Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  There were various reasons behind the concessions. Several British MPs, sympathetic to the colonials’ loathing of taxation without representation, had taken to wearing blue-and-buff clothing to Parliament in homage to Washington’s uniform. Their spiritual leader, whom even the king could not ignore, was the renowned Irish statesman, philosopher, and essayist Edmund Burke, who in a speech before the House of Commons equated the American cause with every Englishman’s civil birthright. Burke’s ally Charles Pratt, Earl of Camden, went further, arguing that the conflict stemmed from a consistent effort by British ministers to drive the colonists into rebellion. “America never entertained any intention of rendering themselves of this country,” Camden told Parliament, “till they were forced to it by a series of the most unjust, arbitrary, and cruel measures.”

  Less idealistic critics took a more pragmatic view. The British stock market had plunged on rumors of a two-front conflict with both France and the Americans, and William Wildman, Viscount Barrington—the nobleman charged with the manning, training, and equipping of the British Army—warned Lord North that though the Royal Navy might contain and constrict the rebellion along the North American coastline, the idea of subduing the entire continent while simultaneously preparing for a possible French invasion was madness.I There were, however, only so many compromises the king and his ministers were willing to make. Should the Peace Commission’s terms be rejected, Clinton would be instructed, the war would now be “prosecuted upon a different plan.” Specifically, if upon taking command Clinton could not decisively defeat Washington’s army come the onset of spring, he was to “relinquish the idea of carrying on Offensive Operations against the Rebels within land” in the northern colonies. Instead, Britain’s emphasis would move to the sea, where Clinton and Adm. Howe would be charged with shattering New England’s maritime economy with a summerlong harassment of its seacoasts and ports.

  Germain also planned to notify Clinton that he could expect reinforcements from England, with the provision that the bulk of these troops be used to strengthen the garrisons protecting British holdings in Canada—particularly Nova Scotia and Newfoundland—and East and West Florida, the two Loyalist colonies ceded by Spain after the French and Indian War, which had declined to send representatives to the First Continental Congress. Finally and if need be, Clinton was also authorized to abandon Philadelphia and lead his army north to New England in order to clear staging areas for Adm. Howe. The summer thrust against New England was to be followed by an autumn campaign to subdue rebel activity in Georgia and the Carolinas. Central to this second phase was the notion that Loyalists in the deep south would, unlike those in the middle states, rise to fight alongside British regulars and the Florida militiamen.

  With America’s southern breadbasket thus defeated and occupied, its export economy—the primary source of its foreign credit—would crash. This would set the stage for a final, inexorable drive north into Virginia and Maryland, harassing the coastlines there in much the same manner that had (theoretically) beleaguered New England. If all went according to plan, these three tactical movements would coalesce into a strategy leaving the few remaining patriots in the northeast to wither on the vine.

  It was a sound blueprint while it lasted—which it did for approximately 13 days. For on March 21—eight days after the French formally announced their alliance with the Americans—an infuriated George III issued a new set of secret instructions to be relayed to Gen. Clinton. Abandoning the three-pronged campaign devised less than two weeks earlier, in a fit of pique the British monarch now ordered Clinton to immediately detach 5,000 of his troops to invade the French island colony of Saint Lucia while preparing another 3,000 to be deployed to bolster Crown holdings in the Floridas. To Clinton’s dismay, the king was effectively signaling that England would now assume a strictly defensive posture in North America. To erase any doubt, the Admiralty Board informed Adm. Howe, “The contest in America being a secondary consideration, our principal object must now be distressing France.” The new orders included a coda—once Clinton had dispatched the nearly 8,000 troops from Philadelphia, he was to quit the city and lead his rump force back to New York. It was left to his discretion whether to remain there or, if he thought himself too vulnerable, to withdraw farther north to Rhode Island or even all the way to Halifax.

  Needless to say, none of these instructions would reach the British commanders in America until late the following month. Meanwhile, the Howe brothers and Clinton were left to their own devices regarding a spring campaign that would never be. Not so George Washington.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  As the most continuous cold rains in memory continued to lash Valley Forge, Washington and his aides nearly wore through the oaken floorboards of the cramped rooms of the Potts House on the bend of the Schuylkill. They were drafting plans for a spring offensive. Although Nathanael Greene had yet to completely settle into the job of quartermaster general—and Jeremiah Wadsworth had not yet informed Congress of his acceptance of the offer to replace William Buchanan as commissary general—for the moment the commander in chief was unburdened of the political intrigues that had consumed him for months. He was finally free to devote his full attention to the enemy.

  True to Washington’s lifelong impulses, his designs revolved around an offensive, slated for no later than June. But where to strike? Although he was not yet ready to summon his general officers to a formal Council of War, he shared his thoughts with his closest confidants. He had narrowed his thinking to two preliminary targets. The first, unsurprisingly, was Philadelphia. This in itself involved two options—whether to pursue a massed attack on the British bulwarks north of the city, or set in place a stranglehold blockade completely encircling it, intended to starve Gen. Howe and his troops into either surrender or retreat. The second objective under consideration was a stealth assault on New York City. If 6,000 able-bodied and well-equipped Continentals could be surreptitiously marched north from Valley Forge and ferried across the Hudson above New York—an optimistic projection at best—they could combine with troops stationed in the Highlands to fall on Clinton.

  While Washington mulled these alternatives, he was certain of one thing. In either battle scenario, the Hudson Highland garrison remained the key to keeping open his supply lines from New England. To that end he also recognized that he needed an officer he could trust commanding those heights. This, in his mind, was not Gen. Israel Putnam. Putnam had made his name as a fierce Indian-fighter, and though his personal courage and energy had never been questioned, he had proved a disappointment as a tactician. Eighteen months earlier, Putnam’s inability to plan and coordinate large troop movements had allowed the British to outflank the Continental Army during the Battle of Long Island. Since then his reputation had only further eroded. “Old Put’s” loud complaints over having to detach troops to reinforce the Pennsylvania campaign were still recalled with bitterness among some in Washington’s inner circle. But the final indignity had occurred the previous October, when Fort Montgomery and Fort Clinton, the western anchors for the precious Hudson River antishipping chain, had fallen. During that campaign Putnam had been embarrassingly outmaneuvered by Gen. Clinton, whose feints had Putnam leading his troops in circles while the British overran the forts’ paltry defenses.

  So it was that, in early March, Washington relieved Putnam of command and appointed as his successor his own old friend Maj. Gen. Alexander McDougall, one of the original Sons of Liberty currently stationed in Morristown, New Jersey. McDougall, still recuperating from the illness that had prevented him from joining Lafayette in Albany, nonetheless agreed to travel from Morristown to the Hudson Highlands, where Washington tasked him with two directives. His first was to ensure that the same fate that befell Fort Montgomery and Fort Clinton would not occur at the new American redoubt rising some eight miles farther up the river at West Point. He was also, on congressional instructions, to convene a court of inquiry to investigate Putnam’s responsibility for the loss of the H
udson River forts. Putnam was eventually exonerated of any wrongdoing when the court found that a lack of manpower, and not the actions of any one commander, was responsible for the loss. But the demotion and taint of dishonor seemed to break the 60-year-old veteran. Within a year he suffered a debilitating stroke and retired from the military.

  Meanwhile, as a relentless mixture of rain and snow fell on the encampment for each of the first 17 days of March, Washington continued to wrestle with ways and means of raising his troop strength. Baron Steuben had already submitted his preliminary plans for the training of 15,000 effectives—the number Washington estimated he would need for an assault on either Philadelphia or New York, or even an impelling blockade of the former. This was perhaps twice as many able bodies as Washington now had under arms despite the fact that, as of March 1, 1778, the Continental Army’s muster master listed 22,283 men in Washington’s command. This optimistic number counted troops too ill to fight, others too ill-clothed to participate in combat, and still more on furlough or special assignment.II

  To remedy this appalling lack of manpower, Washington pulled and prodded incessantly, dispatching messengers from headquarters nearly daily to exhort the states to fulfill their seasonal recruiting commitments, and sending riders to collect the hundreds of recovering convalescents who had wintered over in Continental hospitals. In addition, the regular-army detail guarding the storehouses at Lancaster was instructed to turn over its duties to local militiamen and report to Valley Forge, and a detachment of North Carolina regulars Washington had lent to the Continental Navy for service on the Delaware River was recalled. Finally, with the Camp Committee delegation having acceded to his request for an Indian regiment, he wrote to Lafayette in Albany asking that at least 400 Oneida be pressed into service and hurried south. He then turned his attention to logistics.

  A squad of officers was dispatched to Virginia with credit vouchers to purchase remudas with which to expand Gen. Pulaski’s cavalry, and the governor of Pennsylvania, Thomas Wharton, was pressed to deliver to Quartermaster Greene all the wagons and dray horses that the state could appropriate. Henry Knox was ordered to Boston to collect as many field pieces as possible, including those that had been sent to Albany for the mismanaged Canadian campaign. Washington even tweaked the Board of War, expressing to Gen. Gates his “apprehensions” over the state of the armories and reminding him how “mortifying and discouraging” it would be if the board were unable to provide each of his soldiers, veteran and new recruit alike, with the appropriate weapons and ammunition.

  In early March “Light Horse Harry” Lee had returned to Valley Forge with the contents of the Delaware and Maryland food magazines, which temporarily allayed the immediate threat of starvation. And by the middle of the month there were reports of herds of cattle being driven from New England and wagonloads of flour and salted meat en route from western Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, Washington’s deputy commissary general warned him that the “Badness of the Roads, & high waters makes it impossible to say when they will arrive in Camp,” and those charged with meting out provisions recognized that it was only a matter of days before their larders would again be depleted. In one of his first official acts as quartermaster general, Nathanael Greene responded to his chief wagon master’s complaint that the army was “Near being totally undone for want of Forage” by ordering the Continental storehouses in Reading and Pottsgrove tapped and their contents shipped to Valley Forge. This was of small solace to American units in Trenton and Wilmington, which continued to face serious shortages of staples such as meat and bread.

  The loud grievances that ensued from these shortages did not go unnoticed at the Potts House. Washington, stalling for time and hoping to check further unrest, disseminated a public proclamation offering his “warmest thanks to the virtuous officers and soldiery . . . for that persevering fidelity and Zeal [and] uncomplaining Patience during the scarcity of provisions.” This was accompanied by the issuance of a gill of rum or whiskey to every man in the cantonment. Notably, in that same General Order the commander in chief also castigated “the few individuals who disgrace themselves by murmurs [and] unmanly behavior.” John Laurens, ever the melancholy idealist, showed more sympathy for “the number of men unfit for duty by reason of their nakedness [and] the number of sick in hospitals.” While Laurens agonized over the misery the fates had directed toward the Continental Army, the more gimlet-eyed Hamilton saw Congress’s inaction as “the chief antagonist to our future prosperity, and with this idea I cannot but wish that every gentleman of influence in the country should think with me.”

  The lack of forage cited by Greene’s wagon master was particularly acute in Trenton, where Casimir Pulaski was forced to relocate his three regiments of cavalry yet again after running through all the supplies to be had in the towns of Flemington and Pennington. Pulaski informed Washington that he was moving the horsemen even farther northwest, to the village of Chatham, where his unit commanders would undertake a rigorous regimen of drilling while awaiting the promised arrival of new men, animals, and equipment. Pulaski, however, would not be with them. He was riding to York in a sulk. Offended by the Continentals’ lack of the deference traditionally shown to dashing cavalry officers throughout Europe, he had decided to resign his post—a resignation, Washington drily noted, “founded on reasons which I presume make you think the measure necessary.”

  Pulaski hoped to convince Congress to stand up under his command a legionary corps of some 70 lancers and 200 light infantry that would act as a guerrilla force operating separately from both the regular army and the militias. He suggested that the delegates allow him to recruit from the Indians fighting with the Continentals as well as any soldiers being held in custody for minor crimes. In theory, the unit would be, as Pulaski’s sympathizer John Laurens envisioned, “perpetually scouring the interval between the two armies and embracing every opportunity for a stroke of partisanship.” Laurens may have been “persuaded from [Pulaski’s] intelligence and enterprising spirit” that yet another headstrong commander striking out on his own was precisely what the revolutionary cause needed at the moment. Cooler minds, less taken with the Polish count’s self-reverence and sharp tongue, were skeptical. As it happened, what came to be known as the Pulaski Legion would later play a crucial role in the fight for American independence. But, for now, Pulaski’s prickliness and pouting merely lent further credence to the idea of an American army in chaos.

  Amid these seemingly unrelenting struggles, a messenger from York arrived at Valley Forge. He carried news that, per Washington’s agreement with the Camp Committee, not only had new and larger state recruiting quotas gone into effect, but the first smattering of draftees from southern state militias had begun trickling through the town. This was in addition to a company of 130 black soldiers moving south from Rhode Island to join Gen. Varnum’s brigade. Even the most morose congressional delegates were buoyed by the high-stepping soldiers marching down York’s main street on their way to the winter encampment. Washington was similarly sanguine, and decided to postpone an official review he had ordered detailing the calamities the army had faced since December. Though his work ground on, wearying, wild, and certain to be bloody, he managed to find time to write to his confidant Gen. Cadwalader, “As our prospects begin to brighten, my complaint shall cease.”

  General Greene, charged with feeding and clothing the new troops soon to be pouring into Valley Forge, was not nearly so blithe.

  * * *

  I. In eighteenth-century England the Secretary of War post had yet to be established and Viscount Barrington held the title of Secretary at War, a non-cabinet level position somewhat analogous, the military historian John J. Patterson explains, to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the current United States system.

  II. Close to 5,000 Valley Forge soldiers had been detached from their battle units to serve as teamsters, bakers, blacksmiths, and carpenters, and as all-purpose valets to nearly all officers above the rank of lieutenant.
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  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A TRIM RECKONING

  Nathanael Greene preferred center stage to the wings. Despite his initial trepidation over abandoning the battlefield—“No body ever heard of a quarter Master in History as such or in relateing any brilliant Action,” he fretted to Washington midway through his tenure—by early March he had thrown himself into the thankless assignment with the ardor of a bull eyeing a billowing red cape.

  His first order of business was to demand an audit of his predecessor Thomas Mifflin’s expenditures in order to determine just how corrupted the supply system had become. This led him to a flock of unpaid creditors who had vowed to never again do business with the Continental Army. In response, he informed Henry Laurens that he expected Congress to authorize “a large and immediate supply of cash” to lure these merchants back into the fold. In the meanwhile he dispatched teams of scouts to comb Pennsylvania and Delaware for any wagons and horses that Thomas Wharton’s state agents had overlooked. Per Washington’s instructions, the identifying details of all confiscated animals—age, size, color, distinguishing marks—were noted and their owners were allowed to negotiate a fair price before being issued certificates of seizure. Greene next took out advertisements in local Whig newspapers admitting that Mifflin’s department had been rife with agents who had inappropriately appropriated cattle, hay, and grain without fair remittance. He promised to remedy this by paying going rates—and overpaying, if necessary—to win back the confidence of wary farmers.