Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Washington could well imagine how the news of Saratoga would play in Paris, though he would not learn for months how strongly the Germantown engagement influenced the French. He was, however, certain of one thing—his bedraggled and bedeviled troops were in no condition to conduct a major offensive against Philadelphia. He had personally journeyed to the city’s edge to view the British defenses, and John Laurens, who accompanied the observation party, described them in a letter to his father as “redoubts of a very respectable profit, faced with plank, formidably fraised, and the intervals between them with an abbatis unusually strong.” The French engineer Col. Duportail delicately advised Washington that even a Continental Army doubled in strength would break on the enemy’s ramparts. Young Laurens was equally direct, telling his father that any attack on the city would constitute “madness.”

  Convinced that his American forces were far too weak to storm Philadelphia, Washington settled on the next best strategy. As he wrote to his old friend Patrick Henry in Virginia, “Next to being strong, it is best to be thought so by the enemy.” Another defeat, the commander in chief knew, would expose his army’s fragility not only to the British, but also to potential allies across the Atlantic. His troops needed the winter to restore their vigor and morale. Ideally this rehabilitation site would be somewhere inland, far from harm’s way. Yet to suggest such a path would be anathema to the federal and state civil authorities. There had to be another way to make his point. In a brazen act of political jujitsu, he decided to turn the criticisms of his leadership skills to his advantage.

  Three days after confiding his fears to Patrick Henry, Washington penned a letter that confronted his doubters head-on. “I am informed that it is matter of amazement, and that reflections have been thrown out against this Army, for not being more active and enterprizing than, in the opinion of some, they ought to have been,” he wrote to the president of Congress, Henry Laurens. He then went on to detail “the best way to account for” these defamations—specifically the scandalous dearth of arms, ammunition, shoes, clothing, blankets, and wages that his soldiers had been promised. Even if these commodities were to somehow miraculously appear, he continued, Gen. Howe’s forces still massively outnumbered his own army. To drive home the point, Lafayette addressed his own letter to Henry Laurens, describing “the quite nacked fellow [soldiers]” warming themselves at his campfire, and proclaimed, “How happy I would be if our army was drest in a comfortable manner.”

  The dual complaint prompted a congressional fact-finding committee to journey to Whitemarsh where—as Washington had presumed—the delegates were shocked by the camp’s ragged condition. A third of the Continentals remained without blankets, shoes, and socks, and the congressmen were shamed into unbuckling their own footwear to hand over to freezing soldiers. They also vowed to press their fellow congressmen for an untangling of the army’s supply line upon their return to York. In their official report, however, they could not resist tossing a dart at the commander in chief. The promised reforms, the committee noted, could be accomplished only with a commensurate upturn in the army’s lax discipline. None of this, of course, answered the question regarding a site for a winter camp.

  Washington’s official papers during this period are noticeably sparse and betray little of his personal feelings over this tumultuous debate. Moreover, unfortunately for historians, fearing the capture of a personal journal, he had discontinued his diary entries early in the revolution. This leaves to posterity’s conjecture many of his intimate thoughts on events through eight years of war. Happily, in many instances the writings of acolytes such as Laurens, Hamilton, and Lafayette provide guideposts to his innermost reflections. In this instance, one can assume that John Laurens’s views mirrored those of the general he cherished when, in a letter to his father, Henry, in early December, he itemized the reasoning behind the Continental Army’s requirement of “exemption from fatigue in order to compensate for their want of clothing.” The men needed safe, warm quarters, he wrote, in order to discourage desertion, encourage enlistment, and fine-tune the force’s discipline and training. Yet he also recognized the realities of abandoning the local populace to the mercies of the Crown. Without naming a specific location, he then suggested a compromise that “leaves us within distance for taking considerable advantage of the Enemy and covering a valuable and extensive country.”

  There were manifold facts to parse in selecting the site. It had to be secure enough to fend off a British attack in force while central enough to afford the citizens throughout the countryside around Philadelphia protection against lesser enemy excursions. It had to lie between the army depots and hospitals at Lancaster, Reading, and York yet still be close enough to the capital city should some as yet unfathomable opportunity for a winter assault present itself. Fresh water would need to be available, as would enough wood to build barracks cabins and keep fires burning. It was a military and political conundrum that Washington was still mulling when, at the urging of Lord Stirling, Gen. Wayne—born in Chester County and thoroughly familiar with the area—came around with the answer.

  Wayne joined Lord Stirling in suggesting “hutting” atop the undulating, triangular plateau overlooking the Valley of the Forges. Washington immediately recognized that the site met both civil and military prescriptions. Some 23 miles northwest of Philadelphia, it was close enough for American horsemen and outlying pickets to react to any British “ravages” or “insults.” Yet at a day’s march from the city, it was also far enough from the enemy stronghold to make it virtually immune to surprise attack. In the event of a major British assault, its natural contours—it was bounded by steep falloffs on two sides and the Schuylkill on the third—would provide excellent defensive terrain. It was blessed with an abundant supply of fresh water from both the river and copious creeks and wells. Finally, the thick carpet of virgin hardwood forests on the western rises anchored by the 426-foot Mount Joy and, behind it, the slightly higher Mount Misery, would prove integral for the sustainment of a winter camp’s two vital B’s—burning and building.

  Perhaps more important, the site lay on the western rim of the fall campaign’s sundry battlegrounds. The farms, orchards, and mills to the southeast had been virtually picked clean by both armies. But to this point western Chester County had been the scene of relatively little pillaging. While the Schuylkill remained ice-free it would provide a thoroughfare into the Pennsylvania interior for both communications and supplies. And once the river froze, Valley Forge’s road network, though susceptible to washouts, afforded at least two sturdy cobblestoned avenues, both laid down in the 1740s and generally passable for Conestoga wagons delivering provisions from points farther west. Moreover, in a worst-case scenario, the large artery formed by the confluence of the two roads could be used as an escape route that ran some 60 miles west all the way to hilly Lancaster, perfect terrain from which to conduct guerrilla operations.

  Unlike Washington’s current encampment at Whitemarsh, Valley Forge was not wilderness. It was farm country, and it would require all the expertise the French engineer Duportail and his subordinates could muster to construct adequate field fortifications. But, overall, it was as stable an anchor from which to run the far-flung business of war as the commander in chief could expect to find. It would do as the bloodied and desperate Continental Army’s home for the next six months.

  * * *

  I. John Hancock, in failing health, resigned from the post he had held since May 1775 on October 31, 1777. The following day the delegates voted near-unanimously to elect Henry Laurens to the post. The only dissenting vote was cast by Laurens himself, a chivalrous action meant to show his uninterest in placing personal promotions over his civic duty.

  PART II

  I am Sick—discontented—and out of humour. Poor food—hard lodging—cold Weather—fatigue—nasty cloaths—nasty cookery—Vomit half my time—smoak’d out of my senses—the Devil’s in’t—I can’t Endure it—why are we sent here to starve and Freeze—Her
e all Confusion—smoke and cold—hunger and filthyness. A pox on my bad luck.

  —ALBIGENCE WALDO, CONTINENTAL ARMY SURGEON, DECEMBER 14, 1777

  George Washington reviews troops at Valley Forge.

  ELEVEN

  THE RELICS OF AN ARMY

  The Continental Army broke camp at Whitemarsh on December 11 and crossed a raft bridge spanning the Schuylkill the next night. In an odd counterpoint to the maxim that history is written by the victors, even the most meticulous scholars and researchers have never been able to establish exactly how many soldiers George Washington led from Whitemarsh in late 1777. The consensus puts the total at somewhere between 11,000 and 14,000. As it was, all of these troops and most of their officers had no idea as to their destination.

  After a brief skirmish with a startled British foraging party led by Gen. Cornwallis, the battered column of Continentals spent the next week following the cobblestoned road west, descending deeper into the dank and rugged defile that the original Welsh settlers, the most numerous in any of the 13 colonies, called the Gulph—“valley” or “glen” in their home language. By day sheets of cold rain blew sideways beneath vivid bursts of cloud-shrouded lightning and turned the road into a trail of mud. Come sunset the downpours froze into a wet, heavy snow that virtually interred the men, Brueghel’s peasants bathed in a Rembrandt’s gloom. During preparations for the battle that did not occur at Whitemarsh, most of the army’s tents had been sent north for safekeeping. Now, canvas strips sliced from the remaining few became the raw material to fashion makeshift shirts, shoes, and stockings. “A cavalcade of wild beasts” was how Joseph Plumb Martin described himself and his compatriots, their personal Via Dolorosa traced across the landscape by the trails of blood left by the thousands of barefoot men. At one point he and his company managed to run down a scrawny cow that was immediately killed and skinned, its untanned hide fashioned into crude moccasins.

  But the march was most miserable for the long roster of sick and wounded. Because of a shortage of wagons—fewer than 40 were on hand for the entire army—most of the injured were either carried on improvised stretchers or supported by strong shoulders. Influenza, typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and scurvy were only just beginning their winter sweep through the ranks, and the dreariness of the landscape was aptly described by the Connecticut surgeon Albigence Waldo as “a place where nothing appears pleasing to the Sicken’d Eye & Nauseating Stomach.” Despite his prolific journal entries, not much is known of the 27-year-old Waldo’s personal life other than that, as he wrote, he had left behind “a good and loving wife” and his “pretty children” in Putnam, Connecticut. Waldo was attached to the 1st Connecticut Infantry Regiment, the unit Gen. Huntington had led south from Peekskill three months earlier, and his diary entries provide an invaluable snapshot of Continental Army operations through the fall and winter of 1777 and 1778. Waldo was a sturdy campaigner and an ardent revolutionary, but by December even the indefatigable surgeon wrote like a man slowly perishing. Waldo stretched the horizons of his vision to recall and lament the mouthwatering “fine stock of provisions, hens, turkeys, pigs, ducks, wine and cider” available aboard the packet he had served on, plying the Hudson River. He could not help ruing the “wiffling wind of fortune” that bore upon it the “disappointments, anxieties, and misfortunes” bracing the American force. Perhaps it was because someone had stolen his shoes.

  Whatever the case, as Waldo and his fellow soldiers slogged forward he was far from alone in considering the army’s dire circumstances. As scant rations had been issued since the breaking of camp at Whitemarsh, anyone lucky enough to have snatched a turnip or an ear of winter corn from the fields along the route devoured it raw. At night, gazing about over the thousands of campfires that blackened their faces and stung their eyes, the wraithlike soldiers could not have helped concluding that they resembled nothing so much as what one future historian would deem “the relics of an army.”

  As the mass movement neared Valley Forge on December 18, a messenger from York arrived with news that Congress had declared this a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise” in honor of the victory at Saratoga. With the Continental Army having lurched a mere six miles in six hours, Washington halted the march outside a country inn named in honor of the king of Prussia. It had stopped snowing, and the night felt as if it were holding its breath as chaplains conducted services before the regiments and brigades. Following the devotions, while his soldiers gathered damp twigs to light feeble fires, Washington and his senior officers lumbered into the tavern, where a painting of the dashing and victorious Frederick the Great seemed to mock them.

  Washington recognized that the announcement of a day of thanks was a shot across his bow from the faction of delegates cozying up to Gen. Gates. Nevertheless he ordered his commissary officers to drain their kegs, slaughter their last drift of hogs, and literally scrape the bottoms of their flour barrels to provide some of the troops a meager celebratory feast of beer, ham, and bread. Others, like Joseph Plumb Martin, made do with half a gill of rice and a tablespoon of vinegar to ward off scurvy. Such a feast, he wrote, was complemented by “a leg of nothing and no turnips.” Since mid-October the commander in chief had been a supplicant before both Congress and Pennsylvania’s state authorities in a determined attempt to keep his army supplied. Now, two months later, the consequences of the delegates’ failure to heed his warnings were manifest in the bobtail force that limped toward Valley Forge like a line of tattered scarecrows.

  As the days dragged on, Washington periodically reined his horse to the side of the road to linger and bear witness as his ghost of an army straggled past. First the officers on horseback leading their stumbling and footsore regiments, then the juddering baggage wagons, and finally the 400 or so “camp women” with their untold children bringing up the rear. These were primal moments. As the commander in chief beheld so many of his soldiers “without Cloathes to cover their nakedness—without blankets to lay on—without Shoes,” it must have crossed his mind that the preponderance of his hungry and half-clad men were present in great part out of personal loyalty to him. Nor could the irony have been lost on him that his days as the leader of this army might well be numbered, through either political perfidy or, as seemed more likely at the moment, the complete dissolution of his vagabond force. By the same token, one cannot help wondering if any of the young troopers he now gazed down upon, their listless eyes sunk deep into gaunt faces, reminded him of the defiant youth who over two decades earlier had undertaken his own hazardous missions into the wilderness on behalf of an empire that was now his sworn enemy.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  In many ways the parallels are striking. Just as Washington’s first command in the Revolutionary War had driven the British from Boston, to worldwide acclaim and astonishment, so his initial military foray in the French and Indian War had resulted in a measure of international fame. It had occurred in 1753, when the 21-year-old Virginian was dispatched into the vast hinterlands west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Washington had volunteered to carry a letter from Virginia’s royal governor addressed to the commander of the French troops currently occupying and fortifying territory in the wild Ohio Country. The communiqué informed the French that they were trespassing on ground claimed by “His Britannic Majesty” and were to depart forthwith. Though the French, in effect and politely, laughed off the English king’s pretensions and sent Washington on his way, he had served as the vehicle for the firing of the first, symbolic shot of the French and Indian War.

  Upon Washington’s return to Richmond, his journal from the expedition was published by a local newspaper. Its tales—of settlers murdered and scalped by marauding Indians, of Alleghany mountain passes traversed through waist-deep snow, of fording icy rivers that froze the legs off pack horses—caused an immediate sensation in the colonies. When the narrative was reprinted by newspapers and magazines from London to Edinburgh, the adventures of the young fourth-generation colonial planter were suddenly the talk of Gre
at Britain’s salons and coffeehouses. More important, the travelogue shone light on a trait Washington would cultivate for the rest of his military and political career—“that of a man of action,” as his biographer Joseph Ellis writes, “determined to tell us what he did, but equally determined not to tell us what he thought about it.”

  Yet just as Washington’s success in Boston in 1776 was followed by catastrophe in New York and—after a brief respite at Trenton and Princeton—by bitter disappointments and recriminations in the aftermath of Brandywine, Paoli, and Germantown, so too did the trajectory of his early military career take a sharp downward turn. In the years following his successful foray into the Ohio Country, Washington, by now an officer in the Virginia militia, was twice more involved with excursions to dislodge the French from the British-claimed territory. Each ended in a fiasco. He led the first mission, which resulted not only in the rout of his rum-soaked militiamen, but also in charges that he had allowed the small band of Indian allies who accompanied him to kill a French nobleman on a diplomatic mission. During the latter expedition he was attached to a much larger army of British regulars charged with capturing Fort Duquesne, a sturdy redoubt the French had constructed at the confluence of the Alleghany, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now rises. The bulk of the Crown forces, unaccustomed to the forest-fighting techniques adopted by the French from their Indian allies, were wiped out with brutal efficiency. Nearly every officer around Washington was killed; he escaped with bullet holes in his hat and in his coat. Thereafter he told friends that he felt as if “Providence was saving him for something larger.”