Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Clinton, eager for the dam to break, halted his caravan often enough to lure Washington into a larger provocation. He had stationed in the rear some 6,000 of his most experienced British troops under Gen. Cornwallis. He did not trust the Hessians, who were deserting in droves.

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  The final regiments of the Continental Army, 12,000 strong, crossed the Delaware and landed above Trenton in western New Jersey on June 22. After poring over maps of the state’s eastern roads and compiling information gleaned from scores of enemy defectors, Washington convened a Council of War. He suspected that the British were making for Sandy Hook, a thin barrier peninsula on New Jersey’s north-central coast about 100 miles northeast of Philadelphia. From there Royal Navy transports and hundreds of small boats, already gathering, would ferry them to Manhattan and Long Island. Reading the pulse of the suddenly invigorated American citizenry, the homegrown firebrands Anthony Wayne and Nathanael Greene pressed for a major attack. Their enthusiasm was shared by Baron Steuben, still eager to draw his sword; and of course by Lafayette, who was harrowed over the “disgrace” and “humiliation” of permitting the British to traverse New Jersey “with impunity.”

  Henry Knox and Lord Stirling were among the majority of general officers who disagreed. They held that Clinton’s humbling withdrawal from Philadelphia was victory enough, at least until reinforcements from France arrived. They also pointed out that despite the abundant magazines of food, hay, and even straw bedding that Greene’s quartermasters had cached along various New Jersey routes, horses and wagons remained scarce. A dash across the state would put the army in danger of outrunning its supply lines.

  The strongest advocate for prudence was Gen. Lee. Not surprisingly, Lee had taken an intense dislike to Steuben, and refused to recognize the effects of his training regimen. His perception still moored in 1776, Lee cautioned that the ragtag American force stood no chance against a professional British army. His final contention struck a more practical chord—why sacrifice more lives against an enemy virtually certain to evacuate New York in flight from the French? Citing a Spanish military proverb, he suggested that “a Bridge of Gold should be built for a flying enemy.” Then they would each raise a glass as they watched the British depart from the war. Lee’s argument repulsed Alexander Hamilton, who noted that the general’s hesitancy “would have done honor to the most honorable society of midwives, and to them only.”

  Privately, Washington agreed with Hamilton, partly because of his own natural aggressiveness, and partly because he too sensed the mood of their suddenly sanguine countrymen. But his initial inclination was to pursue a middle ground between a major assault and complete inaction. Inflicting a sharp if glancing blow on the rear of Clinton’s train without risking his entire army would sate the more aggressive bloc of his officers as well as result in a wealth of political capital. To that end, on June 24 he dispatched another 1,500 Virginians to reinforce Maxwell, Morgan, and the New Jersey militiamen. He had not counted on Gen. Greene’s powers of persuasion. That night Greene sent him a private communiqué. “If we suffer the enemy to pass through the Jerseys without attempting any thing on them I think we shall ever regret it,” he argued. “People expect something from us & our strength demands it.”

  The quartermaster general, one of his most trusted and effective officers, also reminded Washington how his Fabian tactics had already resulted in defeat at Brandywine and the loss of Philadelphia. It was Greene’s steady hand that had stayed Washington from attempting a harebrained Christmas assault on the city. But now, he advised the commander in chief, the war’s momentum had turned. Was it not time, he prodded, to trust in his army despite the enemy’s superior numbers? Plus, he added, with the British train so strung out, what were the chances that Gen. Clinton would be able to throw his entire force against an American assault? Washington was convinced, and that night summoned Greene to help him redraw his plan of attack. It was decided that Gen. Wayne’s 1,000-man brigade would now join the nearly 4,000 Continentals already harassing the British. Together they would fall in force on the rear of the enemy line. Should Clinton decide to stand and fight with a reinforced rear guard, Washington would sweep in with the bulk of the army. If the Redcoats ran for Sandy Hook, the American advance corps would devour whatever defensive screen they threw up.

  Ironically, the honor of leading this vanguard would fall to his second in command, the suddenly pacific Gen. Lee. Who turned it down. Heading such a small force, Lee caviled, was beneath the dignity of his rank. Lafayette, “still burning to distinguish himself,” leaped at the opportunity.

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  Lafayette insisted that he had learned his lesson at Barren Hill. There would be no more immature mistakes. Further, this was no cat-and-mouse scouting expedition. It was a full-on offensive calling for zeal and daring. It was not lost on Washington that these were the very qualities that made up for the marquis’s tactical inexperience. The commander in chief was also secure in the knowledge that Gen. Wayne would be present and would provide a guiding hand. As insurance, he also freed the coolheaded Hamilton from his inkwell and assigned him to the Frenchman’s personal guard. But Lafayette had not even drawn up his battle plan before Charles Lee had a change of heart. Fearing that the glory of a possible war-ending triumph would fall to another, he beseeched Washington to reconsider and reinstate him. This left the commander in chief somewhere between the tree and its bark.

  On the one hand, a French expeditionary force—led by Lafayette’s cousin, no less—was already somewhere on the high seas racing to America’s relief. What might be the repercussions of withdrawing a laurel already bestowed on the flower of France? Moreover, taking the command from Lafayette and handing it to Lee broke a cardinal maxim of warfare—never place a man in charge of a mission whose heart is not in it. Yet both Lee’s battlefield experience and his length of service eclipsed Lafayette’s. By rights it was his expedition to command. Before Washington could commit, Lafayette himself broke the impasse by volunteering to serve under Lee “for the good of the service.” It was a face-saving courtesy Washington would never forget.

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  By Friday, June 26, the Continental Army’s most forward elements had closed to within six miles of the tail of the British column. That morning Washington dispatched Steuben, John Laurens, and the French engineer Louis Duportail to evaluate the terrain through which the enemy was traveling. The Prussian was delighted with what he found. The boggy, wooded countryside, laced with deep ravines and crosshatched by a series of fenced orchards, was splendidly suited for a surprise attack. The enemy would have neither room nor opportunity to arrange his rear guard for a pitched, European-style battle. In any case, the more muscular British regiments would surely be surrounding Clinton’s supply train in the van of the column. By the time they responded to the raid the damage would have been done.

  The next evening Gen. Clinton made camp some 30 miles from Sandy Hook, near the small crossroads village of Monmouth Court House. Another day’s march, Steuben warned Washington, would place the enemy in the hills of Middletown, New Jersey, unassailable high ground, and thence at the seacoast. It was time. Washington showed no hesitation. He ordered Gen. Lee to launch his assault as soon as the Redcoats resumed their movements at daybreak. He told Lee that he would rejoin and lead his main force to support the assault as necessary while, given Lee’s proximity to the field, he left the specifics of the attack to his second’s discretion. This was an error.

  That night, with torrential downpours battering his tent, Lee declined to ride through the heavy rains to conduct his own reconnaissance, leaving himself personally ignorant of both the terrain and the enemy’s strength. He instead relied upon a crude map, which John Laurens had sketched while scouting with Steuben, as well as on incomplete reports from the New Jersey militiamen. But the latter had seriously underestimated Cornwallis’s numbers. Lafayette and Wayne both came away perplexed from their final meeting with Lee. He had given the
m no coordinated instructions other than a vague order to prepare to advance in the morning. To where, he did not say. He preferred to wait and see.

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  A sultry summer wind had blown the rain clouds to sea as Sunday, June 28, dawned unbearably hot and humid. Among the Americans stalking the British that morning was the peregrine Joseph Plumb Martin, who compared traversing New Jersey’s sandy tidal plains and airless woods to marching through “the mouth of a heated oven.” By the time they received their orders to move out, he and many of his compatriots had already doffed their shirts.

  General Lee’s offensive proved a cavalcade of blunders from the onset. It took the various spokes of the Continental vanguard five hours to pick their way across the three miles of marshy, treacherous terrain. During the advance Lee had no communication with his flanking wings. When his central assault column finally broke out of a wood and onto a muddy plowed cornfield, he found himself facing not the expected 1,500 or so troops protecting the British train’s tail, but Cornwallis’s 6,000 grenadiers and Foot Guards. Lee, staring at these elite units of the British army, panicked. Before the majority of the Continentals had even reached their staging areas, he ordered a general retreat. Lafayette was aghast. Lee, wheeling his horse, scoffed at him, saying that the Frenchman did not know British soldiers. Steuben’s training be damned; the British would annihilate his patchwork collection of shopkeepers and farmhands.

  Cornwallis easily beat back the few disconnected skirmishers who managed to break forward under elements of Gen. Wayne’s corps. Then, with Clinton rushing more troops to Cornwallis’s side, the two organized a counterattack. If they were careful, a confident Clinton told Cornwallis, they might even turn the action into a rout. At his signal 10,000 red-coated soldiers shed their heavy packs and fixed bayonets.

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  Some five miles to the west, Washington’s frustration climbed with the temperature, now cresting 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Earlier that morning he had received an assurance from Gen. Lee that he was about to encircle a small enemy rear guard. With that the commander in chief had dashed off a note to Henry Laurens informing Congress that an important clash was imminent. He then led his two divisions of 6,000 to 8,000 men in a march east toward Monmouth Court House.

  Since that moment he had listened for the cascading sounds of artillery fire that would indicate a serious engagement. They never came. The occasional report of a distant field piece was all he had heard. As noon approached and with his patience running out, he ordered his aides Robert Hanson Harrison and John Fitzgerald to the front to survey the field. It was not long before they came upon the retreating Lee. Lee told them that he had had no communication with his flanking commanders, and was not quite certain of their whereabouts. When Harrison asked what message he should take back to Washington, a glassy-eyed Lee replied that “he really did not know what to say.” The men stared at each other, sweat pouring from their brows.

  It was a dramatic moment of honesty. John Laurens, riding with Lee, described the general’s serial instructions as “one [succeeding] another with a rapidity and indecision calculated to ruin us.” “All this disgraceful retreating,” Laurens would write to his father, “passed without the firing of a musket, over ground which might have been disputed inch by inch.”

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  By early afternoon Washington still had no idea that Lee’s forces were falling back. He was two miles from Lee’s position when he received his first inkling of the debacle in progress. As he interviewed a local resident who told him of spotting half-naked Continentals staggering helter-skelter through his fields, Hamilton rode up to confirm the news. He also urged Washington to cover his right flank, as the British were massing for a counterstrike. A moment later a terrified young fifer was brought before the commander in chief. The boy allowed that his fellow soldiers were retreating, although more in bewilderment than in panic. Washington had commanded troops for long enough to place great faith in the adage that one should never trust a deserter and rarely trust a straggler. Yet he also knew how rapidly the merest scent of impending defeat could permeate an army. With that, he threatened the lad with a horsewhipping should he repeat his story to anyone else, and arranged for the generals Greene and Lord Stirling to quick-march their divisions to the front. Greene, per Hamilton’s suggestion, veered off to the right at the head of his smaller force. Washington then spurred the handsome white charger gifted to him the day before by the governor of New Jersey and galloped forward with his remaining aides in tow.

  He had raced less than half a mile before he encountered the first signs of stragglers. Dozens became scores, scores became companies, companies became entire regiments. Many of the Continentals, felled by the searing heat, had simply slumped to the ground in exhaustion. Their officers appeared as mystified at their circumstances as the young fifer. One volunteered that they were “flying from a shadow.” Washington ordered the junior officers to gather and re-form their companies, and pointed them toward a nearby wood to shade themselves and rest. A moment later, pushing forward, he crossed a small wooden bridge spanning a swampy culvert known as the West Ravine. As he crested its eastern slope, he spied a familiar sight—Gen. Lee’s hunting dogs keeping pace with a rider darting directly toward him. Lee was still reining his frothing horse when Washington thundered, “What is the meaning of this, sir? I desire to know the meaning of this disorder and confusion!”

  Lee’s face betrayed a dazed bewilderment. He expected acclamation on the orderly nature of his retreat. Instead, perplexed and battered by what some witnesses described as a string of oaths coming from his superior, he initially responded with a slurred mumble that one of Washington’s aides made out as, “Sir? Sir?” Finally, as his commander in chief towered over him, Lee gathered himself enough to manage a coherent sentence: “The American troops would not stand the British bayonets.” He then blurted something to the effect that his brigade commanders were disobeying his orders.

  Washington, who those same witnesses describe as trembling with rage, pointed to the confused mass of soldiers streaming to the rear. They had thrown down neither their muskets nor their cartridge cases. None appeared wounded, and there was no sign of powder-blackened hands or faces that would indicate that they had even fired their weapons. This was not a mob fleeing in terror. It was an army bereft of leadership, an army retreating because it had been ordered to retreat. In his memoirs, Lafayette recorded Washington turning to Lee and shouting, “You damned poltroon. You never tried them.”

  Another officer observing the exchange reported that Washington proceeded to aim yet more oaths at Lee “till the leaves shook on the trees.” This is probably apocryphal, although what is certain is the astonishment the commander in chief’s aides and nearest soldiers felt at his rare public display of temper. It was as if some internal bottle in which he had stored all the slights suffered at the hands of the pompous Lee had finally been uncorked. “No one,” wrote Lafayette, “had ever before seen Washington so terribly excited; his whole appearance was fearful.”

  Lee, confused and distraught, stammered that he had advised against the attack in council, and had but reluctantly accepted its command. With that Washington turned his back to Lee and again pressed on.

  * * *

  I. An additional 3,000 civilian Tories had previously been evacuated from Philadelphia on Adm. Howe’s ships.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “SO SUPERB A MAN”

  By the time Washington and his outriders reached a rolling stretch of farmland bisected by yet another deep, marshy crevasse, Continental scouts reported two enemy columns advancing less than a mile to the east. The approaching force, no more than 15 minutes away, consisted of some 2,500 Foot Guards and grenadiers with a cavalry escort. That Gen. Clinton would throw his best and hardest fighters into the center of the fray was no surprise. But Washington also suspected that the enemy would at some point attempt to flank him from the north, the south, or both. He had already decide
d to make a stand on the high ground of the far rim of the West Ravine several hundred yards to his rear that he had crossed while searching for Charles Lee. But he needed time to form up his battle line. He then spied two threadbare battalions from Anthony Wayne’s brigade falling back nearby and waylaid Wayne and their commanders.

  Washington instructed them to take positions in a finger of forest that jutted into the field from the north. He could only hope that from this “Point of Woods,” as it came to be called, Wayne and his 900 or so men could buy him enough time to organize a defensive line along the heights behind them. He then spotted Gen. Lee. Lee later testified that he believed he had been dismissed by Washington after his dressing-down, and some eyewitnesses reported hearing Washington order Lee to the rear. But Lee had not fallen back. Still dazed, and not certain what to do with himself, he had ended up skulking after Washington’s party at some distance. Now the commander in chief waved him forward. He asked if Lee was prepared to muster as many retreating troops as possible to stand and fight. The humiliated general, sensing redemption, replied that he would be one of the last to leave the field. Washington nodded, and he and his coterie turned and rode back west.

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  John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton were among the 700 or so soldiers whom Gen. Lee positioned behind a hedgerow atop a small rise as the British column approached. Hamilton reined his horse next to Lee’s, brandished his sword, and declared, “That’s right, my dear general, and I will stay, and we will all die here on this spot.” Some said that Lee then offered Hamilton a courtly bow and a pithy rejoinder. This is doubtful. The two hated each other.

  While Hamilton and Lee played out their melodrama on the line’s right flank, the implacable Gen. Wayne—seething at Lee for the retreat and refusing to speak to him—raced his regiments toward the Point of Woods to the left. They made the timberland without being spotted, and settled in amid the thick spinney of juniper and oak. There, with Wayne urging them to “pick out the king birds,” they waited until a company of horsemen charging Lee’s position through a narrow defile were at nearly point-blank range. The series of musket volleys emanating from the trees decimated the enemy cavalry and tore through Redcoats marching on either flank. Yet true to their training, the experienced British guards and grenadiers re-formed rapidly. A portion charged the timber while the remainder, flanked by what was left of the dragoons, fell on Lee’s wing. The close-quarters fighting that ensued was savage and swift. Both sides fixed bayonets that hacked and tore at human flesh. When Laurens’s horse was shot out from under him, Hamilton—whose own steed had been killed earlier in the action—raced to his side with a spare.