by Bob Drury
Although with the outbreak of war Washington had insisted that Martha be inoculated against smallpox—he would otherwise never have allowed her to set foot near his camps—scant evidence exists to support the now popular myth that she was a figure always in motion at Valley Forge, flitting from hut to hut delivering food when there was any, good cheer when there wasn’t, or even her knitted socks. She did reportedly visit dying soldiers on occasion, pausing to kneel and pray by their pallets. But more important than her prayers, particularly to her husband, were the homespun determination and common sense she returned to Washington’s orbit. These were the same qualities she had shown in dealing with multiple London “factors,” or purchasing agents, in the years between Daniel Custis’s death and her remarriage. It was during this period that she had gained respect not only for her assertiveness in setting the price of the tobacco shipped across the Atlantic from the 18,000 acres that constituted the Custis plantations, but for her attention to detail concerning the clothes, perfumes, and exotic comestibles she imported. She would need every drop in her deep well of resolve to counterbalance the fatigue and anxiety she had never before seen in her husband.
One legendary tale in particular limns Washington’s emotional state during that February, poetically throwing his near-despair into relief. Perhaps, skeptics charge, a bit too poetically. As the story is told, one night the young Quaker Isaac Potts was riding near the house his sister-in-law had rented to Washington, when he spied a solitary figure kneeling in a glade of crooked timber. Potts dismounted, tied his horse to a sapling, and quietly approached the scene. In the pale moonlight he recognized the obeisant man as Washington. The general’s sword lay in the snow to one side, his cocked hat to the other. He was praying aloud, Potts reported, “to the God of the Armies, beseeching [him] to interpose with his Divine aid, as it was ye Crisis, & the cause of the country, of humanity & of the world.”
The scene so struck the Tory-leaning Potts that he galloped home and told his wife that if the Continental Army’s commander in chief could conduct himself as both a soldier and a Christian, he could too. He declared for the Whig cause on the spot. The fact that Potts’s revelation came to light only some 38 years after the fact, when his family’s pastor passed on the description of the incident to Washington’s biographer Parson Mason Weems, has led most historians to view the recollection with suspicion. It was Weems, after all, who invented the fable of a young Washington unable to lie about chopping down a cherry tree.
Washington was known to instruct his troops to attend religious ceremonies after military victories “to praise to the supreme disposer of all events who has granted us this signal success.”II Similarly, on certain special occasions—as in the case of the thanksgiving on the Gulph Road—he would order his chaplains to perform divine services. But he himself was not overtly religious. Like many of his contemporaries, the avowed deist Thomas Jefferson perhaps most famously, he paid lip service to an amorphous Almighty. And though his public and private correspondence was liberally sprinkled with references to “God,” “Providence,” and “Heaven,” he refused to be confirmed as a member of any one denomination. He was known to attend Episcopal services, although he usually left during the Communion ceremony.
Given the circumstances and timing of the incident Potts allegedly witnessed, some scholars are inclined to give the anecdotal version at least the benefit of the doubt. As the historian and Revolutionary War chronicler Thomas Fleming observes, “In the agony of those two mid-February weeks, with his army dissolving into mutiny, with Generals Mifflin and Gates doing their utmost to ruin him, and with Lafayette about to invade Canada with unforeseeable but potentially ruinous consequences to Washington’s prestige, could this man, alone in the wintry woods, have sunk to his knees? Perhaps.” On the other hand, the most damning testament to what his biographer Ron Chernow views as a fraudulent attempt “designed to meld religion and politics” is Washington’s well-cited aversion to kneeling before any god or man. It is indeed difficult to believe that the general would venture into the forest to so ostentatiously ask God to bless and protect his force. An even farther-fetched version of the story began to circulate in the late 1870s when a government pension agent published a remembrance from a Valley Forge veteran. This variant had the Marquis de Lafayette and the Virginia pastor turned general Peter Muhlenberg stumbling upon a “sorrowful” Washington on his knees in a barn near his Valley Forge headquarters.
Yet such was the impact of these stories, particularly Isaac Potts’s version, that Arnold Friberg’s painting The Prayer at Valley Forge—created in celebration of the United States’ bicentennial in 1976—remains a best-selling print today. This despite the fact that, in 1918, the National Park Service, which maintains and operates Valley Forge National Historical Park, refused a request to erect a monument to “Washington’s prayer” after examining thousands of pages of Revolutionary War–era correspondence and diaries as well as manuscripts held by the Library of Congress. “In none of these [was] found a single paragraph that will substantiate the tradition of the ‘Prayer at Valley Forge,’ ” reported the Park Service commission assigned to investigate.
Whether or not there is any veracity to the stories of Washington’s prayer, there was no question that at this low point in the war he was certainly in need of guidance. And even if, as seems likely, the scene in the woods did not actually occur, the emotions it portrayed as swirling within and around the commander in chief of a rapidly deteriorating Continental Army were genuine. As for guidance, divine or mortal, Washington needed to look no further than to his wife, Martha, his polestar during the most melancholy days of the revolution as he turned a year older.
♦ ♦ ♦
Sunday, February 22, 1778, dawned dank and chill. It was George Washington’s 46th birthday; there was little to celebrate. One week earlier the commissaries at Valley Forge had run out of food, and seven days with no rations had again raised the prospect of famine in a cantonment that had taken on the trappings of a refugee camp. Having already issued a General Proclamation to “the virtuous yeomanry of the States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia” pleading for cattle in exchange for a “bountiful price,” the commander in chief turned toward the sick in his General Orders for the date. The orders stressed that if rice could not be distributed in the “flying hospitals,” sepawn, or “Indian meal”—boiled cornmeal ground from maize—was to be substituted. There followed an unmistakable warning to the infirmary administrators. “As [Indian meal] is an article that can at all times and under all circumstances be had, no excuse will be admitted for the neglect.” It was all an angry and frustrated Washington could do. His ire would have surely risen had he been aware that earlier that morning a herd of 150 cows bound for Valley Forge had been captured by a British patrol mere miles from the Schuylkill, a dark precursor to the seizure of 2,000 yards of Continental cloth by Tories the next morning. As it was, he did not learn of either misadventure for days.
Even as Washington was dashing off another urgent letter to New York Governor George Clinton pleading for emergency provisions, Martha had arranged to purchase enough supplies from local farmers to constitute a veritable feast in honor of her husband’s birthday. Using his personal account, she had managed to scrounge a meager quantity of veal and fowl as well as a small supply of vegetables and eggs. On this occasion, no one at the Potts House had to share a tin plate. As the celebratory after-dinner toasts came to an end the Washingtons and their guests heard stirrings outside on the Gulph Road. The next instant, from atop a hill just east of headquarters, the fife and drum corps from Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia regiment burst into an impromptu concert. Though Washington retired without acknowledging the players—perhaps he felt the tribute too reminiscent of the British custom of military bands honoring the king on his birthday—Martha emerged and handed the bandleader 15 shillings. It was the first public recognition of George Washington’s birthday in the history of the United S
tates.
The melodies had barely ceased to echo off the eastern flank of Mount Joy when Gen. Greene and his foraging party trudged into camp with several wagonloads of food. Though the commander in chief’s mood may have been black enough to match the day, Greene’s return to camp foreshadowed the arrival of another visitor on his way to Valley Forge, a man who would transform the entire tenor of the Continental Army.
* * *
I. All told, before the eight-year war ended, Martha Washington would spend close to four years by her husband’s side in the field.
II. Washington’s General Orders for October 20, 1781—the day after Gen. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown and effectively ended the war—encouraged his troops to commemorate the occasion by attending church services.
PART III
I rejoice most sincerely with you on the glorious change in our prospects. Calmness and serenity seems likely to succeed in some measure those dark and tempestuous clouds which at times appeared ready to overwhelm us. The game, whether well or ill played hitherto, seems now to be verging fast to a favourable issue, and I cannot think be lost, unless we throw it away by too much supineness on the one hand, and impetuosity on the other. God forbid that either of these should happen at a time when we seem to be upon the point of reaping the fruits of our toil and labour.
—GEORGE WASHINGTON TO ROBERT MORRIS, MAY 25, 1778
A portrait of General George Washington painted by James Peale, based on an earlier painting by his older brother, Charles Willson Peale, during the Valley Forge encampment.
TWENTY-FIVE
PRUSSIAN SPRING
When Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben arrived at Valley Forge on the cold, dreary afternoon of February 23, he did so with panache. This was only fitting. For the corpulent Prussian nobleman’s journey to the United States, like the man himself, had been as colorful as it was circuitous.
George Washington was not certain what to expect when he rode out of camp that afternoon to greet Steuben and his cortege as they emerged from the soft fronds of fading daylight that dappled the road from York. Twenty years earlier the Virginia planter had ordered from London a series of busts depicting history’s renowned military figures, including the likenesses of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Friedrich II of Prussia—Frederick the Great. Now, a protégé of the exalted Hohenzollern warrior-king himself was arriving. The man whom Washington encountered was a plump officer ensconced in a grandiose sleigh adorned with 24 jingle bells and pulled by a team of well-muscled, coal-dark Percheron horses stepping in sync, as if dancing a ponderous waltz. Steuben, as cheerful as Pickwick’s precursor, had imported the horses from western France to enhance his entrance. As he introduced himself to Washington he stroked an Italian greyhound curled by his side. Azor was the dog’s name.
It is not recorded what the American commander in chief made of his visitor’s fur-trimmed silk robe, black beaver bicorne cocked in the French style, and double-holstered belt holding two enormous horse pistols. However, one teenage Continental private would, years later, remember the Prussian entering Valley Forge as the very “personification of Mars.” For Steuben’s part, Washington’s towering personal bodyguard must have reminded him of the handpicked grenadiers known as the “Potsdam Giants” with whom King Frederick routinely surrounded himself.
Washington had, of course, been briefed on Steuben’s background. Some of what he had been told was even true. Steuben was indeed the grandson of one of Germany’s most prominent theologians and the son of a career military engineer in Frederick’s renowned army, then the most advanced and efficient force on the European continent. His childhood had been a nomadic blur as he, his mother, and his siblings followed their father from station to station across what today constitutes Poland, western Russia, and the Baltic States. At Breslau, on the banks of the Oder, Steuben, reared as a Calvinist, was granted the rare opportunity to study under Jesuit priests. And at the age of 14 he began his military apprenticeship by accompanying his father to Bohemia, where the elder Steuben directed the Prussian engineers executing the siege of Prague during the Second Silesian War. As decreed by Prussian law, at 17 Steuben formally enlisted in the army. Eschewing his father’s “technical” branch of engineering, he opted instead for a career in the more glamorous infantry.
After a decade as a peacetime soldier, including five years living with the common enlisted men as an officer in training, Steuben received his first taste of fire in 1756 when Prussia allied with England upon the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. He saw action on the Austrian frontier, where he was seriously wounded. Upon his recovery he volunteered for a command post in Frederick’s light infantry battalion, a new unit which the king was standing up to conduct reconnaissance and lightning raids. Both his superb war record and his family connections—Frederick the Great’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm I, was one of Steuben’s four godfathers—led to an appointment on Frederick’s staff. During this time he attended the Prussian king’s personal classes on the art of war. Despite being dwarfed by its neighbors, Prussia was eighteenth-century Europe’s great military success story—an army with a country, as the saying went, and not the other way around. And its king was already a mythic figure, an atheist as famous for his religious tolerance and Enlightenment values as for his martial prowess.
Frederick was also an admirer of Washington, and had followed the events of the American Revolution with interest. He described the engagements at Trenton and Princeton as among the most brilliant surprise attacks in the annals of warfare, and his unprecedented respect and fondness for commoners—epitomized by the soldiers of the Continental Army—influenced the young Steuben. As did Frederick’s homophile fetishes. The king’s summer palace in Potsdam included a “Friendship Temple” where the homoerotic attachments of Greek antiquity were celebrated. It was there that Frederick’s younger and more openly homosexual brother, Prince Henry, took a particular interest in the ruggedly handsome—and inordinately lucky—young Lt. Steuben.
Incredibly enough, Steuben’s good fortune reached its apex when he was captured by Russian forces in 1761 and marched off to Saint Petersburg as a prisoner of war. As a child, he had lived for a time in the canal-crossed city and picked up the rudiments of the Russian language. It was the nature of the age to treat captive officers more as guests than as prisoners, and Steuben used his rough facility with the Cyrillic alphabet to cultivate a friendship with a Russian nobleman who, a year later, ascended to the czar’s throne as Peter III. Despite allying with France and Austria in their war against Prussia and England, Peter had an undisguised admiration for all things Prussian, and he idolized King Frederick. Aware of this, Steuben suggested that the czar employ him as a go-between to initiate a separate peace between the two rulers. The idea could not have come at a more opportune time; Prussia was surrounded by much larger armies, and even its martial exceptionalism could not forestall its otherwise inevitable collapse. With the signing of the peace treaty between Prussia and Russia, the former was spared and Steuben was hailed as a hero in Berlin and promoted to captain. And then his inherent good luck turned.
With the Seven Years’ War drawing to a close, Steuben and 12 other officers were invited to attend a special school for strategic warfare initiated by King Frederick with an eye toward grooming a new generation of generals. There he ran afoul of one of Frederick’s favorite senior officers. Nothing in the annals records precisely why or how Steuben’s star fell, although anonymous rumors of liaisons with teenage boys soon spread. Homosexuality may have been tolerated if not encouraged at Frederick’s court, but pederasty overstepped the bonds. After being demoted to a backwater post on the far edge of the kingdom, Steuben was dismissed from the army altogether. That begat over a decade of wandering in Europe, forsaking his country’s Blut und Boden to solicit the French, the English, the Spanish, and even his old archfoes the Austrians for an army posting. But Europe was at peace, and opportunities for freelance mercenaries were sc
arce. To survive he returned home and drifted from court to court among the scores of Germany’s quasi-independent territorial states, seeking employment from a succession of princes, dukes, and margraves.
Finally, the ruler of the small principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen engaged him as a court chamberlain and bestowed upon him the title Freiherr, or baron. By June 1777, however, the 47-year-old Steuben was again on the move, and this time his peregrinations took him to Paris. There the French foreign minister de Vergennes and the playwright turned arms dealer Beaumarchais somewhat enigmatically helped him to wangle an audience with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane.I
Conversing with Steuben in French—the Prussian spoke no English—over the course of several meetings, a wary Franklin only reluctantly came to recognize that his country’s interests dovetailed with those of this seasoned soldier seeking adventure across the sea. What differentiated Steuben from the hordes of foreign officers clamoring for service in North America was his background. Of all the armies of Europe, only Prussia’s had vested in its officer corps the duty to personally instruct and tend to the physical and emotional welfare of the rank and file, a task invariably left to noncommissioned officers in other countries. Frederick led by example, and expected his officers to do the same. Such was his solidarity with his officers that he wore the same plain blue uniform and unadorned regimental jacket as they did while leading enlisted men in the unending tactical drills that characterized his army’s Spartan efficiency. It was not unusual to see the king timing with a stopwatch the number of shots his infantrymen fired per minute or personally demonstrating the correct formation of a line of battle. For a regal general and his officers to muddy their uniforms teaching technique to troops of the line was unheard of. Except in Prussia.
