Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Rapidly undoing “Light Horse Harry” Lee’s more discriminating policies toward the inhabitants, Greene dutifully followed his commander in chief’s orders. He arrested more than a score of collaborators and seized their carriages and carts. Any American mills suspected of provisioning the enemy were destroyed, their spindles removed and their waterwheels sawed off. Greene even ordered the lashing of two women whom he intercepted on the road transporting foodstuffs toward the city. “I determine to forage the country very bare,” he informed Washington. “The inhabitants cry out and beset me from all quarters, but like Pharoh I harden my heart.”

  To that end Greene and his troops cut a swath that stretched for nearly 20 miles west of the Schuylkill, combing the area farmstead by farmstead. But even their haul fell short, as recorded by the diarist Joseph Plumb Martin, whose company had been assigned to operate a relay checkpoint delivering Greene’s spoils to Valley Forge. Theoretically, he and his fellow freighters should have been the first to benefit from the scavenging. But as he observed with his usual wryness, “Here we continued to fast; indeed we kept a continual Lent as faithfully as any of the most rigorous Roman Catholics did.”

  In desperation, Washington fired off orders to the commanders of both the southern and the northern divisions of the army to send supplies immediately. He beseeched the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Maryland to the same effect while detaching two more foraging companies even farther afield from Valley Forge. Anthony Wayne, who had accompanied Greene, was instructed to lead nearly 800 troopers into New Jersey to extend the supply search across an arc from Salem County in the southwestern corner of the state all the way north to Trenton. Whatever provisions Wayne could not drive before him or carry with him were ordered burned. But New Jersey was also fertile ground for British provisioners’ thrusts.

  When Gen. Howe learned of Wayne’s expedition he sent close to 4,000 troops across the Delaware to find him and destroy his regiment. Wayne turned the tables, however, throwing his outnumbered troops against the enemy expedition with such ferocity that the British commander, Col. Charles Mawhood, was convinced he was being attacked by a much larger force and signaled retreat. Wayne’s Pennsylvanians, flanked by Gen. Pulaski and some 50 dragoons, pursued the enemy nearly back to the Delaware River before disappearing into the wild. When an embarrassed Mawhood learned of the true size of Wayne’s command, he turned and gave chase. Wayne managed to elude him.I

  While Wayne traversed New Jersey, “Light Horse Harry” Lee was charged with leading another 500 Continentals south into Delaware. This was a risky enterprise. If the territory east of the Schuylkill had devolved into a virtual no-man’s-land, Lee’s horsemen in conjunction with Dan Morgan’s riflemen on the river’s west bank had at least constituted something of a firewall protecting Chester County from similar ravages. But as Gen. Greene had only just learned, despite Lee’s best efforts to deal fairly with the locals, the lower reaches of Chester County remained tinged with Tory red. Moreover, from a tactical viewpoint the absence of Lee’s dragoons would leave a gap in Valley Forge’s defenses in the event that Gen. Howe decided to seize the opportunity for a full-scale attack. Though Morgan’s small, mobile units continued to patrol the countryside west of the river, theirs was primarily an observational mission. They could not in reality be tasked with pacifying the region, much less enforcing American jurisdiction.

  One beleaguered officer among Morgan’s scouts who understood this perfectly was the company commander John “Silverheels” Marshall of the 11th Virginia. The 21-year-old Marshall, a sharpshooter from the state’s western frontier, was nicknamed “Silverheels” for his speed and leaping ability, and would go on to write a comprehensive contemporaneous biography of Washington and serve as the United States’ secretary of state before becoming the nation’s most distinguished interpreter of the Constitution during his 34 years as the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. “The real condition of Washington was not well understood by Sir William Howe,” Marshall wrote in the second volume of his Life of Washington. But in fact Gen. Howe was receiving steady reports of the deprivations at Valley Forge from deserters and local Loyalists. That he eschewed an assault on the camp to wipe out the rebels once and for all represented less an intersection of his timidity and confusion regarding instructions from Whitehall as his hauteur and an ingrained habit of avoiding winter battles. Besides, if what he was learning was true, nature would do his work for him. He had not counted on what Capt. Marshall called Washington’s characteristic attention “to the lives and comfort of his troops [which] saved the American army.”

  What Marshall meant was that Washington understood better than most that without an immediate influx of supplies, hunger would crush his army without the enemy’s having fired a shot. Thus when Capt. Lee reported the deficiencies of his march through Delaware, the commander in chief took the perilous step of ordering him to tap the food magazines from storehouses not only in that state, but in Maryland as well. These provisions had been earmarked to sustain his spring campaign, and some of the commander in chief’s subordinates argued that he was mortgaging his future as a fighter. Washington’s answer was succinct—there would be no future campaigns without food right now. These measures of “temporary relief,” as John Laurens called them, had barely edged the army back “from the brink of ruin.”

  As most at Valley Forge recognized, the modicum of provisions borne into the camp by Greene, Wayne, and Lee constituted no more than a stopgap. As famine and disease beset the winter cantonment, more than a few enlistees decided to take matters into their own hands.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Sometime around mid-February a British agent stationed along the heights overlooking the Hudson River near West Point dispatched an enigmatic message to his handler in New York City. Nearly daily, he had spotted dozens of Continentals snaking through the thick wood on the west side of the river. By night they would cross to the east bank, often in small craft operated by smugglers. Where these men disappeared to, he could not say. But he worried that they were massing for an operation behind Gen. Clinton’s lines. He needn’t have. The soldiers he had seen were in fact New Englanders deserting Valley Forge to return home. They were far from alone.

  Farther south, the civilian teamsters and wagon masters may have considered the Schuylkill impassable, but the raging high waters did not prevent hundreds of Pennsylvania enlisted men from simply abandoning their posts, swimming the frigid river, and evaporating into the night. Many, upon finding their farmsteads ravaged and abandoned, continued on to Philadelphia to surrender in the hope of being fed. One of the rumors spreading through the winter camp was that Gen. Howe had finally bowed to pressure from Washington’s repeated written protests and agreed to provide his American prisoners with blankets and food. In addition, Tory newspapers had begun posting notices promising Continental bounty jumpers free passage to England or Ireland.II When a foraging patrol of nearly two dozen men of Irish descent under Gen. Greene’s command simply vanished in western Chester County, the general concluded that their officer had been forced at gunpoint to lead them into the enemy-held city for precisely this purpose.

  One Continental officer noted that during the worst of the February food crisis more than half the soldiers at Valley Forge had been apprehended attempting to slip away. This number is undoubtedly exaggerated—a starving, barefoot Rhode Islander or Virginian would have had to be taken in by delusion to imagine he could survive a winter journey of hundreds of miles without succumbing to either the elements or enemy patrols. Yet British records indicate that in the month of February alone an average of six Continentals per day walked into Philadelphia to surrender.

  While penned up in the Potts House during the peak of the blizzard, Washington had complained to the ineffective commissary general, William Buchanan—the “present Gentleman” he had disparaged to the Camp Committee—“The spirit of desertion among the soldiery never before rose to such a threatening height as at the pre
sent time.” His men needed food, he told Buchanan, and they needed it now. And it was not only enlisted men who were euphemistically categorized as being on “self-granted furlough.” One regular-army brigade of Pennsylvanians found themselves so bereft of junior officers that their commander was reduced to placing ads in local newspapers ordering them to return to camp or face courts-martial. Rhode Island’s Gen. Varnum, writing to Gen. Greene to inquire about the success of his forage expedition, cut to the nub of the matter. “The love of freedom,” he observed, “is controlled by hunger.”

  Washington’s correspondence from these weeks—actually written by Hamilton, Laurens, and Tench Tilghman, who shared not only their commander’s growing dismay but the cornmeal mush that constituted most meals at the Potts House—expressed the frustration the commander in chief had to keep hidden from his soldiery. It was only his enormous self-control that allowed Washington to publicly suppress, as he put it, “a tendency to resignation.” That his inspirational leadership, serene dignity, and sheer physical presence held the Continental Army together throughout this desperate month is no less than astounding.

  Upon reflection, however, the near-catastrophe that befell his army at Valley Forge in February 1778 did result in two counterintuitive blessings. The first was its effect on the squabbling officer corps. Although the matter was poorly understood by most of his subordinates, the commander in chief had but limited power over decisions of rank and promotion. These were ultimately decided by Congress, and Washington had earlier beseeched the representatives on the Camp Committee to help him overcome this handicap. Now that their collective survival was at stake, however, the officers were forced to put aside their feuds in order to work together for the army’s greater good. Their revolutionary credentials tested, they were destined to become, in John Laurens’s description, “those dear ragged Continentals whose patience will be the admiration of future ages.”

  And if, as Laurens predicted, those future ages “would glory in bleeding with them,” it was only because of the amazing spirit of self-sacrifice that the commander in chief had instilled in those who remained by his side. It took an anonymous French officer stationed at Valley Forge to encapsulate the impression that Washington’s “imposing countenance” made on others—“grave yet not severe; affable without familiarity.” He went on, describing the American general’s “calm dignity, through which you could trace the strong feelings of the patriot and discern the father as well as the commander of his soldiers.”

  Many before, most notably Henry Knox, had referred to Washington as the spiritual father of the revolution. But it took the hardships of February 1778 for a soon to be commonplace phrase to be codified in print for the first time. For that was the month when the cover of a German-language almanac published in Lancaster described him as Des Landes Vater—“Father of the Country.”

  * * *

  I. Wayne’s skirmish with Mawhood inadvertently sparked a conflagration that burned at the southern end of the Garden State for months. When Mawhood could not find Wayne’s regiment, he took out his frustration on the area’s Whig population. Defeated New Jersey militiamen were bayoneted as they surrendered while their homes and farms were burned to the ground. Mawhood left a trail of butchery specifically intended, he wrote, “to reduce them [and] their unfortunate Wives & Children to Beggary & Distress.” (http://www.revolutionarywarnewjersey.com/new_jersey_revolutionary_war_sites/towns/hancocks_bridge_nj_revolutionary_war_sites.htm.)

  II. In fact, the American soldiers who fell for this ruse were forced to serve as seamen on British ships or in garrisons far from the revolution’s battlefields. Like the British counterfeiting operation, the false promises in the newspaper postings enraged Washington, who wrote to the Virginia congressman Richard Henry Lee, “The enemy are governed by no principles that ought to actuate honest men.” (From “George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, 15 February 1778,” in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, Vol. 13, ed. Lengel, pp. 549–50.)

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE POLITICAL MAESTRO

  Except for the previous December’s brief delegation to Whitemarsh, the storm-scoured February of 1778 marked the first occasion that any members of the Continental Congress were personally forced to confront the army’s broken supply system. It was one thing to pace the floor of the county courthouse in York listening as Henry Laurens read aloud Washington’s desperate appeals for succor. It was quite another for the five delegates who constituted the Camp Committee to witness the trauma inflicted upon the troops at Valley Forge. The effect was driven home viscerally by the stench from the rotting carcasses of starved army horses that had been corralled not far from Moore Hall. Although there is no proof, a skeptical observer might fairly wonder if this was the intent of the decision to house the delegates so near the stockade. In any case, the foul air wafting from the horse yard may have influenced a subtle if powerful shift in the committeemen’s attitude toward their main purpose—the reorganization of the entire American military.

  Since their initial meetings with Washington weeks earlier, the visiting congressmen had resolved several of the less contentious proposals contained within A Representation to the Committee of Congress. They had agreed to recommend to their parent body that a company of Indians be recruited to match those in the employ of the British. They had also acceded to Washington’s suggestion that political considerations be eliminated in promoting officers, and bowed to his request to increase the current limit of lashes as corporal punishment—those convicted of the most heinous crimes could now receive over 100. The Camp Committee had also succeeded in sanding down some of the report’s rougher edges that it sensed might encounter objections within the larger body. Given the sick and absent ghost soldiers still technically assigned to their units, for instance, Washington had wanted to recombine his battalions and reduce the current number from 97 to 80. But few delegates back in York wanted their respective states’ contributions minimized. Congress, upon the committee’s recommendation, eventually settled on 88.

  More important, at Washington’s urging the five congressmen insisted on inspecting the personnel rosters of the departments of the commissary general and forage master general. They were flabbergasted to find that these key support systems were larded with so many civilian purchasing and issuing agents as to create a corkscrew effect in the provisions pipeline. Although the delegates kept few written minutes of their early deliberations, they were doubtless also struck by the most obvious anachronism of the procurement process: while an entire country’s political course could be debated and set by a mere 56 members of the Continental Congress—many of whom were not even in session in York during the early months of 1778—the army’s lifeblood depended upon a bureaucracy that required literally hundreds of civilian employees.

  It took the Camp Committee less than two days to begin trimming what Washington called this “extravagant rage of deputation.” It began from the top down. First the delegates recommended that Gen. Schuyler—Washington’s old friend whose position Gen. Gates had usurped prior to Saratoga—be recruited to fill the quartermaster general position vacated by Gen. Mifflin in November. The proposal of Schuyler, sworn blood enemy of Gen. Gates and anathema to every New Englander sitting in Congress, was virtually covered with Washington’s fingerprints. This was followed by a recommendation to sack the commissary general, William Buchanan, and replace him with the seasoned Connecticut sea trader Jeremiah Wadsworth. The choice of Wadsworth was telling. A patriot not averse to also pursuing a profit, Wadsworth had, through a combination of intelligence and guile, worked his way from common deck hand to captain of his own ship. He subsequently accrued a fortune trading in the West Indies, and when war broke out he volunteered to serve on several procurement committees obtaining supplies for the Continentals ranging from stockings to tin kettles. If anyone could wrangle the bureaucracy of the Commissary Department, it was Wadsworth.

  Not all of the Camp Committee’s efforts proved
as productive. The panel recognized, for instance, that Washington’s proposal of pensions on half pay would be an abomination to a substantial subset of congressional hard-liners skeptical about even the hint of a postwar standing army. Indeed, when weather permitted toward the end of February, the delegates Francis Dana and Nathaniel Folsom journeyed to York and argued in person for the pension plan. Their colleagues were not moved, and merely voted to table the matter indefinitely.I Similarly, Washington’s dual request for funds to procure extra horses and saddles for his cavalry corps and to streamline the army’s clothing procurement process also disappeared into a bottomless bureaucratic maw.II And though it took less than a week of deliberations for the Camp Committee to recommend a military draft within the state militias, the formal enactment process would eventually take months.

  After the initial flurry of activity, moreover, the Camp Committee’s progress was increasingly sidetracked by the worsening food crisis. Some officers addressed the delegates directly. “Pray Use your Influence with the [Congress] to get our Soldiers clothed,” begged the Massachusetts general John Patterson, who counted 450 of the 756 men in his command as “unfit for Duty for want of Shoes and other clothing.” Others were like Connecticut’s acerbic Jedediah Huntington, who was just glad of the “happy Circumstance that the Com of Congress happen to be Eye Witness of our Condition.” Similar mutterings and Washington’s dramatically descriptive reports of his empty commissaries—“the present dreadful situation of the army for want of provisions and the miserable prospects before us”—were initially met with a measured skepticism by the delegates at Valley Forge. Their reaction was to suspect some form of accounting fraud.