Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Conway spent the next week stewing over the cool reception he had received at Valley Forge. He finally penned another letter to Washington, accusing him of acting like an “absolute King.” As if addressing an unschooled bumpkin, he wrote that if Washington’s thin skin had been bruised over the disparaging remarks in his correspondence with Gen. Gates, well, that too followed the sophisticated Old World manner of European officers freely critiquing their superiors. He ended the dispatch with an ultimatum. “I do not wish to Give you or any officer in the army the Least uneasiness,” he wrote. “Since you will not accept of my services, since you can not bear the sight of me in your camp, I am very ready to goe Where ever Congress thinks proper and even to france. And I solemnly Declare that far from resenting the undeserv’d rebuke I met with from you, I shall Do everything in my power to serve this cause. These are the true sentiments with Which I remain sir your Excellency’s Most obedt humble servant.”

  For several days Conway’s challenge hung in the air like a mote of dust. Washington, checking his temper, sensed a trap and refused to be drawn into a political dispute with a man whose patronage was so powerfully proved. Finally, he effortlessly deflected the bluff by informing Conway, “It remains with Congress alone to accept your resignation.” He surely took sly pleasure in adding that should the delegates indeed acquiesce in their new inspector general’s fit of pique, “you will have my hopes for a favourable passage and a happy meeting with your Family & Friends.” As Washington expected, Congress refused to accept Conway’s resignation.

  Washington may have held his tongue at Conway’s impudence, but the Irishman’s patronizing words were more than his longtime aide Tench Tilghman could swallow. Tilghman surely spoke for Washington’s inner circle when he wrote to Pennsylvania’s Gen. John Cadwalader that Conway “has come down full of his own importance and wrote the General a letter for which he deserved to be kicked.” Intimating a duel, John Laurens noted that had Conway condescended so to any officer other than the commander in chief of the Continental Army, the insult would have been “revenged in a private way.”IV Yet even as Conway continued to bombard Gen. Mifflin and congressional delegates with complaints about Washington’s icy reception, Washington did not engage. As he would explain to the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, “To persevere in one’s duty, and be silent, is the best answer to calumny.”

  Shunned by nearly every officer at Valley Forge, Conway found himself operating in a sort of limbo and took to quartering himself and his staff some 20 miles north of the camp in the village of Pottsgrove. Washington, meanwhile, saw a more sinister hand than the bumptious Conway’s driving the imbroglio. His suspicion fell on the generals Gates and Mifflin. The entire affair might have struck him as a plot device from Goldoni’s slapstick A Servant of Two Masters, a version of which he had surely attended back in Virginia.

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  It had long chafed foreign-born officers such as Gates, Lee, and Conway that Washington’s leadership style kept faith with a meritocracy that favored young, competent homegrown generals with little formal military education over so-called professional soldiers. That the likes of Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, and Anthony Wayne had ascended to key positions in the Continental Army was seen as an insult to the established hierarchy. Foisting an auditor like Thomas Conway upon the commander in chief was one of the few means Gates had of putting Washington in his place. But Conway’s promotion and appointment were only one front in a multifaceted assault.

  Earlier that fall Congress had approved a long-debated plan to professionalize the Board of War to more closely resemble Britain’s War Office. No longer would rotating congressional delegates make up the committee; it would now consist of three permanent members and a clerical staff tasked with acting as sole intermediaries between Congress, state authorities, and the army. The board’s original purview—compiling officer rolls; securing prisoners of war; and monitoring the movements of troops, arms, and equipment—was also expanded to include the supervision of recruiting operations and the oversight of arms production and procurement. General Mifflin, Adjutant Gen. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, and Washington’s fellow Virginian and military secretary Robert Hanson Harrison were initially elected to constitute the board’s directorship. But Harrison wished to remain at Washington’s side in the field and declined the post. His seat was awarded to the former commissary general, Connecticut’s Joseph Trumbull. At this Gen. Mifflin persuaded Congress to expand the board to five permanent members and recommended the appointments of the board’s former secretary Richard Peters and Gen. Gates to fill the new slots. Congress agreed and, again at Mifflin’s suggestion, Gates was named the board’s president.

  If Mifflin did not hide his disdain for Washington, Gates was more subtle. The “Hero of Saratoga” had already shown himself to be a wily political operative, and as president of the new Board of War he was unlikely to remain satisfied with an offstage role filing regimental rosters or tending to prisoners. Behind the scenes he wisely juxtaposed his victory in the north against Washington’s stalled Pennsylvania campaign, so much so that, to most observers, Gates seemed, like Gen. Lee before him, to have set his sights on Washington’s job. For now, however, the board’s most urgent task was provisioning Valley Forge, and to that end its ukases flew fast and furious toward Lancaster, seat of the Pennsylvania state assembly ostensibly tasked with supplying the winter camp. The Board of War’s directives, though couched as suggestions, were intended to demonstrate to the state representatives that the national government would no longer abide their foot-dragging.

  Congress also authorized the board’s principals to journey to the winter encampment on an official inspection tour. This mission fell apart almost immediately, fractured by personal politics worthy of the Byzantine court. After seeming to acquiesce in the congressional mandate, Gen. Gates announced suddenly that he and his fellow members were entirely too busy with reorganizing the board’s affairs to venture so far from York. Though the excuse fooled few, no delegates objected. It was left to soldiers like Connecticut’s truculent Gen. Huntington to speak plain. “I fancy they don’t like us well enough to come,” he bluntly informed his friend Joseph Trumbull.

  Yet Huntington and officers of a similar mind had missed the forest for the trees. It was Gates’s offhand mention of the board’s reorganizational efforts that should have raised eyebrows. In fact, Gates and his fellow board members were in the process of securing from Congress unprecedented concessions, including the power to establish a network of supply depots throughout Pennsylvania and western New Jersey independent of Washington’s control. These would be manned by purchasing agents and transportation superintendents appointed by the board, in effect overriding the army’s established commissary department. Although the term would not enter the American vernacular for another 150 years, these were the first steps of a classic power play Gates and his cohort planned to spring against Washington.V

  Not everyone in Washington’s orbit was as obtuse about the board’s intentions as Gen. Huntington. It took the Marquis de Lafayette less than a week after Gen. Conway’s arrival at Valley Forge to deduce the true intent of his presence. The young Frenchman wrote to Washington that before departing his home country he’d “believed that all good Americans were united together.” Now, however, he professed himself shocked at the Board of War’s duplicity, and in a separate note to Henry Laurens he warned the president of Congress to keep a watchful eye on Gates. The general’s successes in the north country, Lafayette noted, “have turned all the heads and raised his party to the highest degree. Some have been audacious, ungrateful, and foolish enough as to hope it would reflect on General Washington’s reputation and honor—men indeed to be pitied as well as despised.” Thus the new year opened with more and increasingly varied reports of “dirty arts and low intrigues” making their way to Washington’s headquarters.

  Few of these “intrigues” came by official post or mail coach. Instead most arrive
d at Valley Forge by hint and rumor, like daylight emanating from a sun so beclouded that neither particle nor wave carried it directly. One old friend alerted Washington that Gates’s allies had convinced influential congressional delegates, particularly the New Englanders, that it was only the commander in chief’s terminal mismanagement that had allowed the British to take Philadelphia. Another reported whispers in York that the Continental Army actually outnumbered Gen. Howe’s troops by a factor of three or four, yet for some reason Washington refused to engage. Patrick Henry forwarded an anonymous letter he’d received in Virginia that scorned Washington’s leadership and posited, “We have wisdom, virtue and strength enough to save us if they could be called into action. The northern army has shown us what Americans are capable of doing with a GENERAL at their head. The spirit of the southern army is in no ways inferior to the spirit of the northern. A Gates, a Lee, or a Conway would in a few weeks render them an irresistible body of men.” Henry and Washington both recognized the author’s handwriting as that of the general’s old ally turned antagonist Dr. Rush.

  This is where the personal embodiment of the world’s first laboratory of democracy stood in the thirtieth month of the American Revolution—blamed for losing both New York and Philadelphia; his troops resembling an army of beggars; his supply lines a laughable calamity; and his authority nibbled and nipped at from all sides by jealous and power-hungry subordinates. All this might have been enough to induce a commander of lesser character to throw up his hands and return home to his wife and family. Washington, needless to say, was not that commander.

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  I. Most historians have since concluded that despite loudly taking credit for the fight, Lee had little impact on the Continental victory, and even less to do with the subsequent triumphant defense of Fort Moultrie, located on Sullivan’s Island, when the British counterattacked.

  II. Such was Paine’s mastery of propaganda that he had in fact managed to transform an amiable and befuddled old “farmer king” most comfortable ambling through his fields into an ogre of tyranny.

  III. Smallwood’s attempt at a reconciliation with his commander in chief was dashed when Washington coolly rebuffed his truce offering of a matched pistol set taken from the brig.

  IV. As it happened, seven months later, on July 4, Cadwalader would severely wound Conway in a duel. After his bullet passed through Conway’s mouth and neck, Cadwalader is said to have stood over the bleeding Irishman and remarked, “I have stopped that damned rascal’s lying, anyway.” (Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 322.)

  V. The first appearance of power play, in 1921, related to an American football formation. A decade later it had gravitated to hockey, and in 1941 the term was applied to politics.

  SIXTEEN

  INTEGRATION

  While Gen. Gates attempted to leverage his victory at Saratoga to attain a new role leading the Continental Army, some 4,000 miles away Benjamin Franklin was also working to exploit Gen. Burgoyne’s surrender. His aim was to use the British defeat to ramp up the enmity between France and England. This argument began and ended with the simple and quite obvious assertion that Britain’s loss of its North American colonies would be France’s fiscal, political, and psychological gain.

  Franklin, sailing with his two grandsons aboard the American merchant brig turned warship Reprisal, had arrived in the French port city of Nantes in late November 1776. The bespectacled 71-year-old polymath’s celebrity had preceded him; he was hailed by the French as the world’s most famous American and feted at every stop on his journey to Paris. He took rooms on the Right Bank of the Seine in the Hôtel de Valentois some three miles outside the city proper in the fashionable suburb of Passy, now a part of the 16th arrondissement. From there, sporting a decidedly frumpy brown suit and fur cap, the son of a simple Boston soap maker cut a swath through the world’s fashion capital, making near-daily calls on government officials and financiers as well as influential aristocrats and intellectuals, all anxious to learn more about the United States’ noble experiment of representative democracy and its chances of survival. In his little spare time, Franklin sought out fellow scientists eager to discuss both his experiments and his philosophical pursuits. A notorious flirt, he also made the acquaintance of several of the French court’s prominent coquettes.

  Despite the adulation—which included several medallions struck in his image—Franklin found that convincing France to officially throw in its lot with the American Revolution was difficult. Though the shocking victories at Trenton and Princeton had mitigated some of the stain of Washington’s loss of New York, Franklin was increasingly hard pressed to explain away the likes of Brandywine, Paoli, and Germantown. He was not aware that the French, particularly their foreign minister de Vergennes, secretly admired the pluck Washington and his army had demonstrated by even attempting to engage the British at Germantown so soon after the defeat at Brandywine.

  That newfound esteem soared when, on the morning of Thursday, December 4, news of Saratoga reached Paris. Within days de Vergennes informed Franklin that the result at Saratoga had convinced Louis XVI to recognize the United States with a treaty of trade and alliance, but there remained one obstacle. A 16-year-old mutual defense pact between France and Spain stipulated that the Spanish monarch Charles III would need to participate in any Franco-American federation. When French attempts to rally Spain failed—Charles III and his ministers rightly viewed the American Revolution as threatening their own holdings in the New World’s southern hemisphere and did not want to risk British retribution unnecessarily—Franklin resorted to subterfuge.

  He knew well that Paris was awash in French and British spies. The Crown’s agents assigned to pry into his secrets would rummage through his trash, break into his writing parlor, reserve tables near his in his favorite boulangerie, and even copy his laundry lists.I Each Tuesday, detailed reports of what they had gleaned were indexed in invisible ink, rolled into a bottle, and deposited in a hidden hollow at the southern boundary of the Tuileries gardens. Later that night the British ambassador’s secretary would retrieve the notes and forward them to London by the next packet ship. If the ambassador had instructions for the agents, he would leave them beneath the flowing roots of a nearby boxwood tree. One night, frustrated by the pace of the talks with Spain, Franklin purposely allowed it to slip to an associate that France was tilting toward accepting the United States as a sovereign nation. Learning of this, George III rushed an envoy named Paul Wentworth across the Channel to meet with Franklin and his colleagues. Had Franklin’s transatlantic passage been intercepted by a British frigate a year earlier, Wentworth would have happily watched the American traitor hanged. Now he was assigned to parley.

  Wentworth’s first target was Silas Deane, a fellow Freemason whom the British considered much less strident than Franklin. Wentworth and Deane met for 11 hours, during which the king’s agent proposed a reconciliation plan that would in essence repeal all offensive parliamentary acts passed since 1763 as well as allow the Americans to maintain their Continental Congress. As a further inducement, he also promised that in exchange for helping to bring about the cessation of hostilities, Deane and Franklin would be awarded knighthoods and generous pensions. Franklin himself subsequently arranged an ostentatiously public dinner with the British emissary, certain that the news of their rendezvous would reach Versailles before coffee and dessert. During the encounter Wentworth repeated his offers, which Franklin had no intention of accepting. But he continued to stall his suitor long enough to unnerve the French king. As he had assumed, within days Louis XVI ordered the Comte de Vergennes to hurriedly hammer out a treaty with the United States, with or without Spain.II

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  Washington at Valley Forge naturally knew nothing of these foreign machinations. And when his dream of a Christmas assault on Philadelphia faded, he finally resigned himself to a protracted war. Given its present course, he reasoned that the conflict would be likely to take years to conclude, with or wit
hout French assistance. Until that time, the preservation of the Continental Army would be his primary concern. As the flurry of construction banged on about him and the desks and tables at the Potts House groaned under rising stacks of paperwork, he surely wrestled with the idea that the army whose disintegration he was charged with preventing resembled no other on earth.

  When Washington took command of the “Troops of the United Provinces of North America” in 1775, one of his first General Orders was to proclaim “that all Distinction of Colonies should be laid aside; so that one and the same spirit may animate the whole.” Save for the officer corps, the Continental Army of two years earlier bore little resemblance to the legion that had tromped into the winter encampment hard by the Schuylkill. The early stages of the revolution had produced a soldiery of largely middle-class New Englanders of Anglo-Saxon extraction. But as the abbreviated enlistments of these yeoman farmers and shopkeepers expired, the Continental Congress had enacted new recruitment terms. The troops who had since stepped forward to fight for three years, or in some cases “for the duration of the war,” emerged from a distinctly lower rung of colonial society—a disparate contingent of indentured servants; younger sons faced with primogeniture; a wave of recent immigrants dominated by impoverished Irish, Scots, and Germans; and even free blacks.