Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Admiral Richard Howe lived out his final years with his reputation somewhat more intact. Long out of favor with the government of Lord North—whom the admiral accused of failing to supply him and his brother with the matériel support to properly put down the rebellion—Adm. Howe was called back to England in September 1778, and spent the next three years campaigning against what he saw as the maladministration of the Royal Navy as the conflict with the Americans escalated into a world war. With the fall of North’s government in the wake of the surrender at Yorktown, Howe returned to the Admiralty in 1782 and accepted command of the Channel Fleet. He distinguished himself during various engagements against the French, Spanish, and Dutch navies and, sailing with an outnumbered squadron, led a heroic relief mission to the besieged Gibraltar peninsula. The following year, Howe was appointed first lord of the admiralty, a post from which he spearheaded a naval arms race against France and Spain. In 1788 he resigned the position after a political rift with Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, but he returned to duty two years later when a territorial dispute with Spain raised the threat of another war. When that conflict was averted, Howe continued to serve through the hostilities brought upon by the French Revolution before dying at the age of 73 in his London home in August 1799. For his lifelong service to the Crown he was posthumously honored with a monument at Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

  Though Gen. Henry Clinton remained the commander in chief of British forces in the Americas for three more years, his relationship with his subordinate Gen. Charles Cornwallis deteriorated steadily until it finally broke with Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. After that disaster, Clinton was recalled to England, where like Gen. Howe he published a defensive tract. His Narrative of the Campaign of 1781 in North America rather unsuccessfully attempted to blame the loss of the American colonies on Cornwallis, and the bitter diatribe exacerbated their feud. Cornwallis’s star inexplicably rose while Clinton spent his final years serving in and out of Parliament before dying just as he was about to assume the governorship of Gibraltar in 1794.

  John André’s demise was a bit more abrupt. On October 2, 1780, he was hanged as a spy. General Clinton had promoted André from captain to major following the British retreat from Philadelphia, and charged him with organizing all British intelligence activities in America. In that capacity André used his ongoing friendship with Peggy Shippen, who had remained in Philadelphia, to ensnare Benedict Arnold in the most notorious case of espionage in American history. After entering Philadelphia, Arnold conducted a whirlwind romance with Shippen which ended in their marriage less than a year after he had taken over as temporary “governor” of the city. Corrupted by Philadelphia’s high society, he lived well above his means and had accrued huge debts by the time he was transferred to command of the American fort at West Point. He also remained bitter over the lack of recognition for his accomplishments at Saratoga.

  With his new wife shuttling messages between him and André, in July 1780 Arnold offered to surrender West Point, the most strategic Continental outpost on the Hudson, to the British for a fee. At André’s urging, Gen. Clinton reluctantly allowed his spymaster to sail up the Hudson to personally negotiate the turnover. On September 21, the two had a secret meeting during which Arnold handed over a sheaf of papers, including a map of West Point detailing how he had systematically weakened the stockade’s defenses. André, wearing civilian clothes, was detained and questioned by a Continental patrol on his way back to his schooner. His captors discovered the papers in his boot—a British officer’s boot, no less—and he was arrested.

  When Arnold learned that André had been taken, he fled West Point on the very day that Washington arrived at the redoubt, leaving his wife to face the commander in chief. In a letter to John Laurens, Washington railed against Arnold’s “villainous perfidy” while acknowledging André as “an accomplished man and gallant officer.” He then ordered him tried by a military court. One week later André was hanged and buried beneath the scaffold from which he had swung. When confronted by Washington, Peggy Shippen Arnold feigned madness, and was eventually reunited with her husband in New York City. The two moved to London, where Arnold died in 1801. Peggy Shippen Arnold, whose Philadelphia family renounced her, outlived her husband by three years. They are buried in adjoining plots at Saint Mary’s Church in Battersea. André’s remains were disinterred in 1821, removed to England, and reburied beneath a marble monument among the kings and poets of Westminster Abbey’s “Heroes’ Corner.”

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  No such splendid fate awaited the coconspirator who lent his name to the so-called Conway Cabal. After recovering from the wounds received in his duel with John Cadwalader, the Irish-born Thomas Conway returned to France in November 1778. He was assigned to its army’s colonial service, and thereafter assumed the governorship of the French holdings in India. He was called back to France following the overthrow of Louis XVI, and commanded a royalist army in the south of the country before his capture by French revolutionaries. Condemned to the guillotine, he was granted a last-minute reprieve under mysterious circumstances probably stemming from France’s centuries-old solidarity with Ireland. From there Conway faded into the fog of history. He was rumored to have died in poverty somewhere in his home country around 1800.

  Thomas Mifflin, by contrast, became a leading figure in the formation of the political system of the United States. Continually dogged by charges of corruption during his tenure as the Continental Army’s quartermaster general, Mifflin resigned his military commission seven months after the Battle of Monmouth Court House in order to clear his name and return to politics. He never quite accomplished the first objective. He excelled at the second. Reelected to the Continental Congress as a Pennsylvania delegate in 1783, Mifflin, as the body’s presiding officer, personally accepted Washington’s resignation as commander in chief in December of that year. Six months later he appointed Thomas Jefferson as America’s minister to France. Mifflin went on to represent Pennsylvania as a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 before being elected as the first official governor of the state in 1790. He served in that capacity until his death in Lancaster in January 1800.

  Horatio Gates could only have wished for such a second act. After the American southern army’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of Camden, South Carolina, in 1780—arguably Britain’s greatest victory of the Revolutionary War—Gates’s reputation lay in tatters. His cowardly performance—he and several units of southern militiamen fled nearly 200 miles in three days while his 900 or so regular troops from the north stood fast to be slaughtered—was put in further relief by the heroism of his second in command Johann de Kalb. After Gates fled, it was Gen. de Kalb who attempted to rally the outnumbered Continentals in the face of successively more murderous bayonet charges. De Kalb fought hard to the end, receiving 11 wounds before finally falling. Like Casimir Pulaski, who died in his saddle after being riddled with grapeshot defending Charleston a year earlier, de Kalb’s legacy lives on in the numerous American streets, monuments, bridges, and even a city in Illinois named in his honor.

  Washington relieved Gates of command following Camden, and though the Continental Congress briefly reinstated him two years later, his tenure proved uneventful. He never again took the field. He retired from military service in 1783. History does not, but should, remember Gates for one sterling act—in 1790 he sold his Virginia plantation and, at the urging of John Adams, freed his slaves. He then moved to a farm in what are today the upper reaches of New York City’s Manhattan Island and served a term in the New York state legislature. He died in April 1806 and is buried in an unmarked grave in New York City’s Trinity Church cemetery.

  Gates, it will be recalled, was merely the second pretender to Washington’s position as commander in chief. The first, Gen. Charles Lee, remained a carbuncle of a creature until the end. Lee recovered rapidly from his stupor at the Battle of Monmouth Court House. Within days he was alternately bragging that his strategy and ta
ctics had placed his force on the brink of total victory when Washington’s arrival ruined all, and complaining that Washington had taken command in the field only when “victory was assured.” He then wrote to Washington blaming the “stupid” and “wicked” generals and aides surrounding him for misrepresenting his battlefield actions. “The success of the day,” he asserted,” “was entirely owing” to his own martial maneuvering. This final insolence sealed his fate.

  Washington accused Lee of misbehavior and a breach of orders during his “shameful retreat,” and ordered the general arrested and brought before a court-martial presided over by Lord Stirling. Lord Stirling and 11 of his fellow officers listened to testimony for six weeks before finding Lee guilty of disobeying orders, permitting a disorderly retreat, and disrespecting the commander in chief. Lee’s sentence, eventually certified by Congress, was a suspension from the army for one year. The verdict ended his military career. Not atypically, Lee labeled the proceedings a sham and soon thereafter published a self-vindicating tract that further insulted his former superior officer. This was too much for John Laurens.

  In late December 1778, with Alexander Hamilton acting as his second, young Laurens challenged Lee to a duel. Whether Washington condoned his aide’s action remains inconclusive, although he certainly could have stopped it. In any case, Lee accepted the ultimatum, and on the appointed morning a ball from Laurens’s pistol pierced Lee’s side, wounding but not killing him. Lee retired to his Shenandoah Valley farm to recover among his beloved dogs, and soon afterward sent to Congress a letter which so offended the delegates that they cashiered him from the army for good. Two years later, on a visit to Philadelphia, he was struck by a sudden fever. As he lay dying on the upper floor of a tavern, Lee requested that he be buried anywhere except a churchyard. Since throwing his lot in with the American cause for liberty, he wrote in a hastily dictated last will and testament, “I have kept so much bad company while living, that I do not choose to continue it when dead.” Fittingly, Lee’s final order was ignored. He was interred in the cemetery of Philadelphia’s Episcopal Christ Church, not far from the graves of Benjamin Franklin and four other signers of the Declaration of Independence.

  Seventy-five years later, in 1857, the official librarian of the New York State Historical Society was rummaging through a dusty file of Revolutionary War–era papers when he discovered a letter in what was later proved to be Charles Lee’s handwriting. It was addressed to the commander of all British forces in America, Gen. William Howe, and contained Lee’s detailed strategy for the subjugation of the colonial rebellion. That Charles Lee was a traitor surprised few. That he had refrained from boasting about it shocked many.

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  Just as there is no reliably precise figure for the number of troops who spent the winter of 1777–1778 at Valley Forge, so does the total number of men who fought for the Continental Army between April 19, 1775, and September 3, 1783, vary. The most accurate rolls indicate that some 232,000 men enlisted during those eight years, although those same rosters do not differentiate among the legions of multiple reenlistees. Historians generally agree that around 170,000 officers, noncommissioned officers, and privates took part in the conflict. In contrast to the many officers who published personal histories of their experiences, the unsung foot soldiers who fought for independence left little for posterity to ponder. Like the majority of warfighters from time immemorial, they marched or sailed into battle, served their country to the best of their abilities, and those lucky enough to return home went about their lives. With several notable exceptions.

  Many of the survivors among the 5,000 or so African Americans who took up the cause of American liberty were left bitterly disappointed when denied citizenship upon the ratification of a United States Constitution in 1787. Incredibly, when that document formally incorporated slavery into the law of the land, hundreds of black men who had stood side by side with white Continentals from Bunker Hill to Yorktown were cast back into chains. This blight on the nation’s founding was loudly protested by foreigners such as Lafayette and Kosciuszko, to no avail. The southern planters—including Washington and Jefferson—convinced the northern businessmen to continue to abide by the African Americans’ chattel status in the peculiar institution. Equally galling is the gap in the postwar histories pertaining to black soldiers who enlisted to free the country from British rule. As the Rev. William Howard Day put it in 1852 while addressing a convention of black veterans who had fought in the War of 1812, “Of the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolution, no attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record. Their history is not written; it lies upon the soil watered with their blood.”

  By contrast, the same cannot be said for the ordinary and obscure diarists such as Albigence Waldo and Joseph Plumb Martin who did put their experiences to paper with such erudite panache. Subsequent to the war, the surgeon Waldo continued his medical practice throughout New England—there are recovered letters addressed to him in Plainfield, Connecticut; in Foster, Rhode Island; and in Worcester, Massachusetts—before his death in 1793. It is thanks to Waldo’s journal that we can today envision the starving and half-naked Continental soldier at Valley Forge who “labors thro’ the Mud & Cold with a Song in his mouth extolling War and Washington.”

  “The sufferings of the Body naturally gain the Attention of the Mind,” the insightful Waldo wrote in that same diary entry. “And this Attention is more or less strong, in greater or lesser souls, altho’ I believe that Ambition & a high Opinion of Fame, makes many People endure hardships and pains with that fortitude we after Times observe them to do.”

  It is hard to imagine any trooper enduring with such fortitude more hardships than the perspicacious Joseph Plumb Martin. He went on to serve admirably through the conclusion of the American War for Independence, rising to the rank of sergeant. True to his Zelig-like character, in 1781 he was one of the sappers and miners digging siege lines around the British fortifications at Yorktown. Regarding the signal to open the bombardment of Cornwallis’s cornered army, he wrote that the sight of the American flag “waving majestically in the very faces of our implacable adversaries” evoked a spontaneous and continuous cheer from the nearly 8,000 French troops on hand, all shouting “Huzzah for the Americans.”

  Joseph Plumb Martin was honorably discharged in June 1783, and after several months wandering in New York state, he settled in Maine—then a northwestern province of Massachusetts—to take up farming in the frontier town of Prospect. Over his long life—he died in 1850 at the age of 89—he served variously as a Prospect selectman, justice of the peace, and town clerk while fathering five children with the former Lucy Clewley. He published his war recollections anonymously in 1830 to little acclaim. It was only after his death that A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier, originally entitled Yankee Doodle Dandy, was recognized as one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the era. An odd sidebar to Joseph Plumb Martin’s life story was a land dispute he engaged in with the Continental Army’s former chief artillery officer Gen. Henry Knox.

  After stepping down from his position as President Washington’s secretary of war in 1794, Knox maintained that 100 acres of land to which Joseph Plumb Martin had laid claim were in fact part of a 600,000-acre land grant seized from his Loyalist in-laws that rightly belonged to him. Knox’s argument was upheld in court, and Martin was ordered to pay Knox $170, over $3,200 in today’s dollars. Martin did not have the money, and in several plaintive letters begged Knox to allow him to keep the land, particularly the mere eight acres that he actually tilled. Knox never acknowledged these appeals, but neither did he ever take any action to collect the fee before his death in 1806.

  Before resigning from the army in 1784, Knox was the guiding force behind the establishment of a national naval academy and the Military Academy at West Point, where he was briefly commandant. He was also a vigorous proponent of a strong national government and a standing peacetime army, both concepts stro
ngly opposed by political leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock. When the latter forces prevailed, Knox left military service, returned to Boston, and engaged in sketchy land speculation deals, including the scheme to acquire the parcel upon which Joseph Plumb Martin had settled in Maine. His business acumen, however, stood in stark contrast to his military mastery, and in hindsight Knox was probably fortunate to be plucked from civilian life in 1789 to serve as Washington’s secretary of war.

  During his early tenure in that office he argued that dispossessing the Native Americans from their traditional homelands on the western fringes of the United States violated the fundamental laws of God and nature. His rhetoric was largely ignored as the nation expanded west along a line from western Georgia to Kentucky to the Old Northwest Territories of the Ohio Country. Nonetheless, Knox’s early calls for the benevolent treatment of the tribes could have been his lasting legacy. It was not to be. In time and at Washington’s urging, Knox came around to side with and oversee the nascent country’s “Indian Removal” policies of broken treaties, relocations, and exterminations. When Knox left government and returned to Maine, his attempts at cattle ranching, shipbuilding, brick making, lumber milling, and further real estate speculation as far west as the Ohio Valley all failed. He had fathered 13 children with his wife Lucy when, in 1806, he swallowed a chicken bone that lodged in his throat and became infected. He died three days later at the age of 56, leaving Lucy to sell off what remained of his insolvent estate to pay his creditors.