by Terry Golway
He treated Gates, Mifflin, and Conway not as colleagues but as enemies who must be crushed before they crushed him. He told other officers that Conway was a “very dangerous man,” a general with “small talents” and “great ambition.” Greene, of course, was not without ambition himself; ambition, in fact, had put him on this road to Valley Forge at the side of his commander in chief.
Through the early weeks of 1778, Greene unleashed a cannonade of letters designed to shred the reputations of his new foes, condemning Conway as “the greatest novice at war” and insisting, again, that Gates had been merely lucky at Saratoga. He wrote to the new president of Congress, Henry Laurens, to complain about Conway’s promotion to major general, promising that in the future, “men of honor will decline the service,” while “low intrigue will be the characteristic and genius of the Army.”
Through his small number of friends and sympathizers in Congress, Greene monitored political gossip and debates about Washington’s fate. A former aide named John Clark Jr. told him that Philadelphia was buzzing with rumors that Washington had written a letter requesting that Congress appoint Greene as commander in chief “if he fell.” This would have been seen as an invasion of congressional prerogative, another weapon to use against both Washington and Greene. No such letter has ever been found, but the rumor made the rounds and still was circulating in 1780, at another low point in the war. If nothing else, the very fact that some people believed it to be true must have given Greene a measure of satisfaction.
But there was very little else to comfort him in this increasingly bitter battle. Clark told Greene that various “reports have been circulated . . . to prejudice the People against His Excellency and you.” The strain of army politics, combined with the privations of winter camp, took a physical and emotional toll on Greene. An unexplained eye ailment prevented him from meeting with Washington in early January, and even Caty’s arrival in camp did little to raise his spirits. In fact, Caty’s presence may have exacerbated, rather than eased, the roiling tensions at headquarters. Lucy Knox, a frequent if often reluctant companion of Caty Greene’s, observed that “all was not well with Greene [and] his lady” at Valley Forge. Some scholars have suggested that Caty Greene, fully recovered now and delighted to be free of the Lotts’ smothering embrace in New Jersey, reveled just a bit too much in the attention paid her by French officers in camp, particularly the marquis de Lafayette. She also was plainly, perhaps far too plainly, attracted to General Anthony Wayne and the army’s commissary general, Jeremiah Wadsworth. Wayne was a blunt, plain-speaking frontiersman trapped in an unhappy marriage. Wadsworth was a handsome and prosperous merchant from Philadelphia. Both men delighted in Caty’s company, and years later, after Nathanael’s death, they would become Caty’s lovers.
Evidence of a strain between the Greenes crept into Nathanael’s letters from Valley Forge. Their two children, George and Martha, were living in Rhode Island with Nathanael’s brother Jacob and his wife. During the winter, however, Jacob fell ill, and Nathanael’s children were taken to the home of another brother, Elihue. Martha soon was diagnosed with a case of rickets. The shuttling of his children from house to house and the news about Martha upset Greene, and in a letter to still another brother, Christopher, he lamented the fate of his “poor almost fatherless and motherless children.” Caty had left the children more than six months earlier, when George was about a year and a halfold, and Martha three months. But if Greene suddenly was upset that his children were “almost. . . motherless,” he had only himself to blame. He had, after all, begged her to join him, and when begging didn’t work, he taunted her with fantasies of infidelity.
In joining their husbands at Valley Forge, Caty Greene, Lucy Knox, Martha Washington, and the wives of other generals bore witness to the terrible suffering that winter. While they were better off than the starving, half-naked soldiers huddled twelve to a hut, they breathed in the same acrid smoke, smelled the same foul camp odors, and shivered through the same long nights. Their very presence, however, and their willingness to endure a measure of discomfort offered the troops inspiration and at least a bit of distraction. A young soldier in camp later recalled how the generals’ wives brightened their spirits: “In the middle of our distress, there were some bright sides to the picture which Valley Forge exhibited. . . . The lady of General Greene is a handsome, elegant, and accomplished woman [who] spoke the French language and was well-versed in French literature.”
The new year of 1778 was only three days old when Nathanael Greene sent a foreboding letter to his brother Jacob. The army had been in Valley Forge fewer than three weeks, but already there were signs that this would be an awful winter. Eleven thousand men were gathered in camp, and it was up to Congress and the army’s supply officers–the quartermaster general, the commissary general, and the clothier general–to see to it that this small city was fed, clothed, and otherwise equipped for the next several months. But supplies were low, and, not coincidentally, so was morale.
Greene told Washington on New Year’s Day that the officers were complaining that they were “exposed to the severity of the weather, subject to hard duty and nothing but bread and beef to eat morning, noon and night, without vegetables or anything to drink but cold water.” Several days earlier, fifty officers in Greene’s division resigned because of low pay.
The troops, Greene wrote, were “almost worn out with fatigue and greatly distressed for want of clothing, particularly the articles of shoes and stockings.” They still were in tents on New Year’s Day, for they had not completed construction of the windowless log huts in which they would spent the rest of the winter. Although these early weeks of the new year were not especially cold or snowy, the troops suffered all the same. The work of building nearly a thousand huts was intense, their flimsy tents could hardly qualify as shelter, and food and other supplies grew scarcer with each day. Greene wrote to General McDougall, who had been with him at Germantown, of the dreadful breakdown in supplies.
The Quarter Master General, Commissary General and Clothier Generals departments are in such a wretched condition that unless there are some very great alterations in those departments, it will be impossible to prosecute another Campaign. Our Troops are naked . . . and the men getting sickly in their Hutts for want of acids and Soap to clean themselves.
Of course, the former quartermaster general, Mifflin, had quit his job when he chose to devote himself to Board of War politics. The commissary office also lacked experienced leadership. Both departments quickly disintegrated thanks in part to congressional bungling, and it was the consequent breakdown in the supply system–more than the weather–that led to misery, illness, and death at Valley Forge. By mid-January, when the camp’s huts finally were completed, some four thousand soldiers were so poorly clothed that they dared not venture outside. Some used pieces of their tents for shirts, coats, or footwear. All the while, fifty loads of clothing were in a warehouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, awaiting supply wagons that never arrived.
The army’s staple food, morning, noon, and night, was a concoction called fire cake–bread, not of the best quality, baked on a stone over a fire. From the damp, grim huts came a muffled complaint: “No meat! No meat!”
Conditions worsened in early February, when the relatively mild winter turned bitter and a snowstorm further reduced the already limited flow of supplies into camp. Men and horses alike starved to death in the snow. The countryside already had been stripped clean of supplies for soldiers and forage for animals, so there was no relief in sight. Colonel James Varnum, Greene’s friend from their younger days in Rhode Island, was despondent, and he warned Greene that the army seemed on the verge of collapse. He wrote that “the situation of the Camp is such that in all human probability the Army must soon dissolve.” Varnum was a respected officer, not one given to complaints or panic. Greene brought the letter to Washington’s headquarters on February 12. That very day, Washington issued an order authorizing the troops to move farther into th
e countryside and simply take what they needed from local citizens. Washington loathed this practice, believing it smacked of British and Hessian thuggery, but he had little choice. He told his officers to impress all “Cattle and Sheep fit for Slaughter” within fifteen to twenty miles of the Schuylkill River. The owners were to be given certificates that, Washington promised, would ensure them of payment for their lost livestock.
Nathanael Greene was given command of this massive foraging operation, upon which hundreds of lives and perhaps even the army itself depended. It was not a command for the faint of heart, because it would require brutal tactics when sweet persuasion failed. Even the most stouthearted friend of American liberty was bound to resent soldiers, however well behaved, hauling off livestock and crops at the point of a gun, tendering only a piece of paper promising payment at some future time. And it was, after all, winter for civilians, too. They had worked a fine harvest in the fall and had planned to enjoy the fruit of their labor through the hard months until spring. The requirements of the Continental army did not enter into their plans.
The forced impressment of private property figured to be a public relations nightmare for the starving American army. From the day he marched off to Boston with the Rhode Island Army of Observation, Nathanael Greene was sensitive to the importance of public opinion, especially in a war fought in the name of democracy. The army’s virtues, he had often said, reflected the virtue of the cause. But now necessity collided with virtue, and Greene had no choice but to put aside his ideals and hope for the best. Much of the foraging operation would take place in areas known for their unenthusiastic Quakers and outright loyalists. At least the Americans would make no new enemies when they showed up at those farmhouses.
Greene and his party of several thousand soldiers moved out of camp and into the countryside almost immediately, and just as quickly he discovered the endless complications of supplying an army. There were not enough wagons to cart whatever they might find, and they were receiving little cooperation from their fellow Americans, who were concealing their wagons from Greene’s men. Other farmers pleaded with Greene to leave them alone. He told Washington on Feburary 15, “[The] Inhabitants cry out and beset me from all quarters, but like Pharoh I harden my heart.” His men had caught two civilians transporting provisions to the British; Greene ordered them whipped with a hundred lashes “by way of Example.”
The example was not intended just for other civilians. He, too, sought to set an example for his subordinate officers. They had no taste for this cruel business, but Greene told them that they had little choice, that they too had to harden their hearts. He told his men that he would punish “the least neglect with the greatest severity.” His instructions to Colonel Nicholas Biddle, the army’s commissary general of forage, were equally blunt: “You must forage the Country naked,” he wrote. Greene knew that stripping the countryside of forage for civilian horses and livestock would create a new set of problems for civilians. It was bad enough that the soldiers took their feed, but what of the animals left behind, doomed to starvation? Greene had a solution. He told Biddle that “to prevent [civilian] complaints of the want of Forage we must take all their Cattle, Sheep and Horses fit for the use of the Army.”
When his men brought back little from their initial forays, Greene expanded the reach of the party, showing a command of details and logistics that clearly made an impression on the commander in chief back at headquarters in Valley Forge. Greene ordered a detachment to Lancaster County to round up a hundred wagons. He expanded foraging operations into Bucks County. Confronted with evidence that civilians continued to conceal stock and wagons from his soldiers, Greene promised Washington that “examples shall not be wanting to facilitate the business.” When patriotic appeals and promises of future payment failed, the lash would have the final word. Greene took no pleasure in this work–the “business I am upon is very disagreeable,” he wrote–but he regarded it as a grim necessity. “God grant that we may never be brought into such a wretched condition again,” he wrote to Washington.
After five days of exhausting work, he was able to send a bit of good news back to Valley Forge from Bucks and Chester counties, whose residents, he noted, were not the most cooperative.
I sent on to Camp yesterday near fifty Head of Cattle. I wish it had been in my power to have sent more, but the Inhabitants have taken the alarm and conceal their stock in such a manner that it is very difficult finding any. They have done the same with their Waggons and Harness. Our poor fellows are obliged to search all the woods and swamps after them and often without success. I have given orders to give no receipts for everything they find concealed and to notify the people accordingly.
Greene’s unsentimental, even cold-blooded, methods were having an effect. By February 20, Colonel Biddle reported that he had forty wagons filled with provisions. General Anthony Wayne, whom Greene dispatched across the Delaware into New Jersey, found a good supply of livestock and also burned supplies of hay that seemed destined to fall into the hands of British foraging parties from Philadelphia. The army’s improving fortunes apparently softened Greene’s heart just a bit, for when a civilian named Nathan Sellers pleaded for the return of his only horse, a mare, Greene agreed, after Sellers promised to keep the horse from the British.
Greene was back in camp in late February after eleven days of arduous and ruthless labor. The supplies he brought back eased the situation in Valley Forge a bit, but conditions still were appalling. Greene told Knox what he found when he returned.
The troops are getting naked, and they were seven days without meat and several days without bread. Such patience and moderation as they manifested under their sufferings does the highest honor to the Magnanimity of the American Soldiers. The seventh day they came before their superior officers and told their sufferings in as respectful terms as if they had been humble petitioners for special favors. . . . Happy relief arrived from the little collections I had made and some others, and prevented the Army from disbanding.
Greene’s contribution to the army’s survival at a critical moment, and the unquestioned zeal with which he acted on Washington’s orders, did not go unnoticed at headquarters. Washington, encircled by enemies even within the army itself, knew he had no more loyal general than Nathanael Greene, and surely none more capable of executing orders, no matter how distasteful. There was no issue more pressing at the moment than the army’s ability to feed and clothe itself. Greene’s foraging mission did, in fact, provide relief, but larger supply problems remained. Greene told Knox that the army was still in danger of starving.
The supply system had become bogged down in congressional and army politics, and the results were deadly. Soldiers continued to die–the body count at Valley Forge would reach twenty-five hundred–and others were deserting for want of food and clothing.
The army needed a quartermaster general, a man who understood the logistics of supply and who was tough enough to take on unpleasant assignments. The army did not need a quartermaster general like Thomas Mifflin, who was glad to rid himself of the dull work of supply to devote himself to the work of undermining the commander in chief.
Congress had been considering General Phillip Schuyler as the army’s new quartermaster general, but a committee from Congress visiting the army at Valley Forge agreed with a conclusion Washington had reached: Nathanael Greene was the only man for the job. Washington had come to treasure Greene’s competency, but that was not the only virtue that recommended him for the vital post. Greene also was devoted to Washington, and that loyalty was never more important than now, with other generals and politicians seemingly plotting against him. Greene’s background as a businessman didn’t hurt, either; he was a problem solver, a man who understood how to find supplies and move them from one point to another. And that, in a nutshell, was the job of a quartermaster general. He was responsible for purchasing, transporting, and distributing a breathtaking array of supplies, everything from tents to canteens to nails to saddl
es. Although the purchasing of food came under the power of the commissary general, and that of clothing was the responsibility of the clothier general, the quartermaster general was in charge of transporting those supplies as well. When the army moved, the quartermaster was in command of the march, which meant that he had to establish supply posts along the route, become familiar with the terrain (for the location of sources of water and forage, among other things), and scout possible sites for new camps.
Washington broached the subject of this immensely complex job directly with Greene, telling him that future supply disasters were inevitable unless somebody familiar with the army’s needs accepted the unglamorous but urgent assignment. These were not words Greene longed to hear. He knew what Washington said was true, but he also knew that he had not joined the army to become a staff officer pushing paper behind the lines. He wished for fame on the battlefield. As he later told Washington, “Nobody ever heard of a quarter master in history.” He told Knox that he had no desire to be “taken out of the Line of splendor.” He had visions of his friends gaining the laurels he dreamed of. To his friend General McDougall, he complained, “All of you will be im-mortallising your selves in the golden pages of History while I am confined to a series of [drudgeries] to pave the way for it.”
Besides, the job promised only frustration, as members of Congress conceded when they said the next quartermaster general would face “the Confusion of the Department, the depreciation of our Money and the exhausted State of our Resources.” One could hardly imagine a less attractive proposition.
The pressure from Congress and Washington at least offered Greene a chance to negotiate, and he took full advantage. He asked that he retain his title of major general, with a vague understanding that he would have a place on the battlefield, rather than behind the lines, when campaign season resumed. Congress agreed, although with the caveat that Greene would no longer command a division. He asked Congress to name two trusted friends, Charles Pettit and John Cox, as his top deputies. Pettit, a lawyer and an accountant in civilian life, would be in charge of the department’s books. Cox, a merchant, would supervise the department’s purchases and would monitor stores of supplies. Congress agreed to this request, too.