George Washington
Page 31
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He needed congressional action, but he could not force the legislative response. Deference to Congress was a hallmark of his leadership. Early in his command, he wrote that “if the Congress will say ‘Thus far and no farther you shall go,’ I will promise not to offend whilst I continue in their service.” After fifteen years as a burgess, he knew the challenges of building consensus among legislators with different experiences and attitudes. He also appreciated that today’s opposition might reflect a lack of information rather than inveterate hostility, and that a legislature may distract itself with small matters to avoid difficult ones.10
Because his army was always in the field or in camp, Washington used letters and reports to inform Congress and urge measures it should consider. He wrote passionate letters to York, but the situation at Valley Forge was too dire for gradual education. He decided to bring Congress to the army so he could persuade the decisionmakers face-to-face.
On Christmas Day, he asked Delegate Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts to devote “particular attention” to sending a congressional committee to camp “to consult with me, . . . on the best regulations, arrangements, and plans for the next campaign.” The committee’s scope, he continued, should be “general and extensive.”11
This Congress was a shadow of the distinguished assembly Washington had joined three years before. Meeting in York’s redbrick courthouse, only two of the current delegates had served in June 1775, when Washington became commander in chief. An observer wrote in February 1778 that “all but a few of the men of superior minds had disappeared.” Henry Laurens complained that “we want genius, insight, foresight, fortitude and all the virtuous powers of the human mind.” Debates, he lamented, ran “into weeds of unmatured conversations from a want of able members.”
Though the delegates did not impress, they worked long days. Committee meetings and conferences began early in the morning. Convened by ten or eleven, Congress sat until one or two p.m. After a dinner break, it sat again until eight or nine p.m., at which point the delegates addressed, according to Laurens, “business out of doors.” They slept in spare rooms around town, starved for information in a region with no newspaper.12
Laurens despaired at the sparse attendance. Eighteen months before, fifty-six delegates had approved the Declaration of Independence. Now Laurens was lucky to have twenty present; often only fifteen arrived. Important matters “are neglected or slovened over, partly from a want of numbers and partly of abilities.” He believed that “thousands and millions have been wasted . . . from a want of proper men and sufficient numbers to attend the affairs of the Treasury.” High absenteeism meant, he added, “there are not men enough even for the drudgery of committees.”13
This last limitation was disabling. As the only organ of national government other than the army, Congress addressed a blizzard of minute matters. In a three-day period in November 1777, it approved individual payments of as little as $40, confirmed officer promotions, transferred soldiers, assigned one officer to a new post, and bought a horse for another. Simultaneously, Congress had to wrestle with complex military, financial, and diplomatic issues that would determine the nation’s survival.14
To manage its work, Congress shunted many matters to temporary committees consisting of three delegates, or occasionally five. The committees launched and expired at a mad pace. In 1777, Congress created 114 committees; the following year, there were 253. Congress preferred short-term bodies because permanent committees would consolidate their power; with short-term committees, however, delegates developed little expertise.15 Congressional expertise also suffered from the states’ rotation of their delegates; few served for as long as two years. “The members of Congress are so perpetually changing,” Richard Henry Lee wrote to his brother, “that it is of little use to give you their names.”16
Congressional dysfunction slowed completion of the Articles of Confederation, the document that would create a rudimentary government for the new nation. The draft articles lingered for sixteen months until Congress approved them in November 1777 and sent them to the states for approval.17
Though Washington hated dealing with the crazy quilt of congressional committees, he had to work through Congress in order to circumvent a Board of War controlled by his adversaries, Mifflin and Gates. In the second week of January, Delegate Gerry advised him that a special committee would address the military situation, as Washington had requested. The committee was to have three members from the Board of War and four congressional delegates.18
It was called the “Committee in Camp” because it spent almost six weeks at Valley Forge. In a crucial reversal, Congress removed the members of the Board of War from it—Gates and Mifflin could hardly confer productively with Washington while they were maneuvering to overturn his control of the army—so Congress added two more delegates. The committee’s large size emphasized its importance. For regional balance, it had two New Englanders, three delegates from the middle states, and a Southerner. The committee’s roster should have encouraged Washington. Two members had served in the military, while three were friends. But Washington did not know the chairman, Francis Dana of Massachusetts, who had been in Congress for only two months.19
A slightly built lawyer, the thirty-five-year-old Dana came from a region often skeptical of Washington. His fellow Massachusetts delegate James Lovell hoped the committee would “rap a demigod [Washington] over the knuckles.” Dana’s friend John Adams had welcomed Gates’s success at Saratoga with the observation, “Now we can allow a certain citizen to be wise, virtuous, and good, without thinking him a deity or savior.” Washington would spare no effort to win Dana’s support.20
Bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1785)
Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association
When the committee members reached Valley Forge on January 24, Washington handed them a 13,000-word report detailing necessary reforms. Drafted by Hamilton, the sharpest writer on Washington’s staff, the report integrated Washington’s ideas with some from senior generals. It also reflected Washington’s years of experience in organizing local government services through the Fairfax County Court and managing a large labor force at Mount Vernon. The report began with Washington’s hardheaded philosophy of government: “With far the greatest part of mankind, [self]-interest is the governing principle.” Patriotism and idealism may motivate people for a time, but “are not of themselves sufficient.” The army and its officers had to be paid, and paid fairly.
To improve the lot of private soldiers, the report called for reorganizing the commissary and quartermaster corps and establishing regular paydays. The report also urged a yearly draft of soldiers rather than voluntary enlistments; it called for more cavalry, consolidating undersized regiments, adopting standards for promotions, and promulgating a “uniform system of manual maneuvers.” Its most controversial passage insisted that Congress must, as the British did, provide half-pay for officers after the war, plus pensions for widows of officers who died in the service. Without those changes, the report concluded, the nation faced “dissolution of the army . . . [or] its operations must infallibly be feeble, languid and ineffectual.”21
After digesting the report, the committee members rolled up their sleeves. They reviewed internal documents and financial ledgers. They consulted at length with Washington and other senior officers. They addressed the commissary function, forage for draft animals, recruitment, the quartermaster’s wagon management, the paymaster’s records, the clothier general’s meltdown, regimental organization, and officer promotions.22
Most important, the committee saw suffering soldiers every day. Its arrival in camp coincided with the starving time of mid-February. Determined to see conditions for himself, Dana rode through camp, stopping to speak with soldiers. He noted that the lack of clothes made many soldiers “totally unfit for duty,” but that was not the worst:
Upon an average ever
y regiment had been destitute of fish or flesh four days. . . . nor have they assurance of regular supplies in future. We do not see from whence the supplies of meat are to come. The want of it will infallibly bring on a mutiny . . . Sunday morning Colonel Brewer’s regiment rose in a body and proceeded to General Patterson’s quarters, . . . and threatened to quit the army. . . . The same spirit was rising in other regiments, . . . ’tis probable this army will disperse if the commissary department is so damnably managed.23
This confirmation of Washington’s reports came not from an officer on his staff, but from a New England lawyer who was praised as “most thorough and active” by James Lovell, a Washington critic. Dana’s reports gave crucial weight to Washington’s demands.24
Because the soldiers’ hardships were new to committee members, their accounts were powerful. Gouverneur Morris, a committee member, described “a skeleton of an army . . . in a naked starving condition, out of health, out of spirits.” Lacking horses and wagons, the committee wrote, the soldiers “without a murmur patiently yoke themselves to little carriages of their own making, or load their wood and provisions on their backs.” Morris raged to New York’s governor that “an American army in the bosom of America is about to disband for the want of somewhat to eat,” adding that the army had been “upon the point of disbanding three times. One dangerous mutiny quelled with difficulty.” One report was so moving that President Laurens broke down while reading it to the delegates. “Your description of the miseries of the Army,” Laurens told Dana, “affected me beyond common feeling.”25
After two weeks, the committee began sending recommendations back to York. It was surprised by its conclusions about the commissary function. “We had presumed that there must have been some mistake or fraud,” they reported, but the problem was “real scarcity.” Other causes, they noted, were currency depreciation, insufficient funds, a shortage of wagons (the quartermaster’s responsibility), and the incompetence of the department head, Buchanan.26
By the second week of March, Congress adopted commissary reforms that Gouverneur Morris had prepared, including an increase in long-term purchasing and more authority for the department head. Congress also granted commissaries a commission on purchases, to encourage more energetic acquisition efforts.27 Finally, the committee recommended replacing the Commissary General. Jeremiah Wadsworth, formerly the deputy, took over in April, when death and desertion had shrunk the army to about 7,000. In late spring, provisions began to flow more predictably.28
When Dana’s committee turned to the quartermaster, it found that corruption had crept in while Mifflin had neglected the office: “The number of little piddling pilfering plunderers . . . is sufficient almost to form an army.” Commissions paid on purchases had reached 5 percent.29 Dana’s committee recommended more centralized control and lower commissions while attacking the structure imposed by Mifflin though the Board of War. But the key change was appointment of a vigorous quartermaster. For that position, the committee nominated Washington’s solution to many problems, Nathanael Greene.30
Greene accepted the position only because Washington insisted. Greene sought glory, not bureaucratic distinction. “Nobody,” he complained, “ever heard of a quartermaster.” The job was not only obscure but difficult. “It is a very disagreeable department,” he wrote, “rendered still more so by mismanagement, by depreciation of our currency and the resources of the country being inadequate to our immediate wants.” Yet Greene transformed the service while Congress enacted the committee’s recommendations to free it from supervision by the Board of War.31
Washington hoped for two more major reforms from Congress, both of which the committee recommended: replacing voluntary enlistments with an annual draft, and the half-pay benefit for officers after the war, with a pension for officers’ widows. Dana returned to York in early March to press those recommendations, but with little success.32 Congress approved drafts to fill the army, but only state governments could implement them. Many state legislators shrank from imposing compulsory military service. Virginia’s draft produced few soldiers while triggering a riot in one county.33
For weeks, Congress disputed the half-pay/pension issue in what President Laurens called “long and fervorous arguments.” Most delegates wanted to support Washington, but feared the cost. Some thought it would violate republican principles by nurturing a permanent army and favoring officers over rank-and-file soldiers, who received much lower pay. Even Laurens, usually Washington’s enthusiastic advocate, balked at the proposal.34
Despite Congress’s reluctance, Washington was adamant. “The salvation of the cause,” he told Laurens, “depends upon it.” In mid-May, Congress approved a compromise: half-pay for seven years after the war ended, long enough for former officers to regain their incomes in private life. Washington announced the action in his daily orders to the army, and hoped it would “quiet in a great measure the uneasinesses.”35
Although Washington did not win every reform, he won enough to stabilize the army. The essential step was bringing the congressional committee to Valley Forge, exposing them to his intense feeling for the soldiers’ welfare and the power of his presence and personality. The camp’s sights, sounds, and smells confirmed his pleas. With the committee on his side, Washington was able to win reorganization of the army, and also to suffocate the efforts by Mifflin, Gates, and the Board of War to gain control of it. By late spring, Washington had solidified both the army’s management and his own position.36
Chapter 35
The Third Adversary: The British
Vanquishing the Conway Cabal and repairing the army’s supply system were necessary steps. To win the war, however, Washington wanted a professional army. Local militias, in his experience, could not endure the brutality of combat.
Warfare required training. Because muskets were not accurate, musket fire had to be concentrated in volleys, a line of soldiers firing at the same moment, so the sheer weight of lead screaming across the field would damage the enemy. The cumbersome act of reloading could take thirty seconds or more, so sequenced firing allowed some soldiers to shoot while others reloaded. If volleys flagged, opposing troops would charge with bayonets. A bayonet fight was sheer butchery, slashing blades and trampled men.
Few American units had mastered battle tactics beyond conducting ambushes or skirmishing from cover. Small-scale engagements could extend the war, but not win it. Unless the Americans had the advantages that Gates enjoyed at Saratoga, or the benefit of surprise they had at Trenton, they could not prevail. They could not move across a battlefield quickly, in formation; or move from column to line and back to column; or move diagonally, then form for volley firing. No American general, certainly not Washington, was a true master of formal drill.
Deep in the misery of February, no one at Valley Forge expected that the starving Continentals would learn those tactics over the next three months. Still less did they expect their instructor to be a stout, middle-aged, gay German with little English and an Italian greyhound who howled balefully at off-key singing. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, son of a Prussian officer, had served with Frederick the Great. After soldiering for other princes, he connected in Paris with American diplomats who were prowling for army officers. Ben Franklin packaged Steuben as a Prussian lieutenant general of noble blood, a charade that held up fairly well.1
With bluff charm, Steuben sold himself to Congress. He was shrewd enough not to demand a specific rank or even pay, asking only to be “reimbursed” for income lost by leaving Europe. His apparent modesty distinguished him from other Europeans.
At Valley Forge in late February, the Prussian impressed Washington and everyone else. “Baron Steuben has had the fortune to please uncommonly for a stranger,” John Laurens wrote to his father. “All the general officers who have seen him are prepossessed in his favor.” He rode through camp, translators by his side, to quiz the soldiers, one of whom recalled him as “a perfect pe
rsonification of Mars. The trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect.” American soldiers impressed Steuben. “No European army,” he later wrote, “could have been kept together under such dreadful deprivations.”2
Washington asked Steuben to create a uniform manual of drill, appointing him acting inspector general, responsible for training; ironically, Thomas Conway still was inspector general in name, but Conway was not in camp and never would be so long as Washington commanded. After nearly three years of war, the Continentals lacked a uniform method for training troops; equally missing was a shared vocabulary of commands. When regiments mixed together during battle, which always happened, officers could not be sure their orders were understood. Steuben reduced how many orders soldiers had to recognize and how many movements they had to learn. Every evening, staff officers translated his French manuscripts into English.3
In mid-March, Steuben began drilling a model company, drawn largely from Washington’s personal guard. The twice-daily sessions became the best entertainment in camp. Officers and soldiers clustered at the parade ground to watch the red-faced German bellow orders in foreign tongues, followed by English translations. He pantomimed correct positions and movements, using his hands to adjust soldiers’ arms, feet, or heads. His favorite English word was “Goddamn,” sprinkled liberally among profanities in several languages.4
Steuben quickly understood his soldiers. “The genius of this nation,” he observed, “is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians or French.” With Europeans, he gave an order and they obeyed. But with Americans, “I am obliged to say: ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that’: and then he does it.”5