of 400 head of cattle, which he ordered driven to Philadelphia as a gift to Howe’s hungry troops.

  With the Delaware River now open to Adm. Richard Howe’s large transport vessels, any hope of starving the British out of Philadelphia slipped away like a smuggler’s schooner. Washington, under pressure from Congress to react, could do no more than dispatch an undersized division of roughly 2,000 men under Nathanael Greene to southern New Jersey with discretionary instructions to engage Cornwallis whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself. Riding with Greene was the peripatetic Marquis de Lafayette.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Lafayette had spent his short convalescence dashing off billets-doux to Adrienne, updating his powerful father-in-law on the vigilance and righteousness of the American cause, and pestering Washington for a command of his own. Finally, having received no reply from his patron, in early October he had quit his hospital bed, wrapped his game leg in a blanket, bidden his Moravian hosts adieu, and ridden off to Whitemarsh. There he slept on the floor in the commander in chief’s hovel of a headquarters, shared the general staff’s one tin plate, and continued his lobbying. This persistence eventually broke down Washington’s inchoate reservations, and in one of his first letters to the new president of Congress, Henry Laurens, Washington wrote of his “delicate situation with respect to the Marquis Le Fayette.”I Washington advised the senior Laurens that a refusal to grant the Frenchman’s request “will not only induce him to return [to France] in disgust—but may involve some unfavorable consequences.” Moreover, in the wake of Lafayette’s heroism at Brandywine, he was now inclined “to gratify him his wishes.”

  “The Marquis,” Washington added with what may be imagined as a sigh of resignation, “is determined to be in the way of danger.” While awaiting Laurens’s directions, Washington attached Lafayette to Gen. Greene’s expeditionary force in a sort of trial run.

  By late November, Greene had stalked Cornwallis’s force to the town of Gloucester in southwest New Jersey. There he put 400 riflemen under the command of Lafayette and tasked him with probing the enemy lines. On the afternoon of November 25, Lafayette, still hobbling on his wounded leg, crept to within yards of the Redcoat camp to conduct a troop count. As he was making his return circumference he came upon a stand-alone picket of some 400 Hessians. Fulfilling Washington’s forecast—and perhaps his worst fears—the Frenchman gathered his infantry and attacked. The Americans routed the Hessians, killing or wounding close to 40 and chasing the rest for a good half mile before the combination of British reinforcements and darkness ended the engagement.

  General Greene’s reconstruction of the action for Washington was evenhanded in its praise for the marquis. More impressive, Lafayette’s own précis of his “little success” stressed the heroics of the American troops while downplaying his own role as “not very considerable.” If nothing else, Lafayette had learned to say what his commander in chief wanted to hear. Immediately after receiving both communiqués, Washington relayed to Congress his own summation of the encounter, again suggesting that Lafayette be given a greater role in the army. This time Congress agreed, and on December 1, Lafayette was placed in charge of the division of Virginians formerly led by the disgraced Gen. Stephen. In the meantime any hopes Washington had of Greene’s luring Cornwallis into a fight evaporated when Cornwallis and his troops were recalled to Philadelphia. If Gen. Howe was going to force a major engagement, he was going to do it on his own terms.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  On December 4, American scouts reported that the entire British army with Howe at its head was marching from Philadelphia toward Whitemarsh. Sensing a final opportunity for a conclusive confrontation before winter set in, Washington roused his troops and, in John Laurens’s words, “paraded our men so as to make them acquainted with the ground and its advantages.” The following morning when the British hove into view the Continentals were already positioned in the fortified hills overlooking a deep swale in front of the camp. The Redcoats were then greeted with a series of feints designed to draw them closer to the defile, including a fusillade into their right flank from Dan Morgan’s rifle corps. General Howe, proving either too savvy or too indifferent, refused to take the bait. “We wished nothing more than to have them engage us,” recorded the prolific Joseph Plumb Martin, who had arrived at Whitemarsh the previous day: “For we were sure of giving them a drubbing, being in excellent fighting trim, as we were starved and as cross and illnatured as curs.” His sarcasm is understandable.

  Instead, for the next 48 hours the British probed the American battle lines for weaknesses, finding none. Howe then withdrew his army in such haste that Continental soldiers raced to scavenge the abandoned blankets and cooking kettles, some of the latter with fires still burning beneath them. Howe’s imminent return to England—and the prospect of explaining another defeat on the heels of the humiliation at Saratoga—probably influenced his decision to seek the succor of Philadelphia. And in that instant the expectation of another large-scale engagement that had buoyed what Washington called his “soldiery” since Germantown became as meager as their paydays and daily rations. What the commander in chief and his staff of confidants considered a moral victory at Whitemarsh left a sour taste in the mouths of many others, not least in the halls of Congress.

  Again the sotto voce grumbling circulated, this time not quite so sotto. Would not someone like Horatio Gates or Benedict Arnold have carried the fight to the enemy from those limestone hills? “Two battles he has lost for us by two such Blunders as might have disgraced a Soldier of three months standing,” sniped the New Jersey delegate Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant to his fellow congressman James Lovell of Massachusetts. Now that the opportunity had passed, all that remained was the prospect of a cold and hungry season of waiting. As Jedediah Huntington wrote to his father in Connecticut, “What probability is there of recruiting our Army? Money will not do it for it has almost intirely lost its Value. How is it possible to clothe our men? They have worn out their Blankets & other Clothing and I see no prospect of renewing them.” Or, as the historian Wayne Bodle observed, “In the camp of the American Army, the winter of discontent had begun early.”

  With the farmsteads and mills surrounding Whitemarsh bled dry by the two voracious armies, there was nothing left for Washington but to find another area to stake winter camp. So it was that in the waning autumn weeks of 1777, mounted messengers pocked the sodden roads between Whitemarsh, York, and Lancaster—the seat of Pennsylvania’s state legislature—as Washington, the Continental Congress, and the local politicians debated various options. Some of Washington’s aides pressed for a chain of winter cantonments meandering from Reading to Lancaster, the better to protect what little Continental stores remained. Others argued that fragmenting the army in such a manner would lead to a flood of desertions. Still other general officers—including Greene, Lafayette, and Wayne—put forth the proposition of marching the troops to winter quarters as far south as Wilmington, Delaware. The irascible Count Pulaski, echoing the sentiments of a healthy swath of junior officers and the more bellicose members of Congress, called for an immediate attack on Philadelphia. General Lord Stirling’s was the lone voice suggesting that the army consider wintering over in the “Great Valley of Trydruffin,” or Valley Forge, some 13 miles to the west. A circumspect Washington was more wary than usual of voicing his opinion on the subject. For ultimately any decision would entail a delicate balancing act.

  On the one hand was the covey of congressional delegates, abetted by some of his own lieutenants, majors, and colonels, who still wanted to take the fight to the enemy. On the other was the political reality of the state government, which expected the Continental Army to remain near enough to Philadelphia to prevent, as one representative put it, “the rav
ages and insults of the enemy” across its suburbs. That both these strategies broke against Washington’s own intuition and military experience was the conundrum. To this point the entire Pennsylvania campaign had been an exercise in experimentation after the decisive victories at Trenton and Princeton that closed out the previous year. To Washington’s critics it had been a failed experiment incurring a cascade of defeats. In reality it had consisted of little more than several inconclusive, though violent, tactical clashes punctuated by extended periods of strategic regrouping. There was, however, a larger picture to consider.

  By early December the news of Burgoyne’s surrender had reached Versailles. King Louis XVI and his ministers were so overjoyed that it inspired a démarche, with the king himself notifying Benjamin Franklin that now was a propitious time for the Americans to officially resubmit their bid for French aid. More surprisingly, France’s military minds appeared to be just as impressed by reports of Washington’s attack on Howe at Germantown as they were by Gates’s victory. The irony was palpable—while at home Washington endured harsh criticism for his army’s failure, across the Atlantic his stab at Germantown, coming so soon after the defeat at Brandywine, was viewed as a dazzling display of audacity. Despite the mixed outcomes, the news that an American army still in its infancy and consisting of citizen-soldiers had defeated the British on one front and thrown a major scare into them on another nearly 300 miles away was taken as a sign of an ascendant United States. As the French foreign minister wrote to Franklin and Deane, “This, promises everything.”