The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  16

  Valley Forge, 1777–1778

  “No bread, no soldier.”

  FOUR DAYS AFTER HIS ARRIVAL, on December 19, in remote Valley Forge, Washington had issued this warning to Henry Laurens, new president of Congress. Unless “some great and capital change” occurred in the commissary, or provisioning department, he advised, “this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve—dissolve—or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.” The troops, numbering 12,000 and wintering by the Schuylkill, were “as often without Provisions now, as with them.” Looking ahead, he added: “what is to become of us in the spring, when our force will be collected, with the aid perhaps of Militia?” Some months later he gave a vivid picture of the hardship endured during the initial weeks at Valley Forge: “men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without Blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet.…Marching through frost & Snow, and at Christmas taking up their Winter Quarters within a day’s march of the enemy, without a House or Hutt to cover them till they could be built & submitting to it without a murmur.” He listed, for Congress, in December 1777, numerous supplies that had been lacking since Brandywine, among them soap and vinegar. He added, “The first indeed [soap] we have now little occasion for,” few men having more than one shirt and some “none at all.”

  Washington established headquarters in a fieldstone house above the Schuylkill, a quarter of a mile from the tents that the officers and men, some 12,000 strong, occupied on their arrival. Aide Timothy Pickering wrote to his wife that they were “exceedingly pinched for room,” but the general considered the arrangements adequate. He had an upper bedchamber. The secretaries and aides bunked in smaller rooms on the same story. Conditions were luxurious compared to the cabins that the troops, in squads of twelve, set about making, according to Washington’s specifications: “fourteen by sixteen each—sides, ends and roofs made with logs, and the roof made tight with split slabs—or in some other way—the sides made tight with clay—fire-place made of wood and secured with clay on the inside eighteen inches thick, this fire-place to be in the rear of the hut—the door to be in the end next the street.…The officers’ huts to form a line in the rear of the troops.”

  Over the next six weeks this “hutting” was accomplished. When Martha arrived at headquarters, a great city of log cabins, affording winter shelter, had been erected above the banks of the Schuylkill. Provisioning the army, however, early on an anxiety, was now in crisis. In late January 1778 Washington castigated the different branches of the “Commissary’s Department,” source of food, forage, transport, and much else for the troops. He was “supplying the army from hand to mouth (if I may be allowed the phrase), scarcely ever having more than two or three days provisions beforehand.” General Greene confirmed this month the bleak outlook: “People begin to think coolly,” he told Washington, offering thoughts on army reform; “they compare their condition in the field with that at home. The situation of their families, & their future prospects grow into objects of importance.” Officers were reluctant to renew their commissions, and desertion by the hungry men they commanded was increasing.

  When Martha joined her husband in camp on February 5, he was oppressed by these difficulties. He had also recently been subject to what he called, in January, “insidious attacks” and “injurious” insinuations. Few—and Washington was not among them—had failed to make the comparison between the British surrender to Gates at Saratoga in October 1777 and his own loss of Philadelphia. Members of Congress and officers—some said, Gates himself—were among those who campaigned behind closed doors to have the successful general replace the current commander-in-chief. An anonymous printed letter, headed “Thoughts of a Freeman,” lauded Gates, criticized Washington, and ended with the charge: “That the people of America have been guilty of Idolatry by making a man their god—and that the God of Heaven and Earth will convince them by wofull experience that he is only a man.”

  Tench Tilghman wrote from Valley Forge to Robert Morris on February 2: “I have never seen any stroke of ill fortune affect the General in the manner that this dirty underhanded dealing has done. It hurts him the more because he cannot take notice of it without publishing to the world that the spirit of faction begins to work among us.” The young Marquis de Lafayette, at headquarters, scoffed at those in Congress who criticized Washington. They were, in his view, “Stupid men who, without knowing a Single word about war, undertake to judge You…make Ridiculous Comparisons; they are infatuated with Gates without thinking of the different Circumstances, and Believe that attacking is the only thing Necessary to Conquer.” But the commander-in-chief himself became prey to doubt about his powers of leadership. He wrote to President Laurens on January 31, “My Heart tells me it has been my unremitted aim to do the best circumstances would permit; yet, I may have been very often mistaken in my judgment of the means, and may, in many instances deserve the imputation of error.” He detailed to a congressional committee in camp the many obstructions to success that threatened his army and made recommendations for their removal. When the committee reported back to York, their firsthand testimony to the strains under which Washington was operating had their effect. Gradually, agitation to replace Washington with Gates died away. Alexander Hamilton informed New York governor George Clinton in February that a “Certain faction”—he dubbed it a monster—had unmasked its batteries too soon. But when Martha arrived in camp on February 5, the attacks were still fresh in the minds of all. Benjamin Harrison, in Virginia, averred to Robert Morris on the nineteenth that only duty had kept Washington from resigning: “The general is fully informed of all these cabals, they prey on his constitution, sink his spirits.…He well knows bad consequences would follow his resignation, or he would not leave it in the power of the wicked and designing thus to insult him.”

  The day after Martha’s arrival, Washington wrote to Jonathan Trumbull, Sr., governor of Connecticut: “There is the strongest reason to believe, that its [the army’s] existence cannot be of long duration, unless more constant, regular and larger supplies of the meat kind are furnished, than have been for some time past.” He urged “those in the purchasing line” in Connecticut to forward supplies of cattle. Similar letters went to the governors of other states. He informed the commissary general of purchases, on February 7, that the “occasional deficiencies in the Article of provisions,” so often severely felt, were now “on the point of resolving themselves into this fatal crisis—total want and dissolution of the army.” The “spirit of desertion among the soldiery” was alarming, he added: “the “murmurs on account of Provisions are become universal.” He dreaded mutiny.

  The cold, and the damp earth on which the men slept in the huts, had other ill effects. Three thousand men were invalid in February, dysentery and malaria among their complaints. Local farmhouses were pressed into service as makeshift isolation wards for smallpox patients. “Our men are falling sick in numbers every day,” General Anthony Wayne told Thomas Wharton on the tenth, “contracting vermin and dying in Hospitals, in a condition shocking to Humanity, & horrid in Idea.” Hundreds of men, he wrote, had “not a single rag of a shirt, (but are obliged to wear their waistcoats next their skins & to sleep in them at nights).” Many were without shoes and could neither make foraging expeditions nor successfully skirmish with the British in the country between the camp and Philadelphia. Everywhere, in short, there were signs of distress. Horses were dying for want of forage, and carcasses littered the camp.

  For lack of central organization in the wake of the autumn campaigns, wagons and teams, with tools and regimental weapons, were scattered haphazardly all over Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The congressional committee, in camp to observe conditions, reported on February 12, “Not less than three thousand spades, and shovels, and the like number of tomahawks have been lately discovered…in the vicinity of the camp.”

  The tr
oops at Valley Forge made a pitiful if valiant picture. Teams of men patiently yoked themselves to little carriages of their own making and loaded wood or provisions on their backs. A gallows humor developed among officers and men reduced to mounting guard in blankets, for lack of a coat and breeches; to drilling with muskets rusted with rain and lacking bayonets; and to eating “firecake,” a patty of flour and water baked in the ashes of campfires when no other rations were forthcoming.

  In these days of suffering, Washington was a highly visible commander, riding daily with his aides between the log huts. But Francis Dana, chairman of the congressional committee, noted on the fifteenth that on average “every regiment had been destitute of fish or flesh four days. On Saturday evening they received, some, three-fourths, and others, one half pound, of salted pork a man—not one day’s allowance.” Discipline in the camp, always fragile in the Continental army, was in danger of breaking down. Officers were court-martialed daily for seizing bread from their men—or whiskey or shoes. On the eighteenth some of the troops received rations of a quarter of a pound of meat, some, none. Mutiny and desertion threatened more than ever. “No bread, no soldier” went the cry. Common soldiers protested their plight to General Washington himself at headquarters.

  There were at Valley Forge no afternoon riding parties for Martha and her “old man” as there had been the previous spring at Morristown. Washington was occupied with his aides and generals until they joined Martha at dinner at three. Thereafter Washington and his aides—Tench Tilghman, Hamilton, and John Laurens among them—fell to business again, before joining Martha and other company. The Washingtons were alone together only at night, before the rigorous routine began again with morning.

  No trace of self-pity appears in the animated letter that Martha directed, a month after her arrival in Valley Forge, to Mercy Otis Warren in Cambridge. She conceded that the general’s quarters at Valley Forge were “very small.” But she added appreciatively, “he has had a log cabin built to dine in which has made our quarters much more tolerable than they were at first.” She hoped and trusted that all the states would “make a vigorous push” early in the spring, “thereby putting a stop to British cruelties and afford[ing] us that peace liberty and happiness which we have so long contended for.” It had given her, she wrote with martial fervor, “unspeakable pleasure” to hear that General Burgoyne and his army—prisoners-of-war, awaiting embarkation for Europe—were “in safe quarters in your state.” She added, “Would bountiful Providence aim a like stroke at General Howe, the measure of my happiness would be complete.”

  Martha’s description of conditions in camp, on March 7, was bland: “The general is camped in what they call the great Valley on the banks of the Schuylkill. Officers and men are chiefly in huts, which they say is tolerable comfortable. The army are as healthy as can well be expected in general.” The truth, not to be expressed in correspondence that the enemy might acquire, was less palatable. More than 2,500 men died at Valley Forge from frostbite, dysentery, malaria, and smallpox during the six months the army was encamped there. Interception of correspondence across state lines was common. It was essential that Howe and the British in Philadelphia should not learn of the ravages that lack of food and other necessities had wrought on the army.

  “Total want,” or famine, and dissolution of the army, which Washington had earlier dreaded, did not take place. At the end of March there were still men unshod and others without shirts. There was still no straw for bedding, and there were to be days of short rations ahead. Many of the civil departments of the army continued in disarray. Congress was slow to act on the recommendations for reform that the committee at Valley Forge urged upon the assembly. But the governors to whom Washington had written made determined efforts to respond to the army’s need for provisions, and a competent commissary general for purchases was appointed. The commander also prevailed on Nathanael Greene to take on the duties of quartermaster general. Greene oversaw the refurbishment of thousands of stands of arms in readiness for a new campaigning season. He also led successful foraging expeditions far afield. As spring came to Pennsylvania, at headquarters a monotonous February diet of veal, fowl, cabbage, and turnips expanded in the course of March to include fresh pork, beef, cheese, and oysters.

  A few weeks after Martha’s arrival, a Prussian officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, had appeared at Valley Forge. His role, with congressional approval, was to be inspector general of the army, or drillmaster. Employing a comical mixture of French and pidgin-English imprecations, he forced parade-ground discipline on the army. Von Steuben, with his secretary, Pierre Du Ponceau, became a regular guest at dinners at headquarters. Du Ponceau later recorded of their relations with the commander: “We visited him also in the evening, when Mrs. Washington was at headquarters. We were in a manner domesticated in the family.” At these gatherings, he added, “Every gentleman or lady who could sing, was called upon in turn for a song.” Other foreign volunteers, too, many of them French, made their way to headquarters. The Washingtons could rely on Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, raised in the French West Indies, and Francophone Caty Greene, who joined her husband at camp in March, as interpreters. New aide John Laurens, President Laurens’s son, who had been educated in Europe, and James Monroe, linguist aide-de-camp to Lord Stirling, were other magnets for foreign visitors.

  While Washington was at work during the day, Martha had established an upper sitting room of her own. In April some Quaker ladies from Philadelphia came to headquarters, seeking clemency for the husband of one of their number. He had been charged with selling supplies to the British. Following the usual “elegant dinner,” Washington considered Mr. Drinker’s case, while Martha entertained the ladies upstairs some hours. Though Washington’s verdict was not favorable to the ladies’ cause, they appreciated their civil reception by his wife. Mrs. Drinker described Martha as a “sociable, pretty kind of woman.”

  Such gatherings of ladies, though they be sober Quakers, in the upper sitting room were rare. Elias Boudinot, a Morristown acquaintance, now commissary of prisoners-of-war, declared Martha in April “almost a mope,” for want of “a female companion.” She was indeed much alone, though numerous officers’ wives dined at headquarters with their husbands. Lucy Knox, Henry’s wife, who Martha liked, was in New Haven, Connecticut, with her young daughter and only reached Valley Forge in late May. The Stirling ladies were never close to Martha. Caty Greene, in her early twenties, took up residence with her husband at Moore Hall, some distance from headquarters. This house, better than his cabin at camp, could accommodate the press of business that came his way, now that Greene was quartermaster general. Young Mrs. Greene was “saucy,” by her own confession—and, some said, more than that with her husband’s colleague, General Anthony Wayne. She was a general favorite, but she was no confidante for Martha.

  Nevertheless, Martha remained stoutly at her husband’s side. In Virginia, as a result of both births and deaths, her world was undergoing significant changes. Her mother, Frances Dandridge, had recently moved from Martha’s childhood home, Chestnut Grove, after her elder son, William, drowned there. She was now the pensioner of her younger son, Bartholomew, elsewhere. With her sister Nancy’s death and this removal of her mother from Chestnut Grove, Martha’s ties to New Kent County lessened.

  Martha appears to have been stoical concerning Jacky’s plan to forge a life among the squirearchy on the Pamunkey. Neither her son nor her daughter-in-law were as much with Martha as they had been before starting a family. Nelly was now “so much confined with her children,” Martha told Mercy Otis Warren in March 1778, “that she stays altogether with them.” Jacky had always doted on his elder daughter, who had dark Parke Custis good looks. He had dubbed her “Miss Bet” and thought her, when she was not yet two, “very saucy and entertaining.” Pat, “the most good natured, quiet little creature in the world,” with her mother’s fair coloring, he wrote to his mother in April, had initially been “a disappointment” to him. He had
hoped for a son and heir. But a few months after her birth, he was partisan: “I could not have loved it better if it had been a boy.”

  Content to be at her husband’s side while Jacky and Nelly lavished affection on their children in Virginia, Martha burnished Washington’s image as commander to some purpose. She paid $56 to Charles Willson Peale, who delivered to her on February 16 a “picture” of her husband and, the following month, “2 miniatures” of His Excellency. These miniatures, unlike full-scale portraits in oil, were eminently portable. Visible emblems of Washington’s status and no bigger than the palm of a hand, they could be displayed and shown and copied in Congress and in camp.

  Martha was not always as pleased with her husband’s portraits. In March, she wished an aide-de-camp to the Austrian volunteer Baron de Kalb to work on a further likeness, as John Laurens told his father: “Mrs. Washington has received the Miniature, and wishes to know whether Major Rogers [the amateur artist] is still at York—the defects of this Portrait, I think, are that the visage is too long, and old age is too strongly marked in it.” (Nicholas Rogers had complained to Laurens Sr. of Washington, as a sitter, that he had a “remarkable dead eye.”) Young Laurens conceded, “Altho’ his Countenance when affected either by Joy or Anger is full of expression—yet when the Muscles are in a state of repose, his eye certainly wants animation.” Washington’s impassive gaze was on many occasions, when another might have shown signs of frustration, of great utility to him.