by Bob Drury
As most Quakers were at the time forbidden to earn academic degrees, they had come to dominate eastern Pennsylvania’s manufacturing and commerce economies. The hostile interactions between Continental troops wintering over at Valley Forge and what they dubbed the local “Thees and Thous” were exacerbated by rumors—sometimes verified; often not—that Quakers were integral to the Tory smuggling trade. The outlaw Doan Gang had Quaker ties, and it was undeniable that Quaker farmers and merchants, like many non-Quakers, preferred British specie to the devalued Continental scrip. Moreover, as several of the 13 colonies maintained separate currencies, exchange rates jounced wildly from region to region and in some places there was an 800 percent inflation rate. Though the federal government printed and issued its own money, this was not backed by gold supplies. For that reason, and because of a concerted British counterfeiting effort that flooded the colonies with forged dollars, American paper money was virtually worthless by this point in the war.I
Given Valley Forge’s location, this proved a bitter paradox. For Washington’s army should have had much greater access than the British to the agricultural resources of the territories surrounding Philadelphia. The bountiful fields of Bucks County and Montgomery County in particular had in 1777 produced crop yields that were among the highest of the decade. And it was clear to all noncombatants that the British seldom played favorites among the settled towns and villages through which they tramped and looted. The Hessians in particular had earned a reputation for leaving devastation in their wake, and the nonviolent religious communities were just as likely to have had their “wives ravished [and] houses Plunder’d and burn’d” as any patriot hamlet. The Potts family’s mills and forges were testament to that. Yet not only did the Continentals lack money; their severe dearth of wagons made useless any provisions they might secure on credit.
At their Yearly Meeting in 1777, all Quakers were threatened with disownment by the faith not only if they took up arms, but also if they traded with soldiers or worked as teamsters, smiths, or foragers for either army. Further, relations between the desperate Continental troops and the local civilians who did arrive at Valley Forge on market day held little hope for improvement when, for instance, the flagging American scrip pushed the price of a pound of butter to one dollar, a small bread pie sold for double that, and the cost of a pair of shoes was nearly equal to a soldier’s monthly pay, which by this point was a very theoretical $25.II
Two days after the battle of Germantown, Quakers in Philadelphia had sent deputations to both Howe and Washington testifying to “the ungodliness of war and their equal love to all men.” To the American commander in chief in particular they pleaded their case as nothing more than conscientious bystanders to the carnage surrounding them. This was a hard sell to the average Continental soldier. Even the more enlightened felt that if the Quakers’ religious principles prevented them from lifting a firearm in anger, they at least had an obligation to support the cause by selling provisions at fair and humane prices. Some Pennsylvania officeholders who knew the sects best went even further, theorizing that if only the right feelers were put out, the Quakers might be persuaded to act as secret couriers and even spies in exchange for official exemption from military service. To make this case they pointed not only to the “Fighting Quaker” Gen. Greene but also to the man in charge of the Valley Forge commissary, 37-year-old Col. Clement Biddle.
Prior to the war, Biddle had worked in his father’s burgeoning shipping business. Though members of the Society of Friends, the Biddles were not prominent in Philadelphia’s Quaker circles. When he was in his twenties Biddle discovered that he did not share his parents’ and his brother Owen’s pacifist views, particularly when it came to the outrages committed against the peaceful Conestoga Indians by the Paxton Boys. Biddle set about recruiting a volunteer militia of like-minded coreligionists to protect the Conestoga, who had taken refuge on Province Island. Ten years later, with the Declaration of Independence, Biddle and what had become known as his “Quaker Blues” threw their lot in with the Continental Army, and fought honorably and ably at Trenton, Brandywine, and Germantown.
The theory had it that if Biddle could convince his fellow Friends to take up arms in defense of godless Indians, what could prevent him or someone like him from recruiting eyes and ears in Philadelphia willing to pass on the latest military gossip? But a series of anti-Quaker events between Biddle’s formation of his militia in the 1760s and the Continental Army’s encampment at Valley Forge had opened a gulf too wide to bridge. Not the least of these events was a 1775 decree by the Pennsylvania state assembly making “defensive military service” compulsory in the state militia.
The law, which imposed a heavy tax on any man who refused to serve, was directed toward Quakers like Joseph Doan. He and others who refused to pay the levy had their property seized and sold at auction. In defiance of the legislation, Quakers attending Philadelphia’s Yearly Meeting in 1776 were advised to “unite against every design of independence.” This earned them a public censure from Pennsylvania’s Committee for Public Safety, which in turn sparked a series of anti-Tory riots in Philadelphia aimed at Quaker establishments. While most Society members fled to the countryside, a few held out, and even as Washington and his army paraded through the city in August 1777 the Continental Congress ordered 18 of the city’s most prominent Friends banished to western Virginia under suspicion of “aiding and abetting the cause of the enemy.”
Washington himself had a unique manner of dealing with Quaker intransigence. At the beginning of the Pennsylvania campaign he had issued standing orders that all millstones be removed from gristmills standing in the enemy’s path. Once the British had passed through the area in question, the stones were returned to the mill owners—except if the millers happened to be Friends. This practice eventually led Gen. Howe to file an official complaint against the Continentals for “inflicting untold hardship” upon the territory’s civilian population. Washington was not moved. Yet whatever his private feelings about the Society’s pacifism, throughout the war and particularly later in life he publicly professed an admiration for the Quakers’ “conscientious scruples of religious belief.” After his defeat at Brandywine Creek, he had even dined and spent the night at the commodious home of one of Chester County’s most illustrious Friends, the London-born trader James Vaux. He was unaware that, the evening before, Vaux had extended the same courtesy to Gen. Howe.
Washington’s attitude toward the Quakers was undoubtedly influenced by Alexander Hamilton, who was drawn to their passionate antipathy to slavery. Hamilton also admired the pro-independence Philadelphian scholar, writer, orator, and lawyer John Dickinson. Though a semi-lapsed Friend, Dickinson retained strong Quaker leanings throughout his life—he said often that his real difference with the Society was that he thought it every man’s duty to fight in a just war—and his famous polemic against parliamentary taxation, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, aligned precisely not only with Hamilton’s republican bent, but with his Quaker-like belief that the essential right to happiness was bestowed by the Almighty, not by any king or general.
That the thoughts of a barely 23-year-old aide-de-camp—“that bastard brat of a Scottish peddler,” per John Adams—could so sway Washington’s mind-set offers insight into how close he had become not only to Hamilton, but to the group of young men with whom he shared such close living quarters at the Potts House. In his 1910 biography of his paternal grandfather, Allan McClane Hamilton observed that there was something about the “gay trio” of Hamilton, John Laurens, and Lafayette “rather suggestive of the three famous heroes of Dumas.” Laurens, with his odes to either “glorious death or the triumph of the cause,” and the swashbuckling Lafayette with his unquenchable thirst for military glory may have indeed aroused the commander in chief’s natural martial impulses. But it was Hamilton in the role of Athos who best channeled Washington’s analytical approach to both war and politics. Nothing illustrated this better than the “basta
rd brat’s” input into the searing policy doctrine that Washington had prepared for the congressional delegates who in late January 1778 departed York for Valley Forge.
♦ ♦ ♦
January 24 dawned warm and gray over the winter cantonment, with misty showers and jagged skeins of fog scudding down from the western hills. The cold front had broken, and the hoarfrost that had spangled the branches of the great chestnut trees was slowly dissipating, giving the impression of glass figurines melting into shapelessness. The unsettling warmth had also released a miasma that lay over the camp like an illness: the black smoke from cooking fires mixed with the effluvia of decomposing animals and overripe latrines leaching into the muddy soil. It was into this cloak of bone-aching damp and noxious haze that the five members of the congressional delegation arrived that afternoon.III One could not blame them for wondering what fresh hell they had ridden into.
The delegates were met by Washington personally at what was to be their quarters, Moore Hall, a grandly gabled Georgian pile hard by the west bank of the Schuylkill. The stone house had been rented by several American officers, including Gen. Greene and Col. Biddle, while the elderly Moores, an aristocratic and outspoken Tory family, had been relegated to a few rooms on an upper floor. After depositing their traveling gear at Moore Hall, the congressmen spent the next several days inspecting the soldiers’ winter lodgings and consulting informally with commanders from their home states.
On the morning of January 29, Washington, John Laurens, and Hamilton rode the two and a half miles from the Potts House to Moore Hall to convene the first session of what would come to be known informally as the Camp Committee. If the men who had journeyed from York were apprehensive about the opacity of their mission statement other than, as the delegation’s chairman Francis Dana put it, “to rap a demi-god over the knuckles,” the commander in chief was not. He and his staff had spent the previous weeks paring the thousands of pages of memoranda submitted by his officers into a 38-page handwritten report that one admiring historian described as “a carefully polished political tract.”
Composed in the baroque vernacular of the era—“I have in the following sheets briefly delivered my sentiments upon such of them as seemed to me most essential; so far, as observation has suggested, and leisure permitted”—the 13,000-word manifesto was written in Hamilton’s elegant cursive and entitled A Representation to the Committee of Congress. That Hamilton, recovering from pneumonia, had returned from upstate New York only a week earlier yet had still managed to compile a document burnished by his protean intellect was as astonishing as the content of its pages. For A Representation to the Committee of Congress was not only a blueprint for reforming the entire Continental Army, but an aggressive rebuttal of the implicit and explicit criticisms of Washington’s leadership from military and civil authorities. Not the least of these was a 45-point critique of the commander in chief that had appeared on the steps of the congressional hall in York only two days earlier.
The savagery of the unsigned tract, entitled The Thoughts of a Freeman, was bracing. Fashioned in the form of a legal indictment, it referred to Washington, his aides, and his leading generals as the hellspawn demon “Baal & his worshipers” and accused the commander in chief alternately of cowardice and incompetence in allowing the enemy to capture Philadelphia.IV It implied that the officers who had ordered the abandonment of Fort Mercer were treasonous; it warned the delegates that the state militias were the only force that stood between the republic and Washington’s using the Continental Army to turn the United States into a dictatorship; it mocked the congressional delegates loyal to Washington for their “great weakness in the head”; and it concluded by charging the American people with “Idolatry by making a man their god” at the expense of offending “the true God of heaven and earth.”
The Thoughts of a Freeman had been discovered on the steps of the county courthouse where Congress met and was turned over to Henry Laurens with its seal unbroken. Laurens read the anonymous screed and, without sharing its contents with any of the 13 congressmen in attendance at York, forwarded a copy to Washington. In an attached note he suggested that “the hearth was the proper depository for such Records.” But it wasn’t burned; Washington wrote back urging Laurens to submit the denunciation to Congress so he could defend himself against any accuser courageous enough to publicly step forward. None did, although “the malignant faction” aligned against him continued, as Washington put it, “to take ungenerous advantage of me.”
Now, if the five delegates who constituted the Camp Committee expected to confront the general described as disaffected and indecisive by his enemies in and outside Congress, they were surely taken aback by the visionary breadth and depth of A Representation to the Committee of Congress. One section suggested restructuring the regimental, cavalry, artillery, and engineering units. Another included concrete recommendations for inducing all officers and enlisted men to commit fully to the war effort for the duration of hostilities. In the furtherance of this end, another long passage addressed standing up a regimented military hospital system between the Potomac and the Hudson with clear and uniform guidelines for treatment of the sick and wounded. But it was the army’s bloated and barely functioning procurement practices and supply stem that ranked highest on Washington’s list of grievances.
Traditionally, both the Commissary Department and the Quartermaster Department were headed by military officers. Yet the majority of employees working under the department heads, even those attached to army units, were civilians. As a result, ineptitude, shortsightedness, theft, and corruption were rampant, particularly in the form of fraudulent purchasing orders. In his report to the delegates, Washington was blunt, categorizing the Commissary Department as “defective” and “deplorable.” He singled out the Maryland militia’s Lt. Col. William Buchanan—the “present Gentleman” in charge of the Commissary Department—as the cause of the “utmost difficulty we are [having] to keep the army together” and went on to warn the politicians that unless “a considerable alteration takes place, I see no prospect of adequate supplies for the succeeding [spring] campaign.”
Washington’s policy statement emphasized that no longer could the bloated commissary bureaucracy continue the practice of provisioning and paying the troops on a “hand to mouth” basis. The document also hinted strongly that if the United States’ civil authorities expected their fighting men to take the offensive come spring and thereafter, a smooth and reliable delivery system for supply and payment must be instituted, with the army’s Quartermaster and Paymaster Departments staffed no longer by civilian employees but by military officers who had earned the positions by dint of their actions on the front lines. In an example of its wide-ranging purview, the report suggested that a deal be struck with the French court to purchase uniforms on credit, with each state embedding within its fighting brigades a clothier and quartermaster’s assistant of some rank with the power and ability to distribute the uniforms as well as rectify losses and wants ranging from food to shoes to kettles to blankets to “spirituous liquors” and “vinegar vegetables and soap.”
In a passage pertaining to the retention of troops, A Representation to the Committee of Congress prescribed a pension system whereby every officer who pledged to serve until the revolution prevailed would be awarded half pay for the rest of his life, with his widow and children equally compensated in the event of his death. In this manner Washington was advancing the reasonable premise that the offer of postwar compensation would reduce if not eliminate the pervasive disgruntlement of an officer corps riven by “apathy, inattention, and neglect of duty” resulting in large part, he felt, from financial insecurity. Conversely, the threat of dismissal and the loss of a promised pension would provide senior officers with a greater measure of discipline over their junior charges. One detects the hand of the eminently practical Hamilton in the argument that public virtue and civic duty “may for only but a time actuate men” to risk their lives for an ideal. Bu
t at the end of the day, the argument concluded, it was fair compensation that kept them on the line. This was merely human nature, and to think otherwise would necessitate “chang[ing] the constitution of man.”
Perhaps with the militia-centric Thoughts of a Freeman lingering in his mind, Washington acknowledged that creating a semipermanent officer class would clash with the infant government’s aversion to any semblance of a standing army, and even more with Congress’s “well-intended frugality.” However, he hinted that if their cause was to triumph, the legislators could not have it both ways. A great percentage of his most efficient and experienced officers at Valley Forge were in fact waiting to see if the new pension plan would be initiated “to reanimate their languishing zeal.” If it was not, he predicted a slew of immediate resignations.V
If retirement at half pay was the carrot dangled before the army’s officer corps, the stick for the enlisted men took the form of a national military draft. Voluntary enlistments in the regular army, Washington contended, could no longer make up for the decimation of its rolls due to deaths, injuries, illnesses, and “dayly desertions.” He calculated that most if not all patriots willing to commit themselves to arms had already done so. If experience had taught him anything, he wrote, it was that forcing whatever men were left into uniform for the duration of the conflict, particularly members of the pacifist religious sects, “would not augment our general strength, in any proportion to what we require.” He thus offered what he felt was the admittedly “disagreeable . . . but unavoidable” alternative of implementing a draft from within each state’s militia. The colonies already required a year of militia service from every white male between the ages of 16 and 60, exempting the clergy and college students and in some cases proscribing free blacks and Catholics.VI Washington’s conscription plan would obligate militia draftees to serve one year in the Continental Army. When this 12-month commitment expired, he suggested that a reenlistment bonus of $25 be offered. If that bounty failed to keep the army fully staffed—as he suspected—the state-by-state draft would be conducted annually for as long as the fighting lasted.
