by Bob Drury
Even the strongest threats of punishment, however, could not feed and clothe troops, a horrified Lafayette noted, “whose feet and legs turn black with frostbite.” Warnings that his starving soldiers were close to open revolt arrived at Washington’s headquarters almost daily. A colonel from New York’s brigade wrote to his governor, George Clinton, that all but 18 men in his regiment were unfit for duty, with the rest “wholly destitute of clothing [and] perishing in the field.” And Gen. Varnum concluded his letter describing the inedible beef with a caution that among some regiments there was talk of taking to the countryside en masse on plunder raids. “The Men must be Supplied,” he wrote to Washington, “or they cannot be commanded.” Yet again it was the omnipresent surgeon Waldo’s vivid prose that captured the dichotomy. “Were soldiers to have plenty of Food and Rum,” he wrote, “I believe they would storm Tophet.” Instead he was left to wander the camp listening to chants of “No Meat! No Coat! No Bread! No Soldier!”
The outcries were not limited to the native-born. The French engineers grumbled—“as of course the French will do,” noted Benjamin Franklin—as they went about their business of standing up a professional military camp for an amateur army, and less than a week after arriving at Valley Forge, Lafayette’s Bavarian companion Gen. de Kalb complained to a Parisian patron, “The idea of wintering in this desert can only have been put into the head of the commanding general by an interested speculator or a disaffected man.” Calling Washington “the bravest and truest of men,” de Kalb nonetheless regretted that the commander in chief had not held hard to his first instinct to select a campsite deeper in the Pennsylvania countryside awash with game, fresh fish, and friendly farmers. Blaming the American politicians’ interference for the soldiers’ current plight, he concluded his letter with the distinctly Teutonic lament that “congress . . . has the foible of interfering with matters which it neither understands nor can understand.”
Lafayette was sympathetic about his Bavarian mentor’s disappointment, if more sensitive to its cause. Writing years later, he observed that in this time and place, “The American situation was never more critical. Its paper money, which had no solid foundation and was not supplemented by any specie, was counterfeited by the enemy and discredited by the partisans. The Americans were afraid to establish taxes and had still less power to collect them. Since the people had revolted against English taxes, they were astonished to have to pay even more now, and the government lacked the power to force them to pay.” These were problems seemingly without answers—at least without any answers that the marquis could provide. Luckily for him, he was at least distracted from the camp’s misery by news that his wife, Adrienne, had given birth to a second healthy daughter.
Meanwhile, across the Schuylkill the situation was equally dreary. General Armstrong was already complaining that he had far too few militiamen to maintain order across a vast territory that stretched all the way to New Jersey. He also reported that skirmishing with the larger and better-armed British foraging parties was out of the question. Local farmers and traders were hiding in barns and root cellars, watching the roads for his foot patrols to pass before sneaking into Philadelphia. He was also chagrined upon discovering that Continental regulars had been sent to fortify Wilmington, and he began lobbying for a similar number of men to be detached to his purview. Washington was sympathetic but resolute. He informed Armstrong that he could spare no more than a few more companies of Continental light horse.
It was clear to the commander in chief that even if the contents of every farmer’s wagon and cart hauling goods into Philadelphia could have been magically diverted to Valley Forge, it would have made but the merest dent in his supply shortage. And despite granting the militia commanders in the hinterlands the power not only to seize provisions but to inflict corporal punishment on the purveyors, he recognized that not every civilian trafficking goods into Philadelphia was a Loyalist to the bone. Some were surely motivated by greed. But most were simply capitalists who had no faith in the debased American currency, much less the certificates of seizure. The British, after all, paid for provisions in hard specie. No, if Congress and the states expected him to carry out this war, it would ultimately fall on those civil authorities to feed and clothe the American army.
These tensions were reaching a crescendo when, with Christmas approaching, word reached the American camp that the British were again stirring.
* * *
I. The first winners of the bonus had their cabin erected by the evening of the second day in camp.
II. These punishments were administered with a whip that ended in several knotted cords that tore into the skin. In order to survive the ordeal, men receiving the lash resorted to biting their lead bullets, the origin of the phrase.
THIRTEEN
TRENTON REDUX?
General Howe did not need the Doan Gang or any other Loyalists to know that Washington and his army were wintering a mere 23 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Following the brief skirmish near Whitemarsh, Gen. Cornwallis’s scouts had shadowed the Continentals all the way to Valley Forge. Howe, however, was less likely to have understood the American army’s nearly crippled condition. As it was, the British were facing their own supply travails. Despite Gen. Armstrong’s complaints, his Pennsylvania militiamen on the east side of the Schuylkill had done a fair job of slowing local produce that was being slipped into Philadelphia. Howe’s quartermaster reported that his storehouses were stocked with enough to feed the army for only about the next 100 or so days. More ominously, ice was beginning to form on the Delaware, meaning that the 15,000 British troops cooped up in Philadelphia would soon be cut off from Adm. Howe’s supply ships. With Washington distracted by the construction of his cantonment, Gen. Howe seized the opportunity to mount a large foraging expedition.
Beginning on December 20, American intelligence officers began delivering daily communiqués to Washington’s headquarters regarding British maneuvers—construction crews digging entrenchments leading out of Philadelphia, engineers hastily throwing up a pontoon bridge over the Schuylkill west of town, hundreds of horses blanketed and saddled on the city common. These were followed by a report that 1,000 Redcoats had crossed the Delaware into New Jersey to sweep away patriot resistance in order to establish a temporary farmers’ market. Nearly simultaneously, close to 100 wagons accompanied by a small contingent of Hessians forded the Schuylkill and ventured some five miles southwest of the city, where they loaded the carts with hay from fields near what was then called Derby, now the borough of Darby, Pennsylvania. In one baleful missive, the commander of an American scout team shadowing this caravan bemoaned the fact that he did not have enough men to ambush such an easy target. Washington convened his aides and generals to discuss the enemy movements. Something was afoot. But what?
The Americans received their answer two days later, on the morning of December 22, when 8,000 Crown troops led by Gen. Howe himself crossed the Schuylkill over the temporary bridge. The enemy, marching in a slender column that stretched for four miles, was again moving in the direction of Derby. When the empty wagons in the van of the train reached the Derby farmsteads, the rear of the detail fanned into protective wings flanking the scythe-wielding threshers. This time the British were not only gathering hay, but sweeping up the cattle that grazed in the surrounding marshes. Whether such a large force would strike north for Valley Forge after the foraging expedition Washington could only guess. In any case, with the enemy but 20 miles south of his encampment, he had to somehow respond. This proved problematic.
In addition to the burgeoning rolls of American sick and wounded, nearly 3,000 soldiers at Valley Forge had been declared unfit for duty because they were missing shoes, clothing, weapons, or some combination thereof. It was against this shortfall that Washington issued his General Orders for December 22: his brigade commanders were instructed to choose from each of their units eight officers and 50 infantrymen in fighting trim “fit for annoying the enemy in light parties.”
Each of these hit-and-run units, perhaps one tenth of Washington’s total force, was to be issued several days’ worth of rations and 40 rounds of ammunition before marching south. Confusion ensued.
Most of these skirmishing companies snaking out of Valley Forge had tentative orders to report to Gen. Lord Stirling, who days earlier had ridden from Valley Forge to combine the Pennsylvania militia pickets and Dan Morgan’s riflemen into a unified force under his command. But the officers in charge of these disparate units now being sent to join Lord Stirling were also given ambiguous instructions to engage any British they encountered en route to their rendezvous. The result was an obvious rupture in the chain of command. Several of the companies simply headed off on their own, while many of the Continentals who managed to link up with Lord Stirling arrived at his camp with no sense of their mission and, despite Washington’s instructions, no rations whatsoever.
Upon first impression, neither Lord Stirling nor Col. Morgan was optimistic as to the new arrivals’ usefulness or purpose. Morgan in particular viewed their lack of provisions as merely adding a greater burden to the field force, and predicted that if any of these companies did manage to engage the British, two Americans would be captured for every enemy soldier cut down. Unsure of what to do, Lord Stirling pointed most of these new men toward Derby and in essence instructed their commanders to do their best to fall on any light cavalry patrols venturing forth from Howe’s main foraging party. As the bulk of the men in the Crown column had been ordered to hold their line in order to protect the hay gatherers, the American general assumed there was little chance of a major encounter.
Dan Morgan considered this a saving grace. But he and Lord Stirling, by now accustomed to working with the undisciplined militiamen, had underestimated the seasoned regulars who had arrived as reinforcements. Dispatches soon began reaching the two officers describing American skirmishers giving as good as they got, swarming enemy horsemen and chasing them hither and yon while inflicting heavy casualties and taking prisoners. Initially surprised by these reports, the two commanders began to reconsider their strategy. Morgan sent out riders with orders for the American companies to consolidate under his banner. The next morning he and Lord Stirling marched the entire force to the nearby village of Radnor, where they incorporated another regiment of Pennsylvania militiamen into their command. Still, the Americans remained too few to face the British in a head-on engagement. But perhaps, Lord Stirling felt, his orders to harass the enemy could now be accomplished with more vigor.
In Derby, Gen. Howe also faced a decision. His scouts and spy network had followed Lord Stirling’s movements, and he was aware that his force outnumbered the Continentals at Radnor. But, as at Whitemarsh, he was not tempted to engage. In what was becoming a pattern, he kept his troops close to his threshers and cattle drivers until it became clear to Washington that the British had no intention of moving on Valley Forge. Howe’s inaction opened another opportunity. With so many Crown troops tied up gathering provisions, large swaths of the countryside to the north of Philadelphia had been left unattended. Lord Stirling sent riders to Valley Forge with instructions to return with as many wagons as possible. He then dispatched his own foraging parties. In exchange for Continental certificates of seizure, these men gathered a fair amount of cattle and sheep as well as several carts of clothing, blankets, and even baskets of dried persimmons.
Clothes, meat, and fruit—Washington was delighted. Only that morning he had informed Henry Laurens that his commissaries contained “not a single hoof of any kind to slaughter and not more than 25 barls of flour.” Despite the unexpected bounty, he continued to remain wary of Howe’s intentions, and dashed off a note to Lord Stirling reminding him that his paramount assignment was to continue to track the British movements. It was sage advice, for Howe, even as his force denuded the fields around Derby, ordered a regiment on an all-night quick march to within seven miles of Radnor. It was only a feint, but it was timed perfectly. When farmers in the area were spooked by the sounds of a vicious thunderstorm they mistook for cannon fire, they panicked. Rumors rapidly spread that Crown forces were marching on their farmsteads. Within hours the farmers sent a procession of overstuffed wagons streaming toward Philadelphia on the justification that it was better to receive seven shillings for a pound of butter or 16 shillings for a bushel of potatoes than to allow the Crown forces to descend on their larders like locusts.
The thin line of Pennsylvania militiamen who had not joined Gen. Lord Stirling had little hope of stemming this tide. And even after Washington’s intelligence officers reported that the British stab toward Radnor was merely a ruse to inspire exactly the hysteria that ensued, it was too late to halt the civilian stampede. Oddly enough, the anxious farmers’ parade of provisions heading toward the city produced an unexpected boon for the Continentals. With so much traffic on the roads, Armstrong’s men were able to confiscate substantial amounts of goods that would have typically slipped by them.
As reports detailing these events trickled into Valley Forge, Washington absorbed each new development with an equanimity that his aides considered conspicuous even for their unflappable commander in chief. What they did not know was that from the moment he had discerned that the enemy intended no assault on his encampment, the seeds for another grand offensive were germinating in his mind.
♦ ♦ ♦
It is difficult to overestimate the impact the previous year’s Christmas raid on Trenton had on the psyche and morale of the Continental Army and its commander in chief. Certainly what Washington termed the “victorious defeats” across the intervening 12 months—at Brandywine, at Germantown, at Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer—could not dull the luster of that marvelous memory. Nor was it lost on Washington that the most glorious celebration of the anniversary would be to stage a replication. As his longtime aide Tench Tilghman wrote to Lord Stirling, “I wish we could put [the British] in mind . . . of what happened this time twelvemonth.” Given the insouciance with which Howe’s troops were ransacking Philadelphia’s inner suburban belt, the idea that another surprise attack was beginning to cohere in Washington’s mind is far from remarkable.
Washington intended to begin the engagement with a ruse of his own. On Christmas Eve, Lord Stirling’s and Dan Morgan’s combined forces, already in the area, would fall on the left flank of the British column at Derby as if they were the point movement of a major assault. Washington assumed that Gen. Howe would naturally attempt to quick-time the bulk of his force back to Philadelphia while leaving several detachments, most likely his light horse, to screen his retreat as well as cover the Schuylkill’s northern fords. Then, while the 6,000 Crown troops who remained in Philadelphia under the command of the Hessian general von Knyphausen rushed to cover Howe’s fallback, a Continental shock corps of some 4,000 men advancing in two columns—between 50 and 60 men and eight officers drawn from each regiment—would dash to capture the British ramparts north of the city. Once these battlements were taken, the right column of Americans would rush south along the Schuylkill to seize the four ferry crossings and destroy any temporary bridges, stranding Howe’s rump army on the west bank of the river and cutting him off from von Knyphausen.
The left wing of the shock corps, meanwhile, would penetrate Philadelphia proper, free the American prisoners of war, and demand von Knyphausen’s surrender “under promise of good Quarter in case of compliance, and no Quarter if opposition is given.” As Continental artillerymen turned the captured British cannons on any of His Majesty’s ships berthed in the harbor, Gen. Armstrong’s Pennsylvania militiamen would recross the Schuylkill to the west, join Gen. Smallwood’s regulars rushing up from Wilmington, and reinforce Lord Stirling’s attack. Howe and his troops, their backs to the Schuylkill, would be left with no choice but to surrender or be swept into the river.
Even if Washington viewed the battle plan as “a work which depends more upon secrecy and dispatch than Numbers,” it nonetheless flew in the face of a hard-and-fast military dictate
of the era—that is, an attacking force should always be at least double the size of the defenders. Moreover, the daunting metrics only complicated the scheme. A victorious outcome, after all, hung not only on Washington’s correct reading of Howe’s tactical thinking, but upon several and various moving parts all working in conjunction—a set of tumblers clicking into place and locking the Continental Army into a commitment that might well end the war, or destroy the revolution. Washington did not need to be reminded that his strategy at Germantown had relied upon similar intricacies of balance and symmetry. Such was the agenda’s mutability that the commander in chief eschewed his customary habit of convening a war council. Instead he decided to put out feelers to a small coterie of confidants via one of his most trusted advisers, Gen. Sullivan, who was presently overseeing the construction of a bridge to span the Schuylkill on the northern outskirts of the Valley Forge encampment.
