First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  Washington found it more difficult to supply his army than to house it. Nearly one-third of the soldiers were without shoes, and even larger numbers had neither blankets nor adequate clothing. Victuals were almost as scarce. Washington ordered a bakehouse constructed, but flour was in such short supply that the structure more frequently was used as a courtroom to hear court martial proceedings. Fresh meat and vegetables never were available, and even salt-pork or salt-beef was a rare treat for the men. The highest ranking officers fared better, however, though some were heard to complain that they had “nothing but bread and beef to eat morning, noon, and night.” Whenever food was available, these soldiers were not inclined to share it with anyone or anything, and certainly not with the army’s horses. While there is no record of any soldier having starved to death during that terrible winter, more than five hundred horses perished of malnutrition.3

  Illness was the inevitable offspring of deprivation. Early on Washington ordered the construction of two log-cabin infirmaries for each brigade, but soon these facilities proved inadequate, and men were hospitalized in nearby Lutheran and German Reformed churches. Even taverns were made to serve as sick bays. Continental army returns for February show that nearly 7000 men were ill and that 290 died. The next month the number of sick declined to 600, but the death rate rose by one-third, to 424.4

  Washington escaped affliction at Valley Forge, in all likelihood because he barely experienced the deprivations that gripped his men. He too lived in a tent until every soldier was hutted, then he moved into the warm and dry farmhouse, a dwelling in which he could sleep in his own bed—literally his own bed, for he had it dismantled and moved each time he changed quarters. Washington did not dine sumptuously during those months, but he never seems to have gone without food, nor does he appear to have suffered any shortage of tea or coffee. In addition, his wife lived with him during most of his stay at Valley Forge, a solace denied the soldiery. The commander, in fact, took a dim view of having any women in camp, unless they were in the company of officers; “care is to be taken to prevent a number of women from following your Regiment,” he ordered his colonels, “as they. ...” Intriguingly, he did not complete the sentence, although a month later he maintained that female visitors enticed the soldiers to desert.5

  If Washington did not think it improper for officers to live comfortably while the soldiery suffered, he had plenty of company. It was as if two armies wintered at Valley Forge, one composed of the highest officers, and a second made up of the rank and file and their lowest ranking officers—a woeful, vexed company upon whom few of the amenities of their superiors ever devolved. But, curiously, the common soldier seemed more inclined than the officers to stoically—virtuously, Washington might have said a year or two earlier—accept the hardships. Enlisted men did desert and there may even have been one brief, isolated instance of mutiny, but in comparison to their officers these men exhibited a quiet, stout patriotism that is as astonishing today as it was then to the foreign officers who were present; a European army, they agreed, would have disintegrated in rebellion or flight under similar conditions.

  Many officers, on the other hand, whined and complained with an insensitiveness that is difficult to imagine, grumbling principally about the alleged financial ruin that they faced for serving for low pay, and, while already living grandly by the standards of their men, pleaded for even more largess. (General Greene, for instance, once proposed that about forty gallons of recently discovered liquor be given to each regiment for the use of the officers; he did not recommend that any be given to the men.) Because of such officers’ overweening self-indulgence, the very existence of the Continental army was placed in jeopardy. In mid-March Washington told Congress that many officers were threatening to resign. In fact, upwards of three hundred officers had quit during the past ninety days, fifty from General Greene’s division walking out on the same day in December. Washington acted to minimize the crisis by granting extended furloughs to his officers, so that many hardly were present to experience the vexations of Valley Forge. But, chiefly, he served as their principal lobbyist with Congress, pleading and arm-twisting for the financial demands his officers made.6

  What the officers wanted from the legislators was a guarantee of half-pay for life upon their involuntary retirement at the end of the war. The English, these officers argued, compensated their officers in this manner, as well as by permitting them to sell their commissions. For a variety of reasons Washington had no difficulty supporting the officers’ demands. Not only did he fear the loss of his army if the officers were unappeased, he had jettisoned his earlier idealistic sentiments about virtuous, sacrificial service. Self-interest, he now said, was mankind’s predominant passion; public virtue briefly might take precedence, but eventually man’s private interest would assert itself and win out. His officers were no exception to this universal maxim. For a time they gladly had risked death for a meager salary, yet those days were gone. Now the half-pay measure was essential to keep good men in the service, good men who would be made into better officers by this reform, “because when an officer’s commission is made valuable to him, and he fears to lose it, you then may exact obedience from him.”7

  Many in Congress forcefully resisted the half-pay scheme. Some feared it would lead to a standing army, others saw this special dispensation as contrary to the virtuous ideals of the Revolution. Moreover, pragmatists found Washington’s argument to be based on a flimsy foundation. If officers were so financially strapped that they could not remain in the army, they asked, how would a pension that would not commence for perhaps five years, maybe even ten years, be of any help? But Congress was in a jam. Not to act was to court trouble, and in the end, in May 1778 the legislators voted a compromise that the officers found acceptable: half-pay for a seven-year period following retirement. (The enlisted men—about whose severance pay Washington had remained silent—were to receive a one-shot bonus of eighty dollars if they enlisted for the duration of the war.)8 The officers within the Continental army had blackmailed the Congress of the United States and secured their own ransom.

  If Washington ever contemplated the double-standard at Valley Forge, he did not bother to record his thoughts. However, he was concerned about the implications of his soldiers’ torments. Unless supplies quickly were found, he told Congress in his first hours at Valley Forge, “this Army must dissolve” totally, or it must break up into small, ineffectual units. He did not have “a single hoof of any kind to Slaughter, and not more than 25 Barls. of Flour!” He needed four thousand blankets, three thousand pairs of shoes and an equal number of stockings, he added. He had nine thousand men with him when he entered the encampment, a third of whom were too ill-equipped to be fit for duty, and still more who were ailing and hospitalized.9

  Washington had foreseen the problems and had begun to take steps to meet them six weeks before he entered his winter quarters. Early in November he urged Congress to institute legal means by which goods could be confiscated from Tories, and he urged the legislators to commission agents who could purchase articles from patriotic Americans. From the army’s war chest, moreover, he found funds by which he could send forth officers to purchase needed commodities. And, of course, he had foraging parties in the field, although he knew that the seizure of goods would alienate civilians. (As a precaution, he issued explicit orders directing his search gangs to buy, not steal, items from the citizenry.) He also pleaded with governors in neighboring states to find and ship food and clothing to his army. “No pains, no efforts can be too great for this purpose,” he implored. Once at Valley Forge he took adequate steps to get the men housed quickly, he furloughed as many men as he could spare in order to conserve his precious stockpile of food, he endeavored to regulate the prices that sutlers could charge for scarce goods, and he refused to allow his general officers to keep horses—even at their own expense—because the beasts would consume essential provender. Yet the crisis persisted as if his efforts had never been undertak
en. So baffled was Washington that he acknowledged that he did “not know from what cause, this alarming deficiency or rather total failure of Supplies arises.” 10

  Indeed, what was the cause of this disaster? Many in Congress believed that Washington was partly to blame. The general was reluctant to impress commodities which belonged to civilians, fearing that the practice would result in “the most pernicious consequences.” Ultimately, Congress ordered him to seize the goods of farmers who would not sell their goods to the army.11

  However, the army’s supply problems ran far deeper than General Washington’s unwillingness to risk the eclipse of morale on the home front.12 Administrative inefficiency and incompetence, as well as rampant graft and corruption within the quartermaster service, took its toll during this winter. In addition, the vicissitudes of war contributed to the suffering. For instance, Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia closed the lanes of supply between Pennsylvania and the South. Nor can the climate be overlooked. While the winter of 1777–78 was not unusual for southeastern Pennsylvania, heavy snows and frequent winter rains often closed the roads to the army’s supply wagons, leaving Valley Forge a scene of destitution in the midst of plenty.13

  The logistical difficulties that occupied much of Washington’s time at Valley Forge were not his only problem. He came to believe that his position as commander in chief was jeopardized. At first it was just an instinctive feeling, but he was concerned and his worry surfaced in the defensive tone he suddenly adopted in his correspondence. Never, he began to tell some correspondents, had his troop strength been the equal of Howe’s army. Besides, he had been compelled to fight the British in a region that teemed with Loyalists. “How different the case in the Northern department!” There, he said, thousands of militiamen had turned out to help Gates, and they had been joined by detachments of regulars which he had sent north. Considering his disadvantages, Washington went on, he had done well, confining Howe’s acquisitions to Philadelphia, a questionable prize. Exculpatory expressions were not uncommon to his manner, although up to this point in the war Washington had never seemed so inclined to seek excuses. In light of Gates’s magisterial victory and his own setbacks at Brandywine and Germantown, common sense led him to conclude that questions inevitably would be raised about his performance. After all, if a person like Reed with whom he had been close had questioned his capabilities a year earlier, what would others now say? He got an inkling on November 8. Among the items in that morning’s mail was a missive from Lord Stirling. “The enclosed was communicated by Colonl. Wilkinson to Majr. McWilliams,” Stirling tattled. “In a letter from Genl. Conway to Genl. Gates he says: ‘Heaven has been determined to save your Country; or a weak General and bad Councellors would have ruind it.’ “14

  Washington was not too surprised that others were whispering about his abilities. But the revelation that Gates might be acting in league with the doubters was sufficient to arouse the deepest anxiety within the commander’s wary, uneasy mind. Gates had revealed himself to be an intensely political person, one with many friends in Congress. He also had just won that victory at Saratoga, a triumph certain to garner more friends.

  Washington’s relationship with Gates already was strained. Their friendship and mutual respect appears to have begun to cool as early as the spring of 1776, although the reasons can only be guessed at. During the siege of Boston it appears to have been an open secret that Gates assiduously was courting the more radical congressmen, particularly influential New England legislators like John and Samuel Adams. Washington, who also had been wooed by Gates before the Second Continental Congress, may have come to see the man as too wily, too ambitious to be completely trustworthy. The next spring Gates became miffed at Washington; almost openly soliciting the Canadian command following the demise of Montgomery and Thomas, Gates seems to have concluded—unfairly it would appear—that he did not have Washington’s support for that post. He got that command, but it initiated a protracted controversy in Congress between his supporters and Schuyler’s defenders, a bitter quarrel that still was in full swing when the commander, reeling across New Jersey in the late fall of 1776, summoned Gates’s assistance against Cornwallis. Gates did hurry south, and three days before Christmas he parked his force with Washington’s army across the river from Trenton. But Gates was not present on the day of Washington’s famous attack on the Hessian cantonment. He had gone to Baltimore, where Congress then was meeting. The next summer Gates’s intriguing paid off. Congress recalled Schuyler and asked Washington to choose a new commander for the Northern Department, but unwilling to risk antagonizing one faction or another in Congress, the commander declined to act. Congress ultimately placed Major General Gates in command of that department, but by then he may have concluded—for the second time—that he did not have Washington’s support.

  By the fall of 1777 Washington already had begun to have sleepless nights on account of Thomas Conway, the author of that cryptic missive to Gates. An Irish-born French officer whom Silas Deane had recruited, Conway had arrived at headquarters during Washington’s final days at Morristown the previous spring. The commander welcomed him as an experienced officer who could be of help, and his effusive support induced Congress to appoint Conway as a brigadier general. Washington’s acumen seemed justified when Conway fought superbly in New Jersey, then again at Brandywine and Germantown. No one was higher on Conway than Conway himself, however, and in October 1777 he commenced an active lobbying campaign with Congress to win a promotion to the rank of major general. Vain and opinionated, Conway loudly interspersed his exalted views of his own talents with his cynical judgment of Washington; the Virginian was a gentleman, he thought, but to put him in charge of the Continental army was to put him out of his league. In the meantime, Washington had begun a campaign of his own to block Conway’s promotion. It is likely that Washington had gotten wind of this Gallic officer’s imputations, but in this case the commander did not act out of personal spite. He quite rightly feared that Conway’s advancement over many with longer American service records would have disastrous results, perhaps provoking some who had expressed their rancor over pay and deplorable conditions to quit. The issue was hanging fire on November 8 when Stirling snitched on Conway.

  Washington’s initial reaction probably mingled alarm and relief, for if the correspondence hinted at a conspiracy against him it also afforded a possible means of embarrassing Conway and preventing his promotion. Washington dealt with Conway first, immediately writing him a terse note penned in the same vein as his ominously curt letter to Reed a year earlier:

  Sir: A Letter which I received last Night, containd the following paragraph. In a Letter from Genl. Conway to Genl. Gates he says: “Heaven has been determined to save your Country; or a weak General and bad Councellors would have ruined it.”

  I am Sir Yr. Hble Servt.15

  He did not have long to wait for a reply. Within hours Conway responded. He admitted having criticized the army and some of its policies, and he confessed that he had aired these views to Gates and others, including former Quartermaster General Mifflin; however, he denied having attacked Washington. “My opinion of you, sir, without flattery or envy is . . . that You are a brave man, an honest man, a patriot and a man of good sense . . . [but that] you have often been influenced by men who were not equal to you in point of experience, knowledge or judgment.” Less than a week later Conway submitted a letter of resignation to Congress.

  Whatever veracity Washington might have attached to Conway’s reply, he gleaned one kernel of information from it: Mifflin as well as Gates appeared to be close to Conway. Moreover, on the day before Stirling’s communication arrived, Congress had reorganized the Board of War, replacing the congressional members with permanent members and naming Mifflin as the president of the reconstituted body. Two weeks later Gates was added to the Board, and two weeks after that the first fruits of this new complement became evident. Congress—which initially had referred Conway’s letter of resignation to
the Board of War—reversed itself in mid-December, naming the Frenchman to a new post, inspector-general, and promoting him to major general. This was precisely the moment, too, when Congress virtually ordered Washington’s army to take up winter quarters around Philadelphia, Mifflin’s hometown.

  Washington, always overly sensitive to criticism, now tired and overworked from the anguish and constant strain of six consecutive months of life-and-death decisions, exaggerated the extent of those who reproached his leadership. He imagined the existence of a conspiracy to overthrow him, a plot that some historians have called the “Conway Cabal.” Conway, Gates, and Mifflin were but the tip of the iceberg, Washington believed, concluding that others in Congress and on the Board of War also had united against him. It is not difficult to imagine the gossip and the half-truths that must have been passed on to him by well-meaning aides and friends, as well as by sycophants and those whose own future was intimately linked to Washington’s survival as commander. Even his old friend Dr. Craik wrote from home to inform him that he had been told on good authority that a “Strong Faction [is] forming Against you”; “Eastern and Southern Members [of Congress] are at the bottom of it,” he related. Washington seems to have credulously accepted most of the tales, as if no tattle was too fanciful for him to believe.16

  There is no question that doubts and harsh judgments about Washington were uttered that fall and winter. His intelligence network was reprehensible, it was charged. It was alleged that his army was undisciplined. Another imputation had it that Washington was too much under the “pernicious influence” of Knox and Greene. Washington plainly was inept, said some accusers. Major General Johann de Kalb, a Bavarian-born soldier of fortune who joined Washington in 1777, even suggested that the commander was sluggish, indeed, lazy. “We want a General,” said Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, a former New Jersey congressman, now the attorney general of Pennsylvania.17 But to grumble about Washington and to question the wisdom of some of his decisions was a far cry from actually conspiring to bring about his downfall.