George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  Washington’s mood was scarcely improved by the seemingly disrespectful stance that Gates now adopted toward him. Instead of reporting his victory directly to Washington, the commander in chief, Gates left it to Congress to convey the news at second hand. As his Northern Department army was a separate force, technically independent of Washington, Gates could claim some justification in writing to Congress first. At the very least, however, this was a breach of etiquette guaranteed to goad a stickler for protocol like Washington; at worst, it suggested that Gates now considered himself Washington’s equal, or even superior. After congratulating Gates on his victory, Washington regretted “that a matter of such magnitude and so interesting to our general operations, should have reached me by report only, or through the channel of letters not bearing that authenticity, which the importance of it required, and which it would have received by a line under your signature, stating the simple fact.”86

  This mild rebuke was the first rumble in a storm that would soon reverberate through the Continental Army’s high command, presenting Washington with yet another crisis to surmount. Meanwhile, the continued presence of a powerful British force in Philadelphia was a more pressing concern. As Gates had disposed of the immediate threat within his department, Washington had sent his trusted aide Captain Alexander Hamilton to explain the plight of the main army and to request reinforcements. By now, Washington was contemplating a blow of his own to rival that landed against Burgoyne. It was nothing less than a full-scale assault to “dislodge the enemy from Philadelphia.” In advance of a scheduled council of war he briefed his general officers with a list of questions. When they met on October 29, Washington explained that, while Howe now commanded about 10,000 rank and file fit for duty, their own force numbered about 11,000 exclusive of garrisons; however, some 2,000 militia from Virginia and Maryland would be leaving camp soon when their enlistments expired. Asked whether their present strength and circumstances justified an attack, Washington’s generals were adamant that they did not.87

  But the notion of attacking the formidable and well-fortified British force in Philadelphia refused to die. It was revived in late November when Brigadier General Cadwalader, himself a Philadelphian, proposed a detailed plan for ejecting the invaders. Seeking to capitalize upon the absence of hefty British detachments in New Jersey, Cadwalader envisaged a coordinated assault involving divisions attacking both overland and by boat from the Delaware River. Ultimately, Cadwalader’s plan fared no better than Washington’s, yet a minority of generals—the Bavarian veteran Johann de Kalb, Lord Stirling, Anthony Wayne, and Charles Scott—supported his offensive. Their opinions, and those of other senior officers, were presented to Washington in writing and make for revealing reading. While some responses, from John Armstrong and John Paterson, for instance, were brief and forthright rejections of a “hazardous” plan likely to be attended with “fatal consequences,” other officers articulated their opposition in detailed reports that not only grappled with the practicality of the proposal, but sought to demonstrate their extensive knowledge of military affairs. For example, both John Sullivan and Henry Knox cautioned wariness of the redoubts that screened Howe’s army: in the course of his reading—which by the way had not been “inconsiderable”—Major General Sullivan had never come across a single instance where “a chain of redoubts covering the whole front on an army” was successfully assaulted; indeed, those thrown up by Peter the Great of Russia in a single night at Poltava in 1709 had defeated the “best army in the world,” led by the Swedish warrior-king Charles XII, one of the heroes whose busts Washington had hoped to install at Mount Vernon. Drawing upon more recent history to make the same point, Sullivan highlighted the fate of Donop’s Hessians at Red Bank. Knox also mentioned Poltava, reinforcing his argument by referencing the renowned French Army general and military theorist of the 1740s, Marshal Maurice de Saxe, who rated redoubts as “the strongest and most excellent kind of field fortification.”88 Saxe’s Reveries; or Memoirs upon the Art of War, first translated into English in 1757, would have been among the volumes that Knox perused in his Boston bookshop before turning from the theory to the reality of war.

  Such reasoned and informed feedback testified to the seriousness with which George Washington’s officers were approaching their task of defending American liberty. Ironically, this keen interest contrasted with the typically casual approach adopted by their professional British counterparts, who, when not fighting the enemy or one another, preferred to amuse themselves with gambling, drinking, and whoring. That December, Captain Ewald noted that the Americans had now “trained a great many excellent officers who very often shame and excel our experienced officers, who consider it sinful to read a book or to think of learning anything during the war.” Rummaging through the enemy’s haversacks, he had often found translations of “the most excellent military books”—for example, “the Instructions of the great Frederick to his generals.” Ewald’s comment was characteristically perceptive: a redcoat ensign who’d read Bland’s Treatise en route to Boston in 1774 and who had suggested that his brother officers might benefit from doing likewise, was mocked mercilessly for his pains: ribbing him as “Humphrey Bland” and “the young general,” they “soon laughed him out of his scheme for reforming the army.”89

  While Cadwalader’s proposal was understandably rejected as too risky, Sir William Howe soon emerged from behind his defenses, looking for a fight. Late on the evening of December 4, a powerful British column moved out from Philadelphia to attack the rebels: according to General Grey’s aide-de-camp, Captain André, their encampment extended along a ridge of hills for about three miles to the east of Whitemarsh. After testing both the right and left of Washington’s position, on December 6 Howe sought to repeat the strategy that had yielded results on Long Island and at Brandywine. A “demonstration” by Grey would distract Washington from the “real attack,” to be delivered by a larger force under Sir William’s personal command. But this time the plan failed, with no more than lively skirmishing as American units fell back to their formidable main position, from which Washington wouldn’t budge. By the next day, André noted, “most people thought an attack upon ground of such difficult access would be a very arduous undertaking” and also a fruitless one, as the enemy had secured a viable line of retreat. The army thereupon returned to Philadelphia, the rebels occasionally nipping at its heels.90 As in New Jersey six months earlier, Washington’s selection of a strong defensive position and careful “Fabian” tactics had kept Sir William at arm’s length.

  As 1777 drew to a close, and Howe’s well-supplied troops stayed snugly ensconced in Philadelphia, the overriding issue for Washington was to find viable winter quarters for his own cold and tattered army. In his General Orders of December 17, he acknowledged that the site he’d chosen was unlikely to be popular. Withdrawal to the heart of Pennsylvania, already crowded with refugees from Philadelphia, would expose a vast tract of fertile land to the ravages of the enemy, he argued. It was therefore essential for the army to adopt a position where it could not only “prevent distress” and “protect the country” but also enjoy “the most extensive security” from a surprise attack. In such a place they must make the best of things, building huts to keep them warm and dry through the coming winter. Washington was confident that officers and soldiers alike would “resolve to surmount every difficulty” with the same “fortitude and patience” that had sustained them through their last campaign. He pledged to “share in the hardship, and partake of every inconvenience.”91

  The location Washington had decided upon was a tiny settlement about eighteen miles northwest of Philadelphia, protected by the Schuylkill River and screening hills: Valley Forge.

  9

  Treason of the Blackest Dye

  Washington’s army had scarcely occupied its new winter quarters at Valley Forge when it became clear that it faced a potentially disastrous supply crisis. On December 23, 1777, Washington reported to Henry Laurens, Hancock’s succe
ssor as president of Congress, that a dearth of provisions left him utterly helpless to act against the enemy. That was bad enough, but with little to eat for days on end his long-suffering troops were growling and mutinous. Unless supplies reached camp immediately, Washington warned, the army faced a stark trinity of choices: “Starve—dissolve—or disperse.”1

  The troops were not only ravenous, but also lamentably clad: of the 11,000 who marched into camp, nearly 3,000 were “barefoot and otherwise naked.” Private Joseph Plumb Martin, a hard-bitten veteran of Kip’s Bay, White Plains, and Germantown who wasn’t given to exaggeration, witnessed a recurrence of what had become the Continental Army’s winter calling card, remembering how its path to Valley Forge could be tracked by yet more bloodstained footprints in the snow. Martin and his comrades now had little more than tatters of old clothing to defy the cutting wind and numbing cold of winter and were mostly without blankets. Lafayette recalled that the soldiers’ “feet and legs turned black with frostbite and often had to be amputated.”2

  Even now, Washington opposed coercing civilians into supplying his men with the provisions and clothing they needed so badly. Small seizures of food made in late December 1777, “in consequence of the most pressing and urgent necessity,” had “excited the greatest alarm and uneasiness,” even among those best disposed toward the Revolution. If repeated, Washington warned, such tough measures would have “the most pernicious consequences,” destroying popular support for the Continental Army.3

  The situation was all the more galling because the food, clothing, and equipment that the army needed so desperately lay stockpiled in storehouses and depots: the root cause of the problem was logistical, resulting from a total breakdown in the transportation network needed to shift supplies over rural Pennsylvania’s muddy roads. Both the commissary and quartermaster departments were to blame, with Congress, which controlled them, ultimately responsible for the shambles; for example, although General Thomas Mifflin resigned his post of quartermaster general in November 1777, it was three months before that vital vacancy was filled. As the Americans’ elected central government, Congress was already revealing the inherent weakness that would increasingly thwart Washington’s ambitions to take the war to the enemy: unsurprisingly for a body spawned by a revolt against British taxation policies, it lacked power to tax the states to fund the revolutionaries’ national war effort or even to enforce its requests for supplies and manpower.

  If food and clothing were scarce at Valley Forge, wood at least was plentiful, and by New Year’s Day 1778 the army was under cover, with the rank and file hunkering in the crude huts they had built for themselves. True to his word, and unlike many of his officers, Washington stayed with his men throughout their winter ordeal in Pennsylvania, just as he had kept close by them at Boston and Morristown. This contrasted with his attitude as commander of the Virginia Regiment between 1755 and 1758, when he’d often left his men in their spartan frontier posts to seek respite in more civilized quarters. At Valley Forge, Washington didn’t share all of his army’s hardships: given his rank and responsibilities, there was no expectation among contemporaries that he should. While the privates, sergeants, and junior officers roughed it in shanties, Washington and his staff were accommodated in cramped but relatively warm stone buildings or wooden farmhouses and ate regular, if rudimentary, meals. There was also a semblance of domesticity as Martha Washington, along with the wives of high-ranking officers such as Greene, Knox, and Lord Stirling, joined their menfolk in camp.

  Washington’s continued physical presence at Valley Forge was crucial for the army’s survival. Even if he was not shoeless, cold, hungry, and lousy, as he went his daily rounds he saw many men who were all of these things and through his unending correspondence spared no pains to ensure that Congress knew of their sufferings and sacrifices in the cause of American liberty. Following the stance that he had adopted since first accepting command of the Continental Army in June 1775, Washington sought to achieve his objectives though careful, respectful lobbying of key players in Congress. This, too, was a marked change from his attitude during the 1750s, when his letters to Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie grew petulant and brusque, and ultimately self-defeating.

  Prompted by Washington’s frequent reports from headquarters, which chronicled his army’s trials in telling detail, Congress took action. In January it appointed a “Committee at Camp,” instructed to work with Washington to overhaul the army’s organization, addressing such key issues as recruitment, clothing, supply, and discipline. The measures that Washington believed essential to address the “numerous defects” in the “present military establishment” were presented to the committee members in an extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive document. Besides urging pensions as a means of motivating his officers, Washington called for a formal annual draft from the militia to fill his depleted battalions. While certainly a “disagreeable alternative” to voluntary enlistments, drafting was now “an unavoidable one,” he argued: with the Continental Army more than 35,000 men short of the paper establishment, something drastic needed to be done. Earlier that month, Virginia had already resorted to conscription to fill its quota of fifteen Continental regiments, targeting unmarried militiamen, who received a $15 bounty and were obliged to serve for a year. Like militiamen balloted for the old Virginia Regiment during the 1750s, those wealthy enough to provide an able-bodied replacement could dodge the draft. In fact, when the “new army” was first authorized in September 1776, with the states each required to provide their share of men, the hiring of substitutes had become common. Having already served a six-month stint in the Connecticut “levies,” in early 1777, young Joseph Plumb Martin resolved to enlist in the Connecticut Continentals for “three years, or during the war.” Badgered to take the place of one of a squad of militiamen and act as their “scapegoat,” he recalled: “I thought, as I must go, I might as well get as much for my skin as I could.” While deploring such auctions, Washington was nonetheless prepared “to provide a man” in place of his cousin Lund, should he “happen to draw a prize in the militia.” To Washington, Lund was more valuable overseeing Mount Vernon than toting a musket against the British, but such responses merely exacerbated the extent to which the war for American liberty was fought by the most underprivileged and unfree members of American society, white and black alike.4

  Once the initial wave of martial enthusiasm, or rage militaire, of 1775 subsided, and it became clear that the war with Britain would be both long and bitter, most of those who endured the greatest dangers and hardships to secure American independence by serving in the Continental Army were not the land-owning citizen-soldiers of hallowed tradition, but rather drifters and marginalized men with little real stake in the society they were defending. Such propertyless men resembled the “volunteers” of the ill-fated American Regiment sent off to Cartagena in 1740 and likewise those who had filled the ranks of Washington’s Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. Many Continentals undoubtedly believed in their cause, but as Washington had acknowledged in the late summer of 1776, they soldiered on as much from necessity as from high-flown ideological reasons.5

  Drawn increasingly from the “lower orders” of American society, as the war ground on, the profile of the Continental Army’s manpower grew ever closer to the redcoats they faced across the battlefield. While the British Army’s rank and file typically took the king’s shilling because they needed a steady wage, they, too, were far from being the mindless scum lambasted by Charles Lee and other commentators. Many of them were unskilled “laborers,” but a significant proportion had worked at trades before enlisting, often in their early twenties. For example, forty-three-year-old Private William Bragg of the 63rd Foot, who was examined for his Chelsea pension in May 1787, was a weaver from Darlington, County Durham. He’d spent twenty-one years with his regiment and not only was “worn out” but had been wounded in the left thigh at Germantown. His comrade, Corporal John Ingram, aged forty-two,
had enlisted in the 63rd at the same time. Born in Taunton, Somerset, and formerly a barber, Corporal Ingram was described as “wounded in the head, right leg and left thigh on Long Island, North America.” A veteran of the 23rd Foot (or “Royal Welch Fusiliers”), who appeared before the Chelsea Board in 1790, must have been among the very first British casualties of the conflict. A forty-four-year-old laborer from Burnley, Lancashire, Corporal Matthew Haymer was “wounded in his right thigh and in his left foot at Lexington, in New England, on the 19th April, 1775, also in the right shoulder at Bunker’s Hill on the 17th June 1775.” These injuries had not stopped him serving throughout the American war, accumulating a total of twenty-four years with his regiment. Unsurprisingly, he too was “worn out.”6

  As these cases show, British soldiers normally enlisted for “life,” although during the American Revolutionary War, shorter terms, for “three years or the duration,” were introduced, along with more generous bounties, paralleling practice in the Continental Army.7 Even with such incentives, after 1776, Britain struggled to keep her battalions across the Atlantic up to strength. With precious few injections of manpower, regiments were loath to shed any trained soldier still capable of marching and fighting, which is why multiply wounded men like Bragg, Ingram, and Haymer were back on duty as soon as they could walk. For all his frustrations with the Continental Army’s fluctuating strength, unlike his opponents, Washington could at least draw upon a reservoir of local replacements. Although Congress shied away from enforcing conscription, other states besides Virginia authorized their own drafts, offering wildly different bounties, conditions, and terms of service. This meant that besides a kernel of long-term veterans like Private Martin, the Continental Army was topped up by relays of recruits drafted for shorter spells—twelve, nine, or even six months. The system was wasteful, as the short-timers had scarcely been trained before their enlistments expired, yet they sustained Washington’s army after the initial pool of “volunteers”—the kind of rootless, hard-up and adventurous men most likely to succumb to the blandishments of the recruiting parties—had run dry.8