Valley Forge — Almost A Trainwreck — Part I
America won the Revolutionary War against its mean old British overlords, so we get to have things like driving on the right side of the road, no extra u’s in words like “favorite” and “harbor,” the right to put z’s instead of “s’s” in words like “prioritize” and “organize”, and that whole freedom from tyranny thing.
But victory was far from guaranteed. Other than some stunning surprise successes — like that time George Washington metaphorically slid down the Hessians’ metaphorical chimney after crossing the Delaware on Christmas, 1776 and gifting them a metaphorical lump of coal, the American track record was not good. In fact, George’s brief turn as a badass metaphorical Santa Claus was seen as necessary in order to keep his job after the disastrous Continental loss of New York City a couple of months before.
George’s Teutonic Christmas present was a holiday high point, which he followed up with a January victory at the Battle of Princeton. That and the time-honored tradition of armies taking the winter off bought George some time, but the year 1777 wasn’t going to be a great one if you were a ragtag band of citizen soldiers looking to defeat the world’s foremost military power.
(If you’d rather listen than read, click here).
It started with the bad news that General Charles Lee, who was both an admittedly talented and experienced general and an oppositionally defiant pain in the ass, had been captured by the British. Lee had been after Washington’s job as Commander-in-Chief, so George could rest easy on that score, but the Continental Congress wanted generals who could win battles. Charles Lee looked like he could. George Washington looked like…well, not that. We found out in the mid-19th century that Charles had spent his time in captivity cavorting with his mistress and hanging out with his dogs, which we kind of expected, but also devising a strategy to defeat the Continental Army for his old pals, the British Empire.
For more about that rascal Charles Lee, see History’s Trainwrecks episodes 50–57, The Men Who Would Be Washington.
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The British side of the Revolution was being run by the Howe brothers, General William for the army and Admiral Richard for the navy, nicknamed “Black Dick” for his dark complexion, but which could have had other connotations. I think we’ll go with “not a compliment.”
The Howe brothers were crafty devils. Admiral Black Dick presided over the Staten Island Peace Conference on September 11, 1776, where he offered peace terms and amnesty for the rebel leaders if they would give up on that whole independence thing and end the war. He told the American representatives — Edward Rutledge, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin — that he couldn’t think of them as anything except British subjects. John Adams, that loveable curmudgeon, shot back, “Your Lordship may consider me in what light you please — except that of a British subject.”
Needless to say, the peace conference came to naught, and we found out years later that there was only one American who would not have gotten a pardon had the peace conference been a success. I wonder what irascible, defiant, contrary, stubborn fellow’s head King George III wanted to see stuck on a pike outside his bedroom window at Buckingham Palace. Post your guesses on the History’s Trainwrecks Facebook page. I’ll pick one correct answer at random and that lucky listener will get a special gift from the train tracks.
General William Howe was an enigma. His track record as a general was pretty good: he personally led three charges at the Battle of Breed’s — I mean, Bunker Hill — and was appointed commander of all British troops in North America in the fall of 1775. He was a fan of symbolic targets instead of strategic ones, defeating the Continentals to take New York City in 1776 and setting his sights on the American capital of Philadelphia in the fall of 1777. By doing so, he ignored the more useful strategy of cutting New England off from the rest of the colonies, which General Burgoyne was trying to do when he encountered Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold at the Battle of Saratoga.
This was no consolation to George Washington and his Continental Army, who kept getting beaten by the British as they tried to force Howe into a pitched battle. There was a stalemate of sorts — the British kept winning, but the American army just wouldn’t quit.
The Congress, packing their bags as Howe’s army got closer, kept wanting Washington to engage the British, which George himself desperately wanted to do. The so-called “Fabian strategy” of avoiding pitched battles and harassing the enemy’s scouts and supply lines, was out of character for Washington and the accepted sense of military propriety at the time. Guerilla attacks were seen as ungentlemanly.
The two armies finally ended up in a real battle at Brandywine Creek, 25 miles south of the city. On September 11th, 1777, the largest battle of the Revolution in terms of numbers of men, began. The British benefited from heavy fog and Loyalist guides familiar with the local terrain. George Washington did not benefit from contradictory reports from his scouts and a lack of knowledge of the local terrain. All the best guides were working for the enemy.
George was on the front line as the battle began, and Charles Lee nearly got his wish when a cannonball killed an artilleryman a few feet from Washington’s horse and a British sharpshooter very nearly shot the commander-in-chief in the back. Only the rifleman’s sense of honor saved George.
But Washington’s famous luck did not hold as his troops were overrun and forced to retreat. General Howe missed a great opportunity to end the war once and for all but he didn’t press the attack as the Continentals fell back. The Americans were able to form up a line that covered their retreat, but things were about to get worse.
Way worse.
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The Continental Congress kept sending Washington requests to defend Philadelphia, but George knew better than to waste his army on that. Black Dick Howe’s fleet, whereabouts unknown, was out there somewhere and no one knew when and where he would strike next. George asked that provisions and troops be sent his way, even taking soldiers away from General Israel Putnam, who was holding the Hudson Valley by the skin of his teeth. The area he was defending was considered the jugular vein of the American colonies. It was the number one strategic target the British should have taken. Charles Lee, cooling his heels in comfortable captivity in New York, advised this very thing.
But Washington surmised that Howe would, as he had previously done, choose symbolic targets over strategic ones. And since he kept his ear to the ground, George knew all about the grumblings in Congress and the army about his leadership of the war effort. As he had known last Christmas, he needed a victory not just to keep his job, but to prove to his country and the world that he could win.
Plus, he really wanted to beat the British.
Tragedy struck on September 20th, 1777 when General Anthony Wayne’s scouting force of about 2,000 men was within three miles of the British lines, camped near a tavern named for the revolutionary Corsican general Pasquale Paoli. The British, led by General Charles Grey, removed the flints from their muskets and fixed bayonets, preparing for a silent night attack. The order was given that no one should fire, so that the only light would come from the Americans.
They engaged after midnight, locating the Continentals by their campfires and the shots fired at them. Shouting “no quarter,” the British bayoneted every Continental they found, even after the terrified men surrendered. Some Americans had hidden in their huts, which the British set fire to with the men still inside.
Sixty Americans were killed, 71 captured, hundreds wounded or missing. The British captured crucial supply wagons. George Washington learned of the massacre from the enemy when they offered a flag of truce so that the Continentals could bury their dead and retrieve their wounded.
Speaking of ungentlemanly conduct, bayoneting men who were surrendering or setting fire to huts where soldiers were hiding definitely violated the rules of engagement of the time. The British, whenever confronted by their own savagery, claimed that they weren’t fighting a real war against a formal enemy. The Americans were criminals in rebellion against the Crown and were therefore not entitled to the protections normally afforded actual opposing armies.
“Remember Paoli” was the first American rallying war cry, anticipating future ones like “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember the Maine.” The Paoli Massacre left the Continentals in a fighting mood, but they were in no shape to stop the British from taking Philadelphia, which they did on September 26th, 1777 without firing a shot.
General Howe was no doubt pleased with himself for taking America’s two biggest cities and the rebel capital, but wiser heads knew his successes only looked good on paper. When Benjamin Franklin, charming the perfumed wigs off everyone in Paris, heard that the British had taken Philadelphia, he replied, “no, sir, Philadelphia has taken the British.”
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There wasn’t a lot to be optimistic about in the fall of 1777 if you were a ragtag band of citizen soldiers looking to defeat the world’s foremost military power. America’s two biggest cities, including its capital, were in enemy hands. The strategic Hudson Valley, the capture of which would likely mean a speedy end to the war, was guarded by a diminishing number of men. The Continental Congress, without Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Hancock, was hiding in York, unable to raise troops or supply the army. Ben Franklin was twisting French arms in Paris trying to get them to join the war on the American side, but the French were of two minds on the subject. They knew an independent America would soon turn its eye toward the Caribbean and lucrative French holdings there, but so would a British Empire looking to consolidate its American sphere of influence if it prevailed over its rebellious colonists. The French were waiting for a sign, but all they saw were American defeats and retreats.
George Washington had the makings of a good army — his men were more than willing to take the fight to the enemy, but their commander in chief knew that they had survived thus far on luck, not military skill. Many of his top generals like Henry Knox and Nathanael Greene were self-educated, like George himself. The professional generals like Charles Lee and Horatio Gates were mostly in this thing for themselves and spent way too much time maneuvering to take George’s job away from him. George’s closest staff advisors — his military family — were men in their early twenties like Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, and the Marquis de Lafayette.
And Black Dick Howe’s navy was still out there…somewhere.
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General Howe had indeed been captured by Philadelphia instead of the other way around. A big army in a big city needed supplies, and the British were having trouble getting some. The Americans had blocked the Delaware River at two strategic points, preventing resupply by sea. So General Howe had to take his army out on a foraging mission.
George Washington, pressured by recent American successes in the running battles of Saratoga, felt there would be no better time for a major engagement with the British, who weren’t expecting any serious American action after their recent defeats at Brandywine and Paoli. But George wrote on October 3 that “our dearest rights, our dearest friends, and our own lives, honor, glory and even shame, urge us to fight.” He said that General Howe “has left us no choice but Conquest or Death.”
He marched the army to Germantown on what everyone believed was a do or die mission.
The Battle of Germantown began on October 4, 1777 under heavy fog. The Continentals were initially successful, driving the British back two miles. But the fog and the inability of key detachments to press the attack turned this success into confusion.
General Howe, typically, helped his enemy by failing to recognize that he was engaged in a major battle. “It is only a scouting party!” he told his retreating battalions. He figured his situation out soon enough, and he and General Charles Cornwallis were able to rally their troops and send them against the stalled and confused Americans. The counterattack sent the Continentals into full retreat.
Germantown was another defeat for the Americans on paper. But the generals who had been in the middle of the fighting knew how close they had come to routing the British. One of George Washington’s aides wrote that only “excessive fogginess” had saved the British. The men knew it too and were itching for a rematch.
The proof that the Americans could win a massive victory against the British arrived later that month, with news of the surrender of General John Burgoyne’s 5,000-man army at Saratoga. This victory was the catalyst for the French to agree to send aid to the Americans. The French were also impressed with the ability of the rebels to stand in the face of British fire at Germantown. Unlike the Americans, the French didn’t expect the Continentals to win — they just wanted to see them stand their ground. So even though George wasn’t getting a lot of credit for Germantown in his homeland, the French at least were happy with it. Despite all that, the news would take weeks to reach Paris, and it would be months before a treaty was signed and months more before French help actually arrived.
Back home, bad news for the British wasn’t exactly great news for George Washington. Another American general had won an impressive victory, and that general wanted George’s job. He also knew deep down that his likely replacements, the power-hungry Horatio Gates and the vain and arrogant Charles Lee, were the worst sort of men to lead a revolution. Winning battles was only half the battle. He knew that if America prevailed, the commander-in-chief was the top candidate to be the leader of the Republic. The idea of Gates or Lee at the head of the new American government must have sent a shiver down his spine.
The complaints he heard about, from his subordinate generals as well as his allies in Congress, centered around the perceived lack of discipline in the army and that it was this lack that had caused Washington’s recent defeats. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a confidante of John Adams wrote that “several officers who have served under General Gates compare his army to a well-regulated family. The same gentlemen have compared General Washington’s imitation of an army to an unformed mob.”
Adams agreed in principle with Rush’s complaints, and he wasn’t disappointed that the biggest American victory to date had come at the hands of a general other than Washington. Adams feared the mythic hold Washington had over the people at the same time he relied on it to keep the army in the field and the revolution alive. He wrote his wife Abigail that Washington was “too close to being considered ‘a deity or savior.’”
You all know by now how much I love me some John Adams, warts and all. But with all the challenges the American Revolution faced in 1777, a leader who was considered a savior was just what the doctor ordered. (Not Doctor Benjamin Rush, whose idea of treatment involved slicing his patient’s veins open to bleed them out a little, but other, better doctors). My favorite historical curmudgeon was afflicted with vanity, and he knew that he and Washington were competing for leadership of the American cause. It must have bothered him that George was, despite every setback, still getting all the applause.
But the applause was fading. Much like after the disastrous retreat from New York in 1776, George knew he needed a win in order to remain at the head of his army.
But he also needed an army.
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The old saying goes that an army marches on its stomach. A Continental soldier in 1777 was, on paper, given a daily ration of “a pound of bread, three pints of dried vegetables, a pint of milk, a quart of spruce beer or cider, and a pound of either beef, pork, or salted fish.”
The reality was far different. The Continental Congress couldn’t raise enough money to keep the war afloat, and corrupt suppliers and a quartermaster with a personal grudge against the commander-in-chief meant that the army was dangerously short of everything it needed to function.
Thomas Mifflin will be his own trainwreck episode when time permits, but in short he served in the army during the retreat from New York. He ordered the rear guard to retreat too soon, which would have compromised the evacuation. Washington lost his temper and told Mifflin, “Good God! I am afraid you have ruined us.”
Like Gates and Lee, Mifflin thought highly of himself and very little of George Washington. George’s failure to prevent the British from capturing his hometown of Philadelphia only confirmed Mifflin’s low opinion. Word soon reached Washington that Mifflin was enriching himself thanks to his position as Quartermaster General of the army.
George wrote to John Hancock, saying, “it gives me pain to repeat so often the wants of the Army,” and then went ahead and repeated them anyway. He needed 3,000 coats, 4,000 waistcoats, 6,000 breeches, 8,000 stockings, 3,000 pairs of shoes, 6,000 shirts, 4,000 blankets, and 2,000 hats. And his letter didn’t even mention things like food and bullets. “It is impossible that any Army so unprovided can long subsist,” he said.
The British faced the same supply shortages. The two American forts along the Delaware kept Black Dick Howe from supplying Philadelphia from the sea, and both armies had depleted all the locally-available supplies. The British began demolishing buildings in Philadelphia for firewood. But the Howe boys knew they had to take the Continental forts on the Delaware or give up on Philly. In a concerted land and naval battle, the British captured both forts by November 20th.
General Howe, knowing that winter was coming and his resignation letter was on its way to London, tried one last time to crush the American army on December 4th, 1777. He marched his troops out of Philadelphia toward Washington’s headquarters at Whitemarsh.
The Americans, after the Paoli Massacre, were itching for a fight. The British spent two days probing the Continental lines for weakness. Not finding any, Howe ordered his army to retreat back to Philadelphia so fast that pursuing American soldiers found cookpots bubbling over British campfires. Howe was going home to England, and he didn’t want to have to explain another defeat so soon after Saratoga. He believed the American army, after a harsh and starving winter, would be easily defeated in the spring by his replacement, so he went back to Philadelphia to wait for his ride to London.
The whisper campaign against Washington kicked into high gear, with many of his haters wanting to know why he hadn’t taken advantage of the British retreat to attack and recapture the capital. “Two battles he has lost for us by two such Blunders as might have disgraced a Soldier of three months standing,” New Jersey delegate Jonathan Dickinson wrote to James Lovell of Massachusetts.
Campaigning season was over. It was time for Washington’s army to find a place to hole up for the winter. George knew the expectation was that he would keep the army close to Philadelphia. He needed a place that was defensible, with lots of forests for the two B’s — building and burning.
Most importantly, he needed time and supplies to rebuild the army. As he saw it, the coming spring was do or die for the American cause. French aid might be on the way, but it would be awhile before it showed up in any meaningful way. In December of 1777, the survival of America depended on the survival of the army. Without supplies, Washington knew his forces would “starve, dissolve, or disperse.” Without discipline and training, the British army would make short work of the resistance once the weather got better.
Washington needed a forge upon which to hammer his army into shape, and he found one.
Valley Forge was a day’s march from Philadelphia, close enough to respond to British depredations but far enough away to prevent surprise attack. It was surrounded by forests and had good roads for the supply wagons the general desperately hoped would show up.
Washington broke camp on December 11th and marched his army, estimated at 11,000 men, toward Valley Forge. He periodically stopped his horse on the side of the road to watch his army file past, most “without Cloathes to cover their nakedness — without blankets to lay on — without Shoes.” He knew the men remained with him out of personal loyalty. Henry Knox had told him a few weeks earlier that “the people of America look up to you as their father, and into your hands they entrust their all.”
The philosophical leaders of the Revolution — Adams, Franklin, Jefferson — got the ball rolling, as it were, but losing the war would mean the end of all the grandiose ideas and flowery phrases. Independence was in the hands of Washington and his army, but with the machinations to replace him and no supplies, the army would indeed “disperse” before the next chance at battle.
On December 19th, 1777, the American army limped its way into Valley Forge.
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On our next episode, we gird our loins, admit our weaknesses, and thereby realize that I am no kind of military historian. In order to understand the dire straits the American army was in when it straggled into Valley Forge, we’re going to need someone who knows something about military operations and strategy to explain it to us.
In the same way that George Washington hired a crabby, short-tempered, foul-mouthed Prussian to teach his army how to army, I bring in a special guest to handle the things I know nothing about, so that we can all get a clear idea of how bad things were how much worse they would get if the Continental Army didn’t get it together at Valley Forge.
Stay tuned for Valley Forge — Almost a Trainwreck, Part II.
