Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Washington could take small solace from the plaudits he received for rallying the few survivors into an orderly retreat. He was now considered an assassin in France, and in Virginia his luster was badly tarnished. As a Richmond newspaper editorial coolly observed, although Washington may have acquired “a high Reputation for Military Skill, Integrity, and Valor; Success has not always attended his Undertakings.” For the rest of his life he could never erase from his memory the wails of the wounded or the images of the dead scalped by the enemy’s own Indian accomplices. Nor would he ever forget the wily guerrilla tactics that had vanquished the British force. If he could not bring his compatriots back to life, he could ensure that any soldiers serving under his future command would be well versed in bush-fighting techniques.

  Back home at Mount Vernon, Washington began to apply these lessons. At just 23 he was charged with raising a colonial regiment from the primarily Anglo-Saxon and Celtic immigrants pouring into Virginia. The company he recruited and trained, the historian Ellis notes, “combined the spit-and-polish discipline of British regulars with the tactical agility and proficiency of Indian warriors.” Although by this point the major campaigns of the French and Indian War had gravitated farther north, Washington’s Virginia Blues—named after the indigo uniforms that he had personally designed—honed their expertise patrolling the homestead-dotted Shenandoah Valley west of the Blue Ridge that was subject to frequent French-directed Indian attacks.

  Each of the Virginia rangers, as he called his enlisted men, was issued a detailed battle plan that Washington had written himself. Based on his earlier experiences, it addressed a variety of contingencies. If his men were ambushed in an open forest clearing, for instance, instead of forming up in a European-style defensive square, they were to rush the woods and flank their attackers. He dictated that the area around any potential stockade site was to be cleared of brush and trees to just beyond the 70 yards of a musket’s range—rectifying an oversight that had helped to doom his first military foray against the French. If troops should happen upon the aftermath of an Indian massacre, they were to harvest the corn crop before moving on. And despite his lifelong love of dogs, he ordered that before a surprise attack was mounted, all dogs roaming the camp were to be killed lest their barks and growls alert the enemy. He was also a harsh disciplinarian to officers and rangers alike. Any man found drunk on duty faced lashes, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. Captured deserters were summarily hanged. Washington was a compassionate man, but the exigencies of war prevailed.

  His Virginia Blues eventually played an integral role in the final defeat of the French at Fort Duquesne in 1758. During that campaign, which was led by the renowned British military administrator Gen. John Forbes, Washington took advantage of his proximity by copying Forbes’s orders into notebooks that he would keep for future reference. By the war’s end his regiment of Provincials was regarded as the most effective colonial fighting force in America. Now, almost two decades later, as Washington watched the threadbare Continentals shamble toward Valley Forge, sometimes pausing to boil their shoes in an attempt to make them digestible, a simple question arose: Would he be granted the same time and leeway to restore and retrain these soldiers as he had done with his Virginia corps? Or would that long-ago newspaper editorialist prove prescient; would military success “not always attend his Undertakings”? In truth, given the horror still facing the raw, unkempt men and boys passing before him, his prospects looked as improbable as a human being’s having the strength to fling a silver dollar across the wide Potomac.I

  Added to this burden was his recognition that he was now the physical embodiment of the American Revolution, the man and the cause having fused into a single entity. Three weeks earlier Henry Knox had advised Washington, “The people of America look up to you as their father, and into your hands they entrust their all.” The Jeffersons and Adamses, the Hancocks and Franklins and Paines may have set in motion a rebellion based on ideals not contemplated since classical Athens. But no one in York or Lancaster, no one in Boston or Albany or Charleston, could lead the political movement those philosophers of freedom had birthed. Pericles may have moved men’s minds, but Leonidas made them get up and march. In practice and in deed, the Spartan mantle of breaking the bonds of stratified British colonialism fell to Washington, and Washington alone.

  In his youth he had been granted a glimpse of the immensity of a continent whose eastern rim was now consumed by revolution. His decisions and actions in the weeks and months to come would determine the fate of those thousands of miles rolling westward that would constitute the future United States of America. Given the gravitas of such a task, it is no wonder that a sense of desperation hung no less heavy over the Gulph Road that December than the storm clouds saturating his army.

  * * *

  I. The legend of a young Washington displaying such prodigious strength probably arose from his ability as a boy to clear Virginia’s 300-foot-wide Rappahannock River with a rock as he and his friends waited by a ferry stop.

  TWELVE

  CHAOS IN THE EAST

  December 19 dawned dank and windy beneath a dove-gray sky. As the army trudged forward through the pale sunlight, the scent of rain was in the air. It was into the afternoon’s gathering mist that Washington cantered down into the declivity that would form Valley Forge’s outer defensive ring and up onto the triangular plateau. He was accompanied by his aides, his personal guard, and the contingent of French military engineers. When they topped the rise’s western slope, he and the others were disappointed, but not surprised, to find no sign of the supply wagons promised by the Pennsylvania state government. The Frenchmen, long accustomed to what they considered the Continental Army’s slipshod procurement process, had other things to fret over. They were already mentally sketching the layout for the thousands of log huts to be erected as well as the sites for the redoubts needed to defend the winter cantonment.

  One month earlier, at Washington’s urging, Congress had officially sanctioned the creation of a rudimentary Army Corps of Engineers, which over the next two centuries was destined to serve the country through an invasion of Mexico, a civil war, countless Indian subjugations, and multiple overseas conflicts. The delegates had selected Louis Duportail to lead this new cadre, over objections from representatives who had met and dealt with the imperious Frenchman. They had also promoted him to the rank of brigadier general. As the wind picked up and a light rain began to fall, Washington’s first executive decision at Valley Forge was to order Duportail and his assistants to join several of his general officers in traversing the campsite to survey and map the rolling meadows. As Duportail’s English was limited, the bilingual Richard Kidder Meade was assigned as a translator and liaison.

  Washington next summoned the commanders of the regiments he planned to detach to patrol the roads leading into Philadelphia. Several hundred Pennyslvania militiamen under Gen. John Armstrong were sent back east across the Schuylkill with instructions to split into small, mobile units and turn back any local tradesmen attempting to haul goods into the city. They were also charged with interdicting the enemy’s lines of communication between New Jersey and New York and, when possible, harassing British foraging parties. Simultaneously, a smaller command of Pennsylvania militiamen supplemented by Dan Morgan’s rifle corps were fanned south to serve as forward pickets. Finally, Gen. Smallwood and a division of regulars were dispatched to Wilmington, Delaware. Smallwood’s orders, like Armstrong’s, were threefold—to shore up the town’s defenses against a surprise attack, to assist the navy in distressing Adm. Howe’s ships along the lower reaches of the Delaware, and to serve as a bulwark against a British raid on the Continental food magazines some 20 miles inland near what is now Elkton, Maryland.

  For months Washington had pushed back against the idea of confiscating provisions from civilians loyal to the revolution. When Henry Laurens succeeded John Hancock and broached just such an idea, the commander in chief foresaw the negative ramification
s. Such a step would undercut the very ideals for which the Americans were fighting. The immortal preamble to the Declaration of Independence often diverts attention from the guts of the document—that is, the 27 specific accusations leveled against the tyranny of George III. One of these accused the British monarch of sending “Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance,” and another of affecting “to render the Military independent and superior to the Civil Power.” The representatives of the 13 colonies who formed the Second Continental Congress did not take these intrusions lightly, and neither did Washington. For Washington to declare himself “superior to the Civil Power” and turn on the local citizenry to “eat out their Substance” was a hypocrisy that could very well doom the revolution.

  From a military perspective, there were also practical considerations. Washington recognized that the arrogation of civilian goods would serve, in effect, to open up another front against his beleaguered force. As he wrote to Henry Laurens, “The mode of seizing and forcing supplies from the Inhabitants, I fear, would prove very inadequate to the demands while it would certainly imbitter the minds of the People, and excite perhaps a hurtful jealousy against the Army.” Since the sending of that letter, however, the army’s supply stem had wilted to the point of near-complete dysfunction. Much of this could be laid at the feet of the sad lot of civilian teamsters hired to deliver provisions to the camp from the inland warehouses. To lighten their loads over rough roads, for instance, they had washed the brine from salted meat, allowing it to spoil; and salt herring “arrived in such condition that the fish had disintegrated into a sort of paste.” To further ease their journey, flour was removed from barrels and poured into the bed of supply wagons to mix with all manner of muck and grime. As for beef on the hoof, what little the Continentals managed to obtain was often unrecognizable.

  Rhode Island’s Gen. James Varnum, fresh from the defense of Fort Mercer, noted that his men had gone four days, including their first two at Valley Forge, without bread or meat. When they finally procured beef, he added, “it is of such a vile Quality, as to render it a poor Succedanium for Food.” Joseph Plumb Martin, now an 18-year-old veteran, reported that after two days with no food his unit was supplied with “a beef creature” so skinny that it was “quite transparent. I thought at the time what an excellent lantern it would make.” As a compromise against growing calls to allow his army to seize any and all foodstuff from civilians wherever it was found, Washington granted leave to the detached militiamen to commandeer any trade goods they discovered being taken to Philadelphia. He added that all wagons and carriages captured during these encounters were to be driven back to Valley Forge, carrying whatever extra food was not needed by the patrolling troops themselves.

  This pruning of his main force served to reduce the number of mouths to feed at Valley Forge, as many of Gen. Armstrong’s Pennsylvanians had local roots, and the commander in chief expected them to be capable of living off the land. Although Gen. Howe may have considered the area a bulwark of rebellion when he destroyed its iron forges, the Quakers populating the surrounding countryside constituted a potential fifth column. Washington hoped that sending the militiamen out into their own neighborhoods would dampen temptations for the populace to trade with the British or, worse, share information. The establishment of even this tentative, porous land blockade around Philadelphia was, however, a military trade-off, for by disseminating his troops as such, Washington had also loosened his grip on his control of them. He would have to rely on a communications system consisting of daily, and sometimes hourly, riders delivering and receiving messages and orders to and from the many spokes of his far-flung wheel.

  Meanwhile, as well-worn campaign tents and temporary brush booths sprouted like mushrooms across the Valley Forge plateau, work crews began emptying the firewood sheds dotting the rolling fields—although, on Washington’s orders, the sheds themselves were left standing. The snake-rail fencing erected by local farmers was dismantled, and the teams of woodcutters climbing into the thick stands of timber west of the site reminded Thomas Paine of “a family of beavers” invading the flanks of Mount Misery and Mount Joy. Horses and oxen were in such short supply that the men were reduced to yoking themselves to jerry-rigged carts to haul the bounty back from the forests. The commander in chief’s General Orders specified that tree trunks were to be hewn into sections of “sixteen to eighteen feet” for cabin construction, while all larger branches were stockpiled to construct the abatis that would ring the camp’s fortifications. Whatever remained was added to the firewood store. By the time the first of these creaking barrows laden with wood had begun to return, the French surveyors had laid out the sites for the cabins and the defensive redoubts.

  Washington ordered all of his regimental commanders to divide their units into 12-man squads, junior officers included, to erect their own living quarters. The cabins were “pitted,” that is, their floors were dug several feet below the frost line, with the rough specifications for each hut set at 16 feet deep by 12 feet wide by six feet high. A dozen straw-covered bunks were to extend from the walls. The soldiers’ work gangs stacked the log walls; trimmed cedar, pine, and chestnut planking for roof shingles; and left but a single opening for a door. The gaps between the ill-jointed logs were chinked with mud and clay to keep out the rain and snow. Though wood for flooring was so scarce that it was distributed only for officers’ huts, and glass for windows was out of the question, some of the teams installed crude fieldstone chimneys in their cabins. But since Washington had offered a 12-dollar reward to the squad in each regiment that completed its cabin first, most rose without fireplaces.I By the time the nearly 2,000 huts were completed—an optimistic number that would never come close to housing its capacity of 24,000 soldiers—the five-square-mile plateau that rose from the Valley of the Forges nonetheless constituted the fifth most populated “city” in the United States.

  Duportail and his staff laid the cantonment’s rough thoroughfares along the flanks of the plateau, with the fronts of the cabins facing each other in parallel lines. The effort expended to assemble these simple structures was evidenced by a Connecticut surgeon’s mate who wrote to his father that he and his fellow soldiers had raised their entire structure with but “one Poor ax & no other Tool.” Though some of his general officers had made arrangements to rent rooms in nearby farmhouses, Washington, as a show of solidarity with his troops, vowed to live in his linen “sleeping marquee” erected next to his headquarters tent until the log cabins were completed. He had barely settled in the shadow of a ridgeline in the far northwest of the campsite before he was faced with another, quite unexpected problem.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  During the slog from Whitemarsh hundreds of summer soldiers, many of whose enlistments were set to expire on December 31, had simply walked away from their commands. Over the ensuing days these semi-desertions became so intolerable that Washington and his staff were deluged with reports of roving gangs of half-uniformed Continentals wandering the countryside looting the farmsteads of friend and foe alike. The state of affairs was exacerbated when word began to circulate among the detached Pennsylvania militiamen that their homes and families were being accosted. The idea of patriots with guns leaving their posts to confront other patriots with guns was a burlesque almost too dark to contemplate. In an effort to halt the exodus, Washington took the extreme step of issuing garrison orders—that is, no man was allowed to set foot outside the cantonment without a written laizzez-passer from his brigade commander. Riders were dispatched to inform local civilians, including Quakers, that anyone whose fields, livestock, or corncribs had been plundered could apply for restitution at the Valley Forge commissary. As this was invariably empty, most petitioners had to settle for certificates of seizure: notes vouchsafing future repayment for stolen goods.

  The garrisoning of the encampment, however, could not prevent those same civilians from taking advantage of the chaotic conditions in the war-torn countryside. One Loy
alist gang in particular had long been a burr beneath Washington’s saddle. The Doan Gang, as it was known, consisted of five hulking brothers and a cousin reared in the loamy farmland of nearby Bucks County. They turned to outlawry when the brothers’ father, Joseph Doan, a devout Quaker who refused to cut ties with England, was jailed for failure to pay taxes to Pennsylvania’s new Whig government and his homestead was seized. The Doan Gang specialized in horse theft and also took a particular satisfaction in robbing Whig tax collectors. Predictably, the Doans offered their services to the British as spies. It was their leader, the eldest brother Moses Doan, who 16 months earlier had informed Gen. Howe of the unprotected Jamaica Pass that allowed Crown troops to surprise the Continental Army at the Battle of Long Island.

  Since then the gang had roamed the Middle Atlantic states and even as far west as the fringes of the Ohio Country, with Bucks County serving as its nominal base. When the British took Philadelphia, the Doans embarked on a virtual reign of terror with the complicit backing of Gen. Howe. They ransacked patriot homesteads, rustled cattle, and helped escaped British and Hessian prisoners make their way back to the city through American lines. Over the winter of 1777–1778 the Doans were said to be responsible for stealing more than 200 horses in and around Bucks County alone, and in turn selling them to the Redcoats. Although many of the Quakers residing in the county came to regard the brothers as modern-day Robin Hoods, the area’s patriots considered them demons incarnate.

  Even as the Doans ran wild, a more insidious threat to Washington’s authority arose. Bands of young men calling themselves Continental Volunteers began appearing on the roadways surrounding Philadelphia, setting up tolls, and refusing to let pass anyone who would not, or could not, pay. More organized than the common deserters, these men were primarily civilian opportunists taking advantage of the area’s anarchy to waylay unwary travelers. More than a few, however, were undoubtedly soldiers from the same units who had deliberately separated from their commands on the march from Whitemarsh. Washington had already threatened 100 lashes for any Continental seized outside camp without a pass. Now he ordered platoons of light cavalry into the countryside not only to track the Doans, but to apprehend and return the American stragglers. As a further precaution he issued General Orders forbidding any man inside the encampment to carry a weapon or ride a horse. His regimental officers were instructed to double their daily roll calls, and any soldier caught discharging a firearm in camp was to receive 20 lashes “on the spot.”II