Valley Forge: George Washington and the Crucible of Victory

by Newt Gingrich

  The wind blew fair on their faces, providing even a touch of warmth in the air. More than a few of the men had stripped off their foot wrappings, which would otherwise have turned into heavy, clogged weights, and ventured ahead barefooted in the mud, one of the men exclaiming with a certain joy when he hit the warm droppings of the horses laboring ahead of the wagons.

  After a steady hour of marching, they reached the banks of the river, passing through the small village of Phoenixville. Word of their approach had spread before them; the houses of more than a few farms they passed along the way were boarded up tight, owners having fled, taking with them their cattle and supplies, leaving behind but a servant or two to keep an eye on the place. In Phoenixville the few shops were boarded shut as well, except for a tavern of a known patriot, who stood outside his doorway, waving to Wayne at his approach. A couple of the tavern keeper’s sons rolled out a few small barrels of beer, and the gesture was met with huzzahs from the men and a promise from Wayne to those marching with him that, at midday, when their task was completed, they could each have a fair portion. He did a quick calculation. The barrels looked to be about ten gallons total. At a gallon per ten men, it would be just under a pint per soldier, and that would be fine. They would avoid the trouble that might have been caused if it had been rum instead.

  The road ahead was fairly level, bordered by orchards, pastures, and fields of corn stubble and winter wheat that shone green in the morning light. Farmers watched apprehensively as they passed. Most of the men stood stoic and silent. A few, though, came down to greet the troops. A woman came down bearing a large basket heavy with warm biscuits, but not enough for all. Wayne ordered that the offering go to the lads who needed it the most, and the woman received three rousing cheers as they passed.

  She beamed with delight, tears in her eyes. “My son, Jimmy Ferguson, is with the First Continental Foot, and you tell that rascal to come home and see his mother,” she cried. “Can you do that, General?”

  Wayne nodded, and made a pretense of turning to one of his aides, telling him to note the boy’s name, find him, and give him a pass for three days. With that, the woman burst into tears of gratitude and came out from behind the gate. She made to kiss Wayne’s hand.

  “Madam, it is I who should kiss your hand in gratitude for your son’s patriotic service,” he replied solemnly, averting his eyes.

  He rode on, noting the farm, marking it for later. He recalled the boy’s name and had not the heart to tell her that her son was on the roll of the dead, the flux having taken him a week ago. He would send one of his staff back later to break the news to her.

  They pressed on, along the banks of the Schuylkill, gently rolling farmland, perhaps the richest in all the Americas, fertile with topsoil six feet deep in places. The river in the spring ran full with shad; apple trees bent nearly double in the autumn with their offerings. Connecticut had been good land, well tended by hardworking Yankee farmers, but here, all one needed to do was cast seed upon the ground and, four months later, bring in the bounty.

  And that bounty is what he now sought, the first target in his new command.

  Boys came out from houses, circling the men, laughing, playing at being soldiers. The men tolerated them with smiles. More than a few of the older ones in his ranks, thinking of sons—even, for some, grandsons—were visibly moved. A couple fought tears as they patted the boys on the heads, allowing them to play with their equipment for a few moments, to carry their heavy muskets or to wear a bedraggled cap.

  The boys were indication enough to him of what he should do next. Excited boys could spread word faster, it seemed, than any mounted courier. Wayne now ordered his few staff and the small detachment of mounted dragoons to gallop ahead, outracing word of their approach if it were still possible to do so.

  The men clattered off with delighted shouts, mud spraying up from their mounts as the rest of the column of infantry staggered on behind them. A couple of the men began to grumble that they had been marching for nearly three hours without a break, but a look back by Wayne stilled their complaints. There was really no serious complaining, though, just typical grumbling, for they all knew the reward ahead.

  The day slowly increased in warmth—another five to ten degrees and it would be springlike. The warming breeze out of the southwest blew at their backs, the sun baking away a bit of the moisture on the road so that the going became easier, though the deep frost from earlier in January was still working its way up out of the ground.

  At last he saw his goal for today. His half-dozen mounted dragoons and staff were out on the road, one of the men with sword drawn. As ordered, the rest were waiting for his arrival. He nudged his mount and cantered ahead of the column to join his advance guard.

  It was Johansson’s mill, one of the most prosperous on the midreaches of the Schuylkill River. He and several of his staff had ridden up here several days earlier, as if heading toward Reading, and had studied it carefully in passing. But they had not stopped—to avoid arousing suspicion. Careful inquiries at a tavern just south of Pottstown, six miles farther on, revealed that, though not an overt Tory, old Johansson kept his cards close as to his loyalties.

  Millers were men with whom all farmers had a relationship of both love and hate. For grinding the farmers’ wheat and corn, millers traditionally charged one-tenth of the crop. If he had enough clients, in a month or more in the autumn a miller could garner far more from twenty farmers than all their hard labor of plowing, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, and threshing would provide for any one farmer in a year. Every one of them doubted a miller’s weights when it came time to measure back the ground corn, wheat, barley, and rye. None had ever seen a penniless miller, and more than a few farmers were forced to turn to them for loans of cash when times were hard. This was not to say that all millers were bad sorts—more than a few were held in esteem as men of Christian charity. If a farmer had had a bad year, the miller would keep but a fraction for himself, and what he did keep would usually then go to a local pastor to be given to the poor.

  Johansson, though, was spoken of in the tavern as a man known for a hard bargain. It was said that if you turned your back while he was measuring out the grain and held up a mirror, you’d see his thumb on the scales.

  However, there was no denying that he was a hardworking man, having built his mill nearly forty years before. The enterprise was now largely run by sons and grandsons. A sluice into the Schuylkill fed water into a millpond, which had enough drop via a wooden pipe made of barrels cobbled and tarred together to feed two overshot wheels.

  As he rode up and dismounted, Anthony could hear the workings of the machinery within. Waterwheels connected to drive shafts, which in turn rotated two stone gristmills. Raw corn, wheat, whatever was to be ground that day would be unloaded from wagons via an upper ramp, shoveled in by Johansson’s ever laboring sons and grandsons, down into a chute to the grindstones, with a near endless stream of flour raining out to be bagged and loaded aboard wagons at the lower level. So powerful were the headwaters of the mill that in the off-season, when flour was not to be made, mechanical gears would be shifted and power diverted to operate a sawmill to turn out clapboard for house siding and floorboards. It even had a fine-toothed saw that could cut chestnut and walnut into wainscoting for paneling.

  It was quite a prosperous industry that Johan Johansson ran. For lack of a better choice for this morning’s operation, given the rumors of his, at best, neutral leanings, Anthony had decided he would start here with his task, heading out far into the countryside beyond Valley Forge rather than beginning closer to home.

  As he rode up, the old man was outside his mill, glaring defiantly at the dragoons whom Anthony had ordered to do nothing more than surround the establishment until his arrival.

  Gray beard quivering, Johansson stormed over to Anthony.

  “What, sir, is the meaning of this?” he cried. “These ruffians ride up, they even drive off one of my customers in a panic! What is it you are
doing?”

  He pointed up the road toward Pottstown, where a heavily laden wagon was retreating, the farmer aboard standing, lashing his horses onward. The back of the oversized wagon was piled high with unground wheat.

  “Sergeant Olsen, fetch that wagon back here,” Wayne announced calmly, and with a grin the sergeant galloped off. Then he turned his attention back to Johansson.

  “I am General Anthony Wayne of the Continental Army, currently encamped at Valley Forge,” he began.

  “Mad Anthony, is it?” Johansson sniffed, looking up at him defiantly. Anthony forced a smile.

  It was a nickname he rather liked, and if that was how this miller wished to address him, so be it; it would help in the dealings he was now embarking upon.

  “Yes, I am Mad Anthony Wayne, and I am here to requisition supplies for the Continental Army.”

  “The devil you say,” Johansson snapped, though Wayne could see the man looking nervously back down the road toward the approaching wagons.

  Anthony dismounted, brushing the mud off his legs, and approached the man, who towered above him. He looked to be in his midsixties, but his shoulders and neck were those of a bull. Clearly a man who had labored for years at his mill, shouldering hundredweight bags, carved out his own grindstones, built the dams and sluices to divert the river both to and away from his mill, so that in those times of flood that so often wiped out many a miller, he could be up the following morning and, just by cleaning out the sluiceways of mud and flotsam, back at work. He had every reason to be proud of his life’s work, and in a way Anthony pitied him for what had to be done. But pity would not stay his hand when he thought of the men back at Valley Forge.

  “Your coin, sir?” Johansson said coldly.

  “A voucher signed by General George Washington himself, payable in hard cash when presented to the Congress or a legal representative thereof.”

  “Damn, is that the game today?” Johansson roared. “I knew it would come to this!

  “Jacob, Ebenezer, Jeremiah!”

  At his call, three men, obviously his sons, all of them bearded as well, all with powerful shoulders and thickset bodies, came out from the upper entryway to the mill, one of them carrying a shotgun.

  The dragoons behind Wayne instantly reacted, drawing their carbines. Several of the men cocked their weapons and raised them.

  “Stand at ease, men,” Wayne snapped, not looking back but with his gaze still warily fixed on the three giants approaching.

  He stepped closer to the old man.

  “Look down that road,” he hissed, pointing to the advancing column of infantry and wagons.

  Johansson gave a quick sidelong glance.

  “We can settle this one of two ways. Either you comply or you fight. I admire your grit, sir. I would react the same if all was reversed. But there are nine thousand starving soldiers back at Valley Forge, and by General Washington and the great Jehovah I am tasked with feeding them. And I shall feed them. Do I make myself clear?”

  Johansson, bristling, began to reply, then looked again at the approaching column now less than a hundred yards off, at the dragoons behind Wayne, and then back at his three sons.

  “We fight them, father?” one of his sons asked, obviously more than a little frightened at the display of force. His shotgun was no longer leveled but now pointed at the ground.

  Johansson threw out his arms in a gesture of exasperation.

  “Put the gun back inside, Jeremiah,” he sighed.

  His son seemed more than happy to comply.

  “When can I have this voucher?” Johansson asked.

  “You can stand beside me and count every pound loaded. I will countersign it. Given the current situation, I regret to say you must carry it to York for payment, but your troubles are but a single drop in an ocean of woe at this moment, sir. This is war. If I do not do this, nine thousand men will starve tomorrow.”

  “Damn your war,” Johansson snapped.

  “It is your war, too.”

  Johansson sniffed derisively.

  “Fellow countrymen, weapons pointed at me. Is this your idea of liberty?”

  “For the moment, it is the necessity from which liberty will spring, yes, sir,” Wayne replied coldly.

  The head of the column was up, the men slowing at the sight of the dragoons, weapons still leveled. The men at the front of the column were now unslinging muskets and holding them half ready.

  “Shall we begin?” Wayne asked, but it was most definitely a statement now, and no longer a question.

  Johansson muttered a curse, stepped aside, and gestured to the open door of the mill.

  “You are the highwaymen now, Mad Anthony, but, by God, I will count every peck that you take.”

  Wayne turned back to the men with the wagons.

  “One at a time, to the lower level.”

  He looked over to a barn slightly upslope from the mill.

  “Two wagons up there as well. Sergeant Travis, you were a miller, were you not?”

  “Yes, sir,” Travis grinned. “And had a damn sight better mill than this on the Housatonic, I can tell you.”

  “Sons of bitches,” Johansson cried, “robbed by New England Yankees, no less.”

  Travis laughed as he came up to Johansson’s side.

  “You stay with Mr. Johansson here, make sure the count is fair,” Wayne ordered. “And no miller’s count, damn your eyes!”

  Travis handed his musket off to a comrade.

  “Come along, old man,” Travis said with a grin. “I’ll make sure you aren’t cheated, and I’ll even help you cheat them a bit if you work with me.”

  Wayne saw that bringing Travis along had been a smart move. Johansson seemed to find some comfort in a fellow of the same trade. The two went inside, Wayne following behind.

  Within the mill there was a cacophony of noise. The mill was in full operation. Both wheels were turning, wooden gears rattling, drive shafts turning the millstones on the lower floor. A farmer, wagon half off loaded and caught by surprise, stood silent, glaring at Wayne, who made mention that he would be compensated and then stepped past him rather than hear yet more complaints.

  Since boyhood he had been fascinated by such contrivances, machines that, once constructed, could do the labor of a hundred men. With the temporary thaw, the Schuylkill was running at full flow, some of the rising waters diverted by sluices into the miller’s upper pond. Cold water flowed in a torrent over the twin waterwheels, which, during the freeze of the previous weeks, had most likely been locked solid.

  Now was the time for grinding down the late fall harvest, and he had timed this raid to match that. A few weeks ago this place would most likely have been idle. Now it was in full, flourishing operation.

  The farmer with the wagonload of wheat looked sullenly at Wayne, saying nothing as Wayne inspected the clanking gears, the turning grindstones a floor below. Off to the left in the work area below, the mill-powered saws stood motionless. Beyond them was a stack of several thousand board feet of fresh-cut lumber, planks ten feet long, a foot wide, and a couple of inches thick. He marked them. If the bounty of sacks of milled flour, corn meal, rye, and barley did not fill his wagons, he would round out the rest with the lumber. A few hundred planks would help with the corduroying of the roads or would serve as siding for one of the hospitals to keep out dangerous drafts. Gearing was also hooked to a bellows for a forge, and there was even a small drop hammer for fashioning iron and the cutting of nails, several barrels filled with them.

  He climbed down a ladder to the lower level, where his men were already eagerly at work, hoisting up fifty-and hundredweight bags of flour and ground meal and carrying them out to the army wagons.

  “Those are not really mine,” Johansson protested. “Their owners will sue me for certain if they come back here and I have nothing to show!”

  “Sergeant Travis, make proper note.”

  Travis, log book open, simply nodded, offering a few words of condolence to Johansson
as he meticulously checked off each bag and its weight when the men dropped the bags on scales, waited for a measurement, then hauled them out and tossed them into the wagons.

  Each bag had already been stenciled with the name of the farmer who owned it, and Wayne felt a moment of pity for the miller who would have to explain to dozens of clients why their ground flour and corn had disappeared. Lawyers in nearby towns would be delighted for months to come with the suits that would most likely follow.

  “Hey, General, you gotta see this!”

  One of the men he had sent to the upper barn was standing excitedly before him, shifting back and forth from foot to foot with excitement.

  Wayne smiled and followed. It was Corporal Garner, one of the best foragers of his old command. If any man could smell out supplies it would be him.

  He followed Garner up to the barn. Inside was indeed a treasure trove that made Wayne’s mouth water. Dozens of hams hung from the rafters, well smoked, more than a few of the men having obviously already cut off a slice for themselves—strictly against orders, but, frankly, he could not blame them. Half a dozen dairy cows on the hoof were in the barn, looking wide-eyed at the new arrivals and, if filled with any sense of consciousness, fully aware of their fate before the day was done. Sacks of ground meal lined the wall of the barn.

  In the upper loft rested hundredweight upon hundredweight of mown hay for the cattle, fodder that his starved horses would greet as eagerly as he would a well-seasoned whiskey or rum.

  Garner excitedly led the way to the back of the barn, where a couple of men, armed with spades, were hard at work, having already unearthed a fifty-gallon barrel.

  Oh, God, Wayne sighed. A barrel of corn liquor. With much heaving and grunting, they pulled it up from its place of concealment.

  The men looked expectantly at the general. “Well, Garner, find me a cup to test this. It could be a wicked Tory plot to poison us.”

  Garner unclipped his own cup from his haversack belt and offered it, even as the men tilted the barrel, one of them taking the cup and holding it under the spigot.