It is too much to believe that some did not wish to depose Washington. It is known that Dr. Benjamin Rush, the medical director of the Middle Department, urged Washington’s removal and proposed that Gates or Lee or Conway supplant him. Yet with the possible exception of William Duer, a congressman from New York who once was alleged by a colleague to be part of a cabal to dump the commander, there is no hard evidence that anyone else sought to oust Washington. Certainly there is no evidence that Gates or Mifflin—or even Conway—endeavored to remove Washington, nor is there much likelihood that they could have succeeded had they been part of such a conspiracy. The hard, cold fact of the matter was that once Congress selected Washington it was stuck with him—at least until he suffered a cataclysmic beating, some defeat that went beyond anything that had occurred through the campaign of 1777. Barring that, or some sort of illicit behavior on his part, Washington virtually had to be kept, for otherwise to have ousted him would have been to expose the Revolution and the fledgling nation to incalculable dangers. Not only is it difficult to conceive of his proud fellow Virginians watching patiently and quietly while Congress dumped the commander without sufficient reason, but for many Washington already had come to symbolize the sacrifice of the Revolution. Scuttle him, said one of the alleged plotters, and “American will lose perhaps her only prop.”18
But it was not as though Washington remained in power simply because Congress was stuck with him. Many congressmen genuinely admired the commander, and the great majority were fair enough to realize that the army’s shortcomings at Brandywine and Germantown were not due to his ineptitude. Henry Laurens, the president of Congress, thought him to be “the first of the Age,” and Robert Morris, a Pennsylvania congressman and later a financial agent for Congress, spoke of Washington as the “first Man in this World.” “I love him to a Degree of Adoration,” wrote Richard Peters, a member of the board of war and supposedly a member of the anti-Washington cabal. John Adams was typical of those who recognized that Washington had fought the cream of the British army, whereas Gates had been blessed with advantages unavailable to the commander. Even so, he was not uncritical of Washington, and, in fact, he was somewhat apprehensive of the idolatrous tendencies that he perceived people held toward him. Once Adams even expressed some relief that the army had not succeeded at Philadelphia, lest the “Adulation would have been unbounded, so excessive as to endanger our Liberties.” Still, he was satisfied with Washington’s abilities, and he chided Dr. Rush: “You are daily looking out for some great military Character.—Have you found none?” Heroes are all about, he went on, and they included Washington and Gates, as well as other officers and the common soldier. How many other countries would have displayed enough “Examples of Fortitude, Valour, and Skill” to have fought Great Britain so successfully for three years? Then he added: the “Idea that any one Man, alone can Save Us, is too Silly . . . to harbour for a Moment.”19
No one could have convinced Washington that there was not a conspiracy. He spent most of that dreary winter engaged in a futile, often malevolent, correspondence with Gates. Actually, Gates initiated communications. Roughly a month after Washington first had written Conway, Gates learned through Mifflin that his correspondence with the French officer had been made public. In his first letter to Washington he said nothing about his views toward the commander, only fulminating that someone—“a Wretch, who may betray me”—had rifled through his private papers. He also told Washington that he was sending a copy of this letter to Congress. The commander’s reply was masterfully concocted, a reminder that he was anything but inept in the nice art of infighting. All along he had presumed, he now claimed, that Gates himself was behind the revelation of Conway’s “infidelity,” a friendly gesture by a colleague in arms to forewarn him of another’s “intrieguing dispositions.” “I have found myself mistaken,” he concluded.20
It was not until late January 1778 that Gates got around to commenting on his correspondence with Conway. He defended the inspector-general, referred to Conway’s missive as “harmless,” one that contained only some justified criticism of the lack of discipline among American soldiers, and he alleged that the quotation which had been passed on to Washington was a forgery concocted by some personal enemy, perhaps, he said in a left-handed way, by Alexander Hamilton, one of the commander’s aides. He did not send along a copy of Conway’s epistle, however, and Washington’s response played on this omission. Washington also meanly ridiculed Conway’s capabilities, only to close with the sarcastic caveat that perhaps he was wrong and Gates was correct about the French officer’s talents, since Gates had a “better acquaintance with him, than I [previously had] reason to think you have had.”21
Washington was too skilled at infighting for Gates, as that outmatched officer now realized. He sent one last missive in which he apologized to the commander for whatever unpleasantness had occurred and pledged that he had never been part of any cabal. Gates also pleaded for an end to this rancorous affair. By late February, when that final letter arrived, Washington felt safe, and he, too, was ready to put the incident to rest. “My temper leads me to peace and harmony with all Men,” he wrote unconvincingly.22
One thing that had eased Washington’s mind was that he had masterfully rid himself of Inspector-General Conway by that time. When the two men were forced together by official business, Washington had treated Conway with a cold formality that did nothing to hide his impenetrable loathing for the man. His manner drove Conway to write Washington, protesting such treatment and defending his action. Eventually, however, Conway destroyed himself. On the last day of December he sent the commander a missive that dripped with sarcasm. He charged that Washington demanded standards for promotion that were too high; perhaps he did not measure up, but he had served for thirty years and he believed that he had learned his craft better than those Americans who had been officers for only a few months. Otherwise, few men could ever attain the “universal merit” that the commander desired, perhaps only “frederick [the Great] in europe, and the great Washington in this continent. I certainly never was so rash as to pretend to such a prodigious height.”23
The day after Washington received this remarkable letter, he dumped all his correspondence with Conway into the lap of Congress. It was clear that the legislators had to do something, lest the army’s already sagging morale be further eroded by this clash. Given a choice between Washington and Conway there never was a doubt which way the Congress would lean. Nor was there any question about which man Washington’s most ambitious subordinates would choose. A truckler like the Marquis de Lafayette, who earlier had offered warm praise for Conway, now characterized his colleague as “cunning” and “dangerous,” while Washington’s young aide Hamilton, himself no stranger to the arts of lickspittle, quickly denounced the French officer as “vermin” and a “villainous calumniator and incendiary.” General Greene used almost identical language when he appraised Conway, as did Washington himself, who now openly called the inspector-general “a secret enemy; or, in other words, a dangerous incendiary.”
Once the Washington-Conway tempest became public knowledge Congress moved quickly, transferring the French officer to the remote North. A few months later, with little to do but watch the snow fall endlessly in this theater, Conway resigned, an option that Congress was only too happy to see exercised. Before he could sail for France, however, Conway became involved in a war of words with Brigadier General John Cadwalader, a foolish altercation that resulted in a duel. Conway was shot in the face during the clash, but he survived the painful wound and returned to France, where he served with distinction for several more years. His final act as an American officer was to write Washington a gracious letter begging forgiveness for any “grief” he may have caused and wishing the commander the best, as “You are in my eyes the great and good man.” General Washington never responded.24
Conway was not the only foreign volunteer to give Washington fits. Since early in 1777 a growing number of foreign
soldiers had arrived in America, and while their expertise and experience was valued, Washington soon discovered that their presence was a mixed blessing. When the war was about a year old Congress happily learned that many professional soldiers in Europe were anxious to fight under America’s banners; some were adventurers in quest of a war, some saw this as a chance to gain experience and promotion upon their return to their own army, and some—Frenchmen anyway—interpreted America’s fight against Britain as a service to their native land. Without considering all the ramifications of the move, Congress quickly authorized its agent in Paris to sign on some of the volunteers, especially those with engineering or artillery backgrounds. The result often was disappointing, however. Some who came were untalented imposters, and others, although skilled, were unable to express their specialized knowledge in understandable English. Congress sadly discovered, too, that one of its agents, Silas Deane, had dispatched some of those officers with commissions that bestowed very high rank in the Continental Army.
One such case involved Philippe du Coudray, a colonel in the French army whom Deane commissioned as a major general. Since his commission was dated August 1, 1776, he was to be the head of the Continental army’s artillery, supplanting Knox and outranking Sullivan and Greene. All three American officers were properly outraged, huffing and pledging to resign before submitting to such an insult. Congress would have faced an impossible quandary had not du Coudray’s horse solved matters for the legislators. With the Frenchman on its back, the beast clumsily fell off a ferry into the Schuylkill River, whereupon both it and its rider drowned.25
Experiences with other imported officers turned out more happily for all involved. Louis le Bégue de Presle Duportail, a French technician, was placed in command of all American engineers, and he skillfully planned both the Delaware River defences and the layout of the encampment at Valley Forge. Johannes de Kalb, a self-styled Bavarian aristocrat, served valiantly as an infantry officer until his death on a southern battlefield in 1780. Colonel Andrew Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a captain in the army of Poland, also served with distinction as an engineer, as did another Pole, Casimir Pulaski, a cavalry officer who died in the Battle of Savannah in 1779.
Two of the foreign officers perhaps are even better known today than are many American officers. Gilbert du Motier, officially the Marquis de Lafayette, arrived in America in 1777. Born into the French aristocracy, he was the son of an army captain who died in battle when the boy was just two years old. Young Lafayette was married by age sixteen—an arranged marriage with the fourteen-year-old daughter of another blueblood. A rather bashful, awkward youth, he easily was overlooked in the heady social swirl of Versailles, and perhaps for this reason he latched onto the army as a means of gaining attention. America, however, was the only place in the western world where one could find a war in progress. He closely watched the conflict for eighteen months, then, just nineteen years old and only a captain in the French reserves, Lafayette talked Deane into a commission as a major general. In the summer of 1777 he arrived in America, and on the same day Washington and his army paraded through Philadelphia en route to the Brandywine, Congress formally commissioned Lafayette. Like the commander, Lafayette agreed to serve without pay. Indeed, in many ways he resembled a young Washington. Wealthy, demure, shy, eager to learn, he also was courageous under fire. (At Brandywine, his first combat experience ever, he continued to fight after sustaining a gunshot wound below the calf, and a few weeks later, even though his leg still was too painful to wear a boot, he again was in action about Philadelphia.)
Already fed up with foreign officers when Lafayette arrived, Washington nevertheless soon took this young Frenchman under his wing. Still almost a boy at twenty, Lafayette seemed to embody every virtue that Washington most prized; for the Frenchman, on the other hand, the commander evidently represented the sobriety and the unselfish commitment to the public good that he thought was required of the citizen and nobleman. In a sense, the relationship that developed between these two was not unlike that which had existed between young Wash ington and Lord Fairfax, a closeness facilitated by Lafayette’s ability to play the role of son, just as the man who now became his “father” once had done. Still, the filiation that developed between these two was genuinely close, a bonding that grew from mutual respect, trust, and love.26
Frederick Steube, self-styled as Frederick Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand, and still better known as Baron von Steuben, was one of the last foreigner volunteers to arrive, reaching Valley Forge only in February 1778. Never more than a captain in his native Prussia, he fibbed that he had been a lieutenant general, and his gullible hosts in America swallowed his story. He was not a Teutonic aristocrat either. Nor did he own a vast estate in Swabia, as he claimed. His allegations were bogus through and through—except that he was indeed a soldier. He came strictly as a volunteer, initially serving without rank in the Continental army and reporting directly to Washington (though he shortly was made a major general and he succeeded Conway as inspector-general). Without any sign of the bluster that had been the hallmark of so many European volunteers, “the Baron” allowed as how he would like to train the troops. Impressed by what seemed to be his candor, Washington additionally realized all too well that his army could not get too much training. He immediately put the German to work. First von Steuben drilled a squad while a hand-picked company watched, then he drilled the company while a regiment watched. And instead of sergeants training the men, he prescribed that officers drill the soldiery. Short and stocky, with thick, powerful arms, von Steuben looked a little like a well-dressed blacksmith; his air of toughness was augmented by his gutteral commands and his favorite Germanic invectives. He was the sort of officer who inspired both fear and respect, not the least because he, too, was on the drill field marching with the men. A month after his arrival he had the entire army at Valley Forge practicing his drill program, a streamlined version of the Prussian system. By the time the spring buds had burst into their radiant hues, the Continental army had begun to look more like a real army, at least on the parade ground, and the leadership had reason to hope that there was some truth in von Steuben’s once sarcastic observation that in the “European armies a man who has been drilled for three months is called a recruit, here in two months . . . a soldier.”27
Von Steuben’s labors to train the soldiery were only part of a concerted effort to remodel the Continental army. Washington still was residing in his tent at Valley Forge when he informed Congress of his desire to initiate major administrative reforms—to “rectifie mistakes and bring things to order,” as he put it—before fighting once again commenced. “We have not more than 3 months to prepare a great deal of business in,” he told Congress; “if we let these slip, or waste, we shall be labouring under the same difficulties all next Campaign as we have done this. . . .” Would Congress send a committee to camp to work with him in the preparation of the “most perfect plan” possible for the army’s reorganization? The legislators responded immediately, sending a committee of four to Valley Forge, a panel that included Joseph Reed, a recent addition to Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation. The congressmen remained with Washington for seven weeks, scrutinizing changes made during the past summer, considering new ideas.28
By the summer of 1778 the army had a somewhat different look. A more formally instituted engineer corps existed, as did companies of sappers and miners, that is combat engineers, men who specialized in digging entrenchments and tunnels. Troops of light dragoons patterned after European partisan corps had come into being, as had mounted police units (the Marechaussee Corps) and special forces (the Corps of Invalids) responsible for guarding prisoners. Units of work crews had been constituted, and responsibility for the maintenance, storage, and transportation of all the cannoneers’ tools had been consolidated in the new Artillery Artificer Regiment. Some minor administrative tinkering was undertaken to improve the accessibility of food and drugs within the Medical Department, and more drastic mending led
both infantry and artillery regiments to be reconstituted along the lines of the British model (additional companies, but fewer officers). Of course, all the reorganizing would be useless if there were no men in the army. To hold on to its disgruntled officers, Congress took two steps: it was at this point that it hit upon the half-pay compromise; and, it also voted to refuse the services of additional foreign volunteers, excepting only those men of extraordinary merit. Enlisted men had to be gathered too, and Congress urged each state to institute conscription as a means of replacing those soldiers whose tour of duty had ended.29
The destitution all about them at Valley Forge made it clear that reform of the army’s logistical departments was the congressional committee’s most pressing problem, although by spring only minor changes had occurred. The committee and Washington proposed to improve the commissary system by curtailing its bureaucracy, reducing, as the committee report stated, the “number of little piddling pilfering Plunderers” who operated within this network. But other than stating that intention, little actual reform took place. The one substantive change occurred when the committee, and especially Washington, induced a reluctant Nathanael Greene to accept the vacant post of quartermaster general; in addition, two assistant quartermasters general—both relatives of Reed—were named, one to be responsible for all acquisitions and issues, the other a comptroller. Congress accepted the recommendations in March, and, incredibly, it voted to allow Greene and each assistant a one-third of one percent commission on all the money they spent.30
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