Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  When Sullivan arrived at Washington’s headquarters tent the commander in chief laid out his proposed operation, which included Sullivan commanding the right wing of the shock corps. He then asked Sullivan to circulate through camp and gather feedback from a select few of his fellow general officers. In the meantime, Washington also shared his thoughts with Gen. Lord Stirling. Since Lord Stirling would be the sacrificial lamb in the attack, Washington felt he was owed an explanation. Finally, he conferred with Gen. Knox, whose artillery would be the key to the assault on the city’s northern bastions; Washington had to be certain that his guns were fit to take the field. Knox told him that the cannons could indeed be prepared for immediate transport. But he expressed his doubts that the troops were in similar readiness.

  Within hours Sullivan returned with correspondingly tepid reactions. Several of the generals cautioned that only if the British were to move on Valley Forge would such a major battle be worth the risk. Others preferred bypassing Philadelphia altogether and instead concentrating an all-out assault on Howe’s right flank, not only to sever the Redcoats’ escape route across the Schuylkill, but also to block any reinforcements pouring out of the city. General Greene’s thoughts were perhaps the most frank. He well knew the near-messianic fervor with which Washington sought to drive the British from Philadelphia, no matter how well hidden behind a facade of executive sobriety. But he reminded Washington that only a month earlier, while chasing Cornwallis across New Jersey, he had counseled the commander in chief about the danger of “consulting our wishes rather than our reason.”

  If anything, Sullivan’s synopsis of the numerous opinions was personally heartening to Washington, although professionally dismaying. Washington’s general officers were willing to follow him onto any field of battle, even to Derby, with ragged, hungry, and outgunned troops, to attack a strong British contingent. But few could muster much enthusiasm for the action. Even Lord Stirling, as prickly as a Highlands thistle, was skeptical if willing.

  In the end, Washington heeded their advice and decided to stand down. It was indeed, as his biographer Chernow put it, “sometimes better to miss a major opportunity than barge into a costly error.” Yet the dearth of documentation regarding this Christmas Eve attack makes it difficult to discern just how serious the commander in chief was about the proposal. Some historians argue that Washington, his naturally aggressive temperament at odds with his adopted Fabian strategy, viewed the Continental Army as in such dire straits that he was willing to risk its survival on long odds rather than see the force disintegrate from a lack of food and supplies. Others, more conspiracy-minded, suggest that he viewed an attack on Philadelphia as an ultimate make-or-break political moment. The enemy’s presence in America’s capital city was an affront to his own personal honor and reputation, and an assault would result in either a stunning victory or a catastrophic defeat that would shock the Continental Congress into finally recognizing his army’s acute distress. Still others, such as the usually sobersided historian Wayne Bodle, wonder if the “sugar-plum reveries” of Washington’s battle plan were an outgrowth of nostalgia for the glories of Trenton enhanced by “a holiday induced overindulgence in hemp or Madeira at Headquarters.” For the record, there is no indication that marijuana had filtered into the winter cantonment.

  As the aborted project disappeared into the churn of history, a heavy snow began to blanket Valley Forge. It would continue for three days, the worst blizzard of the season thus far. It was during this Christmas whiteout that Washington transferred his headquarters to a small fieldstone cottage hard by the confluence of the Schuylkill and Valley Creek.I Known as the Isaac Potts House, or Potts House, the dwelling belonged to the eponymous Quaker whose family’s gristmill and ironworks had been destroyed by the British two months earlier. Potts had rented the two-story structure to his late brother’s wife, to whom Washington paid 100 pounds in Pennsylvania currency for her inconvenience while she left to live with her brother-in-law. The structure consisted of two ground-floor rooms, three upstairs bedrooms, a detached kitchen, and a rough basement and attic. While his personal guard began construction of their own cabins close by, Washington, his staff, and their servants moved in. On any given day, 18 to 25 people were squeezed into the cramped, musty quarters that for the next six months would serve as the de facto capital of the United States.

  Meanwhile, on the afternoon of December 25 the troops of the Continental Army filed from their half-built huts and tattered tents like weakened animals emerging from their burrows. Many with their feet wrapped in rags, they hunched past barefoot sentries standing on their hats to receive a Christmas dinner of burned mutton and watery grog. The scrappy holiday meal was courtesy of a small flock of sheep Gen. Lord Stirling’s foragers had delivered to camp. It had been the standard practice of the commander in chief to order a gill of rum distributed to each soldier on special occasions. On this holiday Washington’s commissary officers used the last of it to mix the grog.

  Washington spent the evening picking over a small meal of mutton, veal, potatoes, and cabbage with several officers and aides, including John Laurens and Lafayette. The latter, “adapted to privation and fatigue,” remarked in his memoirs on the “simple, frugal, and austere” repast. There was no Madeira, much less hemp.

  That night a Continental soldier from Connecticut’s 7th Regiment known to posterity only as Jethro was found dead in his tent. His skin was as cold as the dirt floor on which he lay, and a crude autopsy attributed his death to a combination of malnutrition and exposure. This was the initial fatality recorded on the rolls at Valley Forge. It would be but the first of many such shrieks from Casca’s bird of night to echo through the winter encampment. That Jethro was one of the hundreds of freed black men at Valley Forge who had enlisted to fight for the cause of American liberty injects an even more tragic note.

  * * *

  I. Though Washington’s pledge to live in his tent until all huts were completed was sincere, he soon discovered that operating from a crowded “marquee” was not the most efficient way for a commander in chief to conduct operations.

  FOURTEEN

  STARVE, DISSOLVE, OR DISPERSE

  Three days earlier, toward the end of the morning when Washington dispatched skirmishers from Valley Forge to harass Gen. Howe’s foragers, the commander in chief had received a letter from Henry Laurens. The president of the Continental Congress informed him that Congress retained serious reservations regarding the advisability of the Continental Army establishing a winter cantonment. The delegates were still in fact debating whether the troops should remain in the field across the coming months for one last “vigorous effort” at dislodging the British from Philadelphia. Washington was astounded and angry. He considered the matter of a winter camp at Valley Forge settled. And after conferring with his generals about a surprise Christmas assault on Philadelphia, he by now nourished no delusions that the emaciated condition of his soldiery would allow for the large offensive the delegates were suggesting.

  As it happened, before receiving Laurens’s letter, Washington had been composing his own dispatch to Congress. In it he again called attention to the dismal conditions under which his troops were being asked to survive. He seemed to sense that the British expedition just kicked off to his south afforded him leverage over the recalcitrant civil authorities who, in his view, had failed so miserably in supporting and sustaining his troops. Ever since the victories at Trenton and Princeton, Washington felt as if he were fighting on two fronts—a straightforward military exercise opposing Crown forces and a bureaucratic rearguard action against his own civilian government. Now, if Howe did decide to attack Valley Forge—in the early morning hours of December 22 this was still very much a possibility from Washington’s perspective—his starving and half-clothed force was in grave peril.

  After reading Henry Laurens’s missive, Washington added a resoundingly testy postscript to his own communiqué, expressing his “infinite pain and concern.” He prefaced th
is with a sincere statement that he was in no way exaggerating the crisis at Valley Forge. He then wrote, “Unless more Vigorous exertions and better regulations take place in that [supply] line, and immediately, this Army must dissolve. I have done all in my power by remonstrating, by writing to, by ordering the Commissaries on this Head . . . but without any good effect, or obtaining more than scanty relief.” He added that he took personal responsibility for the decision, now firmly made, to stake winter camp at Valley Forge. Finally, as in his earlier letter to Congress regarding Lafayette’s status, he turned to sarcasm to answer the statesmen’s primary questions about his defensive plans for the Middle Atlantic area.

  “It would give me infinite pleasure to afford protection to every individual Spot of Ground in the whole of the United States,” he wrote. “Nothing is more my wish. But this is not possible with our present force.” Then, as if to twist the rhetorical knife, he referred specifically to congressional queries regarding the defense of New Jersey. He was, he wrote, “most sensible to her sufferings” if, alas, completely powerless to ease them. By the next morning Washington was still chafing as he dictated an even more contentious letter to Henry Laurens and Congress, doubling down on the threat of the army’s dissolution. This missive was destined to become one of the most famous communiqués in American history. It is worth quoting at length.

  Washington opened this second dispatch with a blunt formulation: the ad hoc system in place for supplying his troops was simply not working. Now, more than ever, the British movement into Derby afforded “fresh and more powerful reasons” to effect an “immediate capital change” in the system of feeding and clothing his army. When he learned that Howe had taken the field with 8,000 men, he continued, “I order’d the Troops to be in rediness [for an attack] but behold! to my great mortification, I was not only informed, but convinced, that the Men were unable to stir on Acct. of Provision. All I could do under these circumstances was, to send out a few light Parties to watch and harrass the Enemy.” His troops, he repeated, were immobilized because of a lack of supplies for which the United States’ civilian authorities bore complete responsibility.

  More personally, he argued that by not fulfilling its promises to adequately feed and clothe his soldiers, Congress had tarnished his good name and reputation. No man, he wrote, “ever had his measure more impeded than I have, by every department in the Army. Finding that the inactivity of the Army, whether for want of provisions, Cloaths, or other essentials, is charged to my Acct., not only by the common vulgar, but by Those in power, it is time to speak plain in exculpation of myself.”

  His biting scorn was remarkable; he rarely displayed such withering derision in public. Then he went further, specifically addressing the members of Pennsylvania’s state legislature who, he charged, expected him to defend their rights and property without themselves making the requisite sacrifices. “I can assure those Gentlemen that it is a much easier and a less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fire side, than to occupy a cold bleak hill, and sleep under frost and Snow with no Cloaths, or Blankets.” He even resorted to stark exaggeration, transforming what had been warnings from his regimental commanders about grumbling among the troops into the specter of a “dangerous mutiny.” One such uprising, he wrote, had occurred just the previous evening, and had been put down only with the “spirited exertion” of himself and his officers.

  With an oratorical flourish Washington had succeeded in composing a symphony of destitution in which his hungry and barefoot patriots were reduced to insubordination by the feckless actions of comfortable civilians in the rear.

  As the dispatch continued, Washington’s ire cooled. He again listed his suggested changes, paramount among them a comprehensive reorganization of the military supply system. Perhaps no single piece of business was more crucial to the commander in chief’s plans than the appointment of a competent quartermaster general. The post was the financial fulcrum from which nearly every department of the Continental Army was supported, including the procurement and delivery of provisions and the collection of forage. The idea of contemplating future campaigns without such a powerful lever was unthinkable.

  General Mifflin, citing illness, had resigned from his post as quartermaster general six weeks earlier. Most assumed he left in a fit of pique over not being assigned a frontline command. His subsequent congressional election to the Board of War was viewed as a way of mollifying him. Given the circumstances, Mifflin’s former position was in truth a thankless job, and to fill the vacated spot Washington stressed his need for an officer with battlefield service who would be granted the authority to take a sword to the department’s congealed bureaucracy. That man would in turn have to be buttressed by a civil authority with the power to fulfill his needs. No longer could Congress and the Pennsylvania state officials be allowed to slough off responsibility onto each other for supply-line failures. Then, as if sensing he had the politicians precisely tuned, Washington played his final, searing chord.

  He wrote that he was now convinced “beyond a doubt” that unless Congress quickly complied with his requests, “unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in that [supply] line, this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.”

  Starve, dissolve, or disperse. It was the gauntlet thrown. At worst it hinted at the elimination and possibly even the surrender of the Continental Army and thus the end of the war against the British across the middle states. At best it evoked visions of armed and desperate men roaming the Pennsylvania countryside singly and in feral packs, scavenging by any means or manner for food and clothing. It was not difficult for the statesmen to imagine these troops eventually overrunning and tearing into the American storehouses in Reading and Easton, in Lancaster and York. It was precisely the image Washington meant to convey.

  George Washington’s “starve, dissolve, or disperse” letter left America’s civilian authorities with little choice. They could accede to the commander in chief’s demands that they immediately reconstruct his army’s supply chain under the supervision of a competent military officer. Or they could allow the revolution to teeter on the brink. It was a stark option. But was it all a masterful bluff?

  Regarding the issue of starvation, it was true that there were technically no cattle in camp at the time of Washington’s writing on December 23. His commissary officers also reported fewer than 30 barrels of flour on hand, a situation which accounted for the handpicked skirmishers detached to Gen. Lord Stirling the previous day with little or no rations. Yet by that same morning Washington had already received word from Radnor, just 10 miles away, that foraged provisions including mutton and beef were on the way to Valley Forge. In addition, dispatch riders from Gen. Armstrong east of the Schuylkill had reported that Armstrong’s militiamen had taken advantage of the British absence to round up another 200 head of cattle that were at present being driven to the winter camp.

  In truth, there had been no “dangerous mutiny” the previous evening, merely the muttering and bickering of weary soldiers. Washington’s subordinates were certainly voicing genuine concern in their reports of the troops’ low morale. Yet he recognized that such grumbling was inherent to battlefield camps since time immemorial. As for the prospect of Gen. Howe’s 8,000-man force marching on Valley Forge, it was likely that by the time Washington sent his mail rider galloping off to York with his second dispatch of December 23, his forward scouts and pickets had informed him that the British movement appeared to constitute no more than a very large forage thrust. Once more the reluctance of Gen. Howe to engage the Continentals in any meaningful way had proved one of the Americans’ few advantages.

  But the strongest indication that Washington’s fiery words were designed to further his political agenda was the fact that at the same time he was writing to Henry Laurens he was also consulting with his generals about attacking Philadelp
hia. How could an all-out assault on the enemy stronghold possibly square with the bone-weary pittance of an army he had just described to Congress? Of course, Washington recognized that with no politician present on the cold and dreary front lines, there was no civil authority to refute his critical depiction. In the end, as was his wont, the master strategist had left the delegates a way to save face. In his “starve, dissolve, or disperse” letter, he also suggested to Congress that a face-to-face meeting with a committee of delegates might resolve their disputes. As there was no way he could leave his troops and journey to York, the committee would have to come to Valley Forge.

  As the commander in chief awaited Congress’s reply, some 20 miles to the south his tired, hungry scouts could only watch through the gathering snow as Howe’s expedition marched back across the Schuylkill’s pontoon bridge and reentered Philadelphia. The British carried with them over 200 tons of horse fodder and carts piled high with plundered furniture, and drove before them several hundred head of cattle and sheep earmarked for Crown commissaries. More dispiriting was the sight of the 40 or so American prisoners hobbling along in the herd’s wake, their weakened condition enough to make John Laurens “weep tears of blood.” The fact that the British teamsters had baled and packed the hay before it was completely dry, rendering most of it useless, provided small solace.

  Nonetheless, with an otherwise well-provisioned enemy presumably settled into the city for the winter, Washington recalled Gen. Lord Stirling and his troops to Valley Forge. Any large military encounters had to be tabled for the moment. Not so his political battles. They were only just beginning.

  FIFTEEN

  THE BEST ANSWER TO CALUMNY