by Sarah Vowell
Washington alerted Congress of Lafayette’s modest success: “I am convinced he possesses a large share of that military ardor which generally characterizes the nobility of his country. He went to Jersey with Genl. Greene, and I find that he has not been inactive there.”
Taking Washington’s advice, Congress resolved, “That General Washington be informed, it is highly agreeable to Congress that the Marquis de La Fayette be appointed to the command of a division in the Continental Army.”
Three days later, Washington put Lafayette in charge of General Stephens’s division of Virginians—Stephens having been relieved of command after a court-martial found him guilty of drunkenness during the friendly fire incident at Germantown.
Lafayette celebrated his dream coming true by writing the biggest critic of his half-baked flight from France, his father-in-law, Jean de Noailles, the Duc d’Ayen. Lafayette informed the duke, “I have passed the whole summer without obtaining a division, which you know I have always wished for, and I have lived all that time at General Washington’s house, where I feel as if I were a friend of twenty years’ standing. Since my return from Jersey, he has offered me the choice, among several brigades, of the division I prefer, and I have selected one composed entirely of Virginians. It is weak in point of numbers at present, even in proportion to the weakness of the whole army; it is almost naked, though I have been promised cloth out of which I shall make clothes, and recruits out of which soldiers must be made in about the same length of time.”
That Lafayette chose to command men from Washington’s home state speaks to his affection for His Excellency. That his Virginians were in such a sorry state speaks to the army’s general disarray in late 1777, as well as to that specific division’s torments after some of them were mowed down by friendlies at Germantown.
Lafayette swooned to Noailles about Washington, “His name will be revered in every age, by all true lovers of liberty and humanity.” After more than two centuries of hyperbole about ye olde Father of Our Country, Lafayette’s hero worship sounds so trite, it seems hardly worth mentioning. I am, for instance, thinking of that time in 1842 when Abraham Lincoln, ignoring slackers like the Buddha and Jesus Christ, proclaimed, “Washington is the mightiest name of earth.”
In autumn 1777, however, Washington wasn’t even the mightiest name in the Philly suburbs. Young Lafayette’s unbending faith that Washington would go down in history as a cherished icon was not the consensus among his fellow officers or their civilian overseers.
Even Washington’s supporters in Congress couldn’t help resenting him for their hundred-mile exodus across the Susquehanna to the village of York, their modest, improvised new capital.
On October 16, Congressman Henry Laurens contacted his son John, a member of Washington’s military family and a friend of Lafayette’s, complaining of “difficulty in the hall of Congress. There is a constant buzzing and confusion . . . among the delegates.” Laurens lamented, “The general opinion is that the difficulty arises from the want of discipline in the American army.”
Thanks to the sluggish pace of transatlantic communication, it would be months before the powers that be in America found out that the powers that be in France were less concerned about the wipeout at Germantown than dazzled with Washington’s nerve at attempting it. Knowing that fact sooner might have soothed a few flustered rebels stateside, and maybe boosted patriot morale in that specific, eccentric way that only French accolades can. Like how it must quiet the mind of Bruce Willis that even though his fellow Americans never nominated him for an Oscar, the French awarded him the Légion d’Honneur.
When Lafayette’s father-in-law, brigadier general of the armies of the French king, received his son-in-law’s letter with the quip about having to whip a division of Virginians into shape in the amount of time it would take to sew a uniform, the old soldier must have shook his head in wonder, understanding Lafayette’s awe of Washington for holding together his gaggle of amateurs.
The following spring, John Adams would arrive in France to replace recalled envoy Silas Deane. Adams wrote home to one of the Continental Congress delegates regarding what he had learned about French reactions to Washington’s flop at Germantown versus Gates’s star turn at Saratoga: “General Gates was the ablest negotiator you had in Europe; and, next to him, General Washington’s attack on the enemy at Germantown. I do not know, indeed, whether this last affair had not more influence upon the European mind than that of Saratoga. Although the attempt was unsuccessful, the military gentlemen in Europe considered it as the most decisive proof that America would finally succeed.”
Of course, that realization came later, well into 1778. In the meantime, circa autumn of 1777, Adams was still representing Massachusetts in the Continental Congress. And he was one of the riled-up patriot bigwigs toying with replacing Washington, the loser of Philadelphia, with the hero of Saratoga, General Gates.
The physician and former congressman Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, volunteered as a doctor during the Philadelphia campaign and wrote to John Adams in York a series of letters after Brandywine and Germantown deploring the chaotic state of Washington’s troops. Describing Washington as “outgenerald and twice beated,” Rush informed Adams, “I have heard several officers who have served under General Gates compare his army to a well regulated family. The same gentlemen have compared Gen’l Washington’s imitation of an army to an unformed mob.”
Rush has been identified as the author of an anonymous letter to Patrick Henry in Virginia, claiming, “The northern army”—the troops General Gates led to victory at Saratoga—“has shown us what Americans are capable of doing with a GENERAL at their head.” It went on to assert, “The spirit of the southern army”—Washington’s bedraggled losers in Pennsylvania—“is in no ways inferior to the spirit of the northern.” The anonymous Rush suggested replacing the homegrown Washington with one of his British-born underlings like Gates or Charles Lee, or perhaps General Thomas Conway, a Frenchman of Irish descent recruited by Silas Deane (whom Lafayette had commended for his “brilliant” soldiering at Brandywine before he soured on him, labeling Conway more Irish than French). Rush believed that if one of those three took Washington’s place as commander in chief, the southern army “would in a few weeks” be whipped into “an irresistible body of men.”
Henry forwarded the letter to his fellow Virginian Washington, who reportedly recognized Rush’s doctor-style handwriting.
Here we have arrived at the largely forgotten and ultimately unsuccessful conspiracy among a few congressmen and Continental officers to oust Washington that is referred to as the “Conway cabal.” It is hazily understood because some of the conspirators covered their tracks later on, after George Washington became George Washington. Rush, for instance, convinced at least two of Washington’s nineteenth-century biographers to edit him out of the episode. In 1895 the Atlantic Monthly even published Rush’s 1777 letters to Adams as news.
What happened was, the opportunistic Conway went over Washington’s head, writing to Congress requesting a promotion. When Washington found out, he wrote to Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee, “General Conway’s merit, then, as an Officer, and his importance to this Army, exist more in his own imagination than in reality.” Knowing that Conway and Gates were angling for his job, Washington also threatened the congressman, saying, “It will be impossible for me to be of any further service, if such insuperable difficulties are thrown in my way.”
The situation just got pettier from there. Conway wrote to General Gates about Washington, “Heaven has been determined to save your Country; or a weak General and bad Councellors would have ruined it.” Washington got wind of the “weak general” snub when an aide of Gates’s let it slip to the underling of one of Washington’s officers, who reported it to His Excellency. Washington wrote to Conway to complain. Conway backpedaled, reassuring Washington that the rumor was false, adding tha
t instead of a weak general, Conway really thought of Washington as a “brave man.” Then Conway wrote to Congress to resign, and the delegates not only refused his resignation but also gave him a promotion, dubbing him inspector general of the Continental Army, a post requiring him to report directly to Congress, not Washington. So the delegates usurped Washington’s command to promote one of his rivals and then assigned the backstabber to be Washington’s auditor and congressional tattletale.
Lafayette characterized Conway as “an ambitious and dangerous man.” Regarding the behind-the-scenes patriot soap opera, he confided to Washington, “Such disputes, if known by the enemy, would be attended with the worst consequences.”
Lafayette’s adamant defense of Washington during a tough time deepened and cemented their bond. He wrote to Washington of his “most tender and Respectful friendship” and confessed, the “Sentiments of my Heart [are] much Stronger than a So new acquaintance Seems to admit. But an other Reason to be Concerned in the present Circumstances is my Ardent, and perhaps enthusiastic wishes for the Happiness and liberty of this Country.” In other words, after only five months’ acquaintance, to Lafayette, Washington and America were one and the same. “I am now fixed to your fate,” he added, begging Washington’s pardon if “youth and friendship make perhaps myself too warm.”
In his reply to Lafayette, Washington expressed “sentiments of the purest affection.” Which is about as gushy as a George Washington interoffice memo gets. He added, “It will ever constitute part of my happiness to know that I stand well in your opinion.” Regarding the “dirty Arts and low intrigues” of Conway, Gates, and their accomplices among the politicians, Washington, echoing The American Crisis by Paine, acknowledged, “We must not in so great a contest, expect to meet with nothing but Sun shine.” He closed the letter predicting a victorious future sleepover at Mount Vernon: “My Dear Marquis, if you will give me your Company in Virginia, we will laugh at our past difficulties and the folly of others.”
In the meantime, some of Washington’s so-called founding brothers continued to consider dispensing with the leader later anointed “the indispensable man.”
On October 26, John Adams, the very delegate who nominated Washington to be commander in chief back in ’75, wrote to Abigail from exile in York about the bright side of Washington’s recent washouts at Brandywine and Germantown. “Now We can allow a certain Citizen to be wise, virtuous, and good, without thinking him a Deity or a savior.”
Adams implied that Congress called for an official day of thanksgiving partly to celebrate the victory at Saratoga and partly to rejoice that Washington had nothing to do with it. “Congress will appoint a Thanksgiving,” he dished, “and one Cause of it ought to be that the Glory of turning the Tide of Arms, is not immediately due to the Commander in Chief.”
Then, cramming about two millennia of republican fears about hotshot warriors run amok into one offhand remark, Adams added that if Washington had been able to take credit for the collective glee over Saratoga, “Idolatry, and Adulation would have been unbounded, so excessive as to endanger our Liberties.”
Adams’s hero was Cicero, not Caesar. “All the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher,” Adams wrote of the ancient thinker and politician who had a bone to pick with Julius Caesar for parlaying his military accomplishments into a new gig as dictator, the beginning of the end of Rome as republic. It was the same ongoing apprehension Senator Henry Clay would express a half century later about what he saw as the danger of electing “a military chieftain” like General Andrew Jackson in 1824. A Jackson presidency, Clay feared, would “guaranty that this republic will march in the fatal road which has conducted every other republic to ruin.”
John Adams’s fretting that too much adulation for George Washington could tempt the commander to thumb his nose at the Congress was healthy and shrewd if unwarranted. Washington turned out to be as staunch a republican as Adams was, believing in civilian control of the military to the extent that later in the war the general stopped disgruntled Continental Army mutineers at gunpoint from marching on Congress to demand back pay. And yet Adams’s note to Abigail does read like a pencil sketch for that creepy painting in the Louvre of Napoleon crowning himself emperor.
In a letter to an old crony from the Virginia House of Burgesses, General Washington marveled at “the jealousy which Congress unhappily entertain of the Army.” Deeming this envy distressing and unfounded, he traced it to “the common, received opinion . . . that Standing Armies are dangerous to a state.” While pointing out that he understood such an attitude in peacetime, Washington avowed that in the middle of a war, “We should all be considered, Congress—Army &c., as one people, embarked in one cause.”
In York, Congress convened in an unassuming country courthouse by day and piled into cramped, shared living quarters at night. Some delegates were taken in by townspeople, including a few local preachers. The Virginian Richard Henry Lee split a rental with Sam and John Adams.
In the ample inventory of kudos racked up by the two Adamses of Massachusetts, I can’t imagine “world’s greatest roommate” made the list. It’s possible that over the course of the revolution, the greatest threat to the stability of the Continental Congress wasn’t the rift about the morality of slavery but rather the long and grating nights the delegates spent in York, hearing each other snore.
As Charles Carroll of Maryland described the mood there, “The Congress does worse than ever, we murder time, and chat it away in idle, impertinent talk.” That does sound congressional. At the very moment their revolution seemed to be going to hell, the founders floundered—they wavered, they gossiped, they played pin the tail on the scapegoat.
Some of the crankier delegates started lashing out at the man they blamed for their uncomfortable circumstances in York. Not General Sir William Howe, rumored to be cozily shacked up in occupied Philadelphia with a Loyalist’s wife nicknamed “Billy Howe’s Cleopatra.” The congressmen instead passed the time grumbling about the neo-Fabius George Washington instead.
“Our affairs are Fabiused into a very disagreeable posture,” carped Congressman Lovell, the gentleman from Massachusetts who months earlier had chewed out the newly arrived Lafayette.
Embarrassed that the patriot capital had fallen, some representatives were livid that Washington seemed to be doing precisely zilch to get it back. Sam Adams wrote to a friend, “If we do not beat [the British] this Fall will not the faithful Historian record it as our own Fault?” (If historian-adjacent, narrative nonfiction wise guys are allowed to weigh in, I will go on record as being cool with it.)
Lafayette bemoaned to Washington of “oppen dissentions in Congress, parties who Hate one an other as much as the Common ennemy.” He went on to denounce the delegates as “stupid men” who “believe that attaking is the only thing Necessary to Conquer.”
One reason some of the antsier patriots were egging on Washington to carry out some splashy Christmastime derring-do is that he had done exactly that the year before when he crossed the Delaware River to ambush a smattering of Hessians sleeping off their holiday cheer in Trenton. As General Nathanael Greene sized up the Trenton victory and a follow-up feat in Princeton: “The successes of last winter were brilliant and attended with the most happy consequences in changing the complexion of the times.” However, he added, “I fancy it would be found we were no great gainers by those operations.”
Thus Trenton accomplished nothing much more than tidings of empty comfort and hollow joy—things, it should be said, that in the fall of 1777 a lot of Americans were really in the mood for. But whereas Trenton had been lightly guarded by a thousand or so Hessian hired guns, occupied Philadelphia was being protected by ten times that number of British regulars who had just licked George Washington more than once. As Henry Knox summed up the situation in a memo to Washington about why a winter campaign to take back the city was such a bad idea, there was
“the improbability & impracticability of surprising 10,000 veteran troops in a well fortified city.”
Moreover, at least a third of the patriot soldiers were shoeless—and one of the top two components of boots on the ground is the aforementioned boots. Not that they were exactly bundled up above the knees either. Knox made note of the Continentals’ “entire want of Cloathing to keep the men from Perishing from the cold Winter’s Season.” With temperatures dropping, how could men without shirts expect to fend off opponents so blatantly well equipped with outerwear that they were nicknamed the redcoats?
Knox concluded his advice to Washington: “My Opinion is for putting the Army in good Winter Quarters: to repair the damages done: to recruit & reform the Army.”
Congress begrudgingly agreed to that plan after a congressional fact-finding committee visited Washington’s camp at Whitemarsh in early December and observed the army’s desperation firsthand. One look at the barefoot wretches whose unclad torsos were shouldering the burden of the revolution and the congressmen unbuckled their own shoes, handed them to some shivering infantrymen, and pledged to trudge back to stupid old York and turn the Continental Congress into the world’s most vindictive, productive shoemaking bee. If only.
All the congressional inspectors actually did was send Washington a snippy note blaming him for low morale. Penned on December 10, 1777, the committee’s letter to Washington charged, “Among the many reasons offered against a Winters Campaigne we were sorry to observe one of the most prevalent was a general discontent in the army and especially among the Officers.”
The congressional committee instructed Washington to hunker down in winter quarters so “that a reform may take place in the army, and proper discipline be introduced.”
On that point, Washington and his officers agreed. Lafayette reassured His Excellency, “There we schall be quiete, there we can discipline and instruct our troops.”