Washington's General

by Terry Golway

  Greene asked Wadsworth to remain at his post as commissary general while “the storm rages.” Nevertheless, Wadsworth was determined to retire by the end of 1779.

  On Christmas Day, a cold and dreary day in camp, an anguished Greene wrote of the army’s increasingly bleak prospects and of the bitter reception Morristown’s citizens offered the hungry and tired men who were fighting and sacrificing for their liberty.

  They receive us with coldness, and provide for us with reluctance. The Army is in great distress for want of Provision and forage. . . . Our affairs are in a disagreeable train from the wretched state of our business of finance. . . . [A] thick cloud hangs over our heads at this hour threatening us with destruction.

  Within a few days, snow was falling from a number of thick, dark clouds. It fell, and fell, and fell some more. It fell on the soldiers as never before; it was nothing like the Christmas snowstorm of 1776, nothing like the snows of Valley Forge two years earlier. It began falling on January 2, a bitterly cold day with gusting winds from the west and northwest, and it continued for the better part of four days. The scanty supplies of food, clothing, and equipment that were being shipped to camp were now out of reach, unable to make it through the snow and drifts. “Our Army is without Meat or Bread; and have been for two or three days past,” Greene wrote on January 4. “Poor Fellows! they exhibit a picture truly distressing. More than half naked, and about two third starved.”

  By January 6, eighteen inches of snow had fallen, making the roads to Jockey Hollow and Morristown impassable. The soldiers’ suffering was, by nearly all accounts, worse than at Valley Forge. Greene told a friend:

  The Army is upon the eve of disbanding for want of Provisions, the poor soldiers having been several days without. . . . Provision is scarce at best; but the late terrible storm and the depth of the Snow and the drifts in the Roads prevent the little stock coming foward which is in readiness at the distant Magazines. . . . The Roads must be kept open by the Inhabitants or the Army cannot be subsisted. And unless the good people immediately lend their assistance to [forward] supplies the Army must disband.

  So desperate was the army’s plight that Greene decided the snow actually was a blessing. If the roads were not clogged, he said, “I believe the Soldiers would take up their packs and march” out of camp. He told Wadsworth that hundreds were “without shirts and many other necessary articles of clothing.” A few cattle were driven into camp on January 5, but that was hardly enough to relieve the army’s hunger. The following day, troops left camp and grabbed what they could from local citizens, with Washington’s reluctant approval.

  The ice, the snow, and the cold were relentless, and not just in Jockey Hollow. The waters around New York City froze, as did portions of Chesapeake Bay. This, the fifth winter of the Revolution, was like no other. Desperate soldiers ate the bark off sticks, ate their shoes, and, on at least one occasion, ate a pet dog. In an unaddressed letter, Greene, a veteran of every winter camp thus far, offered a terrible word picture of conditions in early January.

  Such weather as we have had, never did I feel. ... In the midst of snow and surrounded on every side by its banks, the army has been cut off from its magazines, and been obliged to fast for several days together. We have been alternately out of meat and bread for eight or nine days past, and without either for three or four. . . . Provisions are scarce indeed, not from any scarcity in the country, but from want of money to purchase it.

  A welcome break in the weather after nearly two weeks of storms eased the crisis temporarily, allowing Washington to turn his attention from food and supplies to offensive operations. The narrow strip of water separating New Jersey from the British stronghold of Staten Island was frozen solid, allowing the possibility of a winter raid without the need for boats. Washington turned to Greene for advice, and, with characteristic energy, the quartermaster general put aside his clerical burdens for a moment and reverted to his role as the army’s chief strategist. He sketched out for Washington a plan calling for a surprise assault by a detachment of twenty-five hundred men that would cross the ice and raid several British outposts on the island. He proposed Clinton as the operation’s password. (Clinton was, of course, the commander of the British garrison, although he was at that moment in the South.) This choice of a password, Greene told Washington, “may deceive the Enemy.”

  Using sleds that Greene had rounded up from the New Jersey countryside, Lord Stirling led the raiding party across the ice and into Staten Island on January 15. This accomplished little, save to astonish observers in the decades and centuries to come, who saw a starving army on the verge of ruin transformed, in a matter of days, into a force capable of a small but bold action.

  The starvation was over, but winter was not, and it continued to heap suffering upon the army’s sagging shoulders. More than two dozen snowstorms buried the camp in six-foot snowdrifts, making supply a never-ending nightmare. The absolute misery, along with the continued breakdown in supplies, reminded Greene that he wished for nothing more than to be relieved of his duties as quartermaster general. Congress, unable to levy taxes, had divested itself of the supply business. Instead, states were charged with the responsibility of supplying troops raised within their individual borders. The new system was an ineffective patchwork and made Greene’s job that much more difficult. He had become a vigorous advocate of strong, centralized government, at least on broad issues affecting the nation as a whole. His business career and his firsthand experience as a soldier emphasized organization and coordination above all else, and the new system of supply was anything but well organized. He sent a letter to the president of Congress, Samuel Huntington, in mid-January, noting that he had submitted his resignation a month earlier but had heard nothing.

  Congress continued to ignore his request, but it put together a committee to reorganize the quartermaster’s department. To Greene’s disgust, among the committee members was Thomas Mifflin, in Greene’s eyes one of the instigators of the defunct Conway Cabal and an undoubted critic of both Greene and Washington. Not surprisingly, Greene’s friend and aide Charles Pettit saw Mifflin’s appointment as evidence of a “plot” to embarrass Greene.

  In the midst of these bleak proceedings, the Greene family grew by one. Caty Greene gave birth to a baby boy on January 31, and they named him Nathanael Ray Greene. He was the center of attention among the women in camp, a welcome distraction from the snow and the cold. Whatever Greene’s unhappiness with Congress, with the uncooperative citizens of Morristown, with Mother Nature herself, he was delighted with his new son. He sent a teasing letter to his business partner Barnabas Deane, who was unmarried, to tell him of the arrival of his “fine son.” Greene wondered why Deane would go through life “without ever tasting some of the sweetest pleasures that falls to the lot of Mortals.”

  But even the sweetest pleasures had to be swept aside for drudge work. “The business of my Department is growing more and more desperate every day,” Greene told Wadsworth. Food supplies were low again. After sending yet another letter to Philadelphia asking why his resignation had not been accepted, Greene decided to go to the capital to raise the issue personally with members of Congress. There would be no happy parties and balls during this visit with Congress; Greene was prepared to tell the politicians precisely what he thought of them. “Their conduct,” he wrote to Wadsworth, “is intolerable.” He told Washington that he expected little good to come of his negotiations–“unless it is dismissing my self from the Department, which I most devoutly wish.” Washington wished him well, and almost as an aside, he confided to Greene that he was concerned about British advances in the South. Thousands of British troops under Clinton’s personal command had begun a siege outside Charleston, and Washington feared for the American garrison and his commander in the South, Benjamin Lincoln. He mentioned to Greene that he was worried about “the effect which the loss of [Charleston] may produce on the minds of People” in the South.

  Greene conveyed Washington’s con
cerns to the nation’s political leaders, but he did not achieve what he so “devoutly” wished–his dismissal from the cares and burdens of the quartermaster general’s department. He was convinced that his archenemy, Mifflin, once again was plotting against him under the guise of cutting the quartermaster’s expenses. It was becoming clear to him that Congress would not authorize the money he believed the army needed to fight a new campaign. After less than a week of talks with Congress, Greene was depressed, pessimistic, and ill. With a nod to his friend Thomas Paine, he told Wadsworth, “These are the times that will try men’s Souls.” He wrote yet another letter to Samuel Huntington, the president of Congress, reminding him that Congress had yet to act on his letter of resignation as quartermaster. He told Huntington that he was tired of meetings, tired of waiting for Congress to pass a resolution declaring its confidence in the quartermaster’s integrity. (Some lawmakers thought there should be an investigation of the department before members offered their support for the quartermaster.) His presence in the capital, Greene declared, “is no longer necessary,” so he announced that he would leave Philadelphia immediately.

  Greene’s curt language and lack of diplomacy did nothing to win new friends in Congress, as became evident after his allies quickly drew up a new resolution of support. During a private debate one of his supporters–he was never identified–asserted that Greene was entitled to congressional support because he was the “properest person” to become commander in chief should anything happen to Washington. According to Philip Schuyler, the former general who was now a member of Congress, the speaker added that Washington himself believed that Greene was his natural heir.

  The resolution failed.

  It was clear that Greene had alienated too many people in Philadelphia. “I feel my self. . . soured, and hurt, at the ungenerous . . . treatment of Congress,” he told Joseph Reed, the president of the Pennsylvania legislature. “[I believe] it will be impossible for me to do business with them, with proper temper; and besides I have lost all confidence in the justice and rectitude of their intentions.” Angry and disgusted, he left the capital on April 10 and returned to the snow and cold of Morristown. He summed up his dark thoughts in a letter on April 15.

  I have been among the great at Philadelphia and have a worse opinion of the issue of our cause than ever. Never was there a people that employed themselves so much about trifles. Their whole policy is a chapter of new expedients, and long debated upon little matters of form. . . . Our treasury is empty. The business of finance is in a doubtful way. Public credit is lost, and National confidence expiring. Our Army [is] small and still upon the decline and little or no prospect of having it recruited this Spring.

  In a letter written in code to his friend Wadsworth, Greene offered his opinion of the Revolution’s political leaders: “Truth and righteousness is of no account with these [people].”

  More than ever, politics, criticism, and paperwork dampened his fervor for the cause. Truth and righteousness could not be found in political debates, in spreadsheets, or in budgets. They could be found only on the battlefield, where Nathanael Greene belonged.

  At Valley Forge two years before, springtime had brought both relief from the weather and pride in the army’s astonishing transformation thanks to Baron von Steuben’s winter-long training. Spring at Morris-town, however, brought only continued misery, and not all of it was related to the snow that remained on the ground into early April. The Greenes suffered a personal blow when Caty’s brother, Simon, died at age twenty-nine on Block Island. Caty remained in camp after receiving the bad news.

  Meanwhile, the Continental dollar’s inexorable decline meant that as never before, merchants, farmers, and citizens refused to sell their goods to the quartermaster’s department or to the commissary general. Food and other daily supplies continued to dwindle; long-term provisions for the coming campaign were nonexistent. Some soldiers had not been paid in months. Not that it mattered, for their meager pay could buy precious little at a time when a pair of shoes in Philadelphia cost twenty-five dollars, and a hat and a simple suit of men’s clothes cost two thousand dollars in Boston. “Our distress,” Greene wrote, “is [beyond] description.”

  There was no escaping the tension and anxiety in camp, even when officers and their wives gathered for modest social outings. At one such party in one of the officer’s quarters, an earnest Rhode Islander, George Olney, apparently objected to the drinking of his colleagues, including Greene. To show his disapproval of this frivolity, Olney turned on his heel and retreated to the more sober company of the officers’ wives in another room. Fueled by drink, the officers dispatched an expeditionary force with orders to return Olney to his rightful place with the men. The women put up a stubborn resistance, and reinforcements–in the form of none other than the commander in chief himself–were called in. Washington grabbed hold of a wrist belonging to Deborah Olney, the fugitive officer’s wife. Mrs. Olney was as stern a soul as her husband. Rather than go along with the joke, she let loose with a verbal cannonade that left everyone in the room speechless. To the commander in chief, she said, “Let go of my hand or I’ll pull every hair out of your head!” Jaws dropped. The words hung in the hair. The joking, the horseplay, the welcome respite from the winter’s privations–all came to a sudden end. The officers and their wives quietly went their separate ways.

  The deprivation continued, even after the snow and ice were long gone. On May 25, two regiments from Connecticut decided to take matters into their own hands. Starving and poorly clothed, they marched out of camp and made it known that they planned either to seize what they could from the locals or to simply return home. The army was on the verge of mutiny, but, to the credit of the troops, it was halfhearted at best. Officers reasoned with the soldiers, and they returned to camp, with little harm done. Still, it was an ominous development. Greene confided to the governor of Rhode Island, William Greene, that he feared discontent would “run through the whole line like wild fire.”

  Even worse news, if that could be imagined, arrived in camp a few days later: the American garrison in Charleston under Benjamin Lincoln, a force of nearly three thousand Continentals and two thousand militia, had surrendered. It was by far the most devastating defeat of the war, surpassing even the loss of Fort Washington in 1776. American hopes had just been revived with reports that the French were sending a large fleet and more than six thousand troops to help their erstwhile ally. But now this–a terrible, devastating surrender of the southern army, even as the main army continued to suffer in Morristown.

  The Hessian commander who was left to watch over New York in Clinton’s absence, General Wilhelm von Knyphausen, now had his eye on a victory of his own. Even as Clinton was preparing to return to New York, leaving Cornwallis to continue to prosecute the southern strategy, Knyphausen was planning an attack on New Jersey, reckoning that the demoralized, poorly supplied main American army could be smashed or badly damaged after its horrendous winter camp. The Hessian was no stranger to Greene, for he had led the successful assault on Fort Washington and had been arrayed across from Greene’s division at the Battle of Brandywine. The son of a Prussian colonel, Knyphausen, like Greene’s antagonist Lord Cornwallis, was a symbol of Old World militarism and privilege, a representative of a way of life the American rebels wished to banish from their continent.

  Five thousand British and Hessian troops crossed from Staten Island into Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, on June 6 and advanced inland toward the town of Connecticut Farms. There they met surprisingly stiff resistance from New Jersey militia. (Knyphausen had been told that the state’s militia were on the verge of mutiny and would likely switch sides if attacked.) The patriot show of force was not in Knyphausen’s battle plan. Frustrated, the British and Hessians burned farms and civilian homes and killed Hannah Caldwell, the wife of a prominent Presbyterian clergyman named James Caldwell, who also served as one of Nathanael Greene’s deputy quartermasters. Reports of British atrocities spread through nearby
villages, and men who might have been inclined to stay at home instead grabbed their firearms and turned out to join local militia units.

  Knyphausen’s unexpected movement attracted the attention of Washington and Greene, still in their winter camp in Morristown. They assumed Knyphausen’s assault was a distraction, and that Clinton would soon arrive back in New York and launch a new offensive up the Hudson River.

  Whatever Clinton’s intentions, Washington decided he must confront Knyphausen, and he chose his quartermaster general to lead an assault on the Hessian general on the night of June 8. Though Greene’s reaction is not recorded, he must have been delighted. Not so many months ago, he had argued that he was automatically entitled to battlefield command despite his job as quartermaster. Washington, to his chagrin, disagreed. But now, as Washington prepared the first assault of the new campaign season, Nathanael Greene had a command.

  And then it began to rain. The assault was called off–although it didn’t matter. Knyphausen, puzzled and frustrated, began withdrawing back to Elizabeth Town that night.