Washington was now, in the middle of the hot and complex summer of 1777, faced with a puzzle that stretched the length of the eastern seabord of the new nation. The British had divided themselves into two armies, which necessitated the Americans doing the same. Howe, with the main army, was advancing on Philadelphia, and Washington would have to deal with him in some manner. But what exactly would be Burgoyne’s move in the north? And how should the Americans prepare for that threat?
Whatever plans Washington was developing on the matter were thrown into confusion when he learned that Congress had decided to remove General Schuyler as commander in the north and replace him with Horatio Gates. Schuyler had been taking steps against what he expected would be a major push southward by Burgoyne. But he had enemies in Congress. The feelings there were partly related to his being an aristocratic New Yorker of Dutch background: all characteristics that alienated him to the New Englanders. When, without so much as a fight, Burgoyne’s army took Fort Ticonderoga, 100 miles north of Albany, blame fell on Schuyler.
Washington had had a comfortable rapport with Schuyler. The Virginian and the Dutch New Yorker were alike in their sensibilities, their belief in the nobless oblige of the gentry, their sense that members of their class were the natural leaders of the rebellion. They spoke the same language. Washington had an entirely different relationship with the blustery and bawdy Gates. They had known each other for more than twenty years. Their careers had followed parallel trajectories, but Gates’s had been the path that was denied to Washington. Gates, an Englishman by birth, had risen as a commissioned officer in the British army. He had served alongside Washington on Braddock’s march to the Forks of the Ohio, and had fought with him against the French on that fateful day in 1755. Eventually, he had left the British army, bought a large tract of land in the Shenandoah Valley and moved there in 1772. When the war broke out—he had actually been a guest of Washington’s at Mount Vernon when news of the clashes at Lexington and Concord reached there—he joined the American cause.
For all the familiarity he had with Washington, Gates didn’t think the Virginian was up to the job he had been given. Washington’s vacillations and missteps on the battlefield seemed to bear out what Gates feared, and fueled the campaign he undertook to be named as Washington’s replacement. Tensions between the two men had first come to the surface in May. Gates was at the time serving under Schuyler in the Northern Army. He complained to the commander in chief that, in denying a shipment of tents for the troops in the north, Washington had favored his own army in the south. Gates accused him of “saying This Army has not the same Necessities, or does not require the same Comforts, as the Southern Armies. . . .” Gates’s very bluntness expressed, at the level of manners, the differences between the two men. Washington was appalled at the tone of the man’s letter. He wrote back stiffly, “I cannot help taking notice of some expressions in your letter,” and assured Gates that the northern army was “as much the object of my Care and Attention as the one immediately under my command.”
In June, Washington got a letter from John Hancock about routine matters the Congress was dealing with. It was the postscript that must have unnerved him: “Genl Gates is here; I hope he will soon be establish’d in a Command equal to his Merit.” Gates, it seemed, was in Philadelphia, personally and nakedly promoting his ambition.
By the time Gates got the commission to replace Schuyler, in early August, Burgoyne’s plans were set: he would march southward, using the Hudson River as a means to cleave the colonies in two. But so too was the elaborate defense that Schuyler had prepared. Gates, in effect, inherited the plan, and was poised to accept praise if things went well for the Americans and to deflect blame onto Schuyler if they did not.
The situation in the north bedeviled Washington. While he now had to concentrate all his attention on Howe, Gates, with his ambition to replace him, was ever-present in his mind.
Howe, meanwhile, had undertaken an exotic maneuver with his vast floating army, landing his troops well south of Philadelphia and marching overland to invade the city. In doing so, he seemed to be trying to lure Washington into a classical battle, to be fought in matched columns. And, despite having recognized repeatedly that his chances were better in nontraditional combat, Washington took the bait. Gates may have been part of his calculation. In his worry about being removed from command, yet again he succumbed to the idea that greater honor came from traditional battle, from executing “one bold stroke.”
So he fought. On September 11, with the air still heavy with late-summer heat, Washington lined up his army—14,000 strong—against Howe’s 15,000 better-equipped men, at a place called Brandywine Creek. He intended to use the natural barrier of what was less a creek than a river to help block the British advance to Philadelphia. He compounded the error of submitting to a straight-ahead battle by committing an even less forgivable one: not fully familiarizing himself with his own terrain. He was unaware that a simple ford of the river existed to the north. Howe’s scouts found it, and it allowed Howe to stage a trap. He sent 5,000 men headlong at the American center, with enough murderous drive to convince Washington that it was the main force, while the actual main body of troops swung around to the north. All morning and well into the afternoon the Americans fought, with Washington visible high atop his horse, encouraging his men toward what he hoped would be a smashing victory. Then, at four in the afternoon, he realized how thoroughly he had been fooled. A thunder of artillery fire signaled the entrance onto the battlefield of the main part of the British army. The Americans were stunned as they pivoted and met the onslaught. The firing of the British muskets was so thick that branches and twigs snapped in the trees overhead; to one soldier the falling leaves made it seem like autumn. As the British lines plunged forward, they crashed fully into the Americans, and a melee of hacking and stabbing ensued. An American private recorded the gory death match with semiliterate impressionism in his diary: “Cannons Roaring muskets Cracking Drums Beating Bumbs Flying all Round, men a dying woundeds Horred Grones which would Greave the Heardiest of Hearts to See Such a manner as this.”
Late that evening, an exhausted Washington dictated a letter to John Hancock. “Sir,” he began, “I am sorry to inform you that in this day’s engagement we have been obliged to leave the enemy masters of the field.” Mindful that Gates might upstage him in the northern theater, he tried as best he could to spin the terrific loss to his advantage. Rather than accept responsibility for failing to reconnoiter the area, he blamed his error on “intelligence.”
Nevertheless, members of Congress and the press began to openly question Washington’s leadership. Many would have agreed with a young colonel who fought under Washington at Brandywine, who said that prior to entering his service “I had an exalted opinion of General Washington’s military talents,” but that after the battle “my opinion was exceedingly lowered.”
Howe’s troops marched into Philadelphia on September 26. Congress had fled so rapidly that members hurriedly packed up what things they could and rushed out into the night, eventually reconvening 100 miles west, in the village of York. Meanwhile, on learning that Howe had divided his army in two, with one part camped in the city of Philadelphia and the other on the outskirts at Germantown, Washington, truly desperate for a victory, decided to make a surprise lunge at the forces in Germantown. He had his men swarm the village at dawn from four directions. The British were indeed surprised that the Americans would launch an attack so soon after their defeat. But Howe had picked the location for its defensibility, and Washington hadn’t accounted for the dense early morning fog that lay over wheat fields and cobbled streets, confusing his men as they tried to execute his overly intricate plan of battle. The fight was short but intense; the result was not what he had hoped. “Upon the whole, it may be said the day was rather unfortunate, than injurious,” he reported to John Hancock. Still, 150 more of his men had given up their lives in trying to get him a victory. He was now doubly conscious of the
need to protect his reputation, and he stressed to the president of the Congress that the decision to attack was not his alone but rather involved “my Genl Officers, who were unanimously of Opinion, that a favourable Opportunity offered to make an Attack. . . .”
While Washington’s army was recuperating from its back-to-back losses, stupendous news came from the north. Gates had defeated Burgoyne’s army on the banks of the Hudson. Burgoyne had begun his advance down the Hudson River valley. On taking over, Gates found that Schuyler’s troops had nicely prepared the landscape, felling trees and blowing up bridges, to make it more difficult for an army to move through. Meanwhile, throughout the summer, as Burgoyne had waited for reinforcements, more and more militiamen had streamed into the American headquarters, swelling the rebel force to more than 9,000 men. Gates had at his disposal a brilliant Polish military engineer named Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who chose the place from which the Americans would make their stand. About 30 miles north of Albany the land rose into a bluff known as Bemis Heights. From here, cannons could reach both the river and the road that ran along it, so that whichever way the British tried to advance they would be at the mercy of the American guns. Burgoyne tried to outmaneuver by splitting his army into three columns. But by using the terrain to his advantage, as Washington had not, Gates trounced the British general. At Saratoga, on October 17, Burgoyne surrendered his army to Gates. One by one, as gawping rows of American troops looked on, 5,895 soldiers laid their muskets on stacks and gave themselves up.
As Washington knew would happen, Gates was lauded as the hero of the battle: indeed, the hero of the American army. Rather than be magnanimous, Gates expressed his animosity toward Washington by sending word of his victory to Congress and to two other generals but not to the general who was his commander in chief. In his general orders to his own troops, Washington took the proper step of formally lauding the success, but he did not highlight Gates’s role, choosing instead to congratulate “the army, on the success of the American Arms, at the northward.” He also ordered, in celebration, a gill of rum for each of his men and a 13-gun salute.
Gates crowed. He was convinced the victory at Saratoga was all his and that it was decisive. “Burgoyne and his whole army have laid down their arms, and surrendered themselves to me and my Yankees,” he trumpeted to his wife, and went on to add, “If Old England is not by this lesson taught humility, then she is an obstinate old Slut, bent upon her ruin.” Certain men in Congress and in the army now actively plotted for Washington to be sacked and Gates installed in his place. “Look at the characters of both!” Benjamin Rush declared to John Adams, referring to Gates and Washington. “The one on the pinnacle of military glory—exulting in the success of schemes planned with wisdom, & executed with vigor and bravery. . . . See the other outgenerald and twice beated . . . forced to give up a city the capital of a state and After all outwitted by the same Army in a retreat.”
Rush was one of the members of a cabal—which seemed to be led by Thomas Conway, a general on Washington’s staff—intent on removing the commander in chief from power. Washington’s friends warned him of the plot. He was at the moment dealing with funding problems, with trying to find winter quarters for his army and weapons and supplies for recently arrived recruits, and perhaps most of all with the state of his men’s feet: “Our distress for want of Shoes & stockings is amazingly great,” he lamented, so much so that many soldiers were unable to walk, let alone fight. The fact that some leaders were plotting to unseat him shouldn’t have been surprising, but it exasperated him, apparently to the point of considering resigning. “I have been a slave to the service,” he complained to Richard Henry Lee, a fellow Virginian. “I have undergone more than most men are aware of, to harmonize so many discordant parts but it will be impossible for me to be of any further survice if such insuperable difficulties are thrown in my way.”
He decided to confront the apparent conspirators directly. He wrote a letter to Conway that consisted only of a quoted sentence from one of Conway’s letters to Gates, referring to Washington as—and the phrase must have echoed in his brain—“a weak general.” The letter’s terseness, its utter lack of commentary, made it a particularly icy way of informing a man who was currently in his service that he was aware of his machinations. He signed off with a curt, “I am Sir Yr Hble Servt.” He also wrote to Gates.
He hoped to have thus quelled the plot. However, in November, Congress named Gates to a new position, president of the Board of War, which technically put him above Washington. And Gates’s resounding victory at Saratoga continued to resonate in the increasingly chilly autumn air. It was being sung about, recounted around blazing hearths in taverns. It thrilled Americans with hope, even as it caused George Washington the gravest concern.
Perhaps the most talked-about event in London during the summer of 1777 was the case of William Dodd, a popular clergyman whose taste for the good life led him to spend beyond his means. Desperate to get out of debt, he committed forgery and got caught. When a wildly excessive sentence of death was pronounced, the case catapulted to the level of an outright sensation. Samuel Johnson himself took up the parson’s cause, penning an essay under Dodd’s name that appeared while the clergyman languished on death row. When pressed to confess his authorship, with the claim that Dodd did not have the literary powers to write it, Johnson remarked (in a turn of phrase that would become an enduring part of the language), “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The essay was to no avail, and Dodd’s public hanging shocked the nation.
There was, of course, much else to occupy Londoners that summer. The carpenter John Harrison, who had recently died, was being memorialized for his invention of a device for determining longitude at sea, which would save mariners from being lost. There were new books published about the wonders of electricity and about “diseases peculiar to women.”
And there was the ongoing saga of the American war. The news had been mostly favorable of late, with accounts of Howe, the wily old general, outwitting Washington on his own turf. But the government’s finances were dire, and many continued to question the wisdom of it. One commentator gloomily compared the state of affairs in England with that in other European nations: “In France, the minister is reducing taxes. . . . In Holland, the Dutch are augmenting their navies, increasing their trade. . . . In Russia, the empress leaves no stone unturned to promote manufactures and trade . . .” while “In poor Old England, the minister is intent to find out articles that will bear fresh taxation, to support a war against her once best friends, at a time when she is least able to support it.” There was the sense that one note of sour news from America would swing the pendulum of public opinion sharply to the negative.
For much of the summer Lord George Germain had reason to bustle about Whitehall with a cheery disposition. His generals were doing their job. Soon, surely, would come news that the armies of the north and south had converged to execute his grand strategy. Roman severity was being brought to bear on the Americans.
Then, in September, came a confusing sequence of reports. General Howe had packed his men into ships and seemingly vanished. They had not sailed north. “The Howes are gone the Lord knows wither,” Horace Walpole wrote. Germain was among the most perplexed, for he had given Howe orders to move northward. In fact, it was Howe’s own idea to divert from the master plan and move on Philadelphia, and to do it by sea. He was banking on intelligence that Pennsylvania seethed with loyalists who were eager to join the conquering army, as well as on the notion that taking the capital would demoralize the rebels.
Germain updated King George, putting a positive shine on things: “The progress of General Burgoyne is as rapid as could be expected, and the difficulties he has surmounted do him great honor.” Germain also told the king, however, that he had received a letter from Burgoyne in which “he complain’d of not hearing from Sir. W. Howe, or of not knowing anything of his operations. He had dispa
tched Ten Messengers to New Yorke, and not one of them had returned.” A few days later, Germain, who was beginning to fear for the strategy he had devised, insisted to a colleague that if Howe did not head north to complete the strangulation of the colonies it would be “the more honour to Burgoyne if he does the business without any assistance from New York.” Privately, though, Germain was worried that Howe had gone off mission.
Finally, in October, a dispatch from Howe arrived. Germain tore it open and learned that his general had altered his plans and “intended for the recovery of the province of Pensilvania,” with the thought that after doing so he would head north to meet Burgoyne. But where Howe had hoped for a friendly reception, he had been “greatly impeded by the prevailing disposition of the inhabitants, strongly in enmity against us; many having taken up arms, and by far the greater number deserted their dwellings, driving off at the same time their stock of cattle and horses.” He was forced to acknowledge that he would not be able to meet the northern army.
This was a blow. It may have felt like a premonition, for there was worse to come. At the beginning of December, Germain received a letter that had been written on October 20, at the Albany mansion of Philip Schuyler, where General John Burgoyne had been invited to stay after relinquishing his army. Rumors had trickled into London over the past few days, but now Germain absorbed the letter’s contents with growing incredulity: Indians had proven unfaithful allies. Many American loyalists had deserted the army. There was the heat, the trudging across difficult forest countryside. The letter was a catalogue of explanations for Burgoyne’s failure, for his having—surrendered his entire army. Surrendered his entire army. The general took pains to note that he had won favorable terms: his men would not be imprisoned but shipped back to England, once they swore never again to take up arms in America.
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