by Bob Drury
Addison’s narrative of a patriot prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause of liberty was performed in a hastily constructed open-air theater on the banks of the Schuylkill. Washington and Martha both attended, as did Nathanael Greene and his coquettish wife, Caty, and Henry and Lucy Knox. By all accounts it was a soft spring night, with a gentle breeze off the river keeping at bay the fetid smells of thousands of dilapidated huts. Officers in their best uniforms crowded around the little stage while enlisted men, though not within earshot of the actors’ lines, milled in the shadows beyond the firepits serving as footlights. Following the dramatic depiction, four more officers tendered their resignations.
Whether word of this embarrassment reached York remains unrecorded. What is known is that, one week later, Congress finally agreed to a compromise on the pension pay conundrum that proved acceptable to both the soldiers and the most parsimonious of the politicians. In addition to granting each noncommissioned officer and private a onetime payment of $80, the delegates would appropriate funds for each officer’s half-pay pension for the period of seven years following the war’s end. “Joy,” wrote one artillery officer, “sparkles in the Eyes of our whole Army.”
Not a moment too soon, he might have added. For just as news of the pension agreement reached Valley Forge, rumors from Philadelphia had the British again stirring.
THIRTY-ONE
KNIGHTS AND FAIR MAIDENS
If truth is the first casualty of war, Gen. Sir William Howe was Louis XVI’s second victim. On the same day that Washington convened his Council of War, a British packet ship sailed up the Delaware carrying official notice to the general that France had entered into a military alliance with the United States and that the Crown had named Gen. Clinton to replace him. These were not hail-fellow communiqués; there was a distinct undertone that his dawdling was to blame for the French perfidy. Howe was ordered to immediately effect the transition of power to his successor, whose frigate had arrived from New York only hours earlier. His brother Richard—Adm. Lord Howe—was also being recalled as soon as a replacement arrived from England.
If Gen. Howe was relieved to be finally returning home, Clinton was far from feeling empowered. He was in fact mortified upon receiving the instructions from George Germain to abandon Philadelphia without a fight and to detach a third of his army, nearly 8,000 troops, to defend the Floridas and attack French holdings in the Caribbean. Citing his “regard for his professional fame,” in his journal, a clearly irritated Clinton concluded that his appointment was nothing more than a “hopeless” footnote “to the unfortunate contest we were engaged in.”
The portraitists of the era were not kind to the short, bowlegged 48-year-old Clinton. Most depictions emphasized his outsize jaw, crooked nose, and thick black eyebrows that resembled nothing so much as a brace of sleeping fruit bats. We will never know if this was the artists’ retaliation for Clinton’s vain and quarrelsome personality. Morbidly sensitive to even perceived slights, the new commander of all British forces in North America had bided his time for three years in the muddy backwaters of the New World awaiting this opportunity. Now, in a series of letters to confidants in London, he carped that his order to retreat from a rabble of American rebels was “beneath the dignity of a British officer.” Clinton was, nonetheless, a soldier loyal to king and Crown. But even here he faced a quandary.
The ship that had borne the announcement of the Franco-American alliance had also brought rumors of a French armada sailing for America. When and where it would make land no one knew. As Adm. Howe’s fleet was too dispersed up and down the eastern seaboard to undertake the immediate troop movements requested by Whitehall, Clinton saw only two options. He could tarry in Philadelphia and hope that the French were no closer to Chesapeake Bay than the Royal Navy’s wayward craft. Or he could consolidate his forces within the relative safety of New York. He chose the latter. The army’s baggage, provisions, and armory, he decided, would be shipped north aboard all available vessels while he marched the bulk of his troops up through New Jersey. For the time being, he declined to share his evacuation plans with Philadelphia’s civilian population, and even attempted to mask his intentions by assigning work gangs to expand the fortifications around the city. This facile “shew of a design to remain,” as John Laurens sneered, fooled neither Washington’s network of double agents nor the panicked Tory population. If the crates piling up on Philadelphia’s quays were not evidence enough, the die was notably cast when the heavy cannons that had anchored the defensive line to the north of town were disassembled and replaced by field pieces.
The members of the Pennsylvania state assembly in Lancaster had made no secret of their plans to hang any American civilian who had cooperated with the British during the occupation of Philadelphia. They had even debated the notion of seizing the property of each such traitor’s surviving family members. With this proverbial “rope about [our] necks,” as one frightened Loyalist put it, the fate of the city’s Tories became a bone of contention between Clinton and his former superior. After the transition ceremony on May 11, Clinton informed Gen. Howe that he would find room either on the cargo ships or in his overland train for the thousands of “Friends of Government” seeking sanctuary from the rebels. Yet this still left a great many of His Majesty’s loyal subjects outraged over the prospect of abandoning their homes, stores, and property to a band of brigand rebels. They begged Howe to intervene, and the genial general, having grown fond of his hosts, agreed. He gathered on his brother’s flagship most of the men who had formed the backbone of the city’s civil government and advised them to send a delegation to Valley Forge to broker a truce.
When word of this reached Clinton, he sputtered an enraged oath. Not only was such a decision no longer Howe’s to make, but any third-party overture to the Continentals would undercut the role of the official peace commissioners scheduled to arrive from London within the month. Clinton was also watching his flank—colonial subjects negotiating a separate peace in Philadelphia would set a dangerous precedent for the Tory population of New York City.
In the end, Clinton was a much savvier political animal than either Howe. Despite the tarnish on the Howe brothers’ military reputation, their family crest still carried weight back in England. Cognizant of this, Clinton hit upon a compromise with his former commander. In lieu of having a citizen’s board journey to Valley Forge, he would deliver a general outline of the Bills of Conciliation to the Continental Congress in York as a sort of gambit before the parley, to buy time to better organize the evacuation of the city. General Howe was confused. The contents of the bills were already well known among the American delegates. They had been quite vocal in rejecting them.
When Washington learned of the ploy he was equally flummoxed. “The Enemy are beginning to play a Game more dangerous than their efforts by Arms,” he wrote to his fellow Virginian John Banister, an attorney serving as a lieutenant colonel in their state’s militia. “They are endeavoring to ensnare the people by specious allurements of Peace.” It was as if he and his adversaries were engaged in an existential chess match whose rules changed by the moment. Washington instructed Dan Morgan to intercept the British officer traveling under a flag of truce and turn him back. More positively, he recognized that each day that he could forestall the enemy’s withdrawal from Philadelphia was that much more time for Steuben and his drillmasters to sharpen the soldiery. Finally, on May 18, he moved his first pawn.
♦ ♦ ♦
Notwithstanding his aborted misadventures at Albany, in the third week of May the Marquis de Lafayette was given his first field command. Washington entrusted him to lead some 2,200 seasoned troops—nearly a fifth of the effectives available at Valley Forge—across the Schuylkill to gather intelligence about the enemy’s evacuation plans. The British were obviously preparing to abandon Philadelphia. But for where? New York? Halifax? Or would they quit the American continent altogether to face the French in either the West Indies or Europe? He hoped that
a deserter or prisoner falling into Lafayette’s hands might make their destination less opaque.
One can only speculate as to why the commander in chief felt he needed such a large and vulnerable force to perform a task just as easily assigned to a scouting unit. Some guessed that Washington was attempting to salve his surrogate son’s Gallic sense of honor in the wake of the Canadian debacle. Others suspected that given the makeup of the detachment—it included Enoch Poor’s respected New Hampshire brigade, a company of 50 of Dan Morgan’s riflemen, and about an equal number of Oneida Indians—the mission was actually the vanguard of a secret assault on Philadelphia. The first notion is unprovable. The second was implausible.
What is recorded is that Washington warned the young Frenchman against splitting his divisions, and stressed that he should keep his party moving at all times “to guard against a surprise.” The British might be teetering in Philadelphia, but the city still housed close to 20,000 enemy troops. Any “severe blow” to the expedition, he wrote to Lafayette, would result in the most “disastrous consequences” not only to the upcoming campaign, but perhaps to the entire revolution. It was sage advice. For barely had Lafayette’s column reached the east bank of the river before it was being stalked by British patrols specifically dispatched to deter American attempts to disrupt Gen. Howe’s extravagant farewell party.
♦ ♦ ♦
General Howe may have been awaiting censure upon his return to London, but in Philadelphia his recall was already engendering an air of nostalgia among his status-conscious junior officers. From Jamestown to Calcutta to Hong Kong, the English who had colonized the globe carried with them the powerful class echelons attendant on hidebound Albion. The bedrock of this cultural system was the entwined concepts of aristocratic privilege and prestige—bespoke tailors, membership in the right clubs, a plummy accent, riding to hounds. Whatever their personal differences, this shared sense of bloodlines had spawned a robust bond between Howe and his officer corps. Moreover, unlike the humorless Clinton, Howe had proved a guileless and, in the eyes of his troops, competent general. He had, after all, won a string of resounding victories on his way to capturing and occupying two of America’s three largest cities. London magazines and newspapers pillorying Howe for the loss of Burgoyne’s army were readily available in Philadelphia, and to the general’s subordinates the perception of their longtime commanding officer skulking home to public opprobrium was decidedly unsporting.
All this convinced a number of them, led by the ubiquitous Capt. André, to pool their private funds to send Howe off with a festival of the likes of which America had never seen. The gala was scheduled for May 18, the same day that Lafayette and his troops marched east. What André dubbed, with typical British military understatement, his Meschianza—from the Italian mescolanza, meaning a “mixture” or “medley”—kicked off with 400 officers joining the elite of Philadelphia’s Tory society on a regatta down the Delaware. The gaudy fleet of beribboned boats and barges sailed to the accompaniment of a military band playing “God Save The King.” Alighting at Walnut Grove, the confiscated estate of the wealthy rebel merchant Joseph Wharton—Thomas Wharton’s uncle—the guests were escorted into a temporary amphitheater that overlooked the estate’s manicured lawns. From tiered bleachers they watched a mock jousting tournament in which costumed medieval “knights” bearing lances and shields contested to honor “fair maidens” clad in Turkish gowns.I At dusk, what the British called the “lighty-dark” time of day, all the participants formed a procession that passed beneath a pair of triumphal arches erected in honor of the Howe brothers to a formal ball, which included a fireworks display that could be seen for miles.
At one point the bacchanal was disrupted by distant gunfire. The commotion was the brainchild of the Continental captain Allan McClane, who had succeeded “Light Horse Harry” Lee as the area’s spymaster. McClane and a small unit of riders, drawn to the sight and sound of the fireworks, had ridden to the edge of the city, dismounted, and stolen to the base of a makeshift defensive wall. They poured buckets of whale oil over the wooden abatis encompassing the barrier, and set it alight. Panicked British sentries were still firing wildly into the trees as McClane and his men galloped away.
With the disturbance, and the fire, quelled, Gen. Howe’s guests adjourned to a candlelit midnight supper served in a cavernous mirrored tent by African American slaves clothed in turbans and sashes. Then the faro tables opened.
When reports of the farewell party reached England, the London Chronicle was far from alone in wondering what exactly Gen. Howe had accomplished in America to deserve such a “nauseous” sendoff. If through the long lens of history the baroque extravaganza of Capt. André’s Meschianza stands in stark relief against the deprivations suffered by the Continentals at Valley Forge—the event was said to have cost over half a million in today’s dollars—not all military matters were cast aside. For throughout the long day and night, the pageant’s honoree, although no longer in command, was nonetheless receiving steady reports of Lafayette’s whereabouts from Loyalist informers.
♦ ♦ ♦
Across the Schuylkill, Lafayette had no way of knowing that such a fete was playing out in the city. Washington, however, had been prescient to be wary of the marquis’s command inexperience. On his first night in enemy territory he had pitched camp on a treeless plateau called Barren Hill some 11 miles northwest of Philadelphia and less than three miles from the most northerly British pickets. There he would remain for the next 36 hours, using an abandoned limestone church on the crest of the rise as his headquarters. When his junior officers reminded Lafayette of Washington’s admonition against remaining stationary, he promised to be on the move again as soon as a messenger he had sent to track down Allan McClane returned.
Meanwhile, he dispatched scouts to probe the British lines. Some of the troops grew confused over the Frenchman’s alleged tactics, not least the acerbic diarist Joseph Plumb Martin, who was marching with Enoch Poor’s New Hampshire unit. “We placed our guards, sent off our scouting parties, and waited for—I know not what,” he recorded. By the following evening he was still waiting as Lafayette’s entire brigade remained bivouacked atop Barren Hill. And the British knew it.
That night, with Gen. Clinton ceding one last courtesy to his former commanding officer, Howe sent a combined force of nearly 5,000 Redcoats and Hessians on a north-by-northwest trajectory with instructions to gird the Continentals from the north and west, cutting them off from the Schuylkill. He then ordered another 2,000 grenadiers and a troop of dragoons under the command of the butcher of Paoli, Gen. Charles “No Flint” Grey, directly up the Germantown road that looped around and approached Barren Hill from the east. To snap shut the trap, Howe and Clinton personally led a third column of 2,000 men on an easy lope up another road and across a series of cultivated fields south of the plateau. Lafayette, surrounded and outnumbered, would have no choice but to surrender. Howe was scheduled to sail home within the week, and the vision of his command ship tacking up the Thames with the most famous Frenchman in North America as his prisoner of war made the coup de main too tempting to pass up.
But there was a complication. An eerie, ground-hugging fog obscured the stars that night, hindering the advance of the largest British attack force across a route strewn with narrow pocket canyons and thick copses of oak, hickory, and yellow poplar. Howe had assumed these men would be in place by dawn. But the sunrise found them still struggling through the thick brake and brushwood. Before they could reach their ambush site, Lafayette’s pickets spotted them and alerted him. In a testament to the discipline instilled by Steuben, the marquis rallied his troops quickly and silently into a marching column. Screened by Morgan’s riflemen and the Oneida, the Continentals slipped through the gap the enemy had left them. They covered the three miles to the Schuylkill in quickstep, linked arms against the strong current, and were splashing back across the chest-deep river as Howe’s column climbed the southern flank of Barren Hill only
to meet Grey’s grenadiers scrambling up the north face.
Howe was flabbergasted. Could these elusive Continentals be the same oafish provincials who had collapsed along the Brandywine and fallen upon themselves during the confusion of Germantown? A disdainful Clinton, on the other hand, refused to concede the professionalism of the retreat and concurred with the infamous Capt. Simcoe, who, citing the starless night and rugged terrain, attributed the incident to just another instance of inexplicable “good fortune” enjoyed by the rebels and their apparently bulletproof commander in chief. Neither man seemed to grasp that throughout his military career, Washington more often than not made his own luck. In any case, with the Americans seemingly vanished, there was nothing left for the British but to re-form and slink back to Philadelphia as Morgan’s sharpshooters and the Indian cohort harassed their rear.
At Valley Forge, Lafayette’s close-run escape was greeted with encomiums. “A brilliant retreat,” gushed John Laurens. And Henry Laurens urged the pamphleteering New Jersey delegate Francis Hopkinson—author of “The Battle of the Kegs”—to once more take quill in hand to commemorate the wily escape “that has done [the marquis] more honor than he would have gained by a drawn battle.” Even Joseph Plumb Martin deigned to praise his field commander’s “courage and conduct.”
Washington, on the other hand, was more chastened, though relieved, and privately wondered if he had made a mistake in handing too much responsibility to a 20-year-old major general. He also realized that even the hint of a reprimand might not sit well with his new French allies, not to mention call into question his own judgment. Instead, he praised Lafayette’s tactical skills while quietly marveling over the transformation Steuben had wrought in his army. He also vowed to send no more large-scale expeditions into no-man’s-land until his entire force was prepared to fight. That moment was fast approaching.
