Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  The initial bloody clash was followed by an hour or so of heavy fighting. Through it, Lee and Wayne managed to lead their surviving troops west toward the bridge that crossed the ravine in front of Washington’s line. A trail of bodies littered the field, red-coated, blue-clad. “A little skirmishing in the wood,” Laurens, grazed by a musket ball, wryly called it. They had bought Washington his precious time.

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  As Washington dashed to and fro across the western heights, his white stallion leaping gullies and hedgerows, some of his veterans were reminded of an incident that occurred during the Delaware crossing 18 months earlier. Then, Washington’s horse had stumbled climbing an icy slope and the commander in chief—shifting his balance in the saddle and gripping the animal’s mane and lifting its head with his enormous hands—had kept the horse upright by dint of sheer “strength, skill, and timing.” Now, as then, he seemed to appear everywhere and anywhere, a ghost with a drawn saber glinting beneath the pale sun. Impervious to injury, his mere presence breathed new life into the broken command.

  By this time British cannons had moved into range, and the sky darkened with canister, grape, and solid shot. As he gathered his troops around him, Washington had to shout to be heard over the incessant din of soaring projectiles. “Will you fight?” he cried. The answer came in the form of three ringing cheers reverberating down the line, a verbal feu de joie.

  Within the hour Washington and his division commanders had managed to organize a stout defensive position. Lord Stirling’s column of men in particular, concentrated around their 10-gun artillery position on the left wing, had formed up with such discipline that had Steuben been present he might well have wept. At one point, Washington culled two regiments of New Englanders and led them to a fence line upon an eminence overlooking the meandering creek. Henry Knox and a company of light artillery had been joined by an exhausted Steuben, who earlier that morning had survived a hard chase after John Graves Simcoe and a unit of his Queen’s American Rangers had recognized him and tried to ride him and John Laurens down.I Now Knox and Steuben were attempting to ford the stream in order to reinforce Gen. Greene and secure the high ground on the Continentals’ right flank. It was apparent to Washington that Clinton and Cornwallis were attempting to envelop the Americans while simultaneously breaking through the center. At his command the New Englanders poured enough balls into the advancing Redcoats to allow Knox’s cannoneers to splash across the knee-deep water and position their guns on the opposite rise. With Knox’s guns in position, Steuben recrossed the creek and rode to Washington, who ordered him back to rally those of Lee’s troops who had already left the field.

  To Lafayette, the transformation in his commander in chief was astonishing. “His presence alone stopped the retreat,” the marquis recalled in his memoirs. “His graceful bearing on horseback, his calm and deportment . . . were all calculated to inspire the highest degree of enthusiasm.” In short, Lafayette concluded, “I thought then as now that I had never beheld so superb a man.”

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  Through the shank of the afternoon Continental soldiers spotted Washington here shoring up a faltering line and there leading reserves into gaps in his defenses. His courage under fire was inspiring as he personally stationed a company of New Yorkers behind a defensive hedgerow looking down on a trail the advancing British would have to traverse; and, during propitious moments, he detached parties of light infantry into the teeth of the enemy advance. The impact made by the imposing Virginian’s presence on the battlefield that day cannot be overstated. It is no exaggeration to state that wherever Washington made his stand on the bloody field, so stood the American Revolution. At one point, while he was gathering dragoons to counter an enemy cavalry charge, a cannon ball landed yards from his position, spooking his horse and throwing mud into his face. Washington never flinched. Hamilton, now back at his commander in chief’s side, could not help seeing it as a metaphor in the making.

  Citing Washington’s “coolness and firmness,” he later recalled, “I never saw the general to so much advantage, directing the whole with the skill of a master workman.”

  Not long afterward, as Washington galloped off to confer with Wayne, his steed staggered, slumped, and tumbled to the ground. It had died from heat exhaustion. Washington grabbed the reins of a chestnut mare tendered by his slave Billy Lee, leaped into the saddle, and rode on.

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  What would become known as the Battle of Monmouth Court House raged until dusk, the longest engagement of the American Revolution. The desperate British formed and re-formed for multiple charges with both bayonet and horse, a tide of scarlet flowing over green fields pocked by what was later described as the heaviest cannonade of any single day of the war.II “The dust and smoke . . . sometimes so shut the view, that none could form what was going on,” wrote one American officer. Through it all, the Continentals never broke. As at Barren Hill, veteran British officers were astounded. Where had the Americans acquired such discipline?

  It was closing on six o’clock when Gen. Clinton had his drummers beat a retreat. As the Redcoats faltered back through the gloaming their rear guard was harried by a company of Continental dragoons, and Lafayette pressed Washington for a final coup de grace to wipe the field clean. The commander in chief was tempted, and even instructed Steuben to gather three of Lee’s brigades to move on the British right wing. He himself would lead an assault from the left, a pincer maneuver that would leave Clinton no escape.

  As Steuben moved forward he passed Lee cantering aimlessly toward the rear. He described the general as slumped atop his horse, his eyes again glazed. Lee mentioned to Steuben that he was tired, and asked what the Prussian was doing. Steuben replied that he was preparing to run down the retreating Redcoats. Lee stiffened, his gaze suddenly focused. The British falling back? The motley Continentals running them down? This was impossible; he said Steuben’s intelligence had to be faulty. He suggested that Clinton and Cornwallis were likely to be merely resting their troops for a final assault. He then proposed that he and Steuben form a defensive line where they stood to fend off the attack. The drillmaster ignored him and pressed on with his troops.

  By the time Steuben reached the front, Washington had a change of heart. He sent word to all his commanders to stand down. Darkness was falling, water was scarce, and he recognized that, as Joseph Plumb Martin well put it, “Fighting is hot work even in cool weather.” The Continentals, on the march since dawn through the sultry heat, had given all they had. The sun had nearly set when Washington instructed the entire army to spread their blankets where they stood. Tonight there would be no tents or cook fires beneath the canopy of stars. Just the living sleeping among the dead.

  The commander in chief laid his own cloak on the ground beneath a spreading oak tree, where Lafayette joined him. British campfires flickered but a few miles away, and the occasional scream from a nearby surgery pierced the eerie stillness. Washington and his young protégé rehashed the events of the day—Lee’s perfidiousness; Wayne’s bold stand; Knox’s industriousness; Steuben’s professional polish. They talked well into the night of their plans to storm the enemy at first light. They were unaware that Clinton’s army was already stealing away under cover of darkness. The fires were decoys, a ruse that Washington had employed many times himself. At sunup the Continentals discovered that the British had vanished.

  Later that day Stephen Moylan relayed word that Clinton’s army had reached the easily defensible hills that Steuben had noted. Washington understood, and instructed Moylan’s cavalry and Dan Morgan’s Virginians to follow from a safe distance. They were to ensure that the British did indeed sail from Sandy Hook, but to provoke no major action. Let them have New York. They would abandon it soon enough. At the end of the day the commander in chief was content in the knowledge that American soldiers could be made the equal—indeed, had been made the equal—of their British foes. It was time to tend the wounded and bury the dead.

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  Both sides attempted to gloss their “victory” on the plains, in the culverts, and in the woodlands encompassing the town of Monmouth Court House. According to the most reliable casualty estimates, the British could technically be considered vanquished, with Gen. Clinton reporting 64 men missing, 170 wounded, and 147 killed, among them what Anthony Wayne adjudged “the flower of their army.” The Continentals buried some 106 dead (including 37 from heatstroke), treated 161 wounded, and reported 95 missing.III But it was the psychological defeat that stung the Crown forces most pointedly.

  Early on that blistering June morning, with nearly half of the American army falling away in a confused and fatigued mass and the remainder still miles from the field, a rout by the British appeared inevitable. Yet within hours Washington had managed to check the retreat, form his troops, take and hold the high ground, and withstand a series of murderous assaults. It was beyond belief, as if Addison’s Cato had survived. And Washington certainly realized it. In the hours to follow, the commander in chief set aside time for his soldiery “to unite in thanksgiving to the Supreme disposer of human Events for the Victory which was obtained on Sunday.”

  Though Monmouth was perhaps less dramatically timed than the Battle of Saratoga, a valedictory note had been struck on what Washington described as that most “glorious and happy day” on the rolling green fields of central New Jersey. It was in fact the turning point in the War for American Independence. Though armed conflict would rage for another five years, the Battle of Monmouth Court House marked the end of the war’s classic period. From there on the struggle would move to the southern states, and Washington would not personally participate in another engagement until the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.

  There can be nothing more Washingtonian than the lengthy after-action report the commander in chief sent to Congress in the wake of Monmouth. In it he described, in specific detail, the “brave and spirited conduct” of his subordinates without once mentioning his own contributions. “Were I to conclude my account of this days transactions without expressing my obligations to the Officers of the Army in general, I should do injustice to their merit, and violence to my own feelings,” he wrote. “They seemed to vie with each other in manifesting their Zeal and Bravery. The Catalogue of those who distinguished themselves is too long to admit. The Behaviour of the troops in general . . . was such as could not be surpassed.” And in a grandly satisfying letter to his brother soon after the engagement, he predicted that the outcome would reduce the likelihood of George III and his war counselors’ deciding to send reinforcements to America.

  Oddly, undoubtedly ironically, it was left to another colonist whose people had been ground under the British heel to foresee the essence of the American Revolution. Nearly two decades before taking up the cause of the 13 colonies in Parliament in 1776, the Irish statesman Edmund Burke published a treatise delineating the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful, he posited, is smooth, polished, relatively small, and founded on pleasure. The sublime, by contrast, is vast and rugged, powerful and magnificent, and—most important—founded on pain. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully,” Burke concluded, “is astonishment.”

  The world may have been astonished that the resilience shown by the Continental Army across the winter of 1777–1778 would culminate in the Battle of Monmouth Court House. Washington knew better. He recognized that there would have been no victory near New Jersey’s sandy shores without the sublime sacrifice of Valley Forge, where over 2,000 American soldiers perished. No battle, no campaign of the war would take a higher toll. For those who survived, not least their inspired and inspiring commander in chief, the hardships they overcame had not so much transformed their innate character as revealed it.

  The Valley Forge winter, the greatest and most costly symbolic victory of the rebellion, had been a cold season out of Revelation, less the city of gold with its walls of glistening jasper. And the massive responsibilities that George Washington had singularly borne on that windswept plateau became the seed for what the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, citing the Gospel of Matthew, had once foreseen as the creation of the mythic “shining city on the hill.”

  No other man, at no other time, in no other place, can boast of such an achievement.

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  I. Simcoe had recognized the array of European medals on Steuben’s chest. Laurens urged Steuben to spur his horse; the middle-aged Prussian, his blood rising as if he were back on the Austrian front, had demurred and taken the time to draw his brace of horse pistols and fire them at his pursuers before fleeing.

  II. It was during one of these ferocious assaults that the legend of “Molly Pitcher” arose. Molly, whose real name may have been Mary Ludwig Hayes, was the wife of a Continental artilleryman. She had been fetching water for the troops, and when her husband fell dead, was said to have stepped in to man his cannon-swabbing post.

  III. Clinton’s numbers apparently did not include casualties from the one German regiment at the scene of the battle. John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton, meanwhile, constructed a fiction that, with deserters included, the British had lost some 2,500 men between Philadelphia and Sandy Hook. Even in the immediate throes of celebration, few found the figure credible.

  EPILOGUE

  Ten days after Gen. Clinton’s army sailed from Sandy Hook to New York—and only weeks after British and French vessels exchanged gunfire in the English Channel, marking the official beginning of hostilities between their two countries—the Comte d’Estaing’s 12 ships of the line carrying 4,000 French troops hove over the eastern horizon and dropped anchor in Delaware Bay. This event may not have been the precise beginning of the end for Great Britain’s colonial rule in America. But it certainly represented, as a future British prime minister would put it, “the end of the beginning.”

  As noted, George Washington would not personally participate in another military engagement until Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, three years after the Battle of Monmouth Court House. There were two underlying reasons for this. One was his obsession with recapturing New York, the loss of which remained, to his mind, the most ignominious chapter of his military career. Equally important was the insistence by the French that, as the British carried out their “southern strategy,” they be met with armed resistance at every turn throughout Georgia and the Carolinas. Washington, recognizing that the revolution relied on France’s navy and expeditionary force, was in no position to argue the point.

  Not surprisingly, Gen. Charles Lee’s advice prior to the Battle of Monmouth Court House that the Continentals should construct for the withdrawing enemy a “Bridge of Gold” to hasten their flight from New York proved, once again, erroneous. In fact, the British would not abandon the city until the ratification of the 1783 Treaties of Paris in which a sullen King George III—who drafted an abdication notice but never delivered it—recognized an independent United States. Washington could and did take solace, however, in having turned the tables on the British in New York. As he wrote to the Virginia statesman and militia commander Gen. Thomas Nelson not long after Monmouth, “It is not a little pleasing, nor less wonderful to contemplate, that after two years of Maneuvering . . . the British are reduced to the use of the spade and pick axe for defense.”

  Over the eight years of America’s Revolutionary War, including the five that followed the fateful winter at Valley Forge, George Washington was a paradox. He was a man of few words in person, but during the conflict he and the 32 aides he employed produced some 17,000 official documents, including 12,000 letters and orders. This coheres with the historian Garry Wills’s observation, “Before there was a United States, before there was any symbol of that nation—a flag, a Constitution, a national seal—there was Washington.” This was never more evident than at Valley Forge. The contrast between Washington’s larger-than-life leadership, as shown during th
at horrid winter, and his verbal tendency toward the terse characterized him for the rest of his life. His second presidential inaugural address remains, at 135 words, the shortest in American history. But it was his valedictory speech of 1796, upon his refusal of a third term, in which he warned the country that the most serious threat to our democracy—“the most frightful . . . and permanent despotism . . . at the expense of public liberty”—could well come from within is not only relevant today, but was so at the time. One need look no further than to the fate of the British officers whom he vanquished.

  Upon his return to England in July 1778 Gen. William Howe continued to receive public opprobrium over the loss of Gen. John Burgoyne’s army, criticism that would hound him to his grave. He also faced censure for his actions, or, more specifically, the lack thereof, during the Pennsylvania campaign. To clear his name, Howe demanded a parliamentary inquiry into his and his brother Richard’s conduct. Though the official probe was unable to confirm any charges of mismanagement or impropriety on either brother’s part, conventional sentiment had already hardened. General Howe published a narrative journal defending himself, to little avail. After losing a bid for reelection to the House of Commons, he spent the next decade or so on the fringes of various branches of British public service—including an appointment to the king’s privy council—until, in 1793, he was reinstated in the army as the French Revolutionary Wars swept the Continent. He saw no action. When his brother Richard died without leaving a male heir, he assumed the title, becoming the fifth Viscount Howe. As he was himself childless, the title died with him in 1814.