First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  Although Washington’s arguments were cogent, they nevertheless rang rather hollow. Canada was but weakly defended, and it was wildly unlikely that the British army ever again would be numerically superior—much less possess a five-to-one superiority as it had in 1776. Washington could not have known that Britain’s defenses were inadequate (as the redcoat commander was reporting by 1778), but he must have known that with France in the war the British no longer could depend on the loyalty of the French-Canadian populace. Had Washington by nature been timid and reluctant to run risks, his objections to a Canadian venture would have been more understandable. But his sudden caution was an uncharacteristic posture, as was his unwillingness to listen to Lafayette, an ardent proponent of such a course. What is most arresting, however, is that two years later he suddenly was converted to the notion of invading Canada, and in 1780 and again in 1782 he proposed such an operation. To deny that Washington’s about-face had nothing to do with Gates’s almost simultaneous fall from grace in 1780, or to believe that the commander’s sudden support for a Canadian campaign was unrelated to the fact that Gates was left without the slightest prospect of leading an invasion army, was a leap to faith that not all contemporaries were willing to make.10

  With another Canadian invasion repudiated, Washington met with a committee of Congress in January 1779 to plan other options. More than anything else he favored a campaign against the British in New York, although he knew that the resources, including French maritime assistance, were uncertain. He did think that a successful assault on Staten Island might demoralize Clinton, and he seemed to feel that still another attack on Newport might compel the redcoats to abandon that outpost. But at the very least Washington wanted a force large enough simultaneously to keep Clinton bottled up in New York and to leave him free to deal with his Indian and Loyalist adversaries on the frontier. Whatever plan was adopted, something must be done, he pleaded, lest America’s inactivity nourish the reconciliationists at home while it lessened France’s zeal to commit its navy to America’s cause.11

  The fact of the matter, however, was that Washington’s plans were merely contingencies. Everything really hinged on French intentions, and the path that France trod depended on many circumstances, including the course of the war in Europe. Early that year Washington learned that the war in Europe was broadening. Spain, he discovered, had entered the war against Britain, news that at once pleased and troubled him. On the one hand he was delighted, for he was certain that the French and Spanish navies would be more than a match for the royal fleet; yet he feared that Spain’s entry would provoke Russia and other continental powers to enter the conflict as allies of Britain, events that might compel France to ignore the American theater.12

  It was May before Washington got his first inkling of French plans, and he learned of his ally’s intentions not from correspondence with Versailles but through word conveyed by the new Spanish minister to the United States. D’Estaing was contemplating an assault on Halifax and Newfoundland. First, however, he wanted to know whether the United States could maintain these posts after they were taken.

  Canada again! And once again Washington did his best to scuttle such an operation. He lacked the manpower for garrisoning those bases, he replied. Instead, he hearkened back to his plan for a joint attack on Clinton in New York.13 Then he waited, a long interminable wait for the French reply.

  In the meantime the commander was pushed into an operation in which he was only mildly interested. For at least a year bloody fighting had raged in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania and at Cherry Valley in New York, deadly clashes between rebel settlers and loyalist raiders who had allied with Indians of the Six Nations. The worst incident occurred in the summer of 1778, just after the larger clash at Monmouth. Early in July a Tory-Indian force of nine hundred extirpated a rebel militia contingent at Forty Fort in Pennsylvania, killing three hundred. Panic-stricken residents poured from the region, their stories of atrocities filling American newspapers and fanning the flames for a campaign against these British allies. Despite the public outcry Washington was lukewarm at best about sending any of his army to the frontier. His reservations were not ill founded. Should d’Estaing suddenly arrive in northern waters, he wished to have an adequate army with which to act in concert with the new ally; to be rendered unable to cooperate would prolong the war and perhaps antagonize the French. Washington resisted the public’s entreaties for six months, but in the end he had to act, for Congress made it clear that it wished him to pacify the frontiers.14

  Washington’s first choice of a commander for the expedition was curious. He turned to Gates, a decision, he said, that was based solely on matters of seniority. Gates, however, believed that Washington meant to embarrass him. Everyone knew that he was too old and infirm to undertake such a campaign, he charged; it was revealing, he added huffily, that “your Exly should offer me the only command to which I am entirely unequal.” There was something to Gates’s acrimonious suggestion, for despite having begun his search on the basis of seniority, Washington then proceeded to bypass Putnam, the next in line, and offered the post to Sullivan instead. It was a position that would afford him the “flattering prospect of acquiring more credit than can be expected by any other officer this year,” the commander told him. Sullivan, of course, accepted without hesitation, much to the chagrin of some in Congress who howled at Washington’s selection of a man whose record was one of repeated failure. “I have a hard time of it,” Washington responded defensively. “To please everybody is impossible,” he added, and he further maintained that Sullivan was more than equal to the task.15

  And for once Sullivan almost succeeded. His mission, according to Washington’s orders, was to destroy every Indian settlement he could find. In addition, he was to seize Fort Niagara, the funnel through which British supplies trickled south from Canada.16 What ensued has been called the “most ruthless application of a scorched earth policy in American history.” It was that, but for all the destruction and suffering wrought by Sullivan the expedition still might have produced greater military benefits.17

  The Indians in Sullivan’s path simply chose to pull back, leaving village after village undefended and an inviting target for the invaders. After a trek of nearly 150 miles Sullivan’s army had obliterated 40 villages, killed and scalped a handful of Indians, raped some captive squaws, burned 160,000 bushels of corn, and pillaged huge amounts of other commodities. Fewer than 40 of his men had perished. Then he decided to return home, although it still was in September and the weather was mild and dry. A lack of supplies prevented him from proceeding to Niagara, he asserted, and, considering the swollen size of his force, perhaps he was correct. He had done great damage to the Indians, but he had not brought peace to the frontier. “The nests are destroyed, but the birds are still on the wing,” one of the expedition’s officers wryly observed that autumn, and, indeed, the Indians still were able to launch episodic raids the following summer.18

  On the eve of Sullivan’s campaign unsettling news trickled into Washington’s headquarters. A few weeks before, it was learned, Clinton had dispatched a small flotilla to the Chesapeake. Landing near Portsmouth, Virginia, on the Elizabeth River, the fleet had destroyed considerable amounts of rebel shipping and supplies; the enterprise was completed within two weeks, and the marines returning to New York laden with the spoils of their easy conquest. That action was a minor episode in this war, but Clinton followed it with what seemed to be a more ominous undertaking. On June 1, 1779, he sent six thousand grenadiers and jägers against Stony Point and Verplanck’s Point on the Hudson, sites of the two southernmost American installations on that important concourse. The uncompleted fort at Stony Point fell without opposition, while Fort Lafayette directly across the river at Verplanck’s surrendered almost as swiftly.

  General Washington was not certain what Clinton intended. Since the redcoats’ possession of these two bastions moved them to within about a dozen miles of West Point, this could mean the comm
encement of operations to seize the Hudson. But that was unlikely, considering the diminutive size of the British army in New York. Washington guessed that Clinton merely wished to increase his foraging area, while at the same time he inconvenienced the Americans, for the loss of these bases added about ninety miles to the communications link between New England and New Jersey. Washington’s guess was essentially correct, although Clinton’s actions also had been guided by two considerations that the American commander did not address. The British high command hoped their operations would compel Washington to try to retake the fortresses. Moreover, Clinton was confident that reinforcements were speeding across the Atlantic, enough additional men, in fact, to permit him to contemplate further raids into the Highlands, either against West Point or its lines of communication.19

  Washington’s initial reaction to the loss of the forts was to do nothing. “All we can do is to lament what we cannot remedy,” he said. But in a couple of weeks his penchant for action persuaded him to consider an assault. By early July the general and his staff had succeeded in getting a spy into the post at Stony Point, while Washington personally reconnoitered the surrounding area. His endeavors convinced him that success was possible, and he concocted a complicated, risky plan for assailing the post. He proposed that a special light infantry unit of about two hundred men be constituted. Striking at midnight on the darkest possible night, these crack troops were to advance from three directions; each party was to be led by a cadre of “prudent and determined” men, volunteers who were to proceed with fixed bayonets, but unloaded muskets, and whose job it would be to silently overpower all sentries and guards. He placed Anthony Wayne in command.20

  Wayne struck on July 16, a night when low, scudding clouds obliterated every beam of moonlight. His men hacked their way inside the fort, then fought doggedly against British soldiers who resisted with bayonets and knives, even with their fists. Nearly half the attackers were killed or wounded, but the British suffered 133 casualties, 543 captured, and the loss of Stony Point.21

  Washington did not hold his new possession for long, however, for he suddenly realized that it would require an enormous force to defend the installation. There was another compelling reason for abandoning the place, one dictated by the commander’s experience at Fort Washington and the Delaware River forts. To abandon Stony Point was to invite inconvenience. To attempt to hold it was to court disaster. He razed the compound. Still, Washington realized what he really had hoped for from the daring venture. The successful action was a morale-builder, something uncommon in the twelve months since Monmouth. It was, he thought, a much needed tonic for the flagging spirits of his countrymen, a people whose commitment to this protracted war, if not to independence, was languishing under the stress of economic despair.22

  Buoyed by this victory, Washington soon approved a similar mission against the British fort at Paulus Hook. This time he placed Henry Lee—Light Horse Harry Lee, as he thereafter would be known—in command. Barely twenty-four, Major Lee was the sort of man to whom Washington was attracted. He once described Lee as zealous, prudent, and brave; everyone seemed to agree that he was bold and daring. At Valley Forge Washington had invited Lee to join his staff as an aide, but the young Virginian rebuffed his commander. “I am wedded to my sword,” he had responded. His air of truculence toward headquarters life appealed to Washington. Here was a man who embodied those qualities that the commander hoped would be visible in himself. In the summer of 1779, when Washington received intelligence that the British were neglecting Paulus Hook, he turned to Lee to make a reconnaissance, then to lead the attack. It was an extraordinary appointment. Lee was a cavalry officer, yet he was to lead infantrymen; in addition, he was not a member of the division that he was given to lead, nor had he any experience in commanding the number of men he would have for this operation.23

  Considering the paucity of booty that might be taken, this was a risky, perhaps foolhardy, venture. Washington understood from the outset that he was incapable of holding this fort. Moreover, while a successful strike would boost morale, the commander knew that America could “lose more in case of failure than we could gain in case of success.” Lee’s men lashed out on August 18, and in a few minutes they killed 50 defenders and took 158 prisoners. But the attack was only a partial success. The likelihood that nearby redcoat installations would dispatch relief parties compelled Lee to abandon the fort before he could put it to the torch.24

  The two victories seemed to lift a burden that Washington long had borne. Four days after Lee’s daring raid he chose to make amends with Joseph Reed, terminating the chill in their relationship that had begun in the aftermath of the disaster at Fort Washington. Washington confessed that he was “at a loss myself to tell” why he chose this moment to rehabilitate the friendship, nor could he explain why, for the first time, he felt compelled to offer a lengthy explanation for his conduct in the Hudson Fort episode. It is not likely that he ever could have understood the reasons for his gesture toward Reed, for the answer to his curious behavior—as well, perhaps, to why he launched these hazardous attacks at Stony Point and Paulus Hook—lay in Washington’s psyche. It was as though his “Spirit of enterprize” in inflicting these “instances of disgrace to the British arms” had exonerated him of responsibility for his earlier debacle on the Hudson. That he selected Wayne and Lee to lead the assaults—the one, in his view, a “brave gallant and Sensible Officers,” the other “the Gentleman and the Soldier”—was as close as he could come to leading the attacks himself. Gallant, prudent, enterprising, and brave were the terms he used to describe his two young officers, the very qualities he always had sought to embody. In effect he demanded that Wayne and Lee bring him glory, and each met his demand, restoring his shaken self-image, the very esteem that Reed had helped to shatter by doubting Washington’s decisiveness.25

  Washington was certain that his two surprise attacks would make the British “feel sore” and cause them to seek vengeance. He was partially correct. Henry Clinton’s “temper from these two unlucky blows of fortune become[s] much soured,” noted an officer at British headquarters. But he did not retaliate. Indeed, Clinton soon learned that the reinforcements he had anticipated would not be coming that year, and by the end of October he had jettisoned not only his Hudson River bases above Manhattan but Newport as well. The British leader anticipated a Franco-American campaign against New York, and he was digging in.26 But he was wrong. d’Estaing instead had sailed south, ending a year of small-scale actions about New York.

  When Washington learned that d’Estaing would winter in the Caribbean in 1779–80, his own thoughts turned to winter quarters. He had spent the previous winter in New Jersey, and he returned there—to Morristown, where he had gone after Trenton-Princeton—for this season too, summoning his legions from the southern and middle states to sites previously selected by Quartermaster General Greene. The prior winter had been a far cry from those dismal months at Valley Forge. The men had been well clothed, better than in any winter since the siege of Boston; their good fortune was due to the French alliance, for ships bearing the news of the partnership barely had cleared ports in New England before other vessels arrived laden with heavy, winter livery. Some men had suffered a dearth of blankets and shoes, but there were ample tents and, ultimately, enough huts for shelter. And the food supply was adequate, due in part to a more streamlined supply service, as well as to the fact that the troops were divided among several cantonments, each conveniently situated near a supply depot.27

  Washington was in high spirits as the campaign of 1779 ended, not only because of his own successes, but on account of his adversary’s failures. Great Britain had “wasted another Campaign,” he believed, frittering away precious weeks in the Caribbean, a theater of secondary importance, while in New York and Pennsylvania a relatively small Continental army was permitted without opposition to destroy the homelands of their “good and faithful Allies,” the Native Americans. Only a few days at Morristown, however,
extinguished his cheer.28

  Hard times returned that winter, and before that vexatious season ended Washington called this period “the most distressing of any we have experienced since the beginning of the War.” What he did not realize was that the longest and bleakest—and in some ways the most dangerous—period of the war had commenced. The travail of Morristown was the first blow. The commander lived comfortably that winter, setting up headquarters in the spacious, two-year-old Ford Mansion, an eight-room, white clapboard Georgia dwelling located half a mile out of town on the Newark and Whippany Road. The soldiery spent a less luxurious season. Often, the men went ten days or more without meat and, on occasion, almost as long without bread. Private Joseph Plumb Martin once went four days without food of any kind, and he reported that some famished officers had killed and roasted their pet dogs in a vain attempt to assuage their hunger. Early in January the situation grew so desperate that half-starved soldiers fled camp to beg food from nearby farmers. The general officers and Washington’s “family,” meanwhile, seem to have fared better. During the three weeks in December that Washington lived in Morristown, headquarters procured the following comestibles: 116 fowl, 13 rabbits, 12 geese, 12 turkeys, 32 pounds of ham butts, 56 quail, 10 pigeons, 15 bushels of potatoes, 9 dozen eggs, 36 head of cabbage, 13 bushels of turnips, and 10 pounds of butter.

  Uniforms and blankets, as well as shoes and hats, also were in short supply at the Morristown cantonment. Private Martin, who was posted close by at Basking Ridge, remembered weeks of sleeping in a tent on a bed of buckwheat straw. In fact, he moved into a hut only after he and a few comrades stole enough tools from local farmers to construct such a facility. As at Valley Forge, illness soon was the companion of ill-clothed, famished soldiers who, like Martin, “had now got beyond hunger” to a point of being “faint & weak.” Fevers and pulmonary disorders struck the men. Colds became as commonplace as the raw biting wind that never seemed to abate, and at one point not only was General Washington afflicted, but eighteen of his aides as well.29