Washington
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Under orders from Washington, Lieutenant Colonel William Smith, carrying a white flag, approached the house with a demand for surrender. The British holed up inside instantly shot and killed the colonel. At this point Washington assigned three regiments to the thankless task of vanquishing the stout house. Knox ringed it with four cannon and pummeled it at oblique angles, but the stone walls seemed impervious. The prolonged attempt to take the Chew house held up part of Washington’s column for half an hour and gave Howe’s men a chance to regroup. Small squads of Americans kept darting toward the house, only to be pelted by British fire until the grounds were “strewn with a prodigious number of rebel dead,” said a British officer.42 Those who tried to clamber through the windows were pierced with bayonets. One Hessian officer, viewing this slaughterhouse the next day, “counted seventy-five dead Americans, some of whom lay stretched in the doorways, under the tables and chairs, and under the windows . . . The rooms of the house were riddled by cannonballs, and looked like a slaughter house because of the blood splattered around.”43 Three American regiments managed to kill a risible four British soldiers. In a scathing judgment of this misstep, General Anthony Wayne later wrote, “A windmill attack was made upon a house into which six light companies had thrown themselves to avoid our bayonets. Our troops were deceived by this attack, thinking it something formidable. They fell back to assist . . . confusion ensued and we ran away from the arms of victory open to receive us.”44
Belatedly, Washington heeded his dissenting officers and told his army to move on, leaving a small detachment behind. Cool as ever, shielded only by a pack of aides, Washington again exposed himself to danger on his conspicuous white horse. “With great concern I saw our brave commander-in-chief exposing himself to the hottest fire of the enemy,” recalled Sullivan, and “regard to my country obliged me to ride to him and beg him to retire.”45 Washington briefly withdrew to the rear, only to ride forward again. At first he imagined he was hearing the sound of British soldiers retreating, with the enemy falling back “in the utmost confusion.”46 He was so sanguine of victory that he nearly ordered his men to march to Philadelphia. Washington remained unalterably convinced that, until bad weather reversed the situation, the British had been on the brink of withdrawing from the battlefield.
Unfortunately, the strange conditions had played havoc with his overly intricate plan. Enveloped in fog and drifting smoke, the four columns found it hard to coordinate their actions. As so often with Washington’s strategies, the many interlocking parts were hard to harmonize. American soldiers began firing at one another in the fog, precipitating a headlong retreat. False reports flew about of an enemy force in the rear, causing patriots to flee a phantom enemy. Washington ordered Major Benjamin Tallmadge to block these stampeding foot soldiers by lining up a row of horses across the road, only to have the infantry run around or crawl desperately beneath them. Washington shouted at his men, even struck at them with his sword, as he had done at Kip’s Bay—to no effect. At the same time Greene’s men to the north were falling back in disorderly fashion. The whole battle lasted less than three hours.
By nine P.M. the American troops had regathered at Pennypacker’s Mill, twenty miles away. By all accounts, they weren’t bowed or crestfallen. “They appeared to me to be only sensible of a disappointment, not a defeat, and to be more displeased at their retreating from Germantown than anxious to get to their rendezvous,” said
Thomas Paine.47 But the final tally of battle—150 Americans killed, 520 wounded, and 400 captured versus 70 British killed, 450 wounded, and 15 captured—decidedly favored the British. “In a word,” Washington told his brother Jack, “it was a bloody day. Would to heaven I could add that it had been a more fortunate one for us.”48
In a letter Howe complained of the torching of flour mills and the suffering of law-abiding citizens; on October 6 Washington replied in a sternly worded reproach. He noted the “wanton and unnecessary depredations” committed by Howe’s own army and the annihilation of Charlestown.49 On that same day, in a magnificently gallant gesture, he sent Howe a two-line letter about a dog found roaming the Germantown battlefield. It said in full: “General Washington’s compliments to General Howe. He does himself the pleasure to return [to] him a dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on the collar appears to belong to General Howe.”50 How could the British portray such a man as a wild-eyed revolutionary?
Although Germantown ended in defeat, Washington had shown extraordinary audacity. With grudging admiration, Howe conceded that he didn’t think “the enemy would have dared to approach after so recent a defeat as that at Brandywine.”51 The French foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes, who was pondering an alliance with America, claimed that “nothing struck him so much” as the Battle of Germantown. 52 He was impressed that Washington, stuck with raw recruits, had fought two consecutive battles against highly seasoned troops. In writing about the battle, Washington stressed how bravely his men had fought and how narrowly victory had eluded them. “Unfortunately, the day was overcast by a dark and heavy fog,” he told one correspondent, “which prevented our columns from discovering each other’s movement . . . Had it not been for this circumstance, I am fully persuaded the enemy would have sustained a total defeat.”53 In narrating events to Hancock, he disguised the fact that twice as many Americans as British had been killed. “Upon the whole,” he wrote, “it may be said the day was rather unfortunate than injurious. We sustained no material loss of men . . . and our troops, who are not in the least dispirited by it, have gained what all young troops gain by being in actions.”54 Of these assertions, the last came closest to the mark: the battle was the sort of defeat that supplies a fillip to the confidence of the losing side. Now, Washington averred, his men knew they could “confuse and rout even the flower of the British army with the greatest ease.”55 Congress seemed to agree with this generous assessment and not only commended Washington for bravery but forged a medal in his honor. After the humiliating flight of Congress from Philadelphia, the Battle of Germantown had proved that the patriotic cause, if ailing, was far from moribund.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Rapping a Demigod over the Knuckles
TWO WEEKS AFTER the Battle of Germantown, George Washington digested the bittersweet news that General Horatio Gates had trounced General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, capturing his army of five thousand men. Just when Washington ached for a victory, his rival achieved a stunning conquest. A victory so incontestable made Gates the natural darling of Washington’s critics. Washington knew that appearances would count heavily against him and that in the afterglow of Saratoga Gates’s reputation would be gilded and his own recent defeats darkened. An anonymous pamphlet called The Thoughts of a Freeman made the rounds of Congress, indicting Washington’s leadership with the damning remark that “the people of America have been guilty of idolatry in making a man their God.”1
For all the adulation of Washington, a vocal, persistent minority of naysayers took issue with his leadership. As assorted voices of discontent echoed in Congress, these discussions were cloaked in secrecy. Writing to John Adams, Dr. Benjamin Rush voiced what others privately thought. Gates, he said, had planned his campaign with “wisdom and executed [it] with vigor and bravery,” making a telling contrast with the hapless Washington, who had been “outgeneralled and twice beaten.”2 He extolled Gates’s army as “a well-regulated family” while deriding Washington’s as “an unformed mob.”3 The disgruntled Adams was relieved to see Gates victorious. “If it had been [Washington],” he said, “idolatry and adulation would have been unbounded, so excessive as to endanger our liberties.”4
With excellent antennae for rivals, Washington knew that Gates represented a competitive threat to his leadership. In August Congress had arbitrated a feud between Philip Schuyler and Gates for control of the army’s northern department.
Washington always felt warm friendship toward Schuyler, the undisputed favorite of the New Yorkers
. But the bearish Gates, who often dispensed with etiquette, appealed to the rough, egalitarian instincts of the New Englanders, and his ambition only grew with success. In tactless letters, he accused Washington of everything from trying to monopolize “every tent upon the continent” to waylaying uniforms meant for his own regiments.5
In midsummer Schuyler had been blamed for the Ticonderoga debacle. In early August Congress had asked Washington to choose the next head of the army’s northern department, and with commendable restraint, he declined. He didn’t care to stir up a hornet’s nest by meddling in the decision and sought to emphasize civilian control of the military. After all, it was Washington’s reflexive restraint in seeking power that had enabled him to exercise so much of it. In this case, however, his neutrality paved the way for Congress to elect Gates. By ceding this power to Congress, Washington allowed his scheming rival to nourish the fantasy that he held an equal and independent command and was beholden only to Congress.
Washington performed another signal service for Gates that summer. Alarmed by Burgoyne’s steady progress south from Canada, Washington grew convinced that only an “active, spirited officer” could stop him, and he recommended that General Benedict Arnold assist Gates: “He is active, judicious, and brave, and an officer in whom the militia will repose great confidence.”6 Washington also steered Daniel Morgan and five hundred sharpshooters to Gates. Many assigned the true credit for Saratoga to the impetuous Arnold, who had fought “inspired by the fury of a demon,” one eyewitness said, suffering a severe gash in one leg from a musket ball.7 Despite Arnold’s contribution, Gates grew puffed up with his own power after the victory. If “old England is not by this taught a lesson of humility,” he told his wife, “then she is an obstinate old slut.”8
On October 15 Washington announced to his troops Gates’s early victory at Saratoga, the Battle of Bemis Heights. His general orders suggest that he felt self-conscious about a possible comparison with his own performance. While he hailed “the troops under the command of General Gates,” he also pointedly expressed hope that his own troops would prove “at least equal to their northern brethren in brave and intrepid exertions.”9 In a gesture pregnant with ominous implications, Gates didn’t notify Washington directly of his victory. Instead, to underscore his autonomous command, he dispatched his flamboyant young aide, Colonel James Wilkinson, to apprise Congress. On October 18 Washington was informed of Burgoyne’s surrender by a brief message from Governor George Clinton of New York. Charles Willson Peale was painting Washington’s portrait when the news came. “Ah,” Washington said tonelessly, reading the dispatch with an impassive face as he sat on the edge of a bed. “Burgoyne is defeated.”10 The unflappable Washington then continued with the session as if nothing had happened. It was a classic performance: he exercised the greatest self-control when roiled by the most unruly emotions. In public he tried hard to smile, but his private letters show he was saddened as well as gladdened by the news. “Let every face brighten and every heart expand with grateful joy and praise to the supreme disposer of all events,” he told his troops, and detonated thirteen cannon to celebrate the victory.11
All the while Washington quietly steamed that Gates hadn’t yet written to him. On October 24, when writing to John Hancock about a shortage of shoes and blankets, he confessed, “I am, and have been, waiting with the most anxious impatience for a confirmation of Gen[era]l Burgoyne’s surrender. I have received no further intelligence respecting it.”12 Characteristically, he saved the most explosive lines until the end, trying to pass them off as an afterthought. Also characteristically, he waited nearly a week to complain and didn’t mention Gates by name, as if he didn’t want to tip his hand. In reply, Hancock, then stepping down as president of Congress, told Washington, “I have not as yet heard a word from Gen[era]l Gates . . . and his army. Should the agreeable news reach” him before he left town, he promised, he would forward it to Washington.13 It was a bizarre situation: after one week, the outgoing president of the Continental Congress and the commander in chief still hadn’t heard from Horatio Gates about the war’s single most important development. When Washington received the articles of capitulation, signed by Burgoyne, they came via Israel Putnam. “As I have not rec[eive]d a single line from Gen[era]l 1 Gates, I do not know what steps he is taking with the army under his command and therefore cannot advise what is most proper to be done in your quarter,” Washington told Putnam, betraying considerable pent-up frustration.14 Two days later he expressed to Richard Henry Lee his bitterness about Gates’s snub and said that, for a time, he actually began to doubt that the Saratoga victory had taken place.
During this period Washington was camped at a farmhouse in Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, a place so cramped that his aides slept on the floor before the fireplace and shared one tin plate. On November 2 Gates at last deigned to send him a short note, saying he was returning Colonel Morgan and his band of marksmen. Clearly, Gates had heard through the grapevine that Washington was agitated about not having heard from him and disposed of the matter in a cavalier line: “I am confident Your Excellency has long ago received all the good news from this quarter.”15 Never one to react on the spot, Washington bided his time to take his revenge upon Horatio Gates.
If he was elated by Burgoyne’s capture, Washington also believed that many circumstances had favored Gates. The mid-Atlantic states, where Washington operated, was rife with Tories, while thousands of militiamen in upstate New York had harassed Burgoyne as his doomed soldiers struggled down the Hudson Valley.
“How different our case!” Washington complained, noting “the disaffection of [a] great part of the inhabitants of this state [and] the languor of others.” 16 Washington had also never faced an enemy in Burgoyne’s vulnerable situation of being dangerously cut off from supply lines. General Howe had never ranged far from his base in New York or other seaboard ports where he could fall back on British naval superiority, depriving Washington of a chance to strike a lethal blow. Still licking his wounds, Washington told Patrick Henry that he had been forced to defend Philadelphia “with less numbers than composed the army of my antagonist,” even though popular opinion had wrongly attributed to him twice as many men.17 Even Martha Washington heaved a weary sigh at the rank injustice of it all. Although she expressed “unspeakable pleasure” at Burgoyne’s surrender, she added, “Would bountiful providence aim a like stroke at Gen[era]l Howe, the measure of my happiness would be complete.”18
The Saratoga victory had a powerful resonance in European courts. Horace Walpole said that George III “fell into agonies” when he absorbed the terrible news.19 Among the opposition party in Parliament, the defeat hardened resistance to approving more money and troops for a costly, faraway war. The repercussions were no less momentous in France. When Jonathan Loring Austin, fresh from America, rode up to Benjamin Franklin in Paris in early December, the elderly statesman gazed up at the young man on horseback and asked, “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?” “Yes, sir,” replied Austin. Crestfallen, Franklin started to lumber off with a heavy heart. “But, sir, I have greater news than that,” Austin shouted after him. “General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war!”20 An ecstatic Franklin used this unexpected news as his most potent argument in luring France into the war on the American side.
Since Washington believed there was a significant numerical imbalance between his forces in Pennsylvania and those of Gates in upstate New York, he sent Alexander Hamilton streaking off toward Albany to request—and if necessary, demand—that Gates direct a portion of his troops southward to bolster Washington’s army. Washington needed these troops to shore up forts along the Delaware, which might now be easy prey for Howe’s army. He also reasoned that, with Burgoyne subdued, Gates required fewer troops. Hamilton’s mission was a delicate one: these were heady days for the vainglorious Gates, who might well suspect that Washington was simply trying to steal his thunder, the better to vie with him for control of the Continental Army. Washington’s
choice of Hamilton as his emissary was astounding testimony to his faith in the young West Indian. Hamilton would have to ride at a breakneck pace, covering three hundred miles to Albany in five days, and he would need all the wit, toughness, and self-assurance at his disposal to stand up to Gates. It may have pleased Washington to tweak Gates’s vanity by sending a twenty-two-year-old aide-de-camp to lay down the law to him.
On October 30 Washington handed Hamilton his marching orders, which stipulated that he should inform Gates of “the absolute necessity that there is for his detaching a very considerable part of the army at present under his command to the reinforcement of this.”21 When Hamilton arrived in Albany, Gates was predictably outraged to have to bargain with the youthful aide. That Hamilton regarded Gates as craven and inept didn’t help matters. In a letter drafted but never sent to Washington, Gates fumed, “Although it is customary and even absolutely necessary to direct implicit obedience to be paid to the verbal orders of aides-de-camp in action . . . yet I believe it is never practiced to delegate that dictatorial power to one aide-camp sent to an army 300 miles distant.”22 Gates, in a cantankerous mood, insisted to Hamilton that he needed all his troops in case Sir Henry Clinton moved up the Hudson River. He seemed emboldened by his newly won renown. To Washington, Hamilton reported, “I found insuperable inconveniences in acting diametrically opposite to the opinion of a gentleman whose successes have raised him to the highest importance.”23 In a masterly performance, however, and after much wrangling, Hamilton extracted two brigades from the reluctant Gates.
The juxtaposition of Gates’s victory and Washington’s defeats crystallized congressional discontent with the latter’s leadership. The rush of battles turned Congress into an assembly of would-be generals, determined to run the war by resolutions. There had always been sotto voce grumbling about Washington’s military ability, but now serious questions arose as to whether he was up to the job. Henry Laurens told his son John that the assembly buzzed with detractors saying that “our army is under no regulations or discipline” and that Washington had failed to stem desertions or adequately provision his men .24 Lafayette warned Washington of “stupid men” in Congress “who, without knowing a single word about war, undertake to judge you, to make ridiculous comparisons; they are infatuated with Gates.”25