Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  In both the more established infirmaries and the flying hospitals, patients with contagious diseases mixed with soldiers recovering from minor wounds or illnesses. This gave rise to a new term, “hospital fever,” referring to a condition that would kill as surely as the frequent outbreaks of dysentery, typhus, and typhoid known collectively as camp fever. Medical science of the era had no idea of the relation between body lice and typhus, and infected blankets and straw used by the recently deceased were issued to new patients. Surgeons’ tools were rarely washed, much less sterilized, before amputations with no anesthetic were performed, and postsurgical infections spread like the ubiquitous vermin that carried them. Moreover, as the early signs of typhus and smallpox bore a striking resemblance to one another, doctors often treated men for the wrong disease. This, however, mattered little when one constant of the medical centers was taken into consideration—there was never enough medicine available. Regimental physicians made do almost exclusively with the conventional practices of blistering, bleeding, and administering a mixture of the extremely toxic tartar emetic with a drug known as “jalap,” a purgative extract from the tuberous roots of plants in the morning glory family. It is not recorded how many died from the treatments meant to heal them.

  As a result, so frightening was the idea of being consigned to one of these slaughterhouses that not a few soldiers instead opted to conceal their fevers and die in their huts. In what may seem a minor clerical inconvenience but was in fact a bureaucratic nightmare for a commander in chief bent on shaping an army for its next campaign, many of the men who died—either in a hospital or in a hut—were carried on the active-duty rolls for months afterward. There was but little army doctors could do to successfully treat the majority of pestilences swirling in and around Valley Forge that winter. Yet one of the few medical triumphs they could claim resulted from the controversial steps Washington took to eradicate the dread smallpox.

  A year earlier, as the army overwintered in Morristown, Washington had experimented on small units with an inoculation technique known as “variolation.” The procedure had been practiced for millennia in China, but was new—and therefore mysterious and frightening—to western minds. It consisted of deliberately exposing healthy soldiers who had never contracted the virus to small doses of infected smallpox scabs or pus, churned into a powder and rubbed into superficial cuts on the skin. The patients would develop pustules and other symptoms similar to those of naturally occurring smallpox—fever, nausea, fatigue, muscle aches. But after a few weeks these manifestations would subside and be followed by recovery and immunity. While at the time the death toll from smallpox outbreaks hovered at around 16 percent of those who contracted it up and down America’s eastern seaboard, less than one percent of the soldiers at Morristown who underwent variolation died. At Valley Forge, Washington went even further, insisting that the entire army undergo the inoculations. The purposeful infections began in January and were done in secret, lest the British be alerted that at any given moment whole brigades might be incapacitated. According to some reports, after 4,000 or so troops had been treated by mid-March, deaths from smallpox dropped to a seventeenth of what they had been. This was but the smallest of comforts.

  So vile were the deteriorating conditions at the winter camp that even the flintiest officers were prone to sympathy. In the same letter in which he detailed the smallpox outbreak, Gen. Poor also asked his governor how he could possibly inflict punishment on any soldier arrested for desertion, “when they plead in their justification that on your part the Contract is broken? That you promised to engage them and supply them with such things that were requisite to make them comfortable here, and the situation of their families tolerable at home, this they say they had an undoubted right to expect.”

  The 41-year-old Poor was no tender shoot. Tall and handsome enough to have sat for the Polish-Lithuanian military engineer and amateur portraitist Tadeusz Kosciuszko, prior to his heroism at Saratoga he had survived the disorganized retreat from Quebec following the invasion of 1775. And before throwing his lot in with the Continentals he had fought for the British in some of the most brutal battles of the French and Indian War. General Poor knew suffering. Yet despite his hard bark, Valley Forge was nudging even him close to a breaking point. It is doubtful he imagined that the conditions could get worse.

  * * *

  I. As we will for convenience refer to him.

  II. The third congressional commission included the Massachusetts congressman Elbridge Gerry. Though little remembered today, the future vice president contributed mightily to the modern lexicon of politics. In 1812, as governor of the Bay State, Gerry signed off on a scheme to redraw the boundaries of its electoral districts to the benefit of his Republican Party. One of these new state senate districts resembled nothing so much as the outline of a salamander, and thus was the word gerrymander introduced into the political vocabulary.

  III. January 1, 1778, was only the twenty-seventh occasion in the 45-year-old Washington’s lifetime that the new year officially began on January 1. Prior to 1752, New Year’s Day had been celebrated in England and in its colonies on March 25. This was the date the Catholic Church had pegged to coincide with the Solemnity of the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary to inform her that she would give birth to Jesus Christ, the son of God. The stubborn British had stuck with that date long after most of Catholic Europe had returned to the Julian calendar.

  IV. In the end, Gen. Gates, who knew Hay and was aware of Hay’s admiration for Washington, persuaded Congress to demur.

  V. Nearly 12,000 American prisoners of war perished in captivity during the revolution, more than in all its battles combined.

  VI. This was the only occasion in Washington’s entire life when he left what became the United States. Two other American presidents, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, were also survivors of the disease.

  EIGHTEEN

  CIVIL WAR

  Given the ravages of winter quarters, it might have been easy for many soldiers to forget that there was still a war on. Washington could not. Though the weather restricted both antagonists’ movements in New England, upstate New York, and even New York City, he was constantly apprised of Continental defensive designs from Savannah to Richmond. He considered Charleston, South Carolina, especially its key harbor, particularly vulnerable to a siege. His daily conversations with the Palmetto State’s John Laurens may have heightened his awareness of that front, and messengers from Valley Forge riding south with warnings and instructions were a common sight.

  Closer to home, he continued to dispatch daily patrols to police the roads leading into and out of Philadelphia. Their primary purpose, as always, was to enforce the ban on commerce with the enemy and to gather intelligence, particularly concerning any British excursions out into the counties neighboring the city. Washington encouraged his field commanders to harass these British patrols whenever feasible, and his campaign of bedevilment even included an attempt to disrupt the enemy’s supply deliveries by floating mines down the Delaware to blast the provision ships in Philadelphia’s harbor.

  The idea was the brainchild of the inventor David Bushnell, a thin, stern-faced Connecticut Yankee with a knack for gadgetry. Bushnell was the oldest of five children in a farming family; after his parents died, he sold his share of the homestead to his brother and enrolled at Yale University at the relatively mature age of 31. There he studied the natural sciences, which led to his successful detonation of several waterproof kegs packed with gunpowder beneath the surface of the Connecticut River. With the help of two New Haven clock makers, and his own precision, Bushnell managed to concoct a crude timing device attached to a musket’s gunlock to explode his “torpedoes,” as he named them. Four years later the gun smoke had barely cleared from the fields of Lexington and Concord when he offered his unique services to the Continental Army.

  Benjamin Franklin, another famous tinkerer, was the first to advise Washington of Bushnell’s
peculiar talents. The commander in chief immediately sensed the potential of these underwater time bombs as a weapon against the mighty Royal Navy. But the question hung—how to deliver them with accuracy? Bushnell’s answer: the world’s first documented use of a submarine in warfare. With his experiments, Bushnell was following in the tradition of a group of visionaries and scalawags who had attempted to pioneer the science of underwater machinery.

  The Dutch-born Cornelis Drebbel is often credited with creating the world’s first submarine. In 1605, Drebbel journeyed to London, where he persuaded King James I to underwrite the construction of a submersible boat propelled by oars fitted into leather joints to make the rowlocks watertight. Drebbel claimed to have conducted a maiden voyage beneath the Thames—but there were in fact no first-person accounts other than his own. Still, even if the Drebbel submarine “was simply an elaborate hoax perpetrated on a guileless king by an ambitious mountebank,” it helped spark genuine innovation by a series of inventors. The most prominent of these was Edmond Halley, the British royal astronomer for whom the comet is named. A century after Cornelis Drebbel’s invisible feat, Halley attached a string of lead weights to a primitive diving bell, procured a volunteer, and sank the contraption into a lake. When its operator detached the weights after a few minutes, the trapped oxygen floated it back to the surface with its occupant unharmed. Now, decades later, it was left to the American David Bushnell to design a craft that could both travel underwater and sustain its driver for more than a few moments of breathing time.

  Bushnell constructed the frame of his one-man submersible by joining two tortoise-shell-shaped oaken slabs in an upright position. A windowed conning tower large enough for a man’s head was affixed to the top of the craft between two snorkels that automatically closed upon submersion. The watertight gaskets were then slathered with tar before the entire contraption was bound with wrought iron staves. Bushnell once again turned to his clock makers for assistance with the ship’s mechanics. They helped him devise a valve-controlled bay that could fill with or flush seawater in order to control the ship’s depth, a form of ballast still employed today. Two screw propellers—one to maintain propulsion and one projecting upward to assist in ascents—were operated by foot pedals and hand cranks.

  Because its tiny compartment held so little air, the vessel Bushnell dubbed the Turtle could remain submerged for only a few minutes. This perforce limited its use to night operations. The ingenious Bushnell solved the problem of operating the machinery in the murky depths by coating his instrument panel and compass needles with bioluminescent fox fire, a species of fungus found in decaying wood that glows in the dark. With more ballast attached to its hull to keep the vessel upright, the Turtle—which actually more resembled a walnut—was deemed fit for operation in the fall of 1776. Its first target was none other than Adm. Howe’s 64-gun flagship of the line HMS Eagle, at the time engaged in the blockade of New York Harbor.

  The Turtle was transported overland to the Hudson River and fitted with a torpedo two and a half feet long packing 150 pounds of gunpowder. Late at night on September 6, Continental whaleboats towed the contraption along the surface in New York Harbor to just outside the range of the Eagle’s cannons. During trials on the Connecticut River and in Long Island Sound, the Turtle’s volunteer pilot, Sgt. Ezra Lee of Connecticut’s 10th Infantry Regiment, had been trained to submerge the vessel when he approached an enemy ship. He would then bore a hole in its hull with a large screw controlled by the hand cranks, guide the torpedo into the opening, and set the explosive’s timer. Like so many of the Continentals’ best-laid military plans, the Turtle’s initial mission fell apart almost immediately. Bushnell and his fellow planners had failed to take into account the Hudson River’s strong currents.

  After Sgt. Lee was cut loose from the whaleboats that night it took him over three hours of furious pedaling to reach the Eagle, by which time the sun was already peeking over the eastern horizon. In addition, the Americans were unaware that copper plating had only recently been laid over the Eagle’s hull to protect against shipworms. Whether the Turtle’s screw failed to penetrate this metal sheathing or was thwarted by the thick iron plate attached to the Eagle’s rudder hinge is immaterial. Lee, running out of air, exhausted, and possibly suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, abandoned the scene. As he made for the New Jersey riverbank in broad daylight he was spotted by enemy sentries on Governors Island, who launched an oared guard boat in pursuit of the floating globe. Lee managed to frighten them off by detonating his torpedo. But with the element of surprise eliminated, the Turtle’s future effectiveness was compromised. Although the British maintained that no such thing as a submarine had attacked them, they subsequently intensified their lookout for any bizarre little boats toting what they referred to as exploding “infernals.”

  Within the month Bushnell tried again. Sailing this time with the tide, Sgt. Lee pedaled the Turtle toward a British frigate anchored off Manhattan. But he was spotted by the ship’s night watch and forced to retreat under a salvo of flintlock fire. A few days later the Turtle’s tender vessel, with the submarine on it, was sunk by enemy cannon fire off New Jersey’s Fort Lee. The Turtle may have been gone; Bushnell’s tenacity remained. In early January 1778 he journeyed to Valley Forge and approached Washington with a plan to prepare a fresh batch of torpedoes and float them down the Delaware toward Philadelphia’s harbor. There would be no need for timing devices, as the triggers on the bombs were set to detonate on contact with the hull of a ship. The city’s moorings were then so crowded with enemy vessels that Bushnell and Washington hoped the torpedoes might ignite a wharf fire which would engulf Adm. Howe’s entire fleet.

  The sun had only just risen on January 5 when two boys walking along the Delaware’s riverbank north of Philadelphia spotted one of the first powder-packed kegs approaching on the ebb tide. Thinking the flotsam might contain something valuable, they secured a small boat to investigate. When they gaffed the object, the “infernal” blew them and their craft to pieces. The explosion alerted lookouts who had been posted near the harbor to warn of floating ice chunks. Within moments panicked British sailors manning berthed warships unleashed a broadside of cannon fire at the remaining torpedoes while half-dressed soldiers rushed to the riverbank to pour shot into the water. The barrage lasted for hours, long after it had destroyed the floating bombs before they could do any physical damage. The psychological bruise to the British, however, was captured smartly by the New Jersey congressman and author Francis Hopkinson, whose subsequent 15-stanza poem, “The Battle of the Kegs,” lampooned the enemy’s hysterical reaction to what they thought was an amphibious invasion. Hopkinson’s mocking parody, with specific references to Gen. Howe leaping from the bed of his mistress to don his battle attire, was published in newspapers from Massachusetts to Georgia, and became a staple recited around Valley Forge campfires.

  Bushnell went on to develop other types of waterborne mines that could be delivered without his submarine, and Continental forces successfully deployed several of his prototypes along the Delaware and in New London Harbor. Years later Washington hailed his pet inventor as “a man of Great Mechanical Powers, fertile of invention and master in execution.” Yet he also admitted that Bushnell “labored for some time ineffectually, and though the advocates for his scheme continued sanguine, he never did succeed.” That the commander in chief of the Continental Army deigned to embrace David Bushnell’s eccentric enterprises reflected Washington’s desperation as well as his tendency to try anything that might addle the enemy’s superior force. As for Bushnell, though he was often referred to as the “father of submarine warfare,” his name—once as celebrated as Fulton’s and Whitney’s—has since faded into the mists of time.

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  The floating time bomb having come to naught but embarrassment to the British, by mid-January 1778 Washington had returned his attention to his increasingly bifurcated land operations. Since arriving at Valley Forge he had in effect s
plit his winter command, using the Schuylkill as the dividing line. To the east of the river, the vast tract that stretched nearly 50 miles to New Jersey remained the nominal responsibility of the Pennsylvania militia, now under the temporary leadership of 23-year-old Gen. John Lacey. Lacey had been appointed after Gen. Armstrong, citing ill health, withdrew on temporary leave to his home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Like his predecessor, Lacey never came close to commanding the 1,000 troops the state had promised. His ranks were further thinned when scores of Pennsylvania men of fighting age subject to the compulsory militia laws simply refused to report for duty. So undermanned were Lacey’s regiments that American spies in Philadelphia reported the city’s markets suddenly awash with goods trundled in by the “country folk” predominantly from Montgomery County and Bucks County north of the city. One alarmed informant reported that there were enough flour sacks pouring into the city to keep 10,000 Redcoats in bread each day. The Continental blockade was further hamstrung by armed Tories banding together to escort caravans of overstuffed supply wagons and herds of cattle into the city, literally daring Lacey’s militiamen to stop them.

  In response, a clearly exasperated Washington turned to desperate measures. He wrote to one militia commander, “With respect to your future treatment of the Tories, the most effectual way of putting a stop to their traitorous practices, will be shooting some of the more notorious offenders wherever they can be found in flagrante delicto.” He also toyed briefly with the idea of depopulating the problematic Montgomery and Bucks counties by forcing their inhabitants to pack up and move a minimum of 15 miles farther north from Philadelphia. Inevitably recognizing the impracticability of such a scheme, he instead dispatched a company of Continental regulars across the Schuylkill to anchor Gen. Lacey’s right wing, and ordered Casimir Pulaski’s already overburdened and undernourished cavalry to recross the Delaware from New Jersey whenever they could to buttress the Pennsylvanians’ left flank.