Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Writing under a roster of pseudonyms, Lee produced endless tracts distributed throughout Europe extolling American independence while simultaneously developing a profusion of political and social connections to pry out information on the motives and movements surrounding George III and Parliament. As his older brother William had only recently been elected high sheriff of London, the only American ever to hold the position, Arthur Lee’s cover was, for a time, unassailable. Yet in the spring of 1776, with the British authorities growing increasingly suspicious of a “pestilent traitor” in their midst, both Lees fled to the European continent. There, at Congress’s behest, William argued the American cause to the Hapsburg monarchy in Vienna while Arthur unsuccessfully lobbied the courts at Madrid and Berlin before joining Deane in Paris.

  Lee and Deane locked horns from the outset. Lee had little truck with Deane’s habit of conveying across the Atlantic a string of unqualified foreign parvenus to bedevil Washington and, more important, drain the congressional coffers. He was apparently particularly annoyed when Deane wrote to Congress suggesting that he might be able to persuade the soldier turned diplomat Comte Charles-François de Broglie to join the revolution, but only as commander in chief of the Continental Army, a clear insult to Washington. Lee was also leery of Deane’s blue-blooded coterie of French aristocrats. He feared that Deane’s words to his wife, Elizabeth, upon departing the United States for France—“I am about to enter the great stage of Europe”—had gone to his head. Despite Lee’s enthusiasm for breaking the chains of British colonization, there still resided in him what John Laurens described as “our ancient hereditary prejudices” against the French. France had been England’s chief international antagonist since long before Jamestown or Plymouth, and Lee’s suspicion that Deane had succumbed to the sirens of Versailles led him to publicly question not only his fellow diplomat’s ability to secure French aid, but his commitment to the enterprise now that he was in fact a player on the European stage.

  Deane, who had only recently learned from a newspaper article of his wife’s death back in Connecticut, was quick to return fire. He noted Lee’s long and deep connection to England, particularly his brother’s political career, and pondered aloud where his true allegiance lay. Franklin’s arrival in France merely exacerbated the animosity, and the Continental Congress was soon bombarded with a series of letters from Lee slandering Deane and the high-living Franklin as “thieves and potential traitors.”

  Lee had nurtured an intense dislike for Franklin since making his acquaintance during the latter’s frequent prewar trips to London as a colonial agent for Pennsylvania. Despite his cosmopolitan accomplishments, Lee was something of a prig, and criticized Franklin’s extravagant lifestyle as well as his apparently congenital flirting. In France, that flirting had culminated in what may or may not have been a platonic relationship with the renowned French musician and composer—and very much married—Anne Louise Brillon. Madame Brillon, 38 years Franklin’s junior, was known to refer to the rambunctious old American as “mon cher papa,” and wrote him over 100 letters. Lee was appalled when news spread of a chess match Franklin had held with the chemist, physician, and mayor of Passy, Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard, in Madame Brillon’s bathroom. It was not the venue that consternated him so much as the fact that Madame Brillon watched the competition while soaking in her tub. Lee wrote to Samuel Adams that no diplomat with Franklin’s libertine habits would ever convince Louis XVI to ally with the United States. This alone stood as proof of how little he understood the French.

  Franklin did his best to ignore Lee’s “Magisterial Snubbings and Rebukes,” explaining sensibly, “I do not like angry letters. I hate Disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for Altercation.” Franklin did, however, find it prudent to warn Lee that he had best “cure your self of this Temper [or] it will end in Insanity.”

  As the summer of 1777 rolled into autumn, the internecine warfare in the American legation combined with a progression of dispiriting reports reaching French shores to take an obvious emotional and physical toll on Franklin. As Burgoyne marched on Albany, Howe threatened Philadelphia, and Washington appeared to be in continual retreat, both French and English spies reported a distinct transformation in his appearance and disposition. In public Franklin still exuded a confident air, championing the revolutionaries’ values to anyone who would listen. When within earshot of those same secret agents, he was particularly vociferous in his belief that it was only a matter of time before France came to America’s assistance. Yet in private he despaired. De Vergennes was refusing to respond to his pleas for meetings, the French finance minister had turned down his request for a substantial loan to the United States, and he seemed a house prisoner at Passy.

  The news from Saratoga, of course, changed everything.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  On Thursday morning, December 4, 1777, Benjamin Franklin watched as the 30-year-old Massachusetts revolutionary, spy, and sometime diplomat Jonathan Loring Austin, just arrived from the United States, galloped into Passy. Before Austin could dismount, Franklin called out, “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?”

  When Austin said yes, the aging diplomat clasped his hands behind his back and turned away. But Austin was not finished. “But, sir,” he said, “I have greater news than that. General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war.”

  Franklin clapped, and replied, “Oh, Mr. Austin, you have brought us glorious news.”

  In the days following, the roads between Passy, Paris, and Versailles were crowded with a stream of coaches and carriages, more than a few carrying anxious British emissaries. They were suddenly more solicitous of finding a way to end the rift between England and its American “cousins.” The parleys culminated in the visit from the official envoy Paul Wentworth. The gathering with Wentworth set two balls in motion. Less than 24 hours after Franklin’s and Deane’s noncommittal response to his overtures, the panicked British ambassador Lord Stormont informed London that he suspected a French treaty with the United States was already en route to the American Congress. Nearly simultaneously, Louis XVI—convinced that Wentworth was close to persuading the Americans to accept the British Crown’s generous terms—instructed his foreign minister, de Vergennes, to conclude a commercial and military alliance with the American legation as soon as possible.

  On January 18, 1778, drafts of the treaties were presented to Franklin, Deane, and Lee. Much to the French court’s annoyance, the Americans spent days reviewing them. They still had not returned their annotated drafts when, on January 22, Lord Stormont called on de Vergennes demanding to know if there was an alliance. Stormont’s agents had picked up rumors that the French and Spanish were about to launch an attack on Gibraltar. Vergennes was evasive; Stormont sullen.

  Finally, in late January, the American representatives reached a general agreement on the terms of the pacts with the French. Louis XVI shrugged off Spain’s official reluctance to participate, and on the evening of February 6 the documents were signed in de Vergennes’s office in the Foreign Ministry. Later that night Franklin and Deane shared a carriage back to Passy carrying the two treaties. Once there, they asked an assistant named Edward Bancroft whom Deane had hired as the American legation’s secretary to write copies of the accords while they composed their letter to Congress. That Franklin omitted Arthur Lee’s name from the announcement is indicative of their mood. It would be more than a century before it came to light that Bancroft was a British spy who took the liberty of also making copies of the treaties for himself to send off to Whitehall the next day.II

  The Spanish throne was far from alone in having misgivings about the efficacy of allying with the Americans. Several influential French officials were also wary of the unintended consequences of throwing their country’s lot in with a colonial rebellion. Louis XVI’s minister of finance warned the king that a successful American war of independence would only inspire France’s own colonies to follow suit—a prediction that reverberat
ed from Port-au-Prince in 1804 through Dien Bien Phu 150 years later. And a few forward-thinking aristocrats, horrified by France’s depleted treasury, noted that diverting precious livres from the country’s own downtrodden peasant class in order to fund a foreign uprising could lead to violent repercussions.III Whether they had the Bastille and the guillotine specifically in mind is not recorded. In the end, however, the French recognition of the United States was perhaps no more of an anomaly than a revolution against the British monarchy sparked by a circle of affluent, conservative planters and businessmen.

  Some argue that France’s true recognition of the United States did not occur until April 1778, when Franklin visited the Academy of Sciences in Paris and was introduced to Voltaire, the titan of Enlightenment philosophie. One witness likened the two hugging and kissing each other on the cheek to “Solon embracing Sophocles.” But in fact the Franco-American alliance became semiofficial on March 20 when, with throngs gathered outside the gates of Versailles shouting, “Vive Franklin,” the king received the American diplomats at his court as official ambassadors. It would take another six weeks for the treaties to reach the United States. Until then, the paramount question of the revolution continued to loom—would the Continental Army still exist by that time?

  * * *

  I. Rarely commented upon in histories of the American Revolution was the efficacy with which the much-reviled “Washington’s navy” disrupted British merchant shipping. Between May 1777 and January 1778, for instance, Continental privateers boarded 733 English merchantmen and captured close to £5 million worth of goods.

  II. On Lee’s behalf, it must be noted that his early and deep mistrust of Bancroft was amply borne out.

  III. France would eventually spend more than a billion in today’s dollars on behalf of the rebelling Americans.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “THOSE DEAR RAGGEDY CONTINENTALS”

  On February 7, 1778, the skies above Valley Forge darkened to an ominous pall, bringing early night to what had been noonday. There followed a rare cyclonic blizzard so heavy with pearly flakes that within hours the white-domed roofs of the log huts sagged and creaked as if calling for quarter beneath several feet of snow. The winter squall raged for two days, a horizontal blur washing in from the west, before suddenly soaring temperatures ushered in a rainfall of biblical proportions. Melting snow swelled rivers and streams that washed out fords and overran their banks. Roads and trails turned into impenetrable quagmires, and the camp itself was inundated with a welter of floating debris that leaped and dived through the widening runnels like schools of flying fish.

  Dozens of teamsters whom Pennsylvania’s governor Thomas Wharton had finally managed to contract to deliver food from the state’s interior refused to slog through the morass. Other wagon masters, having already begun their journeys to Valley Forge, simply unhitched their teams, abandoned their drays in the knee-deep bog, and returned to their farms on foot, leaving their cargo to rot. Drivers who had reached the winter camp before the storms began found themselves stranded with no shelter but their overturned carts. Soon their horses, deprived of hay and grain, began toppling to the ground. They died where they dropped, their carcasses silent witness to the shuddering catastrophe.

  When the rains ceased another ferocious cold front moved in, entombing the encampment in ice so thick that water parties gingerly picking their way to the Schuylkill had to hack at the river with axes and tomahawks before filling their pails. Movement became so parlous that on February 11 the congressional committee warned Washington not to hazard the two-mile journey from the Potts House to Moore Hall. And in the absence of mail riders, cabin fever stimulated rumors that bounced through the cantonment like hailstones, including one bizarre report that Dr. Franklin had been murdered in his French lodgings by a professional assassin. The Continental Army, already reeling from December’s food and clothing shortages, was suddenly pitched into an even more precipitous spiral.

  As the dismal days passed, strung together like beads, the fear of riot increased exponentially. Washington was forced to deny Gen. John Sullivan’s request for a brief furlough to visit his family, as he needed Sullivan close at hand to help quell what he feared was an incipient “Mutiny for want of Victuals.” And when the congressman Francis Dana defied the weather and ventured out to visit a regiment from his home state, Massachusetts, he was astounded to arrive at the commander’s hut at the same time as scores of his malnourished soldiers threatening to desert en masse. They were mollified only when issued certificates of credit and allowed to leave camp on foot to purchase food. It is likely that John Laurens had this and similar insurrections in mind when he wrote to his father, “The soldiers [are] scarcely restrained from mutiny by the eloquence and management of our Officers.”

  Laurens went on to fill his letter—carried to York in a sledge driven by Thomas Paine—with forlorn reports that echoed Washington’s earlier grievances. He described an army “reduced almost to the point of disbanding.” At best, he hoped, Valley Forge would be abandoned and the troops divided into smaller winter bivouacs. For the second time in weeks, the Continental Army found itself on the verge of dissolution.

  A surviving commissary checklist for the previous month, January, illuminates the roots of the disaffection. In retrospect the inventory roster, specifying the provisions on order, serves as a sort of black joke. Of the requisitioned quantities of flour, pork, beef, veal or mutton, fish, butter, peas, turnips, potatoes, cabbages, wheat, lard, molasses, cider, rum, whiskey, vinegar, rice, and salt, less than 10 percent was on hand at Valley Forge. Even absent the miserable weather, few supplies would be forthcoming from local sources. During the Christmas food shortage, the farms surrounding Valley Forge had been stripped clean—“plundered for three miles in every direction” according to an unusually blunt Continental Army memorandum. General Varnum was more descriptive. “We are situated in a place that abounds with nothing but poverty and Wretchedness,” he wrote to a fellow general officer stationed in the north. “Sickness and deaths are somewhat common.”

  When the worst of the weather cleared, Washington summoned Nathanael Greene to his headquarters and instructed him to lead a foraging party of over 1,500 men—close to a third of the able-bodied and adequately clothed soldiers left in camp—across Chester County as far west as Brandywine Creek. A withered Alexander Hamilton was placed in charge of confiscating horses and wagons from civilians in the area to turn over to Greene. Hamilton, still not fully recovered from his debilitating bout of pneumonia, was at a low ebb. For the first time since embracing the revolution, he was beginning to doubt its efficacy. As he rode through camp he saw nothing but gaunt, shivering men hunched over small campfires. The questioning eyes that peered up at him from those sallow faces reflected his own apprehensions—with one difference. Most of the troops were not quite certain who or what to blame for their cursed conditions. Hamilton had no doubts. It was Congress, “a degeneracy of representation in the great council of America,” as he described the body to Gov. George Clinton of New York, that deserved censure. “Their conduct,” he told Clinton, “with respect to the army especially is feeble and indecisive and improvident—insomuch that we are reduced to a more terrible situation than you can conceive.”

  Washington was undoubtedly of a similar mind, for at long last he was forced into a decision he had tried hard to avoid. He told Greene that his foragers were to seize any foodstuffs in their path—as always, giving the by now dubious certificates of seizure for all supplies confiscated. But he startled the general by failing to append his usual precaution: to leave the farmers and residents enough food to sustain their families. When Greene pressed him about the omission, Washington remained silent. Instead, he was vehement about his anger at war profiteers who placed their own acquisition of what he would call “a little dirty pelf” above the fate of the revolution. If Greene should catch any of these “stock jobbing” civilians trading with the enemy, Washington said, they were to be shown no m
ercy, and might even be summarily executed.

  Washington undoubtedly recognized the dark implications of these imperious decrees, not least because they were diametrically opposed to the very philosophy from which the revolution was born. He himself, upon being named commander in chief, had directed every soldier in the Continental Army to sign a copy of regulations intended to limit the abuse of civilians and ensure that the soldiers’ conduct respected what he called “the rights of humanity.” This restraint, he wrote at the time, “justly secured to us the attachment of all good men.” Now he was breaking his own commandment, forced to compromise the moral demands he had made of his own troops, in order to ensure their very survival. As he told Greene, “Our present wants will justifie any measures you take.”

  But Greene discovered that six months of dealing with marauding armies had transformed the local populace into sophisticated hoarders. They had cached provisions in nearly every thicket of trees or earthen defile through which Greene’s men slogged, and at the first whisper of scavenging troops they drove their cattle deep into the country’s marshes. There was even an elusive Tory freelance spy named Jacob James who, in the manner of the Doan Gang of Bucks County, had gathered 100 or so Loyalists into a Provincial Corps of dragoons determined to help Chester County farmers move their goods to the Philadelphia market.