by Bob Drury
But Gen. Howe also understood that Britain could not benefit from the profitable trade with its vast web of colonies without asserting martial authority over them. If in his personal philosophy he preferred maneuver to battle—not only to conserve Britain’s manpower, but to demonstrate its army’s military superiority—that was not an option either the king or his prime minister Lord North condoned. Howe was not a soldier to buck orders. Now, however, he had been stung twice. The first blow was the Crown’s refusal to provide him with the manpower he felt he needed to tamp down the rebellion. The second was the growing public criticism in and outside of Whitehall that his failure to send Gen. Clinton to Burgoyne’s rescue had precipitated the British defeat at Saratoga. In the face of this dual burden, he wrote to George Germain requesting “his Majesty’s permission to resign the command [and] to be relieved from this very painful service.”
Several of Gen. Howe’s officers gingerly proposed abandoning Pennsylvania and consolidating forces with Clinton in New York. At this Howe dug in his heels and condoned a petulant frenzy of citywide burnings and lootings “so brutal and cruel” that the revolutionary diarist Christopher Marshall found it “tiresome tracing them with a pen.” Marshall, a former Philadelphia chemist and pharmacist now enlisted in the Continental Army, received regular, smuggled letters from his son chronicling the “many instances of wanton cruelty in his neighborhood, among which is the burning of the house where Col. Reed did live, the house where Thompson kept tavern, with everything in it, [and] all the hay at Col. Bull’s [including] fifteen hundred bushels of wheat with other grain [and] his powder mill and iron works.” It is safe to say that it was not a happy time to be a revolutionary in Philadelphia.
General Howe, meanwhile, had finally absorbed Washington’s propensity for sudden, unforeseen strikes. As a result he positioned his army behind a line of trenches and redoubts his engineers constructed north of the city. The defensive front stretched for two and a half miles from the Schuylkill to the Delaware and was pocked with 12-pound artillery pieces strategically placed among howitzers and lighter cannons. Within days it would be further bolstered by the arrival of reinforcements Howe had requested from Gen. Clinton in New York. To the Continentals it might as well have been the walls of Asgard. Washington’s chief artillery officer Gen. Henry Knox noted “the improbability & impracticability of surprising 10,000 veteran troops in a well fortified city.” Washington valued not only Knox’s guns, but his opinion. When Gen. Knox cast doubt on the success of a potential operation, the commander in chief took notice.
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Henry Knox weighed in at north of 300 pounds; the only thing missing from his ample paunch was barrel staves. Yet his Father Christmas–like countenance belied one of the most ingenious military minds of the revolution. The Boston-born Knox was the grandson of Northern Irish immigrants whose father had deserted the family when young Henry was 12. Forced to drop out of the Boston Latin school and seek employment to help support his mother and three younger siblings, he was hired by a local bookseller who, taken with the boy’s warm and gregarious personality, assumed the role of surrogate father. Knox was allowed free rein among the shelves before and after store hours, which he used to immerse himself in volumes of military history, engineering, and advanced mathematics. He also mixed easily with the British soldiers who frequented the shop. When not picking their brains about strategy and tactics, he found the time to teach himself French. By his mid-teens Knox had acquired an extraordinary reputation in his neighborhood near Boston Harbor as a self-educated polymath as well as a fearsome street fighter.
Knox opened his own bookstore in Boston at the age of 21 just as his republican inclinations were hardening into deed. A year earlier he had been a witness to the quelled riots that became known as the Boston Massacre, and stepped forward to testify in court against several British soldiers who had fired indiscriminately into the crowd. His breaking point arrived in 1774 with Parliament’s passage of the Coercive Acts, the punitive retributions for the Boston Tea Party known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts. These called in part for the closing of Boston Harbor to international trade. As Knox’s livelihood depended upon book shipments from London, the laws effectively put him out of business. The loss to literate Bostonians, however, was a boon to the American cause. With time on his hands, Knox devoted himself to drilling with a local patriot militia called the Boston Grenadiers. More important, he put his idle hours to use broadening his self-education into the mechanics and maintenance of heavy ordnance.
Knox and his Boston Grenadiers had fought well at Breed’s Hill—known to posterity as the Battle of Bunker Hill—and by the time Washington arrived in Boston to take command of the new Continental Army the opposing forces had more or less settled into a stalemate. The British occupied Boston proper, including its harbor, which allowed their troops and Loyalists to survive on provisions shipped from Canada. The Continentals controlled the higher ground surrounding the city but lacked the firepower to implement a proper siege. One day as Washington was inspecting the breastworks Knox had helped to engineer on the heights of Charlestown, the former bookseller introduced himself to his new commander. He then volunteered to journey the over 200 miles to Fort Ticonderoga and return with the cache of artillery recently captured by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold. The harsh New England winter notwithstanding, a skeptical Washington signed off on the harebrained scheme.
That November, Knox and his brother set off for Lake Champlain. Two months later they reappeared with 43 cannons, 14 mortars, and a brace of howitzers they had hauled up and over the snowy Berkshires on sleds pulled by oxen. Washington was astounded. So were the British who, staring up at the guns, abandoned the city on Saint Patrick’s Day 1776. Washington had retained a soft spot for the portly cannoneer ever since. He also had to take seriously Knox’s doubts about dealing the British in Philadelphia a decisive blow before the snows set in. As it happened, the commander in chief had a more immediate foe to confront.
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In a stinging coda to the setback at Germantown, Washington’s antagonists both in and outside the military had begun to exhume old whispers about what they viewed as his central deficiency: an inability to make and enforce command decisions on the battlefield. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and influential former congressman who had volunteered as a surgeon during the Pennsylvania campaign, was perhaps the most public voice attributing the defeats at Brandywine and Germantown to this shortcoming. Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who once counted Washington as an ally, was a zealous republican reformer who now blamed the commander in chief—wrongly, as it was—for the scrofulous state of the Continental military hospitals and medical stations. In a bitter letter to John Adams at the Continental Congress in York, Rush charged that Washington had been “outgenerald and twice beaten” by Howe, and went on to suggest a solution. “I have heard several officers who have served under General Gates compare his army to a well-regulated family,” Rush told Adams. “The same gentlemen have compared Gen’l Washington’s imitation of an army to an unformed mob.”
That Rush had written specifically to Adams, or that Adams had appeared to welcome and agree with the doctor, was no surprise. Adams had long viewed Washington’s growing popularity with both the American citizenry and the military’s rank and file as posing a threat to the young republic. Upon receiving news of Burgoyne’s surrender, Adams had written to his wife, Abigail, of his satisfaction that it was Gen. Gates who had earned the victory and not a certain general too close to being considered “a deity or savior.” Further, with the impending retirement of John Hancock due to ill health, Adams had become the center of a new generation of delegates whose loyalty to the commander in chief was more abstract than personal. Rush and Adams were in fact in the middle of the stirrings to replace Washington with either Gen. Gates or Gen. Charles Lee, the two British-born generals fighting for the Continentals—notwithstanding the fact that Lee was currently a British prisoner
of war.
To no one’s surprise, the imperious Lee had also weighed in with his own scalding contempt for Washington’s performance at Germantown. When informed of the British victory, he told his jailers that his putative commander in chief “was not fit to command a sergeant’s guard.” Lee was a blister of a man unencumbered by charisma who preferred the company of his hunting hounds to human beings. Human beings who came into contact with him felt similarly. Yet he was also a decorated veteran of the Seven Years’ War and considered one of the Continental Army’s soundest military strategists. Lee’s bloated ego notwithstanding, his critique was shared by more than a few delegates. Adams’s fellow Massachusetts congressman James Lovell predicted that Washington would lose more men “marching and countermarching over hills and thro rivers than in battles.” And even Lafayette, though he would never entertain the thought of replacing Washington, could not help extolling Gates’s “glorious” virtues. “I find myself very happy to have had the pleasure of your acquaintance before your going to take command of the northern army,” he wrote to the general from his convalescent’s bed in Bethlehem.
By mid-October Henry Laurens was alarmed enough at the anti-Washington sentiments in York to confide to his son John, “The general opinion is that the difficulty arises from the want of discipline in the American army.” John Laurens of course passed this on to his commander in chief. Though Washington seemed to take the criticism with equanimity in the presence of his aides, he complained to an old friend from the Virginia House of Burgesses about “the jealousy which Congress unhappily entertain.” More overtly—and quite out of character—in one of his last letters to the outgoing president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, Washington expressed his “most anxious impatience” over the fact that he had yet to receive an official report from Gen. Gates regarding Gen. Burgoyne’s surrender. That the ambitious Gates had ignored the chain of command and reported the details of his victory directly to Congress was another cutting display too obvious to overlook. Washington had publicly congratulated Gates on his “signal success,” calling his mastery of Burgoyne “an event that does the highest honor to the American Arms.” In private, however, he bristled over his subordinate’s impertinence. In a letter to his friend Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, he admitted feeling “most bitterly of Genl Gates’ neglect in not giving me the earliest authentic advice of it.” And in his one public hint of churlishness over Gates’s severance of military protocol, he sarcastically inquired of Hancock, “If Congress have had authentic advices about [Burgoyne’s surrender], I wish to be favor’d with them.”
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In hindsight, there were many reasons put forward for the failure at Germantown—the risk that Washington’s baroque battle plan would not cohere; the confusing fog and smoke; the friendly fire that panicked Wayne’s advancing troops; the auspicious arrival of Cornwallis’s reinforcements. In his invaluable wartime diary, the Connecticut private Joseph Plumb Martin even postulated that the retreating British were emboldened to turn, stand, and ultimately counterattack when the fog carried the voices of the most forward Continentals desperately crying for more ammunition. Washington’s political enemies, however, focused on one incident that reflected a particularly unfavorable light on him.
About midway through the fight, the gathering American thrust was stopped short when one of the forward columns under the command of Gen. Sullivan was enfolded in a hail of musket fire emanating from a three-story stone residence on its flank. The estate—belonging to Pennsylvania’s Chief Justice Benjamin Chew, currently under house arrest in New Jersey on suspicion of being a Crown sympathizer—had been commandeered by over 100 British foot soldiers who had barricaded themselves inside. Washington had convened an impromptu horseback conference with several of his officers and aides to decide whether to lay immediate siege to the Chew House or keep moving forward and take the hornet’s nest later. All but one favored leaving the house surrounded by a company of soldiers and pushing on. The lone dissenter was Henry Knox, whose cannons were already trained on it. Washington sided with Gen. Knox. The artilleryman’s judgment and expertise had, after all, served him well on the Charlestown heights overlooking Boston. This time Knox was wrong.
For over an hour Knox’s three- and six-pounders failed to make a dent in the structure’s sturdy schist facade. British marksmen stationed at the upper windows also repelled three separate assaults by American regiments, leaving nearly 80 dead Continentals lying splayed across the handsomely manicured lawn. A few charging soldiers managed to reach the blasted-out ground-floor windows only to be dispatched by British bayonets. Finally, too late, Washington ordered the stronghold cordoned off and his troops moved forward. The decision to delay the American push, Washington’s detractors charged, had turned the momentum of the battle by giving Howe the time he needed to re-form his lines. In the end, however, Thomas Paine, riding with Gen. Greene as an observer, probably said it best: “I can never . . . and I believe no man can inform truly, the cause of that day’s miscarriage.”
Paine’s notion has the whiff of the true nature of the confused fight, though this did not stop the campaign of innuendo against the commander in chief. First his strategy at Brandywine had been questioned. Now his tactics at Germantown were under scrutiny. Washington was by nature reserved and aloof, and he had cultivated a knack for distancing himself from others that well served his leadership. That said, he was also hypersensitive to criticism, and only a general of steely self-possession and fortitude could have bucked such a tide of insinuation without countering with an assault on Philadelphia to relieve the political pressure. Yet buck it he did. Moreover, if there was a silver lining to the unfortunate events surrounding the fight at the Chew House, it came in the form of the valor displayed by John Laurens during the failed siege.
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Laurens had been riding with Gen. Sullivan when in the opening moments of battle a British ball tore through the fleshy part of his right shoulder. Ignoring the wound, he pressed on through the fog until Sullivan halted his troops outside the Chew House. One of Sullivan’s French aides, watching Knox’s cannonballs bounce off the estate’s thick walls, hatched a plan to burn the British out and tabbed Laurens as his second. The two streaked across the killing field to gather straw from a nearby stable. Their arms filled with the combustible hay, they crept beneath one of the house’s ground-floor windows. When the Frenchman ripped open what was left of the shutters, a Redcoat fired. He missed, but Laurens drew his sword and made for the window. He had nearly reached it when he was spun to the ground by another ball, this one lodging in his side. The two escaped without further injury—unless one counts the anxiety that overcame Laurens’s father. When Henry Laurens learned of his son’s wounds, he dashed off a letter pleading with John to appreciate the difference between genuine courage and reckless temerity.
Washington had quite the opposite reaction. Two days after the battle he summoned John Laurens to his headquarters and, acceding to the young man’s long-standing request, appointed him an official member of his staff. Though Laurens had served as a voluntary aide-de-camp to the commander in chief since August, he was now formally inducted into the small, elite circle of admirers granted access to the innermost thoughts of the patriarch of the American Revolution. Aside from Hamilton, at the time these included the 31-year-old Virginian Richard Kidder Meade, a superb horseman who, like Hamilton, was often charged with secret military and diplomatic missions; Tench Tilghman, a 33-year-old Philadelphian whose primary responsibility was handling the voluminous correspondence that passed into and out of the commander in chief’s headquarters; and the “Old Secretary” Robert Hanson Harrison, a Maryland lawyer who, though only 32, had served as Washington’s attorney since before the war. It was electrifying company, and John Laurens, as devoted to the commander in chief as his new associates were, felt as if he had been born for the position.
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In his voluminous letter
s, John Laurens’s free-flowing prose attempted to affect a worldview of Machiavellian clarity. In truth, his romantic vision of combat and the thirst for honor and glory presaged the Byronic action-hero’s appearance on the world stage by half a century. The plumage of young Laurens’s detailed and entertaining accounts of battles waged, conspiracies uncovered, and strategies concocted constitute one long ode to the American Revolution. Though his recollections are little known to the general public today, historians are grateful to have them.
Ten months earlier, in January 1777, Laurens was newly married and pursuing his legal education at London’s Middle Temple when he abruptly informed his pregnant wife that he was quitting law school and returning to America to fight for the revolution. Naturally, his decision to “to offer his services to his Country” did not sit well with his in-laws, members of the English gentry. More surprising was the reaction of his father, Henry, the South Carolina delegate who would succeed John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress. Henry Laurens had accumulated enough of a fortune to send his three sons, of whom John was the eldest, to study in Europe. Although Henry was a successful merchant and rice planter, much of his wealth was derived from his half ownership in the largest slave-trading house in North America. Henry made it clear that he preferred John to establish a law practice and perhaps follow him into politics rather than risk the great social leveler of the battlefield, “whose bullets and cannonballs proved indiscriminating, felling gentleman officers and common soldiers alike.” But the father knew better than to try too hard to dissuade his headstrong son.
Henry Laurens had already won the career battle with John by steering him away from his early interests in science and medicine and convincing him to take up law. His influence, however, had proved temporary, and John had conspicuously failed to seek his father’s blessing when he married Martha Manning, who would give birth to their daughter while John was voyaging to America. Moreover, John’s ambivalence toward the institution of slavery was not merely a philosophical tenet he had picked up while studying in Europe. It was his opinion that Americans could not fight for their own freedom while owning slaves, and as a practical matter he would act on his beliefs two years later by petitioning the Continental Congress to authorize his recruitment of a brigade of 3,000 slaves who in exchange for fighting for the United States would be freed after the Continentals’ victory.I