by Bob Drury
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I. Captain André himself, attended by a teenage “squire” and resplendent atop a great gray charger, took part in the pageant as a “Knight of the Blended Rose” engaging in combat for Peggy Shippen.
THIRTY-TWO
THE GAUNTLET THROWN
They watched from across the river. There was no need for an abacus. A cursory glance at the traffic on the Delaware told the American scouts that the British did not have enough ships to transport an army. This was confirmed in the last week of May, when Continental spies in Philadelphia reported the first of the vessels on hand departing under the cover of darkness, their holds bulging with crates of heavy equipment, their decks crammed with sick soldiers and Loyalist women and children. The round-the-clock procession of carts and wheelbarrows adding to the jumbled piles of baggage and armaments littering the wharfs pointed to the only conclusion possible. General Clinton would have to march his troops overland. But to where?
At least one of Washington’s chief lieutenants suspected Delaware. This was Charles Lee, who had arrived back at Valley Forge on May 23. During his incarceration, Lee said, he had picked up loose talk about the enemy’s next destination. He believed that after a series of feints toward New Jersey, the British were planning to seize the entire Chesapeake Bay area. There they would stand up a new center of operations in a last-ditch attempt to sever New England from the rest of the colonies. At the very least, he warned, Gen. Clinton was probably preparing to make a dash for Delaware’s riverside city of New Castle to await the gathering of Adm. Howe’s troop transports. Lee even suggested that he cleave a section of Washington’s army to lead south to counter the threat. The commander in chief demurred.
Lee was as odd a duck as ever. His 16 months in British hands had done nothing to sweep away the nimbus of hauteur that enveloped him like a shroud. On his journey to Valley Forge from his Virginia estate he and his hounds had even tarried in York, where he publicly pressed Congress for a promotion to lieutenant general, which would have made him Washington’s equal in rank. The delegates could only react with a collective head shake. Washington, aware of Lee’s pretensions, nevertheless continued to treat him with the warmest cordiality. He retained Lee as his second in command, and gave him charge of Gen. Greene’s old division. Perhaps part of this consideration was due to Washington’s provincial insecurities, but he still valued Lee’s military mind and, at least on the face of it, attributed the general’s natural obstreperousness to a “fountain of candor.”
The commander in chief also had to consider Lee’s familiarity with his jailers—many of whom he had served with during the French and Indian War. For that reason, at least for the moment, he was forced to take seriously the prospect of Clinton’s marching on Delaware or Maryland. Only when riders from New York reached Valley Forge with news that housing in Manhattan and Brooklyn was being appropriated for officers, and that larger New York City structures were being converted into barracks, did Washington know. Clinton would withdraw through New Jersey.
Washington had long been a student of international politics, and with the French now in the fight it was obvious that England faced a hard choice: “Relinquishing all pretensions to conquest in America,” he predicted in a letter to Gouverneur Morris, or abandoning its lucrative West Indian islands. The latter, of course, would prove disastrous on the world stage. Yet, as he concluded, “what she will choose, I cannot say; what she ought to do, is evident. But how far obstinacy, revenge, & villainy, may induce them to persevere I shall not undertake to determine.” Thus whether Clinton would linger in New York or use its harbor as a staging area to depart for Canada or the Caribbean was anyone’s guess. One thing, however, was certain—his long and unwieldy column would be vulnerable as it traversed New Jersey.
From here events moved rapidly; Washington reacted instinctively. He ordered Gen. Maxwell, now camped in Bucks County, to recross the Delaware with his two regiments and fold the New Jersey regulars already there under Col. Israel Shreve into his command. They were to block the roads leading north with felled trees and destroy any bridges spanning creeks and streams. General Smallwood was instructed to remove the warehoused stores from Head of Elk, Maryland, and hand over the defense of Wilmington to local militiamen. Thereafter he was to split his command of 2,000 regulars, sending half to Valley Forge and leading the other half to Chadds Ford. From that location they could serve as a forward screen in the unlikely event that Gen. Lee’s intelligence proved correct, yet still be within a day’s march of Valley Forge. General Greene’s quartermasters, already creaking under the strain of laying in caches of supplies approximately every 15 miles along the enemy’s likely escape route through New Jersey, were pressed to double their efforts to acquire more horses and wagons. And Henry Knox was implored to somehow hasten the expected shipments of artillery and arms from Massachusetts and upstate New York, including 2,000 muskets and bayonets en route from Albany that had been waylaid by Gen. Gates at Peekskill. Finally, the camp’s surgeons were advised to scour the flying hospitals for any hog lard and sulfur that could be made ready to move. The scabies epidemic had barely abated.
Amid this frenzied final week of May a succession of General Orders reminded regimental commanders to lighten their baggage and prepare their troops “to be ready to march at an hour’s warning.” Each soldier was issued 40 rounds of ammunition and two flints, and commissary officers were instructed to have hardtack and salted meat ready to be loaded onto wagons. The excitement at the prospect of renewed fighting was distinctly discernible as both officers and enlisted men, contravening Washington’s long-standing injunction against gambling, circulated pools as to what day, down to the hour, the army would take the field. Those who had no money to wager staked their beaver hats. One Massachusetts colonel compared the British in Philadelphia to “a wounded dog, as malicious as ever.” And even Alexander Hamilton took it upon himself to notify regimental commanders—under his own signature, no less—that they would be held personally responsible for wayward or furloughed troops who failed to rejoin their units.
Yet Washington remained torn. Heartened by his army’s enthusiasm, he recognized that his brigadiers needed time to integrate the thousands of new recruits flocking into their ranks. He was also anxious about his support departments’ ability to provision the 15,000 troops he now commanded over a prolonged campaign. Despite Greene’s yeoman efforts, blankets remained in short supply, several companies of Massachusetts men were still awaiting a shipment of shoes, and an entire regiment had arrived from North Carolina without a single musket among them. He was also alert to the possibility that the British would make a final thrust toward Valley Forge before they quit the area.
Henry Laurens, unaware of Gen. Clinton’s orders to abandon Philadelphia without a fight, urged the commander in chief to beware of Clinton’s cunning. Transporting Loyalists from Philadelphia, he noted, was no assurance that the British would leave without a fight. And in an ominous message, a Continental agent reported Redcoats and Hessians queuing in the city center to draw three days of provisions and full canteens of rum. This was not enough to carry them to New York, but certainly adequate, as Washington observed, for them “to cross the Schuylkill and by a sudden and rapid march” strike at either Valley Forge or Wilmington. Though the information turned out to be erroneous, the cannon master Knox acknowledged these fears in a letter to his brother in which he brooded over the deficiencies of the cantonment’s artillery redoubts, “for the Enemy threaten hard to fight bloodily before they depart.”
On May 24, as rumors of a direct assault on Valley Forge peaked, Washington recalled two of Col. Stephen Moylan’s three cavalry regiments, perhaps 200 men, from northern New Jersey to bolster his defenses. He also urged Martha and the other officers’ wives to begin making their arrangements to depart the encampment.I Yet four days later he redirected the horsemen to Trenton and asked Martha to remain for at least another two weeks. In the interim it had become clear why the British wer
e loitering in Philadelphia. It was not to stage an assault on Valley Forge. It was to await the arrival of George III’s Peace Commission.
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On Saturday, June 6, the three-man British negotiating team disembarked in Philadelphia. Led by Frederick Howard, the 30-year-old Earl of Carlisle, the commission that bore his name was charged with presenting the formal terms of the Bills of Conciliation to the Continental Congress.II Carlisle immediately made clear that it would be the rebels who would be responsible for the “horrors, devastations, and calamities” to follow should they fail to accept the king’s generous overture. “We call God and the world to witness that the evils which must follow are not to be imputed to Great Britain,” he announced. The emissaries also employed the more subtle and emotional tactic of delivering private letters to prominent Americans from friends and relatives in England. Naturally these missives urged the recipients to help broker a cease-fire. Henry Laurens heard from his old Scottish trading partner, and John Laurens received a note from his father-in-law in London pleading with him to reject the “unnatural alliance” with France. Father and son both saw through the “awkward and disgraceful” ploy.
Two years earlier, a committee from the First Continental Congress had agreed to meet with Adm. Howe to discuss a rapprochement between England and its colonies. This time, however, Henry Laurens sent word to Carlisle not to waste the delegates’ time. The earl was not surprised. In the few days since he landed he had come to realize that the America of his expectations was a vanished world, all but erased by the war. He and his fellow commissioners had been chosen for a fool’s errand, and had not even been informed of George Germain’s instructions to withdraw from Philadelphia. Carlisle was flabbergasted at how far along Gen. Clinton’s evacuation plans had come, and urged Clinton to delay his departure. Why, he asked, would the Americans deign to bargain with a retreating enemy? But Clinton had long ago read the tea leaves. Citing his orders, he refused.
From there Carlisle’s mission rapidly descended into farce. Before the week was out one of his commissioners was accused of attempting to bribe several American delegates to sign the Bills of Conciliation.III The same man was then challenged to a duel by Lafayette for publishing a broadsheet article denigrating the French. And the peace panel’s secretary, the renowned Scottish philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson, publicly ruminated over which “Instruments of Terror” the Crown might employ to bring the traitorous rebels to heel. Ferguson was apparently not fully cognizant of the mores of diplomatic statecraft.
By this point there were few instruments of terror or of any kind that might have swayed Congress to accept the Crown’s terms. The Americans, long schooled in self-government, were well past the stage where half measures—what Washington’s aide Tench Tilghman called “This last effort to divide us”—would resolve their myriad grievances. Tilghman was quite obviously channeling his commander in chief’s thoughts. Writing to his fellow Virginia planter Landon Carter, Washington described the offers put forward by the Carlisle Commission as “so strongly marked with folly and villany, that one can scarce tell which predominates.” They were, he added, “an insult to common sense” that demonstrated “to what extremity of folly wicked men in a bad cause are sometimes driven.”
On June 10, with Valley Forge near to bursting with recalled regulars, new recruits, and returning convalescents, Washington ordered the first of his troops across the Schuylkill to establish a temporary camp on the east bank of the river. The withdrawal was hastened by an unseasonable heat wave that caused nearly six months of effluvia to bubble up from the miles of trench latrines and haphazardly buried animal carcasses—“the unwholesome exhalations from the ground which we occupy,” as perhaps only the young Laurens could describe it. As the beginnings of this duck-cloth tent city arose across the water, some 20 miles to the south Washington’s actions were mirrored by Clinton, who each night employed a flotilla of flat-bottomed barges to ferry his own horses, wagons, and select units of soldiers across the Delaware to New Jersey.
Finally, on June 17, after three days of deliberations, Congress formally rejected the Crown’s Bills of Conciliation, calling the proposals “derogatory to the honor of an independent nation.” In a defiant coda, Henry Laurens denounced the British sovereign and his emissaries for “suppos[ing] the people of these states to be subjects of the crown of Great Britain” and reaffirmed his earlier demand that only “an explicit acknowledgement of the independence of these states or the withdrawing of [the king’s] fleets and armies” would end hostilities.
By this time the British had all but abandoned Philadelphia, leaving behind only a small rear guard. When word reached Clinton of the Continental Congress’s rejection, he withdrew that guard, too. Even as those last Redcoats were departing, American state and federal officials were arriving at the Potts House in anticipation of reclaiming the city. They were met by a contingent of uneasy Tories who had opted to stand fast in Philadelphia. With nothing to lose, they had defied Gen. Clinton’s orders and traveled to Valley Forge to ask for terms. As the two sides bickered, Washington sensed the disorganization and confusion in the making, and saw a solution in the person of Benedict Arnold. General Arnold had only recently arrived at Valley Forge. Though the musket ball that had shattered his leg at Saratoga still left him barely able to walk, the more serious wound was to his fragile ego. He still chafed at what he considered the inadequate recognition of his battlefield heroics, and was eager for any assignment to salve his honor and, should fortune smile, replenish his empty pocketbook. After conferring with Henry Laurens, Washington placed Arnold at the head of a small occupying force to take control of the city until civil authority was restored. He also issued a General Order forbidding any Continental soldier not under Arnold’s command to enter Philadelphia. He then turned his gaze north.
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On the morning of June 18, two American divisions consisting of some 8,000 men under Charles Lee assembled into six brigades, turned northeast, and began marching toward New Jersey. Those who remained at Valley Forge set to burning whatever the army could not carry. The jagged flames and greasy smoke from the pyres could be seen for miles.
At dawn the following morning—June 19, exactly six months from the day when the Continental Army staggered out of the Gulph and into its winter camp—Washington led his last three divisions away from the cantonment in quick time to the beat of fifes and drums. He left behind rows of crumbling huts, an ecologically despoiled landscape, and an enervated local populace. In the months to follow the winter encampment in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania would become home to a logistical support center, a military hospital, and a temporary prisoner-of-war holding pen. But for now, it was abandoned. It is not recorded if George Washington stopped to look back.
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I. Before her ultimate departure on June 8, Martha Washington visited the camp’s deputy quartermaster to request several earthenware mugs specific to Pennsylvania’s Amish country to carry back to Mount Vernon as souvenirs. The embarrassed man could not find any.
II. Perhaps auspiciously, one day earlier the missing crates of 2,000 muskets and bayonets finally found their way to Valley Forge.
III. Curiously, a Scottish lawyer well connected to the Crown suggested to George III that Washington be offered the title of duke in exchange for endorsing the peace overtures. The king instead endorsed a plan to have his colonial officials distribute forged documents contending that Washington was in fact a secret British agent bent on losing the war, with the defeats at Brandywine and Germantown and the horrors the Continental Army endured at Valley Forge merely the initial phases of this nefarious plot.
THIRTY-THREE
“YOU DAMNED POLTROON”
The column consisted of some 1,500 wagons, carriages, and carts, and stretched for 12 miles. Its wanton trail was not hard to follow, littered as it was by burned farmsteads and hayricks, dead cattle shot for sport or vengeance, and fruit trees in bloom h
acked at the stump.
Composed of close to 20,000 British and Hessian troops and encumbered by 1,500 Loyalist Philadelphians, the procession slogged north at a languorous six miles per day, an unintentional metaphor for the British war effort through 1778.I It was slowed by a series of severe downpours interspersed with “melting hot” temperatures that dehydrated and felled scores of wool-clad Redcoats. Forced to halt intermittently to repair the bridges burned by Gen. William Maxwell’s guerrilla cadre, it presented a fat target. General Clinton was certain that the Americans would attack somewhere along the road. He did not expect an all-out assault, not with Washington waiting on the French. The Americans would be likely to come away happy with “a little triumph of some partial blow,” as he recorded in his journal. He was particularly protective of his baggage train, a meaty spoil of war he knew the underfed and underequipped Continentals eyed hungrily.
Maxwell and his Continental regulars, abetted by close to 1,000 New Jersey militiamen, had shadowed the convoy’s every step from its onset, nipping at its flanks with musket fire from behind stone fences, farm sheds, and dense thickets of scrub pine. They were soon reinforced by Col. Stephen Moylan’s dragoons as well as 600 sharpshooters under Dan Morgan’s command. The accuracy of Morgan’s Virginians only further inflamed an army already humiliated by its retreat from Philadelphia.