by Bob Drury
For the most part these young men and teenagers were uneducated, wildly undisciplined, shockingly under-armed, and strikingly unkempt.III The last particularly nettled the commander in chief. From his days organizing the Virginia Blues, Washington had taken great pride in the appearance of his troops. He had even ensured that his personal guard, then and now, were tall, broad-shouldered, and well-groomed troops whose martial carriage set them apart. But the motley collection of soldiers now under his command routinely defied their superiors’ orders regarding the length of their hair and regularly decorated their uniforms, such as these were, with whatever bits of animal fur, ribbons, and feathers struck their fancy. Further, even in the best of times, throwing together a mix of southern sharecroppers, cosmopolitan seaport dwellers from the middle states, and flinty New Englanders would have resulted in a complex disharmony. As living conditions at Valley Forge deteriorated, these animosities began to take on a distinctly regional tenor.
The first 400 huts erected, for instance, were located just past the defensive redoubt facing Philadelphia at the camp’s southeast corner. They housed troops from Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Pennsylvania. The Virginians, naive about the rigors of northern winters, complained that their New England counterparts had purposely failed to show them how to construct these “outer line” cabins for maximum warmth. Similarly, urban units invariably contained more artisans than their rural counterparts, and the skilled carpenters scoffed that the frontiersmen’s quarters were barely a step above lean-tos. As the revolutionary historian John Milsop observed, “The New Englanders resented the southerners, while the southerners resented the New Yorkers.”
Milsop’s remark was understated. The Maryland papists were never fully accepted—even those who proclaimed themselves merely “Catholic around the edges.” And no one seemed to like the Pennsylvanians. Joseph Plumb Martin, noting that the New England contingents contained not a few soldiers of puritan leanings who were more conversant with Savonarola than with Paine, observed in his journal that his fellow Nutmeg Staters considered even the “Fighting Quakers” little more than “savages.” But among certain ranks, particularly in southern regiments, the greatest enmity was reserved for the free blacks.
By 1775, blacks made up some 20 percent of the colonial population; close to half a million men, women, and children. Ninety-nine percent of them were enslaved. Washington had wavered over accepting the nation’s few free blacks into the army’s ranks from the onset of the revolution. Although considered a compassionate slaveholder by the standards of the era, he was nonetheless a Virginia planter who upon his appointment as commander in chief continued to own 135 human beings. He was of course aware of the loyalty and grit shown by black volunteers who had fought for the colonies in and around Boston. And by now most patriots were familiar with the story of Crispus Attucks, the fugitive slave considered the first casualty of the revolution when he was killed during the Boston Massacre. On a more personal level, Washington respected the opinions of his personal manservant William “Billy” Lee and appreciated the hardships Lee had shared with him since he had taken the field. (Lee was one of the few slaves granted the dignity of a surname.) Yet the idea of arming black men weighed heavily on a class of gentry whose subconscious was so invested in the fear of slave uprisings that they included this concern in the Declaration of Independence.IV It was not until a Loyalist politician outmaneuvered Washington on the subject that he reluctantly acknowledged the need for black soldiers.
In the wake of the British evacuation of Boston, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, incorporated what he called an Ethiopian Regiment into his state’s Loyalist forces. The unit was composed of slaves promised their freedom in exchange for deserting insurrectionist masters and fighting for the Crown. Slaves at the time outnumbered the white population in Virginia, and when Patrick Henry informed Washington that his manpower was being stretched to its limits pursuing these fugitives, the reaction was swift. Washington wrote to John Hancock that Lord Dunmore’s policy might not only swell the British ranks with escaped slaves, but also encourage free blacks to turn coat. These freemen, he had decided, should be granted the right to fight for the cause, albeit awarded smaller enlistment bonuses. Congress acquiesced, and over the course of the revolution some 5,000 black men enlisted in the Continental Army and, to a lesser extent, in various state militias. This was the first and only time an American fighting force was integrated until the Korean War. These enlistees included the more than 750 black soldiers who had marched from Whitemarsh to Valley Forge.
Concerning his attitude toward slavery, historians have generally viewed Washington through a complex lens: that is, as a man who held slaves but also expressed reservations about the institution of slavery throughout his public career. Although he left ambiguous writings on the subject—including a 1778 letter to his cousin and estate manager Lund Washington prohibiting Lund from selling Mount Vernon’s slaves against their will—it is safe to assume that he shared the attitude of his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people are to be free,” Jefferson wrote in his autobiography. “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion had drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”V It thus came as something of a surprise when John Laurens—a man from an even more aggressive and pernicious slave state—broke with those prevailing instincts.
In the early days of 1778, the younger Laurens—whose family fortune was built on the backs of captured Africans passing through his father’s auction houses—began to agitate to raise his own regiment of freed black soldiers. He was probably influenced by Rhode Island’s Gen. Varnum, who convinced his state’s legislature to stand up a battalion of freed chattel upon the condition that their masters were fairly compensated.VI An excited Laurens wrote to his father with an overture “to augment the Continental Forces from an untried Source.” In lieu of any future personal family inheritance, he went on, “I would solicit you to cede me a number of your able bodied men Slaves . . . those who are unjustly deprived of the Rights of Mankind [to] reinforce the Defenders of Liberty.” In an earlier letter, Laurens had emphasized to his father that he had “long deplored the wretched state of these men,” and insisted that his “black scheme” was far from “a chimera” of a young and foolish mind.
Laurens’s arguments were heavily influenced by the writings of John Locke, perhaps the Enlightenment’s greatest liberal thinker. Laurens had fallen under the seventeenth-century philosopher’s spell while studying his writings in Geneva, and Locke’s doctrines attacking taxation without representation had originally drawn him to the patriot cause. Similarly, Locke’s contention that all men were born equal regardless of skin tone struck the young man like a blast from Gabriel’s trumpet. Unusually progressive for a son of South Carolina, Laurens reasoned that African Americans’ alleged intellectual deficiencies and lack of social refinement resulted only from decades if not generations of enslavement. He believed that given the educational opportunities afforded to whites, black men—he never spoke of women of color—would naturally reveal their potential as full contributors to American society. Yet for all his noble intentions, Laurens remained a creature of his era. Reading his words today, no matter how virtuous their design, still makes one’s gorge rise.
He contended, for instance, that the violence of the south’s peculiar institution had prepared the slaves for the hard life of infantrymen. “Habits of subordinations, patience under fatigues, sufferings and privations of every kind, are soldierly qualifications, which these men possess in an eminent degree,” he wrote. “Those who fall in battle will not lose much. Those who survive will obtain their reward.” Laurens even proposed a uniform design for the regiment, a white coat with red facing “to form a good Contrast with the complexion of the soldier.” Whether the warmly dressed Laurens recognized the speciousness of arguing for the un
iversal “Rights of Mankind” while retaining at Valley Forge his own half-clothed manservant, a slave named Shrewsberry, remains unrecorded.
What posterity does reveal is Henry Laurens’s surprising reaction to his son’s entreaties. Henry replied that he was not personally averse to John’s proposition. He merely considered it improbable. After immersing himself in the cause of American independence he had gradually changed his views on the institution and become a proponent, if a tepid one, of emancipation. Of his own slaves, he wrote to John, “I am devising means for manumitting many of them & for cutting of the entail of Slavery.” This was far from the prevalent view among his peers, and Henry Laurens knew it. “Great powers oppose me,” he added, specifically citing “the avarice of my Countrymen.” The elder Laurens ultimately decided that bucking those great powers was a fool’s errand. As he informed his son, “I will do as much as I can in my time & leave the rest to a better man.” He then suggested that if it was more troops John needed, he travel home to South Carolina and use the powerful Laurens name to raise a regiment of white men who would eagerly flock to his banner.
John Laurens, however, had by now become such an intrinsic member of Washington’s staff that the idea of taking even temporary leave from Valley Forge was out of the question. It is debatable, in any case, whether Washington would have given him permission. He had only reluctantly acceded to allowing free blacks to enlist, his hand forced by Lord Dunmore. A regiment of former slaves could well have been a bridge too far. Moreover, by this point even the indefatigable commander in chief had become too reliant on the diligence of his young kitchen cabinet as they oversaw a plethora of administrative duties.
Washington was no longer the foxhunting Virginia squire who had ridden off to war 30 months earlier. He was now the porcelain crucible of the nascent United States, and he recognized in the southern passion of Laurens, in the erudite insouciance of Hamilton, and even in the Gallic je ne sais quoi of Lafayette the molten material with which the new nation would be sculpted. Perhaps even more than he needed his favorite generals, he needed these surrogate sons now. For amid the flurry of construction activity at Valley Forge as the calendar rolled into 1778, he sensed that the solidarity of his officer corps was steadily disintegrating.
♦ ♦ ♦
Most of the Continental Army’s enlisted men were accustomed to hard labor in adverse conditions. They were farmers and blacksmiths, carpenters and miners, fishermen and stonecutters whose sunburned faces and callused hands attested to their ability to withstand the rigors of nature. The majority of Washington’s officers, on the other hand, were sons of America’s aristocracy, patricians whose vision of war tended toward heroic cavalry charges followed by giddy minuets in Philadelphia taverns. Their illusions were obliterated by the reality of shoeing one’s own horses or boiling one’s own lye and lard to make soap. Moreover, hanging over Valley Forge like Banquo’s resentful ghost was the specter of a provisionless winter. The conditions made for a grousing gentry.
The Christmas forage sweeps conducted by Lord Stirling and Gen. Armstrong had provided a short-term reprieve from the gnawing hunger afflicting the troops. But Washington well understood that the link between adequate supplies and good morale that sustained an army was close to shattering. A telling example was the experience of Gen. Armstrong himself after he and his militiamen had secured their prize of close to 200 cattle. They had driven the herd all Christmas Day and night, forded the Schuylkill, and arrived at Valley Forge some 24 hours later. Once the beef was delivered to the commissary, the proud Pennsylvanian general, formerly a prosperous civil engineer and surveyor, was reduced to abjectly approaching his commander in chief to beg that he be allowed to cull six of the cows in order to feed his own hungry and exhausted soldiers.
Even the troops whose short-term enlistments were about to expire presented Washington with a double-edged sword. Though their departure would mean fewer mouths in camp, by contract and the rules of basic morality they were also due enough provisions to last them through the duration of their homeward trek. John Laurens aside, South Carolina and Georgia—busy with fending off threats from the Royal Navy at Charleston and Savannah—were the only two states not represented at Valley Forge. This meant supplying comestibles for journeys into the upper reaches of New Hampshire or deep into North Carolina’s piney woods. Given these and too many similar circumstances, Washington worked at the edges as best he could to maintain his army’s equilibrium. One solution was to detach more units, as he had done several weeks earlier with Armstrong’s Pennsylvania militia. This would serve the dual purpose of lessening the strain on his kitchens while fulfilling his commitment to Congress to protect the territory surrounding Philadelphia. With hay and oats particularly precious commodities, his gaze fell first on the four companies of General Casimir Pulaski’s light horse dragoons.
The 32-year-old Pulaski had arrived in the United States the previous July an abject pauper, having been driven into exile when the czar’s armies crushed the Polish-Lithuanian resistance to Russian hegemony over the Baltic states. Born to a noble family and having been a soldier since his teens, Pulaski was by the age of 21 already a renowned horseman who had raised a Polish cavalry unit, or choragiew, that for close to a decade had struck fear into the far larger armies of his country’s Russian, Austrian, and Prussian oppressors. The failure of the quixotic Polish rebellion was the American Revolution’s gain, and by September Congress had acceded to Washington’s request to grant Pulaski command of the Continental Army’s horse service. In a letter to John Hancock recommending the commission, Washington showed his softer side for this budding Sobieski “who has sacrificed his fortune engaged in the liberty and independence of his country.” His compassion paid immediate dividends when Pulaski rallied the disorganized American light horse in the latter stages of the Battle of Brandywine Creek.
In the interim between Brandywine and the Battle of Germantown, Pulaski set about writing the Continental Army’s first cavalry manual and transforming the force’s few hundred mounted scouts and mail carriers into a formidable fighting unit. With his dashing black mustache and swarthy good looks set off by his favorite white sable uniform collar, Pulaski was instantly recognizable galloping at the head of the Continental dragoons. Yet even the greatest horseman is only as good as his steed. And in an effort to spare his horseflesh from Valley Forge’s deprivations, Washington dispatched Pulaski and his men to a winter garrison at Trenton. Pulaski was given instructions to provide for the city’s security and, perhaps more important, to rest and nourish his emaciated animals as best he could in order to have them battle ready by spring. A smaller mounted detachment with similar orders was carved from Pulaski’s charge and sent to reinforce the Continental regulars holding Wilmington, Delaware. There the failure of the Maryland and Delaware militias to turn out in force had left the American remuda decimated, so that mail riders had been reduced to mounting mares heavy with foal.
With Pulaski’s horsemen departed, Washington took a moment to turn his eye toward the distant future. He pressed the camp’s quartermasters to work with his staff in drawing up plans for provisioning the next spring’s offensives, and dispatched junior officers whose troops had been decommissioned to scour the southern states for deserters while fanning others north to secure arms and supplies from New England. He then requested that his remaining regimental commanders compile lists of the specific deprivations from which their units suffered, as well as recommendations to remedy the deficiencies. His aides were instructed to collect and collate these files in order to present them to the congressional delegation that Washington was gambling would agree to journey to Valley Forge.
How confident the commander in chief was in Congress’s reaction to his entreaties for a personal consultation, and how much of this was a show of bravado to stay the morale of his officer corps, is difficult to determine. In either case, so eager were his subordinates to vent their frustrations that the Potts House was soon awash in thousands of
pages of exhaustive memorandums. In the meanwhile, Washington allowed a full week to pass after sending his “starve, dissolve, or disperse” letter. He had made his case and said his piece. In the interim, his silence spoke for itself. This proved yet another shrewd political tactic. For 80 miles to the west, his deliberate reticence was having its desired effect.
* * *
I. One of these operatives, it was later revealed, was the American diplomatic delegation’s own chief secretary.
II. One year later Spain did join the entente, albeit without making any commitment to American independence.
III. According to the American Revolution specialist Arthur S. Lefkowitz, a mere 830 American college degrees, predominantly from Harvard, Yale, and the College of New Jersey at Princeton, were awarded between the years 1769 and 1775. (Lefkowitz, George Washington’s Indispensable Men, p. 8.)
IV. The Declaration’s twenty-seventh and final accusation against George III included the charge, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” a clear reference to slave revolts.
V. That first sentence is inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial. Tellingly, the following sentences are not.
VI. So estimable in drill and maneuver was Rhode Island’s all-black battalion of 130 men that Massachusetts and Connecticut soon followed suit.
SEVENTEEN
FIRECAKES AND COLD WATER
Throughout 1777, Washington’s plaints to the Continental Congress, while urgent, had reflected the same quiet constancy with which he commanded his army. The delegates, however, could not help reading his dispatch of December 23 as full-blown fulmination. Henry Laurens in particular, prodded by his son, recognized that the commander in chief had crossed a metaphorical line.