by Sarah Vowell
Lafayette later recalled that Washington spoke to him “very kindly” and acknowledged the boy’s “sacrifices . . . in favor of the American cause.” Impelled by congressional urging to look after this important son of France, as well as Lafayette’s standing as a brother Mason, Washington invited Lafayette to join him at headquarters and asked the boy to “consider himself at all times as one of his family.” Washington was referring to his military family or aides-de-camp, the same way John Adams described the aide Alexander Hamilton as “one of General Washington’s Family.” So when Washington said “family,” he meant “chummy minion.” The orphaned Lafayette heard “son.”
“I wish to serve near the person of General Washington,” Lafayette wrote to John Hancock a few days later. At least until “such time as he may think proper to entrust me with a division of the Army.” While Lafayette seemed to accept, for the moment, that he was an honorary officer without his own command, he had not given up on that particular dream. In fact, his letter to Congress promising to work for free included his hope “to serve at first as a volunteer,” meaning just that: at first.
Washington found the whole thing awkward and confusing. Writing to a Virginia congressional delegate in August, he wondered, “If Congress meant, that this Rank should be unaccompanied by Command I wish it had been sufficiently explain’d to [Lafayette]. If on the other hand, it was intended to vest him with all powers of a Major General, why have I been led into a Contrary belief, and left in the dark with respect to my own Conduct towards him?”
Aside from this “great chaos” as Washington saw it, Lafayette grew on him right from the start. He invited Lafayette to join him to review the troops posted north of the city along the Delaware River. Lafayette observed, “About eleven thousand men, ill armed, and still worse clothed . . . many of them were almost naked. The best dressed wore hunting shirts, large gray linen shirts used in the Carolinas.”
Well aware that his men were supposed to confront the redcoats whilst dressed to shoot raccoons, Washington confessed to Lafayette, “We must feel embarrassed to exhibit ourselves before an officer who has just quitted French troops.”
To Washington’s relief Lafayette replied, “It is to learn, and not to teach, that I come hither.” Observing the Continentals’ marching skills or lack thereof, Lafayette attempted to put a cheerful spin on the half-naked bunglers. He reckoned, “Virtue stood in place of science.”
• • •
While British soldiers were well clad in proper professional uniforms, “uniform” would not be the best description of their civilian government back home. Parliament, the font of the dreaded tax laws that incited the revolution, was nevertheless rife with pro-American MPs like Charles James Fox, who took to dressing up in the colors buff and blue as an homage to the palette of George Washington’s military uniform. And Edmund Burke, who, in a pensive if Anglocentric speech before the House of Commons, pleaded for peace and reconciliation with the “descendants of Englishmen.” Identifying the rebellion as an inherently British demand for civil rights, he warned, “To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself.”
Then there was the inner conflict of men like Britain’s secretary at war, Lord William Barrington, who confirmed in a 1775 letter to his prime minister about ratcheting up troop strength in the colonies, “It is my duty and inclination to make that measure succeed to the utmost.” However, he added, “My own opinion always has been and still is, that the Americans may be reduced by the fleet, but never can be by the army.” Which is to say that he was on top of flinging more red-jacketed infantrymen at the colonies while privately pointing out that unless the patriot miscreants would be polite enough to line up along Boston Harbor within cannon range of the British Royal Navy, then the whole damn thing was doomed.
Circa 1777, the most meaningful rift was a muddled lack of consensus about basic strategy among the British leadership. Initially, the British command’s big plan for the war that year was to end it. This involved forces under the command of General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne moving south from Canada while General Sir William Howe led men north from New York City. They were to converge along the Hudson River at Albany. Since the British already controlled Manhattan and Long Island, sewing up the Hudson would isolate troublesome New England from the other colonies, delivering a mortal blow to the revolution.
Howe, the commander in chief in America, requested fifteen thousand recruits to seal the deal. The point man in London, the secretary of state for America, Lord George Germain, denied this request. By April, Howe grumbled to Germain, “My hopes of terminating the war this year are vanished.”
Howe was still smarting from the embarrassment of Trenton. Plus, he was concerned that Gentleman Johnny, a part-time playwright, would hog the spotlight if they pulled off the Albany job. So Howe got it in his head to capture the rebel capital of Philadelphia, leaving Burgoyne to fend for himself in upstate New York. For what could be more glorious than occupying the largest city in British North America, seat of the treasonous Continental Congress? Howe repeatedly alerted Germain to this significant change of plans. Still, Germain somehow failed to understand that Howe and his troops wouldn’t finish conquering Philadelphia in time to swing north to assist Burgoyne.
In the summer of 1777, the only person more confused by Howe’s evolving scheme than Germain was George Washington. Washington not only believed Howe would veer north toward the Hudson, he also worried that Howe’s helping Burgoyne was a “good policy” for the enemy. With the Northern Department of the Continental Army, under the command of General Horatio Gates, perched in New York to deal with Burgoyne, Washington’s forces would confront Howe—somewhere. It was only because Howe’s fleet was spotted sailing south from New York City that Washington was convinced that Philadelphia might be the target. Even then, Washington couldn’t quite believe it, writing, “I caught myself casting my eyes continually behind me.” It did not calm Washington’s nerves that Howe sailed right on past Delaware Bay, a logical entry point for an invasion of Pennsylvania, and disappeared at sea for a few strange weeks (prompting speculation of an attack on Charleston).
The reason the American commander was waiting around to react was that, in 1777, Washington’s plan to outsmart and outlive the enemy was to try not to die. This was the so-called Fabian strategy, named for the Roman general Fabius Maximus, the Cunctator (“the delayer”), who spent years wearing down the deadlier Carthaginians by retreating every time his opponents seemed poised to prevail, thus holding the Roman army together; basically, Fabius annoyed his enemies to death.
After the fiasco of the New York campaign, Washington returned to the question he hollered amid the sloppy retreat from Kips Bay: “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?” The unfortunate answer—yep—prompted him to face the grim fact that “it is impossible, at least very unlikely, that any effectual opposition can be given to the British Army with the Troops we have.” Hence the plan to play to his army’s strengths. The men might have been lacking in skill and discipline, not to mention ammo and food, but given their behavior in New York, they were not inexperienced at running away.
In March, Washington sent General Nathanael Greene to break the news to Congress about this wise if not particularly stirring policy. The delegates immediately understood the implications for their home base of Philadelphia: while the army intended to take a stab at defending the city, perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst idea for the delegates to start looking into office space out in York County? In the event of a full-scale British attack on the capital, the politicians should be prepared to join the soldiers in their mad dash to who knows where. From Philadelphia, John Adams attempted to convince Abigail, or perhaps himself, “We are under no more Apprehensions here than if the British Army was in the Crimea. Our Fabius will be slow, but sure.”
Washington got word that Howe’s missing f
leet had finally popped up in Chesapeake Bay. On August 24, he led his scruffy army, including his new general, Lafayette, through the streets of Philadelphia. John Adams, observing the parade, lamented to Abigail, “Our soldiers have not yet, quite the Air of Soldiers.” The not-quite-soldiers continued marching twenty-five miles or so southwest toward Brandywine Creek and Chadds Ford. On August 25, around thirteen thousand British forces landed in Maryland about sixty miles south of Philadelphia and advanced north toward the coming confrontation in the Brandywine Valley on September 11.
• • •
The place looks wrong. I’m not bothered that the present intrudes on the past, what with the combination Pizza Hut–Taco Bell looming near a road once crammed with redcoats; or that Fuzzy Butts Dog Daycare is situated a stone’s throw from the old Quaker house where Lafayette reportedly spent the night before the battle. No, my problem is springtime. The Brandywine countryside is in bloom—too green, too chirpy, too full of life.
Alas, it’s May. I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I was pining for the leafless trees and frozen earth in the paintings of the late local artist Andrew Wyeth. His pictures of this region summarize the soulful emptiness of a country where, as Gertrude Stein observed, “there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” The occasional solitary figures in Wyeth’s landscapes look like somebodies—a boy and his shadow running down a barren hill, a solemn woman watching over a snowy yard. When he painted Brandywine Battlefield in winter, it was a perfectly bleak clearing behind a pale man in a wool cap. Today the place smells like hope and freshly grown grass.
Brandywine Creek empties into the Christina River across the Delaware state line. That the river was named for a queen of Sweden and that its tributary may have been named after a Dutchman called Brantwyn hint at the area’s older colonial past. It was New Sweden and then New Netherland prior to King Charles II signing it over to the Quaker William Penn in 1681. Long before Englishmen and a handful of Germans came to Penn’s Woods and started putting up the stout stone houses Andrew Wyeth often rendered, the Swedes in these parts had introduced the log cabin to America. No wonder Wyeth often painted the place in egg tempera, the medium of the old Netherlandish masters—these wooded hills and planted fields have a decidedly northern atmosphere, as in northern Europe, which is curious considering Chadds Ford is less than twenty miles from the Mason-Dixon Line.
Elkanah Watson, an employee of the Rhode Island merchant and slave trader John Brown, traveled through the area on business during the revolution. After spending time farther south, he noted in his journal that he preferred Pennsylvania: “The verdure of the fields, and the neatness and superior tillage of the farms in the rich vales, were so grateful to the eye.” Chalking up the difference to “but one cause,” an absence of slavery, he wrote, “Here we witness the impulses and results of honest industry, where freemen labor for themselves.” Watson did, however, note the bad roads.
Nick, my Philadelphia-based driver, and I think the roads around here aren’t bad—just the confusing kind of picturesque. Unlike George Washington, I have a good map. To Nick, there is no such thing. Even though he must be ten or twenty years older than I am, he is entirely addicted to his dashboard GPS, and he sighs theatrically at the page I’ve ripped out of a Pennsylvania road atlas and marked up with the approximate locations of various landmarks and whatnot related to the Battle of Brandywine and/or Lafayette.
When Nick picked me up at my Philly hotel that morning, I told him that I wanted to start in Chester County at a monument to Lafayette erected by area schoolchildren. An astounding five thousand people attended its dedication on September 11, 1895.
Five thousand was not a number that interested Nick. He pointed at his GPS gadget and asked, “What’s the address?”
I replied that I didn’t think it had an address, that it was more like a skinny sculpture out in the country by the side of a road. I pointed at the town of Chadds Ford on my map, and suggested we head that way and just ask around once we get there. He said nothing, grabbed the map page, got out of the car, and disappeared into the hotel for twenty minutes like William Howe and his mystery fleet. Apparently he was in there trying to track down the address of a thing without an address, because he came back and barked, “No address!”
Starting to worry that this dillydallying was going to make me miss A Son of Liberty, the Lafayette-themed puppet show I planned on catching at the Battle of Brandywine reenactment that afternoon, I rifled around my papers and found an actual address for a cemetery named after Lafayette that I wanted to check out in West Chester. Nick punched the digits into his beloved contraption, and finally we were off down I-95 for a carefree day reliving one of the biggest, dumbest skirmishes of the revolution.
On September 11, 1777, about eleven thousand Americans confronted thirteen thousand or so Britons and Hessians within ten square miles of Brandywine Creek. Nowadays, this clash is remembered, if it’s remembered, for its commanders’ mistakes—the unfortunate long-term repercussions of Howe’s victory and Washington’s tactical blunders day-of. Which is one reason I was so keen on catching the afternoon’s reenactment festivities promising “Battles! Music! 18th-century celebrities!” I was curious how area boosters would splice together a celebration out of this particular clip from the patriot blooper reel. Especially since one factor in Howe’s overwhelming triumph was the superior intel he received from Loyalist valley residents, whom General Nathanael Greene, an ex-Quaker, ridiculed as “villinous Quakers . . . employed to serve the enemy.”
When Howe and his troops crossed the Mason-Dixon Line and entered Pennsylvania on September 9, they passed, according to John Adams, “thro the very Regions of Passive obedience,” meaning obedience to the king. Adams complained, “There is not such another Body of Quakers in all America, perhaps not in all the World.” It should be noted that the Quakers could be excused for failing to dominate, say, Adams’s home colony of Massachusetts, where in the previous century his Puritan ancestors were still hanging Friends on Boston Common.
Hessian officer Johann von Ewald noted in his journal that from some local Quakers they “received positive information here that the greater part of the American army had entrenched behind . . . the Brandywine.”
Washington chose to make his stand at the Brandywine because it was the only significant topographical obstacle between present-day Elkton, Maryland, where the British landed, and their objective, Philadelphia. Officially a creek, the Brandywine was (and still is) often referred to as a river because of its river-y width, depth, and current. It was substantial enough to support a series of profitable mills up and down its banks—mostly gristmills and a few sawmills, along with the odd paper mill, including the one that produced the paper on which copies of the Declaration of Independence were printed.
As for Howe, he set up camp at the town of Kennett Square, and local Loyalists let him know that Washington had concentrated his forces about seven miles to the northeast near Chadds Ford, the creek’s major crossing.
Washington was headquartered east of Chadds Ford in the stone house of mill owner Benjamin Ring, which still stands in Brandywine Battlefield Park. From there, he coordinated the Continental regulars and regional militias positioned along the eastern, Philadelphia side of the creek at what he assumed—incorrectly—were all the other traversable fords.
After the battle, Timothy Pickering, a colonel from Massachusetts, jotted down a few lessons the patriots learned too late. He noted “the importance of good maps of the country,” the value of having “guides perfectly acquainted with every road,” and the necessity of conducting proper recon. “Before the battle of Brandywine,” he wrote, “we had time to have viewed all the ground several miles on our right, but did not do it.”
At one of the patriots’ northernmost defenses along the creek, Washington posted troops commanded by General John Sullivan, a New Hampshire attorney and delegate to the First Continental
Congress. Sullivan and his men ended up, as Lafayette put it, “fated to receive all the heavy blows.” A few weeks after the battle, Washington wrote to Sullivan, “We were led to believe, by those whom we had reason to think well acquainted with the Country, that no ford above our [pickets] could be passed, without making a very circuitous march.”
Oops: Generals Howe and Cornwallis had nearly eight thousand men up at four o’clock on the morning of September 11 and trudging stealthily toward undefended northern crossings of the Brandywine that Washington was unaware of.
Meanwhile, by six o’clock that morning, a smaller column of about five thousand Brits and Hessians commanded by the Prussian baron General von Knyphausen were making haste to the Brandywine’s western bank at Chadds Ford, where Washington expected them to show up—that being the point. Knyphausen’s orders from Howe were to “amuse the Americans.” By which he meant hoodwink the Continentals into believing they were holding their own against Howe’s entire army while the bulk of it was en route to sneak up behind them. The morning fog, followed by smoke generated by artillery fire exchanged across the creek, not to mention the exasperating trees, abetted the misdirection, cloaking Knyphausen’s troops and dooming any American attempt to get an accurate British head count.
According to the journal of the then captain of the Seventh Royal Fusiliers, John André, “The design, it seemed, was that General Knyphausen, taking Post at Chad’s Ford, should begin early to cannonade the Enemy on the opposite side, thereby to take up his attention and make him presume an attack was then intended with the whole Army, whilst the other Column should be performing the détour.”
