Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  On the last day of February 1778, Washington encapsulated the entire episode in a letter to his fellow Virginian, Lt. Col John Fitzgerald. Eschewing his usual dictation, he took quill in hand to inform Fitzgerald that “Matters have, & will, turn out very different to what the party expected. G[ate]s has involved himself in his letters to me, in the most absurd contradictions—M[ifflin] has brought himself into a scrape he does not know how to get out of . . . & C[onway], as you know, is sent upon an expedition which all the world knew—& the event has proved, was not practicable. In a word, I have a good deal of reason to believe that the Machinations of this Junto will recoil upon their own heads.”III

  Washington proved himself a fair prognosticator. For the final nail in the coffin of Gen. Gates’s plan to usurp the commander in chief’s position was driven by a hammer some 300 miles to the north of York and Valley Forge.

  * * *

  I. After much haggling, a compromise was finally reached on May 15, 1778, when, in lieu of a half-pay pension for life, Congress voted on a half-pay stipend to last for seven years after the war’s end, provided that the recipient remained in the army through the conflict’s conclusion.

  II. Though the Camp Committee’s recommendation that Congress approve the cavalry realignment was submitted in February, the full body did not vote in favor of purchasing the additional horses until late May. The clothing procurement question lasted even longer; on August 3, and again five months later in January 1779, Washington was still petitioning Henry Laurens for a reorganization to deal with the army’s “worsening” clothing shortage.

  III. In Washington’s original letter, Gates was written as “G—s,” Mifflin as “M—,” and Conway as “C—.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MARTHA

  It was a disaster portended.

  Despite his lust for battlefield glory, when Lafayette learned of his appointment to lead the Canadian expedition he was torn. When news of his achievements reached his homeland, there would not be enough stonemasons between the Pyrenees and the Rhine to carve the statues exalting him for liberating “New France” from the vile Roast Beefs. Typically, the young Frenchman never considered the possibility that he might fail. Yet he also saw through Gen. Gates’s seductive ploy as easily as John Laurens, and recoiled at the idea of being manipulated to undermine his cherished commander in chief.

  When the marquis approached Washington to voice his concerns, his mentor urged him to accept the assignment—as long as he understood the battle plan. General Gates’s original orders were rife with ambiguities, and Washington advised the young Frenchman to visit York before leaving for Albany in order to learn the precise details of the campaign. In private, Washington considered the entire premise of an invasion of Canada foolhardy—“the child of folly,” he wrote to the Virginia congressman and militia officer Gen. Thomas Nelson. He also doubted that the plan would ever come to fruition, but it would not be fair to dampen Lafayette’s enthusiasm. In turn, Lafayette was perhaps naively confident that, on the strength of his reputation, he would be able to thread his way between battlefield laurels and loyalty to Washington. Lafayette thus departed Valley Forge for York with a list of carefully calculated demands.

  He met first with Henry Laurens. Proclaiming himself “flattered and honored” by Congress’s confidence in a 20-year-old foreigner’s readiness to command an army, he nonetheless stipulated that he could not accept the position unless $200,000 in gold or silver to finance the expedition was immediately shipped to Albany. In addition, he demanded that “sixty days [worth of] provisions and all the necessary Baggage, Artillery, and Ammunition for an army of three Thousand men” also await his arrival. Mindful of the fine line he was treading, he then insisted that the civil authorities jettison Thomas Conway as his second in command. “I know that Conway will sacrifice honor, truth, and every thing respectable to his own ambition and desire of making a fortune,” he told Henry Laurens. “What engages me to despise him more is that he is with me as submist, as complaisant, and low than he is insolent with those he do’nt fear.”

  There were also political ramifications to consider. Despite Conway’s service in the French army, Lafayette intuited that Louis XVI and his ministers would take a dim view of an Irishman accruing any credit for liberating a French-speaking nation, even as a deputy commander. An American second in command, or even a volunteer officer from the European continent, would be more acceptable to French sensibilities. To that end, he suggested to Henry Laurens that replacing Conway with either Washington’s confidant Gen. Alexander McDougall or his own fellow traveler Johann de Kalb might seem more accommodating. In either case, he reiterated, unless Conway was dismissed, he and every French officer currently in service to the United States would be prepared to quit the war and return home.

  Henry Laurens was fully aware of the importance of the Gallic presence on American soil, as well as what disastrous reverberations such a mass exodus would send through the mirrored halls of Versailles. He agreed to each prerequisite. General Conway, already in Albany prepping for the offensive, was eventually posted to Peekskill where, for all intents and purpose, he disappeared from the pages of history until he was shot in the face during his duel with Gen. Cadwalader. As McDougall was too ill to undertake such an arduous adventure, de Kalb was soon tabbed to replace Conway.

  Emboldened by Congress’s submission, Lafayette next sought out Gen. Gates at his lodgings above a local tavern. Over a dinner attended by the entire Board of War, he told the gathering that he required detailed marching orders before his departure, and informed Gates that any subsequent instructions he received while stationed in the north country must arrive, per military protocol, via the commander in chief’s headquarters at Valley Forge. In turn, all his own reports would be filed directly to Washington, with the board merely copied on their contents. Gates was trapped. He had painted himself into a corner with his fulsome praise of the Frenchman’s military expertise in touting him to Congress to lead the expedition. There was nothing to do but accede. The evening turned even glummer for the host and his guests when, after what each thought was the final round of after-dinner toasts, Lafayette stood and insisted that they raise a final goblet to the health of George Washington. They did, Lafayette later recalled, “but not with much exuberance of feeling.”

  The marquis rode from York the next morning, stopping at Valley Forge to collect his battle gear and say good-bye to Hamilton and John Laurens before departing for Albany. Showing his unfamiliarity with the territory, along the journey he wrote to Washington with some wonderment that the farther north he traveled, the more he found the torrential downpours that had beset the Pennsylvania cantonment gradually freezing into the whiteout snowstorms to which upstate New Yorkers were so accustomed. He added that he much preferred the latter.

  Oddly, almost 250 years of legend have left an impression of the Valley Forge winter of 1777–1778 as perpetually snowbound, with bone-chilling temperatures. In fact, although snowfall was relatively common at the camp, it was by historical standards a fairly mild winter for southeast Pennsylvania. Only twice did the mercury drop into single digits, on both occasions during the month of February. It had been consistently colder at the previous winter camp at Morristown, and would be more polar still the following year.

  Counterintuitively, this meteorological variability only added to the Continental Army’s suffering. Pining for the crisp New England winters of his youth, Rhode Island’s Gen. James Varnum bemoaned the fact that the Pennsylvania weather “frequently changes five times in Twenty four Hours.” And when it snowed, he added, “the snow falls only to produce Mire & Dirt.” Washington himself noted that working or drilling in fortifying, below-freezing temperatures was preferable to slogging through an endless morass of half-frozen mud stippled with putrefying animal carcasses. Although details were formed to bury dead horses, the graves were so shallow that each lashing rainstorm reexposed the turgid remains. Whenever the mercury edged above freezing the
stench of escaping gases made the atmosphere seem almost opaque and assaulted and lingered in the noses, eyes, and throats of an already sullen and febrile army.

  Lafayette, blessedly free from this fetor and galloping hard, arrived in Albany on February 17, eight days earlier than he was expected. After conferring with New York’s Gov. Clinton—a supporter of Washington who harbored grave doubts about the wisdom of a midwinter Canadian campaign—he set off to inspect his invasion force. As John Laurens had predicted, not only were there too few men to mount a successful “irruption,” but the appalling lack of food and supplies cast the entire enterprise into so foul a light that many of the officers with whom he conferred considered the plan madness. Gates’s old opponent Benedict Arnold, still recovering from the leg wound he’d received near Freeman’s Farm, warned the young marquis that he would be daft to proceed with the operation.

  Arnold noted that the Board of War’s instructions to attack Montreal by crossing the frozen Lake Champlain would require some 800 sleds. There were 50 on hand. Further, of the 1,200 or so officers and enlisted men assembled in Albany—about half the promised number—most had no winter overcoats, wool uniforms, snowshoes, or gloves or mittens. Nor, as Lafayette discovered, were they in any mood to fight. Even with the distribution of the $200,000 promised and delivered by Congress—as well as some $50,000 of Lafayette’s personal funds—the majority were still owed more than $400,000 in back pay. More harrowingly, word of the Continentals’ “secret” assault had leaked to such an extent that British forces across Quebec were already strengthening their defensive redoubts in preparation for it.

  Discouraged and frustrated perhaps for the first time in his life, Lafayette wrote to Henry Laurens detailing the hellish state “of blunders, madness, and deception I am involved in.” Whether this had resulted from “a piece of folly or a piece of villainy” made little difference. He was embarrassed, and in a private communiqué to Washington he lamented that he had been “shamefully deceived by the board of war.” Worst of all for the would-be conquering hero was his anguish over the slapdash plan; his rapidly deteriorating prospects for any invasion at all, much less a victory; and the possibility of becoming a laughingstock in France. He therefore begged a favor of Washington in order to save face. Might the commander in chief concoct a raid on New York City, with him in command, perhaps in conjunction with the main army’s assault on Philadelphia?

  Washington, having predicted the entire Canadian calamity, must have chuckled darkly at the idea of his emaciated troops attacking Philadelphia. Nor was he about to order a half-cocked offensive against Gen. Henry Clinton’s New York defenses that, in the end, would be likely to fulfill Lafayette’s foreboding of being an object of mockery. Instead, in an attempt to assuage his young friend’s fragile ego, he replied that the mere fact of Lafayette’s appointment to head an American expedition into Canada was proof enough to French and European observers of the Continental Congress’s “good opinion and confidence” in him.” As for the news of an aborted invasion reaching Paris and Versailles, he added that he was “persuaded that everyone will applaud your prudence in renouncing a Project, in pursuing which you would vainly have attempted Physical Impossibilities.” Finally, regarding the prospect of an assault on New York, he assured Lafayette “that your Character stands as fair as it ever did, and no new Enterprise is necessary to wipe off this imaginary stain.”

  Meanwhile, during the last week of February, Henry Laurens made plain to his fellow delegates the sorry state of affairs in Albany. In response, Lafayette was instructed by Congress to delay the entire folie de grandeur until more militiamen could be recruited. When that goal faltered, and with an eye toward Lake Champlain’s thinning ice, a second mail rider subsequently arrived from York informing the marquis that the invasion was canceled, thanking him for his efforts, and recalling him to Valley Forge. One needn’t be a code breaker to detect that the politicians, recognizing a potential fiasco, thought it best to put the entire undertaking behind them as quietly as possible. But Washington, sensing an opening, was too shrewd for that.

  The commander in chief had foreseen in the Canadian offensive the possibility of a political triumph even before the campaign reached its opera buffa denouement. Now he felt the time right for the whip hand to extend an olive branch. With the war far from over, it would serve no military purpose to completely embarrass and alienate the “Hero of Saratoga.” General Gates, monitoring the situation in Albany, had in fact already put out feelers to Henry Laurens about returning to Washington’s good graces. He had even written a strained letter to Washington disowning Gen. Conway. In his reply, Washington set aside what he considered the assaults on his dignity as well as his resentment against the plotters of the Conway Cabal. He would carry those feelings through the rest of the war and beyond, but now was not the time to air them. Instead, he wrote to Gates, “My temper leads me to peace and harmony with all men. And it is particularly my wish to avoid any personal feuds or dissensions.”

  The letter’s nominal purpose was to suspend the discord between the two proud, prickly, and—despite the politesse of their written communiqués—ruthless generals. Washington had triumphed. Gates, Mifflin, Conway, and their allies were defeated. Now it was time for all involved to return their attention to the common enemy occupying Philadelphia and New York. At least a convalescing Conway had the grace to apologize to Washington for his behavior before resigning and sailing back to France nine months later. Gates, on the other hand, continued to disparage the commander in chief in his personal correspondence right up until his humiliating performance during the Battle of Camden in South Carolina two and a half years later. While the heroic de Kalb stood and fought to his last breath, Gates abandoned his troops and fled the battlefield in panic. The dishonorable act would finally end his military aspirations. Yet until that ultimate disgrace, he was far from the last of George Washington’s burdens.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  If a diffuse glint of light penetrated the darkest month of the darkest winter of the American Revolution, it was the arrival at Valley Forge of Martha Washington in the first week of February 1778. Washington had grown accustomed to having his wife join him at the Continental Army’s winter billets—at Cambridge in 1775 and at Morristown in 1776—and he had sent for her soon after settling into the Potts House.I But her departure from Virginia was delayed several weeks because of the recent death of her younger and favorite sister, Anna Maria Basset. It was not until January 26, after Martha settled her sister’s affairs, that she and her cortege of indentured servants and slaves finally stepped into the carriages that would carry them the 160-odd miles north over rutted roads, across ice-choked rivers, and into increasingly inclement weather. It was a long and tedious journey, and not a little dangerous despite her military escort. But, as usual, her arrival seemed to transform the man she referred to as “the general.”

  Throughout their courtship and 19 years of marriage, Martha’s natural aplomb had served as a balm to her husband, salving his many complicated inner torments. Some gossips sniped that Washington had married the plump, dowdy widow Custis, née Dandridge, with an eye toward the not inconsiderable fortune she inherited after the death in 1757 of her first husband, the elderly Daniel Parke Custis. It was true that physically, the two could not have been further apart. Few people who encountered the tall and imposing Washington failed to be struck by the sheer gravitas and silent authority he projected, an aura strong enough to penetrate the farthest corner of any room he entered. Martha, on the other hand, though at 45 only a year younger than her husband, could have been taken for a doting aunt, or the wife of the local vicar come to call, as imagined by the portraitist Gilbert Stuart.

  Yet all who engaged with the couple discerned that the woman known to the era as “Lady Washington” was one of the few people granted total and unfettered access across the virtual moat that Washington had constructed around himself to forestall nearly every hint of intimacy. Martha somehow managed to op
en an emotional spigot in the decorous Washington, her presence turning the “the general’s” stony persona soft as starlight. This was particularly true at Valley Forge, where her bright recollections of their lives together back at their beloved Mount Vernon broke through the gray reality of the winter camp. Washington doted on her in return, and treated her only surviving child, the 22-year-old John “Jacky” Parke Custis, as his own.

  Martha had traveled little before the war, and whenever she joined Washington he attempted to make her lodgings as familiar as possible. At Valley Forge he had his private baggage, including the family tableware and cutlery, released from storage and shipped to the Potts House. These possessions must have struck Martha as talismans—or as islands in a gale, crammed as the quarters were with tides of arriving and departing aides-de-camp, Continental officers, mail riders and messengers, and visiting dignitaries with their own retinues in train. Even after the addition of a new great room—its floor, walls, and roof hewn from the same trees as the huts—the Potts House afforded little privacy. Though secretly dismayed by the cramped living conditions, Martha never complained, and instead slipped naturally into her familiar role of convivial lady of the manor. She bustled about the household with a casual industriousness, acted as official hostess, organized social functions with the wives of other officers, and brought a semblance of decorum to the headquarters’ fraternity house ambience.

  Among the women in camp attracted to this good-humored woman were the ravishing Catharine “Caty” Greene, a dozen years her husband Nathanael’s junior and a notorious flirt; the cosmopolitan Sarah Stirling and her 22-year-old daughter Lady Kitty; and the down-home Lucy Knox, as round as one of her husband Henry’s cannonballs. The women were often at each other’s throats—the swaggering Gen. Wayne’s conspicuous attraction to Caty Greene caused his wife, Polly, to banish him from their home; Lucy Knox’s catty remarks about the Greenes’ marriage sparked a lifelong feud between the two; and the Stirling women’s proclivity for putting on airs of Scottish nobility in the midst of a war fought to attain equality hardly endeared them to the proletariat. They nonetheless coalesced into Martha’s inner circle. Together they herded a slew of junior officers’ wives to the Potts House to participate in sewing bees arranged by Martha to mend soldiers’ garments, stitch shirts, or, when materials were unavailable, simply roll bandages as they sang to keep up their spirits. A trait Martha shared with her husband was his work ethic, and during the rare interludes in her dawn-to–late night schedule—including overseeing multiple shifts of suppers, served before dusk in order to conserve candle wax—she would find a quiet corner in her sitting room and break out her needles and yarn to knit stockings for the troops.