Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Pulaski’s light dragoons had encountered a chilly reception in Trenton, whose pastures and infrastructure were still recovering from the ravages of both the Hessians’ occupation and the previous Christmas’s fighting. The fact that Pulaski’s unit arrived with a reputation as horse thieves did not ease tensions. Only weeks earlier Washington had been forced to reprimand Pulaski for his liberal interpretation of his instructions to confiscate horses from Loyalists only. Moreover, New Jersey’s capital city, consisting of barely 600 structures, was already garrisoning several hundred American sailors who had participated in the defense of Fort Mercer and Fort Mifflin. Its sullen citizenry was loath to welcome more mouths, human or equine, to feed and shelter. For his part, the Polish count repeatedly complained to Washington that the Navy’s “galley men” had so stretched the township’s limits that he had difficulty finding beds for his troops, much less stalls for his animals. As the days passed, Pulaski’s increasingly shrill communiqués arrived at the Potts House as regularly as the Angelus—which is to say as often as petitions from Trenton’s civil magistrates imploring the commander in chief to find another winter billet for either the sailors or the cavalrymen, if not both.

  Washington trod delicately around the two squabbling factions. As much as he relied on a healthy and rested cavalry corps for his spring campaign, he could ill afford to alienate the New Jerseyans. After he abandoned his plans for a Christmas attack on Philadelphia, his strategy was more focused on the long view of the war. Accordingly, he suspected that when fighting resumed it would center on New York rather than Philadelphia. This meant that key battles were likely to take place throughout New Jersey. To that end Washington had cultivated a cordial relationship with the state’s governor William Livingston, who was also the commander of the New Jersey militia—precisely the musket men whom he expected to play a prominent role in future engagements. Now, Livingston had taken up the cause of Trenton’s grumbling town fathers. Placating Pulaski was not worth the risk of compromising the goodwill he had built up with Livingston. Pulaski was in essence left to his own foraging devices as long as he hatched no more “plundering schemes.”

  Pulaski, finding the area too fallow to support his dragoons, ultimately split his four companies between the New Jersey towns of Flemington and Pennington to Trenton’s northwest. The count himself, when not attempting to fulfill his orders to patrol Bucks County, remained in Trenton with a small coterie of horsemen whose mounts were quartered in hay fields miles from town. These arrangements inevitably rendered the concept of quick strikes against Pennsylvania’s Tory smugglers rather negligible.

  Meanwhile, the mutual distrust that arose between Lacey’s state militiamen and the army regulars sent to reinforce them took on the trappings of a cold war within the hot war. If the New Jersey irregulars in and around Trenton grudgingly accepted the presence of the American sailors and Pulaski’s horsemen, the Pennsylvanians flaunted their outright hostility toward the Continentals. They accused the regulars of taking bribes to allow supply wagons to pass into Philadelphia, and of the more heinous crime of confiscating supplies from patriotic farmers and selling them to city-bound Loyalists. Regular-army officers answered these accusations by painting the militiamen as too frightened to stop and fight the gun-toting civilians, particularly the Doan Gang.

  Struggling to maintain some shred of equanimity, Washington reacted as best he could to the charges and countercharges, sending a fact-finding mission across the river to report back on the situation. But a string of outraged General Orders evidenced his frustration—“It is with inexpressible grief and indignation that the General has received information of the cruel outrages and robberies lately committed by soldiers, on the other side of the Schuylkill: Were we in an enemy’s country such practices would be unwarrantable; but committed against our friends are in the highest degree base, cruel and injurious to the cause in which we are engaged,” read one.

  In the end, his investigators found some merit in both arguments. A few Continentals suspected of selling travel passes were reprimanded and transferred back to Valley Forge. At the same time, Washington urged Gen. Lacey to step up his efforts against the armed supply caravans. But for the most part, the commander in chief’s hands were tied, and any joint embargo effort on the part of these two groups was a pipe dream. Even if he could have afforded to buttress the patrols east of the Schuylkill with more of his regulars—which, given his finite resources, he could not—it had long been decided in York and Lancaster that the territory in question was under the nominal military purview of the state of Pennsylvania. Picking another fight with the state’s civil authorities was pointless, particularly since a congressional delegation was soon due in camp. The agreement to bottle up the British in Philadelphia had been a joint pact between the army and Pennsylvania’s statesmen, after all, and if they were overly worried in Lancaster about the ample amount of provisions reaching Gen. Howe’s troops, it was their responsibility to strengthen their own force to halt it.

  By late January the enmity between the militia and the regulars had so calcified that the American efforts on that side of the river were more sieve than blockade. As more marketers flooded the roads into the city, the price of food in Philadelphia actually began to fall. Allowing the bad blood to persist between the state militiamen and his regulars—and allowing the British to get fat off the intramural rift—was about the best of Washington’s several terrible options. Until, that is, he could make his case to the delegation from York. At least the situation on the west bank of the Schuylkill was more manageable.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Washington considered the area just below and to the west of Valley Forge the most vulnerable to a British probe, and thus the more dangerous defensive assignment. In addition to the trenches and redoubts excavated beyond the 400 “outer line” cabins facing Philadelphia, another mile-long slit trench pocked with rifle pits had been dug as a fallback position on the western edge of the camp near the base of the double-humped Mount Joy. This trough roughly followed the contours of the base of the mountain, atop which the Continentals had erected a 38-foot observation tower with sweeping views down the Schuylkill Valley. The tower was staffed day and night by lookouts supplied with spyglasses and signal flags. In addition, there were some 800 to 1,000 pickets constantly patrolling the territory to the southeast between Valley Forge and Philadelphia.

  Given the wretchedness of camp life, it was considered something of a plum detail to be detached for anything that smacked of real soldiering. To that end the task of proscribing smugglers west of the Schuylkill as well as guarding against any British raids fell primarily to Dan Morgan and his rifle corps, the Continental Army’s most effective guerrilla fighters. Morgan’s men were bolstered by a small corps of mounted dragoons under the command of his fellow Virginian, 21-year-old Captain Henry Lee III. The dashing Lee, nicknamed “Light Horse Harry,” was a scion of one of Virginia’s first families and considered one of the finest horsemen in the state. He had graduated from the College of New Jersey four years earlier with a degree in Latin and the intent of pursuing a legal career. The war changed that, and upon volunteering his services he was commissioned a captain.

  The Lees had known the Washingtons since Mount Vernon, and Capt. Lee had in fact declined the commander in chief’s invitation to join his staff as an aide-de-camp. He was flattered by the offer, he wrote, and thanked Washington for the opportunity, “certainly the first recommendation I can bear to posterity.”I But he remained, as he put it, “wedded to my sword,” and preferred to continue in the field. His gracious decline of the post was in keeping with his outsize reputation for professional and personal concern for his riders.

  Chester County had a population of some 30,000 at the time, with Quakers making up a sizable portion, and the county’s lower reaches were known to be dominated by an increasingly Tory-inclined populace. In addition to maintaining security and disrupting trade with the enemy, Lee’s assignment on the western periphery
of Valley Forge was also to broaden the army’s network of spies and informants. It was hazardous duty. Any Whigs thought to have contact with the Continentals, or even a favorable impression of their cause, faced harassment and, in some cases, British-condoned kidnapping. Moreover, Gen. Howe had offered a bounty of 40 to 60 “hard dollars” for every captured American officer, and the risk of encountering Loyalist informers made it too chancy for Lee’s limited detachments to linger in any one vicinity for more than 24 hours.

  Despite the risk, not only did Capt. Lee become Washington’s unofficial geographer in the area—scouting the countryside and recommending the most favorable junctions to place pickets and erect guard posts—but he and his 25 or so horsemen interacted with the local population perhaps more than any other American troopers. As the historian Wayne Bodle observes, Lee’s “rapport with the common soldiers seemed to extend to the class of common citizens from which they were drawn.” This sympathy led Lee to keep meticulous payment records for farmers under his jurisdiction who supplied him with food and shelter as well as offer them protection from both British and Continental foraging parties.

  As it happened, the mutual bonds of trust Lee cultivated with these local patriots led to one of the most exciting sidebars of the war. On the night of January 19, one of Lee’s constituents allowed him and his small escort of seven riders to bunk in his farmhouse. The Americans were awakened at daybreak by the sound of Redcoats attempting to batter down the farmer’s oaken front door. Lee, rushing to a window, counted a sizable British patrol consisting of some 130 mounted dragoons surrounding the property. Only later would he discover that the company was commanded by the despised Banastre Tarleton. The farmhouse had more windows than Lee had men, but he positioned his Virginians so expertly that the British were soon retreating under what Lee drolly described as a “very warm” cascade of musket balls. Tarleton then threatened to burn Lee and his men out. This was met with jeers, hoots, and taunts reminding the British colonel that the structure was made of stone.

  In an attempt to salvage his advantage, if not his dignity, Tarleton finally ordered his troops to seize the Americans’ horses. But as the Redcoats approached the adjacent stable they were intercepted by Lee and his reckless squad, who rushed from the farmstead with their carbines blazing. The enemy turned tail and fled down the road toward Philadelphia. Lee and his men saddled quickly and, joined by a small company of Morgan’s foot soldiers drawn to the sound of the gunfire, gave chase. The British riders rapidly outdistanced the Continentals afoot. With three of his horsemen bleeding from minor wounds, Lee opted for discretion over valor and called off the pursuit. A minor engagement soon forgotten. Or so he thought.

  From a military perspective, the tactical significance of Lee’s skirmish was close to nil. Two of the British dragoons had been killed, with Lee counting another four, including Tarleton, wounded. But the spreading tales of the outnumbered company’s derring-do sent a vicarious shiver through the Valley Forge campsite. John Laurens was naturally agog, lauding the audacity “of the officers and men who had the honor of forcing such an incomparable superiority of numbers to a shameful retreat.” And a 19-year-old New Jersey captain named William Gifford, writing to his best friend in the state’s militia, encapsulated the mythology born that morning by describing how Lee’s “superior bravery . . . and vigilance baffled the [British] designs . . . Obligat[ing] them to disgracefully retreat after Repeated & fruitless attempts.” Washington personally congratulated Lee on his gallantry, and included in his General Orders for January 20 “his warmest thanks to Captn Lee & Officers & men . . . which by their superior Bravery . . . baffled the Enemy’s designs.”

  Within days Lee’s exploits at the farmhouse had become the stuff of legend, a fable masked by reality. One of the reasons Lee found himself bushwhacked with such an underwhelming force was that no American commander at Valley Forge, regardless of the value of his assignment, could muster much in the way of manpower or, in Lee’s case, horsepower. As noted, two days before Christmas, Washington had reported to Congress that between one quarter and one third of his force—nearly 3,000 troopers—did not possess the clothing to render them fit for duty. Now, a month later, that number had risen by another 1,000. It was only natural for men living amid such misery to direct their anger toward local and state legislators who had sent them off to war and now seemingly abandoned them.

  General Poor, for instance, having apparently given up on receiving redress from his governor, wrote to the New Hampshire state assembly about being barely able to tolerate the shame of having to inspect his troops each morning while listening to their “lamentable tales of distresses” that were beyond his power to alleviate. His starving and half-naked soldiers, Poor wrote, were solely dependent “on the cold hand of meek-eyed charity alone.” As with the implied menace in Washington’s “disperse” letter, Poor intimated that unless the situation was rapidly remedied, he did not know how much longer he could hold his troops in the field. Similarly, a lieutenant colonel with Massachusetts’s 12th Regiment described to his state’s executive council the appalling sight of assembling his company each morning in the snow and slushy mud. Some 90 of his soldiers, he wrote, “have not a Shoee to their foot and near as many who have no feet to their Stockings.”

  At least the young New Jersey officer so aroused by Light Horse Harry Lee’s gallantry was willing to give the civil authorities back home the benefit of the doubt. In the same letter to his friend, Capt. Gifford wrote that he could not believe his state representatives were venal; they were merely ignorant of the hardship facing him and fellow New Jerseyans. “If they had any idea,” he wrote, “they certainly wou’d do more for us.” After fighting through the fall campaigns, Gifford and his companions had expected to be assigned a winter bivouac closer to home. They were, after all, less than 50 miles from the New Jersey border. Instead, they found themselves “very bare for clothes” atop a snow-swept plateau in southeast Pennsylvania, forced to shelter in what he called dilapidated Indian “wigwams.”

  Gifford’s charity toward his state’s civil authorities was the exception. The 26-year-old Massachusetts lieutenant colonel John Brooks spoke for most when he concluded that if in fact the “bare footed, bare leg’d, bare breech’d” condition of his troops was merely a lack of foresight, “then the Lord pity us.” But, invoking the principle res ipsa loquitur, he added that if their plight was brought about “thro’ negligence or Design, is there not some chosen curse reserv’d for those who are the cause of so much Misery?”II

  The groundswell of grievances from the enlisted ranks did not go unnoticed by the officers they held responsible for their plight. Food purchasing agents rarely set foot within the confines of the Valley Forge encampment after a commissary officer was killed by a mob of hungry soldiers. And representatives from the clothier general’s department attached to the army so feared physical retribution that they staked winter quarters some five miles northwest of the camp. The Continental Army’s paymaster in York, aware of his unwelcome presence at the cantonment, quite simply wrote to Washington that there was no sense in his visiting until Congress somehow managed to raise enough money to actually pay the soldiers.

  Washington was left to cope with this myriad of colliding catastrophes while still concentrating on his overarching strategy of keeping his army a disciplined, confident, and competent force. Yet there was one hurdle he was never able to clear. For if there was a common and overriding enemy aside from the British, aside from the Tories, and aside from the bickering lawmakers upon whom the American troops longed to loose their wrath, it was the members of the numerous pacifist religious sects who populated much of southeastern Pennsylvania. Many a Continental soldier went to his grave hating the Quakers.

  * * *

  I. Little did Lee know that “the first recommendation I can bear to posterity” would in fact be to father a son he named Robert Edward, who married the daughter of George Washington’s adopted step-grandson George Washington P
arke Custis and, on April 9, 1865, surrendered his sword to Ulysses S. Grant in the town of Appomattox Court House.

  II. Brooks would later practice what he preached when, as commander of his state’s militia in 1787, he made sure that his soldiers were well-clothed, well-armed, and well-fed when he ordered them into the field to put down Shays’ Rebellion.

  NINETEEN

  AN AMERICAN ARMY

  When William Penn founded his eponymous Commonwealth in 1682, he and his followers preached open-mindedness toward the various Mennonites, Dunkers, Amish, Moravians, and smaller if similar religious communities that settled in Pennsylvania and, to a lesser extent, Delaware and southern New Jersey. To the Continental soldiers, these somewhat diverse groups were lumped together under the rubric of the largest faith among them, Penn’s own Society of Friends, or Quakers—the latter name referred to the physical trembling before God that they advocated and sometimes performed at their religious meetings. In late 1777, nearly a century after Penn’s grand experiment in tolerance, it was the progeny of these early settlers who quite conspicuously refused to take up arms in defense of the American Revolution. This proved contentious at Valley Forge, particularly to the Virginians and Carolinians, who already cast a wary eye at the members of the Society for their antislavery sentiments.

  The resentment was understandable. For five months Washington’s troops had crisscrossed the farmlands and villages of Quaker country fighting and dying for a cause they felt represented all Americans. These men had watched friends and compatriots fall while the inimical “Dutchmen from this Sanctified Quaking State” remained neutral at best and antagonistic at worst. More than one bitter patriot echoed the sentiments of the Massachusetts officer John Brooks—the dyspeptic lieutenant colonel who had called down curses on his own state government—when he wondered, regarding the outcome at Saratoga, whether his fellow New Englanders exhibited the same nonviolent tendencies toward Gen. Burgoyne’s army “which the cringing, nonresisting ass-like Fools of [this] State have shown towards Howe.” Perhaps more chillingly, in an age when religion remained a fundamental theme of life and death, there were few premonitions more frightening to the righteous than the possibility, as Rhode Island’s Gen. James Varnum put it, “of dying in a heathenish land, depriv’d of a Christian burial.”