First Founding Father

by Harlow Giles Unger

  On July 23, 1777, Howe took full advantage of Washington’s vulnerability, ordering 15,000 troops onto ships bound for Chesapeake Bay, where they sailed to the northernmost rim and streamed ashore unopposed at Head of Elk (now Elkton, Maryland). Once on land they all but strolled toward Brandywine Creek, the last natural barrier on the way to the national capital at Philadelphia. They saw no American troops until Washington and a force of just over 10,000 appeared on the opposite, Philadelphia side of Brandywine Creek.

  Washington badly miscalculated the strength and intentions of his enemy, however, by concentrating his troops and fire power at the center of the British line at Chadd’s Ford. As the battle raged with ever-greater intensity, British general Lord Cornwallis quietly slipped away to the northwest with 8,000 British and Hessian troops. They crossed Brandywine Creek at its narrowest point, far from the battle at Chadd’s Ford, and looped around and behind the American army’s right flank, threatening to encircle Washington’s entire force.

  As paralyzing British fire swept across American lines from three directions, Washington’s troops turned about and fled in panic, leaving half an army of dead and dying men and boys, screaming in pain, their tatters soaked in blood, sweat, and dirt. British troops closed in from three sides—south, west, and north—to claim victory.

  “We had a most bloody battle with General Howe, which ended [with] our army retiring,” a crestfallen Richard Henry Lee, admitted to Patrick Henry. As the member of Congress most responsible for reinforcing Washington’s army, however, Lee shone as bright a light on the disaster as he could: “Every account… says the enemy’s loss in killed and wounded must be between 2,000 and 3,000.… Our loss in killed and wounded comes up to 500.”33 In fact, American losses were about 1,000 killed and wounded, and the losses for the British were 576.

  On September 19 Richard Henry Lee and the rest of Congress fled Philadelphia, with members scattering in different directions to return to their homes while Lee and his brother Francis Lightfoot Lee rallied a handful of colleagues to follow them to Lancaster, eighty miles to the west.

  “At 3 this morning, [I] was waked… and told that the members of Congress were gone, some of them a little after midnight,” a startled John Adams scribbled in his diary later. He and another delegate sent for their horses “and rode off after the others,” finding delegates from New York and New Jersey gathered at a tavern in Trenton, New Jersey. “So many disasters,” he seemed to moan as he penned his recollections of the day.

  “Oh, Heaven! Grant us one great soul! One leading mind would extricate the best cause from that ruin which seems to await it for the want of it. We have as good a cause as ever was fought for.”34 Rather than rejoin Congress, John Adams decided to return home, leaving Richard Henry Lee without his closest friend and ally in Congress.

  “It was my intention to decline the next election and return to the bar,” Adams explained.

  I had been four years in Congress… I was daily losing the fruits of seventeen years industry.… My children were growing up without my care in their education. All my emoluments [pay] as a member of Congress… had not been sufficient to pay a laboring man upon my farm. Young gentlemen who had been clerks in my office… were growing rich. I thought, therefore, that four years drudgery and sacrifice… were sufficient… that another might take my place.35

  On September 26 Howe’s army marched into Philadelphia unopposed.

  Washington was to suffer still more humiliations. To try to prevent further advances by Howe’s army, Washington staged what devolved into a suicidal counterattack near Germantown, just outside Philadelphia. He sent two separate columns along what a schematic diagram showed as parallel roads to Germantown for a two-pronged pincer attack on the British. In fact, one road followed a longer serpentine course, allowing the column on the straighter, shorter road to reach Germantown before its twin column.

  Faced with an impenetrable wall of British fire and no support from the second column, the first column retreated. As night fell a dense fog enveloped the area, and the retreating column collided with the second American column, which was still advancing. Mistaking them for enemy soldiers, they fired at their American comrades. Caught between American and British fire, the trapped column lost 700 men, with 400 more taken prisoner as they retreated into British lines. The British had crushed the American army and put the American government to flight. For all intents and purposes, the American Revolution was over. North America would remain British.

  Richard Henry Lee, however, refused to concede defeat.

  * Kips Bay is near present-day 34th Street on the east side of Manhattan Island; Harlem Heights stretched from present-day 110th Street to 125th Street, on the west side of Manhattan, where Columbia University now stands.

  * A low-slung boat with a variable number of guns but propelled by oars and highly maneuverable in narrow waterways.

  CHAPTER 8

  To Discard General Washington

  AS BRITISH COMMANDERS DOUBLED OVER WITH LAUGHTER IN Germantown, the two Lee brothers—Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot—led the remnants of the American government, barely twenty delegates, thirty miles farther west from Lancaster to York, Pennsylvania. Richard Henry Lee nonetheless sought to paint as fine a picture as he could to sustain Patrick Henry’s support for the war.

  “We have had another general engagement with the enemy,” Lee wrote of the Germantown disaster. “We attacked their army. The plan was well executed, and… a brilliant victory was on the moment of being obtained, when accident alone removed it from us.” After describing how the Patriots had “quitted a glorious victory absolutely in their power,” Lee assured Henry that the army had “retired in order… is now upon the ground they left before the battle in high spirits, and satisfied they can beat the enemy.”1

  If Patrick Henry was by now able to read between the lines of Richard Henry Lee’s embellished versions of Washington’s disastrous encounters, the unadorned news of Gates’s stunning victory over Burgoyne at Saratoga cheered him—and thousands of other Americans. Under the terms of surrender Burgoyne agreed to march his 5,700 Redcoats back to Boston, where they were to sail to Britain, barred from ever returning to America or serving in battle against Americans.

  The victory at Saratoga electrified the Western world—Europeans as well as Americans. Patriot morale soared. Believing victory near, if not at hand, the withering Congress put aside interstate disputes to renew work on creating the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union,” with Richard Henry Lee again named chairman of the committee to develop a final draft. In Europe political leaders routinely spoke of “the new nation,” while monarchs shuddered at the epochal character of Saratoga: an army of farmers and woodsmen with no military training had humiliated a well-disciplined, accomplished professional army; a peasant rebellion had crushed the military might of a divinely ordained, absolute monarch. If it happened in America…

  In Versailles Vergennes ignored the possible social contagion and pushed the king closer to war with Britain, using as a lure the immeasurable wealth awaiting the nation that dominated trade with the new American nation. The costs of war, he told the king, were simply an investment to assure that wealth. Blinded by the prospects of immeasurable profits, the king ignored the warnings of some who feared that a commoner rebellion against an absolute monarch in one country might spark similar political conflagrations elsewhere—perhaps even in France.

  As the extent of the American victory became clearer, a few European newspapers not only embellished the British-Hessian humiliation, they invented other American victories and British disasters and elevated the Anglo-American conflict to an Arthurian romance.

  In York, Congress, or what was left of it, sensed victory and independence near at hand—and the need to establish a nation with officials empowered to sign a peace treaty with Britain and trade agreements with other nations on behalf of all the states. Still fearful of the taxing powers and other emasculating tactics of a stron
g central government, delegates decided to perpetuate state sovereignty in virtually every area of government except foreign affairs. In one of the last obstacles to national unity, a majority of states balked at allowing Virginia to retain control over the huge “northwest territory,” which encompassed present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. When Virginia expressed willingness to cede public but not private lands in the territory to the Confederation, Congress agreed, thus safeguarding Washington and Lee’s ownership of hundreds of thousands of acres in the Ohio territory. With that, Congress adopted America’s first constitution on November 15, 1777, and sent copies to each of the states for ratification by their legislatures.

  Map 2. Northwest Territory. Once part of Virginia, the Northwest Territory encompassed present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. Virginia’s cession of the territory to the Confederation ensured passage of the Articles of Confederation, the first “constitution” of the United States. In creating the first federally own lands in America, the transfer ensured a permanent ban on slavery in any states created in the territory.

  To ensure agreement by all states Richard Henry Lee composed Articles of Confederation that created an all-but-impotent Confederation Congress. A combined executive and legislative body, it would be unable to take any action without unanimous consent of the states. Under Article Two, moreover, each state would retain its sovereignty. Although Congress would be able to appoint Confederation emissaries to foreign capitals, they would have no negotiating authority without unanimous consent of the states. The Articles created “a firm league of friendship” that “bound” states to the common defense but made no provision for ensuring they would have to act for the common defense by providing money or troops. Nor did the Articles give Congress powers to raise or fund an army or tax states to procure arms and ammunition. Until then the lack of congressional taxing powers had so frustrated Richard Henry Lee’s every attempt to supply Washington’s army that he invested all his energy into trying to convince delegates to give Congress at least limited taxing powers.

  One by one the states succumbed to the logic of his persistent appeals, and in the end twelve states agreed. But New York delegates stood firm in opposition and left Congress with no way to pay for the rest of the Revolutionary War except by borrowing from foreign countries.

  As Congress debated the Articles of Confederation, Washington and his army limped away from its humiliation in Germantown and set up winter quarters on an elevated plateau above Valley Forge, about twenty-five miles northwest of Philadelphia. At first glance the site gave Washington’s army the advantage of elevation on the east if it had to defend itself against British troops advancing from Philadelphia. A gentle slope to the west gave his men a route for an orderly retreat, while steep walls to the north and south made the camp impregnable to a pincer attack from the sides.

  In what proved to be a poor political decision, however, Washington downplayed the extent of his losses at Germantown in a letter to Congress: “Upon the whole,” he wrote, “it may be said the day was more unfortunate than injurious.… The enemy are nothing better by the event.”2 Within a week, however, he confessed that his “military chest is nearly exhausted.… Our distress for want of shoes and stockings is amazingly great.”3 Making matters worse, there were no springs on the plateau. The stream and the forge that gave the site its name were at the foot of the hill.

  Washington ordered his men at Valley Forge to raise a city of huts with branches and twigs that might have been tolerable even in the bitter winter that followed had the quartermaster general provided clothes, blankets, foods, and other supplies that Washington had ordered.

  “The soldiers lived in misery,” according to the Marquis de Lafayette, who had come from France to volunteer in the American army. “They lacked for clothes, hats, shirts, shoes, their legs and feet black from frostbite—we often had to amputate.… The army often went whole days without provisions.… The misery prevented new enlistments.”4

  By Christmas desertions, disease, exposure to subzero temperatures, starvation, and thirst had reduced Washington’s Continental Army, once 11,000 men, to 5,000. Some froze to death; most of those who survived were too weak to fight. With Congress disabled and impotent in York, Washington pleaded in vain to Richard Henry Lee for supplies, then to Quartermaster General Thomas Mifflin. When Mifflin failed to respond, Washington turned to state governors for help.

  In York, meanwhile, Richard Henry Lee and Congress lived in conditions only slightly better than those at Valley Forge. Although Lee’s sister Alice and her husband, Dr. William Shippen, managed to ship twenty-five gallons of fine French wine to him in York, the wine did nothing to soothe fraying tempers of Congress—or what was left of it. More than annoyed by the repeated British humiliations of Washington’s army—which stood in stark contrast to Gates’s Saratoga victory—Congress started questioning Washington’s military skills. To weaken Lee’s influence in Congress—and Ohio Land Company control of western territory—Robert Morris stirred dissent, whispering that Richard Henry Lee himself was dissatisfied with Washington’s leadership but refused to show his dissatisfaction because of his friendship with the general.

  A barrage of anonymous letters to Congress and articles in the press denounced Washington’s loss of the national capital while praising Gates’s success at Saratoga. Washington was furious at the comparison, confiding in Henry that “I was left to fight two battles… to save Philadelphia with less numbers than composed the army of my antagonist, whilst the world has given us at least double.

  This impression, though mortifying in some points of view, I have been obliged to encourage, because, next to being strong, it is best to be thought so by the enemy.… How different the case in the northern department! There the states of New York and New England resolving to crush Burgoyne, continued pouring in their troops till the surrender of that army; at which time not less than fourteen thousand militia… were actually in Gates’s camp… in many instances supplied with provisions of their own carrying.5

  With encouragement from Robert Morris and Quartermaster General Thomas Mifflin, Congress effectively demoted Washington by creating a Board of War with supreme powers over him and the military. Ignoring protests from Richard Henry Lee, it named General Gates Board president, giving him overall authority over the war. It also promoted Gates’s aide, Colonel Thomas Conway, to inspector general, with authority to investigate misconduct by army officers—including George Washington.

  Washington let loose a blast of his legendary temper at Richard Henry: “If there is any truth in the report… that Congress has appointed Brigadier Conway to be major general in this army, it will be as unfortunate a measure as ever was adopted. I may add (and I think with truth) that it will give a fatal blow to the existence of this army. The duty I owe my country, the ardent desire I have to promote its true interests, and justice… require [that] I speak plain.”6

  Washington said he would not object to Conway’s promotion “if there was a degree of… merit in General Conway unpossessed by his seniors.” But this was not the case, he insisted. “General Conway’s merit… as an officer and his importance in this army exists more in his own imagination that in reality, for it is a maxim with him to leave no service of his own untold.” Washington warned Lee that once other officers of greater merit learned of Conway’s promotion, they would resign in droves. “These gentlemen have feelings as officers, and though they do not dispute the authority of Congress to make appointments, they will judge of the propriety of acting under them.

  In a word, the service is so difficult and every necessary so expensive that almost all your officers are tired out. Do not, therefore, afford them good pretexts for retiring. Within the last six days, twenty commissions have been tendered to me. I must therefore conjure you to conjure Congress to consider this matter well, and not by a real act of injustice compel some good officers to leave your service and
incur a train of evils unforeseen and irremediable.7

  By implication Washington himself seemed ready to quit. “I have been a slave to the service,” he fumed at Lee. “I have undergone more than most men are aware of to harmonize so many discordant parts, but it will be impossible for me to be of any further service if such insuperable difficulties are thrown in my way.” He said he hoped Lee would bring the Conway controversy “to a speedy and happy issue,” then reminded Lee that “half of our men are rendered unfit for service for want of… clothing.”8

  Lee found himself trapped between his loyalty and friendship of many years to his friend (and sometimes business partner) and the overwhelming sentiment of a shrunken Congress that favored subordinating Washington to the victor at Saratoga and his aide. Lee told Washington that he—Lee—was helpless to prevent “a speedy erecting and judicious filling of the new board” and the appointment of Conway as inspector general.

  Lee was aware of rumors that he too had been dissatisfied with Washington’s performance as commander of the army. Adding to the rumors was the appearance in a Boston newspaper of letters apparently signed by Washington deploring the rebellion against British rule, criticizing Congress, and calling for rapprochement with Britain.

  “The enclosed came to my hand only a few days past,” Richard Henry wrote of the pamphlet to Washington to try to console and display his loyalty to his friend. “The arts of the enemies of America are endless, but all wicked as they are various; among other tricks, they have forged a pamphlet of letters… the design of the forger is evident and no doubt gained him a good beef steak from his masters.”9