George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  Many had received no pay for as long as ten months. “Besides feeding and clothing a soldier well,” Washington lectured Congress, “nothing is of greater importance than paying him with punctuality.” Yet, due to failures of Congress, the states, and the army, the Continentals received neither adequate food, nor sufficient clothing, nor pay.31

  By early February, Washington warned that the conditions drove the soldiers toward mutiny or desertion. “The spirit of desertion,” he wrote, “never before rose to such a threatening height.” An officer estimated that three-fourths of the men had attempted it. Washington confessed he was “astonished . . . that more of them have not left us.” After cataloguing the soldiers’ woes, a New Hampshire general wondered, “If any of them desert how can I punish them?” The army nonetheless hanged four as an object lesson. The desertions continued.32

  Disillusionment spread into the officer ranks. Escalating prices and low pay caused many to fear poverty for their families back home. Every officer promotion brought an avalanche of complaints from those passed over. “My feelings are every day wounded,” Washington reported to Congress, “by the discontent, complaints and jarring of officers, not to add resignations.” In a single week, more than fifty officers resigned from Greene’s division. Ninety officers resigned from nine Virginia regiments. Washington was so disgusted with the resignations that he stopped accepting them, directing officers to petition Congress for release from their commissions. So many left that he feared “being left alone with the soldiers only.”33

  * * *

  As Pennsylvania winters go, 1778 was not especially frigid, though there were bone-chilling cold snaps in late December and mid-February, and rain and snow ruined roads for days at a time. Even in good weather, however, the army’s supply services were fragile. Their challenge was immense.

  After forming outside Boston in the summer of 1775, the army had to create an infrastructure that provided clothing, bedding, tents, muskets, ammunition, and food, plus wagons and teams of draft animals to haul them. No American had attempted an enterprise on the scale of supplying 10,000 men for years of war. Lack of money multiplied the failures.

  On the day the army arrived, the Valley Forge camp became the third largest city in America, but it was a city with no food stored for the winter, one that produced no goods and had little income. Somehow Washington had to transform that primitive camp into a place that not only supported the soldiers but built them into a fighting force.

  Accustomed to managing every detail at Mount Vernon, Washington shouldered duties far beyond the military. He directed waste removal, privy construction, and hut design; he prescribed the fabrication of shoes, organized wagon convoys and smallpox inoculations, and a hundred other mundane matters. No issue was beneath his attention. To solve the clothing shortage, he proposed a new jacket design that used less cloth.34

  He rode through camp every day, just as he rode the grounds daily at Mount Vernon. He showed himself, reassured the troops that he cared, and found problems to solve. Were horse carcasses piling up? Was illicit liquor for sale? Should hospitals be built offsite? Were soldiers stealing from neighboring farms? Washington insisted the army pay for livestock and crops taken from farms, even if the payment came in flimsy Continental dollars or dubious scrip signed by the officer conducting the seizure.35

  Each problem led to another. Hungry men grew sick; sick men could not go on foraging expeditions; men on foraging expeditions deserted; deserters spread disaffection and undermined recruiting; and while they foraged, soldiers neither drilled nor patrolled. Often, the British may have seemed the least of Washington’s troubles.

  He rose before dawn and planned his day, often down to quarter-hour segments, so he could work ten hours before midafternoon dinner.36 Any dispute or uncertainty that no one else could resolve came to him. He reviewed every court-martial verdict, roughly one every day. For six months, he never left Valley Forge. Mostly he listened, hearing officers’ complaints and aspirations, absorbing the fears, the far-fetched schemes, the recriminations, and the suffering of the soldiers.

  After a dinner that could be meager, taken with aides and a few invited guests, he turned to the never-ending correspondence with Congress, with distant American commanders, with state governors who might provide supplies or soldiers, and with the British over prisoner treatment. He wheedled support from or conciliated disputes with every level of government: local pooh-bahs, state dignitaries, congressional grandees, and militia officer divas. He kept five aides busy acquiring information or summoning people, screening petitioners on his doorstep, copying letters, and drafting the less important ones.37

  Incoming letters included apologies from quartermasters and commissaries who lacked cash as prices skyrocketed. The supply crisis had to be solved. For the initial three months at Valley Forge, the starving army consumed 2.25 million pounds of beef, 2.3 million pounds of flour, and more than 16,000 gallons of rum and whiskey. Someone had to find it, buy it, then carry it by wagon or drive the cattle across rivers, mountains, and bogs.38

  The army had three supply offices. The Commissary General’s Office acquired and distributed food; the Quartermaster General’s Office managed transport and acquired equipment; the Clothier General’s Office provided uniforms and blankets. By Valley Forge days, all three were staggering.

  A foraging party from Valley Forge

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  After Congress reorganized the Commissary General in early 1777, the resignation of a competent chief elevated bumbling William Buchanan, who was called “as incapable as a child” by one congressional delegate. Widespread resignations in his office left only the incompetent. Depreciating currency combined with state price ceilings to drive farmers into the arms of the British, who paid with silver money.39

  The Quartermaster General’s Office was in a comparable slough. General Thomas Mifflin, a popular Pennsylvania politician, neglected the office for months through 1777, pleading illness. He resigned in November, as speculation swirled about friction between him and Washington. During Mifflin’s long period of inattention, regional quartermasters stopped coordinating with each other and hoarded scarce forage, wagons, and teams. Limits on driver pay further confounded the effort. It mattered little what provisions the commissaries acquired if the quartermasters did not transport them.40

  The head of the Clothier General’s Office, James Mease, was hapless. “The complaints against your department have become so loud and universal,” Washington thundered, that he issued “a positive and peremptory injunction [for Mease] immediately to repair to headquarters.” Instead, Mease resigned.41

  In late January, Nathanael Greene predicted that these failings, if not reversed, would prevent the army from fighting in 1778.42 Washington agreed, writing to the president of Congress that without a “great and capital change” in the supply system, the army must “starve—dissolve—or disperse.” Washington repeated that apocalyptic warning for weeks. How, amid the chaos and desperate want of Valley Forge, could he plan a campaign against a well-provisioned and well-led enemy?43

  Washington had to inspire and reassure others while groping toward improvements. He allowed his self-command to fray in letters to Henry Laurens, the South Carolinian who became president of Congress in November 1777. “No man,” Washington complained, “ever had his measures more impeded than I have.” The general’s scolding tone reflected impatience with second-guessing:

  It is a much easier and less distressing thing, to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fire side, than to occupy a cold, bleak hill, and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets: However, although they [his critics] seem to have little feeling for the naked and distressed soldier, I . . . from my soul pity those miseries, which it is neither in my power to relieve or prevent.44

  Through the desperate winter, Washington faced three principal adversaries.
The greatest risk, of course, arose from the enemy in Philadelphia. For the first few months, however, General Howe rarely stirred. One German officer remembered Philadelphia as offering “no lack of pleasant winter-time activities”:

  Almost daily assemblies were held (get-togethers for pleasure); every Monday, comedy, and every Tuesday was a dance and card playing for the officers. Every week there were trips in groups to the nearby places, such as Germantown and Frankford, where pleasure was to be had in shooting and pitching hay.

  Officers’ pastimes included cockfights, horse races, and cricket matches, plus theatricals at the Southwark Theatre. Gamblers gathered nightly at the faro bank organized by the Hessians.45

  Sir William contentedly gambled and kept company with Mrs. Elizabeth Loring, his American mistress, who came from Boston to warm his evenings while her husband enjoyed a profitable military position. When springtime arrived, Henry Laurens observed that “had the British general been a man of enterprise,” he might have captured Congress: “Our safety lay in Mrs. [Loring’s] lap.”46

  To address the military danger, Washington had to solve his second major adversary: the army’s broken supply services. That required delicate political maneuvering, both inside the army and with congressional and state officials.

  Before he was fairly started on that task, an unexpected letter allowed him to strike at his third major adversary: a small group seeking to wrest control of the army from him. This was a straightforward political knife fight. Given a weapon to employ against those adversaries, he would strike at them hard. They would learn that they might disparage Washington’s military ability, but they were no match for his political skills.

  Chapter 33

  The First Adversary: The Conway Cabal

  A general who loses will be criticized, so Washington was. A Pennsylvanian lamented that “Thousands of lives and millions of property are yearly sacrificed to the insufficiency of our commander in chief,” adding that Washington had committed “two such blunders as might have disgraced a soldier of three months standing.” Massachusetts delegate James Lovell agreed. “The spirit of enterprise,” he grumbled, “is a stranger in the main army.” After Brandywine and Germantown, a North Carolinian observed that British commander Sir William Howe “out general’d us, as usual.” A dozen or more delegates and former delegates expressed doubts about Washington as commander in chief. That autumn, two officers close to Washington, Greene and Timothy Pickering, agreed that their commander was indecisive.1

  With his triumph at Saratoga, which brought Burgoyne’s surrender of his entire army, General Horatio Gates became the darling of the disenchanted, the champion who would bring thumping wins if elevated to overall command. Washington and his allies argued that Gates enjoyed advantages at Saratoga that Washington could only dream of. Gates’s forces outnumbered the enemy 3 to 1. Burgoyne’s men, after slogging through the Adirondacks from Canada, had been hungry, demoralized, and far from the protection of the Royal Navy. Lafayette dismissed Gates’s victory as won “in the middle of the woods, expecting an enemy who could arrive to him by one single road . . . it was almost impossible not to conquer.” Gates, Greene concurred, was “but the child of fortune.”2

  Older than Washington by several years, Horatio Gates had modest energy and little flair. His men called him “Granny Gates,” testament to his fussiness, thinning gray hair, stooped shoulders, and spectacles sliding down his nose. A stunning victory, however, creates its own mystique. Saratoga won Gates a gold medal from Congress and inflated his self-regard.

  Though Washington was his superior, Gates sent notice of the victory directly to Congress, not bothering to dispatch a report to the commander in chief. When Washington asked Gates to release the units sent north to help him, Gates dragged his feet. To expedite that transfer, Washington sent the relentless Colonel Alexander Hamilton, who ruffled the feathers of America’s newest hero but recovered only some of the loaned troops.3

  In early November, surprising news arrived on Washington’s desk. In an enclosure to a letter, Major General William Alexander (called Lord Stirling for the Scottish title he claimed) wrote a single sentence that embodied the disparagement of Washington then circulating:

  In a letter from General Conway to General Gates he says, “Heaven has been determined to save your country; or a weak general and bad counsellors would have ruined it.”

  Washington did not hesitate. He held in his hand a link between men he thought were scheming to supersede him. To flush out any plan that was afoot, Washington had the explosive message copied, added the flat statement that he had received it, signed the sheet, and sent it to General Thomas Conway, an Irish veteran of the French Army. Washington did not deign to ask for an explanation.4

  The young Washington might have responded to Stirling’s warning with hot anger, firing off a protest to his superior (in this case, Congress) while demanding that Conway account for his words. The mature political operator, however, applied quiet pressure to Conway and his fellows, steadily driving them into blunders, and held his fire when it came to Congress.

  Stirling’s enclosure derived from Colonel James Wilkinson, a twenty-year-old aide to Gates, who had been carrying the official Saratoga victory notice to Congress in York. On his way to York, Wilkinson stopped at the home of General Thomas Mifflin, the resigning quartermaster general, and drank through the evening with an aide to Stirling. Wilkinson decried Washington’s failings, describing a letter from Conway to Gates that disparaged the commander in chief. Next morning Stirling’s aide reported the conversation to Stirling, who reported on to Washington.5

  Conway replied to Washington with neither apology nor regret. He admitted writing to Gates about the army’s faults. He noted that, while at Mifflin’s home, he made similar remarks in the presence of Dr. James Craik, Washington’s old friend (who would be expected to report them to the commander in chief, and later did). Conway denied writing the passage quoted by Washington and volunteered his permission for Gates to disclose his letter. He called Washington “a brave man, an honest man, a patriot, and a man of great sense,” but added that the commander had “often been influenced by men who were not equal to [him].” Conway followed that barbed flattery with a threat: that he would report back to France “the operations which I saw during this campaign.”6

  With a single move, Washington had confirmed the involvement of the three principals in what became known as the Conway Cabal, named for its least powerful and most voluble participant. The evidence was sketchy at first. Two weeks earlier, Washington had learned that Congress would promote Conway to major general, vaulting him over twenty-three more senior men. Smelling something amiss, Washington opposed the elevation. Conway’s merit, he warned, “exists more in his own imagination than in reality” and the promotion would rankle the other brigadier generals.7

  A few days after Conway’s response to Washington, Congress took steps that triggered more suspicions. James Wilkinson won a brevet promotion to brigadier general, a position he had done little to deserve. Then Congress accepted Mifflin’s resignation as quartermaster general but retained him as major general, appointing him and two others to the Board of War, a largely dormant body that initially had been intended to coordinate the war effort. Henceforth, the Board of War would serve as a platform for trying to wrench control of the army from Washington.8

  Thomas Mifflin

  Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Although Gates could be unimpressive and Conway irritated more people than he charmed, the smooth Mifflin was an adversary to reckon with. Rivalry between Mifflin and Nathanael Greene led a Massachusetts delegate to predict that the army would split “into Greenites and Mifflineans.” Mifflin had recently clashed with Washington, urging a more aggressive defense of Philadelphia and raising “a prodigious clamor” against reinforcing Gates before Saratoga, then resigning as quartermaster general, claiming i
llness. Mifflin’s estate in Reading became a hub for Washington detractors, who included John and Sam Adams, James Lovell, and even Richard Henry Lee, who played a double game, remaining friendly with Washington while flirting with the cabal. Mifflin declared to Gates that the hero of Saratoga should be in overall command. “This army will be totally lost,” he wrote, “unless you come down and collect the virtuous band . . . and with their aid save the southern hemisphere. . . . Congress must send for you.”9

  Like Greene, Mifflin was a Quaker who left that faith to fight the British. Washington and his allies came to see the Pennsylvanian as scheming to use the Board of War to promote Gates. By mid-November, Mifflin sought Gates’s appointment as president of the board, which would compel Washington to report to Gates. Mifflin argued that “the military knowledge and authority of Gates [was] necessary to procure the indispensable changes in our army.”10

  Then came a speedy bureaucratic shuffle designed to elevate those who wished to see Washington superseded. Conway submitted his resignation from the army, which Washington referred to Congress, which Congress referred to the Board of War. A few days later, Congress installed Gates as the board’s president and appointed two more members. Rather than accept Conway’s resignation, the Board of War promoted him to major general—the step Washington had opposed—and made him inspector general reporting to the board, not to Washington. As inspector general, Conway would investigate and report on the army’s failings. Promoting Conway looked like a calculated insult to the commander in chief.11

  Swiftly, the cabal had assumed a commanding bureaucratic position, especially with Mifflin and Gates on the Board of War. By breathing life into that body, they could pursue their own military ideas or obstruct Washington’s. They could sap his power or force him out of the army. Conway, as inspector general, could publicize the army’s problems and blame Washington.12 Although the commander in chief looked vulnerable, Washington took no impulsive step. The contest was still in its early stages. He waited. Mifflin alerted Gates in Albany that Washington knew of Conway’s letter. Gates realized he must write to the commander in chief, but misjudged entirely what to say.13