by Bob Drury
But after a personal inspection of the camp’s storehouses and larders, they faced the withering truth—there was no food. Each and every regiment, they noted, had been “destitute of fish or flesh” for days and the soldiers were barely surviving on maggot-infested firecakes. As an aside in the National Park Service’s official history of Valley Forge drolly notes, “If the army had been able to subsist on magazines of flour or herds of cattle voted into existence with the summary ease and authority with which the new arrangements of battalions could be decreed, the committee could have completed its work and returned to York within a fortnight.”
Instead, the specter of an army near disintegration galvanized the individual members of the Camp Committee to demonstrate an independence that in effect upended their political relationship with their parent body. What, after all, was the point of reorganizing a force teetering on the brink of starvation? They thus saw no need to consult with their peers in York before, as Washington had already done, officially imploring Gov. William Livingston of New Jersey and Gov. Thomas Johnson of Maryland to provide emergency provisions. The New York delegate Gouverneur Morris also wrote privately to his state’s governor, George Clinton, pleading for cartloads of food. Morris warned Clinton “that an American Army in the Bosom of America is about to disband for want of something to eat.”
This newfound autonomy in the Camp Committee bore the undeniable imprint of Washington and his circle of young aides working behind the scenes, cajoling the representatives to accept most of the arguments put forth in A Representation to the Committee of Congress. Hamilton in particular, the author of the report and still disgusted with the “glut of mediocrities” who had succeeded the First Continental Congress, saw the five delegates as the last best chance to hold the army together.
Such was Washington’s canny ability to influence the panel that in several communiqués to York the task force adopted his report’s language verbatim. The delegates’ self-determination also empowered them to scuttle a harebrained proposal put forward by a clique of Pennsylvania congressmen clamoring once again for a full-bore assault on Philadelphia. The small delegation’s new boldness and its alignment with Washington were not lost on the members of the Board of War. General Gates in particular took the nomination of Gen. Schuyler as a shot across his own bow. But ambition and bluster were Gates’s stock-in-trade, and he was too shrewd to be outflanked without a fight.
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From the outset of his elevation to the reconstructed Board of War, Gates had been far from satisfied with what he considered the mundane tasks of the position. Overseeing recruiting and arms production, particularly now that the French were surreptitiously supplying most of the new weapons distributed throughout the American army, was a chore beneath his eminence. He and his closest ally Thomas Mifflin were even less enamored of having to arbitrate the disputes that arose between Washington and the individual states, especially the commander in chief’s continual rifts with the Pennsylvania state assembly. Goading the likes of Thomas Wharton into collecting and transferring clothing and foodstuffs to Valley Forge was not what Gates had ridden south to do. He set his sights on grander accomplishments, the Canadian campaign being but one. So it was that the board, having already convinced Congress, first, to let it establish its own parallel commissary systems and, second, to bless its plan to invade Canada, now played its third card.
Washington and the delegates composing the Camp Committee had no idea that on the day before they tendered Gen. Schuyler as a candidate to fill the vacant post of quartermaster general, the Board of War had proposed to Congress an alternative plan, which would in effect hand Gen. Gates control of the Continental Army’s quotidian operations. In the board’s scenario, the quartermaster general would be relieved of his hands-on procurement duties, with those functions devolving to several regional superintendents who would be subordinate to the board.
Abolishing the traditional function of the quartermaster general as the unfettered guardian of the army’s purse strings would effectively reduce him to a figurehead. It would also drastically undermine Washington’s authority. As either a sop or a slap in the face to the commander in chief—no one was certain which—the board’s overture did deign to leave the quartermaster general in control of mundane affairs regulating encampment sites and when and how to march into battle. In essence, the proposal would allow the generals Gates and Mifflin to dictate military strategies while graciously allowing Washington to devise the tactics to carry them out. It was the hauteur of the Canadian campaign writ large, and effectively amounted to a bloodless coup. The delegates in York adopted it in early February.
Why Congress would cooperate with the board’s ploy to sabotage its top commander in the field remains something of a mystery. An obvious speculation touches upon that favorite congressional hobbyhorse, fiscal prudence. This pecuniary obsession was ingrained and had even influenced the appointment of Washington as commander in chief—as a wealthy planter married to an even wealthier widow, Washington had volunteered to forgo any salary when he accepted the post. Now, nearly three years later, the civil authorities could point to Washington’s own testimony regarding the incompetence and waste pervading the Quartermaster Department as a rationale for handing the Board of War such power. General Gates, after all, had argued that under his new system the department’s profligacy would magically vanish when all military expenditures were contingent upon his new implementation of proper checks and balances.
Another hypothesis regarding Congress’s acquiescence was apparently more personal. At any given moment there were never more than 21 delegates sitting in York during the winter session of 1777–1778. The majority of these had replaced the deceased, retired, or enlisted congressmen who had taken part in the unanimous vote to appoint Washington to lead the Continental Army in June 1775. These new delegates had no personal investment in his selection, nor in his continuing service. Few of them had even met him, and most relied for their knowledge of him largely upon the legends that had sprung up. Further, in York Congress convened on the second floor of a nondescript brick county courthouse by day and congressmen slept in cramped rooms, often shared, that reeked of the stench from the city’s half-frozen open sewers. Unlike Washington some 80 miles away, Gen. Gates took quarters in the city, ensuring that he was but a short stroll from lobbying individual delegates, particularly the New England contingent, over warm fires in cozy taprooms. A veteran back-channel operator dating back to his service in the British military, Gates had developed an ambitious friendship in particular with John Adams, whom the newer delegates held in awe. York was a small town of just 2,000, and it would be asking much for a cranky, sulky politician trapped in a squalid and overcrowded backwater to resist a bit of massaging from the “Hero of Saratoga.”
In the end, the disappointing outcomes of Washington’s autumn campaigns as well as the vortex of intrigue surrounding the Conway affair had chastened politicians. The fortunes of war had finally convinced the delegates, particularly the more vociferous armchair generals, to tread lightly through the minutiae of military comportment. For months these same statesmen had either completely misread or ignored the depths to which the army’s broken supply arteries had collapsed. Now their commander in chief’s own insistent warnings about the failure of his support systems had grown ever blunter. It would not have taken much persuasion to convince a majority of delegates that Gates was the officer to relieve them of the burden of cutting through these knotty conflicts.
There was, however, a flaw in Gates’s strategy—the catastrophic mid-February food crisis at Valley Forge had proved a double-edged sword. For with each report arriving from the Camp Committee, it became more apparent to Gates and his allies that Washington’s masterly handling of the visiting delegates was eroding the board’s own backroom manipulations at York. Coincidentally, as the weather continued to worsen across the northeast, the same swollen rivers and impassable roads that had prevented supplies from reaching Va
lley Forge for two solid weeks had also cut off all communications between York and the cantonment. Thus were Washington, his young and devoted staff, and the Camp Committee initially insulated from any knowledge of Gen. Gates’s putsch. The information blackout also provided the five delegates at Moore Hall a bit of breathing room to reconsider their nomination of Gen. Schuyler to the quartermaster general’s post as perhaps too inflammatory. It was during this interlude that the Camp Committee, with an assist from Washington, recognized that an alternative candidate for the position was right under their noses. They turned their attention to Nathanael Greene.
The night before Greene had led his foraging party into eastern Chester County, the Camp Committee corralled him in an informal meeting at Moore Hall to gauge his interest in the quartermaster general’s post. Greene knew how crucial the position was to the war effort, but also expressed reluctance to be pulled from the front lines. He dreaded the idea of his colleagues in the field “immortalizing [themselves] on the golden pages of history” while his own reputation would be “confin’d to a series of druggery.” He nonetheless promised the delegates to give the matter more thought during his provisioning expedition, and rode off the next day.
Twenty-four hours later, on February 13, a mail rider from York finally made it through to Valley Forge. He carried a letter from Henry Laurens outlining Congress’s decision to accept the Board of War’s scheme to co-opt the Quartermaster Department. The elder Laurens also requested that the delegates at Valley Forge submit the names of officers they felt were best qualified to serve as Quartermaster Department superintendents in Gen. Gates’s new arrangement. Congress, Laurens wrote, would whittle from this list its final nominees. Once confirmed they would report directly to the board. The delegates were stunned. That they waited several hours before informing Washington of this turn of events strongly hints at their fear that the commander in chief might resign on the spot.
Washington did not step down, of course. But the Camp Committee nevertheless still faced an impasse. The most effective riposte to the board’s maneuvering would be to counter with their own qualified candidate for quartermaster general. To that end Washington made certain to keep them apprised of how effectively Greene was performing on his forage mission. He also talked up the Rhode Islander’s nimble mind, his round-the-clock work ethic, and the indomitable courage he had displayed in battles from Long Island to Brandywine Creek. Finally, Washington also tacitly reminded them of Greene’s early enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause—Greene was one of the first out-of-staters to reach Massachusetts and volunteer his services in the wake of Lexington and Concord.
Were these not precisely the qualities the Continental Army needed in a quartermaster? Washington made plain that he was in no way attempting to lobby the distinguished gentlemen. He was merely offering his services, providing facts and commensurate recommendations that, he hoped, would buttress their decision-making. If these happened to guide the outcome of the committee’s thinking, he was happy to be of service. Though Washington kept few written records during this period, there is no doubt that his backstage manipulations steered the panel toward the outcome he desired.
If the men on the Camp Committee had not been convinced of Greene’s worthiness before his departure, they now were. But there remained two major obstacles: Greene was not due back in camp for another nine days, and no one was certain that he would accept the position. The delegates had no choice but to stall for time. They drafted a reply to Henry Laurens that effectively ignored the news of the Board of War’s plans and instead devoted their report to describing Valley Forge’s deprivations in lurid and alarming detail. Desertions were rampant, they wrote, and morning collections of the bodies of men who had died silently in the night had become routine. Those who still survived—“Naked from the Crown of their Heads to the Soles of their Feet”—faced unimaginable “tryals and Sufferings of Body & mind.” Not the least of these was an outbreak of scabies stemming from the lack of soap and the dearth of cisterns, pans, and buckets in which to wash. Joseph Plumb Martin relates a particularly gruesome home remedy that he undertook to relieve himself of “that delectable disease the itch”—inundating the scabies pustules on his body with burning-hot sulfur acquired from an artillery unit. He added that he could not have withstood the pain without also having acquired a jug of whiskey.
The members of the Camp Committee laid the entire “shameful Situation” at the feet of their fellow civil authorities. As they hoped and suspected, upon receipt of their doleful description, Henry Laurens convinced Congress to act immediately. In the interest of rectifying the food crisis as rapidly as possible, he wrote back that the delegates at Valley Forge were now empowered to immediately fill the Quartermaster Department’s superintendent offices themselves. At some point in the future, he added, Congress would review their selections.
Still playing for time, the Camp Committee responded by acting as if the Board of War’s takeover plot was not a fait accompli but still up for debate. Without mentioning Gen. Greene by name, they informed Henry Laurens that they had someone new in mind to fill the quartermaster general’s position, but would need a few more days before “we shall do ourselves the Honor of laying our Sentiments before Congress on the material Alteration proposed in this Office.” When this communiqué reached York, Laurens convinced Congress to again acquiesce. Ever so subtly, the five elected officials at Valley Forge were making their parent body subservient on this issue—the tail was wagging the dog. All the while Washington continued to lay the groundwork for a political counterattack against what Hamilton labeled “the traits of the monster” and their “secret machinations.”
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As the weather eased, the commander in chief rode off to Moore Hall daily to assist the delegates in shaping their job offer to Greene. Upon Greene’s return the delegates began their campaign of persuasion immediately. Greene was as alarmed as his commander in chief at the prospect of subservience to Gates, Mifflin, and their accomplices, and Washington assured him that his reputation was enough to cow Congress into backing away from the board’s designs. Playing on Greene’s patriotism, his considerable ego, and especially his antipathy toward Gen. Mifflin, Washington convinced the proud Rhode Islander that he alone was the man on whose shoulders rested not only the Continental Army’s independence, but quite possibly its very survival. He also dangled a monetary plum—henceforth, Greene and those he selected as his deputies would be allocated a percentage of all official payments as salaries, in Greene’s case a healthy one percent of all moneys handled by the department.
It took 72 hours for Greene to allow his name to be submitted for the post. He had but two stipulations—his elevation would be temporary until the immediate supply crisis was solved, and he would conduct all Quartermaster Department business from the front lines. He also asked to work with two familiar assistants. He wanted Col. John Cox, currently a deputy quartermaster stationed at Reading, as his chief procurement officer, and the scrupulous New Jersey iron merchant Charles Pettit as his head bookkeeper.
That night the members of the Camp Committee, emboldened by their formidable candidate, drafted a letter to their fellow congressmen critiquing the Board of War’s plan as a waste of money that would divide the American army into clashing camps. The five delegates contended that the proposal to hand power to a gaggle of superintendents, as opposed to one controlling officer, could only increase “the Chance of Frauds.” As their prime example they noted that a paucity of wagons had contributed mightily to the supply shortages at Valley Forge. The long list of civilian teamsters who had shirked their duty to the country in order to rent their services to private parties was damning. Under Gates’s new operation, they argued, this practice would undoubtedly continue, given how easy it would be for the Board of War’s superintendents to lay any blame for “Ignorance, Indolence, or Iniquity” on each other. Finally, in perhaps their most savvy counterpunch, the delegates questioned the wisdom of having t
hose very superintendents report to an oversight board that included one member—Gen. Mifflin—whose neglectful tenure as quartermaster general could be construed as the root cause of the army’s succession of supply misfortunes.
In Gen. Greene, the committeemen stressed, they had found an officer of impeccable character who knew firsthand the military’s wants and needs, its strengths and weaknesses. Only Greene and his two handpicked seconds could streamline the army’s bloated, overwrought support systems. There would be no need for far-flung superintendents operating through a chain of command resembling a hedge maze.
The delegates’ arguments were strong, clear, and effective. On March 2, five days after receiving their recommendation, Henry Laurens convinced Congress to withdraw its support for the Board of War’s overhaul. Nathanael Greene was simultaneously elevated to the post of quartermaster general. The rapidity with which the parent body yielded to the committee’s proposal must have surprised even the wily Washington. To pour salt into the wound, Gen. Mifflin was also ordered to hand over to Greene any preparations the board might have already made for the army’s spring campaigns.
Washington had conducted the perilous political concerto like a maestro. He had used the confluence of the Camp Committee’s journey to Valley Forge, February’s catastrophic food shortages, and the Board of War’s blunted coup to forge a greater cooperation between America’s civil and military branches. Moreover, with eyes on the ground at the winter camp, the Congress in York now had a more practical vantage point from which to view, and appreciate, the commander in chief’s many complex problems. In turn, Washington’s personal outreach to the delegates at Moore Hall and his artful outmaneuvering of his political enemies provided him with deeper insight into the obstacles a nascent Continental Congress continually faced.