by Bob Drury
As the field commanders filed into the Potts House that morning, a few noticed the absence of Charles Lee, who had been returned several days earlier in exchange for a British general virtually kidnapped from his mistress’s bed in Rhode Island. The British had held Lee in custody in comfortable Manhattan quarters, where they had treated him as military royalty, plying him with fine food and drink. There were in fact suspicions, not proved until decades later, that Lee had collaborated with the enemy by sharing Continental strategies and suggesting countermeasures. Pending his release, he had been transferred to Philadelphia, and Washington had sent a guard to greet him on the Germantown Highway with the pomp customarily extended to a conquering hero.
It took Lee less than 24 hours to wear out his welcome at Valley Forge. After a celebratory supper at the Potts House, he was given his own bedroom behind Martha Washington’s sitting room. The next morning he arrived for breakfast late, unwashed, and noticeably disheveled. It was subsequently discovered that he had used a back door to smuggle in his mistress, the wife of a British sergeant. Martha Washington was not amused. Lee subsequently found it expeditious to leave for York to meet with Congress before heading home to his Virginia tobacco plantation for several weeks of “recuperation” from his ordeal as a prisoner. It is doubtful that he was now missed as Washington addressed his senior officers.
In his opening remarks the commander in chief couched his call to arms as a response to the “injustice, delusion, and fraud” of the British peace terms. He assured his guests that the enemy’s offer represented nothing so much as a sign of desperation. Congress was of a similar mind, he continued—the proof was the delegates’ acceding to Gen. Gates’s request to return to a field command. Even as they met here at Valley Forge, Washington said, Gates was preparing to ride to Fishkill to place the northern army on a war footing.
Washington also disclosed that his spy network in Philadelphia had uncovered interesting information—the same packet ship that had carried the Bills of Conciliation to America had also delivered to Gen. Howe a letter stating that his resignation had been accepted. He guessed—correctly as it would happen—that Howe would be succeeded by the more bellicose Gen. Clinton. With this in mind he then presented to his subordinates the alternative campaigns he had been pondering for weeks—Philadelphia or New York. If they leaned toward the latter, he asked, should it occur “by a coup de main, with a small force? Or shall we collect a large force and make an attack in form?” He then put forth a third option for consideration—to remain at Valley Forge until all the states had met their recruitment commitments. He asked his generals for written responses. He received them within a week.
Four of the officers—Massachusetts’s John Patterson, the Ulster-born New Jerseyan William Maxwell, Anthony Wayne, and Lord Stirling—voted for a siege of Philadelphia, with Lord Stirling adding in a footnote to his comments that his first preference was simultaneous expeditions against Philadelphia from Valley Forge and against New York City from the Hudson Highlands. Four others—Rhode Island’s James Varnum, Enoch Poor of New Hampshire, Massachusetts’s Henry Knox, and Virginia’s Peter Muhlenberg—were keen to fall in with the Highlanders and march on New York. The three New Englanders, no doubt weighing the outcome at Saratoga against the engagements at Brandywine and Germantown, all noted the assistance Washington could expect from the northern militias should he opt to move the theater of war to the Hudson.
Finally, of the remaining four, two of the three foreigners—Steuben and the French engineer Louis Duportail—joined Gen. Greene in expressing a preference to bide their time at Valley Forge until a refortified army was strong enough to move on either target. Curiously, Lafayette was the only general officer to withhold an explicit opinion. In a long letter to Washington that constituted his response, he called the three options “the most difficult to resolve” since he had landed in America. He did evaluate each one in detail, but the closest he came to offering a solid suggestion was his recommendation that a move on either Philadelphia or New York would require at least 25,000 troops. This large number, he had determined, would be needed to counteract the reinforcements that Adm. Howe’s vessels would be sure to rush from British strongholds in Rhode Island, Canada, and perhaps even the Floridas.
It crossed no one’s mind that the elder Howe’s ships might be otherwise engaged. For not a man in the room that morning could have been aware that only days earlier, on April 13, a French war fleet had sailed west from the port of Toulon. The armada, under the command of Lafayette’s dashing 48-year-old cousin-in-law Adm. Comte Jean-Baptiste-Charles-Henry-Hector d’Estaing, consisted of four frigates carrying 4,000 French soldiers and 12 ships of the line, including the 90-gun Languedoc. It had been provisioned for nine months. Its destination was the United States.
* * *
I. Incredibly, a full 70 years before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their Communist Manifesto, John Laurens was advocating that Congress enact a luxury tax “which would be felt only by the rich” in order to fund the military pension program. “I would wish the burthens of society as equally distributed as possible,” he wrote to his father on April 11. “That there may not be one part of the community appropriating to itself the summit of wealth and grandeur, while another is reduced to extreme indigence in the common cause.” (“John Laurens, Letter to Henry Laurens, 11 April 1778,” in Simms, The Army Correspondence of John Laurens 1777–1778, p. 156.)
II. Greene was almost correct; an attempt by Congress to defer the question of half-pay pensions to state politicians was narrowly voted down by the delegates at York.
TWENTY-NINE
“LONG LIVE THE KING OF FRANCE”
To the British it was a bold ambush. To George Washington, it was yet another war crime. In the event, there was little doubt that what came to be known as the Battle of Crooked Billet was designed as a harbinger—these were the consequences facing the upstart Continentals who had the temerity to decline the Crown’s generous peace terms.
The engagement was conceived in the waning hours of the final night of April 1778, when Gen. Howe summoned Capt. John Graves Simcoe and Lt. Col. Robert Abercrombie to his headquarters at the Masters-Penn House in Philadelphia to order their light infantry units into the field. Despite his reluctance to initiate a full-scale engagement with Washington’s regulars, Howe was quick to recognize, and to take advantage of, the Pennsylvania militia’s tenuous hold on the townships and farmsteads that lay between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers.
Earlier that day, Loyalist spies had passed along the precise location of the young militia leader Gen. John Lacey’s camp on the border of Bucks County and Montgomery County. Simcoe, whose regiment had been fighting in the area for months, knew the place well. The British-born Simcoe’s green-coated Queen’s American Rangers, as they had been dubbed, were a particularly brutal band of Tories who had earned the description “partisan hunters” for their search-and-destroy missions against civilians thought to be sympathetic to the rebels. They rarely took prisoners. Simcoe’s orders were, in cooperation with Abercrombie’s regulars, “to secure the country and facilitate the inhabitants bringing in their products to market.” If in the process of “securing the country” the Rangers managed to stage a sneak attack on Lacey’s bedraggled force, so much the better.
Over the first months of 1778 reports of British incursions and depredations across southern New Jersey had streamed into Washington’s headquarters. More recently—and more worrisomely—enemy movements into Pennsylvania east of the Schuylkill had also grown more flagrant. Since assuming command from Gen. Armstrong in January, Lacey had been handicapped by—and complained loudly about—a hostile populace and, not coincidentally, a lack of accurate intelligence. The allotment of 1,000 troops promised to him by the Pennsylvania state legislature had never arrived, and by early spring a combination of desertions and decommissions had reduced his strength to little more than 400 men to patrol an area larger than Rhode Island. Of these troops,
the majority had arrived in-theater only within the past week. Most were without guns; none had ever seen combat.
By both necessity and their instructions, Lacey and his irregulars were constantly on the move, either seeking (with little success) to intercept farmers hauling goods into Philadelphia or avoiding the more frequent and larger British patrols. Added to their woes were the well-armed gangs of Loyalist vigilantes that had lately sprung up in imitation of the Doan Gang. These mounted cohorts lived off the plunder looted from Whig-owned farms and mills, and had given themselves semiofficial-sounding names such as the Independent Dragoons and the Pennsylvania Volunteers. So undermanned and ill-equipped was Lacey’s company that it could not even interdict a committee of Quakers openly traveling to Philadelphia earlier that month for their annual meeting under the protection of these armed guards.
On the night of April 30, Lacey had made camp along Pennypack Creek near the Crooked Billet Tavern, about midway between Valley Forge and Trenton and just over 20 miles from Philadelphia. He ordered pickets to patrol the surrounding roads, but the officer in charge of the sentries fell asleep before assigning the manpower.I Simcoe’s Rangers and Abercrombie’s Redcoats, totaling some 850 men, encountered no resistance as they crept to the edge of the encampment in a pincer formation. As dawn broke on May 1, they attacked.
Surrounded and outnumbered, the groggy Americans took heavy casualties as they stumbled out of their tents into sheets of musket fire. Lacey at last managed to mount his horse and whip into place a tenuous battle line that repelled a subsequent bayonet charge. Then, while the British regrouped, he led a small company of troops into a nearby brake of wood. Employing the thick copse of oak and chestnut to defensive advantage, he and his surviving militiamen repulsed a cavalry charge from Abercrombie’s dragoons before engaging in a running, four-mile firefight. Then, inexplicably, the British broke off the engagement despite having suffered only seven men wounded and two horses killed. When Lacey and his little company returned to the original battleground they understood why. While they had been fending off Abercrombie, Simcoe’s Rangers had turned their campground into a charnel house. Nearly half of Lacey’s command had been wiped out, with civilian witnesses reporting that surrendering Continentals were run through with bayonets and cutlasses while the American wounded were heaved onto pyres of buckwheat straw and burned alive.
The atrocity at Crooked Billet in effect rendered moot the entire Continental presence in Pennsylvania east of the Schuylkill. Many of the militiamen who had managed to flee the slaughter never returned to duty. Even as his company commanders took roll call in the blood-soaked fields, Lacey recognized that those who remained were now too psychologically damaged to constitute a professional force. As Simcoe himself noted in his journal, the savagery of the massacre “had its full effect of intimidating the militia, as they never afterward appeared but in small parties and like robbers.” It was with a bittersweet melancholy that Washington would within the week relieve Gen. Lacey of command. He told Lacey that he recognized that he had done his best with the “fatiguing” task he had been assigned, “considering the smallness of your numbers and the constant motion which you have consequently obliged to be in.” He also understood that the inexperienced Lacey through no fault of his own was in over his head, a quandary all too common in every state’s militia.
For Washington, the similarities between the Battle of Paoli and the Battle of Crooked Billet were palpable—with one striking difference. In the wake of the debacle at Paoli eight months earlier, the American commander in chief had been left to ponder, yet again, the futility of asking amateur citizen-soldiers to stand and fight against trained professionals. Then, with a weakened army and no hope for reinforcements, he had been left to merely watch from across the Schuylkill as Gen. Howe moved on Philadelphia. Now, however, some 24 hours before the news from Crooked Billet had even reached Valley Forge, a breathless courier had arrived at the Potts House with a message that would break over the winter encampment like a mustering thunderclap. France had entered the war.
♦ ♦ ♦
Rumors that Louis XVI would formally recognize the United States had been circulating in America since at least the previous November. In the middle of that month Washington had even dropped an apocryphal hint in the last paragraph of a long letter to his stepson Jacky Parke Custis: “War expected every moment between France & Britain.” Over the interim similar unfounded reports had abounded, with at least two Whig newspapers publishing stories asserting that France and Spain had agreed to aid “the Independence of the American States.” But it was not until April 13 that the wishful fantasy became fact when Simeon Deane, Silas’s older brother, disembarked from the fast French frigate Sensible at the docks of what is now Portland, Maine. He carried with him copies of the Treaties of Alliance.
As Simeon Deane made his way to York, he paused at his home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to entrust a friend to convey the news to Valley Forge. The courtesy call to Washington had been the idea of his brother, who was preparing to relinquish his Parisian diplomatic assignment to John Adams later in the year. The commander in chief received Simeon Deane’s letter on the evening of April 30, the same night that Howe, Simcoe, and Abercrombie were plotting to assail John Lacey’s little company. Though exultant at the “glorious News” certain to set “all Europe into a flame,” Washington thought it prudent to refrain from disclosing the pact, except to a few close members of his staff, until an official announcement from Congress.
When he shared the news with John Laurens, the young aide reacted with his typical brio, calling the alliance “the most humiliating stroke that the national pride of Britain ever suffered.” On a more personal level, Laurens also fretted that “France might give a mortal blow to the English” before he had an opportunity to achieve battlefield glory. Lafayette, on the other hand, was so overcome by his nation’s beau geste that he flung open the door to Washington’s study without knocking, smothered the aloof general in a bear hug, kissed him on both cheeks, and burst into tears. The young marquis’s emotion was understandable. The same courier who had delivered the announcement from Simeon Deane also carried a letter from Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, informing him that their 22-month-old daughter Henriette had died of pneumonia.
The following morning, Washington’s communiqué to the delegates in York betrayed no small sense of relief. “With infinite pleasure I beg leave to congratulate Congress on the very important and interesting advices brought by the frigate Sensible,” he wrote to Henry Laurens. “I believe no event was ever received with more heartfelt joy.” And though he still kept the news hidden from his troops, his General Orders for May 1 instructing the camp’s chaplains to perform special services the next day at 11 a.m., with compulsory attendance of officers of all ranks, hinted that something momentous was afoot.
The whispers grew louder when word spread through camp that Steuben had been summoned to the Potts House and instructed to prepare the army for a “Grand Review.” Deciphering the extra jaunt to Steuben’s step, the jubilant Continentals erected maypoles decorated with spring flowers before each regimental headquarters hut and rushed back from their drills to congregate in the brigade lanes to toast each other with free-flowing spirits purchased from the suddenly pro-republican sutlers’ stocks. It was always the civilians who were the first to sense a change in the wind.
At the same time in York, Henry Laurens was summoning the delegates to a special Saturday session at which the treaties were read aloud. The following days were a blur of giddy festivity. After attending a thanksgiving service on Sunday, the South Carolina congressman William Henry Drayton hurriedly dictated and had printed 100 copies of a broadsheet hailing the alliance. These were for distribution in and around Valley Forge. On Monday, May 4, the delegates unanimously ratified the treaties and sent couriers galloping off in all directions to announce the triumphant news. That evening, upon learning of the vote in York, Washington journeyed from the Potts House to dine at
the artillery park with Henry Knox and his senior officers.
Although Drayton’s official notices had yet to reach the encampment, Washington confided to Knox that the following morning’s General Orders would contain the announcement along with his grand good thanks “to the Almighty ruler of the Universe [for] raising us up a powerful friend among the princes of the earth, to establish our liberty and independence upon a lasting foundation.” As Washington was returning to his headquarters he noticed a group of Knox’s young cannoneers gathered in the gloaming for a raucous game of wickets, an Americanized form of cricket. The commander in chief dismounted, and much to the artillerymen’s amazement, deigned to take several swings with the bat. Perhaps he felt that his prayers in that snowy glade had indeed been answered.
♦ ♦ ♦
It had been a celebratory French tradition since the fourteenth century, when the Mongols and their Chinese mercenaries introduced gunpowder to Europe. Now it was crossing the Atlantic. George Washington eagerly seized upon Lafayette’s suggestion of the feu de joie, or “fire of joy,” as a most apt tribute to commemorate the official notice of France’s alliance with the United States. At just past nine on the morning of May 6 a booming cannon report summoned all troops to the parade ground in the center of camp. There the Treaties of Alliance were read aloud before Steuben and his subinspectors marched the entire Continental Army, brigade by brigade, to the middle of the drilling fields. Steuben had spent the preceding days literally diagramming the movements of each brigade, regiment, company, and platoon, and now, their thousands of flintlocks polished to a gleam, the troops were arranged into two long, parallel columns by the generals de Kalb, Lafayette, and Lord Stirling.
