Conway, however, was becoming more difficult. In August, Washington received another agitated letter from Major General Stirling, contending that Conway
has endeavoured to throw Contempt on every order I have Issued.… On [the brigade major’s] Informing him, that I had sent for a Guard … his Answer was, “Tell my Lord I do refuse him the Guard”.… Nothing would at present have prevailed on me, to have [complained again], but the InJustice I should do myself in Risqueing my reputation in the hands of a man Capable of disobeying my Orders, and that perhaps at a time when it may be attended with the most Serious Consequences to the public as well as myself.
Washington again made allowances for Conway, needing every experienced officer he could muster for what was expected to be a large and potentially decisive battle against the British for control of Philadelphia.
In the midst of the American army’s crossing of the Schuylkill to go to that fight against the British, Coudray decided not to dismount while he was being ferried across. His mount reared, and horse and rider fell into the river and drowned. Although Congress posthumously promoted Coudray to major general and gave him proper obsequies, the artillerist was not widely mourned. Many of those he had brought with him made plans to return to France. Congress then appointed Duportail as inspector general of the engineers.
On September 11, 1777, Washington’s twelve thousand men fought eighteen thousand British and Hessians at Brandywine Creek in the largest set battle of the war. For the first time the Americans had reasonable amounts of gunpowder, ammunition, and field artillery. However, over the course of a very long day the Continental forces were defeated, mainly due to poor decisions by Washington, attributable to some bad information coming to him but also to his being outmaneuvered by Sir William Howe. Even so, the British were impressed by the ferocity of the Americans in the fight and by their resistance to panic. Not long after the battle Howe entered Philadelphia from the land, bypassing the riverine defenses that were to have shielded the capital.
Brandywine Creek was a calamity for the Continentals but not a total disaster because the bulk of Washington’s army was able to avoid capture. In significant measure their escapes were due to the officers managing orderly retreats. Among those specifically praised for such actions at Brandywine were Armand, Fleury, Conway, and Lafayette. And the day had been very difficult; Conway later said that he “never saw so close and severe a fire” as at Brandywine at the head of the Ninth Pennsylvania regiment; his incessant parade-ground training of his troops paid off in their discipline under fire. The only outright failure, among the French officers, was Borre’s; his leadership of a Maryland division was so bad, and his post-battle explanations were so unsatisfactory, that upon being threatened with a court-martial he resigned.
Lafayette distinguished himself while stemming an unruly retreat. Turning his troops around, he rallied them and directed their fire at the British until the enemy came within twenty yards, and only then led them to safety. Blood from the marquis’s left calf was seen brimming into his boot. He was still in the saddle twelve miles later when, in obvious pain, he used his horse to block troops from making a second poor retreat. Later Stirling’s French-speaking aide, Captain James Monroe, helped the marquis off his horse, and then Washington—according to Lafayette’s later recollection—instructed the surgeons, “Take care of him as if he were my son.”
The commander and the marquis were adopting each other. Lafayette, fatherless since the age of two, courted Washington’s paternal favor. Washington, also fatherless at an early age and without children of his own, was already acting as a substitute father to Hamilton and other aides. Washington’s usual pattern was only to become close to an officer after that officer had demonstrated his capability and bravery in battle. The commander judged Lafayette’s wounds and battlefield feats as evidence that the marquis was worthy of his trust. Their personal relationship, composed of equal parts paternal tutelage, filial devotion, mutual admiration, and friendship, helped their nations toward acceptance of a partnership alliance.
Among the other foreign fighters who fought well at Brandywine was a Pole, Kazimierz Pulaski. Washington had given him command of his personal cavalry guard, and some accounts have Pulaski saving Washington’s life by heading off an attack on the general’s position. In France, Pulaski and de la Balme had been rivals for the regard of the elderly philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and in America they vied for the position of cavalry expert. Congress had previously appointed de la Balme as a colonel and inspector general of cavalry, but after Brandywine they brevetted Pulaski as a brigadier general of cavalry. De la Balme’s appeal to Congress at this indignity was fruitless—a friendly biographer characterized his protests as containing “soupçons [of] presumption, vanity, and egoism”—and so he decided to return home. But he did not do so, instead concocting a scheme to invade Canada with a mounted regiment that he would underwrite and lead.
* * *
Recuperating at Bethlehem, Lafayette realized that lack of information in France about the tides of battle in America, along with the carping of returned French officers, would cause Louis XVI, Vergennes, and the council of ministers to worry—not about the Americans winning but about them losing. The question would arise: If the Americans were on the verge of collapse, should France augment its aid to prop them up, or diminish that assistance to prevent Great Britain from redirecting its ire across the Channel? Lafayette felt that proper publicity in France would help the cause, and asked his wife to circulate his letters. In one he instructed her how to respond should people in France assert that the war in America was going badly. In another he provided ammunition to counter expected expressions of sour grapes from fellow officers who had been sent home from America prematurely.
Those sour grapes were also the target of a French artillerist who had been in America during 1777 and returned to write a highly sympathetic analysis of the Continental army’s strengths, interlaced with a critique of certain French officers in America. While French officers who were “self-disciplined, intelligent, fair to their inferiors, and sympathetic to the principle of equality” assimilated well in America, others who lacked those qualities did not. In words that could be applied to the conduct of Conway, Coudray, and Borre, the artillerist derided those “who do not understand how an officer should act, who dress up in elaborate uniforms, who cause a lot of trouble—officers who are a plague to others and no good to their friends [and who] are particularly enraged by the fact that they find themselves completely ignored in a country where no consideration is given to birth, name, rank, wealth, or letters of recommendation.” He recognized that some French officers looked askance at the American army because of what they viewed as its lax discipline, but:
The fact that the [American] soldiers do not show a sense of discipline and respect for their officers when they are not on guard duty or in ranks can be explained by the national character and by the spirit of liberty, independence, and equality that these people possess. Yet whenever insubordination becomes too flagrant it is punished, though … the punishments inflicted take into account the fact that except for the difference in military rank the offender is the equal of the man he has offended.
De Kalb had reached similar conclusions. He liked America and its army, and regretted only that he had not obtained his commission in time to fight at Brandywine. He had, however, seen enough of Washington to advise de Broglie that the American commander was “the most amiable, kind-hearted, and upright of men [even though] as a General he is too slow, too indolent, and far too weak; besides, he has a tinge of vanity in his composition, and overestimates himself.” And so, despite Washington’s shortcomings as demonstrated at Brandywine, de Kalb in the same letter began to break the news to de Broglie that making him the leader of the American forces was “totally impractical [because] it would be regarded no less an act of crying injustice against Washington, than as an outrage on the honor of the country.”
De Kalb was not ye
t on Washington’s staff on October 3 when the commander decided to make a surprise attack on the British at Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia, where Howe had stationed some forces. But the British had set up well there for defensive purposes, and so the attack did not surprise them. Conway’s Ninth Pennsylvania was again assigned a leading position, but this time, according to Laurens, who observed Conway that day, he had no stomach for the fighting. Later Laurens and a second officer wanted to accuse Conway of cowardice and provide evidence at a court-martial, but Washington dissuaded them. During the battle other French officers acquitted themselves well, Fleury, for instance, having his horse shot out from under him and taking several balls through his hat. Artillery captain Thomas Antoine Maudit du Plessis and Laurens attacked in tandem, Laurens throwing himself into the battle with enough fervor that afterward he could inform his father that he’d been promoted and was no longer a “supernumerary.”
Amid dense fog and the confusion produced by several American units wearing clothing that was mistaken for British and that drew friendly fire, during the Germantown battle 152 Continentals were killed, 521 wounded, and 438 captured. Washington contributed to the defeat by directing too many troops to assault one relatively small target. Nonetheless, Germantown demonstrated the Americans’ grit and willingness to attack even when the odds were against them. Reporting the Battle of Germantown to Congress, Washington tried to have it judged not by the fact that twice as many American as British had died but by his contention that had there been no fog the Continental army would have won.
Congress was not convinced, and an effort to curb Washington’s power gathered momentum. It was fueled in part by the French officers’ demonstrations of battlefield expertise, and particularly by the self-reports of Conway, with whom the representatives could converse in English and who unfailingly touted his own prowess. Congress contemplated reestablishing the Board of War to oversee Washington’s actions, and to commission an inspector general with the power to examine any army unit or installation and report to Congress, frankly and outside the military chain of command, regarding the troops, their discipline, their morale, and their battle readiness. The name of a certain Irish-born French militarist of vast experience was mentioned as the leading candidate for the position.
7
“If ever destruction was complete, it was here.” —Joseph Plumb Martin
In the summer of 1777 the French army held a series of war games in which the forces of General Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, fifty-two, opposed those of Marshal de Broglie. The games were intended in part to test the relative efficacy of Rochambeau’s “ordre mince” (thin lines) versus de Broglie’s “ordre profond” (deep lines), but the true differential turned out to be the protocols recently codified by Saint-Germain—even as the minister was being replaced in office. When Rochambeau’s men prevailed in the first set of games, de Broglie protested that the maneuver his opponent had used was improper since it was not sanctioned in the Saint-Germain ordinance. Rochambeau demurred, pointing out the page and section in which the maneuver was detailed. During a second round, de Broglie’s forces triumphed, and afterward he sent a gracious note to Saint-Germain, asserting that Rochambeau’s inadequate attention to Saint-Germain’s rules had allowed de Broglie to best the younger general.
* * *
Military appointments made for political reasons are more subject to change than those made on merit. Thus Saint-Germain was cashiered by Maurepas on grounds other than competence; and in America, Congress three times in a few months changed the general in charge of the Northern Department. In the spring Congress replaced General Philip Schuyler with Horatio Gates, mostly to separate Gates from Washington, of whom he had been openly critical.
Gates readied a headquarters in Albany while he fended off the political machinations of Schuyler to retake the command. He sent Kościuszko to Fort Ticonderoga to review its defenses. “We are very fond here of making Block houses, and they are all erected in the wrong places,” Kościuszko reported. He found defenses being built too close to the fort. He later contended that he was distressed that no fortifications were being considered for the highest point near the fort, Sugar Loaf Hill, later called Mount Defiance, and that on this and other matters he clashed with Ticonderoga’s resident American engineer, Jeduthan Baldwin. However, his contemporary correspondence, and that of Gates, does not mention the Mount Defiance idea, perhaps because they considered its sides too steep to permit dragging cannons and building supplies to its crest. Fort Ticonderoga’s vulnerability had not been rectified by the time Congress fired Gates and reappointed Schuyler to head the Northern Department.
On the night of July 4, 1777, John Burgoyne’s forces, sweeping down from Canada, occupied that strategic high point near Ticonderoga and started dragging cannons to the top. Burgoyne later commented that the Americans’ “manner of taking up the ground at Ticonderoga convinces me that they have no men of military science.” After the Americans realized that the enemy’s forces and cannons were on the heights, General Arthur St. Clair and his council unanimously agreed that the fort had to be abandoned, an operation that would take place in the middle of the next night. St. Clair later stated that his reasons for leaving Ticonderoga owed more to the greater size of Burgoyne’s forces than to his presence on the heights. Matthias-Alexis Roche de Fermoy, a French participant in the American war councils, almost ruined that escape when in a drunken stupor at two in the morning he accidentally set fire to his camp, illuminating the preparations. A floating bridge over the lake, begun by Baldwin and finished by Kościuszko, enabled the escape. Washington called the loss of Fort Ticonderoga “not within the Compass of my reasoning,” but was relieved that the army avoided capture and hoped that “the Confidence derived from [Burgoyne’s] Success will bring him into Measures, that will in their consequences be favorable to us.”
Washington believed that the British plan to end the American Revolution was for Burgoyne’s forces, marching south and conquering as they went, to join Howe’s, which were marching north with the same objective, and to have their conjoint, end-to-end control of the North River fatally separate the radical New England colonies from the others. Burgoyne had indeed suggested such a plan, and since landing in Canada in May had been attempting to complete his part. But Howe had not agreed to the plan, and he was the senior commander. As summer ripened, he advised Burgoyne that his activities near Philadelphia precluded joining his army to Burgoyne’s. “One can only speculate about Howe’s motives,” writes the historian Don Higginbotham, and suggests that Howe was known to dislike “interior campaigning,” preferring operations in which his troops could be transported and supplied by sea, as they had been to the Philadelphia area.
Henry Clinton, in charge of the British forces in New York, also was hesitant to send his men north to aid Burgoyne, but Burgoyne pushed ahead anyway. However, after recapturing Ticonderoga his pursuit of the Continentals ran into trouble, due to the ingenuity of Kościuszko and Baldwin. With three hundred troops Kościuszko felled trees to block roads as soon as American troops had passed them, destroyed bridges, and dammed and diverted streams to frustrate Burgoyne’s advance. Baldwin made similar efforts. The British were forced to build forty bridges and causeways, and to take twenty days to traverse twenty-two miles, a rate of progress that quickly ate up their supplies just as their supply lines from Canada were also being compromised. Burgoyne exacerbated his difficult travel by his insistence on bringing along fifty-two cannon, some too heavy for the roads and bridges.
Congress had reacted to the loss of Ticonderoga by once again removing Schuyler from command and giving the Northern Department to Gates. These abrupt changes of command reflected the desperation afflicting everyone on the Rebel side, from the civilian overlords to the frontline troops and militia. Washington, almost alone, refused to give in to hopelessness, engage in finger-pointing, or foster failure. Even though he knew that Gates wanted to oust him as supreme commander
, Washington provided Gates with the best resources and the most battle-tested frontline commander and troops, Daniel Morgan and his five hundred sharpshooters, plus units from Massachusetts. He also persuaded Gates to make more use of a man he knew Gates did not like, Major General Benedict Arnold, whose resignation Washington had refused to accept once he learned of the loss of Fort Ticonderoga. He pressed Gates to accept Arnold on account of Arnold’s extensive knowledge of the North River valley and fighting abilities. Should Gates’s forces be unable to fend off Burgoyne’s, Washington knew, more would be lost than an army. The Revolution itself would be in peril.
The American tactics first paid off at battles near Bennington, Vermont in late August. Burgoyne’s forces suffered, losing 10 percent of their soldiers. He told London that while Bennington had “little effect upon the strength or spirits of the army,” those spirits were deeply affected by the local populace’s unwillingness to assist the British, by the rebel militias’ mysterious ability to show up at just the right spots to harass his troops and to regularly catch and hang messengers to and from Howe.
The Gates forces dug in at Bemis Heights, a high bluff ten miles south of Saratoga, New York, behind a Kościuszko-built breastworks of three-quarters of a mile. A Baldwin-built nine-hundred-foot-long, sixteen-foot-wide floating bridge across the North River brought in the Rebels’ Massachusetts brethren along with cattle and sheep, and cannons and other supplies originally from Amphitrite and Mercure. These influxes, and the quality of the defensive works, made the Americans better prepared for this British attack than they had been for any engagement during the entire course of the war. Gates did have to ration ammunition on the first day, until more arrived from Albany, but he did not have to fret about only having cannons with too-limited ranges, or too few of them, or a less than adequate number of troops.
How the French Saved America Page 9
